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Updated: May 23, 2025
"One minute, my dear fellow," Laevsky said softly, and he went to look for the ink; returning to the window, he signed the papers without looking at them, and said: "It's hot!" "Yes. Are you coming to-day?" "I don't think so. . . . I'm not quite well. Tell Sheshkovsky that I will come and see him after dinner." The clerk went away.
With pale face and wet hair sticking to his forehead and his cheeks, wet through and muddy, he was standing in the maize on the further bank, smiling rather queerly and waving his wet hat. Sheshkovsky laughed with joy, burst into tears, and moved away. . . . A little while afterwards, Von Koren and the deacon met near the little bridge.
Sheshkovsky glanced at the officers and shrugged his shoulders. "Gentlemen," he said aloud, addressing no one in particular. "Gentlemen, we propose that you should be reconciled." "Let us make haste and get the formalities over," said Von Koren. "Reconciliation has been discussed already. What is the next formality? Make haste, gentlemen, time won't wait for us."
The young officers, who were present at a duel for the first time in their lives, and even now hardly believed in this civilian and, to their thinking, unnecessary duel, looked critically at their tunics and stroked their sleeves. Sheshkovsky went up to them and said softly: "Gentlemen, we must use every effort to prevent this duel; they ought to be reconciled."
As for her husband, maybe I was in an indirect way one of the causes of his death; but again, is it my fault that I fell in love with his wife and she with me?" Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the Government clerks met every day to play vint and drink beer. "My indecision reminds me of Hamlet," thought Laevsky on the way.
"When seconds suggest reconciliation they are usually not listened to; it is looked upon as a formality. Amour propre and all that. But I humbly beg you to look carefully at Ivan Andreitch. He's not in a normal state, so to speak, to-day not in his right mind, and a pitiable object. He has had a misfortune. I can't endure gossip. . . ." Sheshkovsky flushed crimson and looked round.
I once chanced, in the course of conversation, to mention the well-known Sheshkóvsky. And at nightfall, into the bargain! Don't utter that name!" I was amazed; what significance could that name possess for such an inoffensive and innocent being, who would not have known how to devise, much less to execute, anything reprehensible?
"How rude it is of them!" said the superintendent of the post-office, looking at his watch. "It may be learned manners to be late, but to my thinking it's hoggish." Sheshkovsky, a stout man with a black beard, listened and said: "They're coming!" "It's the first time in my life I've seen it! How glorious!" said Von Koren, pointing to the glade and stretching out his hands to the east.
His lower lip quivered, he walked away from Sheshkovsky, unwilling to hear more, and as though he had accidentally tasted something bitter, spat loudly again, and for the first time that morning looked with hatred at Laevsky. His excitement and awkwardness passed off; he tossed his head and said aloud: "Gentlemen, what are we waiting for, I should like to know? Why don't we begin?"
Laevsky went to Sheshkovsky, told him all about it, and asked him to be his second; then they both went to the superintendent of the postal telegraph department, and asked him, too, to be a second, and stayed to dinner with him. At dinner there was a great deal of joking and laughing.
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