And still Pinegin puffed on his pipe and said nothing.
He had not counted on this young man. The deed was the key. He had even left to fate the question of whether or not Sergei discovered his revenge. If he did, so much the better: Pinegin had no fear of the consequences. But young Misha was a bystander whom, for some reason, the gods had added to the scene, and there it was. The young man’s speech, of course, was absolutely correct. He found no fault with it at all. And he wondered what to do.
Slowly he turned and began to stroll down the alley again, Misha at his side.
‘I certainly have no quarrel with you, Mikhail Alexeevich,’ he remarked at last. ‘And you have spoken wisely. I will not say whether or not there has been a misunderstanding: but I believe that you should no longer feel any concern about the matter. Please put your mind at rest.’
And taking this for an assurance, Misha was satisfied.
It was therefore with stupefaction, on rising early the following morning, that he saw Pinegin quietly come out of Nadia’s room.
An hour later, he challenged him.
‘I’m afraid I cannot accept your challenge.’
Misha stared at him.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I refuse to fight you,’ Pinegin told him calmly.
‘Do you deny sleeping with my Uncle’s wife, in this very house?’
‘No.’
‘May I ask why you refuse my challenge?’
‘I do not wish to fight you.’
Misha was completely at a loss.
‘Then I must call you a coward.’
Pinegin bowed.
‘For that, Mikhail Alexeevich, I will fight you.’ He paused. ‘Are you content to fight at a time of my choosing?’
‘As you wish. The sooner the better.’
‘I will let you know when I am ready. Next year perhaps. But I promise you, we shall fight.’ And with that he walked away, leaving Misha completely mystified.
Now, he thought, what the devil do I do?
At ten o’clock that morning, a small event took place at Bobrovo that went almost unnoticed.
Ilya Bobrov came slowly downstairs, crammed a large, wide-brimmed hat on his head, took a stout walking stick and left the house without a word to anyone. A short time later, the villagers were surprised to see his cumbersome figure wheezing along, his face red with the unwonted exertion but set into a look of the grimmest determination. Nobody had ever seen him go walking like this before. Once through the village, he took the lane that led through the woods towards the monastery. Several times, as he went along, he muttered nervously.
No one had taken much notice of Ilya recently. If he had seemed to be more abstracted than usual, if there had sometimes been a hint of desperation in his manner, Tatiana had put it down to hard work and thought nothing of it. She was quite unaware, therefore, that after all his months of labour at this great project, Ilya had reached a point of absolute crisis and near breakdown. He had been up all the previous night; and had anyone met him as he walked through the woods, they would have noticed that his eyes, which usually gazed out so placidly upon the world, were fixed ahead, staring wildly as though the sight of only one object in the universe could satisfy them. He looked like a haggard pilgrim in search of the grail.
Which in a way he was.
It was at noon that day, when Tatiana had gone over to Russka, taking Pinegin with her, that Misha, alone with his thoughts in the quiet house, was suddenly disturbed by a clatter at the door and the sound of laughing voices.
It was Sergei, back from the Ukraine. And he had brought his friend Karpenko with him.
He bounced into the hall, looking sunburned, rested, full of life and good humour. Encountering Misha in the hall, he gave a cry of joy and embraced him. ‘Look at this,’ he called to Karpenko. ‘See what has become of little Misha the bear!’
In front of Misha now stood a very different man from the nervous youth who had once gazed adoringly at Olga. Karpenko was a charming man at the end of his thirties with a gleaming black beard, wonderful, sensitive eyes, and a reputation of huge success with women – ‘Who always seem to stay his friends, whenever he dumps them,’ Sergei would say with puzzled admiration. Karpenko had reason to be contented. Most of his hopes had been realized. For himself he had three plays to his credit and edited a successful journal in Kiev. Even better, in a way, he had witnessed his beloved Ukraine achieve literary honour. His fellow Ukrainian, the satirist Gogol, had already made an important name for himself in Russia. And best of all – confounding all those who would dismiss it as a peasant’s language – his country had at last found a writer of true greatness, the national poet Shevchenko, who wrote his exquisite lines in the Ukrainian tongue; so that Karpenko could truly say, ‘See, the ambitious hopes of my youth have not been dimmed: they have been vindicated.’
And Misha stared at this happy pair and wondered what to say.
‘We shall go to Moscow tomorrow,’ Sergei gaily announced. ‘Then to St Petersburg. Karpenko and I are full of ideas. We shall take the capital by storm!’ He looked about him. ‘Where the devil’s Ilya? We’re both longing to see him.’ And servants were sent to look for him.
It was only after running upstairs to see his wife that Sergei returned looking puzzled. ‘That’s the strangest thing,’ he remarked to Misha. ‘I thought she hated the country. Now she says she wants to stay down here another week or two while we go on to Moscow. What do you make of that?’ And then, staring in perplexity at his nephew’s troubled face: ‘Now what’s the matter with you, my Misha?’
And now, it seemed to Misha, he had to tell him.
The arrangements were discreetly made that afternoon.
The place chosen was the little clearing by the burial mounds off the lane that led to the monastery. No one was likely to come by there at dawn. Pinegin having no person to be his second, Karpenko had unwillingly done as Sergei asked, and assumed that responsibility.
Dinner that afternoon passed quietly. Sergei, Pinegin and Karpenko made polite conversation, in which Misha attempted to follow them. By agreement, neither Tatiana nor Nadia was given any inkling of what was passing.
Indeed, the only mystery that day lay in the whereabouts of Ilya who still, by afternoon, had not returned. Since he had been seen going along the lane towards Russka, however, it was hard to believe that much harm could have come to him. After dinner, Karpenko undertook to amuse the ladies while Sergei retired to his room to make his preparations.
There were a number of letters to write. One was to Olga; another to his mother; another to his wife. He wrote them very calmly and carefully. The one to his wife contained no reproaches. The letter on which he spent the most trouble, strangely, was the one to Alexis.
It was in the late afternoon, as the sun was starting to sink towards the tall watchtower at Russka, that another, even more curious sight was seen by the villagers at Bobrovo.
It was the return of Ilya.
He came, as before, on foot. He was very tired now and his feet were dragging, but he did not seem to mind. And upon his face was a look which, insofar as was possible in a man so overweight, could only be described as religious ecstasy.
For Ilya had found that which he sought.
And it was this wonderful discovery that he shared with Sergei, in the latter’s room that night, long after the sun had gone down.
It was a strange little scene: the one brother tired, shaken, longing only to be left alone with his thoughts until the dawn; the other, entirely unaware of what was going on, his face flushed with excitement, intent upon telling his companion the things that were passing through his mind and which seemed to him so important. ‘Indeed, Seriozha,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t have come at a better time.’