A Hero of our time / Герой нашего времени. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Михаил Лермонтов
flinty hills merging with the main chain of the Caucasus. We were sitting at a corner of a bastion and so we had a perfect view of either side. As I scanned the landscape, a man riding a gray horse emerged from the woods and came closer and closer, until he finally stopped on the far side of the creek two hundred yards or so from where we were and began spinning around on his horse like mad. What the hell was that?
“‘Your eyes are younger than mine, Bela, see if you can make out that horseman,’ said I. ‘I wonder whom he is trying to impress with that display.’
“She looked and cried out: ‘It’s Kazbich!’
“‘Ah, the bandit! Has he come to mock us?’ Now I could see it was Kazbich: the same dark face, and as ragged and dirty as ever. ‘that’s my father’s horse,’ Bela said, grabbing my arm; she trembled like a leaf and her eyes flashed. ‘Aha, my little one,’ thought I, ‘bandit blood talks in you too.’
“‘Come here,’ I called to a sentry, ‘take aim and knock that fellow off for me and you’ll get a ruble in silver.’ ‘Yes, Your Honor, only he doesn’t stay still…’ ‘tell him to,’ said I, laughing. ‘Hey, there!’ shouted the sentry waving his arm, ‘wait a minute, will you, stop spinning like a top!’ Kazbich actually paused to listen, probably thinking we wanted to negotiate, the insolent beggar! My grenadier took aim… bang!… and missed, for as soon as the powder flashed in the pan, Kazbich gave a jab to the horse making it leap aside. He stood up in his stirrups, shouted something in his own language, shook his whip menacingly in the air – and in a flash was gone.
“‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’ I said to the sentry.
“‘Your Honor! He’s gone off to die,’ he replied. ‘Such a cussed crowd they are you can’t kill them with one shot.’
“A quarter of an hour later Pechorin returned from the chase. Bela ran to meet him and threw her arms around his neck, and not a single complaint, not a single reproach for his long absence did I hear… Even I had lost patience with him. ‘Look here,’ said I, ‘Kazbich was on the other side of the river just now and we fired at him; you could easily have run into him too. These mountaineers are revenging people, and do you think he doesn’t suspect you helped Azamat? I’ll bet he saw Bela here. And I happen to know that a year ago he was sure attracted by her – told me so himself, in fact. Had he had any hope of raising a substantial bride-price he surely would have asked for her in marriage…’ Pechorin was serious now. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we have to be more careful… Bela, after today you mustn’t go out on the ramparts any more.’
“That evening I had a long talk with him; it made me sad that he had changed toward the poor girl, for besides being out hunting half the time, he began to treat her coldly, rarely showing her any affection. She began to waste away visibly, her face grew thin, and her eyes lost their glow. Whenever I asked her, ‘Why are you sighing, Bela? Are you sad?’ she would reply ‘No.’ ‘Do you want anything?’ ‘No!’ ‘Are you homesick for your family?’ ‘I have no family.’ For days on end you couldn’t get more than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ out of her.
“I decided to have a talk with him about this. ‘Listen, Maksim Maksimich,’ he replied, ‘I have an unfortunate character. Whether it is my upbringing that made me like that or God who created me so, I don’t know. I know only that if I cause unhappiness to others I myself am no less unhappy. I realize this is poor consolation for them – but the fact remains that it’s so. In my early youth after leaving my parents, I plunged into all the pleasures money could buy, and naturally these pleasures grew distasteful to me. Then I went into high society, but soon enough grew tired of it; I fell in love with beautiful society women and was loved by them, but their love only aggravated my imagination and vanity while my heart remained desolate… I began to read and to study, but wearied of learning too. I saw that neither fame nor happiness depended on it in the slightest, for the happiest people were the most ignorant, and fame was a matter of luck, to achieve which you only had to be clever. And I grew bored… Soon I was transferred to the Caucasus – this was the happiest time of my life. I hoped that boredom would not survive under Chechen bullets – but it’s no use. In a month I had become so accustomed to their whine and the breath of death that, to tell the truth, the mosquitoes bothered me more, and life became more boring than ever because I had now lost practically my last hope. When I saw Bela in my quarters, when I held her on my lap and first kissed her raven locks, I foolishly thought she was an angel sent down to me by a compassionate Providence… Again I was mistaken: the love of a savage girl is little better than that of a well-born lady. The ignorance and simplicity of the one are as boring as the coquetry of the other. I still love her, if you want to know. I am grateful to her for a few rather blissful moments. I am ready to die for her even, but I am really bored with her… I don’t know whether I am a fool or a scoundrel, but the fact is that I am to be pitied as much, if not more than she. My soul has been warped by the world, my mind is restless, my heart insatiable – nothing satisfies me. I grow accustomed to sorrow as readily as to joy, and my life becomes emptier from day to day. Only one thing is left for me, and that is to travel. As soon as possible I’ll set out – not for Europe, God forbid – but for America, Arabia, India – and maybe I’ll die somewhere on the road! Ar least I’m sure that with the help of storms and bad roads this consolation won’t soon cease to be a last resort.’ He talked long in this vein and his words seared themselves in my memory for it was the first time I had heard such talk from a man of twenty-five, and, I hope to God, the last. Amazing! You probably were in the capital recently; perhaps you can tell me,” the captain went on, talking to me, “whether the young people there are all like that?”
I replied that there are many who speak in the same way, and that most likely some of them are speaking the truth; but that disillusionment, having begun like all vogues in the upper strata of society, had descended to the lower, which wear it out, and that nowadays those who are really the most bored try hard to conceal that misfortune as if it were a vice. The captain didn’t understand these subtleties, and he shook his head and smiled shyly. “It was the French, I suppose, who made boredom fashionable?”
“No, the English.”
“Ah, so that’s it!” he replied. “Of course, they’ve always been habitual drunks!”
Involuntarily I recalled one Moscow lady who claimed Byron was nothing more than a drunkard. The captain’s remark, however, was more excusable, for in order to abstain from drink he naturally tried to reassure himself that all the misfortunes in the world are caused by intemperance.
“Kazbich did not come again,” he went on with his story. “Still, for some unknown reason, I couldn’t get rid of the idea that his visit was to some purpose and that he was scheming something evil.
“One day Pechorin persuaded me to go hunting wild boar with him. I tried to resist, for what was a wild boar to me, but finally he did drag me with him. We set out early in the morning, taking five soldiers with us. Until ten o’clock we poked about the reeds and the woods without seeing a single animal. ‘What do you say to turning back?’ said I. ‘What’s the use of being stubborn? You can see for yourself it’s an unlucky day.’ But Pechorin didn’t want to return emptyhanded in spite of the hear and fatigue… That’s how he was: if he set his mind on something, he had to get it – his mother must have spoiled him as a child… At last around noon we came upon the cussed boar-bang!… bang!… but no: the beast slipped into the reeds… yes, it was indeed our unlucky day. After a short rest we set out for home.
“We rode side by side, in silence, reins hanging loose, and had almost reached the fort, though we couldn’t yet see it for the brush, when a shot rang out. We looked at each other, and the same suspicion flashed through our minds. Galloping in the direction of the sound, we saw a group of soldiers huddled together on the rampart, pointing to the field where a horseman was scooting off into the distance at breakneck speed with something white across his saddle. Pechorin yelled not a bit worse than any Chechen, drew his pistol from its holster and dashed in pursuit, and I after him.
“Luckily, because of our poor hunting luck, our horses were quite fresh. They strained under the saddle, and with every moment we gained on our