the bet

by anton chekhov

I
It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was pacing from corner to corner of his study,
recalling to his mind the party he gave in the autumn fifteen years before. There were many
clever people at the party and much interesting conversation. They talked among other things of
capital punishment. The guests, among them not a few scholars and journalists, for the most part
disapproved of capital punishment. They found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted to
a Christian State and immoral. Some of them thought that capital punishment should be replaced
universally by life-imprisonment.
"I don't agree with you," said the host. "I myself have experienced neither capital punishment nor
life-imprisonment, but if one may judge a priori, then in my opinion capital punishment is more
moral and more humane than imprisonment. Execution kills instantly, life-imprisonment kills by
degrees. Who is the more humane executioner, one who kills you in a few seconds or one who
draws the life out of you incessantly, for years?"
"They're both equally immoral," remarked one of the guests, "because their purpose is the same,
to take away life. The State is not God. It has no right to take away that which it cannot give
back, if it should so desire."
Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five. On being asked his
opinion, he said:
"Capital punishment and life-imprisonment are equally immoral; but if I were offered the choice
between them, I would certainly choose the second. It's better to live somehow than not to live at
all."
There ensued a lively discussion. The banker who was then younger and more nervous suddenly
lost his temper, banged his fist on the table, and turning to the young lawyer, cried out:
"It's a lie. I bet you two millions you wouldn't stick in a cell even for five years."
"If you mean it seriously," replied the lawyer, "then I bet I'll stay not five but fifteen."
"Fifteen! Done!" cried the banker. "Gentlemen, I stake two millions."
"Agreed. You stake two millions, I my freedom," said the lawyer.
So this wild, ridiculous bet came to pass. The banker, who at that time had too many millions to
count, spoiled and capricious, was beside himself with rapture. During supper he said to the
lawyer jokingly:
"Come to your senses, young roan, before it's too late. Two millions are nothing to me, but you
stand to lose three or four of the best years of your life. I say three or four, because you'll never
stick it out any longer. Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary is much heavier than
enforced imprisonment. The idea that you have the right to free yourself at any moment will
poison the whole of your life in the cell. I pity you."
And now the banker, pacing from corner to corner, recalled all this and asked himself:
"Why did I make this bet? What's the good? The lawyer loses fifteen years of his life and I throw
away two millions. Will it convince people that capital punishment is worse or better than
imprisonment for life? No, no! all stuff and rubbish. On my part, it was the caprice of a well-fed
man; on the lawyer's pure greed of gold."
He recollected further what happened after the evening party. It was decided that the lawyer must
undergo his imprisonment under the strictest observation, in a garden wing of the banker's house.
It was agreed that during the period he would be deprived of the right to cross the threshold, to
see living people, to hear human voices, and to receive letters and newspapers. He was permitted
to have a musical instrument, to read books, to write letters, to drink wine and smoke tobacco.
By the agreement he could communicate, but only in silence, with the outside world through a
little window specially constructed for this purpose. Everything necessary, books, music, wine,
he could receive in any quantity by sending a note through the window. The agreement provided
for all the minutest details, which made the confinement strictly solitary, and it obliged the
lawyer to remain exactly fifteen years from twelve o'clock of November 14th, 1870, to twelve
o'clock of November 14th, 1885. The least attempt on his part to violate the conditions, to escape
if only for two minutes before the time freed the banker from the obligation to pay him the two
millions.
During the first year of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it was possible to judge from his short
notes, suffered terribly from loneliness and boredom. From his wing day and night came the
sound of the piano. He rejected wine and tobacco. "Wine," he wrote, "excites desires, and desires
are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink good wine alone,"
and tobacco spoils the air in his room. During the first year the lawyer was sent books of a light
character; novels with a complicated love interest, stories of crime and fantasy, comedies, and so
on.
In the second year the piano was heard no longer and the lawyer asked only for classics. In the
fifth year, music was heard again, and the prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him said
that during the whole of that year he was only eating, drinking, and lying on his bed. He yawned
often and talked angrily to himself. Books he did not read. Sometimes at nights he would sit
down to write. He would write for a long time and tear it all up in the morning. More than once
he was heard to weep.
In the second half of the sixth year, the prisoner began zealously to study languages, philosophy,
and history. He fell on these subjects so hungrily that the banker hardly had time to get books
enough for him. In the space of four years about six hundred volumes were bought at his request.
It was while that passion lasted that the banker received the following letter from the prisoner:
"My dear gaoler, I am writing these lines in six languages. Show them to experts. Let them read
them. If they do not find one single mistake, I beg you to give orders to have a gun fired off in
the garden. By the noise I shall know that my efforts have not been in vain. The geniuses of all
ages and countries speak in different languages; but in them all burns the same flame. Oh, if you
knew my heavenly happiness now that I can understand them!" The prisoner's desire was
fulfilled. Two shots were fired in the garden by the banker's order.
Later on, after the tenth year, the lawyer sat immovable before his table and read only the New
Testament. The banker found it strange that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred
erudite volumes, should have spent nearly a year in reading one book, easy to understand and by
no means thick. The New Testament was then replaced by the history of religions and theology.
During the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an extraordinary amount, quite
haphazard. Now he would apply himself to the natural sciences, then he would read Byron or
Shakespeare. Notes used to come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book
on chemistry, a text-book of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. He
read as though he were swimming in the sea among broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire
to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.
II
The banker recalled all this, and thought:
"To-morrow at twelve o'clock he receives his freedom. Under the agreement, I shall have to pay
him two millions. If I pay, it's all over with me. I am ruined for ever …"
Fifteen years before he had too many millions to count, but now he was afraid to ask himself
which he had more of, money or debts. Gambling on the Stock-Exchange, risky speculation, and
the recklessness of which he could not rid himself even in old age, had gradually brought his
business to decay; and the fearless, self-confident, proud man of business had become an
ordinary banker, trembling at every rise and fall in the market.
"That cursed bet," murmured the old man clutching his head in despair… "Why didn't the man
die? He's only forty years old. He will take away my last farthing, marry, enjoy life, gamble on
the Exchange, and I will look on like an envious beggar and hear the same words from him every
day: 'I'm obliged to you for the happiness of my life. Let me help you.' No, it's too much! The
only escape from bankruptcy and disgrace—is that the man should die."
The clock had just struck three. The banker was listening. In the house everyone was asleep, and
one could hear only the frozen trees whining outside the windows. Trying to make no sound, he
took out of his safe the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years, put on his
overcoat, and went out of the house. The garden was dark and cold. It was raining. A damp,
penetrating wind howled in the garden and gave the trees no rest. Though he strained his eyes,
the banker could see neither the ground, nor the white statues, nor the garden wing, nor the trees.
Approaching the garden wing, he called the watchman twice. There was no answer. Evidently
the watchman had taken shelter from the bad weather and was now asleep somewhere in the
kitchen or the greenhouse.
"If I have the courage to fulfil my intention," thought the old man, "the suspicion will fall on the
watchman first of all."
In the darkness he groped for the steps and the door and entered the hall of the garden-wing, then
poked his way into a narrow passage and struck a match. Not a soul was there. Someone's bed,
with no bedclothes on it, stood there, and an iron stove loomed dark in the corner. The seals on
the door that led into the prisoner's room were unbroken.
When the match went out, the old man, trembling from agitation, peeped into the little window.
In the prisoner's room a candle was burning dimly. The prisoner himself sat by the table. Only
his back, the hair on his head and his hands were visible. Open books were strewn about on the
table, the two chairs, and on the carpet near the table.
Five minutes passed and the prisoner never once stirred. Fifteen years' confinement had taught
him to sit motionless. The banker tapped on the window with his finger, but the prisoner made
no movement in reply. Then the banker cautiously tore the seals from the door and put the key
into the lock. The rusty lock gave a hoarse groan and the door creaked. The banker expected
instantly to hear a cry of surprise and the sound of steps. Three minutes passed and it was as
quiet inside as it had been before. He made up his mind to enter.
Before the table sat a man, unlike an ordinary human being. It was a skeleton, with tight-drawn
skin, with long curly hair like a woman's, and a shaggy beard. The colour of his face was yellow,
of an earthy shade; the cheeks were sunken, the back long and narrow, and the hand upon which
he leaned his hairy head was so lean and skinny that it was painful to look upon. His hair was
already silvering with grey, and no one who glanced at the senile emaciation of the face would
have believed that he was only forty years old. On the table, before his bended head, lay a sheet
of paper on which something was written in a tiny hand.
"Poor devil," thought the banker, "he's asleep and probably seeing millions in his dreams. I have
only to take and throw this half-dead thing on the bed, smother him a moment with the pillow,
and the most careful examination will find no trace of unnatural death. But, first, let us read what
he has written here."
The banker took the sheet from the table and read:
"To-morrow at twelve o'clock midnight, I shall obtain my freedom and the right to mix with
people. But before I leave this room and see the sun I think it necessary to say a few words to
you. On my own clear conscience and before God who sees me I declare to you that I despise
freedom, life, health, and all that your books call the blessings of the world.
"For fifteen years I have diligently studied earthly life. True, I saw neither the earth nor the
people, but in your books I drank fragrant wine, sang songs, hunted deer and wild boar in the
forests, loved women… And beautiful women, like clouds ethereal, created by the magic of your
poets' genius, visited me by night and whispered to me wonderful tales, which made my head
drunken. In your books I climbed the summits of Elbruz and Mont Blanc and saw from there
how the sun rose in the morning, and in the evening suffused the sky, the ocean and lie mountain
ridges with a purple gold. I saw from there how above me lightnings glimmered cleaving the
clouds; I saw green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, cities; I heard syrens singing, and the playing of
the pipes of Pan; I touched the wings of beautiful devils who came flying to me to speak of
God… In your books I cast myself into bottomless abysses, worked miracles, burned cities to the
ground, preached new religions, conquered whole countries…
"Your books gave me wisdom. All that unwearying human thought created in the centuries is
compressed to a little lump in my skull. I know that I am cleverer than you all.
"And I despise your books, despise all worldly blessings and wisdom. Everything is void, frail,
visionary and delusive as a mirage. Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death
wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history,
and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down together with the
terrestrial globe.
"You are mad, and gone the wrong way. You take falsehood for truth and ugliness for beauty.
You would marvel if suddenly apple and orange trees should bear frogs and lizards instead of
fruit, and if roses should begin to breathe the odour of a sweating horse. So do I marvel at you,
who have bartered heaven for earth. I do not want to understand you.
"That I may show you in deed my contempt for that by which you live, I waive the two millions
of which I once dreamed as of paradise, and which I now despise. That I may deprive myself of
my right to them, I shall come out from here five minutes before the stipulated term, and thus
shall violate the agreement."
When he had read, the banker put the sheet on the table, kissed the head of the strange man, and
began to weep. He went out of the wing. Never at any other time, not even after his terrible
losses on the Exchange, had he felt such contempt for himself as now. Coming home, he lay
down on his bed, but agitation and tears kept him a long time from sleeping…
The next morning the poor watchman came running to him and told him that they had seen the
man who lived in the wing climb through the window into the garden. He had gone to the gate
and disappeared. The banker instantly went with his servants to the wing and established the
escape of his prisoner. To avoid unnecessary rumours he took the paper with the renunciation
from the table and, on his return, locked it in his safe.
THE END