—28 Fomous
—T\vo Complete The Cherr> oiul *The Boor/
llfflft) il Selection froin his LETTEHS.
IN NF\V on REVISEll I RANSLATIONS BY THE 0UTS7ANUJNG AUTHORITV
AVRAHM VAIVMOLINSin
M
The Portable CHEKHOV
The Viking Portable Library
Each Portable Library vol^e is made up of representative works of a favorite modem or classic author, or is a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. The format is designed for compactness and for pleasurable reading. The books average about 700 pages in length. Each is intended to fill a need not hitherto met by any single book. Each is edited by an authority distinguished in his field, who adds a thoroughgoing introductory essay and other helpful material. Most "Portables" are available both in durable cloth and in stif paper covers.
My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.
—CI^^OV
COPYIUYIUGHT 1947, © 1968 BY ■^ffi VIKINC PRESS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1947 BY THE VIKING PRESS, INC., 625 MADISON A\'ENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10022
twenty-f;ftii printinc september 1972
SBN 670-21409-4 ( H^TOBOUND) SBN 670-01035-9 ( PAPERBOUND)
UIIRARY OF CONCRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER; 47-113OI
PUBLISHED SJ:lIULTANEOUSLY IN CANADA BY ^ffi MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMLTED PRINTED IN U.S.A.
Contents
Editor's Introduction 1
Notable Dates in the Life of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov 28
Selected Bibliography: Works by Chekhov 31 STORIES
Vanka
34
Gusev
251
The Privy Councilor
39
Anna on the Neck
268
A Calamity
61
In the Cart
285
At the Mill
78
At Home
296
The Chameleon
85
Peasants
312
The Siren
90
The Man in a Shell
354
Sergeant Prishibeyev
97
Gooseberries
371
The Culprit
103
About Love
384
Daydreams
108
The Darling
396
Heartache
118
The Lady With the
An Encounter
125
Pet Dog
412
The Letter
141
At Christmas Time
434
The Kiss
156
On Official Business
440
The Name-Day Party 180
In the Ravine
461
An Attack of Nerves
222
PLAYS
The Boor
514
The Cherry Oichard
531
LE^reRS
596
Works about Chekhov
632
Editor's Note
Kiss," "An Attack of Nerves," "The Name-Day Party," and "In the Ravine" are by Constance Garnett and are reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Com- pany, of David Garnett, and of Messrs. Chatto and Windus. They are taken from the following volumes: The Wife and Other Stories, The Party and Other Stories, The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, The Witch and Other Stories. Grateful acknowledgment is also due to Bernard G. Guerney, who translated the Chekhov letters of May 16, June 5, and December 9, 1890. All these ren- derings have been revised by the editor, who is respon- sible for the translation of the rest of the Russian text.
HE translations of "The Privy Councilor," "The
With few exceptions, the stories are arranged chrono- logically. The dates in the Editor's Introduction are Old Style. To make them conform to our calendar (New Style), which was adopted by Russia in 1918, add twelve days for the nineteenth century and thirteen for the twen- tieth. The dates of Chekhov's letters written in Russia are Old Style, those of the letters written outside of Rus- sia are presumably New Style. In the chronological out- line of Chekhov's life each exact date is given according to both styles.
The editor is deeply indebted to Babette Deutsch for her help in the preparation of this book.
A. Y.
Editor's Introduction
history, Chekhov never attempted to conceal the sordidness of his beginnings. On. one occasion he gave a fairly clear hint at what his early environment had been. As a successful young writer he made this sug- gestion to a fellow author: "Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, a former grocery boy, chorister, high school lad and university student, who was brought up to respect rank, to kiss priests' hands, to revere other people's ideas, to give thanks for every morsel of bread, who was whipped many times, who without rubbers traipsed from pupil to pupil, who used his fists and tormented animals, who was fond of dining with rich relatives, who was hypocritical in his dealings with God and men gratuitously, out of the mere con- sciousness of his insignificance—write how this youth squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop, and how, waking up one fine morning, he feels that in his veins flows no longer the blood of a slave but that of a real man. . . ." He was talking about himself.
HOUGH generally reticent about his personal
Perhaps he did not quite squeeze the last drop of the slave out of himself. Certainly he never felt that he was in any sense a master of life or of art. But he was a freedman. He bought his freedom at the cost of per- sistent effort, by a process of self-education, so that morally as well as economically he was a self-made man.
In the end, this boy who had been born into the mean- est and the most backward section of Russian society, the lower middle class, and who had not been immune to its vulgarities, managed to make his way into what E. M. Forster happily describes as "the aristocracy of the considerate, the sensitive, and the plucky."
Chekhov was indeed the son of a serf and would have been born one himself, had not his grandfather, an acquisitive peasant, managed to purchase the family's freedom. His father rose in the world, becoming the o^er of a grocery, or rather of a general store, which also dispensed liquor. This was in the wretched little southern seaport of Taganrog, where Anton was born on January 17, 1860, the third child in a family that was to include five boys and a girl.
The grocer was a strict disciplinarian who adminis- tered beatings to his children as a parental duty and forced them to attend church services, of which he was himself passionately fond. He was the kind of person who uses religion to make those about him miserable. In addition to attending endless masses, little Anton, though he had neither ear nor voice, had to sing in the church choir organized by his father. As he stood in the chancel under the admiring eyes of the congrega- tion, the high-spirited boy felt like a little convict, and he came to associate religious education with torture behind unctuous smiles. "It is sickening and dreadful to recall," he once wrote to his eldest brother, "the ex- tent to which despotism and lying mutilated our child- hood." He grew up to abhor every form of deceit and coercion.
The population of Taganrog included a great many Greeks, some of them wealthy importers. They main- tained a one-room parish school of their o^ for the children of the poor, which was presided over by an ignorant and brutal master. Anton was sent there in the hope that he might eventually obtain the position of bookkeeper with one of the Greek merchants. After a year's attendance, during which he didn't learn as much as the Greek alphabet, he was transferred, at the age of nine, to the local gimnaziya, a combined gram- mar and high school. There he gave a poor account of himself, partly perhaps because he had little time for study. Among other things, he had to play watchdog for his father at the store, where he became familiar with all the tricks of short-weighting and short-chang- ing.
Anton was sixteen when the store failed and his fa- ther escaped debtors' prison by absconding. He went to Moscow, where his two older sons were studying. The rest of the family soon followed, except Anton. Left to shift for himself, he continued at school, earning his way by tutoring and getting some help from rela- tives. His situation was not a happy one, but at least his natural gaiety was no longer restrained by an op- pressive domestic atmosphere.
After graduating from high school, he joined the family and, having a small stipend from the Taganrog municipality, entered the university as a medical stu- dent. The Chekhovs were in a sad way. Anton became virtually the head of the house, and it was to him that the family looked for support, as it was to go on doing through the years. That winter, the story goes, in order to buy a pie for his mother's birthday, he wrote a piece for a comic weekly. That brought him his first literary earnings.
"Oh, with what trash I began," Chekhov once said, "my God, with what trash!" He supplied the humbler public prints with fillers of all sorts: jokes, legends for cartoons, advertisements, aphorisms, recipes, all in a comic vein. He wrote sketches, theatrical notices, and short short stories. He even produced, on a bet, a ro- mantic tale purporting to be a translation, and a full- length thriller, in which a femme fatale is murdered under baffling circumstances. (Unlike so many of his early pieces, this novel was not allowed to lie decently buried in the files of the paper in which it first appeared, but sixty years later was seized upon by the ghouls of Hollywood.) He also tried his hand at journalism. This was not yet serious writing, but it meant being occupied with serious subject matter. He was turning out a great amount of copy, being able to scribble under any condi- tions, whenever and wherever he pleased, and some- times dashing off a sketch—such as "The Siren"—with- out a single erasure. The stuff wrote itself. For the most part it was farce, innocent banter, calculated to raise a good-natured laugh. Occasionally, however, a note of bitterness, a suggestion of civic feeling, a hint of sym- pathy for the underdog crept in. And, though his work did not show it, the humorist had his moods of self- disgust. The hacks with whom he associated were an unsavory lot. He hated to think of himself in that galley. "A newspaper man is a crook at best . . ." he wrote to one of his brothers. "I am one of them, I work with them, shake hands with them, and people say that at a distance I have begun to look like a crook." At any rate, he told himself he wouldn't die a journalist. Al- though he could not quite see himself as a doctor, per- haps medicine would be his salvation.
On receiving his medical diploma, he was for a while in charge of a hospital in a small town. Even earlier he had begun accumulating the knowledge of the peasant patients and provincial doctors who figure in his stories. After a few months he returned to Moscow to hang out his shingle. He was a hard-working and conscientious physician, but medicine did not prove his salvation, certainly not in a financial sense. His patients were mostly poor people, and in any case he regarded heal- ing the sick as a humane duty, scarcely a means of livelihood. He continued to rely chiefly on his pen for his earnings and although he went on writing at a great rate, only the worst of the worrying and pinching was over. In time he came to take a certain satisfaction in having two occupations. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he wrote to a friend when he had been a doctor for four years, "and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and be- sides, neither of them loses anything through my in- fidelity." EventuaUy the mistress came to supplant the ^tfe.
There were times when he felt that medicine some- what hampered him as a writer. A doctor has few illu- sions and that, he said, "somehow desiccates life." But his better judgment was that medical training helped his writing, giving him a more perceptive and penetrat- ing knowledge of men and women, guarding him against the pitfalls of subjectivity, one of his bugbears. There are few clinical studies among his stories. And even when he deals with a case of typhus or with a woman having a miscarriage, however precise the delineation of the symptoms, he observes the patient for the sake of the human being, never the other way about. Basically his concern is not with illness, but with health.
Meanwhile there began to turn up among his writ- ings, and with increasing frequency, pieces that gave promise of the harvest to come: bits of pure comedy, sharp character sketches, little masterpieces of pathos, candid studies of the folly of the heart. He was matur- ing, slowly, unevenly, yet unmistakably. To his aston- ishment he was discovering that he had a public and that, indeed, he was the object of critical consideration, in spite of the fact that he had not yet made the dignified "stout" monthlies. When, early in 1886, he scraped together enough rubles to take him to Peters- burg, the intellectual and publishing center of the coun- he was received "like the Shah of Persia." And then came a marvelous letter from Grigorovich, one of the Olympians, telling him that he was the foremost of the younger writers and pleading with him to take his talent seriously. Toward the end of the year when he again visited the capital he found that he was "the most fashionable writer" there. In the interim he had brought out a second and successful book of stories (the first had passed unnoticed), and had begun to write for the great daily, Novoye vremya (New Time), which meant bet- ter rates and greater prestige.
He was developing a literary conscience. Formerly, he joked, writing had been like eating pancakes; now when he took up his pen he trembled. He was anxious to undertake something serious, something that would engage all his powers and that he could work at without haste. In the summer of 1887 he fulfilled at least the first of these wishes by writing a drama, which he called Ivanov after its unhappy hero. He had always loved the theater and had written plays even as a schoolboy. Ivanov, however, was a failure, which he was in haste to forget, and he was soon at work on his first serious long narrative, "The Steppe." For this leisurely, tender, evocative "history of a journey" he drew largely upon childhood memories of the great southern plain. But the vein of comedy was not to dry up all at once. In a few days he dashed off The Boor, which he described as "an empty Frenchifled little vaudeville piece." It proved to be a box-office hit that was to entertain generations of Russians. He was to write several more such skits, most of them dramatizations of his own early stories, but henceforth the comic spirit was practically absent from his fiction.
To his surprise, as much as to his delight, in the autumn of 1888 he received the Academy's Pushkin Prize for distinguished literary achievement. He was tasting the full sweetness of recognition. But there were times when he felt that he did not deserve it. "The Steppe" he had worked at slowly, "the way a gourmet eats woodcock." And yet, although its publication cen- tered all eyes on him, he suspected that there was something radically wrong with it: it was not an organic whole, but a sequence of tableaux. "The Name-Day Party," which he wrote the same year, he had killed with hurry. He had a father and mother, a sister and younger brothers on his hands, living together in a two-story house that had to be kept up, and to pay his bills he had to meet deadlines. Shortly after he had received the prize he was writing to a friend that his literary activity had not yet begun in earnest. He was a mere apprentice, worse, "a complete ignoramus." He must start from scratch, learn everything from the be- ginning. If he were to spend forty years reading and studying, then perhaps he might fire such a cannon at his public that the skies would tremble. "As it is, I am a lilliputian like everybody else," he concluded.
Novoye vremya, the daily to which Chekhov began contributing in 1886, was an organ of reactionary opin- ion. He had no scruples about appearing in its pages, and he contracted a close friendship with its owner and editor, the renegade liberal, Alexey Suvorin. During his school and university years he had remained untouched by the radicalism that flourished among the students. He moved largely in conservative circles and shared the prejudices current there against socialists, "trouble- makers," and even, to some extent, against Jews. A couple of years after the beginning of his association with Suvorin's paper, he was writing for the mon^^es, which belonged to the opposite camp. He was com- mencing to abandon political conformity, as he had earlier rid himself of the coarseness, servility, and hy- pocrisy to which he had also been bred. And yet he was far from having achieved a consistent outlook. He was on the hither side of thirty when he observed that he changed his political, religious, and philosophical Weltanschauung every month. He seems to have been at this time under the spell of Tolstoy's ideas. Some traces of this influence, which lasted several years, are to be found in his works.
But Chekhov was not the stuff of which disciples are made. In reaction against the authoritarian spirit of his upbringing, he developed a skeptical independence of judgment. In the end he discovered that he couldn't share Tolstoy's faith. He put his trust in science; he loved culture, by which he meant, he wrote on one occasion, carpets, carriage with springs, wit. Between being whipped as a matter of course and not being whipped there was a gulf that compelled him to be- lieve in progress. He came to feel that there was more love of one's fellow men in steam and electricity than in chastity and vegetarianism. Once the spell of Tol- stoy's influence was broken, he was in the position of a man whose house, as he put it, was left empty. No new tenant came to occupy it. His mind was not doctrinal, much less dogmatic. The nearest he came to formulating a positive credo was in a letter to a friend in which he remarked casually: "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and false- hood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves."
He had come by freedom the hard way and he prized it all the more highly. It was one of the few certainties in a world of shifting values, a firm principle, a guide for the perplexed. And freedom seemed to him to be menaced not so much from the Right as from the Left. It was this camp, he felt, that harbored a spirit of parti- sanship and intolerance that he recognized as a threat to his liberty both as man and writer. In a mood of prophecy, rare with him, he remarked that a time would come in Russia when "toads and crocodiles," giv- ing lip service to "science, art and free thought" would outdo the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.
He might have added another article to his credo. He put no stock in classes or institutions, he had no faith in the intelligentsia or the proletariat, or for that matter in the peasantry, although he shared the populists' bf'- lief in the essential moral soundness, indeed superiority, of the masses. It was in the individual that he put his trust. For him a man's own conscience was the sole arbiter of right and wrong. Little of the rebel as there was in him, he learned not merely to hate coercion in private relations, but to look quizzically at government itself. He saw no reason why the State should be ex- cused from the decencies required of its subjects. In any case, as a writer of fiction he was little concerned with social questions and less with political matters. It should be noted that the greater part of his work was produced in the period of discouragement with political action following upon the failure of the inchoate radical movement of the seventies which culminated in the assassination of Alexander II. A sensitive writer could not help taking on to some degree the color of this twi- light age.
Without being political-minded, Chekhov was yet fully aware of social evils and had a strong sense of civic responsibility. Here too he felt that what counted was individual initiative, personal effort. This attitude makes intelligible a somewhat puzzling episode in his life. In the spring of 1890 he abandoned his manuscripts and his practice, his family and his friends, and traveled six thousand miles by train, by boat, by sledge, by coach, under the most exhausting and sometimes dan- gerous conditions—this was before the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad—to reach the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. He spent over three months there, visiting practically every settlement—in fact, he claimed that single-handed he took a census of the population—and returned home via the Indian Ocean with material for a book. This was published between boards five years later. It is a hodge-podge of statistics, anecdotes, detailed geographical and historical data, thumbnail portraits, hardly redeemed by some pages that rival Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the Dead House in the candor with which they depict the degradation to which man can be reduced. Chekhov was glad to have written the book and proud to think of "this coarse convict's garb" hanging in his literary wardrobe. But was it for this satisfaction that he had endured the hardships of the trip to and of the sojourn on Sakhalin? Before he left he had given his friends an assortment of reasons for his enterprise. His real reason seems to have been to arouse public interest in the tragic lot of the convicts, for which he felt himself, with all his com- patriots, responsible. It was in vain that he had gone freely where others were driven. His gesture was a quixotic one: the book did not rouse the public and seems not to have helped the convicts. It can only be surmised that it helped Chekhov to feel that he had attempted to pay his debt to society.
He made other attempts in that direction. Early in 1892 he traveled into the famine-stricken provinces to organize relief, and was nearly lost in a blizzard. Later in the year, when central Russia was threatened with cholera, he acted as medical supervisor of the district in which he was living. With characteristic candor he con- fessed to a friend that he was in the vexing position of being able to read of nothing but cholera, to think of nothing but diarrhoea, while feeling indifferent to the people he was treating. It was equally characteristic that he should give up every other activity for an entire summer in order to help them. He took an active part in the building of village schools near his home and interested himself in a project of founding a settlement house in Moscow. In 1897 he was a volunteer census- taker, going from one log cabin to another, in spite of illness.
Two years after his return from Sakhalin Chekhov settled in the country. Since his student days he had summered there, for much as he loved the bustle and the human contacts of the city, he relished the solitude and serenity that the rural scene offered. Now he bought an estate of six hundred acres near the village of Melihovo, in the province of Moscow, and made a home there for his parents, his sister, and his younger brothers. One reason why he wished to leave town was that his health was poor. He said he was like an old cupboard coming apart. He had never been strong. For years his digestion had been poor, he had been suffering from piles, and since his early twenties he had had a per- sistent cough and from time to time had spat blood. Though he resolutely ignored these symptoms and would not let himself be examined by a physician—he was the opposite of a hypochondriac—he supposed that the country might benefit his health. Besides, living
might be cheaper there, and perhaps he would be able
to write less and in a more leisurely and painstaking,
fashion. Again, there would be fewer visitors and other
distractions.
Some weeks after he was installed at Melihovo he was telling a friend that what with the chores and the fresh air, he was getting so husky that if the place were brought under the hammer, he would hire himself out as a circus athlete. But he was soon forced to realize that the change was doing him little good. He may have lacked a certain spontaneity of feeling and his relations with people may have been pretty much on the surface, but he was incorrigibly gregarious, so that there were as many guests as there had been in Moscow and they were harder to get rid of. Then, too, life in the bosom of the family had its drawbacks. Again there were the patients: in a year nearly a thousand peasants were treated by him, free of charge. It was delightful not to have to pay rent, but the expenses had nowise de- creased. In order to buy the property he had gone into debt, and he was driven to fresh exertions by the oppres- sive thought of the money he owed. Some of it he had borrowed from Suvorin, who, though Chekhov no longer contributed to Novoye vremya, continued to publish his books. He had scarcely made himself at home at Meli- hovo when he was complaining that while his soul wanted to expand and soar, he had to go on scribbling for lucre, without respecting what he wrote, and that his only solace was medicine, which he practiced with- out thought of money. He had grown up among people with whom money played "an infinitely great role," and that, he confessed on another occasion, had terribly depraved him. He should take a sulphuric acid bath, he said, so as to have his old skin eaten away and then grow a new hide. But if his soul had few opportunities to expand and soar, he knew moods of animal con- tentment here, when he neither regretted yesterday nor anticipated tomorrow. Spring in the country was so ex- quisite that he could not but hope there would be spring in paradise. On a walk across the snowy fields he felt as detached, as remote from the humdrum and the hurly-burly as if he were on the moon. At moments he was so happy that he superstitiously brought himself up short by recalling his creditors.
Even at its best, the place could not hold him. The master of Melihovo was a restless man, craving new impressions, eager for all that was strange and fresh. He made frequent trips to Moscow, where he was profusely feted. He visited friends in the provinces, sailed up and down the Volga, traveled to the Crimea and the Cau- casus, and in Suvorin's company saw France and Italy. European comforts, European culture made Russia seem more drab and dingy than ever. His return from Sakha- lin by the Orient route had whetted his appetite for the exotic. He longed to go to South America. He wanted to see Chicago. Lack of funds and lack of courage, according to him, prevented him from realiz- ing these dreams. Probably lack of health also had a good deal to do with it.
On one of his trips to Moscow he was dining in a restaurant with Suvorin when he had a severe hemor- rhage of the lungs. With his usual nonchalance, he went about his business as soon as the bleeding stopped, only to suffer a relapse three days later. He was taken to a hospital. This was in March 1897. An examination—the first he had permitted—showed that he was far gone in consumption.
While he was in the hospital he was correcting the proofs of his story "The Peasants," one of his finest and most substantial pieces. It was the fruit of that intimate knowledge of the people that life in the country had helped to give him. The years at Melihovo had not been as productive as the Moscow period had been. Never- theless, it was then that he wrote most of his long stories and some shorter ones that are among his best.
The doctors prescribed a strict regimen, country air, and residence in a southern climate, and they forbade him to practice medicine. He was not the man to take their orders seriously. But that autumn he did go abroad for his health. He settled in Nice, and in the spring went up to Paris. The Dreyfus case had recently been re- opened, and he became interested in it. He took his stand with the Dreyfusards. He was full of admiration for Zola. Novoye vremya stank in his nostrils; anti- Semitism smelt to him of the slaughter-house. What particularly disgusted him was that the paper reviled Zola in its editorial columns while pirating one of his novels in its supplement. Chekhov stated his position frankly enough to Suvorin, and their former intimacy became impossible, but he did not break completely with the old reactionary. He continued to count Suvorin among his friends, who included Tolstoy, the Christian anarchist, and were soon to be joined by Maxim Gorky, the revolutionist.
He could not stay abroad indefinitely. Whatever in- terest the foreign scene had for him, and that interest paled since he was ill, the pull of home was a strong one. On his return he was forced to give up Melihovo and go to live in Yalta, in the mild air of the southern coast of the Crimea.
He had visited the resort once or twice before, and it had depressed him profoundly. Now he was con- demned to live in the Godforsaken place, where, he said, even the bacilli were asleep. It was exile to a warm Siberia, a balmy Devil's Island. When he had been there over a year he wrote that he still felt like a transplanted tree hesitating whether to take root or begin to wither. Eventually he resigned himself to Yalta, but he never got to like it, in spite of the fact that he had the companionship of several fellow writers there, including Tolstoy, whom he revered. ,
The exile did not do for him what it should have. He did not get the proper diet or nursing, and he kept breaking away to take trips that cannot have benefited his health. His condition grew steadily worse. Neverthe- less he was able to write. Such memorable stories as "The Man in a Shell," "Gooseberries," "The Darling," "On Official Business," "The Lady With the Pet Dog," were composed during those years. He also prepared his collected works for the press—not an unmixed pleasure, since he was dissatisfied with much that he had written and disgusted with his early stuff. They were issued in ten volumes in 1899-1901 under the imprint of A. F. Marx. He had sold his works to that publisher for 75,000 rubles, becoming, as he said, "a Marxist for life."
It was during these years that Chekhov composed his better known plays. He had made a fiasco of his firrt attempt at playwriting with Ivanov, which was written and staged in Moscow in 1887. Two years later he re- wrote the play for a revival in Petersburg and found the work of revision excruciating. He decided that he was no playwright. "Shoot me," he wrote to a friend, "if I go mad and occupy myself with what is not my busi- ness." In its revised form Ivanov proved a success, but his next piece, The Wood Demon, put on the same year, fell flat, and he disliked it so much that he refused to have it published. It was six years before he tried his hand at playwriting again. The Sea Gull was pro- duced in Petersburg in 1896. Its failure verged on a scandal. The unhappy author swore that he would never attempt a play again. Yet in 1898 his Uncle Vanya, a revised version of The Wood Demon, was produced in the provinces and met with a favorable re- ception. At the close of the same year a newly formed company which went by the name of The Moscow Art Theatre performed The Sea Gull with great success. This was the beginning of the association between Chekhov and the Art Theatre, which persisted in spite of the fact that he was not wholly satisfied with the way in which his plays were interpreted. All of them, in- cluding the last two: The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, became the very backbone of the repertory of the Art Theatre, which, in fact, adopted the gull as its emblem.
The role of Irina in The Sea Gull was played by Olga Knipper. Chekhov met the actress at a rehearsal. Within less than three years, on May 25, 1901, they were married. He was then forty-one and his bride thirty-one. They spent their honeymoon in a sanatorium.
Some years earlier when Suvorin had been urging him to marry, Chekhov had declared: "Very well, I'll get married, if you wish. But my conditions are: every- thing must remain just as before, that is, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I'll go to see her. Happiness continuing day after day, from morning to morning, I shan't be able to stand.. . . I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear in my sky every day." He found precisely such a wife. To keep her engagements, she had to winter in the two capitals. His illness tied him to his southern place of exile. He went to see her in Moscow, occasionally she visited him at Yalta, or they would have a few weeks together elsewhere. They exchanged letters almost daily. Writing to her, before their marriage, of the fate that kept them apart, he said that neither of them was to blame: "It's the devil who has put the bacillus in me and the love of art in you." After they were married, he assured her that she need feel no pricking of conscience if she could not be at his side, that he didn't feel cheated, that all was going well with them, and that they were indeed a model couple, since they didn't interfere with one another's work. The arrangement, however, had its drawbacks. He missed her more than he had imagined possible. Separation was not a matter of choice: it was enforced by his ill health. On that account he was not with her when she had a miscarriage; she promised him a son the follow- ing year, but they were never to have the child that both longed for. There was something pathetic about this union, for all the insistent gaiety that marked his resigned acceptance of the situation.
The year before his marriage Chekhov was elected honorary member of the newly created Section of Belles Lettres in the National Academy of Sciences. He was at this time the most outstanding literary figure in Russia, next to Tolstoy. He did not long wear the academic laurels, however. In 1902 Maxim Gorky was accorded the same honor, but as he was then under indictment for a political offense, the authorities succeeded in hav- ing the election annulled. Thereupon Chekhov resigned from the august body. Though his protest was not a public one, the gesture was significant for a man of his temper. He had long since abandoned any attachment to the ideas that Suvorin championed in his paper. For at least a decade Chekhov's public—and that meant all literate Russia—had been taking it for granted that he belonged in the liberal camp. He still had no patience with cut-and-dried ideologies, owed no allegiance to any political group, nor did he show any leanings to- ward socialism. On occasion he could bracket "sulky- faced Marxists" with police inspectors. But he was now definitely with those who looked forward to the speedy do^fall of the autocratic regime. What cropped up in the writings of his last years was something above and beyond millennial hopes: a dissatisfaction with quietism, a welcoming of the violent change that he saw on the way. At twenty-eight he had asserted that there would never be a revolution in Russia. At forty he believed ^fferently. The country, he felt, was emerging from its torpor and beginning, as he put it, "to hum like a bee- hive." He wanted to catch this new mood of wakening energies. Indeed, in his last story, "Betrothed," a girl breaks away from her confining home environment and goes out into the world, and it has been stated that in the first draft Nadya, the heroine, joins the revolution- ists. Chekhov also spoke of wanting to write "a buoyant play." He did not write it. His last play, The Cherry Orchard, first staged the year before the upheaval of 1905, tolled the knell of old Russia rather than rang in the new. Nor did he witness its aborted start.
What with his trips north and the excitement attend- ant upon the production of his plays, his mode of living was scarcely what the doctor ordered. After he was married, he grew rapidly worse. The first night of The Cherry Orchard was set for January 17, 1904, the play- wright's forty-fourth birthday. His friends turned the evening into a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniver- sary of his literary activity, although he had actually broken into print in 1880, twenty-four years previously. Shaken with coughing, Chekhov was hardly able to stand up to receive the ovation and listen to the ad- dresses. He was criticaUy ill that spring and yet, with the war against Japan in progress, he talked of going to the front as an doctor. In June he was rushed to a health resort in the Black Forest and there, on July 2, he died. His body was taken to Moscow in a refrigerating car for the transportation of oysters. The last trick that Fate played on ^rn was of the sort that it would have amused him to jot do^ in his notebook.
Toward the end of his life Chekhov remarked to a friend that people would stop reading ^rn a year after his death. As a matter of fact, his vogue kept growing steadily until the cataclysm of 1917 and his position as the major figure of the Silver Age of Russian literature was becoming increasingly secure. During the harsh, strenuous revolutionary years his reputation suffered a partial eclipse, but by now it has regained its former luster, and his work is valued not alone for its intrinsic quality but also for the light that it throws on a dead past. Just when his compatriots, coping with the tasks and hardships of the new order, were looking away from Chekhov, the western world, especially England and ^merica, was enthusiastically exploring ^rn as a remark- able discovery. Indeed, shortly after the First World War, the homage paid to him in certain literary circles verged on a cult. That first fine careless rapture has since died do^, and something closer to a just estimate of his significance can be arrived at.
As a playwright Chekhov made a virtue of his limita- tions and so brought something new into the theater. He lacked the dramatic instinct. His plays want the sense of crisis, the heightened tension, the clear-cut clash of wills that one expects on the stage. There is something loose and amorphous about them. Of the five full-sized pieces that he wrote, The Cherry Orchard alone comes near to answering the demands of the theater. It is also the play which has had the greatest box-office success. The supersession of the landed gen- try by the mercantile middle class, which is its theme, is obviously one with abundant dramatic possibilities. The auctioning off of Mme. Ranevskaya's ancestral estate affords a definite climax toward which the action rises and from which it declines. The more important char- acters are drawn in such a fashion as to offset one an- other, and there is a good deal of suspense, first as to the fate of the property, and second as to whether the new owner will propose to the daughter of the house.
Not that the other plays are wholly wanting in theat- rical moments. In fact, they are punctuated by pistol shots, accounting for two suicides, one fatal duel, and one attempted murder. But these outbursts of violence are of little dramatic significance and merely serve to underscore the static condition into which they irrupt. They are like stones flung into a stream and soon covered by the waters. With the exception of a few indurate egotists, the characters in all the plays are unhappy, defeated, and mostly futile, though restive, individuals, caught in situations that are pathetic and that skirt trag- edy by suggesting what is irremediable in life. Aware of their failings, these people reach out for the meaning of their sufferings and on occasion dream of a glorious and distant future which would compensate for their wasted lives. For the rest, they are ordinary men and women, typical of the strata of society to which they belong, chiefly the intelligentsia and the rural gentry. The characters engage in much anguished talk about the shortcomings of Russian life and hold up work as the salvation of the country, but the heart of the plays lies not in action or in programs, but rather in states of mind, in the ebb and flow of feeling, in the nuances of inner experience. The frustration, the self-probing, the emotionalism, the starry-eyed aspiration—all this, with the enveloping mood of wistful musing, relieved by a saving touch of the grotesque, bathes the plays in an atmosphere peculiarly their own, gives them a lyrical quality which to a large degree compensates for their lack of drama.
Russian audiences are still receptive to the spell of Chekhov's plays, though one imagines that it is difficult for them to identify themselves with his weary, lacka- daisical heroes. The foreign spectator, too, is apt to sur- render to the emotional tone of The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. As for the reader, by an imagina- tive effort he should be able to establish rapport with this elegiac poet of the theater.
Chekhov's stories are by far the larger and the more rewarding, as well as the more influential portion of his work. He limited himself to the short narrative' not with- out a struggle. When his writing first assumed a serious cast, he was harassed by the feeling that he was doing less than his best. Characters, situations, scenes were crowding his mind, begging to be realized: what wed- dings, what funerals, what splendid women! The un- born figments were jealous, as he put it, of those that had seen the light. But he was hoarding this wealth, he was not going to throw it away on trifles, he was going to save it for some substantial work, for a novel. And he did start the novel. He kept mentioning it in his letters. He called it: "Stories from the Lives of My Friends." In spite of the suspicious title, he insisted that it was not going to be a patchwork, but a composed whole. He even chose a dedicatee. And then, about 1891, all ref- erences to the work cease, and no trace of the manu- script has been found to this day. Now and again, in later years his desire to write a novel would reawaken, and indeed he did produce several long narratives, but not one of them quite achieves the stature of a novel.
Perhaps to account for his failure, Chekhov threw out the rather dubious suggestion that the writing of novels required a degree of cultivation, a mastery, a conscious- ness of personal freedom possessed only by members of the privileged classes, and that the art was beyond the powers of plebeians like himself. Aggravating the sense of his inadequacy was the beb'ef that he belonged to a generation of epigoni, unworthy descendants of giants like Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. In any case, the short story remained his vehicle to the end. It offered a form admirably suited to his genius.
With few exceptions, the locale of his tales is the na- tive one, their time that in which Chekhov himself lived, their approach realistic. Within these limits, their vari- ety is enormous, taking in, as they do, men and women, old and young, rich and poor, people in every station: peasants, landowners, priests, policemen, school teach^ ers, prostitutes, doctors, merchants, government officials. The human comedy, at least a large part of it, is enacted in a series of short scenes, some of them farcical, many of them deeply tinged with pathos, a few verging on tragedy or having a touch of irony. The interest may at- tach to a simple situation, as in "Vanka," or it may lie in a complex of relations, as in "The Name-Day Party," or again it may center on a psychological type, as in "The Man in a Shell."
In his notebook Chekhov entered this quotation from Daudet: " 'Why are your songs so short?' a bird was asked. 'Is it because you are short of breath?' 'I have a great many songs and I should like to sing them all.' " He wrote seven or eight hundred stories. A large number of them, including much, though by no means all, of his best work and every one of his longer narratives, are available in English. He was an uneven writer, and many pieces were omitted from the present volume without regret. Where he attempts a story involving ac- tion and suspense, one with a plot, a sharp point, a neat solution, the result is apt to be wanting in distinction. Probably his lack of dramatic instinct was responsible for this. Where, however, he uses the method that he made peculiarly his o^, though it had been employed before his time by Turgenev and other Russians, he is one of the masters, and he shows his gifts often enough to embarrass an editor with riches.
The most characteristic of Chekhov's stories lack purely narrative interest. They no more bear retelling than does a poem. Nothing thrilling happens in them, nor are the few reflective passages particularly compell- ing. Some of the tales, having neither beginning nor end, are, as Galsworthy put it, "all middle like a tor- toise." Others have a static quality, with no more pro- gression than there is in a dance. Instead of moving toward a definite conclusion, they are apt to trail off or drop to an anti-climax. And yet they manage to take hold of the imagination in an amazing fashion. Precisely because of the lack of invention and contrivance, the absence of cleverness, the fact that the loose ends are not tucked up nor the rough edges beveled, and that they remain unfinished in more senses than one, they have the impact of a direct experience.
It lay within Chekhov's gift to create characters who have come to be a by-word in Russia. And this although the creatures of his imagination are somewhat shadowy, since he is inclined to sketch a type rather than to paint the portrait of an individual. He had an intimate under- standing of the complexities, the non-sequiturs of the mind and particularly of the heart. His was an observant eye for the telling detail of appearance or behavior, for whatever would contribute to placing his characters within the proper physical or social setting. His stories have an atmosphere as distinct as an odor.
Chekhov's preoccupation is with existences that are commonplace, drab, narrow. The life he pictures is one in which there is cruelty, want, boredom, misunder- standing, with only an occasional interval of happiness or serenity, a rare intimation that justice and goodness may ultimately prevail—in sum, an unintelligible and largely painful business. A man and woman are involved with one another and can live neither together nor apart. A cabman loses his son and can find no one to give ear to his grief but his horse. A woman wastes her youth in the provinces. Human beings are broken by the machinery of the State. Chekhov's characters may long for something that would lend meaning and beauty to their existence, yet they do not act to bring that con- summation nearer. Their frustration is apt to be the re- sult of their own helplessness. Often we encounter them in the midst of their feeble struggles, or, already de- feated, facing an impasse. Chekhov preached the gospel of work as the panacea for his country's ills, and his heart went out to non-conformists and to enterprising, courageous men, such as the explorers of the Russian North, and yet he was incapable of projecting success- fully a fighter, a rebel, a man of steadfast purpose. It is as though he were so suspicious of power, associating it with its abuse, that he looked upon weakness with a for- giving, almost an affectionate eye. The situations he usually presents are at the opposite pole from melo- drama, as is his style from the melodramatic. His lan- guage is simple, rather slovenly, with rare strokes of bold imagery, sometimes very expressive, always free from the emphatic, the rhetorical, the florid.
A man of a sober and naturalistic temper, Chekhov was dogged by the thought that our condition in this uncomfortable world is a baffling one. He liked to say that there was no understanding it. And, indeed, his writings heighten that sense of the mystery of life which is one of the effects of all authentic literature. At the same time they tend to discourage the view that exist- ence is a meaningless play of chance forces. In "A Tedi- ous Story," a work of his early maturity and one of the most somber pieces to have come from his pen, an old professor discovers to his deep distress that there is nothing in his thoughts and feelings that could be called "a general idea, or the god of living man." Chekhov's writings pay covert homage to such a life-giving idea. In the semblance of the image of beauty, of the impulse toward justice, of the ideal of saintliness, it glimmers through the daily commonplace. His men and women sometimes reach out for something "holy, lofty and majestic as the heavens overhead." On a few occasions he allows his characters intuitions tinged with mysti- cism. Thus "The Black Monk" is concerned, however ambiguously, with madness as the gateway to trans- cendental reality, and the examining magistrate in "On Official Business" is haunted by the thought that noth- ing is accidental or fragmentary in our existence, that "everything has one soul, one aim," that individual lives are all parts of an organic whole.
Like the student in "A Nervous Breakdown," Che- khov had a "talent for humanity"—a generous compas- sion that went hand in hand with understanding and with a profound regard for the health of body and soul. Asked to give his opinion about a story dealing with a syphilitic, he wrote to the author that syphilis was not a vice but a disease, and that those who suffer from it needed not censure but friendly care. It was a bad thing, he went on to say, for the wife in the story to desert her husband on the ground that he had a con- tagious or loathsome illness. "However," he concluded, "she may take what attitude she likes toward the mal- ady. But the author must be humane to the tips of his
fingers." Chekhov lived up to this precept.
Next to his humanity, his supreme virtue is his can- dor. He is no teller of fairy-tales, no dispenser of illusory solaces or promises. He does not tailor his material to fit our sense of poetic justice or to satisfy our desire for a happy ending. In his mature years he clung to the con- viction that a writer was not an entertainer, not a con- fectioner, not a beautician, but a man working under contract who was bound by his conscience to tell the whole truth with the objectivity and the indifference to bad smells of a chemist. At the same time he was plagued, as has been seen, by a feeling of his insuffi- ciency. He lived, he protested, in "a flabby, sour, dull time," and he had, like the rest of his generation, no goals toward which to lead his readers, no enthusiasm with which to infect them. And so he assigned to him- self the modest role of a reporter, a witness, a man who, without presuming to solve any problems, merely posed them or recorded, to the best of ability, the way others posed them.
He was indeed an incorruptible witness, but he did not remain in the witness box all the time. Implicit in his writings is a judgment against cruelty, greed, hypocrisy, stupidity, snobbery, sloth—all the slavish traits he had been at pains to squeeze out of himself, against what- ever degrades man and prevents him from achieving his full stature. Notwithstanding his protestations of objec- tivity, and though his attitude toward evil was not so much active hatred as abhorrence, there is indignation and indictment in his pages, a thinly veiled criticism of life. He even succumbs to the Russian weakness for preachment. There is no doubt that eventually he came to expect a corrective influence from his plays and stories. By telling the truth, he said to himself, he would help men to live more decently. "Man will become bet- ter when you show him what he is like," runs an entry in his notebook. One need not have faith in human per- fectibility to acknowledge that there is something liber- ating and exalting in a frank facing of man's estate.
Just before the recent war so competent an observer as Somerset Maugham remarked: "Today most young writeis of ambition model themselves on Chekhov." Un- questionably the Russian's influence has helped to direct public taste in the English-speaking countries toward the acceptance of a rather shapeless kind of short narra- tive implying the forlornness of man, morally flabby creature that he is, in a world he never made. There is, of course, bound to be a reaction against this trend, and it is to be expected that the conventional story of a less quietist and more optimistic tenor, which has never lost popularity with the general, will again be prized by both craftsmen and critics. But whatever the vicissitudes of literary fashion, men are likely to keep returning to a writer who, in addition to his other virtues, came as close as any of his fellows to being humane to the tips of his fingers.
Notable Dates in the Life of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
1860 January 17/29: Anton is born in Taganrog.
1869 Admitted to the local gimnaziya.
1876 The family moves to Moscow, leaving him behind.
S^mer: Graduates from the Taganrog gimnaziya. Autumn: Joins the family in Moscow and enrolls in the medical department of the university.
March: Breaks into print with a short h^orous piece.
1880-81 Writes a full-length play, first published in 1923 and translated into English under the title, That Worthless Fel1ow Platonov.
Completes his studies and takes up the practice of medicine, continuing to live in Moscow with the family. The Tales of Melpomene, first collection of short stories.
January: Motley Tales, a book of stories. February: Starts contributing short stories to the daily, Novoye vremya.
April: Shows alarming symptoms of lung trouble. April: Revisits Taganrog and neighboring to^s. Summer: Twilight and Innocent Words, coUections of stories.
1884 1886 J887
November 19/December 1: First performance of Ivanov in Moscow. 1888 January: Visits his friend Suvorin in the Crimea and travels in the Caucasus.
March: For the first time makes the pages of a monthlv with his long tale, "The Steppe." December: Awarded the Pushkin prize by the Academy of Sciences.
January 31/February 12: A revised version of Ivanov opens at the Alexandrinsky Theater in Len- ingrad.
Leaves Moscow for Sakhalin in April, reaches the island on July 11/23, spends three months there and is back in Moscow on December 9/21. Gloomy People, a collect on of stories.
Travels in Western Europe, visitine Vienna, Ven- ice, Florence, Rome, Paris. The Duel, a short novel, his last contribution to Novoye vremya.
January: Active in organizing relief for famine vic- tims.
February: Acauires an estate near the village of Melihovo in tne province of Moscow and settles there with his parents.
Summer: Acts as medical supervisor of a rural district in a campaign against an impending epi- demic of cholera.
Becomes a contributor to Russkaya mysl, a populist monthly, and to a liberal daily.
His health worsens. Travels in the Crimea and in Southern Europe. Tales and stories.
1894-97 Takes an active interest in and partly finances the construction of schools at Melihovo and in two neighboring villages.
June: The Island of Sakhalin; travel notes (serial- ized in 1893-94 ).
August: Visits Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.
Aut^n: Revisits the Crimea and the Caucasus. October 17/29: Premiere of The Sea Gull, which is a fiasco.
1897-98 March: Has a severe pulmonary hemorrhage.
Spends the autumn and the following winter and spring in Nice. The Peasants. My Life. The Plays (including Uncle Vanya).
In Nice, follows the Dreyfus case, siding with Zola. September: On the advice of his doctors gives up the practice of medicine and settles in a villa of his o^ in a suburb of Yalta.
November: Starts corresponding with Maxim Gorky.
December 17/29:First performance of The Sea Gull by the Moscow Art Theatre company is an immense success.
Sells the right to publish all his works to A. F. Marx for 75,000 rubles. Ten volumes of his col- lected works came out in 1899-1901.
October 26/November 7: Premiere of Uncle Vanya in the Moscow Art Theatre.
January: Elected, with Tolstoy, honorary member of the newly created Section of Belles Lettres of the Academy of Sciences. Spends part of the win- ter of 1900-01 on the Riviera.
January 31/February 12: Premiere of The Three Sisters at the Moscow Art Theatre.
May 25/June 7: Marries Olga Knipper. Autumn: Sees a good deal of Tolstoy, Gorky, Ku- prin, Bunin, who were then staying in or near Yalta.
His health continues to deteriorate. September: Resigns his membership in the Acad- emy as a protest against Gorky's exclusion from it.
Spends the spring and part of the summer in Mos- cow and in the country near Moscow. Autumn: Becomes an editor of Russkaya mysl. "Betrothed," his last story.
January 17/30: First performance of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre.
June 3/16: Goes, with his wife, to Badenweiler, a German health resort.
July 2/15: Dies there and a week later is buried in Moscow.
Selected Bibliography: WORKS BY CHEKHOV
A few of the stories appeared in English and American magazines during the fi.rst decade of this century. But not until the publication of The Tales of Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett (London, 1916-1922; New York, 1916- 1923, 13 vols.) did Chekhov cease to be an obscure figure in the Anglo-American world. Not that all his fiction is con- tained in that edition. A few of the omitted pieces, notably the four in the present volume, are admirable. Many of the others, largely early work, are without distinction, but quite a number of them, translated by various hands, found their way into print. A. E. Chamot Englished The Shooting Pariif (London, 1926), a full-length thriller that was eventually made into a movie. The Unknown Chekhov, edited and translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York, 1954), con- tains, in addition to fiction not rendered by Mrs. Garnett, Chekhov's remarkable account of his journey to Sakhalin, not previously translated. His monograph on the penal colony there has been rendered by Luba and Michael Terpak and published as The Island ( 1'\ew York, 1967). Selections from the Garnett version of the stories have been reprinted in numerous collections and anthologies. Selected Stories, translated by Jessie Coulson (London, New York, 1963 ), and Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, translated by David Magarshack (Baltimore, 1964 ), exemplify the effort made in recent years to retranslate the stories.
The plays, too, were translated by Constance Garnett (London, 1923, New York, 1924, 2 vols.). The same text was reprinted (New York, 1930) with a preface by Eva Le Later editions of the collected plays include
Best Plys, translated and with an introduction by Stark Young (New York, 1956); the Penguin Plays, translated by Elisaveta Fen (Baltimore, 1959, reissued in 1964); Six Plays of Chekhov, new English version by Robert W. Corrigan (New York, 1962). Mention should also be made of Brute and Other Farces, new versions by Eric Bentley and Theo- dore Hoffman (New York, 1958).
The plays have attracted more translators than h&ve the stories. There are even four renderings of Chekhov's first work for the stage, written at the age of twenty-one and known as Platonov (the hero's name), since the early draft di.scovered after the author's death—he had destroyed the clean copy—lacks a title page. The full text of this wretched melodrama has been translated by David Magarshak (New York, 1964). As for The Cherry Orchard, it exists in nearly a dozen translations. The latest ones are: "English version by John Gielgud, introduction by Michel Saint-Denis" (New York, 1963); "a new translation by Ronald Hingley"—to- gether with Uncle Vania (London, New York, 1965); a trans- lation by Tyrone Guthrie and Leonid Kipnis (Minneapolis, 1965); and a translation by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, with ample commentaries by various hands (New York, 1965). The Wisteria Trees, by Joshua Logan (New York, 1950), is an adaptation of The Cherry Orchard. John Gielgud is also the author of a version of Ivanov, based on a translation by Ariadne Nikolaelf (London, 1966).
A considerable proportion of Chekhov's correspondence is available in: Selectea Letters, edited by Lillian Hellman, translated by Sidonie Lederer (New York, 1955); Letters by Anton Tchekhov to His Family and Friends, translated by Constance Garnett (1\:ew York, 1920); and Letters of Anton Tchekhov to Olga L. Knipper, also translated by Constance Garnett (New York, 1925; reprinted in 1966). Then, too, there is Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and other Literary Topics, selected and edited by Louis S. Friedland (New York, 1924). A welcome addition to Chekhov literature is The Personal Papers of Anton Chekhov, introduced by Matthew Josephson (New York, 1948). The volume contains Chekhov's notebook, 1892-1904, his diary, 1896-1903, and "Selected letters on writing, writers, and the theatre, 1882-1904."
The Oxford University Press of London has recently launched The Oxford Chekhov, edited and translated by Ronald Hingley. To judge by the two volumes issued so far and dated respectively 1964 and 1965, this bids fair to be a model edition of a classic. It is based on the twenty- volume edition of Chekhov's works and letters, as well as notebook anJ diary (Moscow, 1944-51 ), which is the definitive edition of his works in the original.
See page 632 for bibliography of works about Chekhov.
STORIES
Vanka
been apprenticed to Alyahin the sboemaker these three months, did not go to bed on Christmas Eve. After his master and mistress and the journeymen had gone to midnight Mass, he got an inkpot and a pen- holder with a rusty nib out of the master's cupboard and having spread out a crumpled sheet of paper, began writing. Before he formed the first letter he looked fear- fully at the doors and windows several times, shot a glance at the dark icon, at either side of which stretched shelves filled with lasts, and heaved a broken sigh. He was kneeling before a bench on which his paper lay.
"Dear Granddaddy, Konstantin Makarych," he wrote. "And I am writing you a letter. I wish you a merry Christmas and everything good from the Lord God. I have neither father nor mother, you alone are left me."
ANKA ZHUKOV, a nine-year-old boy, who had
Vanka shifted his glance to the dark window on which flickered the reflection of his candle and vividly pictured his grandfather to himself. Employed as a watchman by the Zhivaryovs, he was a short, thin, but extraordinarily lively and nimble old man of about sixty-five whose face was always crinkled with laughter and who had a toper's eyes. By day he slept in th.. servants' kitchen or cracked jokes with the cook; at night, wrapped in an ample sheepskin coat, he made the rounds of the estate, shaking his clapper. The oldbitch, Brownie, and the dog called Wriggles, who had a black coat aad a long body like a weasel's, followed him with hanging heads. This Wriggles was extraor- dinarily deferential and demonstrative, looked with equally friendly eyes both at his masters and at stran- gers, but did not enjoy a good reputation. His deference and meekness concealed the most Jesuitical spite. No one knew better than he how to creep up behind you and suddenly snap at your leg, how to slip into the icehouse, or how to steal a hen from a peasant. More than once his hind legs had been all but broken, twice he had been hanged, every week he was whipped till he was half dead, but he always managed to revive.
At the moment Grandfather was sure to be standing at the gates, screwing up his eyes at the bright-red win- dows of the church, stamping his felt boots, and crack- ing jokes with the servants. His clapper was tied to his belt. He was clapping his hands, shrugging with the cold, and, with a senile titter, pinching now the house- maid, now the cook.
"Shall we have a pinch of snuff?" he was saying, offering the women his snuffbox.
They each took a pinch and sneezed. Grandfather, indescribably delighted, went off into merry peals of laughter and shouted:
"Peel it off, it has frozen onl"
The dogs too are given a pinch of snuff. Bro^me sneezes, wags her head, and walks away offended. Wrig- gles is too polite to sneeze and only wags his tail. And the weather is glorious. The air is still, clear, and fresh. The night is dark, but one can see the whole village with its white roofs and smoke streaming out of the c^mneys, the trees silvery with hoarfrost, the snow- drifts. The entire sky is studded with gaily twinkling stars and the Milky Way is as distinctly visible as
though it had been washed and rubbed with snow for
the holiday. . . .
Vanka sighed, dipped his pen into the ink and went on writing:
"And yesterday I got it hot. The master pulled me out into the courtyard by the hair and gave me a hiding with a knee-strap because I was rocking the baby in its cradle and happened to fall asleep. And last week the mistress ordered me to clean a herring and I began with the tail, and she took the herring and jabbed me in the mug with it. The helpers make fun of me, send me to the pothouse for vodka and tell me to steal pickles for them from the master, and the master hits me with anything that comes handy. And there is noth- ing to eat. In the morning they give me bread, for din- ner porridge, and in the evening bread again. As for tea or cabbage soup, the master and mistress bolt it all themselves. And they tell me to sleep in the entry, and when the baby cries I don't sleep at all, but rock the cradle. Dear Granddaddy, for God's sake have pity on me, take me away from here, take me home to the vil- lage, it's more than I can bear. I bow down at your feet and I will pray to God for you forever, take me away from here or I'll die."
Vanka puckered his mouth, rubbed his eyes with his black fist, and gave a sob.
"I will grind your snuff for you,'' he continued, "I will pray to God for you, and if anything happens, you may thrash me all you like. And if you think there's no situation for me, I will beg the manager for Christ's sake to let me clean boots, or I will take Fedka's place as a shepherd boy. Dear Granddaddy, it's more than I can bear, it will simply be the death of me. I thought of running away to the village, but I have no boots and I am afraid of the frost. And in return for this when I grow big, I will feed you and won't let anybody do you any harm, and when you die I will pray for the repose of your soul, just as for my Mom's.
"Moscow is a big city. The houses are all the kind the gentry live in, and there are lots of horses, but no sheep, and the dogs are not fierce. The boys here don't go caroling, carrying the star at Christmas, and they don't let anyone sing in the choir, and once in a shop window I saw fishing-hooks for sale all fitted up with a line, for every kind of fish, very fine ones, there was even one hook that will hold a forty-pound sheatfish. And I saw shops where there are all sorts of guns, like the master's at home, so maybe each one of them is a hundred ru- bles. And in butchers' shops there are woodcocks and partridge and hares, but where they shoot them the clerks won't tell.
"Dear Granddaddy, when they have a Christmas tree with presents at the master's, do get a gilt walnut and put it away in the little green chest. Ask the young lady, Olga Ignatyevna, for it, say it's for Vanka."
Vanka heaved a broken sigh and again stared at the window. He recalled that it was his grandfather who always went to the forest to get the Christmas tree for the master's family and that he would take his grandson with him. It was a jolly time! Grandfather grunted, the frost crackled, and, not to be outdone, Vanka too made a cheerful noise in his throat. Before chopping down the Christmas tree, Grandfather would smoke a pipe, slowly take a pinch of snuff, and poke fun at Vanka who looked chilled to the bone. The young firs draped in hoarfrost stood still, waiting to see which of them was to die. Suddenly, coming out of nowhere, a hare would dart across the snowdrifts like an arrow. Grandfather could not keep from shouting: "Hold ^rn, hold him, hold ^rn! Ah, the bob-tailed devil!"
When he had cut down the fir tree, Grandfather would drag it to the master's house, and there they would set to work decorating it. The young lady, Olga Ignatyevna, Vanka's favorite, was the busiest of all. When Vanka's mother, Pelageya, was alive and a cham- bermaid in the master's house, the young lady used to give him goodies, and, having nothing with which to occupy herself, taught him to read and write, to count up to a hundred, and even to dance the quadrille. When Pelageya died, Vanka had been relegated to the serv- ants' kitchen to stay with his grandfather, and from the kitchen to the shoemaker's.
"Do come, dear Granddaddy," Vanka went on. "For Christ's sake, I beg you, take me away from here. Have pity on me, an unhappy orphan, here everyone beats me, and I am terribly hungry, and I am so blue, I can't tell you how, I keep crying. And the other day the master hit me on the head with a last, so that I fell down and it was a long time before I came to. My life is miserable, worse than a dog's— I also send greetings to Alyona, one-eyed Yegorka and the coachman, and don't give my harmonica to anyone. I remain, your grandson, Ivan Zhukov, dear Granddaddy, do come."
Vanka twice folded the sheet covered with writing and put it into an envelope he had bought for a kopeck the previous day. He reflected a while, then dipped the pen into the ink and wrote the address:
To Grandfather in the village
Then he scratched himself, thought a little, and added: Konstantin Makarych. Glad that no one had interrupted him at his writing, he put on his cap and, without slip- ping on his coat, ran out into the street with nothing over his shirt.
The clerks at the butchers' whom he had questioned the day before had told him that letters were dropped into letter boxes and from the boxes they were carried all over the world in troikas with ringing bells and drunken drivers. Vanka ran to the nearest letter box and thrust the precious letter into the slit.
An hour later, lulled by sweet hopes, he was fast asleep. In his dream he saw the stove. On the stove sat grandfather, his bare legs hanging down, and read the letter to the cooks. Near the stove was Wriggles, wag- ging his tail.
1886
Tlu Privy Councilor
T THE beginning of April in 1870 my mother,
Klavdia Arhipovna, the widow of a lieutenant, received from her brother Ivan, a privy councilor who lived in Petersburg, a letter in which, among other things, this passage occurred: "My liver trouble forces me to spend every summer abroad, and as I have not at the moment the money in hand for a bip to Marien- bad, it is very possible, dear sister, that I may spend this summer with you at Kochuevko. . . ."
On reading the letter my mother turned pale and be- gan trembling all over; then an expression of mingled tears and laughter came into her face. She began crying and laughing. This conflict of tears and laughter always reminds me of the flickering and spluttering of a brightly burning candle when one sprinkles it with water. Hav- ing reread the letter, mother called together all the house- hold, and in a voice broken with emotion began explain- ing to us that there had been four Gundasov brothers: one Gundasov had died as a baby; another had gone into the anny, and he, too, was dead; the third, without offence to him be it said, was an actor; the fourth—
"The fourth has risen far above us," my mother brought out tearfully. "My own brother, we grew up to- gether; and I am all of a tremble, all of a tremble! . . . A privy councilor, a General! How shall I meet him, my angel brother? What can I, a foolish, uneducated woman, talk to him about? It's fifteen years since I've seen him! Andryushenka," my mother turned to me, "you must rejoice, little stupid! It's a piece of luck for you that God is sending him to us!"
After we had heard a detailed history of the Gun- dasovs, there followed a fuss and bustle in the place such as I had been accustomed to see only before Christ- mas. The sky above and the water in the river were all that escaped; everything else was subjected to a merci- less cleansing, scrubbing, painting. If the sky had been lower and smaller and the river had not flowed so swiftly, they would have scoured them, too, with brick dust and rubbed them, too, with tow. Our walls were as white as snow, but they were whitewashed; the floors were bright and shining, but they were washed every day. The cat Bobtail (as a small child I had cut off a good quarter of his tail with the knife used for chopping sugar, and that was why he was called Bobtail) was car- ried off to the kitchen and put in care of Anisya; Fedka was told that if any of the dogs came near the front-door "God would punish him." But no one was treated so roughly as the poor sofas, easy-chairs, and rugs! They had never before been so violently beaten as on this oc- casion in preparation for our visitor. My pigeons took fright at the loud thud of the sticks, and were continu- ally soaring into the sky.
The tailor Spiridon, the only tailor in the whole dis- trict who ventured to work for the genby, came over from Novostroevka. He was a hard-working, capable man who did not drink and was not without a certain fancy and feeling for form, but was nevertheless an atrocious tailor. His work was ruined by hesitation. . . The idea that his cut was not fashionable enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits that even a caricaturist would have called outre and grotesque. We cut a dash in impossibly tight trousers and in such short jackets that we always felt quite abashed in the presence of young ladies.
This Spiridon spent a long time taking my measure. He measured me all over lengthways and crossways, as though he meant to put hoops round me like a barrel; then he spent a long time noting down my measure- ments with a thick pencil on a bit of paper, and ticked off all the measurements with triangular signs. When he had finished with me he set to work on my tutor, Yegor Alexeyevich Pobedimsky. My unforgettable tutor was then at the stage when young men watch the growth of their mustache and are critical of their clothes, and so you can imagine the religious awe with which Spiridon approached him! Yegor Alexeyevich had to throw back his head, straddle his legs like an inverted V, lift up his arms, let them fall. Spiridon measured him several times, walking round him during the process like a lovesick dove round its mate, going down on one knee, bending double. . . . My mother, weary, exhausted by her exertions and headachey from ironing, watched these lengthy proceedings, and said:
"Mind now, Spiridon, you will have to answer for it to God if you spoil the cloth! And you wiU never have any luck if the clothes don't fit!"
Mother's words threw Spiridon first into a fever, then into a perspiration, for he was convinced that the clothes wouldn't fit. He received one ruble twenty kopecks for making my suit, and for Pobedimsky's two rubles, we providing the cloth, the lining, and the buttons. The price cannot be considered excessive, as Novostroevka was about six miles from us, and the tailor came to fit us four times. When he came to try the things on and we squeezed ourselvĉs into the tight trousers and jackets full of basting threads, mother always frowned con- temptuously and expressed her surprise:
"Goodness knows what the fashions are coming to nowadays! I am positively ashamed to look at them. If brother were not used to Petersburg I would not get you fashionable clothes!"
Spiridon, relieved that the blame was thrown on the fashions and not on him, shrugged his shoulders and sighed, as though to say:
"Theres no help for it; it's the spirit of the age!" The excitement with which we awaited the arrival of our guest can only be compared to the strained suspense with which spiritualists await from minute to minute the appearance of a ghost. Mother went about with a sick headache, and was continually melting into tears. I lost my appetite, slept badly, and did not do my lessons. Even in my dreams I was haunted by an impatient long- ing to see a General—that is, a man with shoulder- straps and an embroidered collar sticking up to his ears, and with a naked sword in his hands, exactly like the one who hung over the sofa in our drawing room and glared with terrible black eyes at everybody who dared to look at him. Pobedimsky was the only one who felt himself in his element. He was neither terrified nor de- lighted, and merely from time to time, when he heard the history of the Gundasov family, said:
"Yes, it will be pleasant to have someone fresh to talk
to.
My tutor was looked upon among us as an exceptional nature. He was a young man of twenty, with a pimply face, shaggy locks, a low forehead, and an unusually long nose. His nose was so big that when he wanted to look close at anything he had to put his head to one side like a bird. To our thinking, in the whole province there was not a cleverer, more cultivated, or more fash- ionably dressed man. He had left high school a year be- fore he was due to graduate, and had then entered a veterinary college, from which he was expelled before the end of the first semester. The reason of his expulsion he carefully concealed, which enabled any one who wished to do so to look upon my instructor as an injured and to some extent mysterious person. He spoke little, and only on intellectual subjects; ate meat on fast days, and looked with contempt and condescension on the life around him, which did not prevent ^rn, how- ever, from taking presents, such as suits of clothes, from my mother, and drawing funny faces with red teeth on my kites. Mother disliked him for his "pride," but stood in awe of his brains.
Our visitor did not keep us long waiting. At the be- ginning of May two cart-loads of big trunks arrived from the station. These trunks looked so majestic that the drivers instinctively took off their hats as they lifted them down.
"There must be uniforms and gunpowder in those trunks," I thought.
Why "gunpowder"? Probably the conception of a General was closely connected in my mind with can- non and gunpowder.
When I woke up on the moming of the tenth of May, nurse told me in a whisper that "Uncle had arrived." I dressed rapidly and, washing after a fashion, flew out of my bedroom without saying my prayers. In the vesti- bule I came upon a tall, thick-set gentleman with fash- ionable whiskers and a foppish-looking overcoat. Half dead with religious awe, I went up to him and, remem- bering the ceremonial mother had impressed upon me, I scraped my foot before him, made a very low bow, and craned forward to kiss his hand; but the gentleman did not allow me to kiss his hand: he informed me that he was not my uncle, but my uncle's footman, Pyotr. The appearance of this Pyotr, who was far better dressed than Pobedimsky or me, filled me with utter astonish- ment, which, to tell the truth, has lasted to this day. Can such dignified, respectable people with stern and intel- lectual faces really be footmen? And what for?
Pyotr told me that my uncle was in the garden my mother. I rushed into the garden.
Nature, ignorant of the history of the Gundasov fam- ily and of my uncle's rank, felt far more at ease and un- constrained than I. There was a clamor going on in the garden such as one only hears at fairs. Masses of star- lings flitting through the air and hopping about the walks were noisily chattering as they hunted for May- bugs. There were swarms of sparrows in the lilac- bushes, which thrust their tender, fragrant blossoms straight in one's face. Wherever one turned, from every direction came the note of the oriole and the shrill cry of the hoopoe and the kestoel. At any other time I should have begun chasing dragon-flies or throwing stones at a crow which was sitting on a low rick under an aspen- tree, with its blunt beak turned away; but at that mo- ment I was in no mood for mischief. My heart was throbbing, and I felt a cold sinking at my stomach; I was preparing myself to confront a gentleman with shoulder- straps, a naked sword, and terrible eyes!
A
man in white silk trousers and with a white cap on his head was walking beside my mother in the garden. With his hands behind him and his head thrown back, every now and then running on ahead of mother, he looked quite young. There was so much life and move- ment in his whole ligure that I could only detect the treachery of age when I came close up behind and saw beneath his cap a fringe of close-cropped silver hair. Instead of the staid dignity and stolidity of a General, I saw an almost school-boyish nimbleness; instead of a collar sticking up to his ears, an ordinary light blue neck- tie. Mother and Uncle were walking in the alley talking. I went softly up to them from behind, and waited for one of them to look round.
"What a delightful place you have here, Klavdia!" said my uncle. "How charming and lovely it is! Had I known before that you had such a charming place, noth- ing would have induced me to go abroad all these years."
Uncle stooped down rapidly and sniffed at a tulip. Everything he saw moved him to rapture and curiosity, as though he had never been in a garden on a sunny day before. The queer man moved about as though he were on springs, and chattered incessantly, without al- lowing mother to utter a single word. Al of a sudden Pobedimsky came into sight from behind an elder-tree at the ^rn of the alley. His appearance was so unex- pected that my uncle positively started and took a step backward. On this occasion my tutor was attired in his best cape with sleeves, in which, especially from the back, he looked remarkably like a windmill. He had a solemn and majestic air. Pressing his hat to his bosom in Spanish style, he took a step towards my uncle and made a bow such as a marquis makes in a melodrama, kending forward, a little to one side.
"I have the honor to introduce myself to your High Excellency," he said aloud: "pedagogue and tutor of your nephew, formerly a student of the veterinary in- stitute, and a nobleman by birth, Pobedimsky!"
Such civility on the part of my tutor pleased my mother very much. She gave a smile, and waited in thrilled suspense to hear what clever thing he would say next; but my tutor, expecting his dignified address to be answered with equal dignity—that is, that my uncle would say "H'm!" like a general and hold out two fingers—was greatly embarrassed and abashed when the latter laughed genially and shook hands with him. He muttered something incoherent, cleared his throat, and walked away.
"Come! isn't that charming?" laughed my uncle. "Just look! he has put on his cape and thinks he's a very clever fellow! I do like that—I swear to God! What youthful aplomb, what life in that cape! And what boy is this?" he asked, suddenly turning and looking at me.
"That is my Andryushenka," my mother introduced me, flushing crimson. "My consolation. . . ."
I made a scrape with my foot on the sand and dropped a low bow.
"A fine feIlow . . . a fine fellow . . ." muttered my uncle, taking his hand from my lips and stroking me on the head. "So your name is Andrusha? Yes, yes. . . . H'ml ... I swear to God! . . . Do you do your les- sons?"
My mother, exaggerating and embellishing as all mothers do, began to describe my achievements in the sciences and the excellence of my behavior, and I walked round my uncle and, following the ceremonial laid down for me, I continued making low bows. Then my mother began throwing out hints that with my remark- able abilities it would not be amiss for me to get a gov- ernment scholarship in the Corps of Cadets; but at the point when I was to have burst into tears and begged for my uncle's patronage my uncle suddenly stopped and flung up his hands in amazement.
"My goo-oodness! What's that?" he asked.
Tatyana Ivanovna, the wife of our steward, Fyodor Petrovna, was coming straight toward us. She was car- rying a starched white skirt and a long ironing-board. As she passed us she looked shyly at the visitor through her eyelashes and flushed crimson.
"Wonders wiU never cease • . my uncle filtered through his teeth, looking after her with friendly inter- est. "You have a fresh surprise at every step, sister • • • I swear to God!"
"She's a beauty . . ." said mother. "They chose her as a bride for Fyodor, though she lived over seventy miles from here. . . ."
Not everyone would have called Tatyana a beauty. She was a plump little woman of twenty, with black eyebrows and a graceful figure, always rosy and attrac- tive-looking, but in her face and in her whole person there was not one striking feature, not one bold line to catch the eye, as though nature had lacked inspiration and confidence when it created her. Tatyana Ivanovna was shy, bashful, and modest in her behavior; she moved softly and smoothly, said little, seldom laughed, and her whole life was as regular as her face and as flat as her sleek hair. My uncle screwed up his eyes looking after her, and smiled. Mother looked intently at his smiling face and grew serious.
"And so, brother, you've never married!" she sighed.
"No; I've not married."
"Why not?" asked mother softly.
"How can I tell you? It just happened so. In my youth I was too hard at work, I had no time to live, and when I longed to live—1 looked round—and there I had fifty years on my back already. It was too late! However, talking about it . . . is depressing."
Mother and Uncle both sighed at once and walked on, and I left them and flew off to find my tutor, that I might share my impressions with him. Pobedimsky was standing in the middle of the yard, looking majestically at the heavens.
"One can see he is a man of culture!" he said, twisting his head round. "I hope we shall get on together."
An hour later mother came to us.
"I am in trouble, my dears!" she began, nghing. "You see, brother has brought a valet with him, and the valet, God bless him, is not one you can put in the kitchen or in the passage; he must have a room to himself. I can't think what I am to do! I tell you what, children, couldn't you move out somewhere—to Fyodor's lodge, for in- stance—and give your room to the valet? What do you say?
We gave our ready consent, for living in the lodge we would be a great deal freer than in the house, under mother's eye.
"It's a nuisance, and that's a fact!" said mother. "Brother says he won't have dinner in the middle of the day, but between six and seven, as they do in Peters- burg. I am simply distracted with worry! By seven o'clock the dinner will be ruined. Really, men don't un- derstand anything about housekeeping, though they have so much intellect. Oh, dear! we shall have to cook two dinners every day! You will have dinner at midday as before, children, while your poor old mother has to wait til seven, for the sake of her brother."
Then my mother heaved a deep sigh, bade me and please my uncle, whose coming was a piece of luck for me for which we must thank God, and hurried off to the kitchen. Pobedimsky and I moved into the wing the same day. We were installed in a room between the en- try to the steward's bedroom.
Contrary to my expectations, life went on just as be- fore, drearily and monotonously, in spite of my uncle's arrival and our removal to new quarters. We were ex- cused from lessons "on account of the visitor." Pobedim- sky, who never read anything or occupied himself in any way, spent most of his time sitting on his bed, with his long nose thrust into the air, thinking. Sometimes he would get up, try on his new suit, and sit down again to relapse into contemplation and silence. Only one thing worried him, the flies, which he mercilessly swatted with his hands. After dinner he usually "rested," and his snores were a cause of annoyance to the whole house- hold. I ran about the garden from morning to night, or sat in the room making kites.
For the first two or three weeks we did not see Uncle often. For days together he sat in his own room work- ing, in spite of the flies and the heat. His extraordinary capacity for sitting as though glued to his table pro- duced upon us the effect of an inexplicable conjuring trick. To us idlers, knowing nothing of systematic work, his industry seemed simply miraculous. Getting up at nine, he sat down at his desk, and did not leave it till dinnertime; after dinner he set to work again, and went on till late at night. Whenever I peeped through the keyhole I invariably saw the same thing: my uncle sit- ting at the desk working. The work consisted in his writ- ing with one hand while he turned over the leaves of a book with the other, and, strange to say, all of him was in constant movement—his leg swinging as though it were a pendulum, his head nodding in time to his 50 the portable chekhov
whistling. He had an extremely careless and frivolous expression aU the while, as though he were not working, but playing tick-tack-toe. I always saw him wearing a smart short jacket and a jauntily tied cravat, and he always smelt, even through the keyhole, of delicate feminine perfume. He only left his room for dinner, but he ate little.
"I can't make brother out!" mother complained of ^m. "Every day we kill a turkey and squabs on purpose for him, I make a compote with my own hands, and he eats a plateful of broth and a bit of meat the size of a finger and gets up from the table. I begin begging him to eat; he comes back and drinks a glass of milk. And what is there in that, in a glass of milk? It's no better than dishwater! You may die of a diet like that. • . . If I to persuade him, he laughs and makes a joke of it. . . . No; he does not care for our fare, poor dear!"
We spent the evenings far more gaily than the days. As a rule, by the time the sun was setting and long shadows were lying across the yard, we—that is, Ta- tyana Ivanovna, Pobedimsky, and I—were sitting on the steps of the lodge. We did not talk tiU it grew quite dark. And, indeed, what is one to talk of when every subject has been talked over already? There was only one piece of news, my uncle's arrival, and even that subject was soon exhausted. My tutor never took his eyes off Tatyana Ivanovna's face, and frequently heaved deep sighs. . . . At the time I did not understand those sighs, and did not try to fathom their significance; now they explain a great deal to me.
When the shadows merged into one thick mass, the steward Fyodor would come in from shooting or from the fields. This Fyodor gave me the impression of being a fierce and even terrible man. The son of a Russianized gypsy from Izyum, swarthy-faced and curly-headed, with big black eyes and a matted beard, he was never called among our Kochuevko peasants by any name but "The Devil." And, indeed, there was a great deal of the gypsy about him apart from his appearance. He could not, for instance, stay at home, and went off for days together into the country or into the woods to shoot. He was gloomy, ill-humored, taciturn, was afraid of no one, and recognized no authority. He was rude to mother, addressed me familiarly, and was contemptuous of Po- bedimsky's learning. All this we forgave him, looking upon him as a hot-tempered and nervous man; mother liked him because, in spite of his gypsy nature, he was ideally honest and industrious. He loved his Tatyana Ivanovna passionately, like a gypsy, but this love took in him a gloomy form, as though it cost him suffering. He was never affectionate to his wife in our presence, but simply rolled his eyes angrily at her and twisted his mouth.
When he came in from the fields he would noisily and angrily put down his gun, would come out to us on the steps, and sit down beside his wife. After resting a little, he would ask his wife a few questions about household matters, and then sink into silence.
"Let's sing," I would suggest.
My tutor would tune his guitar, and in a deep dea- con's bass strike up "Down in the Level Valley." The singing began. My tutor took the bass, Fyodor sang in a hardly audible tenor, while I sang soprano in unison with Tatyana Ivanovna.
When the whole sky was covered with stars and the frogs had left off croaking, they would bring in our supper from the kitchen. We went into the lodge and sat down to the meal. My tutor and the gypsy ate greedily, with such a noise that it was hard to tell whether it was the bones crunching or their jaws, while
Tatyana Ivanovna and I scarcely managed to eat our
share. After supper the lodge was plunged in deep sleep.
One evening, it was at the end of May, we were sit- ting on the steps, waiting for supper. A shadow sud- denly fell across us, and Uncle stood before us as though he had sprung out of the ground. He looked at us for a long time, then struck his hands together and laughed gaily.
"An idyll!" he said. "They sing and dream in the moonlight! It's charming, I swear to God! May I sit do^ and dream with you?"
We looked at one another and said nothing. My uncle sat down on the bottom step, yawned, and looked at the sky. A silence fell. Pobedimsky, who had for a long time now been wanting to talk to some person, was delighted at the opportunity, and was the first to break the silence. He had only one subject for intellectual conversation: epizootic diseases. It sometimes happens that after one has been in an immense crowd, only some one counte- nance of the thousands remains long imprinted on the memory; in the same way, of all that Pobedimsky had heard during his six months at the veterinary institute he remembered only one passage:
"Epizootics do immense damage to national economy. It is the duty of society to work hand in hand with the government in waging war upon them."
Before saying this to Uncle, my tutor cleared his throat three times, and several times, in his excitement, wrapped himself up in his cape. On hearing about the epizootics, my uncle looked intently at my tutor and made a sound between a snort and a laugh.
"Upon my soul, that's charming!" he said, scrutinizing us as though we were lay figures. "This is actually life. • • • This is what reality is bound to be. Why are you silent, Pelageya Ivanovna?" he said, addressing Tatyana Ivanovna.
She coughed, overcome with embarrassment.
"Talk, my friends, sing . . . play! . . • Don't lose time. You know, time, the rascal, runs away and waits for no man! I swear to God, before you have time to look round, old age is upon you. . . . Then it is too late to live! That's how it is, Pelageya Ivanovna. . . • We mustn't sit still and be silent. . . ."
At that point supper was brought in from the kitchen. Uncle went into the wing with us, and to keep us com- pany ate five curd fritters and the wing of a duck. He ate and looked at us. He was touched and delighted by us aU. Whatever silly nonsense my precious tutor talked, and whatever Tatyana Ivanovna did, he thought charm- ing and delightful. When after supper Tatyana Ivan- ovna sat quietly down and took up her knitting, he kept his eyes fixed on her fingers and chatted away without ceasing.
"Make all the haste you can to live, my friends . . ." he said. "God forbid you should sacrifice the present for the future! There is youth, health, fire in the present; the future is smoke and deception! As soon as you are twenty begin to live."
Tatyana Ivanovna dropped a knitting-needle. Uncle jumped up, picked up the needle, and handed it to Tatyana Ivanovna with a bow, and for the first time in my life I learned that there were people in the world more refined than Pobedimsky.
"Yes . . ." my uncle went on, "love, marry . . . do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaning- ful life."
Uncle talked a great deal, so much that he bored us;
I sat on a chest listening to him and dropping to sleep. It distressed me that he did not once all the evening pay attention to me. He left the lodge at two o'clock, when, overcome with drowsiness, I was sound asleep.
From that time forth my uncle took to coming to the lodge every evening. He sang with us, had supper with us, and always stayed on till two o'clock in the morning, chatting incessantly, always about the same subject. His evening and night work was given up, and by the end of June, when the privy councilor had learned to eat mother's turkey and compote, his work by day was aban- doned too. My uncle tore himself away from his desk and was dra^ into "life." In the daytime he walked up and down the garden, whistled and interfered with the men's work, making them tell him various stories. When his eye fell on Tatyana Ivanovna he ran up to her and, if she was carrying anything, offered his assistance, which embarrassed her dreadfully.
As the summer advanced, Uncle grew more and more frivolous, volatile, and abstracted. Pobedimsky was com- pletely disappointed in him.
"He is too one-sided," he said. "There is nothing to show that he is in the very foremost ranks of the service. And he doesn't even know how to talk. At every word it's 'I swear to God!' No, I don't like him!"
From the time that my uncle began visiting the lodge there was a noticeable change both in Fyodor and my tutor. Fyodor gave up going out shooting, came home early, sat more taciturn than ever, and stared with particular ill-humor at his wife. In my uncle's presence my tutor gave up talking about epizootics, frowned, and even laughed sarcastically.
"Here comes our little bantam cock!" he growled on one occasion when Uncle was coming into the wing.
I put down this change in them both to their being offended with my uncle. My absent-minded uncle mixed up their names, and to the very day of his departure had not learned to tell my tutor from Tatyana Ivan- ovna's husband. Tatyana Ivanovna herself he sometimes called Nastasya, sometimes Pelageya, and sometimes Yevdokia. Touched and delighted by us, he laughed and behaved exactly as though he was in the company of small children. . . . All this, of course, might well offend young men. It was not a case of offended pride, however, but, as I realize now, of subtler feelings.
I remember one evening I was sitting on the chest struggling with sleep. My eyelids felt glued together and my body, tired out by running about all day, drooped sideways. But I struggled against sleep and tried to look on. It was about midnight. Tatyana Ivan- ovna, rosy and meek as always, was sitting at a little table sewing a shirt for her husband. Fyodor, sullen and gloomy, was staring at her from one corner, and in the other sat Pobedimsky, snorting angrily and retreat- ing into the high collar of his shirt. Uncle was walking up and down the room, thinking. Silence reigned; noth- ing was to be heard but the rustling of the linen in Tatyana Ivanovna's hands. Suddenly my uncle stood still before Tatyana Ivanovna, and said:
"You are all so young, so fresh, so nice, you live so peacefully in this quiet place that I envy you. I have become attached to your way of life here; my heart aches when I remember I have to go away. . . . You may believe in my sincerity!"
Sleep closed my eyes and I dropped off. When some noise waked me, my uncle was standing before Tatyana Ivanovna, looking at her with a softened expression. His cheeks were flushed.
"My life has been wasted," he said. "I have not lived! Your young face makes me think of my own lost youth, and I should be ready to sit here watching you to my dying day. It would be a pleasure to me to take you with me to Petersburg."
"What for?" Fyodor asked in a husky voice.
"I should put her under a glass case on my desk. I should admire her and show her to other people. You know, Pelageya Ivanovna, we have no women like you there. We have wealth, distinction, sometimes beauty, but we have not this true sort of life, this healthy serenity. . . ."
My uncle sat do^ facing Tatyana Ivanovna and took her by the hand.
"So you won't come with me to Petersburg?" he laughed. "In that case give me your little hand. ... A charming little hand! . . . You won't give it? Come, you miser! let me kiss it, anyway. . . ."
At that moment there was the scrape of a chair. Fyodor jumped up and with heavy, measured steps went up to his wife. His face was pale gray and quiver- ing. He brought his fist down on the table with a bang, and said in a hollow voice: "I won't allow itl"
At the same moment Pobedimsky too jumped up from his chair. Pale and angry, he went up to Tatyana Ivanovna, and he, too, struck the table with his fist.
"I . . . I won't allow it!" he said.
"What? What's the matter?" asked my uncle in sur- prise.
"I won't allow it!" repeated Fyodor, banging on the table.
Uncle jumped up and blinked faint-heartedly. He tried to speak, but in his amazement and alarm could not utter a word; with an embarrassed smile, he shuffied out of the lodge with the mincing step of an old man, leaving his hat behind. When, a little later, mother ran into the lodge, Fyodor and Pobedimsky were still hammering on the table like blacksmiths and repeating, "I won't allow it!"
'What has happened here?" asked mother. "Why has my brother been taken ill? What's the matter?"
Looking at Tatyana's pale, frightened face and at her infuriated husband, mother probably guessed what was the matter. She sighed and shook her head.
"Cornel Quit banging on the table!" she said. "Leave off, FyodorI And why are you thumping, Yegor Alexeye- vich? What have you got to do with it?"
Pobedimsky was startled and confused. Fyodor looked intently at him, then at his wife, and began walking about the room. When mother had gone out of the lodge, I saw what for long afterwards I looked upon as a dream. I saw Fyodor seize my tutor, lift him up in the air, and thrust him out of the door.
When I woke up in the morning my tutor's bed was empty. To my question where he was nurse told me in a whisper that he had been taken off early in the morn- ing to the hospital, as his arm was broken. Saddened by this news and remembering the scene of the previous evening, I went out of doors. It was a gray day. The sky was overcast and there was a wind blowing dust, bits of paper, and feathers along the ground. . . . It felt as though rain were coming. People and animals looked bored. When I went into the house I was told not to make such a noise with my feet, as mother was in bed with a migraine. What was I to do? I went out- side the gate, sat down on the little bench there, and fell to trying to discover the meaning of what I had seen and heard the day before. From our gate there was a road which, passing the forge and the pool that never dried up, led to the highway. I looked at the telegraph- posts, about which clouds of dust were whirling, and at the sleepy birds sitting on the wires, and I suddenly felt so dreary that I began to cry.
A dusty bus crammed full of to^speople, probably going to visit the shrine, drove by along the highway. The bus was hardly out of sight when a light carriage drawn by a pair of horses came into view. In it was Akim Nikitich, the district police officer, standing up and holding on to the coachman's belt. To my great swprise, the carriage turned into our road and flew by me into the gate. While I was puzzling why the police inspector had come to see us, I heard a noise, and a troika came into sight on the road. In the carriage stood the chief of police, directing his coachman towards our
gaie'
"And why is he coming?" I thought, looking at the dusty chief of police. "Most probably Pobedimsky has complained of Fyodor to him, and they have come to take him to prison."
But the mystery was not so easily solved. The police officer and the chief of police were only forerunners, for five minutes had scarcely passed when another coach drove in at our gate. It dashed by me so swiftly that I could only get a glimpse of a red beard at the window.
Lost in conjecture and fuU of apprehension, I ran to the house. In the vestibule first of all I saw mother; she was pale and looking with horror towards the door, from which came the sounds of men's voices. The visi- tors had taken her by surprise at the height of her mi- graine.
"Who has come, mother?" I asked.
"Sister," I heard my uncle's voice, "will you send in something to eat for the Governor and me?"
"It is easy to say 'something to eat,' " whispered my mother, numb with horror. 'What have I time to get ready now? I am put to shame in my old agel"
Mother clutched at her head and ran into the kitchen. The Governor's sudden visit stirred and overwhelmed the whole household. A ferocious. slaughter followed. A dozen hens, five turkeys, eight ducks were killed, and in the confusion the old gander, the progenitor of our whole flock of geese and a great favorite of mother's, was beheaded. The coachmen and the cook seemed frenzied, and slaughtered birds at random, without dis- tinction of age or breed. For the sake of some wretched sauce a pair of valuable pigeons, as dear to me as the gander was to mother, were sacrificed. It was a long while before I could forgive the Governor their death.
In the evening, when the Governor and his suite, after a sumptuous dinner, had got into their carriages and driven away, I went into the house to look at the remains of the feast. Glancing into the drawing-room from the vestibule, I saw my uncle and my mother. My uncle, with his hands behind his back, was walking nervously up and down close to the wall, shrugging his shoulders. Mother, exhausted and looking much thin- ner, was sitting on the sofa and watching his move- ments with heavy eyes.
"Excuse me, sister, but this won't do at all," my uncle grumbled, wrinkling up his face. "I introduced the Gov- ernor to you, and you didn't offer to shake hands. You covered him with embarrassment, poor fellow! No, that won't do. . . . Simplicity is a very good thing, but there must be limits to it, too . . . I swear to God! And then that dinnerl How can one give people such food? What was that mess, for instance, that they served for the fourth course?"
"That was duck with sweet sauce . . ." mother an- swered softly.
"Duck! Forgive me, sister, but . • . but here I've got heartburn! I am ill!"
Uncle made a sour, tearful face, and went on:
"It was the devil sent that Governorl As though I wanted his visit! Pff! . . . heartburn! I can't work or sleep ... I am going to pieces. . . . And I can't un- derstand how you can live here without anything to do . . . in this boredom! Here I've got a pain in the pit of my stomach! . . ."
My uncle frowned and strode more rapidly than ever.
"Brother," my mother inquired softly, "what does it cost to go abroad?"
"At least three thousand . . ." my uncle answered in a tearful voice. "I would go, but where am I to get the money? I haven't a kopeck. PH! . . . heartburn!"
Uncle stopped, looked dejectedly at the gray, over- cast prospect from the window, and began pacing to and fro again.
A silence followed. . . . Mother looked a long while at the icon, pondering something, then began crying, and said:
'Tll give you the three thousand, brother. . . ."
Three days later the majestic trunks went off to the station and the privy councilor drove off after them. As he said good-by to mother he dropped a tear, and it was a long time before he took his lips from her hands, but when he got into his carriage his face beamed with childlike pleasure. . . . Radiant and happy, he settled himself comfortably, blew a kiss to my mother, who was crying, and all at once I caught his eye. A look of the utmost astonishment came into his face.
"What boy is this?" he asked.
My mother, who had assured me that my uncle's coming was a piece of luck for which I must thank God, was bitterly mortified at this question. I was in no mood for questions. I looked at my uncle's happy face, and for some reason felt fearfully sorry for him. I could not control myself, jumped into the carriage and hugged that frivolous man, weak as all men are. Looking into his face and wanting to say something pleasant, I asked: "Uncle, have you ever been in a battle?" "Ah, the dear boy . . ." Uncle laughed, kissing me. "A charming boy, I swear to God! How natural, how true to life it all is, I swear to God! . . ."
The carriage set off. ... I looked after him, and long afterwards that farewell "I swear to God" was ring- ing in my ears.
1886
A Calamity
S
OFYA PETROVN A, the wife of Lubyantzev, the notary public, a beautiful young woman of twenty- five, was walking slowly along a lane that had been cleared through the woods, with Ilyin, a lawyer who occupied a summer cottage near hers. It was past four o'clock in the afternoon. Fluffy white clouds were massed just above; here and there patches of bright blue sky peeped out from under them. The clouds hung motionless, as though caught in the tops of the tall old pine-trees. It was still and sultry.
In the distance the lane was cut off by a low railway embankment on which just then a sentry with a gun was pacing to and fro for some reason. Right beyond the embankment there was a large white church with a rusty roof and six domes.
"I did not expect to meet you here," said Sofya Petrovna, looking at the ground and stirring last year's leaves with the tip of her parasol, "and now I am glad we have met. I must have a serious and final talk with you. I beg you, Ivan Mihailovich, if you really love and respect me, please stop pursuing me! You follow me about like a shadow, you constantly look at me in a way which isn't nice, you declare yourself repeatedly, you vvrite me strange letters, and . . . and I don't know when it's all going to end! Lord, what can come of it?"
Ilyin was silent. Sofya Petrovna took a few steps and continued:
"And this abrupt change in you took place in the course of two or three weeks, after an acquaintance of five years. I don't recognize you, Ivan Mihailovich!"
Sofya Petrovna cast a sidelong glance at her com- panion. With narrowed eyes, he was staring intently at the fluffy clouds. His expression was harsh, capricious, and abstracted, like that of a man who suffers pain and at the same time is forced to listen to twaddle.
"It is surprising that you don't understand it your- self," she continued with a shrug of her shoulders. "You ought to realize that it is not a very nice game you've started. I am married, I love and respect my husband. ... I have a daughter. . . . Does all that mean noth- ing to you? Besides, as an old friend you know what I think of marriage . • . and of the institution of the family—"
Ilyin grunted with disgust and sighed.
"The institution of the family—" he muttered. "Oh, Lord!"
"Yes, yes. • . . I love my husband, I respect him; and in any event I value the peace of my family life. I would rather die than cause Andrey and his daughter any unhappiness. And I beg you, Ivan Mihailovich, for
God's sake, leave me alone! Let us be good, kind friends, as before, and give up these sighs and groans, which don't become you. It's settled and done with! Not an- other word about it. Let us talk of something else."
Sofya Petrovna again cast a sidelong glance at Ilyin. Pale and angrily biting his trembling lips, he was look- ing upwards. She could not understand what made him angry and indignant, but his pallor touched her.
"So don't be angry, let's be friends," she said af- fectionately. "Agreed? Here is my hand."
Ilyin took her plump little hand into both of his, pressed it and slowly raised it to his lips.
"I am not a schoolboy," he muttered. "Friendship with the woman I love doesn't tempt me in the least."
"Enough, enough! It's settled and done with. We have reached the bench; let's sit down."
Sofya Petrovna was filled with a sweet sense of re- lief: the most difficult and ticklish things have been said, the painful question has been settled and disposed of. Now she could breathe freely and look him straight in the face. She looked at him, and the woman's selfish sense of superiority over the man who is in love with her flattered her agreeably. It gratified her to see this strong, huge man, clever, educated and, people said, gifted, with his sullen, masculine face and big black beard, sit down obediently beside her and drop his head dejectedly. For two or three minutes they sat in silence.
"Nothing is settled and done with," began Ilyin. "You 'recite copybook maxims to me: 'I love and respect my husband . . . the institution of the family . . ! I know all that without your saying anything, and I could tell you more about it, too. I admit frankly and honestly that I consider my behavior criminal and im- moral. What more can one say? But what is the good of saying what is clear to anybody? Instead of feeding
the nightingale heart-rending words, you'd much better
tell me what I am to do."
"I've told you already: go away."
"As you know perfectly well, I went away five times, and every time I returned before I had gone half way. I can show you my through tickets—I have kept them all. I haven't the will power to run away from you! I am struggling, I am struggling hard, but what the devil am I good for if I have no character, if I am weak, faint-hearted! D'you understand? I can't, I can't fight Nature! I run away from here, and she holds on to my coattails and pulls me back. Vulgar, hideous weakness!"
Ilyin turned red, rose, and walked up and down in front of the bench.
"I feel as cross as a bear," he growled, clenching his fists. "I hate and despise myself! My God, like some dissolute schoolboy I run after another man's wife, write idiotic letters, degrade myself . . . ugh!
Ilyin clutched his head, grunted, and sat down.
"And then this insincerity of yours!" he continued bitterly. "If you really object to my ugly game, why have you come here? What drew you here? In my let- ters I only ask for a straight, unequivocal answer: yes or no, but instead of giving me a straight answer, every day you manage these 'chance' meetings with me and regale me with copybook maxims!"
She was frightened and flared up. She suddenly felt the. embarrassment which a decent woman experiences when she is accidentally discovered undressed.
"You seem to suspect me of playing with you," she muttered. "I have always given you a straight answer, and . . . just now I begged you—"
"Oh, as though one begged in such matters! If you were to say right out: 'Go away,' I should have cleared out long ago; but you have never said that. You've never once given me a straight answer. Strange hesi- tancy! By God, either you're playing with me, or else—"
Ilyin broke off short and propped his head on his fists. Sofya Petrovna started going over her behavior from beginning to end in her own mind. She recalled that not only in her actions but even in her inmost thoughts she had never encouraged Ilyin's advances; at the same time she felt that there was some truth in the lawyer's words. But not knowing exactly to what extent he was right, she could find nothing to say in reply to his complaint, no matter how she racked her brain. It was awkward to be silent, and with a shrug of her shoulders she said:
"So it is I who am at fault!"
"I don't blame you for your insincerity," sighed Ilyin. "I just blurted out those words without meaning them. Your insincerity is natural and in the order of things. If people agreed suddenly to become sincere, every- thing would go to the devil, would fall to pieces."
Sofya Petrovna was in no mood for philosophizing, but she was glad of a chance to change the subject and asked: "But why?"
"Because only savages and animals are sincere. Once civilization has ushered in the need for such comforts as, for instance, feminine virtue, sincerity is out of place."
Ilyin drove his cane angrily into the sand. Madam Lubyantzeva listened to him and failed to understand a great deal, but relished his conversation. What grati- fied her in the first place was that a gifted man talked to her, an ordinary woman, on an "intellectual" sub- ject; it afforded her great pleasure, too, to watch the working of his mobile, young, white face, which was still cross. Much of what he said she did not grasp, but what she found attractive about his talk was the temer- ity with which modern man, casting all hesitation and doubt to the winds, settles great questions once for all and reaches final conclusions.
She suddenly realized that she was admiring him, and took fright.
"Forgive me, but I don't understand," she made haste to say. "Why do you speak of insincerity? I repeat my request: be my good, kind friend; leave me alone! I earnestly beg you!"
"Very well; I'll try again," sighed Ilyin. "I am at your service. But I doubt if anything will come of my efforts. Either I shall put a bullet through my brain or take to drink in the silliest way. I shall bark my shins badly! There's a limit to everything, even to fighting against Nature. Tell me, how can one fight against madness? If you drink wine, how are you to fight against intoxica- tion? What am I to do if your image has struck root in my soul, and day and night stands persistently before my eyes, the way that pine over there stands at this moment? Come, tell me, what feat must I perform to rid myself of this abominable, wretched condition, in which all my thoughts, desires, dreams are no longer my own, but belong to some demon who has gained possession of me? I love you, love you so much that I am completely thrown off balance; I have given up my work and turned my back on those dear to me; I have forgotten my God! I've never been in love like this in all my life."
Sofya Petrovna, who had not expected that the con- versation would take such a turn, drew away from Ilyin and looked into his face, frightened. Tears came into his eyes, his lips trembled, and his face assumed an im- ploring, hungry expression.
"I love you," he muttered, bringing his eyes close to her big, frightened eyes. "You are so beautiful! I am suffering now, but I'd be willing to sit here all my life agonizing, if I could only look into your eyes. But . . . do not speak, I implore you!"
Caught unawares, Sofya Petrovna tried to think quickly, quickly of something to say to stop him. "I'U go away," she decided, but no sooner did she make a movement to rise, than he was kneeling before her. He clasped her knees, looking into her face and speaking, passionately, ardently, eloquently. Terrified and dazed, she did not hear his words. For some reason now, at this dangerous moment while her knees were being agreeably pressed, as though she were in a warm bath, she was trying, with a sort of exasperated malice, to find the meaning of her o^ sensations. She was vexed that instead of brimming over with protesting virtue, she felt weak, indolent, and empty, like one who is half- seas over; only deep down within her a remote frag- ment of her consciousness was maliciously taunting her: "Then why don't you leave? So this is as it should be, eh?"
Seeking to understand herself, she could not grasp how it was that she did not pull away her hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a leech, and why she, like Ilyin, hastily glanced right and left to see if anyone was look- ing. The clouds and the pines were motionless, gazing at them severely like monitors seeing mischief but bribed not to report to the authorities. The sentry stood like a post on the embankment and seemed to have his eye on the bench.
"Let him look," thought Sofya Petrovna.
"But . . . but listen," she said at last with a note of despair in her voice. "What will this lead to? What will happen next?"
"I don't know, I don't know," he whispered, waving the disagreeable questions away with his hand.
The hoarse, tremulous whistle of the train was heard. This chilly, alien sound of humdrum prosiness roused Sofya Petrovna.
"I can't stay. . . . It's time for me to leave," she said, getting up quickly. "The train is coming in • . • Andrey is on it! He has to have his dinner."
Sofya Petrovna, her face burning, turned toward the embankment. At first the engine slowly crawled by, then came the cars. It was not the local passenger train, as she had supposed, but a freight train. The boxcars filed past in a long string against the background of the white church, one after another, like the days of a man's life, and it seemed as though there was no end to them.
But at last the train passed, and the caboose with its lanterns and the conductor had disappeared behind the foliage. Sofya Petrovna turned round abruptly and with- out looking at Ilyin walked rapidly back along the lane. She had regained her self-possession. Blushing with shame, humiliated, not by Ilyin, no, but by her own faint-heartedness, by the shamelessness with which she, a chaste and blameless woman, had allowed a strange man to hug her knees—she had only one thought now: to get back as quickly as possible to her summer cot- tage, to her family. The lawyer could hardly keep pace with her. Turning from the lane into a narrow path, she glanced at him so rapidly that she saw nothing but the sand on his knees, and signaled to him not to follow her.
Back home, Sofya Petrovna stood motionless in the middle of her room for some five minutes and looked now at the window and now at her desk.
"You vile creature!" she scolded herself. "You vile creature!"
To spite herself, she recalled in every detail, conceal- ing nothing, how although all these days she had been averse to Ilyin's advances, something had driven her to have an explanation with him; and what was more, when he lay at her feet she had enjoyed it immensely. She remembered it all without sparing herself, and now, choking with shame, she would have liked to slap her own face again and again.
"Poor Andrey!" she said to herself, trying to assume the tenderest possible expression, as she thought of her husband. "Varya, my poor little girl, doesn't know what a mother she has! Forgive me, my dears! I love you very, very much!"
And wishing to prove to herself that she was still a good wife and mother, and that corruption had not yet touched "the institution of the family" of which she had spoken to Ilyin, Sofya Petrovna ran to the kitchen and raged at the cook for not yet having laid the table for Andrey Ilyich. She tried to picture to herself her hus- band's hungry and exhausted appearance, spoke of how hard he worked, and laid the table for him with her own hands, which she had never done before. Then she found her daughter Varya, picked her up in her arms and hugged her ardently. The child seemed to her rather heavy and irresponsive, but she was loath to ad- mit this to herself, and she began explaining to the child what a nice, kind, and honorable man her papa was.
Yet when Andrey Ilyich arrived soon afterwards she hardly greeted him. The rush of sham feeling had al- ready subsided, without proving anything to her, but only vexing and exasperating her by its lack of genuine- ness. She was sitting by the window, feeling unhappy and cross. It is only when they are in trouble that peo- ple can understand how difficult it is to control their thoughts and emotions. Sofya Petrovna said afterwards that there was "a confusion of feeling within her which it was as difficult to disentangle as to count sparrows rapidly flying in a flock." From the fact, for instance, that she was not overjoyed to see her husband, that she did not like the way he behaved at dinner, she suddenly concluded that she was beginning to hate him.
Andrey Ilyich, languid with hunger and fatigue, at- tacked the sausage while waiting for the soup to be served, and ate it chewing noisily and moving his tem- ples.
"My God!" thought Sofya Petrovna. "I love and re- spect him, but . . • why does he chew his food so disgustingly?"
The disorder in her thoughts was no less than the disorder in her emotions. Like all persons inexperienced in warding off unpleasant thoughts, Madam Lubyant- zeva did her utmost not to think of her predicament, and the harder she tried the more sharply did Ilyin, the sand on his knees, the fluffy clouds, the train stand out in her imagination.
"And why did I go there today, fool that I ^?" she tormented herself. "And am I really so weak that I can- not trust myself?"
Fear has big eyes. By the time Andrey Ilyich was finishing his last course, she had firmly decided to tell her husband everything and to flee from danger!
"I must have a serious talk with you, Andrey," she began after dinner while her husband who was about to lie down for a nap was removing his coat and boots. "Well?"
"Let's go away!"
"H'm! . . . Where shall we go? It is too early in the season to go back to town."
"No, let's take a trip or something—"
"A trip . . ." muttered the notary, stretching. '1 dream of that myself, but where are we to get the money? And who is to take care of the office?"
And reflecting a little, he added, "Of course, it is dull for you here. Go alone if you like."
Sofya Petrovna agreed, then it occurred to her that Ilyin would welcome such an opportunity, and would travel with her on the same train, in the same car . . . As she reflected, she looked at her husband, now full of food but stili languid. For some reason, her glance rested on his feet, very small, almost feminine, in striped socks; there was a thread sticking up at the tip of each sock.
Behind the lowered blind a bumblebee was bump- ing against the window-pane and buzzing. Sofya Pe- trovna looked at the threads on the socks, listened to the bee and pictured herself traveling . . . Ilyin sits op- posite day and night, never taking his eyes off her, angered by his o^ weakness and pale with mental agony. He calls himself a dissolute schoolboy, abuses her, tears his hair, but when darkness comes and the passengers are asleep or get out at the station, he seizes the opportunity to kneel before her and press her knees as he had done at the bench. . . .
She stopped short, suddenly aware that she was day- dreaming.
"Listen. I won't go alone," she said to her husband. "You must come with me."
"Ridiculous, Sofochka!" said Lubyantzev. "One must be sensible and only wish for what is possible."
"You will come when you find out," thought Sofya Petrovna.
Having decided to leave at all costs, she felt herself out of danger. Little by little, order came into her thoughts, she grew more cheerful and she even allowed herself to dwell upon it all, since no matter what she
thought about, no matter what she dreamed of, she
would leave anyway.
While her husband was sleeping, evening gradually advanced. She sat in the drawing-room playing the pi- ano. The stir out-of-doors that comes at dusk, the strains of music, and above all, the thought that she had used her head, that she had solved her problem, completely restored her spirits. Other women in her position, her now serene conscience told her, would probably have been carried away and lost their balance, while she had almost died of shame, had been unhappy and was now fleeing from a danger which, indeed, might be non- existent! She was soon so impressed by her own virtuous and resolute conduct that she even looked at herself in the mirror two or three times.
When it got dark, company arrived. The men sat down in the dining room to play cards; the ladies oc- cupied the drawing-room and the porch. The last to arrive was Ilyin. He was gloomy, morose, and looked il. He sat down in the corner of the couch and did not budge all evening. Usually high-spirited and talkative, this time he was silent and kept frowning and rubbing his eyes. When someone asked him a question, he gave a forced smile with his upper lip only and answered curtly and with irritation. He cracked several jokes, but his witticisms were harsh and impertinent. It seemed to Sofya Petrovna that he was on the verge of hysteria. Only now, sitting at the piano, she realized fully for the first time that this unhappy man was in no mood for jokes, that his soul was sick and that he was in torment. It was on her account that he was wasting the best days of his youth, ruining his career, spending the last of his money on a summer cottage; it was because of her that he had left his mother and sisters to the mercy of Fate, and, worst of all, was enduring a martyr- dom in a struggle with himself that was undoing him. Out of mere common humanity, he ought to be taken seriously. . . .
She was so keenly aware of all this that it made her heart ache, and if at that moment she had gone up to him and said, "No," there would have been a force in her voice that would have commanded obedience. But she did not go up to him and did not speak, indeed, she did not consider doing so. She had never, perhaps, exhibited more clearly the pettiness and selfishness of youth than that evening. She realized that Ilyin was miserable and that he was sitting on the couch as on hot coals; she was sorry for him but, at the same time, the presence of a man who loved her so passionately filled her with triumph, with a sense of her own power. She was conscious of her youth, her beauty, and her inviolable virtue, and since she had decided to leave she gave herself full liberty for that evening. She flirted, laughed incessantly, sang with peculiar animation and feeling. Everything entertained and amused her. She was amused by the recollection of what had happened at the bench in the woods, by the memory of the sentry who had looked on. She was amused by her guests, by Ilyin's impertinent witticisms, by the- pin in his cravat which she had never noticed before. The pin was in the shape of a red snake with diamond eyes. This snake struck her as so amusing that she could have covered it with kisses.
Sofya Petrovna sang nervously with a kind of half- intoxicated bravado, and as though in mockery of an- other's sorrow she chose sad, melancholy songs about blasted hopes, the past, old age. "Old age comes closer and closer . . ." she sang. But what was old age to her?
"I am behaving oddly," flashed through her mind ar she laughed and sang.
The party broke up at midnight. Ilyin was the last to leave. Sofya Petrovna was still giddy enough to see him off to the bottom step of the porch. She wanted to teU him that she was going away with her husband, and to watch the effect this news would have on him.
The moon was hidden behind the clouds, but it was light enough for Sofya Petrovna to see how the wind flipped the skirts of Ilyin's overcoat and the blinds of the porch. She could also see how pale he was and how he twisted his upper lip in an effort to smile.
"Sonya, Sonichka, dearest!" he muttered, not letting her speak. "My dear, my darling!"
In a fit of tenderness, with tears in his voice, he showered her with caressing words, one more tender than the other, and even addressed her in the intimate second person singular, as though she were his wife or mistress. He surprised her by suddenly putting one arm around her waist and grasping her elbow with the other.
"My precious, my darling," he whispered, kissing the nape of her neck; "be sincere, come to me at once!"
She slipped out of his embrace and raised her head to vent her indignation and resentment, but the indig- nation did not come off, and all her vaunted virtue and purity was only sufficient to enable her to say the phrase which all ordinary women use under such circum- stances:
"You're mad."
"Really, let's go," Ilyin continued. "I realized just now, as I did at the bench in the woods, that you are as helpless as I am, Sonya. You, too, will bark your shins! You love me and are bargaining with your con- science to no purpose."
Seeing that she was moving away, he caught her by her lace cuff and rapidly finished what he had started to say:
"If not today, then tomorrow, but you will have to give in! Why this delay then? My precious, my darling, Sonya, the sentence has been passed, why put off the execution? Why deceive ourselves?"
Sofya Petrovna tore herself away and darted through the door. Returning to the drawing-room, she shut the piano automatically, stared for a long time at the vi- gnette on a sheet of music, and sat down. She could not stand up, nor could she think. All that was left of her excitement and bravado was a fearful exhaustion, apathy, and ennui. Her conscience whispered to her that she had behaved badly, foolishly that evening, like a giddy girl, that she had just been making love on the porch and still had an odd feeling about her waist and her elbow.
The drawing-room was deserted; there was only one candle burning. Madam Lubyantzeva sat on the round stool before the piano motionless, waiting for something. And as though taking advantage of the darkness and of her extreme lassitude, desire, oppressive, irresistible, be- gan to take possession of her. Like a boa constrictor, it tightened about her limbs and her soul, grew stronger every moment and no longer menaced her, as it had be- fore, but stood plainly before her in all its nakedness.
She sat without stirring for half an hour, permitting herself to think freely of Ilyin. Then she got up lan- guidly and dragged herself to her bedroom. Andrey Ilyich was already in bed. She sat down by the open window and gave herself up to desire. There was now no confusion in her mind. All her thoughts and feelings were directed with one accord toward a single object. She tried to struggle against it, but at once gave up the effort. It was clear to her that she was dealing with a strange and implacable enemy. To fight it she needed strength and courage, yet her family background, her education, and her experience in life had given her nothing to lean upon.
"Shameless thing! Vile creature!" she scored herself for her weakness. "So that's what you're like!"
Her sense of propriety, outraged by this weakness moved her to such indignation that she heaped upon herself every term of abuse she knew and told herself many biting and humiliating truths. Thus, for instance, she told herself that she had never been virtuous, that she had not fallen before simply because she had had no opportunity, that her inner conflict that day had all been a comedy and a pastime.
"And even if I did put up a fight," she reflected, "what sort of fight was it? Even the women who sell themselves struggle before they bring themselves to do it, and yet they do sell themselves. A fine struggle! Like milk, I've turned in one day! In one dayl"
\Vhat drew her from home, she now knew, was not emotion, not Ilyin's person, but the sensations that awaited her . . . She was a lady, one of many, who was making the most of the summer season!
"And when the fledgling's mother had been slain," someone sang in a husky tenor outside the window.
"If I am to go, it's time," thought Sofya Petrovna. Her heart suddenly began beating with terrible violence.
"Andrey!" she almost shrieked. "Listen! We • • . we are going, aren't we?"
"Yes . . . I've told you aheady: you go alone."
"But listen," she began. "If you don't go with me, you risk losing me. I believe I am . . . in love already."
"With whom?" asked Andrey Ilyich.
"It's all one to you who it is!" cried Sofya Petrovna.
Andrey Ilyich sat up, put his legs over the edge of the bed and looked in wonder at his wife's dark figure.
"Ridiculous!" he yawned.
He did not believe her, and yet he was frightened. After thinking awhile and asking his wife several trivial questions, he delivered himself of his opinions on the family, on infidelity . . . He spoke dully for about ten minutes and lay down again. His sententious pronounce- ments had no effect. There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble!
In spite of the late hour, summer folk were still promenading outside. Sofya Petrovna threw on a light cape, stood about awhile, thought a little . . . She still had enough determination to say to her sleepy husband:
"Are you asleep? I am going for a walk. Do you want to come along?"
That was her last hope. Receiving no answer, she went out . . . It was fresh and blowy. She was con- scious neither of the wind nor the darkness, but walked on and on. An irresistible force was driving her forward, and it seemed as though, if she had stopped, it would have pushed her in the back.
"Shameless thing!" she muttered mechanically. "Vile creature!
She was choking, burning with shame, she did not feel her legs under her, but what pushed her forward was stronger than shame, reason, or fear.
At the Mill
set middle-aged man who resembled in face and figure the uncouth, heavy-footed, rough seamen of whom boys dream after reading Jules Verne, sat at the threshold of his hut, sucking lazily at his pipe that had gone out. He wore gray breeches made of coarse army cloth, and large clumsy boots, but no jacket or cap, al- though it was late autumn and the weather was chilly and damp. The mist seeped freely through his unbut- toned shirt, but the miller's huge body that was as tough as a bunion seemed to be insensitive to cold. His red, beefy face was, as usual, apathetic and flabby, as if he had just been sleeping, and his small eyes drowned in fat stared grimly from under his eyebrows, surveying the dam, the two sheds, and the ancient, awkward lows.
Two monks from the neighboring monastery, who had just arrived, Kleopa, a tall, white-haired old man in a cassock bespattered with mud and a patched skullcap, and Diodor, black-haired and swarthy, apparently a Georgian, in an ordinary peasant sheepskin coat, were bustling near the sheds. They were unloading from carts sacks of rye brought to be ground. At some distance, on the brown, muddy grass sat the miller's helper, Yevsey, a beardless young fellow in a tattered coat that was too short for him. He was dead drunk. He crumpled a fish- ing net in his hands, making believe that he was mend-
HE miller, Alexey Birukov, a big, powerful, thick-
ing K.
For a long time the miller looked about and held his peace, then he stared at the monks who were hauling the sacks and said in a thick voice:
"You monks, why have you been fishing in the river? Who said you could?"
The monks made no reply and did not even glance at the miller.
He kept quiet for a while, then lit his pipe and went on:
"You fish yourselves, and you let the townsmen do it, too. I leased the river from you and from the town, too. I pay you money, so the fish is mine and nobody's got the right to catch it. You pray all right, but you don't think it's a sin to steal."
The miller yawned, fell silent again, and then went on grumbling:
"Look at the habit they've got into! They think be- cause they're monks and they're signed up to be saints, there's no law against them. I'll lodge a complaint with the justice of the peace. He won't pay no mind to your cassock and you'll have plenty of time to find out what the clink's like. Or maybe I'll settle your hash for you without troubling His Honor. If I just catch you fishing I'll give it you in the neck so you'll lose your appetite for fish till Judgment Day."
"Don't use such language, Alexey Dorofeich," said Kleopa in a gentle tenor. "Decent, God-fearing people wouldn't talk that way to a dog, and we are monks!"
"Monks!" the miller sneered. "You want fish? Yes? Then buy it from me, don't steal!"
"Good Lord, are we stealing?" Kleopa fro^ed. "Why use such words? True, our lay brothers did catch fish, but they had had Father Superior's permission to do so. Father Superior reasons that you paid out the money not for the whole river, but only so you'd have the right to set out nets near our bank. You didn't get the rights to the whole river. It isn't yours, or ours, it is Gods. . . "
"Father Superior is no better'n you," the miller grum- bled, knocking his pipe against his boot. "He likes cheating, too. I don't make no distinctions. Father Su- perior is the same to me as you or Yevsey there. If I catch him fishing, he'll get it from me too. . . ."
"As for your getting ready to beat up the monks, do as you please. It will be all the better for us in the world to come. You have already beaten up Vissarion and Antipy, so beat up the others."
"Keep still, don't start anything with him!" said Dio- dor, pulling the other by the sleeve.
Kleopa quieted down, stopped talking and started hauling sacks again, while the miller went on scolding. He was speaking lazily, sucking at his pipe after each phrase and spitting. When he had exhausted the subject of fish, he recalled two sacks of his that the monks had allegedly made off with, and he began to abuse them on account of the sacks. Then, noticing that Yevsey was drunk and idling, he left the monks alone and began bawling out his hired men, filling the air with foul curses.
At first the monks restrained themselves and only uttered loud sighs, but soon Kleopa could stand it no longer. He clapped his hands together and said in a tearful voice: "Holy Saints, there is no worse penance for me than to go to the mill! It's hell! Veritable hell!"
"Don't come then!" the miller snapped.
"Queen of Heaven, we'd gladly keep away from here, but where shall we find another mill? Judge for your- self. Except for yours, there isn't a mill in this district! It's a choice between starving and eating unmiled grain!"
The miller wouldn't give in but kept on cursing. It was plain that grumbling and swearing were as much a habit with him as sucking on his pipe.
"If only you didn't mention the Evil One, at least!" Kleopa implored, blinking unhappily. "Keep still a while, I beg you!"
The miller soon desisted, but not because of Kleopa's request. A tiny stooped old woman, with a kindly face, wearing a queer striped jacket, that looked like the back of a bug, appeared on the dam. She carried a small bundle and leaned on a little stick.
"A good day to you, my dears!" she lisped, making a low bow to the monks. "The Lord be good to you! A good day, my little Alyosha! A good day to you, Yevsey darhng . . . ."
"Good day, Maminka," the miller mumbled, with a frown, not looking at the old woman.
"And here I've come to see you, my dear," she said, smiling and peering tenderly into the miller's face. "I haven't seen you in a long time. Why, I haven't seen you since the Feast of the Assumption. Whether it pleases you or not, receive me! I believe you have got- ten a bit thin."
The old woman seated herself beside the miller, and near this huge man her little jacket looked even more strikingly like the back of a bug.
"Yes, since the Feast of the Assumption!" she con- tinued. "I've been missing you sorely, sonny, my heart has been aching for you, but whenever I got ready to come to you, it would either start raining or I would fall
SiCk. "
"You are coming from town now?" asked the miller morosely.
"Yes, from town, straight from home—"
"With all your ailments and in your condition you
should stay home, and not traipse about visiting. What
did you come here for? Just wearing out shoe-leather!"
''I've come to have a look at you. I have two of them, sons, I mean," she said, turning to the monks, "this one and Vasily, who lives in town. Just the two of them. It's all the same to them if I am alive or dead, but they are my own, my joy. They can do without me, but without them I don't think I could live a day. Only, fathers, I'm getting old and it is hard for me now to come to him all the way from town."
A silence fell. The monks had carried the last sack to the shed and were sitting down in the cart resting. The drunken Yevsey kept crumpling the net in his hands and nodding sleepily.
"You've come at the wrong time, Maminka," said the miller. "I have to drive out to Karyazhino now."
"Do drive out. God speed you!" sighed the old woman. "Naturally, you can't drop business on my ac count. I will rest here a while and then go back. . . . Vasya and his children send you greetings, Alyosha darling. . . ."
"He still swills vodka?"
"Not so much, but he does take a drop. No use hiding the sin, he does drink. You know yourself he hasn't the money to drink a lot. Except perhaps when good people stand him a treat. It's a wretched life he leads, Alyosha! It hurts me to see it. Nothing to eat, the children in tat- ters, he ashamed to show himself in the street, what with holes in his pants and no boots. All the six of us sleep in one room. Such poverty, such bitter poverty. You can't imagine anything worse. Indeed, I've come to beg you to help us out. For the old woman's sake, Alyosha, do help Vasily. After all, he is your brother!"
The miller was silent and kept looking in the other direction.
"He is poor, but you—the Lord be praised!—you have a mill of your own, and orchards, and you trade in fish. The Lord has given you wisdom, He has raised you above all and given you bounty—and you are all alone. But Vasya has four children, and I, the accursed one, am a burden to him, and all he earns is seven rubles. How can he feed us all that way? You help us. • . ," In silence the miller carefully filled his pipe.
'Won't you help?" asked the old woman.
The miller was as silent as a clam. Receiving no an- swer, the old woman sighed, looked round at the monks and at Yevsey, then got up and said:
"Well, God bless you, don't help us—1 knew you wouldn't—l've come to you more on account of Nazar Andreich—He cried so, Alyosha darling! He kissed my hands and kept asking me to go to you and beg
M
you.
"What does he want?"
"He begs you to give him what's coming to him. He brought you his rye to be ground, he says, and you never gave him the flour."
"It isn't your business to meddle in other people's affairs, Maminka," the miller growled. "Your business is to say your prayers."
"I do pray, but it looks as though God doesn't heed my prayers. Vasily is a pauper, and as for me, I beg my bread and wear a cast-off jacket, while you are well-off, but the Lord knows what kind of a soul you have. Oh, Alyosha darling, the envious have put the evil eye on you! You've been blessed in everything. You're clever and handsome and you are a prince among merchants, but you're not human. You're unfriendly, you never smile or say a kind word, you're as pitiless as a beast. Look at your face! And what people say about you, my grief! Ask the fathers here! They lie about you, they say that you suck people's blood, that there are evil deeds upon your soul, that with your helpers you rob pass- ers-by at night and that you are a horse-thief. Your mill is like an accursed place. Boys and girls are afraid to come near it, all creatures keep clear of you. They have no other name for you but Cain and Herod—"
"You are a fool, Maminka!"
"Where your foot steps, the grass does not grow, where you breathe, not a fly buzzes. All I hear is 'Ah, if only someone did him in or if he were put away!' What does it do to a mother when she has to hear that? How does she feel? You are my own child, my flesh and blood—"
"It's time for me to go," muttered the miller, rising. "Good-by, Maminkal"
He wheeled a carriage out of the shed, led out a horse and, shoving it between the shafts as if it were a small dog, started hitching it up. The old woman hovered about him, looked into his face, and blinked tear- fully.
"Well, good-by!" she said, as her son started hur- riedly shouldering into a coat. "Stay here with God's blessing and do not forget us. Wait, I have a present for you." She mumbled, lowering her voice and untying her bundle, "Yesterday I was at the deaconess's, and they passed something round. So I put one away for you."
And the old woman held out to her son a small spice- cake.
"Leave off!" snarled the miller and pushed her hand away.
Embarrassed, the old woman dropped the cake and quietly waddled off towards the dam. It was a painful scene. Not to mention the monks, who exclaimed and held out their arms in horror, even the drunken Yevsey was petrified and stared at his master in dismay.
Whether because the miller was impressed by the re- action of the monks and his helper or because an emo- tion long dormant stirred in his breast, something like an expression of fear flashed across his face.
"Maminka!" he called.
The old woman started and looked back. The miller hurriedly plunged his hand into his pocket and drew out a large leather purse.
"There," he mumbled, pulling out of the purse a wad of paper money in which some silver coins were stuck, "take it!"
He rolled the wad in his hand, crushed it, for some reason looked at the monks, then fingered it again. The bills and the silver coins, slipping between his fingers, dropped back into the purse one after another, and only a twenty-kopeck piece remained in his hand. The miller examined it, rubbed it between his fingers and, groaning and getting purple, handed it to his mother.
1886
The Chameleon
P
OLICE INSPECTOR Ochumelov[1], wearing a new uniform and carrying a bundle in his hand, is crossing the market place. Behind him strides a red- headed policeman with a sieve that is filled to the brim with confiscated gooseberries. Silence reigns. Not a soul on the square. . . . The open doors of shops and tav- erns look out on God's world dejectedly, like hungry jaws. Not even a beggar is to be seen about them.
"So you bite, do you, you devil!" Ochumelov hears suddenly. "Don't let her get away, fellows! It's against the law to bite nowadays. Hold her! A-ahhl"
A canine squeal is heard. Ochumelov looks about and sees a dog dash out of merchant Pichugin's lumberyard, limping on three legs and looking behind it as it runs. It is being chased by a man in a starched cotton shirt, with his vest unbuttoned. He dashes after it, throwing him- self forward, drops to the ground, and seizes the dog by its hind legs. The canine squeal sounds again, and the cry: "Don't let her get away!" Sleepy faces appear in the doorways of the shops, and soon, as though it had sprung out of the ground, a crowd gathers near the l^beryard.
"Looks like trouble, Your Honor," says the policeman. Ochumelov makes a half turn to the left and strides toward the crowd. At the very gates of the lumberyard he sees the man with the unbuttoned vest, described above, holding up his right hand and showing the crowd a bleeding finger. On his rather groggy-looking face Is written, as it were: "I'll let you have it, you brute!" and his very finger looks like the banner of victory. Ochume- lov recognizes Hmkin,1 the goldsmith. In the center of the crowd crouches the culprit responsible for the ^ndal, a white borzoi puppy with a pointed muzzle and a yellow spot on its back, its forepaws spread out, and trembling all over. There is an expression of anguish ^^ terror in its moist eyes.
"What's going on here?" demands Ochumelov, shoul- ^mng his way through the crowd. "What's it about? What's that finger? Who was hollering?"
..Here I'm on my way, Your Honor," begins Hrukin, ^raghing into his fist, "to talk to Mitry Mitrich about firewood, not harming a soul, and all at once this nasty creature for no reason at all snaps at my finger. Excuse me, but I'm a man what works . . . and mine's delicate work. They've got to pay me damages. Maybe it'll be a week before I can move this finger again. It don't say in the law that you must put up with injury from a beast. If they're all going to bite, there'll be no living. . . ."
"Mm. . . . Right!" says Ochumelov severely, clear- ing his throat and knitting his eyebrows. "Right. • . . Whose dog is it? I won't stand for this! I'll teach you to let your dogs run wild. It's time we took notice of these people who won't obey regulations. When he's fined, the scamp, he'll know, thanks to me, what a dog is, and other stray cattle. I'll show him what's what. Yeldyrin," he turns to the policeman, "find out whose dog it is and draw up a report. As for the dog, she must be done away with. At once! She's sure to be mad. Whose dog is it, I ask you?"
"Could be General Zhigalov's," says someone in the Crowd.
"General Zhigalov's? H'mml Yeldyrin, help me off with my coat. It's terribly hotl Guess it's going to rain. There's just one thing I can't make out: how could she possibly bite you?" Ochumelov turns to Hrukin. "How could she reach your finger? She's a little bit of a thing and you're a big husky. You must have scratched your finger on a nail and you got it into your head to blame it on the dog. I know your sort. I know you devils!"
"He poked a cigarette into its snout, Your Honor, for fun, and the dog's no fool—she snapped at him. He's an ugly customer, Your Honor."
"You're lying, you with the one eyel You didn't see it, so why tell lies about it? His Honor is an intelligent gentleman, His Honor knows the difference between a liar and an honest man who speaks God's truth. And if it's me that's lying, let the justice of the peace decide.
He knows what the law says. We're all equal nowadays.
My own brother's a gendarme, if you want to know."
"None of your lip!" says the police inspector.
"No, it's not the GeneraFs," observes the policeman thoughtfully. "The General ain't got none like this. He's got mostly setters."
"Are you sure about that?"
"Sure, Your Honor."
"Of course, I know. The General's dogs are all thor- oughbreds, and worth a lot of money, and this is some kind of mutt! No points, no looks, just a mean tyke. The idea of keeping a dog like that! Where's your brains? If a dog like that turned up in Petersburg or Moscow, do you know what would happen? They wouldn't think twice about the law—to the pound with it! Hrukin, you're the injured party, and don't you drop the case. They've got to be taught a lesson! High time!"
"But maybe she is the General's," the policeman thinks out loud. "It ain't written on her snout. The other day I saw one just like her in the General's courtyard."
"Sure she's the General's," says a voice from the crowd.
"H'mm. . . . Help me on with my coat, brother Yel- dyrin. It's blowing up, getting chilly. You take the dog to the General, and make inquiries. Tell him I was the one that found her and saw he got her back. . . . And tell them there to keep her off the street. . . . It may be a valuable dog, and if every swine pokes his cigarette into her snout she may get damaged. A dog is a delicate creature. . . . And you, you blockhead, put your hand down. What's the sense of sticking up your silly finger? It's your own fault!"
"There's the General's cook! Let's ask him. Hey, Prohor! Come here, brother. Look at this dog. Is that yours?"
"Nonsense! We never had no such dogs."
"No need to ask questions," says Ochumelov. "She's a stray. No use talking about it. I said she was a stray, and she is a stray. To the pound with her and that's all!"
"She's not one of ours," Prohor continues. "She be- longs to the General's brother, he came a few days ago. Our General don't fancy borzois, but His Excellency's brother, he likes 'em."
"You don't mean to say His Excellency's brother is here! Vladimir Ivanych?" asks Ochumelov, and a smile of exaltation suffuses his face. "Good Lordl and I didn't know! Has the dear man come on a visit?"
"Yes, on a visit."
"Good Lord! So the dear man got lonesome for his brother. And to think I didn't know! So the little dog belongs to His Excellency's brother! I'm mighty glad! Take her. She's not a bad little dog! So smart! Chkk! Snapped at that fellow's finger! Ha-ha-ha! What are you shaking about, puppy? Grr-grr . . . The rascal's cross, the little pet!"
Prohor calls the dog and leaves the lumberyard with it ... The crowd howls at Hrukin.
"111 get you yet!" Ochumelov threatens him, and wrapping his coat about him, continues his way across the market place.
1884
The Siren
peace, the Justices withdrew to the chamber where they usually deliberated. They wanted to get into their street clothes, and after resting a while, go off to dine. The Presiding Judge, a very presentable man with fluffy side-whiskers, had failed to concur with his associates in a case that had just been tried and was sitting at a desk hastening to set down his dissenting opinion. An Acting Justice of the Peace, Milkin, a young man with a languid, melancholy face, who had a repu- tation as a philosopher at odds with the world and dis- tressed by the emptiness of existence, stood at a window and gazed sadly out into the courtyard. Two judges had already left. An Honorary Justice, a fat man with a bloated look who breathed heavily, and the Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, a young man of German extrac- tion with a catarrhal complexion, sat on a couch and waited for their colleague to finish writing his opinion so that they could all go to dinner together. Standing before them was the secretary, a short man with side- whiskerS growing close to his ears and a sugary expres- sion on his face. He was looking at the fat man with a honeyed smile and speaking in a low voice:
FT E R one of the sessions of the assizes of the
"We are all hungry now, it's true, but that's because we're tired and it's after three: it's not, my dear Grigory Savvich, what you would call real appetite. I mean real appetite, the wolfish sort, when you're ready to make a meal of your own father. That comes only after physicalexertion, for instance, when you've ridden to hounds, or say after you've been jolted over a hundred versts[2]without a stop in a wretched conveyance. Of course, I won't deny, sir, that imagination has something to do with it, too. Suppose you are coming home after a day's shooting and you want to bring an appetite to your din- ner. Then you mustn't let your mind dwell on anything intellectual. Intellectual things, learned things, ruin the appetite. You know yourself that thinkers and scholars are just nowhere when it comes to eating. Even pigs, pardon the expression, pay more regard to their food than such people do. As I was saying, you are on your way home, and you must make sure that your mind dwells on nothing but the wineglass and the appetizer. Once as I was traveling I closed my eyes and pictured to myself a sucking-pig with horseradish. Well, sir, I became virtually hysterical with sheer appetite! Now this is important: when you drive into your own court- yard, you should be aware of a smell from the kitchen, a smell of something, you know. . . ."
"Roast goose is a prime smeller," observed the Hon- orary Justice, breathing heavily.
"Don't say that, my dear Grigory Savvich. Duck or woodcock, those are the trumps! The bouquet of a goose lacks refinement, lacks delicacy. The richest odor is that of young onions when they just begin to get golden- brown, you know, and when the rascals fill the house with their sizzling. Another thing: when you come in, the table must be set, and when you sit do^ you tuck the napkin into your collar and you take your time about reaching for the vodka decanter. And mind you, you don't pour it into an ordinary wineglass, you don't treat the sweetheart that way! No. You pour it into something antique, made of silver, an heirloom, or into a quaint pot-bellied little glass with an inscription on it, some- thing like this: 'As you clink, you may think, monks also thus do drink.' And you don't gulp it down, straight off, but first you sigh, you rub your hands together, you gaze nonchalantly at the ceiling, and only then, slowly, you raise it to your lips, and at once sparks from your stomach flash through your whole body."
An expression of beatitude spread over the secretary's sugary face.
"Sparks," he repeated, screwing up his eyes. "And as soon as you have had your snifter, you turn to the appetizers.''
"See here," put in the Presiding Judge, raising his eyes to the secretary, 'be quiet! You've made me spoil two sheets!"
"Oh, I am so sorry, Pyotr Nikolaich! I will speak more quietly," murmured the secretary, and continued in a half whisper. ^VelJ, my dear Grigory Savvich, as I was about to say, when it comes to appetizers, one must know one's way about. The best appetizer is herring. You eat a bit of herring with onion and mustard sauce, and without waiting, my friend, while the sparks are still flying in the stomach, you help yourself to caviar, with lemon juice, if you prefer it that way, then you have a radish with salt, and another piece of herring. But I'll tell you what's better still, my friend: salted pink mushrooms, minced as fine as caviar and served with onion and olive oil . . . exquisite! But eel-pout liver— that's beyond anything!"
"Mm—yes . . ." agreed the Honorary Justice, screw- ing up his eyes in turn. "Another good appetizer is stewed white mushrooms."
"Yes, yes, with onion, you know, and bay leaf and other spices. You lift the lid of the dish, and the steam rises, a smell of mushrooms . . . sometimes it really brings tears to my eyes! Well, sir, the meat pie is brought in from the kitchen and at once, without delay, another glass of vodka is in order."
"Ivan Guryich!" exclaimed the Presiding Judge in a tearful voice. "You made me ruin the third sheet!"
"Deuce take him, he can't think of anything but food!" grumbled Milkin, the philosopher, with a look of contempt. "Is there nothing to live for but mushrooms and meat pie?"
"Well, sir, before the meat pie you down another one," the secretary repeated in a low tone. He was so carried away that, like a nightingale singing, he heard only his o^ voice. "The meat pie must make your mouth water, it must lie there before you, naked, shame- less, a temptation! You wink at it, you cut off a sizable slice, and you let your fingers just play over it, this way, out of excess of feeling. You eat, the butter drips from it like tears, and the filling is fat, juicy, rich, with eggs, giblets, onions. • • ."
The secretary rolled up his eyes and his mouth stretched to his ears. The Honorary Justice groaned and twiddled his fingers, apparently seeing the meat pie be- fore him.
"What the devil!" grumbled the Acting Justice, walk- ing over to the farther window.
"You eat only two slices, the third you keep for the shchi," the secretary went on like a man inspired. "And as soon as you've finished with the meat pie, have the shchi served, to keep the appetite at pitch. The shchi must be piping hot. But even better than shchi, with all that cabbage, is a borshch, prepared with sugar beets, Ukrainian style, you know the way, my friend, with ham and country sausages. It should be served with sour cream, of course, and a sprinkling of fresh parsley and dill. Another exceUent thing is a rassolnik,[3] with tripe in it and giblets and young kidneys, and then if you want a soup, the best thing is a vegetable soup, with carrots, fresh asparagus, a bit of cauliflower and whatever else is legitimate."
"Yes, it's an excellent thing," sighed the Presiding Judge, lifting his eyes from his papers, but at once he caught himself up and moaned, "For heaven's sake! If you go on like that, it'll be evening by the time I get through with my opinion! I've spoiled the fourth sheet!"
"Not a word more, not a word! I am very sorry!" the secretary apologized, and went on in a whisper, "Mter you have had your borshch or your soup, as you prefer, have the fish course served, and immediately, my friend. Of all the mute race, the finest is cmcian carp, fried in sour cream. But so that it shouldn't have any odor of silt, and to give it true delicacy, it must be kept alive in milk for twenty-four hours."
"A fish ring made of sterlet is good, too," put in the Honorary Justice, closing his eyes, and then suddenly, astonishingly, with a ferocious air he rushed from his seat, and roared at the Presiding Judge, "Pyotr Nik- olaich, you be done soon? I can't wait any longer, I just can't!"
"Just let me finish!"
"The deuce! I'll eat alone!"
The fat man waved his hand in despair, seized his hat and without a good-by ran out of the chamber. The secretary sighed, and bending over the ear of the As- sistant Prosecuting Attorney, proceeded in a low voice:
"Pike perch or carp with tomato and mushroom sauce isn't to be sneezed at, either. But fish doesn't really sat- isfy one, you'll admit, Stepan Frantzych: there's no sub- stance to it. The main thing in a dinner isn't the fish, no matter with what sauce, but the roast. Which are you fondest of?"
The Assistant Prosecuting Attorney made a sour face and said, sighing:
"Unfortunately, I can't share your transports: I have catarrh of the stomach."
"Tut, tut, my dear sir! Catarrh of the stomach is an invention of the doctors! It's a complaint that comes mostly from pride and free-thinking. Don't give it a thought. Suppose you don't feel like eating or you're even nauseated, just pay no attention, but go right ahead and eat. Say the roast is a snipe or two, and perhaps a partridge with it, or a brace of fat quail, then you'll for- get all about your catarrh, I give you my word of honor. And what about roast turkey? The bird should be a hen, with fat, juicy, white meat—the breast of a nymph. . . ."
"That should be tasty," murmured the Prosecuting Attorney, with a wistful smile. "Perhaps I would enjoy a slice of turkey."
"Good Lord! and what about duck? If you take a duckling, one that has had a taste of the ice during the first frost, and roast it, and be sure to put the potatoes, cut small, of course, in the dripping-pan too, so that they get browned to a tum and soaked with duck fat and—"
Milkin, the philosopher, made a ferocious face and was apparently about to say something but instead sud- denly smacked his lips, probably dreaming of roast duck, and without a word, as though pulled by some mysterious force, seized his hat and ran out.
"Yes, perhaps I would enjoy a bit of duck, too," breathed the Assistant Prosecuting Attorney.
The Presiding Judge got up, walked about the cham- ber, and sat down again.
"After the roast, sir, a man is full, and he goes off into a sweet eclipse," continued the secretary. "The body is basking, the soul is transported. And then for the crown- ing touch, two or three glasses of spiced brandy."
The Presiding Judge grunted and struck out what he had written.
"I have ruined the sixth sheet!" he exclaimed angrily. "This is monstrous!"
"Go on, go on writing, my friend," murmured the secretary. "I shan't say another word. You won't hear a thing. Believe me, Stepan Frantzych," he went on in a scarcely audible whisper, "spiced brandy, if it's home- made, is better than the finest champagne. After the very first glass your whole being is suffused with a kind of fragrance, enveloped in a mirage, as it were, and it seems to you as if you aren't at home, in your own ann- chair, but somewhere in Australia, that you are astride a do^y ostrich—"
"Oh, let's be off, Pyotr Nikolaichl" cried the Prosecut- ing Attorney, with an impatient jerk of his leg.
"Yes, my friend," the secretary continued. "And while you are sipping your brandy, it's not a bad thing to smoke a cigar, and you blow rings, and you begin to fancy that you are a generalissimo, or better still, you are married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and all day long she is floating under your windows in a kind of pool with goldfish in it. She floats there, and you call to her: 'Darling, come and give me a kiss.'"
"Pyotr Nikolaich!" moaned the Prosecuting Attorney.
"Yes, my friend," the secretary proceeded. "And when you have had your smoke, you lift the skirts of your dressing-gown and climb into bed! You lie on your back, and you pick up a newspaper. When you can hardly keep your eyes open, and your whole body i.s ready for sleep, politics makes agreeable reading: Austria made a misstep, France got somebody's back up, the Pope put a spoke in someone's wheel—it's a pleasure, sir, to read of such things."
The Presiding Judge threw down his pen, jumped up and seized his hat in both hands. The Assistant Pros- ecuting Attorney, who had quite forgotten his catarrh and was nearly fainting with impatience, jumped up, too.
"Let's be off!" he cried.
"Pyotr Nikolaich, and what about your dissenting opinion?" asked the secretary in dismay. "My dear friend, when will you write it? You have to be in town at six o'clock!"
The Presiding Judge waved his hand in despair and made a dash for the door. The Assistant Prosecuting Attorney made the same gesture and, seizing his brief case, vanished together with the judge. The secretary looked after them reproachfully and began to gather up the papers.
1887
Sergeant Prishibeyev
S
ERGEANT PRISHIBEYEV,t the charge against you is that on the third of September you committed assault and battery on Constable Zhigin, Elder Alyapov, Policeman Yefimov, special deputies Ivanov and Gavrilov, and on six other peasants, the three first-named having been attacked by you while they were performing their official duties. Do you plead guilty?"
Prishibeyev, a wrinkled non-com with a face that seemed to bristle, comes to attention and replies in a hoarse, choked voice, emphasizing each word, as though he were issuing a command:
"Your Honor, Mr. justice of the peace! It follows, ac- cording to all the articles of the law, there is cause to attest every circumstance mutually. It's not me that's guilty, but all them others. This whole trouble started on account of this dead corpse, the Kingdom of Heaven be his! On the third instant my wife, Anfisa, and I was walking quiet and proper. Suddenly I look and what do I see but a crowd of all sorts of people standing on the river bank. By what rights, I ask, have people assembled there? What for? Is there a law that says people should go about in droves? Break it up, I holler. And I start shoving people, telling them to go on home, and I order the policeman to chase 'em and give it 'em in the neck. . . ."
"AUow me, but you are not a constable, not an elder —is it your business to break up crowds?"
"It ain't! It ain't!" voices are heard from various parts of the courtroom. "There's no standing him, Your Honor! It's fifteen years he's been plaguing us! Since the day he came back from the army, there's no living in the vil- lage. He's done nothing but badger us."
"Just so, Your Honor," says the elder. "The whole village is complaining. There's no standing him! No matter whether we carry the icons in a church proces- sion, or have a wedding, or some accident happens, there he is, shouting, making a racket, setting things straight. He pulls the children's ears, he spies on the women folk, afraid something might go amiss, like he were their father-in-law. The other day he made the round of the cabins, ordering everybody not to sing songs, not to burn lights. 'There ain't no law,' he tells 'em, 'as says people should sing songs.'"
"Hold on, you'll have a chance to testify," says the justice of the peace; "and now let Prishibeyev continue. Go on, Prishibeyev!"
"Yes, sir!" crows the sergeant. "Your Honor, you're pleased to say that it ain't my business to break up crowds. . . . Very well, sir. . . . But what if there's breach of the peace? You can't allow folks to carry on disgracefully. Where is the law that says people should do as they please? I won't have it, sir! If I don't chase 'em and call 'em to account, who will? Nobody here knows the rights of things; I'm the only one, Your Honor, I'm the only one in the whole village, you might say, who knows how to deal with the common people. And I know what's what, Your Honor. I'm no hick, I'm a non-co^missioned officer, a retired quartermaster- sergeant. I served in Warsaw, I was attached to head- quarters, sir, and after, when I got my honorable dis- charge, I was on duty as a fireman, and then on account of iU health I retired from the fire department, and for two years I held the post of doorman in a junior high school for boys of good family. I know all the rules and regulations, sir. But the peasant, he's ignorant, he don't understand the first thing, and he's got to do as I say, seeing as how it's for his own good. Take this affair, for instance. Here I was, breaking up the crowd, and right there on the shore, on the sand, lies the dro^ed corpse of a dead man. What right has he got to lie there, I asks. Is that proper? What's the constable thinking of? How come, constable, says I, that you didn't notify the authorities? Maybe this drowned corpse dro^ed him- self or maybe this smells of Siberia? Maybe it's a case of criminal homicide. But Zhigin, the constable, he don't take no notice, but just puffs away at a cigarette. 'Who is this,' says he, 'as is laying down the law to you fel- lows? Where does he come from?' says he. 'Don't we know what's what without him putting in his oar?' says he. 'It looks as if you don't know what's what, you fool, you,' says I, 'if you stand there and don't take no notice.' 'I notified the district police officer yesterday,' says he. 'Why the district police officer?' says I. 'Accord- ing to what article of the Code of Laws? In cases like drowning and hanging and matters of a similar kind, is there anything the district police officer can do about them? Here's a corpse,' says I, 'this is a criminal case, plainly a civil suit. The thing to do,' says I, sir, 'is to send a dispatch right away to His Honor the examining magistrate and Their Honors the judges. And first off,' says I, 'you ought to draw up a report and send it to His Honor the justice of the peace.' But the constable, he just listens to it all, and laughs. And the peasants, too. They all laughed, Your Honor. I can testify to it under oath. This one here laughed, and that one there, and Zhigin, he laughed too. 'What's the joke?' says I. And the constable, he says: 'Such cases ain't within the jurisdiction of the justice of the peace.' I got hot under the collar when I heard them words. 'You did say them words, didn't you, constable?'" The sergeant turned to Zhigin.
"I did.''
"Everybody heard you say them very words in front of the common people: 'Such cases ain't within the jurisdiction of the justice of the peace.' Everybody heard you say them words. I got hot under the collar, Your Honor. Honest, it took away my breath. 'Repeat,' says I, 'repeat, you blankety blank, what you just said.' And he did. 'How can you say them words,' says I, 'about His Honor the justice of the peace? You, a police officer, and you're against the government! What! Do you know,' says I, 'that if he takes it into his head, His Honor the justice of the peace can ship you off to the provincial office of the gendarmerie on account of your unreliable conduct? Do you know,' says I, 'where His Honor the justice of the peace can send you for such political words?' And the elder, he says: 'The justice of the peace can't do nothing,' he says, 'beyond his limits. Only minor cases comes within his jurisdiction.' Them's his exact words, everybody heard him. 'How dare you belittle the authorities?' says I. 'Don't you get gay with me,' says I, 'or you'll come to grief, brother.' When I was serving in Warsaw and when I was doorman at the junior high school for boys of good family, if I heard something as shouldn't be said, I'd look up and do^ the street for a gendarme. 'Come here, officer,' I'd say, and I'd make a report of the whole affair to him. But here in the village, to whom can you report? This made me sore. It got under my skin to see folks indulge in license and insubordination, and I gave the elder a crack. Of course, not much of a one, just easy like, so he'd know better than to say such words about Your Honor. The constable stuck up for the elder. So, natu- rally, I went for the constable, too. And then there was a rumpus. I forgot myself, Your Honor. But how'll you get along if you don't punch 'em sometimes? If you don't thrash a fool, you take a sin on your soul. And all the more if he deserves it, if there's a breach of the peace."
"Allow me, but there are proper authorities to keep order. There is the constable, the elder, the policeman.''
"The constable can't keep an eye on everything, and besides he don't understand things like I do. . . ."
"But get it into your head: this is none of your busi- ness!"
"How's that, sir? What do you mean—none of my business? That's queer, sir. People carry on disgrace- ful!y, and it's none of my business! Should I pat 'em on the back for it? Here they kick because I don't let 'em sing. What's the good of singing? Instead of doing something useful, they sing. And now they've got into the way of sitting up evenings and burning lights. They should go to bed, and instead they gab and cackle. I've got it all wrote down!"
"What have you written down?"
"About them as sit up and bums lights."
Prishibeyev takes a greasy sheet of paper out of his pocket, puts on his spectacles, and reads:
"Peasants what burn lights: Ivan Prokhorov, Savva Mikiforov, Pyotr Petrov, Shustrova, soldier's widow, lives in sin with Semyon Kislov. Ignat Sverchok prac- tices witchcraft and his wife Mavra is a witch: she milks other folks' cows at night."
"That will do," says the judge, and starts to question the witnesses.
Sergeant Prishibeyev shoves his spectacles up on his forehead and stares in astonishment at the judge, who appears not to side with him. His protruding eyes glit- ter, his nose turns bright red. He gazes at the justice of the peace, and at the witnesses, and cannot grasp why the judge is so agitated or why now a murmur, now subdued laughter is heard from all the corners of the courtroom. The sentence, too, is incomprehensible to him: a month in jail!
"What for?" says he, throwing up his hands in be- wilderment. "By what law?"
And it is clear to him that the world has changed and that it is utterly impossible to go on living. He falls prey to gloomy, despondent thoughts. But when he leaves the courtroom and catches sight of a crowd of peasants milling about and talking, a habit that he can no longer control makes him come to attention and shout in a hoarse, angry voice:
"Break it up, folks! Move along! Go on home!"
1885
The Culprit
A
PUNY little peasant, exceedingly skinny, wearing patched trousers and a shirt made of ticking, stands before the investigating magistrate. His hairy, pockmarked face, and his eyes, scarcely visible under thick, overhanging brows, have an expression of grim sullenness. The mop of tangled hair that has not known the touch of a comb for a long time gives him a spider- ish air that makes him look even grimmer. He is bare- foot.
"Denis Grigoryev!" the magistrate begins. "Step nearer and answer my questions. On the morning of the seventh of this present month of July, the railway watchman, Ivan Semyonovich Akinfov, making his rounds, found you, near the hundred-and-forty-first milepost, unscrewing the nut of one of the bolts by which the rails are fastened to the sleepers. Here is the nut! . . . With the said nut he detained you. Is this true?"
"Wot?"
"Did all this happen as stated by Akinfov?"
"It did, sure."
"Very well; now, for what purpose were you un- screwing the nut?"
"Wot?" "Stop saying 'wot' and answer the question: for what purpose were you unscrewing the nut?"
"If I didn't need it, I wouldn't've unscrewed it," croaks Denis, with a sidelong glance at the ceiling.
"What did you want that nut for?"
'The nut? We make sinkers of these nuts."
"Who are 'we'?"
'We, folks. . . . The Klimovo peasants, that is."
"Listen, brother; don't play the fool with me, but talk sense. There's no use lying to me about sinkers."
"I never lied in my life, and here I'm lying . . ." mutters Denis, blinking. "But can you do without a sinker, Your Honor? If you put live bait or worms on a hook, would it go to the bottom without a sinker? . . . So I'm lying," sneers Denis. "What the devil is the good of live bait if it floats on the surface? The perch and the pike and the eel-pout will bite only if your line touches bottom, and if your bait floats on the surface, it's only a bullhead will take it, and that only sometimes, and there ain't no bullhead in our river . • . That fish likes plenty of room."
"What are you telling me about bullhead for?"
'Wot? Why, you asked me yourself! Up our way the gentry catch fish that way, too. Even a little kid wouldn't try to catch fish without a sinker. Of course, somebody with no sense might go fishing without a sinker. No rules for fools."
"So you say you unscrewed this nut to make a sinker of it?"
"What else for? Not to play knucklebones with!"
"But you might have taken a bit of lead or a bullet for a smker . . . a nail . . . "
"You don't pick up lead on the road, you have to pay for it, and a nail's no good. You can't find nothing better than a nut . . . It's heavy, and it's got a hole."
"He keeps playing the fool! As though he'd been born yesterday or dropped out of the sky! Don't you under- stand, you blockhead, what this unscrewing leads to? If the watchman hadn't been on the lookout, the train might have been derailed, people would have been killed—you would have killed people."
"God forbid, Your Honor! Kill people? Are we un- baptized, or criminals? Glory be to God, sir, we've lived our lives without dreaming of such a thing, much less killing anybody . • . Save us, Queen of Heaven, have mercy on us! What are you saying, sir?"
"And how do you suppose train wrecks happen? Un- screw two or three nuts, and you have a wreck!"
Denis sneers and screws up his eyes at the magistrate incredulously.
"Well! How many years have all of us here in the vil- lage been unscrewing nuts, and the Lord's protected us; and here you talk about wrecks, killing people. If I'd carried off a rail or put a log in the way, then maybe the train might've gone off the track, but . . . ppfff! a nut!"
"But try to get it into your head that the nut holds the rail fast to the sleepers!"
'We understand that . . . We don't unscrew all of 'em . . . We leave some • • . We don't do things without using our heads . . . We understand."
Denis yawns and makes the sign of the cross over his mouth.
"Last year a train was derailed here," says the mag- istrate. "Now it's plain why!"
"Beg pardon?"
"I say that it's plain why the train was derailed last year . . . Now I understand!"
"That's what you're educated for, our protectors, to understand. The Lord knew to whom to give under- standing • . . Here you've figured out how and what, but the watchman, a peasant like us, with no brains at all, he gets you by the collar and pulls you in. You should figure it out first and then pull people in. But it's known, a peasant has the brains of a peasant. . . . Write down, too, Your Honor, that he hit me twice on the jaw, and on the chest, too."
"When your house was searched they found another nut. . . . At what spot did you unscrew that, and when?"
"You mean the nut under the little red chest?"
"I don't know where you kept it, but it was found. When did you unscrew it?'
"I didn't unscrew it; Ignashka, one-eyed Semyon's son, he gave it to me. I mean the one that was under the chest, but the one that was in the sledge in the yard, that one Mitrofan and I unscrewed together."
"Which Mitrofan?"
"Mitrofan Petrov . . . Didn't you hear of him? He makes nets and sells them to the gentry. He needs a lot of those nuts. Reckon a matter of ten for every net."
"Listen. According to Article 1081 of the Penal Code, deliberate damage to a railroad, calculated to jeopardize the trains, provided the perpetrator of the damage knew that it might cause an accident—you understand? Knew! And you couldn't help knowing what this unscrewing might lead to—is punishable by hard labor."
"Of course, you know best . . . We're ignorant folk . • . What do we understand?"
"You understand all about it! You are lying, faking!"
"Why should I lie? Ask in the village if you don't be- lieve me. Only bleak is caught without a sinker. And a gudgeon's no kind of fish, but even gudgeon won't bite without a sinker."
"Tell me about bullhead, now," says the magistrate with a smile.
"There ain't no bullhead in our parts. . . . If we cast our lines without a sinker, with a butterfly for bait, we can maybe catch a chub that way, but even that not often."
"Now, be quiet."
There is silence. Denis shifts from one foot to the other, stares at the table covered with green cloth, and blinks violently as though he were looking not at cloth but at the sun. The magistrate writes rapidly.
"Can I go?" asks Denis, after a silence.
"No. I must put you in custody and send you to prison."
Denis stops blinking and, raising his thick eyebrows, looks inquiringly at the official.
"What do you mean, prison? Your Honor! I haven't the time; I must go to the fair; I must get three rubles from Yegor for lard!"
"Be quiet; don't disturb me."
"Prison . . . If I'd done something, I'd go; but to go just for nothing! What for? I didn't steal anything, so far as I know, I wasn't fighting . . . If there's any ques- tion about the arrears, Your Honor, don't believe the elder . . . Ask the permanent member of the Board . . . the elder, he's no Christian."
"Be quiet."
''I'm quiet as it is," mutters Denis; "as for the elder, he's lied about the assessment, I'll take my oath on it . . . We're three brothers: Kuzma Grigoryev, then Yegor Grigoryev, and me, Denis Grigoryev."
"You're disturbing me . . . Hey, Semyon," cries the magistrate, "take him out."
"We're three brothers," mutters Denis, as two husky soldiers seize him and lead him out of the chamber. "A brother don't have to answer for a brother. Kuzma don't pay, so you, Denis, have to answer for it ... Judges!
Our late master the general is dead—the Kingdom of Heaven be his!—or he'd have shown you judges what's what . . . You must have the know-how when you judge, not do it any which way . . . All right, flog a man, hut justly, when it's coming to him."
1885
Daydreams
T
WO rural constables—one a black-bearded stocky fellow with such extraordinarily short legs that if you look at him from the rear it seems as though they begin much lower down than other people's; the other, tall, lean, and straight as a stick, with a skimpy reddish beard—are taking to the county seat a tramp who has refused to give his name. The first waddles along, glances about, chews now a straw, now his own sleeve, slaps himself on the thighs, hums, and generally has a carefree, lighthearted air about him; the other, in spite of his gaunt face and narrow shoulders, looks solid, seri- ous, and substantial; his whole appearance and the way he carries himself suggest a priest of the Old Be- lievers' sect or a warrior in an ancient icon. "Forasmuch as he is. wise, God hath added unto his brow"—in other words, he is bald—which increases the resemblance just mentioned. The name of the first is Andrey Ptaha, that of the second Nikandr Sapozhnikov.
The man they are escorting does not at all fit the usual conception of a tramp. He is a puny little man, feeble and sickly, with small, colorless, extremely blurred fea- tures. His eyebrows are scanty, his expression gentle and submissive; he has hardly a trace of a mustache, al- though he is over thirty. He moves timidly, a hunched figure, his hands thrust into his sleeves. The collar of his threadbare cloth overcoat, which is not a peasant's, is turned up to the very edge of his cap, so that only his little red nose ventures to peep out into God's world. He speaks in a small, wheedling tenor and coughs continu- ally. It is very, very hard to accept him as a tramp who is concealing his identity. He looks more like a priest's son, a poor devil of a fellow, reduced to beggary; a clerk sacked for drunkenness; a merchant's son or nephew who has tested his feeble powers on the stage and is now going home to play the last act in the parable ol the prodigal son. Perhaps, to judge from the dull pa- tience with which he is struggling against the impass- able autumn mud, he is a fanatic, a novice, wandering from one Russian monastery to another, continually seek- ing "a life of peace that knoweth no sin" and not finding it. . . .
The men have been walking for a long time but they seem to be unable to leave one small patch of land. Be- fore them stretch some thirty feet of road, black-brown and muddy, behind them is an identical stretch of road, and beyond, wherever one looks, there is an impene- trable wall of white fog. They walk on and on, but the ground remains the same, the wall is no nearer, and the patch is the same. Sometimes there floats past them a white, angular boulder, a gulley, or an armful of hay fallen from a passing cart; or a large, muddy puddle will gleam briefly, or, suddenly, a shadow with vague outlines will come into view ahead of them, growing smaller and darker as they approach, and finally there will loom before the wayfarers a slanting milestone with a half-effaced number on it, or a pitiful birch tree, drenched and bare as a wayside beggar. The little birch whispers something with what remains of its yeUow leaves, one leaf breaks off and floats lazily to the ground. . . . And then once more, fog, mud, brown grass at the edges of the road. Dull, unkind tears hang on the grass. They are not the tears of quiet joy that the earth sheds on greeting the summer sun and on parting &om it, not the tears that she gives the quails, corncrakes, and grace- ful, long-beaked curlews to drink at dawn. The way- farers' feet stick in the heavy, clinging mud. Every step costs an effort.
Andrey Ptaha is somewhat agitated. He keeps staring at the tramp and trying to understand how a living, sober human being can fail to recall his o^ name.
"You are an Orthodox Christian, no?" he asks.
"I am that," the tramp answers meekly.
"Hm—then you were christened?"
"Why, sure! I'm no Turk. I go to church and take the sacrament and don't eat forbidden food on fast days. I don't neglect my religious duties none—"
"Well, what name do they call you by, then?"
"Call me what you please, mate."
Ptaha shrugs his shoulders and slaps himself on the thighs in extreme perplexity. The other constable, Nik- andr Sapozhnikov, maintains a dignified silence. He is not so naive as Ptaha, and knows very well the reasons why an Orthodox Christian may wish to conceal his name from people. His expressive face is cold and stern. He walks apart and does not condescend to chatter idly with his companions, but tries to show everyone, as it were, even the fog, that he is staid and sensible.
"God knows what to make of you," Ptaha persists in pestering the tramp. "Peasant you ain't and gentleman you ain't, but something betwixt and between. The other day I was washing the sieves in the pond and I caught a viper—see, as long as a finger, with gills and a tail. At first I thought it was a fish, and then I looked—and damn the creature, if it hadn't paws! Maybe it was a fish, maybe it was a viper, the devil only knows what it was. Same with you. What are your folks?"
"I am a peasant, of peasant stock," the tramp sighs. "My dear mother was a house serf. True, I don't look like a peasant, but that was the way of it, my friend. My dear mother was a nurse to the master's children, and she had it very well, and I was her flesh and blood, so I lived with her in the big house. She*took care of me and spoiled me and did all she could to raise me above my class and make something of me. I slept in a bed, I ate a regular dinner every day, I wore breeches and shoes like any gentleman's child. My dear mother fed me just what she ate; if they gave her material for a present, she made clothes for me out of it. What a life we had of it! I ate so much candy and cake when I was a child that if it could be sold now it would bring the price of a good horse. My dear mother taught me how to read and write, she put the fear of God in me when I was little, and she brought me up so that now I can't get myself to say an indelicate peasant word. And I don't drink vodka, mate, and I'm neat about my person, and I know how to behave properly in good society. If my dear mother is still living, God give her health; and if she has departed this life, then God rest her soul, and may she know peace in Thy kingdom, Lord, where the righteous are at rest."
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