THE WIFE AND OTHER STORIES

THE WIFE
and other stories

The Wife and other stories by Anton Chekhov is a publication of the Pennsylvania State University.
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Contents
THE WIFE........................................................................................................................................ 4
DIFFICULT PEOPLE.................................................................................................................... 46
THE GRASSHOPPER................................................................................................................... 53
A DREARY STORY ....................................................................................................................... 78
THE PRIVY COUNCILLOR ...................................................................................................... 134
THE MAN IN A CASE ................................................................................................................ 151
GOOSEBERRIES ........................................................................................................................ 163
ABOUT LOVE .............................................................................................................................. 173
THE LOTTERY TICKET ........................................................................................................... 182
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Anton Chekhov
THE WIFE
and other stories
by
ANTON TCHEKHOV
Translated by CONSTANCE GARNETT
THE WIFE
I
I RECEIVED the following letter:
“Dear sir, Pavel Andreitch!
“Not far from you — that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo
— very distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which
I feel it my duty to write to you. All the peasants of that
village sold their cottages and all their belongings, and set off
for the province of Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting
there, and have come back. Here, of course, they have nothing
now; everything belongs to other people. They have settled
three or four families in a hut, so that there are no less than
fifteen persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the
young children; and the long and the short of it is, there is
nothing to eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence
of hunger, or spotted, typhus; literally every one is
stricken. The doctor’s assistant says one goes into a cottage
and what does one see? Every one is sick, every one delirious,
some laughing, others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no
one to fetch them water, no one to give them a drink, and
nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our
Zemstvo doctor) and his lady assistant do when more than
medicine the peasants need bread which they have not? The
District Zemstvo refuses to assist them, on the ground that
their names have been taken off the register of this district,
and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants of Tomsk; and,
besides, the Zemstvo has no money.
“Laying these facts before you, and knowing your human5
The Wife and other stories
ity, I beg you not to refuse immediate help.
“Your well-wisher.”
Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the
animal name* or his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their
assistants go on for years growing more and more convinced
every day that they can do nothing, and yet continue to receive
their salaries from people who are living upon frozen
potatoes, and consider they have a right to judge whether I
am humane or not.
Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants
came every morning to the servants’ kitchen and went
down on their knees there, and that twenty sacks of rye had
been stolen at night out of the barn, the wall having first been
broken in, and by the general depression which was fostered
by conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather — worried
by all this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing
“A History of Railways”; I had to read a great number of
Russian and foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the
magazines, to make calculations, to refer to logarithms, to
think and to write; then again to read, calculate, and think;
but as soon as I took up a book or began to think, my thoughts
were in a muddle, my eyes began blinking, I would get up
from the table with a sigh and begin walking about the big
rooms of my deserted country-house. When I was tired of
walking about I would stand still at my study window, and,
looking across the wide courtyard, over the pond and the bare
young birch-trees and the great fields covered with recently
fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the horizon a
group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road
ran down in an irregular streak through the white field. That
was Pestrovo, concerning which my anonymous correspondent
had written to me. If it had not been for the crows who,
foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated cawing over the pond
and the fields, and the tapping in the carpenter’s shed, this bit
of the world about which such a fuss was being made would
have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all so still, motionless,
lifeless, and dreary!
My uneasiness hindered me from working and concentrating
myself; I did not know what it was, and chose to believe
*Sobol in Russian means “sable-marten.”- TRANSLATOR’S it was disappointment. I had actually given up my post in the
NOTE.
6
Anton Chekhov
Department of Ways and Communications, and had come
here into the country expressly to live in peace and to devote
myself to writing on social questions. It had long been my
cherished dream. And now I had to say good-bye both to
peace and to literature, to give up everything and think only
of the peasants. And that was inevitable, because I was convinced
that there was absolutely nobody in the district except
me to help the starving. The people surrounding me were
uneducated, unintellectual, callous, for the most part dishonest,
or if they were honest, they were unreasonable and unpractical
like my wife, for instance. It was impossible to rely
on such people, it was impossible to leave the peasants to
their fate, so that the only thing left to do was to submit to
necessity and see to setting the peasants to rights myself.
I began by making up my mind to give five thousand roubles
to the assistance of the starving peasants. And that did not
decrease, but only aggravated my uneasiness. As I stood by
the window or walked about the rooms I was tormented by
the question which had not occurred to me before: how this
money was to be spent. To have bread bought and to go from
hut to hut distributing it was more than one man could do,
to say nothing of the risk that in your haste you might give
twice as much to one who was well-fed or to one who was
making. money out of his fellows as to the hungry. I had no
faith in the local officials. All these district captains and tax
inspectors were young men, and I distrusted them as I do all
young people of today, who are materialistic and without ideals.
The District Zemstvo, the Peasant Courts, and all the
local institutions, inspired in me not the slightest desire to
appeal to them for assistance. I knew that all these institutions
who were busily engaged in picking out plums from
the Zemstvo and the Government pie had their mouths always
wide open for a bite at any other pie that might turn up.
The idea occurred to me to invite the neighbouring landowners
and suggest to them to organize in my house something
like a committee or a centre to which all subscriptions
could be forwarded, and from which assistance and instructions
could be distributed throughout the district; such an
organization, which would render possible frequent consultations
and free control on a big scale, would completely meet
my views. But I imagined the lunches, the dinners, the suppers
and the noise, the waste of time, the verbosity and the
7
The Wife and other stories
bad taste which that mixed provincial company would inevitably
bring into my house, and I made haste to reject my idea.
As for the members of my own household, the last thing I
could look for was help or support from them. Of my father’s
household, of the household of my childhood, once a big
and noisy family, no one remained but the governess Mademoiselle
Marie, or, as she was now called, Marya Gerasimovna,
an absolutely insignificant person. She was a precise little old
lady of seventy, who wore a light grey dress and a cap with
white ribbons, and looked like a china doll. She always sat in
the drawing-room reading.
Whenever I passed by her, she would say, knowing the reason
for my brooding:
“What can you expect, Pasha? I told you how it would be
before. You can judge from our servants.”
My wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, lived on the lower storey, all
the rooms of which she occupied. She slept, had her meals,
and received her visitors downstairs in her own rooms, and
took not the slightest interest in how I dined, or slept, or
whom I saw. Our relations with one another were simple and
not strained, but cold, empty, and dreary as relations are between
people who have been so long estranged, that even living
under the same roof gives no semblance of nearness. There
was no trace now of the passionate and tormenting love — at
one time sweet, at another bitter as wormwood — which I
had once felt for Natalya Gavrilovna. There was nothing left,
either, of the outbursts of the past — the loud altercations,
upbraidings, complaints, and gusts of hatred which had usually
ended in my wife’s going abroad or to her own people,
and in my sending money in small but frequent instalments
that I might sting her pride oftener. (My proud and sensitive
wife and her family live at my expense, and much as she would
have liked to do so, my wife could not refuse my money:
that afforded me satisfaction and was one comfort in my sorrow.)
Now when we chanced to meet in the corridor downstairs
or in the yard, I bowed, she smiled graciously. We spoke
of the weather, said that it seemed time to put in the double
windows, and that some one with bells on their harness had
driven over the dam. And at such times I read in her face: “I
am faithful to you and am not disgracing your good name
which you think so much about; you are sensible and do not
worry me; we are quits.”
8
Anton Chekhov
I assured myself that my love had died long ago, that I was
too much absorbed in my work to think seriously of my
relations with my wife. But, alas! that was only what I imagined.
When my wife talked aloud downstairs I listened intently
to her voice, though I could not distinguish one word.
When she played the piano downstairs I stood up and listened.
When her carriage or her saddlehorse was brought to
the door, I went to the window and waited to see her out of
the house; then I watched her get into her carriage or mount
her horse and ride out of the yard. I felt that there was something
wrong with me, and was afraid the expression of my
eyes or my face might betray me. I looked after my wife and
then watched for her to come back that I might see again
from the window her face, her shoulders, her fur coat, her
hat. I felt dreary, sad, infinitely regretful, and felt inclined in
her absence to walk through her rooms, and longed that the
problem that my wife and I had not been able to solve because
our characters were incompatible, should solve itself in
the natural way as soon as possible — that is, that this beautiful
woman of twenty-seven might make haste and grow old,
and that my head might be grey and bald.
One day at lunch my bailiff informed me that the Pestrovo
peasants had begun to pull the thatch off the roofs to feed
their cattle. Marya Gerasimovna looked at me in alarm and
perplexity.
“What can I do?” I said to her. “One cannot fight singlehanded,
and I have never experienced such loneliness as I do
now. I would give a great deal to find one man in the whole
province on whom I could rely.”
“Invite Ivan Ivanitch,” said Marya Gerasimovna.
“To be sure!” I thought, delighted. “That is an idea! C’est
raison,” I hummed, going to my study to write to Ivan Ivanitch.
“C’est raison, c’est raison.”
II
OF ALL THE MASS of acquaintances who, in this house twentyfive
to thirty-five years ago, had eaten, drunk, masqueraded,
fallen in love, married bored us with accounts of their splendid
packs of hounds and horses, the only one still living was
Ivan Ivanitch Bragin. At one time he had been very active,
talkative, noisy, and given to falling in love, and had been
9
The Wife and other stories
famous for his extreme views and for the peculiar charm of
his face, which fascinated men as well as women; now he was
an old man, had grown corpulent, and was living out his days
with neither views nor charm. He came the day after getting
my letter, in the evening just as the samovar was brought into
the dining-room and little Marya Gerasimovna had begun
slicing the lemon.
“I am very glad to see you, my dear fellow,” I said gaily,
meeting him. “Why, you are stouter than ever.…”
“It isn’t getting stout; it’s swelling,” he answered. “The bees
must have stung me.”
With the familiarity of a man laughing at his own fatness,
he put his arms round my waist and laid on my breast his big
soft head, with the hair combed down on the forehead like a
Little Russian’s, and went off into a thin, aged laugh.
“And you go on getting younger,” he said through his laugh.
“I wonder what dye you use for your hair and beard; you
might let me have some of it.” Sniffing and gasping, he embraced
me and kissed me on the cheek. “You might give me
some of it,” he repeated. “Why, you are not forty, are you?”
“Alas, I am forty-six!” I said, laughing.
Ivan Ivanitch smelt of tallow candles and cooking, and that
suited him. His big, puffy, slow-moving body was swathed
in a long frock-coat like a coachman’s full coat, with a high
waist, and with hooks and eyes instead of buttons, and it
would have been strange if he had smelt of eau-de-Cologne,
for instance. In his long, unshaven, bluish double chin, which
looked like a thistle, his goggle eyes, his shortness of breath,
and in the whole of his clumsy, slovenly figure, in his voice,
his laugh, and his words, it was difficult to recognize the graceful,
interesting talker who used in old days to make the husbands
of the district jealous on account of their wives.
“I am in great need of your assistance, my friend,” I said,
when we were sitting in the dining-room, drinking tea. “I
want to organize relief for the starving peasants, and I don’t
know how to set about it. So perhaps you will be so kind as
to advise me.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Ivan Ivanitch, sighing. “To be sure, to be
sure, to be sure.…”
“I would not have worried you, my dear fellow, but really
there is no one here but you I can appeal to. You know what
people are like about here.”
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Anton Chekhov
“To be sure, to be sure, to be sure.… Yes.”
I thought that as we were going to have a serious, business
consultation in which any one might take part, regardless of
their position or personal relations, why should I not invite
Natalya Gavrilovna.
“Tres faciunt collegium,” I said gaily. “What if we were to ask
Natalya Gavrilovna? What do you think? Fenya,” I said, turning
to the maid, “ask Natalya Gavrilovna to come upstairs to
us, if possible at once. Tell her it’s a very important matter.”
A little later Natalya Gavrilovna came in. I got up to meet
her and said:
“Excuse us for troubling you, Natalie. We are discussing a
very important matter, and we had the happy thought that
we might take advantage of your good advice, which you will
not refuse to give us. Please sit down.”
Ivan Ivanitch kissed her hand while she kissed his forehead;
then, when we all sat down to the table, he, looking at her
tearfully and blissfully, craned forward to her and kissed her
hand again. She was dressed in black, her hair was carefully
arranged, and she smelt of fresh scent. She had evidently dressed
to go out or was expecting somebody. Coming into the dining-
room, she held out her hand to me with simple friendliness,
and smiled to me as graciously as she did to Ivan Ivanitch
— that pleased me; but as she talked she moved her fingers,
often and abruptly leaned back in her chair and talked rapidly,
and this jerkiness in her words and movements irritated me
and reminded me of her native town — Odessa, where the
society, men and women alike, had wearied me by its bad taste.
“I want to do something for the famine-stricken peasants,”
I began, and after a brief pause I went on: “ Money, of course,
is a great thing, but to confine oneself to subscribing money,
and with that to be satisfied, would be evading the worst of
the trouble. Help must take the form of money, but the most
important thing is a proper and sound organization. Let us
think it over, my friends, and do something.”
Natalya Gavrilovna looked at me inquiringly and shrugged
her shoulders as though to say, “What do I know about it?”
“Yes, yes, famine…” muttered Ivan Ivanitch. “Certainly… yes.”
“It’s a serious position,” I said, “and assistance is needed as
soon as possible. I imagine the first point among the principles
which we must work out ought to be promptitude.
We must act on the military principles of judgment, promp11
The Wife and other stories
titude, and energy.”
“Yes, promptitude…” repeated Ivan Ivanitch in a drowsy
and listless voice, as though he were dropping asleep. “Only
one can’t do anything. The crops have failed, and so what’s
the use of all your judgment and energy?… It’s the elements.…
You can’t go against God and fate.”
“Yes, but that’s what man has a head for, to conten d against
the elements.”
“Eh? Yes… that’s so, to be sure.… Yes.”
Ivan Ivanitch sneezed into his handkerchief, brightened up,
and as though he had just woken up, looked round at my
wife and me.
“My crops have failed, too.” He laughed a thin little laugh
and gave a sly wink as though this were really funny. “No
money, no corn, and a yard full of labourers like Count
Sheremetyev’s. I want to kick them out, but I haven’t the
heart to.”
Natalya Gavrilovna laughed, and began questioning him
about his private affairs. Her presence gave me a pleasure
such as I had not felt for a long time, and I was afraid to
look at her for fear my eyes would betray my secret feeling.
Our relations were such that that feeling might seem surprising
and ridiculous.
She laughed and talked with Ivan Ivanitch without being in
the least disturbed that she was in my room and that I was
not laughing.
“And so, my friends, what are we to do?” I asked after waiting
for a pause. “I suppose before we do anything else we had
better immediately open a subscription-list. We will write to
our friends in the capitals and in Odessa, Natalie, and ask
them to subscribe. When we have got together a little sum
we will begin buying corn and fodder for the cattle; and you,
Ivan Ivanitch, will you be so kind as to undertake distributing
the relief? Entirely relying on your characteristic tact and
efficiency, we will only venture to express a desire that before
you give any relief you make acquaintance with the details of
the case on the spot, and also, which is very important, you
should be careful that corn should be distributed only to those
who are in genuine need, and not to the drunken, the idle, or
the dishonest.”
“Yes, yes, yes…” muttered Ivan Ivanitch. “To be sure, to be
sure.”
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Anton Chekhov
“Well, one won’t get much done with that slobbering
wreck,” I thought, and I felt irritated.
“I am sick of these famine-stricken peasants, bother them!
It’s nothing but grievances with them!” Ivan Ivanitch went
on, sucking the rind of the lemon. “The hungry have a grievance
against those who have enough, and those who have
enough have a grievance against the hungry. Yes… hunger stupefies
and maddens a man and makes him savage; hunger is
not a potato. When a man is starving he uses bad language,
and steals, and may do worse.… One must realize that.”
Ivan Ivanitch choked over his tea, coughed, and shook all
over with a squeaky, smothered laughter.
“‘There was a battle at Pol… Poltava,’” he brought out,
gesticulating with both hands in protest against the laughter
and coughing which prevented him from speaking. “ ‘There
was a battle at Poltava!’ When three years after the Emancipation
we had famine in two districts here, Fyodor Fyodoritch
came and invited me to go to him. ‘Come along, come along,’
he persisted, and nothing else would satisfy him. ‘Very well,
let us go,’ I said. And, so we set off. It was in the evening;
there was snow falling. Towards night we were getting near
his place, and suddenly from the wood came ‘bang!’ and another
time ‘bang!’ ‘Oh, damn it all!’… I jumped out of the
sledge, and I saw in the darkness a man running up to me,
knee-deep in the snow. I put my arm round his shoulder, like
this, and knocked the gun out of his hand. Then another one
turned up; I fetched him a knock on the back of his head so
that he grunted and flopped with his nose in the snow. I was
a sturdy chap then, my fist was heavy; I disposed of two of
them, and when I turned round Fyodor was sitting astride of
a third. We did not let our three fine fellows go; we tied their
hands behind their backs so that they might not do us or
themselves any harm, and took the fools into the kitchen.
We were angry with them and at the same time ashamed to
look at them; they were peasants we knew, and were good
fellows; we were sorry for them. They were quite stupid with
terror. One was crying and begging our pardon, the second
looked like a wild beast and kept swearing, the third knelt
down and began to pray. I said to Fedya: ‘Don’t bear them a
grudge; let them go, the rascals!’ He fed them, gave them a
bushel of flour each, and let them go: ‘Get along with you,’
he said. So that’s what he did.. . . The Kingdom of Heaven be
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The Wife and other stories
his and everlasting peace! He understood and did not bear
them a grudge; but there were some who did, and how many
people they ruined! Yes. . . Why, over the affair at the
Klotchkovs’ tavern eleven men were sent to the disciplinary
battalion. Yes.… And now, look, it’s the same thing. Anisyin,
the investigating magistrate, stayed the night with me last
Thursday, and he told me about some landowner.… Yes.…
They took the wall of his barn to pieces at night and carried
off twenty sacks of rye. When the gentleman heard that such
a crime had been committed, he sent a telegram to the Governor
and another to the police captain, another to the investigating
magistrate!… Of course, every one is afraid of a man
who is fond of litigation. The authorities were in a flutter
and there was a general hubbub. Two villages were searched.”
“Excuse me, Ivan Ivanitch,” I said. “Twenty sacks of rye were
stolen from me, and it was I who telegraphed to the Governor.
I telegraphed to Petersburg, too. But it was by no means out of
love for litigation, as you are pleased to express it, and not because
I bore them a grudge. I look at every subject from the
point of view of principle. From the point of view of the law,
theft is the same whether a man is hungry or not.”
“Yes, yes. . .” muttered Ivan Ivanitch in confusion. “Of
course. . . To be sure, yes.”
Natalya Gavrilovna blushed.
“There are people. . .” she said and stopped; she made an
effort to seem indifferent, but she could not keep it up, and
looked into my eyes with the hatred that I know so well.
“There are people,” she said, “for whom famine and human
suffering exist simply that they may vent their hateful and
despicable temperaments upon them.”
I was confused and shrugged my shoulders.
“I meant to say generally,” she went on, “that there are people
who are quite indifferent and completely devoid of all feeling
of sympathy, yet who do not pass human suffering by, but
insist on meddling for fear people should be able to do without
them. Nothing is sacred for their vanity.”
“There are people,” I said softly, “who have an angelic character,
but who express their glorious ideas in such a form that it is
difficult to distinguish the angel from an Odessa market-woman.”
I must confess it was not happily expressed.
My wife looked at me as though it cost her a great effort to
hold her tongue. Her sudden outburst, and then her inappro14
Anton Chekhov
priate eloquence on the subject of my desire to help the famine-
stricken peasants, were, to say the least, out of place; when
I had invited her to come upstairs I had expected quite a different
attitude to me and my intentions. I cannot say definitely
what I had expected, but I had been agreeably agitated
by the expectation. Now I saw that to go on speaking about
the famine would be difficult and perhaps stupid.
“Yes…” Ivan Ivanitch muttered inappropriately. “Burov, the
merchant, must have four hundred thousand at least. I said to
him: ‘Hand over one or two thousand to the famine. You
can’t take it with you when you die, anyway.’ He was offended.
But we all have to die, you know. Death is not a
potato.”
A silence followed again.
“So there’s nothing left for me but to reconcile myself to
loneliness,” I sighed. “One cannot fight single-handed. Well,
I will try single-handed. Let us hope that my campaign against
the famine will be more successful than my campaign against
indifference.”
“I am expected downstairs,” said Natalya Gavrilovna.
She got up from the table and turned to Ivan Ivanitch.
“So you will look in upon me downstairs for a minute? I
won’t say good-bye to you.”
And she went away.
Ivan Ivanitch was now drinking his seventh glass of tea, choking,
smacking his lips, and sucking sometimes his moustache,
sometimes the lemon. He was muttering something drowsily
and listlessly, and I did not listen but waited for him to go.
At last, with an expression that suggested that he had only
come to me to take a cup of tea, he got up and began to take
leave. As I saw him out I said:
“And so you have given me no advice.”
“Eh? I am a feeble, stupid old man,” he answered. “What
use would my advice be? You shouldn’t worry yourself.… I
really don’t know why you worry yourself. Don’t disturb yourself,
my dear fellow! Upon my word, there’s no need,” he
whispered genuinely and affectionately, soothing me as though
I were a child. “Upon my word, there’s no need.”
“No need? Why, the peasants are pulling the thatch off their
huts, and they say there is typhus somewhere already.”
“Well, what of it? If there are good crops next year, they’ll
thatch them again, and if we die of typhus others will live
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The Wife and other stories
after us. Anyway, we have to die — if not now, later. Don’t
worry yourself, my dear.”
“I can’t help worrying myself,” I said irritably.
We were standing in the dimly lighted vestibule. Ivan
Ivanitch suddenly took me by the elbow, and, preparing to
say something evidently very important, looked at me in silence
for a couple of minutes.
“Pavel Andreitch!” he said softly, and suddenly in his puffy,
set face and dark eyes there was a gleam of the expression for
which he had once been famous and which was truly charming.
“Pavel Andreitch, I speak to you as a friend: try to be
different! One is ill at ease with you, my dear fellow, one
really is!”
He looked intently into my face; the charming expression
faded away, his eyes grew dim again, and he sniffed and muttered
feebly:
“Yes, yes.… Excuse an old man.… It’s all nonsense… yes.”
As he slowly descended the staircase, spreading out his
hands to balance himself and showing me his huge, bulky
back and red neck, he gave me the unpleasant impression of
a sort of crab.
“You ought to go away, your Excellency,” he muttered. “To
Petersburg or abroad.… Why should you live here and waste
your golden days? You are young, wealthy, and healthy.…
Yes.… Ah, if I were younger I would whisk away like a hare,
and snap my fingers at everything.”
III
MY WIFE’S OUTBURST reminded me of our married life together.
In old days after every such outburst we felt irresistibly drawn
to each other; we would meet and let off all the dynamite
that had accumulated in our souls. And now after Ivan Ivanitch
had gone away I had a strong impulse to go to my wife. I
wanted to go downstairs and tell her that her behaviour at tea
had been an insult to me, that she was cruel, petty, and that
her plebeian mind had never risen to a comprehension of what
I was saying and of what I was doing. I walked about the
rooms a long time thinking of what I would say to her and
trying to guess what she would say to me.
That evening, after Ivan Ivanitch went away, I felt in a peculiarly
irritating form the uneasiness which had worried me
16
Anton Chekhov
of late. I could not sit down or sit still, but kept walking
about in the rooms that were lighted up and keeping near to
the one in which Marya Gerasimovna was sitting. I had a
feeling very much like that which I had on the North Sea
during a storm when every one thought that our ship, which
had no freight nor ballast, would overturn. And that evening
I understood that my uneasiness was not disappointment, as
I had supposed, but a different feeling, though what exactly I
could not say, and that irritated me more than ever.
“I will go to her,” I decided. “I can think of a pretext. I shall
say that I want to see Ivan Ivanitch; that will be all.”
I went downstairs and walked without haste over the carpeted
floor through the vestibule and the hall. Ivan Ivanitch
was sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room; he was drinking
tea again and muttering something. My wife was standing
opposite to him and holding on to the back of a chair. There
was a gentle, sweet, and docile expression on her face, such as
one sees on the faces of people listening to crazy saints or holy
men when a peculiar hidden significance is imagined in their
vague words and mutterings. There was something morbid,
something of a nun’s exaltation, in my wife’s expression and
attitude; and her low-pitched, half-dark rooms with their oldfashioned
furniture, with her birds asleep in their cages, and
with a smell of geranium, reminded me of the rooms of some
abbess or pious old lady.
I went into the drawing-room. My wife showed neither
surprise nor confusion, and looked at me calmly and serenely,
as though she had known I should come.
“I beg your pardon,” I said softly. “I am so glad you have
not gone yet, Ivan Ivanitch. I forgot to ask you, do you know
the Christian name of the president of our Zemstvo?”
“Andrey Stanislavovitch. Yes.…”
“Merci,” I said, took out my notebook, and wrote it down.
There followed a silence during which my wife and Ivan
Ivanitch were probably waiting for me to go; my wife did
not believe that I wanted to know the president’s name — I
saw that from her eyes.
“Well, I must be going, my beauty,” muttered Ivan Ivanitch,
after I had walked once or twice across the drawing-room and
sat down by the fireplace.
“No,” said Natalya Gavrilovna quickly, touching his hand.
“Stay another quarter of an hour.… Please do!”
17
The Wife and other stories
Evidently she did not wish to be left alone with me without
a witness.
“Oh, well, I’ll wait a quarter of an hour, too,” I thought.
“Why, it’s snowing!” I said, getting up and looking out of
window. “A good fall of snow! Ivan Ivanitch”— I went on
walking about the room — “I do regret not being a sportsman.
I can imagine what a pleasure it must be coursing hares
or hunting wolves in snow like this!”
My wife, standing still, watched my movements, looking
out of the corner of her eyes without turning her head. She
looked as though she thought I had a sharp knife or a revolver
in my pocket.
“Ivan Ivanitch, do take me out hunting some day,” I went
on softly. “I shall be very, very grateful to you.”
At that moment a visitor came into the room. He was a
tall, thick-set gentleman whom I did not know, with a bald
head, a big fair beard, and little eyes. From his baggy, crumpled
clothes and his manners I took him to be a parish clerk or a
teacher, but my wife introduced him to me as Dr. Sobol.
“Very, very glad to make your acquaintance,” said the doctor
in a loud tenor voice, shaking hands with me warmly,
with a naive smile. “Very glad!”
He sat down at the table, took a glass of tea, and said in a
loud voice:
“Do you happen to have a drop of rum or brandy? Have
pity on me, Olya, and look in the cupboard; I am frozen,” he
said, addressing the maid.
I sat down by the fire again, looked on, listened, and from
time to time put in a word in the general conversation. My
wife smiled graciously to the visitors and kept a sharp lookout
on me, as though I were a wild beast. She was oppressed
by my presence, and this aroused in me jealousy, annoyance,
and an obstinate desire to wound her. “Wife, these snug rooms,
the place by the fire,” I thought, “are mine, have been mine
for years, but some crazy Ivan Ivanitch or Sobol has for some
reason more right to them than I. Now I see my wife, not
out of window, but close at hand, in ordinary home surroundings
that I feel the want of now I am growing older, and, in
spite of her hatred for me, I miss her as years ago in my childhood
I used to miss my mother and my nurse. And I feel that
now, on the verge of old age, my love for her is purer and
loftier than it was in the past; and that is why I want to go up
18
Anton Chekhov
to her, to stamp hard on her toe with my heel, to hurt her and
smile as I do it.”
“Monsieur Marten,” I said, addressing the doctor, “how
many hospitals have we in the district?”
“Sobol,” my wife corrected.
“Two,” answered Sobol.
“And how many deaths are there every year in each hospital?”
“Pavel Andreitch, I want to speak to you,” said my wife.
She apologized to the visitors and went to the next room. I
got up and followed her.
“You will go upstairs to your own rooms this minute,” she said.
“You are ill-bred,” I said to her.
“You will go upstairs to your own rooms this very minute,”
she repeated sharply, and she looked into my face with hatred.
She was standing so near that if I had stooped a lit tle my
beard would have touched her face.
“What is the matter?” I asked. “What harm have I done all
at once?”
Her chin quivered, she hastily wiped her eyes, and, with a
cursory glance at the looking-glass, whispered:
“The old story is beginning all over again. Of course you
won’t go away. Well, do as you like. I’ll go away myself, and
you stay.”
We returned to the drawing-room, she with a resolute face,
while I shrugged my shoulders and tried to smile. There were
some more visitors — an elderly lady and a young man in
spectacles. Without greeting the new arrivals or taking leave
of the others, I went off to my own rooms.
After what had happened at tea and then again downstairs,
it became clear to me that our “family happiness,” which we
had begun to forget about in the course of the last two years,
was through some absurd and trivial reason beginning all over
again, and that neither I nor my wife could now stop ourselves;
and that next day or the day after, the outburst of hatred
would, as I knew by experience of past years, be followed
by something revolting which would upset the whole order
of our lives. “So it seems that during these two years we have
grown no wiser, colder, or calmer,” I thought as I began walking
about the rooms. “So there will again be tears, outcries,
curses, packing up, going abroad, then the continual sickly
fear that she will disgrace me with some coxcomb out there,
Italian or Russian, refusing a passport, letters, utter loneliness,
19
The Wife and other stories
missing her, and in five years old age, grey hairs.” I walked
about, imagining what was really impossible — her, grown
handsomer, stouter, embracing a man I did not know. By
now convinced that that would certainly happen, “‘Why,” I
asked myself, “Why, in one of our long past quarrels, had not
I given her a divorce, or why had she not at that time left me
altogether? I should not have had this yearning for her now,
this hatred, this anxiety; and I should have lived out my life
quietly, working and not worrying about anything.”
A carriage with two lamps drove into the yard, then a big
sledge with three horses. My wife was evidently having a party.
Till midnight everything was quiet downstairs and I heard
nothing, but at midnight there was a sound of moving chairs
and a clatter of crockery. So there was supper. Then the chairs
moved again, and through the floor I heard a noise; they
seemed to be shouting hurrah. Marya Gerasimovna was already
asleep and I was quite alone in the whole upper storey;
the portraits of my forefathers, cruel, insignificant people,
looked at me from the walls of the drawing-room, and the
reflection of my lamp in the window winked unpleasantly.
And with a feeling of jealousy and envy for what was going
on downstairs, I listened and thought: “I am master here; if I
like, I can in a moment turn out all that fine crew.” But I
knew that all that was nonsense, that I could not turn out any
one, and the word “master” had no meaning. One may think
oneself master, married, rich, a kammer-junker, as much as
one likes, and at the same time not know what it means.
After supper some one downstairs began singing in a tenor
voice.
“Why, nothing special has happened,” I tried to persuade
myself. “Why am I so upset? I won’t go downstairs tomorrow,
that’s all; and that will be the end of our quarrel.”
At a quarter past one I went to bed.
“Have the visitors downstairs gone?” I asked Alexey as he
was undressing me.
“Yes, sir, they’ve gone.”
“And why were they shouting hurrah?”
“Alexey Dmitritch Mahonov subscribed for the famine fund
a thousand bushels of flour and a thousand roubles. And the
old lady — I don’t know her name — promised to set up a
soup kitchen on her estate to feed a hundred and fifty people.
Thank God… Natalya Gavrilovna has been pleased to ar20
Anton Chekhov
range that all the gentry should assemble every Friday.”
“To assemble here, downstairs?”
“Yes, sir. Before supper they read a list: since August up to
today Natalya Gavrilovna has collected eight thousand roubles,
besides corn. Thank God.… What I think is that if our mistress
does take trouble for the salvation of her soul, she will
soon collect a lot. There are plenty of rich people here.”
Dismissing Alexey, I put out the light and drew the bedclothes
over my head.
“After all, why am I so troubled?” I thought. “What force
draws me to the starving peasants like a butterfly to a flame?
I don’t know them, I don’t understand them; I have never
seen them and I don’t like them. Why this uneasiness?”
I suddenly crossed myself under the quilt.
“But what a woman she is!” I said to myself, thinking of my
wife. “There’s a regular committee held in the house without
my knowing. Why this secrecy? Why this conspiracy? What
have I done to them? Ivan Ivanitch is right — I must go away.”
Next morning I woke up firmly resolved to go away. The
events of the previous day — the conversation at tea, my wife,
Sobol, the supper, my apprehensions — worried me, and I
felt glad to think of getting away from the surroundings which
reminded me of all that. While I was drinking my coffee the
bailiff gave me a long report on various matters. The most
agreeable item he saved for the last.
“The thieves who stole our rye have been found,” he announced
with a smile. “The magistrate arrested three peasants
at Pestrovo yesterday.”
“Go away!” I shouted at him; and a propos of nothing, I
picked up the cake-basket and flung it on the floor.
IV
AFTER LUNCH I rubbed my hands, and thought I must go to
my wife and tell her that I was going away. Why? Who cared?
Nobody cares, I answered, but why shouldn’t I tell her, especially
as it would give her nothing but pleasure? Besides, to go
away after our yesterday’s quarrel without saying a word would
not be quite tactful: she might think that I was frightened of
her, and perhaps the thought that she has driven me out of
my house may weigh upon her. It would be just as well, too,
to tell her that I subscribe five thousand, and to give her some
21
The Wife and other stories
advice about the organization, and to warn her that her inexperience
in such a complicated and responsible matter might
lead to most lamentable results. In short, I wanted to see my
wife, and while I thought of various pretexts for going to her,
I had a firm conviction in my heart that I should do so.
It was still light when I went in to her, and the lamps had
not yet been lighted. She was sitting in her study, which led
from the drawing-room to her bedroom, and, bending low
over the table, was writing something quickly. Seeing me, she
started, got up from the table, and remained standing in an
attitude such as to screen her papers from me.
“I beg your pardon, I have only come for a minute,” I said,
and, I don’t know why, I was overcome with embarrassment.
“I have learnt by chance that you are organizing relief for the
famine, Natalie.”
“Yes, I am. But that’s my business,” she answered.
“Yes, it is your business,” I said softly. “I am glad of it, for it
just fits in with my intentions. I beg your permission to take
part in it.”
“Forgive me, I cannot let you do it,” she said in response,
and looked away.
“Why not, Natalie?” I said quietly. “Why not? I, too, am
well fed and I, too, want to help the hungry.”
“I don’t know what it has to do with you,” she said with a contemptuous
smile, shrugging her shoulders. “Nobody asks you.”
“Nobody asks you, either, and yet you have got up a regular
committee in my house,” I said.
“I am asked, but you can have my word for it no one will
ever ask you. Go and help where you are not known.”
“For God’s sake, don’t talk to me in that tone.” I tried to be
mild, and besought myself most earnestly not to lose my
temper. For the first few minutes I felt glad to be with my
wife. I felt an atmosphere of youth, of home, of feminine
softness, of the most refined elegance — exactly what was
lacking on my floor and in my life altogether. My wife was
wearing a pink flannel dressing-gown; it made her look much
younger, and gave a softness to her rapid and sometimes abrupt
movements. Her beautiful dark hair, the mere sight of which
at one time stirred me to passion, had from sitting so long
with her head bent c ome loose from the comb and was untidy,
but, to my eyes, that only made it look more rich and
luxuriant. All this, though is banal to the point of vulgarity.
22
Anton Chekhov
Before me stood an ordinary woman, perhaps neither beautiful
nor elegant, but this was my wife with whom I had once
lived, and with whom I should have been living to this day if
it had not been for her unfortunate character; she was the one
human being on the terrestrial globe whom I loved. At this
moment, just before going away, when I knew that I should
no longer see her even through the window, she seemed to
me fascinating even as she was, cold and forbidding, answering
me with a proud and contemptuous mockery. I was proud
of her, and confessed to myself that to go away from her was
terrible and impossible.
“Pavel Andreitch,” she said after a brief silence, “for two
years we have not interfered with each other but have lived
quietly. Why do you suddenly feel it necessary to go back to
the past? Yesterday you came to insult and humiliate me,” she
went on, raising her voice, and her face flushed and her eyes
flamed with hatred; “but restrain yourself; do not do it, Pavel
Andreitch! Tomorrow I will send in a petition and they will
give me a passport, and I will go away; I will go! I will go! I’ll
go into a convent, into a widows’ home, into an
almshouse.…”
“Into a lunatic asylum!” I cried, not able to restrain myself.
“Well, even into a lunatic asylum! That would be better,
that would be better,” she cried, with flashing eyes. “When I
was in Pestrovo today I envied the sick and starving peasant
women because they are not living with a man like you. They
are free and honest, while, thanks to you, I am a parasite, I am
perishing in idleness, I eat your bread, I spend your money,
and I repay you with my liberty and a fidelity which is of no
use to any one. Because you won’t give me a passport, I must
respect your good name, though it doesn’t exist.”
I had to keep silent. Clenching my teeth, I walked quickly
into the drawing-room, but turned back at once and said:
“I beg you earnestly that there should be no more assemblies,
plots, and meetings of conspirators in my house! I only
admit to my house those with whom I am acquainted, and
let all your crew find another place to do it if they want to
take up philanthropy. I can’t allow people at midnight in my
house to be shouting hurrah at successfully exploiting an hysterical
woman like you!”
My wife, pale and wringing her hands, took a rapid stride
across the room, uttering a prolonged moan as though she
23
The Wife and other stories
had toothache. With a wave of my hand, I went into the
drawing-room. I was choking with rage, and at the same time
I was trembling with terror that I might not restrain myself,
and that I might say or do something which I might regret all
my life. And I clenched my hands tight, hoping to hold myself
in.
After drinking some water and recovering my calm a little, I
went back to my wife. She was standing in the same attitude as
before, as though barring my approach to the table with the
papers. Tears were slowly trickling down her pale, cold face. I
paused then and said to her bitterly but without anger:
“How you misunderstand me! How unjust you are to me!
I swear upon my honour I came to you with the best of motives,
with nothing but the desire to do good!”
“Pavel Andreitch!” she said, clasping her hands on her bosom,
and her face took on the agonized, imploring expression
with which frightened, weeping children beg not to be
punished, “I know perfectly well that you will refuse me, but
still I beg you. Force yourself to do one kind action in your
life. I entreat you, go away from here! That’s the only thing
you can do for the starving peasants. Go away, and I will
forgive you everything, everything!”
“There is no need for you to insult me, Natalie,” I sighed,
feeling a sudden rush of humility. “I had already made up my
mind to go away, but I won’t go until I have done something
for the peasants. It’s my duty!”
“Ach!” she said softly with an impatient frown. “You can
make an excellent bridge or railway, but you can do nothing
for the starving peasants. Do understand!”
“Indeed? Yesterday you reproached me with indifference and
with being devoid of the feeling of compassion. How well
you know me!” I laughed. “You believe in God — well, God
is my witness that I am worried day and night.…”
“I see that you are worried, but the famine and compassion
have nothing to do with it. You are worried because the starving
peasants can get on without you, and because the Zemstvo,
and in fact every one who is helping them, does not need
your guidance.”
I was silent, trying to suppress my irritation. Then I said:
“I came to speak to you on business. Sit down. Please sit down.”
She did not sit down.
“I beg you to sit down,” I repeated, and I motioned her to a chair.
24
Anton Chekhov
She sat down. I sat down, too, thought a little, and said:
“I beg you to consider earnestly what I am saying. Listen.…
Moved by love for your fellow-creatures, you have undertaken
the organization of famine relief. I have nothing against
that, of course; I am completely in sympathy with you, and
am prepared to co-operate with you in every way, whatever
our relations may be. But, with all my respect for your mind
and your heart… and your heart,” I repeated, “I cannot allow
such a difficult, complex, and responsible matter as the organization
of relief to be left in your hands entirely. You are a
woman, you are inexperienced, you know nothing of life,
you are too confiding and expansive. You have surrounded
yourself with assistants whom you know nothing about. I
am not exaggerating if I say that under these conditions your
work will inevitably lead to two deplorable consequences. To
begin with, our district will be left unrelieved; and, secondly,
you will have to pay for your mistakes and those of your
assistants, not only with your purse, but with your reputation.
The money deficit and other losses I could, no doubt,
make good, but who could restore you your good name?
When through lack of proper supervision and oversight there
is a rumour that you, and consequently I, have made two
hundred thousand over the famine fund, will your assistants
come to your aid?”
She said nothing.
“Not from vanity, as you say,” I went on, “but simply that
the starving peasants may not be left unrelieved and your reputation
may not be injured, I feel it my moral duty to take part
in your work.”
“Speak more briefly,” said my wife.
“You will be so kind,” I went on, “as to show me what has
been subscribed so far and what you have spent. Then inform
me daily of every fresh subscription in money or kind, and of
every fresh outlay. You will also give me, Natalie, the list of
your helpers. Perhaps they are quite decent people; I don’t doubt
it; but, still, it is absolutely necessary to make inquiries.”
She was silent. I got up, and walked up and down the room.
“Let us set to work, then,” I said, and I sat down to her table.
“Are you in earnest?” she asked, looking at me in alarm and
bewilderment.
“Natalie, do be reasonable!” I said appealingly, seeing from
her face that she meant to protest. “I beg you, trust my expe25
The Wife and other stories
rience and my sense of honour.”
“I don’t understand what you want.”
“Show me how much you have collected and how much
you have spent.”
“I have no secrets. Any one may see. Look.”
On the table lay five or six school exercise books, several
sheets of notepaper covered with writing, a map of the district,
and a number of pieces of paper of different sizes. It was
getting dusk. I lighted a candle.
“Excuse me, I don’t see anything yet,” I said, turning over
the leaves of the exercise books. “Where is the account of the
receipt of money subscriptions?”
“That can be seen from the subscription lists.”
“Yes, but you must have an account,” I said, smiling at her
naivete. “Where are the letters accompanying the subscriptions
in money or in kind? _Pardon_, a little practical advice,
Natalie: it’s absolutely necessary to keep those letters. You
ought to number each letter and make a special note of it in a
special record. You ought to do the same with your own letters.
But I will do all that myself.”
“Do so, do so…” she said.
I was very much pleased with myself. Attracted by this living
interesting work, by the little table, the naive exercise books
and the charm of doing this work in my wife’s society, I was
afraid that my wife would suddenly hinder me and upset everything
by some sudden whim, and so I was in haste and
made an effort to attach no consequence to the fact that her
lips were quivering, and that she was looking about her with
a helpless and frightened air like a wild creature in a trap.
“I tell you what, Natalie,” I said without looking at her;
“let me take all these papers and exercise books upstairs to my
study. There I will look through them and tell you what I
think about it tomorrow. Have you any more papers?” I asked,
arranging the exercise books and sheets of papers in piles.
“Take them, take them all!” said my wife, helping me to
arrange them, and big tears ran down her cheeks. “Take it all!
That’s all that was left me in life.… Take the last.”
“Ach! Natalie, Natalie!” I sighed reproachfully.
She opened the drawer in the table and began flinging the papers
out of it on the table at random, poking me in the chest
with her elbow and brushing my face with her hair; as she did so,
copper coins kept dropping upon my knees and on the floor.
26
Anton Chekhov
“Take everything!” she said in a husky voice.
When she had thrown out the papers she walked away from
me, and putting both hands to her head, she flung herself on
the couch. I picked up the money, put it back in the drawer,
and locked it up that the servants might not be led into dishonesty;
then I gathered up all the papers and went off with
them. As I passed my wife I stopped. and, looking at her back
and shaking shoulders, I said:
“What a baby you are, Natalie! Fie, fie! Listen, Natalie: when
you realize how serious and responsible a business it is you
will be the first to thank me. I assure you you will.”
In my own room I set to work without haste. The exercise
books were not bound, the pages were not numbered. The
entries were put in all sorts of handwritings; evidently any
one who liked had a hand in managing the books. In the
record of the subscriptions in kind there was no note of their
money value. But, excuse me, I thought, the rye which is
now worth one rouble fifteen kopecks may be worth two
roubles fifteen kopecks in two months’ time! Was that the
way to do things? Then, “Given to A. M. Sobol 32 roubles.”
When was it given? For what purpose was it given? Where
was the receipt? There was nothing to show, and no making
anything of it. In case of legal proceedings, these papers would
only obscure the case.
“How naive she is!” I thought with surprise. “What a child!”
I felt both vexed and amused.
V
MY WIFE HAD ALREADY collected eight thousand; with my five
it would be thirteen thousand. For a start that was very good.
The business which had so worried and interested me was at
last in my hands; I was doing what the others would not and
could not do; I was doing my duty, organizing the relief fund
in a practical and businesslike way
Everything seemed to be going in accordance with my desires
and intentions; but why did my feeling of uneasiness
persist? I spent four hours over my wife’s papers, making out
their meaning and correcting her mistakes, but instead of feeling
soothed, I felt as though some one were standing behind
me and rubbing my back with a rough hand. What was it I
wanted? The organization of the relief fund had come into
27
The Wife and other stories
trustworthy hands, the hungry would be fed — what more
was wanted?
The four hours of this light work for some reason exhausted
me, so that I could not sit bending over the table nor write.
From below I heard from time to time a smothered moan; it
was my wife sobbing. Alexey, invariably meek, sleepy, and
sanctimonious, kept coming up to the table to see to the
candles, and looked at me somewhat strangely.
“Yes, I must go away,” I decided at last, feeling utterly exhausted.
“As far as possible from these agreeable impressions!
I will set off tomorrow.”
I gathered together the papers and exercise books, and went
down to my wife. As, feeling quite worn out and shattered, I
held the papers and the exercise books to my breast with both
hands, and passing through my bedroom saw my trunks, the
sound of weeping reached me through the floor.
“Are you a kammer-junker?” a voice whispered in my ear.
“That’s a very pleasant thing. But yet you are a reptile.”
“It’s all nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” I muttered as I went
downstairs. “Nonsense… and it’s nonsense, too, that I am
actuated by vanity or a love of display.… What rubbish! Am
I going to get a decoration for working for the peasants or be
made the director of a department? Nonsense, nonsense! And
who is there to show off to here in the country?”
I was tired, frightfully tired, and something kept whispering
in my ear: “Very pleasant. But, still, you are a reptile.” For
some reason I remembered a line out of an old poem I knew
as a child: “How pleasant it is to be good!”
My wife was lying on the couch in the same attitude, on
her face and with her hands clutching her head. She was crying.
A maid was standing beside her with a perplexed and
frightened face. I sent the maid away, laid the papers on the
table, thought a moment and said:
“Here are all your papers, Natalie. It’s all in order, it’s all capital,
and I am very much pleased. I am going away tomorrow.”
She went on crying. I went into the drawing-room and sat
there in the dark. My wife’s sobs, her sighs, accused me of
something, and to justify myself I remembered the whole of
our quarrel, starting from my unhappy idea of inviting my
wife to our consultation and ending with the exercise books
and these tears. It was an ordinary attack of our conjugal hatred,
senseless and unseemly, such as had been frequent dur28
Anton Chekhov
ing our married life, but what had the starving peasants to do
with it? How could it have happened that they had become a
bone of contention between us? It was just as though pursuing
one another we had accidentally run up to the altar and
had carried on a quarrel there.
“Natalie,” I said softly from the drawing-room, “hush,
hush!”
To cut short her weeping and make an end of this agonizing
state of affairs, I ought to have gone up to my wife and
comforted her, caressed her, or apologized; but how could I
do it so that she would believe me? How could I persuade the
wild duck, living in captivity and hating me, that it was dear
to me, and that I felt for its sufferings? I had never known my
wife, so I had never known how to talk to her or what to talk
about. Her appearance I knew very well and appreciated it as
it deserved, but her spiritual, moral world, her mind, her
outlook on life, her frequent changes of mood, her eyes full
of hatred, her disdain, the scope and variety of her reading
which sometimes struck me, or, for instance, the nun-like
expression I had seen on her face the day before — all that
was unknown and incomprehensible to me. When in my
collisions with her I tried to define what sort of a person she
was, my psychology went no farther than deciding that she
was giddy, impractical, ill-tempered, guided by feminine logic;
and it seemed to me that that was quite sufficient. But now
that she was crying I had a passionate desire to know more.
The weeping ceased. I went up to my wife. She sat up on
the couch, and, with her head propped in both hands, looked
fixedly and dreamily at the fire.
“I am going away tomorrow morning,” I said.
She said nothing. I walked across the room, sighed, and said:
“Natalie, when you begged me to go away, you said: ‘I will
forgive you everything, everything’… . So you think I have
wronged you. I beg you calmly and in brief terms to formulate
the wrong I’ve done you.”
“I am worn out. Afterwards, some time. . .,” said my wife.
“How am I to blame?” I went on. “What have I done? Tell
me: you are young and beautiful, you want to live, and I am
nearly twice your age and hated by you, but is that my fault?
I didn’t marry you by force. But if you want to live in freedom,
go; I’ll give you your liberty. You can go and love who
m you please.… I will give you a divorce.”
29
The Wife and other stories
“That’s not what I want,” she said. “You know I used to
love you and always thought of myself as older than you.
That’s all nonsense.… You are not to blame for being older
or for my being younger, or that I might be able to love some
one else if I were free; but because you are a difficult person,
an egoist, and hate every one.”
“Perhaps so. I don’t know,” I said.
“Please go away. You want to go on at me till the morning,
but I warn you I am quite worn out and cannot answer you.
You promised me to go to town. I am very grateful; I ask
nothing more.”
My wife wanted me to go away, but it was not easy for me
to do that. I was dispirited and I dreaded the big, cheerless,
chill rooms that I was so weary of. Sometimes when I had an
ache or a pain as a child, I used to huddle up to my mother or
my nurse, and when I hid my face in the warm folds of their
dress, it seemed to me as though I were hiding from the pain.
And in the same way it seemed to me now that I could only
hide from my uneasiness in this little room beside my wife. I
sat down and screened away the light from my eyes with my
hand.… There was a stillness.
“How are you to blame?” my wife said after a long silence,
looking at me with red eyes that gleamed with tears. “You are
very well educated and very well bred, very honest, just, and
high-principled, but in you the effect of all that is that wherever
you go you bring suffocation, oppression, something
insulting and humiliating to the utmost degree. You have a
straightforward way of looking at things, and so you hate the
whole world. You hate those who have faith, because faith is
an expression of ignorance and lack of culture, and at the same
time you hate those who have no faith for having no faith
and no ideals; you hate old people for being conservative and
behind the times, and young people for free-thinking. The
interests of the peasantry and of Russia are dear to you, and so
you hate the peasants because you suspect every one of them
of being a thief and a robber. You hate every one. You are just,
and always take your stand on your legal rights, and so you
are always at law with the peasants and your neighbours. You
have had twenty bushels of rye stolen, and your love of order
has made you complain of the peasants to the Governor and
all the local authorities, and to send a complaint of the local
authorities to Petersburg. Legal justice!” said my wife, and
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Anton Chekhov
she laughed. “On the ground of your legal rights and in the
interests of morality, you refuse to give me a passport. Law
and morality is such that a self-respecting healthy young
woman has to spend her life in idleness, in depression, and in
continual apprehension, and to receive in return board and
lodging from a man she does not love. You have a thorough
knowledge of the law, you are very honest and just, you respect
marriage and family life, and the effect of all that is that
all your life you have not done one kind action, that every
one hates you, that you are on bad terms with every one, and
the seven years that you have been married you’ve only lived
seven months with your wife. You’ve had no wife and I’ve
had no husband. To live with a man like you is impossible;
there is no way of doing it. In the early years I was frightened
with you, and now I am ashamed.… That’s how my best
years have been wasted. When I fought with you I ruined my
temper, grew shrewish, coarse, timid, mistrustful.… Oh, but
what’s the use of talking! As though you wanted to understand!
Go upstairs, and God be with you!”
My wife lay down on the couch and sank into thought.
“And how splendid, how enviable life might have been!”
she said softly, looking reflectively into the fire. “What a life
it might have been! There’s no bringing it back now.”
Any one who has lived in the country in winter and knows
those long dreary, still evenings when even the dogs are too
bored to bark and even the clocks seem weary of ticking, and
any one who on such evenings has been troubled by awakening
conscience and has moved restlessly about, trying now to
smother his conscience, now to interpret it, will understand
the distraction and the pleasure my wife’s voice gave me as it
sounded in the snug little room, telling me I was a bad man.
I did not understand what was wanted of me by my conscience,
and my wife, translating it in her feminine way, made
clear to me in the meaning of my agitation. As often before
in the moments of intense uneasiness, I guessed that the whole
secret lay, not in the starving peasants, but in my not being
the sort of a man I ought to be.
My wife got up with an effort and came up to me.
“Pavel Andreitch,” she said, smiling mournfully, “forgive
me, I don’t believe you: you are not going away, but I will ask
you one more favour. Call this” — she pointed to her papers
—”self-deception, feminine logic, a mistake, as you like; but
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The Wife and other stories
do not hinder me. It’s all that is left me in life.” She turned
away and paused. “Before this I had nothing. I have wasted
my youth in fighting with you. Now I have caught at this
and am living; I am happy.… It seems to me that I have found
in this a means of justifying my existence.”
“Natalie, you are a good woman, a woman of ideas,” I said,
looking at my wife enthusiastically, and everything you say
and do is intelligent and fine.”
I walked about the room to conceal my emotion.
“Natalie,” I went on a minute later, “before I go away, I beg
of you as a special favour, help me to do something for the
starving peasants!”
“What can I do?” said my wife, shrugging her shoulders.
“Here’s the subscription list.”
She rummaged among the papers and found the subscription
list.
“Subscribe some money,” she said, and from her tone I could
see that she did not attach great importance to her subscription
list; “that is the only way in which you can take part in
the work.”
I took the list and wrote: “Anonymous, 5,000.”
In this “anonymous” there was something wrong, false, conceited,
but I only realized that when I noticed that my wife
flushed very red and hurriedly thrust the list into the heap of
papers. We both felt ashamed; I felt that I must at all costs
efface this clumsiness at once, or else I should feel ashamed
afterwards, in the train and at Petersburg. But how efface it?
What was I to say?
“I fully approve of what you are doing, Natalie,” I said genuinely,
“and I wish you every success. But allow me at parting
to give you one piece of advice, Natalie; be on your guard
with Sobol, and with your assistants generally, and don’t trust
them blindly. I don’t say they are not honest, but they are not
gentlefolks; they are people with no ideas, no ideals, no faith,
with no aim in life, no definite principles, and the whole
object of their life is comprised in the rouble. Rouble, rouble,
rouble!” I sighed. “They are fond of getting money easily, for
nothing, and in that respect the better educated they are the
more they are to be dreaded.”
My wife went to the couch and lay down.
“Ideas,” she brought out, listlessly and reluctantly, “ideas,
ideals, objects of life, principles… .you always used to use
32
Anton Chekhov
those words when you wanted to insult or humiliate some
one, or say something unpleasant. Yes, that’s your way: if with
your views and such an attitude to people you are allowed to
take part in anything, you would destroy it from the first day.
It’s time you understand that.”
She sighed and paused.
“It’s coarseness of character, Pavel Andreitch,” she said. “You
are well-bred and educated, but what a… Scythian you are in
reality! That’s because you lead a cramped life full of hatred,
see no one, and read nothing but your engineering books.
And, you know, there are good people, good books! Yes…
but I am exhausted and it wearies me to talk. I ought to be in
bed.”
“So I am going away, Natalie,” I said.
“Yes… yes.… Merci.…”
I stood still for a little while, then went upstairs. An hour
later — it was half-past one — I went downstairs again with
a candle in my hand to speak to my wife. I didn’t know what
I was going to say to her, but I felt that I must say some thing
very important and necessary. She was not in her study, the
door leading to her bedroom was closed.
“Natalie, are you asleep?” I asked softly.
There was no answer.
I stood near the door, sighed, and went into the drawingroom.
There I sat down on the sofa, put out the candle, and
remained sitting in the dark till the dawn.
VI
I WENT TO THE STATION at ten o’clock in the morning. There
was no frost, but snow was falling in big wet flakes and an
unpleasant damp wind was blowing.
We passed a pond and then a birch copse, and then began
going uphill along the road which I could see from my window.
I turned round to take a last look at my house, but I
could see nothing for the snow. Soon afterwards dark huts
came into sight ahead of us as in a fog. It was Pestrovo.
“If I ever go out of my mind, Pestrovo will be the cause of
it,” I thought. “It persecutes me.”
We came out into the village street. All the roofs were intact,
not one of them had been pulled to pieces; so my bailiff
had told a lie. A boy was pulling along a little girl and a baby
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The Wife and other stories
in a sledge. Another boy of three, with his head wrapped up
like a peasant woman’s and with huge mufflers on his hands,
was trying to catch the flying snowflakes on his tongue, and
laughing. Then a wagon loaded with fagots came toward us
and a peasant walking beside it, and there was no telling
whether his beard was white or whether it was covered with
snow. He recognized my coachman, smiled at him and said
something, and mechanically took off his hat to me. The
dogs ran out of the yards and looked inquisitively at my horses.
Everything was quiet, ordinary, as usual. The emigrants had
returned, there was no bread; in the huts “some were laughing,
some were delirious”; but it all looked so ordinary that
one could not believe it really was so. There were no distracted
faces, no voices whining for help, no weeping, nor
abuse, but all around was stillness, order, life, children, sledges,
dogs with dishevelled tails. Neither the children nor the peasant
we met were troubled; why was I so troubled?
Looking at the smiling peasant, at the boy with the huge
mufflers, at the huts, remembering my wife, I realized there
was no calamity that could daunt this people; I felt as though
there were already a breath of victory in the air. I felt proud
and felt ready to cry out that I was with them too; but the
horses were carrying us away from the village into the open
country, the snow was whirling, the wind was howling, and I
was left alone with my thoughts. Of the million people working
for the peasantry, life itself had cast me out as a useless,
incompetent, bad man. I was a hindrance, a part of the people’s
calamity; I was vanquished, cast out, and I was hurrying to
the station to go away and hide myself in Petersburg in a
hotel in Bolshaya Morskaya.
An hour later we reached the station. The coachman and a
porter with a disc on his breast carried my trunks into the
ladies’ room. My coachman Nikanor, wearing high felt boots
and the skirt of his coat tucked up through his belt, all wet
with the snow and glad I was going away, gave me a friendly
smile and said:
“A fortunate journey, your Excellency. God give you luck.”
Every one, by the way, calls me “your Excellency,” though I
am only a collegiate councillor and a kammer-junker. The
porter told me the train had not yet left the next station; I
had to wait. I went outside, and with my head heavy from
my sleepless night, and so exhausted I could hardly move my
34
Anton Chekhov
legs, I walked aimlessly towards the pump. There was not a
soul anywhere near.
“Why am I going?” I kept asking myself. “What is there
awaiting me there? The acquaintances from whom I have come
away, loneliness, restaurant dinners, noise, the electric light,
which makes my eyes ache. Where am I going, and what am
I going for? What am I going for?”
And it seemed somehow strange to go away without speaking
to my wife. I felt that I was leaving her in uncertainty.
Going away, I ought to have told that she was right, that I
really was a bad man.
When I turned away from the pump, I saw in the doorway
the station-master, of whom I had twice made complaints to
his superiors, turning up the collar of his coat, shrinking from
the wind and the snow. He came up to me, and putting two
fingers to the peak of his cap, told me with an expression of
helpless confusion, strained respectfulness, and hatred on his
face, that the train was twenty minutes late, and asked me
would I not like to wait in the warm?
“Thank you,” I answered, “but I am probably not going. Send
word to my coachman to wait; I have not made up my mind.”
I walked to and fro on the platform and thought, should I
go away or not? When the train came in I decided not to go.
At home I had to expect my wife’s amazement and perhaps
her mockery, the dismal upper storey and my uneasiness; but,
still, at my age that was easier and as it were more homelike
than travelling for two days and nights with strangers to Petersburg,
where I should be conscious every minute that my
life was of no use to any one or to anything, and that it was
approaching its end. No, better at home whatever awaited
me there.… I went out of the station. It was awkward by
daylight to return home, where every one was so glad at my
going. I might spend the rest of the day till evening at some
neighbour’s, but with whom? With some of them I was on
strained relations, others I did not know at all. I considered
and thought of Ivan Ivanitch.
“We are going to Bragino!” I said to the coachman, getting
into the sledge.
“It’s a long way,” sighed Nikanor; “it will be twenty miles,
or maybe twenty-five.”
“Oh, please, my dear fellow,” I said in a tone as though
Nikanor had the right to refuse. “Please let us go!”
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The Wife and other stories
Nikanor shook his head doubtfully and said slowly that we
really ought to have put in the shafts, not Circassian, but Peasant
or Siskin; and uncertainly, as though expecting I should
change my mind, took the reins in his gloves, stood up,
thought a moment, and then raised his whip.
“A whole series of inconsistent actions…,” I thought, screening
my face from the snow. “I must have gone out of my
mind. Well, I don’t care.…”
In one place, on a very high and steep slope, Nikanor carefully
held the horses in to the middle of the descent, but in
the middle the horses suddenly bolted and dashed downhill
at a fearful rate; he raised his elbows and shouted in a wild,
frantic voice such as I had never heard from him before:
“Hey! Let’s give the general a drive! If you come to grief
he’ll buy new ones, my darlings! Hey! look out! We’ll run
you down!”
Only now, when the extraordinary pace we were going at
took my breath away, I noticed that he was very drunk. He
must have been drinking at the station. At the bottom of the
descent there was the crash of ice; a piece of dirty frozen snow
thrown up from the road hit me a painful blow in the face.
The runaway horses ran up the hill as rapidly as they had
downhill, and before I had time to shout to Nikanor my
sledge was flying along on the level in an old pine forest, and
the tall pines were stretching out their shaggy white paws to
me from all directions.
“I have gone out of my mind, and the coachman’s drunk,”
I thought. “Good!”
I found Ivan Ivanitch at home. He laughed till he coughed,
laid his head on my breast, and said what he always did say on
meeting me:
“You grow younger and younger. I don’t know what dye
you use for your hair and your beard; you might give me
some of it.”
“I’ve come to return your call, Ivan Ivanitch,” I said untruthfully.
“Don’t be hard on me; I’m a townsman, conventional;
I do keep count of calls.”
“I am delighted, my dear fellow. I am an old man; I like
respect.… Yes.”
From his voice and his blissfully smiling face, I could see
that he was greatly flattered by my visit. Two peasant women
helped me off with my coat in the entry, and a peasant in a
36
Anton Chekhov
red shirt hung it on a hook, and when Ivan Ivanitch and I
went into his little study, two barefooted little girls were sitting
on the floor looking at a picture-book; when they saw us
they jumped up and ran away, and a tall, thin old woman in
specta cles came in at once, bowed gravely to me, and picking
up a pillow from the sofa and a picture-book from the floor,
went away. From the adjoining rooms we heard incessant
whispering and the patter of bare feet.
“I am expecting the doctor to dinner,” said Ivan Ivanitch.
“He promised to come from the relief centre. Yes. He dines
with me every Wednesday, God bless him.” He craned towards
me and kissed me on the neck. “You have come, my
dear fellow, so you are not vexed,” he whispered, sniffing.
“Don’t be vexed, my dear creature. Yes. Perhaps it is annoying,
but don’t be cross. My only prayer to God before I die is
to live in peace and harmony with all in the true way. Yes.”
“Forgive me, Ivan Ivanitch, I will put my feet on a chair,” I
said, feeling that I was so exhausted I could not be myself; I
sat further back on the sofa and put up my feet on an armchair.
My face was burning from the snow and the wind, and
I felt as though my whole body were basking in the warmth
and growing weaker from it.
“It’s very nice here,” I went on — “warm, soft, snug… and
goose-feather pens,” I laughed, looking at the writing-table;
“sand instead of blotting-paper.”
“Eh? Yes… yes.… The writing-table and the mahogany cupboard
here were made for my father by a self-taught cabinetmaker
— Glyeb Butyga, a serf of General Zhukov’s. Yes… a
great artist in his own way.”
Listlessly and in the tone of a man dropping asleep, he began
telling me about cabinet-maker Butyga. I listened. Then
Ivan Ivanitch went into the next room to show me a polisander
wood chest of drawers remarkable for its beauty and cheapness.
He tapped the chest with his fingers, then called my
attention to a stove of patterned tiles, such as one never sees
now. He tapped the stove, too, with his fingers. There was an
atmosphere of good-natured simplicity and well-fed abundance
about the chest of drawers, the tiled stove, the low chairs,
the pictures embroidered in wool and silk on canvas in solid,
ugly frames. When one remembers that all those objects were
standing in the same places and precisely in the same order
when I was a little child, and used to come here to name-day
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The Wife and other stories
parties with my mother, it is simply unbelievable that they
could ever cease to exist.
I thought what a fearful difference between Butyga and me!
Butyga who made things, above all, solidly and substantially,
and seeing in that his chief object, gave to length of life peculiar
significance, had no thought of death, and probably hardly
believed in its possibility; I, when I built my bridges of iron
and stone which would last a thousand years, could not keep
from me the thought, “It’s not for long… .it’s no use.” If in
time Butyga’s cupboard and my bridge should come under the
notice of some sensible historian of art, he would say: “These
were two men remarkable in their own way: Butyga loved his
fellow-creatures and would not admit the thought that they
might die and be annihilated, and so when he made his furniture
he had the immortal man in his mind. The engineer Asorin
did not love life or his fellow-creatures; even in the happy moments
of creation, thoughts of death, of finiteness and dissolution,
were not alien to him, and we see how insignificant and
finite, how timid and poor, are these lines of his.…”
“I only heat these rooms,” muttered Ivan Ivanitch, showing
me his rooms. “Ever since my wife died and my son was killed
in the war, I have kept the best rooms shut up. Yes… see. . .”
He opened a door, and I saw a big room with four columns,
an old piano, and a heap of peas on the floor; it smelt
cold and damp.
“The garden seats are in the next room…” muttered Ivan
Ivanitch. “There’s no one to dance the mazurka now.… I’ve
shut them up.”
We heard a noise. It was Dr. Sobol arriving. While he was
rubbing his cold hands and stroking his wet beard, I had time
to notice in the first place that he had a very dull life, and so
was pleased to see Ivan Ivanitch and me; and, secondly, that
he was a naive and simple-hearted man. He looked at me as
though I were very glad to see him and very much interested
in him.
“I have not slept for two nights,” he said, looking at me
naively and stroking his beard. “One night with a confinement,
and the next I stayed at a peasant’s with the bugs biting
me all night. I am as sleepy as Satan, do you know.”
With an expression on his face as though it could not afford
me anything but pleasure, he took me by the arm and
led me to the dining-room. His naive eyes, his crumpled coat,
38
Anton Chekhov
his cheap tie and the smell of iodoform made an unpleasant
impression upon me; I felt as though I were in vulgar company.
When we sat down to table he filled my glass with
vodka, and, smiling helplessly, I drank it; he put a piece of
ham on my plate and I ate it submissively.
“Repetitia est mater studiorum,” said Sobol, hastening to
drink off another wineglassful. “Would you believe it, the joy
of seeing good people has driven away my sleepiness? I have
turned into a peasant, a savage in the wilds; I’ve grown coarse,
but I am still an educated man, and I tell you in good earnest,
it’s tedious without company.”
They served first for a cold course white sucking-pig with
horse-radish cream, then a rich and very hot cabbage soup with
pork on it, with boiled buckwheat, from which rose a column
of steam. The doctor went on talking, and I was soon convinced
that he was a weak, unfortunate man, disorderly in external
life. Three glasses of vodka made him drunk; he grew
unnaturally lively, ate a great deal, kept clearing his throat and
smacking his lips, and already addressed me in Italian,
“Eccellenza.” Looking naively at me as though he were convinced
that I was very glad to see and hear him, he informed
me that he had long been separated from his wife and gave her
three-quarters of his salary; that she lived in the town with his
children, a boy and a girl, whom he adored; that he loved another
woman, a widow, well educated, with an estate in the
country, but was rarely able to see her, as he was busy with his
work from morning till night and had not a free moment.
“The whole day long, first at the hospital, then on my
rounds,” he told us; “and I assure you, Eccellenza, I have not
time to read a book, let alone going to see the woman I love.
I’ve read nothing for ten years! For ten years, Eccellenza. As
for the financial side of the question, ask Ivan Ivanitch: I have
often no money to buy tobacco.”
“On the other hand, you have the moral satisfaction of your
work,” I said.
“What?” he asked, and he winked. “No,” he said, “better let
us drink.”
I listened to the doctor, and, after my invariable habit, tried
to take his measure by my usual classification — materialist,
idealist, filthy lucre, gregarious instincts, and so on; but no
classification fitted him even approximately; and strange to
say, while I simply listened and looked at him, he seemed
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The Wife and other stories
perfectly clear to me as a person, but as soon as I began trying
to classify him he became an exceptionally complex, intricate,
and incomprehensible character in spite of all his candour
and simplicity. “Is that man,” I asked myself, “capable of wasting
other people’s money, abusing their confidence, being disposed
to sponge on them?” And now this question, which
had once seemed to me grave and important, struck me as
crude, petty, and coarse.
Pie was served; then, I remember, with long intervals between,
during which we drank home-made liquors, they gave
us a stew of pigeons, some dish of giblets, roast sucking-pig,
partridges, cauliflower, curd dumplings, curd cheese and milk,
jelly, and finally pancakes and jam. At first I ate with great
relish, especially the cabbage soup and the buckwheat, but
afterwards I munched and swallowed mechanically, smiling
helplessly and unconscious of the taste of anything. My face
was burning from the hot cabbage soup and the heat of the
room. Ivan Ivanitch and Sobol, too, were crimson.
“To the health of your wife,” said Sobol. “She likes me.
Tell her her doctor sends her his respects.”
“She’s fortunate, upon my word,” sighed Ivan Ivanitch.
“Though she takes no trouble, does not fuss or worry herself,
she has become the most important person in the whole district.
Almost the whole business is in her hands, and they all
gather round her, the doctor, the District Captains, and the
ladies. With people of the right sort that happens of itself.
Yes.… The apple-tree need take no thought for the apple to
grow on it; it will grow of itself.”
“It’s only people who don’t care who take no thought,” said I.
“Eh? Yes… “ muttered Ivan Ivanitch, not catching what I
said, “that’s true.… One must not worry oneself. Just so, just
so.… Only do your duty towards God and your neighbour,
and then never mind what happens.”
“Eccellenza,” said Sobol solemnly, “just look at nature about
us: if you poke your nose or your ear out of your fur collar it
will be frost-bitten; stay in the fields for one hour, you’ll be
buried in the snow; while the village is just the same as in the
days of Rurik, the same Petchenyegs and Polovtsi. It’s nothing
but being burnt down, starving, and struggling against
nature in every way. What was I saying? Yes! If one thinks
about it, you know, looks into it and analyses all this hotchpotch,
if you will allow me to call it so, it’s not life but more
40
Anton Chekhov
like a fire in a theatre! Any one who falls down or screams
with terror, or rushes about, is the worst enemy of good order;
one must stand up and look sharp, and not stir a hair!
There’s no time for whimpering and busying oneself with
trifles. When you have to deal with elemental forces you must
put out force against them, be firm and as unyielding as a
stone. Isn’t that right, grandfather?” He turned to Ivan Ivanitch
and laughed. “I am no better than a woman myself; I am a
limp rag, a flabby creature, so I hate flabbiness. I can’t endure
petty feelings! One mopes, another is frightened, a third will
come straight in here and say: ‘Fie on you! Here you’ve guzzled
a dozen courses and you talk about the starving!’ That’s petty
and stupid! A fourth will reproach you, Eccellenza, for being
rich. Excuse me, Eccellenza,” he went on in a loud voice, laying
his hand on his heart, “but your having set our magistrate
the task of hunting day and night for your thieves —excuse
me, that’s also petty on your part. I am a little drunk, so that’s
why I say this now, but you know, it is petty!”
“Who’s asking him to worry himself? I don’t understand!” I
said, getting up.
I suddenly felt unbearably ashamed and mortified, and I
walked round the table.
“Who asks him to worry himself? I didn’t ask him to.…
Damn him!”
“They have arrested three men and let them go again. They
turned out not to be the right ones, and now they are looking
for a fresh lot,” said Sobol, laughing. “It’s too bad!”
“I did not ask him to worry himself,” said I, almost crying
with excitement. “What’s it all for? What’s it all for? Well,
supposing I was wrong, supposing I have done wrong, why
do they try to put me more in the wrong?”
“Come, come, come, come!” said Sobol, trying to soothe
me. “Come! I have had a drop, that is why I said it. My tongue
is my enemy. Come,” he sighed, “we have eaten and drunk
wine, and now for a nap.”
He got up from the table, kissed Ivan Ivanitch on the head,
and staggering from repletion, went out of the dining-room.
Ivan Ivanitch and I smoked in silence.
I don’t sleep after dinner, my dear,” said Ivan Ivanitch, “but
you have a rest in the lounge-room.”
I agreed. In the half-dark and warmly heated room they
called the lounge-room, there stood against the walls long,
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The Wife and other stories
wide sofas, solid and heavy, the work of Butyga the cabinet
maker; on them lay high, soft, white beds, probably made by
the old woman in spectacles. On one of them Sobol, without
his coat and boots, already lay asleep with his face to the
back of the sofa; another bed was awaiting me. I took off my
coat and boots, and, overcome by fatigue, by the spirit of
Butyga which hovered over the quiet lounge-room, and by
the light, caressing snore of Sobol, I lay down submissively.
And at once I began dreaming of my wife, of her room, of
the station-master with his face full of hatred, the heaps of
snow, a fire in the theatre. I dreamed of the peasants who had
stolen twenty sacks of rye out of my barn.
“Anyway, it’s a good thing the magistrate let them go,” I
said.
I woke up at the sound of my own voice, looked for a
moment in perplexity at Sobol’s broad back, at the buckles
of his waistcoat, at his thick heels, then lay down again and
fell asleep.
When I woke up the second time it was quite dark. Sobol
was asleep. There was peace in my heart, and I longed to make
haste home. I dressed and went out of the lounge-room. Ivan
Ivanitch was sitting in a big arm-chair in his study, absolutely
motionless, staring at a fixed point, and it was evident that he
had been in the same state of petrifaction all the while I had
been asleep.
“Good!” I said, yawning. “I feel as though I had woken up
after breaking the fast at Easter. I shall often come and see you
now. Tell me, did my wife ever dine here?”
“So-ome-ti-mes… sometimes,”’ muttered Ivan Ivanitch,
making an effort to stir. “She dined here last Saturday. Yes.…
She likes me.”
After a silence I said:
“Do you remember, Ivan Ivanitch, you told me I had a disagreeable
character and that it was difficult to get on with
me? But what am I to do to make my character different?”
“I don’t know, my dear boy.… I’m a feeble old man, I can’t
advise you.… Yes.… But I said that to you at the time because
I am fond of you and fond of your wife, and I was fond
of your father.… Yes. I shall soon die, and what need have I
to conceal things from you or to tell you lies? So I tell you: I
am very fond of you, but I don’t respect you. No, I don’t
respect you.”
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Anton Chekhov
He turned towards me and said in a breathless whisper:
“It’s impossible to respect you, my dear fellow. You look
like a real man. You have the figure and deportment of the
French President Carnot — I saw a portrait of him the other
day in an illustrated paper… yes.… You use lofty language,
and you are clever, and you are high up in the service beyond
all reach, but haven’t real soul, my dear boy… there’s no
strength in it.”
“A Scythian, in fact,” I laughed. “But what about my wife?
Tell me something about my wife; you know her better.”
I wanted to talk about my wife, but Sobol came in and
prevented me.
“I’ve had a sleep and a wash,” he said, looking at me naively.
“I’ll have a cup of tea with some rum in it and go home.”
VII
IT WAS BY NOW past seven. Besides Ivan Ivanitch, women servants,
the old dame in spectacles, the little girls and the peasant,
all accompanied us from the hall out on to the steps,
wishing us good-bye and all sorts of blessings, while near the
horses in the darkness there were standing and moving about
men with lanterns, telling our coachmen how and which way
to drive, and wishing us a lucky journey. The horses, the men,
and the sledges were white.
“Where do all these people come from?” I asked as my three
horses and the doctor’s two moved at a walking pace out of
the yard.
“They are all his serfs,” said Sobol. “The new order has not
reached him yet. Some of the old servants are living out their
lives with him, and then there are orphans of all sorts who
have nowhere to go; there are some, too, who insist on living
there, there’s no turning them out. A queer old man!”
Again the flying horses, the strange voice of drunken
Nikanor, the wind and the persistent snow, which got into
one’s eyes, one’s mouth, and every fold of one’s fur coat.…
“Well, I am running a rig,” I thought, while my bells chimed
in with the doctor’s, the wind whistled, the coachmen shouted;
and while this frantic uproar was going on, I recalled all the
details of that strange wild day, unique in my life, and it seemed
to me that I really had gone out of my mind or become a
different man. It was as though the man I had been till that
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The Wife and other stories
day were already a stranger to me.
The doctor drove behind and kept talking loudly with his
coachman. From time to time he overtook me, drove side by
side, and always, with the same naive confidence that it was
very pleasant to me, offered me a ci garette or asked for the
matches. Or, overtaking me, he would lean right out of his
sledge, and waving about the sleeves of his fur coat, which
were at least twice as long as his arms, shout:
“Go it, Vaska! Beat the thousand roublers! Hey, my kittens!”
And to the accompaniment of loud, malicious laughter from
Sobol and his Vaska the doctor’s kittens raced ahead. My
Nikanor took it as an affront, and held in his three horses,
but when the doctor’s bells had passed out of hearing, he raised
his elbows, shouted, and our horses flew like mad in pursuit.
We drove into a village, there were glimpses of lights, the
silhouettes of huts. Some one shouted:
“Ah, the devils!” We seemed to have galloped a mile and a
half, and still it was the village street and there seemed no end
to it. When we caught up the doctor and drove more quietly,
he asked for matches and said:
“Now try and feed that street! And, you know, there are
five streets like that, sir. Stay, stay,” he shouted. “Turn in at
the tavern! We must get warm and let the horses rest.”
They stopped at the tavern.
“I have more than one village like that in my district,” said
the doctor, opening a heavy door with a squeaky block, and
ushering me in front of him. “If you look in broad daylight
you can’t see to the end of the street, and there are side-streets,
too, and one can do nothing but scratch one’s head. It’s hard
to do anything.”
We went into the best room where there was a strong smell
of table-cloths, and at our entrance a sleepy peasant in a waistcoat
and a shirt worn outside his trousers jumped up from a
bench. Sobol asked for some beer and I asked for tea.
“It’s hard to do anything,” said Sobol. “Your wife has faith;
I respect her and have the greatest reverence for her, but I have
no great faith myself. As long as our relations to the people
continue to have the character of ordinary philanthropy, as
shown in orphan asylums and almshouses, so long we shall
only be shuffling, shamming, and deceiving ourselves, and
nothing more. Our relations ought to be businesslike, founded
on calculation, knowledge, and justice. My Vaska has been
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Anton Chekhov
working for me all his life; his crops have failed, he is sick and
starving. If I give him fifteen kopecks a day, by so doing I try
to restore him to his former condition as a workman; that is,
I am first and foremost looking after my own interests, and
yet for some reason I call that fifteen kopecks relief, charity,
good works. Now let us put it like this. On the most modest
computation, reckoning seven kopecks a soul and five souls a
family, one needs three hundred and fifty roubles a day to
feed a thousand families. That sum is fixed by our practical
duty to a thousand families. Meanwhile we give not three
hundred and fifty a day, but only ten, and say that that is
relief, charity, that that makes your wife and all of us exceptionally
good people and hurrah for our humaneness. That is
it, my dear soul! Ah! if we would talk less of being humane
and calculated more, reasoned, and took a conscientious attitude
to our duties! How many such humane, sensitive people
there are among us who tear about in all good faith with
subscription lists, but don’t pay their tailors or their cooks.
There is no logic in our life; that’s what it is! No logic!”
We were silent for a while. I was making a mental calculation
and said:
“I will feed a thousand families for two hundred days. Come
and see me tomorrow to talk it over.”
I was pleased that this was said quite simply, and was glad
that Sobol answered me still more simply:
“Right.”
We paid for what we had and went out of the tavern.
“I like going on like this,” said Sobol, getting into the sledge.
“Eccellenza, oblige me with a match. I’ve forgotten mine in
the tavern.”
A quarter of an hour later his horses fell behind, and the
sound of his bells was lost in the roar of the snow-storm.
Reaching home, I walked about my rooms, trying to think
things over and to define my position clearly to myself; I had
not one word, one phrase, ready for my wife. My brain was
not working.
But without thinking of anything, I went downstairs to
my wife. She was in her room, in the same pink dressinggown,
and standing in the same attitude as though screening
her papers from me. On her face was an expression of perplexity
and irony, and it was evident that having heard of my
arrival, she had prepared herself not to cry, not to entreat me,
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The Wife and other stories
not to defend herself, as she had done the day before, but to
laugh at me, to answer me contemptuously, and to act with
decision. Her face was saying: “If that’s how it is, good-bye.”
“Natalie, I’ve not gone away,” I said, “but it’s not deception.
I have gone out of my mind; I’ve grown old, I’m ill, I’ve
become a different man — think as you like.… I’ve shaken
off my old self with horror, with horror; I despise him and
am ashamed of him, and the new man who has been in me
since yesterday will not let me go away. Do not drive me
away, Natalie!”
She looked intently into my face and believed me, and there
was a gleam of uneasiness in her eyes. Enchanted by her presence,
warmed by the warmth of her room, I muttered as in
delirium, holding out my hands to her:
“I tell you, I have no one near to me but you. I have never
for one minute ceased to miss you, and only obstinate vanity
prevented me from owning it. The past, when we lived as
husband and wife, cannot be brought back, and there’s no
need; but make me your servant, take all my property, and
give it away to any one you like. I am at peace, Natalie, I am
content.… I am at peace.”
My wife, looking intently and with curiosity into my face,
suddenly uttered a faint cry, burst into tears, and ran into the
next room. I went upstairs to my own storey.
An hour later I was sitting at my table, writing my “History
of Railways,” and the starving peasants did not now hinder me
from doing so. Now I feel no uneasiness. Neither the scenes of
disorder which I saw when I went the round of the huts at
Pestrovo with my wife and Sobol the other day, nor malignant
rumours, nor the mistakes of the people around me, nor old
age close upon me — nothing disturbs me. Just as the flying
bullets do not hinder soldiers from talking of their own affairs,
eating and cleaning their boots, so the starving peasants do not
hinder me from sleeping quietly and looking after my personal
affairs. In my house and far around it there is in full swing the
work which Dr. Sobol calls “an orgy of philanthropy.” My wife
often comes up to me and looks about my rooms uneasily, as
though looking for what more she can give to the starving
peasants “to justify her existence,” and I see that, thanks to her,
there will soon be nothing of our property left and we shall be
poor; but that does not trouble me, and I smile at her gaily.
What will happen in the future I don’t know.
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Anton Chekhov
DIFFICULT PEOPLE
YEVGRAF IVANOVITCH SHIRYAEV, a small farmer, whose father, a
parish priest, now deceased, had received a gift of three hundred
acres of land from Madame Kuvshinnikov, a general’s
widow, was standing in a corner before a copper washingstand,
washing his hands. As usual, his face looked anxious
and ill-humoured, and his beard was uncombed.
“What weather!” he said. “It’s not weather, but a curse laid
upon us. It’s raining again!”
He grumbled on, while his family sat waiting at table for
him to have finished washing his hands before beginning dinner.
Fedosya Semyonovna, his wife, his son Pyotr, a student,
his eldest daughter Varvara, and three small boys, had been
sitting waiting a long time. The boys — Kolka, Vanka, and
Arhipka — grubby, snub-nosed little fellows with chubby
faces and tousled hair that wanted cutting, moved their chairs
impatiently, while their elders sat without stirring, and apparently
did not care whether they ate their dinner or waited.…
As though trying their patience, Shiryaev deliberately dried
his hands, deliberately said his prayer, and sat down to the
table without hurrying himself. Cabbage-soup was served
immediately. The sound of carpenters’ axes (Shiryaev was
having a new barn built) and the laughter of Fomka, their
labourer, teasing the turkey, floated in from the courtyard.
Big, sparse drops of rain pattered on the window.
Pyotr, a round-shouldered student in spectacles, kept exchanging
glances with his mother as he ate his dinner. Several
times he laid down his spoon and cleared his throat, meaning
to begin to speak, but after an intent look at his father he fell
to eating again. At last, when the porridge had been served,
he cleared his throat resolutely and said:
“I ought to go tonight by the evening train. I out to have
gone before; I have missed a fortnight as it is. The lectures
begin on the first of September.”
“Well, go,” Shiryaev assented; “why are you lingering on
here? Pack up and go, and good luck to you.”
A minute passed in silence.
“He must have money for the journey, Yevgraf Ivanovitch,”
the mother observed in a low voice.
“Money? To be sure, you can’t go without money. Take it
at once, since you need it. You could have had it long ago!”
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The Wife and other stories
The student heaved a faint sigh and looked with relief at his
mother. Deliberately Shiryaev took a pocket-book out of his
coat-pocket and put on his spectacles.
“How much do you want?” he asked.
“The fare to Moscow is eleven roubles forty-two kopecks.…”
“Ah, money, money!” sighed the father. (He always sighed
when he saw money, even when he was receiving it.) “Here
are twelve roubles for you. You will have change out of that
which will be of use to you on the journey.”
“Thank you.”
After waiting a little, the student said:
“I did not get lessons quite at first last year. I don’t know
how it will be this year; most likely it will take me a little
time to find work. I ought to ask you for fifteen roubles for
my lodging and dinner.”
Shiryaev thought a little and heaved a sigh.
“You will have to make ten do,” he said. “Here, take it.”
The student thanked him. He ought to have asked him for
something more, for clothes, for lecture fees, for books, but after
an intent look at his father he decided not to pester him further.
The mother, lacking in diplomacy and prudence, like all
mothers, could not restrain herself, and said:
“You ought to give him another six roubles, Yevgraf
Ivanovitch, for a pair of boots. Why, just see, how can he go
to Moscow in such wrecks?”
“Let him take my old ones; they are still quite good.”
“He must have trousers, anyway; he is a disgrace to look at.”
And immediately after that a storm-signal showed itself, at
the sight of which all the family trembled.
Shiryaev’s short, fat neck turned suddenly red as a beetroot.
The colour mounted slowly to his ears, from his ears to his
temples, and by degrees suffused his whole face. Yevgraf
Ivanovitch shifted in his chair and unbuttoned his shirt-collar
to save himself from choking. He was evidently struggling
with the feeling that was mastering him. A deathlike silence
followed. The children held their breath. Fedosya
Semyonovna, as though she did not grasp what was happening
to her husband, went on:
“He is not a little boy now, you know; he is ashamed to go
about without clothes.”
Shiryaev suddenly jumped up, and with all his might flung
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Anton Chekhov
down his fat pocket-book in the middle of the table, so that
a hunk of bread flew off a plate. A revolting expression of
anger, resentment, avarice — all mixed together — flamed
on his face.
“Take everything!” he shouted in an unnatural voice; “plunder
me! Take it all! Strangle me!”
He jumped up from the table, clutched at his head, and ran
staggering about the room.
“Strip me to the last thread!” he shouted in a shrill voice.
“Squeeze out the last drop! Rob me! Wring my neck!”
The student flushed and dropped his eyes. He could not go on
eating. Fedosya Semyonovna, who had not after twenty-five years
grown used to her husband’s difficult character, shrank into herself
and muttered something in self-defence. An expression of
amazement and dull terror came into her wasted and birdlike
face, which at all times looked dull and scared. The little boys
and the elder daughter Varvara, a girl in her teens, with a pale ugly
face, laid down their spoons and sat mute.
Shiryaev, growing more and more ferocious, uttering words
each more terrible than the one before, dashed up to the table
and began shaking the notes out of his pocket-book.
“Take them!” he muttered, shaking all over. “You’ve eaten
and drunk your fill, so here’s money for you too! I need nothing!
Order yourself new boots and uniforms!”
The student turned pale and got up.
“Listen, papa,” he began, gasping for breath. “I… I beg you
to end this, for…”
“Hold your tongue!” the father shouted at him, and so
loudly that the spectacles fell off his nose; “hold your tongue!”
“I used… I used to be able to put up with such scenes,
but… but now I have got out of the way of it. Do you understand?
I have got out of the way of it!”
“Hold your tongue!” cried the father, and he stamped with
his feet. “You must listen to what I say! I shall say what I like,
and you hold your tongue. At your age I was earning my
living, while you… Do you know what you cost me, you
scoundrel? I’ll turn you out! Wastrel!”
“Yevgraf Ivanovitch,” muttered Fedosya Semyonovna, moving
her fingers nervously; “you know he. . . you know Petya… !”
“Hold your tongue!” Shiryaev shouted out to her, and tears
actually came into his eyes from anger. “It is you who have
spoilt them — you! It’s all your fault! He has no respect for
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The Wife and other stories
us, does not say his prayers, and earns nothing! I am only one
against the ten of you! I’ll turn you out of the house!”
The daughter Varvara gazed fixedly at her mother with her
mouth open, moved her vacant-looking eyes to the window,
turned pale, and, uttering a loud shriek, fell back in her chair.
The father, with a curse and a wave of the hand, ran out into
the yard.
This was how domestic scenes usually ended at the Shiryaevs’.
But on this occasion, unfortunately, Pyotr the student was carried
away by overmastering anger. He was just as hasty and illtempered
as his father and his grandfather the priest, who used
to beat his parishioners about the head with a stick. Pale and
clenching his fists, he went up to his mother and shouted in the
very highest tenor note his voice could reach:
“These reproaches are loathsome! sickening to me! I want
nothing from you! Nothing! I would rather die of hunger
than eat another mouthful at your expense! Take your nasty
money back! take it!”
The mother huddled against the wall and waved her hands,
as though it were not her son, but some phantom before her.
“What have I done?” she wailed. “What?”
Like his father, the boy waved his hands and ran into the
yard. Shiryaev’s house stood alone on a ravine which ran like
a furrow for four miles along the steppe. Its sides were overgrown
with oak saplings and alders, and a stream ran at the
bottom. On one side the house looked towards the ravine,
on the other towards the open country, there were no fences
nor hurdles. Instead there were farm-buildings of all sorts close
to one another, shutting in a small space in front of the house
which was regarded as the yard, and in which hens, ducks,
and pigs ran about.
Going out of the house, the student walked along the
muddy road towards the open country. The air was full of a
penetrating autumn dampness. The road was muddy, puddles
gleamed here and there, and in the yellow fields autumn itself
seemed looking out from the grass, dismal, decaying, dark.
On the right-hand side of the road was a vegetable-garden
cleared of its crops and gloomy-looking, with here and there
sunflowers standing up in it with hanging heads already black.
Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to walk to Moscow
on foot; to walk just as he was, with holes in his boots,
without a cap, and without a farthing of money. When he
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Anton Chekhov
had gone eighty miles his father, frightened and aghast, would
overtake him, would begin begging him to turn back or take
the money, but he would not even look at him, but would go
on and on.… Bare forests would be followed by desolate fields,
fields by forests again; soon the earth would be white with the
first snow, and the streams would be coated with ice.… Somewhere
near Kursk or near Serpuhovo, exhausted and dying of
hunger, he would sink down and die. His corpse would be
found, and there would be a paragraph in all the papers saying
that a student called Shiryaev had died of hunger.…
A white dog with a muddy tail who was wandering about
the vegetable-garden looking for something gazed at him and
sauntered after him.
He walked along the road and thought of death, of the
grief of his family, of the moral sufferings of his father, and
then pictured all sorts of adventures on the road, each more
marvellous than the one before — picturesque places, terrible
nights, chance encounters. He imagined a string of pilgrims,
a hut in the forest with one little window shining in the darkness;
he stands before the window, begs for a night’s lodging.…
They let him in, and suddenly he sees that they are
robbers. Or, better still, he is taken into a big manor-house,
where, learning who he is, they give him food and drink, play
to him on the piano, listen to his complaints, and the daughter
of the house, a beauty, falls in love with him.
Absorbed in his bitterness and such thoughts, young Shiryaev
walked on and on. Far, far ahead he saw the inn, a dark patch
against the grey background of cloud. Beyond the inn, on the
very horizon, he could see a little hillock; this was the railway-
station. That hillock reminded him of the connection
existing between the place where he was now standing and
Moscow, where street-lamps were burning and carriages were
rattling in the streets, where lectures were being given. And he
almost wept with depression and impatience. The solemn
landscape, with its order and beauty, the deathlike stillness all
around, revolted him and moved him to despair and hatred!
“Look out!” He heard behind him a loud voice.
An old lady of his acquaintance, a landowner of the
neighbourhood, drove past him in a light, elegant landau. He
bowed to her, and smiled all over his face. And at once he
caught himself in that smile, which was so out of keeping
with his gloomy mood. Where did it come from if his whole
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The Wife and other stories
heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature
itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult
moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the
secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do. Every
family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they
may be, it’s hard for an outsider’s eye to see them; they are a
secret. The father of the old lady who had just driven by, for
instance, had for some offence lain for half his lifetime under
the ban of the wrath of Tsar Nicolas I.; her husband had been
a gambler; of her four sons, not one had turned out well.
One could imagine how many terrible scenes there must have
been in her life, how many tears must have been shed. And
yet the old lady seemed happy and satisfied, and she had answered
his smile by smiling too. The student thought of his
comrades, who did not like talking about their families; he
thought of his mother, who almost always lied when she had
to speak of her husband and children.…
Pyotr walked about the roads far from home till dusk, abandoning
himself to dreary thoughts. When it began to drizzle
with rain he turned homewards. As he walked back he made
up his mind at all costs to talk to his father, to explain to
him, once and for all, that it was dreadful and oppressive to
live with him.
He found perfect stillness in the house. His sister Varvara
was lying behind a screen with a headache, moaning faintly.
His mother, with a look of amazement and guilt upon her
face, was sitting beside her on a box, mending Arhipka’s trousers.
Yevgraf Ivanovitch was pacing from one window to another,
scowling at the weather. From his walk, from the way
he cleared his throat, and even from the back of his head, it
was evident he felt himself to blame.
“I suppose you have changed your mind about going today?”
he asked.
The student felt sorry for him, but immediately suppressing
that feeling, he said:
“Listen… I must speak to you seriously. . . yes, seriously. I
have always respected you, and… and have never brought
myself to speak to you in such a tone, but your behaviour…
your last action…”
The father looked out of the window and did not speak.
The student, as though considering his words, rubbed his forehead
and went on in great excitement:
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Anton Chekhov
“Not a dinner or tea passes without your making an uproar.
Your bread sticks in our throat. . . nothing is more bitter,
more humiliating, than bread that sticks in one’s throat.…
Though you are my father, no one, neither God nor nature,
has given you the right to insult and humiliate us so horribly,
to vent your ill-humour on the weak. You have worn my
mother out and made a slave of her, my sister is hopelessly
crushed, while I…”
“It’s not your business to teach me,” said his father.
“Yes, it is my business! You can quarrel with me as much as
you like, but leave my mother in peace! I will not allow you
to torment my mother!” the student went on, with flashing
eyes. “You are spoilt because no one has yet dared to oppose
you. They tremble and are mute towards you, but now that
is over! Coarse, ill-bred man! You are coarse… do you understand?
You are coarse, ill-humoured, unfeeling. And the peasants
can’t endure you!”
The student had by now lost his thread, and was not so much
speaking as firing off detached words. Yevgraf Ivanovitch listened
in silence, as though stunned; but suddenly his neck turned crimson,
the colour crept up his face, and he made a movement.
“Hold your tongue!” he shouted.
“That’s right!” the son persisted; “you don’t like to hear the
truth! Excellent! Very good! begin shouting! Excellent!”
“Hold your tongue, I tell you!” roared Yevgraf Ivanovitch.
Fedosya Semyonovna appeared in the doorway, very pale,
with an astonished face; she tried to say something, but she
could not, and could only move her fingers.
“It’s all your fault!” Shiryaev shouted at her. “You have
brought him up like this!”
“I don’t want to go on living in this house!” shouted the
student, crying, and looking angrily at his mother. “I don’t
want to live with you!”
Varvara uttered a shriek behind the screen and broke into loud
sobs. With a wave of his hand, Shiryaev ran out of the house.
The student went to his own room and quietly lay down.
He lay till midnight without moving or opening his eyes. He
felt neither anger nor shame, but a vague ache in his soul. He
neither blamed his father nor pitied his mother, nor was he
tormented by stings of conscience; he realized that every one
in the house was feeling the same ache, and God only knew
which was most to blame, which was suffering most.…
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The Wife and other stories
At midnight he woke the labourer, and told him to have
the horse ready at five o’clock in the morning for him to
drive to the station; he undressed and got into bed, but could
not get to sleep. He heard how his father, still awake, paced
slowly from window to window, sighing, till early morning.
No one was asleep; they spoke rarely, and only in whispers.
Twice his mother came to him behind the screen. Always
with the same look of vacant wonder, she slowly made the
cross over him, shaking nervously.
At five o’clock in the morning he said good-bye to them all
affectionately, and even shed tears. As he passed his father’s
room, he glanced in at the door. Yevgraf Ivanovitch, who had
not taken off his clothes or gone to bed, was standing by the
window, drumming on the panes.
“Good-bye; I am going,” said his son.
“Good-bye… the money is on the round table…” his father
answered, without turning round.
A cold, hateful rain was falling as the labourer drove him to
the station. The sunflowers were drooping their heads still
lower, and the grass seemed darker than ever.
THE GRASSHOPPER
I
ALL OLGA IVANOVNA’S FRIENDS and acquaintances were at her
wedding.
“Look at him; isn’t it true that there is something in him?”
she said to her friends, with a nod towards her husband, as
though she wanted to explain why she was marrying a simple,
very ordinary, and in no way remarkable man.
Her husband, Osip Stepanitch Dymov, was a doctor, and
only of the rank of a titular councillor. He was on the staff of
two hospitals: in one a ward-surgeon and in the other a dissecting
demonstrator. Every day from nine to twelve he saw
patients and was busy in his ward, and after twelve o’clock he
went by tram to the other hospital, where he dissected. His
private practice was a small one, not worth more than five
hundred roubles a year. That was all. What more could one
say about him? Meanwhile, Olga Ivanovna and her friends
and acquaintances were not quite ordinary people. Every one
of them was remarkable in some way, and more or less fa54
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mous; already had made a reputation and was looked upon as
a celebrity; or if not yet a celebrity, gave brilliant promise of
becoming one. There was an actor from the Dramatic Theatre,
who was a great talent of established reputation, as well
as an elegant, intelligent, and modest man, and a capital elocutionist,
and who taught Olga Ivanovna to recite; there was
a singer from the opera, a good-natured, fat man who assured
Olga Ivanovna, with a sigh, that she was ruining herself, that
if she would take herself in hand and not be lazy she might
make a remarkable singer; then there were several artists, and
chief among them Ryabovsky, a very handsome, fair young
man of five-and-twenty who painted genre pieces, animal studies,
and landscapes, was successful at exhibitions, and had sold
his last picture for five hundred roubles. He touched up Olga
Ivanovna’s sketches, and used to say she might do something.
Then a violoncellist, whose instrument used to sob, and who
openly declared that of all the ladies of his acquaintance the
only one who could accompany him was Olga Ivanovna; then
there was a literary man, young but already well known, who
had written stories, novels, and plays. Who else? Why, Vassily
Vassilyitch, a landowner and amateur illustrator and vignettist,
with a great feeling for the old Russian style, the old ballad
and epic. On paper, on china, and on smoked plates, he
produced literally marvels. In the midst of this free artistic
company, spoiled by fortune, though refined and modest,
who recalled the existence of doctors only in times of illness,
and to whom the name of Dymov sounded in no way different
from Sidorov or Tarasov — in the midst of this company
Dymov seemed strange, not wanted, and small, though he
was tall and broad-shouldered. He looked as though he had
on somebody else’s coat, and his beard was like a shopman’s.
Though if he had been a writer or an artist, they would have
said that his beard reminded them of Zola.
An artist said to Olga Ivanovna that with her flaxen hair
and in her wedding-dress she was very much like a graceful
cherry-tree when it is covered all over with delicate white blossoms
in spring.
“Oh, let me tell you,” said Olga Ivanovna, taking his arm,
“how it was it all came to pass so suddenly. Listen, listen!… I
must tell you that my father was on the same staff at the
hospital as Dymov. When my poor father was taken ill,
Dymov watched for days and nights together at his bedside.
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The Wife and other stories
Such self-sacrifice! Listen, Ryabovsky! You, my writer, listen;
it is very interesting! Come nearer. Such self-sacrifice, such
genuine sympathy! I sat up with my father, and did not sleep
for nights, either. And all at once — the princess had won the
hero’s heart — my Dymov fell head over ears in love. Really,
fate is so strange at times! Well, after my father’s death he
came to see me sometimes, met me in the street, and one fine
evening, all at once he made me an offer… like snow upon
my head.… I lay awake all night, crying, and fell hellishly in
love myself. And here, as you see, I am his wife. There really
is something strong, powerful, bearlike about him, isn’t there?
Now his face is turned three-quarters towards us in a bad light,
but when he turns round look at his forehead. Ryabovsky,
what do you say to that forehead? Dymov, we are talking
about you!” she called to her husband. “Come here; hold out
your honest hand to Ryabovsky.… That’s right, be friends.”
Dymov, with a naive and good-natured smile, held out his
hand to Ryabovsky, and said:
“Very glad to meet you. There was a Ryabovsky in my year
at the medical school. Was he a relation of yours?”
II
OLGA IVANOVNA WAS twenty-two, Dymov was thirty-one.
They got on splendidly together when they were married.
Olga Ivanovna hung all her drawing-room walls with her own
and other people’s sketches, in frames and without frames,
and near the piano and furniture arranged picturesque corners
with Japanese parasols, easels, daggers, busts, photographs,
and rags of many colours.… In the dining-room she papered
the walls with peasant woodcuts, hung up bark shoes and
sickles, stood in a corner a scythe and a rake, and so achieved
a dining-room in the Russian style. In her bedroom she draped
the ceiling and the walls with dark cloths to make it like a
cavern, hung a Venetian lantern over the beds, and at the door
set a figure with a halberd. And every one thought that the
young people had a very charming little home.
When she got up at eleven o’clock every morning, Olga
Ivanovna played the piano or, if it were sunny, painted something
in oils. Then between twelve and one she drove to her
dressmaker’s. As Dymov and she had very little money, only
just enough, she and her dressmaker were often put to clever
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shifts to enable her to appear constantly in new dresses and
make a sensation with them. Very often out of an old dyed
dress, out of bits of tulle, lace, plush, and silk, costing nothing,
perfect marvels were created, something bewitching —
not a dress, but a dream. From the dressmaker’s Olga Ivanovna
usually drove to some actress of her acquaintance to hear the
latest theatrical gossip, and incidentally to try and get hold of
tickets for the first night of some new play or for a benefit
performance. From the actress’s she had to go to some artist’s
studio or to some exhibition or to see some celebrity — either
to pay a visit or to give an invitation or simply to have a
chat. And everywhere she met with a gay and friendly welcome,
and was assured that she was good, that she was sweet,
that she was rare.… Those whom she called great and famous
received her as one of themselves, as an equal, and predicted
with one voice that, with her talents, her taste, and her intelligence,
she would do great things if she concentrated herself.
She sang, she played the piano, she painted in oils, she carved,
she took part in amateur performances; and all this not just
anyhow, but all with talent, whether she made lanterns for an
illumination or dressed up or tied somebody’s cravat — everything
she did was exceptionally graceful, artistic, and charming.
But her talents showed themselves in nothing so clearly as
in her faculty for quickly becoming acquainted and on intimate
terms with celebrated people. No sooner did any one
become ever so little celebrated, and set people talking about
him, than she made his acquaintance, got on friendly terms the

same day, and invited him to her house. Every new acquaintance
she made was a veritable fete for her. She adored celebrated
people, was proud of them, dreamed of them every
night. She craved for them, and never could satisfy her craving.
The old ones departed and were forgotten, new ones came to
replace them, but to these, too, she soon grew accustomed or
was disappointed in them, and began eagerly seeking for fresh
great men, finding them and seeking for them again. What for?
Between four and five she dined at home with her husband.
His simplicity, good sense, and kind-heartedness
touched her and moved her up to enthusiasm. She was constantly
jumping up, impulsively hugging his head and showering
kisses on it.
“You are a clever, generous man, Dymov,” she used to say,
“but you have one very serious defect. You take absolutely no
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interest in art. You don’t believe in music or painting.”
“I don’t understand them,” he would say mildly. “I have
spent all my life in working at natural science and medicine,
and I have never had time to take an interest in the arts.”
“But, you know, that’s awful, Dymov!”
“Why so? Your friends don’t know a nything of science or
medicine, but you don’t reproach them with it. Every one has
his own line. I don’t understand landscapes and operas, but
the way I look at it is that if one set of sensible people devote
their whole lives to them, and other sensible people pay immense
sums for them, they must be of use. I don’t understand
them, but not understanding does not imply disbelieving
in them.”
“Let me shake your honest hand!”
After dinner Olga Ivanovna would drive off to see her
friends, then to a theatre or to a concert, and she returned
home after midnight. So it was every day.
On Wednesdays she had “At Homes.” At these “At Homes”
the hostess and her guests did not play cards and did not dance,
but entertained themselves with various arts. An actor from
the Dramatic Theatre recited, a singer sang, artists sketched in
the albums of which Olga Ivanovna had a great number, the
violoncellist played, and the hostess herself sketched, carved,
sang, and played accompaniments. In the intervals between
the recitations, music, and singing, they talked and argued
about literature, the theatre, and painting. There were no ladies,
for Olga Ivanovna considered all ladies wearisome and
vulgar except actresses and her dressmaker. Not one of these
entertainments passed without the hostess starting at every
ring at the bell, and saying, with a triumphant expression, “It
is he,” meaning by “he,” of course, some new celebrity. Dymov
was not in the drawing-room, and no one remembered his
existence. But exactly at half-past eleven the door leading into
the dining-room opened, and Dymov would appear with his
good-natured, gentle smile and say, rubbing his hands:
“Come to supper, gentlemen.”
They all went into the dining-room, and every time found
on the table exactly the same things: a dish of oysters, a piece
of ham or veal, sardines, cheese, caviare, mushrooms, vodka,
and two decanters of wine.
My dear maitre d’ hotel!” Olga Ivanovna would say, clasping
her hands with enthusiasm, “you are simply fascinating!
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My friends, look at his forehead! Dymov, turn your profile.
Look! he has the face of a Bengal tiger and an expression as
kind and sweet as a gazelle. Ah, the darling!”
The visitors ate, and, looking at Dymov, thought, “He really
is a nice fellow”; but they soon forgot about him, and
went on talking about the theatre, music, and painting.
The young people were happy, and their life flowed on without
a hitch.
The third week of their honeymoon was spent, however,
not quite happily — sadly, indeed. Dymov caught erysipelas
in the hospital, was in bed for six days, and had to have his
beautiful black hair cropped. Olga Ivanovna sat beside him
and wept bitterly, but when he was better she put a white
handkerchief on his shaven head and began to paint him as a
Bedouin. And they were both in good spirits. Three days after
he had begun to go back to the hospital he had another
mischance.
“I have no luck, little mother,” he said one day at dinner. “I
had four dissections to do today, and I cut two of my fingers
at one. And I did not notice it till I got home.”
Olga Ivanovna was alarmed. He smiled, and told her that it
did not matter, and that he often cut his hands when he was
dissecting.
“I get absorbed, little mother, and grow careless.”
Olga Ivanovna dreaded symptoms of blood-poisoning, and
prayed about it every night, but all went well. And again life
flowed on peaceful and happy, free from grief and anxiety.
The present was happy, and to follow it spring was at hand,
already smiling in the distance, and promising a thousand
delights. There would be no end to their happiness. In April,
May and June a summer villa a good distance out of town;
walks, sketching, fishing, nightingales; and then from July
right on to autumn an artist’s tour on the Volga, and in this
tour Olga Ivanovna would take part as an indispensable member
of the society. She had already had made for her two travelling
dresses of linen, had bought paints, brushes, canvases,
and a new palette for the journey. Almost every day Ryabovsky
visited her to see what progress she was making in her painting;
when she showed him her painting, he used to thrust his
hands deep into his pockets, compress his lips, sniff, and say:
“Ye—es… ! That cloud of yours is screaming: it’s not in the
evening light. The foreground is somehow chewed up, and
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The Wife and other stories
there is something, you know, not the thing.… And your
cottage is weighed down and whines pitifully. That corner
ought to have been taken more in shadow, but on the whole
it is not bad; I like it.”
And the more incomprehensible he talked, the more readily
Olga Ivanovna understood him.
III
AFTER DINNER on the second day of Trinity week, Dymov
bought some sweets and some savouries and went down to
the villa to see his wife. He had not seen her for a fortnight,
and missed her terribly. As he sat in the train and afterwards as
he looked for his villa in a big wood, he felt all the while
hungry and weary, and dreamed of how he would have supper
in freedom with his wife, then tumble into bed and to
sleep. And he was delighted as he looked at his parcel, in which
there was caviare, cheese, and white salmon.
The sun was setting by the time he found his villa and recognized
it. The old servant told him that her mistress was not
at home, but that most likely she would soon be in. The
villa, very uninviting in appearance, with low ceilings papered
with writing-paper and with uneven floors full of crevices,
consisted only of three rooms. In one there was a bed, in the
second there were canvases, brushes, greasy papers, and men’s
overcoats and hats lying about on the chairs and in the windows,
while in the third Dymov found three unknown men;
two were dark-haired and had beards, the other was cleanshaven
and fat, apparently an actor. There was a samovar boiling
on the table.
“What do you want?” asked the actor in a bass voice, looking
at Dymov ungraciously. “Do you want Olga Ivanovna?
Wait a minute; she will be here directly.”
Dymov sat down and waited. One of the dark-haired men,
looking sleepily and listlessly at him, poured himself out a
glass of tea, and asked:
“Perhaps you would like some tea?”
Dymov was both hungry and thirsty, but he refused tea for
fear of spoiling his supper. Soon he heard footsteps and a
familiar laugh; a door slammed, and Olga Ivanovna ran into
the room, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a box in
her hand; she was followed by Ryabovsky, rosy and good60
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humoured, carrying a big umbrella and a camp-stool.
“Dymov!” cried Olga Ivanovna, and she flushed crimson
with pleasure. “Dymov!” she repeated, laying her head and
both arms on his bosom. “Is that you? Why haven’t you come
for so long? Why? Why?”
“When could I, little mother? I am always busy, and whenever
I am free it always happens somehow that the train does
not fit.”
“But how glad I am to see you! I have been dreaming about
you the whole night, the whole night, and I was afraid you
must be ill. Ah! if you only knew how sweet you are! You
have come in the nick of time! You will be my salvation! You
are the only person who can save me! There is to be a most
original wedding here tomorrow,” she went on, laughing, and
tying her husband’s cravat. “A young telegraph clerk at the
station, called Tchikeldyeev, is going to be married. He is a
handsome young man and — well, not stupid, and you know
there is something strong, bearlike in his face… you might
paint him as a young Norman. We summer visitors take a
great interest in him, and have promised to be at his wedding.…
He is a lonely, timid man, not well off, and of course
it would be a shame not to be sympathetic to him. Fancy! the
wedding will be after the service; then we shall all walk from
the church to the bride’s lodgings. . . you see the wood, the
birds singing, patches of sunlight on the grass, and all of us
spots of different colours against the bright green background
— very original, in the style of the French impressionists.
But, Dymov, what am I to go to the church in?” said Olga
Ivanovna, and she looked as though she were going to cry. “I
have nothing here, literally nothing! no dress, no flowers, no
gloves… you must save me. Since you have come, fate itself
bids you save me. Take the keys, my precious, go home and
get my pink dress from the wardrobe. You remember it; it
hangs in front.… Then, in the storeroom, on the floor, on
the right side, you will see two cardboard boxes. When you
open the top one you will see tulle, heaps of tulle and rags of
all sorts, and under them flowers. Take out all the flowers
carefully, try not to crush them, darling; I will choose among
them later.… And buy me some gloves.”
“Very well,” said Dymov; “I will go tomorrow and send
them to you.”
“Tomorrow?” asked Olga Ivanovna, and she looked at him
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surprised. “You won’t have time tomorrow. The first train
goes tomorrow at nine, and the wedding’s at eleven. No, darling,
it must be today; it absolutely must be today. If you
won’t be able to come tomorrow, send them by a messenger.
Come, you must run along.… The passenger train will be in
directly; don’t miss it, darling.”
“Very well.”
“Oh, how sorry I am to let you go!” said Olga Ivanovna,
and tears came into her eyes. “And why did I promise that
telegraph clerk, like a silly?”
Dymov hurriedly drank a glass of tea, took a cracknel, and,
smiling gently, went to the station. And the caviare, the cheese,
and the white salmon were eaten by the two dark gentlemen
and the fat actor.
IV
ON A STILL MOONLIGHT NIGHT in July Olga Ivanovna was standing
on the deck of a Volga steamer and looking alternately at
the water and at the picturesque banks. Beside her was standing
Ryabovsky, telling her the black shadows on the water
were not shadows, but a dream, that it would be sweet to
sink into forgetfulness, to die, to become a memory in the
sight of that enchanted water with the fantastic glimmer, in
sight of the fathomless sky and the mournful, dreamy shores
that told of the vanity of our life and of the existence of something
higher, blessed, and eternal. The past was vulgar and
uninteresting, the future was trivial, and that marvellous night,
unique in a lifetime, would soon be over, would blend with
eternity; then, why live?
And Olga Ivanovna listened alternately to Ryabovsky’s voice
and the silence of the night, and thought of her being immortal
and never dying. The turquoise colour of the water,
such as she had never seen before, the sky, the river-banks, the
black shadows, and the unaccountable joy that flooded her
soul, all told her that she would make a great artist, and that
somewhere in the distance, in the infinite space beyond the
moonlight, success, glory, the love of the people, lay awaiting
her.… When she gazed steadily without blinking into the distance,
she seemed to see crowds of people, lights, triumphant
strains of music, cries of enthusiasm, she herself in a white
dress, and flowers showered upon her from all sides. She
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thought, too, that beside her, leaning with his elbows on the
rail of the steamer, there was standing a real great man, a genius,
one of God’s elect.… All that he had created up to the
present was fine, new, and extraordinary, but what he would
create in time, when with maturity his rare talent reached its
full development, would be astounding, immeasurably sublime;
and that could be seen by his face, by his manner of
expressing himself and his attitude to nature. He talked of
shadows, of the tones of evening, of the moonlight, in a special
way, in a language of his own, so that one could not help
feeling the fascination of his power over nature. He was very
handsome, original, and his life, free, independent, aloof from
all common cares, was like the life of a bird.
“It’s growing cooler,” said Olga Ivanovna, and she gave a
shudder.
Ryabovsky wrapped her in his cloak, and said mournfully:
“I feel that I am in your power; I am a slave. Why are you so
enchanting today?”
He kept staring intently at her, and his eyes were terrible.
And she was afraid to look at him.
“I love you madly,” he whispered, breathing on her cheek.
“Say one word to me and I will not go on living; I will give up
art…” he muttered in violent emotion. “Love me, love… .”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Olga Ivanovna, covering her eyes.
“It’s dreadful! How about Dymov?”
“What of Dymov? Why Dymov? What have I to do with
Dymov? The Volga, the moon, beauty, my love, ecstasy, and
there is no such thing as Dymov.… Ah! I don’t know… I
don’t care about the past; give me one moment, one instant!”
Olga Ivanovna’s heart began to throb. She tried to think
about her husband, but all her past, with her wedding, with
Dymov, and with her “At Homes,” seemed to her petty, trivial,
dingy, unnecessary, and far, far away.… Yes, really, what of
Dymov? Why Dymov? What had she to do with Dymov?
Had he any existence in nature, or was he only a dream?
“For him, a simple and ordinary man the happiness he has
had already is enough,” she thought, covering her face with
her hands. “Let them condemn me, let them curse me, but in
spite of them all I will go to my ruin; I will go to my ruin!…
One must experience everything in life. My God! how terrible
and how glorious!”
“Well? Well?” muttered the artist, embracing her, and greedily
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The Wife and other stories
kissing the hands with which she feebly tried to thrust him
from her. “You love me? Yes? Yes? Oh, what a night! marvellous
night!”
“Yes, what a night!” she whispered, looking into his eyes,
which were bright with tears.
Then she looked round quickly, put her arms round him,
and kissed him on the lips.
“We are nearing Kineshmo!” said some one on the other
side of the deck.
They heard heavy footsteps; it was a waiter from the refreshment-
bar.
“Waiter,” said Olga Ivanovna, laughing and crying with happiness,
“bring us some wine.”
The artist, pale with emotion, sat on the seat, looking at
Olga Ivanovna with adoring, grateful eyes; then he closed his
eyes, and said, smiling languidly:
“I am tired.”
And he leaned his head against the rail.
V
ON THE SECOND of September the day was warm and still,
but overcast. In the early morning a light mist had hung over
the Volga, and after nine o’clock it had begun to spout with
rain. And there seemed no hope of the sky clearing. Over
their morning tea Ryabovsky told Olga Ivanovna that painting
was the most ungrateful and boring art, that he was not
an artist, that none but fools thought that he had any talent,
and all at once, for no rhyme or reason, he snatched up a
knife and with it scraped over his very best sketch. After his
tea he sat plunged in gloom at the window and gazed at the
Volga. And now the Volga was dingy, all of one even colour
without a gleam of light, cold-looking. Everything, everything
recalled the approach of dreary, gloomy autumn. And
it seemed as though nature had removed now from the Volga
the sumptuous green covers from the banks, the brilliant reflections
of the sunbeams, the transparent blue distance, and
all its smart gala array, and had packed it away in boxes till the
coming spring, and the crows were flying above the Volga
and crying tauntingly, “Bare, bare!”
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Ryabovsky heard their cawing, and thought he had already
gone off and lost his talent, that everything in this world was
relative, conditional, and stupid, and that he ought not to
have taken up with this woman.… In short, he was out of
humour and depressed.
Olga Ivanovna sat behind the screen on the bed, and, passing
her fingers through her lovely flaxen hair, pictured herself
first in the drawing-room, then in the bedroom, then in her
husband’s study; her imagination carried her to the theatre, to
the dress-maker, to her distinguished friends. Were they getting
something up now? Did they think of her? The season
had begun by now, and it would be time to think about her
“At Homes.” And Dymov? Dear Dymov! with what gentleness
and childlike pathos he kept begging her in his letters to
make haste and come home! Every month he sent her seventy-
five roubles, and when she wrote him that she had lent
the artists a hundred roubles, he sent that hundred too. What
a kind, generous-hearted man! The travelling wearied Olga
Ivanovna; she was bored; and she longed to get away from
the peasants, from the damp smell of the river, and to cast off
the feeling of physical uncleanliness of which she was conscious
all the time, living in the peasants’ huts and wandering
from village to village. If Ryabovsky had not given his word
to the artists that he would stay with them till the twentieth
of September, they might have gone away that very day. And
how nice that would have been!
“My God!” moaned Ryabovsky. “Will the sun ever come
out? I can’t go on with a sunny landscape without the sun.…”
“But you have a sketch with a cloudy sky,” said Olga
Ivanovna, coming from behind the screen. “Do you remember,
in the right foreground forest trees, on the left a herd of
cows and geese? You might finish it now.”
“Aie!” the artist scowled. “Finish it! Can you imagine I am
such a fool that I don’t know what I want to do?”
“How you have changed to me!” sighed Olga Ivanovna.
“Well, a good thing too!”
Olga Ivanovna’s face quivered; she moved away to the stove
and began to cry.
“Well, that’s the last straw — crying! Give over! I have a
thousand reasons for tears, but I am not crying.”
“A thousand reasons!” cried Olga Ivanovna. “The chief one
is that you are weary of me. Yes!” she said, and broke into
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sobs. “If one is to tell the truth, you are ashamed of our love.
You keep trying to prevent the artists from noticing it, though
it is impossible to conceal it, and they have known all about
it for ever so long.”
“Olga, one thing I beg you,” said the artist in an imploring
voice, laying his hand on his heart — “one thing; don’t worry
me! I want nothing else from you!”
“But swear that you love me still!”
“This is agony!” the artist hissed through his teeth, and he
jumped up. “It will end by my throwing myself in the Volga
or going out of my mind! Let me alone!”
“Come, kill me, kill me!” cried Olga Ivanovna. “Kill me!”
She sobbed again, and went behind the screen. There was a
swish of rain on the straw thatch of the hut. Ryabovsky
clutched his head and strode up and down the hut; then with
a resolute face, as though bent on proving something to somebody,
put on his cap, slung his gun over his shoulder, and
went out of the hut.
After he had gone, Olga Ivanovna lay a long time on the
bed, crying. At first she thought it would be a good thing to
poison herself, so that when Ryabovsky came back he would
find her dead; then her imagination carried her to her drawing-
room, to her husband’s study, and she imagined herself
sitting motionless beside Dymov and enjoying the physical
peace and cleanliness, and in the evening sitting in the theatre,
listening to Mazini. And a yearning for civilization, for the
noise and bustle of the town, for celebrated people sent a
pang to her heart. A peasant woman came into the hut and
began in a leisurely way lighting the stove to get the dinner.
There was a smell of charcoal fumes, and the air was filled
with bluish smoke. The artists came in, in muddy high boots
and with faces wet with rain, examined their sketches, and
comforted themselves by saying that the Volga had its charms
even in bad weather. On the wall the cheap clock went “tictic-
tic.”… The flies, feeling chilled, crowded round the ikon
in the corner, buzzing, and one could hear the cockroaches
scurrying about among the thick portfolios under the seats.…
Ryabovsky came home as the sun was setting. He flung his
cap on the table, and, without removing his muddy boots,
sank pale and exhausted on the bench and closed his eyes.
“I am tired…” he said, and twitched his eyebrows, trying to
raise his eyelids.
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To be nice to him and to show she was not cross, Olga
Ivanovna went up to him, gave him a silent kiss, and passed the
comb through his fair hair. She meant to comb it for him.
“What’s that?” he said, starting as though something cold
had touched him, and he opened his eyes. “What is it? Please
let me alone.”
He thrust her off, and moved away. And it seemed to her
that there was a look of aversion and annoyance on his face.
At that time the peasant woman cautiously carried him, in
both hands, a plate of cabbage-soup. And Olga Ivanovna saw
how she wetted her fat fingers in it. And the dirty peasant
woman, standing with her body thrust forward, and the cabbage-
soup which Ryabovsky began eating greedily, and the
hut, and their whole way of life, which she at first had so
loved for its simplicity and artistic disorder, seemed horrible
to her now. She suddenly felt insulted, and said coldly:
“We must part for a time, or else from boredom we shall
quarrel in earnest. I am sick of this; I am going today.”
“Going how? Astride on a broomstick?”
“Today is Thursday, so the steamer will be here at halfpast
nine.”
“Eh? Yes, yes.… Well, go, then…” Ryabovsky said softly,
wiping his mouth with a towel instead of a dinner napkin.
“You are dull and have nothing to do here, and one would
have to be a great egoist to try and keep you. Go home, and
we shall meet again after the twentieth.”
Olga Ivanovna packed in good spirits. Her cheeks positively
glowed with pleasure. Could it really be true, she asked herself,
that she would soon be writing in her drawing-room and
sleeping in her bedroom, and dining with a cloth on the table?
A weight was lifted from her heart, and she no longer felt
angry with the artist.
“My paints and brushes I will leave with you, Ryabovsky,”
she said. “You can bring what’s left.… Mind, now, don’t be
lazy here when I am gone; don’t mope, but work. You are
such a splendid fellow, Ryabovsky!”
At ten o’clock Ryabovsky gave her a farewell kiss, in order,
as she thought, to avoid kissing her on the steamer before the
artists, and went with her to the landing-stage. The steamer
soon came up and carried her away.
She arrived home two and a half days later. Breathless with
excitement, she went, without taking off her hat or water67
The Wife and other stories
proof, into the drawing-room and thence into the diningroom.
Dymov, with his waistcoat unbuttoned and no coat,
was sitting at the table sharpening a knife on a fork; before
him lay a grouse on a plate. As Olga Ivanovna went into the
flat she was convinced that it was essential to hide everything
from her husband, and that she would have the strength and
skill to do so; but now, when she saw his broad, mild, happy
smile, and shining, joyful eyes, she felt that to deceive this
man was as vile, as revolting, and as impossible and out of her
power as to bear false witness, to steal, or to kill, and in a flash
she resolved to tell him all that had happened. Letting him
kiss and embrace her, she sank down on her knees before him
and hid her face.
“What is it, what is it, little mother?” he asked tenderly.
“Were you homesick?”
She raised her face, red with shame, and gazed at him with
a guilty and imploring look, but fear and shame prevented
her from telling him the truth.
“Nothing,” she said; “it’s just nothing.…”
“Let us sit down,” he said, raising her and seating her at the table.
“That’s right, eat the grouse. You are starving, poor darling.”
She eagerly breathed in the atmosphere of home and ate the
grouse, while he watched her with tenderness and laughed
with delight.
VI
APPARENTLY, BY THE MIDDLE of the winter Dymov began to
suspect that he was being deceived. As though his conscience
was not clear, he could not look his wife straight in the face,
did not smile with delight when he met her, and to avoid
being left alone with her, he often brought in to dinner his
colleague, Korostelev, a little close-cropped man with a
wrinkled face, who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his reefer
jacket with embarrassment when he talked with Olga
Ivanovna, and then with his right hand nipped his left moustache.
At dinner the two doctors talked about the fact that a
displacement of the diaphragm was sometimes accompanied
by irregularities of the heart, or that a great number of neurotic
complaints were met with of late, or that Dymov had
the day before found a cancer of the lower abdomen while
dissecting a corpse with the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia.
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And it seemed as though they were talking of medicine to
give Olga Ivanovna a chance of being silent — that is, of not
lying. After dinner Korostelev sat down to the piano, while
Dymov sighed and said to him:
“Ech, brother — well, well! Play something melancholy.”
Hunching up his shoulders and stretching his fingers wide
apart, Korostelev played some chords and began singing in a
tenor voice, “Show me the abode where the Russian peasant
would not groan,” while Dymov sighed once more, propped
his head on his fist, and sank into thought.
Olga Ivanovna had been extremely imprudent in her conduct
of late. Every morning she woke up in a very bad humour
and with the thought that she no longer cared for Ryabovsky,
and that, thank God, it was all over now. But as she drank her
coffee she reflected that Ryabovsky had robbed her of her
husband, and that now she was left with neither her husband
nor Ryabovsky; then she remembered talks she had heard
among her acquaintances of a picture Ryabovsky was preparing
for the exhibition, something striking, a mixture of genre
and landscape, in the style of Polyenov, about which every
one who had been into his studio went into raptures; and
this, of course, she mused, he had created under her influence,
and altogether, thanks to her influence, he had greatly
changed for the better. Her influence was so beneficent and
essential that if she were to leave him he might perhaps go to
ruin. And she remembered, too, that the last time he had
come to see her in a great-coat with flecks on it and a new tie,
he had asked her languidly:
“Am I beautiful?”
And with his elegance, his long curls, and his blue eyes, he
really was very beautiful (or perhaps it only seemed so), and
he had been affectionate to her.
Considering and remembering many things Olga Ivanovna
dressed and in great agitation drove to Ryabovsky’s studio.
She found him in high spirits, and enchanted with his really
magnificent picture. He was dancing about and playing the
fool and answering serious questions with jokes. Olga Ivanovna
was jealous of the picture and hated it, but from politeness
she stood before the picture for five minutes in silence, and,
heaving a sigh, as though before a holy shrine, said softly:
“Yes, you have never painted anything like it before. Do
you know, it is positively awe-inspiring?”
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And then she began beseeching him to love her and not to
cast her off, to have pity on her in her misery and her wretchedness.
She shed tears, kissed his hands, insisted on his swearing
that he loved her, told him that without her good influence
he would go astray and be ruined. And, when she had
spoilt his good-humour, feeling herself humiliated, she would
drive off to her dressmaker or to an actress of her acquaintance
to try and get theatre tickets.
If she did not find him at his studio she left a letter in
which she swore that if he did not come to see her that day
she would poison herself. He was scared, came to see her,
and stayed to dinner. Regardless of her husband’s presence,
he would say rude things to her, and she would answer him
in the same way. Both felt they were a burden to each other,
that they were tyrants and enemies, and were wrathful, and
in their wrath did not notice that their behaviour was unseemly,
and that even Korostelev, with his close-cropped
head, saw it all. After dinner Ryabovsky made haste to say
good-bye and get away.
“Where are you off to?” Olga Ivanovna would ask him in
the hall, looking at him with hatred.
Scowling and screwing up his eyes, he mentioned some lady
of their acquaintance, and it was evident that he was laughing
at her jealousy and wanted to annoy her. She went to her
bedroom and lay down on her bed; from jealousy, anger, a
sense of humiliation and shame, she bit the pillow and began
sobbing aloud. Dymov left Korostelev in the drawing-room,
went into the bedroom, and with a desperate and embarrassed
face said softly:
“Don’t cry so loud, little mother; there’s no need. You must
be quiet about it. You must not let people see.… You know
what is done is done, and can’t be mended.”
Not knowing how to ease the burden of her jealousy, which
actually set her temples throbbing with pain, and thinking
still that things might be set right, she would wash, powder
her tear-stained face, and fly off to the lady mentioned.
Not finding Ryabovsky with her, she would drive off to a
second, then to a third. At first she was ashamed to go about
like this, but afterwards she got used to it, and it would happen
that in one evening she would make the round of all her
female acquaintances in search of Ryabovsky, and they all
understood it.
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One day she said to Ryabovsky of her husband:
“That man crushes me with his magnanimity.”
This phrase pleased her so much that when she met the
artists who knew of her affair with Ryabovsky she said every
time of her husband, with a vigorous movement of her arm:
“That man crushes me with his magnanimity.”
Their manner of life was the same as it had been the year
before. On Wednesdays they were “At Home”; an actor recited,
the artists sketched. The violoncellist played, a singer
sang, and invariably at half-past eleven the door leading to the
dining-room opened and Dymov, smiling, said:
“Come to supper, gentlemen.”
As before, Olga Ivanovna hunted celebrities, found
them, was not satisfied, and went in pursuit of fresh ones.
As before, she came back late every night; but now Dymov
was not, as last year, asleep, but sitting in his study at
work of some sort. He went to bed at three o’clock and
got up at eight.
One evening when she was getting ready to go to the theatre
and standing before the pier glass, Dymov came into her
bedroom, wearing his dress-coat and a white tie. He was smiling
gently and looked into his wife’s face joyfully, as in old
days; his face was radiant.
“I have just been defending my thesis,” he said, sitting down
and smoothing his knees.
“Defending?” asked Olga Ivanovna.
“Oh, oh!” he laughed, and he craned his neck to see his
wife’s face in the mirror, for she was still standing with her
back to him, doing up her hair. “Oh, oh,” he repeated, “do
you know it’s very possible they may offer me the Readership
in General Pathology? It seems like it.”
It was evident from his beaming, blissful face that if Olga
Ivanovna had shared with him his joy and triumph he would
have forgiven her everything, both the present and the future,
and would have forgotten everything, but she did not understand
what was meant by a “readership” or by “general pathology”;
besides, she was afraid of being late for the theatre, and
she said nothing.
He sat there another two minutes, and with a guilty smile
went away.
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VII
IT HAD BEEN a very troubled day.
Dymov had a very bad headache; he had no breakfast, and
did not go to the hospital, but spent the whole time lying on
his sofa in the study. Olga Ivanovna went as usual at midday
to see Ryabovsky, to show him her still-life sketch, and to ask
him why he had not been to see her the evening before. The
sketch seemed to her worthless, and she had painted it only
in order to have an additional reason for going to the artist.
She went in to him without ringing, and as she was taking
off her goloshes in the entry she heard a sound as of something
running softly in the studio, with a feminine rustle of
skirts; and as she hastened to peep in she caught a momentary
glimpse of a bit of brown petticoat, which vanished behind a
big picture draped, together with the easel, with black calico,
to the floor. There could be no doubt that a woman was
hiding there. How often Olga Ivanovna herself had taken refuge
behind that picture!
Ryabovsky, evidently much embarrassed, held out both
hands to her, as though surprised at her arrival, and said with
a forced smile:
“Aha! Very glad to see you! Anything nice to tell me?”
Olga Ivanovna’s eyes filled with tears. She felt ashamed and
bitter, and would not for a million roubles have consented to
speak in the presence of the outsider, the rival, the deceitful
woman who was standing now behind the picture, and probably
giggling malignantly.
“I have brought you a sketch,” she said timidly in a thin
voice, and her lips quivered. “_Nature morte._”
“Ah—ah!… A sketch?”
The artist took the sketch in his hands, and as he examined
it w alked, as it were mechanically, into the other room.
Olga Ivanovna followed him humbly.
“Nature morte… first-rate sort,” he muttered, falling into
rhyme. “Kurort… sport… port…”
From the studio came the sound of hurried footsteps and
the rustle of a skirt.
So she had gone. Olga Ivanovna wanted to scream aloud, to
hit the artist on the head with something heavy, but she could
see nothing through her tears, was crushed by her shame, and
felt herself, not Olga Ivanovna, not an artist, but a little insect.
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“I am tired…” said the artist languidly, looking at the sketch
and tossing his head as though struggling with drowsiness.
“It’s very nice, of course, but here a sketch today, a sketch last
year, another sketch in a month… I wonder you are not bored
with them. If I were you I should give up painting and work
seriously at music or something. You’re not an artist, you know,
but a musician. But you can’t think how tired I am! I’ll tell
them to bring us some tea, shall I?”
He went out of the room, and Olga Ivanovna heard him
give some order to his footman. To avoid farewells and explanations,
and above all to avoid bursting into sobs, she ran as
fast as she could, before Ryabovsky came back, to the entry,
put on her goloshes, and went out into the street; then she
breathed easily, and felt she was free for ever from Ryabovsky
and from painting and from the burden of shame which had
so crushed her in the studio. It was all over!
She drove to her dressmaker’s; then to see Barnay, who had
only arrived the day before; from Barnay to a music-shop,
and all the time she was thinking how she would write
Ryabovsky a cold, cruel letter full of personal dignity, and
how in the spring or the summer she would go with Dymov
to the Crimea, free herself finally from the past there, and
begin a new life.
On getting home late in the evening she sat down in the
drawing-room, without taking off her things, to begin the
letter. Ryabovsky had told her she was not an artist, and to
pay him out she wrote to him now that he painted the same
thing every year, and said exactly the same thing every day;
that he was at a standstill, and that nothing more would come
of him than had come already. She wanted to write, too, that
he owed a great deal to her good influence, and that if he was
going wrong it was only because her influence was paralysed
by various dubious persons like the one who had been hiding
behind the picture that day.
“Little mother!” Dymov called from the study, without
opening the door.
“What is it?”
“Don’t come in to me, but only come to the door — that’s
right.… The day before yesterday I must have caught diphtheria
at the hospital, and now… I am ill. Make haste and
send for Korostelev.”
Olga Ivanovna always called her husband by his surname, as
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The Wife and other stories
she did all the men of her acquaintance; she disliked his Christian
name, Osip, because it reminded her of the Osip in Gogol
and the silly pun on his name. But now she cried:
“Osip, it cannot be!”
“Send for him; I feel ill,” Dymov said behind the door, and
she could hear him go back to the sofa and lie down. “Send!”
she heard his voice faintly.
“Good Heavens!” thought Olga Ivanovna, turning chill with
horror. “Why, it’s dangerous!”
For no reason she took the candle and went into the bedroom,
and there, reflecting what she must do, glanced casually
at herself in the pier glass. With her pale, frightened face,
in a jacket with sleeves high on the shoulders, with yellow
ruches on her bosom, and with stripes running in unusual
directions on her skirt, she seemed to herself horrible and
disgusting. She suddenly felt poignantly sorry for Dymov,
for his boundless love for her, for his young life, and even for
the desolate little bed in which he had not slept for so long;
and she remembered his habitual, gentle, submissive smile.
She wept bitterly, and wrote an imploring letter to Korostelev.
It was two o’clock in the night.
VIII
WHEN TOWARDS EIGHT O’CLOCK in the morning Olga Ivanovna,
her head heavy from want of sleep and her hair unbrushed,
came out of her bedroom, looking unattractive and with a
guilty expression on her face, a gentleman with a black beard,
apparently the doctor, passed by her into the entry. There was
a smell of drugs. Korostelev was standing near the study door,
twisting his left moustache with his right hand.
“Excuse me, I can’t let you go in,” he said surlily to Olga
Ivanovna; “it’s catching. Besides, it’s no use, really; he is delirious,
anyway.”
“Has he really got diphtheria?” Olga Ivanovna asked in a
whisper.
“People who wantonly risk infection ought to be hauled
up and punished for it,” muttered Korostelev, not answering
Olga Ivanovna’s question. “Do you know why he caught it?
On Tuesday he was sucking up the mucus through a pipette
from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was stupid.…
Just from folly.…”
“Is it dangerous, very?” asked Olga Ivanovna.
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Anton Chekhov
“Yes; they say it is the malignant form. We ought to send
for Shrek really.”
A little red-haired man with a long nose and a Jewish accent
arrived; then a tall, stooping, shaggy individual, who looked
like a head deacon; then a stout young man with a red face
and spectacles. These were doctors who came to watch by
turns beside their colleague. Korostelev did not go home when
his turn was over, but remained and wandered about the rooms
like an uneasy spirit. The maid kept getting tea for the various
doctors, and was constantly running to the chemist, and
there was no one to do the rooms. There was a dismal stillness
in the flat.
Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God
was punishing her for having deceived her husband. That silent,
unrepining, uncomprehended creature, robbed by his
mildness of all personality and will, weak from excessive kindness,
had been suffering in obscurity somewhere on his sofa,
and had not complained. And if he were to complain even in
delirium, the doctors watching by his bedside would learn
that diphtheria was not the only cause of his sufferings. They
would ask Korostelev. He knew all about it, and it was not
for nothing that he looked at his friend’s wife with eyes that
seemed to say that she was the real chief criminal and diphtheria
was only her accomplice. She did not think now of the
moonlight evening on the Volga, nor the words of love, nor
their poetical life in the peasant’s hut. She thought only that
from an idle whim, from self-indulgence, she had sullied herself
all over from head to foot in something filthy, sticky,
which one could never wash off.…
“Oh, how fearfully false I’ve been!” she thought, recalling the
troubled passion she had known with Ryabovsky. “Curse it all!…”
At four o’clock she dined with Korostelev. He did nothing
but scowl and drink red wine, and did not eat a morsel. She
ate nothing, either. At one minute she was praying inwardly
and vowing to God that if Dymov recovered she would love
him again and be a faithful wife to him. Then, forgetting
herself for a minute, she would look at Korostelev, and think:
“Surely it must be dull to be a humble, obscure person, not
remarkable in any way, especially with such a wrinkled face
and bad manners!”
Then it seemed to her that God would strike her dead that
minute for not having once been in her husband’s study, for
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fear of infection. And altogether she had a dull, despondent
feeling and a conviction that her life was spoilt, and that there
was no setting it right anyhow.…
After dinner darkness came on. When Olga Ivanovna went
into the drawing-room Korostelev was asleep on the sofa,
with a gold-embroidered silk cushion under his head.
“Khee-poo-ah,” he snored — “khee-poo-ah.”
And the doctors as they came to sit up and went away again
did not notice this disorder. The fact that a strange man was
asleep and snoring in the drawing-room, and the sketches on
the walls and the exquisite decoration of the room, and the
fact that the lady of the house was dishevelled and untidy —
all that aroused not the slightest interest now. One of the
doctors chanced to laugh at something, and the laugh had a
strange and timid sound that made one’s heart ac he.
When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-room next
time, Korostelev was not asleep, but sitting up and smoking.
“He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity,” he said in a low
voice, “and the heart is not working properly now. Things are
in a bad way, really.”
“But you will send for Shrek?” said Olga Ivanovna.
“He has been already. It was he noticed that the diphtheria had
passed into the nose. What’s the use of Shrek! Shrek’s no use at
all, really. He is Shrek, I am Korostelev, and nothing more.”
The time dragged on fearfully slowly. Olga Ivanovna lay
down in her clothes on her bed, that had not been made all
day, and sank into a doze. She dreamed that the whole flat
was filled up from floor to ceiling with a huge piece of iron,
and that if they could only get the iron out they would all be
light-hearted and happy. Waking, she realized that it was not
the iron but Dymov’s illness that was weighing on her.
“Nature morte, port…” she thought, sinking into forgetfulness
again. “Sport… Kurort… and what of Shrek? Shrek. . .
trek… wreck.… And where are my friends now? Do they know
that we are in trouble? Lord, save… spare! Shrek. . . trek…”
And again the iron was there.… The time dragged on slowly,
though the clock on the lower storey struck frequently. And bells
were continually ringing as the doctors arrived.… The housemaid
came in with an empty glass on a tray, and asked, “Shall I
make the bed, madam?” and getting no answer, went away.
The clock below struck the hour. She dreamed of the rain
on the Volga; and again some one came into her bedroom,
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Anton Chekhov
she thought a stranger. Olga Ivanovna jumped up, and recognized
Korostelev.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“About three.”
“Well, what is it?”
“What, indeed!… I’ve come to tell you he is passing.…”
He gave a sob, sat down on the bed beside her, and wiped
away the tears with his sleeve. She could not grasp it at once,
but turned cold all over and began slowly crossing herself.
“He is passing,” he repeated in a shrill voice, and again he
gave a sob. “He is dying because he sacrificed himself. What a
loss for science!” he said bitterly. “Compare him with all of
us. He was a great man, an extraordinary man! What gifts!
What hopes we all had of him!” Korostelev went on, wringing
his hands: “Merciful God, he was a man of science; we
shall never look on his like again. Osip Dymov, what have
you done — aie, aie, my God!”
Korostelev covered his face with both hands in despair, and
shook his head.
“And his moral force,” he went on, seeming to grow more
and more exasperated against some one. “Not a man, but a
pure, good, loving soul, and clean as crystal. He served science
and died for science. And he worked like an ox night and
day — no one spared him — and with his youth and his
learning he had to take a private practice and work at translations
at night to pay for these… vile rags!”
Korostelev looked with hatred at Olga Ivanovna, snatched
at the sheet with both hands and angrily tore it, as though it
were to blame.
“He did not spare himself, and others did not spare him.
Oh, what’s the use of talking!”
“Yes, he was a rare man,” said a bass voice in the drawingroom.
Olga Ivanovna remembered her whole life with him from
the beginning to the end, with all its details, and suddenly she
understood that he really was an extraordinary, rare, and, compared
with every one else she knew, a great man. And remembering
how her father, now dead, and all the other doctors
had behaved to him, she realized that they really had seen in
him a future celebrity. The walls, the ceiling, the lamp, and
the carpet on the floor, seemed to be winking at her sarcastically,
as though they would say, “You were blind! you were
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blind!” With a wail she flung herself out of the bedroom,
dashed by some unknown man in the drawing-room, and
ran into her husband’s study. He was lying motionless on the
sofa, covered to the waist with a quilt. His face was fearfully
thin and sunken, and was of a greyish-yellow colour such as is
never seen in the living; only from the forehead, from the
black eyebrows and from the familiar smile, could he be recognized
as Dymov. Olga Ivanovna hurriedly felt his chest, his
forehead, and his hands. The chest was still warm, but the
forehead and hands were unpleasantly cold, and the half-open
eyes looked, not at Olga Ivanovna, but at the quilt.
“Dymov!” she called aloud, “Dymov!” She wanted to explain
to him that it had been a mistake, that all was not lost,
that life might still be beautiful and happy, that he was an extraordinary,
rare, great man, and that she would all her life worship
him and bow down in homage and holy awe before him.…
“Dymov!” she called him, patting him on the shoulder, unable
to believe that he would never wake again. “Dymov!
Dymov!”
In the drawing-room Korostelev was saying to the housemaid:
“Why keep asking? Go to the church beadle and enquire
where they live. They’ll wash the body and lay it out, and do
everything that is necessary.”
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Anton Chekhov
A DREARY STORY
From the Notebook of an Old Man
I
THERE IS IN RUSSIA AN emeritus Professor Nikolay
Stepanovitch, a chevalier and privy councillor; he has so many
Russian and foreign decorations that when he has occasion to
put them on the students nickname him “The Ikonstand.”
His acquaintances are of the most aristocratic; for the last
twenty-five or thirty years, at any rate, there has not been one
single distinguished man of learning in Russia with whom he
has not been intimately acquainted. There is no one for him
to make friends with nowadays; but if we turn to the past,
the long list of his famous friends winds up with such names
as Pirogov, Kavelin, and the poet Nekrasov, all of whom bestowed
upon him a warm and sincere affection. He is a member
of all the Russian and of three foreign universities. And so
on, and so on. All that and a great deal more that might be
said makes up what is called my “name.”
That is my name as known to the public. In Russia it is
known to every educated man, and abroad it is mentioned in
the lecture-room with the addition “honoured and distinguished.”
It is one of those fortunate names to abuse which
or to take which in vain, in public or in print, is considered a
sign of bad taste. And that is as it should be. You see, my
name is closely associated with the conception of a highly
distinguished man of great gifts and unquestionable usefulness.
I have the industry and power of endurance of a camel,
and that is important, and I have talent, which is even more
important. Moreover, while I am on this subject, I am a welleducated,
modest, and honest fellow. I have never poked my
nose into literature or politics; I have never sought popularity
in polemics with the ignorant; I have never made speeches
either at public dinners or at the funerals of my friends.… In
fact, there is no slur on my learned name, and there is no
complaint one can make against it. It is fortunate.
The bearer of that name, that is I, see myself as a man of
sixty-two, with a bald head, with false teeth, and with an
incurable tic douloureux. I am myself as dingy and unsightly
as my name is brilliant and splendid. My head and my hands
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tremble with weakness; my neck, as Turgenev says of one of
his heroines, is like the handle of a double bass; my chest is
hollow; my shoulders narrow; when I talk or lecture, my
mouth turns down at one corner; when I smile, my whole
face is covered with aged-looking, deathly wrinkles. There is
nothing impressive about my pitiful figure; only, perhaps,
when I have an attack of tic douloureux my face wears a peculiar
expression, the sight of which must have roused in every
one the grim and impressive thought, “Evidently that man
will soon die.”
I still, as in the past, lecture fairly well; I can still, as in the
past, hold the attention of my listeners for a couple of hours.
My fervour, the literary skill of my exposition, and my
humour, almost efface the defects of my voice, though it is
harsh, dry, and monotonous as a praying beggar’s. I write
poorly. That bit of my brain which presides over the faculty
of authorship refuses to work. My memory has grown weak;
there is a lack of sequence in my ideas, and when I put them
on paper it always seems to me that I have lost the instinct for
their organic connection; my construction is monotonous;
my language is poor and timid. Often I write what I do not
mean; I have forgotten the beginning when I am writing the
end. Often I forget ordinary words, and I always have to waste
a great deal of energy in avoiding superfluous phrases and
unnecessary parentheses in my letters, both unmistakable
proofs of a decline in mental activity. And it is noteworthy
that the simpler the letter the more painful the effort to write
it. At a scientific article I feel far more intelligent and at ease
than at a letter of congratulation or a minute of proceedings.
Another point: I find it easier to write German or English
than to write Russian.
As regards my present manner of life, I must give a foremost
place to the insomnia from which I have suffered of
late. If I were asked what constituted the chief and fundamental
feature of my existence now, I should answer, Insomnia.
As in the past, from habit I undress and go to bed exactly
at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but before two o’clock I
wake up and feel as though I had not slept at all. Sometimes
I get out of bed and light a lamp. For an hour or two I walk
up and down the room looking at the familiar photographs
and pictures. When I am weary of walking about, I sit down
to my table. I sit motionless, thinking of nothing, conscious
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of no inclination; if a book is lying before me, I mechanically
move it closer and read it without any interest — in that way
not long ago I mechanically read through in one night a whole
novel, with the strange title “The Song the Lark was Singing”;
or to occupy my attention I force myself to count to a
thousand; or I imagine the face of one of my colleagues and
begin trying to remember in what year and under what circumstances
he entered the service. I like listening to sounds.
Two rooms away from me my daughter Liza says something
rapidly in her sleep, or my wife crosses the drawing-room
with a candle and invariably drops the matchbox; or a warped
cupboard creaks; or the burner of the lamp suddenly begins
to hum — and all these sounds, for some reason, excite me.
To lie awake at night means to be at every moment conscious
of being abnormal, and so I look forward with impatience
to the morning and the day when I have a right to be
awake. Many wearisome hours pass before the cock crows in
the yard. He is my first bringer of good tidings. As soon as he
crows I know that within an hour the porter will wake up
below, and, coughing angrily, will go upstairs to fetch something.
And then a pale light will begin gradually glimmering
at the windows, voices will sound in the street.…
The day begins for me with the entrance of my wife. She
comes in to me in her petticoat, before she has done her hair,
but after she has washed, smelling of flower-scented eau-de-
Cologne, looking as though she had come in by chance. Every
time she says exactly the same thing: “Excuse me, I have
just come in for a minute.… Have you had a bad night again?”
Then she puts out the lamp, sits down near the table, and
begins talking. I am no prophet, but I know what she will
talk about. Every morning it is exactly the same thing. Usually,
after anxious inquiries concerning my health, she suddenly
mentions our son who is an officer serving at Warsaw.
After the twentieth of each month we send him fifty roubles,
and that serves as the chief topic of our conversation.
“Of course it is difficult for us,” my wife would sigh, “but
until he is completely on his own feet it is our duty to help
him. The boy is among strangers, his pay is small.… However,
if you like, next month we won’t send him fifty, but
forty. What do you think?”
Daily experience might have taught my wife that constantly
talking of our expenses does not reduce them, but my wife
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refuses to learn by experience, and regularly every morning
discusses our officer son, and tells me that bread, thank God,
is cheaper, while sugar is a halfpenny dearer — with a tone
and an air as though she were communicating interesting news.
I listen, mechanically assent, and probably because I have
had a bad night, strange and inappropriate thoughts intrude
themselves upon me. I gaze at my wife and wonder like a
child. I ask myself in perplexity, is it possible that this old,
very stout, ungainly woman, with her dull expression of petty
anxiety and alarm about daily bread, with eyes dimmed by
continual brooding over debts and money difficulties, who
can talk of nothing but expenses and who smiles at nothing
but things getting cheaper — is it possible that this woman is
no other than the slender Varya whom I fell in love with so
passionately for her fine, clear intelligence, for her pure soul,
her beauty, and, as Othello his Desdemona, for her “sympathy”
for my studies? Could that woman be no other than the
Varya who had once borne me a son?
I look with strained attention into the face of this flabby,
spiritless, clumsy old woman, seeking in her my Varya, but
of her past self nothing is left but her anxiety over my health
and her manner of calling my salary “our salary,” and my cap
“our cap.” It is painful for me to look at her, and, to give her
what little comfort I can, I let her say what she likes, and say
nothing even when she passes unjust criticisms on other people
or pitches into me for not having a private practice or not
publishing text-books.
Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife
suddenly remembers with dismay that I have not had my tea.
“What am I thinking about, sitting here?” she says, getting
up. “The samovar has been on the table ever so long, and here
I stay gossiping. My goodness! how forgetful I am growing!”
She goes out quickly, and stops in the doorway to say:
“We owe Yegor five months’ wages. Did you know it? You
mustn’t let the servants’ wages run on; how many times I
have said it! It’s much easier to pay ten roubles a month than
fifty roubles every five months!”
As she goes out, she stops to say:
“The person I am sorriest for is our Liza. The girl studies at
the Conservatoire, always mixes with people of good position,
and goodness knows how she is dressed. Her fur coat is
in such a state she is ashamed to show herself in the street. If
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she were somebody else’s daughter it wouldn’t matter, but of
course every one knows that her father is a distinguished professor,
a privy councillor.”
And having reproached me with my rank and reputation,
she goes away at last. That is how my day begins. It does not
improve as it goes on.
As I am drinking my tea, my Liza comes in wearing her fur
coat and her cap, with her music in her hand, already quite
ready to go to the Conservatoire. She is two-and-twenty. She
looks younger, is pretty, and rather like my wife in her young
days. She kisses me tenderly on my forehead and on my hand,
and says:
“Good-morning, papa; are you quite well?”
As a child she was very fond of ice-cream, and I used often
to take her to a confectioner’s. Ice-cream was for her the type
of everything delightful. If she wanted to praise me she would
say: “You are as nice as cream, papa.” We used to call one of
her little fingers “pistachio ice,” the next, “cream ice,” the third
“raspberry,” and so on. Usually when she came in to say goodmorning
to me I used to sit her on my knee, kiss her little
fingers, and say:
“Creamy ice… pistachio… lemon.…”
And now, from old habit, I kiss Liza’s fingers and mutter:
“Pistachio… cream… lemon. . .” but the effect is utterly different.
I am cold as ice and I am ashamed. When my daughter
comes in to me and touches my forehead with her lips I start
as though a bee had stung me on the head, give a forced smile,
and turn my face away. Ever since I have been suffering from
sleeplessness, a question sticks in my brain like a nail. My
daughter often sees me, an old man and a distinguished man,
blush painfully at being in debt to my footman; she sees how
often anxiety over petty debts forces me to lay aside my work
and to walk u p and down the room for hours together, thinking;
but why is it she never comes to me in secret to whisper
in my ear: “Father, here is my watch, here are my bracelets,
my earrings, my dresses.… Pawn them all; you want
money…”? How is it that, seeing how her mother and I are
placed in a false position and do our utmost to hide our poverty
from people, she does not give up her expensive pleasure
of music lessons? I would not accept her watch nor her bracelets,
nor the sacrifice of her lessons — God forbid! That isn’t
what I want.
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I think at the same time of my son, the officer at Warsaw.
He is a clever, honest, and sober fellow. But that is not enough
for me. I think if I had an old father, and if I knew there were
moments when he was put to shame by his poverty, I should
give up my officer’s commission to somebody else, and should
go out to earn my living as a workman. Such thoughts about
my children poison me. What is the use of them? It is only a
narrow-minded or embittered man who can harbour evil
thoughts about ordinary people because they are not heroes.
But enough of that!
At a quarter to ten I have to go and give a lecture to my dear
boys. I dress and walk along the road which I have known for
thirty years, and which has its history for me. Here is the big
grey house with the chemist’s shop; at this point there used to
stand a little house, and in it was a beershop; in that beershop
I thought out my thesis and wrote my first love-letter to Varya.
I wrote it in pencil, on a page headed “Historia morbi.” Here
there is a grocer’s shop; at one time it was kept by a little Jew,
who sold me cigarettes on credit; then by a fat peasant woman,
who liked the students because “every one of them has a
mother”; now there is a red-haired shopkeeper sitting in it, a
very stolid man who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And
here are the gloomy gates of the University, which have long
needed doing up; I see the bored porter in his sheep-skin, the
broom, the drifts of snow.… On a boy coming fresh from
the provinces and imagining that the temple of science must
really be a temple, such gates cannot make a healthy impression.
Altogether the dilapidated condition of the University
buildings, the gloominess of the corridors, the griminess of
the walls, the lack of light, the dejected aspect of the steps,
the hat-stands and the benches, take a prominent position
among predisposing causes in the history of Russian pessimism.…
Here is our garden… I fancy it has grown neither
better nor worse since I was a student. I don’t like it. It would
be far more sensible if there were tall pines and fine oaks growing
here instead of sickly-looking lime-trees, yellow acacias,
and skimpy pollard lilacs. The student whose state of mind is
in the majority of cases created by his surroundings, ought in
the place where he is studying to see facing him at every turn
nothing but what is lofty, strong and elegant.… God preserve
him from gaunt trees, broken windows, grey walls, and
doors covered with torn American leather!
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When I go to my own entrance the door is flung wide open,
and I am met by my colleague, contemporary, and namesake,
the porter Nikolay. As he lets me in he clears his throat and says:
“A frost, your Excellency!”
Or, if my great-coat is wet:
“Rain, your Excellency!”
Then he runs on ahead of me and opens all the doors on my
way. In my study he carefully takes off my fur coat, and while
doing so manages to tell me some bit of University news.
Thanks to the close intimacy existing between all the University
porters and beadles, he knows everything that goes on in
the four faculties, in the office, in the rector’s private room, in
the library. What does he not know? When in an evil day a
rector or dean, for instance, retires, I hear him in conversation
with the young porters mention the candidates for the post,
explain that such a one would not be confirmed by the minister,
that another would himself refuse to accept it, then drop
into fantastic details concerning mysterious papers received in
the office, secret conversations alleged to have taken place between
the minister and the trustee, and so on. With the exception
of these details, he almost always turns out to be right. His
estimates of the candidates, though original, are very correct,
too. If one wants to know in what year some one read his
thesis, entered the service, retired, or died, then summon to
your assistance the vast memory of that soldier, and he will not
only tell you the year, the month and the day, but will furnish
you also with the details that accompanied this or that event.
Only one who loves can remember like that.
He is the guardian of the University traditions. From the
porters who were his predecessors he has inherited many legends
of University life, has added to that wealth much of his
own gained during his time of service, and if you care to hear
he will tell you many long and intimate stories. He can tell
one about extraordinary sages who knew _everything_, about
remarkable students who did not sleep for weeks, about numerous
martyrs and victims of science; with him good triumphs
over evil, the weak always vanquishes the strong, the
wise man the fool, the humble the proud, the young the old.
There is no need to take all these fables and legends for sterling
coin; but filter them, and you will have left what is wanted:
our fine traditions and the names of real heroes, recognized as
such by all.
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The Wife and other stories
In our society the knowledge of the learned world consists
of anecdotes of the extraordinary absentmindedness of certain
old professors, and two or three witticisms variously ascribed
to Gruber, to me, and to Babukin. For the educated
public that is not much. If it loved science, learned men, and
students, as Nikolay does, its literature would long ago have
contained whole epics, records of sayings and doings such as,
unfortunately, it cannot boast of now.
After telling me a piece of news, Nikolay assumes a severe
expression, and conversation about business begins. If any
outsider could at such times overhear Nikolay’s free use of
our terminology, he might perhaps imagine that he was a
learned man disguised as a soldier. And, by the way, the
rumours of the erudition of the University porters are greatly
exaggerated. It is true that Nikolay knows more than a hundred
Latin words, knows how to put the skeleton together,
sometimes prepares the apparatus and amuses the students by
some long, learned quotation, but the by no means complicated
theory of the circulation of the blood, for instance, is as
much a mystery to him now as it was twenty years ago.
At the table in my study, bending low over some book or
preparation, sits Pyotr Ignatyevitch, my demonstrator, a modest
and industrious but by no means clever man of five-andthirty,
already bald and corpulent; he works from morning to
night, reads a lot, remembers well everything he has read —
and in that way he is not a man, but pure gold; in all else he is
a carthorse or, in other words, a learned dullard. The carthorse
characteristics that show his lack of talent are these: his outlook
is narrow and sharply limited by his specialty; outside
his special branch he is simple as a child.
“Fancy! what a misfortune! They say Skobelev is dead.”
Nikolay crosses himself, but Pyotr Ignatyevitch turns to
me and asks:
“What Skobelev is that?”
Another time — somewhat earlier — I told him that Professor
Perov was dead. Good Pyotr Ignatyevitch asked:
“What did he lecture on?”
I believe if Patti had sung in his very ear, if a horde of Chinese
had invaded Russia, if there had been an earthquake, he
would not have stirred a limb, but screwing up his eye, would
have gone on calmly looking through his microscope. What
is he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him, in fact? I would give a
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good deal to see how this dry stick sleeps with his wife at
night.
Another characteristic is his fanatical faith in the infallibility
of science, and, above all, of everything written by the
Germans. He believes in himself, in his preparations; knows
the object of life, and knows nothing of the doubts and disappointments
that turn the hair o f talent grey. He has a slavish
reverence for authorities and a complete lack of any desire
for independent thought. To change his convictions is difficult,
to argue with him impossible. How is one to argue with
a man who is firmly persuaded that medicine is the finest of
sciences, that doctors are the best of men, and that the traditions
of the medical profession are superior to those of any
other? Of the evil past of medicine only one tradition has
been preserved — the white tie still worn by doctors; for a
learned — in fact, for any educated man the only traditions
that can exist are those of the University as a whole, with no
distinction between medicine, law, etc. But it would be hard
for Pyotr Ignatyevitch to accept these facts, and he is ready to
argue with you till the day of judgment.
I have a clear picture in my mind of his future. In the course
of his life he will prepare many hundreds of chemicals of exceptional
purity; he will write a number of dry and very accurate
memoranda, will make some dozen conscientious translations,
but he won’t do anything striking. To do that one
must have imagination, inventiveness, the gift of insight, and
Pyotr Ignatyevitch has nothing of the kind. In short, he is not
a master in science, but a journeyman.
Pyotr Ignatyevitch, Nikolay, and I, talk in subdued tones.
We are not quite ourselves. There is always a peculiar feeling
when one hears through the doors a murmur as of the sea
from the lecture-theatre. In the course of thirty years I have
not grown accustomed to this feeling, and I experience it every
morning. I nervously button up my coat, ask Nikolay
unnecessary questions, lose my temper.… It is just as though
I were frightened; it is not timidity, though, but something
different which I can neither describe nor find a name for.
Quite unnecessarily, I look at my watch and say: “Well, it’s
time to go in.”
And we march into the room in the following order: foremost
goes Nikolay, with the chemicals and apparatus or with
a chart; after him I come; and then the carthorse follows hum87
The Wife and other stories
bly, with hanging head; or, when necessary, a dead body is
carried in first on a stretcher, followed by Nikolay, and so on.
On my entrance the students all stand up, then they sit down,
and the sound as of the sea is suddenly hushed. Stillness reigns.
I know what I am going to lecture about, but I don’t know
how I am going to lecture, where I am going to begin or with
what I am going to end. I haven’t a single sentence ready in
my head. But I have only to look round the lecture-hall (it is
built in the form of an amphitheatre) and utter the stereotyped
phrase, “Last lecture we stopped at…” when sentences
spring up from my soul in a long string, and I am carried
away by my own eloquence. I speak with irresistible rapidity
and passion, and it seems as though there were no force which
could check the flow of my words. To lecture well — that is,
with profit to the listeners and without boring them — one
must have, besides talent, experience and a special knack; one
must possess a clear conception of one’s own powers, of the
audience to which one is lecturing, and of the subject of one’s
lecture. Moreover, one must be a man who knows what he is
doing; one must keep a sharp lookout, and not for one second
lose sight of what lies before one.
A good conductor, interpreting the thought of the composer,
does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his
baton, watches the singer, makes a motion sideways, first to
the drum then to the wind-instruments, and so on. I do just
the same when I lecture. Before me a hundred and fifty faces,
all unlike one another; three hundred eyes all looking straight
into my face. My object is to dominate this many-headed
monster. If every moment as I lecture I have a clear vision of
the degree of its attention and its power of comprehension, it
is in my power. The other foe I have to overcome is in myself.
It is the infinite variety of forms, phenomena, laws, and
the multitude of ideas of my own and other people’s conditioned
by them. Every moment I must have the skill to snatch
out of that vast mass of material what is most important and
necessary, and, as rapidly as my words flow, clothe my thought
in a form in which it can be grasped by the monster’s intelligence,
and may arouse its attention, and at the same time one
must keep a sharp lookout that one’s thoughts are conveyed,
not just as they come, but in a certain order, essential for the
correct composition of the picture I wish to sketch. Further,
I endeavour to make my diction literary, my definitions brief
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and precise, my wording, as far as possible, simple and eloquent.
Every minute I have to pull myself up and remember
that I have only an hour and forty minutes at my disposal. In
short, one has one’s work cut out. At one and the same minute
one has to play the part of savant and teacher and orator, and
it’s a bad thing if the orator gets the upper hand of the savant
or of the teacher in one, or vice versa.
You lecture for a quarter of an hour, for half an hour, when
you notice that the students are beginning to look at the ceiling,
at Pyotr Ignatyevitch; one is feeling for his handkerchief,
another shifts in his seat, another smiles at his thoughts.…
That means that their attention is flagging. Something must
be done. Taking advantage of the first opportunity, I make
some pun. A broad grin comes on to a hundred and fifty
faces, the eyes shine brightly, the sound of the sea is audible
for a brief moment.… I laugh too. Their attention is refreshed,
and I can go on.
No kind of sport, no kind of game or diversion, has ever
given me such enjoyment as lecturing. Only at lectures have I
been able to abandon myself entirely to passion, and have
understood that inspiration is not an invention of the poets,
but exists in real life, and I imagine Hercules after the most
piquant of his exploits felt just such voluptuous exhaustion
as I experience after every lecture.
That was in old times. Now at lectures I feel nothing but
torture. Before half an hour is over I am conscious of an overwhelming
weakness in my legs and my shoulders. I sit down
in my chair, but I am not accustomed to lecture sitting down;
a minute later I get up and go on standing, then sit down
again. There is a dryness in my mouth, my voice grows husky,
my head begins to go round.… To conceal my condition
from my audience I continually drink water, cough, often
blow my nose as though I were hindered by a cold, make
puns inappropriately, and in the end break off earlier than I
ought to. But above all I am ashamed.
My conscience and my intelligence tell me that the very
best thing I could do now would be to deliver a farewell lecture
to the boys, to say my last word to them, to bless them,
and give up my post to a man younger and stronger than me.
But, God, be my judge, I have not manly courage enough to
act according to my conscience.
Unfortunately, I am not a philosopher and not a theolo89
The Wife and other stories
gian. I know perfectly well that I cannot live more than another
six months; it might be supposed that I ought now to
be chiefly concerned with the question of the shadowy life
beyond the grave, and the visions that will visit my slumbers
in the tomb. But for some reason my soul refuses to recognize
these questions, though my mind is fully alive to their
importance. Just as twenty, thirty years ago, so now, on the
threshold of death, I am interested in nothing but science. As
I yield up my last breath I shall still believe that science is the
most important, the most splendid, the most essential thing
in the life of man; that it always has been and will be the
highest manifestation of love, and that only by means of it
will man conquer himself and nature. This faith is perhaps
naive and may rest on false assumptions, but it is not my
fault that I believe that and nothing else; I cannot overcome
in myself this belief.
But that is not the point. I only ask people to be indulgent
to my weakness, and to realize that to tear from the lecturetheatre
and his pupils a man who is more interested in the
history of the development of the bone medulla than in the
final object of creation would be equivalent to taking him
and nailing him up in his coffin without waiting for him to
be dead.
Sleeplessness and the consequent strain of combating increasing
weakness leads to something strange in me. In the
middle of my lecture tears suddenly rise in my throat, my
eyes begin to smart, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to
stretch out my hands before me and break into loud lamentation.
I want to cry out in a loud voice that I, a famous man,
have been sentenced by fate to the death penalty, that within
some six months another man will be in control here in the
lecture-theatre. I want to shriek that I am poisoned; new ideas
such as I have not known before have poisoned the last days
of my life, and are still stinging my brain like mosquitoes.
And at that moment my position seems to me so awful that
I want all my listeners to be horrified, to leap up from their
seats and to rush in panic terror, with desperate screams, to
the exit.
It is not easy to get through such moments.
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II
AFTER MY LECTURE I sit at home and work. I read journals and
monographs, or prepare my next lecture; sometimes I write
something. I work with interruptions, as I have from time to
time to see visitors.
There is a ring at the bell. It is a colleague come to discuss
some business matter with me. He comes in to me with his hat
and his stick, and, holding out both these objects to me, says:
“Only for a minute! Only for a minute! Sit down, _collega_!
Only a couple of words.”
To begin with, we both try to show each other that we are
extraordinarily polite and highly delighted to see each other. I
make him sit down in an easy-chair, and he makes me sit
down; as we do so, we cautiously pat each other on the back,
touch each other’s buttons, and it looks as though we were
feeling each other and afraid of scorching our fingers. Both of
us laugh, though we say nothing amusing. When we are seated
we bow our heads towards each other and begin talking in
subdued voices. However affectionately disposed we may be
to one another, we cannot help adorning our conversation
with all sorts of Chinese mannerisms, such as “As you so justly
observed,” or “I have already had the honour to inform you”;
we cannot help laughing if one of us makes a joke, however
unsuccessfully. When we have finished with business my colleague
gets up impulsively and, waving his hat in the direction
of my work, begins to say good-bye. Again we paw one
another and laugh. I see him into the hall; when I assist my
colleague to put on his coat, while he does all he can to decline
this high honour. Then when Yegor opens the door my
colleague declares that I shall catch cold, while I make a show
of being ready to go even into the street with him. And when
at last I go back into my study my face still goes on smiling,
I suppose from inertia.
A little later another ring at the bell. Somebody comes into
the hall, and is a long time coughing and taking off his things.
Yegor announces a student. I tell him to ask him in. A minute
later a young man of agreeable appearance comes in. For the
last year he and I have been on strained relations; he answers
me disgracefully at the examinations, and I mark him one.
Every year I have some seven such hopefuls whom, to express
it in the students’ slang, I “chivy” or “floor.” Those of them
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who fail in their examination through incapacity or illness
usually bear their cross patiently and do not haggle with
me; those who come to the house and haggle with me are
always youths of sanguine temperament, broad natures,
whose failure at examinations spoils their appetites and hinders
them from visiting the opera with their usual regularity.
I let the first class off easily, but the second I chivy through
a whole year.
“Sit down,” I say to my visitor; “what have you to tell me?”
“Excuse me, professor, for troubling you,” he begins, hesitating,
and not looking me in the face. “I would not have
ventured to trouble you if it had not been… I have been up
for your examination five times, and have been ploughed.…
I beg you, be so good as to mark me for a pass, because…”
The argument which all the sluggards bring forward on their
own behalf is always the same; they have passed well in all
their subjects and have only come to grief in mine, and that is
the more surprising because they have always been particularly
interested in my subject and knew it so well; their failure
has always been entirely owing to some incomprehensible
misunderstanding.
“Excuse me, my friend,” I say to the visitor; “I cannot mark
you for a pass. Go and read up the lectures and come to me
again. Then we shall see.”
A pause. I feel an impulse to torment the student a little
for liking beer and the opera better than science, and I say,
with a sigh:
“To my mind, the best thing you can do now is to give up
medicine altogether. If, with your abilities, you cannot succeed
in passing the examination, it’s evident that you have
neither the desire nor the vocation for a doctor’s calling.”
The sanguine youth’s face lengthens.
“Excuse me, professor,” he laughs, “but that would be odd
of me, to say the least of it. After studying for five years, all at
once to give it up.”
“Oh, well! Better to have lost your five years than have to
spend the rest of your life in doing work you do not care for.”
But at once I feel sorry for him, and I hasten to add:
“However, as you think best. And so read a little more and
come again.”
“When?” the idle youth asks in a hollow voice.
“When you like. Tomorrow if you like.”
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And in his good-natured eyes I read:
“I can come all right, but of course you will plough me
again, you beast!”
“Of course,” I say, “you won’t know more science for going
in for my examination another fifteen times, but it is training
your character, and you must be thankful for that.”
Silence follows. I get up and wait for my visitor to go, but
he stands and looks towards the window, fingers his beard,
and thinks. It grows boring.
The sanguine youth’s voice is pleasant and mellow, his eyes
are clever and ironical, his face is genial, though a little bloated
from frequent indulgence in beer and overlong lying on the
sofa; he looks as though he could tell me a lot of interesting
things about the opera, about his affairs of the heart, and
about comrades whom he likes. Unluckily, it is not the thing
to discuss these subjects, or else I should have been glad to
listen to him.
“Professor, I give you my word of honour that if you mark
me for a pass I… I’ll…”
As soon as we reach the “word of honour” I wave my hands
and sit down to the table. The student ponders a minute
longer, and says dejectedly:
“In that case, good-bye. . . I beg your pardon.”
“Good-bye, my friend. Good luck to you.”
He goes irresolutely into the hall, slowly puts on his outdoor
things, and, going out into the street, probably ponders
for some time longer; unable to think of anything, except
“old devil,” inwardly addressed to me, he goes into a wretched
restaurant to dine and drink beer, and then home to bed. “Peace
be to thy ashes, honest toiler.”
A third ring at the bell. A young doctor, in a pair of new
black trousers, gold spectacles, and of course a white tie, walks
in. He introduces himself. I beg him to be seated, and ask
what I can do for him. Not without emotion, the young
devotee of science begins telling me that he has passed his
examination as a doctor of medicine, and that he has now
only to write his dissertation. He would like to work with
me under my guidance, and he would be greatly obliged to
me if I would give him a subject for his dissertation.
“Very glad to be of use to you, colleague,” I say, “but just let
us come to an understanding as to the meaning of a dissertation.
That word is taken to mean a composition which is a
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product of independent creative effort. Is that not so? A work
written on another man’s subject and under another man’s
guidance is called something different.…”
The doctor says nothing. I fly into a rage and jump up
from my seat.
“Why is it you all come to me?” I cry angrily. “Do I keep a
shop? I don’t deal in subjects. For the tho usand and oneth
time I ask you all to leave me in peace! Excuse my brutality,
but I am quite sick of it!”
The doctor remains silent, but a faint flush is apparent on
his cheek-bones. His face expresses a profound reverence for
my fame and my learning, but from his eyes I can see he feels
a contempt for my voice, my pitiful figure, and my nervous
gesticulation. I impress him in my anger as a queer fish.
“I don’t keep a shop,” I go on angrily. “And it is a strange
thing! Why don’t you want to be independent? Why have
you such a distaste for independence?”
I say a great deal, but he still remains silent. By degrees I
calm down, and of course give in. The doctor gets a subject
from me for his theme not worth a halfpenny, writes under
my supervision a dissertation of no use to any one, with dignity
defends it in a dreary discussion, and receives a degree of
no use to him.
The rings at the bell may follow one another endlessly, but
I will confine my description here to four of them. The bell
rings for the fourth time, and I hear familiar footsteps, the
rustle of a dress, a dear voice.…
Eighteen years ago a colleague of mine, an oculist, died leaving
a little daughter Katya, a child of seven, and sixty thousand
roubles. In his will he made me the child’s guardian. Till
she was ten years old Katya lived with us as one of the family,
then she was sent to a boarding-school, and only spent the
summer holidays with us. I never had time to look after her
education. I only superintended it at leisure moments, and so
I can say very little about her childhood.
The first thing I remember, and like so much in remembrance,
is the extraordinary trustfulness with which she came
into our house and let herself be treated by the doctors, a
trustfulness which was always shining in her little face. She
would sit somewhere out of the way, with her face tied up,
invariably watching something with attention; whether she
watched me writing or turning over the pages of a book, or
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watched my wife bustling about, or the cook scrubbing a
potato in the kitchen, or the dog playing, her eyes invariably
expressed the same thought — that is, “Everything that is
done in this world is nice and sensible.” She was curious, and
very fond of talking to me. Sometimes she would sit at the
table opposite me, watching my movements and asking questions.
It interested her to know what I was reading, what I
did at the University, whether I was not afraid of the dead
bodies, what I did with my salary.
“Do the students fight at the University?” she would ask.
“They do, dear.”
“And do you make them go down on their knees?”
“Yes, I do.”
And she thought it funny that the students fought and I
made them go down on their knees, and she laughed. She
was a gentle, patient, good child. It happened not infrequently
that I saw something taken away from her, saw her punished
without reason, or her curiosity repressed; at such times a look
of sadness was mixed with the invariable expression of trustfulness
on her face — that was all. I did not know how to
take her part; only when I saw her sad I had an inclination to
draw her to me and to commiserate her like some old nurse:
“My poor little orphan one!”
I remember, too, that she was fond of fine clothes and of
sprinkling herself with scent. In that respect she was like me.
I, too, am fond of pretty clothes and nice scent.
I regret that I had not time nor inclination to watch over
the rise and development of the passion which took complete
possession of Katya when she was fourteen or fifteen. I
mean her passionate love for the theatre. When she used to
come from boarding-school and stay with us for the summer
holidays, she talked of nothing with such pleasure and such
warmth as of plays and actors. She bored us with her continual
talk of the theatre. My wife and children would not
listen to her. I was the only one who had not the courage to
refuse to attend to her. When she had a longing to share her
transports, she used to come into my study and say in an
imploring tone:
“Nikolay Stepanovitch, do let me talk to you about the
theatre!”
I pointed to the clock, and said:
“I’ll give you half an hour — begin.”
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Later on she used to bring with her dozens of portraits of
actors and actresses which she worshipped; then she attempted
several times to take part in private theatricals, and the upshot
of it all was that when she left school she came to me and
announced that she was born to be an actress.
I had never shared Katya’s inclinations for the theatre. To my
mind, if a play is good there is no need to trouble the actors in
order that it may make the right impression; it is enough to
read it. If the play is poor, no acting will make it good.
In my youth I often visited the theatre, and now my family
takes a box twice a year and carries me off for a little distraction.
Of course, that is not enough to give me the right to
judge of the theatre. In my opinion the theatre has become
no better than it was thirty or forty years ago. Just as in the
past, I can never find a glass of clean water in the corridors or
foyers of the theatre. Just as in the past, the attendants fine
me twenty kopecks for my fur coat, though there is nothing
reprehensible in wearing a warm coat in winter. As in the past,
for no sort of reason, music is played in the intervals, which
adds something new and uncalled-for to the impression made
by the play. As in the past, men go in the intervals and drink
spirits in the buffet. If no progress can be seen in trifles, I
should look for it in vain in what is more important. When
an actor wrapped from head to foot in stage traditions and
conventions tries to recite a simple ordinary speech, “To be or
not to be,” not simply, but invariably with the accompaniment
of hissing and convulsive movements all over his body,
or when he tries to convince me at all costs that Tchatsky,
who talks so much with fools and is so fond of folly, is a very
clever man, and that “Woe from Wit” is not a dull play, the
stage gives me the same feeling of conventionality which bored
me so much forty years ago when I was regaled with the classical
howling and beating on the breast. And every time I
come out of the theatre more conservative than I go in.
The sentimental and confiding public may be persuaded
that the stage, even in its present form, is a school; but any
one who is familiar with a school in its true sense will not be
caught with that bait. I cannot say what will happen in fifty
or a hundred years, but in its actual condition the theatre can
serve only as an entertainment. But this entertainment is too
costly to be frequently enjoyed. It robs the state of thousands
of healthy and talented young men and women, who, if they
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had not devoted themselves to the theatre, might have been
good doctors, farmers, schoolmistresses, officers; it robs
the public of the evening hours — the best time for intellectual
work and social intercourse. I say nothing of the
waste of money and the moral damage to the spectator
when he sees murder, fornication, or false witness unsuitably
treated on the stage.
Katya was of an entirely different opinion. She assured me
that the theatre, even in its present condition, was superior to
the lecture-hall, to books, or to anything in the world. The
stage was a power that united in itself all the arts, and actors
were missionaries. No art nor science was capable of producing
so strong and so certain an effect on the soul of man as
the stage, and it was with good reason that an actor of medium
quality enjoys greater popularity than the greatest savant
or artist. And no sort of public service could provide
such enjoyment and gratification as the theatre.
And one fine day Katya joined a troupe of actors, and went
off, I believe to Ufa, taking away with her a good supply of
money, a store of rainbow hopes, and the most aristocratic
views of her work.
Her first letters on the journey were marvellous. I read them,
and was simply amazed that those small sheets of paper could
contain so much youth, purity of spirit, holy innocence, and at
the same time subtle and apt judgments which would have
done credit to a fine mas culine intellect. It was more like a
rapturous paean of praise she sent me than a mere description
of the Volga, the country, the towns she visited, her companions,
her failures and successes; every sentence was fragrant with
that confiding trustfulness I was accustomed to read in her face
—and at the same time there were a great many grammatical
mistakes, and there was scarcely any punctuation at all.
Before six months had passed I received a highly poetical
and enthusiastic letter beginning with the words, “I have come
to love…” This letter was accompanied by a photograph representing
a young man with a shaven face, a wide-brimmed
hat, and a plaid flung over his shoulder. The letters that followed
were as splendid as before, but now commas and stops
made their appearance in them, the grammatical mistakes disappeared,
and there was a distinctly masculine flavour about
them. Katya began writing to me how splendid it would be
to build a great theatre somewhere on the Volga, on a coop97
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erative system, and to attract to the enterprise the rich merchants
and the steamer owners; there would be a great deal of
money in it; there would be vast audiences; the actors would
play on co-operative terms.… Possibly all this was really excellent,
but it seemed to me that such schemes could only
originate from a man’s mind.
However that may have been, for a year and a half everything
seemed to go well: Katya was in love, believed in her
work, and was happy; but then I began to notice in her letters
unmistakable signs of falling off. It began with Katya’s complaining
of her companions — this was the first and most
ominous symptom; if a young scientific or literary man begins
his career with bitter complaints of scientific and literary
men, it is a sure sign that he is worn out and not fit for his
work. Katya wrote to me that her companions did not attend
the rehearsals and never knew their parts; that one could see
in every one of them an utter disrespect for the public in the
production of absurd plays, and in their behaviour on the
stage; that for the benefit of the Actors’ Fund, which they
only talked about, actresses of the serious drama demeaned
themselves by singing chansonettes, while tragic actors sang
comic songs making fun of deceived husbands and the pregnant
condition of unfaithful wives, and so on. In fact, it was
amazing that all this had not yet ruined the provincial stage,
and that it could still maintain itself on such a rotten and
unsubstantial footing.
In answer I wrote Katya a long and, I must confess, a very
boring letter. Among other things, I wrote to her:
“I have more than once happened to converse with old actors,
very worthy men, who showed a friendly disposition towards
me; from my conversations with them I could understand
that their work was controlled not so much by their own
intelligence and free choice as by fashion and the mood of the
public. The best of them had had to play in their day in tragedy,
in operetta, in Parisian farces, and in extravaganzas, and
they always seemed equally sure that they were on the right
path and that they were of use. So, as you see, the cause of the
evil must be sought, not in the actors, but, more deeply, in the
art itself and in the attitude of the whole of society to it.”
This letter of mine only irritated Katya. She answered me:
“You and I are singing parts out of different operas. I wrote
to you, not of the worthy men who showed a friendly dispo98
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sition to you, but of a band of knaves who have nothing
worthy about them. They are a horde of savages who have
got on the stage simply because no one would have taken
them elsewhere, and who call themselves artists simply because
they are impudent. There are numbers of dull-witted
creatures, drunkards, intriguing schemers and slanderers, but
there is not one person of talent among them. I cannot tell
you how bitter it is to me that the art I love has fallen into the
hands of people I detest; how bitter it is that the best men
look on at evil from afar, not caring to come closer, and,
instead of intervening, write ponderous commonplaces and
utterly useless sermons.…” And so on, all in the same style.
A little time passed, and I got this letter: “I have been brutally
deceived. I cannot go on living. Dispose of my money as
you think best. I loved you as my father and my only friend.
Good-bye.”
It turned out that _he_, too, belonged to the “horde of
savages.” Later on, from certain hints, I gathered that there
had been an attempt at suicide. I believe Katya tried to poison
herself. I imagine that she must have been seriously ill afterwards,
as the next letter I got was from Yalta, where she had
most probably been sent by the doctors. Her last letter contained
a request to send her a thousand roubles to Yalta as
quickly as possible, and ended with these words:
“Excuse the gloominess of this letter; yesterday I buried my
child.” After spending about a year in the Crimea, she returned
home.
She had been about four years on her travels, and during
those four years, I must confess, I had played a rather strange
and unenviable part in regard to her. When in earlier days she
had told me she was going on the stage, and then wrote to me
of her love; when she was periodically overcome by extravagance,
and I continually had to send her first one and then
two thousand roubles; when she wrote to me of her intention
of suicide, and then of the death of her baby, every time
I lost my head, and all my sympathy for her sufferings found
no expression except that, after prolonged reflection, I wrote
long, boring letters which I might just as well not have written.
And yet I took a father’s place with her and loved her like
a daughter!
Now Katya is living less than half a mile off. She has taken
a flat of five rooms, and has installed herself fairly comfort99
The Wife and other stories
ably and in the taste of the day. If any one were to undertake
to describe her surroundings, the most characteristic note in
the picture would be indolence. For the indolent body there
are soft lounges, soft stools; for indolent feet soft rugs; for
indolent eyes faded, dingy, or flat colours; for the indolent
soul the walls are hung with a number of cheap fans and trivial
pictures, in which the originality of the execution is more
conspicuous than the subject; and the room contains a multitude
of little tables and shelves filled with utterly useless articles
of no value, and shapeless rags in place of curtains.…
All this, together with the dread of bright colours, of symmetry,
and of empty space, bears witness not only to spiritual
indolence, but also to a corruption of natural taste. For days
together Katya lies on the lounge reading, principally novels
and stories. She only goes out of the house once a day, in the
afternoon, to see me.
I go on working while Katya sits silent not far from me on
the sofa, wrapping herself in her shawl, as though she were
cold. Either because I find her sympathetic or because I was
used to her frequent visits when she was a little girl, her presence
does not prevent me from concentrating my attention.
From time to time I mechanically ask her some question; she
gives very brief replies; or, to rest for a minute, I turn round
and watch her as she looks dreamily at some medical journal
or review. And at such moments I notice that her face has lost
the old look of confiding trustfulness. Her expression now is
cold, apathetic, and absent-minded, like that of passengers
who had to wait too long for a train. She is dressed, as in old
days, simply and beautifully, but carelessly; her dress and her
hair show visible traces of the sofas and rocking-chairs in which
she spends whole days at a stretch. And she has lost the curiosity
she had in old days. She has ceased to ask me questions
now, as though she had experienced everything in life and
looked for nothing new from it.
Towards four o’clock there begins to be sounds of movement
in the hall and in the drawing-room. Liza has come
back from the Conservatoire, and has brought some girlfriends
in with her. We hear them playing on the piano, trying
their voices and laughing; in the dining-room Yegor is
laying th e table, with the clatter of crockery.
“Good-bye,” said Katya. “I won’t go in and see your people
today. They must excuse me. I haven’t time. Come and see me.”
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While I am seeing her to the door, she looks me up and
down grimly, and says with vexation:
“You are getting thinner and thinner! Why don’t you consult
a doctor? I’ll call at Sergey Fyodorovitch’s and ask him to
have a look at you.”
“There’s no need, Katya.”
“I can’t think where your people’s eyes are! They are a nice
lot, I must say!”
She puts on her fur coat abruptly, and as she does so two or three hairpins drop unnoticed on the floor from her carelessly
arranged hair. She is too lazy and in too great a hurry to do
her hair up; she carelessly stuffs the falling curls under her hat,
and goes away.
When I go into the dining-room my wife asks me:
“Was Katya with you just now? Why didn’t she come in to
see us? It’s really strange… .”
“Mamma,” Liza says to her reproachfully, “let her alone, if she
doesn’t want to. We are not going down on our knees to her.”
“It’s very neglectful, anyway. To sit for three hours in the
study without remembering our existence! But of course she
must do as she likes.”
Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is beyond my
comprehension, and probably one would have to be a woman
in order to understand it. I am ready to stake my life that of
the hundred and fifty young men I see every day in the lecture-
theatre, and of the hundred elderly ones I meet every
week, hardly one could be found capable of understanding
their hatred and aversion for Katya’s past — that is, for her
having been a mother without being a wife, and for her having
had an illegitimate child; and at the same time I cannot
recall one woman or girl of my acquaintance who would not
consciously or unconsciously harbour such feelings. And this
is not because woman is purer or more virtuous than man:
why, virtue and purity are not very different from vice if they
are not free from evil feeling. I attribute this simply to the
backwardness of woman. The mournful feeling of compassion
and the pang of conscience experienced by a modern man
at the sight of suffering is, to my mind, far greater proof of
culture and moral elevation than hatred and aversion. Woman
is as tearful and as coarse in her feelings now as she was in the
Middle Ages, and to my thinking those who advise that she
should be educated like a man are quite right.
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My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for
ingratitude, for pride, for eccentricity, and for the numerous
vices which one woman can always find in another.
Besides my wife and daughter and me, there are dining with
us two or three of my daughter’s friends and Alexandr
Adolfovitch Gnekker, her admirer and suitor. He is a fairhaired
young man under thirty, of medium height, very stout
and broad-shouldered, with red whiskers near his ears, and
little waxed moustaches which make his plump smooth face
look like a toy. He is dressed in a very short reefer jacket, a
flowered waistcoat, breeches very full at the top and very narrow
at the ankle, with a large check pattern on them, and
yellow boots without heels. He has prominent eyes like a
crab’s, his cravat is like a crab’s neck, and I even fancy there is
a smell of crab-soup about the young man’s whole person.
He visits us every day, but no one in my family knows anything
of his origin nor of the place of his education, nor of his
means of livelihood. He neither plays nor sings, but has some
connection with music and singing, sells somebody’s pianos
somewhere, is frequently at the Conservatoire, is acquainted
with all the celebrities, and is a steward at the concerts; he
criticizes music with great authority, and I have noticed that
people are eager to agree with him.
Rich people always have dependents hanging about them;
the arts and sciences have the same. I believe there is not an art
nor a science in the world free from “foreign bodies” after the
style of this Mr. Gnekker. I am not a musician, and possibly
I am mistaken in regard to Mr. Gnekker, of whom, indeed, I
know very little. But his air of authority and the dignity with
which he takes his stand beside the piano when any one is
playing or singing strike me as very suspicious.
You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor,
but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of
immunity from that petty bourgeois atmosphere which is so
often brought into your house and into your mood by the
attentions of suitors, by matchmaking and marriage. I can
never reconcile myself, for instance, to the expression of triumph
on my wife’s face every time Gnekker is in our company,
nor can I reconcile myself to the bottles of Lafitte, port
and sherry which are only brought out on his account, that
he may see with his own eyes the liberal and luxurious way in
which we live. I cannot tolerate the habit of spasmodic laugh102
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ter Liza has picked up at the Conservatoire, and her way of
screwing up her eyes whenever there are men in the room.
Above all, I cannot understand why a creature utterly alien to
my habits, my studies, my whole manner of life, completely
different from the people I like, should come and see me
every day, and every day should dine with me. My wife and
my servants mysteriously whisper that he is a suitor, but still
I don’t understand his presence; it rouses in me the same wonder
and perplexity as if they were to set a Zulu beside me at
the table. And it seems strange to me, too, that my daughter,
whom I am used to thinking of as a child, should love that
cravat, those eyes, those soft cheeks.…
In the old days I used to like my dinner, or at least was
indifferent about it; now it excites in me no feeling but weariness
and irritation. Ever since I became an “Excellency” and
one of the Deans of the Faculty my family has for some reason
found it necessary to make a complete change in our menu
and dining habits. Instead of the simple dishes to which I was
accustomed when I was a student and when I was in practice,
now they feed me with a puree with little white things like
circles floating about in it, and kidneys stewed in madeira.
My rank as a general and my fame have robbed me for ever of
cabbage-soup and savoury pies, and goose with apple-sauce,
and bream with boiled grain. They have robbed me of our
maid-servant Agasha, a chatty and laughter-loving old woman,
instead of whom Yegor, a dull-witted and conceited fellow
with a white glove on his right hand, waits at dinner. The
intervals between the courses are short, but they seem immensely
long because there is nothing to occupy them. There
is none of the gaiety of the old days, the spontaneous talk, the
jokes, the laughter; there is nothing of mutual affection and
the joy which used to animate the children, my wife, and me
when in old days we met together at meals. For me, the celebrated
man of science, dinner was a time of rest and reunion,
and for my wife and children a fete — brief indeed, but bright
and joyous — in which they knew that for half an hour I
belonged, not to science, not to students, but to them alone.
Our real exhilaration from one glass of wine is gone for ever,
gone is Agasha, gone the bream with boiled grain, gone the
uproar that greeted every little startling incident at dinner,
such as the cat and dog fighting under the table, or Katya’s
bandage falling off her face into her soup-plate.
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To describe our dinner nowadays is as uninteresting as to
eat it. My wife’s face wears a look of triumph and affected
dignity, and her habitual expression of anxiety. She looks at
our plates and says, “I see you don’t care for the joint. Tell me;
you don’t like it, do you?” and I am obliged to answer: “There
is no need for you to trouble, my dear; the meat is very nice.”
And she will say: “You always stand up for me, Nikolay
Stepanovitch, and you never tell the truth. Why is Alexandr
Adolfovitch eating so little?” And so on in the same style all
through dinner. Liza laughs spasmodically and screws up her
eyes. I watch them both, and it is only now at dinner that it
becomes absolutely evident to me that the inner life of these
two has slipped away out of my ken. I have a feeling as though
I had once lived at home with a real wife and children and
that now I am dining with visitors, in the house of a sham
wife who is not the real one, and am looking at a Liza who is
not the real Liza. A startling change has taken place in both of
them; I have missed the long process by which that change
was effected, and it is no wonder that I can make nothing of
it. Why did that change take place? I don’t know. Perhaps the
whole trouble is that God has not given my wife and daughter
the same strength of character as me. From childhood I
have been accustomed to resisting external influences, and have
steeled myself pretty thoroughly. Such catastrophes in life as
fame, the rank of a general, the transition from comfort to
living beyond our means, acquaintance with celebrities, etc.,
have scarcely affected me, and I have remained intact and unashamed;
but on my wife and Liza, who have not been through
the same hardening process and are weak, all this has fallen
like an avalanche of snow, overwhelming them. Gnekker and
the young ladies talk of fugues, of counterpoint, of singers
and pianists, of Bach and Brahms, while my wife, afraid of
their suspecting her of ignorance of music, smiles to them
sympathetically and mutters: “That’s exquisite… really! You
don’t say so!… Gnekker eats with solid dignity, jests with
solid dignity, and condescendingly listens to the remarks of
the young ladies. From time to time he is moved to speak in
bad French, and then, for some reason or other, he thinks it
necessary to address me as ”Votre Excellence.”
And I am glum. Evidently I am a constraint to them and
they are a constraint to me. I have never in my earlier days had
a close knowledge of class antagonism, but now I am tor104
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mented by something of that sort. I am on the lookout for
nothing but bad qualities in Gnekker; I quickly find them,
and am fretted at the thought that a man not of my circle is
sitting here as my daughter’s suitor. His presence has a bad
influence on me in other ways, too. As a rule, when I am
alone or in the society of people I like, never think of my
own achievements, or, if I do recall them, they seem to me as
trivial as though I had only completed my studies yesterday;
but in the presence of people like Gnekker my achievements
in science seem to be a lofty mountain the top of which vanishes
into the clouds, while at its foot Gnekkers are running
about scarcely visible to the naked eye.
After dinner I go into my study and there smoke my pipe,
the only one in the whole day, the sole relic of my old bad
habit of smoking from morning till night. While I am smoking
my wife comes in and sits down to talk to me. Just as in
the morning, I know beforehand what our conversation is
going to be about.
“I must talk to you seriously, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she
begins. “I mean about Liza.… Why don’t you pay attention
to it?”
“To what?”
“You pretend to notice nothing. But that is not right. We
can’t shirk responsibility.… Gnekker has intentions in regard
to Liza.… What do you say?”
“That he is a bad man I can’t say, because I don’t know him,
but that I don’t like him I have told you a thousand times
already.”
“But you can’t… you can’t!”
She gets up and walks about in excitement.
“You can’t take up that attitude to a serious step,” she says.
“When it is a question of our daughter’s happiness we must
lay aside all personal feeling. I know you do not like him.…
Very good… if we refuse him now, if we break it all off, how
can you be sure that Liza will not have a grievance against us
all her life? Suitors are not plentiful nowadays, goodness
knows, and it may happen that no other match will turn up.…
He is very much in love with Liza, and she seems to like
him.… Of course, he has no settled position, but that can’t
be helped. Please God, in time he will get one. He is of good
family and well off.”
“Where did you learn that?”
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“He told us so. His father has a large house in Harkov and
an estate in the neighbourhood. In short, Nikolay
Stepanovitch, you absolutely must go to Harkov.”
“What for?”
“You will find out all about him there.… You know the
professors there; they will help you. I would go myself, but I
am a woman. I cannot.…”
“I am not going to Harkov,” I say morosely.
My wife is frightened, and a look of intense suffering comes
into her face.
“For God’s sake, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she implores me,
with tears in her voice —”for God’s sake, take this burden off
me! I am so worried!”
It is painful for me to look at her.
“Very well, Varya,” I say affectionately, “if you wish it, then
certainly I will go to Harkov and do all you want.”
She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes off to her
room to cry, and I am left alone.
A little later lights are brought in. The armchair and the
lamp-shade cast familiar shadows that have long grown wearisome
on the walls and on the floor, and when I look at
them I feel as though the night had come and with it my
accursed sleeplessness. I lie on my bed, then get up and walk
about the room, then lie down again. As a rule it is after dinner,
at the approach of evening, that my nervous excitement
reaches its highest pitch. For no reason I begin crying and
burying my head in the pillow. At such times I am afraid that
some one may come in; I am afraid of suddenly dying; I am
ashamed of my tears, and altogether there is something insufferable
in my soul. I feel that I can no longer bear the sight of
my lamp, of my books, of the shadows on the floor. I cannot
bear the sound of the voices coming from the drawing-room.
Some force unseen, uncomprehended, is roughly thrusting
me out of my flat. I leap up hurriedly, dress, and cautiously,
that my family may not notice, slip out into the street. Where
am I to go?
The answer to that question has long been ready in my
brain. To Katya.
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III
AS A RULE she is lying on the sofa or in a lounge-chair reading.
Seeing me, she raises her head languidly, sits up, and shakes
hands.
“You are always lying down,” I say, after pausing and taking
breath. “That’s not good for you. You ought to occupy yourself
with something.”
“What?”
“I say you ought to occupy yourself in some way.”
“With what? A woman can be nothing but a simple workwoman
or an actress.”
“Well, if you can’t be a workwoman, be an actress.”
She says nothing.
“You ought to get married,” I say, half in jest.
“There is no one to marry. There’s no reason to, either.”
“You can’t live like this.”
“Without a husband? Much that matters; I could have as
many men as I like if I wanted to.”
“That’s ugly, Katya.”
“What is ugly?”
“Why, what you have just said.”
Noticing that I am hurt and wishing to efface the disagreeable
impression, Katya says:
“Let us go; come this way.”
She takes me into a very snug little room, and says, pointing
to the writing-table:
“Look… I have got that ready for you. You shall work here.
Come here every day and bring your work with you. They
only hinder you there at home. Will you work here? Will you
like to?”
Not to wound her by refusing, I answer that I will work
here, and that I like the room very much. Then we both sit
down in the snug little room and begin talking.
The warm, snug surroundings and the presence of a sympathetic
person does not, as in old days, arouse in me a feeling
of pleasure, but an intense impulse to complain and grumble.
I feel for some reason that if I lament and complain I shall
feel better.
“Things are in a bad way with me, my dear — very bad.…”
“What is it?”
“You see how it is, my dear; the best and holiest right of
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kings is the right of mercy. And I have always felt myself a
king, since I have made unlimited use of that right. I have
never judged, I have been indulgent, I have readily forgiven
every one, right and left. Where others have protested and
expressed indignation, I have only advised and persuaded. All
my life it has been my endeavour that my society should not
be a burden to my family, to my students, to my colleagues,
to my servants. And I know that this attitude to people has
had a good influence on all who have chanced to c ome into
contact with me. But now I am not a king. Something is
happening to me that is only excusable in a slave; day and
night my brain is haunted by evil thoughts, and feelings such
as I never knew before are brooding in my soul. I am full of
hatred, and contempt, and indignation, and loathing, and
dread. I have become excessively severe, exacting, irritable, ungracious,
suspicious. Even things that in old days would have
provoked me only to an unnecessary jest and a good-natured
laugh now arouse an oppressive feeling in me. My reasoning,
too, has undergone a change: in old days I despised money;
now I harbour an evil feeling, not towards money, but towards
the rich as though they were to blame: in old days I
hated violence and tyranny, but now I hate the men who make
use of violence, as though they were alone to blame, and not
all of us who do not know how to educate each other. What
is the meaning of it? If these new ideas and new feelings have
come from a change of convictions, what is that change due
to? Can the world have grown worse and I better, or was I
blind before and indifferent? If this change is the result of a
general decline of physical and intellectual powers — I am ill,
you know, and every day I am losing weight — my position
is pitiable; it means that my new ideas are morbid and abnormal;
I ought to be ashamed of them and think them of no
consequence.…”
“Illness has nothing to do with it,” Katya interrupts me;
“it’s simply that your eyes are opened, that’s all. You have seen
what in old days, for some reason, you refused to see. To my
thinking, what you ought to do first of all, is to break with
your family for good, and go away.”
“You are talking nonsense.”
“You don’t love them; why should you force your feelings?
Can you call them a family? Nonentities! If they died today,
no one would notice their absence tomorrow.”
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Katya despises my wife and Liza as much as they hate her.
One can hardly talk at this date of people’s having a right to
despise one another. But if one looks at it from Katya’s standpoint
and recognizes such a right, one can see she has as much
right to despise my wife and Liza as they have to hate her.
“Nonentities,” she goes on. “Have you had dinner today?
How was it they did not forget to tell you it was ready? How
is it they still remember your existence?”
“Katya,” I say sternly, “I beg you to be silent.”
“You think I enjoy talking about them? I should be glad
not to know them at all. Listen, my dear: give it all up and go
away. Go abroad. The sooner the better.”
“What nonsense! What about the University?”
“The University, too. What is it to you? There’s no sense in
it, anyway. You have been lecturing for thirty years, and where
are your pupils? Are many of them celebrated scientific men?
Count them up! And to multiply the doctors who exploit ignorance
and pile up hundreds of thousands for themselves, there
is no need to be a good and talented man. You are not wanted.”
“Good heavens! how harsh you are!” I cry in horror. “How
harsh you are! Be quiet or I will go away! I don’t know how
to answer the harsh things you say!”
The maid comes in and summons us to tea. At the samovar
our conversation, thank God, changes. After having had my
grumble out, I have a longing to give way to another weakness
of old age, reminiscences. I tell Katya about my past, and
to my great astonishment tell her incidents which, till then, I
did not suspect of being still preserved in my memory, and
she listens to me with tenderness, with pride, holding her
breath. I am particularly fond of telling her how I was educated
in a seminary and dreamed of going to the University.
“At times I used to walk about our seminary garden…” I
would tell her. “If from some faraway tavern the wind floated
sounds of a song and the squeaking of an accordion, or a
sledge with bells dashed by the garden-fence, it was quite
enough to send a rush of happiness, filling not only my heart,
but even my stomach, my legs, my arms.… I would listen to
the accordion or the bells dying away in the distance and imagine
myself a doctor, and paint pictures, one better than another.
And here, as you see, my dreams have come true. I have
had more than I dared to dream of. For thirty years I have
been the favourite professor, I have had splendid comrades, I
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have enjoyed fame and honour. I have loved, married from
passionate love, have had children. In fact, looking back upon
it, I see my whole life as a fine composition arranged with
talent. Now all that is left to me is not to spoil the end. For
that I must die like a man. If death is really a thing to dread,
I must meet it as a teacher, a man of science, and a citizen of a
Christian country ought to meet it, with courage and untroubled
soul. But I am spoiling the end; I am sinking, I fly
to you, I beg for help, and you tell me ‘Sink; that is what you
ought to do.’ “
But here there comes a ring at the front-door. Katya and I
recognize it, and say:
“It must be Mihail Fyodorovitch.”
And a minute later my colleague, the philologist Mihail
Fyodorovitch, a tall, well-built man of fifty, clean-shaven, with
thick grey hair and black eyebrows, walks in. He is a goodnatured
man and an excellent comrade. He comes of a fortunate
and talented old noble family which has played a prominent
part in the history of literature and enlightenment. He is
himself intelligent, talented, and very highly educated, but
has his oddities. To a certain extent we are all odd and all
queer fish, but in his oddities there is something exceptional,
apt to cause anxiety among his acquaintances. I know a good
many people for whom his oddities completely obscure his
good qualities.
Coming in to us, he slowly takes off his gloves and says in
his velvety bass:
“Good-evening. Are you having tea? That’s just right. It’s
diabolically cold.”
Then he sits down to the table, takes a glass, and at once
begins talking. What is most characteristic in his manner of
talking is the continually jesting tone, a sort of mixture of
philosophy and drollery as in Shakespeare’s gravediggers. He
is always talking about serious things, but he never speaks
seriously. His judgments are always harsh and railing, but,
thanks to his soft, even, jesting tone, the harshness and abuse
do not jar upon the ear, and one soon grows used to them.
Every evening he brings with him five or six anecdotes from
the University, and he usually begins with them when he sits
down to table.
“Oh, Lord!” he sighs, twitching his black eyebrows ironically.
“What comic people there are in the world!”
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“Well?” asks Katya.
“As I was coming from my lecture this morning I met that
old idiot N. N—— on the stairs.… He was going along as
usual, sticking out his chin like a horse, looking for some one
to listen to his grumblings at his migraine, at his wife, and his
students who won’t attend his lectures. ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘he
has seen me — I am done for now; it is all up.…’”
And so on in the same style. Or he will begin like this:
“I was yesterday at our friend Z. Z——’s public lecture. I
wonder how it is our alma mater — don’t speak of it after
dark — dare display in public such noodles and patent dullards
as that Z. Z—— Why, he is a European fool! Upon my
word, you could not find another like him all over Europe!
He lectures — can you imagine? — as though he were sucking
a sugar-stick — sue, sue, sue;… he is in a nervous funk;
he can hardly decipher his own manuscript; his poor little
thoughts crawl along like a bishop on a bicycle, and, what’s
worse, you can never make out what he is trying to say. The
deadly dulness is awful, the very flies expire. It can only be
compared with the boredom in the assembly-hall at the yearly
meeting when the traditional address is read — damn it!”
And at once an abrupt transition:
“Three years ago — Nikolay Stepanovitch here will remember
it —I had to deliver that address. It was hot, stifling, my
uniform cut me under the arms — it was deadly! I read for
half an hour, for an hour, for an hour and a half, for two
hours.… ‘Come,’ I thought; ‘thank God, there are only ten
pages left!’ And at the end there were four pages that there
was no need to read, and I reckoned to leave them out. ‘So
there are only six really,’ I thought; ‘that is, only six pages left
to read.’ But, only fancy, I chanced to glance before me, and,
sitting in the front row, side by side, were a general with a
ribbon on his breast and a bishop. The poor beggars were
numb with boredom; they were staring with their eyes wide
open to keep awake, and yet they were trying to put on an
expression of attention and to pretend that they understood
what I was saying and liked it. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘since you
like it you shall have it! I’ll pay you out;’ so I just gave them
those four pages too.”
As is usual with ironical people, when he talks nothing in
his face smiles but his eyes and eyebrows. At such times there
is no trace of hatred or spite in his eyes, but a great deal of
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humour, and that peculiar fox-like slyness which is only to be
noticed in very observant people. Since I am speaking about
his eyes, I notice another peculiarity in them. When he takes
a glass from Katya, or listens to her speaking, or looks after
her as she goes out of the room for a moment, I notice in his
eyes something gentle, beseeching, pure.…
The maid-servant takes away the samovar and puts on the
table a large piece of cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean
champagne — a rather poor wine of which Katya had grown
fond in the Crimea. Mihail Fyodorovitch takes two packs of
cards off the whatnot and begins to play patience. According
to him, some varieties of patience require great concentration
and attention, yet while he lays out the cards he does not
leave off distracting his attention with talk. Katya watches his
cards attentively, and more by gesture than by words helps
him in his play. She drinks no more than a couple of wineglasses
of wine the whole evening; I drink four glasses, and
the rest of the bottle falls to the share of Mihail Fyodorovitch,
who can drink a great deal and never get drunk.
Over our patience we settle various questions, principally
of the higher order, and what we care for most of all — that
is, science and learning — is more roughly handled than
anything.
“Science, thank God, has outlived its day,” says Mihail
Fyodorovitch emphatically. “Its song is sung. Yes, indeed.
Mankind begins to feel impelled to replace it by something
different. It has grown on the soil of superstition, been nourished
by superstition, and is now just as much the quintessence
of superstition as its defunct granddames, alchemy,
metaphysics, and philosophy. And, after all, what has it given
to mankind? Why, the difference between the learned Europeans
and the Chinese who have no science is trifling, purely
external. The Chinese know nothing of science, but what have
they lost thereby?”
“Flies know nothing of science, either,” I observe, “but what
of that?”
“There is no need to be angry, Nikolay Stepanovitch. I only
say this here between ourselves. . . I am more careful than you
think, and I am not going to say this in public — God forbid!
The superstition exists in the multitude that the arts and
sciences are superior to agriculture, commerce, superior to
handicrafts. Our sect is maintained by that superstition, and
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it is not for you and me to destroy it. God forbid!”
After patience the younger generation comes in for a dressing
too.
“Our audiences have degenerated,” sighs Mihail Fyodorovitch.
“Not to speak of ideals and all the rest of it, if only they were
capable of work and rational thought! In fact, it’s a case of ‘I
look with mournful eyes on the young men of today.’”
“Yes; they have degenerated horribly,” Katya agrees. “Tell
me, have you had one man of distinction among them for
the last five or ten years?”
“I don’t know how it is with the other professors, but I
can’t remember any among mine.”
“I have seen in my day many of your students and young
scientific men and many actors — well, I have never once
been so fortunate as to meet — I won’t say a hero or a man of
talent, but even an interesting man. It’s all the same grey mediocrity,
puffed up with self-conceit.”
All this talk of degeneration always affects me as though I had
accidentally overheard offensive talk about my own daughter.
It offends me that these charges are wholesale, and rest on
such worn-out commonplaces, on such wordy vapourings as
degeneration and absence of ideals, or on references to the
splendours of the past. Every accusation, even if it is uttered
in ladies’ society, ought to be formulated with all possible
definiteness, or it is not an accusation, but idle disparagement,
unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, I have been lecturing for thirty years, but
I notice neither degeneration nor lack of ideals, and I don’t
find that the present is worse than the past. My porter Nikolay,
whose experience of this subject has its value, says that the
students of today are neither better nor worse than those of
the past.
If I were asked what I don’t like in my pupils of today, I
should answer the question, not straight off and not at length,
but with sufficient definiteness. I know their failings, and so
have no need to resort to vague generalities. I don’t like their
smoking, using spirituous beverages, marrying late, and often
being so irresponsible and careless that they will let one of
their number be starving in their midst while they neglect to
pay their subscriptions to the Students’ Aid Society. They don’t
know modern languages, and they don’t express themselves
correctly in Russian; no longer ago than yesterday my col113
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league, the professor of hygiene, complained to me that he
had to give twice as many lectures, because the students had a
very poor knowledge of physics and were utterly ignorant of
meteorology. They are readily carried away by the influence
of the last new writers, even when they are not first-rate, but
they take absolutely no interest in classics such as Shakespeare,
Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to
distinguish the great from the small betrays their ignorance of
practical life more than anything. All difficult questions that
have more or less a social character (for instance the migration
question) they settle by studying monographs on the subject,
but not by way of scientific investigation or experiment,
though that method is at their disposal and is more in keeping
with their calling. They gladly become ward-surgeons,
assistants, demonstrators, external teachers, and are ready to
fill such posts until they are forty, though independence, a
sense of freedom and personal initiative, are no less necessary
in science than, for instance, in art or commerce. I have pupils
and listeners, but no successors and helpers, and so I love them
and am touched by them, but am not proud of them. And so
on, and so on.…
Such shortcomings, however numerous they may be, can
only give rise to a pessimistic or fault-finding temper in a
faint-hearted and timid man. All these failings have a casual,
transitory character, and are completely dependent on conditions
of life; in some ten years they will have disappeared or
given place to other fresh defects, which are all inevitable and
will in their turn alarm the faint-hearted. The students’ sins
often vex me, but that vexation is nothing in comparison
with the joy I have been experiencing now for the last thirty
years when I talk to my pupils, lecture to them, watch their
relations, and compare them with people not of their circle.
Mihail Fyodorovitch speaks evil of everything. Katya listens,
and neither of them notices into what depths the apparently
innocent diversion of finding fault with their neighbours
is gradually drawing them. They are not conscious how by
degrees simple talk passes into malicious mockery and jeering,
and how they are both beginning to drop into the habits
and methods of slander.
“Killing types one meets with,” says Mihail Fyodorovitch.
“I went yesterday to our friend Yegor Petrovitch’s, and there I
found a studious gentleman, one of your medicals in his third
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year, I believe. Such a face!… in the Dobrolubov style, the
imprint of profound thought on his brow; we got i nto talk.
‘Such doings, young man,’ said I. ‘I’ve read,’ said I, ‘that some
German —I’ve forgotten his name — has created from the
human brain a new kind of alkaloid, idiotine.’ What do you
think? He believed it, and there was positively an expression
of respect on his face, as though to say, ‘See what we fellows
can do!’ And the other day I went to the theatre. I took my
seat. In the next row directly in front of me were sitting two
men: one of ‘us fellows’ and apparently a law student, the
other a shaggy-looking figure, a medical student. The latter
was as drunk as a cobbler. He did not look at the stage at all.
He was dozing with his nose on his shirt-front. But as soon as
an actor begins loudly reciting a monologue, or simply raises
his voice, our friend starts, pokes his neighbour in the ribs,
and asks, ‘What is he saying? Is it elevating?’ ‘Yes,’ answers
one of our fellows. ‘B-r-r-ravo!’ roars the medical student.
‘Elevating! Bravo!’ He had gone to the theatre, you see, the
drunken blockhead, not for the sake of art, the play, but for
elevation! He wanted noble sentiments.”
Katya listens and laughs. She has a strange laugh; she catches
her breath in rhythmically regular gasps, very much as though
she were playing the accordion, and nothing in her face is
laughing but her nostrils. I grow depressed and don’t know
what to say. Beside myself, I fire up, leap up from my seat,
and cry:
“Do leave off! Why are you sitting here like two toads, poisoning
the air with your breath? Give over!”
And without waiting for them to finish their gossip I prepare
to go home. And, indeed, it is high time: it is past ten.
“I will stay a little longer,” says Mihail Fyodorovitch. “Will
you allow me, Ekaterina Vladimirovna?”
“I will,” answers Katya.
“Bene! In that case have up another little bottle.”
They both accompany me with candles to the hall, and
while I put on my fur coat, Mihail Fyodorovitch says:
“You have grown dreadfully thin and older looking, Nikolay
Stepanovitch. What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”
“Yes; I am not very well.”
“And you are not doing anything for it. . .,” Katya puts in grimly.
“Why don’t you? You can’t go on like that! God helps those
who help themselves, my dear fellow. Remember me to your
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wife and daughter, and make my apologies for not having
been to see them. In a day or two, before I go abroad, I shall
come to say good-bye. I shall be sure to. I am going away
next week.”
I come away from Katya, irritated and alarmed by what has
been said about my being ill, and dissatisfied with myself. I
ask myself whether I really ought not to consult one of my
colleagues. And at once I imagine how my colleague, after
listening to me, would walk away to the window without
speaking, would think a moment, then would turn round to
me and, trying to prevent my reading the truth in his face,
would say in a careless tone: “So far I see nothing serious, but
at the same time, collega, I advise you to lay aside your
work.…” And that would deprive me of my last hope.
Who is without hope? Now that I am diagnosing my illness
and prescribing for myself, from time to time I hope
that I am deceived by my own illness, that I am mistaken in
regard to the albumen and the sugar I find, and in regard to
my heart, and in regard to the swellings I have twice noticed
in the mornings; when with the fervour of the hypochondriac
I look through the textbooks of therapeutics and take a
different medicine every day, I keep fancying that I shall hit
upon something comforting. All that is petty.
Whether the sky is covered with clouds or the moon and
the stars are shining, I turn my eyes towards it every evening
and think that death is taking me soon. One would think
that my thoughts at such times ought to be deep as the sky,
brilliant, striking.… But no! I think about myself, about my
wife, about Liza, Gnekker, the students, people in general;
my thoughts are evil, petty, I am insincere with myself, and at
such times my theory of life may be expressed in the words
the celebrated Araktcheev said in one of his intimate letters:
“Nothing good can exist in the world without evil, and there
is more evil than good.” That is, everything is disgusting; there
is nothing to live for, and the sixty-two years I have already
lived must be reckoned as wasted. I catch myself in these
thoughts, and try to persuade myself that they are accidental,
temporary, and not deeply rooted in me, but at once I think:
“If so, what drives me every evening to those two toads?”
And I vow to myself that I will never go to Katya’s again,
though I know I shall go next evening.
Ringing the bell at the door and going upstairs, I feel that I
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have no family now and no desire to bring it back again. It is
clear that the new Araktcheev thoughts are not casual, temporary
visitors, but have possession of my whole being. With
my conscience ill at ease, dejected, languid, hardly able to move
my limbs, feeling as though tons were added to my weight, I
get into bed and quickly drop asleep.
And then — insomnia!
IV
SUMMER COMES on and life is changed.
One fine morning Liza comes in to me and says in a jesting
tone:
“Come, your Excellency! We are ready.”
My Excellency is conducted into the street, and seated in a
cab. As I go along, having nothing to do, I read the signboards
from right to left. The word “Traktir” reads “ Ritkart”;
that would just suit some baron’s family: Baroness Ritkart.
Farther on I drive through fields, by the graveyard, which
makes absolutely no impression on me, though I shall soon
lie in it; then I drive by forests and again by fields. There is
nothing of interest. After two hours of driving, my Excellency
is conducted into the lower storey of a summer villa
and installed in a small, very cheerful little room with light
blue hangings.
At night there is sleeplessness as before, but in the morning
I do not put a good face upon it and listen to my wife, but lie
in bed. I do not sleep, but lie in the drowsy, half-conscious
condition in which you know you are not asleep, but dreaming.
At midday I get up and from habit sit down at my table,
but I do not work now; I amuse myself with French books in
yellow covers, sent me by Katya. Of course, it would be more
patriotic to read Russian authors, but I must confess I cherish
no particular liking for them. With the exception of two or
three of the older writers, all our literature of today strikes me
as not being literature, but a special sort of home industry,
which exists simply in order to be encouraged, though people
do not readily make use of its products. The very best of
these home products cannot be called remarkable and cannot
be sincerely praised without qualification. I must say the same
of all the literary novelties I have read during the last ten or
fifteen years; not one of them is remarkable, and not one of
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them can be praised without a “but.” Cleverness, a good tone,
but no talent; talent, a good tone, but no cleverness; or talent,
cleverness, but not a good tone.
I don’t say the French books have talent, cleverness, and a
good tone. They don’t satisfy me, either. But they are not so
tedious as the Russian, and it is not unusual to find in them
the chief element of artistic creation — the feeling of personal
freedom which is lacking in the Russian authors. I don’t
remember one new book in which the author does not try
from the first page to entangle himself in all sorts of conditions
and contracts with his conscience. One is afraid to speak
of the naked body; another ties himself up hand and foot in
psychological analysis; a third must have a “warm attitude to
man”; a fourth purposely scrawls whole descriptions of nature
that he may not be suspected of writing with a purpose.…
One is bent upon being middle-class in his work, another
must be a nobleman, and so on. There is intentionalness, circumspection,
and self-will, but they have neither the independence
nor the manliness to write as they like, and therefore
there is no creativeness.
All this applies to what is called belles-lettres.
As for serious treatises in Russian on sociology, for instance,
on art, and so on, I do not rea d them simply from timidity.
In my childhood and early youth I had for some reason a
terror of doorkeepers and attendants at the theatre, and that
terror has remained with me to this day. I am afraid of them
even now. It is said that we are only afraid of what we do not
understand. And, indeed, it is very difficult to understand
why doorkeepers and theatre attendants are so dignified,
haughty, and majestically rude. I feel exactly the same terror
when I read serious articles. Their extraordinary dignity, their
bantering lordly tone, their familiar manner to foreign authors,
their ability to split straws with dignity — all that is
beyond my understanding; it is intimidating and utterly unlike
the quiet, gentlemanly tone to which I am accustomed
when I read the works of our medical and scientific writers. It
oppresses me to read not only the articles written by serious
Russians, but even works translated or edited by them. The
pretentious, edifying tone of the preface; the redundancy of
remarks made by the translator, which prevent me from concentrating
my attention; the question marks and “sic” in parenthesis
scattered all over the book or article by the liberal
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translator, are to my mind an outrage on the author and on
my independence as a reader.
Once I was summoned as an expert to a circuit court; in an
interval one of my fellow-experts drew my attention to the
rudeness of the public prosecutor to the defendants, among
whom there were two ladies of good education. I believe I
did not exaggerate at all when I told him that the prosecutor
s manner was no ruder than that of the authors of serious
articles to one another. Their manners are, indeed, so rude
that I cannot speak of them without distaste. They treat one
another and the writers they criticize either with superfluous
respect, at the sacrifice of their own dignity, or, on the contrary,
with far more ruthlessness than I have shown in my
notes and my thoughts in regard to my future son-in-law
Gnekker. Accusations of irrationality, of evil intentions, and,
indeed, of every sort of crime, form an habitual ornament of
serious articles. And that, as young medical men are fond of
saying in their monographs, is the _ultima ratio!_ Such ways
must infallibly have an effect on the morals of the younger
generation of writers, and so I am not at all surprised that in
the new works with which our literature has been enriched
during the last ten or fifteen years the heroes drink too much
vodka and the heroines are not over-chaste.
I read French books, and I look out of the window which is
open; I can see the spikes of my garden-fence, two or three
scraggy trees, and beyond the fence the road, the fields, and
beyond them a broad stretch of pine-wood. Often I admire a
boy and girl, both flaxen-headed and ragged, who clamber on
the fence and laugh at my baldness. In their shining little eyes
I read, “Go up, go up, thou baldhead!” They are almost the
only people who care nothing for my celebrity or my rank.
Visitors do not come to me every day now. I will only mention
the visits of Nikolay and Pyotr Ignatyevitch. Nikolay
usually comes to me on holidays, with some pretext of business,
though really to see me. He arrives very much exhilarated,
a thing which never occurs to him in the winter.
“What have you to tell me?” I ask, going out to him in the
hall.
“Your Excellency!” he says, pressing his hand to his heart
and looking at me with the ecstasy of a lover — “your Excellency!
God be my witness! Strike me dead on the spot!
Gaudeamus egitur juventus!”
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And he greedily kisses me on the shoulder, on the sleeve,
and on the buttons.
“Is everything going well?” I ask him.
“Your Excellency! So help me God!…”
He persists in grovelling before me for no sort of reason,
and soon bores me, so I send him away to the kitchen, where
they give him dinner.
Pyotr Ignatyevitch comes to see me on holidays, too, with
the special object of seeing me and sharing his thoughts with
me. He usually sits down near my table, modest, neat, and
reasonable, and does not venture to cross his legs or put his
elbows on the table. All the time, in a soft, even, little voice,
in rounded bookish phrases, he tells me various, to his mind,
very interesting and piquant items of news which he has read
in the magazines and journals. They are all alike and may be
reduced to this type: “A Frenchman has made a discovery;
some one else, a German, has denounced him, proving that
the discovery was made in 1870 by some American; while a
third person, also a German, trumps them both by proving
they both had made fools of themselves, mistaking bubbles
of air for dark pigment under the microscope. Even when he
wants to amuse me, Pyotr Ignatyevitch tells me things in the
same lengthy, circumstantial manner as though he were defending
a thesis, enumerating in detail the literary sources from
which he is deriving his narrative, doing his utmost to be
accurate as to the date and number of the journals and the
name of every one concerned, invariably mentioning it in full
— Jean Jacques Petit, never simply Petit. Sometimes he stays
to dinner with us, and then during the whole of dinner-time
he goes on telling me the same sort of piquant anecdotes,
reducing every one at table to a state of dejected boredom. If
Gnekker and Liza begin talking before him of fugues and
counterpoint, Brahms and Bach, he drops his eyes modestly,
and is overcome with embarrassment; he is ashamed that such
trivial subjects should be discussed before such serious people
as him and me.
In my present state of mind five minutes of him is enough
to sicken me as though I had been seeing and hearing him for
an eternity. I hate the poor fellow. His soft, smooth voice and
bookish language exhaust me, and his stories stupefy me.…
He cherishes the best of feelings for me, and talks to me simply
in order to give me pleasure, and I repay him by looking
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at him as though I wanted to hypnotize him, and think, “Go,
go, go!…” But he is not amenable to thought-suggestion,
and sits on and on and on.…
While he is with me I can never shake off the thought, “It’s
possible when I die he will be appointed to succeed me,” and
my poor lecture-hall presents itself to me as an oasis in which
the spring is died up; and I am ungracious, silent, and surly
with Pyotr Ignatyevitch, as though he were to blame for such
thoughts, and not I myself. When he begins, as usual, praising
up the German savants, instead of making fun of him
good-humouredly, as I used to do, I mutter sullenly:
“Asses, your Germans!…”
That is like the late Professor Nikita Krylov, who once,
when he was bathing with Pirogov at Revel and vexed at the
water’s being very cold, burst out with, “Scoundrels, these
Germans!” I behave badly with Pyotr Ignatyevitch, and only
when he is going away, and from the window I catch a glimpse
of his grey hat behind the garden-fence, I want to call out and
say, “Forgive me, my dear fellow!”
Dinner is even drearier than in the winter. Gnekker, whom
now I hate and despise, dines with us almost every day. I used
to endure his presence in silence, now I aim biting remarks at
him which make my wife and daughter blush. Carried away
by evil feeling, I often say things that are simply stupid, and I
don’t know why I say them. So on one occasion it happened
that I stared a long time at Gnekker, and, _a propos_ of nothing,
I fired off:
“An eagle may perchance swoop down below a cock,
But never will the fowl soar upwards to the clouds. .
And the most vexatious thing is that the fowl Gnekker shows
himself much cleverer than the eagle professor. Knowing that
my wife and daughter are on his side, he takes up the line of
meeting my gibes with condescending silence, as though to say:
“The old chap is in his dotage; what’s the use of talking to
him?”
Or he makes fun of me good-naturedly. It is wonderful
how petty a man may become! I am capable of dreaming all
dinner-time of how Gnekker will turn out to be an adventurer,
how my wife and Liza will come to see their mistake,
and how I will taunt them — and such absurd thoughts at
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the time when I am standing with one foot in th e grave!
There are now, too, misunderstandings of which in the
old days I had no idea except from hearsay. Though I am
ashamed of it, I will describe one that occurred the other
day after dinner.
I was sitting in my room smoking a pipe; my wife came in
as usual, sat down, and began saying what a good thing it
would be for me to go to Harkov now while it is warm and
I have free time, and there find out what sort of person our
Gnekker is.
“Very good; I will go,” I assented.
My wife, pleased with me, got up and was going to the
door, but turned back and said:
“By the way, I have another favour to ask of you. I know
you will be angry, but it is my duty to warn you.… Forgive
my saying it, Nikolay Stepanovitch, but all our neighbours
and acquaintances have begun talking about your being so
often at Katya’s. She is clever and well-educated; I don’t deny
that her company may be agreeable; but at your age and with
your social position it seems strange that you should find pleasure
in her society.… Besides, she has such a reputation that…”
All the blood suddenly rushed to my brain, my eyes flashed
fire, I leaped up and, clutching at my head and stamping my
feet, shouted in a voice unlike my own:
“Let me alone! let me alone! let me alone!”
Probably my face was terrible, my voice was strange, for
my wife suddenly turned pale and began shrieking aloud in a
despairing voice that was utterly unlike her own. Liza,
Gnekker, then Yegor, came running in at our shouts.…
“Let me alone!” I cried; “let me alone! Go away!”
My legs turned numb as though they had ceased to exist; I
felt myself falling into someone’s arms; for a little while I still
heard weeping, then sank into a swoon which lasted two or
three hours.
Now about Katya; she comes to see me every day towards
evening, and of course neither the neighbours nor our acquaintances
can avoid noticing it. She comes in for a minute and
carries me off for a drive with her. She has her own horse and
a new chaise bought this summer. Altogether she lives in an
expensive style; she has taken a big detached villa with a large
garden, and has taken all her town retinue with her — two
maids, a coachman… I often ask her:
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“Katya, what will you live on when you have spent your
father’s money?”
“Then we shall see,” she answers.
“That money, my dear, deserves to be treated more seriously.
It was earned by a good man, by honest labour.”
“You have told me that already. I know it.”
At first we drive through the open country, then through
the pine-wood which is visible from my window. Nature
seems to me as beautiful as it always has been, though some
evil spirit whispers to me that these pines and fir trees, birds,
and white clouds on the sky, will not notice my absence when
in three or four months I am dead. Katya loves driving, and
she is pleased that it is fine weather and that I am sitting beside
her. She is in good spirits and does not say harsh things.
“You are a very good man, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she says.
“You are a rare specimen, and there isn’t an actor who would
understand how to play you. Me or Mihail Fyodorovitch,
for instance, any poor actor could do, but not you. And I
envy you, I envy you horribly! Do you know what I stand
for? What?”
She ponders for a minute, and then asks me:
“Nikolay Stepanovitch, I am a negative phenomenon! Yes?”
“Yes,” I answer.
“H’m! what am I to do?”
What answer was I to make her? It is easy to say “work,” or
“give your possessions to the poor,” or “know yourself,” and
because it is so easy to say that, I don’t know what to answer.
My colleagues when they teach therapeutics advise “the individual
study of each separate case.” One has but to obey
this advice to gain the conviction that the methods recommended
in the textbooks as the best and as providing a safe
basis for treatment turn out to be quite unsuitable in individual
cases. It is just the same in moral ailments.
But I must make some answer, and I say:
“You have too much free time, my dear; you absolutely
must take up some occupation. After all, why shouldn’t you
be an actress again if it is your vocation?”
“I cannot!”
“Your tone and manner suggest that you are a victim. I don’t
like that, my dear; it is your own fault. Remember, you began
with falling out with people and methods, but you have
done nothing to make either better. You did not struggle with
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evil, but were cast down by it, and you are not the victim of
the struggle, but of your own impotence. Well, of course you
were young and inexperienced then; now it may all be different.
Yes, really, go on the stage. You will work, you will serve
a sacred art.”
“Don’t pretend, Nikolay Stepanovitch,” Katya interrupts
me. “Let us make a compact once for all; we will talk about
actors, actresses, and authors, but we will let art alone. You are
a splendid and rare person, but you don’t know enough about
art sincerely to think it sacred. You have no instinct or feeling
for art. You have been hard at work all your life, and have not
had time to acquire that feeling. Altogether… I don’t like
talk about art,” she goes on nervously. “I don’t like it! And,
my goodness, how they have vulgarized it!”
“Who has vulgarized it?”
“They have vulgarized it by drunkenness, the newspapers
by their familiar attitude, clever people by philosophy.”
“Philosophy has nothing to do with it.”
“Yes, it has. If any one philosophizes about it, it shows he
does not understand it.”
To avoid bitterness I hasten to change the subject, and then
sit a long time silent. Only when we are driving out of the
wood and turning towards Katya’s villa I go back to my former
question, and say:
“You have still not answered me, why you don’t want to go
on the stage.”
“Nikolay Stepanovitch, this is cruel!” she cries, and suddenly
flushes all over. “You want me to tell you the truth
aloud? Very well, if… if you like it! I have no talent! No
talent and… and a great deal of vanity! So there!”
After making this confession she turns her face away from
me, and to hide the trembling of her hands tugs violently at
the reins.
As we are driving towards her villa we see Mihail
Fyodorovitch walking near the gate, impatiently awaiting us.
“That Mihail Fyodorovitch again!” says Katya with vexation.
“Do rid me of him, please! I am sick and tired of him…
bother him!”
Mihail Fyodorovitch ought to have gone abroad long ago, but
he puts off going from week to. week. Of late there have been
certain changes in him. He looks, as it were, sunken, has taken to
drinking until he is tipsy, a thing which never used to happen to
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him, and his black eyebrows are beginning to turn grey. When
our chaise stops at the gate he does not conceal his joy and his
impatience. He fussily helps me and Katya out, hurriedly asks
questions, laughs, rubs his hands, and that gentle, imploring,
pure expression, which I used to notice only in his eyes, is
now suffused all over his face. He is glad and at the same time
he is ashamed of his gladness, ashamed of his habit of spending
every evening with Katya. And he thinks it necessary to
explain his visit by some obvious absurdity such as: “I was
driving by, and I thought I would just look in for a minute.”
We all three go indoors; first we drink tea, then the familiar
packs of cards, the big piece of cheese, the fruit, and the bottle
of Crimean champagne are put upon the table. The subjects
of our conversation are not new; they are just the same as in
the winter. We fall foul of the University, the students, and
literature and the theatre; the air grows thick and stifling with
evil speaking, and poisoned by the breath, not of two toads as
in the winter, but of three. Besides the velvety baritone laugh
and the giggle like the gasp of a concertina, the maid who
waits upon us hears an unpleasant cracked “He, he!” like the
chuckle of a general in a vaudeville.
V
THERE ARE TERRIBLE NIGHTS with thunder, lightning, rain, and
wind, such as are called among the people “sparrow nights.”
There has been one such night in my personal life.
I woke up after midnight and leaped suddenly out of bed.
It seemed to me for some reason that I was just immedi ately
going to die. Why did it seem so? I had no sensation in my
body that suggested my immediate death, but my soul was
oppressed with terror, as though I had suddenly seen a vast
menacing glow of fire.
I rapidly struck a light, drank some water straight out of the
decanter, then hurried to the open window. The weather outside
was magnificent. There was a smell of hay and some other
very sweet scent. I could see the spikes of the fence, the gaunt,
drowsy trees by the window, the road, the dark streak of woodland,
there was a serene, very bright moon in the sky and not a
single cloud, perfect stillness, not one leaf stirring. I felt that
everything was looking at me and waiting for me to die.…
It was uncanny. I closed the window and ran to my bed. I
felt for my pulse, and not finding it in my wrist, tried to find
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it in my temple, then in my chin, and again in my wrist, and
everything I touched was cold and clammy with sweat. My
breathing came more and more rapidly, my body was shivering,
all my inside was in commotion; I had a sensation on my
face and on my bald head as though they were covered with
spiders’ webs.
What should I do? Call my family? No; it would be no use.
I could not imagine what my wife and Liza would do when
they came in to me.
I hid my head under the pillow, closed my eyes, and waited
and waited.… My spine was cold; it seemed to be drawn
inwards, and I felt as though death were coming upon me
stealthily from behind
“Kee-vee! kee-vee!” I heard a sudden shriek in the night’s
stillness, and did not know where it was — in my breast or in
the street — “Kee-vee! kee-vee!”
“My God, how terrible!” I would have drunk some more
water, but by then it was fearful to open my eyes and I was
afraid to raise my head. I was possessed by unaccountable
animal terror, and I cannot understand why I was so frightened:
was it that I wanted to live, or that some new unknown
pain was in store for me?
Upstairs, overhead, some one moaned or laughed. I listened.
Soon afterwards there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs.
Some one came hurriedly down, then went up again. A minute
later there was a sound of steps downstairs again; some one
stopped near my door and listened.
“Who is there?” I cried.
The door opened. I boldly opened my eyes, and saw my
wife. Her face was pale and her eyes were tear-stained.
“You are not asleep, Nikolay Stepanovitch?” she asked.
“What is it? “
“For God’s sake, go up and have a look at Liza; there is
something the matter with her.…”
“Very good, with pleasure,” I muttered, greatly relieved at
not being alone. “Very good, this minute.…”
I followed my wife, heard what she said to me, and was too
agitated to understand a word. Patches of light from her candle
danced about the stairs, our long shadows trembled. My feet
caught in the skirts of my dressing-gown; I gasped for breath,
and felt as though something were pursuing me and trying to
catch me from behind.
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“I shall die on the spot, here on the staircase,” I thought.
“On the spot.…” But we passed the staircase, the dark corridor
with the Italian windows, and went into Liza’s room. She
was sitting on the bed in her nightdress, with her bare feet
hanging down, and she was moaning.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” she was muttering, screwing
up her eyes at our candle. “I can’t bear it.”
“Liza, my child,” I said, “what is it?”
Seeing me, she began crying out, and flung herself on my
neck.
“My kind papa!…” she sobbed — “my dear, good papa…
my darling, my pet, I don’t know what is the matter with
me.… I am miserable!”
She hugged me, kissed me, and babbled fond words I used
to hear from her when she was a child.
“Calm yourself, my child. God be with you,” I said. “There
is no need to cry. I am miserable, too.”
I tried to tuck her in; my wife gave her water, and we awkwardly
stumbled by her bedside; my shoulder jostled against
her shoulder, and meanwhile I was thinking how we used to
give our children their bath together.
“Help her! help her!” my wife implored me. “Do something!”
What could I do? I could do nothing. There was some load
on the girl’s heart; but I did not understand, I knew nothing
about it, and could only mutter:
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing; it will pass. Sleep, sleep!”
To make things worse, there was a sudden sound of dogs
howling, at first subdued and uncertain, then loud, two dogs
howling together. I had never attached significance to such
omens as the howling of dogs or the shrieking of owls, but
on that occasion it sent a pang to my heart, and I hastened to
explain the howl to myself.
“It’s nonsense,” I thought, “the influence of one organism
on another. The intensely strained condition of my nerves
has infected my wife, Liza, the dog — that is all.… Such
infection explains presentiments, forebodings.…”
When a little later I went back to my room to write a prescription
for Liza, I no longer thought I should die at once,
but only had such a weight, such a feeling of oppression in
my soul that I felt actually sorry that I had not died on the
spot. For a long time I stood motionless in the middle of the
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room, pondering what to prescribe for Liza. But the moans
overhead ceased, and I decided to prescribe nothing, and yet I
went on standing there.…
There was a deathlike stillness, such a stillness, as some author
has expressed it, “it rang in one’s ears.” Time passed slowly;
the streaks of moonlight on the window-sill did not shift
their position, but seemed as though frozen.… It was still
some time before dawn.
But the gate in the fence creaked, some one stole in and,
breaking a twig from one of those scraggy trees, cautiously
tapped on the window with it.
“Nikolay Stepanovitch,” I heard a whisper. “Nikolay
Stepanovitch.”
I opened the window, and fancied I was dreaming: under
the window, huddled against the wall, stood a woman in a
black dress, with the moonlight bright upon her, looking at
me with great eyes. Her face was pale, stern, and weird-looking
in the moonlight, like marble, her chin was quivering.
“It is I,” she said — “ I… Katya.”
In the moonlight all women’s eyes look big and black, all
people look taller and paler, and that was probably why I had
not recognized her for the first minute.
“What is it?”
“Forgive me! “ she said. “I suddenly felt unbearably miserable…
I couldn’t stand it, so came here. There was a light in
your window and… and I ventured to knock.… I beg your
pardon. Ah! if you knew how miserable I am! What are you
doing just now?”
“Nothing.… I can’t sleep.”
“I had a feeling that there was something wrong, but that is
nonsense.”
Her brows were lifted, her eyes shone with tears, and her
whole face was lighted up with the familiar look of trustfulness
which I had not seen for so long.
“Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she said imploringly, stretching out
both hands to me, “my precious friend, I beg you, I implore
you.… If you don’t despise my affection and respect for you,
consent to what I ask of you.”
“What is it?”
“Take my money from me!”
“Come! what an idea! What do I want with your money?”
“You’ll go away somewhere for your health.… You ought
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to go for your health. Will you take it? Yes? Nikolay
Stepanovitch darling, yes?”
She looked greedily into my face and repeated: “Yes, you
will take it?”
“No, my dear, I won’t take it . . “ I said. “Thank you.”
She turned her back upon me and bowed her head. Probably
I refused her in a tone which made further conversation
about money impossible.
“Go home to bed,” I said. “We will see each other tomorrow.”
“So you don’t consider me your friend?” she asked dejectedly.
“I don’t say that. But your money would be no use to me
now.”
“I beg your pardon…” she said, dropping her voice a whole
octave. “I understand you… to be indebted to a person like
me… a retired actress.… But, good-bye.…”
And she went away so quickly that I had not time even to
say good-bye.
VI
I AM IN HARKOV.
As it would be useless to contend against my present mood
and, indeed, beyond my power, I have made up my mind
that the last days of my life shall at least be irreproachable
externally. If I am unjust in regard to my wife and daughter,
which I fully recognize, I will try and do as she wishes; since
she wants me to go to Harkov, I go to Harkov. Besides, I
have become of late so indifferent to everything that it is really
all the same to me where I go, to Harkov, or to Paris, or
to Berditchev.
I arrived here at midday, and have put up at the hotel not
far from the cathedral. The train was jolting, there were
draughts, and now I am sitting on my bed, holding my head
and expecting tic douloureux. I ought to have gone today to
see some professors of my acquaintance, but I have neither
strength nor inclination.
The old corridor attendant comes in and asks whether I
have brought my bed-linen. I detain him for five minutes,
and put several questions to him about Gnekker, on whose
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account I have come here. The attendant turns out to be a native
of Harkov; he knows the town like the fingers of his hand, but
does not remember any household of the surname of Gnekker. I
question him about the estate — the same answer.
The clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three.…
These last months in which I am waiting for death seem much
longer than the whole of my life. And I have never before
been so ready to resign myself to the slowness of time as now.
In the old days, when one sat in the station and waited for a
train, or presided in an examination-room, a quarter of an
hour would seem an eternity. Now I can sit all night on my
bed without moving, and quite unconcernedly reflect that
tomorrow will be followed by another night as long and
colourless, and the day after tomorrow.
In the corridor it strikes five, six, seven.… It grows dark.
There is a dull pain in my cheek, the tic beginning. To occupy
myself with thoughts, I go back to my old point of
view, when I was not so indifferent, and ask myself why I, a
distinguished man, a privy councillor, am sitting in this little
hotel room, on this bed with the unfamiliar grey quilt. Why
am I looking at that cheap tin washing-stand and listening to
the whirr of the wretched clock in the corridor? Is all this in
keeping with my fame and my lofty position? And I answer
these questions with a jeer. I am amused by the naivete with
which I used in my youth to exaggerate the value of renown
and of the exceptional position which celebrities are supposed
to enjoy. I am famous, my name is pronounced with reverence,
my portrait has been both in the _Niva_ and in the
Illustrated News of the World; I have read my biography even
in a German magazine. And what of all that? Here I am sitting
utterly alone in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing
my aching cheek with my hand.… Domestic worries, the
hard-heartedness of creditors, the rudeness of the railway servants,
the inconveniences of the passport system, the expensive
and unwholesome food in the refreshment-rooms, the
general rudeness and coarseness in social intercourse — all
this, and a great deal more which would take too long to
reckon up, affects me as much as any working man who is
famous only in his alley. In what way, does my exceptional
position find expression? Admitting that I am celebrated a
thousand times over, that I am a hero of whom my country is
proud. They publish bulletins of my illness in every paper,
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letters of sympathy come to me by post from my colleagues,
my pupils, the general public; but all that does not prevent
me from dying in a strange bed, in misery, in utter loneliness.
Of course, no one is to blame for that; but I in my foolishness
dislike my popularity. I feel as though it had cheated me.
At ten o’clock I fall asleep, and in spite of the tic I sleep
soundly, and should have gone on sleeping if I had not been
awakened. Soon after one came a sudden knock at the door.
“Who is there?”
“A telegram.”
“You might have waited till tomorrow,” I say angrily, taking
the telegram from the attendant. “Now I shall not get to
sleep again.”
“I am sorry. Your light was burning, so I thought you were
not asleep.”
I tear open the telegram and look first at the signature. From
my wife.
“What does she want?”
“Gnekker was secretly married to Liza yesterday. Return.”
I read the telegram, and my dismay does not last long. I am
dismayed, not by what Liza and Gnekker have done, but by
the indifference with which I hear of their marriage. They say
philosophers and the truly wise are indifferent. It is false: indifference
is the paralysis of the soul; it is premature death.
I go to bed again, and begin trying to think of something
to occupy my mind. What am I to think about? I feel as
though everything had been thought over already and there is
nothing which could hold my attention now.
When daylight comes I sit up in bed with my arms round
my knees, and to pass the time I try to know myself. “Know
thyself ” is excellent and useful advice; it is only a pity that the
ancients never thought to indicate the means of following
this precept.
When I have wanted to understand somebody or myself I
have considered, not the actions, in which everything is relative,
but the desires.
“Tell me what you want, and I will tell you what manner
of man you are.”
And now I examine myself: what do I want?
I want our wives, our children, our friends, our pupils, to
love in us, not our fame, not the brand and not the label, but
to love us as ordinary men. Anything else? I should like to
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have had helpers and successors. Anything else? I should like
to wake up in a hundred years’ time and to have just a peep
out of one eye at what is happening in science. I should have
liked to have lived another ten years. . . What further? Why,
nothing further. I think and think, and can think of nothing
more. And however much I might think, and however far
my thoughts might travel, it is clear to me that there is nothing
vital, nothing of great importance in my desires. In my
passion for science, in my desire to live, in this sitting on a
strange bed, and in this striving to know myself — in all the
thoughts, feelings, and ideas I form about everything, there is
no common bond to connect it all into one whole. Every
feeling and every thought exists apart in me; and in all my
criticisms of science, the theatre, literature, my pupils, and in
all the pictures my imagination draws, even the most skilful
analyst could not find what is called a general idea, or the god
of a living man.
And if there is not that, then there is nothing.
In a state so poverty-stricken, a serious ailment, the fear of
death, the influences of circumstance and men were enough
to turn upside down and scatter in fragments all which I had
once looked upon as my theory of life, and in which I had
seen the meaning and joy of my existence. So there is nothing
surprising in the fact that I have over-shadowed the last months
of my life with thoughts and feelings only worthy of a slave
and barbarian, and that now I am indifferent and take no
heed of the dawn. When a man has not in him what is loftier
and mightier than all external impressions a bad cold is really
enough to upset his equilibrium and make him begin to see
an owl in every bird, to hear a dog howling in every sound.
And all his pessimism or optimism with his thoughts great
and small have at such times significance as symptoms and
nothing more.
I am vanquished. If it is so, it is useless to think, it is useless
to talk. I will sit and wait in silence for what is to come.
In the morning the corridor attendant brings me tea and a
copy of the local newspaper. Mechanically I read the advertisements
on the first page, the leading article, the extracts
from the newspapers and journals, the chronicle of events.…
In the latter I find, among other things, the following paragraph:
“Our distinguished savant, Professor Nikolay
Stepanovitch So-and-so, arrived yesterday in Harkov, and is
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staying in the So-and-so Hotel.”
Apparently, illustrious names are created to live on their
own account, apart from those that bear them. Now my name
is promenading tranquilly about Harkov; in another three
months, printed in gold letters on my monument, it will
shine bright as the sun itself, while I s hall be already under
the moss.
A light tap at the door. Somebody wants me.
“Who is there? Come in.”
The door opens, and I step back surprised and hurriedly
wrap my dressing-gown round me. Before me stands Katya.
“How do you do?” she says, breathless with running upstairs.
“You didn’t expect me? I have come here, too.… I have
come, too!”
She sits down and goes on, hesitating and not looking at me.
“Why don’t you speak to me? I have come, too… today.…
I found out that you were in this hotel, and have come to
you.”
“Very glad to see you,” I say, shrugging my shoulders, “but
I am surprised. You seem to have dropped from the skies.
What have you come for?”
“Oh… I’ve simply come.”
Silence. Suddenly she jumps up impulsively and comes to
me.
“Nikolay Stepanovitch,” she says, turning pale and pressing
her hands on her bosom — “Nikolay Stepanovitch, I cannot
go on living like this! I cannot! For God’s sake tell me quickly,
this minute, what I am to do! Tell me, what am I to do?”
“What can I tell you?” I ask in perplexity. “I can do nothing.”
“Tell me, I beseech you,” she goes on, breathing hard and
trembling all over. “I swear that I cannot go on living like
this. It’s too much for me!”
She sinks on a chair and begins sobbing. She flings her head
back, wrings her hands, taps with her feet; her hat falls off
and hangs bobbing on its elastic; her hair is ruffled.
“Help me! help me! “she implores me. “I cannot go on!”
She takes her handkerchief out of her travelling-bag, and
with it pulls out several letters, which fall from her lap to the
floor. I pick them up, and on one of them I recognize the
handwriting of Mihail Fyodorovitch and accidentally read a
bit of a word “passionat. . .”
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“There is nothing I can tell you, Katya,” I say.
“Help me!” she sobs, clutching at my hand and kissing it.
“You are my father, you know, my only friend! You are clever,
educated; you have lived so long; you have been a teacher!
Tell me, what am I to do?”
“Upon my word, Katya, I don’t know.…”
I am utterly at a loss and confused, touched by her sobs,
and hardly able to stand.
“Let us have lunch, Katya,” I say, with a forced smile. “Give
over crying.”
And at once I add in a sinking voice:
“I shall soon be gone, Katya.…”
“Only one word, only one word!” she weeps, stretching
out her hands to me.
“What am I to do?”
“You are a queer girl, really…” I mutter. “I don’t understand
it! So sensible, and all at once crying your eyes out.…”
A silence follows. Katya straightens her hair, puts on her
hat, then crumples up the letters and stuffs them in her bag
— and all this deliberately, in silence. Her face, her bosom,
and her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression now is
cold and forbidding.… I look at her, and feel ashamed that I
am happier than she. The absence of what my philosophic
colleagues call a general idea I have detected in myself only
just before death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of
this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life,
all her life!
“Let us have lunch, Katya,” I say.
“No, thank you,” she answers coldly. Another minute passes
in silence. “I don’t like Harkov,” I say; “it’s so grey here —
such a grey town.”
“Yes, perhaps.… It’s ugly. I am here not for long, passing
through. I am going on today.”
“Where?”
“To the Crimea… that is, to the Caucasus.”
“Oh! For long?”
“I don’t know.”
Katya gets up, and, with a cold smile, holds out her hand
without looking at me.
I want to ask her, “Then, you won’t be at my funeral?” but
she does not look at me; her hand is cold and, as it were,
strange. I escort her to the door in silence. She goes out, walks
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down the long corridor without looking back; she knows
that I am looking after her, and most likely she will look
back at the turn.
No, she did not look back. I’ve seen her black dress for the
last time: her steps have died away. Farewell, my treasure!
THE PRIVY COUNCILLOR
AT THE BEGINNING of April in 1870 my mother, Klavdia
Arhipovna, the widow of a lieutenant, received from her
brother Ivan, a privy councillor 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 trip to Marienbad, it is
very possible, dear sister, that I may spend this summer with
you at Kotchuevko.…”
On reading the letter my mother turned pale and began
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. Reading the letter once more,
mother called together all the household, and in a voice broken
with emotion began explaining to us that there had been
four Gundasov brothers: one Gundasov had died as a baby;
another had gone to the war, and he, too, was dead; the third,
without offence to him be it said, was an actor; the fourth…
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“The fourth has risen far above us,” my mother brought out
tearfully. “My own brother, we grew up together; and I am all
of a tremble, all of a tremble!… A privy councillor with the
rank of 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 Gundasovs,
there followed a fuss and bustle in the place such as I had been
accustomed to see only before Christmas and Easter. The sky
above and the water in the river were all that escaped; everything
else was subjected to a merciless 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 bath-brick 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 the sugar,
and that was why he was called Bobtail) was carried off to the
kitchen and put in charge of Anisya; Fedka was told that if
any of the dogs came near the front-door “God would punish
him.” But no one was so badly treated as the poor sofas,
easy-chairs, and rugs! They had never, before been so violently
beaten as on this occasion in preparation for our visitor. My
pigeons took fright at the loud thud of the sticks, and were
continually flying up into the sky.
The tailor Spiridon, the only tailor in the whole district
who ventured to make for the gentry, 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 yet he was 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
narrow 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
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meant to put hoops round me like a barrel; then he spent a
long time noting down my measurements 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 Alexyevitch Pobyedimsky. My beloved
tutor was then at the stage when young men watch the growth
of their moustache and are critical of their clothes, and so you
can imagine the devout awe with which Spiridon approached
him. Yegor Alexyevitch had to throw back his head, to straddle
his legs like an inverted V, first lift up his arms, then let them
fall. Spiridon measured him several times, walking round him
during the process like a love-sick pigeon round its mate, going
down on one knee, bending double.… My mother, weary,
exhausted by her exertions and heated by 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 it will be the worse for you if
you don’t make them fit!”
Mother’s words threw Spiridon first into a fever, then into
a perspiration, for he was convinced that he would not make
them fit. He received one rouble twenty kopecks for making
my suit, and for Pobyedimsky’s two roubles, but we provided
the cloth, the lining, and the buttons. The price cannot
be considered excessive, as Novostroevka was about seven miles
from us, and the tailor came to fit us four times. When he
came to try the things on and we squeezed ourselves into the
tight trousers and jackets adorned with basting threads, mother
always frowned contemptuously 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 fashion
and not on him, shrugged his shoulders and sighed, as
though to say:
“There’s 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 with the strained suspense with
which spiritualists wait 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 learn my lessons. Even in my dreams I was
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haunted by an impatient longing to see a general — that is, a
man with epaulettes 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 the drawing-room and glared
with terrible black eyes at everybody who dared to look at
him. Pobyedimsky was the only one who felt himself in his
element. He was neither terrified nor delighted, and merely
from time to time, when he heard the history of the Gundasov
family, said:
“Yes, it will be pleasant to have some one 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 on one side like a bird. To our
thinking, there was not a man in the province cleverer, more
cultivated, or more stylish. He had left the high-school in the
class next to the top, and had then entered a veterinary college,
from which he was expelled before the end of the first
half-year. 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 a mysterious
person. He spoke little, and only of intellectual subjects; he
ate meat during the fasts, and looked with contempt and condescension
on the life going on around him, which did not
prevent him, however, 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 cleverness.
Our visitor did not keep us long waiting. At the beginning
of May two wagon-loads of big boxes arrived from the station.
These boxes looked so majestic that the drivers instinctively
took off their hats as they lifted them down.
“There must be uniforms and gunpowder in those boxes,”
I thought.
Why “gunpowder”? Probably the conception of a general
was closely connected in my mind with cannons and gunpowder.
When I woke up on the morning of the tenth of May,
nurse told me in a whisper that “my uncle had come.” I dressed
rapidly, and, washing after a fashion, flew out of my bedroom
without saying my prayers. In the vestibule I came upon
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a tall, solid gentleman with fashionable whiskers and a foppish-
looking overcoat. Half dead with devout awe, I went up
to him and, remembering 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, far better dressed than Pobyedimsky
or me, excited in me the utmost astonishment, which, to tell
the truth, has lasted to this day. Can such dignified, respectable
people with stern and intellectual faces really be footmen?
And what for?
Pyotr told me that my uncle was in the garden with my
mother. I rushed into the garden.
Nature, knowing nothing of the history of the Gundasov
family and the rank of my uncle, felt far more at ease and
unconstrained than I. There was a clamour going on in the
garden such as one only bears at fairs. Masses of starlings flitting
through the air and hopping about the walks were noisily
chattering as they hunted for cockchafers. There were
swarms of sparrows in the lilac-bushes, which threw their tender,
fragrant blossoms straight in one’s face. Wherever one
turned, from every direction came the note of the golden
oriole and the shrill cry of the hoopoe and the red-legged
falcon. At any other time I should have begun chasing dragonflies
or throwing stones at a crow which was sitting on a low
mound under an aspen-tree, with his blunt beak turned away;
but at that moment 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 epaulettes,
with a naked sword, and with terrible eyes!
But imagine my disappointment! A dapper little foppish
gentleman in white silk trousers, 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 movement in his whole figure 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 schoolboyish nimbleness; instead of a collar
sticking up to his ears, an ordinary light blue necktie. Mother
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and my uncle were walking in the avenue talking together. 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, nothing would have induced
me to go abroad all these years.”
My uncle stooped down rapidly and sniffed at a tulip. Everything
he saw moved him to rapture and excitement, 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 allowing mother to utter a
single word. All of a sudden Pobyedimsky came into sight
from behind an elder-tree at the turn of the avenue. His appearance
was so unexpected that my uncle positively started
and stepped back a pace. On this occasion my tutor was attired
in his best Inverness cape with sleeves, in which, especially
back-view, 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, bending forward,
a little to one side.
“I have the honour to present myself to your high excellency,”
he said aloud: “the teacher and instructor of your
nephew, formerly a pupil of the veterinary institute, and a
nobleman by birth, Pobyedimsky!”
This politeness 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 confused 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 made his little flourish and thinks he’s a very clever
fellow! I do like that — upon my soul I do! What youthful
aplomb, what life in that foolish flourish! 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. . .”
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I made a scrape with my foot on the sand and dropped a
low bow.
“A fine fellow… 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’m!… upon my soul!…
Do you learn lessons?”
My mother, exaggerating and embellishing as all mothers
do, began to describe my achievements in the sciences and the
excellence of my behaviour, 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 remarkable abilities it would not be amiss for
me to get a government nomination to the cadet school; but
at the point when I was to have burst into tears and begged
for my uncle’s protection, 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 bailiff, Fyodor Petrovna,
was coming towards us. She was carrying a starched white petticoat
and a long ironing-board. As she passed us she looked
shyly at the visitor through her eyelashes and flushed crimson.
“Wonders will never cease…” my uncle filtered through his
teeth, looking after her with friendly interest. “You have a
fresh surprise at every step, sister… upon my soul!”
“She’s a beauty…” said mother. “They chose her as a bride
for Fyodor, though she lived over seventy miles from here.…”
Not every one would have called Tatyana a beauty. She was
a plump little woman of twenty, with black eyebrows and a
graceful figure, always rosy and attractive-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 creating her. Tatyana
Ivanovna was shy, bashful, and modest in her behaviour; she
moved softly and smoothly, said little, seldom laughed, and
her whole life was as regular as her face and as flat as her
smooth, tidy 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 has happened so. In my youth I was
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too hard at work, I had no time to live, and when I longed to
live —I looked round — and there I had fifty years on my
back already. I was too late! However, talking about it… is
depressing.”
My mother and my 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. Pobyedimsky 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, sighing. “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 hall;
we must give him a room apart. 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 instance — and give your
room to the valet? What do you say?”
We gave our ready consent, for living in the lodge was a
great deal more free 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 Petersburg. I am simply distracted with
worry! By seven o’clock the dinner will be done to rags in the
oven. Really, men don’t understand 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 till seven, for the sake of her brother.”
Then my mother heaved a deep sigh, bade me try 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.
Pobyedimsky and I moved into the lodge the same day. We
were installed in a room which formed the passage from the
entry to the bailiff ’s bedroom.
Contrary to my expectations, life went on just as before,
drearily and monotonously, in spite of my uncle’s arrival and
our move into new quarters. We were excused lessons “on
account of the visitor. “Pobyedimsky, 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, think142
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ing. 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 used mercilessly to
squash between his hands. After dinner he usually “rested,”
and his snores were a cause of annoyance to the whole household.
I ran about the garden from morning to night, or sat in
the lodge sticking my kites together. For the first two or three
weeks we did not see my uncle often. For days together he sat
in his own room working, in spite of the flies and the heat.
His extraordinary capacity for sitting as though glued to his
table produced 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 to his table, and did not leave it till dinner-time;
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 sitting at the table working.
The work consisted in his writing with one hand while he
turned over the leaves of a book with the other, and, strange
to say, he kept moving all over — swinging his leg as though
it were a pendulum, whistling, and nodding his head in time.
He had an extremely careless and frivolous expression all the
while, as though he were not working, but playing at noughts
and crosses. 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 perfumery. He only left his
room for dinner, but he ate little.
“I can’t make brother out!” mother complained of him. “Every
day we kill a turkey and pigeons 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 washing up water! You may die of a diet like
that.… If I try 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, Tatyana Ivanovna,
Pobyedimsky, and I —were sitting on the steps of the lodge.
We did not talk till it grew quite dusk. And, indeed, what is
one to talk of when every subject has been talked over al143
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ready? There was only one thing new, 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 of shade,
the bailiff Fyodor would come in from shooting or from the
field. This Fyodor gave me the impres sion of being a fierce
and even a terrible man. The son of a Russianized gipsy from
Izyumskoe, swarthy-faced and curly-headed, with big black
eyes and a matted beard, he was never called among our
Kotchuevko peasants by any name but “The Devil.” And,
indeed, there was a great deal of the gipsy 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-humoured, taciturn, was
afraid of nobody, and refused to recognize any authority. He
was rude to mother, addressed me familiarly, and was contemptuous
of Pobyedimsky’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 gipsy nature, he was
ideally honest and industrious. He loved his Tatyana Ivanovna
passionately, like a gipsy, 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 us sing,” I would suggest.
My tutor would tune his guitar, and in a deep deacon’s bass
strike up “In the midst of the valley.” We would begin singing.
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 gipsy ate greedily, with such a sound
that it was hard to tell whether it was the bones crunching or
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their jaws, and Tatyana Ivanovna and I scarcely succeeded in getting
our share. After supper the lodge was plunged in deep sleep.
One evening, it was at the end of May, we were sitting on
the steps, waiting for supper. A shadow suddenly fell across
us, and Gundasov stood before us as though he had sprung
out of the earth. He looked at us for a long time, then clasped
his hands and laughed gaily.
“An idyll!” he said. “They sing and dream in the moonlight!
It’s charming, upon my soul! May I sit down 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 followed. Pobyedimsky, who had for a long time been
wanting to talk to somebody fresh, was delighted at the opportunity,
and was the first to break the silence. He had only
one subject for intellectual conversation, the epizootic diseases.
It sometimes happens that after one has been in an immense
crowd, only some one countenance of the thousands
remains long imprinted on the memory; in the same way, of
all that Pobyedimsky had heard, during his six months at the
veterinary institute, he remembered only one passage:
“The epizootics do immense damage to the stock of the
country. It is the duty of society to work hand in hand with
the government in waging war upon them.”
Before saying this to Gundasov, my tutor cleared his throat
three times, and several times, in his excitement, wrapped himself
up in his Inverness. 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 mannequins. “This is actually life.… This is
really what reality is bound to be. Why are you silent, Pelagea
Ivanovna?” he said, addressing Tatyana Ivanovna.
She coughed, overcome with confusion.
“Talk, my friends, sing… play!… Don’t lose time. You
know, time, the rascal, runs away and waits for no man! Upon
my soul, before you have time to look round, old age is upon
you.… Then it is too late to live! That’s how it is, Pelagea
Ivanovna.… We mustn’t sit still and be silent.…”
At that point supper was brought out from the kitchen.
Uncle went into the lodge with us, and to keep us company
ate five curd fritters and the wing of a duck. He ate and looked
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at us. He was touched and delighted by us all. Whatever silly
nonsense my precious tutor talked, and whatever Tatyana
Ivanovna did, he thought charming and delightful. When after
supper Tatyana Ivanovna 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. My 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 learnt
that there were people in the world more refined than
Pobyedimsky.
“Yes…” my uncle went on, “love, marry, do silly things.
Foolishness is a great deal more living and healthy than our
straining and striving after rational life.”
My uncle talked a great deal, so much that he bored us; I sat
on a box 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
councillor had learned to eat mother’s turkey and compote,
his work by day was abandoned too. My uncle tore himself
away from his table and plunged into “life.” In the daytime
he walked up and down the garden, he whistled to the workmen
and hindered them from working, making them tell
him their various histories. When his eye fell on Tatyana
Ivanovna he ran up to her, and, if she were carrying anything,
offered his assistance, which embarrassed her dreadfully.
As the summer advanced my uncle grew more and more
frivolous, volatile, and careless. Pobyedimsky was completely
disillusioned in regard to 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 ‘upon my
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soul.’ 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-humour 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 my uncle was coming into the lodge.
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 failed to distinguish which
was my tutor and which was Tatyana Ivanovna’s husband.
Tatyana Ivanovna herself he sometimes called Nastasya, sometimes
Pelagea, and sometimes Yevdokia. Touched and delighted
by us, he laughed and behaved exactly as though 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, subtler feelings.
I remember one evening I was sitting on the box 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 Ivanovna, rosy and unassuming as always, was sitting
at a little table sewing at her husband’s shirt. Fyodor, sullen and
gloomy, was staring at her from one corner, and in the other sat
Pobyedimsky, snorting angrily and retreating into the high collar
of his shi rt. My uncle was walking up and down the room
thinking. Silence reigned; nothing 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 lost myself. When some sound
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 the day of my
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death. 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 work-table. I
should admire her and show her to other people. You know,
Pelagea Ivanovna, we have no women like you there. Among
us there is wealth, distinction, sometimes beauty, but we have
not this true sort of life, this healthy serenity.…”
My uncle sat down 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, grey, and quivering. He brought his
fist down on the table with a bang, and said in a hollow voice:
“I won’t allow it!
At the same moment Pobyedimsky jumped up from his
chair. He, too, pale and angry, 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 surprise.
“I won’t allow it!” repeated Fyodor, banging on the table.
My uncle jumped up and blinked nervously. He tried to
speak, but in his amazement and alarm could not utter a word;
with an embarrassed smile, he shuffled out of the lodge with
the hurried step of an old man, leaving his hat behind. When,
a little later, my mother ran into the lodge, Fyodor and
Pobyedimsky 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.
“Come! give over banging on the table!” she said. “Leave
off, Fyodor! And why are you thumping, Yegor Alexyevitch?
What have you got to do with it?”
Pobyedimsky was startled and confused. Fyodor looked intently
at him, then at his wife, and began walking about the
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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 morning to the hospital, as
his arm was broken. Distressed at this intelligence and remembering
the scene of the previous evening, I went out of doors.
It was a grey day. The sky was covered with storm-clouds and
there was a wind blowing dust, bits of paper, and feathers
along the ground.… It felt as though rain were coming. There
was a look of boredom in the servants and in the animals.
When I went into the house I was told not to make such a
noise with my feet, as mother was ill and in bed with a migraine.
What was I to do? I went outside 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 which never dried up, ran into the main road. 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 wagonette crammed full of townspeople, probably
going to visit the shrine, drove by along the main road. The
wagonette was hardly out of sight when a light chaise with a
pair of horses came into view. In it was Akim Nikititch, the
police inspector, standing up and holding on to the coachman’s
belt. To my great surprise, the chaise turned into our road
and flew by me in at the gate. While I was puzzling why the
police inspector had come to see us, I heard a noise, and a
carriage with three horses came into sight on the road. In the
carriage stood the police captain, directing his coachman towards
our gate.
“And why is he coming?” I thought, looking at the dusty
police captain. “Most probably Pobyedimsky 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 inspector
and the police captain were only the first instalment,
for five minutes had scarcely passed when a coach drove in at
our gate. It dashed by me so swiftly that I could only get a
glimpse of a red beard.
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Lost in conjecture and full of misgivings, I ran to the house.
In the passage 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 visitors had taken her by surprise in the
very throes of migraine.
“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 age!”
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 fowls,
five turkeys, eight ducks, were killed, and in the fluster the
old gander, the progenitor of our whole flock of geese and a
great favourite of mother’s, was beheaded. The coachmen and
the cook seemed frenzied, and slaughtered birds at random,
without distinction 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 passage, 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 thinner,
was sitting on the sofa and watching his movements with
heavy eyes.
“Excuse me, sister, but this won’t do at all,” my uncle
grumbled, wrinkling up his face. “I introduced the governor
to you, and you didn’t offer to shake hands. You covered him
with confusion, poor fellow! No, that won’t do.… Simplicity
is a very good thing, but there must be limits to it.…
Upon my soul! And then that dinner! How can one give people
such things? What was that mess, for instance, that they served
for the fourth course?”
“That was duck with sweet sauce…” mother answered softly.
“Duck! Forgive me, sister, but… but here I’ve got heartburn!
I am ill!”
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My uncle made a sour, tearful face, and went on:
“It was the devil sent that governor! As though I wanted his
visit! Pff!… heartburn! I can’t work or sleep… I am completely
out of sorts.… And I can’t understand how you can
live here without anything to do… in this boredom! Here
I’ve got a pain coming under my shoulder-blade!…”
My uncle frowned, and walked about more rapidly than
ever.
“Brother,” my mother inquired softly, “what would it cost
to go abroad?”
“At least three thousand…” my uncle answered in a te arful
voice. “I would go, but where am I to get it? I haven’t a farthing.
Pff!… heartburn!”
My uncle stopped to look dejectedly at the grey, overcast
prospect from the window, and began pacing to and fro again.
A silence followed.… Mother looked a long while at the
ikon, pondering something, then she began crying, and said:
“I’ll give you the three thousand, brother.…”
THREE DAYS LATER the majestic boxes went off to the station,
and the privy councillor drove off after them. As he said goodbye
to mother he shed tears, 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, kissed his hand to my
mother, who was crying, and all at once his eye was caught by
me. A look of the utmost astonishment came into his face.
“What boy is this?” he asked.
My mother, who had declared 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 I felt fearfully sorry for
him. I could not resist jumping up to the carriage and hugging
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…” laughed my uncle, kissing me. “A
charming boy, upon my soul! How natural, how living it all
is, upon my soul!…”
The carriage set off.… I looked after him, and long afterwards
that farewell “upon my soul” was ringing in my ears.
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THE MAN IN A CASE
AT THE FURTHEST END of the village of Mironositskoe some
belated sportsmen lodged for the night in the elder Prokofy’s
barn. There were two of them, the veterinary surgeon Ivan
Ivanovitch and the schoolmaster Burkin. Ivan Ivanovitch had
a rather strange double-barrelled surname — Tchimsha-
Himalaisky — which did not suit him at all, and he was called
simply Ivan Ivanovitch all over the province. He lived at a
stud-farm near the town, and had come out shooting now to
get a breath of fresh air. Burkin, the high-school teacher, stayed
every summer at Count P——’s, and had been thoroughly at
home in this district for years.
They did not sleep. Ivan Ivanovitch, a tall, lean old fellow
with long moustaches, was sitting outside the door, smoking
a pipe in the moonlight. Burkin was lying within on the hay,
and could not be seen in the darkness.
They were telling each other all sorts of stories. Among
other things, they spoke of the fact that the elder’s wife, Mavra,
a healthy and by no means stupid woman, had never been
beyond her native village, had never seen a town nor a railway
in her life, and had spent the last ten years sitting behind the
stove, and only at night going out into the street.
“What is there wonderful in that!” said Burkin. “There are
plenty of people in the world, solitary by temperament, who
try to retreat into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.
Perhaps it is an instance of atavism, a return to the period
when the ancestor of man was not yet a social animal and
lived alone in his den, or perhaps it is only one of the diversities
of human character — who knows? I am not a natural
science man, and it is not my business to settle such questions;
I only mean to say that people like Mavra are not uncommon.
There is no need to look far; two months ago a
man called Byelikov, a colleague of mine, the Greek master,
died in our town. You have heard of him, no doubt. He was
remarkable for always wearing goloshes and a warm wadded
coat, and carrying an umbrella even in the very finest weather.
And his umbrella was in a case, and his watch was in a case
made of grey chamois leather, and when he took out his penknife
to sharpen his pencil, his penknife, too, was in a little
case; and his face seemed to be in a case too, because he always
hid it in his turned-up collar. He wore dark spectacles and
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flannel vests, stuffed up his ears with cotton-wool, and when
he got into a cab always told the driver to put up the hood. In
short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse
to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to
speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from
external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept
him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity,
his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and
what had never existed; and even the classical languages which
he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in
which he sheltered himself from real life.
“‘Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful is the Greek language!’
he would say, with a sugary expression; and as though to prove
his words he would screw up his eyes and, raising his finger,
would pronounce ‘Anthropos!’
“And Byelikov tried to hide his thoughts also in a case. The
only things that were clear to his mind were government
circulars and newspaper articles in which something was forbidden.
When some proclamation prohibited the boys from
going out in the streets after nine o’clock in the evening, or
some article declared carnal love unlawful, it was to his mind
clear and definite; it was forbidden, and that was enough. For
him there was always a doubtful element, something vague
and not fully expressed, in any sanction or permission. When
a dramatic club or a reading-room or a tea-shop was licensed
in the town, he would shake his head and say softly:
“It is all right, of course; it is all very nice, but I hope it
won’t lead to anything!”
“Every sort of breach of order, deviation or departure from
rule, depressed him, though one would have thought it was
no business of his. If one of his colleagues was late for church
or if rumours reached him of some prank of the high-school
boys, or one of the mistresses was seen late in the evening in
the company of an officer, he was much disturbed, and said
he hoped that nothing would come of it. At the teachers’
meetings he simply oppressed us with his caution, his circumspection,
and his characteristic reflection on the illbehaviour
of the young people in both male and female highschools,
the uproar in the classes.
“Oh, he hoped it would not reach the ears of the authorities;
oh, he hoped nothing would come of it; and he thought
it would be a very good thing if Petrov were expelled from
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the second class and Yegorov from the fourth. And, do you
know, by his sighs, his despondency, his black spectacles on
his pale little face, a little face like a pole-cat’s, you know, he
crushed us all, and we gave way, reduced Petrov’s and Yegorov’s
marks for conduct, kept them in, and in the end expelled
them both. He had a strange habit of visiting our lodgings.
He would come to a teacher’s, would sit down, and remain
silent, as though he were carefully inspecting something. He
would sit like this in silence for an hour or two and then go
away. This he called ‘maintaining good relations with his colleagues’;
and it was obvious that coming to see us and sitting
there was tiresome to him, and that he came to see us simply
because he considered it his duty as our colleague. We teachers
were afraid of him. And even the headmaster was afraid of
him. Would you believe it, our teachers were all intellectual,
right-minded people, brought up on Turgenev and Shtchedrin,
yet this little chap, who always went about with goloshes and
an umbrella, had the whole high-school under his thumb for
fifteen long years! High-school, indeed — he had the whole
town under his thumb! Our ladies did not get up private
theatricals on Saturdays for fear he should hear of it, and the
clergy dared not eat meat or play cards in his presence. Under
the influence of people like Byelikov we have got into the
way of being afraid of everything in our town for the last ten
or fifteen years. They are afraid to speak aloud, afraid to send
letters, afraid to make acquaintances, afraid to read books,
afraid to help the poor, to teach people to read and write.…”
Ivan Ivanovitch cleared his throat, meaning to say something,
but first lighted his pipe, g azed at the moon, and then
said, with pauses:
“Yes, intellectual, right minded people read Shtchedrin and
Turgenev, Buckle, and all the rest of them, yet they knocked
under and put up with it. . . that’s just how it is.”
“Byelikov lived in the same house as I did,” Burkin went
on, “on the same storey, his door facing mine; we often saw
each other, and I knew how he lived when he was at home.
And at home it was the same story: dressing-gown, nightcap,
blinds, bolts, a perfect succession of prohibitions and restrictions
of all sorts, and —’Oh, I hope nothing will come of it!’
Lenten fare was bad for him, yet he could not eat meat, as
people might perhaps say Byelikov did not keep the fasts,
and he ate freshwater fish with butter — not a Lenten dish,
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yet one could not say that it was meat. He did not keep a
female servant for fear people might think evil of him, but
had as cook an old man of sixty, called Afanasy, half-witted
and given to tippling, who had once been an officer’s servant
and could cook after a fashion. This Afanasy was usually standing
at the door with his arms folded; with a deep sigh, he
would mutter always the same thing:
“‘There are plenty of them about nowadays!’
“Byelikov had a little bedroom like a box; his bed had curtains.
When he went to bed he covered his head over; it was
hot and stuffy; the wind battered on the closed doors; there
was a droning noise in the stove and a sound of sighs from
the kitchen — ominous sighs.… And he felt frightened under
the bed-clothes. He was afraid that something might happen,
that Afanasy might murder him, that thieves might break
in, and so he had troubled dreams all night, and in the morning,
when we went together to the high-school, he was depressed
and pale, and it was evident that the high-school full
of people excited dread and aversion in his whole being, and
that to walk beside me was irksome to a man of his solitary
temperament.
“‘They make a great noise in our classes,’ he used to say, as
though trying to find an explanation for his depression. ‘It’s
beyond anything.’
“And the Greek master, this man in a case — would you
believe it? — almost got married.”
Ivan Ivanovitch glanced quickly into the barn, and said:
“You are joking!”
“Yes, strange as it seems, he almost got married. A new
teacher of history and geography, Milhail Savvitch Kovalenko,
a Little Russian, was appointed. He came, not alone, but with
his sister Varinka. He was a tall, dark young man with huge
hands, and one could see from his face that he had a bass
voice, and, in fact, he had a voice that seemed to come out of
a barrel — ‘boom, boom, boom!’ And she was not so young,
about thirty, but she, too, was tall, well-made, with black
eyebrows and red cheeks —in fact, she was a regular sugarplum,
and so sprightly, so noisy; she was always singing Little
Russian songs and laughing. For the least thing she would go
off into a ringing laugh —’Ha-ha-ha!’ We made our first thorough
acquaintance with the Kovalenkos at the headmaster’s
name-day party. Among the glum and intensely bored teach155
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ers who came even to the name-day party as a duty we suddenly
saw a new Aphrodite risen from the waves; she walked
with her arms akimbo, laughed, sang, danced.… She sang
with feeling ‘The Winds do Blow,’ then another song, and
another, and she fascinated us all — all, even Byelikov. He sat
down by her and said with a honeyed smile:
“‘The Little Russian reminds one of the ancient Greek in
its softness and agreeable resonance.’
“That flattered her, and she began telling him with feeling
and earnestness that they had a farm in the Gadyatchsky district,
and that her mamma lived at the farm, and that they
had such pears, such melons, such _kabaks_! The Little Russians
call pumpkins kabaks (i.e., pothouses), while their
pothouses they call shinki, and they make a beetroot soup
with tomatoes and aubergines in it, ‘which was so nice —
awfully nice!’
“We listened and listened, and suddenly the same idea
dawned upon us all:
“ ‘It would be a good thing to make a match of it,’ the
headmaster’s wife said to me softly.
“We all for some reason recalled the fact that our friend
Byelikov was not married, and it now seemed to us strange
that we had hitherto failed to observe, and had in fact completely
lost sight of, a detail so important in his life. What
was his attitude to woman? How had he settled this vital
question for himself? This had not interested us in the least
till then; perhaps we had not even admitted the idea that a
man who went out in all weathers in goloshes and slept under
curtains could be in love.
“‘He is a good deal over forty and she is thirty,’ the
headmaster’s wife went on, developing her idea. ‘I believe she
would marry him.’
“All sorts of things are done in the provinces through boredom,
all sorts of unnecessary and nonsensical things! And that
is because what is necessary is not done at all. What need was
there for instance, for us to make a match for this Byelikov,
whom one could not even imagine married? The headmaster’s
wife, the inspector’s wife, and all our high-school ladies, grew
livelier and even better-looking, as though they had suddenly
found a new object in life. The headmaster’s wife would take
a box at the theatre, and we beheld sitting in her box Varinka,
with such a fan, beaming and happy, and beside her Byelikov,
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a little bent figure, looking as though he had been extracted
from his house by pincers. I would give an evening party, and
the ladies would insist on my inviting Byelikov and Varinka.
In short, the machine was set in motion. It appeared that
Varinka was not averse to matrimony. She had not a very
cheerful life with her brother; they could do nothing but
quarrel and scold one another from morning till night. Here
is a scene, for instance. Kovalenko would be coming along
the street, a tall, sturdy young ruffian, in an embroidered shirt,
his love-locks falling on his forehead under his cap, in one
hand a bundle of books, in the other a thick knotted stick,
followed by his sister, also with books in her hand.
“‘But you haven’t read it, Mihalik!’ she would be arguing
loudly. ‘I tell you, I swear you have not read it at all!’
“‘And I tell you I have read it,’ cries Kovalenko, thumping
his stick on the pavement.
“‘Oh, my goodness, Mihalik! why are you so cross? We are
arguing about principles.’
“‘I tell you that I have read it!’ Kovalenko would shout,
more loudly than ever.
“And at home, if there was an outsider present, there was
sure to be a skirmish. Such a life must have been wearisome,
and of course she must have longed for a home of her own.
Besides, there was her age to be considered; there was no time
left to pick and choose; it was a case of marrying anybody,
even a Greek master. And, indeed, most of our young ladies
don’t mind whom they marry so long as they do get married.
However that may be, Varinka began to show an unmistakable
partiality for Byelikov.
“And Byelikov? He used to visit Kovalenko just as he did
us. He would arrive, sit down, and remain silent. He would
sit quiet, and Varinka would sing to him ‘The Winds do Blow,’
or would look pensively at him with her dark eyes, or would
suddenly go off into a peal — ‘Ha-ha-ha!’
“Suggestion plays a great part in love affairs, and still more
in getting married. Everybody — both his colleagues and the
ladies — began assuring Byelikov that he ought to get married,
that there was nothing left for him in life but to get
married; we all congratulated him, with solemn countenances
delivered ourselves of various platitudes, such as ‘Marriage is
a serious step.’ Besides, Varinka was good-looking and interesting;
she was the daughter of a civil councillor, and had a
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farm; and what was more, she was the first woman who had
been warm and friendly in her manner to him. His head was
turned, and he decided that he really ought to get married.”
“Well, at that point you ought to have taken away his
goloshes and umbrella,” said Ivan Ivanovitch.
“Only fancy! that turned out to be impossible. He put
Varinka’s portrait on his table, kept coming to see me and
talking about Varinka, and home life, saying marriage was a
serious step. He was frequently at Kovalenko’s, but he did
not alter his manner of life in the least; on the contrary, indeed,
his determination to get married seemed to have a depressing
effect on him. He grew thinner and paler, and seemed
to retreat further and further into his case.
“‘I like Varvara Savvishna,’ he used to say to me, with a
faint and wry smile, ‘and I know that every one ought to get
married, but… you know all this has happened so suddenly.…
One must think a little.’
“‘What is there to think over?’ I used to say to him. ‘Get
married — that is all.’
“‘No; marriage is a serious step. One must first weigh the
duties before one, the responsibilities… that nothing may go
wrong afterwards. It worries me so much that I don’t sleep at
night. And I must confess I am afraid: her brother and she
have a strange way of thinking; they look at things strangely,
you know, and her disposition is very impetuous. One may
get married, and then, there is no knowing, one may find
oneself in an unpleasant position.’
“And he did not make an offer; he kept putting it off, to
the great vexation of the headmaster’s wife and all our ladies;
he went on weighing his future duties and responsibilities,
and meanwhile he went for a walk with Varinka almost every
day —possibly he thought that this was necessary in his position
—and came to see me to talk about family life. And in
all probability in the end he would have proposed to her, and
would have made one of those unnecessary, stupid marriages
such as are made by thousands among us from being bored
and having nothing to do, if it had not been for a kolossalische
scandal. I must mention that Varinka’s brother, Kovalenko,
detested Byelikov from the first day of their acquaintance,
and could not endure him.
“‘I don’t understand,’ he used to say to us, shrugging his
shoulders —’I don’t understand how you can put up with
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that sneak, that nasty phiz. Ugh! how can you live here! The
atmosphere is stifling and unclean! Do you call yourselves
schoolmasters, teachers? You are paltry government clerks. You
keep, not a temple of science, but a department for red tape
and loyal behaviour, and it smells as sour as a police-station.
No, my friends; I will stay with you for a while, and then I
will go to my farm and there catch crabs and teach the Little
Russians. I shall go, and you can stay here with your Judas —
damn his soul!’
“Or he would laugh till he cried, first in a loud bass, then in
a shrill, thin laugh, and ask me, waving his hands:
“‘What does he sit here for? What does he want? He sits
and stares.’
“He even gave Byelikov a nickname, ‘The Spider.’ And it
will readily be understood that we avoided talking to him of
his sister’s being about to marry ‘The Spider.’
“And on one occasion, when the headmaster’s wife hinted
to him what a good thing it would be to secure his sister’s
future with such a reliable, universally respected man as
Byelikov, he frowned and muttered:
“ ‘It’s not my business; let her marry a reptile if she likes. I
don’t like meddling in other people’s affairs.’
“Now hear what happened next. Some mischievous person
drew a caricature of Byelikov walking along in his goloshes
with his trousers tucked up, under his umbrella, with Varinka
on his arm; below, the inscription ‘Anthropos in love.’ The
expression was caught to a marvel, you know. The artist must
have worked for more than one night, for the teachers of
both the boys’ and girls’ high-schools, the teachers of the seminary,
the government officials, all received a copy. Byelikov
received one, too. The caricature made a very painful impression
on him.
“We went out together; it was the first of May, a Sunday,
and all of us, the boys and the teachers, had agreed to meet at
the high-school and then to go for a walk together to a wood
beyond the town. We set off, and he was green in the face and
gloomier than a storm-cloud.
‘What wicked, ill-natured people there are!’ he said, and his
lips quivered.
“I felt really sorry for him. We were walking along, and all
of a sudden — would you believe it? — Kovalenko came
bowling along on a bicycle, and after him, also on a bicycle,
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Varinka, flushed and exhausted, but good-humoured and gay.
“‘We are going on ahead,’ she called. ‘What lovely weather!
Awfully lovely!’
“And they both disappeared from our sight. Byelikov turned
white instead of green, and seemed petrified. He stopped short
and stared at me.…
“‘What is the meaning of it? Tell me, please!’ he asked. ‘Can
my eyes have deceived me? Is it the proper thing for highschool
masters and ladies to ride bicycles?’
“‘What is there improper about it?’ I said. ‘Let them ride
and enjoy themselves.’
“‘But how can that be?’ he cried, amazed at my calm. ‘What
are you saying?’
“And he was so shocked that he was unwilling to go on,
and returned home.
“Next day he was continually twitching and nervously rubbing
his hands, and it was evident from his face that he was
unwell. And he left before his work was over, for the first
time in his life. And he ate no dinner. Towards evening he
wrapped himself up warmly, though it was quite warm
weather, and sallied out to the Kovalenkos’. Varinka was out;
he found her brother, however.
“‘Pray sit down,’ Kovalenko said coldly, with a frown. His
face looked sleepy; he had just had a nap after dinner, and was
in a very bad humour.
“Byelikov sat in silence for ten minutes, and then began:
“‘I have come to see you to relieve my mind. I am very, very
much troubled. Some scurrilous fellow has drawn an absurd
caricature of me and another person, in whom we are both
deeply interested. I regard it as a duty to assure you that I have
had no hand in it.… I have given no sort of ground for such
ridicule — on the contrary, I have always behaved in every
way like a gentleman.’
“Kovalenko sat sulky and silent. Byelikov waited a little,
and went on slowly in a mournful voice:
“‘And I have something else to say to you. I have been in
the service for years, while you have only lately entered it, and
I consider it my duty as an older colleague to give you a warning.
You ride on a bicycle, and that pastime is utterly unsuitable
for an educator of youth.’
“‘Why so?’ asked Kovalenko in his bass.
“‘Surely that needs no explanation, Mihail Savvitch — surely
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you can understand that? If the teacher rides a bicycle, what
can you expect the pupils to do? You will have them walking
on their heads next! And so long as there is no formal permission
to do so, it is out of the question. I was horrified yesterday!
When I saw your sister everything seemed dancing before
my eyes. A lady or a young girl on a bicycle — it’s awful!’
“‘What is it you want exactly?’
“‘All I want is to warn you, Mihail Savvitch. You are a young
man, you have a future before you, you must be very, very
careful in your behaviour, and you are so careless — oh, so
careless! You go about in an embroidered shirt, are constantly
seen in the street carrying books, and now the bicycle, too.
The headmaster will learn that you and your sister ride the
bicycle, and then it will reach the higher authorities.… Will
that be a good thing?’
“‘It’s no business of anybody else if my sister and I do bicycle!’
said Kovalenko, and he turned crimson. ‘And damnation
take any one who meddles in my private affairs!’
“Byelikov turned pale and got up.
“‘If you speak to me in that tone I cannot continue,’ he
said. ‘And I beg you never to express yourself like that about
our superiors in my presence; you ought to be respectful to
the authorities.’
“‘Why, have I said any harm of the authorities?’ asked
Kovalenko, looking at him wrathfully. ‘Please leave me alone.
I am an honest man, and do not care to talk to a gentleman
like you. I don’t like sneaks!’
“Byelikov flew into a nervous flutter, and began hurriedly
putting on his coat, with an expression of horror on his face.
It was the first time in his life he had been spoken to so rudely.
“‘You can say what you please,’ he said, as he went out from
the entry to the landing on the staircase. ‘I ought only to warn
you: possibly some on e may have overheard us, and that our
conversation may not be misunderstood and harm come of it,
I shall be compelled to inform our headmaster of our conversation…
in its main features. I am bound to do so.’
“‘Inform him? You can go and make your report!’
“Kovalenko seized him from behind by the collar and gave
him a push, and Byelikov rolled downstairs, thudding with
his goloshes. The staircase was high and steep, but he rolled
to the bottom unhurt, got up, and touched his nose to see
whether his spectacles were all right. But just as he was falling
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down the stairs Varinka came in, and with her two ladies;
they stood below staring, and to Byelikov this was more
terrible than anything. I believe he would rather have broken
his neck or both legs than have been an object of ridicule.
‘Why, now the whole town would hear of it; it would
come to the headmaster’s ears, would reach the higher authorities
— oh, it might lead to something! There would
be another caricature, and it would all end in his being asked
to resign his post.…
“When he got up, Varinka recognized him, and, looking at
his ridiculous face, his crumpled overcoat, and his goloshes,
not understanding what had happened and supposing that he
had slipped down by accident, could not restrain herself, and
laughed loud enough to be heard by all the flats:
“‘Ha-ha-ha!’
“And this pealing, ringing ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ was the last straw
that put an end to everything: to the proposed match and to
Byelikov’s earthly existence. He did not hear what Varinka
said to him; he saw nothing. On reaching home, the first
thing he did was to remove her portrait from the table; then
he went to bed, and he never got up again.
“Three days later Afanasy came to me and asked whether
we should not send for the doctor, as there was something
wrong with his master. I went in to Byelikov. He lay silent
behind the curtain, covered with a quilt; if one asked him a
question, he said ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ and not another sound. He lay
there while Afanasy, gloomy and scowling, hovered about him,
sighing heavily, and smelling like a pothouse.
“A month later Byelikov died. We all went to his funeral —
that is, both the high-schools and the seminary. Now when
he was lying in his coffin his expression was mild, agreeable,
even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been
put into a case which he would never leave again. Yes, he had
attained his ideal! And, as though in his honour, it was dull,
rainy weather on the day of his funeral, and we all wore
goloshes and took our umbrellas. Varinka, too, was at the
funeral, and when the coffin was lowered into the grave she
burst into tears. I have noticed that Little Russian women are
always laughing or crying — no intermediate mood.
“One must confess that to bury people like Byelikov is a
great pleasure. As we were returning from the cemetery we
wore discreet Lenten faces; no one wanted to display this feel162
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ing of pleasure — a feeling like that we had experienced long,
long ago as children when our elders had gone out and we ran
about the garden for an hour or two, enjoying complete freedom.
Ah, freedom, freedom! The merest hint, the faintest
hope of its possibility gives wings to the soul, does it not?
“We returned from the cemetery in a good humour. But
not more than a week had passed before life went on as in the
past, as gloomy, oppressive, and senseless — a life not forbidden
by government prohibition, but not fully permitted, either:
it was no better. And, indeed, though we had buried
Byelikov, how many such men in cases were left, how many
more of them there will be!”
“That’s just how it is,” said Ivan Ivanovitch and he lighted
his pipe.
“How many more of them there will be!” repeated Burkin.
The schoolmaster came out of the barn. He was a short,
stout man, completely bald, with a black beard down to his
waist. The two dogs came out with him.
“What a moon!” he said, looking upwards.
It was midnight. On the right could be seen the whole village,
a long street stretching far away for four miles. All was
buried in deep silent slumber; not a movement, not a sound;
one could hardly believe that nature could be so still. When
on a moonlight night you see a broad village street, with its
cottages, haystacks, and slumbering willows, a feeling of calm
comes over the soul; in this peace, wrapped away from care,
toil, and sorrow in the darkness of night, it is mild, melancholy,
beautiful, and it seems as though the stars look down
upon it kindly and with tenderness, and as though there were
no evil on earth and all were well. On the left the open country
began from the end of the village; it could be seen stretching
far away to the horizon, and there was no movement, no
sound in that whole expanse bathed in moonlight.
“Yes, that is just how it is,” repeated Ivan Ivanovitch; “and
isn’t our living in town, airless and crowded, our writing useless
papers, our playing vint — isn’t that all a sort of case for
us? And our spending our whole lives among trivial, fussy
men and silly, idle women, our talking and our listening to
all sorts of nonsense — isn’t that a case for us, too? If you like,
I will tell you a very edifying story.”
“No; it’s time we were asleep,” said Burkin. “Tell it tomorrow.”
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They went into the barn and lay down on the hay. And
they were both covered up and beginning to doze when they
suddenly heard light footsteps — patter, patter.… Some one
was walking not far from the barn, walking a little and stopping,
and a minute later, patter, patter again.… The dogs began
growling.
“That’s Mavra,” said Burkin.
The footsteps died away.
“You see and hear that they lie,” said Ivan Ivanovitch, turning
over on the other side, “and they call you a fool for putting
up with their lying. You endure insult and humiliation,
and dare not openly say that you are on the side of the honest
and the free, and you lie and smile yourself; and all that for
the sake of a crust of bread, for the sake of a warm corner, for
the sake of a wretched little worthless rank in the service. No,
one can’t go on living like this.”
“Well, you are off on another tack now, Ivan Ivanovitch,”
said the schoolmaster. “Let us go to sleep!
And ten minutes later Burkin was asleep. But Ivan Ivanovitch
kept sighing and turning over from side to side; then he got up,
went outside again, and, sitting in the doorway, lighted his pipe.

GOOSEBERRIES
THE WHOLE SKY had been overcast with rain-clouds from early
morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey
dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country
for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not
come. Ivan Ivanovitch, the veterinary surgeon, and Burkin,
the high-school teacher, were already tired from walking, and
the fields seemed to them endless. Far ahead of them they
could just see the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe;
on the right stretched a row of hillocks which disappeared in
the distance behind the village, and they both knew that this
was the bank of the river, that there were meadows, green
willows, homesteads there, and that if one stood on one of
the hillocks one could see from it the same vast plain, telegraph-
wires, and a train which in the distance looked like a
crawling caterpillar, and that in clear weather one could even
see the town. Now, in still weather, when all nature seemed
mild and dreamy, Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were filled with
love of that countryside, and both thought how great, how
beautiful a land it was.
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Anton Chekhov
“Last time we were in Prokofy’s barn,” said Burkin, “you
were about to tell me a story.”
“Yes; I meant to tell you about my brother.”
Ivan Ivanovitch heaved a deep sigh and lighted a pipe to
begin to tell his story, but just at that moment the rain began.
And five minutes later heavy rain came down, covering the
sky, and it was hard to tell when it would be over. Ivan
Ivanovitch and Burkin stopped in hesitation; the dogs, already
drenched, stood with their tails between their legs gazing
at them feelingly.
“We must take shelter somewhere,” said Burkin. “Let us go
to Alehin’s; it’s close by.”
“Come along.”
They turned aside a nd walked through mown fields, sometimes
going straight forward, sometimes turning to the right,
till they came out on the road. Soon they saw poplars, a garden,
then the red roofs of barns; there was a gleam of the
river, and the view opened on to a broad expanse of water
with a windmill and a white bath-house: this was Sofino,
where Alehin lived.
The watermill was at work, drowning the sound of the
rain; the dam was shaking. Here wet horses with drooping
heads were standing near their carts, and men were walking
about covered with sacks. It was damp, muddy, and desolate;
the water looked cold and malignant. Ivan Ivanovitch and
Burkin were already conscious of a feeling of wetness, messiness,
and discomfort all over; their feet were heavy with mud,
and when, crossing the dam, they went up to the barns, they
were silent, as though they were angry with one another.
In one of the barns there was the sound of a winnowing
machine, the door was open, and clouds of dust were coming
from it. In the doorway was standing Alehin himself, a man
of forty, tall and stout, with long hair, more like a professor
or an artist than a landowner. He had on a white shirt that
badly needed washing, a rope for a belt, drawers instead of
trousers, and his boots, too, were plastered up with mud and
straw. His eyes and nose were black with dust. He recognized
Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin, and was apparently much delighted
to see them.
“Go into the house, gentlemen,” he said, smiling; “I’ll come
directly, this minute.”
It was a big two-storeyed house. Alehin lived in the lower
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The Wife and other stories
storey, with arched ceilings and little windows, where the bailiffs
had once lived; here everything was plain, and there was a
smell of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harness. He went upstairs
into the best rooms only on rare occasions, when visitors
came. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were met in the house
by a maid-servant, a young woman so beautiful that they
both stood still and looked at one another.
“You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you, my
friends,” said Alehin, going into the hall with them. “It is a
surprise! Pelagea,” he said, addressing the girl, “give our visitors
something to change into. And, by the way, I will change
too. Only I must first go and wash, for I almost think I have
not washed since spring. Wouldn’t you like to come into the
bath-house? and meanwhile they will get things ready here.”
Beautiful Pelagea, looking so refined and soft, brought them
towels and soap, and Alehin went to the bath-house with his guests.
“It’s a long time since I had a wash,” he said, undressing. “I
have got a nice bath-house, as you see — my father built it —
but I somehow never have time to wash.”
He sat down on the steps and soaped his long hair and his
neck, and the water round him turned brown.
“Yes, I must say,” said Ivan Ivanovitch meaningly, looking
at his head.
“It’s a long time since I washed…” said Alehin with embarrassment,
giving himself a second soaping, and the water near
him turned dark blue, like ink.
Ivan Ivanovitch went outside, plunged into the water with
a loud splash, and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out
wide. He stirred the water into waves which set the white
lilies bobbing up and down; he swam to the very middle of
the millpond and dived, and came up a minute later in another
place, and swam on, and kept on diving, trying to touch
the bottom.
“Oh, my goodness!” he repeated continually, enjoying himself
thoroughly. “Oh, my goodness!” He swam to the mill,
talked to the peasants there, then returned and lay on his back
in the middle of the pond, turning his face to the rain. Burkin
and Alehin were dressed and ready to go, but he still went on
swimming and diving. “Oh, my goodness!…” he said. “Oh,
Lord, have mercy on me!…”
“That’s enough!” Burkin shouted to him.
They went back to the house. And only when the lamp was
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lighted in the big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and
Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers,
were sitting in arm-chairs; and Alehin, washed and
combed, in a new coat, was walking about the drawing-room,
evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry
clothes, and light shoes; and when lovely Pelagea, stepping
noiselessly on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and
jam on a tray — only then Ivan Ivanovitch began on his story,
and it seemed as though not only Burkin and Alehin were
listening, but also the ladies, young and old, and the officers
who looked down upon them sternly and calmly from their
gold frames.
“There are two of us brothers,” he began —”I, Ivan
Ivanovitch, and my brother, Nikolay Ivanovitch, two years
younger. I went in for a learned profession and became a veterinary
surgeon, while Nikolay sat in a government office from
the time he was nineteen. Our father, Tchimsha-Himalaisky,
was a kantonist, but he rose to be an officer and left us a little
estate and the rank of nobility. After his death the little estate
went in debts and legal expenses; but, anyway, we had spent
our childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children,
we passed our days and nights in the fields and the woods,
looked after horses, stripped the bark off the trees, fished,
and so on.… And, you know, whoever has once in his life
caught perch or has seen the migrating of the thrushes in autumn,
watched how they float in flocks over the village on
bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman, and will
have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother
was miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and
he went on sitting in the same place, went on writing the
same papers and thinking of one and the same thing — how
to get into the country. And this yearning by degrees passed
into a definite desire, into a dream of buying himself a little
farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake.
“He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of
him, but I never sympathized with this desire to shut himself
up for the rest of his life in a little farm of his own. It’s the
correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of
earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they
say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to
the land and yearn for a farm, it’s a good thing. But these
farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from
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town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat
and bury oneself in one’s farm — it’s not life, it’s egoism,
laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without
good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm,
but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to
display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit.
“My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office,
dreamed of how he would eat his own cabbages, which would
fill the whole yard with such a savoury smell, take his meals
on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on the
seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the forest. Gardening
books and the agricultural hints in calendars were his delight,
his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading newspapers,
too, but the only things he read in them were the advertisements
of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow
with farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and
millponds, for sale. And his imagination pictured the gardenpaths,
flowers and fruit, starling cotes, the carp in the pond,
and all that sort of thing, you know. These imaginary pictures
were of different kinds according to the advertisements
which he came across, but for some reason in every one of
them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine
a homestead, he could not picture an idyllic nook, without
gooseberries.
“‘Country life has its conveniences,’ he would sometimes
say. ‘You sit on the verandah and you drink tea, while your
ducks swim on the pond, there is a delicious smell everywhere,
and… and the gooseberries are growing.’
“He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map
there were the same things — (a) house for the family, (b) servants’
quarters, (c) kitchen-ga rden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He
lived parsimoniously, was frugal in food and drink, his clothes
were beyond description; he looked like a beggar, but kept on
saving and putting money in the bank. He grew fearfully avaricious.
I did not like to look at him, and I used to give him
something and send him presents for Christmas and Easter,
but he used to save that too. Once a man is absorbed by an
idea there is no doing anything with him.
“Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He
was over forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in
the papers and saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still
with the same object of buying a farm and having gooseber168
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ries, he married an elderly and ugly widow without a trace of
feeling for her, simply because she had filthy lucre. He went
on living frugally after marrying her, and kept her short of
food, while he put her money in the bank in his name.
“Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him
she was accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with
her second husband she did not get enough black bread; she
began to pine away with this sort of life, and three years later
she gave up her soul to God. And I need hardly say that my
brother never for one moment imagined that he was responsible
for her death. Money, like vodka, makes a man queer. In
our town there was a merchant who, before he died, ordered
a plateful of honey and ate up all his money and lottery tickets
with the honey, so that no one might get the benefit of it.
While I was inspecting cattle at a railway-station, a cattledealer
fell under an engine and had his leg cut off. We carried
him into the waiting-room, the blood was flowing — it was
a horrible thing — and he kept asking them to look for his
leg and was very much worried about it; there were twenty
roubles in the boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he
was afraid they would be lost.”
“That’s a story from a different opera,” said Burkin.
“After his wife’s death,” Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking
for half a minute, “my brother began looking out for an
estate for himself. Of course, you may look about for five
years and yet end by making a mistake, and buying something
quite different from what you have dreamed of. My
brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mortgaged estate
of three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family,
with servants’ quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no
gooseberry-bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but
the water in it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of
the estate there was a brickyard and on the other a factory for
burning bones. But Nikolay Ivanovitch did not grieve much;
he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes, planted them, and began
living as a country gentleman.
“Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go
and see what it was like. In his letters my brother called his
estate ‘Tchumbaroklov Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.’ I reached
‘alias Himalaiskoe’ in the afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere
there were ditches, fences, hedges, fir-trees planted in rows,
and there was no knowing how to get to the yard, where to
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put one’s horse. I went up to the house, and was met by a fat
red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was
too lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the
kitchen, and she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her
master was resting after dinner. I went in to see my brother.
He was sitting up in bed with a quilt over his legs; he had
grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks, his nose, and his
mouth all stuck out — he looked as though he might begin
grunting into the quilt at any moment.
“We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness
at the thought that we had once been young and now
were both grey-headed and near the grave. He dressed, and
led me out to show me the estate.
“‘Well, how are you getting on here?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.’
“He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner,
a gentleman. He was already accustomed to it, had grown
used to it, and liked it. He ate a great deal, went to the bathhouse,
was growing stout, was already at law with the village
commune and both factories, and was very much offended
when the peasants did not call him ‘Your Honour.’ And he
concerned himself with the salvation of his soul in a substantial,
gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity, not
simply, but with an air of consequence. And what deeds of
charity! He treated the peasants for every sort of disease with
soda and castor oil, and on his name-day had a thanksgiving
service in the middle of the village, and then treated the peasants
to a gallon of vodka — he thought that was the thing to
do. Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka! One day the fat landowner
hauls the peasants up before the district captain for
trespass, and next day, in honour of a holiday, treats them to
a gallon of vodka, and they drink and shout ‘Hurrah!’ and
when they are drunk bow down to his feet. A change of life
for the better, and being well-fed and idle develop in a Russian
the most insolent self-conceit. Nikolay Ivanovitch, who
at one time in the government office was afraid to have any
views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel
truth, and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime minister.
‘Education is essential, but for the peasants it is premature.’
‘Corporal punishment is harmful as a rule, but in some cases
it is necessary and there is nothing to take its place.’
“‘I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,’
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he would say. ‘The peasants like me. I need only to hold up
my little finger and the peasants will do anything I like.’
“And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent
smile. He repeated twenty times over ‘We noblemen,’ ‘I as a
noble’; obviously he did not remember that our grandfather
was a peasant, and our father a soldier. Even our surname
Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so incongruous, seemed to
him now melodious, distinguished, and very agreeable.
“But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell
you about the change that took place in me during the brief
hours I spent at his country place. In the evening, when we
were drinking tea, the cook put on the table a plateful of
gooseberries. They were not bought, but his own gooseberries,
gathered for the first time since the bushes were planted.
Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence
at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not
speak for excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his
mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a child who has at
last received his favourite toy, and said:
“‘How delicious!’
“And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, ‘Ah, how
delicious! Do taste them!’
“They were sour and unripe, but, as Pushkin says:
“‘Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts
Than hosts of baser truths.’
“I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously
fulfilled, who had attained his object in life, who had
gained what he wanted, who was satisfied with his fate and
himself. There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness
mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on
this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by
an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly
oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in
the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear
that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to
the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many
satisfied, happy people there really are! ‘What a suffocating
force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the
strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible
poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunken171
The Wife and other stories
ness, hypocrisy, lying.… Yet all is calm and stillness in the
houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a
town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give
vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to
market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking
their silly nonse nse, getting married, growing old, serenely
escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see
and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in
life goes on somewhere behind the scenes.… Everything is
quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics:
so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of
vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition.…
And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the
happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their
burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would
be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought
to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some
one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with
a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he
may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble
will come for him — disease, poverty, losses, and no one will
see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But
there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his
ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in
the aspen-tree — and all goes well.
“That night I realized that I, too, was happy and contented,”
Ivan Ivanovitch went on, getting up. “I, too, at dinner and at
the hunt liked to lay down the law on life and religion, and
the way to manage the peasantry. I, too, used to say that science
was light, that culture was essential, but for the simple
people reading and writing was enough for the time. Freedom
is a blessing, I used to say; we can no more do without it
than without air, but we must wait a little. Yes, I used to talk
like that, and now I ask, ‘For what reason are we to wait?’ “
asked Ivan Ivanovitch, looking angrily at Burkin. “Why wait,
I ask you? What grounds have we for waiting? I shall be told,
it can’t be done all at once; every idea takes shape in life gradually,
in its due time. But who is it says that? Where is the
proof that it’s right? You will fall back upon the natural order
of things, the uniformity of phenomena; but is there order
and uniformity in the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand
over a chasm and wait for it to close of itself, or to fill up
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with mud at the very time when perhaps I might leap over it
or build a bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of
what? Wait till there’s no strength to live? And meanwhile
one must live, and one wants to live!
“I went away from my brother’s early in the morning, and
ever since then it has been unbearable for me to be in town. I
am oppressed by its peace and quiet; I am afraid to look at the
windows, for there is no spectacle more painful to me now
than the sight of a happy family sitting round the table drinking
tea. I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am not
even capable of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated
and vexed; but at night my head is hot from the rush of
ideas, and I cannot sleep.… Ah, if I were young!”
Ivan Ivanovitch walked backwards and forwards in excitement,
and repeated: “If I were young!”
He suddenly went up to Alehin and began pressing first
one of his hands and then the other.
“Pavel Konstantinovitch,” he said in an imploring voice,
“don’t be calm and contented, don’t let yourself be put to
sleep! While you are young, strong, confident, be not weary
in well-doing! There is no happiness, and there ought not to
be; but if there is a meaning and an object in life, that meaning
and object is not our happiness, but something greater
and more rational. Do good!”
And all this Ivan Ivanovitch said with a pitiful, imploring
smile, as though he were asking him a personal favour.
Then all three sat in arm-chairs at different ends of the drawing-
room and were silent. Ivan Ivanovitch’s story had not satisfied
either Burkin or Alehin. When the generals and ladies
gazed down from their gilt frames, looking in the dusk as
though they were alive, it was dreary to listen to the story of
the poor clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt inclined, for
some reason, to talk about elegant people, about women. And
their sitting in the drawing-room where everything — the
chandeliers in their covers, the arm-chairs, and the carpet under
their feet —reminded them that those very people who
were now looking down from their frames had once moved
about, sat, drunk tea in this room, and the fact that lovely
Pelagea was moving noiselessly about was better than any story.
Alehin was fearfully sleepy; he had got up early, before three
o’clock in the morning, to look after his work, and now his
eyes were closing; but he was afraid his visitors might tell
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some interesting story after he had gone, and he lingered on.
He did not go into the question whether what Ivan Ivanovitch
had just said was right and true. His visitors did not talk of
groats, nor of hay, nor of tar, but of something that had no
direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to
go on.
“It’s bed-time, though,” said Burkin, getting up. “Allow me
to wish you good-night.”
Alehin said good-night and went downstairs to his own
domain, while the visitors remained upstairs. They were both
taken for the night to a big room where there stood two old
wooden beds decorated with carvings, and in the corner was
an ivory crucifix. The big cool beds, which had been made by
the lovely Pelagea, smelt agreeably of clean linen.
Ivan Ivanovitch undressed in silence and got into bed.
“Lord forgive us sinners!” he said, and put his head under
the quilt.
His pipe lying on the table smelt strongly of stale tobacco,
and Burkin could not sleep for a long while, and kept wondering
where the oppressive smell came from.
The rain was pattering on the window-panes all night.
ABOUT LOVE
AT LUNCH NEXT DAY there were very nice pies, crayfish, and
mutton cutlets; and while we were eating, Nikanor, the cook,
came up to ask what the visitors would like for dinner. He
was a man of medium height, with a puffy face and little
eyes; he was close-shaven, and it looked as though his moustaches
had not been shaved, but had been pulled out by the
roots. Alehin told us that the beautiful Pelagea was in love
with this cook. As he drank and was of a violent character,
she did not want to marry him, but was willing to live with
him without. He was very devout, and his religious convictions
would not allow him to “live in sin”; he insisted on her
marrying him, and would consent to nothing else, and when
he was drunk he used to abuse her and even beat her. Whenever
he got drunk she used to hide upstairs and sob, and on
such occasions Alehin and the servants stayed in the house to
be ready to defend her in case of necessity.
We began talking about love.
“How love is born,” said Alehin, “why Pelagea does not
love somebody more like herself in her spiritual and external
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qualities, and why she fell in love with Nikanor, that ugly
snout — we all call him ‘The Snout’ — how far questions of
personal happiness are of consequence in love — all that is
known; one can take what view one likes of it. So far only
one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: ‘This is a
great mystery.’ Everything else that has been written or said
about love is not a conclusion, but only a statement of questions
which have remained unanswered. The explanation
which would seem to fit one case does not apply in a dozen
others, and the very best thing, to my mind, would be to
explain every case individually without attempting to generalize.
We ought, as the doctors say, to individualize each case.”
“Perfectly true,” Burkin assented.
“We Russians of the educated class have a partiality for these
questions that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized,
decorated with roses, nightingales; we Russians decorate our
loves with these momentous questions, and select the most
uninteresting of them, too. In Moscow, when I was a student,
I had a friend who shared my life, a charming lady, and
every time I took her in my arms she was thinking what I
would allow her a month for housekeeping and what was the
price of beef a pound. In the same way, when we are in love
we are never tired of asking ourselves questi ons: whether it is
honourable or dishonourable, sensible or stupid, what this
love is leading up to, and so on. Whether it is a good thing or
not I don’t know, but that it is in the way, unsatisfactory, and
irritating, I do know.”
It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People
who lead a solitary existence always have something in their
hearts which they are eager to talk about. In town bachelors
visit the baths and the restaurants on purpose to talk, and
sometimes tell the most interesting things to bath attendants
and waiters; in the country, as a rule, they unbosom themselves
to their guests. Now from the window we could see a
grey sky, trees drenched in the rain; in such weather we could
go nowhere, and there was nothing for us to do but to tell
stories and to listen.
“I have lived at Sofino and been farming for a long time,”
Alehin began, “ever since I left the University. I am an idle
gentleman by education, a studious person by disposition;
but there was a big debt owing on the estate when I came
here, and as my father was in debt partly because he had spent
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so much on my education, I resolved not to go away, but to
work till I paid off the debt. I made up my mind to this and
set to work, not, I must confess, without some repugnance.
The land here does not yield much, and if one is not to farm
at a loss one must employ serf labour or hired labourers, which
is almost the same thing, or put it on a peasant footing —
that is, work the fields oneself and with one’s family. There is
no middle path. But in those days I did not go into such
subtleties. I did not leave a clod of earth unturned; I gathered
together all the peasants, men and women, from the
neighbouring villages; the work went on at a tremendous pace.
I myself ploughed and sowed and reaped, and was bored doing
it, and frowned with disgust, like a village cat driven by
hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen-garden. My body
ached, and I slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me that I
could easily reconcile this life of toil with my cultured habits;
to do so, I thought, all that is necessary is to maintain a certain
external order in life. I established myself upstairs here in
the best rooms, and ordered them to bring me there coffee
and liquor after lunch and dinner, and when I went to bed I
read every night the _Yyesnik Evropi_. But one day our priest,
Father Ivan, came and drank up all my liquor at one sitting;
and the _Yyesnik Evropi_ went to the priest’s daughters; as in
the summer, especially at the haymaking, I did not succeed in
getting to my bed at all, and slept in the sledge in the barn, or
somewhere in the forester’s lodge, what chance was there of
reading? Little by little I moved downstairs, began dining in
the servants’ kitchen, and of my former luxury nothing is left
but the servants who were in my father’s service, and whom it
would be painful to turn away.
“In the first years I was elected here an honourary justice of
the peace. I used to have to go to the town and take part in
the sessions of the congress and of the circuit court, and this
was a pleasant change for me. When you live here for two or
three months without a break, especially in the winter, you
begin at last to pine for a black coat. And in the circuit court
there were frock-coats, and uniforms, and dress-coats, too, all
lawyers, men who have received a general education; I had
some one to talk to. After sleeping in the sledge and dining in
the kitchen, to sit in an arm-chair in clean linen, in thin boots,
with a chain on one’s waistcoat, is such luxury!
“I received a warm welcome in the town. I made friends
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eagerly. And of all my acquaintanceships the most intimate
and, to tell the truth, the most agreeable to me was my acquaintance
with Luganovitch, the vice-president of the circuit
court. You both know him: a most charming personality.
It all happened just after a celebrated case of incendiarism;
the preliminary investigation lasted two days; we were exhausted.
Luganovitch looked at me and said:
“‘Look here, come round to dinner with me.’
“This was unexpected, as I knew Luganovitch very little,
only officially, and I had never been to his house. I only just
went to my hotel room to change and went off to dinner.
And here it was my lot to meet Anna Alexyevna, Luganovitch’s
wife. At that time she was still very young, not more than
twenty-two, and her first baby had been born just six months
before. It is all a thing of the past; and now I should find it
difficult to define what there was so exceptional in her, what
it was in her attracted me so much; at the time, at dinner, it
was all perfectly clear to me. I saw a lovely young, good, intelligent,
fascinating woman, such as I had never met before;
and I felt her at once some one close and already familiar, as
though that face, those cordial, intelligent eyes, I had seen
somewhere in my childhood, in the album which lay on my
mother’s chest of drawers.
“Four Jews were charged with being incendiaries, were regarded
as a gang of robbers, and, to my mind, quite groundlessly.
At dinner I was very much excited, I was uncomfortable,
and I don’t know what I said, but Anna Alexyevna kept
shaking her head and saying to her husband:
“‘Dmitry, how is this?’
“Luganovitch is a good-natured man, one of those simplehearted
people who firmly maintain the opinion that once a
man is charged before a court he is guilty, and to express doubt
of the correctness of a sentence cannot be done except in legal
form on paper, and not at dinner and in private conversation.
“‘You and I did not set fire to the place,’ he said softly, ‘and
you see we are not condemned, and not in prison.’
“And both husband and wife tried to make me eat and drink
as much as possible. From some trifling details, from the way
they made the coffee together, for instance, and from the way
they understood each other at half a word, I could gather that
they lived in harmony and comfort, and that they were glad
of a visitor. After dinner they played a duet on the piano; then
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it got dark, and I went home. That was at the beginning of
spring.
“After that I spent the whole summer at Sofino without a
break, and I had no time to think of the town, either, but the
memory of the graceful fair-haired woman remained in my
mind all those days; I did not think of her, but it was as
though her light shadow were lying on my heart.
“In the late autumn there was a theatrical performance for
some charitable object in the town. I went into the governor’s
box (I was invited to go there in the interval); I looked, and
there was Anna Alexyevna sitting beside the governor’s wife;
and again the same irresistible, thrilling impression of beauty
and sweet, caressing eyes, and again the same feeling of nearness.
We sat side by side, then went to the foyer.
“‘You’ve grown thinner,’ she said; ‘have you been ill?’
“‘Yes, I’ve had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy
weather I can’t sleep.’
“‘You look dispirited. In the spring, when you came to dinner,
you were younger, more confident. You were full of eagerness,
and talked a great deal then; you were very interesting,
and I really must confess I was a little carried away by
you. For some reason you often came back to my memory
during the summer, and when I was getting ready for the
theatre today I thought I should see you.’
“And she laughed.
“‘But you look dispirited today,’ she repeated; ‘it makes
you seem older.’
“The next day I lunched at the Luganovitchs’. After lunch
they drove out to their summer villa, in order to make arrangements
there for the winter, and I went with them. I returned
with them to the town, and at midnight drank tea
with them in quiet domestic surroundings, while the fire
glowed, and the young mother kept going to see if her baby
girl was asleep. And after that, every time I went to town I
never failed to visit the Luganovitchs. They grew used to me,
and I grew used to them. As a rule I went in unannounced, as
though I were one of the family.
“‘Who is there?’ I would hear from a faraway room, in the
drawling voice that seemed to me so lovely.
“‘It is Pavel Konstantinovitch,’ answered the maid or the nurse.
“Anna Alexyevna would come out to me with an anxious
face, and would ask every time:
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“‘Why is it so long since you have been? Has anything happened?’
“Her eyes, the elegant refined hand she gave me, her indoor
dress, the way she did her hair, her voice, her step, always
produced the same impression on me of something new and
extraordinary in my life, and very important. We talked together
for hours, were silent, thinking each our own thoughts,
or she played for hours to me on the piano. If there were no
one at home I stayed and waited, talked to the nurse, played
with the child, or lay on the sofa in the study and read; and
when Anna Alexyevna came back I met her in the hall, took
all her parcels from her, and for some reason I carried those
parcels every time with as much love, with as much solemnity,
as a boy.
“There is a proverb that if a peasant woman has no troubles
she will buy a pig. The Luganovitchs had no troubles, so they
made friends with me. If I did not come to the town I must
be ill or something must have happened to me, and both of
them were extremely anxious. They were worried that I, an
educated man with a knowledge of languages, should, instead
of devoting myself to science or literary work, live in the country,
rush round like a squirrel in a rage, work hard with never
a penny to show for it. They fancied that I was unhappy, and
that I only talked, laughed, and ate to conceal my sufferings,
and even at cheerful moments when I felt happy I was aware
of their searching eyes fixed upon me. They were particularly
touching when I really was depressed, when I was being worried
by some creditor or had not money enough to pay interest
on the proper day. The two of them, husband and wife,
would whisper together at the window; then he would come
to me and say with a grave face:
“‘If you really are in need of money at the moment, Pavel
Konstantinovitch, my wife and I beg you not to hesitate to
borrow from us.’
“And he would blush to his ears with emotion. And it would
happen that, after whispering in the same way at the window,
he would come up to me, with red ears, and say:
“‘My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this present.’
“And he would give me studs, a cigar-case, or a lamp, and I
would send them game, butter, and flowers from the country.
They both, by the way, had considerable means of their
own. In early days I often borrowed money, and was not very
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particular about it —borrowed wherever I could — but nothing
in the world would have induced me to borrow from the
Luganovitchs. But why talk of it?
“I was unhappy. At home, in the fields, in the barn, I thought
of her; I tried to understand the mystery of a beautiful, intelligent
young woman’s marrying some one so uninteresting,
almost an old man (her husband was over forty), and having
children by him; to understand the mystery of this uninteresting,
good, simple-hearted man, who argued with such
wearisome good sense, at balls and evening parties kept near
the more solid people, looking listless and superfluous, with
a submissive, uninterested expression, as though he had been
brought there for sale, who yet believed in his right to be
happy, to have children by her; and I kept trying to understand
why she had met him first and not me, and why such a
terrible mistake in our lives need have happened.
“And when I went to the town I saw every time from her
eyes that she was expecting me, and she would confess to me
herself that she had had a peculiar feeling all that day and had
guessed that I should come. We talked a long time, and were
silent, yet we did not confess our love to each other, but timidly
and jealously concealed it. We were afraid of everything
that might reveal our secret to ourselves. I loved her tenderly,
deeply, but I reflected and kept asking myself what our love
could lead to if we had not the strength to fight against it. It
seemed to be incredible that my gentle, sad love could all at
once coarsely break up the even tenor of the life of her husband,
her children, and all the household in which I was so
loved and trusted. Would it be honourable? She would go
away with me, but where? Where could I take her? It would
have been a different matter if I had had a beautiful, interesting
life — if, for instance, I had been struggling for the emancipation
of my country, or had been a celebrated man of science,
an artist or a painter; but as it was it would mean taking
her from one everyday humdrum life to another as humdrum
or perhaps more so. And how long would our happiness
last? What would happen to her in case I was ill, in case I
died, or if we simply grew cold to one another?
“And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She thought
of her husband, her children, and of her mother, who loved
the husband like a son. If she abandoned herself to her feelings
she would have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and in her
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position either would have been equally terrible and inconvenient.
And she was tormented by the question whether her
love would bring me happiness — would she not complicate
my life, which, as it was, was hard enough and full of all sorts
of trouble? She fancied she was not young enough for me,
that she was not industrious nor energetic enough to begin a
new life, and she often talked to her husband of the importance
of my marrying a girl of intelligence and merit who
would be a capable housewife and a help to me —and she
would immediately add that it would be difficult to find
such a girl in the whole town.
“MEANWHILE THE YEARS were passing. Anna Alexyevna already
had two children. When I arrived at the Luganovitchs’ the
servants smiled cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel
Konstantinovitch had come, and hung on my neck; every
one was overjoyed. They did not understand what was passing
in my soul, and thought that I, too, was happy. Every one
looked on me as a noble being. And grown-ups and children
alike felt that a noble being was walking about their rooms,
and that gave a peculiar charm to their manner towards me,
as though in my presence their life, too, was purer and more
beautiful. Anna Alexyevna and I used to go to the theatre
together, always walking there; we used to sit side by side in
the stalls, our shoulders touching. I would take the operaglass
from her hands without a word, and feel at that minute
that she was near me, that she was mine, that we could not
live without each other; but by some strange misunderstanding,
when we came out of the theatre we always said goodbye
and parted as though we were strangers. Goodness knows
what people were saying about us in the town already, but
there was not a word of truth in it all!
“In the latter years Anna Alexyevna took to going away for
frequent visits to her mother or to her sister; she began to
suffer from low spirits, she began to recognize that her life
was spoilt and unsatisfied, and at times she did not care to see
her husband nor her children. She was already being treated
for neurasthenia.
“We were silent and still silent, and in the presence of outsiders
she displayed a strange irritation in regard to me; whatever
I talked about, she disagreed with me, and if I had an
argument she sided with my opponent. If I dropped any181
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thing, she would say coldly:
“‘I congratulate you.’
“If I forgot to take the opera-glass when we were going to
the theatre, she would say afterwards:
“‘I knew you would forget it.’
“Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives that does
not end sooner or later. The time of parting came, as
Luganovitch was appointed president in one of the western
provinces. They had to sell their furniture, their horses, their
summer villa. When they drove out to the villa, and afterwards
looked back as they were going away, to look for the
last time at the garden, at the green roof, every one was sad,
and I realized that I had to say goodbye not only to the villa.
It was arranged that at the end of August we should see Anna
Alexyevna off to the Crimea, where the doctors were sending
her, and that a little later Luganovitch and the children would
set off for the western province.
“We were a great crowd to see Anna Alexye vna off. When
she had said good-bye to her husband and her children and
there was only a minute left before the third bell, I ran into
her compartment to put a basket, which she had almost forgotten,
on the rack, and I had to say good-bye. When our
eyes met in the compartment our spiritual fortitude deserted
us both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my
breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her
shoulders, her hands wet with tears — oh, how unhappy we
were! — I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain
in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how
deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood
that when you love you must either, in your reasonings
about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more
important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their
accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.
“I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and parted
for ever. The train had already started. I went into the next
compartment — it was empty — and until I reached the next
station I sat there crying. Then I walked home to Sofino.…”
While Alehin was telling his story, the rain left off and the
sun came out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch went out on the
balcony, from which there was a beautiful view over the garden
and the mill-pond, which was shining now in the sunshine
like a mirror. They admired it, and at the same time
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they were sorry that this man with the kind, clever eyes, who
had told them this story with such genuine feeling, should be
rushing round and round this huge estate like a squirrel on a
wheel instead of devoting himself to science or something
else which would have made his life more pleasant; and they
thought what a sorrowful face Anna Alexyevna must have
had when he said good-bye to her in the railway-carriage and
kissed her face and shoulders. Both of them had met her in
the town, and Burkin knew her and thought her beautiful.
THE LOTTERY TICKET
IVAN DMITRITCH, a middle-class man who lived with his family
on an income of twelve hundred a year and was very well
satisfied with his lot, sat down on the sofa after supper and
began reading the newspaper.
“I forgot to look at the newspaper today,” his wife said to
him as she cleared the table. “Look and see whether the list of
drawings is there.”
“Yes, it is,” said Ivan Dmitritch; “but hasn’t your ticket
lapsed?”
“No; I took the interest on Tuesday.”
“What is the number?”
“Series 9,499, number 26.”
“All right… we will look… 9,499 and 26.”
Ivan Dmitritch had no faith in lottery luck, and would not,
as a rule, have consented to look at the lists of winning numbers,
but now, as he had nothing else to do and as the newspaper
was before his eyes, he passed his finger downwards along
the column of numbers. And immediately, as though in
mockery of his scepticism, no further than the second line
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from the top, his eye was caught by the figure 9,499! Unable
to believe his eyes, he hurriedly dropped the paper on his knees
without looking to see the number of the ticket, and, just as
though some one had given him a douche of cold water, he
felt an agreeable chill in the pit of the stomach; tingling and
terrible and sweet!
“Masha, 9,499 is there!” he said in a hollow voice.
His wife looked at his astonished and panic-stricken face,
and realized that he was not joking.
“9,499?” she asked, turning pale and dropping the folded
tablecloth on the table.
“Yes, yes… it really is there!”
“And the number of the ticket?”
“Oh, yes! There’s the number of the ticket too. But stay…
wait! No, I say! Anyway, the number of our series is there!
Anyway, you understand.…”
Looking at his wife, Ivan Dmitritch gave a broad, senseless
smile, like a baby when a bright object is shown it. His wife
smiled too; it was as pleasant to her as to him that he only
mentioned the series, and did not try to find out the number
of the winning ticket. To torment and tantalize oneself with
hopes of possible fortune is so sweet, so thrilling!
“It is our series,” said Ivan Dmitritch, after a long silence.
“So there is a probability that we have won. It’s only a probability,
but there it is!”
“Well, now look!”
“Wait a little. We have plenty of time to be disappointed.
It’s on the second line from the top, so the prize is seventyfive
thousand. That’s not money, but power, capital! And in a
minute I shall look at the list, and there — 26! Eh? I say, what
if we really have won?”
The husband and wife began laughing and staring at one
another in silence. The possibility of winning bewildered them;
they could not have said, could not have dreamed, what they
both needed that seventy-five thousand for, what they would
buy, where they would go. They thought only of the figures
9,499 and 75,000 and pictured them in their imagination,
while somehow they could not think of the happiness itself
which was so possible.
Ivan Dmitritch, holding the paper in his hand, walked several
times from corner to corner, and only when he had recovered
from the first impression began dreaming a little.
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“And if we have won,” he said — “why, it will be a new life,
it will be a transformation! The ticket is yours, but if it were
mine I should, first of all, of course, spend twenty-five thousand
on real property in the shape of an estate; ten thousand
on immediate expenses, new furnishing… travelling… paying
debts, and so on.… The other forty thousand I would
put in the bank and get interest on it.”
“Yes, an estate, that would be nice,” said his wife, sitting
down and dropping her hands in her lap.
“Somewhere in the Tula or Oryol provinces.… In the first
place we shouldn’t need a summer villa, and besides, it would
always bring in an income.”
And pictures came crowding on his imagination, each more
gracious and poetical than the last. And in all these pictures he
saw himself well-fed, serene, healthy, felt warm, even hot!
Here, after eating a summer soup, cold as ice, he lay on his
back on the burning sand close to a stream or in the garden
under a lime-tree.… It is hot.… His little boy and girl are
crawling about near him, digging in the sand or catching ladybirds
in the grass. He dozes sweetly, thinking of nothing,
and feeling all over that he need not go to the office today,
tomorrow, or the day after. Or, tired of lying still, he goes to
the hayfield, or to the forest for mushrooms, or watches the
peasants catching fish with a net. When the sun sets he takes a
towel and soap and saunters to the bathing-shed, where he
undresses at his leisure, slowly rubs his bare chest with his
hands, and goes into the water. And in the water, near the
opaque soapy circles, little fish flit to and fro and green waterweeds
nod their heads. After bathing there is tea with cream
and milk rolls.… In the evening a walk or _vint_ with the
neighbours.
“Yes, it would be nice to buy an estate,” said his wife, also
dreaming, and from her face it was evident that she was enchanted
by her thoughts.
Ivan Dmitritch pictured to himself autumn with its rains, its
cold evenings, and its St. Martin’s summer. At that season he
would have to take longer walks about the garden and beside
the river, so as to get thoroughly chilled, and then drink a big
glass of vodka and eat a salted mushroom or a soused cucumber,
and then — drink another.… The children would come
running from the kitchen-garden, bringing a carrot and a radish
smelling of fresh earth.… And then, he would lie stretched
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full length on the sofa, and in leisurely fashion turn over the
pages of some illustrated magazine, or, covering his face with it
and unbuttoning his waistcoat, give himself up to slumber.
The St. Martin’s summer is followed by cloudy, gloomy
weather. It rains day and night, the bare trees weep, the wind
is damp and cold. The dogs, the horses, the fowls — all are
wet, depressed, downcast. There is nowhere to walk; one can’t
go out for days together; one has to pace up and down the
room, looking despondently at the grey window. It is dreary!
Ivan Dmitritch stopped and looked at his wife.
“I should go abro ad, you know, Masha,” he said.
And he began thinking how nice it would be in late autumn
to go abroad somewhere to the South of France… to
Italy… . to India!
“I should certainly go abroad too,” his wife said. “But look
at the number of the ticket!”
“Wait, wait!…”
He walked about the room and went on thinking. It occurred
to him: what if his wife really did go abroad? It is
pleasant to travel alone, or in the society of light, careless
women who live in the present, and not such as think and
talk all the journey about nothing but their children, sigh,
and tremble with dismay over every farthing. Ivan Dmitritch
imagined his wife in the train with a multitude of parcels,
baskets, and bags; she would be sighing over something, complaining
that the train made her head ache, that she had spent
so much money.… At the stations he would continually be
having to run for boiling water, bread and butter.… She
wouldn’t have dinner because of its being too dear.…
“She would begrudge me every farthing,” he thought, with
a glance at his wife. “The lottery ticket is hers, not mine!
Besides, what is the use of her going abroad? What does she
want there? She would shut herself up in the hotel, and not
let me out of her sight.… I know!”
And for the first time in his life his mind dwelt on the fact
that his wife had grown elderly and plain, and that she was
saturated through and through with the smell of cooking,
while he was still young, fresh, and healthy, and might well
have got married again.
“Of course, all that is silly nonsense,” he thought; “but…
why should she go abroad? What would she make of it? And
yet she would go, of course.… I can fancy… In reality it is all

Anton Chekhov
one to her, whether it is Naples or Klin. She would only be in
my way. I should be dependent upon her. I can fancy how,
like a regular woman, she will lock the money up as soon as
she gets it.… She will hide it from me.… She will look after
her relations and grudge me every farthing.”
Ivan Dmitritch thought of her relations. All those wretched
brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles would come crawling
about as soon as they heard of the winning ticket, would
begin whining like beggars, and fawning upon them with
oily, hypocritical smiles. Wretched, detestable people! If they
were given anything, they would ask for more; while if they
were refused, they would swear at them, slander them, and
wish them every kind of misfortune.
Ivan Dmitritch remembered his own relations, and their
faces, at which he had looked impartially in the past, struck
him now as repulsive and hateful.
“They are such reptiles!” he thought.
And his wife’s face, too, struck him as repulsive and hateful.
Anger surged up in his heart against her, and he thought
malignantly:
“She knows nothing about money, and so she is stingy. If
she won it she would give me a hundred roubles, and put the
rest away under lock and key.”
And he looked at his wife, not with a smile now, but with
hatred. She glanced at him too, and also with hatred and anger.
She had her own daydreams, her own plans, her own
reflections; she understood perfectly well what her husband’s
dreams were. She knew who would be the first to try and
grab her winnings.
“It’s very nice making daydreams at other people’s expense!”
is what her eyes expressed. “No, don’t you dare!”
Her husband understood her look; hatred began stirring
again in his breast, and in order to annoy his wife he glanced
quickly, to spite her at the fourth page on the newspaper and
read out triumphantly:
“Series 9,499, number 46! Not 26!”
Hatred and hope both disappeared at once, and it began
immediately to seem to Ivan Dmitritch and his wife that their
rooms were dark and small and low-pitched, that the supper
they had been eating was not doing them good, but lying
heavy on their stomachs, that the evenings were long and
wearisome.…
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“What the devil’s the meaning of it?” said Ivan Dmitritch,
beginning to be ill-humoured. “Wherever one steps there are
bits of paper under one’s feet, crumbs, husks. The rooms are
never swept! One is simply forced to go out. Damnation take
my soul entirely! I shall go and hang myself on the first aspen-
tree!”