Short Stories by Chekhov
look like under a microscope, my boy? Wouldn't it be horrid!"
The old-fashioned clock in the drawing-room does not strike, but coughs
ten times huskily as though it had a cold. The cook, Anna, comes into
the dining-room, and plumps down at the master's feet.
"Forgive me, for Christ's sake, Pavel Vassilitch!" she says, getting up,
flushed all over.
"You forgive me, too, for Christ's sake," Pavel Vassilitch responds
unconcernedly.
In the same manner, Anna goes up to the other members of the family,
plumps down at their feet, and begs forgiveness. She only misses out
Markovna to whom, not being one of the gentry, she does not feel it
necessary to bow down.
Another half-hour passes in stillness and tranquillity. The "Neva" is by
now lying on the sofa, and Pavel Vassilitch, holding up his finger,
repeats by heart some Latin verses he has learned in his childhood.
Styopa stares at the finger with the wedding ring, listens to the
unintelligible words, and dozes; he rubs his eyelids with his fists, and
they shut all the tighter.
"I am going to bed . . ." he says, stretching and yawning.
"What, to bed?" says Pelageya Ivanovna. "What about supper before the
fast?"
"I don't want any."
"Are you crazy?" says his mother in alarm. "How can you go without your
supper before the fast? You'll have nothing but Lenten food all through
the fast!"
Pavel Vassilitch is scared too.
"Yes, yes, my boy," he says. "For seven weeks mother will give you
nothing but Lenten food. You can't miss the last supper before the
fast."
"Oh dear, I am sleepy," says Styopa peevishly.
"Since that is how it is, lay the supper quickly," Pavel Vassilitch
cries in a fluster. "Anna, why are you sitting there, silly? Make haste
and lay the table."
Pelageya Ivanovna clasps her hands and runs into the kitchen with an
expression as though the house were on fire.
"Make haste, make haste," is heard all over the house. "Styopotchka is
sleepy. Anna! Oh dear me, what is one to do? Make haste."
Five minutes later the table is laid. Again the cats, arching their
spines, and stretching themselves with their tails in the air, come into
the dining-room. . . . The family begin supper. . . . No one is hungry,
everyone's stomach is overfull, but yet they must eat.
THE OLD HOUSE (A Story told by a Houseowner)
THE old house had to be pulled down that a new one might be built in its
place. I led the architect through the empty rooms, and between our
business talk told him various stories. The tattered wallpapers, the
dingy windows, the dark stoves, all bore the traces of recent habitation
and evoked memories. On that staircase, for instance, drunken men were
once carrying down a dead body when they stumbled and flew headlong
downstairs together with the coffin; the living were badly bruised,
while the dead man looked very serious, as though nothing had happened,
and shook his head when they lifted him up from the ground and put him
back in the coffin. You see those three doors in a row: in there lived
young ladies who were always receiving visitors, and so were better
dressed than any other lodgers, and could pay their rent regularly. The
door at the end of the corridor leads to the wash-house, where by day
they washed clothes and at night made an uproar and drank beer. And in
that flat of three rooms everything is saturated with bacteria and
bacilli. It's not nice there. Many lodgers have died there, and I can
positively assert that that flat was at some time cursed by someone, and
that together with its human lodgers there was always another lodger,
unseen, living in it. I remember particularly the fate of one family.
Picture to yourself an ordinary man, not remarkable in any way, with a
wife, a mother, and four children. His name was Putohin; he was a
copying clerk at a notary's, and received thirty-five roubles a month.
He was a sober, religious, serious man. When he brought me his rent for
the flat he always apologised for being badly dressed; apologised for
being five days late, and when I gave him a receipt he would smile good-
humouredly and say: "Oh yes, there's that too, I don't like those
receipts." He lived poorly but decently. In that middle room, the
grandmother used to be with the four children; there they used to cook,
sleep, receive their visitors, and even dance. This was Putohin's own
room; he had a table in it, at which he used to work doing private jobs,
copying parts for the theatre, advertisements, and so on. This room on
the right was let to his lodger, Yegoritch, a locksmith--a steady fellow,
but given to drink; he was always too hot, and so used to go about in
his waistcoat and barefoot. Yegoritch used to mend locks, pistols,
children's bicycles, would not refuse to mend cheap clocks and make
skates for a quarter-rouble, but he despised that work, and looked on
himself as a specialist in musical instruments. Amongst the litter of
steel and iron on his table there was always to be seen a concertina
with a broken key, or a trumpet with its sides bent in. He paid Putohin
two and a half roubles for his room; he was always at his work-table,
and only came out to thrust some piece of iron into the stove.
On the rare occasions when I went into that flat in the evening, this
was always the picture I came upon: Putohin would be sitting at his
little table, copying something; his mother and his wife, a thin woman
with an exhausted-looking face, were sitting near the lamp, sewing;
Yegoritch would be making a rasping sound with his file. And the hot,
still smouldering embers in the stove filled the room with heat and
fumes; the heavy air smelt of cabbage soup, swaddling-clothes, and
Yegoritch. It was poor and stuffy, but the working-class faces, the
children's little drawers hung up along by the stove, Yegoritch's bits
of iron had yet an air of peace, friendliness, content. . . . In the
corridor outside the children raced about with well-combed heads, merry
and profoundly convinced that everything was satisfactory in this world,
and would be so endlessly, that one had only to say one's prayers every
morning and at bedtime.
Now imagine in the midst of that same room, two paces from the stove,
the coffin in which Putohin's wife is lying. There is no husband whose
wife will live for ever, but there was something special about this
death. When, during the requiem service, I glanced at the husband's
grave face, at his stern eyes, I thought: "Oho, brother!"
It seemed to me that he himself, his children, the grandmother and
Yegoritch, were already marked down by that unseen being which lived
with them in that flat. I am a thoroughly superstitious man, perhaps,
because I am a houseowner and for forty years have had to do with
lodgers. I believe if you don't win at cards from the beginning you will
go on losing to the end; when fate wants to wipe you and your family off
the face of the earth, it remains inexorable in its persecution, and the
first misfortune is commonly only the first of a long series. . . .
Misfortunes are like stones. One stone has only to drop from a high
cliff for others to be set rolling after it. In short, as I came away
from the requiem service at Putohin's, I believed that he and his family
were in a bad way.
And, in fact, a week afterwards the notary quite unexpectedly dismissed
Putohin, and engaged a young lady in his place. And would you believe
it, Putohin was not so much put out at the loss of his job as at being
superseded by a young lady and not by a man. Why a young lady? He so
resented this that on his return home he thrashed his children, swore at
his mother, and got drunk. Yegoritch got drunk, too, to keep him
company.
Putohin brought me the rent, but did not apologise this time, though it
was eighteen days overdue, and said nothing when he took the receipt
from me. The following month the rent was brought by his mother; she
only brought me half, and promised to bring the remainder a week later.
The third month, I did not get a farthing, and the porter complained to
me that the lodgers in No. 23 were "not behaving like gentlemen."
These were ominous symptoms.
Picture this scene. A sombre Petersburg morning looks in at the dingy
windows. By the stove, the granny is pouring out the children's tea.
Only the eldest, Vassya, drinks out of a glass, for the others the tea
is poured out into saucers. Yegoritch is squatting on his heels before
the stove, thrusting a bit of iron into the fire. His head is heavy and
his eyes are lustreless from yesterday's drinking-bout; he sighs and
groans, trembles and coughs.
"He has quite put me off the right way, the devil," he grumbles; "he
drinks himself and leads others into sin."
Putohin sits in his room, on the bedstead from which the bedclothes and
the pillows have long ago disappeared, and with his hands straying in
his hair looks blankly at the floor at his feet. He is tattered,
unkempt, and ill.
"Drink it up, make haste or you will be late for school," the old woman
urges on Vassya, "and it's time for me, too, to go and scrub the floors
for the Jews. . . ."
The old woman is the only one in the flat who does not lose heart. She
thinks of old times, and goes out to hard dirty work. On Fridays she
scrubs the floors for the Jews at the crockery shop, on Saturdays she
goes out washing for shopkeepers, and on Sundays she is racing about the
town from morning to night, trying to find ladies who will help her.
Every day she has work of some sort; she washes and scrubs, and is by
turns a midwife, a matchmaker, or a beggar. It is true she, too, is not
disinclined to drown her sorrows, but even when she has had a drop she
does not forget her duties. In Russia there are many such tough old
women, and how much of its welfare rests upon them!
When he has finished his tea, Vassya packs up his books in a satchel and
goes behind the stove; his greatcoat ought to be hanging there beside
his granny's clothes. A minute later he comes out from behind the stove
and asks:
"Where is my greatcoat?"
The grandmother and the other children look for the greatcoat together,
they waste a long time in looking for it, but the greatcoat has utterly
vanished. Where is it? The grandmother and Vassya are pale and
frightened. Even Yegoritch is surprised. Putohin is the only one who
does not move. Though he is quick to notice anything irregular or
disorderly, this time he makes a pretence of hearing and seeing nothing.
That is suspicious.
"He's sold it for drink," Yegoritch declares.
Putohin says nothing, so it is the truth. Vassya is overcome with
horror. His greatcoat, his splendid greatcoat, made of his dead mother's
cloth dress, with a splendid calico lining, gone for drink at the
tavern! And with the greatcoat is gone too, of course, the blue pencil
that lay in the pocket, and the note-book with "Nota bene" in gold
letters on it! There's another pencil with india-rubber stuck into the
note-book, and, besides that, there are transfer pictures lying in it.
Vassya would like to cry, but to cry is impossible. If his father, who
has a headache, heard crying he would shout, stamp with his feet, and
begin fighting, and after drinking he fights horribly. Granny would
stand up for Vassya, and his father would strike granny too; it would
end in Yegoritch getting mixed up in it too, clutching at his father and
falling on the floor with him. The two would roll on the floor,
struggling together and gasping with drunken animal fury, and granny
would cry, the children would scream, the neighbours would send for the
porter. No, better not cry.
Because he mustn't cry, or give vent to his indignation aloud, Vassya
moans, wrings his hands and moves his legs convulsively, or biting his