Short Stories by Chekhov
the yard. From time to time he peeped out into the street: the horse and
the dog were standing like posts by the fence, looking dejectedly
towards the gate.
"Try how you can do without me," muttered the old man, feeling as though
a weight of anger were being lifted from his heart. "Let somebody else
look after you now! I am stingy and ill-tempered. . . . It's nasty
living with me, so you try living with other people . . . . Yes. . . ."
After enjoying the crushed expression of his dependents, and grumbling
to his heart's content, Zotov went out of the yard, and, assuming a
ferocious air, shouted:
"Well, why are you standing there? Whom are you waiting for? Standing
right across the middle of the road and preventing the public from
passing! Go into the yard!"
The horse and the dog with drooping heads and a guilty air turned
towards the gate. Lyska, probably feeling she did not deserve
forgiveness, whined piteously.
"Stay you can, but as for food, you'll get nothing from me! You may die,
for all I care!"
Meanwhile the sun began to break through the morning mist; its slanting
rays gilded over the autumn frost. There was a sound of steps and
voices. Zotov put back the broom in its place, and went out of the yard
to see his crony and neighbour, Mark Ivanitch, who kept a little general
shop. On reaching his friend's shop, he sat down on a folding-stool,
sighed sedately, stroked his beard, and began about the weather. From
the weather the friends passed to the new deacon, from the deacon to the
choristers; and the conversation lengthened out. They did not notice as
they talked how time was passing, and when the shop-boy brought in a big
teapot of boiling water, and the friends proceeded to drink tea, the
time flew as quickly as a bird. Zotov got warm and felt more cheerful.
"I have a favour to ask of you, Mark Ivanitch," he began, after the
sixth glass, drumming on the counter with his fingers. "If you would
just be so kind as to give me a gallon of oats again to-day. . . ."
From behind the big tea-chest behind which Mark Ivanitch was sitting
came the sound of a deep sigh.
"Do be so good," Zotov went on; "never mind tea--don't give it me to-day,
but let me have some oats. . . . I am ashamed to ask you, I have wearied
you with my poverty, but the horse is hungry."
"I can give it you," sighed the friend--"why not? But why the devil do
you keep those carcases?--tfoo!--Tell me that, please. It would be all
right if it were a useful horse, but--tfoo!-- one is ashamed to look at
it. . . . And the dog's nothing but a skeleton! Why the devil do you
keep them?"
"What am I to do with them?"
"You know. Take them to Ignat the slaughterer--that is all there is to
do. They ought to have been there long ago. It's the proper place for
them."
"To be sure, that is so! . . . I dare say! . . ."
"You live like a beggar and keep animals," the friend went on. "I don't
grudge the oats. . . . God bless you. But as to the future, brother . .
. I can't afford to give regularly every day! There is no end to your
poverty! One gives and gives, and one doesn't know when there will be an
end to it all."
The friend sighed and stroked his red face.
"If you were dead that would settle it," he said. "You go on living, and
you don't know what for. . . . Yes, indeed! But if it is not the Lord's
will for you to die, you had better go somewhere into an almshouse or a
refuge."
"What for? I have relations. I have a great-niece. . . ."
And Zotov began telling at great length of his great-niece Glasha,
daughter of his niece Katerina, who lived somewhere on a farm.
"She is bound to keep me!" he said. "My house will be left to her, so
let her keep me; I'll go to her. It's Glasha, you know . . . Katya's
daughter; and Katya, you know, was my brother Panteley's stepdaughter. .
. . You understand? The house will come to her . . . . Let her keep me!"
"To be sure; rather than live, as you do, a beggar, I should have gone
to her long ago."
"I will go! As God's above, I will go. It's her duty."
When an hour later the old friends were drinking a glass of vodka, Zotov
stood in the middle of the shop and said with enthusiasm:
"I have been meaning to go to her for a long time; I will go this very
day."
"To be sure; rather than hanging about and dying of hunger, you ought to
have gone to the farm long ago."
"I'll go at once! When I get there, I shall say: Take my house, but keep
me and treat me with respect. It's your duty! If you don't care to, then
there is neither my house, nor my blessing for you! Good-bye, Ivanitch!"
Zotov drank another glass, and, inspired by the new idea, hurried home.
The vodka had upset him and his head was reeling, but instead of lying
down, he put all his clothes together in a bundle, said a prayer, took
his stick, and went out. Muttering and tapping on the stones with his
stick, he walked the whole length of the street without looking back,
and found himself in the open country. It was eight or nine miles to the
farm. He walked along the dry road, looked at the town herd lazily
munching the yellow grass, and pondered on the abrupt change in his life
which he had only just brought about so resolutely. He thought, too,
about his dependents. When he went out of the house, he had not locked
the gate, and so had left them free to go whither they would.
He had not gone a mile into the country when he heard steps behind him.
He looked round and angrily clasped his hands. The horse and Lyska, with
their heads drooping and their tails between their legs, were quietly
walking after him.
"Go back!" he waved to them.
They stopped, looked at one another, looked at him. He went on, they
followed him. Then he stopped and began ruminating. It was impossible to
go to his great-niece Glasha, whom he hardly knew, with these creatures;
he did not want to go back and shut them up, and, indeed, he could not
shut them up, because the gate was no use.
"To die of hunger in the shed," thought Zotov. "Hadn't I really better
take them to Ignat?"
Ignat's hut stood on the town pasture-ground, a hundred paces from the
flagstaff. Though he had not quite made up his mind, and did not know
what to do, he turned towards it. His head was giddy and there was a
darkness before his eyes. . . .
He remembers little of what happened in the slaughterer's yard. He has a
memory of a sickening, heavy smell of hides and the savoury steam of the
cabbage-soup Ignat was sipping when he went in to him. As in a dream he
saw Ignat, who made him wait two hours, slowly preparing something,
changing his clothes, talking to some women about corrosive sublimate;
he remembered the horse was put into a stand, after which there was the
sound of two dull thuds, one of a blow on the skull, the other of the
fall of a heavy body. When Lyska, seeing the death of her friend, flew
at Ignat, barking shrilly, there was the sound of a third blow that cut
short the bark abruptly. Further, Zotov remembers that in his drunken
foolishness, seeing the two corpses, he went up to the stand, and put
his own forehead ready for a blow.
And all that day his eyes were dimmed by a haze, and he could not even
see his own fingers.
WHO WAS TO BLAME?
As my uncle Pyotr Demyanitch, a lean, bilious collegiate councillor,
exceedingly like a stale smoked fish with a stick through it, was
getting ready to go to the high school, where he taught Latin, he
noticed that the corner of his grammar was nibbled by mice.
"I say, Praskovya," he said, going into the kitchen and addressing the
cook, "how is it we have got mice here? Upon my word! yesterday my top
hat was nibbled, to-day they have disfigured my Latin grammar . . . . At
this rate they will soon begin eating my clothes!
"What can I do? I did not bring them in!" answered Praskovya.
"We must do something! You had better get a cat, hadn't you?"
"I've got a cat, but what good is it?"
And Praskovya pointed to the corner where a white kitten, thin as a
match, lay curled up asleep beside a broom.
"Why is it no good?" asked Pyotr Demyanitch.
"It's young yet, and foolish. It's not two months old yet."
"H'm. . . . Then it must be trained. It had much better be learning
instead of lying there."
Saying this, Pyotr Demyanitch sighed with a careworn air and went out of
the kitchen. The kitten raised his head, looked lazily after him, and
shut his eyes again.
The kitten lay awake thinking. Of what? Unacquainted with real life,
having no store of accumulated impressions, his mental processes could
only be instinctive, and he could but picture life in accordance with
the conceptions that he had inherited, together with his flesh and
blood, from his ancestors, the tigers (vide Darwin). His thoughts were
of the nature of day-dreams. His feline imagination pictured something
like the Arabian desert, over which flitted shadows closely resembling
Praskovya, the stove, the broom. In the midst of the shadows there
suddenly appeared a saucer of milk; the saucer began to grow paws, it
began moving and displayed a tendency to run; the kitten made a bound,
and with a thrill of blood-thirsty sensuality thrust his claws into it.
When the saucer had vanished into obscurity a piece of meat appeared,
dropped by Praskovya; the meat ran away with a cowardly squeak, but the
kitten made a bound and got his claws into it. . . . Everything that
rose before the imagination of the young dreamer had for its starting-
point leaps, claws, and teeth. . . The soul of another is darkness, and
a cat's soul more than most, but how near the visions just described are
to the truth may be seen from the following fact: under the influence of
his day-dreams the kitten suddenly leaped up, looked with flashing eyes
at Praskovya, ruffled up his coat, and making one bound, thrust his
claws into the cook's skirt. Obviously he was born a mouse catcher, a
worthy son of his bloodthirsty ancestors. Fate had destined him to be
the terror of cellars, store-rooms and cornbins, and had it not been for
education . . . we will not anticipate, however.
On his way home from the high school, Pyotr Demyanitch went into a
general shop and bought a mouse-trap for fifteen kopecks. At dinner he
fixed a little bit of his rissole on the hook, and set the trap under
the sofa, where there were heaps of the pupils' old exercise-books,
which Praskovya used for various domestic purposes. At six o'clock in
the evening, when the worthy Latin master was sitting at the table
correcting his pupils' exercises, there was a sudden "klop!" so loud
that my uncle started and dropped his pen. He went at once to the sofa
and took out the trap. A neat little mouse, the size of a thimble, was
sniffing the wires and trembling with fear.
"Aha," muttered Pyotr Demyanitch, and he looked at the mouse
malignantly, as though he were about to give him a bad mark. "You are
cau--aught, wretch! Wait a bit! I'll teach you to eat my grammar!"
Having gloated over his victim, Poytr Demyanitch put the mouse-trap on
the floor and called:
"Praskovya, there's a mouse caught! Bring the kitten here!
"I'm coming," responded Praskovya, and a minute later she came in with
the descendant of tigers in her arms.
"Capital!" said Pyotr Demyanitch, rubbing his hands. "We will give him a
lesson. . . . Put him down opposite the mouse-trap . . . that's it. . .
. Let him sniff it and look at it. . . . That's it. . . ."
The kitten looked wonderingly at my uncle, at his arm-chair, sniffed the
mouse-trap in bewilderment, then, frightened probably by the glaring
lamplight and the attention directed to him, made a dash and ran in
terror to the door.
"Stop!" shouted my uncle, seizing him by the tail, "stop, you rascal!