Short Stories by Chekhov
thing does not happen in any country! As her pastor and spiritual
father, I ought not to allow it, but what can I do? What? Why, I am
always trying to get treated by her husband for nothing myself! It is
true that, as you say, it is all incredible! One can hardly believe
one's eyes. During Mass, you know, when I look out from the altar and
see my congregation, Avraamy starving, and my wife, and think of the
doctor's wife--how blue her hands were from the cold water--would you
believe it, I forget myself and stand senseless like a fool, until the
sacristan calls to me. . . . It's awful!"
Father Yakov began walking about again.
"Lord Jesus!" he said, waving his hands, "holy Saints! I can't officiate
properly. . . . Here you talk to me about the school, and I sit like a
dummy and don't understand a word, and think of nothing but food. . . .
Even before the altar. . . . But . . . what am I doing?" Father Yakov
pulled himself up suddenly. "You want to go out. Forgive me, I meant
nothing. . . . Excuse . . ."
Kunin shook hands with Father Yakov without speaking, saw him into the
hall, and going back into his study, stood at the window. He saw Father
Yakov go out of the house, pull his wide-brimmed rusty-looking hat over
his eyes, and slowly, bowing his head, as though ashamed of his
outburst, walk along the road.
"I don't see his horse," thought Kunin.
Kunin did not dare to think that the priest had come on foot every day
to see him; it was five or six miles to Sinkino, and the mud on the road
was impassable. Further on he saw the coachman Andrey and the boy
Paramon, jumping over the puddles and splashing Father Yakov with mud,
run up to him for his blessing. Father Yakov took off his hat and slowly
blessed Andrey, then blessed the boy and stroked his head.
Kunin passed his hand over his eyes, and it seemed to him that his hand
was moist. He walked away from the window and with dim eyes looked round
the room in which he still seemed to hear the timid droning voice. He
glanced at the table. Luckily, Father Yakov, in his haste, had forgotten
to take the sermons. Kunin rushed up to them, tore them into pieces, and
with loathing thrust them under the table.
"And I did not know!" he moaned, sinking on to the sofa. "After being
here over a year as member of the Rural Board, Honorary Justice of the
Peace, member of the School Committee! Blind puppet, egregious idiot! I
must make haste and help them, I must make haste!"
He turned from side to side uneasily, pressed his temples and racked his
brains.
"On the twentieth I shall get my salary, two hundred roubles. . . . On
some good pretext I will give him some, and some to the doctor's wife. .
. . I will ask them to perform a special service here, and will get up
an illness for the doctor. . . . In that way I shan't wound their pride.
And I'll help Father Avraamy too. . . ."
He reckoned his money on his fingers, and was afraid to own to himself
that those two hundred roubles would hardly be enough for him to pay his
steward, his servants, the peasant who brought the meat. . . . He could
not help remembering the recent past when he was senselessly squandering
his father's fortune, when as a puppy of twenty he had given expensive
fans to prostitutes, had paid ten roubles a day to Kuzma, his cab-
driver, and in his vanity had made presents to actresses. Oh, how useful
those wasted rouble, three-rouble, ten-rouble notes would have been now!
"Father Avraamy lives on three roubles a month!" thought Kunin. "For a
rouble the priest's wife could get herself a chemise, and the doctor's
wife could hire a washerwoman. But I'll help them, anyway! I must help
them."
Here Kunin suddenly recalled the private information he had sent to the
bishop, and he writhed as from a sudden draught of cold air. This
remembrance filled him with overwhelming shame before his inner self and
before the unseen truth.
So had begun and had ended a sincere effort to be of public service on
the part of a well-intentioned but unreflecting and over-comfortable
person.
THE MURDER I
The evening service was being celebrated at Progonnaya Station. Before
the great ikon, painted in glaring colours on a background of gold,
stood the crowd of railway servants with their wives and children, and
also of the timbermen and sawyers who worked close to the railway line.
All stood in silence, fascinated by the glare of the lights and the
howling of the snow-storm which was aimlessly disporting itself outside,
regardless of the fact that it was the Eve of the Annunciation. The old
priest from Vedenyapino conducted the service; the sacristan and Matvey
Terehov were singing.
Matvey's face was beaming with delight; he sang stretching out his neck
as though he wanted to soar upwards. He sang tenor and chanted the
"Praises" too in a tenor voice with honied sweetness and persuasiveness.
When he sang "Archangel Voices" he waved his arms like a conductor, and
trying to second the sacristan's hollow bass with his tenor, achieved
something extremely complex, and from his face it could be seen that he
was experiencing great pleasure.
At last the service was over, and they all quietly dispersed, and it was
dark and empty again, and there followed that hush which is only known
in stations that stand solitary in the open country or in the forest
when the wind howls and nothing else is heard and when all the emptiness
around, all the dreariness of life slowly ebbing away is felt.
Matvey lived not far from the station at his cousin's tavern. But he did
not want to go home. He sat down at the refreshment bar and began
talking to the waiter in a low voice.
"We had our own choir in the tile factory. And I must tell you that
though we were only workmen, our singing was first-rate, splendid. We
were often invited to the town, and when the Deputy Bishop, Father Ivan,
took the service at Trinity Church, the bishop's singers sang in the
right choir and we in the left. Only they complained in the town that we
kept the singing on too long: 'the factory choir drag it out,' they used
to say. It is true we began St. Andrey's prayers and the Praises between
six and seven, and it was past eleven when we finished, so that it was
sometimes after midnight when we got home to the factory. It was good,"
sighed Matvey. "Very good it was, indeed, Sergey Nikanoritch! But here
in my father's house it is anything but joyful. The nearest church is
four miles away; with my weak health I can't get so far; there are no
singers there. And there is no peace or quiet in our family; day in day
out, there is an uproar, scolding, uncleanliness; we all eat out of one
bowl like peasants; and there are beetles in the cabbage soup. . . . God
has not given me health, else I would have gone away long ago, Sergey
Nikanoritch."
Matvey Terehov was a middle-aged man about forty-five, but he had a look
of ill-health; his face was wrinkled and his lank, scanty beard was
quite grey, and that made him seem many years older. He spoke in a weak
voice, circumspectly, and held his chest when he coughed, while his eyes
assumed the uneasy and anxious look one sees in very apprehensive
people. He never said definitely what was wrong with him, but he was
fond of describing at length how once at the factory he had lifted a
heavy box and had ruptured himself, and how this had led to "the
gripes," and had forced him to give up his work in the tile factory and
come back to his native place; but he could not explain what he meant by
"the gripes."
"I must own I am not fond of my cousin," he went on, pouring himself out
some tea. "He is my elder; it is a sin to censure him, and I fear the
Lord, but I cannot bear it in patience. He is a haughty, surly, abusive
man; he is the torment of his relations and workmen, and constantly out
of humour. Last Sunday I asked him in an amiable way, 'Brother, let us
go to Pahomovo for the Mass!' but he said 'I am not going; the priest
there is a gambler;' and he would not come here to-day because, he said,
the priest from Vedenyapino smokes and drinks vodka. He doesn't like the
clergy! He reads Mass himself and the Hours and the Vespers, while his
sister acts as sacristan; he says, 'Let us pray unto the Lord'! and she,
in a thin little voice like a turkey-hen, 'Lord, have mercy upon us! . .
.' It's a sin, that's what it is. Every day I say to him, 'Think what
you are doing, brother! Repent, brother!' and he takes no notice."
Sergey Nikanoritch, the waiter, poured out five glasses of tea and
carried them on a tray to the waiting-room. He had scarcely gone in when
there was a shout:
"Is that the way to serve it, pig's face? You don't know how to wait!"
It was the voice of the station-master. There was a timid mutter, then
again a harsh and angry shout:
"Get along!"
The waiter came back greatly crestfallen.
"There was a time when I gave satisfaction to counts and princes," he
said in a low voice; "but now I don't know how to serve tea. . . . He
called me names before the priest and the ladies!"
The waiter, Sergey Nikanoritch, had once had money of his own, and had
kept a buffet at a first-class station, which was a junction, in the
principal town of a province. There he had worn a swallow-tail coat and
a gold chain. But things had gone ill with him; he had squandered all
his own money over expensive fittings and service; he had been robbed by
his staff, and getting gradually into difficulties, had moved to another
station less bustling. Here his wife had left him, taking with her all
the silver, and he moved to a third station of a still lower class,
where no hot dishes were served. Then to a fourth. Frequently changing
his situation and sinking lower and lower, he had at last come to
Progonnaya, and here he used to sell nothing but tea and cheap vodka,
and for lunch hard-boiled eggs and dry sausages, which smelt of tar, and
which he himself sarcastically said were only fit for the orchestra. He
was bald all over the top of his head, and had prominent blue eyes and
thick bushy whiskers, which he often combed out, looking into the little
looking-glass. Memories of the past haunted him continually; he could
never get used to sausage "only fit for the orchestra," to the rudeness
of the station-master, and to the peasants who used to haggle over the
prices, and in his opinion it was as unseemly to haggle over prices in a
refreshment room as in a chemist's shop. He was ashamed of his poverty
and degradation, and that shame was now the leading interest of his
life.
"Spring is late this year," said Matvey, listening. "It's a good job; I
don't like spring. In spring it is very muddy, Sergey Nikanoritch. In
books they write: Spring, the birds sing, the sun is setting, but what
is there pleasant in that? A bird is a bird, and nothing more. I am fond
of good company, of listening to folks, of talking of religion or
singing something agreeable in chorus; but as for nightingales and
flowers--bless them, I say!"
He began again about the tile factory, about the choir, but Sergey
Nikanoritch could not get over his mortification, and kept shrugging his
shoulders and muttering. Matvey said good-bye and went home.
There was no frost, and the snow was already melting on the roofs,
though it was still falling in big flakes; they were whirling rapidly
round and round in the air and chasing one another in white clouds along
the railway line. And the oak forest on both sides of the line, in the
dim light of the moon which was hidden somewhere high up in the clouds,
resounded with a prolonged sullen murmur. When a violent storm shakes
the trees, how terrible they are! Matvey walked along the causeway
beside the line, covering his face and his hands, while the wind beat on