Short Stories by Chekhov
"When I accepted orthodoxy in Novotcherkassk my mother was looking for
me in Rostov. She felt that I meant to change my religion," he sighed,
and went on: "It is six years since I was there in the province of
Mogilev. My sister must be married by now."
After a short silence, seeing that I was still awake, he began talking
quietly of how they soon, thank God, would give him a job, and that at
last he would have a home of his own, a settled position, his daily
bread secure. . . . And I was thinking that this man would never have a
home of his own, nor a settled position, nor his daily bread secure. He
dreamed aloud of a village school as of the Promised Land; like the
majority of people, he had a prejudice against a wandering life, and
regarded it as something exceptional, abnormal and accidental, like an
illness, and was looking for salvation in ordinary workaday life. The
tone of his voice betrayed that he was conscious of his abnormal
position and regretted it. He seemed as it were apologizing and
justifying himself.
Not more than a yard from me lay a homeless wanderer; in the rooms of
the hostels and by the carts in the courtyard among the pilgrims some
hundreds of such homeless wanderers were waiting for the morning, and
further away, if one could picture to oneself the whole of Russia, a
vast multitude of such uprooted creatures was pacing at that moment
along highroads and side-tracks, seeking something better, or were
waiting for the dawn, asleep in wayside inns and little taverns, or on
the grass under the open sky. . . . As I fell asleep I imagined how
amazed and perhaps even overjoyed all these people would have been if
reasoning and words could be found to prove to them that their life was
as little in need of justification as any other. In my sleep I heard a
bell ring outside as plaintively as though shedding bitter tears, and
the lay brother calling out several times:
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon us! Come to mass!"
When I woke up my companion was not in the room. It was sunny and there
was a murmur of the crowds through the window. Going out, I learned that
mass was over and that the procession had set off for the Hermitage some
time before. The people were wandering in crowds upon the river bank
and, feeling at liberty, did not know what to do with themselves: they
could not eat or drink, as the late mass was not yet over at the
Hermitage; the Monastery shops where pilgrims are so fond of crowding
and asking prices were still shut. In spite of their exhaustion, many of
them from sheer boredom were trudging to the Hermitage. The path from
the Monastery to the Hermitage, towards which I directed my steps,
twined like a snake along the high steep bank, going up and down and
threading in and out among the oaks and pines. Below, the Donets
gleamed, reflecting the sun; above, the rugged chalk cliff stood up
white with bright green on the top from the young foliage of oaks and
pines, which, hanging one above another, managed somehow to grow on the
vertical cliff without falling. The pilgrims trailed along the path in
single file, one behind another. The majority of them were Little
Russians from the neighbouring districts, but there were many from a
distance, too, who had come on foot from the provinces of Kursk and
Orel; in the long string of varied colours there were Greek settlers,
too, from Mariupol, strongly built, sedate and friendly people, utterly
unlike their weakly and degenerate compatriots who fill our southern
seaside towns. There were men from the Donets, too, with red stripes on
their breeches, and emigrants from the Tavritchesky province. There were
a good many pilgrims of a nondescript class, like my Alexandr Ivanitch;
what sort of people they were and where they came from it was impossible
to tell from their faces, from their clothes, or from their speech. The
path ended at the little landing-stage, from which a narrow road went to
the left to the Hermitage, cutting its way through the mountain. At the
landing-stage stood two heavy big boats of a forbidding aspect, like the
New Zealand pirogues which one may see in the works of Jules Verne. One
boat with rugs on the seats was destined for the clergy and the singers,
the other without rugs for the public. When the procession was returning
I found myself among the elect who had succeeded in squeezing themselves
into the second. There were so many of the elect that the boat scarcely
moved, and one had to stand all the way without stirring and to be
careful that one's hat was not crushed. The route was lovely. Both
banks--one high, steep and white, with overhanging pines and oaks, with
the crowds hurrying back along the path, and the other shelving, with
green meadows and an oak copse bathed in sunshine--looked as happy and
rapturous as though the May morning owed its charm only to them. The
reflection of the sun in the rapidly flowing Donets quivered and raced
away in all directions, and its long rays played on the chasubles, on
the banners and on the drops splashed up by the oars. The singing of the
Easter hymns, the ringing of the bells, the splash of the oars in the
water, the calls of the birds, all mingled in the air into something
tender and harmonious. The boat with the priests and the banners led the
way; at its helm the black figure of a lay brother stood motionless as a
statue.
When the procession was getting near the Monastery, I noticed Alexandr
Ivanitch among the elect. He was standing in front of them all, and, his
mouth wide open with pleasure and his right eyebrow cocked up, was
gazing at the procession. His face was beaming; probably at such
moments, when there were so many people round him and it was so bright,
he was satisfied with himself, his new religion, and his conscience.
When a little later we were sitting in our room, drinking tea, he still
beamed with satisfaction; his face showed that he was satisfied both
with the tea and with me, that he fully appreciated my being an
intellectual, but that he would know how to play his part with credit if
any intellectual topic turned up. . . .
"Tell me, what psychology ought I to read?" he began an intellectual
conversation, wrinkling up his nose.
"Why, what do you want it for?"
"One cannot be a teacher without a knowledge of psychology. Before
teaching a boy I ought to understand his soul."
I told him that psychology alone would not be enough to make one
understand a boy's soul, and moreover psychology for a teacher who had
not yet mastered the technical methods of instruction in reading,
writing, and arithmetic would be a luxury as superfluous as the higher
mathematics. He readily agreed with me, and began describing how hard
and responsible was the task of a teacher, how hard it was to eradicate
in the boy the habitual tendency to evil and superstition, to make him
think honestly and independently, to instil into him true religion, the
ideas of personal dignity, of freedom, and so on. In answer to this I
said something to him. He agreed again. He agreed very readily, in fact.
Obviously his brain had not a very firm grasp of all these "intellectual
subjects."
Up to the time of my departure we strolled together about the Monastery,
whiling away the long hot day. He never left my side a minute; whether
he had taken a fancy to me or was afraid of solitude, God only knows! I
remember we sat together under a clump of yellow acacia in one of the
little gardens that are scattered on the mountain side.
"I am leaving here in a fortnight," he said; "it is high time."
"Are you going on foot?"
"From here to Slavyansk I shall walk, then by railway to Nikitovka; from
Nikitovka the Donets line branches off, and along that branch line I
shall walk as far as Hatsepetovka, and there a railway guard, I know,
will help me on my way."
I thought of the bare, deserted steppe between Nikitovka and
Hatsepetovka, and pictured to myself Alexandr Ivanitch striding along
it, with his doubts, his homesickness, and his fear of solitude . . . .
He read boredom in my face, and sighed.
"And my sister must be married by now," he said, thinking aloud, and at
once, to shake off melancholy thoughts, pointed to the top of the rock
and said:
"From that mountain one can see Izyum."
As we were walking up the mountain he had a little misfortune. I suppose
he stumbled, for he slit his cotton trousers and tore the sole of his
shoe.
"Tss!" he said, frowning as he took off a shoe and exposed a bare foot
without a stocking. "How unpleasant! . . . That's a complication, you
know, which . . . Yes!"
Turning the shoe over and over before his eyes, as though unable to
believe that the sole was ruined for ever, he spent a long time
frowning, sighing, and clicking with his tongue.
I had in my trunk a pair of boots, old but fashionable, with pointed
toes and laces. I had brought them with me in case of need, and only
wore them in wet weather. When we got back to our room I made up a
phrase as diplomatic as I could and offered him these boots. He accepted
them and said with dignity:
"I should thank you, but I know that you consider thanks a convention."
He was pleased as a child with the pointed toes and the laces, and even
changed his plans.
"Now I shall go to Novotcherkassk in a week, and not in a fortnight," he
said, thinking aloud. "In shoes like these I shall not be ashamed to
show myself to my godfather. I was not going away from here just because
I hadn't any decent clothes. . . ."
When the coachman was carrying out my trunk, a lay brother with a good
ironical face came in to sweep out the room. Alexandr Ivanitch seemed
flustered and embarrassed and asked him timidly:
"Am I to stay here or go somewhere else?"
He could not make up his mind to occupy a whole room to himself, and
evidently by now was feeling ashamed of living at the expense of the
Monastery. He was very reluctant to part from me; to put off being
lonely as long as possible, he asked leave to see me on my way.
The road from the Monastery, which had been excavated at the cost of no
little labour in the chalk mountain, moved upwards, going almost like a
spiral round the mountain, over roots and under sullen overhanging
pines. . . .
The Donets was the first to vanish from our sight, after it the
Monastery yard with its thousands of people, and then the green roofs. .
. . Since I was mounting upwards everything seemed vanishing into a pit.
The cross on the church, burnished by the rays of the setting sun,
gleamed brightly in the abyss and vanished. Nothing was left but the
oaks, the pines, and the white road. But then our carriage came out on a
level country, and that was all left below and behind us. Alexandr
Ivanitch jumped out and, smiling mournfully, glanced at me for the last
time with his childish eyes, and vanished from me for ever. . . .
The impressions of the Holy Mountains had already become memories, and I
saw something new: the level plain, the whitish-brown distance, the way
side copse, and beyond it a windmill which stood with out moving, and
seemed bored at not being allowed to wave its sails because it was a
holiday.
THE STEPPE The Story of a Journey I
EARLY one morning in July a shabby covered chaise, one of those
antediluvian chaises without springs in which no one travels in Russia
nowadays, except merchant's clerks, dealers and the less well-to-do
among priests, drove out of N., the principal town of the province of
Z., and rumbled noisily along the posting-track. It rattled and creaked
at every movement; the pail, hanging on behind, chimed in gruffly, and
from these sounds alone and from the wretched rags of leather hanging
loose about its peeling body one could judge of its decrepit age and
readiness to drop to pieces.