Short Stories by Chekhov
brother. My head feels empty; there's a sinking at my heart, a weakness.
. . . I must run away."
"Run where?"
"There, to the North. To the pines and the mushrooms, to people and
ideas. . . . I'd give half my life to bathe now in some little stream in
the province of Moscow or Tula; to feel chilly, you know, and then to
stroll for three hours even with the feeblest student, and to talk and
talk endlessly. . . . And the scent of the hay! Do you remember it? And
in the evening, when one walks in the garden, sounds of the piano float
from the house; one hears the train passing. . . ."
Laevsky laughed with pleasure; tears came into his eyes, and to cover
them, without getting up, he stretched across the next table for the
matches.
"I have not been in Russia for eighteen years," said Samoylenko. "I've
forgotten what it is like. To my mind, there is not a country more
splendid than the Caucasus."
"Vereshtchagin has a picture in which some men condemned to death are
languishing at the bottom of a very deep well. Your magnificent Caucasus
strikes me as just like that well. If I were offered the choice of a
chimney-sweep in Petersburg or a prince in the Caucasus, I should choose
the job of chimney-sweep."
Laevsky grew pensive. Looking at his stooping figure, at his eyes fixed
dreamily at one spot, at his pale, perspiring face and sunken temples,
at his bitten nails, at the slipper which had dropped off his heel,
displaying a badly darned sock, Samoylenko was moved to pity, and
probably because Laevsky reminded him of a helpless child, he asked:
"Is your mother living?"
"Yes, but we are on bad terms. She could not forgive me for this
affair."
Samoylenko was fond of his friend. He looked upon Laevsky as a good-
natured fellow, a student, a man with no nonsense about him, with whom
one could drink, and laugh, and talk without reserve. What he understood
in him he disliked extremely. Laevsky drank a great deal and at
unsuitable times; he played cards, despised his work, lived beyond his
means, frequently made use of unseemly expressions in conversation,
walked about the streets in his slippers, and quarrelled with Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna before other people--and Samoylenko did not like this. But the
fact that Laevsky had once been a student in the Faculty of Arts,
subscribed to two fat reviews, often talked so cleverly that only a few
people understood him, was living with a well-educated woman--all this
Samoylenko did not understand, and he liked this and respected Laevsky,
thinking him superior to himself.
"There is another point," said Laevsky, shaking his head. "Only it is
between ourselves. I'm concealing it from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna for the
time. . . . Don't let it out before her. . . . I got a letter the day
before yesterday, telling me that her husband has died from softening of
the brain."
"The Kingdom of Heaven be his!" sighed Samoylenko. "Why are you
concealing it from her?"
"To show her that letter would be equivalent to 'Come to church to be
married.' And we should first have to make our relations clear. When she
understands that we can't go on living together, I will show her the
letter. Then there will be no danger in it."
"Do you know what, Vanya," said Samoylenko, and a sad and imploring
expression came into his face, as though he were going to ask him about
something very touching and were afraid of being refused. "Marry her, my
dear boy!"
"Why?"
"Do your duty to that splendid woman! Her husband is dead, and so
Providence itself shows you what to do!"
"But do understand, you queer fellow, that it is impossible. To marry
without love is as base and unworthy of a man as to perform mass without
believing in it."
"But it's your duty to."
"Why is it my duty?" Laevsky asked irritably.
"Because you took her away from her husband and made yourself
responsible for her."
"But now I tell you in plain Russian, I don't love her!"
"Well, if you've no love, show her proper respect, consider her wishes.
. . ."
"'Show her respect, consider her wishes,'" Laevsky mimicked him. "As
though she were some Mother Superior! . . . You are a poor psychologist
and physiologist if you think that living with a woman one can get off
with nothing but respect and consideration. What a woman thinks most of
is her bedroom."
"Vanya, Vanya!" said Samoylenko, overcome with confusion.
"You are an elderly child, a theorist, while I am an old man in spite of
my years, and practical, and we shall never understand one another. We
had better drop this conversation. Mustapha!" Laevsky shouted to the
waiter. "What's our bill?"
"No, no . . ." the doctor cried in dismay, clutching Laevsky's arm. "It
is for me to pay. I ordered it. Make it out to me," he cried to
Mustapha.
The friends got up and walked in silence along the sea-front. When they
reached the boulevard, they stopped and shook hands at parting.
"You are awfully spoilt, my friend!" Samoylenko sighed. "Fate has sent
you a young, beautiful, cultured woman, and you refuse the gift, while
if God were to give me a crooked old woman, how pleased I should be if
only she were kind and affectionate! I would live with her in my
vineyard and . . ."
Samoylenko caught himself up and said:
"And she might get the samovar ready for me there, the old hag."
After parting with Laevsky he walked along the boulevard. When, bulky
and majestic, with a stern expression on his face, he walked along the
boulevard in his snow-white tunic and superbly polished boots, squaring
his chest, decorated with the Vladimir cross on a ribbon, he was very
much pleased with himself, and it seemed as though the whole world were
looking at him with pleasure. Without turning his head, he looked to
each side and thought that the boulevard was extremely well laid out;
that the young cypress-trees, the eucalyptuses, and the ugly, anemic
palm-trees were very handsome and would in time give abundant shade;
that the Circassians were an honest and hospitable people.
"It's strange that Laevsky does not like the Caucasus," he thought,
"very strange."
Five soldiers, carrying rifles, met him and saluted him. On the right
side of the boulevard the wife of a local official was walking along the
pavement with her son, a schoolboy.
"Good-morning, Marya Konstantinovna," Samoylenko shouted to her with a
pleasant smile. "Have you been to bathe? Ha, ha, ha! . . . My respects
to Nikodim Alexandritch!"
And he went on, still smiling pleasantly, but seeing an assistant of the
military hospital coming towards him, he suddenly frowned, stopped him,
and asked:
"Is there any one in the hospital?"
"No one, Your Excellency."
"Eh?"
"No one, Your Excellency."
"Very well, run along. . . ."
Swaying majestically, he made for the lemonade stall, where sat a full-
bosomed old Jewess, who gave herself out to be a Georgian, and said to
her as loudly as though he were giving the word of command to a
regiment:
"Be so good as to give me some soda-water!" II
Laevsky's not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in the
fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or equivalent
to a lie, and everything he read against women and love seemed to him to
apply perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband.
When he returned home, she was sitting at the window, dressed and with
her hair done, and with a preoccupied face was drinking coffee and
turning over the leaves of a fat magazine; and he thought the drinking
of coffee was not such a remarkable event that she need put on a
preoccupied expression over it, and that she had been wasting her time
doing her hair in a fashionable style, as there was no one here to
attract and no need to be attractive. And in the magazine he saw nothing
but falsity. He thought she had dressed and done her hair so as to look
handsomer, and was reading in order to seem clever.
"Will it be all right for me to go to bathe to-day?" she said.
"Why? There won't be an earthquake whether you go or not, I suppose . .
. ."
"No, I only ask in case the doctor should be vexed."
"Well, ask the doctor, then; I'm not a doctor."
On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of her head.
And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her husband, what
she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought: "How true it is, how
true!"
Feeling weak and as though his head were perfectly empty, he went into
his study, lay down on his sofa, and covered his face with a
handkerchief that he might not be bothered by the flies. Despondent and
oppressive thoughts always about the same thing trailed slowly across
his brain like a long string of waggons on a gloomy autumn evening, and
he sank into a state of drowsy oppression. It seemed to him that he had
wronged Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband, and that it was through
his fault that her husband had died. It seemed to him that he had sinned
against his own life, which he had ruined, against the world of lofty
ideas, of learning, and of work, and he conceived that wonderful world
as real and possible, not on this sea-front with hungry Turks and lazy
mountaineers sauntering upon it, but there in the North, where there
were operas, theatres, newspapers, and all kinds of intellectual
activity. One could only there--not here--be honest, intelligent, lofty,
and pure. He accused himself of having no ideal, no guiding principle in
life, though he had a dim understanding now what it meant. Two years
before, when he fell in love with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, it seemed to him
that he had only to go with her as his wife to the Caucasus, and he
would be saved from vulgarity and emptiness; in the same way now, he was
convinced that he had only to part from Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and to go
to Petersburg, and he would get everything he wanted.
"Run away," he muttered to himself, sitting up and biting his nails.
"Run away!"
He pictured in his imagination how he would go aboard the steamer and
then would have some lunch, would drink some cold beer, would talk on
deck with ladies, then would get into the train at Sevastopol and set
off. Hurrah for freedom! One station after another would flash by, the
air would keep growing colder and keener, then the birches and the fir-
trees, then Kursk, Moscow. . . . In the restaurants cabbage soup, mutton
with kasha, sturgeon, beer, no more Asiaticism, but Russia, real Russia.
The passengers in the train would talk about trade, new singers, the
Franco-Russian entente; on all sides there would be the feeling of keen,
cultured, intellectual, eager life. . . . Hasten on, on! At last Nevsky
Prospect, and Great Morskaya Street, and then Kovensky Place, where he
used to live at one time when he was a student, the dear grey sky, the
drizzling rain, the drenched cabmen. . . .
"Ivan Andreitch!" some one called from the next room. "Are you at home?"
"I'm here," Laevsky responded. "What do you want?"
"Papers."
Laevsky got up languidly, feeling giddy, walked into the other room,
yawning and shuffling with his slippers. There, at the open window that
looked into the street, stood one of his young fellow-clerks, laying out
some government documents on the window-sill.
"One minute, my dear fellow," Laevsky said softly, and he went to look
for the ink; returning to the window, he signed the papers without
looking at them, and said: "It's hot!"
"Yes. Are you coming to-day?"
"I don't think so. . . . I'm not quite well. Tell Sheshkovsky that I
will come and see him after dinner."
The clerk went away. Laevsky lay down on his sofa again and began
thinking:
"And so I must weigh all the circumstances and reflect on them. Before I