Short Stories by Chekhov
go away from here I ought to pay up my debts. I owe about two thousand
roubles. I have no money. . . . Of course, that's not important; I shall
pay part now, somehow, and I shall send the rest, later, from
Petersburg. The chief point is Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. . . . First of all
we must define our relations. . . . Yes."
A little later he was considering whether it would not be better to go
to Samoylenko for advice.
"I might go," he thought, "but what use would there be in it? I shall
only say something inappropriate about boudoirs, about women, about what
is honest or dishonest. What's the use of talking about what is honest
or dishonest, if I must make haste to save my life, if I am suffocating
in this cursed slavery and am killing myself? . . . One must realise at
last that to go on leading the life I do is something so base and so
cruel that everything else seems petty and trivial beside it. To run
away," he muttered, sitting down, "to run away."
The deserted seashore, the insatiable heat, and the monotony of the
smoky lilac mountains, ever the same and silent, everlastingly solitary,
overwhelmed him with depression, and, as it were, made him drowsy and
sapped his energy. He was perhaps very clever, talented, remarkably
honest; perhaps if the sea and the mountains had not closed him in on
all sides, he might have become an excellent Zemstvo leader, a
statesman, an orator, a political writer, a saint. Who knows? If so, was
it not stupid to argue whether it were honest or dishonest when a gifted
and useful man--an artist or musician, for instance--to escape from
prison, breaks a wall and deceives his jailers? Anything is honest when
a man is in such a position.
At two o'clock Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When
the cook gave them rice and tomato soup, Laevsky said:
"The same thing every day. Why not have cabbage soup?"
"There are no cabbages."
"It's strange. Samoylenko has cabbage soup and Marya Konstantinovna has
cabbage soup, and only I am obliged to eat this mawkish mess. We can't
go on like this, darling."
As is common with the vast majority of husbands and wives, not a single
dinner had in earlier days passed without scenes and fault-finding
between Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Laevsky; but ever since Laevsky had
made up his mind that he did not love her, he had tried to give way to
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna in everything, spoke to her gently and politely,
smiled, and called her "darling."
"This soup tastes like liquorice," he said, smiling; he made an effort
to control himself and seem amiable, but could not refrain from saying:
"Nobody looks after the housekeeping. . . . If you are too ill or busy
with reading, let me look after the cooking."
In earlier days she would have said to him, "Do by all means," or, "I
see you want to turn me into a cook"; but now she only looked at him
timidly and flushed crimson.
"Well, how do you feel to-day?" he asked kindly.
"I am all right to-day. There is nothing but a little weakness."
"You must take care of yourself, darling. I am awfully anxious about
you."
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was ill in some way. Samoylenko said she had
intermittent fever, and gave her quinine; the other doctor, Ustimovitch,
a tall, lean, unsociable man, who used to sit at home in the daytime,
and in the evenings walk slowly up and down on the sea-front coughing,
with his hands folded behind him and a cane stretched along his back,
was of opinion that she had a female complaint, and prescribed warm
compresses. In old days, when Laevsky loved her, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna's
illness had excited his pity and terror; now he saw falsity even in her
illness. Her yellow, sleepy face, her lustreless eyes, her apathetic
expression, and the yawning that always followed her attacks of fever,
and the fact that during them she lay under a shawl and looked more like
a boy than a woman, and that it was close and stuffy in her room--all
this, in his opinion, destroyed the illusion and was an argument against
love and marriage.
The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with a
preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began
languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he was
possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his head tingle.
He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a dog, but
he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, for
arousing such a feeling, and he understood why lovers sometimes murder
their mistresses. He would not murder her, of course, but if he had been
on a jury now, he would have acquitted the murderer.
"Merci, darling," he said after dinner, and kissed Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
on the forehead.
Going back into his study, he spent five minutes in walking to and fro,
looking at his boots; then he sat down on his sofa and muttered:
"Run away, run away! We must define the position and run away!"
He lay down on the sofa and recalled again that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna's
husband had died, perhaps, by his fault.
"To blame a man for loving a woman, or ceasing to love a woman, is
stupid," he persuaded himself, lying down and raising his legs in order
to put on his high boots. "Love and hatred are not under our control. As
for her husband, maybe I was in an indirect way one of the causes of his
death; but again, is it my fault that I fell in love with his wife and
she with me?"
Then he got up, and finding his cap, set off to the lodgings of his
colleague, Sheshkovsky, where the Government clerks met every day to
play vint and drink beer.
"My indecision reminds me of Hamlet," thought Laevsky on the way. "How
truly Shakespeare describes it! Ah, how truly!" III
For the sake of sociability and from sympathy for the hard plight of
newcomers without families, who, as there was not an hotel in the town,
had nowhere to dine, Dr. Samoylenko kept a sort of table d'hôte. At
this time there were only two men who habitually dined with him: a young
zoologist called Von Koren, who had come for the summer to the Black Sea
to study the embryology of the medusa, and a deacon called Pobyedov, who
had only just left the seminary and been sent to the town to take the
duty of the old deacon who had gone away for a cure. Each of them paid
twelve roubles a month for their dinner and supper, and Samoylenko made
them promise to turn up at two o'clock punctually.
Von Koren was usually the first to appear. He sat down in the drawing-
room in silence, and taking an album from the table, began attentively
scrutinising the faded photographs of unknown men in full trousers and
top-hats, and ladies in crinolines and caps. Samoylenko only remembered
a few of them by name, and of those whom he had forgotten he said with a
sigh: "A very fine fellow, remarkably intelligent!" When he had finished
with the album, Von Koren took a pistol from the whatnot, and screwing
up his left eye, took deliberate aim at the portrait of Prince
Vorontsov, or stood still at the looking-glass and gazed a long time at
his swarthy face, his big forehead, and his black hair, which curled
like a negro's, and his shirt of dull-coloured cotton with big flowers
on it like a Persian rug, and the broad leather belt he wore instead of
a waistcoat. The contemplation of his own image seemed to afford him
almost more satisfaction than looking at photographs or playing with the
pistols. He was very well satisfied with his face, and his becomingly
clipped beard, and the broad shoulders, which were unmistakable evidence
of his excellent health and physical strength. He was satisfied, too,
with his stylish get-up, from the cravat, which matched the colour of
his shirt, down to his brown boots.
While he was looking at the album and standing before the glass, at that
moment, in the kitchen and in the passage near, Samoylenko, without his
coat and waistcoat, with his neck bare, excited and bathed in
perspiration, was bustling about the tables, mixing the salad, or making
some sauce, or preparing meat, cucumbers, and onion for the cold soup,
while he glared fiercely at the orderly who was helping him, and
brandished first a knife and then a spoon at him.
"Give me the vinegar!" he said. "That's not the vinegar--it's the salad
oil!" he shouted, stamping. "Where are you off to, you brute?"
"To get the butter, Your Excellency," answered the flustered orderly in
a cracked voice.
"Make haste; it's in the cupboard! And tell Daria to put some fennel in
the jar with the cucumbers! Fennel! Cover the cream up, gaping laggard,
or the flies will get into it!"
And the whole house seemed resounding with his shouts. When it was ten
or fifteen minutes to two the deacon would come in; he was a lanky young
man of twenty-two, with long hair, with no beard and a hardly
perceptible moustache. Going into the drawing-room, he crossed himself
before the ikon, smiled, and held out his hand to Von Koren.
"Good-morning," the zoologist said coldly. "Where have you been?"
"I've been catching sea-gudgeon in the harbour."
"Oh, of course. . . . Evidently, deacon, you will never be busy with
work."
"Why not? Work is not like a bear; it doesn't run off into the woods,"
said the deacon, smiling and thrusting his hands into the very deep
pockets of his white cassock.
"There's no one to whip you!" sighed the zoologist.
Another fifteen or twenty minutes passed and they were not called to
dinner, and they could still hear the orderly running into the kitchen
and back again, noisily treading with his boots, and Samoylenko
shouting:
"Put it on the table! Where are your wits? Wash it first."
The famished deacon and Von Koren began tapping on the floor with their
heels, expressing in this way their impatience like the audience at a
theatre. At last the door opened and the harassed orderly announced that
dinner was ready! In the dining-room they were met by Samoylenko,
crimson in the face, wrathful, perspiring from the heat of the kitchen;
he looked at them furiously, and with an expression of horror, took the
lid off the soup tureen and helped each of them to a plateful; and only
when he was convinced that they were eating it with relish and liked it,
he gave a sigh of relief and settled himself in his deep arm-chair. His
face looked blissful and his eyes grew moist. . . . He deliberately
poured himself out a glass of vodka and said:
"To the health of the younger generation."
After his conversation with Laevsky, from early morning till dinner
Samoylenko had been conscious of a load at his heart, although he was in
the best of humours; he felt sorry for Laevsky and wanted to help him.
After drinking a glass of vodka before the soup, he heaved a sigh and
said:
"I saw Vanya Laevsky to-day. He is having a hard time of it, poor
fellow! The material side of life is not encouraging for him, and the
worst of it is all this psychology is too much for him. I'm sorry for
the lad."
"Well, that is a person I am not sorry for," said Von Koren. "If that
charming individual were drowning, I would push him under with a stick
and say, 'Drown, brother, drown away.' . . ."
"That's untrue. You wouldn't do it."
"Why do you think that?" The zoologist shrugged his shoulders. "I'm just
as capable of a good action as you are."
"Is drowning a man a good action?" asked the deacon, and he laughed.
"Laevsky? Yes."
"I think there is something amiss with the soup . . ." said Samoylenko,
anxious to change the conversation.
"Laevsky is absolutely pernicious and is as dangerous to society as the
cholera microbe," Von Koren went on. "To drown him would be a service."
"It does not do you credit to talk like that about your neighbour. Tell
us: what do you hate him for?"