Short Stories by Chekhov
"I have been consecrated. I am in a state of grace."
"Oh, deacon, deacon," repeated Von Koren, laughing, "I love talking to
you."
"You say you have faith," said the deacon. "What sort of faith is it?
Why, I have an uncle, a priest, and he believes so that when in time of
drought he goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes his
umbrella and leather overcoat for fear of getting wet through on his way
home. That's faith! When he speaks of Christ, his face is full of
radiance, and all the peasants, men and women, weep floods of tears. He
would stop that cloud and put all those forces you talk about to flight.
Yes . . . faith moves mountains."
The deacon laughed and slapped the zoologist on the shoulder.
"Yes . . ." he went on; "here you are teaching all the time, fathoming
the depths of the ocean, dividing the weak and the strong, writing books
and challenging to duels--and everything remains as it is; but, behold!
some feeble old man will mutter just one word with a holy spirit, or a
new Mahomet, with a sword, will gallop from Arabia, and everything will
be topsy-turvy, and in Europe not one stone will be left standing upon
another."
"Well, deacon, that's on the knees of the gods."
"Faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse
still--mere waste of time and nothing more."
The doctor came into sight on the sea-front. He saw the deacon and the
zoologist, and went up to them.
"I believe everything is ready," he said, breathing hard. "Govorovsky
and Boyko will be the seconds. They will start at five o'clock in the
morning. How it has clouded over," he said, looking at the sky. "One can
see nothing; there will be rain directly."
"I hope you are coming with us?" said the zoologist.
"No, God preserve me; I'm worried enough as it is. Ustimovitch is going
instead of me. I've spoken to him already."
Far over the sea was a flash of lightning, followed by a hollow roll of
thunder.
"How stifling it is before a storm!" said Von Koren. "I bet you've been
to Laevsky already and have been weeping on his bosom."
"Why should I go to him?" answered the doctor in confusion. "What next?"
Before sunset he had walked several times along the boulevard and the
street in the hope of meeting Laevsky. He was ashamed of his hastiness
and the sudden outburst of friendliness which had followed it. He wanted
to apologise to Laevsky in a joking tone, to give him a good talking to,
to soothe him and to tell him that the duel was a survival of mediæval
barbarism, but that Providence itself had brought them to the duel as a
means of reconciliation; that the next day, both being splendid and
highly intelligent people, they would, after exchanging shots,
appreciate each other's noble qualities and would become friends. But he
could not come across Laevsky.
"What should I go and see him for?" repeated Samoylenko. "I did not
insult him; he insulted me. Tell me, please, why he attacked me. What
harm had I done him? I go into the drawing-room, and, all of a sudden,
without the least provocation: 'Spy!' There's a nice thing! Tell me, how
did it begin? What did you say to him?"
"I told him his position was hopeless. And I was right. It is only
honest men or scoundrels who can find an escape from any position, but
one who wants to be at the same time an honest man and a scoundrel --it
is a hopeless position. But it's eleven o'clock, gentlemen, and we have
to be up early to-morrow."
There was a sudden gust of wind; it blew up the dust on the sea-front,
whirled it round in eddies, with a howl that drowned the roar of the
sea.
"A squall," said the deacon. "We must go in, our eyes are getting full
of dust."
As they went, Samoylenko sighed and, holding his hat, said:
"I suppose I shan't sleep to-night."
"Don't you agitate yourself," laughed the zoologist. "You can set your
mind at rest; the duel will end in nothing. Laevsky will magnanimously
fire into the air--he can do nothing else; and I daresay I shall not fire
at all. To be arrested and lose my time on Laevsky's account--the game's
not worth the candle. By the way, what is the punishment for duelling?"
"Arrest, and in the case of the death of your opponent a maximum of
three years' imprisonment in the fortress."
"The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul?"
"No, in a military fortress, I believe."
"Though this fine gentleman ought to have a lesson!"
Behind them on the sea, there was a flash of lightning, which for an
instant lighted up the roofs of the houses and the mountains. The
friends parted near the boulevard. When the doctor disappeared in the
darkness and his steps had died away, Von Koren shouted to him:
"I only hope the weather won't interfere with us to-morrow!"
"Very likely it will! Please God it may!"
"Good-night!"
"What about the night? What do you say?"
In the roar of the wind and the sea and the crashes of thunder, it was
difficult to hear.
"It's nothing," shouted the zoologist, and hurried home. XVII
"Upon my mind, weighed down with woe, Crowd thoughts, a heavy multitude:
In silence memory unfolds Her long, long scroll before my eyes. Loathing
and shuddering I curse And bitterly lament in vain, And bitter though
the tears I weep I do not wash those lines away."
PUSHKIN.
Whether they killed him next morning, or mocked at him--that is, left him
his life--he was ruined, anyway. Whether this disgraced woman killed
herself in her shame and despair, or dragged on her pitiful existence,
she was ruined anyway.
So thought Laevsky as he sat at the table late in the evening, still
rubbing his hands. The windows suddenly blew open with a bang; a violent
gust of wind burst into the room, and the papers fluttered from the
table. Laevsky closed the windows and bent down to pick up the papers.
He was aware of something new in his body, a sort of awkwardness he had
not felt before, and his movements were strange to him. He moved
timidly, jerking with his elbows and shrugging his shoulders; and when
he sat down to the table again, he again began rubbing his hands. His
body had lost its suppleness.
On the eve of death one ought to write to one's nearest relation.
Laevsky thought of this. He took a pen and wrote with a tremulous hand:
"Mother!"
He wanted to write to beg his mother, for the sake of the merciful God
in whom she believed, that she would give shelter and bring a little
warmth and kindness into the life of the unhappy woman who, by his
doing, had been disgraced and was in solitude, poverty, and weakness,
that she would forgive and forget everything, everything, everything,
and by her sacrifice atone to some extent for her son's terrible sin.
But he remembered how his mother, a stout, heavily-built old woman in a
lace cap, used to go out into the garden in the morning, followed by her
companion with the lap-dog; how she used to shout in a peremptory way to
the gardener and the servants, and how proud and haughty her face was--he
remembered all this and scratched out the word he had written.
There was a vivid flash of lightning at all three windows, and it was
followed by a prolonged, deafening roll of thunder, beginning with a
hollow rumble and ending with a crash so violent that all the window-
panes rattled. Laevsky got up, went to the window, and pressed his
forehead against the pane. There was a fierce, magnificent storm. On the
horizon lightning-flashes were flung in white streams from the storm-
clouds into the sea, lighting up the high, dark waves over the far-away
expanse. And to right and to left, and, no doubt, over the house too,
the lightning flashed.
"The storm!" whispered Laevsky; he had a longing to pray to some one or
to something, if only to the lightning or the storm-clouds. "Dear
storm!"
He remembered how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without a
hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with blue
eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with the rain;
they laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal of thunder,
the girls used to nestle up to the boy confidingly, while he crossed
himself and made haste to repeat: "Holy, holy, holy. . . ." Oh, where
had they vanished to! In what sea were they drowned, those dawning days
of pure, fair life? He had no fear of the storm, no love of nature now;
he had no God. All the confiding girls he had ever known had by now been
ruined by him and those like him. All his life he had not planted one
tree in his own garden, nor grown one blade of grass; and living among
the living, he had not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy
and ruin, and lie, lie. . . .
"What in my past was not vice?" he asked himself, trying to clutch at
some bright memory as a man falling down a precipice clutches at the
bushes.
School? The university? But that was a sham. He had neglected his work
and forgotten what he had learnt. The service of his country? That, too,
was a sham, for he did nothing in the Service, took a salary for doing
nothing, and it was an abominable swindling of the State for which one
was not punished.
He had no craving for truth, and had not sought it; spellbound by vice
and lying, his conscience had slept or been silent. Like a stranger,
like an alien from another planet, he had taken no part in the common
life of men, had been indifferent to their sufferings, their ideas,
their religion, their sciences, their strivings, and their struggles. He
had not said one good word, not written one line that was not useless
and vulgar; he had not done his fellows one ha'p'orth of service, but
had eaten their bread, drunk their wine, seduced their wives, lived on
their thoughts, and to justify his contemptible, parasitic life in their
eyes and in his own, he had always tried to assume an air of being
higher and better than they. Lies, lies, lies. . . .
He vividly remembered what he had seen that evening at Muridov's, and he
was in an insufferable anguish of loathing and misery. Kirilin and
Atchmianov were loathsome, but they were only continuing what he had
begun; they were his accomplices and his disciples. This young weak
woman had trusted him more than a brother, and he had deprived her of
her husband, of her friends and of her country, and had brought her
here--to the heat, to fever, and to boredom; and from day to day she was
bound to reflect, like a mirror, his idleness, his viciousness and
falsity--and that was all she had had to fill her weak, listless,
pitiable life. Then he had grown sick of her, had begun to hate her, but
had not had the pluck to abandon her, and he had tried to entangle her
more and more closely in a web of lies. . . . These men had done the
rest.
Laevsky sat at the table, then got up and went to the window; at one
minute he put out the candle and then he lighted it again. He cursed
himself aloud, wept and wailed, and asked forgiveness; several times he
ran to the table in despair, and wrote:
"Mother!"
Except his mother, he had no relations or near friends; but how could
his mother help him? And where was she? He had an impulse to run to
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, to fall at her feet, to kiss her hands and feet,
to beg her forgiveness; but she was his victim, and he was afraid of her
as though she were dead.
"My life is ruined," he repeated, rubbing his hands. "Why am I still
alive, my God! . . ."
He had cast out of heaven his dim star; it had fallen, and its track was
lost in the darkness of night. It would never return to the sky again,
because life was given only once and never came a second time. If he
could have turned back the days and years of the past, he would have
replaced the falsity with truth, the idleness with work, the boredom
with happiness; he would have given back purity to those whom he had