Short Stories by Chekhov
would leave not one stone standing upon another anywhere on earth."
"What would be left?"
"Bashi-Bazouke and brothels. In my next article I'll talk about that
perhaps. Thank you for reminding me."
And a week later my friend kept his promise. That was just at the
period--in the eighties--when people were beginning to talk and write of
non-resistance, of the right to judge, to punish, to make war; when some
people in our set were beginning to do without servants, to retire into
the country, to work on the land, and to renounce animal food and carnal
love.
After reading her brother's article, Vera Semyonovna pondered and hardly
perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.
"Very nice!" she said. "But still there's a great deal I don't
understand. For instance, in Leskov's story 'Belonging to the Cathedral'
there is a queer gardener who sows for the benefit of all--for customers,
for beggars, and any who care to steal. Did he behave sensibly?"
From his sister's tone and expression Vladimir Semyonitch saw that she
did not like his article, and, almost for the first time in his life,
his vanity as an author sustained a shock. With a shade of irritation he
answered:
"Theft is immoral. To sow for thieves is to recognise the right of
thieves to existence. What would you think if I were to establish a
newspaper and, dividing it into sections, provide for blackmailing as
well as for liberal ideas? Following the example of that gardener, I
ought, logically, to provide a section for blackmailers, the
intellectual scoundrels? Yes."
Vera Semyonovna made no answer. She got up from the table, moved
languidly to the sofa and lay down.
"I don't know, I know nothing about it," she said musingly. "You are
probably right, but it seems to me, I feel somehow, that there's
something false in our resistance to evil, as though there were
something concealed or unsaid. God knows, perhaps our methods of
resisting evil belong to the category of prejudices which have become so
deeply rooted in us, that we are incapable of parting with them, and
therefore cannot form a correct judgment of them."
"How do you mean?"
"I don't know how to explain to you. Perhaps man is mistaken in thinking
that he is obliged to resist evil and has a right to do so, just as he
is mistaken in thinking, for instance, that the heart looks like an ace
of hearts. It is very possible in resisting evil we ought not to use
force, but to use what is the very opposite of force--if you, for
instance, don't want this picture stolen from you, you ought to give it
away rather than lock it up. . . ."
"That's clever, very clever! If I want to marry a rich, vulgar woman,
she ought to prevent me from such a shabby action by hastening to make
me an offer herself!"
The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding each
other. If any outsider had overheard them he would hardly have been able
to make out what either of them was driving at.
They usually spent the evening at home. There were no friends' houses to
which they could go, and they felt no need for friends; they only went
to the theatre when there was a new play--such was the custom in literary
circles--they did not go to concerts, for they did not care for music.
"You may think what you like," Vera Semyonovna began again the next day,
"but for me the question is to a great extent settled. I am firmly
convinced that I have no grounds for resisting evil directed against me
personally. If they want to kill me, let them. My defending myself will
not make the murderer better. All I have now to decide is the second
half of the question: how I ought to behave to evil directed against my
neighbours?"
"Vera, mind you don't become rabid!" said Vladimir Semyonitch, laughing.
"I see non-resistance is becoming your idée fixe!"
He wanted to turn off these tedious conversations with a jest, but
somehow it was beyond a jest; his smile was artificial and sour. His
sister gave up sitting beside his table and gazing reverently at his
writing hand, and he felt every evening that behind him on the sofa lay
a person who did not agree with him. And his back grew stiff and numb,
and there was a chill in his soul. An author's vanity is vindictive,
implacable, incapable of forgiveness, and his sister was the first and
only person who had laid bare and disturbed that uneasy feeling, which
is like a big box of crockery, easy to unpack but impossible to pack up
again as it was before.
Weeks and months passed by, and his sister clung to her ideas, and did
not sit down by the table. One spring evening Vladimir Semyonitch was
sitting at his table writing an article. He was reviewing a novel which
described how a village schoolmistress refused the man whom she loved
and who loved her, a man both wealthy and intellectual, simply because
marriage made her work as a schoolmistress impossible. Vera Semyonovna
lay on the sofa and brooded.
"My God, how slow it is!" she said, stretching. "How insipid and empty
life is! I don't know what to do with myself, and you are wasting your
best years in goodness knows what. Like some alchemist, you are
rummaging in old rubbish that nobody wants. My God!"
Vladimir Semyonitch dropped his pen and slowly looked round at his
sister.
"It's depressing to look at you!" said his sister. "Wagner in 'Faust'
dug up worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you are
looking for worms for the sake of the worms."
"That's vague!"
"Yes, Volodya; all these days I've been thinking, I've been thinking
painfully for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that you
are hopelessly reactionary and conventional. Come, ask yourself what is
the object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me, what is it?
Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can be extracted from
that rubbish in which you are always rummaging. You may pound water in a
mortar and analyse it as long as you like, you'll make nothing more of
it than the chemists have made already. . . ."
"Indeed!" drawled Vladimir Semyonitch, getting up. "Yes, all this is old
rubbish because these ideas are eternal; but what do you consider new,
then?"
"You undertake to work in the domain of thought; it is for you to think
of something new. It's not for me to teach you."
"Me--an alchemist!" the critic cried in wonder and indignation, screwing
up his eyes ironically. "Art, progress--all that is alchemy?"
"You see, Volodya, it seems to me that if all you thinking people had
set yourselves to solving great problems, all these little questions
that you fuss about now would solve themselves by the way. If you go up
in a balloon to see a town, you will incidentally, without any effort,
see the fields and the villages and the rivers as well. When stearine is
manufactured, you get glycerine as a by-product. It seems to me that
contemporary thought has settled on one spot and stuck to it. It is
prejudiced, apathetic, timid, afraid to take a wide titanic flight, just
as you and I are afraid to climb on a high mountain; it is
conservative."
Such conversations could not but leave traces. The relations of the
brother and sister grew more and more strained every day. The brother
became unable to work in his sister's presence, and grew irritable when
he knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back; while the
sister frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to bring back the
past, he attempted to share his enthusiasms with her. Every evening she
complained of being bored, and talked about independence of mind and
those who are in the rut of tradition. Carried away by her new ideas,
Vera Semyonovna proved that the work that her brother was so engrossed
in was conventional, that it was a vain effort of conservative minds to
preserve what had already served its turn and was vanishing from the
scene of action. She made no end of comparisons. She compared her
brother at one time to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who
would sooner die than listen to reason. By degrees there was a
perceptible change in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying
on the sofa all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a
cold, dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong
faith. She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and
tidied her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.
Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred at
her cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work, which
was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something strained
and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected. And knowing
he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her and teased her
like a schoolboy.
"You won't resist evil, but you resist my having servants!" he taunted
her. "If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That's
inconsistent!"
He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when his
sister began doing odd things before strangers.
"It's awful, my dear fellow," he said to me in private, waving his hands
in despair. "It seems that our ingénue has remained to play a part in
the farce, too. She's become morbid to the marrow of her bones! I've
washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but why does she
talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what it means for me to
listen to her. What I feel when in my presence she has the effrontery to
support her errors by blasphemously quoting the teaching of Christ! It
chokes me! It makes me hot all over to hear my sister propounding her
doctrines and trying to distort the Gospel to suit her, when she
purposely refrains from mentioning how the moneychangers were driven out
of the Temple. That's, my dear fellow, what comes of being half
educated, undeveloped! That's what comes of medical studies which
provide no general culture!"
One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found his
sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed, wringing
her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks. The critic's
good heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his eyes, too, and he
longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg her forgiveness, and to
live as they used to before. . . . He knelt down and kissed her head,
her hands, her shoulders. . . . She smiled, smiled bitterly,
unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped up, seized the magazine
from the table and said warmly:
"Hurrah! We'll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God's blessing! And
I've such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the occasion
with champagne, let us read it together! A splendid, wonderful thing!"
"Oh, no, no!" cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.
"I've read it already! I don't want it, I don't want it!"
"When did you read it?"
"A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it, I
know it!"
"H'm! . . . You're a fanatic!" her brother said coldly, flinging the
magazine on to the table.
"No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!" And Vera Semyonovna dissolved into
tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her quivering
shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness
endured by any one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of
the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the
outrage of his programme, the outrage to his author's vanity.
From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony, and he
endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence of old
women that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off disputing
with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks with a
condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.