Short Stories by Chekhov
One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a
satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed him
on the forehead.
"Where are you going?" he asked with surprise.
"To the province of N. to do vaccination work." Her brother went out
into the street with her.
"So that's what you've decided upon, you queer girl," he muttered.
"Don't you want some money?"
"No, thank you. Good-bye."
The sister shook her brother's hand and set off.
"Why don't you have a cab?" cried Vladimir Semyonitch.
She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her rusty-
looking waterproof, the swaying of her figure as she slouched along,
forced himself to sigh, but did not succeed in rousing a feeling of
regret. His sister had become a stranger to him. And he was a stranger
to her. Anyway, she did not once look round.
Going back to his room, Vladimir Semyonitch at once sat down to the
table and began to work at his article.
I never saw Vera Semyonovna again. Where she is now I do not know. And
Vladimir Semyonitch went on writing his articles, laying wreaths on
coffins, singing Gaudeamus, busying himself over the Mutual Aid Society
of Moscow Journalists.
He fell ill with inflammation of the lungs; he was ill in bed for three
months--at first at home, and afterwards in the Golitsyn Hospital. An
abscess developed in his knee. People said he ought to be sent to the
Crimea, and began getting up a collection for him. But he did not go to
the Crimea--he died. We buried him in the Vagankovsky Cemetery, on the
left side, where artists and literary men are buried.
One day we writers were sitting in the Tatars' restaurant. I mentioned
that I had lately been in the Vagankovsky Cemetery and had seen Vladimir
Semyonitch's grave there. It was utterly neglected and almost
indistinguishable from the rest of the ground, the cross had fallen; it
was necessary to collect a few roubles to put it in order.
But they listened to what I said unconcernedly, made no answer, and I
could not collect a farthing. No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He
was utterly forgotten.
MIRE I
GRACEFULLY swaying in the saddle, a young man wearing the snow-white
tunic of an officer rode into the great yard of the vodka distillery
belonging to the heirs of M. E. Rothstein. The sun smiled carelessly on
the lieutenant's little stars, on the white trunks of the birch-trees,
on the heaps of broken glass scattered here and there in the yard. The
radiant, vigorous beauty of a summer day lay over everything, and
nothing hindered the snappy young green leaves from dancing gaily and
winking at the clear blue sky. Even the dirty and soot-begrimed
appearance of the bricksheds and the stifling fumes of the distillery
did not spoil the general good impression. The lieutenant sprang gaily
out of the saddle, handed over his horse to a man who ran up, and
stroking with his finger his delicate black moustaches, went in at the
front door. On the top step of the old but light and softly carpeted
staircase he was met by a maidservant with a haughty, not very youthful
face. The lieutenant gave her his card without speaking.
As she went through the rooms with the card, the maid could see on it
the name "Alexandr Grigoryevitch Sokolsky." A minute later she came back
and told the lieutenant that her mistress could not see him, as she was
not feeling quite well. Sokolsky looked at the ceiling and thrust out
his lower lip.
"How vexatious!" he said. "Listen, my dear," he said eagerly. "Go and
tell Susanna Moiseyevna, that it is very necessary for me to speak to
her--very. I will only keep her one minute. Ask her to excuse me."
The maid shrugged one shoulder and went off languidly to her mistress.
"Very well!" she sighed, returning after a brief interval. "Please walk
in!"
The lieutenant went with her through five or six large, luxuriously
furnished rooms and a corridor, and finally found himself in a large and
lofty square room, in which from the first step he was impressed by the
abundance of flowers and plants and the sweet, almost revoltingly heavy
fragrance of jasmine. Flowers were trained to trellis-work along the
walls, screening the windows, hung from the ceiling, and were wreathed
over the corners, so that the room was more like a greenhouse than a
place to live in. Tits, canaries, and goldfinches chirruped among the
green leaves and fluttered against the window-panes.
"Forgive me for receiving you here," the lieutenant heard in a mellow
feminine voice with a burr on the letter r which was not without charm.
"Yesterday I had a sick headache, and I'm trying to keep still to
prevent its coming on again. What do you want?"
Exactly opposite the entrance, he saw sitting in a big low chair, such
as old men use, a woman in an expensive Chinese dressing-gown, with her
head wrapped up, leaning back on a pillow. Nothing could be seen behind
the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed,
somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark eye. Her ample dressing-gown
concealed her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her
voice, her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.
"Forgive me for being so persistent . . ." began the lieutenant,
clinking his spurs. "Allow me to introduce myself: Sokolsky! I come
with a message from my cousin, your neighbour, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov, who . . ."
"I know!" interposed Susanna Moiseyevna. "I know Kryukov. Sit down; I
don't like anything big standing before me."
"My cousin charges me to ask you a favour," the lieutenant went on,
clinking his spurs once more and sitting down. "The fact is, your late
father made a purchase of oats from my cousin last winter, and a small
sum was left owing. The payment only becomes due next week, but my
cousin begs you most particularly to pay him--if possible, to-day."
As the lieutenant talked, he stole side-glances about him.
"Surely I'm not in her bedroom?" he thought.
In one corner of the room, where the foliage was thickest and tallest,
under a pink awning like a funeral canopy, stood a bed not yet made,
with the bedclothes still in disorder. Close by on two arm-chairs lay
heaps of crumpled feminine garments. Petticoats and sleeves with rumpled
lace and flounces were trailing on the carpet, on which here and there
lay bits of white tape, cigarette-ends, and the papers of caramels. . .
. Under the bed the toes, pointed and square, of slippers of all kinds
peeped out in a long row. And it seemed to the lieutenant that the scent
of the jasmine came not from the flowers, but from the bed and the
slippers.
"And what is the sum owing?" asked Susanna Moiseyevna.
"Two thousand three hundred."
"Oho!" said the Jewess, showing another large black eye. "And you call
that--a small sum! However, it's just the same paying it to-day or paying
it in a week, but I've had so many payments to make in the last two
months since my father's death. . . . Such a lot of stupid business, it
makes my head go round! A nice idea! I want to go abroad, and they keep
forcing me to attend to these silly things. Vodka, oats . . ." she
muttered, half closing her eyes, "oats, bills, percentages, or, as my
head-clerk says, 'percentage.' . . . It's awful. Yesterday I simply
turned the excise officer out. He pesters me with his Tralles. I said to
him: 'Go to the devil with your Tralles! I can't see any one!' He kissed
my hand and went away. I tell you what: can't your cousin wait two or
three months?"
"A cruel question!" laughed the lieutenant. "My cousin can wait a year,
but it's I who cannot wait! You see, it's on my own account I'm acting,
I ought to tell you. At all costs I must have money, and by ill-luck my
cousin hasn't a rouble to spare. I'm forced to ride about and collect
debts. I've just been to see a peasant, our tenant; here I'm now calling
on you; from here I shall go on to somewhere else, and keep on like that
until I get together five thousand roubles. I need money awfully!"
"Nonsense! What does a young man want with money? Whims, mischief. Why,
have you been going in for dissipation? Or losing at cards? Or are you
getting married?"
"You've guessed!" laughed the lieutenant, and rising slightly from his
seat, he clinked his spurs. "I really am going to be married."
Susanna Moiseyevna looked intently at her visitor, made a wry face, and
sighed.
"I can't make out what possesses people to get married!" she said,
looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. "Life is so short, one
has so little freedom, and they must put chains on themselves!"
"Every one has his own way of looking at things. . . ."
"Yes, yes, of course; every one has his own way of looking at things . .
. . But, I say, are you really going to marry some one poor? Are you
passionately in love? And why must you have five thousand? Why won't
four do, or three?"
"What a tongue she has!" thought the lieutenant, and answered: "The
difficulty is that an officer is not allowed by law to marry till he is
twenty-eight; if you choose to marry, you have to leave the Service or
else pay a deposit of five thousand."
"Ah, now I understand. Listen. You said just now that every one has his
own way of looking at things. . . . Perhaps your fiancée is some one
special and remarkable, but . . . but I am utterly unable to understand
how any decent man can live with a woman. I can't for the life of me
understand it. I have lived, thank the Lord, twenty-seven years, and I
have never yet seen an endurable woman. They're all affected minxes,
immoral, liars. . . . The only ones I can put up with are cooks and
housemaids, but so-called ladies I won't let come within shooting
distance of me. But, thank God, they hate me and don't force themselves
on me! If one of them wants money she sends her husband, but nothing
will induce her to come herself, not from pride--no, but from cowardice;
she's afraid of my making a scene. Oh, I understand their hatred very
well! Rather! I openly display what they do their very utmost to conceal
from God and man. How can they help hating me? No doubt you've heard
bushels of scandal about me already. . . ."
"I only arrived here so lately . . ."
"Tut, tut, tut! . . . I see from your eyes! But your brother's wife,
surely she primed you for this expedition? Think of letting a young man
come to see such an awful woman without warning him--how could she? Ha,
ha! . . . But tell me, how is your brother? He's a fine fellow, such a
handsome man! . . . I've seen him several times at mass. Why do you look
at me like that? I very often go to church! We all have the same God. To
an educated person externals matter less than the idea. . . . That's so,
isn't it?"
"Yes, of course . . ." smiled the lieutenant.
"Yes, the idea. . . . But you are not a bit like your brother. You are
handsome, too, but your brother is a great deal better-looking. There's
wonderfully little likeness!"
"That's quite natural; he's not my brother, but my cousin."
"Ah, to be sure! So you must have the money to-day? Why to-day?"
"My furlough is over in a few days."
"Well, what's to be done with you!" sighed Susanna Moiseyevna. "So be
it. I'll give you the money, though I know you'll abuse me for it
afterwards. You'll quarrel with your wife after you are married, and
say: 'If that mangy Jewess hadn't given me the money, I should perhaps
have been as free as a bird to-day!' Is your fiancée pretty?"
"Oh yes. . . ."
"H'm! . . . Anyway, better something, if it's only beauty, than nothing.
Though however beautiful a woman is, it can never make up to her husband
for her silliness."
"That's original!" laughed the lieutenant. "You are a woman yourself,
and such a woman-hater!"