Short Stories by Chekhov
for his wife? But I really don't care whether your belle-soeur has
dresses or not."
The lieutenant had ceased to remember that he was in a strange house
with an unknown lady, and did not trouble himself with decorum. He
strode up and down the room, scowled and nervously fingered his
waistcoat. The fact that the Jewess had lowered herself in his eyes by
her dishonest action, made him feel bolder and more free-and-easy.
"The devil knows what to make of it!" he muttered. "Listen. I shan't go
away from here until I get the IOUs!"
"Ah, so much the better," laughed Susanna. "If you stay here for good,
it will make it livelier for me."
Excited by the struggle, the lieutenant looked at Susanna's laughing,
insolent face, at her munching mouth, at her heaving bosom, and grew
bolder and more audacious. Instead of thinking about the IOU he began
for some reason recalling with a sort of relish his cousin's stories of
the Jewess's romantic adventures, of her free way of life, and these
reminiscences only provoked him to greater audacity. Impulsively he sat
down beside the Jewess and thinking no more of the IOUs began to eat. .
. .
"Will you have vodka or wine?" Susanna asked with a laugh. "So you will
stay till you get the IOUs? Poor fellow! How many days and nights you
will have to spend with me, waiting for those IOUs! Won't your fiancée
have something to say about it?" II
Five hours had passed. The lieutenant's cousin, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov was walking about the rooms of his country-house in his
dressing-gown and slippers, and looking impatiently out of window. He
was a tall, sturdy man, with a large black beard and a manly face; and
as the Jewess had truly said, he was handsome, though he had reached the
age when men are apt to grow too stout, puffy, and bald. By mind and
temperament he was one of those natures in which the Russian
intellectual classes are so rich: warm-hearted, good-natured, well-bred,
having some knowledge of the arts and sciences, some faith, and the most
chivalrous notions about honour, but indolent and lacking in depth. He
was fond of good eating and drinking, was an ideal whist-player, was a
connoisseur in women and horses, but in other things he was apathetic
and sluggish as a seal, and to rouse him from his lethargy something
extraordinary and quite revolting was needed, and then he would forget
everything in the world and display intense activity; he would fume and
talk of a duel, write a petition of seven pages to a Minister, gallop at
breakneck speed about the district, call some one publicly "a
scoundrel," would go to law, and so on.
"How is it our Sasha's not back yet?" he kept asking his wife, glancing
out of window. "Why, it's dinner-time!"
After waiting for the lieutenant till six o'clock, they sat down to
dinner. When supper-time came, however, Alexey Ivanovitch was listening
to every footstep, to every sound of the door, and kept shrugging his
shoulders.
"Strange!" he said. "The rascally dandy must have stayed on at the
tenant's."
As he went to bed after supper, Kryukov made up his mind that the
lieutenant was being entertained at the tenant's, where after a festive
evening he was staying the night.
Alexandr Grigoryevitch only returned next morning. He looked extremely
crumpled and confused.
"I want to speak to you alone . . ." he said mysteriously to his cousin.
They went into the study. The lieutenant shut the door, and he paced for
a long time up and down before he began to speak.
"Something's happened, my dear fellow," he began, "that I don't know how
to tell you about. You wouldn't believe it . . ."
And blushing, faltering, not looking at his cousin, he told what had
happened with the IOUs. Kryukov, standing with his feet wide apart and
his head bent, listened and frowned.
"Are you joking?" he asked.
"How the devil could I be joking? It's no joking matter!"
"I don't understand!" muttered Kryukov, turning crimson and flinging up
his hands. "It's positively . . . immoral on your part. Before your very
eyes a hussy is up to the devil knows what, a serious crime, plays a
nasty trick, and you go and kiss her!"
"But I can't understand myself how it happened!" whispered the
lieutenant, blinking guiltily. "Upon my honour, I don't understand it!
It's the first time in my life I've come across such a monster! It's not
her beauty that does for you, not her mind, but that . . . you
understand . . . insolence, cynicism. . . ."
"Insolence, cynicism . . . it's unclean! If you've such a longing for
insolence and cynicism, you might have picked a sow out of the mire and
have devoured her alive. It would have been cheaper, anyway! Instead of
two thousand three hundred!"
"You do express yourself elegantly!" said the lieutenant, frowning.
"I'll pay you back the two thousand three hundred!"
"I know you'll pay it back, but it's not a question of money! Damn the
money! What revolts me is your being such a limp rag . . . such filthy
feebleness! And engaged! With a fiancée!"
"Don't speak of it . . ." said the lieutenant, blushing. "I loathe
myself as it is. I should like to sink into the earth. It's sickening
and vexatious that I shall have to bother my aunt for that five
thousand. . . ."
Kryukov continued for some time longer expressing his indignation and
grumbling, then, as he grew calmer, he sat down on the sofa and began to
jeer at his cousin.
"You young officers!" he said with contemptuous irony. "Nice
bridegrooms."
Suddenly he leapt up as though he had been stung, stamped his foot, and
ran about the study.
"No, I'm not going to leave it like that!" he said, shaking his fist. "I
will have those IOUs, I will! I'll give it her! One doesn't beat women,
but I'll break every bone in her body. . . . I'll pound her to a jelly!
I'm not a lieutenant! You won't touch me with insolence or cynicism! No-
o-o, damn her! Mishka!" he shouted, "run and tell them to get the racing
droshky out for me!"
Kryukov dressed rapidly, and, without heeding the agitated lieutenant,
got into the droshky, and with a wave of his hand resolutely raced off
to Susanna Moiseyevna. For a long time the lieutenant gazed out of
window at the clouds of dust that rolled after his cousin's droshky,
stretched, yawned, and went to his own room. A quarter of an hour later
he was sound asleep.
At six o'clock he was waked up and summoned to dinner.
"How nice this is of Alexey!" his cousin's wife greeted him in the
dining-room. "He keeps us waiting for dinner."
"Do you mean to say he's not come back yet?" yawned the lieutenant.
"H'm! . . . he's probably gone round to see the tenant."
But Alexey Ivanovitch was not back by supper either. His wife and
Sokolsky decided that he was playing cards at the tenant's and would
most likely stay the night there. What had happened was not what they
had supposed, however.
Kryukov returned next morning, and without greeting any one, without a
word, dashed into his study.
"Well?" whispered the lieutenant, gazing at him round-eyed.
Kryukov waved his hand and gave a snort.
"Why, what's the matter? What are you laughing at?"
Kryukov flopped on the sofa, thrust his head in the pillow, and shook
with suppressed laughter. A minute later he got up, and looking at the
surprised lieutenant, with his eyes full of tears from laughing, said:
"Close the door. Well . . . she is a fe-e-male, I beg to inform you!"
"Did you get the IOUs?"
Kryukov waved his hand and went off into a peal of laughter again.
"Well! she is a female!" he went on. "Merci for the acquaintance, my
boy! She's a devil in petticoats. I arrived; I walked in like such an
avenging Jove, you know, that I felt almost afraid of myself . . . . I
frowned, I scowled, even clenched my fists to be more awe-inspiring. . .
. 'Jokes don't pay with me, madam!' said I, and more in that style. And
I threatened her with the law and with the Governor. To begin with she
burst into tears, said she'd been joking with you, and even took me to
the cupboard to give me the money. Then she began arguing that the
future of Europe lies in the hands of the French, and the Russians,
swore at women. . . . Like you, I listened, fascinated, ass that I was.
. . . She kept singing the praises of my beauty, patted me on the arm
near the shoulder, to see how strong I was, and . . . and as you see,
I've only just got away from her! Ha, ha! She's enthusiastic about you!"
"You're a nice fellow!" laughed the lieutenant. "A married man! highly
respected. . . . Well, aren't you ashamed? Disgusted? Joking apart
though, old man, you've got your Queen Tamara in your own neighbourhood.
. . ."
"In my own neighbourhood! Why, you wouldn't find another such chameleon
in the whole of Russia! I've never seen anything like it in my life,
though I know a good bit about women, too. I have known regular devils
in my time, but I never met anything like this. It is, as you say, by
insolence and cynicism she gets over you. What is so attractive in her
is the diabolical suddenness, the quick transitions, the swift shifting
hues. . . . Brrr! And the IOU-- phew! Write it off for lost. We are both
great sinners, we'll go halves in our sin. I shall put down to you not
two thousand three hundred, but half of it. Mind, tell my wife I was at
the tenant's."
Kryukov and the lieutenant buried their heads in the pillows, and broke
into laughter; they raised their heads, glanced at one another, and
again subsided into their pillows.
"Engaged! A lieutenant!" Kryukov jeered.
"Married!" retorted Sokolsky. "Highly respected! Father of a family!"
At dinner they talked in veiled allusions, winked at one another, and,
to the surprise of the others, were continually gushing with laughter
into their dinner-napkins. After dinner, still in the best of spirits,
they dressed up as Turks, and, running after one another with guns,
played at soldiers with the children. In the evening they had a long
argument. The lieutenant maintained that it was mean and contemptible to
accept a dowry with your wife, even when there was passionate love on
both sides. Kryukov thumped the table with his fists and declared that
this was absurd, and that a husband who did not like his wife to have
property of her own was an egoist and a despot. Both shouted, boiled
over, did not understand each other, drank a good deal, and in the end,
picking up the skirts of their dressing-gowns, went to their bedrooms.
They soon fell asleep and slept soundly.
Life went on as before, even, sluggish and free from sorrow. The shadows
lay on the earth, thunder pealed from the clouds, from time to time the
wind moaned plaintively, as though to prove that nature, too, could
lament, but nothing troubled the habitual tranquillity of these people.
Of Susanna Moiseyevna and the IOUs they said nothing. Both of them felt,
somehow, ashamed to speak of the incident aloud. Yet they remembered it
and thought of it with pleasure, as of a curious farce, which life had
unexpectedly and casually played upon them, and which it would be
pleasant to recall in old age.
On the sixth or seventh day after his visit to the Jewess, Kryukov was
sitting in his study in the morning writing a congratulatory letter to
his aunt. Alexandr Grigoryevitch was walking to and fro near the table
in silence. The lieutenant had slept badly that night; he woke up
depressed, and now he felt bored. He paced up and down, thinking of the
end of his furlough, of his fiancée, who was expecting him, of how
people could live all their lives in the country without feeling bored.
Standing at the window, for a long time he stared at the trees, smoked
three cigarettes one after another, and suddenly turned to his cousin.
"I have a favour to ask you, Alyosha," he said. "Let me have a saddle-