Short Stories by Chekhov
used to come and see you, I felt as though I were going to a holy
shrine, and I really did worship Zina. Now my reverence for her grows
every day. For me she is something higher than a wife--yes, higher!"
Vlassitch waved his hands. "She is my holy of holies. Since she is
living with me, I enter my house as though it were a temple. She is an
extraordinary, rare, most noble woman!"
"Well, he's off now!" thought Pyotr Mihalitch; he disliked the word
"woman."
"Why shouldn't you be married properly?" he asked. "How much does your
wife want for a divorce?"
"Seventy-five thousand."
"It's rather a lot. But if we were to negotiate with her?"
"She won't take a farthing less. She is an awful woman, brother," sighed
Vlassitch. "I've never talked to you about her before--it was unpleasant
to think of her; but now that the subject has come up, I'll tell you
about her. I married her on the impulse of the moment--a fine, honourable
impulse. An officer in command of a battalion of our regiment--if you
care to hear the details--had an affair with a girl of eighteen; that is,
to put it plainly, he seduced her, lived with her for two months, and
abandoned her. She was in an awful position, brother. She was ashamed to
go home to her parents; besides, they wouldn't have received her. Her
lover had abandoned her; there was nothing left for her but to go to the
barracks and sell herself. The other officers in the regiment were
indignant. They were by no means saints themselves, but the baseness of
it was so striking. Besides, no one in the regiment could endure the
man. And to spite him, you understand, the indignant lieutenants and
ensigns began getting up a subscription for the unfortunate girl. And
when we subalterns met together and began to subscribe five or ten
roubles each, I had a sudden inspiration. I felt it was an opportunity
to do something fine. I hastened to the girl and warmly expressed my
sympathy. And while I was on my way to her, and while I was talking to
her, I loved her fervently as a woman insulted and injured. Yes. . . .
Well, a week later I made her an offer. The colonel and my comrades
thought my marriage out of keeping with the dignity of an officer. That
roused me more than ever. I wrote a long letter, do you know, in which I
proved that my action ought to be inscribed in the annals of the
regiment in letters of gold, and so on. I sent the letter to my colonel
and copies to my comrades. Well, I was excited, and, of course, I could
not avoid being rude. I was asked to leave the regiment. I have a rough
copy of it put away somewhere; I'll give it to you to read sometime. It
was written with great feeling. You will see what lofty and noble
sentiments I was experiencing. I resigned my commission and came here
with my wife. My father had left a few debts, I had no money, and from
the first day my wife began making acquaintances, dressing herself
smartly, and playing cards, and I was obliged to mortgage the estate.
She led a bad life, you understand, and you are the only one of the
neighbours who hasn't been her lover. After two years I gave her all I
had to set me free and she went off to town. Yes. . . . And now I pay
her twelve hundred roubles a year. She is an awful woman! There is a
fly, brother, which lays an egg in the back of a spider so that the
spider can't shake it off: the grub fastens upon the spider and drinks
its heart's blood. That was how this woman fastened upon me and sucks
the blood of my heart. She hates and despises me for being so stupid;
that is, for marrying a woman like her. My chivalry seems to her
despicable. 'A wise man cast me off,' she says, 'and a fool picked me
up.' To her thinking no one but a pitiful idiot could have behaved as I
did. And that is insufferably bitter to me, brother. Altogether, I may
say in parenthesis, fate has been hard upon me, very hard."
Pyotr Mihalitch listened to Vlassitch and wondered in perplexity what it
was in this man that had so charmed his sister. He was not young--he was
forty-one--lean and lanky, narrow-chested, with a long nose, and grey
hairs in his beard. He talked in a droning voice, had a sickly smile,
and waved his hands awkwardly as he talked. He had neither health, nor
pleasant, manly manners, nor savoir-faire, nor gaiety, and in all his
exterior there was something colourless and indefinite. He dressed
without taste, his surroundings were depressing, he did not care for
poetry or painting because "they have no answer to give to the questions
of the day" --that is, he did not understand them; music did not touch
him. He was a poor farmer.
His estate was in a wretched condition and was mortgaged; he was paying
twelve percent on the second mortgage and owed ten thousand on personal
securities as well. When the time came to pay the interest on the
mortgage or to send money to his wife, he asked every one to lend him
money with as much agitation as though his house were on fire, and, at
the same time losing his head, he would sell the whole of his winter
store of fuel for five roubles and a stack of straw for three roubles,
and then have his garden fence or old cucumber-frames chopped up to heat
his stoves. His meadows were ruined by pigs, the peasants' cattle
strayed in the undergrowth in his woods, and every year the old trees
were fewer and fewer: beehives and rusty pails lay about in his garden
and kitchen-garden. He had neither talents nor abilities, nor even
ordinary capacity for living like other people. In practical life he was
a weak, naïve man, easy to deceive and to cheat, and the peasants with
good reason called him "simple."
He was a Liberal, and in the district was regarded as a "Red," but even
his progressiveness was a bore. There was no originality nor moving
power about his independent views: he was revolted, indignant, and
delighted always on the same note; it was always spiritless and
ineffective. Even in moments of strong enthusiasm he never raised his
head or stood upright. But the most tiresome thing of all was that he
managed to express even his best and finest ideas so that they seemed in
him commonplace and out of date. It reminded one of something old one
had read long ago, when slowly and with an air of profundity he would
begin discoursing of his noble, lofty moments, of his best years; or
when he went into raptures over the younger generation, which has always
been, and still is, in advance of society; or abused Russians for
donning their dressing-gowns at thirty and forgetting the principles of
their alma mater. If you stayed the night with him, he would put
Pissarev or Darwin on your bedroom table; if you said you had read it,
he would go and bring Dobrolubov.
In the district this was called free-thinking, and many people looked
upon this free-thinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; it
made him profoundly unhappy, however. It was for him the maggot of which
he had just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and was sucking his
life-blood. In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style
of Dostoevsky; long letters and copies written in a bad, unintelligible
hand-writing, but with great feeling, endless misunderstandings,
explanations, disappointments, then debts, a second mortgage, the
allowance to his wife, the monthly borrowing of money--and all this for
no benefit to any one, either himself or others. And in the present, as
in the past, he was still in a nervous flurry, on the lookout for heroic
actions, and poking his nose into other people's affairs; as before, at
every favourable opportunity there were long letters and copies,
wearisome, stereotyped conversations about the village community, or the
revival of handicrafts or the establishment of cheese
factories--conversations as like one another as though he had prepared
them, not in his living brain, but by some mechanical process. And
finally this scandal with Zina of which one could not see the end!
And meanwhile Zina was young--she was only twenty-two--good-looking,
elegant, gay; she was fond of laughing, chatter, argument, a passionate
musician; she had good taste in dress, in furniture, in books, and in
her own home she would not have put up with a room like this, smelling
of boots and cheap vodka. She, too, had advanced ideas, but in her free-
thinking one felt the overflow of energy, the vanity of a young, strong,
spirited girl, passionately eager to be better and more original than
others. . . . How had it happened that she had fallen in love with
Vlassitch?
"He is a Quixote, an obstinate fanatic, a maniac," thought Pyotr
Mihalitch, "and she is as soft, yielding, and weak in character as I am.
. . . She and I give in easily, without resistance. She loves him; but,
then, I, too, love him in spite of everything."
Pyotr Mihalitch considered Vlassitch a good, straightforward man, but
narrow and one-sided. In his perturbations and his sufferings, and in
fact in his whole life, he saw no lofty aims, remote or immediate; he
saw nothing but boredom and incapacity for life. His self-sacrifice and
all that Vlassitch himself called heroic actions or noble impulses
seemed to him a useless waste of force, unnecessary blank shots which
consumed a great deal of powder. And Vlassitch's fanatical belief in the
extraordinary loftiness and faultlessness of his own way of thinking
struck him as naïve and even morbid; and the fact that Vlassitch all
his life had contrived to mix the trivial with the exalted, that he had
made a stupid marriage and looked upon it as an act of heroism, and then
had affairs with other women and regarded that as a triumph of some idea
or other was simply incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, Pyotr Mihalitch was fond of Vlassitch; he was conscious of
a sort of power in him, and for some reason he had never had the heart
to contradict him.
Vlassitch sat down quite close to him for a talk in the dark, to the
accompaniment of the rain, and he had cleared his throat as a prelude to
beginning on something lengthy, such as the history of his marriage. But
it was intolerable for Pyotr Mihalitch to listen to him; he was
tormented by the thought that he would see his sister directly.
"Yes, you've had bad luck," he said gently; "but, excuse me, we've been
wandering from the point. That's not what we are talking about."
"Yes, yes, quite so. Well, let us come back to the point," said
Vlassitch, and he stood up. "I tell you, Petrusha, our conscience is
clear. We are not married, but there is no need for me to prove to you
that our marriage is perfectly legitimate. You are as free in your ideas
as I am, and, happily, there can be no disagreement between us on that
point. As for our future, that ought not to alarm you. I'll work in the
sweat of my brow, I'll work day and night-- in fact, I will strain every
nerve to make Zina happy. Her life will be a splendid one! You may ask,
am I able to do it. I am, brother! When a man devotes every minute to
one thought, it's not difficult for him to attain his object. But let us
go to Zina; it will be a joy to her to see you."
Pyotr Mihalitch's heart began to beat. He got up and followed Vlassitch
into the hall, and from there into the drawing-room. There was nothing
in the huge gloomy room but a piano and a long row of old chairs
ornamented with bronze, on which no one ever sat. There was a candle
alight on the piano. From the drawing-room they went in silence into the
dining-room. This room, too, was large and comfortless; in the middle of
the room there was a round table with two leaves with six thick legs,
and only one candle. A clock in a large mahogany case like an ikon stand
pointed to half-past two.
Vlassitch opened the door into the next room and said:
"Zina, here is Petrusha come to see us!"