Short Stories by Chekhov
At once there was the sound of hurried footsteps and Zina came into the
dining-room. She was tall, plump, and very pale, and, just as when he
had seen her for the last time at home, she was wearing a black skirt
and a red blouse, with a large buckle on her belt. She flung one arm
round her brother and kissed him on the temple.
"What a storm!" she said. "Grigory went off somewhere and I was left
quite alone in the house."
She was not embarrassed, and looked at her brother as frankly and
candidly as at home; looking at her, Pyotr Mihalitch, too, lost his
embarrassment.
"But you are not afraid of storms," he said, sitting down at the table.
"No," she said, "but here the rooms are so big, the house is so old, and
when there is thunder it all rattles like a cupboard full of crockery.
It's a charming house altogether," she went on, sitting down opposite
her brother. "There's some pleasant memory in every room. In my room,
only fancy, Grigory's grandfather shot himself."
"In August we shall have the money to do up the lodge in the garden,"
said Vlassitch.
"For some reason when it thunders I think of that grandfather," Zina
went on. "And in this dining-room somebody was flogged to death."
"That's an actual fact," said Vlassitch, and he looked with wide-open
eyes at Pyotr Mihalitch. "Sometime in the forties this place was let to
a Frenchman called Olivier. The portrait of his daughter is lying in an
attic now--a very pretty girl. This Olivier, so my father told me,
despised Russians for their ignorance and treated them with cruel
derision. Thus, for instance, he insisted on the priest walking without
his hat for half a mile round his house, and on the church bells being
rung when the Olivier family drove through the village. The serfs and
altogether the humble of this world, of course, he treated with even
less ceremony. Once there came along this road one of the simple-hearted
sons of wandering Russia, somewhat after the style of Gogol's divinity
student, Homa Brut. He asked for a night's lodging, pleased the
bailiffs, and was given a job at the office of the estate. There are
many variations of the story. Some say the divinity student stirred up
the peasants, others that Olivier' s daughter fell in love with him. I
don't know which is true, only one fine evening Olivier called him in
here and cross-examined him, then ordered him to be beaten. Do you know,
he sat here at this table drinking claret while the stable-boys beat the
man. He must have tried to wring something out of him. Towards morning
the divinity student died of the torture and his body was hidden. They
say it was thrown into Koltovitch's pond. There was an inquiry, but the
Frenchman paid some thousands to some one in authority and went away to
Alsace. His lease was up just then, and so the matter ended."
"What scoundrels!" said Zina, shuddering.
"My father remembered Olivier and his daughter well. He used to say she
was remarkably beautiful and eccentric. I imagine the divinity student
had done both--stirred up the peasants and won the daughter's heart.
Perhaps he wasn't a divinity student at all, but some one travelling
incognito."
Zina grew thoughtful; the story of the divinity student and the
beautiful French girl had evidently carried her imagination far away. It
seemed to Pyotr Mihalitch that she had not changed in the least during
the last week, except that she was a little paler. She looked calm and
just as usual, as though she had come with her brother to visit
Vlassitch. But Pyotr Mihalitch felt that some change had taken place in
himself. Before, when she was living at home, he could have spoken to
her about anything, and now he did not feel equal to asking her the
simple question, "How do you like being here?" The question seemed
awkward and unnecessary. Probably the same change had taken place in
her. She was in no haste to turn the conversation to her mother, to her
home, to her relations with Vlassitch; she did not defend herself, she
did not say that free unions are better than marriages in the church;
she was not agitated, and calmly brooded over the story of Olivier. . .
. And why had they suddenly begun talking of Olivier?
"You are both of you wet with the rain," said Zina, and she smiled
joyfully; she was touched by this point of resemblance between her
brother and Vlassitch.
And Pyotr Mihalitch felt all the bitterness and horror of his position.
He thought of his deserted home, the closed piano, and Zina's bright
little room into which no one went now; he thought there were no prints
of little feet on the garden-paths, and that before tea no one went off,
laughing gaily, to bathe. What he had clung to more and more from his
childhood upwards, what he had loved thinking about when he used to sit
in the stuffy class-room or the lecture theatre--brightness, purity, and
joy, everything that filled the house with life and light, had gone
never to return, had vanished, and was mixed up with a coarse, clumsy
story of some battalion officer, a chivalrous lieutenant, a depraved
woman and a grandfather who had shot himself. . . . And to begin to talk
about his mother or to think that the past could ever return would mean
not understanding what was clear.
Pyotr Mihalitch's eyes filled with tears and his hand began to tremble
as it lay on the table. Zina guessed what he was thinking about, and her
eyes, too, glistened and looked red.
"Grigory, come here," she said to Vlassitch.
They walked away to the window and began talking of something in a
whisper. From the way that Vlassitch stooped down to her and the way she
looked at him, Pyotr Mihalitch realised again that everything was
irreparably over, and that it was no use to talk of anything. Zina went
out of the room.
"Well, brother!" Vlassitch began, after a brief silence, rubbing his
hands and smiling. "I called our life happiness just now, but that was,
so to speak, poetical license. In reality, there has not been a sense of
happiness so far. Zina has been thinking all the time of you, of her
mother, and has been worrying; looking at her, I, too, felt worried.
Hers is a bold, free nature, but, you know, it's difficult when you're
not used to it, and she is young, too. The servants call her 'Miss'; it
seems a trifle, but it upsets her. There it is, brother."
Zina brought in a plateful of strawberries. She was followed by a little
maidservant, looking crushed and humble, who set a jug of milk on the
table and made a very low bow: she had something about her that was in
keeping with the old furniture, something petrified and dreary.
The sound of the rain had ceased. Pyotr Mihalitch ate strawberries while
Vlassitch and Zina looked at him in silence. The moment of the
inevitable but useless conversation was approaching, and all three felt
the burden of it. Pyotr Mihalitch's eyes filled with tears again; he
pushed away his plate and said that he must be going home, or it would
be getting late, and perhaps it would rain again. The time had come when
common decency required Zina to speak of those at home and of her new
life.
"How are things at home?" she asked rapidly, and her pale face quivered.
"How is mother?"
"You know mother . . ." said Pyotr Mihalitch, not looking at her.
"Petrusha, you've thought a great deal about what has happened," she
said, taking hold of her brother's sleeve, and he knew how hard it was
for her to speak. "You've thought a great deal: tell me, can we reckon
on mother's accepting Grigory . . . and the whole position, one day?"
She stood close to her brother, face to face with him, and he was
astonished that she was so beautiful, and that he seemed not to have
noticed it before. And it seemed to him utterly absurd that his sister,
so like his mother, pampered, elegant, should be living with Vlassitch
and in Vlassitch's house, with the petrified servant, and the table with
six legs--in the house where a man had been flogged to death, and that
she was not going home with him, but was staying here to sleep.
"You know mother," he said, not answering her question. "I think you
ought to have . . . to do something, to ask her forgiveness or
something. . . ."
"But to ask her forgiveness would mean pretending we had done wrong. I'm
ready to tell a lie to comfort mother, but it won't lead anywhere. I
know mother. Well, what will be, must be!" said Zina, growing more
cheerful now that the most unpleasant had been said. "We'll wait for
five years, ten years, and be patient, and then God's will be done."
She took her brother's arm, and when she walked through the dark hall
she squeezed close to him. They went out on the steps. Pyotr Mihalitch
said good-bye, got on his horse, and set off at a walk; Zina and
Vlassitch walked a little way with him. It was still and warm, with a
delicious smell of hay; stars were twinkling brightly between the
clouds. Vlassitch's old garden, which had seen so many gloomy stories in
its time, lay slumbering in the darkness, and for some reason it was
mournful riding through it.
"Zina and I to-day after dinner spent some really exalted moments," said
Vlassitch. "I read aloud to her an excellent article on the question of
emigration. You must read it, brother! You really must. It's remarkable
for its lofty tone. I could not resist writing a letter to the editor to
be forwarded to the author. I wrote only a single line: 'I thank you and
warmly press your noble hand.'"
Pyotr Mihalitch was tempted to say, "Don't meddle in what does not
concern you," but he held his tongue.
Vlassitch walked by his right stirrup and Zina by the left; both seemed
to have forgotten that they had to go home. It was damp, and they had
almost reached Koltovitch's copse. Pyotr Mihalitch felt that they were
expecting something from him, though they hardly knew what it was, and
he felt unbearably sorry for them. Now as they walked by the horse with
submissive faces, lost in thought, he had a deep conviction that they
were unhappy, and could not be happy, and their love seemed to him a
melancholy, irreparable mistake. Pity and the sense that he could do
nothing to help them reduced him to that state of spiritual softening
when he was ready to make any sacrifice to get rid of the painful
feeling of sympathy.
"I'll come over sometimes for a night," he said.
But it sounded as though he were making a concession, and did not
satisfy him. When they stopped near Koltovitch's copse to say good-bye,
he bent down to Zina, touched her shoulder, and said:
"You are right, Zina! You have done well." To avoid saying more and
bursting into tears, he lashed his horse and galloped into the wood. As
he rode into the darkness, he looked round and saw Vlassitch and Zina
walking home along the road--he taking long strides, while she walked
with a hurried, jerky step beside him--talking eagerly about something.
"I am an old woman!" thought Pyotr Mihalitch. "I went to solve the
question and I have only made it more complicated--there it is!"
He was heavy at heart. When he got out of the copse he rode at a walk
and then stopped his horse near the pond. He wanted to sit and think
without moving. The moon was rising and was reflected in a streak of red
on the other side of the pond. There were low rumbles of thunder in the
distance. Pyotr Mihalitch looked steadily at the water and imagined his
sister's despair, her martyr-like pallor, the tearless eyes with which
she would conceal her humiliation from others. He imagined her with
child, imagined the death of their mother, her funeral, Zina's horror. .
. . The proud, superstitious old woman would be sure to die of grief.
Terrible pictures of the future rose before him on the background of
smooth, dark water, and among pale feminine figures he saw himself, a