Short Stories by Chekhov
"My only grandchild! Verotchka!"
And tears would glisten in his eyes. Or his face would turn suddenly
crimson, his neck would swell, he would look with fury at the servants,
and ask, tapping with his stick:
"Why haven't you brought the horse-radish?"
In winter he led a perfectly inactive existence; in summer he sometimes
drove out into the fields to look at the oats and the hay; and when he
came back he would flourish his stick and declare that everything was
neglected now that he was not there to look after it.
"Your grandfather is out of humour," Auntie Dasha would whisper. "But
it's nothing now to what it used to be in the old days: 'Twenty-five
strokes! The birch!'"
Her aunt complained that every one had grown lazy, that no one did
anything, and that the estate yielded no profit. Indeed, there was no
systematic farming; they ploughed and sowed a little simply from habit,
and in reality did nothing and lived in idleness. Meanwhile there was a
running to and fro, reckoning and worrying all day long; the bustle in
the house began at five o'clock in the morning; there were continual
sounds of "Bring it," "Fetch it," "Make haste," and by the evening the
servants were utterly exhausted. Auntie Dasha changed her cooks and her
housemaids every week; sometimes she discharged them for immorality;
sometimes they went of their own accord, complaining that they were
worked to death. None of the village people would come to the house as
servants; Auntie Dasha had to hire them from a distance. There was only
one girl from the village living in the house, Alyona, and she stayed
because her whole family--old people and children--were living upon her
wages. This Alyona, a pale, rather stupid little thing, spent the whole
day turning out the rooms, waiting at table, heating the stoves, sewing,
washing; but it always seemed as though she were only pottering about,
treading heavily with her boots, and were nothing but a hindrance in the
house. In her terror that she might be dismissed and sent home, she
often dropped and broke the crockery, and they stopped the value of it
out of her wages, and then her mother and grandmother would come and bow
down at Auntie Dasha's feet.
Once a week or sometimes oftener visitors would arrive. Her aunt would
come to Vera and say:
"You should sit a little with the visitors, or else they'll think that
you are stuck up."
Vera would go in to the visitors and play vint with them for hours
together, or play the piano for the visitors to dance; her aunt, in high
spirits and breathless from dancing, would come up and whisper to her:
"Be nice to Marya Nikiforovna."
On the sixth of December, St. Nikolay's Day, a large party of about
thirty arrived all at once; they played vint until late at night, and
many of them stayed the night. In the morning they sat down to cards
again, then they had dinner, and when Vera went to her room after dinner
to rest from conversation and tobacco smoke, there were visitors there
too, and she almost wept in despair. And when they began to get ready to
go in the evening, she was so pleased they were going at last, that she
said:
"Do stay a little longer."
She felt exhausted by the visitors and constrained by their presence;
yet every day, as soon as it began to grow dark, something drew her out
of the house, and she went out to pay visits either at the works or at
some neighbours', and then there were cards, dancing, forfeits, suppers.
. . .The young people in the works or in the mines sometimes sang Little
Russian songs, and sang them very well. It made one sad to hear them
sing. Or they all gathered together in one room and talked in the dusk
of the mines, of the treasures that had once been buried in the steppes,
of Saur's Grave. . . . Later on, as they talked, a shout of "Help!"
sometimes reached them. It was a drunken man going home, or some one was
being robbed by the pit near by. Or the wind howled in the chimneys, the
shutters banged; then, soon afterwards, they would hear the uneasy
church bell, as the snow-storm began.
At all the evening parties, picnics, and dinners, Auntie Dasha was
invariably the most interesting woman and the doctor the most
interesting man. There was very little reading either at the works or at
the country-houses; they played only marches and polkas; and the young
people always argued hotly about things they did not understand, and the
effect was crude. The discussions were loud and heated, but, strange to
say, Vera had nowhere else met people so indifferent and careless as
these. They seemed to have no fatherland, no religion, no public
interests. When they talked of literature or debated some abstract
question, it could be seen from Dr. Neshtchapov's face that the question
had no interest for him whatever, and that for long, long years he had
read nothing and cared to read nothing. Serious and expressionless, like
a badly painted portrait, for ever in his white waistcoat, he was silent
and incomprehensible as before; but the ladies, young and old, thought
him interesting and were enthusiastic over his manners. They envied
Vera, who appeared to attract him very much. And Vera always came away
from the visits with a feeling of vexation, vowing inwardly to remain at
home; but the day passed, the evening came, and she hurried off to the
works again, and it was like that almost all the winter.
She ordered books and magazines, and used to read them in her room. And
she read at night, lying in bed. When the clock in the corridor struck
two or three, and her temples were beginning to ache from reading, she
sat up in bed and thought, "What am I to do? Where am I to go?"
Accursed, importunate question, to which there were a number of ready-
made answers, and in reality no answer at all.
Oh, how noble, how holy, how picturesque it must be to serve the people,
to alleviate their sufferings, to enlighten them! But she, Vera, did not
know the people. And how could she go to them? They were strange and
uninteresting to her; she could not endure the stuffy smell of the huts,
the pot-house oaths, the unwashed children, the women's talk of
illnesses. To walk over the snow-drifts, to feel cold, then to sit in a
stifling hut, to teach children she disliked--no, she would rather die!
And to teach the peasants' children while Auntie Dasha made money out of
the pot-houses and fined the peasants--it was too great a farce! What a
lot of talk there was of schools, of village libraries, of universal
education; but if all these engineers, these mine-owners and ladies of
her acquaintance, had not been hypocrites, and really had believed that
enlightenment was necessary, they would not have paid the schoolmasters
fifteen roubles a month as they did now, and would not have let them go
hungry. And the schools and the talk about ignorance--it was all only to
stifle the voice of conscience because they were ashamed to own fifteen
or thirty thousand acres and to be indifferent to the peasants' lot.
Here the ladies said about Dr. Neshtchapov that he was a kind man and
had built a school at the works. Yes, he had built a school out of the
old bricks at the works for some eight hundred roubles, and they sang
the prayer for "long life" to him when the building was opened, but
there was no chance of his giving up his shares, and it certainly never
entered his head that the peasants were human beings like himself, and
that they, too, needed university teaching, and not merely lessons in
these wretched schools.
And Vera felt full of anger against herself and every one else. She took
up a book again and tried to read it, but soon afterwards sat down and
thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that one must pass an
examination in Latin; besides, she had an invincible repugnance to
corpses and disease. It would be nice to become a mechanic, a judge, a
commander of a steamer, a scientist; to do something into which she
could put all her powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out
and sleep soundly at night; to give up her life to something that would
make her an interesting person, able to attract interesting people, to
love, to have a real family of her own. . . . But what was she to do?
How was she to begin?
One Sunday in Lent her aunt came into her room early in the morning to
fetch her umbrella. Vera was sitting up in bed clasping her head in her
hands, thinking.
"You ought to go to church, darling," said her aunt, "or people will
think you are not a believer."
Vera made no answer.
"I see you are dull, poor child," said Auntie Dasha, sinking on her
knees by the bedside; she adored Vera. "Tell me the truth, are you
bored?"
"Dreadfully."
"My beauty, my queen, I am your willing slave, I wish you nothing but
good and happiness. . . . Tell me, why don't you want to marry
Nestchapov? What more do you want, my child? You must forgive me,
darling; you can't pick and choose like this, we are not princes . . . .
Time is passing, you are not seventeen. . . . And I don't understand it!
He loves you, idolises you!"
"Oh, mercy!" said Vera with vexation. "How can I tell? He sits dumb and
never says a word."
"He's shy, darling. . . . He's afraid you'll refuse him!"
And when her aunt had gone away, Vera remained standing in the middle of
her room uncertain whether to dress or to go back to bed. The bed was
hateful; if one looked out of the window there were the bare trees, the
grey snow, the hateful jackdaws, the pigs that her grandfather would
eat. . . .
"Yes, after all, perhaps I'd better get married!" she thought. III
For two days Auntie Dasha went about with a tear-stained and heavily
powdered face, and at dinner she kept sighing and looking towards the
ikon. And it was impossible to make out what was the matter with her.
But at last she made up her mind, went in to Vera, and said in a casual
way:
"The fact is, child, we have to pay interest on the bank loan, and the
tenant hasn't paid his rent. Will you let me pay it out of the fifteen
thousand your papa left you?"
All day afterwards Auntie Dasha spent in making cherry jam in the
garden. Alyona, with her cheeks flushed with the heat, ran to and from
the garden to the house and back again to the cellar.
When Auntie Dasha was making jam with a very serious face as though she
were performing a religious rite, and her short sleeves displayed her
strong, little, despotic hands and arms, and when the servants ran about
incessantly, bustling about the jam which they would never taste, there
was always a feeling of martyrdom in the air. . . .
The garden smelt of hot cherries. The sun had set, the charcoal stove
had been carried away, but the pleasant, sweetish smell still lingered
in the air. Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched a new
labourer, a young soldier, not of the neighbourhood, who was, by her
express orders, making new paths. He was cutting the turf with a spade
and heaping it up on a barrow.
"Where were you serving?" Vera asked him.
"At Berdyansk."
"And where are you going now? Home?"
"No," answered the labourer. "I have no home."
"But where were you born and brought up?"
"In the province of Oryol. Till I went into the army I lived with my
mother, in my step-father's house; my mother was the head of the house,
and people looked up to her, and while she lived I was cared for. But
while I was in the army I got a letter telling me my mother was dead. .
. . And now I don't seem to care to go home. It's not my own father, so
it's not like my own home."
"Then your father is dead?"
"I don't know. I am illegitimate."
At that moment Auntie Dasha appeared at the window and said:
"Il ne faut pas parler aux gens . . . . Go into the kitchen, my good
man. You can tell your story there," she said to the soldier.