Short Stories by Chekhov
But it was clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The
peasants did not believe her. They always thought she received too large
a salary, twenty-one roubles a month (five would have been enough), and
that of the money that she collected from the children for the firewood
and the watchman the greater part she kept for herself. The guardian
thought the same as the peasants, and he himself made a profit off the
firewood and received payments from the peasants for being a
guardian--without the knowledge of the authorities.
The forest, thank God! was behind them, and now it would be flat, open
ground all the way to Vyazovye, and there was not far to go now. They
had to cross the river and then the railway line, and then Vyazovye was
in sight.
"Where are you driving?" Marya Vassilyevna asked Semyon. "Take the road
to the right to the bridge."
"Why, we can go this way as well. It's not deep enough to matter."
"Mind you don't drown the horse."
"What?"
"Look, Hanov is driving to the bridge," said Marya Vassilyevna, seeing
the four horses far away to the right. "It is he, I think."
"It is. So he didn't find Bakvist at home. What a pig-headed fellow he
is. Lord have mercy upon us! He's driven over there, and what for? It's
fully two miles nearer this way."
They reached the river. In the summer it was a little stream easily
crossed by wading. It usually dried up in August, but now, after the
spring floods, it was a river forty feet in breadth, rapid, muddy, and
cold; on the bank and right up to the water there were fresh tracks of
wheels, so it had been crossed here.
"Go on!" shouted Semyon angrily and anxiously, tugging violently at the
reins and jerking his elbows as a bird does its wings. "Go on!"
The horse went on into the water up to his belly and stopped, but at
once went on again with an effort, and Marya Vassilyevna was aware of a
keen chilliness in her feet.
"Go on!" she, too, shouted, getting up. "Go on!"
They got out on the bank.
"Nice mess it is, Lord have mercy upon us!" muttered Semyon, setting
straight the harness. "It's a perfect plague with this Zemstvo...."
Her shoes and goloshes were full of water, the lower part of her dress
and of her coat and one sleeve were wet and dripping: the sugar and
flour had got wet, and that was worst of all, and Marya Vassilyevna
could only clasp her hands in despair and say:
"Oh, Semyon, Semyon! How tiresome you are really!..."
The barrier was down at the railway crossing. A train was coming out of
the station. Marya Vassilyevna stood at the crossing waiting till it
should pass, and shivering all over with cold. Vyazovye was in sight
now, and the school with the green roof, and the church with its crosses
flashing in the evening sun: and the station windows flashed too, and a
pink smoke rose from the engine... and it seemed to her that everything
was trembling with cold.
Here was the train; the windows reflected the gleaming light like the
crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. On the
little platform between two first-class carriages a lady was standing,
and Marya Vassilyevna glanced at her as she passed. Her mother! What a
resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a
brow and bend of the head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first
time in those thirteen years, there rose before her mind a vivid picture
of her mother, her father, her brother, their flat in Moscow, the
aquarium with little fish, everything to the tiniest detail; she heard
the sound of the piano, her father's voice; she felt as she had been
then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her
own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she
pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstacy, and called softly,
beseechingly:
"Mother!"
And she began crying, she did not know why. Just at that instant Hanov
drove up with his team of four horses, and seeing him she imagined
happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as an
equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her
triumph, was glowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on
the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a
schoolmistress, it was a long, tedious, strange dream, and now she had
awakened....
"Vassilyevna, get in!"
And at once it all vanished. The barrier was slowly raised. Marya
Vassilyevna, shivering and numb with cold, got into the cart. The
carriage with the four horses crossed the railway line; Semyon followed
it. The signalman took off his cap.
"And here is Vyazovye. Here we are."
A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
A MEDICAL student called Mayer, and a pupil of the Moscow School of
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture called Rybnikov, went one evening
to see their friend Vassilyev, a law student, and suggested that he
should go with them to S. Street. For a long time Vassilyev would not
consent to go, but in the end he put on his greatcoat and went with
them.
He knew nothing of fallen women except by hearsay and from books, and he
had never in his life been in the houses in which they live. He knew
that there are immoral women who, under the pressure of fatal
circumstances--environment, bad education, poverty, and so on--are forced
to sell their honor for money. They know nothing of pure love, have no
children, have no civil rights; their mothers and sisters weep over them
as though they were dead, science treats of them as an evil, men address
them with contemptuous familiarity. But in spite of all that, they do
not lose the semblance and image of God. They all acknowledge their sin
and hope for salvation. Of the means that lead to salvation they can
avail themselves to the fullest extent. Society, it is true, will not
forgive people their past, but in the sight of God St. Mary of Egypt is
no lower than the other saints. When it had happened to Vassilyev in the
street to recognize a fallen woman as such, by her dress or her manners,
or to see a picture of one in a comic paper, he always remembered a
story he had once read: a young man, pure and self-sacrificing, loves a
fallen woman and urges her to become his wife; she, considering herself
unworthy of such happiness, takes poison.
Vassilyev lived in one of the side streets turning out of Tverskoy
Boulevard. When he came out of the house with his two friends it was
about eleven o'clock. The first snow had not long fallen, and all nature
was under the spell of the fresh snow. There was the smell of snow in
the air, the snow crunched softly under the feet; the earth, the roofs,
the trees, the seats on the boulevard, everything was soft, white,
young, and this made the houses look quite different from the day
before; the street lamps burned more brightly, the air was more
transparent, the carriages rumbled with a deeper note, and with the
fresh, light, frosty air a feeling stirred in the soul akin to the
white, youthful, feathery snow. "Against my will an unknown force,"
hummed the medical student in his agreeable tenor, "has led me to these
mournful shores."
"Behold the mill..." the artist seconded him, "in ruins now...."
"Behold the mill... in ruins now," the medical student repeated, raising
his eyebrows and shaking his head mournfully.
He paused, rubbed his forehead, trying to remember the words, and then
sang aloud, so well that passers-by looked round:
"Here in old days when I was free, Love, free, unfettered, greeted me."
The three of them went into a restaurant and, without taking off their
greatcoats, drank a couple of glasses of vodka each. Before drinking the
second glass, Vassilyev noticed a bit of cork in his vodka, raised the
glass to his eyes, and gazed into it for a long time, screwing up his
shortsighted eyes. The medical student did not understand his
expression, and said:
"Come, why look at it? No philosophizing, please. Vodka is given us to
be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked
upon. For one evening anyway live like a human being!"
"But I haven't said anything..." said Vassilyev, laughing. "Am I
refusing to?"
There was a warmth inside him from the vodka. He looked with softened
feelings at his friends, admired them and envied them. In these strong,
healthy, cheerful people how wonderfully balanced everything is, how
finished and smooth is everything in their minds and souls! They sing,
and have a passion for the theatre, and draw, and talk a great deal, and
drink, and they don't have headaches the day after; they are both
poetical and debauched, both soft and hard; they can work, too, and be
indignant, and laugh without reason, and talk nonsense; they are warm,
honest, self-sacrificing, and as men are in no way inferior to himself,
Vassilyev, who watched over every step he took and every word he
uttered, who was fastidious and cautious, and ready to raise every
trifle to the level of a problem. And he longed for one evening to live
as his friends did, to open out, to let himself loose from his own
control. If vodka had to be drunk, he would drink it, though his head
would be splitting next morning. If he were taken to the women he would
go. He would laugh, play the fool, gaily respond to the passing advances
of strangers in the street....
He went out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends--one in a
crushed broad-brimmed hat, with an affectation of artistic untidiness;
the other in a sealskin cap, a man not poor, though he affected to
belong to the Bohemia of learning. He liked the snow, the pale street
lamps, the sharp black tracks left in the first snow by the feet of the
passers-by. He liked the air, and especially that limpid, tender, naive,
as it were virginal tone, which can be seen in nature only twice in the
year--when everything is covered with snow, and in spring on bright days
and moonlight evenings when the ice breaks on the river.
"Against my will an unknown force, Has led me to these mournful shores,"
he hummed in an undertone.
And the tune for some reason haunted him and his friends all the way,
and all three of them hummed it mechanically, not in time with one
another.
Vassilyev's imagination was picturing how, in another ten minutes, he
and his friends would knock at a door; how by little dark passages and
dark rooms they would steal in to the women; how, taking advantage of
the darkness, he would strike a match, would light up and see the face
of a martyr and a guilty smile. The unknown, fair or dark, would
certainly have her hair down and be wearing a white dressing-jacket; she
would be panic-stricken by the light, would be fearfully confused, and
would say: "For God's sake, what are you doing! Put it out!" It would
all be dreadful, but interesting and new.
The friends turned out of Trubnoy Square into Gratchevka, and soon
reached the side street which Vassilyev only knew by reputation. Seeing
two rows of houses with brightly lighted windows and wide-open doors,
and hearing gay strains of pianos and violins, sounds which floated out
from every door and mingled in a strange chaos, as though an unseen
orchestra were tuning up in the darkness above the roofs, Vassilyev was
surprised and said:
"What a lot of houses!"
"That's nothing," said the medical student. "In London there are ten
times as many. There are about a hundred thousand such women there."
The cabmen were sitting on their boxes as calmly and indifferently as in
any other side street; the same passers-by were walking along the
pavement as in other streets. No one was hurrying, no one was hiding his
face in his coat-collar, no one shook his head reproachfully.... And in
this indifference to the noisy chaos of pianos and violins, to the