Short Stories by Chekhov
"Listen!" he said sharply and angrily. "Why do you come here? Is it
possible--is it possible you don't understand how horrible it is? Your
medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of
consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even
earlier. Every one of them dies because she has in her time to entertain
five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed
by five hundred men. You are among those five hundred! If each of you in
the course of your lives visits this place or others like it two hundred
and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of
you! Can't you understand that? Isn't it horrible to murder, two of you,
three of you, five of you, a foolish, hungry woman! Ah! isn't it awful,
my God!"
"I knew it would end like that," the artist said frowning. "We ought not
to have gone with this fool and ass! You imagine you have grand notions
in your head now, ideas, don't you? No, it's the devil knows what, but
not ideas. You are looking at me now with hatred and repulsion, but I
tell you it's better you should set up twenty more houses like those
than look like that. There's more vice in your expression than in the
whole street! Come along, Volodya, let him go to the devil! He's a fool
and an ass, and that's all...."
"We human beings do murder each other," said the medical student. "It's
immoral, of course, but philosophizing doesn't help it. Good-by!"
At Trubnoy Square the friends said good-by and parted. When he was left
alone, Vassilyev strode rapidly along the boulevard. He felt frightened
of the darkness, of the snow which was falling in heavy flakes on the
ground, and seemed as though it would cover up the whole world; he felt
frightened of the street lamps shining with pale light through the
clouds of snow. His soul was possessed by an unaccountable, faint-
hearted terror. Passers-by came towards him from time to time, but he
timidly moved to one side; it seemed to him that women, none but women,
were coming from all sides and staring at him....
"It's beginning," he thought, "I am going to have a breakdown."
VI
At home he lay on his bed and said, shuddering all over: "They are
alive! Alive! My God, those women are alive!"
He encouraged his imagination in all sorts of ways to picture himself
the brother of a fallen woman, or her father; then a fallen woman
herself, with her painted cheeks; and it all moved him to horror.
It seemed to him that he must settle the question at once at all costs,
and that this question was not one that did not concern him, but was his
own personal problem. He made an immense effort, repressed his despair,
and, sitting on the bed, holding his head in his hands, began thinking
how one could save all the women he had seen that day. The method for
attacking problems of all kinds was, as he was an educated man, well
known to him. And, however excited he was, he strictly adhered to that
method. He recalled the history of the problem and its literature, and
for a quarter of an hour he paced from one end of the room to the other
trying to remember all the methods practiced at the present time for
saving women. He had very many good friends and acquaintances who lived
in lodgings in Petersburg.... Among them were a good many honest and
self-sacrificing men. Some of them had attempted to save women....
"All these not very numerous attempts," thought Vassilyev, "can be
divided into three groups. Some, after buying the woman out of the
brothel, took a room for her, bought her a sewing-machine, and she
became a semptress. And whether he wanted to or not, after having bought
her out he made her his mistress; then when he had taken his degree, he
went away and handed her into the keeping of some other decent man as
though she were a thing. And the fallen woman remained a fallen woman.
Others, after buying her out, took a lodging apart for her, bought the
inevitable sewing-machine, and tried teaching her to read, preaching at
her and giving her books. The woman lived and sewed as long as it was
interesting and a novelty to her, then getting bored, began receiving
men on the sly, or ran away and went back where she could sleep till
three o'clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners. The third class, the
most ardent and self-sacrificing, had taken a bold, resolute step. They
had married them. And when the insolent and spoilt, or stupid and
crushed animal became a wife, the head of a household, and afterwards a
mother, it turned her whole existence and attitude to life upside down,
so that it was hard to recognize the fallen woman afterwards in the wife
and the mother. Yes, marriage was the best and perhaps the only means."
"But it is impossible!" Vassilyev said aloud, and he sank upon his bed.
"I, to begin with, could not marry one! To do that one must be a saint
and be unable to feel hatred or repulsion. But supposing that I, the
medical student, and the artist mastered ourselves and did marry
them--suppose they were all married. What would be the result? The result
would be that while here in Moscow they were being married, some
Smolensk accountant would be debauching another lot, and that lot would
be streaming here to fill the vacant places, together with others from
Saratov, Nizhni-Novgorod, Warsaw.... And what is one to do with the
hundred thousand in London? What's one to do with those in Hamburg?"
The lamp in which the oil had burnt down began to smoke. Vassilyev did
not notice it. He began pacing to and fro again, still thinking. Now he
put the question differently: what must be done that fallen women should
not be needed? For that, it was essential that the men who buy them and
do them to death should feel all the immorality of their share in
enslaving them and should be horrified. One must save the men.
"One won't do anything by art and science, that is clear..." thought
Vassilyev. "The only way out of it is missionary work."
And he began to dream how he would the next evening stand at the corner
of the street and say to every passer-by: "Where are you going and what
for? Have some fear of God!"
He would turn to the apathetic cabmen and say to them: "Why are you
staying here? Why aren't you revolted? Why aren't you indignant? I
suppose you believe in God and know that it is a sin, that people go to
hell for it? Why don't you speak? It is true that they are strangers to
you, but you know even they have fathers, brothers like yourselves...."
One of Vassilyev's friends had once said of him that he was a talented
man. There are all sorts of talents--talent for writing, talent for the
stage, talent for art; but he had a peculiar talent--a talent for
humanity. He possessed an extraordinarily fine delicate scent for pain
in general. As a good actor reflects in himself the movements and voice
of others, so Vassilyev could reflect in his soul the sufferings of
others. When he saw tears, he wept; beside a sick man, he felt sick
himself and moaned; if he saw an act of violence, he felt as though he
himself were the victim of it, he was frightened as a child, and in his
fright ran to help. The pain of others worked on his nerves, excited
him, roused him to a state of frenzy, and so on.
Whether this friend were right I don't know, but what Vassilyev
experienced when he thought this question was settled was something like
inspiration. He cried and laughed, spoke aloud the words that he should
say next day, felt a fervent love for those who would listen to him and
would stand beside him at the corner of the street to preach; he sat
down to write letters, made vows to himself....
All this was like inspiration also from the fact that it did not last
long. Vassilyev was soon tired. The cases in London, in Hamburg, in
Warsaw, weighed upon him by their mass as a mountain weighs upon the
earth; he felt dispirited, bewildered, in the face of this mass; he
remembered that he had not a gift for words, that he was cowardly and
timid, that indifferent people would not be willing to listen and
understand him, a law student in his third year, a timid and
insignificant person; that genuine missionary work included not only
teaching but deeds...
When it was daylight and carriages were already beginning to rumble in
the street, Vassilyev was lying motionless on the sofa, staring into
space. He was no longer thinking of the women, nor of the men, nor of
missionary work. His whole attention was turned upon the spiritual agony
which was torturing him. It was a dull, vague, undefined anguish akin to
misery, to an extreme form of terror and to despair. He could point to
the place where the pain was, in his breast under his heart; but he
could not compare it with anything. In the past he had had acute
toothache, he had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but all that was
insignificant compared with this spiritual anguish. In the presence of
that pain life seemed loathsome. The dissertation, the excellent work he
had written already, the people he loved, the salvation of fallen
women--everything that only the day before he had cared about or been
indifferent to, now when he thought of them irritated him in the same
way as the noise of the carriages, the scurrying footsteps of the
waiters in the passage, the daylight.... If at that moment someone had
performed a great deed of mercy or had committed a revolting outrage, he
would have felt the same repulsion for both actions. Of all the thoughts
that strayed through his mind only two did not irritate him: one was
that at every moment he had the power to kill himself, the other that
this agony would not last more than three days. This last he knew by
experience.
After lying for a while he got up and, wringing his hands, walked about
the room, not as usual from corner to corner, but round the room beside
the walls. As he passed he glanced at himself in the looking-glass. His
face looked pale and sunken, his temples looked hollow, his eyes were
bigger, darker, more staring, as though they belonged to someone else,
and they had an expression of insufferable mental agony.
At midday the artist knocked at the door.
"Grigory, are you at home?" he asked.
Getting no answer, he stood for a minute, pondered, and answered himself
in Little Russian: "Nay. The confounded fellow has gone to the
University."
And he went away. Vassilyev lay down on the bed and, thrusting his head
under the pillow, began crying with agony, and the more freely his tears
flowed the more terrible his mental anguish became. As it began to get
dark, he thought of the agonizing night awaiting him, and was overcome
by a horrible despair. He dressed quickly, ran out of his room, and,
leaving his door wide open, for no object or reason, went out into the
street. Without asking himself where he should go, he walked quickly
along Sadovoy Street.
Snow was falling as heavily as the day before; it was thawing. Thrusting
his hands into his sleeves, shuddering and frightened at the noises, at
the trambells, and at the passers-by, Vassilyev walked along Sadovoy
Street as far as Suharev Tower; then to the Red Gate; from there he
turned off to Basmannya Street. He went into a tavern and drank off a
big glass of vodka, but that did not make him feel better. When he
reached Razgulya he turned to the right, and strode along side streets
in which he had never been before in his life. He reached the old bridge
by which the Yauza runs gurgling, and from which one can see long rows
of lights in the windows of the Red Barracks. To distract his spiritual
anguish by some new sensation or some other pain, Vassilyev, not knowing
what to do, crying and shuddering, undid his greatcoat and jacket and
exposed his bare chest to the wet snow and the wind. But that did not