Short Stories by Chekhov
"That's capital!" said Von Taunitz, a fat man with an incredibly thick
neck and with whiskers, as he shook the examining magistrate's hand.
"That's capital! You are very welcome, delighted to make your
acquaintance. We are colleagues to some extent, you know. At one time I
was deputy prosecutor; but not for long, only two years. I came here to
look after the estate, and here I have grown old--an old fogey, in fact.
You are very welcome," he went on, evidently restraining his voice so as
not to speak too loud; he was going upstairs with his guests. "I have no
wife, she's dead. But here, I will introduce my daughters," and turning
round, he shouted down the stairs in a voice of thunder: "Tell Ignat to
have the sledge ready at eight o'clock to-morrow morning."
His four daughters, young and pretty girls, all wearing gray dresses and
with their hair done up in the same style, and their cousin, also young
and attractive, with her children, were in the drawing-room.
Startchenko, who knew them already, began at once begging them to sing
something, and two of the young ladies spent a long time declaring they
could not sing and that they had no music; then the cousin sat down to
the piano, and with trembling voices, they sang a duet from "The Queen
of Spades." Again "Un Petit Verre de Clicquot" was played, and the
children skipped about, beating time with their feet. And Startchenko
pranced about too. Everybody laughed.
Then the children said good-night and went off to bed. The examining
magistrate laughed, danced a quadrille, flirted, and kept wondering
whether it was not all a dream? The kitchen of the Zemstvo hut, the heap
of hay in the corner, the rustle of the beetles, the revolting poverty-
stricken surroundings, the voices of the witnesses, the wind, the snow
storm, the danger of being lost; and then all at once this splendid,
brightly lighted room, the sounds of the piano, the lovely girls, the
curly-headed children, the gay, happy laughter--such a transformation
seemed to him like a fairy tale, and it seemed incredible that such
transitions were possible at the distance of some two miles in the
course of one hour. And dreary thoughts prevented him from enjoying
himself, and he kept thinking this was not life here, but bits of life
fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no
conclusions from it; and he even felt sorry for these girls, who were
living and would end their lives in the wilds, in a province far away
from the center of culture, where nothing is accidental, but everything
is in accordance with reason and law, and where, for instance, every
suicide is intelligible, so that one can explain why it has happened and
what is its significance in the general scheme of things. He imagined
that if the life surrounding him here in the wilds were not intelligible
to him, and if he did not see it, it meant that it did not exist at all.
At supper the conversation turned on Lesnitsky.
"He left a wife and child," said Startchenko. "I would forbid
neurasthenics and all people whose nervous system is out of order to
marry, I would deprive them of the right and possibility of multiplying
their kind. To bring into the world nervous, invalid children is a
crime."
"He was an unfortunate young man," said Von Taunitz, sighing gently and
shaking his head. "What a lot one must suffer and think about before one
brings oneself to take one's own life,... a young life! Such a
misfortune may happen in any family, and that is awful. It is hard to
bear such a thing, insufferable...."
And all the girls listened in silence with grave faces, looking at their
father. Lyzhin felt that he, too, must say something, but he couldn't
think of anything, and merely said:
"Yes, suicide is an undesirable phenomenon."
He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed covered with a quilt under which
there were fine clean sheets, but for some reason did not feel
comfortable: perhaps because the doctor and Von Taunitz were, for a long
time, talking in the adjoining room, and overhead he heard, through the
ceiling and in the stove, the wind roaring just as in the Zemstvo hut,
and as plaintively howling: "Oo-oo-oo-oo!"
Von Taunitz's wife had died two years before, and he was still unable to
resign himself to his loss and, whatever he was talking about, always
mentioned his wife; and there was no trace of a prosecutor left about
him now.
"Is it possible that I may some day come to such a condition?" thought
Lyzhin, as he fell asleep, still hearing through the wall his host's
subdued, as it were bereaved, voice.
The examining magistrate did not sleep soundly. He felt hot and
uncomfortable, and it seemed to him in his sleep that he was not at Von
Taunitz's, and not in a soft clean bed, but still in the hay at the
Zemstvo hut, hearing the subdued voices of the witnesses; he fancied
that Lesnitsky was close by, not fifteen paces away. In his dreams he
remembered how the insurance agent, black-haired and pale, wearing dusty
high boots, had come into the bookkeeper's office. "This is our
insurance agent...."
Then he dreamed that Lesnitsky and Loshadin the constable were walking
through the open country in the snow, side by side, supporting each
other; the snow was whirling about their heads, the wind was blowing on
their backs, but they walked on, singing: "We go on, and on, and on...."
The old man was like a magician in an opera, and both of them were
singing as though they were on the stage:
"We go on, and on, and on!... You are in the warmth, in the light and
snugness, but we are walking in the frost and the storm, through the
deep snow.... We know nothing of ease, we know nothing of joy.... We
bear all the burden of this life, yours and ours.... Oo-oo-oo! We go on,
and on, and on...."
Lyzhin woke and sat up in bed. What a confused, bad dream! And why did
he dream of the constable and the agent together? What nonsense! And now
while Lyzhin's heart was throbbing violently and he was sitting on his
bed, holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him that there really
was something in common between the lives of the insurance agent and the
constable. Don't they really go side by side holding each other up? Some
tie unseen, but significant and essential, existed between them, and
even between them and Von Taunitz and between all men--all men; in this
life, even in the remotest desert, nothing is accidental, everything is
full of one common idea, everything has one soul, one aim, and to
understand it it is not enough to think, it is not enough to reason, one
must have also, it seems, the gift of insight into life, a gift which is
evidently not bestowed on all. And the unhappy man who had broken down,
who had killed himself--the "neurasthenic," as the doctor called him--and
the old peasant who spent every day of his life going from one man to
another, were only accidental, were only fragments of life for one who
thought of his own life as accidental, but were parts of one
organism--marvelous and rational--for one who thought of his own life as
part of that universal whole and understood it. So thought Lyzhin, and
it was a thought that had long lain hidden in his soul, and only now it
was unfolded broadly and clearly to his consciousness.
He lay down and began to drop asleep; and again they were going along
together, singing: "We go on, and on, and on.... We take from life what
is hardest and bitterest in it, and we leave you what is easy and
joyful; and sitting at supper, you can coldly and sensibly discuss why
we suffer and perish, and why we are not as sound and as satisfied as
you."
What they were singing had occurred to his mind before, but the thought
was somewhere in the background behind his other thoughts, and flickered
timidly like a faraway light in foggy weather. And he felt that this
suicide and the peasant's sufferings lay upon his conscience, too; to
resign himself to the fact that these people, submissive to their fate,
should take up the burden of what was hardest and gloomiest in life--how
awful it was! To accept this, and to desire for himself a life full of
light and movement among happy and contented people, and to be
continually dreaming of such, means dreaming of fresh suicides of men
crushed by toil and anxiety, or of men weak and outcast whom people only
talk of sometimes at supper with annoyance or mockery, without going to
their help.... And again:
"We go on, and on, and on..." as though someone were beating with a
hammer on his temples.
He woke early in the morning with a headache, roused by a noise; in the
next room Von Taunitz was saying loudly to the doctor:
"It's impossible for you to go now. Look what's going on outside. Don't
argue, you had better ask the coachman; he won't take you in such
weather for a million."
"But it's only two miles," said the doctor in an imploring voice.
"Well, if it were only half a mile. If you can't, then you can't.
Directly you drive out of the gates it is perfect hell, you would be off
the road in a minute. Nothing will induce me to let you go, you can say
what you like."
"It's bound to be quieter towards evening," said the peasant who was
heating the stove.
And in the next room the doctor began talking of the rigorous climate
and its influence on the character of the Russian, of the long winters
which, by preventing movement from place to place, hinder the
intellectual development of the people; and Lyzhin listened with
vexation to these observations and looked out of window at the snow
drifts which were piled on the fence. He gazed at the white dust which
covered the whole visible expanse, at the trees which bowed their heads
despairingly to right and then to left, listened to the howling and the
banging, and thought gloomily:
"Well, what moral can be drawn from it? It's a blizzard and that is all
about it...."
At midday they had lunch, then wandered aimlessly about the house; they
went to the windows.
"And Lesnitsky is lying there," thought Lyzhin, watching the whirling
snow, which raced furiously round and round upon the drifts. "Lesnitsky
is lying there, the witnesses are waiting...."
They talked of the weather, saying that the snowstorm usually lasted two
days and nights, rarely longer. At six o'clock they had dinner, then
they played cards, sang, danced; at last they had supper. The day was
over, they went to bed.
In the night, towards morning, it all subsided. When they got up and
looked out of window, the bare willows with their weakly drooping
branches were standing perfectly motionless; it was dull and still, as
though nature now were ashamed of its orgy, of its mad nights, and the
license it had given to its passions. The horses, harnessed tandem, had
been waiting at the front door since five o'clock in the morning. When
it was fully daylight the doctor and the examining magistrate put on
their fur coats and felt boots, and, saying good-by to their host, went
out.
At the steps beside the coachman stood the familiar figure of the
constable, Ilya Loshadin, with an old leather bag across his shoulder
and no cap on his head, covered with snow all over, and his face was red
and wet with perspiration. The footman who had come out to help the
gentlemen and cover their legs looked at him sternly and said:
"What are you standing here for, you old devil? Get away!"
"Your honor, the people are anxious," said Loshadin, smiling naively all
over his face, and evidently pleased at seeing at last the people he had
waited for so long. "The people are very uneasy, the children are
crying.... They thought, your honor, that you had gone back to the town
again. Show us the heavenly mercy, our benefactors!..."
The doctor and the examining magistrate said nothing, got into the
sledge, and drove to Syrnya.