Short Stories by Chekhov
dinner. The feeling of repletion was unpleasant, oppressive, and to
distract his thoughts he looked at the boot on his left foot.
"For a boot like that I used not to take less than seven and a half
roubles. What shoemaker made it?" he asked.
"Kuzma Lebyodkin," answered the footman.
"Send for him, the fool!"
Kuzma Lebyodkin from Warsaw soon made his appearance. He stopped in a
respectful attitude at the door and asked:
"What are your orders, your honor?"
"Hold your tongue!" cried Fyodor, and stamped his foot. "Don't dare to
argue; remember your place as a cobbler! Blockhead! You don't know how
to make boots! I'll beat your ugly phiz to a jelly! Why have you come?"
"For money."
"What money? Be off! Come on Saturday! Boy, give him a cuff!"
But he at once recalled what a life the customers used to lead him, too,
and he felt heavy at heart, and to distract his attention he took a fat
pocketbook out of his pocket and began counting his money. There was a
great deal of money, but Fyodor wanted more still. The devil in the blue
spectacles brought him another notebook fatter still, but he wanted even
more; and the more he counted it, the more discontented he became.
In the evening the evil one brought him a full-bosomed lady in a red
dress, and said that this was his new wife. He spent the whole evening
kissing her and eating gingerbreads, and at night he went to bed on a
soft, downy feather-bed, turned from side to side, and could not go to
sleep. He felt uncanny.
"We have a great deal of money," he said to his wife; "we must look out
or thieves will be breaking in. You had better go and look with a
candle."
He did not sleep all night, and kept getting up to see if his box was
all right. In the morning he had to go to church to matins. In church
the same honor is done to rich and poor alike. When Fyodor was poor he
used to pray in church like this: "God, forgive me, a sinner!" He said
the same thing now though he had become rich. What difference was there?
And after death Fyodor rich would not be buried in gold, not in
diamonds, but in the same black earth as the poorest beggar. Fyodor
would burn in the same fire as cobblers. Fyodor resented all this, and,
too, he felt weighed down all over by his dinner, and instead of prayer
he had all sorts of thoughts in his head about his box of money, about
thieves, about his bartered, ruined soul.
He came out of church in a bad temper. To drive away his unpleasant
thoughts as he had often done before, he struck up a song at the top of
his voice. But as soon as he began a policeman ran up and said, with his
fingers to the peak of his cap:
"Your honor, gentlefolk must not sing in the street! You are not a
shoemaker!"
Fyodor leaned his back against a fence and fell to thinking: what could
he do to amuse himself?
"Your honor," a porter shouted to him, "don't lean against the fence,
you will spoil your fur coat!"
Fyodor went into a shop and bought himself the very best concertina,
then went out into the street playing it. Everybody pointed at him and
laughed.
"And a gentleman, too," the cabmen jeered at him; "like some
cobbler...."
"Is it the proper thing for gentlefolk to be disorderly in the street?"
a policeman said to him. "You had better go into a tavern!"
"Your honor, give us a trifle, for Christ's sake," the beggars wailed,
surrounding Fyodor on all sides.
In earlier days when he was a shoemaker the beggars took no notice of
him, now they wouldn't let him pass.
And at home his new wife, the lady, was waiting for him, dressed in a
green blouse and a red skirt. He meant to be attentive to her, and had
just lifted his arm to give her a good clout on the back, but she said
angrily:
"Peasant! Ignorant lout! You don't know how to behave with ladies! If
you love me you will kiss my hand; I don't allow you to beat me."
"This is a blasted existence!" thought Fyodor. "People do lead a life!
You mustn't sing, you mustn't play the concertina, you mustn't have a
lark with a lady.... Pfoo!"
He had no sooner sat down to tea with the lady when the evil spirit in
the blue spectacles appeared and said:
"Come, Fyodor Pantelyeitch, I have performed my part of the bargain. Now
sign your paper and come along with me!"
And he dragged Fyodor to hell, straight to the furnace, and devils flew
up from all directions and shouted:
"Fool! Blockhead! Ass!"
There was a fearful smell of paraffin in hell, enough to suffocate one.
And suddenly it all vanished. Fyodor opened his eyes and saw his table,
the boots, and the tin lamp. The lamp-glass was black, and from the
faint light on the wick came clouds of stinking smoke as from a chimney.
Near the table stood the customer in the blue spectacles, shouting
angrily:
"Fool! Blockhead! Ass! I'll give you a lesson, you scoundrel! You took
the order a fortnight ago and the boots aren't ready yet! Do you suppose
I want to come trapesing round here half a dozen times a day for my
boots? You wretch! you brute!"
Fyodor shook his head and set to work on the boots. The customer went on
swearing and threatening him for a long time. At last when he subsided,
Fyodor asked sullenly:
"And what is your occupation, sir?"
"I make Bengal lights and fireworks. I am a pyrotechnician."
They began ringing for matins. Fyodor gave the customer the boots, took
the money for them, and went to church.
Carriages and sledges with bearskin rugs were dashing to and fro in the
street; merchants, ladies, officers were walking along the pavement
together with the humbler folk.... But Fyodor did not envy them nor
repine at his lot. It seemed to him now that rich and poor were equally
badly off. Some were able to drive in a carriage, and others to sing
songs at the top of their voice and to play the concertina, but one and
the same thing, the same grave, was awaiting all alike, and there was
nothing in life for which one would give the devil even a tiny scrap of
one's soul.
The Wife and Other Stories
THE WIFE I
I RECEIVED the following letter:
"DEAR SIR, PAVEL ANDREITCH!
"Not far from you--that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo--very
distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which I feel it my
duty to write to you. All the peasants of that village sold their
cottages and all their belongings, and set off for the province of
Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting there, and have come back. Here,
of course, they have nothing now; everything belongs to other people.
They have settled three or four families in a hut, so that there are no
less than fifteen persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the
young children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing to
eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence of hunger, or
spotted, typhus; literally every one is stricken. The doctor's assistant
says one goes into a cottage and what does one see? Every one is sick,
every one delirious, some laughing, others frantic; the huts are filthy;
there is no one to fetch them water, no one to give them a drink, and
nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor)
and his lady assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need
bread which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them,
on the ground that their names have been taken off the register of this
district, and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants of Tomsk; and,
besides, the Zemstvo has no money.
"Laying these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg you not
to refuse immediate help.
"Your well-wisher."
Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal name* or
his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their assistants go on for years
growing more and more convinced every day that they can do nothing, and
yet continue to receive their salaries from people who are living upon
frozen potatoes, and consider they have a right to judge whether I am
humane or not.
*Sobol in Russian means "sable-marten."--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants came every
morning to the servants' kitchen and went down on their knees there, and
that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen at night out of the barn, the
wall having first been broken in, and by the general depression which
was fostered by conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather--worried
by all this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing "A
History of Railways"; I had to read a great number of Russian and
foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make
calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then again
to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a book or began
to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes began blinking, I would
get up from the table with a sigh and begin walking about the big rooms
of my deserted country-house. When I was tired of walking about I would
stand still at my study window, and, looking across the wide courtyard,
over the pond and the bare young birch-trees and the great fields
covered with recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the
horizon a group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road ran
down in an irregular streak through the white field. That was Pestrovo,
concerning which my anonymous correspondent had written to me. If it had
not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated
cawing over the pond and the fields, and the tapping in the carpenter's
shed, this bit of the world about which such a fuss was being made would
have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all so still, motionless,
lifeless, and dreary!
My uneasiness hindered me from working and concentrating myself; I did
not know what it was, and chose to believe it was disappointment. I had
actually given up my post in the Department of Ways and Communications,
and had come here into the country expressly to live in peace and to
devote myself to writing on social questions. It had long been my
cherished dream. And now I had to say good-bye both to peace and to
literature, to give up everything and think only of the peasants. And
that was inevitable, because I was convinced that there was absolutely
nobody in the district except me to help the starving. The people
surrounding me were uneducated, unintellectual, callous, for the most
part dishonest, or if they were honest, they were unreasonable and
unpractical like my wife, for instance. It was impossible to rely on
such people, it was impossible to leave the peasants to their fate, so
that the only thing left to do was to submit to necessity and see to
setting the peasants to rights myself.
I began by making up my mind to give five thousand roubles to the
assistance of the starving peasants. And that did not decrease, but only
aggravated my uneasiness. As I stood by the window or walked about the
rooms I was tormented by the question which had not occurred to me
before: how this money was to be spent. To have bread bought and to go
from hut to hut distributing it was more than one man could do, to say
nothing of the risk that in your haste you might give twice as much to
one who was well-fed or to one who was making money out of his fellows
as to the hungry. I had no faith in the local officials. All these
district captains and tax inspectors were young men, and I distrusted
them as I do all young people of today, who are materialistic and
without ideals. The District Zemstvo, the Peasant Courts, and all the
local institutions, inspired in me not the slightest desire to appeal to
them for assistance. I knew that all these institutions who were busily
engaged in picking out plums from the Zemstvo and the Government pie had
their mouths always wide open for a bite at any other pie that might