Short Stories by Chekhov
read nothing but your engineering books. And, you know, there are good
people, good books! Yes... but I am exhausted and it wearies me to talk.
I ought to be in bed."
"So I am going away, Natalie," I said.
"Yes... yes.... Merci...."
I stood still for a little while, then went upstairs. An hour later--it
was half-past one--I went downstairs again with a candle in my hand to
speak to my wife. I didn't know what I was going to say to her, but I
felt that I must say some thing very important and necessary. She was
not in her study, the door leading to her bedroom was closed.
"Natalie, are you asleep?" I asked softly.
There was no answer.
I stood near the door, sighed, and went into the drawing-room. There I
sat down on the sofa, put out the candle, and remained sitting in the
dark till the dawn.
VI
I went to the station at ten o'clock in the morning. There was no frost,
but snow was falling in big wet flakes and an unpleasant damp wind was
blowing.
We passed a pond and then a birch copse, and then began going uphill
along the road which I could see from my window. I turned round to take
a last look at my house, but I could see nothing for the snow. Soon
afterwards dark huts came into sight ahead of us as in a fog. It was
Pestrovo.
"If I ever go out of my mind, Pestrovo will be the cause of it," I
thought. "It persecutes me."
We came out into the village street. All the roofs were intact, not one
of them had been pulled to pieces; so my bailiff had told a lie. A boy
was pulling along a little girl and a baby in a sledge. Another boy of
three, with his head wrapped up like a peasant woman's and with huge
mufflers on his hands, was trying to catch the flying snowflakes on his
tongue, and laughing. Then a wagon loaded with fagots came toward us and
a peasant walking beside it, and there was no telling whether his beard
was white or whether it was covered with snow. He recognized my
coachman, smiled at him and said something, and mechanically took off
his hat to me. The dogs ran out of the yards and looked inquisitively at
my horses. Everything was quiet, ordinary, as usual. The emigrants had
returned, there was no bread; in the huts "some were laughing, some were
delirious"; but it all looked so ordinary that one could not believe it
really was so. There were no distracted faces, no voices whining for
help, no weeping, nor abuse, but all around was stillness, order, life,
children, sledges, dogs with dishevelled tails. Neither the children nor
the peasant we met were troubled; why was I so troubled?
Looking at the smiling peasant, at the boy with the huge mufflers, at
the huts, remembering my wife, I realized there was no calamity that
could daunt this people; I felt as though there were already a breath of
victory in the air. I felt proud and felt ready to cry out that I was
with them too; but the horses were carrying us away from the village
into the open country, the snow was whirling, the wind was howling, and
I was left alone with my thoughts. Of the million people working for the
peasantry, life itself had cast me out as a useless, incompetent, bad
man. I was a hindrance, a part of the people's calamity; I was
vanquished, cast out, and I was hurrying to the station to go away and
hide myself in Petersburg in a hotel in Bolshaya Morskaya.
An hour later we reached the station. The coachman and a porter with a
disc on his breast carried my trunks into the ladies' room. My coachman
Nikanor, wearing high felt boots and the skirt of his coat tucked up
through his belt, all wet with the snow and glad I was going away, gave
me a friendly smile and said:
"A fortunate journey, your Excellency. God give you luck."
Every one, by the way, calls me "your Excellency," though I am only a
collegiate councillor and a kammer-junker. The porter told me the train
had not yet left the next station; I had to wait. I went outside, and
with my head heavy from my sleepless night, and so exhausted I could
hardly move my legs, I walked aimlessly towards the pump. There was not
a soul anywhere near.
"Why am I going?" I kept asking myself. "What is there awaiting me
there? The acquaintances from whom I have come away, loneliness,
restaurant dinners, noise, the electric light, which makes my eyes ache.
Where am I going, and what am I going for? What am I going for?"
And it seemed somehow strange to go away without speaking to my wife. I
felt that I was leaving her in uncertainty. Going away, I ought to have
told that she was right, that I really was a bad man.
When I turned away from the pump, I saw in the doorway the station-
master, of whom I had twice made complaints to his superiors, turning up
the collar of his coat, shrinking from the wind and the snow. He came up
to me, and putting two fingers to the peak of his cap, told me with an
expression of helpless confusion, strained respectfulness, and hatred on
his face, that the train was twenty minutes late, and asked me would I
not like to wait in the warm?
"Thank you," I answered, "but I am probably not going. Send word to my
coachman to wait; I have not made up my mind."
I walked to and fro on the platform and thought, should I go away or
not? When the train came in I decided not to go. At home I had to expect
my wife's amazement and perhaps her mockery, the dismal upper storey and
my uneasiness; but, still, at my age that was easier and as it were more
homelike than travelling for two days and nights with strangers to
Petersburg, where I should be conscious every minute that my life was of
no use to any one or to anything, and that it was approaching its end.
No, better at home whatever awaited me there.... I went out of the
station. It was awkward by daylight to return home, where every one was
so glad at my going. I might spend the rest of the day till evening at
some neighbour's, but with whom? With some of them I was on strained
relations, others I did not know at all. I considered and thought of
Ivan Ivanitch.
"We are going to Bragino!" I said to the coachman, getting into the
sledge.
"It's a long way," sighed Nikanor; "it will be twenty miles, or maybe
twenty-five."
"Oh, please, my dear fellow," I said in a tone as though Nikanor had the
right to refuse. "Please let us go!"
Nikanor shook his head doubtfully and said slowly that we really ought
to have put in the shafts, not Circassian, but Peasant or Siskin; and
uncertainly, as though expecting I should change my mind, took the reins
in his gloves, stood up, thought a moment, and then raised his whip.
"A whole series of inconsistent actions..." I thought, screening my face
from the snow. "I must have gone out of my mind. Well, I don't care...."
In one place, on a very high and steep slope, Nikanor carefully held the
horses in to the middle of the descent, but in the middle the horses
suddenly bolted and dashed downhill at a fearful rate; he raised his
elbows and shouted in a wild, frantic voice such as I had never heard
from him before:
"Hey! Let's give the general a drive! If you come to grief he'll buy new
ones, my darlings! Hey! look out! We'll run you down!"
Only now, when the extraordinary pace we were going at took my breath
away, I noticed that he was very drunk. He must have been drinking at
the station. At the bottom of the descent there was the crash of ice; a
piece of dirty frozen snow thrown up from the road hit me a painful blow
in the face.
The runaway horses ran up the hill as rapidly as they had downhill, and
before I had time to shout to Nikanor my sledge was flying along on the
level in an old pine forest, and the tall pines were stretching out
their shaggy white paws to me from all directions.
"I have gone out of my mind, and the coachman's drunk," I thought.
"Good!"
I found Ivan Ivanitch at home. He laughed till he coughed, laid his head
on my breast, and said what he always did say on meeting me:
"You grow younger and younger. I don't know what dye you use for your
hair and your beard; you might give me some of it."
"I've come to return your call, Ivan Ivanitch," I said untruthfully.
"Don't be hard on me; I'm a townsman, conventional; I do keep count of
calls."
"I am delighted, my dear fellow. I am an old man; I like respect....
Yes."
From his voice and his blissfully smiling face, I could see that he was
greatly flattered by my visit. Two peasant women helped me off with my
coat in the entry, and a peasant in a red shirt hung it on a hook, and
when Ivan Ivanitch and I went into his little study, two barefooted
little girls were sitting on the floor looking at a picture-book; when
they saw us they jumped up and ran away, and a tall, thin old woman in
spectacles came in at once, bowed gravely to me, and picking up a pillow
from the sofa and a picture-book from the floor, went away. From the
adjoining rooms we heard incessant whispering and the patter of bare
feet.
"I am expecting the doctor to dinner," said Ivan Ivanitch. "He promised
to come from the relief centre. Yes. He dines with me every Wednesday,
God bless him." He craned towards me and kissed me on the neck. "You
have come, my dear fellow, so you are not vexed," he whispered,
sniffing. "Don't be vexed, my dear creature. Yes. Perhaps it is
annoying, but don't be cross. My only prayer to God before I die is to
live in peace and harmony with all in the true way. Yes."
"Forgive me, Ivan Ivanitch, I will put my feet on a chair," I said,
feeling that I was so exhausted I could not be myself; I sat further
back on the sofa and put up my feet on an arm-chair. My face was burning
from the snow and the wind, and I felt as though my whole body were
basking in the warmth and growing weaker from it.
"It's very nice here," I went on--"warm, soft, snug... and goose-feather
pens," I laughed, looking at the writing-table; "sand instead of
blotting-paper."
"Eh? Yes... yes.... The writing-table and the mahogany cupboard here
were made for my father by a self-taught cabinet-maker--Glyeb Butyga, a
serf of General Zhukov's. Yes... a great artist in his own way."
Listlessly and in the tone of a man dropping asleep, he began telling me
about cabinet-maker Butyga. I listened. Then Ivan Ivanitch went into the
next room to show me a polisander wood chest of drawers remarkable for
its beauty and cheapness. He tapped the chest with his fingers, then
called my attention to a stove of patterned tiles, such as one never
sees now. He tapped the stove, too, with his fingers. There was an
atmosphere of good-natured simplicity and well-fed abundance about the
chest of drawers, the tiled stove, the low chairs, the pictures
embroidered in wool and silk on canvas in solid, ugly frames. When one
remembers that all those objects were standing in the same places and
precisely in the same order when I was a little child, and used to come
here to name-day parties with my mother, it is simply unbelievable that
they could ever cease to exist.
I thought what a fearful difference between Butyga and me! Butyga who
made things, above all, solidly and substantially, and seeing in that
his chief object, gave to length of life peculiar significance, had no
thought of death, and probably hardly believed in its possibility; I,
when I built my bridges of iron and stone which would last a thousand
years, could not keep from me the thought, "It's not for long....it's no
use." If in time Butyga's cupboard and my bridge should come under the
notice of some sensible historian of art, he would say: "These were two
men remarkable in their own way: Butyga loved his fellow-creatures and
would not admit the thought that they might die and be annihilated, and
so when he made his furniture he had the immortal man in his mind. The
engineer Asorin did not love life or his fellow-creatures; even in the