Short Stories by Chekhov
Turgenev says of one of his heroines, is like the handle of a double
bass; my chest is hollow; my shoulders narrow; when I talk or lecture,
my mouth turns down at one corner; when I smile, my whole face is
covered with aged-looking, deathly wrinkles. There is nothing impressive
about my pitiful figure; only, perhaps, when I have an attack of tic
douloureux my face wears a peculiar expression, the sight of which must
have roused in every one the grim and impressive thought, "Evidently
that man will soon die."
I still, as in the past, lecture fairly well; I can still, as in the
past, hold the attention of my listeners for a couple of hours. My
fervour, the literary skill of my exposition, and my humour, almost
efface the defects of my voice, though it is harsh, dry, and monotonous
as a praying beggar's. I write poorly. That bit of my brain which
presides over the faculty of authorship refuses to work. My memory has
grown weak; there is a lack of sequence in my ideas, and when I put them
on paper it always seems to me that I have lost the instinct for their
organic connection; my construction is monotonous; my language is poor
and timid. Often I write what I do not mean; I have forgotten the
beginning when I am writing the end. Often I forget ordinary words, and
I always have to waste a great deal of energy in avoiding superfluous
phrases and unnecessary parentheses in my letters, both unmistakable
proofs of a decline in mental activity. And it is noteworthy that the
simpler the letter the more painful the effort to write it. At a
scientific article I feel far more intelligent and at ease than at a
letter of congratulation or a minute of proceedings. Another point: I
find it easier to write German or English than to write Russian.
As regards my present manner of life, I must give a foremost place to
the insomnia from which I have suffered of late. If I were asked what
constituted the chief and fundamental feature of my existence now, I
should answer, Insomnia. As in the past, from habit I undress and go to
bed exactly at midnight. I fall asleep quickly, but before two o'clock I
wake up and feel as though I had not slept at all. Sometimes I get out
of bed and light a lamp. For an hour or two I walk up and down the room
looking at the familiar photographs and pictures. When I am weary of
walking about, I sit down to my table. I sit motionless, thinking of
nothing, conscious of no inclination; if a book is lying before me, I
mechanically move it closer and read it without any interest--in that way
not long ago I mechanically read through in one night a whole novel,
with the strange title "The Song the Lark was Singing"; or to occupy my
attention I force myself to count to a thousand; or I imagine the face
of one of my colleagues and begin trying to remember in what year and
under what circumstances he entered the service. I like listening to
sounds. Two rooms away from me my daughter Liza says something rapidly
in her sleep, or my wife crosses the drawing-room with a candle and
invariably drops the matchbox; or a warped cupboard creaks; or the
burner of the lamp suddenly begins to hum--and all these sounds, for some
reason, excite me.
To lie awake at night means to be at every moment conscious of being
abnormal, and so I look forward with impatience to the morning and the
day when I have a right to be awake. Many wearisome hours pass before
the cock crows in the yard. He is my first bringer of good tidings. As
soon as he crows I know that within an hour the porter will wake up
below, and, coughing angrily, will go upstairs to fetch something. And
then a pale light will begin gradually glimmering at the windows, voices
will sound in the street....
The day begins for me with the entrance of my wife. She comes in to me
in her petticoat, before she has done her hair, but after she has
washed, smelling of flower-scented eau-de-Cologne, looking as though she
had come in by chance. Every time she says exactly the same thing:
"Excuse me, I have just come in for a minute.... Have you had a bad
night again?"
Then she puts out the lamp, sits down near the table, and begins
talking. I am no prophet, but I know what she will talk about. Every
morning it is exactly the same thing. Usually, after anxious inquiries
concerning my health, she suddenly mentions our son who is an officer
serving at Warsaw. After the twentieth of each month we send him fifty
roubles, and that serves as the chief topic of our conversation.
"Of course it is difficult for us," my wife would sigh, "but until he is
completely on his own feet it is our duty to help him. The boy is among
strangers, his pay is small.... However, if you like, next month we
won't send him fifty, but forty. What do you think?"
Daily experience might have taught my wife that constantly talking of
our expenses does not reduce them, but my wife refuses to learn by
experience, and regularly every morning discusses our officer son, and
tells me that bread, thank God, is cheaper, while sugar is a halfpenny
dearer--with a tone and an air as though she were communicating
interesting news.
I listen, mechanically assent, and probably because I have had a bad
night, strange and inappropriate thoughts intrude themselves upon me. I
gaze at my wife and wonder like a child. I ask myself in perplexity, is
it possible that this old, very stout, ungainly woman, with her dull
expression of petty anxiety and alarm about daily bread, with eyes
dimmed by continual brooding over debts and money difficulties, who can
talk of nothing but expenses and who smiles at nothing but things
getting cheaper--is it possible that this woman is no other than the
slender Varya whom I fell in love with so passionately for her fine,
clear intelligence, for her pure soul, her beauty, and, as Othello his
Desdemona, for her "sympathy" for my studies? Could that woman be no
other than the Varya who had once borne me a son?
I look with strained attention into the face of this flabby, spiritless,
clumsy old woman, seeking in her my Varya, but of her past self nothing
is left but her anxiety over my health and her manner of calling my
salary "our salary," and my cap "our cap." It is painful for me to look
at her, and, to give her what little comfort I can, I let her say what
she likes, and say nothing even when she passes unjust criticisms on
other people or pitches into me for not having a private practice or not
publishing text-books.
Our conversation always ends in the same way. My wife suddenly remembers
with dismay that I have not had my tea.
"What am I thinking about, sitting here?" she says, getting up. "The
samovar has been on the table ever so long, and here I stay gossiping.
My goodness! how forgetful I am growing!"
She goes out quickly, and stops in the doorway to say:
"We owe Yegor five months' wages. Did you know it? You mustn't let the
servants' wages run on; how many times I have said it! It's much easier
to pay ten roubles a month than fifty roubles every five months!"
As she goes out, she stops to say:
"The person I am sorriest for is our Liza. The girl studies at the
Conservatoire, always mixes with people of good position, and goodness
knows how she is dressed. Her fur coat is in such a state she is ashamed
to show herself in the street. If she were somebody else's daughter it
wouldn't matter, but of course every one knows that her father is a
distinguished professor, a privy councillor."
And having reproached me with my rank and reputation, she goes away at
last. That is how my day begins. It does not improve as it goes on.
As I am drinking my tea, my Liza comes in wearing her fur coat and her
cap, with her music in her hand, already quite ready to go to the
Conservatoire. She is two-and-twenty. She looks younger, is pretty, and
rather like my wife in her young days. She kisses me tenderly on my
forehead and on my hand, and says:
"Good-morning, papa; are you quite well?"
As a child she was very fond of ice-cream, and I used often to take her
to a confectioner's. Ice-cream was for her the type of everything
delightful. If she wanted to praise me she would say: "You are as nice
as cream, papa." We used to call one of her little fingers "pistachio
ice," the next, "cream ice," the third "raspberry," and so on. Usually
when she came in to say good-morning to me I used to sit her on my knee,
kiss her little fingers, and say:
"Creamy ice... pistachio... lemon...."
And now, from old habit, I kiss Liza's fingers and mutter: "Pistachio...
cream... lemon..." but the effect is utterly different. I am cold as ice
and I am ashamed. When my daughter comes in to me and touches my
forehead with her lips I start as though a bee had stung me on the head,
give a forced smile, and turn my face away. Ever since I have been
suffering from sleeplessness, a question sticks in my brain like a nail.
My daughter often sees me, an old man and a distinguished man, blush
painfully at being in debt to my footman; she sees how often anxiety
over petty debts forces me to lay aside my work and to walk up and down
the room for hours together, thinking; but why is it she never comes to
me in secret to whisper in my ear: "Father, here is my watch, here are
my bracelets, my earrings, my dresses.... Pawn them all; you want
money..."? How is it that, seeing how her mother and I are placed in a
false position and do our utmost to hide our poverty from people, she
does not give up her expensive pleasure of music lessons? I would not
accept her watch nor her bracelets, nor the sacrifice of her lessons--God
forbid! That isn't what I want.
I think at the same time of my son, the officer at Warsaw. He is a
clever, honest, and sober fellow. But that is not enough for me. I think
if I had an old father, and if I knew there were moments when he was put
to shame by his poverty, I should give up my officer's commission to
somebody else, and should go out to earn my living as a workman. Such
thoughts about my children poison me. What is the use of them? It is
only a narrow-minded or embittered man who can harbour evil thoughts
about ordinary people because they are not heroes. But enough of that!
At a quarter to ten I have to go and give a lecture to my dear boys. I
dress and walk along the road which I have known for thirty years, and
which has its history for me. Here is the big grey house with the
chemist's shop; at this point there used to stand a little house, and in
it was a beershop; in that beershop I thought out my thesis and wrote my
first love-letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page headed
"Historia morbi." Here there is a grocer's shop; at one time it was kept
by a little Jew, who sold me cigarettes on credit; then by a fat peasant
woman, who liked the students because "every one of them has a mother";
now there is a red-haired shopkeeper sitting in it, a very stolid man
who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy gates of
the University, which have long needed doing up; I see the bored porter
in his sheep-skin, the broom, the drifts of snow.... On a boy coming
fresh from the provinces and imagining that the temple of science must
really be a temple, such gates cannot make a healthy impression.
Altogether the dilapidated condition of the University buildings, the
gloominess of the corridors, the griminess of the walls, the lack of
light, the dejected aspect of the steps, the hat-stands and the benches,
take a prominent position among predisposing causes in the history of
Russian pessimism.... Here is our garden... I fancy it has grown neither
better nor worse since I was a student. I don't like it. It would be far
more sensible if there were tall pines and fine oaks growing here
instead of sickly-looking lime-trees, yellow acacias, and skimpy pollard