Short Stories by Chekhov
overcome by extravagance, and I continually had to send her first one
and then two thousand roubles; when she wrote to me of her intention of
suicide, and then of the death of her baby, every time I lost my head,
and all my sympathy for her sufferings found no expression except that,
after prolonged reflection, I wrote long, boring letters which I might
just as well not have written. And yet I took a father's place with her
and loved her like a daughter!
Now Katya is living less than half a mile off. She has taken a flat of
five rooms, and has installed herself fairly comfortably and in the
taste of the day. If any one were to undertake to describe her
surroundings, the most characteristic note in the picture would be
indolence. For the indolent body there are soft lounges, soft stools;
for indolent feet soft rugs; for indolent eyes faded, dingy, or flat
colours; for the indolent soul the walls are hung with a number of cheap
fans and trivial pictures, in which the originality of the execution is
more conspicuous than the subject; and the room contains a multitude of
little tables and shelves filled with utterly useless articles of no
value, and shapeless rags in place of curtains.... All this, together
with the dread of bright colours, of symmetry, and of empty space, bears
witness not only to spiritual indolence, but also to a corruption of
natural taste. For days together Katya lies on the lounge reading,
principally novels and stories. She only goes out of the house once a
day, in the afternoon, to see me.
I go on working while Katya sits silent not far from me on the sofa,
wrapping herself in her shawl, as though she were cold. Either because I
find her sympathetic or because I was used to her frequent visits when
she was a little girl, her presence does not prevent me from
concentrating my attention. From time to time I mechanically ask her
some question; she gives very brief replies; or, to rest for a minute, I
turn round and watch her as she looks dreamily at some medical journal
or review. And at such moments I notice that her face has lost the old
look of confiding trustfulness. Her expression now is cold, apathetic,
and absent-minded, like that of passengers who had to wait too long for
a train. She is dressed, as in old days, simply and beautifully, but
carelessly; her dress and her hair show visible traces of the sofas and
rocking-chairs in which she spends whole days at a stretch. And she has
lost the curiosity she had in old days. She has ceased to ask me
questions now, as though she had experienced everything in life and
looked for nothing new from it.
Towards four o'clock there begins to be sounds of movement in the hall
and in the drawing-room. Liza has come back from the Conservatoire, and
has brought some girl-friends in with her. We hear them playing on the
piano, trying their voices and laughing; in the dining-room Yegor is
laying the table, with the clatter of crockery.
"Good-bye," said Katya. "I won't go in and see your people today. They
must excuse me. I haven't time. Come and see me."
While I am seeing her to the door, she looks me up and down grimly, and
says with vexation:
"You are getting thinner and thinner! Why don't you consult a doctor?
I'll call at Sergey Fyodorovitch's and ask him to have a look at you."
"There's no need, Katya."
"I can't think where your people's eyes are! They are a nice lot, I must
say!"
She puts on her fur coat abruptly, and as she does so two or three
hairpins drop unnoticed on the floor from her carelessly arranged hair.
She is too lazy and in too great a hurry to do her hair up; she
carelessly stuffs the falling curls under her hat, and goes away.
When I go into the dining-room my wife asks me:
"Was Katya with you just now? Why didn't she come in to see us? It's
really strange...."
"Mamma," Liza says to her reproachfully, "let her alone, if she doesn't
want to. We are not going down on our knees to her."
"It's very neglectful, anyway. To sit for three hours in the study
without remembering our existence! But of course she must do as she
likes."
Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is beyond my comprehension,
and probably one would have to be a woman in order to understand it. I
am ready to stake my life that of the hundred and fifty young men I see
every day in the lecture-theatre, and of the hundred elderly ones I meet
every week, hardly one could be found capable of understanding their
hatred and aversion for Katya's past--that is, for her having been a
mother without being a wife, and for her having had an illegitimate
child; and at the same time I cannot recall one woman or girl of my
acquaintance who would not consciously or unconsciously harbour such
feelings. And this is not because woman is purer or more virtuous than
man: why, virtue and purity are not very different from vice if they are
not free from evil feeling. I attribute this simply to the backwardness
of woman. The mournful feeling of compassion and the pang of conscience
experienced by a modern man at the sight of suffering is, to my mind,
far greater proof of culture and moral elevation than hatred and
aversion. Woman is as tearful and as coarse in her feelings now as she
was in the Middle Ages, and to my thinking those who advise that she
should be educated like a man are quite right.
My wife also dislikes Katya for having been an actress, for ingratitude,
for pride, for eccentricity, and for the numerous vices which one woman
can always find in another.
Besides my wife and daughter and me, there are dining with us two or
three of my daughter's friends and Alexandr Adolfovitch Gnekker, her
admirer and suitor. He is a fair-haired young man under thirty, of
medium height, very stout and broad-shouldered, with red whiskers near
his ears, and little waxed moustaches which make his plump smooth face
look like a toy. He is dressed in a very short reefer jacket, a flowered
waistcoat, breeches very full at the top and very narrow at the ankle,
with a large check pattern on them, and yellow boots without heels. He
has prominent eyes like a crab's, his cravat is like a crab's neck, and
I even fancy there is a smell of crab-soup about the young man's whole
person. He visits us every day, but no one in my family knows anything
of his origin nor of the place of his education, nor of his means of
livelihood. He neither plays nor sings, but has some connection with
music and singing, sells somebody's pianos somewhere, is frequently at
the Conservatoire, is acquainted with all the celebrities, and is a
steward at the concerts; he criticizes music with great authority, and I
have noticed that people are eager to agree with him.
Rich people always have dependents hanging about them; the arts and
sciences have the same. I believe there is not an art nor a science in
the world free from "foreign bodies" after the style of this Mr.
Gnekker. I am not a musician, and possibly I am mistaken in regard to
Mr. Gnekker, of whom, indeed, I know very little. But his air of
authority and the dignity with which he takes his stand beside the piano
when any one is playing or singing strike me as very suspicious.
You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if
you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity from that petty
bourgeois atmosphere which is so often brought into your house and into
your mood by the attentions of suitors, by matchmaking and marriage. I
can never reconcile myself, for instance, to the expression of triumph
on my wife's face every time Gnekker is in our company, nor can I
reconcile myself to the bottles of Lafitte, port and sherry which are
only brought out on his account, that he may see with his own eyes the
liberal and luxurious way in which we live. I cannot tolerate the habit
of spasmodic laughter Liza has picked up at the Conservatoire, and her
way of screwing up her eyes whenever there are men in the room. Above
all, I cannot understand why a creature utterly alien to my habits, my
studies, my whole manner of life, completely different from the people I
like, should come and see me every day, and every day should dine with
me. My wife and my servants mysteriously whisper that he is a suitor,
but still I don't understand his presence; it rouses in me the same
wonder and perplexity as if they were to set a Zulu beside me at the
table. And it seems strange to me, too, that my daughter, whom I am used
to thinking of as a child, should love that cravat, those eyes, those
soft cheeks....
In the old days I used to like my dinner, or at least was indifferent
about it; now it excites in me no feeling but weariness and irritation.
Ever since I became an "Excellency" and one of the Deans of the Faculty
my family has for some reason found it necessary to make a complete
change in our menu and dining habits. Instead of the simple dishes to
which I was accustomed when I was a student and when I was in practice,
now they feed me with a puree with little white things like circles
floating about in it, and kidneys stewed in madeira. My rank as a
general and my fame have robbed me for ever of cabbage-soup and savoury
pies, and goose with apple-sauce, and bream with boiled grain. They have
robbed me of our maid-servant Agasha, a chatty and laughter-loving old
woman, instead of whom Yegor, a dull-witted and conceited fellow with a
white glove on his right hand, waits at dinner. The intervals between
the courses are short, but they seem immensely long because there is
nothing to occupy them. There is none of the gaiety of the old days, the
spontaneous talk, the jokes, the laughter; there is nothing of mutual
affection and the joy which used to animate the children, my wife, and
me when in old days we met together at meals. For me, the celebrated man
of science, dinner was a time of rest and reunion, and for my wife and
children a fete--brief indeed, but bright and joyous--in which they knew
that for half an hour I belonged, not to science, not to students, but
to them alone. Our real exhilaration from one glass of wine is gone for
ever, gone is Agasha, gone the bream with boiled grain, gone the uproar
that greeted every little startling incident at dinner, such as the cat
and dog fighting under the table, or Katya's bandage falling off her
face into her soup-plate.
To describe our dinner nowadays is as uninteresting as to eat it. My
wife's face wears a look of triumph and affected dignity, and her
habitual expression of anxiety. She looks at our plates and says, "I see
you don't care for the joint. Tell me; you don't like it, do you?" and I
am obliged to answer: "There is no need for you to trouble, my dear; the
meat is very nice." And she will say: "You always stand up for me,
Nikolay Stepanovitch, and you never tell the truth. Why is Alexandr
Adolfovitch eating so little?" And so on in the same style all through
dinner. Liza laughs spasmodically and screws up her eyes. I watch them
both, and it is only now at dinner that it becomes absolutely evident to
me that the inner life of these two has slipped away out of my ken. I
have a feeling as though I had once lived at home with a real wife and
children and that now I am dining with visitors, in the house of a sham
wife who is not the real one, and am looking at a Liza who is not the
real Liza. A startling change has taken place in both of them; I have
missed the long process by which that change was effected, and it is no
wonder that I can make nothing of it. Why did that change take place? I
don't know. Perhaps the whole trouble is that God has not given my wife
and daughter the same strength of character as me. From childhood I have
been accustomed to resisting external influences, and have steeled