Short Stories by Chekhov
giving himself a second soaping, and the water near him turned dark
blue, like ink.
Ivan Ivanovitch went outside, plunged into the water with a loud splash,
and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He stirred the water
into waves which set the white lilies bobbing up and down; he swam to
the very middle of the millpond and dived, and came up a minute later in
another place, and swam on, and kept on diving, trying to touch the
bottom.
"Oh, my goodness!" he repeated continually, enjoying himself thoroughly.
"Oh, my goodness!" He swam to the mill, talked to the peasants there,
then returned and lay on his back in the middle of the pond, turning his
face to the rain. Burkin and Alehin were dressed and ready to go, but he
still went on swimming and diving. "Oh, my goodness!..." he said. "Oh,
Lord, have mercy on me!..."
"That's enough!" Burkin shouted to him.
They went back to the house. And only when the lamp was lighted in the
big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in
silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in arm-chairs; and
Alehin, washed and combed, in a new coat, was walking about the drawing-
room, evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry
clothes, and light shoes; and when lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly
on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray--only then
Ivan Ivanovitch began on his story, and it seemed as though not only
Burkin and Alehin were listening, but also the ladies, young and old,
and the officers who looked down upon them sternly and calmly from their
gold frames.
"There are two of us brothers," he began--"I, Ivan Ivanovitch, and my
brother, Nikolay Ivanovitch, two years younger. I went in for a learned
profession and became a veterinary surgeon, while Nikolay sat in a
government office from the time he was nineteen. Our father, Tchimsha-
Himalaisky, was a kantonist, but he rose to be an officer and left us a
little estate and the rank of nobility. After his death the little
estate went in debts and legal expenses; but, anyway, we had spent our
childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children, we passed
our days and nights in the fields and the woods, looked after horses,
stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on.... And, you know,
whoever has once in his life caught perch or has seen the migrating of
the thrushes in autumn, watched how they float in flocks over the
village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real townsman, and will
have a yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother was
miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on
sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers and thinking
of one and the same thing--how to get into the country. And this yearning
by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of buying himself
a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake.
"He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I
never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of
his life in a little farm of his own. It's the correct thing to say that
a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a
corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our
intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm,
it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of
earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life,
to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm--it's not life, it's egoism,
laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good
works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole
globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities
and peculiarities of his free spirit.
"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he
would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a
savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit
for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the
forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were his
delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading
newspapers, too, but the only things he read in them were the
advertisements of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow with
farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds, for
sale. And his imagination pictured the garden-paths, flowers and fruit,
starling cotes, the carp in the pond, and all that sort of thing, you
know. These imaginary pictures were of different kinds according to the
advertisements which he came across, but for some reason in every one of
them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a
homestead, he could not picture an idyllic nook, without gooseberries.
"'Country life has its conveniences,' he would sometimes say. 'You sit
on the verandah and you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond,
there is a delicious smell everywhere, and... and the gooseberries are
growing.'
"He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were the
same things--(a) house for the family, (b) servants' quarters, (c)
kitchen-garden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He lived parsimoniously, was
frugal in food and drink, his clothes were beyond description; he looked
like a beggar, but kept on saving and putting money in the bank. He grew
fearfully avaricious. I did not like to look at him, and I used to give
him something and send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he
used to save that too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no
doing anything with him.
"Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was over
forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and
saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same object of
buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married an elderly and ugly
widow without a trace of feeling for her, simply because she had filthy
lucre. He went on living frugally after marrying her, and kept her short
of food, while he put her money in the bank in his name.
"Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him she was
accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with her second husband
she did not get enough black bread; she began to pine away with this
sort of life, and three years later she gave up her soul to God. And I
need hardly say that my brother never for one moment imagined that he
was responsible for her death. Money, like vodka, makes a man queer. In
our town there was a merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful of
honey and ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so
that no one might get the benefit of it. While I was inspecting cattle
at a railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an engine and had his
leg cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, the blood was
flowing--it was a horrible thing--and he kept asking them to look for his
leg and was very much worried about it; there were twenty roubles in the
boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they would be
lost."
"That's a story from a different opera," said Burkin.
"After his wife's death," Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking for
half a minute, "my brother began looking out for an estate for himself.
Of course, you may look about for five years and yet end by making a
mistake, and buying something quite different from what you have dreamed
of. My brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mortgaged estate of
three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family, with
servants' quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no gooseberry-
bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the
colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a
brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones. But Nikolay
Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes,
planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.
"Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what
it was like. In his letters my brother called his estate 'Tchumbaroklov
Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.' I reached 'alias Himalaiskoe' in the
afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges,
fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the
yard, where to put one's horse. I went up to the house, and was met by a
fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too
lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and
she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after
dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a
quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks,
his nose, and his mouth all stuck out--he looked as though he might begin
grunting into the quilt at any moment.
"We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the
thought that we had once been young and now were both grey-headed and
near the grave. He dressed, and led me out to show me the estate.
"'Well, how are you getting on here?' I asked.
"'Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.'
"He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a gentleman.
He was already accustomed to it, had grown used to it, and liked it. He
ate a great deal, went to the bath-house, was growing stout, was already
at law with the village commune and both factories, and was very much
offended when the peasants did not call him 'Your Honour.' And he
concerned himself with the salvation of his soul in a substantial,
gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity, not simply, but with
an air of consequence. And what deeds of charity! He treated the
peasants for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his
name-day had a thanksgiving service in the middle of the village, and
then treated the peasants to a gallon of vodka--he thought that was the
thing to do. Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka! One day the fat
landowner hauls the peasants up before the district captain for
trespass, and next day, in honour of a holiday, treats them to a gallon
of vodka, and they drink and shout 'Hurrah!' and when they are drunk bow
down to his feet. A change of life for the better, and being well-fed
and idle develop in a Russian the most insolent self-conceit. Nikolay
Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid to have
any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel truth,
and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime minister. 'Education is
essential, but for the peasants it is premature.' 'Corporal punishment
is harmful as a rule, but in some cases it is necessary and there is
nothing to take its place.'
"'I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,' he would say.
'The peasants like me. I need only to hold up my little finger and the
peasants will do anything I like.'
"And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile. He
repeated twenty times over 'We noblemen,' 'I as a noble'; obviously he
did not remember that our grandfather was a peasant, and our father a
soldier. Even our surname Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so
incongruous, seemed to him now melodious, distinguished, and very
agreeable.
"But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell you about
the change that took place in me during the brief hours I spent at his
country place. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put
on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They were not bought, but his
own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were
planted. Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence
at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for