Short Stories by Chekhov
that I am capable of flying." And then I heard him say: "Take that
gentleman away; he gets upon my nerves."
Two days later I was dismissed. And in this way I have, during the years
I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine situations, to the great
mortification of my father, the architect of our town. I have served in
various departments, but all these nine jobs have been as alike as one
drop of water is to another: I had to sit, write, listen to rude or
stupid observations, and go on doing so till I was dismissed.
When I came in to my father he was sitting buried in a low arm-chair
with his eyes closed. His dry, emaciated face, with a shade of dark blue
where it was shaved (he looked like an old Catholic organist), expressed
meekness and resignation. Without responding to my greeting or opening
his eyes, he said:
"If my dear wife and your mother were living, your life would have been
a source of continual distress to her. I see the Divine Providence in
her premature death. I beg you, unhappy boy," he continued, opening his
eyes, "tell me: what am I to do with you?"
In the past when I was younger my friends and relations had known what
to do with me: some of them used to advise me to volunteer for the army,
others to get a job in a pharmacy, and others in the telegraph
department; now that I am over twenty-five, that grey hairs are
beginning to show on my temples, and that I have been already in the
army, and in a pharmacy, and in the telegraph department, it would seem
that all earthly possibilities have been exhausted, and people have
given up advising me, and merely sigh or shake their heads.
"What do you think about yourself?" my father went on. "By the time they
are your age, young men have a secure social position, while look at
you: you are a proletarian, a beggar, a burden on your father!"
And as usual he proceeded to declare that the young people of to-day
were on the road to perdition through infidelity, materialism, and self-
conceit, and that amateur theatricals ought to be prohibited, because
they seduced young people from religion and their duties.
"To-morrow we shall go together, and you shall apologize to the
superintendent, and promise him to work conscientiously," he said in
conclusion. "You ought not to remain one single day with no regular
position in society."
"I beg you to listen to me," I said sullenly, expecting nothing good
from this conversation. "What you call a position in society is the
privilege of capital and education. Those who have neither wealth nor
education earn their daily bread by manual labour, and I see no grounds
for my being an exception."
"When you begin talking about manual labour it is always stupid and
vulgar!" said my father with irritation. "Understand, you dense fellow-
understand, you addle-pate, that besides coarse physical strength you
have the divine spirit, a spark of the holy fire, which distinguishes
you in the most striking way from the ass or the reptile, and brings you
nearer to the Deity! This fire is the fruit of the efforts of the best
of mankind during thousands of years. Your great-grandfather Poloznev,
the general, fought at Borodino; your grandfather was a poet, an orator,
and a Marshal of Nobility; your uncle is a schoolmaster; and lastly, I,
your father, am an architect! All the Poloznevs have guarded the sacred
fire for you to put it out!"
"One must be just," I said. "Millions of people put up with manual
labour."
"And let them put up with it! They don't know how to do anything else!
Anybody, even the most abject fool or criminal, is capable of manual
labour; such labour is the distinguishing mark of the slave and the
barbarian, while the holy fire is vouchsafed only to a few!"
To continue this conversation was unprofitable. My father worshipped
himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself.
Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of
physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire
as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should set the
whole town talking about me; what was worse, all my contemporaries had
long ago taken their degrees and were getting on well, and the son of
the manager of the State Bank was already a collegiate assessor, while
I, his only son, was nothing! To continue the conversation was
unprofitable and unpleasant, but I still sat on and feebly retorted,
hoping that I might at last be understood. The whole question, of
course, was clear and simple, and only concerned with the means of my
earning my living; but the simplicity of it was not seen, and I was
talked to in mawkishly rounded phrases of Borodino, of the sacred fire,
of my uncle a forgotten poet, who had once written poor and artificial
verses; I was rudely called an addlepate and a dense fellow. And how I
longed to be understood! In spite of everything, I loved my father and
my sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them-a
habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever have got rid of
it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I was in constant dread of
wounding them, constantly afraid that my father's thin neck would turn
crimson and that he would have a stroke.
"To sit in a stuffy room," I began, "to copy, to compete with a
typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age. What can
the sacred fire have to do with it?"
"It's intellectual work, anyway," said my father. "But that's enough;
let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I warn you: if you
don't go back to your work again, but follow your contemptible
propensities, then my daughter and I will banish you from our hearts. I
shall strike you out of my will, I swear by the living God!"
With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by which I
wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said:
"The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me. I shall
renounce it all beforehand."
For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were deeply
resented by my father. He turned crimson.
"Don't dare to talk to me like that, stupid!" he shouted in a thin,
shrill voice. "Wastrel!" and with a rapid, skilful, and habitual
movement he slapped me twice in the face. "You are forgetting yourself."
When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight, with my
hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him straight in the
face. And now when he hit me I was utterly overwhelmed, and, as though I
were still a child, drew myself up and tried to look him in the face. My
father was old and very thin but his delicate muscles must have been as
strong as leather, for his blows hurt a good deal.
I staggered back into the passage, and there he snatched up his
umbrella, and with it hit me several times on the head and shoulders; at
that moment my sister opened the drawing-room door to find out what the
noise was, but at once turned away with a look of horror and pity
without uttering a word in my defence.
My determination not to return to the Government office, but to begin a
new life of toil, was not to be shaken. All that was left for me to do
was to fix upon the special employment, and there was no particular
difficulty about that, as it seemed to me that I was very strong and
fitted for the very heaviest labour. I was faced with a monotonous life
of toil in the midst of hunger, coarseness, and stench, continually
preoccupied with earning my daily bread. And-who knows?-as I returned
from my work along Great Dvoryansky Street, I might very likely envy
Dolzhikov, the engineer, who lived by intellectual work, but, at the
moment, thinking over all my future hardships made me light-hearted. At
times I had dreamed of spiritual activity, imagining myself a teacher, a
doctor, or a writer, but these dreams remained dreams. The taste for
intellectual pleasures-for the theatre, for instance, and for reading-
was a passion with me, but whether I had any ability for intellectual
work I don't know. At school I had had an unconquerable aversion for
Greek, so that I was only in the fourth class when they had to take me
from school. For a long while I had coaches preparing me for the fifth
class. Then I served in various Government offices, spending the greater
part of the day in complete idleness, and I was told that was
intellectual work. My activity in the scholastic and official sphere had
required neither mental application nor talent, nor special
qualifications, nor creative impulse; it was mechanical. Such
intellectual work I put on a lower level than physical toil; I despise
it, and I don't think that for one moment it could serve as a
justification for an idle, careless life, as it is indeed nothing but a
sham, one of the forms of that same idleness. Real intellectual work I
have in all probability never known.
Evening came on. We lived in Great Dvoryansky Street; it was the
principal street in the town, and in the absence of decent public
gardens our beau monde used to use it as a promenade in the evenings.
This charming street did to some extent take the place of a public
garden, as on each side of it there was a row of poplars which smelt
sweet, particularly after rain, and acacias, tall bushes of lilac, wild-
cherries and apple-trees hung over the fences and palings. The May
twilight, the tender young greenery with its shifting shades, the scent
of the lilac, the buzzing of the insects, the stillness, the warmth-how
fresh and marvellous it all is, though spring is repeated every year! I
stood at the garden gate and watched the passers-by. With most of them I
had grown up and at one time played pranks; now they might have been
disconcerted by my being near them, for I was poorly and unfashionably
dressed, and they used to say of my very narrow trousers and huge,
clumsy boots that they were like sticks of macaroni stuck in boats.
Besides, I had a bad reputation in the town because I had no decent
social position, and used often to play billiards in cheap taverns, and
also, perhaps, because I had on two occasions been hauled up before an
officer of the police, though I had done nothing whatever to account for
this.
In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at Dolzhikov's.
It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in the sky. Here
my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim, walked slowly by
with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to greetings.
"Look up," he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same
umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. "Look up at the
sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant is man in
comparison with the universe!"
And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly
agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant. How
absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! Sad to say, he was
the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty years that
I could remember not one single decent house had been built in it. When
any one asked him to plan a house, he usually drew first the reception
hall and drawing-room: just as in old days the boarding-school misses
always started from the stove when they danced, so his artistic ideas
could only begin and develop from the hall and drawing-room. To them he
tacked on a dining-room, a nursery, a study, linking the rooms together
with doors, and so they all inevitably turned into passages, and every
one of them had two or even three unnecessary doors. His imagination
must have been lacking in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed. As
though feeling that something was lacking, he invariably had recourse to
all sorts of outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I can see