Short Stories by Chekhov
The plasterers spoke of the foreman, and of a certain Fyodot Vasilyev. I
did not understand, and gradually I was overcome by depression-the
physical depression in which one is conscious of one's arms and legs and
huge body, and does not know what to do with them or where to put them.
After I had been walking about for at least a couple of hours, I noticed
that there were telegraph poles running off to the right from the
station, and that they ended a mile or a mile and a half away at a white
stone wall. The workmen told me the office was there, and at last I
reflected that that was where I ought to go.
It was a very old manor house, deserted long ago. The wall round it, of
porous white stone, was mouldering and had fallen away in places, and
the lodge, the blank wall of which looked out on the open country, had a
rusty roof with patches of tin-plate gleaming here and there on it.
Within the gates could be seen a spacious courtyard overgrown with rough
weeds, and an old manor house with sunblinds on the windows, and a high
roof red with rust. Two lodges, exactly alike, stood one on each side of
the house to right and to left: one had its windows nailed up with
boards; near the other, of which the windows were open, there was
washing on the line, and there were calves moving about. The last of the
telegraph poles stood in the courtyard, and the wire from it ran to the
window of the lodge, of which the blank wall looked out into the open
country. The door stood open; I went in. By the telegraph apparatus a
gentleman with a curly dark head, wearing a reefer coat made of
sailcloth, was sitting at a table; he glanced at me morosely from under
his brows, but immediately smiled and said:
"Hullo, Better-than-nothing!"
It was Ivan Tcheprakov, an old schoolfellow of mine, who had been
expelled from the second class for smoking. We used at one time, during
autumn, to catch goldfinches, finches, and linnets together, and to sell
them in the market early in the morning, while our parents were still in
their beds. We watched for flocks of migrating starlings and shot at
them with small shot, then we picked up those that were wounded, and
some of them died in our hands in terrible agonies (I remember to this
day how they moaned in the cage at night); those that recovered we sold,
and swore with the utmost effrontery that they were all cocks. On one
occasion at the market I had only one starling left, which I had offered
to purchasers in vain, till at last I sold it for a farthing. "Anyway,
it's better than nothing," I said to comfort myself, as I put the
farthing in my pocket, and from that day the street urchins and the
schoolboys called after me: "Better-than-nothing"; and to this day the
street boys and the shopkeepers mock at me with the nickname, though no
one remembers how it arose.
Tcheprakov was not of robust constitution: he was narrow-chested, round-
shouldered, and long-legged. He wore a silk cord for a tie, had no trace
of a waistcoat, and his boots were worse than mine, with the heels
trodden down on one side. He stared, hardly even blinking, with a
strained expression, as though he were just going to catch something,
and he was always in a fuss.
"You wait a minute," he would say fussily. "You listen. . . . Whatever
was I talking about?"
We got into conversation. I learned that the estate on which I now was
had until recently been the property of the Tcheprakovs, and had only
the autumn before passed into the possession of Dolzhikov, who
considered it more profitable to put his money into land than to keep it
in notes, and had already bought up three good-sized mortgaged estates
in our neighbourhood. At the sale Tcheprakov's mother had reserved for
herself the right to live for the next two years in one of the lodges at
the side, and had obtained a post for her son in the office.
"I should think he could buy!" Tcheprakov said of the engineer. "See
what he fleeces out of the contractors alone! He fleeces everyone!"
Then he took me to dinner, deciding fussily that I should live with him
in the lodge, and have my meals from his mother.
"She is a bit stingy," he said, "but she won't charge you much."
It was very cramped in the little rooms in which his mother lived; they
were all, even the passage and the entry, piled up with furniture which
had been brought from the big house after the sale; and the furniture
was all old-fashioned mahogany. Madame Tcheprakov, a very stout middle-
aged lady with slanting Chinese eyes, was sitting in a big arm-chair by
the window, knitting a stocking. She received me ceremoniously.
"This is Poloznev, mamma," Tcheprakov introduced me. "He is going to
serve here."
"Are you a nobleman?" she asked in a strange, disagreeable voice: it
seemed to me to sound as though fat were bubbling in her throat.
"Yes," I answered.
"Sit down."
The dinner was a poor one. Nothing was served but pies filled with
bitter curd, and milk soup. Elena Nikiforovna, who presided, kept
blinking in a queer way, first with one eye and then with the other. She
talked, she ate, but yet there was something deathly about her whole
figure, and one almost fancied the faint smell of a corpse. There was
only a glimmer of life in her, a glimmer of consciousness that she had
been a lady who had once had her own serfs, that she was the widow of a
general whom the servants had to address as "your Excellency"; and when
these feeble relics of life flickered up in her for an instant she would
say to her son:
"Jean, you are not holding your knife properly!"
Or she would say to me, drawing a deep breath, with the mincing air of a
hostess trying to entertain a visitor:
"You know we have sold our estate. Of course, it is a pity, we are used
to the place, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster of
Dubetchnya, so we shall not have to go away; we shall live here at the
station, and that is just the same as being on our own property! The
engineer is so nice! Don't you think he is very handsome?"
Until recently the Tcheprakovs had lived in a wealthy style, but since
the death of the general everything had been changed. Elena Nikiforovna
had taken to quarrelling with the neighbours, to going to law, and to
not paying her bailiffs or her labourers; she was in constant terror of
being robbed, and in some ten years Dubetchnya had become
unrecognizable.
Behind the great house was an old garden which had already run wild, and
was overgrown with rough weeds and bushes. I walked up and down the
verandah, which was still solid and beautiful; through the glass doors
one could see a room with parquetted floor, probably the drawing-room;
an old-fashioned piano and pictures in deep mahogany frames-there was
nothing else. In the old flower-beds all that remained were peonies and
poppies, which lifted their white and bright red heads above the grass.
Young maples and elms, already nibbled by the cows, grew beside the
paths, drawn up and hindering each other's growth. The garden was
thickly overgrown and seemed impassable, but this was only near the
house where there stood poplars, fir-trees, and old limetrees, all of
the same age, relics of the former avenues. Further on, beyond them the
garden had been cleared for the sake of hay, and here it was not moist
and stuffy, and there were no spiders' webs in one's mouth and eyes. A
light breeze was blowing. The further one went the more open it was, and
here in the open space were cherries, plums, and spreading apple-trees,
disfigured by props and by canker; and pear-trees so tall that one could
not believe they were pear-trees. This part of the garden was let to
some shopkeepers of the town, and it was protected from thieves and
starlings by a feeble-minded peasant who lived in a shanty in it.
The garden, growing more and more open, till it became definitely a
meadow, sloped down to the river, which was overgrown with green weeds
and osiers. Near the milldam was the millpond, deep and full of fish; a
little mill with a thatched roof was working away with a wrathful sound,
and frogs croaked furiously. Circles passed from time to time over the
smooth, mirror-like water, and the water-lilies trembled, stirred by the
lively fish. On the further side of the river was the little village
Dubetchnya. The still, blue millpond was alluring with its promise of
coolness and peace. And now all this-the millpond and the mill and the
snug-looking banks-belonged to the engineer!
And so my new work began. I received and forwarded telegrams, wrote
various reports, and made fair copies of the notes of requirements, the
complaints, and the reports sent to the office by the illiterate foremen
and workmen. But for the greater part of the day I did nothing but walk
about the room waiting for telegrams, or made a boy sit in the lodge
while I went for a walk in the garden, until the boy ran to tell me that
there was a tapping at the operating machine. I had dinner at Madame
Tcheprakov's. Meat we had very rarely: our dishes were all made of milk,
and Wednesdays and Fridays were fast days, and on those days we had pink
plates which were called Lenten plates. Madame Tcheprakov was
continually blinking-it was her invariable habit, and I always felt ill
at ease in her presence.
As there was not enough work in the lodge for one, Tcheprakov did
nothing, but simply dozed, or went with his gun to shoot ducks on the
millpond. In the evenings he drank too much in the village or the
station, and before going to bed stared in the looking-glass and said:
"Hullo, Ivan Tcheprakov."
When he was drunk he was very pale, and kept rubbing his hands and
laughing with a sound like a neigh: "hee-hee-hee!" By way of bravado he
used to strip and run about the country naked. He used to eat flies and
say they were rather sour. IV
One day, after dinner, he ran breathless into the lodge and said: "Go
along, your sister has come."
I went out, and there I found a hired brake from the town standing
before the entrance of the great house. My sister had come in it with
Anyuta Blagovo and a gentleman in a military tunic. Going up closer I
recognized the latter: it was the brother of Anyuta Blagovo, the army
doctor.
"We have come to you for a picnic," he said; "is that all right?"
My sister and Anyuta wanted to ask how I was getting on here, but both
were silent, and simply gazed at me. I was silent too. They saw that I
did not like the place, and tears came into my sister's eyes, while
Anyuta Blagovo turned crimson.
We went into the garden. The doctor walked ahead of us all and said
enthusiastically:
"What air! Holy Mother, what air!"
In appearance he was still a student. And he walked and talked like a
student, and the expression of his grey eyes was as keen, honest, and
frank as a nice student's. Beside his tall and handsome sister he looked
frail and thin; and his beard was thin too, and his voice, too, was a
thin but rather agreeable tenor. He was serving in a regiment somewhere,
and had come home to his people for a holiday, and said he was going in
the autumn to Petersburg for his examination as a doctor of medicine. He
was already a family man, with a wife and three children, he had married
very young, in his second year at the University, and now people in the
town said he was unhappy in his family life and was not living with his
wife.
"What time is it?" my sister asked uneasily. "We must get back in good
time. Papa let me come to see my brother on condition I was back at
six."
"Oh, bother your papa!" sighed the doctor.
I set the samovar. We put down a carpet before the verandah of the great
house and had our tea there, and the doctor knelt down, drank out of his
saucer, and declared that he now knew what bliss was. Then Tcheprakov