Short Stories by Chekhov
eight and she is not back. She has taken to going out frequently without
telling me; she is less dutiful-and I see in it your evil and degrading
influence. Where is she?"
In his hand he had the umbrella I knew so well, and I was already
flustered and drew myself up like a schoolboy, expecting my father to
begin hitting me with it, but he noticed my glance at the umbrella and
most likely that restrained him.
"Live as you please!" he said. "I shall not give you my blessing!"
"Holy Saints!" my nurse muttered behind the door. "You poor, unlucky
child! Ah, my heart bodes ill!"
I worked on the railway-line. It rained without stopping all August; it
was damp and cold; they had not carried the corn in the fields, and on
big farms where the wheat had been cut by machines it lay not in sheaves
but in heaps, and I remember how those luckless heaps of wheat turned
blacker every day and the grain was sprouting in them. It was hard to
work; the pouring rain spoiled everything we managed to do. We were not
allowed to live or to sleep in the railway buildings, and we took refuge
in the damp and filthy mud huts in which the navvies had lived during
the summer, and I could not sleep at night for the cold and the woodlice
crawling on my face and hands. And when we worked near the bridges the
navvies used to come in the evenings in a gang, simply in order to beat
the painters-it was a form of sport to them. They used to beat us, to
steal our brushes. And to annoy us and rouse us to fight they used to
spoil our work; they would, for instance, smear over the signal boxes
with green paint. To complete our troubles, Radish took to paying us
very irregularly. All the painting work on the line was given out to a
contractor; he gave it out to another; and this subcontractor gave it to
Radish after subtracting twenty per cent. for himself. The job was not a
profitable one in itself, and the rain made it worse; time was wasted;
we could not work while Radish was obliged to pay the fellows by the
day. The hungry painters almost came to beating him, called him a cheat,
a blood-sucker, a Judas, while he, poor fellow, sighed, lifted up his
hand to Heaven in despair, and was continually going to Madame
Tcheprakov for money. VII
Autumn came on, rainy, dark, and muddy. The season of unemployment set
in, and I used to sit at home out of work for three days at a stretch,
or did various little jobs, not in the painting line. For instance, I
wheeled earth, earning about fourpence a day by it. Dr. Blagovo had gone
away to Petersburg. My sister had given up coming to see me. Radish was
laid up at home ill, expecting death from day to day.
And my mood was autumnal too. Perhaps because, having become a workman,
I saw our town life only from the seamy side, it was my lot almost every
day to make discoveries which reduced me almost to despair. Those of my
fellow-citizens, about whom I had no opinion before, or who had
externally appeared perfectly decent, turned out now to be base, cruel
people, capable of any dirty action. We common people were deceived,
cheated, and kept waiting for hours together in the cold entry or the
kitchen; we were insulted and treated with the utmost rudeness. In the
autumn I papered the reading-room and two other rooms at the club; I was
paid a penny three-farthings the piece, but had to sign a receipt at the
rate of twopence halfpenny, and when I refused to do so, a gentleman of
benevolent appearance in gold-rimmed spectacles, who must have been one
of the club committee, said to me:
"If you say much more, you blackguard, I'll pound your face into a
jelly!"
And when the flunkey whispered to him what I was, the son of Poloznev
the architect, he became embarrassed, turned crimson, but immediately
recovered himself and said: "Devil take him."
In the shops they palmed off on us workmen putrid meat, musty flour, and
tea that had been used and dried again; the police hustled us in church,
the assistants and nurses in the hospital plundered us, and if we were
too poor to give them a bribe they revenged themselves by bringing us
food in dirty vessels. In the post-office the pettiest official
considered he had a right to treat us like animals, and to shout with
coarse insolence: "You wait!" "Where are you shoving to?" Even the
housedogs were unfriendly to us, and fell upon us with peculiar
viciousness. But the thing that struck me most of all in my new position
was the complete lack of justice, what is defined by the peasants in the
words: "They have forgotten God." Rarely did a day pass without
swindling. We were swindled by the merchants who sold us oil, by the
contractors and the workmen and the people who employed us. I need not
say that there could never be a question of our rights, and we always
had to ask for the money we earned as though it were a charity, and to
stand waiting for it at the back door, cap in hand.
I was papering a room at the club next to the reading-room; in the
evening, when I was just getting ready to go, the daughter of Dolzhikov,
the engineer, walked into the room with a bundle of books under her arm.
I bowed to her.
"Oh, how do you do!" she said, recognizing me at once, and holding out
her hand. "I'm very glad to see you."
She smiled and looked with curiosity and wonder at my smock, my pail of
paste, the paper stretched on the floor; I was embarrassed, and she,
too, felt awkward.
"You must excuse my looking at you like this," she said. "I have been
told so much about you. Especially by Dr. Blagovo; he is simply in love
with you. And I have made the acquaintance of your sister too; a sweet,
dear girl, but I can never persuade her that there is nothing awful
about your adopting the simple life. On the contrary, you have become
the most interesting man in the town."
She looked again at the pail of paste and the wallpaper, and went on:
"I asked Dr. Blagovo to make me better acquainted with you, but
apparently he forgot, or had not time. Anyway, we are acquainted all the
same, and if you would come and see me quite simply I should be
extremely indebted to you. I so long to have a talk. I am a simple
person," she added, holding out her hand to me, "and I hope that you
will feel no constraint with me. My father is not here, he is in
Petersburg."
She went off into the reading-room, rustling her skirts, while I went
home, and for a long time could not get to sleep.
That cheerless autumn some kind soul, evidently wishing to alleviate my
existence, sent me from time to time tea and lemons, or biscuits, or
roast game. Karpovna told me that they were always brought by a soldier,
and from whom they came she did not know; and the soldier used to
enquire whether I was well, and whether I dined every day, and whether I
had warm clothing. When the frosts began I was presented in the same way
in my absence with a soft knitted scarf brought by the soldier. There
was a faint elusive smell of scent about it, and I guessed who my good
fairy was. The scarf smelt of lilies-of-the-valley, the favourite scent
of Anyuta Blagovo.
Towards winter there was more work and it was more cheerful. Radish
recovered, and we worked together in the cemetery church, where we were
putting the ground-work on the ikon-stand before gilding. It was a
clean, quiet job, and, as our fellows used to say, profitable. One could
get through a lot of work in a day, and the time passed quickly,
imperceptibly. There was no swearing, no laughter, no loud talk. The
place itself compelled one to quietness and decent behaviour, and
disposed one to quiet, serious thoughts. Absorbed in our work we stood
or sat motionless like statues; there was a deathly silence in keeping
with the cemetery, so that if a tool fell, or a flame spluttered in the
lamp, the noise of such sounds rang out abrupt and resonant, and made us
look round. After a long silence we would hear a buzzing like the
swarming of bees: it was the requiem of a baby being chanted slowly in
subdued voices in the porch; or an artist, painting a dove with stars
round it on a cupola would begin softly whistling, and recollecting
himself with a start would at once relapse into silence; or Radish,
answering his thoughts, would say with a sigh: "Anything is possible!
Anything is possible!" or a slow disconsolate bell would begin ringing
over our heads, and the painters would observe that it must be for the
funeral of some wealthy person. . . .
My days I spent in this stillness in the twilight of the church, and in
the long evenings I played billiards or went to the theatre in the
gallery wearing the new trousers I had bought out of my own earnings.
Concerts and performances had already begun at the Azhogins'; Radish
used to paint the scenes alone now. He used to tell me the plot of the
plays and describe the tableaux vivants which he witnessed. I listened
to him with envy. I felt greatly drawn to the rehearsals, but I could
not bring myself to go to the Azhogins'.
A week before Christmas Dr. Blagovo arrived. And again we argued and
played billiards in the evenings. When he played he used to take off his
coat and unbutton his shirt over his chest, and for some reason tried
altogether to assume the air of a desperate rake. He did not drink much,
but made a great uproar about it, and had a special faculty for getting
through twenty roubles in an evening at such a poor cheap tavern as the
Volga.
My sister began coming to see me again; they both expressed surprise
every time on seeing each other, but from her joyful, guilty face it was
evident that these meetings were not accidental. One evening, when we
were playing billiards, the doctor said to me:
"I say, why don't you go and see Miss Dolzhikov? You don't know Mariya
Viktorovna; she is a clever creature, a charmer, a simple, good-natured
soul."
I described how her father had received me in the spring.
"Nonsense!" laughed the doctor, "the engineer's one thing and she's
another. Really, my dear fellow, you mustn't be nasty to her; go and see
her sometimes. For instance, let's go and see her tomorrow evening. What
do you say?"
He persuaded me. The next evening I put on my new serge trousers, and in
some agitation I set off to Miss Dolzhikov's. The footman did not seem
so haughty and terrible, nor the furniture so gorgeous, as on that
morning when I had come to ask a favour. Mariya Viktorovna was expecting
me, and she received me like an old acquaintance, shaking hands with me
in a friendly way. She was wearing a grey cloth dress with full sleeves,
and had her hair done in the style which we used to call "dogs' ears,"
when it came into fashion in the town a year before. The hair was combed
down over the ears, and this made Mariya Viktorovna's face look broader,
and she seemed to me this time very much like her father, whose face was
broad and red, with something in its expression like a sledge-driver.
She was handsome and elegant, but not youthful looking; she looked
thirty, though in reality she was not more than twenty-five.
"Dear Doctor, how grateful I am to you," she said, making me sit down.
"If it hadn't been for him you wouldn't have come to see me. I am bored
to death! My father has gone away and left me alone, and I don't know
what to do with myself in this town."
Then she began asking me where I was working now, how much I earned,
where I lived.
"Do you spend on yourself nothing but what you earn?" she asked.
"No."
"Happy man!" she sighed. "All the evil in life, it seems to me, comes
from idleness, boredom, and spiritual emptiness, and all this is
inevitable when one is accustomed to living at other people's expense.
Don't think I am showing off, I tell you truthfully: it is not
interesting or pleasant to be rich. 'Make to yourselves friends of the