Short Stories by Chekhov
mammon of unrighteousness' is said, because there is not and cannot be a
mammon that's righteous."
She looked round at the furniture with a grave, cold expression, as
though she wanted to count it over, and went on:
"Comfort and luxury have a magical power; little by little they draw
into their clutches even strong-willed people. At one time father and I
lived simply, not in a rich style, but now you see how! It is something
monstrous," she said, shrugging her shoulders; "we spend up to twenty
thousand a year! In the provinces!"
"One comes to look at comfort and luxury as the invariable privilege of
capital and education," I said, "and it seems to me that the comforts of
life may be combined with any sort of labour, even the hardest and
dirtiest. Your father is rich, and yet he says himself that it has been
his lot to be a mechanic and an oiler."
She smiled and shook her head doubtfully: "My father sometimes eats
bread dipped in kvass," she said. "It's a fancy, a whim!"
At that moment there was a ring and she got up.
"The rich and well-educated ought to work like everyone else," she said,
"and if there is comfort it ought to be equal for all. There ought not
to be any privileges. But that's enough philosophizing. Tell me
something amusing. Tell me about the painters. What are they like?
Funny?"
The doctor came in; I began telling them about the painters, but, being
unaccustomed to talking, I was constrained, and described them like an
ethnologist, gravely and tediously. The doctor, too, told us some
anecdotes of working men: he staggered about, shed tears, dropped on his
knees, and, even, mimicking a drunkard, lay on the floor; it was as good
as a play, and Mariya Viktorovna laughed till she cried as she looked at
him. Then he played on the piano and sang in his thin, pleasant tenor,
while Mariya Viktorovna stood by and picked out what he was to sing, and
corrected him when he made a mistake.
"I've heard that you sing, too?" I enquired.
"Sing, too!" cried the doctor in horror. "She sings exquisitely, a
perfect artist, and you talk of her 'singing too'! What an idea!"
"I did study in earnest at one time," she said, answering my question,
"but now I have given it up."
Sitting on a low stool she told us of her life in Petersburg, and
mimicked some celebrated singers, imitating their voice and manner of
singing. She made a sketch of the doctor in her album, then of me; she
did not draw well, but both the portraits were like us. She laughed, and
was full of mischief and charming grimaces, and this suited her better
than talking about the mammon of unrighteousness, and it seemed to me
that she had been talking just before about wealth and luxury, not in
earnest, but in imitation of someone. She was a superb comic actress. I
mentally compared her with our young ladies, and even the handsome,
dignified Anyuta Blagovo could not stand comparison with her; the
difference was immense, like the difference between a beautiful,
cultivated rose and a wild briar.
We had supper together, the three of us. The doctor and Mariya
Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne, and coffee with brandy in it; they
clinked glasses and drank to friendship, to enlightenment, to progress,
to liberty, and they did not get drunk but only flushed, and were
continually, for no reason, laughing till they cried. So as not to be
tiresome I drank claret too.
"Talented, richly endowed natures," said Miss Dolzhikov, "know how to
live, and go their own way; mediocre people, like myself for instance,
know nothing and can do nothing of themselves; there is nothing left for
them but to discern some deep social movement, and to float where they
are carried by it."
"How can one discern what doesn't exist?" asked the doctor.
"We think so because we don't see it."
"Is that so? The social movements are the invention of the new
literature. There are none among us."
An argument began.
"There are no deep social movements among us and never have been," the
doctor declared loudly. "There is no end to what the new literature has
invented! It has invented intellectual workers in the country, and you
may search through all our villages and find at the most some lout in a
reefer jacket or a black frock-coat who will make four mistakes in
spelling a word of three letters. Cultured life has not yet begun among
us. There's the same savagery, the same uniform boorishness, the same
triviality, as five hundred years ago. Movements, currents there have
been, but it has all been petty, paltry, bent upon vulgar and mercenary
interests-and one cannot see anything important in them. If you think
you have discerned a deep social movement, and in following it you
devote yourself to tasks in the modern taste, such as the emancipation
of insects from slavery or abstinence from beef rissoles, I congratulate
you, Madam. We must study, and study, and study and we must wait a bit
with our deep social movements; we are not mature enough for them yet;
and to tell the truth, we don't know anything about them."
"You don't know anything about them, but I do," said Mariya Viktorovna.
"Goodness, how tiresome you are to-day!"
"Our duty is to study and to study, to try to accumulate as much
knowledge as possible, for genuine social movements arise where there is
knowledge; and the happiness of mankind in the future lies only in
knowledge. I drink to science!"
"There is no doubt about one thing: one must organize one's life somehow
differently," said Mariya Viktorovna, after a moment's silence and
thought. "Life, such as it has been hitherto, is not worth having. Don't
let us talk about it."
As we came away from her the cathedral clock struck two.
"Did you like her?" asked the doctor; "she's nice, isn't she?"
On Christmas day we dined with Mariya Viktorovna, and all through the
holidays we went to see her almost every day. There was never anyone
there but ourselves, and she was right when she said that she had no
friends in the town but the doctor and me. We spent our time for the
most part in conversation; sometimes the doctor brought some book or
magazine and read aloud to us. In reality he was the first well-educated
man I had met in my life: I cannot judge whether he knew a great deal,
but he always displayed his knowledge as though he wanted other people
to share it. When he talked about anything relating to medicine he was
not like any one of the doctors in our town, but made a fresh, peculiar
impression upon me, and I fancied that if he liked he might have become
a real man of science. And he was perhaps the only person who had a real
influence upon me at that time. Seeing him, and reading the books he
gave me, I began little by little to feel a thirst for the knowledge
which would have given significance to my cheerless labour. It seemed
strange to me, for instance, that I had not known till then that the
whole world was made up of sixty elements, I had not known what oil was,
what paints were, and that I could have got on without knowing these
things. My acquaintance with the doctor elevated me morally too. I was
continually arguing with him and, though I usually remained of my own
opinion, yet, thanks to him, I began to perceive that everything was not
clear to me, and I began trying to work out as far as I could definite
convictions in myself, that the dictates of conscience might be
definite, and that there might be nothing vague in my mind. Yet, though
he was the most cultivated and best man in the town, he was nevertheless
far from perfection. In his manners, in his habit of turning every
conversation into an argument, in his pleasant tenor, even in his
friendliness, there was something coarse, like a divinity student, and
when he took off his coat and sat in his silk shirt, or flung a tip to a
waiter in the restaurant, I always fancied that culture might be all
very well, but the Tatar was fermenting in him still.
At Epiphany he went back to Petersburg. He went off in the morning, and
after dinner my sister came in. Without taking off her fur coat and her
cap she sat down in silence, very pale, and kept her eyes fixed on the
same spot. She was chilled by the frost and one could see that she was
upset by it.
"You must have caught cold," I said.
Her eyes filled with tears; she got up and went out to Karpovna without
saying a word to me, as though I had hurt her feelings. And a little
later I heard her saying, in a tone of bitter reproach:
"Nurse, what have I been living for till now? What? Tell me, haven't I
wasted my youth? All the best years of my life to know nothing but
keeping accounts, pouring out tea, counting the halfpence, entertaining
visitors, and thinking there was nothing better in the world! Nurse, do
understand, I have the cravings of a human being, and I want to live,
and they have turned me into something like a housekeeper. It's
horrible, horrible!"
She flung her keys towards the door, and they fell with a jingle into my
room. They were the keys of the sideboard, of the kitchen cupboard, of
the cellar, and of the tea-caddy, the keys which my mother used to
carry.
"Oh, merciful heavens!" cried the old woman in horror. "Holy Saints
above!"
Before going home my sister came into my room to pick up the keys, and
said:
"You must forgive me. Something queer has happened to me lately." VIII
On returning home late one evening from Mariya Viktorovna's I found
waiting in my room a young police inspector in a new uniform; he was
sitting at my table, looking through my books.
"At last," he said, getting up and stretching himself. "This is the
third time I have been to you. The Governor commands you to present
yourself before him at nine o'clock in the morning. Without fail."
He took from me a signed statement that I would act upon his
Excellency's command, and went away. This late visit of the police
inspector and unexpected invitation to the Governor's had an
overwhelmingly oppressive effect upon me. From my earliest childhood I
have felt terror-stricken in the presence of gendarmes, policemen, and
law court officials, and now I was tormented by uneasiness, as though I
were really guilty in some way. And I could not get to sleep. My nurse
and Prokofy were also upset and could not sleep. My nurse had earache
too; she moaned, and several times began crying with pain. Hearing that
I was awake, Prokofy came into my room with a lamp and sat down at the
table.
"You ought to have a drink of pepper cordial," he said, after a moment's
thought. "If one does have a drink in this vale of tears it does no
harm. And if Mamma were to pour a little pepper cordial in her ear it
would do her a lot of good."
Between two and three he was going to the slaughter-house for the meat.
I knew I should not sleep till morning now, and to get through the time
till nine o'clock I went with him. We walked with a lantern, while his
boy Nikolka, aged thirteen, with blue patches on his cheeks from
frostbites, a regular young brigand to judge by his expression, drove
after us in the sledge, urging on the horse in a husky voice.
"I suppose they will punish you at the Governor's," Prokofy said to me
on the way. "There are rules of the trade for governors, and rules for
the higher clergy, and rules for the officers, and rules for the
doctors, and every class has its rules. But you haven't kept to your
rules, and you can't be allowed."
The slaughter-house was behind the cemetery, and till then I had only
seen it in the distance. It consisted of three gloomy barns, surrounded
by a grey fence, and when the wind blew from that quarter on hot days in
summer, it brought a stifling stench from them. Now going into the yard
in the dark I did not see the barns; I kept coming across horses and