Short Stories by Chekhov
lately I had been in the employment of this red-faced, well-fed man, and
that he had been brutally rude to me. It is true that he put his arm
round my waist, slapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way, approved
my manner of life, but I felt that, as before, he despised my
insignificance, and only put up with me to please his daughter, and I
couldn't now laugh and talk as I liked, and I behaved unsociably and
kept expecting that in another minute he would address me as Panteley as
he did his footman Pavel. How my pride as a provincial and a working man
was revolted. I, a proletarian, a house painter, went every day to rich
people who were alien to me, and whom the whole town regarded as though
they were foreigners, and every day I drank costly wines with them and
ate unusual dainties-my conscience refused to be reconciled to it! On my
way to the house I sullenly avoided meeting people, and looked at them
from under my brows as though I really were a dissenter, and when I was
going home from the engineer's I was ashamed of my well-fed condition.
Above all I was afraid of being carried away. Whether I was walking
along the street, or working, or talking to the other fellows, I was all
the time thinking of one thing only, of going in the evening to see
Mariya Viktorovna and was picturing her voice, her laugh, her movements.
When I was getting ready to go to her I always spent a long time before
my nurse's warped looking-glass, as I fastened my tie; my serge trousers
were detestable in my eyes, and I suffered torments, and at the same
time despised myself for being so trivial. When she called to me out of
the other room that she was not dressed and asked me to wait, I listened
to her dressing; it agitated me, I felt as though the ground were giving
way under my feet. And when I saw a woman's figure in the street, even
at a distance, I invariably compared it. It seemed to me that all our
girls and women were vulgar, that they were absurdly dressed, and did
not know how to hold themselves; and these comparisons aroused a feeling
of pride in me: Mariya Viktorovna was the best of them all! And I
dreamed of her and myself at night.
One evening at supper with the engineer we ate a whole lobster As I was
going home afterwards I remembered that the engineer twice called me "My
dear fellow" at supper, and I reflected that they treated me very kindly
in that house, as they might an unfortunate big dog who had been kicked
out by its owners, that they were amusing themselves with me, and that
when they were tired of me they would turn me out like a dog. I felt
ashamed and wounded, wounded to the point of tears as though I had been
insulted, and looking up at the sky I took a vow to put an end to all
this.
The next day I did not go to the Dolzhikov's. Late in the evening, when
it was quite dark and raining, I walked along Great Dvoryansky Street,
looking up at the windows. Everyone was asleep at the Azhogins', and the
only light was in one of the furthest windows. It was Madame Azhogin in
her own room, sewing by the light of three candles, imagining that she
was combating superstition. Our house was in darkness, but at the
Dolzhikovs', on the contrary, the windows were lighted up, but one could
distinguish nothing through the flowers and the curtains. I kept walking
up and down the street; the cold March rain drenched me through. I heard
my father come home from the club; he stood knocking at the gate. A
minute later a light appeared at the window, and I saw my sister, who
was hastening down with a lamp, while with the other hand she was
twisting her thick hair together as she went. Then my father walked
about the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands, while my sister
sat in a low chair, thinking and not listening to what he said.
But then they went away; the light went out. . . . I glanced round at
the engineer's, and there, too, all was darkness now. In the dark and
the rain I felt hopelessly alone, abandoned to the whims of destiny; I
felt that all my doings, my desires, and everything I had thought and
said till then were trivial in comparison with my loneliness, in
comparison with my present suffering, and the suffering that lay before
me in the future. Alas, the thoughts and doings of living creatures are
not nearly so significant as their sufferings! And without clearly
realizing what I was doing, I pulled at the bell of the Dolzhikovs'
gate, broke it, and ran along the street like some naughty boy, with a
feeling of terror in my heart, expecting every moment that they would
come out and recognize me. When I stopped at the end of the street to
take breath I could hear nothing but the sound of the rain, and
somewhere in the distance a watchman striking on a sheet of iron.
For a whole week I did not go to the Dolzhikovs'. My serge trousers were
sold. There was nothing doing in the painting trade. I knew the pangs of
hunger again, and earned from twopence to fourpence a day, where I
could, by heavy and unpleasant work. Struggling up to my knees in the
cold mud, straining my chest, I tried to stifle my memories, and, as it
were, to punish myself for the cheeses and preserves with which I had
been regaled at the engineer's. But all the same, as soon as I lay in
bed, wet and hungry, my sinful imagination immediately began to paint
exquisite, seductive pictures, and with amazement I acknowledged to
myself that I was in love, passionately in love, and I fell into a
sound, heavy sleep, feeling that hard labour only made my body stronger
and younger.
One evening snow began falling most inappropriately, and the wind blew
from the north as though winter had come back again. When I returned
from work that evening I found Mariya Viktorovna in my room. She was
sitting in her fur coat, and had both hands in her muff.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she asked, raising her clear, clever
eyes, and I was utterly confused with delight and stood stiffly upright
before her, as I used to stand facing my father when he was going to
beat me; she looked into my face and I could see from her eyes that she
understood why I was confused.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she repeated. "If you don't want to
come, you see, I have come to you."
She got up and came close to me.
"Don't desert me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "I am
alone, utterly alone."
She began crying; and, hiding her face in her muff, articulated:
"Alone! My life is hard, very hard, and in all the world I have no one
but you. Don't desert me!"
Looking for a handkerchief to wipe her tears she smiled; we were silent
for some time, then I put my arms round her and kissed her, scratching
my cheek till it bled with her hatpin as I did it.
And we began talking to each other as though we had been on the closest
terms for ages and ages. X
Two days later she sent me to Dubetchnya and I was unutterably delighted
to go. As I walked towards the station and afterwards, as I was sitting
in the train, I kept laughing from no apparent cause, and people looked
at me as though I were drunk. Snow was falling, and there were still
frosts in the mornings, but the roads were already dark-coloured and
rooks hovered over them, cawing.
At first I had intended to fit up an abode for us two, Masha and me, in
the lodge at the side opposite Madame Tcheprakov's lodge, but it
appeared that the doves and the ducks had been living there for a long
time, and it was impossible to clean it without destroying a great
number of nests. There was nothing for it but to live in the comfortless
rooms of the big house with the sunblinds. The peasants called the house
the palace; there were more than twenty rooms in it, and the only
furniture was a piano and a child's arm-chair lying in the attic. And if
Masha had brought all her furniture from the town we should even then
have been unable to get rid of the impression of immense emptiness and
cold. I picked out three small rooms with windows looking into the
garden, and worked from early morning till night, setting them to
rights, putting in new panes, papering the walls, filling up the holes
and chinks in the floors. It was easy, pleasant work. I was continually
running to the river to see whether the ice were not going; I kept
fancying that starlings were flying. And at night, thinking of Masha, I
listened with an unutterably sweet feeling, with clutching delight to
the noise of the rats and the wind droning and knocking above the
ceiling. It seemed as though some old house spirit were coughing in the
attic.
The snow was deep; a great deal had fallen even at the end of March, but
it melted quickly, as though by magic, and the spring floods passed in a
tumultuous rush, so that by the beginning of April the starlings were
already noisy, and yellow butterflies were flying in the garden. It was
exquisite weather. Every day, towards evening, I used to walk to the
town to meet Masha, and what a delight it was to walk with bare feet
along the gradually drying, still soft road. Half-way I used to sit down
and look towards the town, not venturing to go near it. The sight of it
troubled me. I kept wondering how the people I knew would behave to me
when they heard of my love. What would my father say? What troubled me
particularly was the thought that my life was more complicated, and that
I had completely lost all power to set it right, and that, like a
balloon, it was bearing me away, God knows whither. I no longer
considered the problem how to earn my daily bread, how to live, but
thought about-I really don't know what.
Masha used to come in a carriage; I used to get in with her, and we
drove to Dubetchnya, feeling light-hearted and free. Or, after waiting
till the sun had set, I would go back dissatisfied and dreary, wondering
why Masha had not come; at the gate or in the garden I would be met by a
sweet, unexpected apparition-it was she! It would turn out that she had
come by rail, and had walked from the station. What a festival it was!
In a simple woollen dress with a kerchief on her head, with a modest
sunshade, but laced in, slender, in expensive foreign boots-it was a
talented actress playing the part of a little workgirl. We looked round
our domain and decided which should be her room, and which mine, where
we would have our avenue, our kitchen garden, our beehives.
We already had hens, ducks, and geese, which we loved because they were
ours. We had, all ready for sowing, oats, clover, timothy grass,
buckwheat, and vegetable seeds, and we always looked at all these stores
and discussed at length the crop we might get; and everything Masha said
to me seemed extraordinarily clever, and fine. This was the happiest
time of my life.
Soon after St. Thomas's week we were married at our parish church in the
village of Kurilovka, two miles from Dubetchnya. Masha wanted everything
to be done quietly; at her wish our "best men" were peasant lads, the
sacristan sang alone, and we came back from the church in a small,
jolting chaise which she drove herself. Our only guest from the town was
my sister Kleopatra, to whom Masha sent a note three days before the
wedding. My sister came in a white dress and wore gloves. During the
wedding she cried quietly from joy and tenderness. Her expression was
motherly and infinitely kind. She was intoxicated with our happiness,
and smiled as though she were absorbing a sweet delirium, and looking at
her during our wedding, I realized that for her there was nothing in the
world higher than love, earthly love, and that she was dreaming of it
secretly, timidly, but continually and passionately. She embraced and
kissed Masha, and, not knowing how to express her rapture, said to her
of me: "He is good! He is very good!"