Short Stories by Chekhov
Before she went away she changed into her ordinary dress, and drew me
into the garden to talk to me alone.
"Father is very much hurt," she said, "that you have written nothing to
him. You ought to have asked for his blessing. But in reality he is very
much pleased. He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of
all society, and that under the influence of Mariya Viktorovna you will
begin to take a more serious view of life. We talk of nothing but you in
the evenings now, and yesterday he actually used the expression: 'Our
Misail.' That pleased me. It seems as though he had some plan in his
mind, and I fancy he wants to set you an example of magnanimity and be
the first to speak of reconciliation. It is very possible he may come
here to see you in a day or two."
She hurriedly made the sign of the cross over me several times and said:
"Well, God be with you. Be happy. Anyuta Blagovo is a very clever girl;
she says about your marriage that God is sending you a fresh ordeal. To
be sure-married life does not bring only joy but suffering too. That's
bound to be so."
Masha and I walked a couple of miles to see her on her way; we walked
back slowly and in silence, as though we were resting. Masha held my
hand, my heart felt light, and I had no inclination to talk about love;
we had become closer and more akin now that we were married, and we felt
that nothing now could separate us.
"Your sister is a nice creature," said Masha, "but it seems as though
she had been tormented for years. Your father must be a terrible man."
I began telling her how my sister and I had been brought up, and what a
senseless torture our childhood had really been. When she heard how my
father had so lately beaten me, she shuddered and drew closer to me.
"Don't tell me any more," she said. "It's horrible!"
Now she never left me. We lived together in the three rooms in the big
house, and in the evenings we bolted the door which led to the empty
part of the house, as though someone were living there whom we did not
know, and were afraid of. I got up early, at dawn, and immediately set
to work of some sort. I mended the carts, made paths in the garden, dug
the flower beds, painted the roof of the house. When the time came to
sow the oats I tried to plough the ground over again, to harrow and to
sow, and I did it all conscientiously, keeping up with our labourer; I
was worn out, the rain and the cold wind made my face and feet burn for
hours afterwards. I dreamed of ploughed land at night. But field labour
did not attract me. I did not understand farming, and I did not care for
it; it was perhaps because my forefathers had not been tillers of the
soil, and the very blood that flowed in my veins was purely of the city.
I loved nature tenderly; I loved the fields and meadows and kitchen
gardens, but the peasant who turned up the soil with his plough and
urged on his pitiful horse, wet and tattered, with his craning neck, was
to me the expression of coarse, savage, ugly force, and every time I
looked at his uncouth movements I involuntarily began thinking of the
legendary life of the remote past, before men knew the use of fire. The
fierce bull that ran with the peasants' herd, and the horses, when they
dashed about the village, stamping their hoofs, moved me to fear, and
everything rather big, strong, and angry, whether it was the ram with
its horns, the gander, or the yard-dog, seemed to me the expression of
the same coarse, savage force. This mood was particularly strong in me
in bad weather, when heavy clouds were hanging over the black ploughed
land. Above all, when I was ploughing or sowing, and two or three people
stood looking how I was doing it, I had not the feeling that this work
was inevitable and obligatory, and it seemed to me that I was amusing
myself. I preferred doing something in the yard, and there was nothing I
liked so much as painting the roof.
I used to walk through the garden and the meadow to our mill. It was let
to a peasant of Kurilovka called Stepan, a handsome, dark fellow with a
thick black beard, who looked very strong. He did not like the miller's
work, and looked upon it as dreary and unprofitable, and only lived at
the mill in order not to live at home. He was a leather-worker, and was
always surrounded by a pleasant smell of tar and leather. He was not
fond of talking, he was listless and sluggish, and was always sitting in
the doorway or on the river bank, humming "oo-loo-loo." His wife and
mother-in-law, both white-faced, languid, and meek, used sometimes to
come from Kurilovka to see him; they made low bows to him and addressed
him formally, "Stepan Petrovitch," while he went on sitting on the river
bank, softly humming "oo-loo-loo," without responding by word or
movement to their bows. One hour and then a second would pass in
silence. His mother-in-law and wife, after whispering together, would
get up and gaze at him for some time, expecting him to look round; then
they would make a low bow, and in sugary, chanting voices, say:
"Good-bye, Stepan Petrovitch!"
And they would go away. After that Stepan, picking up the parcel they
had left, containing cracknels or a shirt, would heave a sigh and say,
winking in their direction:
"The female sex!"
The mill with two sets of millstones worked day and night. I used to
help Stepan; I liked the work, and when he went off I was glad to stay
and take his place. XI
After bright warm weather came a spell of wet; all May it rained and was
cold. The sound of the millwheels and of the rain disposed one to
indolence and slumber. The floor trembled, there was a smell of flour,
and that, too, induced drowsiness. My wife in a short fur-lined jacket,
and in men's high golosh boots, would make her appearance twice a day,
and she always said the same thing:
"And this is called summer! Worse than it was in October!"
We used to have tea and make the porridge together, or we would sit for
hours at a stretch without speaking, waiting for the rain to stop. Once,
when Stepan had gone off to the fair, Masha stayed all night at the
mill. When we got up we could not tell what time it was, as the
rainclouds covered the whole sky; but sleepy cocks were crowing at
Dubetchnya, and landrails were calling in the meadows; it was still
very, very early. . . . My wife and I went down to the millpond and drew
out the net which Stepan had thrown in over night in our presence. A big
pike was struggling in it, and a cray-fish was twisting about, clawing
upwards with its pincers.
"Let them go," said Masha. "Let them be happy too."
Because we got up so early and afterwards did nothing, that day seemed
very long, the longest day in my life. Towards evening Stepan came back
and I went home.
"Your father came to-day," said Masha.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"He has gone away. I would not see him."
Seeing that I remained standing and silent, that I was sorry for my
father, she said:
"One must be consistent. I would not see him, and sent word to him not
to trouble to come and see us again."
A minute later I was out at the gate and walking to the town to explain
things to my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time
since my marriage I felt suddenly sad, and in my brain exhausted by that
long, grey day, there was stirring the thought that perhaps I was not
living as I ought. I was worn out; little by little I was overcome by
despondency and indolence, I did not want to move or think, and after
going on a little I gave it up with a wave of my hand and turned back.
The engineer in a leather overcoat with a hood was standing in the
middle of the yard.
"Where's the furniture? There used to be lovely furniture in the Empire
style: there used to be pictures, there used to be vases, while now you
could play ball in it! I bought the place with the furniture. The devil
take her!"
Moisey, a thin pock-marked fellow of twenty-five, with insolent little
eyes, who was in the service of the general's widow, stood near him
crumpling up his cap in his hands; one of his cheeks was bigger than the
other, as though he had lain too long on it.
"Your honour was graciously pleased to buy the place without the
furniture," he brought out irresolutely; "I remember."
"Hold your tongue!" shouted the engineer; he turned crimson and shook
with anger . . . and the echo in the garden loudly repeated his shout.
XII
When I was doing anything in the garden or the yard, Moisey would stand
beside me, and folding his arms behind his back he would stand lazily
and impudently staring at me with his little eyes. And this irritated me
to such a degree that I threw up my work and went away.
From Stepan we heard that Moisey was Madame Tcheprakov's lover. I
noticed that when people came to her to borrow money they addressed
themselves first to Moisey, and once I saw a peasant, black from head to
foot-he must have been a coalheaver-bow down at Moisey's feet.
Sometimes, after a little whispering, he gave out money himself, without
consulting his mistress, from which I concluded that he did a little
business on his own account.
He used to shoot in our garden under our windows, carried off victuals
from our cellar, borrowed our horses without asking permission, and we
were indignant and began to feel as though Dubetchnya were not ours, and
Masha would say, turning pale:
"Can we really have to go on living with these reptiles another eighteen
months?"
Madame Tcheprakov's son, Ivan, was serving as a guard on our railway-
line. He had grown much thinner and feebler during the winter, so that a
single glass was enough to make him drunk, and he shivered out of the
sunshine. He wore the guard's uniform with aversion and was ashamed of
it, but considered his post a good one, as he could steal the candles
and sell them. My new position excited in him a mixed feeling of wonder,
envy, and a vague hope that something of the same sort might happen to
him. He used to watch Masha with ecstatic eyes, ask me what I had for
dinner now, and his lean and ugly face wore a sad and sweetish
expression, and he moved his fingers as though he were feeling my
happiness with them.
"Listen, Better-than-nothing," he said fussily, relighting his cigarette
at every instant; there was always a litter where he stood, for he
wasted dozens of matches, lighting one cigarette. "Listen, my life now
is the nastiest possible. The worst of it is any subaltern can shout:
'Hi, there, guard!' I have overheard all sorts of things in the train,
my boy, and do you know, I have learned that life's a beastly thing! My
mother has been the ruin of me! A doctor in the train told me that if
parents are immoral, their children are drunkards or criminals. Think of
that!"
Once he came into the yard, staggering; his eyes gazed about blankly,
his breathing was laboured; he laughed and cried and babbled as though
in a high fever, and the only words I could catch in his muddled talk
were, "My mother! Where's my mother?" which he uttered with a wail like
a child who has lost his mother in a crowd. I led him into our garden
and laid him down under a tree, and Masha and I took turns to sit by him
all that day and all night. He was very sick, and Masha looked with
aversion at his pale, wet face, and said:
"Is it possible these reptiles will go on living another year and a half
in our yard? It's awful! it's awful!"
And how many mortifications the peasants caused us! How many bitter
disappointments in those early days in the spring months, when we so
longed to be happy. My wife built a school. I drew a plan of a school
for sixty boys, and the Zemstvo Board approved of it, but advised us to
build the school at Kurilovka the big village which was only two miles