Short Stories by Chekhov
bricks, tiles, pieces of iron. The village elder with witnesses made a
search in their huts; the village meeting fined them two roubles each,
and afterwards this money was spent on drink by the whole commune.
When Masha heard about this, she would say to the doctor or my sister
indignantly:
"What beasts! It's awful! awful!"
And I heard her more than once express regret that she had ever taken it
into her head to build the school.
"You must understand," the doctor tried to persuade her, "that if you
build this school and do good in general, it's not for the sake of the
peasants, but in the name of culture, in the name of the future; and the
worse the peasants are the more reason for building the school.
Understand that!"
But there was a lack of conviction in his voice, and it seemed to me
that both he and Masha hated the peasants.
Masha often went to the mill, taking my sister with her, and they both
said, laughing, that they went to have a look at Stepan, he was so
handsome. Stepan, it appeared, was torpid and taciturn only with men; in
feminine society his manners were free and easy, and he talked
incessantly. One day, going down to the river to bathe, I accidentally
overheard a conversation. Masha and Kleopatra, both in white dresses,
were sitting on the bank in the spreading shade of a willow, and Stepan
was standing by them with his hands behind his back, and was saying:
"Are peasants men? They are not men, but, asking your pardon, wild
beasts, impostors. What life has a peasant? Nothing but eating and
drinking; all he cares for is victuals to be cheaper and swilling liquor
at the tavern like a fool; and there's no conversation, no manners, no
formality, nothing but ignorance! He lives in filth, his wife lives in
filth, and his children live in filth. What he stands up in, he lies
down to sleep in; he picks the potatoes out of the soup with his
fingers; he drinks kvass with a cockroach in it, and doesn't bother to
blow it away!"
"It's their poverty, of course," my sister put in.
"Poverty? There is want to be sure, there's different sorts of want,
Madam. If a man is in prison, or let us say blind or crippled, that
really is trouble I wouldn't wish anyone, but if a man's free and has
all his senses, if he has his eyes and his hands and his strength and
God, what more does he want? It's cockering themselves, and it's
ignorance, Madam, it's not poverty. If you, let us suppose, good
gentlefolk, by your education, wish out of kindness to help him he will
drink away your money in his low way; or, what's worse, he will open a
drinkshop, and with your money start robbing the people. You say
poverty, but does the rich peasant live better? He, too, asking your
pardon, lives like a swine: coarse, loud-mouthed, cudgel-headed, broader
than he is long, fat, red-faced mug, I'd like to swing my fist and send
him flying, the scoundrel. There's Larion, another rich one at
Dubetchnya, and I bet he strips the bark off your trees as much as any
poor one; and he is a foul-mouthed fellow; his children are the same,
and when he has had a drop too much he'll topple with his nose in a
puddle and sleep there. They are all a worthless lot, Madam. If you live
in a village with them it is like hell. It has stuck in my teeth, that
village has, and thank the Lord, the King of Heaven, I've plenty to eat
and clothes to wear, I served out my time in the dragoons, I was village
elder for three years, and now I am a free Cossack, I live where I like.
I don't want to live in the village, and no one has the right to force
me. They say-my wife. They say you are bound to live in your cottage
with your wife. But why so? I am not her hired man."
"Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?" asked Masha.
"Love among us in the village!" answered Stepan, and he gave a laugh.
"Properly speaking, Madam, if you care to know, this is my second
marriage. I am not a Kurilovka man, I am from Zalegoshtcho, but
afterwards I was taken into Kurilovka when I married. You see my father
did not want to divide the land among us. There were five of us
brothers. I took my leave and went to another village to live with my
wife's family, but my first wife died when she was young."
"What did she die of?"
"Of foolishness. She used to cry and cry and cry for no reason, and so
she pined away. She was always drinking some sort of herbs to make her
better looking, and I suppose she damaged her inside. And my second wife
is a Kurilovka woman too, there is nothing in her. She's a village
woman, a peasant woman, and nothing more. I was taken in when they
plighted me to her. I thought she was young and fair-skinned, and that
they lived in a clean way. Her mother was just like a Flagellant and she
drank coffee, and the chief thing, to be sure, they were clean in their
ways. So I married her, and next day we sat down to dinner; I bade my
mother-in-law give me a spoon, and she gives me a spoon, and I see her
wipe it out with her finger. So much for you, thought I; nice sort of
cleanliness yours is. I lived a year with them and then I went away. I
might have married a girl from the town," he went on after a pause.
"They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want with a
helpmate? I help myself; I'd rather she talked to me, and not clack,
clack, clack, but circumstantially, feelingly. What is life without good
conversation?"
Stepan suddenly paused, and at once there was the sound of his dreary,
monotonous "oo-loo-loo-loo." This meant that he had seen me.
Masha used often to go to the mill, and evidently found pleasure in her
conversations with Stepan. Stepan abused the peasants with such
sincerity and conviction, and she was attracted to him. Every time she
came back from the mill the feeble-minded peasant, who looked after the
garden, shouted at her:
"Wench Palashka! Hulla, wench Palashka!" and he would bark like a dog:
"Ga! Ga!"
And she would stop and look at him attentively, as though in that
idiot's barking she found an answer to her thoughts, and probably he
attracted her in the same way as Stepan's abuse. At home some piece of
news would await her, such, for instance, as that the geese from the
village had ruined our cabbage in the garden, or that Larion had stolen
the reins; and shrugging her shoulders, she would say with a laugh:
"What do you expect of these people?"
She was indignant, and there was rancour in her heart, and meanwhile I
was growing used to the peasants, and I felt more and more drawn to
them. For the most part they were nervous, irritable, downtrodden
people; they were people whose imagination had been stifled, ignorant,
with a poor, dingy outlook on life, whose thoughts were ever the same-of
the grey earth, of grey days, of black bread, people who cheated, but
like birds hiding nothing but their head behind the tree-people who
could not count. They would not come to mow for us for twenty roubles,
but they came for half a pail of vodka, though for twenty roubles they
could have bought four pails. There really was filth and drunkenness and
foolishness and deceit, but with all that one yet felt that the life of
the peasants rested on a firm, sound foundation. However uncouth a wild
animal the peasant following the plough seemed, and however he might
stupefy himself with vodka, still, looking at him more closely, one felt
that there was in him what was needed, something very important, which
was lacking in Masha and in the doctor, for instance, and that was that
he believed the chief thing on earth was truth and justice, and that his
salvation, and that of the whole people, was only to be found in truth
and justice, and so more than anything in the world he loved just
dealing. I told my wife she saw the spots on the glass, but not the
glass itself; she said nothing in reply, or hummed like Stepan "oo-loo-
loo-loo." When this good-hearted and clever woman turned pale with
indignation, and with a quiver in her voice spoke to the doctor of the
drunkenness and dishonesty, it perplexed me, and I was struck by the
shortness of her memory. How could she forget that her father the
engineer drank too, and drank heavily, and that the money with which
Dubetchnya had been bought had been acquired by a whole series of
shameless, impudent dishonesties? How could she forget it? XIV
My sister, too, was leading a life of her own which she carefully hid
from me. She was often whispering with Masha. When I went up to her she
seemed to shrink into herself, and there was a guilty, imploring look in
her eyes; evidently there was something going on in her heart of which
she was afraid or ashamed. So as to avoid meeting me in the garden, or
being left alone with me, she always kept close to Masha, and I rarely
had an opportunity of talking to her except at dinner.
One evening I was walking quietly through the garden on my way back from
the building. It was beginning to get dark. Without noticing me, or
hearing my step, my sister was walking near a spreading old apple-tree,
absolutely noiselessly as though she were a phantom. She was dressed in
black, and was walking rapidly backwards and forwards on the same track,
looking at the ground. An apple fell from the tree; she started at the
sound, stood still and pressed her hands to her temples. At that moment
I went up to her.
In a rush of tender affection which suddenly flooded my heart, with
tears in my eyes, suddenly remembering my mother and our childhood, I
put my arm round her shoulders and kissed her.
"What is the matter?" I asked her. "You are unhappy; I have seen it for
a long time. Tell me what's wrong?"
"I am frightened," she said, trembling.
"What is it?" I insisted. "For God's sake, be open!"
"I will, I will be open; I will tell you the whole truth. To hide it
from you is so hard, so agonizing. Misail, I love . . ." she went on in
a whisper, "I love him . . . I love him. . . . I am happy, but why am I
so frightened?"
There was the sound of footsteps; between the trees appeared Dr. Blagovo
in his silk shirt with his high top boots. Evidently they had arranged
to meet near the apple-tree. Seeing him, she rushed impulsively towards
him with a cry of pain as though he were being taken from her.
"Vladimir! Vladimir!"
She clung to him and looked greedily into his face, and only then I
noticed how pale and thin she had become of late. It was particularly
noticeable from her lace collar which I had known for so long, and which
now hung more loosely than ever before about her thin, long neck. The
doctor was disconcerted, but at once recovered himself, and, stroking
her hair, said:
"There, there. . . . Why so nervous? You see, I'm here."
We were silent, looking with embarrassment at each other, then we walked
on, the three of us together, and I heard the doctor say to me:
"Civilized life has not yet begun among us. Old men console themselves
by making out that if there is nothing now, there was something in the
forties or the sixties; that's the old: you and I are young; our brains
have not yet been touched by marasmus senilis; we cannot comfort
ourselves with such illusions. The beginning of Russia was in 862, but
the beginning of civilized Russia has not come yet."
But I did not grasp the meaning of these reflections. It was somehow
strange, I could not believe it, that my sister was in love, that she
was walking and holding the arm of a stranger and looking tenderly at
him. My sister, this nervous, frightened, crushed, fettered creature,
loved a man who was married and had children! I felt sorry for
something, but what exactly I don't know; the presence of the doctor was
for some reason distasteful to me now, and I could not imagine what
would come of this love of theirs. XV
Masha and I drove to Kurilovka to the dedication of the school.