Short Stories by Chekhov
"Autumn, autumn, autumn, . . ." said Masha softly, looking away. "Summer
is over. There are no birds and nothing is green but the willows."
Yes, summer was over. There were fine, warm days, but it was fresh in
the morning, and the shepherds went out in their sheepskins already; and
in our garden the dew did not dry off the asters all day long. There
were plaintive sounds all the time, and one could not make out whether
they came from the shutters creaking on their rusty hinges, or from the
flying cranes-and one's heart felt light, and one was eager for life.
"The summer is over," said Masha. "Now you and I can balance our
accounts. We have done a lot of work, a lot of thinking; we are the
better for it-all honour and glory to us-we have succeeded in self-
improvement; but have our successes had any perceptible influence on the
life around us, have they brought any benefit to anyone whatever? No.
Ignorance, physical uncleanliness, drunkenness, an appallingly high
infant mortality, everything remains as it was, and no one is the better
for your having ploughed and sown, and my having wasted money and read
books. Obviously we have been working only for ourselves and have had
advanced ideas only for ourselves." Such reasonings perplexed me, and I
did not know what to think.
"We have been sincere from beginning to end," said I, "and if anyone is
sincere he is right."
"Who disputes it? We were right, but we haven't succeeded in properly
accomplishing what we were right in. To begin with, our external methods
themselves-aren't they mistaken? You want to be of use to men, but by
the very fact of your buying an estate, from the very start you cut
yourself off from any possibility of doing anything useful for them.
Then if you work, dress, eat like a peasant you sanctify, as it were, by
your authority, their heavy, clumsy dress, their horrible huts, their
stupid beards. . . . On the other hand, if we suppose that you work for
long, long years, your whole life, that in the end some practical
results are obtained, yet what are they, your results, what can they do
against such elemental forces as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold,
degeneration? A drop in the ocean! Other methods of struggle are needed,
strong, bold, rapid! If one really wants to be of use one must get out
of the narrow circle of ordinary social work, and try to act direct upon
the mass! What is wanted, first of all, is a loud, energetic propaganda.
Why is it that art-music, for instance-is so living, so popular, and in
reality so powerful? Because the musician or the singer affects
thousands at once. Precious, precious art!" she went on, looking
dreamily at the sky. "Art gives us wings and carries us far, far away!
Anyone who is sick of filth, of petty, mercenary interests, anyone who
is revolted, wounded, and indignant, can find peace and satisfaction
only in the beautiful."
When we drove into Kurilovka the weather was bright and joyous.
Somewhere they were threshing; there was a smell of rye straw. A
mountain ash was bright red behind the hurdle fences, and all the trees
wherever one looked were ruddy or golden. They were ringing the bells,
they were carrying the ikons to the school, and we could hear them sing:
"Holy Mother, our Defender," and how limpid the air was, and how high
the doves were flying.
The service was being held in the classroom. Then the peasants of
Kurilovka brought Masha the ikon, and the peasants of Dubetchnya offered
her a big loaf and a gilt salt cellar. And Masha broke into sobs.
"If anything has been said that shouldn't have been or anything done not
to your liking, forgive us," said an old man, and he bowed down to her
and to me.
As we drove home Masha kept looking round at the school; the green roof,
which I had painted, and which was glistening in the sun, remained in
sight for a long while. And I felt that the look Masha turned upon it
now was one of farewell. XVI
In the evening she got ready to go to the town. Of late she had taken to
going often to the town and staying the night there. In her absence I
could not work, my hands felt weak and limp; our huge courtyard seemed a
dreary, repulsive, empty hole. The garden was full of angry noises, and
without her the house, the trees, the horses were no longer "ours."
I did not go out of the house, but went on sitting at her table beside
her bookshelf with the books on land work, those old favourites no
longer wanted and looking at me now so shamefacedly. For whole hours
together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the autumn night,
black as soot, came on outside, I kept examining her old glove, or the
pen with which she always wrote, or her little scissors. I did nothing,
and realized clearly that all I had done before, ploughing, mowing,
chopping, had only been because she wished it. And if she had sent me to
clean a deep well, where I had to stand up to my waist in deep water, I
should have crawled into the well without considering whether it was
necessary or not. And now when she was not near, Dubetchnya, with its
ruins, its untidiness, its banging shutters, with its thieves by day and
by night, seemed to me a chaos in which any work would be useless.
Besides, what had I to work for here, why anxiety and thought about the
future, if I felt that the earth was giving way under my feet, that I
had played my part in Dubetchnya, and that the fate of the books on
farming was awaiting me too? Oh, what misery it was at night, in hours
of solitude, when I was listening every minute in alarm, as though I
were expecting someone to shout that it was time for me to go away! I
did not grieve for Dubetchnya. I grieved for my love which, too, was
threatened with its autumn. What an immense happiness it is to love and
be loved, and how awful to feel that one is slipping down from that high
pinnacle!
Masha returned from the town towards the evening of the next day. She
was displeased with something, but she concealed it, and only said, why
was it all the window frames had been put in for the winter it was
enough to suffocate one. I took out two frames. We were not hungry, but
we sat down to supper.
"Go and wash your hands," said my wife; "you smell of putty."
She had brought some new illustrated papers from the town, and we looked
at them together after supper. There were supplements with fashion
plates and patterns. Masha looked through them casually, and was putting
them aside to examine them properly later on; but one dress, with a flat
skirt as full as a bell and large sleeves, interested her, and she
looked at it for a minute gravely and attentively.
"That's not bad," she said.
"Yes, that dress would suit you beautifully," I said, "beautifully."
And looking with emotion at the dress, admiring that patch of grey
simply because she liked it, I went on tenderly:
"A charming, exquisite dress! Splendid, glorious, Masha! My precious
Masha!"
And tears dropped on the fashion plate.
"Splendid Masha . . ." I muttered; "sweet, precious Masha. . . ."
She went to bed, while I sat another hour looking at the illustrations.
"It's a pity you took out the window frames," she said from the bedroom,
"I am afraid it may be cold. Oh, dear, what a draught there is!"
I read something out of the column of odds and ends, a receipt for
making cheap ink, and an account of the biggest diamond in the world. I
came again upon the fashion plate of the dress she liked, and I imagined
her at a ball, with a fan, bare shoulders, brilliant, splendid, with a
full understanding of painting, music, literature, and how small and how
brief my part seemed!
Our meeting, our marriage, had been only one of the episodes of which
there would be many more in the life of this vital, richly gifted woman.
All the best in the world, as I have said already, was at her service,
and she received it absolutely for nothing, and even ideas and the
intellectual movement in vogue served simply for her recreation, giving
variety to her life, and I was only the sledge-driver who drove her from
one entertainment to another. Now she did not need me. She would take
flight, and I should be alone.
And as though in response to my thought, there came a despairing scream
from the garden.
"He-e-elp!"
It was a shrill, womanish voice, and as though to mimic it the wind
whistled in the chimney on the same shrill note. Half a minute passed,
and again through the noise of the wind, but coming, it seemed, from the
other end of the yard:
"He-e-elp!"
"Misail, do you hear?" my wife asked me softly. "Do you hear?"
She came out from the bedroom in her nightgown, with her hair down, and
listened, looking at the dark window.
"Someone is being murdered," she said. "That is the last straw."
I took my gun and went out. It was very dark outside, the wind was high,
and it was difficult to stand. I went to the gate and listened, the
trees roared, the wind whistled and, probably at the feeble-minded
peasant's, a dog howled lazily. Outside the gates the darkness was
absolute, not a light on the railway-line. And near the lodge, which a
year before had been the office, suddenly sounded a smothered scream:
"He-e-elp!"
"Who's there?" I called.
There were two people struggling. One was thrusting the other out, while
the other was resisting, and both were breathing heavily.
"Leave go," said one, and I recognized Ivan Tcheprakov; it was he who
was shrieking in a shrill, womanish voice: "Let go, you damned brute, or
I'll bite your hand off."
The other I recognized as Moisey. I separated them, and as I did so I
could not resist hitting Moisey two blows in the face. He fell down,
then got up again, and I hit him once more.
"He tried to kill me," he muttered. "He was trying to get at his mamma's
chest. . . . I want to lock him up in the lodge for security."
Tcheprakov was drunk and did not recognize me; he kept drawing deep
breaths, as though he were just going to shout "help" again.
I left them and went back to the house; my wife was lying on her bed;
she had dressed. I told her what had happened in the yard, and did not
conceal the fact that I had hit Moisey.
"It's terrible to live in the country," she said.
"And what a long night it is. Oh dear, if only it were over!"
"He-e-elp!" we heard again, a little later.
"I'll go and stop them," I said.
"No, let them bite each other's throats," she said with an expression of
disgust.
She was looking up at the ceiling, listening, while I sat beside her,
not daring to speak to her, feeling as though I were to blame for their
shouting "help" in the yard and for the night's seeming so long.
We were silent, and I waited impatiently for a gleam of light at the
window, and Masha looked all the time as though she had awakened from a
trance and now was marvelling how she, so clever, and well-educated, so
elegant, had come into this pitiful, provincial, empty hole among a crew
of petty, insignificant people, and how she could have so far forgotten
herself as ever to be attracted by one of these people, and for more
than six months to have been his wife. It seemed to me that at that
moment it did not matter to her whether it was I, or Moisey, or
Tcheprakov; everything for her was merged in that savage drunken "help"-
I and our marriage, and our work together, and the mud and slush of
autumn, and when she sighed or moved into a more comfortable position I
read in her face: "Oh, that morning would come quickly!"
In the morning she went away. I spent another three days at Dubetchnya
expecting her, then I packed all our things in one room, locked it, and
walked to the town. It was already evening when I rang at the
engineer's, and the street lamps were burning in Great Dvoryansky