Short Stories by Chekhov
are glad to give me orders, and I am now considered a first-rate
workman, and the best foreman after Radish, who, though he has regained
his health, and though, as before, he paints the cupola on the belfry
without scaffolding, has no longer the force to control the workmen;
instead of him I now run about the town looking for work, I engage the
workmen and pay them, borrow money at a high rate of interest, and now
that I myself am a contractor, I understand how it is that one may have
to waste three days racing about the town in search of tilers on account
of some twopenny-halfpenny job. People are civil to me, they address me
politely, and in the houses where I work, they offer me tea, and send to
enquire whether I wouldn't like dinner. Children and young girls often
come and look at me with curiosity and compassion.
One day I was working in the Governor's garden, painting an arbour there
to look like marble. The Governor, walking in the garden, came up to the
arbour and, having nothing to do, entered into conversation with me, and
I reminded him how he had once summoned me to an interview with him. He
looked into my face intently for a minute, then made his mouth like a
round "O," flung up his hands, and said: "I don't remember!"
I have grown older, have become silent, stern, and austere, I rarely
laugh, and I am told that I have grown like Radish, and that like him I
bore the workmen by my useless exhortations.
Mariya Viktorovna, my former wife, is living now abroad, while her
father is constructing a railway somewhere in the eastern provinces, and
is buying estates there. Dr. Blagovo is also abroad. Dubetchnya has
passed again into the possession of Madame Tcheprakov, who has bought it
after forcing the engineer to knock the price down twenty per cent.
Moisey goes about now in a bowler hat; he often drives into the town in
a racing droshky on business of some sort, and stops near the bank. They
say he has already bought up a mortgaged estate, and is constantly
making enquiries at the bank about Dubetchnya, which he means to buy
too. Poor Ivan Tcheprakov was for a long while out of work, staggering
about the town and drinking. I tried to get him into our work, and for a
time he painted roofs and put in window-panes in our company, and even
got to like it, and stole oil, asked for tips, and drank like a regular
painter. But he soon got sick of the work, and went back to Dubetchnya,
and afterwards the workmen confessed to me that he had tried to persuade
them to join him one night and murder Moisey and rob Madame Tcheprakov.
My father has greatly aged; he is very bent, and in the evenings walks
up and down near his house. I never go to see him.
During an epidemic of cholera Prokofy doctored some of the shopkeepers
with pepper cordial and pitch, and took money for doing so, and, as I
learned from the newspapers, was flogged for abusing the doctors as he
sat in his shop. His shop boy Nikolka died of cholera. Karpovna is still
alive and, as always, she loves and fears her Prokofy. When she sees me,
she always shakes her head mournfully, and says with a sigh: "Your life
is ruined."
On working days I am busy from morning till night. On holidays, in fine
weather, I take my tiny niece (my sister reckoned on a boy, but the
child is a girl) and walk in a leisurely way to the cemetery. There I
stand or sit down, and stay a long time gazing at the grave that is so
dear to me, and tell the child that her mother lies here.
Sometimes, by the graveside, I find Anyuta Blagovo. We greet each other
and stand in silence, or talk of Kleopatra, of her child, of how sad
life is in this world; then, going out of the cemetery we walk along in
silence and she slackens her pace on purpose to walk beside me a little
longer. The little girl, joyous and happy, pulls at her hand, laughing
and screwing up her eyes in the bright sunlight, and we stand still and
join in caressing the dear child.
When we reach the town Anyuta Blagovo, agitated and flushing crimson,
says good-bye to me and walks on alone, austere and respectable. . . .
And no one who met her could, looking at her, imagine that she had just
been walking beside me and even caressing the child. AT A COUNTRY HOUSE
PAVEL ILYITCH RASHEVITCH walked up and down, stepping softly on the
floor covered with little Russian plaids, and casting a long shadow on
the wall and ceiling while his guest, Meier, the deputy examining
magistrate, sat on the sofa with one leg drawn up under him smoking and
listening. The clock already pointed to eleven, and there were sounds of
the table being laid in the room next to the study.
"Say what you like," Rashevitch was saying, "from the standpoint of
fraternity, equality, and the rest of it, Mitka, the swineherd, is
perhaps a man the same as Goethe and Frederick the Great; but take your
stand on a scientific basis, have the courage to look facts in the face,
and it will be obvious to you that blue blood is not a mere prejudice,
that it is not a feminine invention. Blue blood, my dear fellow, has an
historical justification, and to refuse to recognize it is, to my
thinking, as strange as to refuse to recognize the antlers on a stag.
One must reckon with facts! You are a law student and have confined your
attention to the humane studies, and you can still flatter yourself with
illusions of equality, fraternity, and so on; I am an incorrigible
Darwinian, and for me words such as lineage, aristocracy, noble blood,
are not empty sounds."
Rashevitch was roused and spoke with feeling. His eyes sparkled, his
pince-nez would not stay on his nose, he kept nervously shrugging his
shoulders and blinking, and at the word "Darwinian" he looked jauntily
in the looking-glass and combed his grey beard with both hands. He was
wearing a very short and shabby reefer jacket and narrow trousers; the
rapidity of his movements, his jaunty air, and his abbreviated jacket
all seemed out of keeping with him, and his big comely head, with long
hair suggestive of a bishop or a veteran poet, seemed to have been fixed
on to the body of a tall, lanky, affected youth. When he stood with his
legs wide apart, his long shadow looked like a pair of scissors.
He was fond of talking, and he always fancied that he was saying
something new and original. In the presence of Meier he was conscious of
an unusual flow of spirits and rush of ideas. He found the examining
magistrate sympathetic, and was stimulated by his youth, his health, his
good manners, his dignity, and, above all, by his cordial attitude to
himself and his family. Rashevitch was not a favourite with his
acquaintances; as a rule they fought shy of him, and, as he knew,
declared that he had driven his wife into her grave with his talking,
and they called him, behind his back, a spiteful creature and a toad.
Meier, a man new to the district and unprejudiced, visited him often and
readily and had even been known to say that Rashevitch and his daughters
were the only people in the district with whom he felt as much at home
as with his own people. Rashevitch liked him too, because he was a young
man who might be a good match for his elder daughter, Genya.
And now, enjoying his ideas and the sound of his own voice, and looking
with pleasure at the plump but well-proportioned, neatly cropped,
correct Meier, Rashevitch dreamed of how he would arrange his daughter's
marriage with a good man, and then how all his worries over the estate
would pass to his son-in-law. Hateful worries! The interest owing to the
bank had not been paid for the last two quarters, and fines and arrears
of all sorts had mounted up to more than two thousand.
"To my mind there can be no doubt," Rashevitch went on, growing more and
more enthusiastic, "that if a Richard Coeur-de-Lion, or Frederick
Barbarossa, for instance, is brave and noble those qualities will pass
by heredity to his son, together with the convolutions and bumps of the
brain, and if that courage and nobility of soul are preserved in the son
by means of education and exercise, and if he marries a princess who is
also noble and brave, those qualities will be transmitted to his
grandson, and so on, until they become a generic characteristic and pass
organically into the flesh and blood. Thanks to a strict sexual
selection, to the fact that high-born families have instinctively
guarded themselves against marriage with their inferiors, and young men
of high rank have not married just anybody, lofty, spiritual qualities
have been transmitted from generation to generation in their full
purity, have been preserved, and as time goes on have, through exercise,
become more exalted and lofty. For the fact that there is good in
humanity we are indebted to nature, to the normal, natural, consistent
order of things, which has throughout the ages scrupulously segregated
blue blood from plebeian. Yes, my dear boy, no low lout, no cook's son
has given us literature, science, art, law, conceptions of honour and
duty . . . . For all these things mankind is indebted exclusively to the
aristocracy, and from that point of view, the point of view of natural
history, an inferior Sobakevitch by the very fact of his blue blood is
superior and more useful than the very best merchant, even though the
latter may have built fifteen museums. Say what you like! And when I
refuse to shake hands with a low lout or a cook's son, or to let him sit
down to table with me, by that very act I am safeguarding what is the
best thing on earth, and am carrying out one of Mother Nature's finest
designs for leading us up to perfection. . ."
Rashevitch stood still, combing his beard with both hands; his shadow,
too, stood still on the wall, looking like a pair of scissors.
"Take Mother-Russia now," he went on, thrusting his hands in his pockets
and standing first on his heels and then on his toes. "Who are her best
people? Take our first-rate painters, writers, composers . . . . Who are
they? They were all of aristocratic origin. Pushkin, Lermontov,
Turgenev, Gontcharov, Tolstoy, they were not sexton's children."
"Gontcharov was a merchant," said Meier.
"Well, the exception only proves the rule. Besides, Gontcharov's genius
is quite open to dispute. But let us drop names and turn to facts. What
would you say, my good sir, for instance, to this eloquent fact: when
one of the mob forces his way where he has not been permitted before,
into society, into the world of learning, of literature, into the
Zemstvo or the law courts, observe, Nature herself, first of all,
champions the higher rights of humanity, and is the first to wage war on
the rabble. As soon as the plebeian forces himself into a place he is
not fit for he begins to ail, to go into consumption, to go out of his
mind, and to degenerate, and nowhere do we find so many puny, neurotic
wrecks, consumptives, and starvelings of all sorts as among these
darlings. They die like flies in autumn. If it were not for this
providential degeneration there would not have been a stone left
standing of our civilization, the rabble would have demolished
everything. Tell me, if you please, what has the inroad of the
barbarians given us so far? What has the rabble brought with it?"
Rashevitch assumed a mysterious, frightened expression, and went on:
"Never has literature and learning been at such low ebb among us as now.
The men of to-day, my good sir, have neither ideas nor ideals, and all
their sayings and doings are permeated by one spirit-to get all they can
and to strip someone to his last thread. All these men of to-day who
give themselves out as honest and progressive people can be bought at a
rouble a piece, and the distinguishing mark of the 'intellectual' of to-
day is that you have to keep strict watch over your pocket when you talk