Short Stories by Chekhov
to him, or else he will run off with your purse." Rashevitch winked and
burst out laughing. "Upon my soul, he will!" he said, in a thin, gleeful
voice. "And morals! What of their morals?" Rashevitch looked round
towards the door. "No one is surprised nowadays when a wife robs and
leaves her husband. What's that, a trifle! Nowadays, my dear boy, a chit
of a girl of twelve is scheming to get a lover, and all these amateur
theatricals and literary evenings are only invented to make it easier to
get a rich merchant to take a girl on as his mistress. . . . Mothers
sell their daughters, and people make no bones about asking a husband at
what price he sells his wife, and one can haggle over the bargain, you
know, my dear. . . ."
Meier, who had been sitting motionless and silent all the time, suddenly
got up from the sofa and looked at his watch.
"I beg your pardon, Pavel Ilyitch," he said, "it is time for me to be
going."
But Pavel Ilyitch, who had not finished his remarks, put his arm round
him and, forcibly reseating him on the sofa, vowed that he would not let
him go without supper. And again Meier sat and listened, but he looked
at Rashevitch with perplexity and uneasiness, as though he were only now
beginning to understand him. Patches of red came into his face. And when
at last a maidservant came in to tell them that the young ladies asked
them to go to supper, he gave a sigh of relief and was the first to walk
out of the study.
At the table in the next room were Rashevitch's daughters, Genya and
Iraida, girls of four-and-twenty and two-and-twenty respectively, both
very pale, with black eyes, and exactly the same height. Genya had her
hair down, and Iraida had hers done up high on her head. Before eating
anything they each drank a wineglassful of bitter liqueur, with an air
as though they had drunk it by accident for the first time in their
lives and both were overcome with confusion and burst out laughing.
"Don't be naughty, girls," said Rashevitch.
Genya and Iraida talked French with each other, and Russian with their
father and their visitor. Interrupting one another, and mixing up French
words with Russian, they began rapidly describing how just at this time
in August, in previous years, they had set off to the boarding school
and what fun it had been. Now there was nowhere to go, and they had to
stay at their home in the country, summer and winter without change.
Such dreariness!
"Don't be naughty, girls," Rashevitch said again.
He wanted to be talking himself. If other people talked in his presence,
he suffered from a feeling like jealousy.
"So that's how it is, my dear boy," he began, looking affectionately at
Meier. "In the simplicity and goodness of our hearts, and from fear of
being suspected of being behind the times, we fraternize with, excuse
me, all sorts of riff-raff, we preach fraternity and equality with
money-lenders and innkeepers; but if we would only think, we should see
how criminal that good-nature is. We have brought things to such a pass,
that the fate of civilization is hanging on a hair. My dear fellow, what
our forefathers gained in the course of ages will be to-morrow, if not
to-day, outraged and destroyed by these modern Huns. . . ."
After supper they all went into the drawing-room. Genya and Iraida
lighted the candles on the piano, got out their music. . . . But their
father still went on talking, and there was no telling when he would
leave off. They looked with misery and vexation at their egoist-father,
to whom the pleasure of chattering and displaying his intelligence was
evidently more precious and important than his daughters' happiness.
Meier, the only young man who ever came to their house, came-they knew-
for the sake of their charming, feminine society, but the irrepressible
old man had taken possession of him, and would not let him move a step
away.
"Just as the knights of the west repelled the invasions of the Mongols,
so we, before it is too late, ought to unite and strike together against
our foe," Rashevitch went on in the tone of a preacher, holding up his
right hand. "May I appear to the riff-raff not as Pavel Ilyitch, but as
a mighty, menacing Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Let us give up sloppy
sentimentality; enough of it! Let us all make a compact, that as soon as
a plebeian comes near us we fling some careless phrase straight in his
ugly face: 'Paws off! Go back to your kennel, you cur!' straight in his
ugly face," Rashevitch went on gleefully, flicking his crooked finger in
front of him. "In his ugly face!"
"I can't do that," Meier brought out, turning away.
"Why not?" Rashevitch answered briskly, anticipating a prolonged and
interesting argument. "Why not?"
"Because I am of the artisan class myself!"
As he said this Meier turned crimson, and his neck seemed to swell, and
tears actually gleamed in his eyes.
"My father was a simple workman," he said, in a rough, jerky voice, "but
I see no harm in that."
Rashevitch was fearfully confused. Dumbfoundered, as though he had been
caught in the act of a crime, he gazed helplessly at Meier, and did not
know what to say. Genya and Iraida flushed crimson, and bent over their
music; they were ashamed of their tactless father. A minute passed in
silence, and there was a feeling of unbearable discomfort, when all at
once with a sort of painful stiffness and inappropriateness, there
sounded in the air the words:
"Yes, I am of the artisan class, and I am proud of it!"
Thereupon Meier, stumbling awkwardly among the furniture, took his
leave, and walked rapidly into the hall, though his carriage was not yet
at the door.
"You'll have a dark drive to-night," Rashevitch muttered, following him.
"The moon does not rise till late to-night."
They stood together on the steps in the dark, and waited for the horses
to be brought. It was cool.
"There's a falling star," said Meier, wrapping himself in his overcoat.
"There are a great many in August."
When the horses were at the door, Rashevitch gazed intently at the sky,
and said with a sigh:
"A phenomenon worthy of the pen of Flammarion. . . ."
After seeing his visitor off, he walked up and down the garden,
gesticulating in the darkness, reluctant to believe that such a queer,
stupid misunderstanding had only just occurred. He was ashamed and vexed
with himself. In the first place it had been extremely incautious and
tactless on his part to raise the damnable subject of blue blood,
without finding out beforehand what his visitor's position was.
Something of the same sort had happened to him before; he had, on one
occasion in a railway carriage, begun abusing the Germans, and it had
afterwards appeared that all the persons he had been conversing with
were German. In the second place he felt that Meier would never come and
see him again. These intellectuals who have risen from the people are
morbidly sensitive, obstinate and slow to forgive.
"It's bad, it's bad," muttered Rashevitch, spitting; he had a feeling of
discomfort and loathing as though he had eaten soap. "Ah, it's bad!"
He could see from the garden, through the drawing-room window, Genya by
the piano, very pale, and looking scared, with her hair down. She was
talking very, very rapidly. . . . Iraida was walking up and down the
room, lost in thought; but now she, too, began talking rapidly with her
face full of indignation. They were both talking at once. Rashevitch
could not hear a word, but he guessed what they were talking about.
Genya was probably complaining that her father drove away every decent
person from the house with his talk, and to-day he had driven away from
them their one acquaintance, perhaps a suitor, and now the poor young
man would not have one place in the whole district where he could find
rest for his soul. And judging by the despairing way in which she threw
up her arms, Iraida was talking probably on the subject of their dreary
existence, their wasted youth. . . .
When he reached his own room, Rashevitch sat down on his bed and began
to undress. He felt oppressed, and he was still haunted by the same
feeling as though he had eaten soap. He was ashamed. As he undressed he
looked at his long, sinewy, elderly legs, and remembered that in the
district they called him the "toad," and after every long conversation
he always felt ashamed. Somehow or other, by some fatality, it always
happened that he began mildly, amicably, with good intentions, calling
himself an old student, an idealist, a Quixote, but without being
himself aware of it, gradually passed into abuse and slander, and what
was most surprising, with perfect sincerity criticized science, art and
morals, though he had not read a book for the last twenty years, had
been nowhere farther than their provincial town, and did not really know
what was going on in the world. If he sat down to write anything, if it
were only a letter of congratulation, there would somehow be abuse in
the letter. And all this was strange, because in reality he was a man of
feeling, given to tears. Could he be possessed by some devil which hated
and slandered in him, apart from his own will?
"It's bad," he sighed, as he lay down under the quilt. "It's bad."
His daughters did not sleep either. There was a sound of laughter and
screaming, as though someone was being pursued; it was Genya in
hysterics. A little later Iraida was sobbing too. A maidservant ran
barefoot up and down the passage several times. . . .
"What a business! Good Lord! . . ." muttered Rashevitch, sighing and
tossing from side to side. "It's bad."
He had a nightmare. He dreamt he was standing naked, as tall as a
giraffe, in the middle of the room, and saying, as he flicked his finger
before him:
"In his ugly face! his ugly face! his ugly face!"
He woke up in a fright, and first of all remembered that a
misunderstanding had happened in the evening, and that Meier would
certainly not come again. He remembered, too, that he had to pay the
interest at the bank, to find husbands for his daughters, that one must
have food and drink, and close at hand were illness, old age,
unpleasantnesses, that soon it would be winter, and that there was no
wood. . . .
It was past nine o'clock in the morning. Rashevitch slowly dressed,
drank his tea and ate two hunks of bread and butter. His daughters did
not come down to breakfast; they did not want to meet him, and that
wounded him. He lay down on his sofa in his study, then sat down to his
table and began writing a letter to his daughters. His hand shook and
his eyes smarted. He wrote that he was old, and no use to anyone and
that nobody loved him, and he begged his daughters to forget him, and
when he died to bury him in a plain, deal coffin without ceremony, or to
send his body to Harkov to the dissecting theatre. He felt that every
line he wrote reeked of malice and affectation, but he could not stop,
and went on writing and writing.
"The toad!" he suddenly heard from the next room; it was the voice of
his elder daughter, a voice with a hiss of indignation. "The toad!"
"The toad!" the younger one repeated like an echo. "The toad!" A FATHER
"I ADMIT I have had a drop. . . . You must excuse me. I went into a beer
shop on the way here, and as it was so hot had a couple of bottles. It's
hot, my boy."
Old Musatov took a nondescript rag out of his pocket and wiped his
shaven, battered face with it.
"I have come only for a minute, Borenka, my angel," he went on, not
looking at his son, "about something very important. Excuse me, perhaps
I am hindering you. Haven't you ten roubles, my dear, you could let me
have till Tuesday? You see, I ought to have paid for my lodging
yesterday, and money, you see! . . . None! Not to save my life!"