Short Stories by Chekhov
"Blockhead!" the prince filtered through his teeth, looking after him.
"It's wonderful how disgusting it sometimes is to see satisfied faces. A
stupid, animal feeling due to hunger, I expect. . . . What was I saying?
Oh, yes, about going into the Service, . . . I should be ashamed to take
the salary, and yet, to tell the truth, it is stupid. If one looks at it
from a broader point of view, more seriously, I am eating what isn't
mine now. Am I not? But why am I not ashamed of that. . . . It is a case
of habit, I suppose . . . and not being able to realize one's true
position. . . . But that position is most likely awful. . ."
I looked at him, wondering if the prince were showing off. But his face
was mild and his eyes were mournfully following the movements of the
chestnut horse racing away, as though his happiness were racing away
with it.
Apparently he was in that mood of irritation and sadness when women weep
quietly for no reason, and men feel a craving to complain of themselves,
of life, of God. . . .
When I got out of the chaise at the gates of the house the prince said
to me:
"A man once said, wanting to annoy me, that I have the face of a
cardsharper. I have noticed that cardsharpers are usually dark. Do you
know, it seems that if I really had been born a cardsharper I should
have remained a decent person to the day of my death, for I should never
have had the boldness to do wrong. I tell you frankly I have had the
chance once in my life of getting rich if I had told a lie, a lie to
myself and one woman . . . and one other person whom I know would have
forgiven me for lying; I should have put into my pocket a million. But I
could not. I hadn't the pluck!"
From the gates we had to go to the house through the copse by a long
road, level as a ruler, and planted on each side with thick, lopped
lilacs. The house looked somewhat heavy, tasteless, like a façade on
the stage. It rose clumsily out of a mass of greenery, and caught the
eye like a great stone thrown on the velvety turf. At the chief entrance
I was met by a fat old footman in a green swallow-tail coat and big
silver-rimmed spectacles; without making any announcement, only looking
contemptuously at my dusty figure, he showed me in. As I mounted the
soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of
india-rubber. At the top I was enveloped in an atmosphere found only in
museums, in signorial mansions and old-fashioned merchant houses; it
seemed like the smell of something long past, which had once lived and
died and had left its soul in the rooms. I passed through three or four
rooms on my way from the entry to the drawing-room. I remember bright
yellow, shining floors, lustres wrapped in stiff muslin, narrow, striped
rugs which stretched not straight from door to door, as they usually do,
but along the walls, so that not venturing to touch the bright floor
with my muddy boots I had to describe a rectangle in each room. In the
drawing-room, where the footman left me, stood old-fashioned ancestral
furniture in white covers, shrouded in twilight. It looked surly and
elderly, and, as though out of respect for its repose, not a sound was
audible.
Even the clock was silent . . . it seemed as though the Princess
Tarakanov had fallen asleep in the golden frame, and the water and the
rats were still and motionless through magic. The daylight, afraid of
disturbing the universal tranquillity, scarcely pierced through the
lowered blinds, and lay on the soft rugs in pale, slumbering streaks.
Three minutes passed and a big, elderly woman in black, with her cheek
bandaged up, walked noiselessly into the drawing-room. She bowed to me
and pulled up the blinds. At once, enveloped in the bright sunlight, the
rats and water in the picture came to life and movement, Princess
Tarakanov was awakened, and the old chairs frowned gloomily.
"Her honour will be here in a minute, sir . . ." sighed the old lady,
frowning too.
A few more minutes of waiting and I saw Nadyezhda Lvovna. What struck me
first of all was that she certainly was ugly, short, scraggy, and round-
shouldered. Her thick, chestnut hair was magnificent; her face, pure and
with a look of culture in it, was aglow with youth; there was a clear
and intelligent expression in her eyes; but the whole charm of her head
was lost through the thickness of her lips and the over-acute facial
angle.
I mentioned my name, and announced the object of my visit.
"I really don't know what I am to say!" she said, in hesitation,
dropping her eyes and smiling. "I don't like to refuse, and at the same
time. . . ."
"Do, please," I begged.
Nadyezhda Lvovna looked at me and laughed. I laughed too. She was
probably amused by what Grontovsky had so enjoyed-that is, the right of
giving or withholding permission; my visit suddenly struck me as queer
and strange.
"I don't like to break the long-established rules," said Madame
Kandurin. "Shooting has been forbidden on our estate for the last six
years. No!" she shook her head resolutely. "Excuse me, I must refuse
you. If I allow you I must allow others. I don't like unfairness. Either
let all or no one."
"I am sorry!" I sighed. "It's all the sadder because we have come more
than ten miles. I am not alone," I added, "Prince Sergey Ivanitch is
with me."
I uttered the prince's name with no arrière pensée, not prompted by
any special motive or aim; I simply blurted it out without thinking, in
the simplicity of my heart. Hearing the familiar name Madame Kandurin
started, and bent a prolonged gaze upon me. I noticed her nose turn
pale.
"That makes no difference . . ." she said, dropping her eyes.
As I talked to her I stood at the window that looked out on the
shrubbery. I could see the whole shrubbery with the avenues and the
ponds and the road by which I had come. At the end of the road, beyond
the gates, the back of our chaise made a dark patch. Near the gate, with
his back to the house, the prince was standing with his legs apart,
talking to the lanky Grontovsky.
Madame Kandurin had been standing all the time at the other window. She
looked from time to time towards the shrubbery, and from the moment I
mentioned the prince's name she did not turn away from the window.
"Excuse me," she said, screwing up her eyes as she looked towards the
road and the gate, "but it would be unfair to allow you only to shoot. .
. . And, besides, what pleasure is there in shooting birds? What's it
for? Are they in your way?"
A solitary life, immured within four walls, with its indoor twilight and
heavy smell of decaying furniture, disposes people to sentimentality.
Madame Kandurin's idea did her credit, but I could not resist saying:
"If one takes that line one ought to go barefoot. Boots are made out of
the leather of slaughtered animals."
"One must distinguish between a necessity and a caprice," Madame
Kandurin answered in a toneless voice.
She had by now recognized the prince, and did not take her eyes off his
figure. It is hard to describe the delight and the suffering with which
her ugly face was radiant! Her eyes were smiling and shining, her lips
were quivering and laughing, while her face craned closer to the panes.
Keeping hold of a flower-pot with both hands, with bated breath and with
one foot slightly lifted, she reminded me of a dog pointing and waiting
with passionate impatience for "Fetch it!"
I looked at her and at the prince who could not tell a lie once in his
life, and I felt angry and bitter against truth and falsehood, which
play such an elemental part in the personal happiness of men.
The prince started suddenly, took aim and fired. A hawk, flying over
him, fluttered its wings and flew like an arrow far away.
"He aimed too high!" I said. "And so, Nadyezhda Lvovna," I sighed,
moving away from the window, "you will not permit . . ."-Madame Kandurin
was silent.
"I have the honour to take my leave," I said, "and I beg you to forgive
my disturbing you. . ."
Madame Kandurin would have turned facing me, and had already moved
through a quarter of the angle, when she suddenly hid her face behind
the hangings, as though she felt tears in her eyes that she wanted to
conceal.
"Good-bye. . . . Forgive me . . ." she said softly.
I bowed to her back, and strode away across the bright yellow floors, no
longer keeping to the carpet. I was glad to get away from this little
domain of gilded boredom and sadness, and I hastened as though anxious
to shake off a heavy, fantastic dream with its twilight, its enchanted
princess, its lustres. . . .
At the front door a maidservant overtook me and thrust a note into my
hand: "Shooting is permitted on showing this. N. K.," I read.
Love and Oher Stories
LOVE
"THREE o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in at my
windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I
am so happy!
"My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange,
incomprehensible feeling. I can't analyse it just now--I haven't the
time, I'm too lazy, and there--hang analysis! Why, is a man likely to
interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost from a belfry,
or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand? Is he in a
state to do it?"
This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girl of
nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times, and as
often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, and copied it all
over again. I spent as long over the letter as if it had been a novel I
had to write to order. And it was not because I tried to make it longer,
more elaborate, and more fervent, but because I wanted endlessly to
prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of
one's study and communes with one's own day-dreams while the spring
night looks in at one's window. Between the lines I saw a beloved image,
and it seemed to me that there were, sitting at the same table writing
with me, spirits as naïvely happy, as foolish, and as blissfully
smiling as I. I wrote continually, looking at my hand, which still ached
deliciously where hers had lately pressed it, and if I turned my eyes
away I had a vision of the green trellis of the little gate. Through
that trellis Sasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I
was saying good-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply
admiring her figure as every decent man admires a pretty woman; when I
saw through the trellis two big eyes, I suddenly, as though by
inspiration, knew that I was in love, that it was all settled between
us, and fully decided already, that I had nothing left to do but to
carry out certain formalities.
It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly putting
on one's hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the
treasure to the post. There are no stars in the sky now: in their place
there is a long whitish streak in the east, broken here and there by
clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses; from that streak the whole
sky is flooded with pale light. The town is asleep, but already the
water-carts have come out, and somewhere in a far-away factory a whistle
sounds to wake up the workpeople. Beside the postbox, slightly moist
with dew, you are sure to see the clumsy figure of a house porter,
wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin and carrying a stick. He is in a
condition akin to catalepsy: he is not asleep or awake, but something
between.
If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decision of
their fate, they would not have such a humble air. I, anyway, almost
kissed my postbox, and as I gazed at it I reflected that the post is the
greatest of blessings.
I beg anyone who has ever been in love to remember how one usually