Short Stories by Chekhov
It was an August night, there were stars, but it was dark. Owing to the
fact that I had never in my life been in such exceptional surroundings,
as I had chanced to come into now, the starry night seemed to me gloomy,
inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality. I was on a railway line
which was still in process of construction. The high, half-finished
embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and rubble, the holes, the wheel-
barrows standing here and there, the flat tops of the mud huts in which
the workmen lived--all this muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness,
gave the earth a strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos.
There was so little order in all that lay before me that it was somehow
strange in the midst of the hideously excavated, grotesque-looking earth
to see the silhouettes of human beings and the slender telegraph posts.
Both spoiled the ensemble of the picture, and seemed to belong to a
different world. It was still, and the only sound came from the
telegraph wire droning its wearisome refrain somewhere very high above
our heads.
We climbed up on the embankment and from its height looked down upon the
earth. A hundred yards away where the pits, holes, and mounds melted
into the darkness of the night, a dim light was twinkling. Beyond it
gleamed another light, beyond that a third, then a hundred paces away
two red eyes glowed side by side--probably the windows of some hut--and a
long series of such lights, growing continually closer and dimmer,
stretched along the line to the very horizon, then turned in a
semicircle to the left and disappeared in the darkness of the distance.
The lights were motionless. There seemed to be something in common
between them and the stillness of the night and the disconsolate song of
the telegraph wire. It seemed as though some weighty secret were buried
under the embankment and only the lights, the night, and the wires knew
of it.
"How glorious, O Lord!" sighed Ananyev; "such space and beauty that one
can't tear oneself away! And what an embankment! It's not an embankment,
my dear fellow, but a regular Mont Blanc. It's costing millions. . . ."
Going into ecstasies over the lights and the embankment that was costing
millions, intoxicated by the wine and his sentimental mood, the engineer
slapped Von Schtenberg on the shoulder and went on in a jocose tone:
"Well, Mihail Mihailitch, lost in reveries? No doubt it is pleasant to
look at the work of one's own hands, eh? Last year this very spot was
bare steppe, not a sight of human life, and now look: life . . .
civilisation. . . And how splendid it all is, upon my soul! You and I
are building a railway, and after we are gone, in another century or
two, good men will build a factory, a school, a hospital, and things
will begin to move! Eh!"
The student stood motionless with his hands thrust in his pockets, and
did not take his eyes off the lights. He was not listening to the
engineer, but was thinking, and was apparently in the mood in which one
does not want to speak or to listen. After a prolonged silence he turned
to me and said quietly:
"Do you know what those endless lights are like? They make me think of
something long dead, that lived thousands of years ago, something like
the camps of the Amalekites or the Philistines. It is as though some
people of the Old Testament had pitched their camp and were waiting for
morning to fight with Saul or David. All that is wanting to complete the
illusion is the blare of trumpets and sentries calling to one another in
some Ethiopian language."
And, as though of design, the wind fluttered over the line and brought a
sound like the clank of weapons. A silence followed. I don't know what
the engineer and the student were thinking of, but it seemed to me
already that I actually saw before me something long dead and even heard
the sentry talking in an unknown tongue. My imagination hastened to
picture the tents, the strange people, their clothes, their armour.
"Yes," muttered the student pensively, "once Philistines and Amalekites
were living in this world, making wars, playing their part, and now no
trace of them remains. So it will be with us. Now we are making a
railway, are standing here philosophising, but two thousand years will
pass--and of this embankment and of all those men, asleep after their
hard work, not one grain of dust will remain. In reality, it's awful!"
"You must drop those thoughts . . ." said the engineer gravely and
admonishingly.
"Why?"
"Because. . . . Thoughts like that are for the end of life, not for the
beginning of it. You are too young for them."
"Why so?" repeated the student.
"All these thoughts of the transitoriness, the insignificance and the
aimlessness of life, of the inevitability of death, of the shadows of
the grave, and so on, all such lofty thoughts, I tell you, my dear
fellow, are good and natural in old age when they come as the product of
years of inner travail, and are won by suffering and really are
intellectual riches; for a youthful brain on the threshold of real life
they are simply a calamity! A calamity!" Ananyev repeated with a wave of
his hand. "To my mind it is better at your age to have no head on your
shoulders at all than to think on these lines. I am speaking seriously,
Baron. And I have been meaning to speak to you about it for a long time,
for I noticed from the very first day of our acquaintance your
partiality for these damnable ideas!"
"Good gracious, why are they damnable?" the student asked with a smile,
and from his voice and his face I could see that he asked the question
from simple politeness, and that the discussion raised by the engineer
did not interest him in the least.
I could hardly keep my eyes open. I was dreaming that immediately after
our walk we should wish each other good-night and go to bed, but my
dream was not quickly realised. When we had returned to the hut the
engineer put away the empty bottles and took out of a large wicker
hamper two full ones, and uncorking them, sat down to his work-table
with the evident intention of going on drinking, talking, and working.
Sipping a little from his glass, he made pencil notes on some plans and
went on pointing out to the student that the latter's way of thinking
was not what it should be. The student sat beside him checking accounts
and saying nothing. He, like me, had no inclination to speak or to
listen. That I might not interfere with their work, I sat away from the
table on the engineer's crooked-legged travelling bedstead, feeling
bored and expecting every moment that they would suggest I should go to
bed. It was going on for one o'clock.
Having nothing to do, I watched my new acquaintances. I had never seen
Ananyev or the student before. I had only made their acquaintance on the
night I have described. Late in the evening I was returning on horseback
from a fair to the house of a landowner with whom I was staying, had got
on the wrong road in the dark and lost my way. Going round and round by
the railway line and seeing how dark the night was becoming, I thought
of the "barefoot railway roughs," who lie in wait for travellers on foot
and on horseback, was frightened, and knocked at the first hut I came
to. There I was cordially received by Ananyev and the student. As is
usually the case with strangers casually brought together, we quickly
became acquainted, grew friendly and at first over the tea and afterward
over the wine, began to feel as though we had known each other for
years. At the end of an hour or so, I knew who they were and how fate
had brought them from town to the far-away steppe; and they knew who I
was, what my occupation and my way of thinking.
Nikolay Anastasyevitch Ananyev, the engineer, was a broad-shouldered,
thick-set man, and, judging from his appearance, he had, like Othello,
begun the "descent into the vale of years," and was growing rather too
stout. He was just at that stage which old match-making women mean when
they speak of "a man in the prime of his age," that is, he was neither
young nor old, was fond of good fare, good liquor, and praising the
past, panted a little as he walked, snored loudly when he was asleep,
and in his manner with those surrounding him displayed that calm
imperturbable good humour which is always acquired by decent people by
the time they have reached the grade of a staff officer and begun to
grow stout. His hair and beard were far from being grey, but already,
with a condescension of which he was unconscious, he addressed young men
as "my dear boy" and felt himself entitled to lecture them good-
humouredly about their way of thinking. His movements and his voice were
calm, smooth, and self-confident, as they are in a man who is thoroughly
well aware that he has got his feet firmly planted on the right road,
that he has definite work, a secure living, a settled outlook. . . . His
sunburnt, thick-nosed face and muscular neck seemed to say: "I am well
fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will come when you
young people too, will be well-fed, healthy, and satisfied with
yourselves. . . ." He was dressed in a cotton shirt with the collar awry
and in full linen trousers thrust into his high boots. From certain
trifles, as for instance, from his coloured worsted girdle, his
embroidered collar, and the patch on his elbow, I was able to guess that
he was married and in all probability tenderly loved by his wife.
Baron Von Schtenberg, a student of the Institute of Transport, was a
young man of about three or four and twenty. Only his fair hair and
scanty beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and frigidity in his
features showed traces of his descent from Barons of the Baltic
provinces; everything else--his name, Mihail Mihailovitch, his religion,
his ideas, his manners, and the expression of his face were purely
Russian. Wearing, like Ananyev, a cotton shirt and high boots, with his
round shoulders, his hair left uncut, and his sunburnt face, he did not
look like a student or a Baron, but like an ordinary Russian workman.
His words and gestures were few, he drank reluctantly without relish,
checked the accounts mechanically, and seemed all the while to be
thinking of something else. His movements and voice were calm, and
smooth too, but his calmness was of a different kind from the
engineer's. His sunburnt, slightly ironical, dreamy face, his eyes which
looked up from under his brows, and his whole figure were expressive of
spiritual stagnatio--mental sloth. He looked as though it did not matter
to him in the least whether the light were burning before him or not,
whether the wine were nice or nasty, and whether the accounts he was
checking were correct or not. . . . And on his intelligent, calm face I
read: "I don't see so far any good in definite work, a secure living,
and a settled outlook. It's all nonsense. I was in Petersburg, now I am
sitting here in this hut, in the autumn I shall go back to Petersburg,
then in the spring here again. . . . What sense there is in all that I
don't know, and no one knows. . . . And so it's no use talking about it.
. . ."
He listened to the engineer without interest, with the condescending
indifference with which cadets in the senior classes listen to an
effusive and good-natured old attendant. It seemed as though there were
nothing new to him in what the engineer said, and that if he had not
himself been too lazy to talk, he would have said something newer and
cleverer. Meanwhile Ananyev would not desist. He had by now laid aside
his good-humoured, jocose tone and spoke seriously, even with a fervour
which was quite out of keeping with his expression of calmness.
Apparently he had no distaste for abstract subjects, was fond of them,