Short Stories by Chekhov
a bit, Lizaveta, the sun will begin to dance. It dances every Easter. So
it rejoices too!"
"It is not alive," said his wife.
"But there are people on it!" exclaimed Tortchakov, "there are really!
Ivan Stepanitch told me that there are people on all the planets--on the
sun, and on the moon! Truly . . . but maybe the learned men tell
lies--the devil only knows! Stay, surely that's not a horse? Yes, it is!"
At the Crooked Ravine, which was just half-way on the journey home,
Tortchakov and his wife saw a saddled horse standing motionless, and
sniffing last year's dry grass. On a hillock beside the roadside a red-
haired Cossack was sitting doubled up, looking at his feet.
"Christ is risen!" Maxim shouted to him. "Wo-o-o!"
"Truly He is risen," answered the Cossack, without raising his head.
"Where are you going?"
"Home on leave."
"Why are you sitting here, then?"
"Why . . . I have fallen ill . . . I haven't the strength to go on."
"What is wrong?"
"I ache all over."
"H'm. What a misfortune! People are keeping holiday, and you fall sick!
But you should ride on to a village or an inn, what's the use of sitting
here!"
The Cossack raised his head, and with big, exhausted eyes, scanned
Maxim, his wife, and the horse.
"Have you come from church?" he asked.
"Yes."
"The holiday found me on the high road. It was not God's will for me to
reach home. I'd get on my horse at once and ride off, but I haven't the
strength. . . . You might, good Christians, give a wayfarer some Easter
cake to break his fast!"
"Easter cake?" Tortchakov repeated, "That we can, to be sure. . . .
Stay, I'll. . . ."
Maxim fumbled quickly in his pockets, glanced at his wife, and said:
"I haven't a knife, nothing to cut it with. And I don't like to break
it, it would spoil the whole cake. There's a problem! You look and see
if you haven't a knife?"
The Cossack got up groaning, and went to his saddle to get a knife.
"What an idea," said Tortchakov's wife angrily. "I won't let you slice
up the Easter cake! What should I look like, taking it home already cut!
Ride on to the peasants in the village, and break your fast there!"
The wife took the napkin with the Easter cake in it out of her husband's
hands and said:
"I won't allow it! One must do things properly; it's not a loaf, but a
holy Easter cake. And it's a sin to cut it just anyhow."
"Well, Cossack, don't be angry," laughed Tortchakov. "The wife forbids
it! Good-bye. Good luck on your journey!"
Maxim shook the reins, clicked to his horse, and the chaise rolled on
squeaking. For some time his wife went on grumbling, and declaring that
to cut the Easter cake before reaching home was a sin and not the proper
thing. In the east the first rays of the rising sun shone out, cutting
their way through the feathery clouds, and the song of the lark was
heard in the sky. Now not one but three kites were hovering over the
steppe at a respectful distance from one another. Grasshoppers began
churring in the young grass.
When they had driven three-quarters of a mile from the Crooked Ravine,
Tortchakov looked round and stared intently into the distance.
"I can't see the Cossack," he said. "Poor, dear fellow, to take it into
his head to fall ill on the road. There couldn't be a worse misfortune,
to have to travel and not have the strength. . . . I shouldn't wonder if
he dies by the roadside. We didn't give him any Easter cake, Lizaveta,
and we ought to have given it. I'll be bound he wants to break his fast
too."
The sun had risen, but whether it was dancing or not Tortchakov did not
see. He remained silent all the way home, thinking and keeping his eyes
fixed on the horse's black tail. For some unknown reason he felt
overcome by depression, and not a trace of the holiday gladness was left
in his heart. When he had arrived home and said, "Christ is risen" to
his workmen, he grew cheerful again and began talking, but when he had
sat down to break the fast and had taken a bite from his piece of Easter
cake, he looked regretfully at his wife, and said:
"It wasn't right of us, Lizaveta, not to give that Cossack something to
eat."
"You are a queer one, upon my word," said Lizaveta, shrugging her
shoulders in surprise. "Where did you pick up such a fashion as giving
away the holy Easter cake on the high road? Is it an ordinary loaf? Now
that it is cut and lying on the table, let anyone eat it that likes--your
Cossack too! Do you suppose I grudge it?"
"That's all right, but we ought to have given the Cossack some. . . .
Why, he was worse off than a beggar or an orphan. On the road, and far
from home, and sick too."
Tortchakov drank half a glass of tea, and neither ate nor drank anything
more. He had no appetite, the tea seemed to choke him, and he felt
depressed again. After breaking their fast, his wife and he lay down to
sleep. When Lizaveta woke two hours later, he was standing by the
window, looking into the yard.
"Are you up already?" asked his wife.
"I somehow can't sleep. . . . Ah, Lizaveta," he sighed. "We were unkind,
you and I, to that Cossack!"
"Talking about that Cossack again!" yawned his wife. "You have got him
on the brain."
"He has served his Tsar, shed his blood maybe, and we treated him as
though he were a pig. We ought to have brought the sick man home and fed
him, and we did not even give him a morsel of bread."
"Catch me letting you spoil the Easter cake for nothing! And one that
has been blessed too! You would have cut it on the road, and shouldn't I
have looked a fool when I got home?"
Without saying anything to his wife, Maxim went into the kitchen,
wrapped a piece of cake up in a napkin, together with half a dozen eggs,
and went to the labourers in the barn.
"Kuzma, put down your concertina," he said to one of them. "Saddle the
bay, or Ivantchik, and ride briskly to the Crooked Ravine. There you
will see a sick Cossack with a horse, so give him this. Maybe he hasn't
ridden away yet."
Maxim felt cheerful again, but after waiting for Kuzma for some hours,
he could bear it no longer, so he saddled a horse and went off to meet
him. He met him just at the Ravine.
"Well, have you seen the Cossack?"
"I can't find him anywhere, he must have ridden on."
"H'm . . . a queer business."
Tortchakov took the bundle from Kuzma, and galloped on farther. When he
reached Shustrovo he asked the peasants:
"Friends, have you seen a sick Cossack with a horse? Didn't he ride by
here? A red-headed fellow on a bay horse."
The peasants looked at one another, and said they had not seen the
Cossack.
"The returning postman drove by, it's true, but as for a Cossack or
anyone else, there has been no such."
Maxim got home at dinner time.
"I can't get that Cossack out of my head, do what you will!" he said to
his wife. "He gives me no peace. I keep thinking: what if God meant to
try us, and sent some saint or angel in the form of a Cossack? It does
happen, you know. It's bad, Lizaveta; we were unkind to the man!"
"What do you keep pestering me with that Cossack for?" cried Lizaveta,
losing patience at last. "You stick to it like tar!"
"You are not kind, you know . . ." said Maxim, looking into his wife's
face.
And for the first time since his marriage he perceived that he wife was
not kind.
"I may be unkind," cried Lizaveta, tapping angrily with her spoon, "but
I am not going to give away the holy Easter cake to every drunken man in
the road."
"The Cossack wasn't drunk!"
"He was drunk!"
"Well, you are a fool then!"
Maxim got up from the table and began reproaching his young wife for
hard-heartedness and stupidity. She, getting angry too, answered his
reproaches with reproaches, burst into tears, and went away into their
bedroom, declaring she would go home to her father's. This was the first
matrimonial squabble that had happened in the Tortchakov's married life.
He walked about the yard till the evening, picturing his wife's face,
and it seemed to him now spiteful and ugly. And as though to torment him
the Cossack haunted his brain, and Maxim seemed to see now his sick
eyes, now his unsteady walk.
"Ah, we were unkind to the man," he muttered.
When it got dark, he was overcome by an insufferable depression such as
he had never felt before. Feeling so dreary, and being angry with his
wife, he got drunk, as he had sometimes done before he was married. In
his drunkenness he used bad language and shouted to his wife that she
had a spiteful, ugly face, and that next day he would send her packing
to her father's. On the morning of Easter Monday, he drank some more to
sober himself, and got drunk again.
And with that his downfall began.
His horses, cows, sheep, and hives disappeared one by one from the yard;
Maxim was more and more often drunk, debts mounted up, he felt an
aversion for his wife. Maxim put down all his misfortunes to the fact
that he had an unkind wife, and above all, that God was angry with him
on account of the sick Cossack.
Lizaveta saw their ruin, but who was to blame for it she did not
understand.
ABORIGINES
BETWEEN nine and ten in the morning. Ivan Lyashkevsky, a lieutenant of
Polish origin, who has at some time or other been wounded in the head,
and now lives on his pension in a town in one of the southern provinces,
is sitting in his lodgings at the open window talking to Franz
Stepanitch Finks, the town architect, who has come in to see him for a
minute. Both have thrust their heads out of the window, and are looking
in the direction of the gate near which Lyashkevsky's landlord, a plump
little native with pendulous perspiring cheeks, in full, blue trousers,
is sitting on a bench with his waistcoat unbuttoned. The native is
plunged in deep thought, and is absent-mindedly prodding the toe of his
boot with a stick.
"Extraordinary people, I tell you," grumbled Lyashkevsky, looking
angrily at the native, "here he has sat down on the bench, and so he
will sit, damn the fellow, with his hands folded till evening. They do
absolutely nothing. The wastrels and loafers! It would be all right, you
scoundrel, if you had money lying in the bank, or had a farm of your own
where others would be working for you, but here you have not a penny to
your name, you eat the bread of others, you are in debt all round, and
you starve your family--devil take you! You wouldn't believe me, Franz
Stepanitch, sometimes it makes me so cross that I could jump out of the
window and give the low fellow a good horse-whipping. Come, why don't
you work? What are you sitting there for?"
The native looks indifferently at Lyashkevsky, tries to say something
but cannot; sloth and the sultry heat have paralysed his conversational
faculties. . . . Yawning lazily, he makes the sign of the cross over his
mouth, and turns his eyes up towards the sky where pigeons fly, bathing
in the hot air.
"You must not be too severe in your judgments, honoured friend," sighs
Finks, mopping his big bald head with his handkerchief. "Put yourself in
their place: business is slack now, there's unemployment all round, a
bad harvest, stagnation in trade."
"Good gracious, how you talk!" cries Lyashkevsky in indignation, angrily
wrapping his dressing gown round him. "Supposing he has no job and no
trade, why doesn't he work in his own home, the devil flay him! I say!
Is there no work for you at home? Just look, you brute! Your steps have
come to pieces, the plankway is falling into the ditch, the fence is
rotten; you had better set to and mend it all, or if you don't know how,
go into the kitchen and help your wife. Your wife is running out every
minute to fetch water or carry out the slops. Why shouldn't you run
instead, you rascal? And then you must remember, Franz Stepanitch, that