Short Stories by Chekhov
vocation, then he can only be satisfied with religion, service, art, and
not with trifles like that."
"Free them from work?" Lyda gave a smile. "Is that possible?"
"Yes.... Take upon yourself a part of their work. If we all, in town and
country, without exception, agreed to share the work which is being
spent by mankind in the satisfaction of physical demands, then none of
us would have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us,
rich and poor, worked three hours a day the rest of our time would be
free. And then to be still less dependent on our bodies, we should
invent machines to do the work and we should try to reduce our demands
to the minimum. We should toughen ourselves and our children should not
be afraid of hunger and cold, and we should not be anxious about their
health, as Anna, Maria, Pelagueya were anxious. Then supposing we did
not bother about doctors and pharmacies, and did away with tobacco
factories and distilleries--what a lot of free time we should have! We
should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all
work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work
together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of
it--truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual,
poignant, depressing fear of death and even of death itself."
"But you contradict yourself," said Lyda. "You talk about service and
deny education."
"I deny the education of a man who can only use it to read the signs on
the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of
understanding--the kind of education we have had from the time of Riurik:
and village life has remained exactly as it was then. Not education is
wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual capacities. Not
schools are wanted but universities."
"You deny medicine too."
"Yes. It should only be used for the investigation of diseases, as
natural phenomenon, not for their cure. It is no good curing diseases if
you don't cure their causes. Remove the chief cause--physical labour, and
there will be no diseases. I don't acknowledge the science which cures,"
I went on excitedly. "Science and art, when they are true, are directed
not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and the
general--they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the
soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities, like
pharmacies and libraries, then they only complicate and encumber life.
We have any number of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and highly educated
people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets.
All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted on temporary passing
needs.... Scientists, writers, painters work and work, and thanks to
them the comforts of life grow greater every day, the demands of the
body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still
remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends
to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in
vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and
the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his
position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement of
the predatory, disgusting animal, man, and supporting the existing state
of things. And I don't want to work and will not.... Nothing is wanted,
so let the world go to hell."
"Missyuss, go away," said Lyda to her sister, evidently thinking my
words dangerous to so young a girl.
Genya looked sadly at her sister and mother and went out.
"People generally talk like that," said Lyda, "when they want to excuse
their indifference. It is easier to deny hospitals and schools than to
come and teach."
"True, Lyda, true," her mother agreed.
"You say you will not work," Lyda went on. "Apparently you set a high
price on your work, but do stop arguing. We shall never agree, since I
value the most imperfect library or pharmacy, of which you spoke so
scornfully just now, more than all the landscapes in the world." And at
once she turned to her mother and began to talk in quite a different
tone: "The Prince has got very thin, and is much changed since the last
time he was here. The doctors are sending him to Vichy."
She talked to her mother about the Prince to avoid talking to me. Her
face was burning, and, in order to conceal her agitation, she bent over
the table as if she were short-sighted and made a show of reading the
newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my leave and went
home.
IV
All was quiet outside: the village on the other side of the pond was
already asleep, not a single light was to be seen, and on the pond there
was only the faint reflection of the stars. By the gate with the stone
lions stood Genya, waiting to accompany me.
"The village is asleep," I said, trying to see her face in the darkness,
and I could see her dark sad eyes fixed on me. "The innkeeper and the
horse-stealers are sleeping quietly, and decent people like ourselves
quarrel and irritate each other."
It was a melancholy August night--melancholy because it already smelled
of the autumn: the moon rose behind a purple cloud and hardly lighted
the road and the dark fields of winter corn on either side. Stars fell
frequently, Genya walked beside me on the road and tried not to look at
the sky, to avoid seeing the falling stars, which somehow frightened
her.
"I believe you are right," she said, trembling in the evening chill. "If
people could give themselves to spiritual activity, they would soon
burst everything."
"Certainly. We are superior beings, and if we really knew all the power
of the human genius and lived only for higher purposes then we should
become like gods. But this will never be. Mankind will degenerate and of
their genius not a trace will be left."
When the gate was out of sight Genya stopped and hurriedly shook my
hand.
"Good night," she said, trembling; her shoulders were covered only with
a thin blouse and she was shivering with cold. "Come to-morrow."
I was filled with a sudden dread of being left alone with my inevitable
dissatisfaction with myself and people, and I, too, tried not to see the
falling stars.
"Stay with me a little longer," I said. "Please."
I loved Genya, and she must have loved me, because she used to meet me
and walk with me, and because she looked at me with tender admiration.
How thrillingly beautiful her pale face was, her thin nose, her arms,
her slenderness, her idleness, her constant reading. And her mind? I
suspected her of having an unusual intellect: I was fascinated by the
breadth of her views, perhaps because she thought differently from the
strong, handsome Lyda, who did not love me. Genya liked me as a painter,
I had conquered her heart by my talent, and I longed passionately to
paint only for her, and I dreamed of her as my little queen, who would
one day possess with me the trees, the fields, the river, the dawn, all
Nature, wonderful and fascinating, with whom, as with them, I have felt
helpless and useless.
"Stay with me a moment longer," I called. "I implore you."
I took off my overcoat and covered her childish shoulders. Fearing that
she would look queer and ugly in a man's coat, she began to laugh and
threw it off, and as she did so, I embraced her and began to cover her
face, her shoulders, her arms with kisses.
"Till to-morrow," she whispered timidly as though she was afraid to
break the stillness of the night. She embraced me: "We have no secrets
from one another. I must tell mamma and my sister.... Is it so terrible?
Mamma will be pleased. Mamma loves you, but Lyda!"
She ran to the gates.
"Good-bye," she called out.
For a couple of minutes I stood and heard her running. I had no desire
to go home, there was nothing there to go for. I stood for a while lost
in thought, and then quietly dragged myself back, to have one more look
at the house in which she lived, the dear, simple, old house, which
seemed to look at me with the windows of the mezzanine for eyes, and to
understand everything. I walked past the terrace, sat down on a bench by
the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness under an old elm-tree, and looked
at the house. In the windows of the mezzanine, where Missyuss had her
room, shone a bright light, and then a faint green glow. The lamp had
been covered with a shade. Shadows began to move.... I was filled with
tenderness and a calm satisfaction, to think that I could let myself be
carried away and fall in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy at the
thought that only a few yards away in one of the rooms of the house lay
Lyda who did not love me, and perhaps hated me. I sat and waited to see
if Genya would come out. I listened attentively and it seemed to me they
were sitting in the mezzanine.
An hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no longer
visible. The moon hung high above the house and lit the sleeping garden
and the avenues: I could distinctly see the dahlias and roses in the
flower-bed in front of the house, and all seemed to be of one colour. It
was very cold. I left the garden, picked up my overcoat in the road, and
walked slowly home.
Next day after dinner when I went to the Volchaninovs', the glass door
was wide open. I sat down on the terrace expecting Genya to come from
behind the flower-bed or from one of the avenues, or to hear her voice
come from out of the rooms; then I went into the drawing-room and the
dining-room. There was not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I
went down a long passage into the hall, and then back again. There were
several doors in the passage and behind one of them I could hear Lyda's
voice:
"To the crow somewhere ... God ..."--she spoke slowly and distinctly, and
was probably dictating--" ... God sent a piece of cheese.... To the crow
... somewhere.... Who is there?" she called out suddenly as she heard my
footsteps.
"It is I."
"Oh! excuse me. I can't come out just now. I am teaching Masha."
"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"
"No. She and my sister left to-day for my Aunt's in Penga, and in the
winter they are probably going abroad." She added after a short silence:
"To the crow somewhere God sent a pi-ece of cheese. Have you got that?"
I went out into the hall, and, without a thought in my head, stood and
looked out at the pond and the village, and still I heard:
"A piece of cheese.... To the crow somewhere God sent a piece of
cheese."
And I left the house by the way I had come the first time, only
reversing the order, from the yard into the garden, past the house, then
along the lime-walk. Here a boy overtook me and handed me a note: "I
have told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you,"
I read. "I could not hurt her by disobeying. God will give you
happiness. If you knew how bitterly mamma and I have cried."
Then through the fir avenue and the rotten fence....Over the fields
where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled
horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn
was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was
ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs', and once more it became
tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left that
evening for Petersburg.
I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Lately on my way to the Crimea I met
Bielokurov at a station. As of old he was in a poddiovka, wearing an
embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied: "Quite
well, thanks be to God." He began to talk. He had sold his estate and
bought another, smaller one in the name of Lyabov Ivanovna. He told me a