Short Stories by Chekhov
people lived. I knew that Kimry made a living by manufacturing boots,
that Tula made samovars and guns, that Odessa was a port; but I did not
know what our town was or what it did. The people in Great Gentry Street
and two other clean streets had independent means and salaries paid by
the Treasury, but how the people lived in the other eight streets which
stretched parallel to each other for three miles and then were lost
behind the hill--that was always an insoluble problem to me. And I am
ashamed to think of the way they lived. They had neither public gardens,
nor a theatre, nor a decent orchestra; the town and club libraries are
used only by young Jews, so that books and magazines would lie for
months uncut. The rich and the intelligentsia slept in close, stuffy
bedrooms, with wooden beds infested with bugs; the children were kept in
filthy, dirty rooms called nurseries, and the servants, even when they
were old and respectable, slept on the kitchen floor and covered
themselves with rags. Except in Lent all the houses smelt of bortsch,
and during Lent of sturgeon fried in sunflower oil. The food was
unsavoury, the water unwholesome. On the town council, at the
governor's, at the archbishop's, everywhere there had been talk for
years about there being no good, cheap water-supply and of borrowing two
hundred thousand roubles from the Treasury. Even the very rich people,
of whom there were about thirty in the town, people who would lose a
whole estate at cards, used to drink the bad water and talk passionately
about the loan--and I could never understand this, for it seemed to me it
would be simpler for them to pay up the two hundred thousand.
I did not know a single honest man in the whole town. My father took
bribes, and imagined they were given to him out of respect for his
spiritual qualities; the boys at the high school, in order to be
promoted, went to lodge with the masters and paid them large sums; the
wife of the military commandant took levies from the recruits during the
recruiting, and even allowed them to stand her drinks, and once she was
so drunk in church that she could not get up from her knees; during the
recruiting the doctors also took bribes, and the municipal doctor and
the veterinary surgeon levied taxes on the butcher shops and public
houses; the district school did a trade in certificates which gave
certain privileges in the civil service; the provosts took bribes from
the clergy and church-wardens whom they controlled, and on the town
council and various committees every one who came before them was
pursued with: "One expects thanks!"--and thereby forty copecks had to
change hands. And those who did not take bribes, like the High Court
officials, were stiff and proud, and shook hands with two fingers, and
were distinguished by their indifference and narrow-mindedness. They
drank and played cards, married rich women, and always had a bad,
insidious influence on those round them. Only the girls had any moral
purity; most of them had lofty aspirations and were pure and honest at
heart; but they knew nothing of life, and believed that bribes were
given to honour spiritual qualities; and when they married, they soon
grew old and weak, and were hopelessly lost in the mire of that vulgar,
bourgeois existence.
III
A railway was being built in our district. On holidays and thereabouts
the town was filled with crowds of ragamuffins called "railies," of whom
the people were afraid. I used often to see a miserable wretch with a
bloody face, and without a hat, being dragged off by the police, and
behind him was the proof of his crime, a samovar or some wet, newly
washed linen. The "railies" used to collect near the public houses and
on the squares; and they drank, ate, and swore terribly, and whistled
after the town prostitutes. To amuse these ruffians our shopkeepers used
to make the cats and dogs drink vodka, or tie a kerosene-tin to a dog's
tail, and whistle to make the dog come tearing along the street with the
tin clattering after him, and making him squeal with terror and think he
had some frightful monster hard at his heels, so that he would rush out
of the town and over the fields until he could run no more. We had
several dogs in the town which were left with a permanent shiver and
used to crawl about with their tails between their legs, and people said
that they could not stand such tricks and had gone mad.
The station was being built five miles from the town. It was said that
the engineer had asked for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles to bring
the station nearer, but the municipality would only agree to forty; they
would not give in to the extra ten thousand, and now the townspeople are
sorry because they had to make a road to the station which cost them
more. Sleepers and rails were fixed all along the line, and service-
trains were running to carry building materials and labourers, and they
were only waiting for the bridges upon which Dolyhikov was at work, and
here and there the stations were not ready.
Dubechnia--the name of our first station--was seventeen versts from the
town. I went on foot. The winter and spring corn was bright green,
shining in the morning sun. The road was smooth and bright, and in the
distance I could see in outline the station, the hills, and the remote
farmhouses.... How good it was out in the open! And how I longed to be
filled with the sense of freedom, if only for that morning, to stop
thinking of what was going on in the town, or of my needs, or even of
eating! Nothing has so much prevented my living as the feeling of acute
hunger, which make my finest thoughts get mixed up with thoughts of
porridge, cutlets, and fried fish. When I stand alone in the fields and
look up at the larks hanging marvellously in the air, and bursting with
hysterical song, I think: "It would be nice to have some bread and
butter." Or when I sit in the road and shut my eyes and listen to the
wonderful sounds of a May-day, I remember how good hot potatoes smell.
Being big and of a strong constitution I never have quite enough to eat,
and so my chief sensation during the day is hunger, and so I can
understand why so many people who are working for a bare living, can
talk of nothing but food.
At Dubechnia the station was being plastered inside, and the upper story
of the water-tank was being built. It was close and smelt of lime, and
the labourers were wandering lazily over piles of chips and rubbish. The
signalman was asleep near his box with the sun pouring straight into his
face. There was not a single tree. The telephone gave a faint hum, and
here and there birds had alighted on it. I wandered over the heaps, not
knowing what to do, and remembered how when I asked the engineer what my
duties would be, he had replied: "We will see there." But what was there
to see in such a wilderness? The plasterers were talking about the
foreman and about one Fedot Vassilievich. I could not understand and was
filled with embarrassment--physical embarrassment. I felt conscious of my
arms and legs, and of the whole of my big body, and did not know what to
do with them or where to go.
After walking for at least a couple of hours I noticed that from the
station to the right of the line there were telegraph-poles which after
about one and a half or two miles ended in a white stone wall. The
labourers said it was the office, and I decided at last that I must go
there.
It was a very old farmhouse, long unused. The wall of rough, white stone
was decayed, and in places had crumbled away, and the roof of the wing,
the blind wall of which looked toward the railway, had perished, and was
patched here and there with tin. Through the gates there was a large
yard, overgrown with tall grass, and beyond that, an old house with
Venetian blinds in the windows, and a high roof, brown with rot. On
either side of the house, to right and left, were two symmetrical wings;
the windows of one were boarded up, while by the other, the windows of
which were open, there were a number of calves grazing. The last
telegraph-pole stood in the yard, and the wire went from it to the wing
with the blind wall. The door was open and I went in. By the table at
the telegraph was sitting a man with a dark, curly head in a canvas
coat; he glared at me sternly and askance, but he immediately smiled and
said:
"How do you do, Profit?"
It was Ivan Cheprakov, my school friend, who was expelled, when he was
in the second class, for smoking. Once, during the autumn, we were out
catching goldfinches, starlings, and hawfinches, to sell them in the
market early in the morning when our parents were still asleep.
We beat up flocks of starlings and shot at them with pellets, and then
picked up the wounded, and some died in terrible agony--I can still
remember how they moaned at night in my case--and some recovered. And we
sold them, and swore black and blue that they were male birds. Once in
the market I had only one starling left, which I hawked about and
finally sold for a copeck. "A little profit!" I said to console myself,
and from that time at school I was always known as "Little Profit," and
even now, schoolboys and the townspeople sometimes use the name to tease
me, though no one but myself remembers how it came about.
Cheprakov never was strong. He was narrow-chested, round-shouldered,
long-legged. His tie looked like a piece of string, he had no waistcoat,
and his boots were worse than mine--with the heels worn down. He blinked
with his eyes and had an eager expression as though he were trying to
catch something and he was in a constant fidget.
"You wait," he said, bustling about. "Look here!... What was I saying
just now?"
We began to talk. I discovered that the estate had till recently
belonged to the Cheprakovs and only the previous autumn had passed to
Dolyhikov, who thought it more profitable to keep his money in land than
in shares, and had already bought three big estates in our district with
the transfer of all mortgages. When Cheprakov's mother sold, she
stipulated for the right to live in one of the wings for another two
years and got her son a job in the office.
"Why shouldn't he buy?" said Cheprakov of the engineer. "He gets a lot
from the contractors. He bribes them all."
Then he took me to dinner, deciding in his emphatic way that I was to
live with him in the wing and board with his mother.
"She is a screw," he said, "but she will not take much from you."
In the small rooms where his mother lived there was a queer jumble; even
the hall and the passage were stacked with furniture, which had been
taken from the house after the sale of the estate; and the furniture was
old, and of redwood. Mrs. Cheprakov, a very stout elderly lady, with
slanting, Chinese eyes, sat by the window, in a big chair, knitting a
stocking. She received me ceremoniously.
"It is Pologniev, mother," said Cheprakov, introducing me. "He is going
to work here."
"Are you a nobleman?" she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice as though
she had boiling fat in her throat.
"Yes," I answered.
"Sit down."
The dinner was bad. It consisted only of a pie with unsweetened curds
and some milk soup. Elena Nikifirovna, my hostess, was perpetually
winking, first with one eye, then with the other. She talked and ate,
but in her whole aspect there was a deathlike quality, and one could
almost detect the smell of a corpse. Life hardly stirred in her, yet she
had the air of being the lady of the manor, who had once had her serfs,
and was the wife of a general, whose servants had to call him "Your
Excellency," and when these miserable embers of life flared up in her
for a moment, she would say to her son:
"Ivan, that is not the way to hold your knife!"