Short Stories by Chekhov
Or she would say, gasping for breath, with the preciseness of a hostess
labouring to entertain her guest:
"We have just sold our estate, you know. It is a pity, of course, we
have got so used to being here, but Dolyhikov promised to make Ivan
station-master at Dubechnia, so that we shan't have to leave. We shall
live here on the station, which is the same as living on the estate. The
engineer is such a nice man! Don't you think him very handsome?"
Until recently the Cheprakovs had been very well-to-do, but with the
general's death everything changed. Elena Nikifirovna began to quarrel
with the neighbours and to go to law, and she did not pay her bailiffs
and labourers; she was always afraid of being robbed--and in less than
ten years Dubechnia changed completely.
Behind the house there was an old garden run wild, overgrown with tall
grass and brushwood. I walked along the terrace which was still well-
kept and beautiful; through the glass door I saw a room with a parquet
floor, which must have been the drawing-room. It contained an ancient
piano, some engravings in mahogany frames on the walls--and nothing else.
There was nothing left of the flower-garden but peonies and poppies,
rearing their white and scarlet heads above the ground; on the paths,
all huddled together, were young maples and elm-trees, which had been
stripped by the cows. The growth was dense and the garden seemed
impassable, and only near the house, where there still stood poplars,
firs, and some old bricks, were there traces of the former avenues, and
further on the garden was being cleared for a hay-field, and here it was
no longer allowed to run wild, and one's mouth and eyes were no longer
filled with spiders' webs, and a pleasant air was stirring. The further
out one went, the more open it was, and there were cherry-trees, plum-
trees, wide-spreading old apple-trees, lichened and held up with props,
and the pear-trees were so tall that it was incredible that there could
be pears on them. This part of the garden was let to the market-women of
our town, and it was guarded from thieves and starlings by a peasant--an
idiot who lived in a hut.
The orchard grew thinner and became a mere meadow running down to the
river, which was overgrown with reeds and withy-beds. There was a pool
by the mill-dam, deep and full of fish, and a little mill with a straw
roof ground and roared, and the frogs croaked furiously. On the water,
which was as smooth as glass, circles appeared from time to time, and
water-lilies trembled on the impact of a darting fish. The village of
Dubechnia was on the other side of the river. The calm, azure pool was
alluring with its promise of coolness and rest. And now all this, the
pool, the mill, the comfortable banks of the river, belonged to the
engineer!
And here my new work began. I received and despatched telegrams, I wrote
out various accounts and copied orders, claims, and reports, sent in to
the office by our illiterate foremen and mechanics. But most of the day
I did nothing, walking up and down the room waiting for telegrams, or I
would tell the boy to stay in the wing, and go into the garden until the
boy came to say the bell was ringing. I had dinner with Mrs. Cheprakov.
Meat was served very rarely; most of the dishes were made of milk, and
on Wednesdays and Fridays we had Lenten fare, and the food was served in
pink plates, which were called Lenten. Mrs. Cheprakov was always
blinking--the habit grew on her, and I felt awkward and embarrassed in
her presence.
As there was not enough work for one, Cheprakov did nothing, but slept
or went down to the pool with his gun to shoot ducks. In the evenings he
got drunk in the village, or at the station, and before going to bed he
would look in the glass and say:
"How are you, Ivan Cheprakov?"
When he was drunk, he was very pale and used to rub his hands and laugh,
or rather neigh, He-he-he! Out of bravado he would undress himself and
run naked through the fields, and he used to eat flies and say they were
a bit sour.
IV
Once after dinner he came running into the wing, panting, to say:
"Your sister has come to see you."
I went out and saw a fly standing by the steps of the house. My sister
had brought Aniuta Blagovo and a military gentleman in a summer uniform.
As I approached I recognised the military gentleman as Aniuta's brother,
the doctor.
"We've come to take you for a picnic," he said, "if you've no
objection."
My sister and Aniuta wanted to ask how I was getting on, but they were
both silent and only looked at me. They felt that I didn't like my job,
and tears came into my sister's eyes and Aniuta Blagovo blushed. We went
into the orchard, the doctor first, and he said ecstatically:
"What air! By Jove, what air!"
He was just a boy to look at. He talked and walked like an
undergraduate, and the look in his grey eyes was as lively, simple, and
frank as that of a nice boy. Compared with his tall, handsome sister he
looked weak and slight, and his little beard was thin and so was his
voice--a thin tenor, though quite pleasant. He was away somewhere with
his regiment and had come home on leave, and said that he was going to
Petersburg in the autumn to take his M.D. He already had a family--a wife
and three children; he had married young, in his second year at the
University, and people said he was unhappily married and was not living
with his wife.
"What is the time?" My sister was uneasy. "We must go back soon, for my
father would only let me have until six o'clock."
"Oh, your father," sighed the doctor.
I made tea, and we drank it sitting on a carpet in front of the terrace,
and the doctor, kneeling, drank from his saucer, and said that he was
perfectly happy. Then Cheprakov fetched the key and unlocked the glass
door and we all entered the house. It was dark and mysterious and
smelled of mushrooms, and our footsteps made a hollow sound as though
there were a vault under the floor. The doctor stopped by the piano and
touched the keys and it gave out a faint, tremulous, cracked but still
melodious sound. He raised his voice and began to sing a romance,
frowning and impatiently stamping his foot when he touched a broken key.
My sister forgot about going home, but walked agitatedly up and down the
room and said:
"I am happy! I am very, very happy!"
There was a note of surprise in her voice as though it seemed impossible
to her that she should be happy. It was the first time in my life that I
had seen her so gay. She even looked handsome. Her profile was not good,
her nose and mouth somehow protruded and made her look as if she was
always blowing, but she had beautiful, dark eyes, a pale, very delicate
complexion, and a touching expression of kindness and sadness, and when
she spoke she seemed very charming and even beautiful. Both she and I
took after our mother; we were broad-shouldered, strong, and sturdy, but
her paleness was a sign of sickness, she often coughed, and in her eyes
I often noticed the expression common to people who are ill, but who for
some reason conceal it. In her present cheerfulness there was something
childish and na?e, as though all the joy which had been suppressed and
dulled during our childhood by a strict upbringing, had suddenly
awakened in her soul and rushed out into freedom.
But when evening came and the fly was brought round, my sister became
very quiet and subdued, and sat in the fly as though it were a prison-
van.
Soon they were all gone. The noise of the fly died away.... I remembered
that Aniuta Blagovo had said not a single word to me all day.
"A wonderful girl!" I thought "A wonderful girl."
Lent came and every day we had Lenten dishes. I was greatly depressed by
my idleness and the uncertainty of my position, and, slothful, hungry,
dissatisfied with myself, I wandered over the estate and only waited for
an energetic mood to leave the place.
Once in the afternoon when Radish was sitting in our wing, Dolyhikov
entered unexpectedly, very sunburnt, and grey with dust. He had been out
on the line for three days and had come to Dubechnia on a locomotive and
walked over. While he waited for the carriage which he had ordered to
come out to meet him he went over the estate with his bailiff, giving
orders in a loud voice, and then for a whole hour he sat in our wing and
wrote letters. When telegrams came through for him, he himself tapped
out the answers, while we stood there stiff and silent.
"What a mess!" he said, looking angrily through the accounts. "I shall
transfer the office to the station in a fortnight and I don't know what
I shall do with you then."
"I've done my best, sir," said Cheprakov.
"Quite so. I can see what your best is. You can only draw your wages."
The engineer looked at me and went on. "You rely on getting
introductions to make a career for yourself with as little trouble as
possible. Well, I don't care about introductions. Nobody helped me.
Before I had this line, I was an engine-driver. I worked in Belgium as
an ordinary lubricator. And what are you doing here, Panteley?" he
asked, turning to Radish. "Going out drinking?"
For some reason or other he called all simple people Panteley, while he
despised men like Cheprakov and myself, and called us drunkards, beasts,
canaille. As a rule he was hard on petty officials, and paid and
dismissed them ruthlessly without any explanation.
At last the carriage came for him. When he left he promised to dismiss
us all in a fortnight; called the bailiff a fool, stretched himself out
comfortably in the carriage, and drove away.
"Andrey Ivanich," I said to Radish, "will you take me on as a labourer?"
"What! Why?"
We went together toward the town, and when the station and the farm were
far behind us, I asked:
"Andrey Ivanich, why did you come to Dubechnia?"
"Firstly because some of my men are working on the line, and secondly to
pay interest to Mrs. Cheprakov. I borrowed fifty roubles from her last
summer, and now I pay her one rouble a month."
The decorator stopped and took hold of my coat.
"Misail Alereich, my friend," he went on, "I take it that if a common
man or a gentleman takes interest, he is a wrong-doer. The truth is not
in him."
Radish, looking thin, pale, and rather terrible, shut his eyes, shook
his head, and muttered in a philosophic tone:
"The grub eats grass, rust eats iron, lies devour the soul. God save us
miserable sinners!"
V
Radish was unpractical and he was no business man; he undertook more
work than he could do, and when he came to payment he always lost his
reckoning and so was always out on the wrong side. He was a painter, a
glazier, a paper-hanger, and would even take on tiling, and I remember
how he used to run about for days looking for tiles to make an
insignificant profit. He was an excellent workman and would sometimes
earn ten roubles a day, and but for his desire to be a master and to
call himself a contractor, he would probably have made quite a lot of
money.
He himself was paid by contract and paid me and the others by the day,
between seventy-five copecks and a rouble per day. When the weather was
hot and dry he did various outside jobs, chiefly painting roofs. Not
being used to it, my feet got hot, as though I were walking over a red-
hot oven, and when I wore felt boots my feet swelled. But this was only
at the beginning. Later on I got used to it and everything went all
right. I lived among the people, to whom work was obligatory and
unavoidable, people who worked like dray-horses, and knew nothing of the
moral value of labour, and never even used the word "labour" in their
talk. Among them I also felt like a dray-horse, more and more imbued
with the necessity and inevitability of what I was doing, and this made