Short Stories by Chekhov
absence. They were excellent. For some reason the engineer had wines and
cigars sent from abroad--duty free; somebody sent him caviare and baliki
gratis; he did not pay rent for his house because his landlord supplied
the railway with kerosene, and generally he and his daughter gave me the
impression of having all the best things in the world at their service
free of charge.
I went on visiting them, but with less pleasure than before. The
engineer oppressed me and I felt cramped in his presence. I could not
endure his clear, innocent eyes; his opinions bored me and were
offensive to me, and I was distressed by the recollection that I had so
recently been subordinate to this ruddy, well-fed man, and that he had
been mercilessly rude to me. True he would put his arm round my waist
and clap me kindly on the shoulder and approve of my way of living, but
I felt that he despised my nullity just as much as before and only
suffered me to please his daughter, but I could no longer laugh and talk
easily, and I thought myself ill-mannered, and all the time was
expecting him to call me Panteley as he did his footman Pavel. How my
provincial, bourgeois pride rode up against him! I, a working man, a
painter, going every day to the house of rich strangers, whom the whole
town regarded as foreigners, and drinking their expensive wines and
outlandish dishes! I could not reconcile this with my conscience. When I
went to see them I sternly avoided those whom I met on the way, and
looked askance at them like a real sectarian, and when I left the
engineer's house I was ashamed of feeling so well-fed.
But chiefly I was afraid of falling in love. Whether walking in the
street, or working, or talking to my mates, I thought all the time of
going to Maria Victorovna's in the evening, and always had her voice,
her laughter, her movements with me. And always as I got ready to go to
her, I would stand for a long time in front of the cracked mirror tying
my necktie; my serge suit seemed horrible to me, and I suffered, but at
the same time, despised myself for feeling so small. When she called to
me from another room to say that she was not dressed yet and to ask me
to wait a bit, and I could hear her dressing, I was agitated and felt as
though the floor was sinking under me. And when I saw a woman in the
street, even at a distance, I fell to comparing her figure with hers,
and it seemed to me that all our women and girls were vulgar, absurdly
dressed, and without manners; and such comparisons roused in me a
feeling of pride; Maria Victorovna was better than all of them. And at
night I dreamed of her and myself.
Once at supper the engineer and I ate a whole lobster. When I reached
home I remember that the engineer had twice called me "my dear fellow,"
and I thought that they treated me as they might have done a big,
unhappy dog, separated from his master, and that they were amusing
themselves with me, and that they would order me away like a dog when
they were bored with me. I began to feel ashamed and hurt; went to the
point of tears, as though I had been insulted, and, raising my eyes to
the heavens, I vowed to put an end to it all.
Next day I did not go to the Dolyhikovs'. Late at night, when it was
quite dark and pouring with rain, I walked up and down Great Gentry
Street, looking at the windows. At the Azhoguins' everybody was asleep
and the only light was in one of the top windows; old Mrs. Azhoguin was
sitting in her room embroidering by candle-light and imagining herself
to be fighting against prejudice. It was dark in our house and opposite,
at the Dolyhikovs' the windows were lit up, but it was impossible to see
anything through the flowers and curtains. I kept on walking up and down
the street; I was soaked through with the cold March rain. I heard my
father come home from the club; he knocked at the door; in a minute a
light appeared at a window and I saw my sister walking quickly with her
lamp and hurriedly arranging her thick hair. Then my father paced up and
down the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands, and my sister sat
still in a corner, lost in thought, not listening to him....
But soon they left the room and the light was put out.... I looked at
the engineer's house and that too was now dark. In the darkness and the
rain I felt desperately lonely. Cast out at the mercy of Fate, and I
felt how, compared with my loneliness, and my suffering, actual and to
come, all my work and all my desires and all that I had hitherto thought
and read, were vain and futile. Alas! The activities and thoughts of
human beings are not nearly so important as their sorrows! And not
knowing exactly what I was doing I pulled with all my might at the bell
at the Dolyhikovs' gate, broke it, and ran away down the street like a
little boy, full of fear, thinking they would rush out at once and
recognise me. When I stopped to take breath at the end of the street, I
could hear nothing but the falling rain and far away a night-watchman
knocking on a sheet of iron.
For a whole week I did not go to the Dolyhikovs'. I sold my serge suit.
I had no work and I was once more half-starved, earning ten or twenty
copecks a day, when possible, by disagreeable work. Floundering knee-
deep in the mire, putting out all my strength, I tried to drown my
memories and to punish myself for all the cheeses and pickles to which I
had been treated at the engineer's. Still, no sooner did I go to bed,
wet and hungry, than my untamed imagination set to work to evolve
wonderful, alluring pictures, and to my amazement I confessed that I was
in love, passionately in love, and I fell sound asleep feeling that the
hard life had only made my body stronger and younger.
One evening it began, most unseasonably, to snow, and the wind blew from
the north, exactly as if winter had begun again. When I got home from
work I found Maria Victorovna in my room. She was in her furs with her
hands in her muff.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she asked, looking at me with her bright
sagacious eyes, and I was overcome with joy and stood stiffly in front
of her, just as I had done with my father when he was going to thrash
me; she looked straight into my face and I could see by her eyes that
she understood why I was overcome.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she repeated. "You don't want to come? I
had to come to you."
She got up and came close to me.
"Don't leave me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "I am
lonely, utterly lonely."
She began to cry and said, covering her face with her muff:
"Alone! Life is hard, very hard, and in the whole world I have no one
but you. Don't leave me!"
Looking for her handkerchief to dry her tears, she gave a smile; we were
silent for some time, then I embraced and kissed her, and the pin in her
hat scratched my face and drew blood.
And we began to talk as though we had been dear to each other for a
long, long time.
X
In a couple of days she sent me to Dubechnia and I was beyond words
delighted with it. As I walked to the station, and as I sat in the
train, I laughed for no reason and people thought me drunk. There were
snow and frost in the mornings still, but the roads were getting dark,
and there were rooks cawing above them.
At first I thought of arranging the side wing opposite Mrs. Cheprakov's
for myself and Masha, but it appeared that doves and pigeons had taken
up their abode there and it would be impossible to cleanse it without
destroying a great number of nests. We would have to live willy-nilly in
the uncomfortable rooms with Venetian blinds in the big house. The
peasants called it a palace; there were more than twenty rooms in it,
and the only furniture was a piano and a child's chair, lying in the
attic, and even if Masha brought all her furniture from town we should
not succeed in removing the impression of frigid emptiness and coldness.
I chose three small rooms with windows looking on to the garden, and
from early morning till late at night I was at work in them, glazing the
windows, hanging paper, blocking up the chinks and holes in the floor.
It was an easy, pleasant job. Every now and then I would run to the
river to see if the ice was breaking and all the while I dreamed of the
starlings returning. And at night when I thought of Masha I would be
filled with an inexpressibly sweet feeling of an all-embracing joy to
listen to the rats and the wind rattling and knocking above the ceiling;
it was like an old hobgoblin coughing in the attic.
The snow was deep; there was a heavy fall at the end of March, but it
thawed rapidly, as if by magic, and the spring floods rushed down so
that by the beginning of April the starlings were already chattering and
yellow butterflies fluttered in the garden. The weather was wonderful.
Every day toward evening I walked toward the town to meet Masha, and how
delightful it was to walk along the soft, drying road with bare feet!
Half-way I would sit down and look at the town, not daring to go nearer.
The sight of it upset me, I was always wondering how my acquaintances
would behave toward me when they heard of my love. What would my father
say? I was particularly worried by the idea that my life was becoming
more complicated, and that I had entirely lost control of it, and that
she was carrying me off like a balloon, God knows whither. I had already
given up thinking how to make a living, and I thought--indeed, I cannot
remember what I thought.
Masha used to come in a carriage. I would take a seat beside her and
together, happy and free, we used to drive to Dubechnia. Or, having
waited till sunset, I would return home, weary and disconsolate,
wondering why Masha had not come, and then by the gate or in the garden
I would find my darling. She would come by the railway and walk over
from the station. What a triumph she had then! In her plain, woollen
dress, with a simple umbrella, but keeping a trim, fashionable figure
and expensive, Parisian boots--she was a gifted actress playing the
country girl. We used to go over the house, and plan out the rooms, and
the paths, and the vegetable-garden, and the beehives. We already had
chickens and ducks and geese which we loved because they were ours. We
had oats, clover, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds all ready for sowing,
and we used to examine them all and wonder what the crops would be like,
and everything Masha said to me seemed extraordinarily clever and fine.
This was the happiest time of my life.
Soon after Easter we were married in the parish church in the village of
Kurilovka three miles from Dubechnia. Masha wanted everything to be
simple; by her wish our bridesmen were peasant boys, only one deacon
sang, and we returned from the church in a little, shaky cart which she
drove herself. My sister was the only guest from the town. Masha had
sent her a note a couple of days before the wedding. My sister wore a
white dress and white gloves.... During the ceremony she cried softly
for joy and emotion, and her face had a maternal expression of infinite
goodness. She was intoxicated with our happiness and smiled as though
she were breathing a sweet perfume, and when I looked at her I
understood that there was nothing in the world higher in her eyes than
love, earthly love, and that she was always dreaming of love, secretly,
timidly, yet passionately. She embraced Masha and kissed her, and, not
knowing how to express her ecstasy, she said to her of me:
"He is a good man! A very good man."
Before she left us, she put on her ordinary clothes, and took me into
the garden to have a quiet talk.
"Father is very hurt that you have not written to him," she said. "You
should have asked for his blessing. But, at heart, he is very pleased.
He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of society, and