Short Stories by Chekhov
every now and then one or two thousand roubles at her request; when she
wrote that she intended to die, and afterwards that her baby was dead,---
I was at a loss every time. All my sympathy with her fate consisted in
thinking hard and writing long tedious letters which might as well never
have been written. But then I was in loco parentis and I loved her as a
daughter.
Katy lives half a mile away from me now. She took a five-roomed house
and furnished it comfortably, with the taste that was born in her. If
anyone were to undertake to depict her surroundings, then the dominating
mood of the picture would be indolence. Soft cushions, soft chairs for
her indolent body; carpets for her indolent feet; faded, dim, dull
colours for her indolent eyes; for her indolent soul, a heap of cheap
fans and tiny pictures on the walls, pictures in which novelty of
execution was more noticeable than content; plenty of little tables and
stands, set out with perfectly useless and worthless things, shapeless
scraps instead of curtains.... All this, combined with a horror of
bright colours, of symmetry, and space, betokened a perversion of the
natural taste as well as indolence of the soul. For whole days Katy lies
on the sofa and reads books, mostly novels and stories. She goes outside
her house but once in the day, to come and see me.
I work. Katy sits on the sofa at my side. She is silent, and wraps
herself up in her shawl as though she were cold. Either because she is
sympathetic to me, or I because I had got used to her continual visits
while she was still a little girl, her presence does not prevent me from
concentrating on my work. At long intervals I ask her some question or
other, mechanically, and she answers very curtly; or, for a moment's
rest, I turn towards her and watch how she is absorbed in looking
through some medical review or newspaper. And then I see that the old
expression of confidence in her face is there no more. Her expression
now is cold, indifferent, distracted, like that of a passenger who has
to wait a long while for his train. She dresses as she used--well and
simply, but carelessly. Evidently her clothes and her hair suffer not a
little from the sofas and hammocks on which she lies for days together.
And she is not curious any more. She doesn't ask me questions any more,
as if she had experienced everything in life and did not expect to hear
anything new.
About four o'clock there is a sound of movement in the hall and the
drawing-room. It's Liza come back from the Conservatoire, bringing her
friends with her. You can hear them playing the piano, trying their
voices and giggling. Yegor is laying the table in the dining-room and
making a noise with the plates.
"Good-bye," says Katy. "I shan't go in to see your people. They must
excuse me. I haven't time. Come and see me."
When I escort her into the hall, she looks me over sternly from head to
foot, and says in vexation:
"You get thinner and thinner. Why don't you take a cure? I'll go to
Sergius Fiodorovich and ask him to come. You must let him see you."
"It's not necessary, Katy."
"I can't understand why your family does nothing. They're a nice lot."
She puts on her jacket with her rush. Inevitably, two or three hair-pins
fall out of her careless hair on to the floor. It's too much bother to
tidy her hair now; besides she is in a hurry. She pushes the straggling
strands of hair untidily under her hat and goes away.
As soon as I come into the dining-room, my wife asks:
"Was that Katy with you just now? Why didn't she come to see us. It
really is extraordinary...."
"Mamma!" says Liza reproachfully, "If she doesn't want to come, that's
her affair. There's no need for us to go on our knees."
"Very well; but it's insulting. To sit in the study for three hours,
without thinking of us. But she can do as she likes."
Varya and Liza both hate Katy. This hatred is unintelligible to me;
probably you have to be a woman to understand it. I'll bet my life on it
that you'll hardly find a single one among the hundred and fifty young
men I see almost every day in my audience, or the hundred old ones I
happen to meet every week, who would be able to understand why women
hate and abhor Katy's past, her being pregnant and unmarried and her
illegitimate child. Yet at the same time I cannot bring to mind a single
woman or girl of my acquaintance who would not cherish such feelings,
either consciously or instinctively. And it's not because women are
purer and more virtuous than men. If virtue and purity are not free from
evil feeling, there's precious little difference between them and vice.
I explain it simply by the backward state of women's development. The
sorrowful sense of compassion and the torment of conscience, which the
modern man experiences when he sees distress have much more to tell me
about culture and moral development than have hatred and repulsion. The
modern woman is as lachrymose and as coarse in heart as she was in the
middle ages. And in my opinion those who advise her to be educated like
a man have wisdom on their side.
But still my wife does not like Katy, because she was an actress, and
for her ingratitude, her pride, her extravagances, and all the
innumerable vices one woman can always discover in another.
Besides myself and my family we have two or three of my daughter's girl
friends to dinner and Alexander Adolphovich Gnekker, Liza's admirer and
suitor. He is a fair young man, not more than thirty years old, of
middle height, very fat, broad shouldered, with reddish hair round his
ears and a little stained moustache, which give his smooth chubby face
the look of a doll's. He wears a very short jacket, a fancy waistcoat,
large-striped trousers, very full on the hip and very narrow in the leg,
and brown boots without heels. His eyes stick out like a lobster's, his
tie is like a lobster's tail, and I can't help thinking even that the
smell of lobster soup clings about the whole of this young man. He
visits us every day; but no one in the family knows where he comes from,
where he was educated, or how he lives. He cannot play or sing, but he
has a certain connection with music as well as singing, for he is agent
for somebody's pianos, and is often at the Academy. He knows all the
celebrities, and he manages concerts. He gives his opinion on music with
great authority and I have noticed that everybody hastens to agree with
him.
Rich men always have parasites about them. So do the sciences and the
arts. It seems that there is no science or art in existence, which is
free from such "foreign bodies" as this Mr. Gnekker. I am not a musician
and perhaps I am mistaken about Gnekker, besides I don't know him very
well. But I can't help suspecting the authority and dignity with which
he stands beside the piano and listens when anyone is singing or
playing.
You may be a gentleman and a privy councillor a hundred times over; but
if you have a daughter you can't be guaranteed against the pettinesses
that are so often brought into your house and into your own humour, by
courtings, engagements, and weddings. For instance, I cannot reconcile
myself to my wife's solemn expression every time Gnekker comes to our
house, nor to those bottles of Château Lafitte, port, and sherry which
are put on the table only for him, to convince him beyond doubt of the
generous luxury in which we live. Nor can I stomach the staccato
laughter which Liza learned at the Academy, and her way of screwing up
her eyes, when men are about the house. Above all, I can't understand
why it is that such a creature should come to me every day and have
dinner with me--a creature perfectly foreign to my habits, my science,
and the whole tenour of my life, a creature absolutely unlike the men I
love. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that that is "the
bridegroom," but still I can't understand why he's there. It disturbs my
mind just as much as if a Zulu were put next to me at table. Besides, it
seems strange to me that my daughter whom I used to think of as a baby
should be in love with that necktie, those eyes, those chubby cheeks.
Formerly, I either enjoyed my dinner or was indifferent about it. Now it
does nothing but bore and exasperate me. Since I was made an Excellency
and Dean of the Faculty, for some reason or other my family found it
necessary to make a thorough change in our menu and the dinner
arrangements. Instead of the simple food I was used to as a student and
a doctor, I am now fed on potage-puree, with some sossoulki swimming
about in it, and kidneys in Madeira. The title of General and my renown
have robbed me for ever of schi and savoury pies, and roast goose with
apple sauce, and bream with kasha. They robbed me as well of my maid
servant Agasha, a funny, talkative old woman, instead of whom I am now
waited on by Yegor, a stupid, conceited fellow who always has a white
glove in his right hand. The intervals between the courses are short,
but they seem terribly long. There is nothing to fill them. We don't
have any more of the old good-humour, the familiar conversations, the
jokes and the laughter; no more mutual endearments, or the gaiety that
used to animate my children, my wife, and myself when we met at the
dinner table. For a busy man like me dinner was a time to rest and meet
my friends, and a feast for my wife and children, not a very long feast,
to be sure, but a gay and happy one, for they knew that for half an hour
I did not belong to science and my students, but solely to them and to
no one else. No more chance of getting tipsy on a single glass of wine,
no more Agasha, no more bream with kasha, no more the old uproar to
welcome our little contretemps at dinner, when the cat fought the dog
under the table, or Katy's head-band fell down her cheek into her soup.
Our dinner nowadays is as nasty to describe as to eat. On my wife's face
there is pompousness, an assumed gravity, and the usual anxiety. She
eyes our plates nervously: "I see you don't like the meat?... Honestly,
don't you like it?" And I must answer, "Don't worry, my dear. The meat
is very good." She: "You're always taking my part, Nicolai Stiepanich.
You never tell the truth. Why has Alexander Adolphovich eaten so
little?" and the same sort of conversation for the whole of dinner. Liza
laughs staccato and screws up her eyes. I look at both of them, and at
this moment at dinner here I can see quite clearly that their inner
lives have slipped out of my observation long ago. I feel as though once
upon a time I lived at home with a real family, but now I am dining as a
guest with an unreal wife and looking at an unreal Liza. There has been
an utter change in both of them, while I have lost sight of the long
process that led up to the change. No wonder I don't understand
anything. What was the reason of the change? I don't know. Perhaps the
only trouble is that God did not give my wife and daughter the strength
He gave me. From my childhood I have been accustomed to resist outside
influences and have been hardened enough. Such earthly catastrophes as
fame, being made General, the change from comfort to living above my
means, acquaintance with high society, have scarcely touched me. I have
survived safe and sound. But it all fell down like an avalanche on my
weak, unhardened wife and Liza, and crushed them.
Gnekker and the girls talk of fugues and counter-fugues; singers and
pianists, Bach and Brahms, and my wife, frightened of being suspected of
musical ignorance, smiles sympathetically and murmurs: "Wonderful.... Is
it possible?... Why?..." Gnekker eats steadily, jokes gravely, and
listens condescendingly to the ladies' remarks. Now and then he has the
desire to talk bad French, and then he finds it necessary for some