Short Stories by Chekhov
As he walks in he slowly removes his gloves and says in his velvety
bass:
"How do you do? Drinking tea. Just in time. It's hellishly cold."
Then he sits down at the table, takes a glass of tea and immediately
begins to talk. What chiefly marks his way of talking is his invariably
ironical tone, a mixture of philosophy and jest, like Shakespeare's
grave-diggers. He always talks of serious matters; but never seriously.
His opinions are always acid and provocative, but thanks to his tender,
easy, jesting tone, it somehow happens that his acidity and
provocativeness don't tire one's ears, and one very soon gets used to
it. Every evening he brings along some half-dozen stories of the
university life and generally begins with them when he sits down at the
table.
"O Lord," he sighs with an amusing movement of his black eyebrows,
"there are some funny people in the world."
"Who?" asks Katy.
"I was coming down after my lecture to-day and I met that old idiot N----
on the stairs. He walks along, as usual pushing out that horse jowl of
his, looking for some one to bewail his headaches, his wife, and his
students, who won't come to his lectures. 'Well,' I think to myself,
'he's seen me. It's all up--no hope for And so on in the same strain. Or
he begins like this,
"Yesterday I was at Z's public lecture. Tell it not in Gath, but I do
wonder how our alma mater dares to show the public such an ass, such a
double-dyed blockhead as Z. Why he's a European fool. Good Lord, you
won't find one like him in all Europe--not even if you looked in daytime,
and with a lantern. Imagine it: he lectures as though he were sucking a
stick of barley-sugar--su--su--su. He gets a fright because he can't make
out his manuscript. His little thoughts will only just keep moving,
hardly moving, like a bishop riding a bicycle. Above all you can't make
out a word he says. The flies die of boredom, it's so terrific. It can
only be compared with the boredom in the great Hall at the
Commemoration, when the traditional speech is made. To hell with it!"
Immediately an abrupt change of subject.
"I had to make the speech; three years ago. Nicolai Stiepanovich will
remember. It was hot, close. My full uniform was tight under my arms,
tight as death. I read for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half,
two hours. 'Well,' I thought, 'thank God I've only ten pages left.' And
I had four pages of peroration that I needn't read at all. 'Only six
pages then,' I thought. Imagine it. I just gave a glance in front of me
and saw sitting next to each other in the front row a general with a
broad ribbon and a bishop. The poor devils were bored stiff. They were
staring about madly to stop themselves from going to sleep. For all that
they are still trying to look attentive, to make some appearance of
understanding what I'm reading, and look as though they like it. 'Well,'
I thought, 'if you like it, then you shall have it. I'll spite you.' So
I set to and read the four pages, every word."
When he speaks only his eyes and eyebrows smile as it is generally with
the ironical. At such moments there is no hatred or malice in his eyes
but a great deal of acuteness and that peculiar fox-cunning which you
can catch only in very observant people. Further, about his eyes I have
noticed one more peculiarity. When he takes his glass from Katy, or
listens to her remarks, or follows her with a glance as she goes out of
the room for a little while, then I catch in his look something humble,
prayerful, pure....
The maid takes the samovar away and puts on the table a big piece of
cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne, a thoroughly bad
wine which Katy got to like when she lived in the Crimea. Mikhail
Fiodorovich takes two packs of cards from the shelves and sets them out
for patience. If one may believe his assurances, some games of patience
demand a great power of combination and concentration. Nevertheless
while he sets out the cards he amuses himself by talking continually.
Katy follows his cards carefully, helping him more by mimicry than
words. In the whole evening she drinks no more than two small glasses of
wine, I drink only a quarter of a glass, the remainder of the bottle
falls to Mikhail Fiodorovich, who can drink any amount without ever
getting drunk.
During patience we solve all kinds of questions, mostly of the lofty
order, and our dearest love, science, comes off second best.
"Science, thank God, has had her day," says Mikhail Fiodorovich very
slowly. "She has had her swan-song. Ye-es. Mankind has begun to feel the
desire to replace her by something else. She was grown from the soil of
prejudice, fed by prejudices, and is now the same quintessence of
prejudices as were her bygone grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics and
philosophy. As between European scholars and the Chinese who have no
sciences at all the difference is merely trifling, a matter only of
externals. The Chinese had no scientific knowledge, but what have they
lost by that?"
"Flies haven't any scientific knowledge either," I say; "but what does
that prove?"
"It's no use getting angry, Nicolai Stiepanich. I say this only between
ourselves. I'm more cautious than you think. I shan't proclaim it from
the housetops, God forbid! The masses still keep alive a prejudice that
science and art are superior to agriculture and commerce, superior to
crafts. Our persuasion makes a living from this prejudice. It's not for
you and me to destroy it. God forbid!"
During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.
"Our public is degenerate nowadays," Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. "I don't
speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should be able to
work and think decently. 'Sadly I look at the men of our time'--it's
quite true in this connection."
"Yes, they're frightfully degenerate," Katy agrees. "Tell me, had you
one single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?"
"I don't know how it is with the other professors,--but somehow I don't
recollect that it ever happened to me."
"In my lifetime I've seen a great many of your students and young
scholars, a great many actors.... What happened? I never once had the
luck to meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily
interesting person. Everything's dull and incapable, swollen and
pretentious...."
All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression
that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my
daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale and
are based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such penny-
dreadful notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons with the
glorious past. Any indictment, even if it's made in a company of ladies,
should be formulated with all possible precision; otherwise it isn't an
indictment, but an empty calumny, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, and have served for the last thirty years; but I don't
see any sign either of degeneracy or the lack of ideals. I don't find it
any worse now than before. My porter, Nicolas, whose experience in this
case has its value, says that students nowadays are neither better nor
worse than their predecessors.
If I were asked what was the thing I did not like about my present
pupils, I wouldn't say offhand or answer at length, but with a certain
precision. I know their defects and there's no need for me to take
refuge in a mist of commonplaces. I don't like the way they smoke, and
drink spirits, and marry late; or the way they are careless and
indifferent to the point of allowing students to go hungry in their
midst, and not paying their debts into "The Students' Aid Society." They
are ignorant of modern languages and express themselves incorrectly in
Russian. Only yesterday my colleague, the hygienist, complained to me
that he had to lecture twice as often because of their incompetent
knowledge of physics and their complete ignorance of meteorology. They
are readily influenced by the most modern writers, and some of those not
the best, but they are absolutely indifferent to classics like
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Pascal; and their worldly
unpracticality shows itself mostly in their inability to distinguish
between great and small. They solve all difficult questions which have a
more or less social character (emigration, for instance) by getting up
subscriptions, but not by the method of scientific investigation and
experiment, though this is at their full disposal, and, above all,
corresponds to their vocation. They readily become house-doctors,
assistant house-doctors, clinical assistants, or consulting doctors, and
they are prepared to keep these positions until they are forty, though
independence, a sense of freedom, and personal initiative are quite as
necessary in science, as, for instance, in art or commerce. I have
pupils and listeners, but I have no helpers or successors. Therefore I
love them and am concerned for them, but I'm not proud of them ... and
so on.
However great the number of such defects may be, it's only in a cowardly
and timid person that they give rise to pessimism and distraction. All
of them are by nature accidental and transitory, and are completely
dependent on the conditions of life. Ten years will be enough for them
to disappear or give place to new and different defects, which are quite
indispensable, but will in their turn give the timid a fright. Students'
shortcomings often annoy me, but the annoyance is nothing in comparison
with the joy I have had these thirty years in speaking with my pupils,
lecturing to them, studying their relations and comparing them with
people of a different class.
Mikhail Fiodorovich is a slanderer. Katy listens and neither of them
notices how deep is the pit into which they are drawn by such an
outwardly innocuous recreation as condemning one's neighbours. They
don't realise how a simple conversation gradually turns into mockery and
derision, or how they both begin even to employ the manners of calumny.
"There are some queer types to be found," says Mikhail Fiodorovich.
"Yesterday I went to see our friend Yegor Pietrovich. There I found a
student, one of your medicos, a third-year man, I think. His face ...
rather in the style of Dobroliubov--the stamp of profound thought on his
brow. We began to talk. 'My dear fellow--an extraordinary business. I've
just read that some German or other--can't remember his name--has
extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain--idiotine.' Do you know he
really believed it, and produced an expression of respect on his face,
as much as to say, 'See, what a power we are.'"
"The other day I went to the theatre. I sat down. Just in front of me in
the next row two people were sitting: one, 'one of the chosen,'
evidently a law student, the other a whiskery medico. The medico was as
drunk as a cobbler. Not an atom of attention to the stage. Dozing and
nodding. But the moment some actor began to deliver a loud monologue, or
just raised his voice, my medico thrills, digs his neighbour in the
ribs. 'What's he say? Something noble?' 'Noble,' answers 'the chosen.'
"'Brrravo!' bawls the medico. 'No--ble. Bravo.' You see the drunken
blockhead didn't come to the theatre for art, but for something noble.
He wants nobility."
Katy listens and laughs. Her laugh is rather strange. She breathes out
in swift, rhythmic, and regular alternation with her inward breathing.
It's as though she were playing an accordion. Of her face, only her
nostrils laugh. My heart fails me. I don't know what to say. I lose my
temper, crimson, jump up from my seat and cry:
"Be quiet, won't you? Why do you sit here like two toads, poisoning the
air with your breath? I've had enough."