Short Stories by Chekhov
God, how awful! I would drink some more water; but now I dread opening
my eyes, and fear to raise my head. The terror is unaccountable, animal.
I cannot understand why I am afraid. Is it because I want to live, or
because a new and unknown pain awaits me?
Upstairs, above the ceiling, a moan, then a laugh ... I listen. A little
after steps sound on the staircase. Someone hurries down, then up again.
In a minute steps sound downstairs again. Someone stops by my door and
listens.
"Who's there?" I call.
The door opens. I open my eyes boldly and see my wife. Her face is pale
and her eyes red with weeping.
"You're not asleep, Nicolai Stiepanovich?" she asks.
"What is it?"
"For God's sake go down to Liza. Something is wrong with her."
"Very well ... with pleasure," I murmur, very glad that I am not alone.
"Very well ... immediately."
As I follow my wife I hear what she tells me, and from agitation
understand not a word. Bright spots from her candle dance over the steps
of the stairs; our long shadows tremble; my feet catch in the skirts of
my dressing-gown. My breath goes, and it seems to me that someone is
chasing me, trying to seize my back. "I shall die here on the staircase,
this second," I think, "this second." But we have passed the staircase,
the dark hall with the Italian window and we go into Liza's room. She
sits in bed in her chemise; her bare legs hang down and she moans.
"Oh, my God ... oh, my God!" she murmurs, half shutting her eyes from
our candles. "I can't, I can't."
"Liza, my child," I say, "what's the matter?"
Seeing me, she calls out and falls on my neck.
"Papa darling," she sobs. "Papa dearest ... my sweet. I don't know what
it is.... It hurts."
She embraces me, kisses me and lisps endearments which I heard her lisp
when she was still a baby.
"Be calm, my child. God's with you," I say. "You mustn't cry. Something
hurts me too."
I try to cover her with the bedclothes; my wife gives her to drink; and
both of us jostle in confusion round the bed. My shoulders push into
hers, and at that moment I remember how we used to bathe our children.
"But help her, help her!" my wife implores. "Do something!" And what can
I do? Nothing. There is some weight on the girl's soul; but I understand
nothing, know nothing and can only murmur:
"It's nothing, nothing.... It will pass.... Sleep, sleep."
As if on purpose a dog suddenly howls in the yard, at first low and
irresolute, then aloud, in two voices. I never put any value on such
signs as dogs' whining or screeching owls; but now my heart contracts
painfully, and I hasten to explain the howling.
"Nonsense," I think. "It's the influence of one organism on another. My
great nervous strain was transmitted to my wife, to Liza, and to the
dog. That's all. Such transmissions explain presentiments and
previsions."
A little later when I return to my room to write a prescription for Liza
I no longer think that I shall die soon. My soul simply feels heavy and
dull, so that I am even sad that I did not die suddenly. For a long
while I stand motionless in the middle of the room, pondering what I
shall prescribe for Liza; but the moans above the ceiling are silent and
I decide not to write a prescription, but stand there still.
There is a dead silence, a silence, as one man wrote, that rings in
one's ears. The time goes slowly. The bars of moonshine on the
windowsill do not move from their place, as though congealed.... The
dawn is still far away.
But the garden-gate creaks; someone steals in, and strips a twig from
the starveling trees, and cautiously knocks with it on my window.
"Nicolai Stiepanovich!" I hear a whisper. "Nicolai Stiepanovich!"
I open the window, and I think that I am dreaming. Under the window,
close against the wall stands a woman in a blade dress. She is brightly
lighted by the moon and looks at me with wide eyes. Her face is pale,
stem and fantastic in the moon, like marble. Her chin trembles.
"It is I...." she says, "I ... Katy!"
In the moon all women's eyes are big and black, people are taller and
paler. Probably that is the reason why I did not recognise her in the
first moment.
"What's the matter?"
"Forgive me," she says. "I suddenly felt so dreary ... I could not bear
it. So I came here. There's a light in your window ... and I decided to
knock.... Forgive me.... Ah, if you knew how dreary I felt! What are you
doing now?"
"Nothing. Insomnia."
Her eyebrows lift, her eyes shine with tears and all her face is
illumined as with light, with the familiar, but long unseen, look of
confidence.
"Nicolai Stiepanovich!" she says imploringly, stretching out both her
hands to me. "Dear, I beg you ... I implore.... If you do not despise my
friendship and my respect for you, then do what I implore you."
"What is it?"
"Take my money."
"What next? What's the good of your money to me?"
"You will go somewhere to be cured. You must cure yourself. You will
take it? Yes? Dear ... Yes?"
She looks into my face eagerly and repeats:
"Yes? You will take it?"
"No, my dear, I won't take it....", I say. "Thank you."
She turns her back to me and lowers her head. Probably the tone of my
refusal would not allow any further talk of money.
"Go home to sleep," I say. "I'll see you to-morrow."
"It means, you don't consider me your friend?" she asks sadly.
"I don't say that. But your money is no good to me."
"Forgive me," she says lowering her voice by a full octave. "I
understand you. To be obliged to a person like me ... a retired
actress... But good-bye."
And she walks away so quickly that I have no time even to say "Good-
bye." VI
I am in Kharkov.
Since it would be useless to fight against my present mood, and I have
no power to do it, I made up my mind that the last days of my life shall
be irreproachable, on the formal side. If I am not right with my family,
which I certainly admit, I will try at least to do as it wishes. Besides
I am lately become so indifferent that it's positively all the same, to
me whether I go to Kharkov, or Paris, or Berditshev.
I arrived here at noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral.
The train made me giddy, the draughts blew through me, and now I am
sitting on the bed with my head in my hands waiting for the tic. I ought
to go to my professor friends to-day, but I have neither the will nor
the strength.
The old hall-porter comes in to ask whether I have brought my own bed-
clothes. I keep him about five minutes asking him questions about
Gnekker, on whose account I came here. The porter happens to be Kharkov-
born, and knows the town inside out; but he doesn't remember any family
with the name of Gnekker. I inquire about the estate. The answer is the
same.
The clock in the passage strikes one,... two,... three.... The last
months of my life, while I wait for death, seem to me far longer than my
whole life. Never before could I reconcile myself to the slowness of
time as I can now. Before, when I had to wait for a train at the
station, or to sit at an examination, a quarter of an hour would seem an
eternity. Now I can sit motionless in bed the whole night long, quite
calmly thinking that there will be the same long, colourless night to-
morrow, and the next day....
In the passage the clock strikes five, six, seven.... It grows dark.
There is dull pain in my cheek--the beginning of the tic. To occupy
myself with thoughts, I return to my old point of view, when I was not
indifferent, and ask: Why do I, a famous man, a privy councillor, sit in
this little room, on this bed with a strange grey blanket? Why do I look
at this cheap tin washstand and listen to the wretched clock jarring in
the passage? Is all this worthy of my fame and my high position among
people? And I answer these questions with a smile. My naïveté seems
funny to me--the naïveté with which as a young man I exaggerated the
value of fame and of the exclusive position which famous men enjoy. I am
famous, my name is spoken with reverence. My portrait has appeared in
"Niva" and in "The Universal Illustration." I've even read my biography
in a German paper, but what of that? I sit lonely, by myself, in a
strange city, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm....
Family scandals, the hardness of creditors, the rudeness of railway men,
the discomforts of the passport system, the expensive and unwholesome
food at the buffets, the general coarseness and roughness of people,--all
this and a great deal more that would take too long to put down,
concerns me as much as it concerns any bourgeois who is known only in
his own little street. Where is the exclusiveness of my position then?
We will admit that I am infinitely famous, that I am a hero of whom my
country is proud. All the newspapers give bulletins of my illness, the
post is already bringing in sympathetic addresses from my friends, my
pupils, and the public. But all this will not save me from dying in
anguish on a stranger's bed in utter loneliness. Of course there is no
one to blame for this. But I must confess I do not like my popularity. I
feel that it has deceived me.
At about ten I fall asleep, and, in spite of the tic sleep soundly, and
would sleep for a long while were I not awakened. Just after one there
is a sudden knock on my door.
"Who's there?"
"A telegram."
"You could have brought it to-morrow," I storm, as I take the telegram
from the porter. "Now I shan't sleep again."
"I'm sorry. There was a light in your room. I thought you were not
asleep."
I open the telegram and look first at the signature--my wife's. What does
she want?
"Gnekker married Liza secretly yesterday. Return."
I read the telegram. For a long while I am not startled. Not Gnekker's
or Liza's action frightens me, but the indifference with which I receive
the news of their marriage. Men say that philosophers and true savants
are indifferent. It is untrue. Indifference is the paralysis of the
soul, premature death.
I go to bed again and begin to ponder with what thoughts I can occupy
myself. What on earth shall I think of? I seem to have thought over
everything, and now there is nothing powerful enough to rouse my
thought.
When the day begins to dawn, I sit in bed clasping my knees and, for
want of occupation I try to know myself. "Know yourself" is good, useful
advice; but it is a pity that the ancients did not think of showing us
the way to avail ourselves of it.
Before, when I had the desire to understand somebody else, or myself, I
used not to take into consideration actions, wherein everything is
conditional, but desires. Tell me what you want, and I will tell you
what you are.
And now I examine myself. What do I want?
I want our wives, children, friends, and pupils to love in us, not the
name or the firm or the label, but the ordinary human beings. What
besides? I should like to have assistants and successors. What more? I
should like to wake in a hundred years' time, and take a look, if only
with one eye, at what has happened to science. I should like to live ten
years more.... What further?
Nothing further. I think, think a long while and cannot make out
anything else. However much I were to think, wherever my thoughts should
stray, it is clear to me that the chief, all-important something is
lacking in my desires. In my infatuation for science, my desire to live,
my sitting here on a strange bed, my yearning to know myself, in all the
thoughts, feelings, and ideas I form about anything, there is wanting
the something universal which could bind all these together in one
whole. Each feeling and thought lives detached in me, and in all my
opinions about science, the theatre, literature, and my pupils, and in