Short Stories by Chekhov
in your look than in the whole street. Let's dear out, Volodya, damn
him! He's a fool. He's a blockhead, and that's all he is."
"Human beings are always killing each other," said the medico. "That is
immoral, of course. But philosophy won't help you. Good-bye!"
The friends parted at Trubnoi Square and went their way. Left alone,
Vassiliev began to stride along the boulevard. He was frightened of the
dark, frightened of the snow, which fell to the earth in little flakes,
but seemed to long to cover the whole world; he was frightened of the
street-lamps, which glimmered faintly through the clouds of snow. An
inexplicable faint-hearted fear possessed his soul. Now and then people
passed him; but he gave a start and stepped aside. It seemed to him that
from everywhere there came and stared at him women, only women....
"It's coming on," he thought, "I'm going to have a fit." VI
At home he lay on his bed and began to talk, shivering all over his
body.
"Live women, live.... My God, they're alive."
He sharpened the edge of his imagination in every possible way. Now he
was the brother of an unfortunate, now her father. Now he was himself a
fallen woman, with painted cheeks; and all this terrified him.
It seemed to him somehow that he must solve this question immediately,
at all costs, and that the problem was not strange to him, but was his
own. He made a great effort, conquered his despair, and, sitting on the
side of the bed, his head clutched in his hands, he began to think:
How could all the women he had seen that night be saved? The process of
solving a problem was familiar to him as to a learned person; and
notwithstanding all his excitement he kept strictly to this process. He
recalled to mind the history of the question, its literature, and just
after three o'clock he was pacing up and down, trying to remember all
the experiments which are practised nowadays for the salvation of women.
He had a great many good friends who lived in furnished rooms, Falzfein,
Galyashkin, Nechaiev, Yechkin ... not a few among them were honest and
self-sacrificing, and some of them had attempted to save these women....
All these few attempts, thought Vassiliev, rare attempts, may be divided
into three groups. Some having rescued a woman from a brothel hired a
room for her, bought her a sewing-machine and she became a dressmaker,
and the man who saved her kept her for his mistress, openly or
otherwise, but later when he had finished his studies and was going
away, he would hand her over to another decent fellow. So the fallen
woman remained fallen. Others after having bought her out also hired a
room for her, bought the inevitable sewing-machine and started her off
reading and writing and preached at her. The woman sits and sews as long
as it is novel and amusing, but later, when she is bored, she begins to
receive men secretly, or runs back to where she can sleep till three in
the afternoon, drink coffee, and eat till she is full. Finally, the most
ardent and self-sacrificing take a bold, determined step. They marry,
and when the impudent, self-indulgent, stupefied creature becomes a
wife, a lady of the house, and then a mother, her life and outlook are
utterly changed, and in the wife and mother it is hard to recognise the
unfortunate woman. Yes, marriage is the best, it may be the only,
resource.
"But it's impossible," Vassiliev said aloud and threw himself down on
his bed. "First of all, I could not marry one. One would have to be a
saint to be able to do it, unable to hate, not knowing disgust. But let
us suppose that the painter, the medico, and I got the better of our
feelings and married, that all these women got married, what is the
result? What kind of effect follows? The result is that while the women
get married here in Moscow, the Smolensk bookkeeper seduces a fresh lot,
and these will pour into the empty places, together with women from
Saratov, Nijni-Novgorod, Warsaw.... And what happens to the hundred
thousand in London? What can be done with those in Hamburg?
The oil in the lamp was used up and the lamp began to smell. Vassiliev
did not notice it. Again he began to pace up and down, thinking. Now he
put the question differently. What can be done to remove the demand for
fallen women? For this it is necessary that the men who buy and kill
them should at once begin to feel all the immorality of their rôle of
slave-owners, and this should terrify them. It is necessary to save the
men.
Science and art apparently won't do, thought Vassiliev. There is only
one way out--to be an apostle.
And he began to dream how he would stand to-morrow evening at the corner
of the street and say to each passer-by: "Where are you going and what
for? Fear God!"
He would turn to the indifferent cabmen and say to them:
"Why are you standing here? Why don't you revolt? You do believe in God,
don't you? And you do know that this is a crime, and that people will go
to Hell for this? Why do you keep quiet, then? True, the women are
strangers to you, but they have fathers and brothers exactly the same as
you...."
Some friend of Vassiliev's once said of him that he was a man of talent.
There is a talent for writing, for the theatre, for painting; but
Vassiliev's was peculiar, a talent for humanity. He had a fine and noble
flair for every kind of suffering. As a good actor reflects in himself
the movement and voice of another, so Vassiliev could reflect in himself
another's pain. Seeing tears, he wept. With a sick person, he himself
became sick and moaned. If he saw violence done, it seemed to him that
he was the victim. He was frightened like a child, and, frightened, ran
for help. Another's pain roused him, excited him, threw him into a state
of ecstasy....
Whether the friend was right I do not know, but what happened to
Vassiliev when it seemed to him that the question was solved was very
much like an ecstasy. He sobbed, laughed, said aloud the things he would
say to-morrow, felt a burning love for the men who would listen to him
and stand by his side at the corner of the street, preaching. He sat
down to write to them; he made vows.
All this was the more like an ecstasy in that it did not last. Vassiliev
was soon tired. The London women, the Hamburg women, those from Warsaw,
crushed him with their mass, as the mountains crush the earth. He
quailed before this mass; he lost himself; he remembered he had no gift
for speaking, that he was timid and faint-hearted, that strange people
would hardly want to listen to and understand him, a law-student in his
third year, a frightened and insignificant figure. The true apostleship
consisted, not only in preaching, but also in deeds....
When daylight came and the carts rattled on the streets, Vassiliev lay
motionless on the sofa, staring at one point. He did not think any more
of women, or men, or apostles. All his attention was fixed on the pain
of his soul which tormented him. It was a dull pain, indefinite, vague;
it was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair. He could say
where the pain was. It was in his breast, under the heart. It could not
be compared to anything. Once on a time he used to have violent
toothache. Once, he had pleurisy and neuralgia. But all these pains were
as nothing beside the pain of his soul. Beneath this pain life seemed
repulsive. The thesis, his brilliant work already written, the people he
loved, the salvation of fallen women, all that which only yesterday he
loved or was indifferent to, remembered now, irritated him in the same
way as the noise of the carts, the running about of the porters and the
daylight.... If someone now were to perform before his eyes a deed of
mercy or an act of revolting violence, both would produce upon him an
equally repulsive impression. Of all the thoughts which roved lazily in
his head, two only did not irritate him: one--at any moment he had the
power to kill himself, the other--that the pain would not last more than
three days. The second he knew from experience.
After having lain down for a while he got up and walked wringing his
hands, not from corner to corner as usually, but in a square along the
walls. He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass. His face was pale
and haggard, his temples hollow, his eyes bigger, darker, more immobile,
as if they were not his own, and they expressed the intolerable
suffering of his soul.
In the afternoon the painter knocked at the door.
"Gregory, are you at home?" he asked.
Receiving no answer, he stood musing for a while, and said to himself
good-naturedly:
"Out. He's gone to the University. Damn him."
And went away.
Vassiliev lay down on his bed and burying his head in the pillow he
began to cry with the pain. But the faster his tears flowed, the more
terrible was the pain. When it was dark, he got into his mind the idea
of the horrible night which was awaiting him and awful despair seized
him. He dressed quickly, ran out of his room, leaving the door wide
open, and into the street without reason or purpose. Without asking
himself where he was going, he walked quickly to Sadovaia Street.
Snow was falling as yesterday. It was thawing. Putting his hands into
his sleeves, shivering, and frightened of the noises and the bells of
the trams and of passers-by, Vassiliev walked from Sadovaia to Sukhariev
Tower then to the Red Gates, and from here he turned and went to
Basmannaia. He went into a public-house and gulped down a big glass of
vodka, but felt no better. Arriving at Razgoulyai, he turned to the
right and began to stride down streets that he had never in his life
been down before. He came to that old bridge under which the river
Yaouza roars and from whence long rows of lights are seen in the windows
of the Red Barracks. In order to distract the pain of his soul by a new
sensation or another pain, not knowing what to do, weeping and
trembling, Vassiliev unbuttoned his coat and jacket, baring his naked
breast to the damp snow and the wind. Neither lessened the pain. Then he
bent over the rail of the bridge and stared down at the black, turbulent
Yaouza, and he suddenly wanted to throw himself head-first, not from
hatred of life, not for the sake of suicide, but only to hurt himself
and so to kill one pain by another. But the black water, the dark,
deserted banks covered with snow were frightening. He shuddered and went
on. He walked as far as the Red Barracks, then back and into a wood,
from the wood to the bridge again.
"No! Home, home," he thought. "At home I believe it's easier."
And he went back. On returning home he tore off his wet clothes and hat,
began to pace along the walls, and paced incessantly until the very
morning. VII
The next morning when the painter and the medico came to see him, they
found him in a shirt torn to ribbons, his hands bitten all over, tossing
about in the room and moaning with pain.
"For God's sake!" he began to sob, seeing his comrades, "Take me
anywhere you like, do what you like, but save me, for God's sake now,
now! I'll kill myself."
The painter went pale and was bewildered. The medico, too, nearly began
to cry; but, believing that medical men must be cool and serious on
every occasion of life, he said coldly:
"It's a fit you've got. But never mind. Come to the doctor, at once."
"Anywhere you like, but quickly, for God's sake!"
"Don't be agitated. You must struggle with yourself."
The painter and the medico dressed Vassiliev with trembling hands and
led him into the street.
"Mikhail Sergueyich has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a
long while," the medico said on the way. "He's a very nice man, and
knows his job splendidly. He took his degree in '82, and has got a huge
practice already. He keeps friends with the students."