Short Stories by Chekhov
"Quicker, quicker...." urged Vassiliev. Mikhail Sergueyich, a stout
doctor with fair hair, received the friends politely, firmly, coldly,
and smiled with one cheek only.
"The painter and Mayer have told me of your disease already," he said.
"Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, please."
He made Vassiliev sit down in a big chair by the table, and put a box of
cigarettes in front of him.
"Well?" he began, stroking his knees. "Let's make a start. How old are
you?"
He put questions and the medico answered. He asked whether Vassiliev's
father suffered from any peculiar diseases, if he had fits of drinking,
was he distinguished by his severity or any other eccentricities. He
asked the same questions about his grandfather, mother, sisters, and
brothers. Having ascertained that his mother had a fine voice and
occasionally appeared on the stage, he suddenly brightened up and asked:
"Excuse me, but could you recall whether the theatre was not a passion
with your mother?"
About twenty minutes passed. Vassiliev was bored by the doctor stroking
his knees and talking of the same thing all the while.
"As far as I can understand your questions, Doctor," he said. "You want
to know whether my disease is hereditary or not. It is not hereditary."
The doctor went on to ask if Vassiliev had not any secret vices in his
early youth, any blows on the head, any love passions, eccentricities,
or exceptional infatuations. To half the questions habitually asked by
careful doctors you may return no answer without any injury to your
health; but Mikhail Sergueyich, the medico and the painter looked as
though, if Vassiliev failed to answer even one single question,
everything would be ruined. For some reason the doctor wrote down the
answers he received on a scrap of paper. Discovering that Vassiliev had
already passed through the faculty of natural science and was now in the
Law faculty, the doctor began to be pensive....
"He wrote a brilliant thesis last year...." said the medico.
"Excuse me. You mustn't interrupt me; you prevent me from
concentrating," the doctor said, smiling with one cheek. "Yes, certainly
that is important for the anamnesis.... Yes, yes.... And do you drink
vodka?" he turned to Vassiliev.
"Very rarely."
Another twenty minutes passed. The medico began sotto voce to give his
opinion of the immediate causes of the fit and told how he, the painter
and Vassiliev went to S----v Street the day before yesterday.
The indifferent, reserved, cold tone in which his friends and the doctor
were speaking of the women and the miserable street seemed to him in the
highest degree strange....
"Doctor, tell me this one thing," he said, restraining himself from
being rude. "Is prostitution an evil or not?"
"My dear fellow, who disputes it?" the doctor said with an expression as
though he had long ago solved all these questions for himself. "Who
disputes it?"
"Are you a psychiatrist?"
"Yes-s, a psychiatrist."
"Perhaps all of you are right," said Vassiliev, rising and beginning to
walk from corner to corner. "It may be. But to me all this seems
amazing. They see a great achievement in my having passed through two
faculties at the university; they praise me to the skies because I have
written a work that will be thrown away and forgotten in three years'
time, but became I can't speak of prostitutes as indifferently as I can
about these chairs, they send me to doctors, call me a lunatic, and pity
me."
For some reason Vassiliev suddenly began to feel an intolerable pity for
himself, his friends, and everybody whom he had seen the day before
yesterday, and for the doctor. He began to sob and fell into the chair.
The friends looked interrogatively at the doctor. He, looking as though
he magnificently understood the tears and the despair, and knew himself
a specialist in this line, approached Vassiliev and gave him some drops
to drink, and then when Vassiliev grew calm undressed him and began to
examine the sensitiveness of his skin, of the knee reflexes....
And Vassiliev felt better. When he was coming out of the doctor's he was
already ashamed; the noise of the traffic did not seem irritating, and
the heaviness beneath his heart became easier and easier as though it
were thawing. In his hand were two prescriptions. One was for kali-
bromatum, the other--morphia. He used to take both before.
He stood still in the street for a while, pensive, and then, taking
leave of his friends, lazily dragged on towards the university.
MISFORTUNE
Sophia Pietrovna, the wife of the solicitor Loubianzev, a handsome young
woman of about twenty-five, was walking quickly along a forest path with
her bungalow neighbour, the barrister Ilyin. It was just after four. In
the distance, above the path, white feathery clouds gathered; from
behind them some bright blue pieces of cloud showed through. The clouds
were motionless, as if caught on the tops of the tall, aged fir trees.
It was calm and warm.
In the distance the path was cut across by a low railway embankment,
along which at this hour, for some reason or other, a sentry strode.
Just behind the embankment a big, six-towered church with a rusty roof
shone white.
"I did not expect to meet you here," Sophia Pietrovna was saying,
looking down and touching the last year's leaves with the end of her
parasol. "But now I am glad to have met you. I want to speak to you
seriously and finally. Ivan Mikhailovich, if you really love and respect
me I implore you to stop pursuing me i You follow me like a
shadow--there's such a wicked look in your eye--you make love to me--write
extraordinary letters and ... I don't know how all this is going to
end--Good Heavens! What can all this lead to?"
Ilyin was silent. Sophia Pietrovna took a few steps and continued:
"And this sudden complete change has happened in two or three weeks
after five years of friendship. I do not know you any more, Ivan
Mikhailovich."
Sophia Pietrovna glanced sideways at her companion. He was staring
intently, screwing up his eyes at the feathery clouds. The expression of
his face was angry, capricious and distracted, like that of a man who
suffers and at the same time must listen to nonsense.
"It is annoying that you yourself can't realise it!" Madame Loubianzev
continued, shrugging her shoulders. "Please understand that you're not
playing a very nice game. I am married, I love and respect my husband. I
have a daughter. Don't you really care in the slightest for all this?
Besides, as an old friend, you know my views on family life ... on the
sanctity of the home, generally."
Ilyin gave an angry grunt and sighed:
"The sanctity of the home," he murmured, "Good Lord!"
"Yes, yes. I love and respect my husband and at any rate the peace of my
family life is precious to me. I'd sooner let myself be killed than be
the cause of Andrey's or his daughter's unhappiness. So, please, Ivan
Mikhailovich, for goodness' sake, leave me alone. Let us be good and
dear friends, and give up these sighings and gaspings which don't suit
you. It's settled and done with! Not another word about it. Let us talk
of something else!"
Sophia Pietrovna again glanced sideways at Ilyin. He was looking up. He
was pale, and angrily he bit his trembling lips. Madame Loubianzev could
not understand why he was disturbed and angry, but his pallor moved her.
"Don't be cross. Let's be friends," she said, sweetly.
"Agreed! Here is my hand."
Ilyin took her tiny plump hand in both his, pressed it and slowly raised
it to his lips.
"I'm not a schoolboy," he murmured. "I'm not in the least attracted by
the idea of friendship with the woman I love."
"That's enough. Stop! It is all settled and done with. We have come as
far as the bench. Let us sit down...."
A sweet sense of repose filled Sophia Pietrovna's soul. The most
difficult and delicate thing was already said. The tormenting question
was settled and done with. Now she could breathe easily and look
straight at Ilyin. She looked at him, and the egotistical sense of
superiority that a woman feels over her lover caressed her pleasantly.
She liked the way this big strong man with a virile angry face and a
huge black beard sat obediently at her side and hung his head. They were
silent for a little while. "Nothing is yet settled and done with," Ilyin
began. "You are reading me a sermon. 'I love and respect my husband ...
the sanctity of the home....' I know all that for myself and I can tell
you more. Honestly and sincerely I confess that I consider my conduct as
criminal and immoral. What else? But why say what is known already?
Instead of sermonizing you had far better tell me what I am to do."
"I have already told you. Go away."
"I have gone. You know quite well. I have started five times and half-
way there I have come back again. I can show you the through tickets. I
have kept them all safe. But I haven't the power to run away from you. I
struggle frightfully, but what in Heaven's name is the use? If I cannot
harden myself, if I'm weak and faint-hearted. I can't fight nature. Do
you understand? I cannot! I run away from her and she holds me back by
my coattails. Vile, vulgar weakness."
Ilyin blushed, got up, and began walking by the bench:
"How I hate and despise myself. Good Lord, I'm like a vicious
boy--running after another man's wife, writing idiotic letters, degrading
myself. Ach!" He clutched his head, grunted and sit down.
"And now comes your lack of sincerity into the bargain," he continued
with bitterness. "If you don't think I am playing a nice game--why are
you here? What drew you? In my letters I only ask you for a
straightforward answer: Yes, or No; and instead of giving it me, every
day you contrive that we shall meet 'by chance' and you treat me to
quotations from a moral copy-book."
Madame Loubianzev reddened and got frightened. She suddenly felt the
kind of awkwardness that a modest woman would feel at being suddenly
discovered naked.
"You seem to suspect some deceit on my side," she murmured. "I have
always given you a straight answer; and I asked you for one to-day."
"Ah, does one ask such things? If you had said to me at once 'Go away,'
I would have gone long ago, but you never told me to. Never once have
you been frank. Strange irresolution. My God, either you're playing with
me, or...."
Ilyin did not finish, and rested his head in his hands. Sophia Pietrovna
recalled her behaviour all through. She remembered that she had felt all
these days not only in deed but even in her most intimate thoughts
opposed to Ilyin's love. But at the same moment she knew that there was
a grain of truth in the barrister's words. And not knowing what kind of
truth it was she could not think, no matter how much she thought about
it, what to say to him in answer to his complaint. It was awkward being
silent, so she said shrugging her shoulders:
"So I'm to blame for that too?"
"I don't blame you for your insincerity," sighed Ilyin. "It slipped out
unconsciously. Your insincerity is natural to you, in the natural order
of things as well. If all mankind were to agree suddenly to become
serious, everything would go to the Devil, to ruin."
Sophia Pietrovna was not in the mood for philosophy; but she was glad of
the opportunity to change the conversation and asked:
"Why indeed?"
"Because only savages and animals are sincere. Since civilisation
introduced into society the demand, for instance, for such a luxury as
woman's virtue, sincerity has been out of place."
Angrily Ilyin began to thrust his stick into the sand. Madame Loubianzev
listened without understanding much of it; she liked the conversation.
First of all, she was pleased that a gifted man should speak to her, an