Short Stories by Chekhov
with carbolic acid. He had no more than a glimpse of the bright red
lampshade, the cello case, and when he looked sideways across the room
to where the dock was ticking, he noticed a stuffed wolf, as solid and
satisfied as Aboguin himself.
It was still.... Somewhere far away in the other rooms someone uttered a
loud "Ah!" A glass door, probably a cupboard door, rang, and again
everything was still. After five minutes had passed, Kirilov did not
look at his hands any more. He raised his eyes to the door through which
Aboguin had disappeared.
Aboguin was standing on the threshold, but not the same man as went out.
The expression of satisfaction and subtle elegance had disappeared from
him. His face and hands, the attitude of his body were distorted with a
disgusting expression either of horror or of tormenting physical pain.
His nose, lips, moustache, all his features were moving and as it were
trying to tear themselves away from his face, but the eyes were as
though laughing from pain.
Aboguin took a long heavy step into the middle of the room, stooped,
moaned, and shook his fists.
"Deceived!" he cried, emphasising the syllable cei. "She deceived me!
She's gone! She fell ill and sent me for the doctor only to run away
with this fool Papchinsky. My God!" Aboguin stepped heavily towards the
doctor, thrust his white soft fists before his face, and went on
wailing, shaking his fists the while.
"She's gone off! She's deceived me! But why this lie? My God, my God!
Why this dirty, foul trick, this devilish, serpent's game? What have I
done to her? She's gone off." Tears gushed from his eyes. He turned on
his heel and began to pace the drawing-room. Now in his short jacket and
his fashionable narrow trousers in which his legs seemed too thin for
his body, he was extraordinarily like a lion. Curiosity kindled in the
doctor's impassive face. He rose and eyed Aboguin.
"Well, where's the patient?"
"The patient, the patient," cried Aboguin, laughing, weeping, and still
shaking his fists. "She's not ill, but accursed. Vile--dastardly. The
Devil himself couldn't have planned a fouler trick. She sent me so that
she could run away with a fool, an utter clown, an Alphonse! My God, far
better she should have died. I'll not bear it. I shall not bear it."
The doctor stood up straight. His eyes began to blink, filled with
tears; his thin beard began to move with his jaw right and left.
"What's this?" he asked, looking curiously about. "My child's dead. My
wife in anguish, alone in all the house.... I can hardly stand on my
feet, I haven't slept for three nights ... and I'm made to play in a
vulgar comedy, to play the part of a stage property! I don't ... I don't
understand it!"
Aboguin opened one fist, flung a crumpled note on the floor and trod on
it, as upon an insect he wished to crush.
"And I didn't see ... didn't understand," he said through his set teeth,
brandishing one fist round his head, with an expression as though
someone had trod on a corn. "I didn't notice how he came to see us every
day. I didn't notice that he came in a carriage to-day! What was the
carriage for? And I didn't see! Innocent!"
"I don't ... I don't understand," the doctor murmured. "What's it all
mean? It's jeering at a man, laughing at a man's suffering! That's
impossible.... I've never seen it in my life before!"
With the dull bewilderment of a man who has just begun to understand
that someone has bitterly offended him, the doctor shrugged his
shoulders, waved his hands and not knowing what to say or do, dropped
exhausted into a chair.
"Well, she didn't love me any more. She loved another man. Very well.
But why the deceit, why this foul treachery?" Aboguin spoke with tears
in his voice. "Why, why? What have I done to you? Listen, doctor," he
said passionately approaching Kirilov. "You were the unwilling witness
of my misfortune, and I am not going to hide the truth from you. I swear
I loved this woman. I loved her with devotion, like a slave. I
sacrificed everything for her. I broke with my family, I gave up the
service and my music. I forgave her things I could not have forgiven my
mother and sister.... I never once gave her an angry look ... I never
gave her any cause. Why this lie then? I do not demand love, but why
this abominable deceit? If you don't love any more then speak out
honestly, above all when you know what I feel about this matter...."
With tears in his eyes and trembling in all his bones, Aboguin was
pouring out his soul to the doctor. He spoke passionately, pressing both
hands to his heart. He revealed all the family secrets without
hesitation, as though he were glad that these secrets were being tom
from his heart. Had he spoken thus for an hour or two and poured out all
his soul, he would surely have been easier.
Who can say whether, had the doctor listened and given him friendly
sympathy, he would not, as so often happens, have been reconciled to his
grief unprotesting, without turning to unprofitable follies? But it
happened otherwise. While Aboguin was speaking the offended doctor
changed countenance visibly. The indifference and amazement in his face
gradually gave way to an expression of bitter outrage, indignation, and
anger. His features became still sharper, harder, and more forbidding.
When Aboguin put before his eyes the photograph of his young wife, with
a pretty, but dry, inexpressive face like a nun's, and asked if it were
possible to look at that face and grant that it could express a lie, the
doctor suddenly started away, with flashing eyes, and said, coarsely
forging out each several word:
"Why do you tell me all this? I do not want to hear! I don't want to,"
he cried and banged his fist upon the table. "I don't want your trivial
vulgar secrets--to Hell with them. You dare not tell me such
trivialities. Or do you think I have not yet been insulted enough! That
I'm a lackey to whom you can give the last insult? Yes?"
Aboguin drew back from Kirilov and stared at him in surprise.
"Why did you bring me here?" the doctor went on, shaking his beard. "You
marry out of high spirits, get angry out of high spirits, and make a
melodrama--but where do I come in? What have I got to do with your
romances? Leave me alone I Get on with your noble grabbing, parade your
humane ideas, play--" the doctor gave a side-glance at the cello-
case--"the double-bass and the trombone, stuff yourselves like capons,
but don't dare to jeer at a real man! If you can't respect him, then you
can at least spare him your attentions."
"What does all this mean?" Aboguin asked, blushing.
"It means that it's vile and foul to play with a man I I'm a doctor. You
consider doctors and all men who work and don't reek of scent and
harlotry, your footmen, your mauvais tons. Very well, but no one gave
you the right to turn a man who suffers into a property."
"How dare you say that?" Aboguin asked quietly. Again his face began to
twist about, this time in visible anger.
"How dare you bring me here to listen to trivial rubbish, when you know
that I'm in sorrow?" the doctor cried and banged his fists on the table
once more. "Who gave you the right to jeer at another's grief?"
"You're mad," cried Aboguin. "You're ungenerous. I too am deeply unhappy
and ... and ..."
"Unhappy"--the doctor gave a sneering laugh--"Don't touch the word, it's
got nothing to do with you. Wasters who can't get money on a bill call
themselves unhappy too. A capon's unhappy, oppressed with all its
superfluous fat. You worthless lot!"
"Sir, you're forgetting yourself," Aboguin gave a piercing scream. "For
words like those, people are beaten. Do you understand?"
Aboguin thrust his hand into his side pocket, took out a pocket-book,
found two notes and flung them on the table.
"There's your fee," he said, and his nostrils trembled. "You're paid."
"You dare not offer me money," said the doctor, and brushed the notes
from the table to the floor. "You don't settle an insult with money."
Aboguin and the doctor stood face to face, heaping each other with
undeserved insults. Never in their lives, even in a frenzy, had they
said so much that was unjust and cruel and absurd. In both the
selfishness of the unhappy is violently manifest. Unhappy men are
selfish, wicked, unjust, and less able to understand each other than
fools. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them; and just
where one would imagine that people should be united by the community of
grief, there is more injustice and cruelty done than among the
comparatively contented.
"Send me home, please," the doctor cried, out of breath.
Aboguin rang the bell violently. Nobody came. He rang once more; then
flung the bell angrily to the floor. It struck dully on the carpet and
gave out a mournful sound like a death-moan. The footman appeared.
"Where have you been hiding, damn you?" The master sprang upon him with
clenched fists. "Where have you been just now? Go away and tell them to
said the carriage round for this gentleman, and get the brougham ready
for me. Wait," he called out as the footman turned to go. "Not a single
traitor remains to-morrow. Pack off all of you! I will engage new ones
... Rabble!"
While they waited Aboguin and the doctor were silent. Already the
expression of satisfaction and the subtle elegance had returned to the
former. He paced the drawing-room, shook his head elegantly and
evidently was planning something. His anger was not yet cool, but he
tried to make as if he did not notice his enemy.... The doctor stood
with one hand on the edge of the table, looking at Aboguin with that
deep, rather cynical, ugly contempt with which only grief and an unjust
lot can look, when they see satiety and elegance before them.
A little later, when the doctor took his seat in the carriage and drove
away, his eyes still glanced contemptuously. It was dark, much darker
than an hour ago. The red half-moon had now disappeared behind the
little hill, and the clouds which watched it lay in dark spots round the
stars. The brougham with the red lamps began to rattle on the road and
passed the doctor. It was Aboguin on his way to protest, to commit all
manner of folly.
All the way the doctor thought not of his wife or Andrey, but only of
Aboguin and those who lived in the house he just left. His thoughts were
unjust, inhuman, and cruel. He passed sentence on Aboguin, his wife,
Papchinsky, and all those who live in rosy semi-darkness and smell of
scent. All the way he hated them, and his heart ached with his contempt
for them. The conviction he formed about them would last his life long.
Time will pass and Kirilov's sorrow, but this conviction, unjust and
unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will remain in the
doctor's mind until the grave. A TRIFLING OCCURRENCE
Nicolai Ilyich Byelyaev, a Petersburg landlord, very fond of the
racecourse, a well fed, pink young man of about thirty-two, once called
towards evening on Madame Irnin--Olga Ivanovna--with whom he had a
liaison, or, to use his own phrase, spun out a long and tedious romance.
And indeed the first pages of this romance, pages of interest and
inspiration, had been read long ago; now they dragged on and on, and
presented neither novelty nor interest.
Finding that Olga Ivanovna was not at home, my hero lay down a moment on
the drawing-room sofa and began to wait.
"Good evening, Nicolai Ilyich," he suddenly heard a child's voice say.
"Mother will be in in a moment. She's gone to the dressmaker's with
Sonya."
In the same drawing-room on the sofa lay Olga Vassilievna's son,
Alyosha, a boy about eight years old, well built, well looked after,
dressed up like a picture in a velvet jacket and long black stockings.