Short Stories by Chekhov
said very little as a rule; she was always silent, thinking and
thinking. . . .
In the six or seven years of her wanderings from one furnished room to
another, she had known five students like Klotchkov. Now they had all
finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and, of course,
like respectable people, had long ago forgotten her. One of them was
living in Paris, two were doctors, the fourth was an artist, and the
fifth was said to be already a professor. Klotchkov was the sixth. . . .
Soon he, too, would finish his studies and go out into the world. There
was a fine future before him, no doubt, and Klotchkov probably would
become a great man, but the present was anything but bright; Klotchkov
had no tobacco and no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left.
She must make haste and finish her embroidery, take it to the woman who
had ordered it, and with the quarter rouble she would get for it, buy
tea and tobacco.
"Can I come in?" asked a voice at the door.
Anyuta quickly threw a woollen shawl over her shoulders. Fetisov, the
artist, walked in.
"I have come to ask you a favour," he began, addressing Klotchkov, and
glaring like a wild beast from under the long locks that hung over his
brow. "Do me a favour; lend me your young lady just for a couple of
hours! I'm painting a picture, you see, and I can't get on without a
model."
"Oh, with pleasure," Klotchkov agreed. "Go along, Anyuta."
"The things I've had to put up with there," Anyuta murmured softly.
"Rubbish! The man's asking you for the sake of art, and not for any sort
of nonsense. Why not help him if you can?"
Anyuta began dressing.
"And what are you painting?" asked Klotchkov.
"Psyche; it's a fine subject. But it won't go, somehow. I have to keep
painting from different models. Yesterday I was painting one with blue
legs. 'Why are your legs blue?' I asked her. 'It's my stockings stain
them,' she said. And you're still grinding! Lucky fellow! You have
patience."
"Medicine's a job one can't get on with without grinding."
"H'm! . . . Excuse me, Klotchkov, but you do live like a pig! It's awful
the way you live!"
"How do you mean? I can't help it. . . . I only get twelve roubles a
month from my father, and it's hard to live decently on that."
"Yes . . . yes . . ." said the artist, frowning with an air of disgust;
"but, still, you might live better. . . . An educated man is in duty
bound to have taste, isn't he? And goodness knows what it's like here!
The bed not made, the slops, the dirt . . . yesterday's porridge in the
plates. . . Tfoo!"
"That's true," said the student in confusion; "but Anyuta has had no
time to-day to tidy up; she's been busy all the while."
When Anyuta and the artist had gone out Klotchkov lay down on the sofa
and began learning, lying down; then he accidentally dropped asleep, and
waking up an hour later, propped his head on his fists and sank into
gloomy reflection. He recalled the artist's words that an educated man
was in duty bound to have taste, and his surroundings actually struck
him now as loathsome and revolting. He saw, as it were in his mind's
eye, his own future, when he would see his patients in his consulting-
room, drink tea in a large dining-room in the company of his wife, a
real lady. And now that slop-pail in which the cigarette ends were
swimming looked incredibly disgusting. Anyuta, too, rose before his
imagination--a plain, slovenly, pitiful figure . . . and he made up his
mind to part with her at once, at all costs.
When, on coming back from the artist's, she took off her coat, he got up
and said to her seriously:
"Look here, my good girl . . . sit down and listen. We must part! The
fact is, I don't want to live with you any longer."
Anyuta had come back from the artist's worn out and exhausted. Standing
so long as a model had made her face look thin and sunken, and her chin
sharper than ever. She said nothing in answer to the student's words,
only her lips began to tremble.
"You know we should have to part sooner or later, anyway," said the
student. "You're a nice, good girl, and not a fool; you'll understand. .
. ."
Anyuta put on her coat again, in silence wrapped up her embroidery in
paper, gathered together her needles and thread: she found the screw of
paper with the four lumps of sugar in the window, and laid it on the
table by the books.
"That's . . . your sugar . . ." she said softly, and turned away to
conceal her tears.
"Why are you crying?" asked Klotchkov.
He walked about the room in confusion, and said:
"You are a strange girl, really. . . . Why, you know we shall have to
part. We can't stay together for ever."
She had gathered together all her belongings, and turned to say good-bye
to him, and he felt sorry for her.
"Shall I let her stay on here another week?" he thought. "She really may
as well stay, and I'll tell her to go in a week;" and vexed at his own
weakness, he shouted to her roughly:
"Come, why are you standing there? If you are going, go; and if you
don't want to, take off your coat and stay! You can stay!"
Anyuta took off her coat, silently, stealthily, then blew her nose also
stealthily, sighed, and noiselessly returned to her invariable position
on her stool by the window.
The student drew his textbook to him and began again pacing from corner
to corner. "The right lung consists of three parts," he repeated; "the
upper part, on anterior wall of thorax, reaches the fourth or fifth rib
. . . ."
In the passage some one shouted at the top of his voice: "Grigory! The
samovar!"
THE TWO VOLODYAS
"LET me; I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver!" Sofya Lvovna
said in a loud voice. "Wait a minute, driver; I'll get up on the box
beside you."
She stood up in the sledge, and her husband, Vladimir Nikititch, and the
friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, held her arms to prevent
her falling. The three horses were galloping fast.
"I said you ought not to have given her brandy," Vladimir Nikititch
whispered to his companion with vexation. "What a fellow you are,
really!"
The Colonel knew by experience that in women like his wife, Sofya
Lvovna, after a little too much wine, turbulent gaiety was followed by
hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they got
home, instead of being able to sleep, he would have to be administering
compresses and drops.
"Wo!" cried Sofya Lvovna. "I want to drive myself!"
She felt genuinely gay and triumphant. For the last two months, ever
since her wedding, she had been tortured by the thought that she had
married Colonel Yagitch from worldly motives and, as it is said, _par
dépit_; but that evening, at the restaurant, she had suddenly become
convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four
years, he was so slim, agile, supple, he made puns and hummed to the
gipsies' tunes so charmingly. Really, the older men were nowadays a
thousand times more interesting than the young. It seemed as though age
and youth had changed parts. The Colonel was two years older than her
father, but could there be any importance in that if, honestly speaking,
there were infinitely more vitality, go, and freshness in him than in
herself, though she was only twenty-three?
"Oh, my darling!" she thought. "You are wonderful!"
She had become convinced in the restaurant, too, that not a spark of her
old feeling remained. For the friend of her childhood, Vladimir
Mihalovitch, or simply Volodya, with whom only the day before she had
been madly, miserably in love, she now felt nothing but complete
indifference. All that evening he had seemed to her spiritless, torpid,
uninteresting, and insignificant, and the _sangfroid_ with which he
habitually avoided paying at restaurants on this occasion revolted her,
and she had hardly been able to resist saying, "If you are poor, you
should stay at home." The Colonel paid for all.
Perhaps because trees, telegraph posts, and drifts of snow kept flitting
past her eyes, all sorts of disconnected ideas came rushing into her
mind. She reflected: the bill at the restaurant had been a hundred and
twenty roubles, and a hundred had gone to the gipsies, and to-morrow she
could fling away a thousand roubles if she liked; and only two months
ago, before her wedding, she had not had three roubles of her own, and
had to ask her father for every trifle. What a change in her life!
Her thoughts were in a tangle. She recalled, how, when she was a child
of ten, Colonel Yagitch, now her husband, used to make love to her aunt,
and every one in the house said that he had ruined her. And her aunt
had, in fact, often come down to dinner with her eyes red from crying,
and was always going off somewhere; and people used to say of her that
the poor thing could find no peace anywhere. He had been very handsome
in those days, and had an extraordinary reputation as a lady-killer. So
much so that he was known all over the town, and it was said of him that
he paid a round of visits to his adorers every day like a doctor
visiting his patients. And even now, in spite of his grey hair, his
wrinkles, and his spectacles, his thin face looked handsome, especially
in profile.
Sofya Lvovna's father was an army doctor, and had at one time served in
the same regiment with Colonel Yagitch. Volodya's father was an army
doctor too, and he, too, had once been in the same regiment as her
father and Colonel Yagitch. In spite of many amatory adventures, often
very complicated and disturbing, Volodya had done splendidly at the
university, and had taken a very good degree. Now he was specialising in
foreign literature, and was said to be writing a thesis. He lived with
his father, the army doctor, in the barracks, and had no means of his
own, though he was thirty. As children Sofya and he had lived under the
same roof, though in different flats. He often came to play with her,
and they had dancing and French lessons together. But when he grew up
into a graceful, remarkably handsome young man, she began to feel shy of
him, and then fell madly in love with him, and had loved him right up to
the time when she was married to Yagitch. He, too, had been renowned for
his success with women almost from the age of fourteen, and the ladies
who deceived their husbands on his account excused themselves by saying
that he was only a boy. Some one had told a story of him lately that
when he was a student living in lodgings so as to be near the
university, it always happened if one knocked at his door, that one
heard his footstep, and then a whispered apology: "_Pardon, je ne suis
pas setul._" Yagitch was delighted with him, and blessed him as a worthy
successor, as Derchavin blessed Pushkin; he appeared to be fond of him.
They would play billiards or picquet by the hour together without
uttering a word, if Yagitch drove out on any expedition he always took
Volodya with him, and Yagitch was the only person Volodya initiated into
the mysteries of his thesis. In earlier days, when Yagitch was rather
younger, they had often been in the position of rivals, but they had
never been jealous of one another. In the circle in which they moved
Yagitch was nicknamed Big Volodya, and his friend Little Volodya.
Besides Big Volodya, Little Volodya, and Sofya Lvovna, there was a
fourth person in the sledge--Margarita Alexandrovna, or, as every one
called her, Rita, a cousin of Madame Yagitch--a very pale girl over
thirty, with black eyebrows and a pince-nez, who was for ever smoking
cigarettes, even in the bitterest frost, and who always had her knees
and the front of her blouse covered with cigarette ash. She spoke
through her nose, drawling every word, was of a cold temperament, could
drink any amount of wine and liquor without being drunk, and used to