Short Stories by Chekhov
into the bedroom once with the soft jingle of his spurs to fetch
something, and then a second time wearing his epaulettes, and his orders
on his breast, limping slightly from rheumatism; and it struck Sofya
Lvovna that he looked and walked like a bird of prey.
She heard Yagitch ring the telephone bell.
"Be so good as to put me on to the Vassilevsky barracks," he said; and a
minute later: "Vassilevsky barracks? Please ask Doctor Salimovitch to
come to the telephone . . ." And a minute later: "With whom am I
speaking? Is it you, Volodya? Delighted. Ask your father to come to us
at once, dear boy; my wife is rather shattered after yesterday. Not at
home, you say? H'm! . . . Thank you. Very good. I shall be much obliged
. . . _Merci_."
Yagitch came into the bedroom for the third time, bent down to his wife,
made the sign of the cross over her, gave her his hand to kiss (the
women who had been in love with him used to kiss his hand and he had got
into the habit of it), and saying that he should be back to dinner, went
out.
At twelve o'clock the maid came in to announce that Vladimir Mihalovitch
had arrived. Sofya Lvovna, staggering with fatigue and headache,
hurriedly put on her marvellous new lilac dressing-gown trimmed with
fur, and hastily did up her hair after a fashion. She was conscious of
an inexpressible tenderness in her heart, and was trembling with joy and
with fear that he might go away. She wanted nothing but to look at him.
Volodya came dressed correctly for calling, in a swallow-tail coat and
white tie. When Sofya Lvovna came in he kissed her hand and expressed
his genuine regret that she was ill. Then when they had sat down, he
admired her dressing-gown.
"I was upset by seeing Olga yesterday," she said. "At first I felt it
dreadful, but now I envy her. She is like a rock that cannot be
shattered; there is no moving her. But was there no other solution for
her, Volodya? Is burying oneself alive the only solution of the problem
of life? Why, it's death, not life!"
At the thought of Olga, Volodya's face softened.
"Here, you are a clever man, Volodya," said Sofya Lvovna. "Show me how
to do what Olga has done. Of course, I am not a believer and should not
go into a nunnery, but one can do something equivalent. Life isn't easy
for me," she added after a brief pause. "Tell me what to do. . . . Tell
me something I can believe in. Tell me something, if it's only one
word."
"One word? By all means: tararaboomdeeay."
"Volodya, why do you despise me?" she asked hotly. "You talk to me in a
special, fatuous way, if you'll excuse me, not as one talks to one's
friends and women one respects. You are so good at your work, you are
fond of science; why do you never talk of it to me? Why is it? Am I not
good enough?"
Volodya frowned with annoyance and said:
"Why do you want science all of a sudden? Don't you perhaps want
constitutional government? Or sturgeon and horse-radish?"
"Very well, I am a worthless, trivial, silly woman with no convictions.
I have a mass, a mass of defects. I am neurotic, corrupt, and I ought to
be despised for it. But you, Volodya, are ten years older than I am, and
my husband is thirty years older. I've grown up before your eyes, and if
you would, you could have made anything you liked of me--an angel. But
you"--her voice quivered-- "treat me horribly. Yagitch has married me in
his old age, and you . . ."
"Come, come," said Volodya, sitting nearer her and kissing both her
hands. "Let the Schopenhauers philosophise and prove whatever they like,
while we'll kiss these little hands."
"You despise me, and if only you knew how miserable it makes me," she
said uncertainly, knowing beforehand that he would not believe her. "And
if you only knew how I want to change, to begin another life! I think of
it with enthusiasm!" and tears of enthusiasm actually came into her
eyes. "To be good, honest, pure, not to be lying; to have an object in
life."
"Come, come, come, please don't be affected! I don't like it!" said
Volodya, and an ill-humoured expression came into his face. "Upon my
word, you might be on the stage. Let us behave like simple people."
To prevent him from getting cross and going away, she began defending
herself, and forced herself to smile to please him; and again she began
talking of Olga, and of how she longed to solve the problem of her life
and to become something real.
"Ta-ra-ra-boomdee-ay," he hummed. "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!"
And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without
knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for a
minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever, ironical
face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.
"You have known that I love you for ever so long," she confessed to him,
and she blushed painfully, and felt that her lips were twitching with
shame. "I love you. Why do you torture me?"
She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the lips, and for a
long while, a full minute, could not take her lips away, though she knew
it was unseemly, that he might be thinking the worse of her, that a
servant might come in.
"Oh, how you torture me!" she repeated.
When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted, he was sitting
at lunch in the dining-room, she was kneeling before him, gazing
greedily into his face, and he told her that she was like a little dog
waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on his
knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed:
"Tara-raboom-dee-ay. . . . Tara-raboom-dee-ay." And when he was getting
ready to go she asked him in a passionate whisper:
"When? To-day? Where?" And held out both hands to his mouth as though
she wanted to seize his answer in them.
"To-day it will hardly be convenient," he said after a minute's thought.
"To-morrow, perhaps."
And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the nunnery to see
Olga, but there she was told that Olga was reading the psalter somewhere
over the dead. From the nunnery she went to her father's and found that
he, too, was out. Then she took another sledge and drove aimlessly about
the streets till evening. And for some reason she kept thinking of the
aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and who could find no peace
anywhere.
And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant out
of town and listened to the gipsies. And driving back past the nunnery
again, Sofya Lvovna thought of Olga, and she felt aghast at the thought
that for the girls and women of her class there was no solution but to
go on driving about and telling lies, or going into a nunnery to mortify
the flesh. . . . And next day she met her lover, and again Sofya Lvovna
drove about the town alone in a hired sledge thinking about her aunt.
A week later Volodya threw her over. And after that life went on as
before, uninteresting, miserable, and sometimes even agonising. The
Colonel and Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet, Rita told
anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless way, and Sofya Lvovna went
about alone in hired sledges and kept begging her husband to take her
for a good drive with three horses.
Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining of
her unbearable misery, weeping, and feeling as she did so that she
brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby. And
Olga repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by rote,
that all this was of no consequence, that it would all pass and God
would forgive her.
THE TROUSSEAU
I HAVE seen a great many houses in my time, little and big, new and old,
built of stone and of wood, but of one house I have kept a very vivid
memory. It was, properly speaking, rather a cottage than a house--a tiny
cottage of one story, with three windows, looking extraordinarily like a
little old hunchback woman with a cap on. Its white stucco walls, its
tiled roof, and dilapidated chimney, were all drowned in a perfect sea
of green. The cottage was lost to sight among the mulberry-trees,
acacias, and poplars planted by the grandfathers and great-grandfathers
of its present occupants. And yet it is a town house. Its wide courtyard
stands in a row with other similar green courtyards, and forms part of a
street. Nothing ever drives down that street, and very few persons are
ever seen walking through it.
The shutters of the little house are always closed; its occupants do not
care for sunlight--the light is no use to them. The windows are never
opened, for they are not fond of fresh air. People who spend their lives
in the midst of acacias, mulberries, and nettles have no passion for
nature. It is only to the summer visitor that God has vouchsafed an eye
for the beauties of nature. The rest of mankind remain steeped in
profound ignorance of the existence of such beauties. People never prize
what they have always had in abundance. "What we have, we do not
treasure," and what's more we do not even love it.
The little house stands in an earthly paradise of green trees with happy
birds nesting in them. But inside . . . alas . . . ! In summer, it is
close and stifling within; in winter, hot as a Turkish bath, not one
breath of air, and the dreariness! . . .
The first time I visited the little house was many years ago on
business. I brought a message from the Colonel who was the owner of the
house to his wife and daughter. That first visit I remember very
distinctly. It would be impossible, indeed, to forget it.
Imagine a limp little woman of forty, gazing at you with alarm and
astonishment while you walk from the passage into the parlour. You are a
stranger, a visitor, "a young man"; that's enough to reduce her to a
state of terror and bewilderment. Though you have no dagger, axe, or
revolver in your hand, and though you smile affably, you are met with
alarm.
"Whom have I the honour and pleasure of addressing?" the little lady
asks in a trembling voice.
I introduced myself and explained why I had come. The alarm and
amazement were at once succeeded by a shrill, joyful "Ach!" and she
turned her eyes upwards to the ceiling. This "Ach!" was caught up like
an echo and repeated from the hall to the parlour, from the parlour to
the kitchen, and so on down to the cellar. Soon the whole house was
resounding with "Ach!" in various voices.
Five minutes later I was sitting on a big, soft, warm lounge in the
drawing-room listening to the "Ach!" echoing all down the street. There
was a smell of moth powder, and of goatskin shoes, a pair of which lay
on a chair beside me wrapped in a handkerchief. In the windows were
geraniums, and muslin curtains, and on the curtains were torpid flies.
On the wall hung the portrait of some bishop, painted in oils, with the
glass broken at one corner, and next to the bishop a row of ancestors
with lemon-coloured faces of a gipsy type. On the table lay a thimble, a
reel of cotton, and a half-knitted stocking, and paper patterns and a
black blouse, tacked together, were lying on the floor. In the next room
two alarmed and fluttered old women were hurriedly picking up similar
patterns and pieces of tailor's chalk from the floor.
"You must, please, excuse us; we are dreadfully untidy," said the little
lady.
While she talked to me, she stole embarrassed glances towards the other
room where the patterns were still being picked up. The door, too,
seemed embarrassed, opening an inch or two and then shutting again.
"What's the matter?" said the little lady, addressing the door.
_"Où est mon cravatte lequel mon père m'avait envoyé de Koursk?"_
asked a female voice at the door.
_"Ah, est-ce que, Marie . . . que_. . . Really, it's impossible . . . .
_Nous avons donc chez nous un homme peu connu de nous._ Ask Lukerya."