Short Stories by Chekhov
"How well we speak French, though!" I read in the eyes of the little
lady, who was flushing with pleasure.
Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen,
in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a
mother-of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson.
Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red
first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.
"My daughter," chanted the little lady, "and, Manetchka, this is a young
gentleman who has come," etc.
I was introduced, and expressed my surprise at the number of paper
patterns. Mother and daughter dropped their eyes.
"We had a fair here at Ascension," said the mother; "we always buy
materials at the fair, and then it keeps us busy with sewing till the
next year's fair comes around again. We never put things out to be made.
My husband's pay is not very ample, and we are not able to permit
ourselves luxuries. So we have to make up everything ourselves."
"But who will ever wear such a number of things? There are only two of
you?"
"Oh . . . as though we were thinking of wearing them! They are not to be
worn; they are for the trousseau!"
"Ah, _mamam_, what are you saying?" said the daughter, and she crimsoned
again. "Our visitor might suppose it was true. I don't intend to be
married. Never!"
She said this, but at the very word "married" her eyes glowed.
Tea, biscuits, butter, and jam were brought in, followed by raspberries
and cream. At seven o'clock, we had supper, consisting of six courses,
and while we were at supper I heard a loud yawn from the next room. I
looked with surprise towards the door: it was a yawn that could only
come from a man.
"That's my husband's brother, Yegor Semyonitch," the little lady
explained, noticing my surprise. "He's been living with us for the last
year. Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an
unsociable person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a
monastery. He was unfairly treated in the service, and the
disappointment has preyed on his mind."
After supper the little lady showed the vestment which Yegor Semyonitch
was embroidering with his own hands as an offering for the Church.
Manetchka threw off her shyness for a moment and showed me the tobacco-
pouch she was embroidering for her father. When I pretended to be
greatly struck by her work, she flushed crimson and whispered something
in her mother's ear. The latter beamed all over, and invited me to go
with her to the store-room. There I was shown five large trunks, and a
number of smaller trunks and boxes.
"This is her trousseau," her mother whispered; "we made it all
ourselves."
After looking at these forbidding trunks I took leave of my hospitable
hostesses. They made me promise to come and see them again some day.
It happened that I was able to keep this promise. Seven years after my
first visit, I was sent down to the little town to give expert evidence
in a case that was being tried there.
As I entered the little house I heard the same "Ach!" echo through it.
They recognised me at once. . . . Well they might! My first visit had
been an event in their lives, and when events are few they are long
remembered.
I walked into the drawing-room: the mother, who had grown stouter and
was already getting grey, was creeping about on the floor, cutting out
some blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa, embroidering.
There was the same smell of moth powder; there were the same patterns,
the same portrait with the broken glass. But yet there was a change.
Beside the portrait of the bishop hung a portrait of the Colonel, and
the ladies were in mourning. The Colonel's death had occurred a week
after his promotion to be a general.
Reminiscences began. . . . The widow shed tears.
"We have had a terrible loss," she said. "My husband, you know, is dead.
We are alone in the world now, and have no one but ourselves to look to.
Yegor Semyonitch is alive, but I have no good news to tell of him. They
would not have him in the monastery on account of--of intoxicating
beverages. And now in his disappointment he drinks more than ever. I am
thinking of going to the Marshal of Nobility to lodge a complaint. Would
you believe it, he has more than once broken open the trunks and . . .
taken Manetchka's trousseau and given it to beggars. He has taken
everything out of two of the trunks! If he goes on like this, my
Manetchka will be left without a trousseau at all."
"What are you saying, _mamam_?" said Manetchka, embarrassed. "Our
visitor might suppose . . . there's no knowing what he might suppose . .
. . I shall never--never marry."
Manetchka cast her eyes up to the ceiling with a look of hope and
aspiration, evidently not for a moment believing what she said.
A little bald-headed masculine figure in a brown coat and goloshes
instead of boots darted like a mouse across the passage and disappeared.
"Yegor Semyonitch, I suppose," I thought.
I looked at the mother and daughter together. They both looked much
older and terribly changed. The mother's hair was silvered, but the
daughter was so faded and withered that her mother might have been taken
for her elder sister, not more than five years her senior.
"I have made up my mind to go to the Marshal," the mother said to me,
forgetting she had told me this already. "I mean to make a complaint.
Yegor Semyonitch lays his hands on everything we make, and offers it up
for the sake of his soul. My Manetchka is left without a trousseau."
Manetchka flushed again, but this time she said nothing.
"We have to make them all over again. And God knows we are not so well
off. We are all alone in the world now."
"We are alone in the world," repeated Manetchka.
A year ago fate brought me once more to the little house.
Walking into the drawing-room, I saw the old lady. Dressed all in black
with heavy crape _pleureuses_, she was sitting on the sofa sewing.
Beside her sat the little old man in the brown coat and the goloshes
instead of boots. On seeing me, he jumped up and ran out of the room.
In response to my greeting, the old lady smiled and said:
_"Je suis charmée de vous revoir, monsieur."_
"What are you making?" I asked, a little later.
"It's a blouse. When it's finished I shall take it to the priest's to be
put away, or else Yegor Semyonitch would carry it off. I store
everything at the priest's now," she added in a whisper.
And looking at the portrait of her daughter which stood before her on
the table, she sighed and said:
"We are all alone in the world."
And where was the daughter? Where was Manetchka? I did not ask. I did
not dare to ask the old mother dressed in her new deep mourning. And
while I was in the room, and when I got up to go, no Manetchka came out
to greet me. I did not hear her voice, nor her soft, timid footstep. . .
.
I understood, and my heart was heavy.
THE HELPMATE
"I'VE asked you not to tidy my table," said Nikolay Yevgrafitch.
"There's no finding anything when you've tidied up. Where's the
telegram? Where have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it. It's
from Kazan, dated yesterday."
The maid--a pale, very slim girl with an indifferent expression --found
several telegrams in the basket under the table, and handed them to the
doctor without a word; but all these were telegrams from patients. Then
they looked in the drawing-room, and in Olga Dmitrievna's room.
It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be
home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her,
and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the
same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and
her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley
which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused
the sickly fragrance of a florist's shop all over the house. On such
nights he became petty, ill-humoured, irritable, and he fancied now that
it was very necessary for him to have the telegram he had received the
day before from his brother, though it contained nothing but Christmas
greetings.
On the table of his wife's room under the box of stationery he found a
telegram, and glanced at it casually. It was addressed to his wife, care
of his mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel . . . . The
doctor did not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign
language, apparently English.
"Who is this Michel? Why Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her mother?"
During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to being
suspicious, guessing, catching at clues, and it had several times
occurred to him, that his exercise at home had qualified him to become
an excellent detective. Going into his study and beginning to reflect,
he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in Petersburg a year
and a half ago, and had lunched with an old school-fellow, a civil
engineer, and how that engineer had introduced to him and his wife a
young man of two or three and twenty, called Mihail Ivanovitch, with
rather a curious short surname--Riss. Two months later the doctor had
seen the young man's photograph in his wife's album, with an inscription
in French: "In remembrance of the present and in hope of the future."
Later on he had met the young man himself at his mother-in-law's. And
that was at the time when his wife had taken to being very often absent
and coming home at four or five o'clock in the morning, and was
constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept
refusing to do; and a continual feud went on in the house which made him
feel ashamed to face the servants.
Six months before, his colleagues had decided that he was going into
consumption, and advised him to throw up everything and go to the
Crimea. When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much
alarmed; she began to be affectionate to her husband, and kept assuring
him that it would be cold and dull in the Crimea, and that he had much
better go to Nice, and that she would go with him, and there would nurse
him, look after him, take care of him.
Now, he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to
Nice: her Michel lived at Monte Carlo.
He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing
their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence: "I
drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a
thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival." He pictured
the pitiable, ludicrous part he would play if he had agreed to go to
Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and
began pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat in great
agitation. His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted.
Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the
son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain,
straightforward man, a surgeon by profession--how could he have let
himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak,
worthless, mercenary, low creature.
"'Little foot'!" he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram;
"'little foot'!"
Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven
years that he had been living with her, all that remained in his memory
was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet,
which certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and even now it seemed
as though he still had from those old embraces the feeling of lace and
silk upon his hands and face--and nothing more. Nothing more--that is,
not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies--brazen,