Short Stories by Chekhov
treacherous lies. He remembered how in his father's house in the village
a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house
and would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset
things; so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into
his life and made complete havoc of it. The best years of his life had
been spent as though in hell, his hopes for happiness shattered and
turned into a mockery, his health gone, his rooms as vulgar in their
atmosphere as a cocotte's, and of the ten thousand he earned every year
he could never save ten roubles to send his old mother in the village,
and his debts were already about fifteen thousand. It seemed that if a
band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have
been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this
woman.
He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed
and got warm, but he could not. He kept walking about the rooms, or sat
down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling
mechanically on a paper.
"Trying a pen. . . . A little foot."
By five o'clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself. It
seemed to him now that if Olga Dmitrievna had married some one else who
might have had a good influence over her--who knows?-- she might after
all have become a good, straightforward woman. He was a poor
psychologist, and knew nothing of the female heart; besides, he was
churlish, uninteresting. . . .
"I haven't long to live now," he thought. "I am a dead man, and ought
not to stand in the way of the living. It would be strange and stupid to
insist upon one's rights now. I'll have it out with her; let her go to
the man she loves. . . . I'll give her a divorce. I'll take the blame on
myself."
Olga Dmitrievna came in at last, and she walked into the study and sank
into a chair just as she was in her white cloak, hat, and overboots.
"The nasty, fat boy," she said with a sob, breathing hard. "It's really
dishonest; it's disgusting." She stamped. "I can't put up with it; I
can't, I can't!"
"What's the matter?" asked Nikolay Yevgrafitch, going up to her.
"That student, Azarbekov, was seeing me home, and he lost my bag, and
there was fifteen roubles in it. I borrowed it from mamma."
She was crying in a most genuine way, like a little girl, and not only
her handkerchief, but even her gloves, were wet with tears.
"It can't be helped!" said the doctor. "If he's lost it, he's lost it,
and it's no good worrying over it. Calm yourself; I want to talk to
you."
"I am not a millionaire to lose money like that. He says he'll pay it
back, but I don't believe him; he's poor . . ."
Her husband begged her to calm herself and to listen to him, but she
kept on talking of the student and of the fifteen roubles she had lost.
"Ach! I'll give you twenty-five roubles to-morrow if you'll only hold
your tongue!" he said irritably.
"I must take off my things!" she said, crying. "I can't talk seriously
in my fur coat! How strange you are!"
He helped her off with her coat and overboots, detecting as he did so
the smell of the white wine she liked to drink with oysters (in spite of
her etherealness she ate and drank a great deal). She went into her room
and came back soon after, having changed her things and powdered her
face, though her eyes still showed traces of tears. She sat down,
retreating into her light, lacy dressing-gown, and in the mass of
billowy pink her husband could see nothing but her hair, which she had
let down, and her little foot wearing a slipper.
"What do you want to talk about?" she asked, swinging herself in a
rocking-chair.
"I happened to see this;" and he handed her the telegram.
She read it and shrugged her shoulders.
"Well?" she said, rocking herself faster. "That's the usual New Year's
greeting and nothing else. There are no secrets in it."
"You are reckoning on my not knowing English. No, I don't know it; but I
have a dictionary. That telegram is from Riss; he drinks to the health
of his beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let us leave that,"
the doctor went on hurriedly. "I don't in the least want to reproach you
or make a scene. We've had scenes and reproaches enough; it's time to
make an end of them. . . . This is what I want to say to you: you are
free, and can live as you like."
There was a silence. She began crying quietly.
"I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretences,"
Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued. "If you love that young man, love him; if
you want to go abroad to him, go. You are young, healthy, and I am a
wreck, and haven't long to live. In short . . . you understand me."
He was agitated and could not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and
speaking in a voice of self-pity, acknowledged that she loved Riss, and
used to drive out of town with him and see him in his rooms, and now she
really did long to go abroad.
"You see, I hide nothing from you," she added, with a sigh. "My whole
soul lies open before you. And I beg you again, be generous, get me a
passport."
"I repeat, you are free."
She moved to another seat nearer him to look at the expression of his
face. She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his secret
meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their
intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish
object in them. And when she looked searchingly into his face, it seemed
to him that there was a gleam of green light in her eyes as in a cat's.
"When shall I get the passport?" she asked softly.
He suddenly had an impulse to say "Never"; but he restrained himself and
said:
"When you like."
"I shall only go for a month."
"You'll go to Riss for good. I'll get you a divorce, take the blame on
myself, and Riss can marry you."
"But I don't want a divorce!" Olga Dmitrievna retorted quickly, with an
astonished face. "I am not asking you for a divorce! Get me a passport,
that's all."
"But why don't you want the divorce?" asked the doctor, beginning to
feel irritated. "You are a strange woman. How strange you are! If you
are fond of him in earnest and he loves you too, in your position you
can do nothing better than get married. Can you really hesitate between
marriage and adultery?"
"I understand you," she said, walking away from him, and a spiteful,
vindictive expression came into her face. "I understand you perfectly.
You are sick of me, and you simply want to get rid of me, to force this
divorce on me. Thank you very much; I am not such a fool as you think. I
won't accept the divorce and I won't leave you--I won't, I won't! To
begin with, I don't want to lose my position in society," she continued
quickly, as though afraid of being prevented from speaking. "Secondly, I
am twenty-seven and Riss is only twenty-three; he'll be tired of me in a
year and throw me over. And what's more, if you care to know, I'm not
certain that my feeling will last long . . . so there! I'm not going to
leave you."
"Then I'll turn you out of the house!" shouted Nikolay Yevgrafitch,
stamping. "I shall turn you out, you vile, loathsome woman!"
"We shall see!" she said, and went out.
It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor still sat at the table
moving the pencil over the paper and writing mechanically.
"My dear Sir. . . . Little foot."
Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph
taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage, and looked at it for a
long time. It was a family group: his father-in-law, his mother-in-law,
his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and himself in the rôle
of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a clean-shaven, dropsical
privy councillor, crafty and avaricious; his mother-in-law, a stout lady
with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to
distraction and helped her in everything; if her daughter were
strangling some one, the mother would not have protested, but would only
have screened her with her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small
predatory-looking features, but more expressive and bolder than her
mother's; she was not a weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale! And
Nikolay Yevgrafitch himself in the photograph looked such a guileless
soul, such a kindly, good fellow, so open and simple-hearted; his whole
face was relaxed in the naïve, good-natured smile of a divinity
student, and he had had the simplicity to believe that that company of
beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give
him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he
used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart
is cold and loveless."
And once more he asked himself in perplexity how he, the son of a
village priest, with his democratic bringing up--a plain, blunt,
straightforward man--could have so helplessly surrendered to the power
of this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature, whose nature was so
utterly alien to him.
When at eleven o'clock he put on his coat to go to the hospital the
servant came into his study.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The mistress has got up and asks you for the twenty-five roubles you
promised her yesterday."
TALENT
AN artist called Yegor Savvitch, who was spending his summer holidays at
the house of an officer's widow, was sitting on his bed, given up to the
depression of morning. It was beginning to look like autumn out of
doors. Heavy, clumsy clouds covered the sky in thick layers; there was a
cold, piercing wind, and with a plaintive wail the trees were all
bending on one side. He could see the yellow leaves whirling round in
the air and on the earth. Farewell, summer! This melancholy of nature is
beautiful and poetical in its own way, when it is looked at with the
eyes of an artist, but Yegor Savvitch was in no humour to see beauty. He
was devoured by ennui and his only consolation was the thought that by
to-morrow he would not be there. The bed, the chairs, the tables, the
floor, were all heaped up with cushions, crumpled bed-clothes, boxes.
The floor had not been swept, the cotton curtains had been taken down
from the windows. Next day he was moving, to town.
His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to hire
horses and carts to move next day to town. Profiting by the absence of
her severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had for a long time
been sitting in the young man's room. Next day the painter was going
away, and she had a great deal to say to him. She kept talking, talking,
and yet she felt that she had not said a tenth of what she wanted to
say. With her eyes full of tears, she gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at
it with rapture and sadness. And Yegor Savvitch was shaggy to a hideous
extent, so that he looked like a wild animal. His hair hung down to his
shoulder-blades, his beard grew from his neck, from his nostrils, from
his ears; his eyes were lost under his thick overhanging brows. It was
all so thick, so matted, that if a fly or a beetle had been caught in
his hair, it would never have found its way out of this enchanted
thicket. Yegor Savvitch listened to Katya, yawning. He was tired. When
Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his overhanging
eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass:
"I cannot marry."
"Why not?" Katya asked softly.
"Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage
is out of the question. An artist must be free."
"But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?"
"I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general. . . . Famous
authors and painters have never married."
"And you, too, will be famous--I understand that perfectly. But put