Short Stories by Chekhov
the same. Ekaterina Pavlovna, too, grew quickly used to me and fond of
me, and when I did not come for two or three days, sent to ask if I were
well. She, too, gazed at my sketches with enthusiasm, and with the same
openness and readiness to chatter as Misuce, she told me what had
happened, and confided to me her domestic secrets.
She had a perfect reverence for her elder daughter. Lida did not care
for endearments, she talked only of serious matters; she lived her life
apart, and to her mother and sister was as sacred and enigmatic a person
as the admiral, always sitting in his cabin, is to the sailors.
"Our Lida is a remarkable person," the mother would often say. "Isn't
she?"
Now, too, while it was drizzling with rain, we talked of Lida.
"She is a remarkable girl," said her mother, and added in an undertone,
like a conspirator, looking about her timidly: "You wouldn't easily find
another like her; only, do you know, I am beginning to be a little
uneasy. The school, the dispensary, books --all that's very good, but
why go to extremes? She is three-and-twenty, you know; it's time for her
to think seriously of herself. With her books and her dispensary she
will find life has slipped by without having noticed it. . . . She must
be married."
Genya, pale from reading, with her hair disarranged, raised her head and
said as it were to herself, looking at her mother:
"Mother, everything is in God's hands."
And again she buried herself in her book.
Byelokurov came in his tunic and embroidered shirt. We played croquet
and tennis, then when it got dark, sat a long time over supper and
talked again about schools, and about Balagin, who had the whole
district under his thumb. As I went away from the Voltchaninovs that
evening, I carried away the impression of a long, long idle day, with a
melancholy consciousness that everything ends in this world, however
long it may be.
Genya saw us out to the gate, and perhaps because she had been with me
all day, from morning till night, I felt dull without her, and that all
that charming family were near and dear to me, and for the first time
that summer I had a yearning to paint.
"Tell me, why do you lead such a dreary, colourless life?" I asked
Byelokurov as I went home. "My life is dreary, difficult, and monotonous
because I am an artist, a strange person. From my earliest days I've
been wrung by envy, self-dissatisfaction, distrust in my work. I'm
always poor, I'm a wanderer, but you--you're a healthy, normal man, a
landowner, and a gentleman. Why do you live in such an uninteresting
way? Why do you get so little out of life? Why haven't you, for
instance, fallen in love with Lida or Genya?"
"You forget that I love another woman," answered Byelokurov.
He was referring to Liubov Ivanovna, the lady who shared the lodge with
him. Every day I saw this lady, very plump, rotund, and dignified, not
unlike a fat goose, walking about the garden, in the Russian national
dress and beads, always carrying a parasol; and the servant was
continually calling her in to dinner or to tea. Three years before she
had taken one of the lodges for a summer holiday, and had settled down
at Byelokurov's apparently forever. She was ten years older than he was,
and kept a sharp hand over him, so much so that he had to ask her
permission when he went out of the house. She often sobbed in a deep
masculine note, and then I used to send word to her that if she did not
leave off, I should give up my rooms there; and she left off.
When we got home Byelokurov sat down on the sofa and frowned
thoughtfully, and I began walking up and down the room, conscious of a
soft emotion as though I were in love. I wanted to talk about the
Voltchaninovs.
"Lida could only fall in love with a member of the Zemstvo, as devoted
to schools and hospitals as she is," I said. "Oh, for the sake of a girl
like that one might not only go into the Zemstvo, but even wear out iron
shoes, like the girl in the fairy tale. And Misuce? What a sweet
creature she is, that Misuce!"
Byelokurov, drawling out "Er--er," began a long-winded disquisition on
the malady of the age--pessimism. He talked confidently, in a tone that
suggested that I was opposing him. Hundreds of miles of desolate,
monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one
man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go.
"It's not a question of pessimism or optimism," I said irritably; "its
simply that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no sense."
Byelokurov took this as aimed at himself, was offended, and went away.
III
"The prince is staying at Malozyomovo, and he asks to be remembered to
you," said Lida to her mother. She had just come in, and was taking off
her gloves. "He gave me a great deal of interesting news . . . . He
promised to raise the question of a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo
again at the provincial assembly, but he says there is very little hope
of it." And turning to me, she said: "Excuse me, I always forget that
this cannot be interesting to you."
I felt irritated.
"Why not interesting to me?" I said, shrugging my shoulders. "You do not
care to know my opinion, but I assure you the question has great
interest for me."
"Yes?"
"Yes. In my opinion a medical relief centre at Malozyomovo is quite
unnecessary."
My irritation infected her; she looked at me, screwing up her eyes, and
asked:
"What is necessary? Landscapes?"
"Landscapes are not, either. Nothing is."
She finished taking off her gloves, and opened the newspaper, which had
just been brought from the post. A minute later she said quietly,
evidently restraining herself:
"Last week Anna died in childbirth, and if there had been a medical
relief centre near, she would have lived. And I think even landscape-
painters ought to have some opinions on the subject."
"I have a very definite opinion on that subject, I assure you," I
answered; and she screened herself with the newspaper, as though
unwilling to listen to me. "To my mind, all these schools, dispensaries,
libraries, medical relief centres, under present conditions, only serve
to aggravate the bondage of the people. The peasants are fettered by a
great chain, and you do not break the chain, but only add fresh links to
it--that's my view of it."
She raised her eyes to me and smiled ironically, and I went on trying to
formulate my leading idea.
"What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all these
Annas, Mavras, Pelageas, toil from early morning till dark, fall ill
from working beyond their strength, all their lives tremble for their
sick and hungry children, all their lives are being doctored, and in
dread of death and disease, fade and grow old early, and die in filth
and stench. Their children begin the same story over again as soon as
they grow up, and so it goes on for hundreds of years and milliards of
men live worse than beasts-- in continual terror, for a mere crust of
bread. The whole horror of their position lies in their never having
time to think of their souls, of their image and semblance. Cold,
hunger, animal terror, a burden of toil, like avalanches of snow, block
for them every way to spiritual activity--that is, to what distinguishes
man from the brutes and what is the only thing which makes life worth
living. You go to their help with hospitals and schools, but you don't
free them from their fetters by that; on the contrary, you bind them in
closer bonds, as, by introducing new prejudices, you increase the number
of their wants, to say nothing of the fact that they've got to pay the
Zemstvo for drugs and books, and so toil harder than ever."
"I am not going to argue with you," said Lida, putting down the paper.
"I've heard all that before. I will only say one thing: one cannot sit
with one's hands in one's lap. It's true that we are not saving
humanity, and perhaps we make a great many mistakes; but we do what we
can, and we are right. The highest and holiest task for a civilised
being is to serve his neighbours, and we try to serve them as best we
can. You don't like it, but one can't please every one."
"That's true, Lida," said her mother--"that's true."
In Lida's presence she was always a little timid, and looked at her
nervously as she talked, afraid of saying something superfluous or
inopportune. And she never contradicted her, but always assented:
"That's true, Lida--that's true."
"Teaching the peasants to read and write, books of wretched precepts and
rhymes, and medical relief centres, cannot diminish either ignorance or
the death-rate, just as the light from your windows cannot light up this
huge garden," said I. "You give nothing. By meddling in these people's
lives you only create new wants in them, and new demands on their
labour."
"Ach! Good heavens! But one must do something!" said Lida with vexation,
and from her tone one could see that she thought my arguments worthless
and despised them.
"The people must be freed from hard physical labour," said I. "We must
lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they may not
spend all their lives at the stove, at the wash-tub, and in the fields,
but may also have time to think of their souls, of God--may have time to
develop their spiritual capacities. The highest vocation of man is
spiritual activity--the perpetual search for truth and the meaning of
life. Make coarse animal labour unnecessary for them, let them feel
themselves free, and then you will see what a mockery these dispensaries
and books are. Once a man recognises his true vocation, he can only be
satisfied by religion, science, and art, and not by these trifles."
"Free them from labour?" laughed Lida. "But is that possible?"
"Yes. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us,
townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree to
divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the satisfaction of
their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need to work only for two
or three hours a day. Imagine that we all, rich and poor, work only for
three hours a day, and the rest of our time is free. Imagine further
that in order to depend even less upon our bodies and to labour less, we
invent machines to replace our work, we try to cut down our needs to the
minimum. We would harden ourselves and our children that they should not
be afraid of hunger and cold, and that we shouldn't be continually
trembling for their health like Anna, Mavra, and Pelagea. Imagine that
we don't doctor ourselves, don't keep dispensaries, tobacco factories,
distilleries--what a lot of free time would be left us after all! All of
us together would devote our leisure to science and art. Just as the
peasants sometimes work, the whole community together mending the roads,
so all of us, as a community, would search for truth and the meaning of
life, and I am convinced that the truth would be discovered very
quickly; man would escape from this continual, agonising, oppressive
dread of death, and even from death itself."
"You contradict yourself, though," said Lida. "You talk about science,
and are yourself opposed to elementary education."
"Elementary education when a man has nothing to read but the signs on
public houses and sometimes books which he cannot understand-- such
education has existed among us since the times of Rurik; Gogol's
Petrushka has been reading for ever so long, yet as the village was in
the days of Rurik so it has remained. What is needed is not elementary
education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual capacities.
What are wanted are not schools, but universities."
"You are opposed to medicine, too."
"Yes. It would be necessary only for the study of diseases as natural