Short Stories by Chekhov
phenomena, and not for the cure of them. If one must cure, it should not
be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause --
physical labour, and then there will be no disease. I don't believe in a
science that cures disease," I went on excitedly. "When science and art
are real, they aim not at temporary private ends, but at eternal and
universal--they seek for truth and the meaning of life, they seek for
God, for the soul, and when they are tied down to the needs and evils of
the day, to dispensaries and libraries, they only complicate and hamper
life. We have plenty of doctors, chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can
read and write, but we are quite without biologists, mathematicians,
philosophers, poets. The whole of our intelligence, the whole of our
spiritual energy, is spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs.
Scientific men, writers, artists, are hard at work; thanks to them, the
conveniences of life are multiplied from day to day. Our physical
demands increase, yet truth is still a long way off, and man still
remains the most rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to
the degeneration of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all
fitness for life. In such conditions an artist's work has no meaning,
and the more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is
his position, as when one looks into it, it is evident that he is
working for the amusement of a rapacious and unclean animal, and is
supporting the existing order. And I don't care to work and I won't
work. . . . Nothing is any use; let the earth sink to perdition!"
"Misuce, go out of the room!" said Lida to her sister, apparently
thinking my words pernicious to the young girl.
Genya looked mournfully at her mother and sister, and went out of the
room.
"These are the charming things people say when they want to justify
their indifference," said Lida. "It is easier to disapprove of schools
and hospitals, than to teach or heal."
"That's true, Lida--that's true," the mother assented.
"You threaten to give up working," said Lida. "You evidently set a high
value on your work. Let us give up arguing; we shall never agree, since
I put the most imperfect dispensary or library of which you have just
spoken so contemptuously on a higher level than any landscape." And
turning at once to her mother, she began speaking in quite a different
tone: "The prince is very much changed, and much thinner than when he
was with us last. He is being sent to Vichy."
She told her mother about the prince in order to avoid talking to me.
Her face glowed, and to hide her feeling she bent low over the table as
though she were short-sighted, and made a show of reading the newspaper.
My presence was disagreeable to her. I said good-bye and went home.
IV
It was quite still out of doors; the village on the further side of the
pond was already asleep; there was not a light to be seen, and only the
stars were faintly reflected in the pond. At the gate with the lions on
it Genya was standing motionless, waiting to escort me.
"Every one is asleep in the village," I said to her, trying to make out
her face in the darkness, and I saw her mournful dark eyes fixed upon
me. "The publican and the horse-stealers are asleep, while we, well-bred
people, argue and irritate each other."
It was a melancholy August night--melancholy because there was already a
feeling of autumn; the moon was rising behind a purple cloud, and it
shed a faint light upon the road and on the dark fields of winter corn
by the sides. From time to time a star fell. Genya walked beside me
along the road, and tried not to look at the sky, that she might not see
the falling stars, which for some reason frightened her.
"I believe you are right," she said, shivering with the damp night air.
"If people, all together, could devote themselves to spiritual ends,
they would soon know everything."
"Of course. We are higher beings, and if we were really to recognise the
whole force of human genius and lived only for higher ends, we should in
the end become like gods. But that will never be--mankind will
degenerate till no traces of genius remain."
When the gates were out of sight, Genya stopped and shook hands with me.
"Good-night," she said, shivering; she had nothing but her blouse over
her shoulders and was shrinking with cold. "Come to-morrow."
I felt wretched at the thought of being left alone, irritated and
dissatisfied with myself and other people; and I, too, tried not to look
at the falling stars. "Stay another minute," I said to her, "I entreat
you."
I loved Genya. I must have loved her because she met me when I came and
saw me off when I went away; because she looked at me tenderly and
enthusiastically. How touchingly beautiful were her pale face, slender
neck, slender arms, her weakness, her idleness, her reading. And
intelligence? I suspected in her intelligence above the average. I was
fascinated by the breadth of her views, perhaps because they were
different from those of the stern, handsome Lida, who disliked me. Genya
liked me, because I was an artist. I had conquered her heart by my
talent, and had a passionate desire to paint for her sake alone; and I
dreamed of her as of my little queen who with me would possess those
trees, those fields, the mists, the dawn, the exquisite and beautiful
scenery in the midst of which I had felt myself hopelessly solitary and
useless.
"Stay another minute," I begged her. "I beseech you."
I took off my overcoat and put it over her chilly shoulders; afraid of
looking ugly and absurd in a man's overcoat, she laughed, threw it off,
and at that instant I put my arms round her and covered her face,
shoulders, and hands with kisses.
"Till to-morrow," she whispered, and softly, as though afraid of
breaking upon the silence of the night, she embraced me. "We have no
secrets from one another. I must tell my mother and my sister at once. .
. . It's so dreadful! Mother is all right; mother likes you--but Lida!"
She ran to the gates.
"Good-bye!" she called.
And then for two minutes I heard her running. I did not want to go home,
and I had nothing to go for. I stood still for a little time hesitating,
and made my way slowly back, to look once more at the house in which she
lived, the sweet, simple old house, which seemed to be watching me from
the windows of its upper storey, and understanding all about it. I
walked by the terrace, sat on the seat by the tennis ground, in the dark
under the old elm-tree, and looked from there at the house. In the
windows of the top storey where Misuce slept there appeared a bright
light, which changed to a soft green--they had covered the lamp with the
shade. Shadows began to move. . . . I was full of tenderness, peace, and
satisfaction with myself--satisfaction at having been able to be carried
away by my feelings and having fallen in love, and at the same time I
felt uncomfortable at the thought that only a few steps away from me, in
one of the rooms of that house there was Lida, who disliked and perhaps
hated me. I went on sitting there wondering whether Genya would come
out; I listened and fancied I heard voices talking upstairs.
About an hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no
longer visible. The moon was standing high above the house, and lighting
up the sleeping garden and the paths; the dahlias and the roses in front
of the house could be seen distinctly, and looked all the same colour.
It began to grow very cold. I went out of the garden, picked up my coat
on the road, and slowly sauntered home.
When next day after dinner I went to the Voltchaninovs, the glass door
into the garden was wide open. I sat down on the terrace, expecting
Genya every minute, to appear from behind the flower-beds on the lawn,
or from one of the avenues, or that I should hear her voice from the
house. Then I walked into the drawing-room, the dining-room. There was
not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I walked along the long
corridor to the hall and back. In this corridor there were several
doors, and through one of them I heard the voice of Lida:
"'God . . . sent . . . a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice,
probably dictating--"'God sent a crow a piece of cheese . . . . A crow .
. . a piece of cheese.' . . . Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing
my steps.
"It's I."
"Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to you this minute; I'm giving Dasha
her lesson."
"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"
"No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the
province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad," she
added after a pause. "'God sent . . . the crow . . . a piece . . . of
cheese.' . . . Have you written it?"
I went into the hall, and stared vacantly at the pond and the village,
and the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese. . . . God sent the crow
a piece of cheese."
And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time-- first
from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of
lime-trees. . . . At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave
me a note:
"I told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you," I
read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give you happiness.
Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!"
Then there was the dark fir avenue, the broken-down fence. . . . On the
field where then the rye was in flower and the corncrakes were calling,
now there were cows and hobbled horses. On the slope there were bright
green patches of winter corn. A sober workaday feeling came over me and
I felt ashamed of all I had said at the Voltchaninovs', and felt bored
with life as I had been before. When I got home, I packed and set off
that evening for Petersburg.
----
I never saw the Voltchaninovs again. Not long ago, on my way to the
Crimea, I met Byelokurov in the train. As before, he was wearing a
jerkin and an embroidered shirt, and when I asked how he was, he replied
that, God be praised, he was well. We began talking. He had sold his old
estate and bought another smaller one, in the name of Liubov Ivanovna.
He could tell me little about the Voltchaninovs. Lida, he said, was
still living in Shelkovka and teaching in the school; she had by degrees
succeeded in gathering round her a circle of people sympathetic to her
who made a strong party, and at the last election had turned out
Balagin, who had till then had the whole district under his thumb. About
Genya he only told me that she did not live at home, and that he did not
know where she was.
I am beginning to forget the old house, and only sometimes when I am
painting or reading I suddenly, apropos of nothing, remember the green
light in the window, the sound of my footsteps as I walked home through
the fields in the night, with my heart full of love, rubbing my hands in
the cold. And still more rarely, at moments when I am sad and depressed
by loneliness, I have dim memories, and little by little I begin to feel
that she is thinking of me, too --that she is waiting for me, and that
we shall meet. . . .
Misuce, where are you?
THREE YEARS
I
IT was dark, and already lights had begun to gleam here and there in the
houses, and a pale moon was rising behind the barracks at the end of the
street. Laptev was sitting on a bench by the gate waiting for the end of
the evening service at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. He was
reckoning that Yulia Sergeyevna would pass by on her way from the
service, and then he would speak to her, and perhaps spend the whole
evening with her.
He had been sitting there for an hour and a half already, and all that
time his imagination had been busy picturing his Moscow rooms, his