Short Stories by Chekhov
lessons in harmony. Her love for him was deep and perfectly
disinterested, and her relations with him did not alter her habits; she
went on giving her lessons and wearing herself out with work as before.
Through her he came to understand and love music, which he had scarcely
cared for till then.
"Half my kingdom for a cup of tea!" she pronounced in a hollow voice,
covering her mouth with her muff that she might not catch cold. "I've
given five lessons, confound them! My pupils are as stupid as posts; I
nearly died of exasperation. I don't know how long this slavery can go
on. I'm worn out. As soon as I can scrape together three hundred
roubles, I shall throw it all up and go to the Crimea, to lie on the
beach and drink in ozone. How I love the sea--oh, how I love the sea!"
"You'll never go," said Laptev. "To begin with, you'll never save the
money; and, besides, you'd grudge spending it. Forgive me, I repeat
again: surely it's quite as humiliating to collect the money by
farthings from idle people who have music lessons to while away their
time, as to borrow it from your friends."
"I haven't any friends," she said irritably. "And please don't talk
nonsense. The working class to which I belong has one privilege: the
consciousness of being incorruptible--the right to refuse to be indebted
to wretched little shopkeepers, and to treat them with scorn. No,
indeed, you don't buy me! I'm not a Yulitchka!"
Laptev did not attempt to pay the driver, knowing that it would call
forth a perfect torrent of words, such as he had often heard before. She
paid herself.
She had a little furnished room in the flat of a solitary lady who
provided her meals. Her big Becker piano was for the time at Yartsev's
in Great Nikitsky Street, and she went there every day to play on it. In
her room there were armchairs in loose covers, a bed with a white summer
quilt, and flowers belonging to the landlady; there were oleographs on
the walls, and there was nothing that would have suggested that there
was a woman, and a woman of university education, living in it. There
was no toilet table; there were no books; there was not even a writing-
table. It was evident that she went to bed as soon as she got home, and
went out as soon as she got up in the morning.
The cook brought in the samovar. Polina Nikolaevna made tea, and, still
shivering--the room was cold--began abusing the singers who had sung in
the ninth symphony. She was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes
open. She drank one glass of tea, then a second, and then a third.
"And so you are married," she said. "But don't be uneasy; I'm not going
to pine away. I shall be able to tear you out of my heart. Only it's
annoying and bitter to me that you are just as contemptible as every one
else; that what you want in a woman is not brains or intellect, but
simply a body, good looks, and youth. . . . Youth!" she pronounced
through her nose, as though mimicking some one, and she laughed. "Youth!
You must have purity, _reinheit! reinheit!_" she laughed, throwing
herself back in her chair. "_Reinheit!_"
When she left off laughing her eyes were wet with tears.
"You're happy, at any rate?" she asked.
"No."
"Does she love you?"
Laptev, agitated, and feeling miserable, stood up and began walking
about the room.
"No," he repeated. "If you want to know, Polina, I'm very unhappy.
There's no help for it; I've done the stupid thing, and there's no
correcting it now. I must look at it philosophically. She married me
without love, stupidly, perhaps with mercenary motives, but without
understanding, and now she evidently sees her mistake and is miserable.
I see it. At night we sleep together, but by day she is afraid to be
left alone with me for five minutes, and tries to find distraction,
society. With me she feels ashamed and frightened."
"And yet she takes money from you?"
"That's stupid, Polina!" cried Laptev. "She takes money from me because
it makes absolutely no difference to her whether she has it or not. She
is an honest, pure girl. She married me simply because she wanted to get
away from her father, that's all."
"And are you sure she would have married you if you had not been rich?"
asked Polina.
"I'm not sure of anything," said Laptev dejectedly. "Not of anything. I
don't understand anything. For God's sake, Polina, don't let us talk
about it."
"Do you love her?"
"Desperately."
A silence followed. She drank a fourth glass, while he paced up and
down, thinking that by now his wife was probably having supper at the
doctors' club.
"But is it possible to love without knowing why?" asked Polina,
shrugging her shoulders. "No; it's the promptings of animal passion! You
are poisoned, intoxicated by that beautiful body, that _reinheit!_ Go
away from me; you are unclean! Go to her!"
She brandished her hand at him, then took up his hat and hurled it at
him. He put on his fur coat without speaking and went out, but she ran
after him into the passage, clutched his arm above the elbow, and broke
into sobs.
"Hush, Polina! Don't!" he said, and could not unclasp her fingers. "Calm
yourself, I entreat you."
She shut her eyes and turned pale, and her long nose became an
unpleasant waxy colour like a corpse's, and Laptev still could not
unclasp her fingers. She had fainted. He lifted her up carefully, laid
her on her bed, and sat by her for ten minutes till she came to herself.
Her hands were cold, her pulse was weak and uneven.
"Go home," she said, opening her eyes. "Go away, or I shall begin
howling again. I must take myself in hand."
When he came out, instead of going to the doctors' club where his
friends were expecting him, he went home. All the way home he was asking
himself reproachfully why he had not settled down to married life with
that woman who loved him so much, and was in reality his wife and
friend. She was the one human being who was devoted to him; and,
besides, would it not have been a grateful and worthy task to give
happiness, peace, and a home to that proud, clever, overworked creature?
Was it for him, he asked himself, to lay claim to youth and beauty, to
that happiness which could not be, and which, as though in punishment or
mockery, had kept him for the last three months in a state of gloom and
oppression. The honeymoon was long over, and he still, absurd to say,
did not know what sort of person his wife was. To her school friends and
her father she wrote long letters of five sheets, and was never at a
loss for something to say to them, but to him she never spoke except
about the weather or to tell him that dinner was ready, or that it was
supper-time. When at night she said her lengthy prayers and then kissed
her crosses and ikons, he thought, watching her with hatred, "Here she's
praying. What's she praying about? What about?" In his thoughts he
showered insults on himself and her, telling himself that when he got
into bed and took her into his arms, he was taking what he had paid for;
but it was horrible. If only it had been a healthy, reckless, sinful
woman; but here he had youth, piety, meekness, the pure eyes of
innocence. . . . While they were engaged her piety had touched him; now
the conventional definiteness of her views and convictions seemed to him
a barrier, behind which the real truth could not be seen. Already
everything in his married life was agonising. When his wife, sitting
beside him in the theatre, sighed or laughed spontaneously, it was
bitter to him that she enjoyed herself alone and would not share her
delight with him. And it was remarkable that she was friendly with all
his friends, and they all knew what she was like already, while he knew
nothing about her, and only moped and was dumbly jealous.
When he got home Laptev put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and sat
down in his study to read a novel. His wife was not at home. But within
half an hour there was a ring at the hall door, and he heard the muffled
footsteps of Pyotr running to open it. It was Yulia. She walked into the
study in her fur coat, her cheeks rosy with the frost,
"There's a great fire in Pryesnya," she said breathlessly. "There's a
tremendous glow. I'm going to see it with Konstantin Ivanovitch."
"Well, do, dear!"
The sight of her health, her freshness, and the childish horror in her
eyes, reassured Laptev. He read for another half-hour and went to bed.
Next day Polina Nikolaevna sent to the warehouse two books she had
borrowed from him, all his letters and his photographs; with them was a
note consisting of one word--_"basta."_
VIII
Towards the end of October Nina Fyodorovna had unmistakable symptoms of
a relapse. There was a change in her face, and she grew rapidly thinner.
In spite of acute pain she still imagined that she was getting better,
and got up and dressed every morning as though she were well, and then
lay on her bed, fully dressed, for the rest of the day. And towards the
end she became very talkative. She would lie on her back and talk in a
low voice, speaking with an effort and breathing painfully. She died
suddenly under the following circumstances.
It was a clear moonlight evening. In the street people were tobogganing
in the fresh snow, and their clamour floated in at the window. Nina
Fyodorovna was lying on her back in bed, and Sasha, who had no one to
take turns with her now, was sitting beside her half asleep.
"I don't remember his father's name," Nina Fyodorovna was saying softly,
"but his name was Ivan Kotchevoy--a poor clerk. He was a sad drunkard,
the Kingdom of Heaven be his! He used to come to us, and every month we
used to give him a pound of sugar and two ounces of tea. And money, too,
sometimes, of course. Yes. . . . And then, this is what happened. Our
Kotchevoy began drinking heavily and died, consumed by vodka. He left a
little son, a boy of seven. Poor little orphan! . . . We took him and
hid him in the clerk's quarters, and he lived there for a whole year,
without father's knowing. And when father did see him, he only waved his
hand and said nothing. When Kostya, the little orphan, was nine years
old--by that time I was engaged to be married--I took him round to all
the day schools. I went from one to the other, and no one would take
him. And he cried. . . . 'What are you crying for, little silly?' I
said. I took him to Razgulyay to the second school, where--God bless
them for it!--they took him, and the boy began going every day on foot
from Pyatnitsky Street to Razgulyay Street and back again . . . .
Alyosha paid for him. . . . By God's grace the boy got on, was good at
his lessons, and turned out well. . . . He's a lawyer now in Moscow, a
friend of Alyosha's, and so good in science. Yes, we had compassion on a
fellow-creature and took him into our house, and now I daresay, he
remembers us in his prayers. . . Yes. . . ."
Nina Fyodorovna spoke more and more slowly with long pauses, then after
a brief silence she suddenly raised herself and sat up.
"There's something the matter with me . . . something seems wrong," she
said. "Lord have mercy on me! Oh, I can't breathe!"
Sasha knew that her mother would soon die; seeing now how suddenly her
face looked drawn, she guessed that it was the end, and she was
frightened.
"Mother, you mustn't!" she began sobbing. "You mustn't."
"Run to the kitchen; let them go for father. I am very ill indeed."
Sasha ran through all the rooms calling, but there were none of the
servants in the house, and the only person she found was Lida asleep on
a chest in the dining-room with her clothes on and without a pillow.
Sasha ran into the yard just as she was without her goloshes, and then
into the street. On a bench at the gate her nurse was sitting watching