Short Stories by Chekhov
because they are neither of them necessary and are only in the way. If a
grown-up juryman, morally and mentally sane, is convinced that the
ceiling is white, or that Ivanov is guilty, to struggle with that
conviction and to vanquish it is beyond the power of any Demosthenes.
Who can convince me that I have a red moustache when I know that it is
black? As I listen to an orator I may perhaps grow sentimental and weep,
but my fundamental conviction, based for the most part on unmistakable
evidence and fact, is not changed in the least. My lawyer maintained
that I was young and foolish and that I was talking childish nonsense.
In his opinion, for one thing, an obvious fact becomes still more
obvious through light being thrown upon it by conscientious, well-
informed people; for another, talent is an elemental force, a hurricane
capable of turning even stones to dust, let alone such trifles as the
convictions of artisans and merchants of the second guild. It is as hard
for human weakness to struggle against talent as to look at the sun
without winking, or to stop the wind. One simple mortal by the power of
the word turns thousands of convinced savages to Christianity; Odysseus
was a man of the firmest convictions, but he succumbed to the Syrens,
and so on. All history consists of similar examples, and in life they
are met with at every turn; and so it is bound to be, or the intelligent
and talented man would have no superiority over the stupid and
incompetent.
"I stuck to my point, and went on maintaining that convictions are
stronger than any talent, though, frankly speaking, I could not have
defined exactly what I meant by conviction or what I meant by talent.
Most likely I simply talked for the sake of talking.
"'Take you, for example,' said the lawyer. 'You are convinced at this
moment that your fiancée is an angel and that there is not a man in the
whole town happier than you. But I tell you: ten or twenty minutes would
be enough for me to make you sit down to this table and write to your
fiancée, breaking off your engagement.
"I laughed.
"'Don't laugh, I am speaking seriously,' said my friend. 'If I choose,
in twenty minutes you will be happy at the thought that you need not get
married. Goodness knows what talent I have, but you are not one of the
strong sort.'
"'Well, try it on!' said I.
"'No, what for? I am only telling you this. You are a good boy and it
would be cruel to subject you to such an experiment. And besides I am
not in good form to-day.'
"We sat down to supper. The wine and the thought of Natasha, my beloved,
flooded my whole being with youth and happiness. My happiness was so
boundless that the lawyer sitting opposite to me with his green eyes
seemed to me an unhappy man, so small, so grey. . . .
"'Do try!' I persisted. 'Come, I entreat you!
"The lawyer shook his head and frowned. Evidently I was beginning to
bore him.
"'I know,' he said, 'after my experiment you will say, thank you, and
will call me your saviour; but you see I must think of your fiancée
too. She loves you; your jilting her would make her suffer. And what a
charming creature she is! I envy you.'
"The lawyer sighed, sipped his wine, and began talking of how charming
my Natasha was. He had an extraordinary gift of description. He could
knock you off a regular string of words about a woman's eyelashes or her
little finger. I listened to him with relish.
"'I have seen a great many women in my day,' he said, 'but I give you my
word of honour, I speak as a friend, your Natasha Andreyevna is a pearl,
a rare girl. Of course she has her defects--many of them, in fact, if you
like--but still she is fascinating.'
"And the lawyer began talking of my fiancée's defects. Now I understand
very well that he was talking of women in general, of their weak points
in general, but at the time it seemed to me that he was talking only of
Natasha. He went into ecstasies over her turn-up nose, her shrieks, her
shrill laugh, her airs and graces, precisely all the things I so
disliked in her. All that was, to his thinking, infinitely sweet,
graceful, and feminine.
"Without my noticing it, he quickly passed from his enthusiastic tone to
one of fatherly admonition, and then to a light and derisive one. . . .
There was no presiding judge and no one to check the diffusiveness of
the lawyer. I had not time to open my mouth, besides, what could I say?
What my friend said was not new, it was what everyone has known for
ages, and the whole venom lay not in what he said, but in the damnable
form he put it in. It really was beyond anything!
"As I listened to him then I learned that the same word has thousands of
shades of meaning according to the tone in which it is pronounced, and
the form which is given to the sentence. Of course I cannot reproduce
the tone or the form; I can only say that as I listened to my friend and
walked up and down the room, I was moved to resentment, indignation, and
contempt together with him. I even believed him when with tears in his
eyes he informed me that I was a great man, that I was worthy of a
better fate, that I was destined to achieve something in the future
which marriage would hinder!
"'My friend!' he exclaimed, pressing my hand. 'I beseech you, I adjure
you: stop before it is too late. Stop! May Heaven preserve you from this
strange, cruel mistake! My friend, do not ruin your youth!'
"Believe me or not, as you choose, but the long and the short of it was
that I sat down to the table and wrote to my fiancée, breaking off the
engagement. As I wrote I felt relieved that it was not yet too late to
rectify my mistake. Sealing the letter, I hastened out into the street
to post it. The lawyer himself came with me.
"'Excellent! Capital!' he applauded me as my letter to Natasha
disappeared into the darkness of the box. 'I congratulate you with all
my heart. I am glad for you.'
"After walking a dozen paces with me the lawyer went on:
"'Of course, marriage has its good points. I, for instance, belong to
the class of people to whom marriage and home life is everything.'
"And he proceeded to describe his life, and lay before me all the
hideousness of a solitary bachelor existence.
"He spoke with enthusiasm of his future wife, of the sweets of ordinary
family life, and was so eloquent, so sincere in his ecstasies that by
the time we had reached his door, I was in despair.
"'What are you doing to me, you horrible man?' I said, gasping. 'You
have ruined me! Why did you make me write that cursed letter? I love
her, I love her!'
"And I protested my love. I was horrified at my conduct which now seemed
to me wild and senseless. It is impossible, gentlemen, to imagine a more
violent emotion than I experienced at that moment. Oh, what I went
through, what I suffered! If some kind person had thrust a revolver into
my hand at that moment, I should have put a bullet through my brains
with pleasure.
"'Come, come . . .' said the lawyer, slapping me on the shoulder, and he
laughed. 'Give over crying. The letter won't reach your fiancée. It was
not you who wrote the address but I, and I muddled it so they won't be
able to make it out at the post-office. It will be a lesson to you not
to argue about what you don't understand.'
"Now, gentlemen, I leave it to the next to speak."
The fifth juryman settled himself more comfortably, and had just opened
his mouth to begin his story when we heard the clock strike on Spassky
Tower.
"Twelve . . ." one of the jurymen counted. "And into which class,
gentlemen, would you put the emotions that are being experienced now by
the man we are trying? He, that murderer, is spending the night in a
convict cell here in the court, sitting or lying down and of course not
sleeping, and throughout the whole sleepless night listening to that
chime. What is he thinking of? What visions are haunting him?"
And the jurymen all suddenly forgot about strong impressions; what their
companion who had once written a letter to his Natasha had suffered
seemed unimportant, even not amusing; and no one said anything more;
they began quietly and in silence lying down to sleep.
DRUNK
A MANUFACTURER called Frolov, a handsome dark man with a round beard,
and a soft, velvety expression in his eyes, and Almer, his lawyer, an
elderly man with a big rough head, were drinking in one of the public
rooms of a restaurant on the outskirts of the town. They had both come
to the restaurant straight from a ball and so were wearing dress coats
and white ties. Except them and the waiters at the door there was not a
soul in the room; by Frolov's orders no one else was admitted.
They began by drinking a big wine-glass of vodka and eating oysters.
"Good!" said Almer. "It was I brought oysters into fashion for the first
course, my boy. The vodka burns and stings your throat and you have a
voluptuous sensation in your throat when you swallow an oyster. Don't
you?"
A dignified waiter with a shaven upper lip and grey whiskers put a
sauceboat on the table.
"What's that you are serving?" asked Frolov.
"Sauce Provençale for the herring, sir. . . ."
"What! is that the way to serve it?" shouted Frolov, not looking into
the sauceboat. "Do you call that sauce? You don't know how to wait, you
blockhead!"
Frolov's velvety eyes flashed. He twisted a corner of the table-cloth
round his finger, made a slight movement, and the dishes, the
candlesticks, and the bottles, all jingling and clattering, fell with a
crash on the floor.
The waiters, long accustomed to pot-house catastrophes, ran up to the
table and began picking up the fragments with grave and unconcerned
faces, like surgeons at an operation.
"How well you know how to manage them!" said Almer, and he laughed. "But
. . . move a little away from the table or you will step in the
caviare."
"Call the engineer here!" cried Frolov.
This was the name given to a decrepit, doleful old man who really had
once been an engineer and very well off; he had squandered all his
property and towards the end of his life had got into a restaurant where
he looked after the waiters and singers and carried out various
commissions relating to the fair sex. Appearing at the summons, he put
his head on one side respectfully.
"Listen, my good man," Frolov said, addressing him. "What's the meaning
of this disorder? How queerly you fellows wait! Don't you know that I
don't like it? Devil take you, I shall give up coming to you!"
"I beg you graciously to excuse it, Alexey Semyonitch!" said the
engineer, laying his hand on his heart. "I will take steps immediately,
and your slightest wishes shall be carried out in the best and speediest
way."
"Well, that'll do, you can go. . . ."
The engineer bowed, staggered back, still doubled up, and disappeared
through the doorway with a final flash of the false diamonds on his
shirt-front and fingers.
The table was laid again. Almer drank red wine and ate with relish some
sort of bird served with truffles, and ordered a matelote of eelpouts
and a sterlet with its tail in its mouth. Frolov only drank vodka and
ate nothing but bread. He rubbed his face with his open hands, scowled,
and was evidently out of humour. Both were silent. There was a
stillness. Two electric lights in opaque shades flickered and hissed as
though they were angry. The gypsy girls passed the door, softly humming.
"One drinks and is none the merrier," said Frolov. "The more I pour into
myself, the more sober I become. Other people grow festive with vodka,
but I suffer from anger, disgusting thoughts, sleeplessness. Why is it,
old man, that people don't invent some other pleasure besides
drunkenness and debauchery? It's really horrible!"
"You had better send for the gypsy girls."
"Confound them!"