Short Stories by Chekhov
are a traitor to your country! At one time Napoleon's your great man, at
another Gambetta. . . . Who the devil can make you out?"
"Monsieur," says Champoun in French, spluttering and crushing up his
table napkin in his hands, "my worst enemy could not have thought of a
greater insult than the outrage you have just done to my feelings! All
is over!"
And with a tragic wave of his arm the Frenchman flings his dinner napkin
on the table majestically, and walks out of the room with dignity.
Three hours later the table is laid again, and the servants bring in the
dinner. Kamyshev sits alone at the table. After the preliminary glass he
feels a craving to babble. He wants to chatter, but he has no listener.
"What is Alphonse Ludovikovitch doing?" he asks the footman.
"He is packing his trunk, sir."
"What a noodle! Lord forgive us!" says Kamyshev, and goes in to the
Frenchman.
Champoun is sitting on the floor in his room, and with trembling hands
is packing in his trunk his linen, scent bottles, prayer-books, braces,
ties. . . . All his correct figure, his trunk, his bedstead and the
table--all have an air of elegance and effeminacy. Great tears are
dropping from his big blue eyes into the trunk.
"Where are you off to?" asks Kamyshev, after standing still for a
little.
The Frenchman says nothing.
"Do you want to go away?" Kamyshev goes on. "Well, you know, but . . . I
won't venture to detain you. But what is queer is, how are you going to
travel without a passport? I wonder! You know I have lost your passport.
I thrust it in somewhere between some papers, and it is lost. . . . And
they are strict about passports among us. Before you have gone three or
four miles they pounce upon you."
Champoun raises his head and looks mistrustfully at Kamyshev.
"Yes. . . . You will see! They will see from your face you haven't a
passport, and ask at once: Who is that? Alphonse Champoun. We know that
Alphonse Champoun. Wouldn't you like to go under police escort somewhere
nearer home!"
"Are you joking?"
"What motive have I for joking? Why should I? Only mind now; it's a
compact, don't you begin whining then and writing letters. I won't stir
a finger when they lead you by in fetters!"
Champoun jumps up and, pale and wide-eyed, begins pacing up and down the
room.
"What are you doing to me?" he says in despair, clutching at his head.
"My God! accursed be that hour when the fatal thought of leaving my
country entered my head! . . ."
"Come, come, come . . . I was joking!" says Kamyshev in a lower tone.
"Queer fish he is; he doesn't understand a joke. One can't say a word!"
"My dear friend!" shrieks Champoun, reassured by Kamyshev's tone. "I
swear I am devoted to Russia, to you and your children. . . . To leave
you is as bitter to me as death itself! But every word you utter stabs
me to the heart!"
"Ah, you queer fish! If I do abuse the French, what reason have you to
take offence? You are a queer fish really! You should follow the example
of Lazar Isaakitch, my tenant. I call him one thing and another, a Jew,
and a scurvy rascal, and I make a pig's ear out of my coat tail, and
catch him by his Jewish curls. He doesn't take offence."
"But he is a slave! For a kopeck he is ready to put up with any insult!"
"Come, come, come . . . that's enough! Peace and concord!"
Champoun powders his tear-stained face and goes with Kamyshev to the
dining-room. The first course is eaten in silence, after the second the
same performance begins over again, and so Champoun's sufferings have no
end.
The Party and Other Stories
THE PARTY I
AFTER the festive dinner with its eight courses and its endless
conversation, Olga Mihalovna, whose husband's name-day was being
celebrated, went out into the garden. The duty of smiling and talking
incessantly, the clatter of the crockery, the stupidity of the servants,
the long intervals between the courses, and the stays she had put on to
conceal her condition from the visitors, wearied her to exhaustion. She
longed to get away from the house, to sit in the shade and rest her
heart with thoughts of the baby which was to be born to her in another
two months. She was used to these thoughts coming to her as she turned
to the left out of the big avenue into the narrow path. Here in the
thick shade of the plums and cherry-trees the dry branches used to
scratch her neck and shoulders; a spider's web would settle on her face,
and there would rise up in her mind the image of a little creature of
undetermined sex and undefined features, and it began to seem as though
it were not the spider's web that tickled her face and neck caressingly,
but that little creature. When, at the end of the path, a thin wicker
hurdle came into sight, and behind it podgy beehives with tiled roofs;
when in the motionless, stagnant air there came a smell of hay and
honey, and a soft buzzing of bees was audible, then the little creature
would take complete possession of Olga Mihalovna. She used to sit down
on a bench near the shanty woven of branches, and fall to thinking.
This time, too, she went on as far as the seat, sat down, and began
thinking; but instead of the little creature there rose up in her
imagination the figures of the grown-up people whom she had just left.
She felt dreadfully uneasy that she, the hostess, had deserted her
guests, and she remembered how her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and her
uncle, Nikolay Nikolaitch, had argued at dinner about trial by jury,
about the press, and about the higher education of women. Her husband,
as usual, argued in order to show off his Conservative ideas before his
visitors--and still more in order to disagree with her uncle, whom he
disliked. Her uncle contradicted him and wrangled over every word he
uttered, so as to show the company that he, Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch,
still retained his youthful freshness of spirit and free-thinking in
spite of his fifty-nine years. And towards the end of dinner even Olga
Mihalovna herself could not resist taking part and unskilfully
attempting to defend university education for women--not that that
education stood in need of her defence, but simply because she wanted to
annoy her husband, who to her mind was unfair. The guests were wearied
by this discussion, but they all thought it necessary to take part in
it, and talked a great deal, although none of them took any interest in
trial by jury or the higher education of women. . . .
Olga Mihalovna was sitting on the nearest side of the hurdle near the
shanty. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. The trees and the air were
overcast as before rain, but in spite of that it was hot and stifling.
The hay cut under the trees on the previous day was lying ungathered,
looking melancholy, with here and there a patch of colour from the faded
flowers, and from it came a heavy, sickly scent. It was still. The other
side of the hurdle there was a monotonous hum of bees. . . .
Suddenly she heard footsteps and voices; some one was coming along the
path towards the beehouse.
"How stifling it is!" said a feminine voice. "What do you think-- is it
going to rain, or not?"
"It is going to rain, my charmer, but not before night," a very familiar
male voice answered languidly. "There will be a good rain."
Olga Mihalovna calculated that if she made haste to hide in the shanty
they would pass by without seeing her, and she would not have to talk
and to force herself to smile. She picked up her skirts, bent down and
crept into the shanty. At once she felt upon her face, her neck, her
arms, the hot air as heavy as steam. If it had not been for the
stuffiness and the close smell of rye bread, fennel, and brushwood,
which prevented her from breathing freely, it would have been delightful
to hide from her visitors here under the thatched roof in the dusk, and
to think about the little creature. It was cosy and quiet.
"What a pretty spot!" said a feminine voice. "Let us sit here, Pyotr
Dmitritch."
Olga Mihalovna began peeping through a crack between two branches. She
saw her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and Lubotchka Sheller, a girl of
seventeen who had not long left boarding-school. Pyotr Dmitritch, with
his hat on the back of his head, languid and indolent from having drunk
so much at dinner, slouched by the hurdle and raked the hay into a heap
with his foot; Lubotchka, pink with the heat and pretty as ever, stood
with her hands behind her, watching the lazy movements of his big
handsome person.
Olga Mihalovna knew that her husband was attractive to women, and did
not like to see him with them. There was nothing out of the way in Pyotr
Dmitritch's lazily raking together the hay in order to sit down on it
with Lubotchka and chatter to her of trivialities; there was nothing out
of the way, either, in pretty Lubotchka's looking at him with her soft
eyes; but yet Olga Mihalovna felt vexed with her husband and frightened
and pleased that she could listen to them.
"Sit down, enchantress," said Pyotr Dmitritch, sinking down on the hay
and stretching. "That's right. Come, tell me something."
"What next! If I begin telling you anything you will go to sleep."
"Me go to sleep? Allah forbid! Can I go to sleep while eyes like yours
are watching me?"
In her husband's words, and in the fact that he was lolling with his hat
on the back of his head in the presence of a lady, there was nothing out
of the way either. He was spoilt by women, knew that they found him
attractive, and had adopted with them a special tone which every one
said suited him. With Lubotchka he behaved as with all women. But, all
the same, Olga Mihalovna was jealous.
"Tell me, please," said Lubotchka, after a brief silence--"is it true
that you are to be tried for something?"
"I? Yes, I am . . . numbered among the transgressors, my charmer."
"But what for?"
"For nothing, but just . . . it's chiefly a question of politics,"
yawned Pyotr Dmitritch--"the antagonisms of Left and Right. I, an
obscurantist and reactionary, ventured in an official paper to make use
of an expression offensive in the eyes of such immaculate Gladstones as
Vladimir Pavlovitch Vladimirov and our local justice of the peace--Kuzma
Grigoritch Vostryakov."
Pytor Dmitritch yawned again and went on:
"And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun
or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching
the Liberals! Heaven forbid! A Liberal is like the poisonous dry fungus
which covers you with a cloud of dust if you accidentally touch it with
your finger."
"What happened to you?"
"Nothing particular. The whole flare-up started from the merest trifle.
A teacher, a detestable person of clerical associations, hands to
Vostryakov a petition against a tavern-keeper, charging him with
insulting language and behaviour in a public place. Everything showed
that both the teacher and the tavern-keeper were drunk as cobblers, and
that they behaved equally badly. If there had been insulting behaviour,
the insult had anyway been mutual. Vostryakov ought to have fined them
both for a breach of the peace and have turned them out of the
court--that is all. But that's not our way of doing things. With us what
stands first is not the person--not the fact itself, but the trade-mark
and label. However great a rascal a teacher may be, he is always in the
right because he is a teacher; a tavern-keeper is always in the wrong
because he is a tavern-keeper and a money-grubber. Vostryakov placed the
tavern-keeper under arrest. The man appealed to the Circuit Court; the
Circuit Court triumphantly upheld Vostryakov's decision. Well, I stuck
to my own opinion. . . . Got a little hot. . . . That was all."
Pyotr Dmitritch spoke calmly with careless irony. In reality the trial