Short Stories by Chekhov
were always called, Nata and Vata, both wearing white frocks and
strikingly like each other. Pyotr Dmitritch was teaching them to mow.
"It's very simple," he said. "You have only to know how to hold the
scythe and not to get too hot over it--that is, not to use more force
than is necessary! Like this. . . . Wouldn't you like to try?" he said,
offering the scythe to Lubotchka. "Come!"
Lubotchka took the scythe clumsily, blushed crimson, and laughed.
"Don't be afraid, Lubov Alexandrovna!" cried Olga Mihalovna, loud enough
for all the ladies to hear that she was with them. "Don't be afraid! You
must learn! If you marry a Tolstoyan he will make you mow."
Lubotchka raised the scythe, but began laughing again, and, helpless
with laughter, let go of it at once. She was ashamed and pleased at
being talked to as though grown up. Nata, with a cold, serious face,
with no trace of smiling or shyness, took the scythe, swung it and
caught it in the grass; Vata, also without a smile, as cold and serious
as her sister, took the scythe, and silently thrust it into the earth.
Having done this, the two sisters linked arms and walked in silence to
the raspberries.
Pyotr Dmitritch laughed and played about like a boy, and this childish,
frolicsome mood in which he became exceedingly good-natured suited him
far better than any other. Olga Mihalovna loved him when he was like
that. But his boyishness did not usually last long. It did not this
time; after playing with the scythe, he for some reason thought it
necessary to take a serious tone about it.
"When I am mowing, I feel, do you know, healthier and more normal," he
said. "If I were forced to confine myself to an intellectual life I
believe I should go out of my mind. I feel that I was not born to be a
man of culture! I ought to mow, plough, sow, drive out the horses."
And Pyotr Dmitritch began a conversation with the ladies about the
advantages of physical labour, about culture, and then about the
pernicious effects of money, of property. Listening to her husband, Olga
Mihalovna, for some reason, thought of her dowry.
"And the time will come, I suppose," she thought, "when he will not
forgive me for being richer than he. He is proud and vain. Maybe he will
hate me because he owes so much to me."
She stopped near Colonel Bukryeev, who was eating raspberries and also
taking part in the conversation.
"Come," he said, making room for Olga Mihalovna and Pyotr Dmitritch.
"The ripest are here. . . . And so, according to Proudhon," he went on,
raising his voice, "property is robbery. But I must confess I don't
believe in Proudhon, and don't consider him a philosopher. The French
are not authorities, to my thinking--God bless them!"
"Well, as for Proudhons and Buckles and the rest of them, I am weak in
that department," said Pyotr Dmitritch. "For philosophy you must apply
to my wife. She has been at University lectures and knows all your
Schopenhauers and Proudhons by heart. . . ."
Olga Mihalovna felt bored again. She walked again along a little path by
apple and pear trees, and looked again as though she was on some very
important errand. She reached the gardener's cottage. In the doorway the
gardener's wife, Varvara, was sitting together with her four little
children with big shaven heads. Varvara, too, was with child and
expecting to be confined on Elijah's Day. After greeting her, Olga
Mihalovna looked at her and the children in silence and asked:
"Well, how do you feel?"
"Oh, all right. . . ."
A silence followed. The two women seemed to understand each other
without words.
"It's dreadful having one's first baby," said Olga Mihalovna after a
moment's thought. "I keep feeling as though I shall not get through it,
as though I shall die."
"I fancied that, too, but here I am alive. One has all sorts of
fancies."
Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked down a little on
her mistress from the height of her experience and spoke in a rather
didactic tone, and Olga Mihalovna could not help feeling her authority;
she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the child, of her
sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara as naïve and
trivial. And she waited in silence for Varvara to say something herself.
"Olya, we are going indoors," Pyotr Dmitritch called from the
raspberries.
Olga Mihalovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara. She
would have been ready to stay like that till night without speaking or
having any duty to perform. But she had to go. She had hardly left the
cottage when Lubotchka, Nata, and Vata came running to meet her. The
sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubotchka ran
right up to her and flung herself on her neck.
"You dear, darling, precious," she said, kissing her face and her neck.
"Let us go and have tea on the island!"
"On the island, on the island!" said the precisely similar Nata and
Vata, both at once, without a smile.
"But it's going to rain, my dears."
"It's not, it's not," cried Lubotchka with a woebegone face. "They've
all agreed to go. Dear! darling!"
"They are all getting ready to have tea on the island," said Pyotr
Dmitritch, coming up. "See to arranging things. . . . We will all go in
the boats, and the samovars and all the rest of it must be sent in the
carriage with the servants."
He walked beside his wife and gave her his arm. Olga Mihalovna had a
desire to say something disagreeable to her husband, something biting,
even about her dowry perhaps--the crueller the better, she felt. She
thought a little, and said:
"Why is it Count Alexey Petrovitch hasn't come? What a pity!"
"I am very glad he hasn't come," said Pyotr Dmitritch, lying. "I'm sick
to death of that old lunatic."
"But yet before dinner you were expecting him so eagerly!" III
Half an hour later all the guests were crowding on the bank near the
pile to which the boats were fastened. They were all talking and
laughing, and were in such excitement and commotion that they could
hardly get into the boats. Three boats were crammed with passengers,
while two stood empty. The keys for unfastening these two boats had been
somehow mislaid, and messengers were continually running from the river
to the house to look for them. Some said Grigory had the keys, others
that the bailiff had them, while others suggested sending for a
blacksmith and breaking the padlocks. And all talked at once,
interrupting and shouting one another down. Pyotr Dmitritch paced
impatiently to and fro on the bank, shouting:
"What the devil's the meaning of it! The keys ought always to be lying
in the hall window! Who has dared to take them away? The bailiff can get
a boat of his own if he wants one!"
At last the keys were found. Then it appeared that two oars were
missing. Again there was a great hullabaloo. Pyotr Dmitritch, who was
weary of pacing about the bank, jumped into a long, narrow boat hollowed
out of the trunk of a poplar, and, lurching from side to side and almost
falling into the water, pushed off from the bank. The other boats
followed him one after another, amid loud laughter and the shrieks of
the young ladies.
The white cloudy sky, the trees on the riverside, the boats with the
people in them, and the oars, were reflected in the water as in a
mirror; under the boats, far away below in the bottomless depths, was a
second sky with the birds flying across it. The bank on which the house
and gardens stood was high, steep, and covered with trees; on the other,
which was sloping, stretched broad green water-meadows with sheets of
water glistening in them. The boats had floated a hundred yards when,
behind the mournfully drooping willows on the sloping banks, huts and a
herd of cows came into sight; they began to hear songs, drunken shouts,
and the strains of a concertina.
Here and there on the river fishing-boats were scattered about, setting
their nets for the night. In one of these boats was the festive party,
playing on home-made violins and violoncellos.
Olga Mihalovna was sitting at the rudder; she was smiling affably and
talking a great deal to entertain her visitors, while she glanced
stealthily at her husband. He was ahead of them all, standing up punting
with one oar. The light sharp-nosed canoe, which all the guests called
the "death-trap"--while Pyotr Dmitritch, for some reason, called it
Penderaklia--flew along quickly; it had a brisk, crafty expression, as
though it hated its heavy occupant and was looking out for a favourable
moment to glide away from under his feet. Olga Mihalovna kept looking at
her husband, and she loathed his good looks which attracted every one,
the back of his head, his attitude, his familiar manner with women; she
hated all the women sitting in the boat with her, was jealous, and at
the same time was trembling every minute in terror that the frail craft
would upset and cause an accident.
"Take care, Pyotr!" she cried, while her heart fluttered with terror.
"Sit down! We believe in your courage without all that!"
She was worried, too, by the people who were in the boat with her. They
were all ordinary good sort of people like thousands of others, but now
each one of them struck her as exceptional and evil. In each one of them
she saw nothing but falsity. "That young man," she thought, "rowing, in
gold-rimmed spectacles, with chestnut hair and a nice-looking beard: he
is a mamma's darling, rich, and well-fed, and always fortunate, and
every one considers him an honourable, free-thinking, advanced man. It's
not a year since he left the University and came to live in the
district, but he already talks of himself as 'we active members of the
Zemstvo.' But in another year he will be bored like so many others and
go off to Petersburg, and to justify running away, will tell every one
that the Zemstvos are good-for-nothing, and that he has been deceived in
them. While from the other boat his young wife keeps her eyes fixed on
him, and believes that he is 'an active member of the Zemstvo,' just as
in a year she will believe that the Zemstvo is good-for-nothing. And
that stout, carefully shaven gentleman in the straw hat with the broad
ribbon, with an expensive cigar in his mouth: he is fond of saying, 'It
is time to put away dreams and set to work!' He has Yorkshire pigs,
Butler's hives, rape-seed, pine-apples, a dairy, a cheese factory,
Italian bookkeeping by double entry; but every summer he sells his
timber and mortgages part of his land to spend the autumn with his
mistress in the Crimea. And there's Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch, who has
quarrelled with Pyotr Dmitritch, and yet for some reason does not go
home."
Olga Mihalovna looked at the other boats, and there, too, she saw only
uninteresting, queer creatures, affected or stupid people. She thought
of all the people she knew in the district, and could not remember one
person of whom one could say or think anything good. They all seemed to
her mediocre, insipid, unintelligent, narrow, false, heartless; they all
said what they did not think, and did what they did not want to.
Dreariness and despair were stifling her; she longed to leave off
smiling, to leap up and cry out, "I am sick of you," and then jump out
and swim to the bank.
"I say, let's take Pyotr Dmitritch in tow!" some one shouted.
"In tow, in tow!" the others chimed in. "Olga Mihalovna, take your
husband in tow."
To take him in tow, Olga Mihalovna, who was steering, had to seize the
right moment and to catch bold of his boat by the chain at the beak.
When she bent over to the chain Pyotr Dmitritch frowned and looked at
her in alarm.
"I hope you won't catch cold," he said.
"If you are uneasy about me and the child, why do you torment me?"
thought Olga Mihalovna.