Short Stories by Chekhov
to give the workpeople anything for nothing, or they would demand it
again next time. And what would be the good of fifteen hundred roubles
when there were eighteen hundred workmen in the factory besides their
wives and children? Or she might, perhaps, pick out one of the writers
of those begging letters-- some luckless man who had long ago lost all
hope of anything better, and give him the fifteen hundred. The money
would come upon the poor creature like a thunder-clap, and perhaps for
the first time in his life he would feel happy. This idea struck Anna
Akimovna as original and amusing, and it fascinated her. She took one
letter at random out of the pile and read it. Some petty official called
Tchalikov had long been out of a situation, was ill, and living in
Gushtchin's Buildings; his wife was in consumption, and he had five
little girls. Anna Akimovna knew well the four-storeyed house,
Gushtchin's Buildings, in which Tchalikov lived. Oh, it was a horrid,
foul, unhealthy house!
"Well, I will give it to that Tchalikov," she decided. "I won't send it;
I had better take it myself to prevent unnecessary talk. Yes," she
reflected, as she put the fifteen hundred roubles in her pocket, "and
I'll have a look at them, and perhaps I can do something for the little
girls."
She felt light-hearted; she rang the bell and ordered the horses to be
brought round.
When she got into the sledge it was past six o'clock in the evening. The
windows in all the blocks of buildings were brightly lighted up, and
that made the huge courtyard seem very dark: at the gates, and at the
far end of the yard near the warehouses and the workpeople's barracks,
electric lamps were gleaming.
Anna Akimovna disliked and feared those huge dark buildings, warehouses,
and barracks where the workmen lived. She had only once been in the main
building since her father's death. The high ceilings with iron girders;
the multitude of huge, rapidly turning wheels, connecting straps and
levers; the shrill hissing; the clank of steel; the rattle of the
trolleys; the harsh puffing of steam; the faces--pale, crimson, or black
with coal-dust; the shirts soaked with sweat; the gleam of steel, of
copper, and of fire; the smell of oil and coal; and the draught, at
times very hot and at times very cold--gave her an impression of hell. It
seemed to her as though the wheels, the levers, and the hot hissing
cylinders were trying to tear themselves away from their fastenings to
crush the men, while the men, not hearing one another, ran about with
anxious faces, and busied themselves about the machines, trying to stop
their terrible movement. They showed Anna Akimovna something and
respectfully explained it to her. She remembered how in the forge a
piece of red-hot iron was pulled out of the furnace; and how an old man
with a strap round his head, and another, a young man in a blue shirt
with a chain on his breast, and an angry face, probably one of the
foremen, struck the piece of iron with hammers; and how the golden
sparks had been scattered in all directions; and how, a little
afterwards, they had dragged out a huge piece of sheet-iron with a
clang. The old man had stood erect and smiled, while the young man had
wiped his face with his sleeve and explained something to her. And she
remembered, too, how in another department an old man with one eye had
been filing a piece of iron, and how the iron filings were scattered
about; and how a red-haired man in black spectacles, with holes in his
shirt, had been working at a lathe, making something out of a piece of
steel: the lathe roared and hissed and squeaked, and Anna Akimovna felt
sick at the sound, and it seemed as though they were boring into her
ears. She looked, listened, did not understand, smiled graciously, and
felt ashamed. To get hundreds of thousands of roubles from a business
which one does not understand and cannot like--how strange it is!
And she had not once been in the workpeople's barracks. There, she was
told, it was damp; there were bugs, debauchery, anarchy. It was an
astonishing thing: a thousand roubles were spent annually on keeping the
barracks in good order, yet, if she were to believe the anonymous
letters, the condition of the workpeople was growing worse and worse
every year.
"There was more order in my father's day," thought Anna Akimovna, as she
drove out of the yard, "because he had been a workman himself. I know
nothing about it and only do silly things."
She felt depressed again, and was no longer glad that she had come, and
the thought of the lucky man upon whom fifteen hundred roubles would
drop from heaven no longer struck her as original and amusing. To go to
some Tchalikov or other, when at home a business worth a million was
gradually going to pieces and being ruined, and the workpeople in the
barracks were living worse than convicts, meant doing something silly
and cheating her conscience. Along the highroad and across the fields
near it, workpeople from the neighbouring cotton and paper factories
were walking towards the lights of the town. There was the sound of talk
and laughter in the frosty air. Anna Akimovna looked at the women and
young people, and she suddenly felt a longing for a plain rough life
among a crowd. She recalled vividly that far-away time when she used to
be called Anyutka, when she was a little girl and used to lie under the
same quilt with her mother, while a washerwoman who lodged with them
used to wash clothes in the next room; while through the thin walls
there came from the neighbouring flats sounds of laughter, swearing,
children's crying, the accordion, and the whirr of carpenters' lathes
and sewing-machines; while her father, Akim Ivanovitch, who was clever
at almost every craft, would be soldering something near the stove, or
drawing or planing, taking no notice whatever of the noise and
stuffiness. And she longed to wash, to iron, to run to the shop and the
tavern as she used to do every day when she lived with her mother. She
ought to have been a work-girl and not the factory owner! Her big house
with its chandeliers and pictures; her footman Mishenka, with his glossy
moustache and swallowtail coat; the devout and dignified Varvarushka,
and smooth-tongued Agafyushka; and the young people of both sexes who
came almost every day to ask her for money, and with whom she always for
some reason felt guilty; and the clerks, the doctors, and the ladies who
were charitable at her expense, who flattered her and secretly despised
her for her humble origin-- how wearisome and alien it all was to her!
Here was the railway crossing and the city gate; then came houses
alternating with kitchen gardens; and at last the broad street where
stood the renowned Gushtchin's Buildings. The street, usually quiet, was
now on Christmas Eve full of life and movement. The eating-houses and
beer-shops were noisy. If some one who did not belong to that quarter
but lived in the centre of the town had driven through the street now,
he would have noticed nothing but dirty, drunken, and abusive people;
but Anna Akimovna, who had lived in those parts all her life, was
constantly recognizing in the crowd her own father or mother or uncle.
Her father was a soft fluid character, a little fantastical, frivolous,
and irresponsible. He did not care for money, respectability, or power;
he used to say that a working man had no time to keep the holy-days and
go to church; and if it had not been for his wife, he would probably
never have gone to confession, taken the sacrament or kept the fasts.
While her uncle, Ivan Ivanovitch, on the contrary, was like flint; in
everything relating to religion, politics, and morality, he was harsh
and relentless, and kept a strict watch, not only over himself, but also
over all his servants and acquaintances. God forbid that one should go
into his room without crossing oneself before the ikon! The luxurious
mansion in which Anna Akimovna now lived he had always kept locked up,
and only opened it on great holidays for important visitors, while he
lived himself in the office, in a little room covered with ikons. He had
leanings towards the Old Believers, and was continually entertaining
priests and bishops of the old ritual, though he had been christened,
and married, and had buried his wife in accordance with the Orthodox
rites. He disliked Akim, his only brother and his heir, for his
frivolity, which he called simpleness and folly, and for his
indifference to religion. He treated him as an inferior, kept him in the
position of a workman, paid him sixteen roubles a month. Akim addressed
his brother with formal respect, and on the days of asking forgiveness,
he and his wife and daughter bowed down to the ground before him. But
three years before his death Ivan Ivanovitch had drawn closer to his
brother, forgave his shortcomings, and ordered him to get a governess
for Anyutka.
There was a dark, deep, evil-smelling archway under Gushtchin's
Buildings; there was a sound of men coughing near the walls. Leaving the
sledge in the street, Anna Akimovna went in at the gate and there
inquired how to get to No. 46 to see a clerk called Tchalikov. She was
directed to the furthest door on the right in the third story. And in
the courtyard and near the outer door, and even on the stairs, there was
still the same loathsome smell as under the archway. In Anna Akimovna's
childhood, when her father was a simple workman, she used to live in a
building like that, and afterwards, when their circumstances were
different, she had often visited them in the character of a Lady
Bountiful. The narrow stone staircase with its steep dirty steps, with
landings at every story; the greasy swinging lanterns; the stench; the
troughs, pots, and rags on the landings near the doors,--all this had
been familiar to her long ago. . . . One door was open, and within could
be seen Jewish tailors in caps, sewing. Anna Akimovna met people on the
stairs, but it never entered her head that people might be rude to her.
She was no more afraid of peasants or workpeople, drunk or sober, than
of her acquaintances of the educated class.
There was no entry at No. 46; the door opened straight into the kitchen.
As a rule the dwellings of workmen and mechanics smell of varnish, tar,
hides, smoke, according to the occupation of the tenant; the dwellings
of persons of noble or official class who have come to poverty may be
known by a peculiar rancid, sour smell. This disgusting smell enveloped
Anna Akimovna on all sides, and as yet she was only on the threshold. A
man in a black coat, no doubt Tchalikov himself, was sitting in a corner
at the table with his back to the door, and with him were five little
girls. The eldest, a broad-faced thin girl with a comb in her hair,
looked about fifteen, while the youngest, a chubby child with hair that
stood up like a hedge-hog, was not more than three. All the six were
eating. Near the stove stood a very thin little woman with a yellow
face, far gone in pregnancy. She was wearing a skirt and a white blouse,
and had an oven fork in her hand.
"I did not expect you to be so disobedient, Liza," the man was saying
reproachfully. "Fie, fie, for shame! Do you want papa to whip you--eh?"
Seeing an unknown lady in the doorway, the thin woman started, and put
down the fork.
"Vassily Nikititch!" she cried, after a pause, in a hollow voice, as
though she could not believe her eyes.
The man looked round and jumped up. He was a flat-chested, bony man with
narrow shoulders and sunken temples. His eyes were small and hollow with
dark rings round them, he had a wide mouth, and a long nose like a
bird's beak--a little bit bent to the right. His beard was parted in the
middle, his moustache was shaven, and this made him look more like a