Short Stories by Chekhov
hired footman than a government clerk.
"Does Mr. Tchalikov live here?" asked Anna Akimovna.
"Yes, madam," Tchalikov answered severely, but immediately recognizing
Anna Akimovna, he cried: "Anna Akimovna!" and all at once he gasped and
clasped his hands as though in terrible alarm. "Benefactress!"
With a moan he ran to her, grunting inarticulately as though he were
paralyzed--there was cabbage on his beard and he smelt of vodka--pressed
his forehead to her muff, and seemed as though he were in a swoon.
"Your hand, your holy hand!" he brought out breathlessly. "It's a dream,
a glorious dream! Children, awaken me!"
He turned towards the table and said in a sobbing voice, shaking his
fists:
"Providence has heard us! Our saviour, our angel, has come! We are
saved! Children, down on your knees! on your knees!"
Madame Tchalikov and the little girls, except the youngest one, began
for some reason rapidly clearing the table.
"You wrote that your wife was very ill," said Anna Akimovna, and she
felt ashamed and annoyed. "I am not going to give them the fifteen
hundred," she thought.
"Here she is, my wife," said Tchalikov in a thin feminine voice, as
though his tears had gone to his head. "Here she is, unhappy creature!
With one foot in the grave! But we do not complain, madam. Better death
than such a life. Better die, unhappy woman!"
"Why is he playing these antics?" thought Anna Akimovna with annoyance.
"One can see at once he is used to dealing with merchants."
"Speak to me like a human being," she said. "I don't care for farces.''
"Yes, madam; five bereaved children round their mother's coffin with
funeral candles--that's a farce? Eh?" said Tchalikov bitterly, and turned
away.
"Hold your tongue," whispered his wife, and she pulled at his sleeve.
"The place has not been tidied up, madam," she said, addressing Anna
Akimovna; "please excuse it . . . you know what it is where there are
children. A crowded hearth, but harmony."
"I am not going to give them the fifteen hundred," Anna Akimovna thought
again.
And to escape as soon as possible from these people and from the sour
smell, she brought out her purse and made up her mind to leave them
twenty-five roubles, not more; but she suddenly felt ashamed that she
had come so far and disturbed people for so little.
"If you give me paper and ink, I will write at once to a doctor who is a
friend of mine to come and see you," she said, flushing red. "He is a
very good doctor. And I will leave you some money for medicine."
Madame Tchalikov was hastening to wipe the table.
"It's messy here! What are you doing?" hissed Tchalikov, looking at her
wrathfully. "Take her to the lodger's room! I make bold to ask you,
madam, to step into the lodger's room," he said, addressing Anna
Akimovna. "It's clean there."
"Osip Ilyitch told us not to go into his room!" said one of the little
girls, sternly.
But they had already led Anna Akimovna out of the kitchen, through a
narrow passage room between two bedsteads: it was evident from the
arrangement of the beds that in one two slept lengthwise, and in the
other three slept across the bed. In the lodger's room, that came next,
it really was clean. A neat-looking bed with a red woollen quilt, a
pillow in a white pillow-case, even a slipper for the watch, a table
covered with a hempen cloth and on it, an inkstand of milky-looking
glass, pens, paper, photographs in frames-- everything as it ought to be;
and another table for rough work, on which lay tidily arranged a
watchmaker's tools and watches taken to pieces. On the walls hung
hammers, pliers, awls, chisels, nippers, and so on, and there were three
hanging clocks which were ticking; one was a big clock with thick
weights, such as one sees in eating-houses.
As she sat down to write the letter, Anna Akimovna saw facing her on the
table the photographs of her father and of herself. That surprised her.
"Who lives here with you?" she asked.
"Our lodger, madam, Pimenov. He works in your factory."
"Oh, I thought he must be a watchmaker."
"He repairs watches privately, in his leisure hours. He is an amateur."
After a brief silence during which nothing could be heard but the
ticking of the clocks and the scratching of the pen on the paper,
Tchalikov heaved a sigh and said ironically, with indignation:
"It's a true saying: gentle birth and a grade in the service won't put a
coat on your back. A cockade in your cap and a noble title, but nothing
to eat. To my thinking, if any one of humble class helps the poor he is
much more of a gentleman than any Tchalikov who has sunk into poverty
and vice."
To flatter Anna Akimovna, he uttered a few more disparaging phrases
about his gentle birth, and it was evident that he was humbling himself
because he considered himself superior to her. Meanwhile she had
finished her letter and had sealed it up. The letter would be thrown
away and the money would not be spent on medicine--that she knew, but she
put twenty-five roubles on the table all the same, and after a moment's
thought, added two more red notes. She saw the wasted, yellow hand of
Madame Tchalikov, like the claw of a hen, dart out and clutch the money
tight.
"You have graciously given this for medicine," said Tchalikov in a
quivering voice, "but hold out a helping hand to me also . . . and the
children!" he added with a sob. "My unhappy children! I am not afraid
for myself; it is for my daughters I fear! It's the hydra of vice that I
fear!"
Trying to open her purse, the catch of which had gone wrong, Anna
Akimovna was confused and turned red. She felt ashamed that people
should be standing before her, looking at her hands and waiting, and
most likely at the bottom of their hearts laughing at her. At that
instant some one came into the kitchen and stamped his feet, knocking
the snow off.
"The lodger has come in," said Madame Tchalikov.
Anna Akimovna grew even more confused. She did not want any one from the
factory to find her in this ridiculous position. As ill-luck would have
it, the lodger came in at the very moment when, having broken the catch
at last, she was giving Tchalikov some notes, and Tchalikov, grunting as
though he were paraylzed, was feeling about with his lips where he could
kiss her. In the lodger she recognized the workman who had once clanked
the sheet-iron before her in the forge, and had explained things to her.
Evidently he had come in straight from the factory; his face looked dark
and grimy, and on one cheek near his nose was a smudge of soot. His
hands were perfectly black, and his unbelted shirt shone with oil and
grease. He was a man of thirty, of medium height, with black hair and
broad shoulders, and a look of great physical strength. At the first
glance Anna Akimovna perceived that he must be a foreman, who must be
receiving at least thirty-five roubles a month, and a stern, loud-voiced
man who struck the workmen in the face; all this was evident from his
manner of standing, from the attitude he involuntarily assumed at once
on seeing a lady in his room, and most of all from the fact that he did
not wear top-boots, that he had breast pockets, and a pointed,
picturesquely clipped beard. Her father, Akim Ivanovitch, had been the
brother of the factory owner, and yet he had been afraid of foremen like
this lodger and had tried to win their favour.
"Excuse me for having come in here in your absence," said Anna Akimovna.
The workman looked at her in surprise, smiled in confusion and did not
speak.
"You must speak a little louder, madam . . . ." said Tchalikov softly.
"When Mr. Pimenov comes home from the factory in the evenings he is a
little hard of hearing."
But Anna Akimovna was by now relieved that there was nothing more for
her to do here; she nodded to them and went rapidly out of the room.
Pimenov went to see her out.
"Have you been long in our employment?" she asked in a loud voice,
without turning to him.
"From nine years old. I entered the factory in your uncle's time."
"That's a long while! My uncle and my father knew all the workpeople,
and I know hardly any of them. I had seen you before, but I did not know
your name was Pimenov."
Anna Akimovna felt a desire to justify herself before him, to pretend
that she had just given the money not seriously, but as a joke.
"Oh, this poverty," she sighed. "We give charity on holidays and working
days, and still there is no sense in it. I believe it is useless to help
such people as this Tchalikov."
"Of course it is useless," he agreed. "However much you give him, he
will drink it all away. And now the husband and wife will be snatching
it from one another and fighting all night," he added with a laugh.
"Yes, one must admit that our philanthropy is useless, boring, and
absurd. But still, you must agree, one can't sit with one's hand in
one's lap; one must do something. What's to be done with the Tchalikovs,
for instance?"
She turned to Pimenov and stopped, expecting an answer from him; he,
too, stopped and slowly, without speaking, shrugged his shoulders.
Obviously he knew what to do with the Tchalikovs, but the treatment
would have been so coarse and inhuman that he did not venture to put it
into words. And the Tchalikovs were to him so utterly uninteresting and
worthless, that a moment later he had forgotten them; looking into Anna
Akimovna's eyes, he smiled with pleasure, and his face wore an
expression as though he were dreaming about something very pleasant.
Only, now standing close to him, Anna Akimovna saw from his face, and
especially from his eyes, how exhausted and sleepy he was.
"Here, I ought to give him the fifteen hundred roubles!" she thought,
but for some reason this idea seemed to her incongruous and insulting to
Pimenov.
"I am sure you are aching all over after your work, and you come to the
door with me," she said as they went down the stairs. "Go home."
But he did not catch her words. When they came out into the street, he
ran on ahead, unfastened the cover of the sledge, and helping Anna
Akimovna in, said:
"I wish you a happy Christmas!" II
Christmas Morning
"They have left off ringing ever so long! It's dreadful; you won't be
there before the service is over! Get up!"
"Two horses are racing, racing . . ." said Anna Akimovna, and she woke
up; before her, candle in hand, stood her maid, red-haired Masha. "Well,
what is it?"
"Service is over already," said Masha with despair. "I have called you
three times! Sleep till evening for me, but you told me yourself to call
you!"
Anna Akimovna raised herself on her elbow and glanced towards the
window. It was still quite dark outside, and only the lower edge of the
window-frame was white with snow. She could hear a low, mellow chime of
bells; it was not the parish church, but somewhere further away. The
watch on the little table showed three minutes past six.
"Very well, Masha. . . . In three minutes . . ." said Anna Akimovna in
an imploring voice, and she snuggled under the bed-clothes.
She imagined the snow at the front door, the sledge, the dark sky, the
crowd in the church, and the smell of juniper, and she felt dread at the
thought; but all the same, she made up her mind that she would get up at
once and go to early service. And while she was warm in bed and
struggling with sleep--which seems, as though to spite one, particularly
sweet when one ought to get up--and while she had visions of an immense
garden on a mountain and then Gushtchin's Buildings, she was worried all
the time by the thought that she ought to get up that very minute and go
to church.
But when she got up it was quite light, and it turned out to be half-
past nine. There had been a heavy fall of snow in the night; the trees