Short Stories by Chekhov
in nothing but what was original and unusual. A copy-book moral in an
original form would move him to tears. Both his notebooks were filled
with extraordinary expressions which he had read in various authors; and
when he needed to look up any expression, he would search nervously in
both books, and usually failed to find it. Anna Akimovna's father had in
a good-humoured moment ostentatiously appointed him legal adviser in
matters concerning the factory, and had assigned him a salary of twelve
thousand roubles. The legal business of the factory had been confined to
two or three trivial actions for recovering debts, which Lysevitch
handed to his assistants.
Anna Akimovna knew that he had nothing to do at the factory, but she
could not dismiss him--she had not the moral courage; and besides, she
was used to him. He used to call himself her legal adviser, and his
salary, which he invariably sent for on the first of the month
punctually, he used to call "stern prose." Anna Akimovna knew that when,
after her father's death, the timber of her forest was sold for railway
sleepers, Lysevitch had made more than fifteen thousand out of the
transaction, and had shared it with Nazaritch. When first she found out
they had cheated her she had wept bitterly, but afterwards she had grown
used to it.
Wishing her a happy Christmas, and kissing both her hands, he looked her
up and down, and frowned.
"You mustn't," he said with genuine disappointment. "I have told you, my
dear, you mustn't!"
"What do you mean, Viktor Nikolaitch?"
"I have told you you mustn't get fat. All your family have an
unfortunate tendency to grow fat. You mustn't," he repeated in an
imploring voice, and kissed her hand. "You are so handsome! You are so
splendid! Here, your Excellency, let me introduce the one woman in the
world whom I have ever seriously loved."
"There is nothing surprising in that. To know Anna Akimovna at your age
and not to be in love with her, that would be impossible."
"I adore her," the lawyer continued with perfect sincerity, but with his
usual indolent grace. "I love her, but not because I am a man and she is
a woman. When I am with her I always feel as though she belongs to some
third sex, and I to a fourth, and we float away together into the domain
of the subtlest shades, and there we blend into the spectrum. Leconte de
Lisle defines such relations better than any one. He has a superb
passage, a marvellous passage. . . ."
Lysevitch rummaged in one notebook, then in the other, and, not finding
the quotation, subsided. They began talking of the weather, of the
opera, of the arrival, expected shortly, of Duse. Anna Akimovna
remembered that the year before Lysevitch and, she fancied, Krylin had
dined with her, and now when they were getting ready to go away, she
began with perfect sincerity pointing out to them in an imploring voice
that as they had no more visits to pay, they ought to remain to dinner
with her. After some hesitation the visitors agreed.
In addition to the family dinner, consisting of cabbage soup, sucking
pig, goose with apples, and so on, a so-called "French" or "chef's"
dinner used to be prepared in the kitchen on great holidays, in case any
visitor in the upper story wanted a meal. When they heard the clatter of
crockery in the dining-room, Lysevitch began to betray a noticeable
excitement; he rubbed his hands, shrugged his shoulders, screwed up his
eyes, and described with feeling what dinners her father and uncle used
to give at one time, and a marvellous matelote of turbots the cook here
could make: it was not a matelote, but a veritable revelation! He was
already gloating over the dinner, already eating it in imagination and
enjoying it. When Anna Akimovna took his arm and led him to the dining-
room, he tossed off a glass of vodka and put a piece of salmon in his
mouth; he positively purred with pleasure. He munched loudly,
disgustingly, emitting sounds from his nose, while his eyes grew oily
and rapacious.
The hors d'oeuvres were superb; among other things, there were fresh
white mushrooms stewed in cream, and sauce provençale made of fried
oysters and crayfish, strongly flavoured with some bitter pickles. The
dinner, consisting of elaborate holiday dishes, was excellent, and so
were the wines. Mishenka waited at table with enthusiasm. When he laid
some new dish on the table and lifted the shining cover, or poured out
the wine, he did it with the solemnity of a professor of black magic,
and, looking at his face and his movements suggesting the first figure
of a quadrille, the lawyer thought several times, "What a fool!"
After the third course Lysevitch said, turning to Anna Akimovna:
"The fin de siècle woman--I mean when she is young, and of course
wealthy--must be independent, clever, elegant, intellectual, bold, and a
little depraved. Depraved within limits, a little; for excess, you know,
is wearisome. You ought not to vegetate, my dear; you ought not to live
like every one else, but to get the full savour of life, and a slight
flavour of depravity is the sauce of life. Revel among flowers of
intoxicating fragrance, breathe the perfume of musk, eat hashish, and
best of all, love, love, love . . . . To begin with, in your place I
would set up seven lovers--one for each day of the week; and one I would
call Monday, one Tuesday, the third Wednesday, and so on, so that each
might know his day."
This conversation troubled Anna Akimovna; she ate nothing and only drank
a glass of wine.
"Let me speak at last," she said. "For myself personally, I can't
conceive of love without family life. I am lonely, lonely as the moon in
the sky, and a waning moon, too; and whatever you may say, I am
convinced, I feel that this waning can only be restored by love in its
ordinary sense. It seems to me that such love would define my duties, my
work, make clear my conception of life. I want from love peace of soul,
tranquillity; I want the very opposite of musk, and spiritualism, and
fin de siècle . . . in short"--she grew embarrassed--"a husband and
children."
"You want to be married? Well, you can do that, too," Lysevitch
assented. "You ought to have all experiences: marriage, and jealousy,
and the sweetness of the first infidelity, and even children. . . . But
make haste and live--make haste, my dear: time is passing; it won't
wait."
"Yes, I'll go and get married!" she said, looking angrily at his well-
fed, satisfied face. "I will marry in the simplest, most ordinary way
and be radiant with happiness. And, would you believe it, I will marry
some plain working man, some mechanic or draughtsman."
"There is no harm in that, either. The Duchess Josiana loved Gwinplin,
and that was permissible for her because she was a grand duchess.
Everything is permissible for you, too, because you are an exceptional
woman: if, my dear, you want to love a negro or an Arab, don't scruple;
send for a negro. Don't deny yourself anything. You ought to be as bold
as your desires; don't fall short of them."
"Can it be so hard to understand me?" Anna Akimovna asked with
amazement, and her eyes were bright with tears. "Understand, I have an
immense business on my hands--two thousand workmen, for whom I must
answer before God. The men who work for me grow blind and deaf. I am
afraid to go on like this; I am afraid! I am wretched, and you have the
cruelty to talk to me of negroes and . . . and you smile!" Anna Akimovna
brought her fist down on the table. "To go on living the life I am
living now, or to marry some one as idle and incompetent as myself,
would be a crime. I can't go on living like this," she said hotly, "I
cannot!"
"How handsome she is!" said Lysevitch, fascinated by her. "My God, how
handsome she is! But why are you angry, my dear? Perhaps I am wrong; but
surely you don't imagine that if, for the sake of ideas for which I have
the deepest respect, you renounce the joys of life and lead a dreary
existence, your workmen will be any the better for it? Not a scrap! No,
frivolity, frivolity!" he said decisively. "It's essential for you; it's
your duty to be frivolous and depraved! Ponder that, my dear, ponder
it."
Anna Akimovna was glad she had spoken out, and her spirits rose. She was
pleased she had spoken so well, and that her ideas were so fine and
just, and she was already convinced that if Pimenov, for instance, loved
her, she would marry him with pleasure.
Mishenka began to pour out champagne.
"You make me angry, Viktor Nikolaitch," she said, clinking glasses with
the lawyer. "It seems to me you give advice and know nothing of life
yourself. According to you, if a man be a mechanic or a draughtsman, he
is bound to be a peasant and an ignoramus! But they are the cleverest
people! Extraordinary people!"
"Your uncle and father . . . I knew them and respected them . . ."
Krylin said, pausing for emphasis (he had been sitting upright as a
post, and had been eating steadily the whole time), "were people of
considerable intelligence and . . . of lofty spiritual qualities."
"Oh, to be sure, we know all about their qualities," the lawyer
muttered, and asked permission to smoke.
When dinner was over Krylin was led away for a nap. Lysevitch finished
his cigar, and, staggering from repletion, followed Anna Akimovna into
her study. Cosy corners with photographs and fans on the walls, and the
inevitable pink or pale blue lanterns in the middle of the ceiling, he
did not like, as the expression of an insipid and unoriginal character;
besides, the memory of certain of his love affairs of which he was now
ashamed was associated with such lanterns. Anna Akimovna's study with
its bare walls and tasteless furniture pleased him exceedingly. It was
snug and comfortable for him to sit on a Turkish divan and look at Anna
Akimovna, who usually sat on the rug before the fire, clasping her knees
and looking into the fire and thinking of something; and at such moments
it seemed to him that her peasant Old Believer blood was stirring within
her.
Every time after dinner when coffee and liqueurs were handed, he grew
livelier and began telling her various bits of literary gossip. He spoke
with eloquence and inspiration, and was carried away by his own stories;
and she listened to him and thought every time that for such enjoyment
it was worth paying not only twelve thousand, but three times that sum,
and forgave him everything she disliked in him. He sometimes told her
the story of some tale or novel he had been reading, and then two or
three hours passed unnoticed like a minute. Now he began rather
dolefully in a failing voice with his eyes shut.
"It's ages, my dear, since I have read anything," he said when she asked
him to tell her something. "Though I do sometimes read Jules Verne."
"I was expecting you to tell me something new."
"H'm! . . . new," Lysevitch muttered sleepily, and he settled himself
further back in the corner of the sofa. "None of the new literature, my
dear, is any use for you or me. Of course, it is bound to be such as it
is, and to refuse to recognize it is to refuse to recognize --would mean
refusing to recognize the natural order of things, and I do recognize
it, but . . ." Lysevitch seemed to have fallen asleep. But a minute
later his voice was heard again:
"All the new literature moans and howls like the autumn wind in the
chimney. 'Ah, unhappy wretch! Ah, your life may be likened to a prison!
Ah, how damp and dark it is in your prison! Ah, you will certainly come
to ruin, and there is no chance of escape for you!' That's very fine,
but I should prefer a literature that would tell us how to escape from
prison. Of all contemporary writers, however, I prefer Maupassant."
Lysevitch opened his eyes. "A fine writer, a perfect writer!" Lysevitch