Short Stories by Chekhov
shifted in his seat. "A wonderful artist! A terrible, prodigious,
supernatural artist!" Lysevitch got up from the sofa and raised his
right arm. "Maupassant!" he said rapturously. "My dear, read Maupassant!
one page of his gives you more than all the riches of the earth! Every
line is a new horizon. The softest, tenderest impulses of the soul
alternate with violent tempestuous sensations; your soul, as though
under the weight of forty thousand atmospheres, is transformed into the
most insignificant little bit of some great thing of an undefined rosy
hue which I fancy, if one could put it on one's tongue, would yield a
pungent, voluptuous taste. What a fury of transitions, of motives, of
melodies! You rest peacefully on the lilies and the roses, and suddenly
a thought --a terrible, splendid, irresistible thought--swoops down upon
you like a locomotive, and bathes you in hot steam and deafens you with
its whistle. Read Maupassant, dear girl; I insist on it."
Lysevitch waved his arms and paced from corner to corner in violent
excitement.
"Yes, it is inconceivable," he pronounced, as though in despair; "his
last thing overwhelmed me, intoxicated me! But I am afraid you will not
care for it. To be carried away by it you must savour it, slowly suck
the juice from each line, drink it in. . . . You must drink it in! . .
."
After a long introduction, containing many words such as dæmonic
sensuality, a network of the most delicate nerves, simoom, crystal, and
so on, he began at last telling the story of the novel. He did not tell
the story so whimsically, but told it in minute detail, quoting from
memory whole descriptions and conversations; the characters of the novel
fascinated him, and to describe them he threw himself into attitudes,
changed the expression of his face and voice like a real actor. He
laughed with delight at one moment in a deep bass, and at another, on a
high shrill note, clasped his hands and clutched at his head with an
expression which suggested that it was just going to burst. Anna
Akimovna listened enthralled, though she had already read the novel, and
it seemed to her ever so much finer and more subtle in the lawyer's
version than in the book itself. He drew her attention to various
subtleties, and emphasized the felicitous expressions and the profound
thoughts, but she saw in it, only life, life, life and herself, as
though she had been a character in the novel. Her spirits rose, and she,
too, laughing and clasping her hands, thought that she could not go on
living such a life, that there was no need to have a wretched life when
one might have a splendid one. She remembered her words and thoughts at
dinner, and was proud of them; and when Pimenov suddenly rose up in her
imagination, she felt happy and longed for him to love her.
When he had finished the story, Lysevitch sat down on the sofa,
exhausted.
"How splendid you are! How handsome!" he began, a little while
afterwards in a faint voice as if he were ill. "I am happy near you,
dear girl, but why am I forty-two instead of thirty? Your tastes and
mine do not coincide: you ought to be depraved, and I have long passed
that phase, and want a love as delicate and immaterial as a ray of
sunshine--that is, from the point of view of a woman of your age, I am of
no earthly use."
In his own words, he loved Turgenev, the singer of virginal love and
purity, of youth, and of the melancholy Russian landscape; but he loved
virginal love, not from knowledge but from hearsay, as something
abstract, existing outside real life. Now he assured himself that he
loved Anna Akimovna platonically, ideally, though he did not know what
those words meant. But he felt comfortable, snug, warm. Anna Akimovna
seemed to him enchanting, original, and he imagined that the pleasant
sensation that was aroused in him by these surroundings was the very
thing that was called platonic love.
He laid his cheek on her hand and said in the tone commonly used in
coaxing little children:
"My precious, why have you punished me?"
"How? When?"
"I have had no Christmas present from you."
Anna Akimovna had never heard before of their sending a Christmas box to
the lawyer, and now she was at a loss how much to give him. But she must
give him something, for he was expecting it, though he looked at her
with eyes full of love.
"I suppose Nazaritch forgot it," she said, "but it is not too late to
set it right."
She suddenly remembered the fifteen hundred she had received the day
before, which was now lying in the toilet drawer in her bedroom. And
when she brought that ungrateful money and gave it to the lawyer, and he
put it in his coat pocket with indolent grace, the whole incident passed
off charmingly and naturally. The sudden reminder of a Christmas box and
this fifteen hundred was not unbecoming in Lysevitch.
"Merci," he said, and kissed her finger.
Krylin came in with blissful, sleepy face, but without his decorations.
Lysevitch and he stayed a little longer and drank a glass of tea each,
and began to get ready to go. Anna Akimovna was a little embarrassed. .
. . She had utterly forgotten in what department Krylin served, and
whether she had to give him money or not; and if she had to, whether to
give it now or send it afterwards in an envelope.
"Where does he serve?" she whispered to Lysevitch.
"Goodness knows," muttered Lysevitch, yawning.
She reflected that if Krylin used to visit her father and her uncle and
respected them, it was probably not for nothing: apparently he had been
charitable at their expense, serving in some charitable institution. As
she said good-bye she slipped three hundred roubles into his hand; he
seemed taken aback, and looked at her for a minute in silence with his
pewtery eyes, but then seemed to understand and said:
"The receipt, honoured Anna Akimovna, you can only receive on the New
Year."
Lysevitch had become utterly limp and heavy, and he staggered when
Mishenka put on his overcoat.
As he went downstairs he looked like a man in the last stage of
exhaustion, and it was evident that he would drop asleep as soon as he
got into his sledge.
"Your Excellency," he said languidly to Krylin, stopping in the middle
of the staircase, "has it ever happened to you to experience a feeling
as though some unseen force were drawing you out longer and longer? You
are drawn out and turn into the finest wire. Subjectively this finds
expression in a curious voluptuous feeling which is impossible to
compare with anything."
Anna Akimovna, standing at the top of the stairs, saw each of them give
Mishenka a note.
"Good-bye! Come again!" she called to them, and ran into her bedroom.
She quickly threw off her dress, that she was weary of already, put on a
dressing-gown, and ran downstairs; and as she ran downstairs she laughed
and thumped with her feet like a school-boy; she had a great desire for
mischief. IV
Evening
Auntie, in a loose print blouse, Varvarushka and two old women, were
sitting in the dining-room having supper. A big piece of salt meat, a
ham, and various savouries, were lying on the table before them, and
clouds of steam were rising from the meat, which looked particularly fat
and appetizing. Wine was not served on the lower story, but they made up
for it with a great number of spirits and home-made liqueurs.
Agafyushka, the fat, white-skinned, well-fed cook, was standing with her
arms crossed in the doorway and talking to the old women, and the dishes
were being handed by the downstairs Masha, a dark girl with a crimson
ribbon in her hair. The old women had had enough to eat before the
morning was over, and an hour before supper had had tea and buns, and so
they were now eating with effort--as it were, from a sense of duty.
"Oh, my girl!" sighed Auntie, as Anna Akimovna ran into the dining-room
and sat down beside her. "You've frightened me to death!"
Every one in the house was pleased when Anna Akimovna was in good
spirits and played pranks; this always reminded them that the old men
were dead and that the old women had no authority in the house, and any
one could do as he liked without any fear of being sharply called to
account for it. Only the two old women glanced askance at Anna Akimovna
with amazement: she was humming, and it was a sin to sing at table.
"Our mistress, our beauty, our picture," Agafyushka began chanting with
sugary sweetness. "Our precious jewel! The people, the people that have
come to-day to look at our queen. Lord have mercy upon us! Generals, and
officers and gentlemen. . . . I kept looking out of window and counting
and counting till I gave it up."
"I'd as soon they did not come at all," said Auntie; she looked sadly at
her niece and added: "They only waste the time for my poor orphan girl."
Anna Akimovna felt hungry, as she had eaten nothing since the morning.
They poured her out some very bitter liqueur; she drank it off, and
tasted the salt meat with mustard, and thought it extraordinarily nice.
Then the downstairs Masha brought in the turkey, the pickled apples and
the gooseberries. And that pleased her, too. There was only one thing
that was disagreeable: there was a draught of hot air from the tiled
stove; it was stiflingly close and every one's cheeks were burning.
After supper the cloth was taken off and plates of peppermint biscuits,
walnuts, and raisins were brought in.
"You sit down, too . . . no need to stand there!" said Auntie to the
cook.
Agafyushka sighed and sat down to the table; Masha set a wineglass of
liqueur before her, too, and Anna Akimovna began to feel as though
Agafyushka's white neck were giving out heat like the stove. They were
all talking of how difficult it was nowadays to get married, and saying
that in old days, if men did not court beauty, they paid attention to
money, but now there was no making out what they wanted; and while
hunchbacks and cripples used to be left old maids, nowadays men would
not have even the beautiful and wealthy. Auntie began to set this down
to immorality, and said that people had no fear of God, but she suddenly
remembered that Ivan Ivanitch, her brother, and Varvarushka--both people
of holy life--had feared God, but all the same had had children on the
sly, and had sent them to the Foundling Asylum. She pulled herself up
and changed the conversation, telling them about a suitor she had once
had, a factory hand, and how she had loved him, but her brothers had
forced her to marry a widower, an ikon-painter, who, thank God, had died
two years after. The downstairs Masha sat down to the table, too, and
told them with a mysterious air that for the last week some unknown man
with a black moustache, in a great-coat with an astrachan collar, had
made his appearance every morning in the yard, had stared at the windows
of the big house, and had gone on further-- to the buildings; the man was
all right, nice-looking.
All this conversation made Anna Akimovna suddenly long to be married
--long intensely, painfully; she felt as though she would give half her
life and all her fortune only to know that upstairs there was a man who
was closer to her than any one in the world, that he loved her warmly
and was missing her; and the thought of such closeness, ecstatic and
inexpressible in words, troubled her soul. And the instinct of youth and
health flattered her with lying assurances that the real poetry of life
was not over but still to come, and she believed it, and leaning back in
her chair (her hair fell down as she did so), she began laughing, and,
looking at her, the others laughed, too. And it was a long time before
this causeless laughter died down in the dining-room.
She was informed that the Stinging Beetle had come. This was a pilgrim