Short Stories by Chekhov
then he went out and returned a minute later with a cup of tea on a
tray.
"What are you laughing at?" she asked, noticing a smile on his face.
"I was downstairs and heard the jokes you were making about Pimenov . .
." he said, and put his hand before his laughing mouth. "If he were sat
down to dinner today with Viktor Nikolaevitch and the general, he'd have
died of fright." Mishenka's shoulders were shaking with laughter. "He
doesn't know even how to hold his fork, I bet."
The footman's laughter and words, his reefer jacket and moustache, gave
Anna Akimovna a feeling of uncleanness. She shut her eyes to avoid
seeing him, and, against her own will, imagined Pimenov dining with
Lysevitch and Krylin, and his timid, unintellectual figure seemed to her
pitiful and helpless, and she felt repelled by it. And only now, for the
first time in the whole day, she realized clearly that all she had said
and thought about Pimenov and marrying a workman was nonsense, folly,
and wilfulness. To convince herself of the opposite, to overcome her
repulsion, she tried to recall what she had said at dinner, but now she
could not see anything in it: shame at her own thoughts and actions, and
the fear that she had said something improper during the day, and
disgust at her own lack of spirit, overwhelmed her completely. She took
up a candle and, as rapidly as if some one were pursuing her, ran
downstairs, woke Spiridonovna, and began assuring her she had been
joking. Then she went to her bedroom. Red-haired Masha, who was dozing
in an arm-chair near the bed, jumped up and began shaking up the
pillows. Her face was exhausted and sleepy, and her magnificent hair had
fallen on one side.
"Tchalikov came again this evening," she said, yawning, "but I did not
dare to announce him; he was very drunk. He says he will come again
tomorrow."
"What does he want with me?" said Anna Akimovna, and she flung her comb
on the floor. "I won't see him, I won't."
She made up her mind she had no one left in life but this Tchalikov,
that he would never leave off persecuting her, and would remind her
every day how uninteresting and absurd her life was. So all she was fit
for was to help the poor. Oh, how stupid it was!
She lay down without undressing, and sobbed with shame and depression:
what seemed to her most vexatious and stupid of all was that her dreams
that day about Pimenov had been right, lofty, honourable, but at the
same time she felt that Lysevitch and even Krylin were nearer to her
than Pimenov and all the workpeople taken together. She thought that if
the long day she had just spent could have been represented in a
picture, all that had been bad and vulgar--as, for instance, the dinner,
the lawyer's talk, the game of "kings" --would have been true, while her
dreams and talk about Pimenov would have stood out from the whole as
something false, as out of drawing; and she thought, too, that it was
too late to dream of happiness, that everything was over for her, and it
was impossible to go back to the life when she had slept under the same
quilt with her mother, or to devise some new special sort of life.
Red-haired Masha was kneeling before the bed, gazing at her in mournful
perplexity; then she, too, began crying, and laid her face against her
mistress's arm, and without words it was clear why she was so wretched.
"We are fools!" said Anna Akimovna, laughing and crying. "We are fools!
Oh, what fools we are!"
A PROBLEM
THE strictest measures were taken that the Uskovs' family secret might
not leak out and become generally known. Half of the servants were sent
off to the theatre or the circus; the other half were sitting in the
kitchen and not allowed to leave it. Orders were given that no one was
to be admitted. The wife of the Colonel, her sister, and the governess,
though they had been initiated into the secret, kept up a pretence of
knowing nothing; they sat in the dining-room and did not show themselves
in the drawing-room or the hall.
Sasha Uskov, the young man of twenty-five who was the cause of all the
commotion, had arrived some time before, and by the advice of kind-
hearted Ivan Markovitch, his uncle, who was taking his part, he sat
meekly in the hall by the door leading to the study, and prepared
himself to make an open, candid explanation.
The other side of the door, in the study, a family council was being
held. The subject under discussion was an exceedingly disagreeable and
delicate one. Sasha Uskov had cashed at one of the banks a false
promissory note, and it had become due for payment three days before,
and now his two paternal uncles and Ivan Markovitch, the brother of his
dead mother, were deciding the question whether they should pay the
money and save the family honour, or wash their hands of it and leave
the case to go for trial.
To outsiders who have no personal interest in the matter such questions
seem simple; for those who are so unfortunate as to have to decide them
in earnest they are extremely difficult. The uncles had been talking for
a long time, but the problem seemed no nearer decision.
"My friends!" said the uncle who was a colonel, and there was a note of
exhaustion and bitterness in his voice. "Who says that family honour is
a mere convention? I don't say that at all. I am only warning you
against a false view; I am pointing out the possibility of an
unpardonable mistake. How can you fail to see it? I am not speaking
Chinese; I am speaking Russian!"
"My dear fellow, we do understand," Ivan Markovitch protested mildly.
"How can you understand if you say that I don't believe in family
honour? I repeat once more: fa-mil-y ho-nour fal-sely un-der-stood is a
prejudice! Falsely understood! That's what I say: whatever may be the
motives for screening a scoundrel, whoever he may be, and helping him to
escape punishment, it is contrary to law and unworthy of a gentleman.
It's not saving the family honour; it's civic cowardice! Take the army,
for instance. . . . The honour of the army is more precious to us than
any other honour, yet we don't screen our guilty members, but condemn
them. And does the honour of the army suffer in consequence? Quite the
opposite!"
The other paternal uncle, an official in the Treasury, a taciturn, dull-
witted, and rheumatic man, sat silent, or spoke only of the fact that
the Uskovs' name would get into the newspapers if the case went for
trial. His opinion was that the case ought to be hushed up from the
first and not become public property; but, apart from publicity in the
newspapers, he advanced no other argument in support of this opinion.
The maternal uncle, kind-hearted Ivan Markovitch, spoke smoothly,
softly, and with a tremor in his voice. He began with saying that youth
has its rights and its peculiar temptations. Which of us has not been
young, and who has not been led astray? To say nothing of ordinary
mortals, even great men have not escaped errors and mistakes in their
youth. Take, for instance, the biography of great writers. Did not every
one of them gamble, drink, and draw down upon himself the anger of
right-thinking people in his young days? If Sasha's error bordered upon
crime, they must remember that Sasha had received practically no
education; he had been expelled from the high school in the fifth class;
he had lost his parents in early childhood, and so had been left at the
tenderest age without guidance and good, benevolent influences. He was
nervous, excitable, had no firm ground under his feet, and, above all,
he had been unlucky. Even if he were guilty, anyway he deserved
indulgence and the sympathy of all compassionate souls. He ought, of
course, to be punished, but he was punished as it was by his conscience
and the agonies he was enduring now while awaiting the sentence of his
relations. The comparison with the army made by the Colonel was
delightful, and did credit to his lofty intelligence; his appeal to
their feeling of public duty spoke for the chivalry of his soul, but
they must not forget that in each individual the citizen is closely
linked with the Christian. . . .
"Shall we be false to civic duty," Ivan Markovitch exclaimed
passionately, "if instead of punishing an erring boy we hold out to him
a helping hand?"
Ivan Markovitch talked further of family honour. He had not the honour
to belong to the Uskov family himself, but he knew their distinguished
family went back to the thirteenth century; he did not forget for a
minute, either, that his precious, beloved sister had been the wife of
one of the representatives of that name. In short, the family was dear
to him for many reasons, and he refused to admit the idea that, for the
sake of a paltry fifteen hundred roubles, a blot should be cast on the
escutcheon that was beyond all price. If all the motives he had brought
forward were not sufficiently convincing, he, Ivan Markovitch, in
conclusion, begged his listeners to ask themselves what was meant by
crime? Crime is an immoral act founded upon ill-will. But is the will of
man free? Philosophy has not yet given a positive answer to that
question. Different views were held by the learned. The latest school of
Lombroso, for instance, denies the freedom of the will, and considers
every crime as the product of the purely anatomical peculiarities of the
individual.
"Ivan Markovitch," said the Colonel, in a voice of entreaty, "we are
talking seriously about an important matter, and you bring in Lombroso,
you clever fellow. Think a little, what are you saying all this for? Can
you imagine that all your thunderings and rhetoric will furnish an
answer to the question?"
Sasha Uskov sat at the door and listened. He felt neither terror, shame,
nor depression, but only weariness and inward emptiness. It seemed to
him that it made absolutely no difference to him whether they forgave
him or not; he had come here to hear his sentence and to explain himself
simply because kind-hearted Ivan Markovitch had begged him to do so. He
was not afraid of the future. It made no difference to him where he was:
here in the hall, in prison, or in Siberia.
"If Siberia, then let it be Siberia, damn it all!"
He was sick of life and found it insufferably hard. He was inextricably
involved in debt; he had not a farthing in his pocket; his family had
become detestable to him; he would have to part from his friends and his
women sooner or later, as they had begun to be too contemptuous of his
sponging on them. The future looked black.
Sasha was indifferent, and was only disturbed by one circumstance; the
other side of the door they were calling him a scoundrel and a criminal.
Every minute he was on the point of jumping up, bursting into the study
and shouting in answer to the detestable metallic voice of the Colonel:
"You are lying!"
"Criminal" is a dreadful word--that is what murderers, thieves, robbers
are; in fact, wicked and morally hopeless people. And Sasha was very far
from being all that. . . . It was true he owed a great deal and did not
pay his debts. But debt is not a crime, and it is unusual for a man not
to be in debt. The Colonel and Ivan Markovitch were both in debt. . . .
"What have I done wrong besides?" Sasha wondered.
He had discounted a forged note. But all the young men he knew did the
same. Handrikov and Von Burst always forged IOU's from their parents or
friends when their allowances were not paid at the regular time, and
then when they got their money from home they redeemed them before they
became due. Sasha had done the same, but had not redeemed the IOU
because he had not got the money which Handrikov had promised to lend
him. He was not to blame; it was the fault of circumstances. It was true
that the use of another person's signature was considered reprehensible;