Short Stories by Chekhov
"I am very grateful for the honour you do me and my daughter, but let me
speak to you as a friend. I will speak to you, not as a father, but as
one gentleman to another. Tell me, why do you want to be married so
young? Only peasants are married so young, and that, of course, is
loutishness. But why should you? Where's the satisfaction of putting on
the fetters at your age?"
"I am not young!" said Nikitin, offended. "I am in my twenty-seventh
year."
"Papa, the farrier has come!" cried Varya from the other room.
And the conversation broke off. Varya, Masha, and Polyansky saw Nikitin
home. When they reached his gate, Varya said:
"Why is it your mysterious Metropolit Metropolititch never shows himself
anywhere? He might come and see us."
The mysterious Ippolit Ippolititch was sitting on his bed, taking off
his trousers, when Nikitin went in to him.
"Don't go to bed, my dear fellow," said Nikitin breathlessly. "Stop a
minute; don't go to bed!"
Ippolit Ippolititch put on his trousers hurriedly and asked in a
flutter:
"What is it?"
"I am going to be married."
Nikitin sat down beside his companion, and looking at him wonderingly,
as though surprised at himself, said:
"Only fancy, I am going to be married! To Masha Shelestov! I made an
offer today."
"Well? She seems a good sort of girl. Only she is very young."
"Yes, she is young," sighed Nikitin, and shrugged his shoulders with a
careworn air. "Very, very young!"
"She was my pupil at the high school. I know her. She wasn't bad at
geography, but she was no good at history. And she was inattentive in
class, too."
Nikitin for some reason felt suddenly sorry for his companion, and
longed to say something kind and comforting to him.
"My dear fellow, why don't you get married?" he asked. "Why don't you
marry Varya, for instance? She is a splendid, first-rate girl! It's true
she is very fond of arguing, but a heart . . . what a heart! She was
just asking about you. Marry her, my dear boy! Eh?"
He knew perfectly well that Varya would not marry this dull, snub-nosed
man, but still persuaded him to marry her--why?
"Marriage is a serious step," said Ippolit Ippolititch after a moment's
thought. "One has to look at it all round and weigh things thoroughly;
it's not to be done rashly. Prudence is always a good thing, and
especially in marriage, when a man, ceasing to be a bachelor, begins a
new life."
And he talked of what every one has known for ages. Nikitin did not stay
to listen, said goodnight, and went to his own room. He undressed
quickly and quickly got into bed, in order to be able to think the
sooner of his happiness, of Masha, of the future; he smiled, then
suddenly recalled that he had not read Lessing.
"I must read him," he thought. "Though, after all, why should I? Bother
him!"
And exhausted by his happiness, he fell asleep at once and went on
smiling till the morning.
He dreamed of the thud of horses' hoofs on a wooden floor; he dreamed of
the black horse Count Nulin, then of the white Giant and its sister
Maika, being led out of the stable. II
"It was very crowded and noisy in the church, and once some one cried
out, and the head priest, who was marrying Masha and me, looked through
his spectacles at the crowd, and said severely: 'Don't move about the
church, and don't make a noise, but stand quietly and pray. You should
have the fear of God in your hearts.'
"My best men were two of my colleagues, and Masha's best men were
Captain Polyansky and Lieutenant Gernet. The bishop's choir sang
superbly. The sputtering of the candles, the brilliant light, the
gorgeous dresses, the officers, the numbers of gay, happy faces, and a
special ethereal look in Masha, everything together--the surroundings and
the words of the wedding prayers--moved me to tears and filled me with
triumph. I thought how my life had blossomed, how poetically it was
shaping itself! Two years ago I was still a student, I was living in
cheap furnished rooms, without money, without relations, and, as I
fancied then, with nothing to look forward to. Now I am a teacher in the
high school in one of the best provincial towns, with a secure income,
loved, spoiled. It is for my sake, I thought, this crowd is collected,
for my sake three candelabra have been lighted, the deacon is booming,
the choir is doing its best; and it's for my sake that this young
creature, whom I soon shall call my wife, is so young, so elegant, and
so joyful. I recalled our first meetings, our rides into the country, my
declaration of love and the weather, which, as though expressly, was so
exquisitely fine all the summer; and the happiness which at one time in
my old rooms seemed to me possible only in novels and stories, I was now
experiencing in reality--I was now, as it were, holding it in my hands.
"After the ceremony they all crowded in disorder round Masha and me,
expressed their genuine pleasure, congratulated us and wished us joy.
The brigadier-general, an old man of seventy, confined himself to
congratulating Masha, and said to her in a squeaky, aged voice, so loud
that it could be heard all over the church:
"'I hope that even after you are married you may remain the rose you are
now, my dear.'
"The officers, the director, and all the teachers smiled from
politeness, and I was conscious of an agreeable artificial smile on my
face, too. Dear Ippolit Ippolititch, the teacher of history and
geography, who always says what every one has heard before, pressed my
hand warmly and said with feeling:
"'Hitherto you have been unmarried and have lived alone, and now you are
married and no longer single.'
"From the church we went to a two-storied house which I am receiving as
part of the dowry. Besides that house Masha is bringing me twenty
thousand roubles, as well as a piece of waste land with a shanty on it,
where I am told there are numbers of hens and ducks which are not looked
after and are turning wild. When I got home from the church, I stretched
myself at full length on the low sofa in my new study and began to
smoke; I felt snug, cosy, and comfortable, as I never had in my life
before. And meanwhile the wedding party were shouting 'Hurrah!' while a
wretched band in the hall played flourishes and all sorts of trash.
Varya, Masha's sister, ran into the study with a wineglass in her hand,
and with a queer, strained expression, as though her mouth were full of
water; apparently she had meant to go on further, but she suddenly burst
out laughing and sobbing, and the wineglass crashed on the floor. We
took her by the arms and led her away.
"'Nobody can understand!' she muttered afterwards, lying on the old
nurse's bed in a back room. 'Nobody, nobody! My God, nobody can
understand!'
"But every one understood very well that she was four years older than
her sister Masha, and still unmarried, and that she was crying, not from
envy, but from the melancholy consciousness that her time was passing,
and perhaps had passed. When they danced the quadrille, she was back in
the drawing-room with a tear-stained and heavily powdered face, and I
saw Captain Polyansky holding a plate of ice before her while she ate it
with a spoon.
"It is past five o'clock in the morning. I took up my diary to describe
my complete and perfect happiness, and thought I would write a good six
pages, and read it tomorrow to Masha; but, strange to say, everything is
muddled in my head and as misty as a dream, and I can remember vividly
nothing but that episode with Varya, and I want to write, 'Poor Varya!'
I could go on sitting here and writing 'Poor Varya!' By the way, the
trees have begun rustling; it will rain. The crows are cawing, and my
Masha, who has just gone to sleep, has for some reason a sorrowful
face."
For a long while afterwards Nikitin did not write his diary. At the
beginning of August he had the school examinations, and after the
fifteenth the classes began. As a rule he set off for school before nine
in the morning, and before ten o'clock he was looking at his watch and
pining for his Masha and his new house. In the lower forms he would set
some boy to dictate, and while the boys were writing, would sit in the
window with his eyes shut, dreaming; whether he dreamed of the future or
recalled the past, everything seemed to him equally delightful, like a
fairy tale. In the senior classes they were reading aloud Gogol or
Pushkin's prose works, and that made him sleepy; people, trees, fields,
horses, rose before his imagination, and he would say with a sigh, as
though fascinated by the author:
"How lovely!"
At the midday recess Masha used to send him lunch in a snow-white
napkin, and he would eat it slowly, with pauses, to prolong the
enjoyment of it; and Ippolit Ippolititch, whose lunch as a rule
consisted of nothing but bread, looked at him with respect and envy, and
gave expression to some familiar fact, such as:
"Men cannot live without food."
After school Nikitin went straight to give his private lessons, and when
at last by six o'clock he got home, he felt excited and anxious, as
though he had been away for a year. He would run upstairs breathless,
find Masha, throw his arms round her, and kiss her and swear that he
loved her, that he could not live without her, declare that he had
missed her fearfully, and ask her in trepidation how she was and why she
looked so depressed. Then they would dine together. After dinner he
would lie on the sofa in his study and smoke, while she sat beside him
and talked in a low voice.
His happiest days now were Sundays and holidays, when he was at home
from morning till evening. On those days he took part in the naïve but
extraordinarily pleasant life which reminded him of a pastoral idyl. He
was never weary of watching how his sensible and practical Masha was
arranging her nest, and anxious to show that he was of some use in the
house, he would do something useless-- for instance, bring the chaise out
of the stable and look at it from every side. Masha had installed a
regular dairy with three cows, and in her cellar she had many jugs of
milk and pots of sour cream, and she kept it all for butter. Sometimes,
by way of a joke, Nikitin would ask her for a glass of milk, and she
would be quite upset because it was against her rules; but he would
laugh and throw his arms round her, saying:
"There, there; I was joking, my darling! I was joking!"
Or he would laugh at her strictness when, finding in the cupboard some
stale bit of cheese or sausage as hard as a stone, she would say
seriously:
"They will eat that in the kitchen."
He would observe that such a scrap was only fit for a mousetrap, and she
would reply warmly that men knew nothing about housekeeping, and that it
was just the same to the servants if you were to send down a
hundredweight of savouries to the kitchen. He would agree, and embrace
her enthusiastically. Everything that was just in what she said seemed
to him extraordinary and amazing; and what did not fit in with his
convictions seemed to him naïve and touching.
Sometimes he was in a philosophical mood, and he would begin to discuss
some abstract subject while she listened and looked at his face with
curiosity.
"I am immensely happy with you, my joy," he used to say, playing with
her fingers or plaiting and unplaiting her hair. "But I don't look upon
this happiness of mine as something that has come to me by chance, as
though it had dropped from heaven. This happiness is a perfectly
natural, consistent, logical consequence. I believe that man is the
creator of his own happiness, and now I am enjoying just what I have
myself created. Yes, I speak without false modesty: I have created this
happiness myself and I have a right to it. You know my past. My unhappy