Short Stories by Chekhov
minute later there was a crowd round me, watching me with curiosity and
amusement. I sat at a table and ate something slimy, salt with a flavour
of dampness and mouldiness. I ate greedily without chewing, without
looking and trying to discover what I was eating. I fancied that if I
opened my eyes I should see glittering eyes, claws, and sharp teeth.
All at once I began biting something hard, there was a sound of a
scrunching.
"Ha, ha! He is eating the shells," laughed the crowd. "Little silly, do
you suppose you can eat that?"
After that I remember a terrible thirst. I was lying in my bed, and
could not sleep for heartburn and the strange taste in my parched mouth.
My father was walking up and down, gesticulating with his hands.
"I believe I have caught cold," he was muttering. "I've a feeling in my
head as though someone were sitting on it. . . . Perhaps it is because I
have not . . . er . . . eaten anything to-day. . . . I really am a
queer, stupid creature. . . . I saw those gentlemen pay ten roubles for
the oysters. Why didn't I go up to them and ask them . . . to lend me
something? They would have given something."
Towards morning, I fell asleep and dreamt of a frog sitting in a shell,
moving its eyes. At midday I was awakened by thirst, and looked for my
father: he was still walking up and down and gesticulating.
HOME
"SOMEONE came from the Grigoryevs' to fetch a book, but I said you were
not at home. The postman brought the newspaper and two letters. By the
way, Yevgeny Petrovitch, I should like to ask you to speak to Seryozha.
To-day, and the day before yesterday, I have noticed that he is smoking.
When I began to expostulate with him, he put his fingers in his ears as
usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice."
Yevgeny Petrovitch Bykovsky, the prosecutor of the circuit court, who
had just come back from a session and was taking off his gloves in his
study, looked at the governess as she made her report, and laughed.
"Seryozha smoking . . ." he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I can
picture the little cherub with a cigarette in his mouth! Why, how old is
he?"
"Seven. You think it is not important, but at his age smoking is a bad
and pernicious habit, and bad habits ought to be eradicated in the
beginning."
"Perfectly true. And where does he get the tobacco?"
"He takes it from the drawer in your table."
"Yes? In that case, send him to me."
When the governess had gone out, Bykovsky sat down in an arm-chair
before his writing-table, shut his eyes, and fell to thinking. He
pictured his Seryozha with a huge cigar, a yard long, in the midst of
clouds of tobacco smoke, and this caricature made him smile; at the same
time, the grave, troubled face of the governess called up memories of
the long past, half-forgotten time when smoking aroused in his teachers
and parents a strange, not quite intelligible horror. It really was
horror. Children were mercilessly flogged and expelled from school, and
their lives were made a misery on account of smoking, though not a
single teacher or father knew exactly what was the harm or sinfulness of
smoking. Even very intelligent people did not scruple to wage war on a
vice which they did not understand. Yevgeny Petrovitch remembered the
head-master of the high school, a very cultured and good-natured old
man, who was so appalled when he found a high-school boy with a
cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale, immediately summoned an
emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the sinner to
expulsion. This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was
understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.
The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled and
their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very often the
punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime itself. The living
organism has the power of rapidly adapting itself, growing accustomed
and inured to any atmosphere whatever, otherwise man would be bound to
feel at every moment what an irrational basis there often is underlying
his rational activity, and how little of established truth and certainty
there is even in work so responsible and so terrible in its effects as
that of the teacher, of the lawyer, of the writer. . . .
And such light and discursive thoughts as visit the brain only when it
is weary and resting began straying through Yevgeny Petrovitch's head;
there is no telling whence and why they come, they do not remain long in
the mind, but seem to glide over its surface without sinking deeply into
it. For people who are forced for whole hours, and even days, to think
by routine in one direction, such free private thinking affords a kind
of comfort, an agreeable solace.
It was between eight and nine o'clock in the evening. Overhead, on the
second storey, someone was walking up and down, and on the floor above
that four hands were playing scales. The pacing of the man overhead who,
to judge from his nervous step, was thinking of something harassing, or
was suffering from toothache, and the monotonous scales gave the
stillness of the evening a drowsiness that disposed to lazy reveries. In
the nursery, two rooms away, the governess and Seryozha were talking.
"Pa-pa has come!" carolled the child. "Papa has co-ome. Pa! Pa! Pa!"
"Votre père vous appelle, allez vite!" cried the governess, shrill as a
frightened bird. "I am speaking to you!"
"What am I to say to him, though?" Yevgeny Petrovitch wondered.
But before he had time to think of anything whatever his son Seryozha, a
boy of seven, walked into the study.
He was a child whose sex could only have been guessed from his dress:
weakly, white-faced, and fragile. He was limp like a hot-house plant,
and everything about him seemed extraordinarily soft and tender: his
movements, his curly hair, the look in his eyes, his velvet jacket.
"Good evening, papa!" he said, in a soft voice, clambering on to his
father's knee and giving him a rapid kiss on his neck. "Did you send for
me?"
"Excuse me, Sergey Yevgenitch," answered the prosecutor, removing him
from his knee. "Before kissing we must have a talk, and a serious talk .
. . I am angry with you, and don't love you any more. I tell you, my
boy, I don't love you, and you are no son of mine. . . ."
Seryozha looked intently at his father, then shifted his eyes to the
table, and shrugged his shoulders.
"What have I done to you?" he asked in perplexity, blinking. "I haven't
been in your study all day, and I haven't touched anything."
"Natalya Semyonovna has just been complaining to me that you have been
smoking. . . . Is it true? Have you been smoking?"
"Yes, I did smoke once. . . . That's true. . . ."
"Now you see you are lying as well," said the prosecutor, frowning to
disguise a smile. "Natalya Semyonovna has seen you smoking twice. So you
see you have been detected in three misdeeds: smoking, taking someone
else's tobacco, and lying. Three faults."
"Oh yes," Seryozha recollected, and his eyes smiled. "That's true,
that's true; I smoked twice: to-day and before."
"So you see it was not once, but twice. . . . I am very, very much
displeased with you! You used to be a good boy, but now I see you are
spoilt and have become a bad one."
Yevgeny Petrovitch smoothed down Seryozha's collar and thought:
"What more am I to say to him!"
"Yes, it's not right," he continued. "I did not expect it of you. In the
first place, you ought not to take tobacco that does not belong to you.
Every person has only the right to make use of his own property; if he
takes anyone else's . . . he is a bad man!" ("I am not saying the right
thing!" thought Yevgeny Petrovitch.) "For instance, Natalya Semyonovna
has a box with her clothes in it. That's her box, and we--that is, you
and I--dare not touch it, as it is not ours. That's right, isn't it?
You've got toy horses and pictures. . . . I don't take them, do I?
Perhaps I might like to take them, but . . . they are not mine, but
yours!"
"Take them if you like!" said Seryozha, raising his eyebrows. "Please
don't hesitate, papa, take them! That yellow dog on your table is mine,
but I don't mind. . . . Let it stay."
"You don't understand me," said Bykovsky. "You have given me the dog, it
is mine now and I can do what I like with it; but I didn't give you the
tobacco! The tobacco is mine." ("I am not explaining properly!" thought
the prosecutor. "It's wrong! Quite wrong!") "If I want to smoke someone
else's tobacco, I must first of all ask his permission. . . ."
Languidly linking one phrase on to another and imitating the language
of the nursery, Bykovsky tried to explain to his son the meaning of
property. Seryozha gazed at his chest and listened attentively (he liked
talking to his father in the evening), then he leaned his elbow on the
edge of the table and began screwing up his short-sighted eyes at the
papers and the inkstand. His eyes strayed over the table and rested on
the gum-bottle.
"Papa, what is gum made of?" he asked suddenly, putting the bottle to
his eyes.
Bykovsky took the bottle out of his hands and set it in its place and
went on:
"Secondly, you smoke. . . . That's very bad. Though I smoke it does not
follow that you may. I smoke and know that it is stupid, I blame myself
and don't like myself for it." ("A clever teacher, I am!" he thought.)
"Tobacco is very bad for the health, and anyone who smokes dies earlier
than he should. It's particularly bad for boys like you to smoke. Your
chest is weak, you haven't reached your full strength yet, and smoking
leads to consumption and other illness in weak people. Uncle Ignat died
of consumption, you know. If he hadn't smoked, perhaps he would have
lived till now."
Seryozha looked pensively at the lamp, touched the lamp-shade with his
finger, and heaved a sigh.
"Uncle Ignat played the violin splendidly!" he said. "His violin is at
the Grigoryevs' now."
Seryozha leaned his elbows on the edge of the table again, and sank into
thought. His white face wore a fixed expression, as though he were
listening or following a train of thought of his own; distress and
something like fear came into his big staring eyes. He was most likely
thinking now of death, which had so lately carried off his mother and
Uncle Ignat. Death carries mothers and uncles off to the other world,
while their children and violins remain upon the earth. The dead live
somewhere in the sky beside the stars, and look down from there upon the
earth. Can they endure the parting?
"What am I to say to him?" thought Yevgeny Petrovitch. "He's not
listening to me. Obviously he does not regard either his misdoings or my
arguments as serious. How am I to drive it home?"
The prosecutor got up and walked about the study.
"Formerly, in my time, these questions were very simply settled," he
reflected. "Every urchin who was caught smoking was thrashed. The
cowardly and faint-hearted did actually give up smoking, any who were
somewhat more plucky and intelligent, after the thrashing took to
carrying tobacco in the legs of their boots, and smoking in the barn.
When they were caught in the barn and thrashed again, they would go away
to smoke by the river . . . and so on, till the boy grew up. My mother
used to give me money and sweets not to smoke. Now that method is looked
upon as worthless and immoral. The modern teacher, taking his stand on
logic, tries to make the child form good principles, not from fear, nor
from desire for distinction or reward, but consciously."
While he was walking about, thinking, Seryozha climbed up with his legs
on a chair sideways to the table, and began drawing. That he might not
spoil official paper nor touch the ink, a heap of half-sheets, cut on