The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
"What if I have? Is that anybody's business? Am I obliged to give an
account of my doings to any one? It's my own money I lose, I suppose?
What I spend as well as what is spent in this house belongs to me--me.
Do you hear? To me!"
And so on, all in the same style. But at no other time is Stepan
Stepanitch so reasonable, virtuous, stern or just as at dinner, when all
his household are sitting about him. It usually begins with the soup.
After swallowing the first spoonful Zhilin suddenly frowns and puts down
his spoon.
"Damn it all!" he mutters; "I shall have to dine at a restaurant, I
suppose."
"What's wrong?" asks his wife anxiously. "Isn't the soup good?"
"One must have the taste of a pig to eat hogwash like that! There's too
much salt in it; it smells of dirty rags ... more like bugs than
onions.... It's simply revolting, Anfissa Ivanovna," he says, addressing
the midwife. "Every day I give no end of money for housekeeping.... I
deny myself everything, and this is what they provide for my dinner! I
suppose they want me to give up the office and go into the kitchen to do
the cooking myself."
"The soup is very good to-day," the governess ventures timidly.
"Oh, you think so?" says Zhilin, looking at her angrily from under his
eyelids. "Every one to his taste, of course. It must be confessed our
tastes are very different, Varvara Vassilyevna. You, for instance, are
satisfied with the behaviour of this boy" (Zhilin with a tragic gesture
points to his son Fedya); "you are delighted with him, while I ... I am
disgusted. Yes!"
Fedya, a boy of seven with a pale, sickly face, leaves off eating and
drops his eyes. His face grows paler still.
"Yes, you are delighted, and I am disgusted. Which of us is right, I
cannot say, but I venture to think as his father, I know my own son
better than you do. Look how he is sitting! Is that the way decently
brought up children sit? Sit properly."
Fedya tilts his chin up, cranes his neck, and fancies that he is holding
himself better. Tears come into his eyes.
"Eat your dinner! Hold your spoon properly! You wait. I'll show you, you
horrid boy! Don't dare to whimper! Look straight at me!"
Fedya tries to look straight at him, but his face is quivering and his
eyes fill with tears.
"A-ah!... you cry? You are naughty and then you cry? Go and stand in the
corner, you beast!"
"But ... let him have his dinner first," his wife intervenes.
"No dinner for him! Such bla ... such rascals don't deserve dinner!"
Fedya, wincing and quivering all over, creeps down from his chair and
goes into the corner.
"You won't get off with that!" his parent persists. "If nobody else
cares to look after your bringing up, so be it; I must begin.... I won't
let you be naughty and cry at dinner, my lad! Idiot! You must do your
duty! Do you understand? Do your duty! Your father works and you must
work, too! No one must eat the bread of idleness! You must be a man! A
m-man!"
"For God's sake, leave off," says his wife in French. "Don't nag at us
before outsiders, at least.... The old woman is all ears; and now,
thanks to her, all the town will hear of it."
"I am not afraid of outsiders," answers Zhilin in Russian. "Anfissa
Ivanovna sees that I am speaking the truth. Why, do you think I ought to
be pleased with the boy? Do you know what he costs me? Do you know, you
nasty boy, what you cost me? Or do you imagine that I coin money, that I
get it for nothing? Don't howl! Hold your tongue! Do you hear what I
say? Do you want me to whip you, you young ruffian?"
Fedya wails aloud and begins to sob.
"This is insufferable," says his mother, getting up from the table and
flinging down her dinner-napkin. "You never let us have dinner in peace!
Your bread sticks in my throat."
And putting her handkerchief to her eyes, she walks out of the
dining-room.
"Now she is offended," grumbles Zhilin, with a forced smile. "She's been
spoilt.... That's how it is, Anfissa Ivanovna; no one likes to hear the
truth nowadays.... It's all my fault, it seems."
Several minutes of silence follow. Zhilin looks round at the plates, and
noticing that no one has yet touched their soup, heaves a deep sigh, and
stares at the flushed and uneasy face of the governess.
"Why don't you eat, Varvara Vassilyevna?" he asks. "Offended, I suppose?
I see.... You don't like to be told the truth. You must forgive me, it's
my nature; I can't be a hypocrite.... I always blurt out the plain
truth" (a sigh). "But I notice that my presence is unwelcome. No one can
eat or talk while I am here.... Well, you should have told me, and I
would have gone away.... I will go."
Zhilin gets up and walks with dignity to the door. As he passes the
weeping Fedya he stops.
"After all that has passed here, you are free," he says to Fedya,
throwing back his head with dignity. "I won't meddle in your bringing up
again. I wash my hands of it! I humbly apologise that as a father, from
a sincere desire for your welfare, I have disturbed you and your
mentors. At the same time, once for all I disclaim all responsibility
for your future...."
Fedya wails and sobs more loudly than ever. Zhilin turns with dignity to
the door and departs to his bedroom.
When he wakes from his after-dinner nap he begins to feel the stings of
conscience. He is ashamed to face his wife, his son, Anfissa Ivanovna,
and even feels very wretched when he recalls the scene at dinner, but
his amour-propre is too much for him; he has not the manliness to be
frank, and he goes on sulking and grumbling.
Waking up next morning, he feels in excellent spirits, and whistles
gaily as he washes. Going into the dining-room to breakfast, he finds
there Fedya, who, at the sight of his father, gets up and looks at him
helplessly.
"Well, young man?" Zhilin greets him good-humouredly, sitting down to
the table. "What have you got to tell me, young man? Are you all right?
Well, come, chubby; give your father a kiss."
With a pale, grave face Fedya goes up to his father and touches his
cheek with his quivering lips, then walks away and sits down in his
place without a word.
THE BLACK MONK
I
ANDREY VASSILITCH KOVRIN, who held a master's degree at the University,
had exhausted himself, and had upset his nerves. He did not send for a
doctor, but casually, over a bottle of wine, he spoke to a friend who
was a doctor, and the latter advised him to spend the spring and summer
in the country. Very opportunely a long letter came from Tanya Pesotsky,
who asked him to come and stay with them at Borissovka. And he made up
his mind that he really must go.
To begin with--that was in April--he went to his own home, Kovrinka, and
there spent three weeks in solitude; then, as soon as the roads were in
good condition, he set off, driving in a carriage, to visit Pesotsky,
his former guardian, who had brought him up, and was a horticulturist
well known all over Russia. The distance from Kovrinka to Borissovka was
reckoned only a little over fifty miles. To drive along a soft road in
May in a comfortable carriage with springs was a real pleasure.
Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the
stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the entrance.
The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe,
stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there
ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare
roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below with an
unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and
there one always felt that one must sit down and write a ballad. But
near the house itself, in the courtyard and orchard, which together with
the nurseries covered ninety acres, it was all life and gaiety even in
bad weather. Such marvellous roses, lilies, camellias; such tulips of
all possible shades, from glistening white to sooty black--such a wealth
of flowers, in fact, Kovrin had never seen anywhere as at Pesotsky's. It
was only the beginning of spring, and the real glory of the flower-beds
was still hidden away in the hot-houses. But even the flowers along the
avenues, and here and there in the flower-beds, were enough to make one
feel, as one walked about the garden, as though one were in a realm of
tender colours, especially in the early morning when the dew was
glistening on every petal.
What was the decorative part of the garden, and what Pesotsky
contemptuously spoke of as rubbish, had at one time in his childhood
given Kovrin an impression of fairyland.
Every sort of caprice, of elaborate monstrosity and mockery at Nature
was here. There were espaliers of fruit-trees, a pear-tree in the shape
of a pyramidal poplar, spherical oaks and lime-trees, an apple-tree in
the shape of an umbrella, plum-trees trained into arches, crests,
candelabra, and even into the number 1862--the year when Pesotsky first
took up horticulture. One came across, too, lovely, graceful trees with
strong, straight stems like palms, and it was only by looking intently
that one could recognise these trees as gooseberries or currants. But
what made the garden most cheerful and gave it a lively air, was the
continual coming and going in it, from early morning till evening;
people with wheelbarrows, shovels, and watering-cans swarmed round the
trees and bushes, in the avenues and the flower-beds, like ants....
Kovrin arrived at Pesotsky's at ten o'clock in the evening. He found
Tanya and her father, Yegor Semyonitch, in great anxiety. The clear
starlight sky and the thermometer foretold a frost towards morning, and
meanwhile Ivan Karlovitch, the gardener, had gone to the town, and they
had no one to rely upon. At supper they talked of nothing but the
morning frost, and it was settled that Tanya should not go to bed, and
between twelve and one should walk through the garden, and see that
everything was done properly, and Yegor Semyonitch should get up at
three o'clock or even earlier.
Kovrin sat with Tanya all the evening, and after midnight went out with
her into the garden. It was cold. There was a strong smell of burning
already in the garden. In the big orchard, which was called the
commercial garden, and which brought Yegor Semyonitch several thousand
clear profit, a thick, black, acrid smoke was creeping over the ground
and, curling around the trees, was saving those thousands from the
frost. Here the trees were arranged as on a chessboard, in straight and
regular rows like ranks of soldiers, and this severe pedantic
regularity, and the fact that all the trees were of the same size, and
had tops and trunks all exactly alike, made them look monotonous and
even dreary. Kovrin and Tanya walked along the rows where fires of dung,
straw, and all sorts of refuse were smouldering, and from time to time
they were met by labourers who wandered in the smoke like shadows. The
only trees in flower were the cherries, plums, and certain sorts of
apples, but the whole garden was plunged in smoke, and it was only near
the nurseries that Kovrin could breathe freely.
"Even as a child I used to sneeze from the smoke here," he said,
shrugging his shoulders, "but to this day I don't understand how smoke
can keep off frost."
"Smoke takes the place of clouds when there are none ..." answered
Tanya.
"And what do you want clouds for?"
"In overcast and cloudy weather there is no frost."
"You don't say so."
He laughed and took her arm. Her broad, very earnest face, chilled with
the frost, with her delicate black eyebrows, the turned-up collar of her
coat, which prevented her moving her head freely, and the whole of her
thin, graceful figure, with her skirts tucked up on account of the dew,
touched him.
"Good heavens! she is grown up," he said. "When I went away from here