The Complete Short Novels

by Chekhov, Anton

I understood nothing and was clearly aware of only one thing: that I must quickly pack my bags and leave. Before the old man’s visit, my lackeydom still had meaning, but now it was ridiculous. Teardrops fell into my open suitcase, I was unbearably sad, but how I wanted to live! I was ready to embrace and pack into my short life all that was accessible to man. I wanted to talk, and read, and pound with a hammer somewhere in a big factory, and stand watch, and till the soil. I was drawn to Nevsky Prospect, and to the fields, and to the sea—wherever my imagination could reach. When Zinaida Fyodorovna came back, I rushed to open the door for her, and with special tenderness helped her out of her fur coat. For the last time!

  Besides the old man, two others came to us that day. In the evening, when it was already quite dark, Gruzin came unexpectedly to pick up some papers for Orlov. He opened the desk, took out the necessary papers, and, rolling them into a tube, told me to put them in the front hall by his hat while he himself went to Zinaida Fyodorovna. She was lying on the sofa in the drawing room with her hands behind her head. Five or six days had gone by since Orlov left on inspection, and no one knew when he would be back, but she no longer sent telegrams or expected any. Polya still lived with us, but she didn’t seem to notice her. ‘‘Let it be!’’—I read on her dispassionate, very pale face. Like Orlov, she now wanted to be unhappy out of stubbornness; to spite herself and the whole world, she spent whole days lying motionless on the sofa, wishing only the bad for herself and expecting only the bad. She was probably imagining Orlov’s return and the inevitable quarrels between them, then his cooling off, his infidelities, then how they would break up, and these tormenting thoughts may have afforded her pleasure. But what would she have said if she had suddenly learned the real truth?

  ‘‘I love you, my friend,’’ said Gruzin, greeting her and kissing her hand. ‘‘You’re so kind! And Georginka’s gone away,’’ he lied. ‘‘Gone away, the villain!’’

  He sat down with a sigh and tenderly stroked her hand.

  ‘‘Allow me, my dove, to sit with you for a little hour,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t really want to go home, and it’s too early to go to the Birshovs’. Today is their Katya’s birthday. A nice girl!’’

  I served him a glass of tea and a decanter of cognac. He drank the tea slowly, with obvious reluctance, and, as he returned the glass to me, asked timidly:

  ‘‘My lad, mightn’t you have a little something... to eat? I haven’t had dinner yet.’’

  We had nothing. I went to the restaurant and brought him an ordinary one-rouble dinner.

  ‘‘To your health, my dove!’’ he said to Zinaida Fyodorovna and drank a glass of vodka. ‘‘My little one, your goddaughter sends you her greetings. The poor thing has scrofula! Ah, children, children!’’ he sighed. ‘‘Say what you like, my dear, but it’s nice to be a father. Georginka doesn’t understand that feeling.’’

  He drank again. Skinny, pale, with the napkin on his chest like a bib, he ate greedily and, raising his eyebrows, glanced guiltily now at Zinaida Fyodorovna, now at me, like a little boy. It seemed if I hadn’t given him grouse or jelly, he would have wept. Having satisfied his hunger, he cheered up and laughingly began telling something about the Birshovs’ family, but, noticing that it was boring and that Zinaida Fyodorovna was not laughing, he fell silent. And somehow it suddenly became boring. After dinner the two of them sat in the drawing room with only one lamp lit and were silent: it was painful for him to lie, and she wanted to ask him about something but could not make up her mind to do it. Half an hour went by that way. Gruzin looked at his watch.

  ‘‘But perhaps it’s time I left.’’

  ‘‘No, stay a little . . . We must talk.’’

  Again they were silent. He sat down at the piano, touched one key, then began to play and sing softly: ‘‘ ‘What does the morrow hold for me?’ ’’—but as usual got up at once and shook his head.

  ‘‘Play something, my friend,’’ Zinaida Fyodorovna requested.

  ‘‘But what?’’ he asked, shrugging his shoulders. ‘‘I’ve forgotten everything. I stopped playing long ago.’’

  Looking at the ceiling as if in recollection, he played two pieces by Tchaikovsky with wonderful expression, so warmly, so intelligently! His face was the same as ever— neither intelligent nor stupid—and to me it seemed simply a wonder that a man whom I was used to seeing in the most mean, impure surroundings was capable of such a high and, for me, inaccessible upsurge of feeling, of such purity. Zinaida Fyodorovna became flushed and began pacing the drawing room in agitation.

  ‘‘But wait now, my friend, if I can remember it, I’ll play a little piece for you,’’ he said. ‘‘I heard it played on the cello.’’

  Timidly and tentatively at first, then with assurance, he began playing the ‘‘Swan Song’’ by Saint-Saëns.19 He played it and repeated it.

  ‘‘Nice, isn’t it?’’ he said.

  Agitated, Zinaida Fyodorovna stopped by him and asked:

  ‘‘Tell me sincerely, as a friend: what do you think of me?’’

  ‘‘What can I say?’’ he said, raising his eyebrows. ‘‘I love you and think only good things of you. If you want me to speak generally on the question that interests you,’’ he went on, brushing his sleeve at the elbow and frowning, ‘‘then, my dear, you know . . . To freely follow the yearnings of one’s heart does not always bring good people happiness. To feel yourself free and at the same time happy, it seems to me, you mustn’t conceal from yourself the fact that life is cruel, crude, and merciless in its conservatism, and you must respond to it according to its worth; that is, be just as crude and merciless in your yearning for freedom. That’s what I think.’’

  ‘‘It’s beyond me!’’ Zinaida Fyodorovna smiled sadly. ‘‘I’m already weary, my friend. I’m so weary that I won’t lift a finger to save myself.’’

  ‘‘Go to a convent, my friend.’’

  He said it jokingly, but after his words, Zinaida Fyodorovna and then he himself had tears glistening in their eyes.

  ‘‘Well, ma’am,’’ he said, ‘‘we’ve sat and sat, now off we go. Good-bye, my dear friend. May God keep you well.’’

  He kissed both her hands and, stroking them tenderly, said he would be sure to visit her one of those days. In the front hall, putting on his coat that resembled a child’s capote, he searched in his pockets for a long time, so as to give me a tip, but found nothing.

  ‘‘Good-bye, my dove!’’ he said sadly and left.

  Never will I forget the mood this man left behind him. Zinaida Fyodorovna still went on pacing the drawing room in agitation. She did not lie down but paced—that was one good thing. I wanted to take advantage of this mood to have a candid talk with her and leave at once, but no sooner had I seen Gruzin off than the bell rang. It was Kukushkin.

  ‘‘Is Georgiy Ivanych at home?’’ he asked. ‘‘Has he returned? No, you say? What a pity! In that case, I’ll go and kiss the mistress’s hand and—be off! Zinaida Fyodorovna, may I?’’ he cried. ‘‘I want to kiss your hand. Excuse the late hour.’’

  He did not sit long in the drawing room, no more than ten minutes, but to me, it seemed he had been sitting for a long time and would never go away. I bit my lip with indignation and vexation, and now hated Zinaida Fyodorovna. ‘‘Why doesn’t she chase him away?’’ I fulminated, though it was obvious that she was bored with him.

  While I held his coat for him, he asked, as a special favor to me, how it was that I could do without a wife.

  ‘‘But I suppose you’re not missing out,’’ he said with a laugh. ‘‘You must have all sorts of hanky-panky going on with Polya . . . You rogue!’’

  Despite my life’s experience, I knew very little about people then, and it’s very possible that I often exaggerated insignificant things and didn’t notice the important at all. I imagined that Kukushkin was tittering and flattering me for a reason: wasn’t he hoping that, being a servant, I would blab in servants’ quarters and kitchens everywhere about him visiti
ng us in the evenings when Orlov was away and staying with Zinaida Fyodorovna till late at night? And when my gossip reached the ears of his acquaintances, he would drop his eyes abashedly and shake his little finger. And mightn’t he—I thought, looking at his honeyed little face—pretend tonight over cards and perhaps let slip that he had already won Zinaida Fyodorovna away from Orlov?

  The hatred I had so lacked at noontime, when the old man came, now took possession of me. Kukushkin finally left, and, listening to the shuffling of his leather galoshes, I felt a strong desire to send some rude oath after him in farewell, but I restrained myself. But when the footsteps died away on the stairs, I went back to the front hall and, not knowing what I was doing, seized the bundle of papers Gruzin had forgotten and rushed downstairs. I ran outside without coat or hat. It wasn’t cold, but snow was falling in big flakes, and the wind was blowing.

  ‘‘Your Excellency!’’ I cried, running after Kukushkin. ‘‘Your Excellency!’’

  He stopped by a streetlamp and looked back in perplexity.

  ‘‘Your Excellency!’’ I said breathlessly. ‘‘Your Excellency!’’

  And, unable to think up anything to say, I struck him on the face twice with the bundle of papers. Understanding nothing and not even astonished—so stunned he was—he leaned his back against the streetlamp and covered his face with his hands. At that moment some military doctor walked by and saw me beating a man, but he only looked at us in perplexity and went on.

  I felt ashamed and ran back into the house.

  XII

  BREATHLESS, MY HEAD wet with snow, I ran to the servants’ quarters, threw off the tailcoat at once, put on a suit jacket and overcoat, and brought my suitcase out to the front hall. To flee! But before leaving, I quickly sat down and began writing to Orlov:

  ‘‘I am leaving you my false passport,’’ I began, ‘‘asking you to keep it as a souvenir, you false man, Mr. Petersburg Official!

  ‘‘To sneak into a house under another man’s name, to observe your intimate life from behind a servant’s mask, to see and hear everything, and then, unbidden, to expose the lie—all that, you will say, resembles theft. Yes, but I cannot worry about nobility now. I lived through dozens of your suppers and dinners, when you said and did whatever you liked, and I had to listen, see, and be silent—I do not want to make you a gift of that. Besides, if there is no living soul around you who would dare to tell you the truth and not flatter, then at least let the servant Stepan wash your splendid physiognomy for you.’’

  I didn’t like this beginning, but I had no wish to correct it. And what difference did it make?

  The big windows with dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled tailcoat on the floor, and the wet tracks of my feet looked stern and sorrowful. And the silence was somehow peculiar.

  Probably because I had run outside without a hat and galoshes, my temperature went up. My face was burning, my legs ached . . . My heavy head bent to the table, and there was a sort of doubling in my thoughts, when it seems that each thought in your brain is followed by its shadow.

  ‘‘I am ill, weak, morally depressed,’’ I went on, ‘‘I cannot write to you as I would like. In the first moment, I had the wish to insult and humiliate you, but now I do not think I have the right to do so. You and I have both fallen, and neither of us will ever get up, and my letter, even if it were eloquent, strong, and fearsome, would still be like knocking on a coffin lid: knock as you will, there’s no waking up! No efforts can warm your cursed cold blood, and you know it better than I do. Why write, then? But my head and heart are on fire, I go on writing, agitated for some reason, as if this letter might still save you and me. Fever keeps the thoughts in my head from cohering, and my pen scratches somehow senselessly on the paper, but the question I want to ask you stands before me as clear as a flame.

  ‘‘Why I grew weak and fell before my time is not hard to explain. Like the biblical strongman,20 I lifted the gates of Gaza on my back, so as to carry them to the top of the mountain, but only when I was exhausted, when youth and health were extinguished in me forever, did I notice that those gates were too heavy for me, that I had deceived myself. Besides, I was in constant, cruel pain. I have experienced hunger, cold, illness, the loss of freedom; personal happiness I have not known and do not know, I have no refuge, my memories are a burden, and my conscience is often afraid of them. But you, why have you fallen? What fatal, diabolical reasons kept your life from unfolding into full spring flower? Why, before you had begun to live, did you hasten to shake from yourself the image and likeness of God 21 and turn into a cowardly animal that barks, and frightens others with its barking, because it is afraid? You are afraid of life, afraid, like that Asiatic, the one who sits on a featherbed all day and smokes a hookah. Yes, you read a lot, and wear your European tailcoat dashingly, but still, with what tender, purely Asiatic, khanlike solicitude you protect yourself from hunger, cold, physical strain—from pain and anxiety! How early your soul hid itself in a dressing gown, how you played the coward before real life and nature, with which every healthy and normal person struggles! How soft, cozy, warm, and comfortable it is for you—and how boring! Yes, it is sometimes killingly, irredeemably boring for you, as in solitary confinement, but you try to hide from that enemy as well: you spend eight hours a day playing cards.

  ‘‘And your irony? Oh, how well I understand it! Living, free, spirited thought is inquisitive and imperious; for a lazy, idle mind, it is unbearable. To keep it from disturbing your peace, you, like thousands of your peers, hastened while still young to set limits to it; you armed yourself with an ironic attitude toward life, or whatever you want to call it, and your restricted, intimidated thought does not dare jump over the little palisade you have set around it, and when you jeer at the ideas that are supposedly all known to you, you are like a deserter who shamefully runs away from the field of battle but, to stifle his shame, mocks at war and courage. Cynicism stifles pain. In one of Dostoevsky’s stories,22 an old man tramples underfoot the portrait of his beloved daughter because he is in the wrong before her, and you vilely and tritely make fun of the ideas of good and truth because you are no longer able to go back to them. Any sincere and truthful hint at your fall is frightening to you, and you have deliberately surrounded yourself with people who know only how to flatter your weaknesses. And not for nothing, not for nothing, are you so afraid of tears!

  ‘‘Incidentally, about your relations with women. We have inherited shamelessness with our flesh and blood, and we are brought up in shamelessness, but it is also for this that we are human beings, so as to overcome the beast in us. With maturity, when all ideas became known to you, you could not help seeing the truth; you knew it, but you did not follow it, you were frightened of it, and in order to deceive your conscience, you began loudly assuring yourself that the one to blame was not you but women themselves, that they were as mean as your relations with them. Your cold, scabrous jokes, your horse laugh, all your numberless theories about the essential, the indefinite demands of marriage, the ten sous that a French worker pays a woman, your eternal allusions to women’s logic, falsity, weakness, and the rest—does it not all look like a desire to force women down into the mud at all costs, so that they and your relations with them stand on the same level? You are a weak, unhappy, unsympathetic man.’’

  In the drawing room, Zinaida Fyodorovna started playing the piano, trying to remember the piece by Saint-Saëns that Gruzin had played. I went and lay on my bed, but, remembering that it was time for me to leave, I forced myself to get up and, with a heavy, hot head, went back to the table.

  ‘‘But here is the question,’’ I went on. ‘‘Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful yout
h? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

  ‘‘The thief who hung on the cross23 managed to recover the joy of life and a bold, realizable hope, though he probably had no more than an hour left to live. You still have long years ahead of you, and most likely I will not die as soon as it seems. What if, by a miracle, the present should turn out to be a dream, a terrible nightmare, and we should wake up renewed, pure, strong, proud of our truth? . . . Sweet dreams burn me, and I can hardly breathe from excitement. I want terribly to live, I want our life to be holy, high, and solemn, like the heavenly vault. Let us live! The sun does not rise twice a day, and life is not given us twice—hold fast to the remains of your life and save them . . .’’

  I did not write a word more. I had many thoughts in my head, but they were all scattered and wouldn’t fit into the lines. Without finishing the letter, I signed it with my rank, name, and family name, and went into the study. It was dark. I felt for the desk and put the letter on it. I must have bumped into the furniture in the darkness and made a noise.

  ‘‘Who’s there?’’ an alarmed voice came from the drawing room.

  And just then the clock on the desk delicately struck one.

  XIII

  IN THE DARKNESS I spent at least half a minute scratching the door, feeling it over, then slowly opened it and went into the drawing room. Zinaida Fyodorovna was lying on a couch and, propped on her elbow, met me with her eyes. Not daring to start talking, I slowly walked past her, and she followed me with her gaze. I stood in the reception room for a while and again walked past, and she looked at me attentively and with perplexity, even with fear. Finally I stopped and forced myself to speak:

  ‘‘He won’t come back!’’

  She quickly stood up and looked at me, not understanding.

  ‘‘He won’t come back!’’ I repeated, and my heart began pounding terribly. ‘‘He won’t come back, because he never left Petersburg. He’s living at Pekarsky’s.’’