Tales of Chekhov 11- The Schoolmaster and other stories

by Anton Chekhov

  "Very good, . . . leave it, . . . I'll read it."

  "Pavel Vassilyevitch," the lady said languishingly, clasping her hands and raising them in supplication, "I know you're busy. . . . Your every minute is precious, and I know you're inwardly cursing me at this moment, but . . . Be kind, allow me to read you my play . . . . Do be so very sweet!"

  "I should be delighted . . ." faltered Pavel Vassilyevitch; "but, Madam, I'm . . . I'm very busy . . . . I'm . . . I'm obliged to set off this minute."

  "Pavel Vassilyevitch," moaned the lady and her eyes filled with tears, "I'm asking a sacrifice! I am insolent, I am intrusive, but be magnanimous. To-morrow I'm leaving for Kazan and I should like to know your opinion to-day. Grant me half an hour of your attention . . . only one half-hour . . . I implore you!"

  Pavel Vassilyevitch was cotton-wool at core, and could not refuse. When it seemed to him that the lady was about to burst into sobs and fall on her knees, he was overcome with confusion and muttered helplessly.

  "Very well; certainly . . . I will listen . . . I will give you half an hour."

  The lady uttered a shriek of joy, took off her hat and settling herself, began to read. At first she read a scene in which a footman and a house maid, tidying up a sumptuous drawing-room, talked at length about their young lady, Anna Sergyevna, who was building a school and a hospital in the village. When the footman had left the room, the maidservant pronounced a monologue to the effect that education is light and ignorance is darkness; then Mme. Murashkin brought the footman back into the drawing-room and set him uttering a long monologue concerning his master, the General, who disliked his daughter's views, intended to marry her to a rich kammer junker, and held that the salvation of the people lay in unadulterated ignorance. Then, when the servants had left the stage, the young lady herself appeared and informed the audience that she had not slept all night, but had been thinking of Valentin Ivanovitch, who was the son of a poor teacher and assisted his sick father gratuitously. Valentin had studied all the sciences, but had no faith in friendship nor in love; he had no object in life and longed for death, and therefore she, the young lady, must save him.

  Pavel Vassilyevitch listened, and thought with yearning anguish of his sofa. He scanned the lady viciously, felt her masculine tenor thumping on his eardrums, understood nothing, and thought:

  "The devil sent you . . . as though I wanted to listen to your tosh! It's not my fault you've written a play, is it? My God! what a thick manuscript! What an infliction!"

  Pavel Vassilyevitch glanced at the wall where the portrait of his wife was hanging and remembered that his wife had asked him to buy and bring to their summer cottage five yards of tape, a pound of cheese, and some tooth-powder.

  "I hope I've not lost the pattern of that tape," he thought, "where did I put it? I believe it's in my blue reefer jacket. . . . Those wretched flies have covered her portrait with spots already, I must tell Olga to wash the glass. . . . She's reading the twelfth scene, so we must soon be at the end of the first act. As though inspiration were possible in this heat and with such a mountain of flesh, too! Instead of writing plays she'd much better eat cold vinegar hash and sleep in a cellar. . . ."

  "You don't think that monologue's a little too long?" the lady asked suddenly, raising her eyes.

  Pavel Vassilyevitch had not heard the monologue, and said in a voice as guilty as though not the lady but he had written that monologue:

  "No, no, not at all. It's very nice. . . ."

  The lady beamed with happiness and continued reading:

  ANNA: You are consumed by analysis. Too early you have ceased to live in the heart and have put your faith in the intellect.

  VALENTIN: What do you mean by the heart? That is a concept of anatomy. As a conventional term for what are called the feelings, I do not admit it.

  ANNA (confused): And love? Surely that is not merely a product of the association of ideas? Tell me frankly, have you ever loved?

  VALENTIN (bitterly): Let us not touch on old wounds not yet healed. (A pause.) What are you thinking of?

  ANNA: I believe you are unhappy.

  During the sixteenth scene Pavel Vassilyevitch yawned, and accidently made with his teeth the sound dogs make when they catch a fly. He was dismayed at this unseemly sound, and to cover it assumed an expression of rapt attention.

  "Scene seventeen! When will it end?" he thought. "Oh, my God! If this torture is prolonged another ten minutes I shall shout for the police. It's insufferable."

  But at last the lady began reading more loudly and more rapidly, and finally raising her voice she read "Curtain."

  Pavel Vassilyevitch uttered a faint sigh and was about to get up, but the lady promptly turned the page and went on reading.

  ACT II.—Scene, a village street. On right, School. On left, Hospital. Villagers, male and female, sitting on the hospital steps.

  "Excuse me," Pavel Vassilyevitch broke in, "how many acts are there?"

  "Five," answered the lady, and at once, as though fearing her audience might escape her, she went on rapidly.

  VALENTIN is looking out of the schoolhouse window. In the background

  Villagers can be seen taking their goods to the Inn.

  Like a man condemned to be executed and convinced of the impossibility of a reprieve, Pavel Vassilyevitch gave up expecting the end, abandoned all hope, and simply tried to prevent his eyes from closing, and to retain an expression of attention on his face. . . . The future when the lady would finish her play and depart seemed to him so remote that he did not even think of it.

  "Trooo—too—too—too . . ." the lady's voice sounded in his ears.

  "Troo—too—too . . . sh—sh—sh—sh . . ."

  "I forgot to take my soda," he thought. "What am I thinking about? Oh—my soda. . . . Most likely I shall have a bilious attack. . . . It's extraordinary, Smirnovsky swills vodka all day long and yet he never has a bilious attack. . . . There's a bird settled on the window . . . a sparrow. . . ."

  Pavel Vassilyevitch made an effort to unglue his strained and closing eyelids, yawned without opening his mouth, and stared at Mme. Murashkin. She grew misty and swayed before his eyes, turned into a triangle and her head pressed against the ceiling. . . .

  VALENTIN No, let me depart.

  ANNA (in dismay): Why?

  VALENTIN (aside): She has turned pale! (To her) Do not force me to explain. Sooner would I die than you should know the reason.

  ANNA (after a pause): You cannot go away. . . .

  The lady began to swell, swelled to an immense size, and melted into the dingy atmosphere of the study—only her moving mouth was visible; then she suddenly dwindled to the size of a bottle, swayed from side to side, and with the table retreated to the further end of the room . . .

  VALENTIN (holding ANNA in his arms): You have given me new life!

  You have shown me an object to live for! You have renewed me as the

  Spring rain renews the awakened earth! But . . . it is too late,

  too late! The ill that gnaws at my heart is beyond cure. . . .

  Pavel Vassilyevitch started and with dim and smarting eyes stared at the reading lady; for a minute he gazed fixedly as though understanding nothing. . . .

  SCENE XI.—The same. The BARON and the POLICE INSPECTOR with assistants.

  VALENTIN: Take me!

  ANNA: I am his! Take me too! Yes, take me too! I love him, I love him more than life!

  BARON: Anna Sergyevna, you forget that you are ruining your father . . . .

  The lady began swelling again. . . . Looking round him wildly Pavel Vassilyevitch got up, yelled in a deep, unnatural voice, snatched from the table a heavy paper-weight, and beside himself, brought it down with all his force on the authoress's head. . . .

  * * * * *

  "Give me in charge, I've killed her!" he said to the maidservant who ran in, a minute later.

  The jury acquitted him.

  A MYSTERY

  ON the evening of Easter Sunday th
e actual Civil Councillor, Navagin, on his return from paying calls, picked up the sheet of paper on which visitors had inscribed their names in the hall, and went with it into his study. After taking off his outer garments and drinking some seltzer water, he settled himself comfortably on a couch and began reading the signatures in the list. When his eyes reached the middle of the long list of signatures, he started, gave an ejaculation of astonishment and snapped his fingers, while his face expressed the utmost perplexity.

  "Again!" he said, slapping his knee. "It's extraordinary! Again! Again there is the signature of that fellow, goodness knows who he is! Fedyukov! Again!"

  Among the numerous signatures on the paper was the signature of a certain Fedyukov. Who the devil this Fedyukov was, Navagin had not a notion. He went over in his memory all his acquaintances, relations and subordinates in the service, recalled his remote past but could recollect no name like Fedyukov. What was so strange was that this incognito, Fedyukov, had signed his name regularly every Christmas and Easter for the last thirteen years. Neither Navagin, his wife, nor his house porter knew who he was, where he came from or what he was like.

  "It's extraordinary!" Navagin thought in perplexity, as he paced about the study. "It's strange and incomprehensible! It's like sorcery!"

  "Call the porter here!" he shouted.

  "It's devilish queer! But I will find out who he is!"

  "I say, Grigory," he said, addressing the porter as he entered, "that Fedyukov has signed his name again! Did you see him?"

  "No, your Excellency."

  "Upon my word, but he has signed his name! So he must have been in the hall. Has he been?"

  "No, he hasn't, your Excellency."

  "How could he have signed his name without being there?"

  "I can't tell."

  "Who is to tell, then? You sit gaping there in the hall. Try and remember, perhaps someone you didn't know came in? Think a minute!"

  "No, your Excellency, there has been no one I didn't know. Our clerks have been, the baroness came to see her Excellency, the priests have been with the Cross, and there has been no one else. . . ."

  "Why, he was invisible when he signed his name, then, was he?"

  "I can't say: but there has been no Fedyukov here. That I will swear before the holy image. . . ."

  "It's queer! It's incomprehensible! It's ex-traordinary!" mused Navagin. "It's positively ludicrous. A man has been signing his name here for thirteen years and you can't find out who he is. Perhaps it's a joke? Perhaps some clerk writes that name as well as his own for fun."

  And Navagin began examining Fedyukov's signature.

  The bold, florid signature in the old-fashioned style with twirls and flourishes was utterly unlike the handwriting of the other signatures. It was next below the signature of Shtutchkin, the provincial secretary, a scared, timorous little man who would certainly have died of fright if he had ventured upon such an impudent joke.

  "The mysterious Fedyukov has signed his name again!" said Navagin, going in to see his wife. "Again I fail to find out who he is."

  Madame Navagin was a spiritualist, and so for all phenomena in nature, comprehensible or incomprehensible, she had a very simple explanation.

  "There's nothing extraordinary about it," she said. "You don't believe it, of course, but I have said it already and I say it again: there is a great deal in the world that is supernatural, which our feeble intellect can never grasp. I am convinced that this Fedyukov is a spirit who has a sympathy for you . . . If I were you, I would call him up and ask him what he wants."

  "Nonsense, nonsense!"

  Navagin was free from superstitions, but the phenomenon which interested him was so mysterious that all sorts of uncanny devilry intruded into his mind against his will. All the evening he was imagining that the incognito Fedyukov was the spirit of some long-dead clerk, who had been discharged from the service by Navagin's ancestors and was now revenging himself on their descendant; or perhaps it was the kinsman of some petty official dismissed by Navagin himself, or of a girl seduced by him. . . .

  All night Navagin dreamed of a gaunt old clerk in a shabby uniform, with a face as yellow as a lemon, hair that stood up like a brush, and pewtery eyes; the clerk said something in a sepulchral voice and shook a bony finger at him. And Navagin almost had an attack of inflammation of the brain.

  For a fortnight he was silent and gloomy and kept walking up and down and thinking. In the end he overcame his sceptical vanity, and going into his wife's room he said in a hollow voice:

  "Zina, call up Fedyukov!"

  The spiritualistic lady was delighted; she sent for a sheet of cardboard and a saucer, made her husband sit down beside her, and began upon the magic rites.

  Fedyukov did not keep them waiting long. . . .

  "What do you want?" asked Navagin.

  "Repent," answered the saucer.

  "What were you on earth?"

  "A sinner. . . ."

  "There, you see!" whispered his wife, "and you did not believe!"

  Navagin conversed for a long time with Fedyukov, and then called up Napoleon, Hannibal, Askotchensky, his aunt Klavdya Zaharovna, and they all gave him brief but correct answers full of deep significance. He was busy with the saucer for four hours, and fell asleep soothed and happy that he had become acquainted with a mysterious world that was new to him. After that he studied spiritualism every day, and at the office, informed the clerks that there was a great deal in nature that was supernatural and marvellous to which our men of science ought to have turned their attention long ago.

  Hypnotism, mediumism, bishopism, spiritualism, the fourth dimension, and other misty notions took complete possession of him, so that for whole days at a time, to the great delight of his wife, he read books on spiritualism or devoted himself to the saucer, table-turning, and discussions of supernatural phenomena. At his instigation all his clerks took up spiritualism, too, and with such ardour that the old managing clerk went out of his mind and one day sent a telegram: "Hell. Government House. I feel that I am turning into an evil spirit. What's to be done? Reply paid. Vassily Krinolinsky."

  After reading several hundreds of treatises on spiritualism Navagin had a strong desire to write something himself. For five months he sat composing, and in the end had written a huge monograph, entitled: My Opinion. When he had finished this essay he determined to send it to a spiritualist journal.

  The day on which it was intended to despatch it to the journal was a very memorable one for him. Navagin remembers that on that never-to-be-forgotten day the secretary who had made a fair copy of his article and the sacristan of the parish who had been sent for on business were in his study. Nayagin's face was beaming. He looked lovingly at his creation, felt between his fingers how thick it was, and with a happy smile said to the secretary:

  "I propose, Filipp Sergeyitch, to send it registered. It will be safer. . . ." And raising his eyes to the sacristan, he said: "I have sent for you on business, my good man. I am putting my youngest son to the high school and I must have a certificate of baptism; only could you let me have it quickly?"

  "Very good, your Excellency!" said the sacristan, bowing. "Very good, I understand. . . ."

  "Can you let me have it by to-morrow?"

  "Very well, your Excellency, set your mind at rest! To-morrow it shall be ready! Will you send someone to the church to-morrow before evening service? I shall be there. Bid him ask for Fedyukov. I am always there. . . ."

  "What!" cried the general, turning pale.

  "Fedyukov."

  "You, . . . you are Fedyukov?" asked Navagin, looking at him with wide-open eyes.

  "Just so, Fedyukov."

  "You. . . . you signed your name in my hall?"

  "Yes . . ." the sacristan admitted, and was overcome with confusion. "When we come with the Cross, your Excellency, to grand gentlemen's houses I always sign my name. . . . I like doing it. . . . Excuse me, but when I see the list of names in the hall I feel an impulse to sign mine. . .
."

  In dumb stupefaction, understanding nothing, hearing nothing, Navagin paced about his study. He touched the curtain over the door, three times waved his hands like a jeune premier in a ballet when he sees her, gave a whistle and a meaningless smile, and pointed with his finger into space.

  "So I will send off the article at once, your Excellency," said the secretary.

  These words roused Navagin from his stupour. He looked blankly at the secretary and the sacristan, remembered, and stamping, his foot irritably, screamed in a high, breaking tenor:

  "Leave me in peace! Lea-eave me in peace, I tell you! What you want of me I don't understand."

  The secretary and the sacristan went out of the study and reached the street while he was still stamping and shouting:

  "Leave me in peace! What you want of me I don't understand. Lea-eave me in peace!"

  STRONG IMPRESSIONS

  IT happened not so long ago in the Moscow circuit court. The jurymen, left in the court for the night, before lying down to sleep fell into conversation about strong impressions. They were led to this discussion by recalling a witness who, by his own account, had begun to stammer and had gone grey owing to a terrible moment. The jurymen decided that before going to sleep, each one of them should ransack among his memories and tell something that had happened to him. Man's life is brief, but yet there is no man who cannot boast that there have been terrible moments in his past.

  One juryman told the story of how he was nearly drowned; another described how, in a place where there were neither doctors nor chemists, he had one night poisoned his own son through giving him zinc vitriol by mistake for soda. The child did not die, but the father nearly went out of his mind. A third, a man not old but in bad health, told how he had twice attempted to commit suicide: the first time by shooting himself and the second time by throwing himself before a train.

  The fourth, a foppishly dressed, fat little man, told us the following story:

  "I was not more than twenty-two or twenty-three when I fell head over ears in love with my present wife and made her an offer. Now I could with pleasure thrash myself for my early marriage, but at the time, I don't know what would have become of me if Natasha had refused me. My love was absolutely the real thing, just as it is described in novels—frantic, passionate, and so on. My happiness overwhelmed me and I did not know how to get away from it, and I bored my father and my friends and the servants, continually talking about the fervour of my passion. Happy people are the most sickening bores. I was a fearful bore; I feel ashamed of it even now. . . .