Tales of Chekhov

by Anton Chekhov

  “And what is the sum owing?” asked Susanna Moiseyevna.

  “Two thousand three hundred.”

  “Oho!” said the Jewess, showing another large black eye. “And you call that—a small sum! However, it’s just the same paying it to-day or paying it in a week, but I’ve had so many payments to make in the last two months since my father’s death. . . . Such a lot of stupid business, it makes my head go round! A nice idea! I want to go abroad, and they keep forcing me to attend to these silly things. Vodka, oats . . .” she muttered, half closing her eyes, “oats, bills, percentages, or, as my head-clerk says, ‘percentage.’ . . . It’s awful. Yesterday I simply turned the excise officer out. He pesters me with his Tralles. I said to him: ‘Go to the devil with your Tralles! I can’t see any one!’ He kissed my hand and went away. I tell you what: can’t your cousin wait two or three months?”

  “A cruel question!” laughed the lieutenant. “My cousin can wait a year, but it’s I who cannot wait! You see, it’s on my own account I’m acting, I ought to tell you. At all costs I must have money, and by ill-luck my cousin hasn’t a rouble to spare. I’m forced to ride about and collect debts. I’ve just been to see a peasant, our tenant; here I’m now calling on you; from here I shall go on to somewhere else, and keep on like that until I get together five thousand roubles. I need money awfully!”

  “Nonsense! What does a young man want with money? Whims, mischief. Why, have you been going in for dissipation? Or losing at cards? Or are you getting married?”

  “You’ve guessed!” laughed the lieutenant, and rising slightly from his seat, he clinked his spurs. “I really am going to be married.”

  Susanna Moiseyevna looked intently at her visitor, made a wry face, and sighed.

  “I can’t make out what possesses people to get married!” she said, looking about her for her pocket-handkerchief. “Life is so short, one has so little freedom, and they must put chains on themselves!”

  “Every one has his own way of looking at things. . . .”

  “Yes, yes, of course; every one has his own way of looking at things . . . . But, I say, are you really going to marry some one poor? Are you passionately in love? And why must you have five thousand? Why won’t four do, or three?”

  “What a tongue she has!” thought the lieutenant, and answered: “The difficulty is that an officer is not allowed by law to marry till he is twenty-eight; if you choose to marry, you have to leave the Service or else pay a deposit of five thousand.”

  “Ah, now I understand. Listen. You said just now that every one has his own way of looking at things. . . . Perhaps your fiancée is some one special and remarkable, but . . . but I am utterly unable to understand how any decent man can live with a woman. I can’t for the life of me understand it. I have lived, thank the Lord, twenty-seven years, and I have never yet seen an endurable woman. They’re all affected minxes, immoral, liars. . . . The only ones I can put up with are cooks and housemaids, but so-called ladies I won’t let come within shooting distance of me. But, thank God, they hate me and don’t force themselves on me! If one of them wants money she sends her husband, but nothing will induce her to come herself, not from pride—no, but from cowardice; she’s afraid of my making a scene. Oh, I understand their hatred very well! Rather! I openly display what they do their very utmost to conceal from God and man. How can they help hating me? No doubt you’ve heard bushels of scandal about me already. . . .”

  “I only arrived here so lately . . .”

  “Tut, tut, tut! . . . I see from your eyes! But your brother’s wife, surely she primed you for this expedition? Think of letting a young man come to see such an awful woman without warning him—how could she? Ha, ha! . . . But tell me, how is your brother? He’s a fine fellow, such a handsome man! . . . I’ve seen him several times at mass. Why do you look at me like that? I very often go to church! We all have the same God. To an educated person externals matter less than the idea. . . . That’s so, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course . . .” smiled the lieutenant.

  “Yes, the idea. . . . But you are not a bit like your brother. You are handsome, too, but your brother is a great deal better-looking. There’s wonderfully little likeness!”

  “That’s quite natural; he’s not my brother, but my cousin.”

  “Ah, to be sure! So you must have the money to-day? Why to-day?”

  “My furlough is over in a few days.”

  “Well, what’s to be done with you!” sighed Susanna Moiseyevna. “So be it. I’ll give you the money, though I know you’ll abuse me for it afterwards. You’ll quarrel with your wife after you are married, and say: ‘If that mangy Jewess hadn’t given me the money, I should perhaps have been as free as a bird to-day!” Is your fiancée pretty?“

  “Oh yes. . . .”

  “H’m! . . . Anyway, better something, if it’s only beauty, than nothing. Though however beautiful a woman is, it can never make up to her husband for her silliness.”

  “That’s original!” laughed the lieutenant. “You are a woman yourself, and such a woman-hater!”

  “A woman . . .” smiled Susanna. “It’s not my fault that God has cast me into this mould, is it? I’m no more to blame for it than you are for having moustaches. The violin is not responsible for the choice of its case. I am very fond of myself, but when any one reminds me that I am a woman, I begin to hate myself. Well, you can go away, and I’ll dress. Wait for me in the drawing-room.”

  The lieutenant went out, and the first thing he did was to draw a deep breath, to get rid of the heavy scent of jasmine, which had begun to irritate his throat and to make him feel giddy.

  “What a strange woman!” he thought, looking about him. “She talks fluently, but . . . far too much, and too freely. She must be neurotic.”

  The drawing-room, in which he was standing now, was richly furnished, and had pretensions to luxury and style. There were dark bronze dishes with patterns in relief, views of Nice and the Rhine on the tables, old-fashioned sconces, Japanese statuettes, but all this striving after luxury and style only emphasised the lack of taste which was glaringly apparent in the gilt cornices, the gaudy wall-paper, the bright velvet table-cloths, the common oleographs in heavy frames. The bad taste of the general effect was the more complete from the lack of finish and the overcrowding of the room, which gave one a feeling that something was lacking, and that a great deal should have been thrown away. It was evident that the furniture had not been bought all at once, but had been picked up at auctions and other favourable opportunities.

  Heaven knows what taste the lieutenant could boast of, but even he noticed one characteristic peculiarity about the whole place, which no luxury or style could efface—a complete absence of all trace of womanly, careful hands, which, as we all know, give a warmth, poetry, and snugness to the furnishing of a room. There was a chilliness about it such as one finds in waiting-rooms at stations, in clubs, and foyers at the theatres.

  There was scarcely anything in the room definitely Jewish, except, perhaps, a big picture of the meeting of Jacob and Esau. The lieutenant looked round about him, and, shrugging his shoulders, thought of his strange, new acquaintance, of her free-and-easy manners, and her way of talking. But then the door opened, and in the doorway appeared the lady herself, in a long black dress, so slim and tightly laced that her figure looked as though it had been turned in a lathe. Now the lieutenant saw not only the nose and eyes, but also a thin white face, a head black and as curly as lamb’s-wool. She did not attract him, though she did not strike him as ugly. He had a prejudice against un-Russian faces in general, and he considered, too, that the lady’s white face, the whiteness of which for some reason suggested the cloying scent of jasmine, did not go well with her little black curls and thick eyebrows; that her nose and ears were astoundingly white, as though they belonged to a corpse, or had been moulded out of transparent wax. When she smiled she showed pale gums as well as her teeth, and he did not like that either.

  “Anæmic d
ebility . . .” he thought; “she’s probably as nervous as a turkey.”

  “Here I am! Come along!” she said, going on rapidly ahead of him and pulling off the yellow leaves from the plants as she passed.

  “I’ll give you the money directly, and if you like I’ll give you some lunch. Two thousand three hundred roubles! After such a good stroke of business you’ll have an appetite for your lunch. Do you like my rooms? The ladies about here declare that my rooms always smell of garlic. With that culinary gibe their stock of wit is exhausted. I hasten to assure you that I’ve no garlic even in the cellar. And one day when a doctor came to see me who smelt of garlic, I asked him to take his hat and go and spread his fragrance elsewhere. There is no smell of garlic here, but the place does smell of drugs. My father lay paralyzed for a year and a half, and the whole house smelt of medicine. A year and a half! I was sorry to lose him, but I’m glad he’s dead: he suffered so!”

  She led the officer through two rooms similar to the drawing-room, through a large reception hall, and came to a stop in her study, where there was a lady’s writing-table covered with little knick-knacks. On the carpet near it several books lay strewn about, opened and folded back. Through a small door leading from the study he saw a table laid for lunch.

  Still chatting, Susanna took out of her pocket a bunch of little keys and unlocked an ingeniously made cupboard with a curved, sloping lid. When the lid was raised the cupboard emitted a plaintive note which made the lieutenant think of an Æolian harp. Susanna picked out another key and clicked another lock.

  “I have underground passages here and secret doors,” she said, taking out a small morocco portfolio. “It’s a funny cupboard, isn’t it? And in this portfolio I have a quarter of my fortune. Look how podgy it is! You won’t strangle me, will you?”

  Susanna raised her eyes to the lieutenant and laughed good-naturedly. The lieutenant laughed too.

  “She’s rather jolly,” he thought, watching the keys flashing between her fingers.

  “Here it is,” she said, picking out the key of the portfolio. “Now, Mr. Creditor, trot out the IOU. What a silly thing money is really! How paltry it is, and yet how women love it! I am a Jewess, you know, to the marrow of my bones. I am passionately fond of Shmuls and Yankels, but how I loathe that passion for gain in our Semitic blood. They hoard and they don’t know what they are hoarding for. One ought to live and enjoy oneself, but they’re afraid of spending an extra farthing. In that way I am more like an hussar than a Shmul. I don’t like money to be kept long in one place. And altogether I fancy I’m not much like a Jewess. Does my accent give me away much, eh?”

  “What shall I say?” mumbled the lieutenant. “You speak good Russian, but you do roll your r’s.”

  Susanna laughed and put the little key in the lock of the portfolio. The lieutenant took out of his pocket a little roll of IOUs and laid them with a notebook on the table.

  “Nothing betrays a Jew as much as his accent,” Susanna went on, looking gaily at the lieutenant. “However much he twists himself into a Russian or a Frenchman, ask him to say ‘feather’ and he will say ‘fedder’ . . . but I pronounce it correctly: ‘Feather! feather! feather!’”

  Both laughed.

  “By Jove, she’s very jolly!” thought Sokolsky.

  Susanna put the portfolio on a chair, took a step towards the lieutenant, and bringing her face close to his, went on gaily:

  “Next to the Jews I love no people so much as the Russian and the French. I did not do much at school and I know no history, but it seems to me that the fate of the world lies in the hands of those two nations. I lived a long time abroad. . . . I spent six months in Madrid. . . . I’ve gazed my fill at the public, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that there are no decent peoples except the Russian and the French. Take the languages, for instance. . . . The German language is like the neighing of horses; as for the English . . . you can’t imagine anything stupider. Fight—feet—foot! Italian is only pleasant when they speak it slowly. If you listen to Italians gabbling, you get the effect of the Jewish jargon. And the Poles? Mercy on us! There’s no language so disgusting! ‘Nie pieprz, Pietrze, pieprzem wieprza bo mozeoz przepieprzyé wieprza pieprzem.’ That means: ‘Don’t pepper a sucking pig with pepper, Pyotr, or perhaps you’ll over-pepper the sucking pig with pepper.’ Ha, ha, ha!”

  Susanna Moiseyevna rolled her eyes and broke into such a pleasant, infectious laugh that the lieutenant, looking at her, went off into a loud and merry peal of laughter. She took the visitor by the button, and went on:

  “You don’t like Jews, of course . . . they’ve many faults, like all nations. I don’t dispute that. But are the Jews to blame for it? No, it’s not the Jews who are to blame, but the Jewish women! They are narrow-minded, greedy; there’s no sort of poetry about them, they’re dull. . . . You have never lived with a Jewess, so you don’t know how charming it is!” Susanna Moiseyevna pronounced the last words with deliberate emphasis and with no eagerness or laughter. She paused as though frightened at her own openness, and her face was suddenly distorted in a strange, unaccountable way. Her eyes stared at the lieutenant without blinking, her lips parted and showed clenched teeth. Her whole face, her throat, and even her bosom, seemed quivering with a spiteful, catlike expression. Still keeping her eyes fixed on her visitor, she rapidly bent to one side, and swiftly, like a cat, snatched something from the table. All this was the work of a few seconds. Watching her movements, the lieutenant saw five fingers crumple up his IOUs and caught a glimpse of the white rustling paper as it disappeared in her clenched fist. Such an extraordinary transition from good-natured laughter to crime so appalled him that he turned pale and stepped back. . . .

  And she, still keeping her frightened, searching eyes upon him, felt along her hip with her clenched fist for her pocket. Her fist struggled convulsively for the pocket, like a fish in the net, and could not find the opening. In another moment the IOUs would have vanished in the recesses of her feminine garments, but at that point the lieutenant uttered a faint cry, and, moved more by instinct than reflection, seized the Jewess by her arm above the clenched fist. Showing her teeth more than ever, she struggled with all her might and pulled her hand away. Then Sokolsky put his right arm firmly round her waist, and the other round her chest and a struggle followed. Afraid of outraging her sex or hurting her, he tried only to prevent her moving, and to get hold of the fist with the IOUs; but she wriggled like an eel in his arms with her supple, flexible body, struck him in the chest with her elbows, and scratched him, so that he could not help touching her all over, and was forced to hurt her and disregard her modesty.

  “How unusual this is! How strange!” he thought, utterly amazed, hardly able to believe his senses, and feeling rather sick from the scent of jasmine.

  In silence, breathing heavily, stumbling against the furniture, they moved about the room. Susanna was carried away by the struggle. She flushed, closed her eyes, and forgetting herself, once even pressed her face against the face of the lieutenant, so that there was a sweetish taste left on his lips. At last he caught hold of her clenched hand. . . . Forcing it open, and not finding the papers in it, he let go the Jewess. With flushed faces and dishevelled hair, they looked at one another, breathing hard. The spiteful, catlike expression on the Jewess’s face was gradually replaced by a good-natured smile. She burst out laughing, and turning on one foot, went towards the room where lunch was ready. The lieutenant moved slowly after her. She sat down to the table, and, still flushed and breathing hard, tossed off half a glass of port.

  “Listen”—the lieutenant broke the silence—“I hope you are joking?”

  “Not a bit of it,” she answered, thrusting a piece of bread into her mouth.

  “H’m! . . . How do you wish me to take all this?”

  “As you choose. Sit down and have lunch!”

  “But . . . it’s dishonest!”

  “Perhaps. But don’t trouble to give me a sermon; I have my own way of looking at thin
gs.”

  “Won’t you give them back?”

  “Of course not! If you were a poor unfortunate man, with nothing to eat, then it would be a different matter. But—he wants to get married!”

  “It’s not my money, you know; it’s my cousin’s!”

  “And what does your cousin want with money? To get fashionable clothes for his wife? But I really don’t care whether your belle-soeur has dresses or not.”

  The lieutenant had ceased to remember that he was in a strange house with an unknown lady, and did not trouble himself with decorum. He strode up and down the room, scowled and nervously fingered his waistcoat. The fact that the Jewess had lowered herself in his eyes by her dishonest action, made him feel bolder and more free-and-easy.

  “The devil knows what to make of it!” he muttered. “Listen. I shan’t go away from here until I get the IOUs!”

  “Ah, so much the better,” laughed Susanna. “If you stay here for good, it will make it livelier for me.”

  Excited by the struggle, the lieutenant looked at Susanna’s laughing, insolent face, at her munching mouth, at her heaving bosom, and grew bolder and more audacious. Instead of thinking about the IOU he began for some reason recalling with a sort of relish his cousin’s stories of the Jewess’s romantic adventures, of her free way of life, and these reminiscences only provoked him to greater audacity. Impulsively he sat down beside the Jewess and thinking no more of the IOUs began to eat. . . .

  “Will you have vodka or wine?” Susanna asked with a laugh. “So you will stay till you get the IOUs? Poor fellow! How many days and nights you will have to spend with me, waiting for those IOUs! Won’t your fiancée have something to say about it?”

  II

  Five hours had passed. The lieutenant’s cousin, Alexey Ivanovitch Kryukov was walking about the rooms of his country-house in his dressing-gown and slippers, and looking impatiently out of window. He was a tall, sturdy man, with a large black beard and a manly face; and as the Jewess had truly said, he was handsome, though he had reached the age when men are apt to grow too stout, puffy, and bald. By mind and temperament he was one of those natures in which the Russian intellectual classes are so rich: warm-hearted, good-natured, well-bred, having some knowledge of the arts and sciences, some faith, and the most chivalrous notions about honour, but indolent and lacking in depth. He was fond of good eating and drinking, was an ideal whist-player, was a connoisseur in women and horses, but in other things he was apathetic and sluggish as a seal, and to rouse him from his lethargy something extraordinary and quite revolting was needed, and then he would forget everything in the world and display intense activity; he would fume and talk of a duel, write a petition of seven pages to a Minister, gallop at breakneck speed about the district, call some one publicly “a scoundrel,” would go to law, and so on.