Tales of Chekhov

by Anton Chekhov

  “A spring .. . er . . . yes. . . . We just drove up. . . .”

  “Overwhelm her, I tell you! She will guess if you go drawing it out.”

  “Oh, do as you like, but spare me,” muttered Tchubikov, getting up and walking to the window. “I can’t! You cooked the mess, you eat it!”

  “Yes, the spring,” Dyukovsky began, going up to the superintendent’s wife and wrinkling his long nose. “We have not come in to . . . er-er-er . . . supper, nor to see Yevgraf Kuzmitch. We have come to ask you, madam, where is Mark Ivanovitch whom you have murdered?”

  “What? What Mark Ivanovitch?” faltered the superintendent’s wife, and her full face was suddenly in one instant suffused with crimson. “I . . . don’t understand.”

  “I ask you in the name of the law! Where is Klyauzov? We know all about it!”

  “Through whom?” the superintendent’s wife asked slowly, unable to face Dyukovsky’s eyes.

  “Kindly inform us where he is!”

  “But how did you find out? Who told you?”

  “We know all about it. I insist in the name of the law.”

  The examining magistrate, encouraged by the lady’s confusion, went up to her.

  “Tell us and we will go away. Otherwise we . . .”

  “What do you want with him?”

  “What is the object of such questions, madam? We ask you for information. You are trembling, confused. . . . Yes, he has been murdered, and if you will have it, murdered by you! Your accomplices have betrayed you!”

  The police superintendent’s wife turned pale.

  “Come along,” she said quietly, wringing her hands. “He is hidden in the bath-house. Only for God’s sake, don’t tell my husband! I implore you! It would be too much for him.”

  The superintendent’s wife took a big key from the wall, and led her visitors through the kitchen and the passage into the yard. It was dark in the yard. There was a drizzle of fine rain. The superintendent’s wife went on ahead. Tchubikov and Dyukovsky strode after her through the long grass, breathing in the smell of wild hemp and slops, which made a squelching sound under their feet. It was a big yard. Soon there were no more pools of slops, and their feet felt ploughed land. In the darkness they saw the silhouette of trees, and among the trees a little house with a crooked chimney.

  “This is the bath-house,” said the superintendent’s wife, “but, I implore you, do not tell anyone.”

  Going up to the bath-house, Tchubikov and Dyukovsky saw a large padlock on the door.

  “Get ready your candle-end and matches,” Tchubikov whispered to his assistant.

  The superintendent’s wife unlocked the padlock and let the visitors into the bath-house. Dyukovsky struck a match and lighted up the entry. In the middle of it stood a table. On the table, beside a podgy little samovar, was a soup tureen with some cold cabbage-soup in it, and a dish with traces of some sauce on it.

  “Go on!”

  They went into the next room, the bath-room. There, too, was a table. On the table there stood a big dish of ham, a bottle of vodka, plates, knives and forks.

  “But where is he . . . where’s the murdered man?”

  “He is on the top shelf,” whispered the superintendent’s wife, turning paler than ever and trembling.

  Dyukovsky took the candle-end in his hand and climbed up to the upper shelf. There he saw a long, human body, lying motionless on a big feather bed. The body emitted a faint snore. . . .

  “They have made fools of us, damn it all!” Dyukovsky cried. “This is not he! It is some living blockhead lying here. Hi! who are you, damnation take you!”

  The body drew in its breath with a whistling sound and moved. Dyukovsky prodded it with his elbow. It lifted up its arms, stretched, and raised its head.

  “Who is that poking?” a hoarse, ponderous bass voice inquired. “What do you want?”

  Dyukovsky held the candle-end to the face of the unknown and uttered a shriek. In the crimson nose, in the ruffled, uncombed hair, in the pitch-black moustaches of which one was jauntily twisted and pointed insolently towards the ceiling, he recognised Cornet Klyauzov.

  “You. . . . Mark . . . Ivanitch! Impossible!”

  The examining magistrate looked up and was dumbfoundered.

  “It is I, yes. . . . And it’s you, Dyukovsky! What the devil do you want here? And whose ugly mug is that down there? Holy Saints, it’s the examining magistrate! How in the world did you come here?”

  Klyauzov hurriedly got down and embraced Tchubikov. Olga Petrovna whisked out of the door.

  “However did you come? Let’s have a drink!—dash it all! Tra-ta-ti-to-tom . . . . Let’s have a drink! Who brought you here, though? How did you get to know I was here? It doesn’t matter, though! Have a drink!”

  Klyauzov lighted the lamp and poured out three glasses of vodka.

  “The fact is, I don’t understand you,” said the examining magistrate, throwing out his hands. “Is it you, or not you?”

  “Stop that. . . . Do you want to give me a sermon? Don’t trouble yourself! Dyukovsky boy, drink up your vodka! Friends, let us pass the . . . What are you staring at . . . ? Drink!”

  “All the same, I can’t understand,” said the examining magistrate, mechanically drinking his vodka. “Why are you here?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be here, if I am comfortable here?”

  Klyauzov sipped his vodka and ate some ham.

  “I am staying with the superintendent’s wife, as you see. In the wilds among the ruins, like some house goblin. Drink! I felt sorry for her, you know, old man! I took pity on her, and, well, I am living here in the deserted bath-house, like a hermit. . . . I am well fed. Next week I am thinking of moving on. . . . I’ve had enough of it. . . .”

  “Inconceivable!” said Dyukovsky.

  “What is there inconceivable in it?”

  “Inconceivable! For God’s sake, how did your boot get into the garden?”

  “What boot?”

  “We found one of your boots in the bedroom and the other in the garden.”

  “And what do you want to know that for? It is not your business. But do drink, dash it all. Since you have waked me up, you may as well drink! There’s an interesting tale about that boot, my boy. I didn’t want to come to Olga’s. I didn’t feel inclined, you know, I’d had a drop too much. . . . She came under the window and began scolding me. . . . You know how women . . . as a rule. Being drunk, I up and flung my boot at her. Ha-ha! . . . ‘Don’t scold,’ I said. She clambered in at the window, lighted the lamp, and gave me a good drubbing, as I was drunk. I have plenty to eat here. . . . Love, vodka, and good things! But where are you off to? Tchubikov, where are you off to?”

  The examining magistrate spat on the floor and walked out of the bath-house. Dyukovsky followed him with his head hanging. Both got into the waggonette in silence and drove off. Never had the road seemed so long and dreary. Both were silent. Tchubikov was shaking with anger all the way. Dyukovsky hid his face in his collar as though he were afraid the darkness and the drizzling rain might read his shame on his face.

  On getting home the examining magistrate found the doctor, Tyutyuev, there. The doctor was sitting at the table and heaving deep sighs as he turned over the pages of the Neva.

  “The things that are going on in the world,” he said, greeting the examining magistrate with a melancholy smile. “Austria is at it again . . . and Gladstone, too, in a way. . . .”

  Tchubikov flung his hat under the table and began to tremble.

  “You devil of a skeleton! Don’t bother me! I’ve told you a thousand times over, don’t bother me with your politics! It’s not the time for politics! And as for you,” he turned upon Dyukovsky and shook his fist at him, “as for you. . . . I’ll never forget it, as long as I live!”

  “But the Swedish match, you know! How could I tell. . . .”

  “Choke yourself with your match! Go away and don’t irritate me, or goodness knows what I shall do to you. Don’t let me se
t eyes on you.”

  Dyukovsky heaved a sigh, took his hat, and went out.

  “I’ll go and get drunk!” he decided, as he went out of the gate, and he sauntered dejectedly towards the tavern.

  When the superintendent’s wife got home from the bath-house she found her husband in the drawing-room.

  “What did the examining magistrate come about?” asked her husband.

  “He came to say that they had found Klyauzov. Only fancy, they found him staying with another man’s wife.”

  “Ah, Mark Ivanitch, Mark Ivanitch!” sighed the police superintendent, turning up his eyes. “I told you that dissipation would lead to no good! I told you so—you wouldn’t heed me!”

  Volume 13

  Love and Other Stories

  Love

  “

  Three o’clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can’t sleep, I am so happy!

  “My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange, incomprehensible feeling. I can’t analyse it just now—I haven’t the time, I’m too lazy, and there—hang analysis! Why, is a man likely to interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost from a belfry, or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand? Is he in a state to do it?”

  This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girl of nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times, and as often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, and copied it all over again. I spent as long over the letter as if it had been a novel I had to write to order. And it was not because I tried to make it longer, more elaborate, and more fervent, but because I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of one’s study and communes with one’s own day-dreams while the spring night looks in at one’s window. Between the lines I saw a beloved image, and it seemed to me that there were, sitting at the same table writing with me, spirits as naïvely happy, as foolish, and as blissfully smiling as I. I wrote continually, looking at my hand, which still ached deliciously where hers had lately pressed it, and if I turned my eyes away I had a vision of the green trellis of the little gate. Through that trellis Sasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I was saying good-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply admiring her figure as every decent man admires a pretty woman; when I saw through the trellis two big eyes, I suddenly, as though by inspiration, knew that I was in love, that it was all settled between us, and fully decided already, that I had nothing left to do but to carry out certain formalities.

  It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly putting on one’s hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the treasure to the post. There are no stars in the sky now: in their place there is a long whitish streak in the east, broken here and there by clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses; from that streak the whole sky is flooded with pale light. The town is asleep, but already the water-carts have come out, and somewhere in a far-away factory a whistle sounds to wake up the workpeople. Beside the postbox, slightly moist with dew, you are sure to see the clumsy figure of a house porter, wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin and carrying a stick. He is in a condition akin to catalepsy: he is not asleep or awake, but something between.

  If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decision of their fate, they would not have such a humble air. I, anyway, almost kissed my postbox, and as I gazed at it I reflected that the post is the greatest of blessings.

  I beg anyone who has ever been in love to remember how one usually hurries home after dropping the letter in the box, rapidly gets into bed and pulls up the quilt in the full conviction that as soon as one wakes up in the morning one will be overwhelmed with memories of the previous day and look with rapture at the window, where the daylight will be eagerly making its way through the folds of the curtain.

  Well, to facts. . . . Next morning at midday, Sasha’s maid brought me the following answer: “I am delited be sure to come to us to day please I shall expect you. Your S.”

  Not a single comma. This lack of punctuation, and the misspelling of the word “delighted,” the whole letter, and even the long, narrow envelope in which it was put filled my heart with tenderness. In the sprawling but diffident handwriting I recognised Sasha’s walk, her way of raising her eyebrows when she laughed, the movement of her lips. . . . But the contents of the letter did not satisfy me. In the first place, poetical letters are not answered in that way, and in the second, why should I go to Sasha’s house to wait till it should occur to her stout mamma, her brothers, and poor relations to leave us alone together? It would never enter their heads, and nothing is more hateful than to have to restrain one’s raptures simply because of the intrusion of some animate trumpery in the shape of a half-deaf old woman or little girl pestering one with questions. I sent an answer by the maid asking Sasha to select some park or boulevard for a rendezvous. My suggestion was readily accepted. I had struck the right chord, as the saying is.

  Between four and five o’clock in the afternoon I made my way to the furthest and most overgrown part of the park. There was not a soul in the park, and the tryst might have taken place somewhere nearer in one of the avenues or arbours, but women don’t like doing it by halves in romantic affairs; in for a penny, in for a pound—if you are in for a tryst, let it be in the furthest and most impenetrable thicket, where one runs the risk of stumbling upon some rough or drunken man. When I went up to Sasha she was standing with her back to me, and in that back I could read a devilish lot of mystery. It seemed as though that back and the nape of her neck, and the black spots on her dress were saying: Hush! . . . The girl was wearing a simple cotton dress over which she had thrown a light cape. To add to the air of mysterious secrecy, her face was covered with a white veil. Not to spoil the effect, I had to approach on tiptoe and speak in a half whisper.

  From what I remember now, I was not so much the essential point of the rendezvous as a detail of it. Sasha was not so much absorbed in the interview itself as in its romantic mysteriousness, my kisses, the silence of the gloomy trees, my vows. . . . There was not a minute in which she forgot herself, was overcome, or let the mysterious expression drop from her face, and really if there had been any Ivan Sidoritch or Sidor Ivanitch in my place she would have felt just as happy. How is one to make out in such circumstances whether one is loved or not? Whether the love is “the real thing” or not?

  From the park I took Sasha home with me. The presence of the beloved woman in one’s bachelor quarters affects one like wine and music. Usually one begins to speak of the future, and the confidence and self-reliance with which one does so is beyond bounds. You make plans and projects, talk fervently of the rank of general though you have not yet reached the rank of a lieutenant, and altogether you fire off such high-flown nonsense that your listener must have a great deal of love and ignorance of life to assent to it. Fortunately for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life. Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac’s words. Sasha listened to me with attention, but I soon detected an absent-minded expression on her face, she did not understand me. The future of which I talked interested her only in its external aspect and I was wasting time in displaying my plans and projects before her. She was keenly interested in knowing which would be her room, what paper she would have in the room, why I had an upright piano instead of a grand piano, and so on. She examined carefully all the little things on my table, looked at the photographs, sniffed at the bottles, peeled the old stamps off the envelopes, saying she wanted them for something.

  “Please collect old stamps for me!” she said, making a grave face. “Please do.”

  Then she found a nut in the window, noisily cracked it and ate it.

  “Why don’t you stick little labels on the backs of your books?” she asked, taking a look at the b
ookcase.

  “What for?”

  “Oh, so that each book should have its number. And where am I to put my books? I’ve got books too, you know.”

  “What books have you got?” I asked.

  Sasha raised her eyebrows, thought a moment and said:

  “All sorts.”

  And if it had entered my head to ask her what thoughts, what convictions, what aims she had, she would no doubt have raised her eyebrows, thought a minute, and have said in the same way: “All sorts.”

  Later I saw Sasha home and left her house regularly, officially engaged, and was so reckoned till our wedding. If the reader will allow me to judge merely from my personal experience, I maintain that to be engaged is very dreary, far more so than to be a husband or nothing at all. An engaged man is neither one thing nor the other, he has left one side of the river and not reached the other, he is not married and yet he can’t be said to be a bachelor, but is in something not unlike the condition of the porter whom I have mentioned above.

  Every day as soon as I had a free moment I hastened to my fiancée. As I went I usually bore within me a multitude of hopes, desires, intentions, suggestions, phrases. I always fancied that as soon as the maid opened the door I should, from feeling oppressed and stifled, plunge at once up to my neck into a sea of refreshing happiness. But it always turned out otherwise in fact. Every time I went to see my fiancée I found all her family and other members of the household busy over the silly trousseau. (And by the way, they were hard at work sewing for two months and then they had less than a hundred roubles’ worth of things). There was a smell of irons, candle grease and fumes. Bugles scrunched under one’s feet. The two most important rooms were piled up with billows of linen, calico, and muslin and from among the billows peeped out Sasha’s little head with a thread between her teeth. All the sewing party welcomed me with cries of delight but at once led me off into the dining-room where I could not hinder them nor see what only husbands are permitted to behold. In spite of my feelings, I had to sit in the dining-room and converse with Pimenovna, one of the poor relations. Sasha, looking worried and excited, kept running by me with a thimble, a skein of wool or some other boring object.