The Tales of Chekhov

by Anton Chekhov

  “Yes, I am,” said Zinaida Fyodorovna, decidedly.

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes, I am jealous,” she repeated, and tears glistened in her eyes. “No, it’s something worse . . . which I find it difficult to find a name for.” She pressed her hands on her temples, and went on impulsively. “You men are so disgusting! It’s horrible!”

  “I see nothing horrible about it.”

  “I’ve not seen it; I don’t know; but they say that you men begin with housemaids as boys, and get so used to it that you feel no repugnance. I don’t know, I don’t know, but I have actually read . . .George, of course you are right,” she said, going up to Orlov and changing to a caressing and imploring tone. “I really am out of humour to-day. But, you must understand, I can’t help it. She disgusts me and I am afraid of her. It makes me miserable to see her.”

  “Surely you can rise above such paltriness?” said Orlov, shrugging his shoulders in perplexity, and walking away from the fire. “Nothing could be simpler: take no notice of her, and then she won’t disgust you, and you won’t need to make a regular tragedy out of a trifle.”

  I went out of the study, and I don’t know what answer Orlov received. Whatever it was, Polya remained. After that Zinaida Fyodorovna never applied to her for anything, and evidently tried to dispense with her services. When Polya handed her anything or even passed by her, jingling her bangle and rustling her skirts, she shuddered.

  I believe that if Gruzin or Pekarsky had asked Orlov to dismiss Polya he would have done so without the slightest hesitation, without troubling about any explanations. He was easily persuaded, like all indifferent people. But in his relations with Zinaida Fyodorovna he displayed for some reason, even in trifles, an obstinacy which sometimes was almost irrational. I knew beforehand that if Zinaida Fyodorovna liked anything, it would be certain not to please Orlov. When on coming in from shopping she made haste to show him with pride some new purchase, he would glance at it and say coldly that the more unnecessary objects they had in the flat, the less airy it would be. It sometimes happened that after putting on his dress clothes to go out somewhere, and after saying good-bye to Zinaida Fyodorovna, he would suddenly change his mind and remain at home from sheer perversity. I used to think that he remained at home then simply in order to feel injured.

  “Why are you staying?” said Zinaida Fyodorovna, with a show of vexation, though at the same time she was radiant with delight. “Why do you? You are not accustomed to spending your evenings at home, and I don’t want you to alter your habits on my account. Do go out as usual, if you don’t want me to feel guilty.”

  “No one is blaming you,” said Orlov.

  With the air of a victim he stretched himself in his easy-chair in the study, and shading his eyes with his hand, took up a book. But soon the book dropped from his hand, he turned heavily in his chair, and again screened his eyes as though from the sun. Now he felt annoyed that he had not gone out.

  “May I come in?” Zinaida Fyodorovna would say, coming irresolutely into the study. “Are you reading? I felt dull by myself, and have come just for a minute . . . to have a peep at you.”

  I remember one evening she went in like that, irresolutely and inappropriately, and sank on the rug at Orlov’s feet, and from her soft, timid movements one could see that she did not understand his mood and was afraid.

  “You are always reading . . .” she said cajolingly, evidently wishing to flatter him. “Do you know, George, what is one of the secrets of your success? You are very clever and well-read. What book have you there?”

  Orlov answered. A silence followed for some minutes which seemed to me very long. I was standing in the drawing-room, from which I could watch them, and was afraid of coughing.

  “There is something I wanted to tell you,” said Zinaida Fyodorovna, and she laughed; “shall I? Very likely you’ll laugh and say that I flatter myself. You know I want, I want horribly to believe that you are staying at home to-night for my sake . . . that we might spend the evening together. Yes? May I think so?”

  “Do,” he said, screening his eyes. “The really happy man is he who thinks not only of what is, but of what is not.”

  “That was a long sentence which I did not quite understand. You mean happy people live in their imagination. Yes, that’s true. I love to sit in your study in the evening and let my thoughts carry me far, far away. . . . It’s pleasant sometimes to dream. Let us dream aloud, George.”

  “I’ve never been at a girls’ boarding-school; I never learnt the art.”

  “You are out of humour?” said Zinaida Fyodorovna, taking Orlov’s hand. “Tell me why. When you are like that, I’m afraid. I don’t know whether your head aches or whether you are angry with me. . . .”

  Again there was a silence lasting several long minutes.

  “Why have you changed?” she said softly. “Why are you never so tender or so gay as you used to be at Znamensky Street? I’ve been with you almost a month, but it seems to me as though we had not yet begun to live, and have not yet talked of anything as we ought to. You always answer me with jokes or else with a long cold lecture like a teacher. And there is something cold in your jokes. . . . Why have you given up talking to me seriously?”

  “I always talk seriously.”

  “Well, then, let us talk. For God’s sake, George. . . . Shall we?”

  “Certainly, but about what?”

  “Let us talk of our life, of our future,” said Zinaida Fyodorovna dreamily. “I keep making plans for our life, plans and plans—and I enjoy doing it so! George, I’ll begin with the question, when are you going to give up your post?”

  “What for?” asked Orlov, taking his hand from his forehead.

  “With your views you cannot remain in the service. You are out of place there.”

  “My views?” Orlov repeated. “My views? In conviction and temperament I am an ordinary official, one of Shtchedrin’s heroes. You take me for something different, I venture to assure you.”

  “Joking again, George!”

  “Not in the least. The service does not satisfy me, perhaps; but, anyway, it is better for me than anything else. I am used to it, and in it I meet men of my own sort; I am in my place there and find it tolerable.”

  “You hate the service and it revolts you.”

  “Indeed? If I resign my post, take to dreaming aloud and letting myself be carried away into another world, do you suppose that that world would be less hateful to me than the service?”

  “You are ready to libel yourself in order to contradict me.” Zinaida Fyodorovna was offended and got up. “I am sorry I began this talk.”

  “Why are you angry? I am not angry with you for not being an official. Every one lives as he likes best.”

  “Why, do you live as you like best? Are you free? To spend your life writing documents that are opposed to your own ideas,” Zinaida Fyodorovna went on, clasping her hands in despair: “to submit to authority, congratulate your superiors at the New Year, and then cards and nothing but cards: worst of all, to be working for a system which must be distasteful to you—no, George, no! You should not make such horrid jokes. It’s dreadful. You are a man of ideas, and you ought to be working for your ideas and nothing else.”

  “You really take me for quite a different person from what I am,” sighed Orlov.

  “Say simply that you don’t want to talk to me. You dislike me, that’s all,” said Zinaida Fyodorovna through her tears.

  “Look here, my dear,” said Orlov admonishingly, sitting up in his chair. “You were pleased to observe yourself that I am a clever, well-read man, and to teach one who knows does nothing but harm. I know very well all the ideas, great and small, which you mean when you call me a man of ideas. So if I prefer the service and cards to those ideas, you may be sure I have good grounds for it. That’s one thing. Secondly, you have, so far as I know, never been in the service, and can only have drawn your ideas of Government service from anecdotes and indifferent novels. So it w
ould not be amiss for us to make a compact, once for all, not to talk of things we know already or of things about which we are not competent to speak.”

  “Why do you speak to me like that?” said Zinaida Fyodorovna, stepping back as though in horror. “What for? George, for God’s sake, think what you are saying!”

  Her voice quivered and broke; she was evidently trying to restrain her tears, but she suddenly broke into sobs.

  “George, my darling, I am perishing!” she said in French, dropping down before Orlov, and laying her head on his knees. “I am miserable, I am exhausted. I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it. . . . In my childhood my hateful, depraved stepmother, then my husband, now you . . . you! . . . You meet my mad love with coldness and irony. . . . And that horrible, insolent servant,” she went on, sobbing. “Yes, yes, I see: I am not your wife nor your friend, but a woman you don’t respect because she has become your mistress. . . . I shall kill myself!”

  I had not expected that her words and her tears would make such an impression on Orlov. He flushed, moved uneasily in his chair, and instead of irony, his face wore a look of stupid, schoolboyish dismay.

  “My darling, you misunderstood me,” he muttered helplessly, touching her hair and her shoulders. “Forgive me, I entreat you. I was unjust and I hate myself.”

  “I insult you with my whining and complaints. You are a true, generous . . . rare man—I am conscious of it every minute; but I’ve been horribly depressed for the last few days. . .”

  Zinaida Fyodorovna impulsively embraced Orlov and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Only please don’t cry,” he said.

  “No, no. . . . I’ve had my cry, and now I am better.”

  “As for the servant, she shall be gone to-morrow,” he said, still moving uneasily in his chair.

  “No, she must stay, George! Do you hear? I am not afraid of her now. . . . One must rise above trifles and not imagine silly things. You are right! You are a wonderful, rare person!”

  She soon left off crying. With tears glistening on her eyelashes, sitting on Orlov’s knee, she told him in a low voice something touching, something like a reminiscence of childhood and youth. She stroked his face, kissed him, and carefully examined his hands with the rings on them and the charms on his watch-chain. She was carried away by what she was saying, and by being near the man she loved, and probably because her tears had cleared and refreshed her soul, there was a note of wonderful candour and sincerity in her voice. And Orlov played with her chestnut hair and kissed her hands, noiselessly pressing them to his lips.

  Then they had tea in the study, and Zinaida Fyodorovna read aloud some letters. Soon after midnight they went to bed. I had a fearful pain in my side that night, and I did not get warm or go to sleep till morning. I could hear Orlov go from the bedroom into his study. After sitting there about an hour, he rang the bell. In my pain and exhaustion I forgot all the rules and conventions, and went to his study in my night attire, barefooted. Orlov, in his dressing-gown and cap, was standing in the doorway, waiting for me.

  “When you are sent for you should come dressed,” he said sternly. “Bring some fresh candles.”

  I was about to apologise, but suddenly broke into a violent cough, and clutched at the side of the door to save myself from falling.

  “Are you ill?” said Orlov.

  I believe it was the first time of our acquaintance that he addressed me not in the singular—goodness knows why. Most likely, in my night clothes and with my face distorted by coughing, I played my part poorly, and was very little like a flunkey.

  “If you are ill, why do you take a place?” he said.

  “That I may not die of starvation,” I answered.

  “How disgusting it all is, really!” he said softly, going up to his table.

  While hurriedly getting into my coat, I put up and lighted fresh candles. He was sitting at the table, with feet stretched out on a low chair, cutting a book.

  I left him deeply engrossed, and the book did not drop out of his hands as it had done in the evening.

  VII

  Now that I am writing these lines I am restrained by that dread of appearing sentimental and ridiculous, in which I have been trained from childhood; when I want to be affectionate or to say anything tender, I don’t know how to be natural. And it is that dread, together with lack of practice, that prevents me from being able to express with perfect clearness what was passing in my soul at that time.

  I was not in love with Zinaida Fyodorovna, but in the ordinary human feeling I had for her, there was far more youth, freshness, and joyousness than in Orlov’s love.

  As I worked in the morning, cleaning boots or sweeping the rooms, I waited with a thrill at my heart for the moment when I should hear her voice and her footsteps. To stand watching her as she drank her coffee in the morning or ate her lunch, to hold her fur coat for her in the hall, and to put the goloshes on her little feet while she rested her hand on my shoulder; then to wait till the hall porter rang up for me, to meet her at the door, cold, and rosy, powdered with the snow, to listen to her brief exclamations about the frost or the cabman—if only you knew how much all that meant to me! I longed to be in love, to have a wife and child of my own. I wanted my future wife to have just such a face, such a voice. I dreamed of it at dinner, and in the street when I was sent on some errand, and when I lay awake at night. Orlov rejected with disgust children, cooking, copper saucepans, and feminine knicknacks and I gathered them all up, tenderly cherished them in my dreams, loved them, and begged them of destiny. I had visions of a wife, a nursery, a little house with garden paths. . . .

  I knew that if I did love her I could never dare hope for the miracle of her returning my love, but that reflection did not worry me. In my quiet, modest feeling akin to ordinary affection, there was no jealousy of Orlov or even envy of him, since I realised that for a wreck like me happiness was only to be found in dreams.

  When Zinaida Fyodorovna sat up night after night for her George, looking immovably at a book of which she never turned a page, or when she shuddered and turned pale at Polya’s crossing the room, I suffered with her, and the idea occurred to me to lance this festering wound as quickly as possible by letting her know what was said here at supper on Thursdays; but—how was it to be done? More and more often I saw her tears. For the first weeks she laughed and sang to herself, even when Orlov was not at home, but by the second month there was a mournful stillness in our flat broken only on Thursday evenings.

  She flattered Orlov, and to wring from him a counterfeit smile or kiss, was ready to go on her knees to him, to fawn on him like a dog. Even when her heart was heaviest, she could not resist glancing into a looking-glass if she passed one and straightening her hair. It seemed strange to me that she could still take an interest in clothes and go into ecstasies over her purchases. It did not seem in keeping with her genuine grief. She paid attention to the fashions and ordered expensive dresses. What for? On whose account? I particularly remember one dress which cost four hundred roubles. To give four hundred roubles for an unnecessary, useless dress while women for their hard day’s work get only twenty kopecks a day without food, and the makers of Venice and Brussels lace are only paid half a franc a day on the supposition that they can earn the rest by immorality! And it seemed strange to me that Zinaida Fyodorovna was not conscious of it; it vexed me. But she had only to go out of the house for me to find excuses and explanations for everything, and to be waiting eagerly for the hall porter to ring for me.

  She treated me as a flunkey, a being of a lower order. One may pat a dog, and yet not notice it; I was given orders and asked questions, but my presence was not observed. My master and mistress thought it unseemly to say more to me than is usually said to servants; if when waiting at dinner I had laughed or put in my word in the conversation, they would certainly have thought I was mad and have dismissed me. Zinaida Fyodorovna was favourably disposed to me, all the same. When she was sending me on some errand or explaining to me
the working of a new lamp or anything of that sort, her face was extraordinarily kind, frank, and cordial, and her eyes looked me straight in the face. At such moments I always fancied she remembered with gratitude how I used to bring her letters to Znamensky Street. When she rang the bell, Polya, who considered me her favourite and hated me for it, used to say with a jeering smile:

  “Go along, your mistress wants you.”

  Zinaida Fyodorovna considered me as a being of a lower order, and did not suspect that if any one in the house were in a humiliating position it was she. She did not know that I, a footman, was unhappy on her account, and used to ask myself twenty times a day what was in store for her and how it would all end. Things were growing visibly worse day by day. After the evening on which they had talked of his official work, Orlov, who could not endure tears, unmistakably began to avoid conversation with her; whenever Zinaida Fyodorovna began to argue, or to beseech him, or seemed on the point of crying, he seized some plausible excuse for retreating to his study or going out. He more and more rarely slept at home, and still more rarely dined there: on Thursdays he was the one to suggest some expedition to his friends. Zinaida Fyodorovna was still dreaming of having the cooking done at home, of moving to a new flat, of travelling abroad, but her dreams remained dreams. Dinner was sent in from the restaurant. Orlov asked her not to broach the question of moving until after they had come back from abroad, and apropos of their foreign tour, declared that they could not go till his hair had grown long, as one could not go trailing from hotel to hotel and serving the idea without long hair.

  To crown it all, in Orlov’s absence, Kukushkin began calling at the flat in the evening. There was nothing exceptional in his behaviour, but I could never forget the conversation in which he had offered to cut Orlov out. He was regaled with tea and red wine, and he used to titter and, anxious to say something pleasant, would declare that a free union was superior in every respect to legal marriage, and that all decent people ought really to come to Zinaida Fyodorovna and fall at her feet.