Peasants and Other Stories

by Anton Chekhov

  I was making my way to my hostess; I had to pay my respects to her, but suddenly everyone said “Hush!” and waved me to step quietly. There was a silence. The lid of the piano was raised; a lady sat down at it, screwing up her shortsighted eyes at the music, and my Masha walked up to the piano, in a low-necked dress, looking beautiful, but with a special, new sort of beauty not in the least like the Masha who used to come and meet me in the spring at the mill. She sang: “Why do I love the radiant night?”

  It was the first time during our whole acquaintance that I had heard her sing. She had a fine, mellow, powerful voice, and while she sang I felt as though I were eating a ripe, sweet, fragrant melon. She ended, the audience applauded, and she smiled, very much pleased, making play with her eyes, turning over the music, smoothing her skirts, like a bird that has at last broken out of its cage and preens its wings in freedom. Her hair was arranged over her ears, and she had an unpleasant, defiant expression in her face, as though she wanted to throw down a challenge to us all, or to shout to us as she did to her horses: “Hey, there, my beauties!”

  And she must at that moment have been very much like her grandfather the sledge driver.

  “You here too?” she said, giving me her hand. “Did you hear me sing? Well, what did you think of it?” and without waiting for my answer she went on: “It’s a very good thing you are here. I am going tonight to Petersburg for a short time. You’ll let me go, won’t you?”

  At midnight I went with her to the station. She embraced me affectionately, probably feeling grateful to me for not asking unnecessary questions, and she promised to write to me, and I held her hands a long time, and kissed them, hardly able to restrain my tears and not uttering a word.

  And when she had gone I stood watching the retreating lights, caressing her in imagination and softly murmuring:

  “My darling Masha, glorious Masha . . .”

  I spent the night at Karpovna’s, and next morning I was at work with Radish, re-covering the furniture of a rich merchant who was marrying his daughter to a doctor.

  17.

  My sister came after dinner on Sunday and had tea with me.

  “I read a great deal now,” she said, showing me the books which she had fetched from the public library on her way to me. “Thanks to your wife and to Vladimir, they have awakened me to self-realization. They have been my salvation; they have made me feel myself a human being. In old days I used to lie awake at night with worries of all sorts, thinking what a lot of sugar we had used in the week, or hoping the cucumbers would not be too salt. And now, too, I lie awake at night, but I have different thoughts. I am distressed that half my life has been passed in such a foolish, cowardly way. I despise my past; I am ashamed of it. And look upon our father now as my enemy. Oh, how grateful I am to your wife! And Vladimir! He is such a wonderful person! They have opened my eyes!”

  “That’s bad that you don’t sleep at night,” I said.

  “Do you think I am ill? Not at all. Vladimir sounded me, and said I was perfectly well. But health is not what matters, it is not so important. . . . Tell me: am I right?”

  She needed moral support, that was obvious. Masha had gone away. Dr. Blagovo was in Petersburg, and there was no one left in the town but me to tell her she was right. She looked intently into my face, trying to read my secret thoughts, and if I were absorbed or silent in her presence, she thought this was on her account and was grieved. I always had to be on my guard, and when she asked me whether she was right I hastened to assure her that she was right, and that I had a deep respect for her.

  “Do you know they have given me a part at the Azhogins’?” she went on. “I want to act on the stage, I want to live—in fact, I mean to drain the full cup. I have no talent, none, and the part is only ten lines, but still this is immeasurably finer and loftier than pouring out tea five times a day, and looking to see if the cook has eaten too much. Above all, let my father see I am capable of protest.”

  After tea she lay down on my bed, and lay for a little while with her eyes closed, looking very pale.

  “What weakness,” she said, getting up. “Vladimir says all city-bred women and girls are anemic from doing nothing. What a clever man Vladimir is! He is right, absolutely right. We must work!”

  Two days later she came to the Azhogins’ with her manuscript for the rehearsal. She was wearing a black dress with a string of coral round her neck, and a brooch that in the distance was like a pastry puff, and in her ears earrings sparkling with brilliants. When I looked at her I felt uncomfortable. I was struck by her lack of taste. That she had very inappropriately put on earrings and brilliants, and that she was strangely dressed, was remarked by other people too; I saw smiles on people’s faces, and heard someone say with a laugh: “Kleopatra of Egypt.”

  She was trying to assume society manners, to be unconstrained and at her ease, and so seemed artificial and strange. She had lost simplicity and sweetness.

  “I told Father just now that I was going to the rehearsal,” she began, coming up to me, “and he shouted that he would not give me his blessing, and actually almost struck me. Only fancy, I don’t know my part,” she said, looking at her manuscript. “I am sure to make a mess of it. So be it, the die is cast,” she went on in intense excitement. “The die is cast. . . .”

  It seemed to her that everyone was looking at her, and that all were amazed at the momentous step she had taken, that everyone was expecting something special of her, and it would have been impossible to convince her that no one was paying attention to people so petty and insignificant as she and I were.

  She had nothing to do till the third act, and her part, that of a visitor, a provincial crony, consisted only in standing at the door as though listening, and then delivering a brief monologue. In the interval before her appearance, an hour and a half at least, while they were moving about on the stage reading their parts, drinking tea and arguing, she did not leave my side, and was all the time muttering her part and nervously crumpling up the manuscript. And, imagining that everyone was looking at her and waiting for her appearance, with a trembling hand she smoothed back her hair and said to me:

  “I shall certainly make a mess of it. . . . What a load on my heart, if only you knew! I feel frightened, as though I were just going to be led to execution.”

  At last her turn came.

  “Kleopatra Alexyevna, it’s your cue!” said the stage manager.

  She came forward into the middle of the stage with an expression of horror on her face, looking ugly and angular, and for half a minute stood as though in a trance, perfectly motionlness, and only her big earrings shook in her ears.

  “The first time you can read it,” said someone.

  It was clear to me that she was trembling, and trembling so much that she could not speak, and could not unfold her manuscript, and that she was incapable of acting her part; and I was already on the point of going to her and saying something, when she suddenly dropped on her knees in the middle of the stage and broke into loud sobs.

  All was commotion and hubbub. I alone stood still, leaning against the side scene, overwhelmed by what had happened, not understanding and not knowing what to do. I saw them lift her up and lead her away. I saw Anyuta Blagovo come up to me; I had not seen her in the room before, and she seemed to have sprung out of the earth. She was wearing her hat and veil, and, as always, had an air of having come only for a moment.

  “I told her not to take a part,” she said angrily, jerking out each word abruptly and turning crimson. “It’s insanity! You ought to have prevented her!”

  Madam Azhogin, in a short jacket with short sleeves, with cigarette ash on her breast, looking thin and flat, came rapidly towards me.

  “My dear, this is terrible,” she brought out, wringing her hands, and, as her habit was, looking intently into my face. “This is terrible! Your sister is in a condition. . . . She is with child. Take her away, I implore you. . . .”

  She was breathless with agitation, while
on one side stood her three daughters, exactly like her, thin and flat, huddling together in a scared way. They were alarmed, overwhelmed, as though a convict had been caught in their house. What a disgrace, how dreadful! And yet this estimable family had spent its life waging war on superstition; evidently they imagined that all the superstition and error of humanity was limited to the three candles, the thirteenth of the month, and to the unluckiness of Monday!

  “I beg you . . . I beg,” repeated Madam Azhogin, pursing up her lips in the shape of a heart on the syllable “you.” “I beg you to take her home.”

  18.

  A little later my sister and I were walking along the street. I covered her with the skirts of my coat; we hastened, choosing back streets where there were no street lamps, avoiding passers-by; it was as though we were running away. She was no longer crying, but looked at me with dry eyes. To Karpovna’s, where I took her, it was only twenty minutes’ walk, and, strange to say, in that short time we succeeded in thinking of our whole life; we talked over everything, considered our position, reflected. . . .

  We decided we could not go on living in this town, and that when I had earned a little money we would move to some other place. In some houses everyone was asleep, in others they were playing cards; we hated these houses; we were afraid of them. We talked of the fanaticism, the coarseness of feeling, the insignificance of these respectable families, these amateurs of dramatic art whom we had so alarmed, and I kept asking in what way these stupid, cruel, lazy, and dishonest people were superior to the drunken and superstitious peasants of Kurilovka, or in what way they were better than animals, who in the same way are thrown into a panic when some incident disturbs the monotony of their life limited by their instincts. What would have happened to my sister now if she had been left to live at home?

  What moral agonies would she have experienced, talking with my father, meeting every day with acquaintances? I imagined this to myself, and at once there came into my mind people, all people I knew, who had been slowly done to death by their nearest relations. I remembered the tortured dogs, driven mad, the live sparrows plucked naked by boys and flung into the water, and a long, long series of obscure lingering miseries which I had looked on continually from early childhood in that town; and I could not understand what these sixty-five thousand people lived for, what they read the gospel for, why they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What good had they gained from all that had been said and written hitherto if they were still possessed by the same spiritual darkness and hatred of liberty, as they were a hundred and three hundred years ago? A master carpenter spends his whole life building houses in the town, and always, to the day of his death, calls a “gallery” a “galdery.” So these sixty-five thousand people have been reading and hearing of truth, of justice, of mercy, of freedom for generations, and yet from morning till night, till the day of their death, they are lying, and tormenting each other, and they fear liberty and hate it as a deadly foe.

  “And so my fate is decided,” said my sister, as we arrived home. “After what has happened I cannot go back there. Heavens, how good that is! My heart feels lighter.”

  She went to bed at once. Tears were glittering on her eyelashes, but her expression was happy; she fell into a sound sweet sleep, and one could see that her heart was lighter and that she was resting. It was a long, long time since she had slept like that.

  And so we began our life together. She was always singing and saying that her life was very happy, and the books I brought her from the public library I took back unread, as now she could not read; she wanted to do nothing but dream and talk of the future, mending my linen, or helping Karpovna near the stove; she was always singing, or talking of her Vladimir, of his cleverness, of his charming manners, of his kindness, of his extraordinary learning, and I assented to all she said, though by now I disliked her doctor. She wanted to work, to lead an independent life on her own account, and she used to say that she would become a schoolteacher or a doctor’s assistant as soon as her health would permit her and would herself do the scrubbing and the washing. Already she was passionately devoted to her child; he was not yet born, but she knew already the color of his eyes, what his hands would be like, and how he would laugh. She was fond of talking about education, and as her Vladimir was the best man in the world, all her discussion of education could be summed up in the question how to make the boy as fascinating as his father. There was no end to her talk, and everything she said made her intensely joyful. Sometimes I was delighted, too, though I could not have said why.

  I suppose her dreaminess infected me. I, too, gave up reading and did nothing but dream. In the evenings, in spite of my fatigue, I walked up and down the room, with my hands in my pockets, talking of Masha.

  “What do you think?” I would ask of my sister. “When will she come back? I think she’ll come back at Christmas, not later; what has she to do there?”

  “As she doesn’t write to you, it’s evident she will come back very soon.”

  “That’s true,” I assented, though I knew perfectly well that Masha would not return to our town.

  I missed her fearfully, and could no longer deceive myself, and tried to get other people to deceive me. My sister was expecting her doctor, and I—Masha; and both of us talked incessantly, laughed, and did not notice that we were preventing Karpovna from sleeping. She lay on the stove and kept muttering:

  “The samovar hummed this morning, it did hum! Oh, it bodes no good, my dears, it bodes no good!”

  No one ever came to see us but the postman, who brought my sister letters from the doctor, and Prokofy, who sometimes came in to see us in the evening, and, after looking at my sister, without speaking went away, and when he was in the kitchen said:

  “Every class ought to remember its rules, and anyone who is so proud that he won’t understand that will find it a vale of tears.”

  He was very fond of the phrase “a vale of tears.” One day—it was in Christmas week, when I was walking by the bazaar—he called me into the butcher’s shop, and, not shaking hands with me, announced that he had to speak to me about something very important. His face was red from the frost and vodka; near him, behind the counter, stood Nikolka, with the expression of a brigand, holding a bloodstained knife in his hand.

  “I desire to express my word to you,” Prokofy began. “This incident cannot continue, because, as you understand yourself that for such a vale, people will say nothing good of you or of us. Mamma, through pity, cannot say something unpleasant to you, that your sister should move into another lodging on account of her condition, but I won’t have it any more, because I can’t approve of her behavior.”

  I understood him, and I went out of the shop. The same day my sister and I moved to Radish’s. We had no money for a cab, and we walked on foot; I carried a parcel of our belongings on my back; my sister had nothing in her hands, but she gasped for breath and coughed and kept asking whether we should get there soon.

  19.

  At last a letter came from Masha.

  “Dear, good M.A.” (she wrote), “our kind, gentle ‘angel,’ as the old painter calls you, farewell; I am going with my father to America for the exhibition. In a few days I shall see the ocean—so far from Dubechnya, it’s dreadful to think! It’s far and unfathomable as the sky, and I long to be there in freedom. I am triumphant, I am mad, and you see how incoherent my letter is. Dear, good one, give me my freedom, make haste to break the thread, which still holds, binding you and me together. My meeting and knowing you was a ray from heaven that lighted up my existence; but my becoming your wife was a mistake, you understand that, and I am oppressed now by the consciousness of the mistake, and I beseech you, on my knees, my generous friend, quickly, quickly, before I start for the ocean, telegraph that you consent to correct our common mistake, to remove the solitary stone from my wings, and my father, who will undertake all the arrangements, promised me not to burden you too much with formalities. And so I am free to fly whither I will
? Yes?

  “Be happy, and God bless you; forgive me, a sinner.

  “I am well, I am wasting money, doing all sorts of silly things, and I thank God every minute that such a bad woman as I has no children. I sing and have success, but it’s not an infatuation; no, it’s my haven, my cell to which I go for peace. King David had a ring with an inscription on it: ‘All things pass.’ When one is sad those words make one cheerful, and when one is cheerful it makes one sad. I have got myself a ring like that with Hebrew letters on it, and this talisman keeps me from infatuations. All things pass, life will pass, one wants nothing. Or at least one wants nothing but the sense of freedom, for when anyone is free, he wants nothing, nothing, nothing. Break the thread. A warm hug to you and your sister. Forgive and forget your M.”

  My sister used to lie down in one room, and Radish, who had been ill again and was now better, in another. Just at the moment when I received this letter my sister went softly into the painter’s room, sat down beside him and began reading aloud. She read to him every day, Ostrovsky or Gogol, and he listened, staring at one point, not laughing, but shaking his head and muttering to himself from time to time:

  “Anything may happen! Anything may happen!”

  If anything ugly or unseemly were depicted in the play he would say as though vindictively, thrusting his finger into the book: