Forty Stories

by Anton Chekhov

  Time passed quickly. On St. Peter’s day Andrey Andreyich took Nadya to Moscow Street after dinner, to have yet another look at the house which had long since been rented and made ready for the young couple. It was a two-story house, but so far only the upper floor had been furnished. On the gleaming floor of the hall, painted to resemble parquet, stood bentwood chairs, a grand piano, a music stand for the violin. There was the smell of paint. On the wall hung a large oil painting in a gold frame—a picture of a naked woman beside a lilac-colored vase with a broken handle.

  “Wonderful painting,” said Andrey Andreyich with an awed sigh. “It’s by Shishmachevsky.”

  Then there was the drawing room with a round table, a sofa, and armchairs upholstered in some bright blue material. Above the sofa hung a large photograph of Father Andrey in priestly skullcap and wearing his decorations. They passed into the dining room, where there was a sideboard, then into the bedroom, where two beds could be seen side by side in the half dusk: it seemed as though the bedroom had been furnished in such a way that life there would always be happy and could never be anything else. Andrey Andreyich led Nadya through the rooms, never taking his arm from her waist; but all the time she felt weak and conscience-stricken, hating these rooms and beds and armchairs, nauseated by the painting of the naked woman. Already it had become transparently clear to her that she no longer loved Andrey Andreyich, and perhaps had never loved him; but she did not—and could not—understand how to say this and to whom to say it and why she should say it, even though she thought about it all day and all night.… He had put his arm round her waist, and was talking so courteously and modestly, and was so happy as he walked around his house, but in all this she saw only vulgarity, stupid, naïve, intolerable vulgarity, and his arm round her waist felt rough and cold like an iron hoop. Every moment she was on the point of running away, bursting into sobs, throwing herself out of the window. Andrey Andreyich led her into the bathroom, and there he touched a tap set in the wall, and at once water flowed out.

  “Just look at that!” he said, and burst out laughing. “I had them put up a cistern in the loft with a hundred gallons of water. So you see, we now have running water!”

  They walked across a yard and out into the street, and hailed a cab. The dust rose in thick clouds, and it looked as though it would rain.

  “You’re not cold?” Andrey Andreyich asked, screwing up his eyes against the dust.

  She did not answer.

  “Remember how yesterday Sasha reproached me for not doing anything?” he said after a brief silence. “Well, he’s right! He’s absolutely right! I do nothing, and don’t know how to do anything! And why is that, my dear? Why is it that I hate the thought of one day putting a cockade in my cap and going into government service? Why is it that I can’t stand the sight of a lawyer, or a teacher of Latin, or a town councilor? O Mother Russia! O Mother Russia! What a burden of idle and useless people you carry along with you! O long-suffering Mother Russia, how many there are like me!”

  And he continued to make generalizations about his own idleness, seeing it as a sign of the times.

  “When we are married, my darling,” he went on, “we’ll go and live in the country, and we’ll get down to work! We’ll buy a small plot of land with a garden and a stream, and we’ll work and observe life.… How splendid it will be!”

  He removed his hat, and his hair waved in the wind, while she listened and thought: “Oh God, I want to go home! Oh God!” They were near the house when they caught up with Father Andrey.

  “Look, there’s Father!” Andrey said joyfully, and he waved his hat. “I love my old man, I really do,” he said, paying off the cab driver. “He is a splendid old fellow. Really splendid.”

  Nadya went into the house, feeling ill and out of humor, remembering that visitors would be arriving in the evening and she would have to entertain them, smile, listen to the violin, listen to all kinds of idiocies, and talk only about the wedding. There would be her grandmother sitting by the samovar, stiff and magnificent in silk, looking very proud, as she always seemed to be in the presence of guests. Father Andrey came into the room with a sly smile.

  “I have the pleasure and blessed consolation of seeing you in excellent health,” he said to Grandmother, and it was hard to say whether he spoke in earnest or in jest.

  IV

  The wind was knocking on the windowpanes and on the roof; whistling sounds were heard; and you could hear the hobgoblin in the chimney singing his melancholy, plaintive song. It was after midnight, everyone was in bed, but no one could sleep. Nadya thought someone was still playing on the violin downstairs. A minute later Nina Ivanovna entered the room in her nightgown, holding a candle.

  “What was that knocking sound, Nadya?” she asked.

  Her mother, her hair in a single plait, a timid smile on her face, looked older, uglier, and shorter than ever on this stormy night. Nadya remembered how, quite recently, she had regarded her mother as a remarkable woman and listened with pride to the things she said, but now she could no longer remember those words she had spoken—the only ones that came back to her seemed feeble and affected.

  She thought she could hear deep-throated voices singing in the chimney, even thought she could distinguish the words “Oh, my Go-o-o-d!” She sat up in bed, suddenly clutched fiercely at her hair, and burst into sobs.

  “Mama, Mama!” she exclaimed. “My own dear mother, if only you knew what was happening to me! I beg you, I implore you—let me go away from here!”

  “Where to?” Nina Ivanovna asked in surprise, and she sat down on the bed. “Where to?”

  Nadya cried for a long time and could not utter a word.

  “Let me leave town,” she said at last. “The wedding mustn’t—won’t happen! Please understand that! I don’t love him!… I can’t bear to talk about him!”

  “No, my darling, no!” Nina Ivanovna said quickly, frightened out of her wits. “Calm yourself. You’re in low spirits, but it will pass. It often happens. Probably you’ve been quarreling with Andrey, but then lovers’ quarrels always end in smiles!”

  “Go away, Mama, go away!” Nadya sobbed.

  “Yes,” said Nina Ivanovna after a pause. “Only a little while ago you were a baby, a little girl, and now you are almost a bride. In nature there are always these transformations. Before you know where you are, you will be a mother and then an old woman, with a stubborn daughter like mine on your hands!”

  “My dear sweet mother, you are clever and unhappy,” said Nadya. “You are so very unhappy—why do you say such vulgar, commonplace things? For God’s sake why?”

  Nina Ivanovna tried to say something but could not utter a word, and went sobbing back to her own room. Once again deep-throated voices droned in the chimney, and Nadya suddenly felt frightened. She jumped out of bed and ran to her mother. Nina Ivanovna’s eyes were red with weeping. She lay on the bed wrapped in a blue blanket, a book in her hands.

  “Mama, listen to me!” Nadya cried. “I implore you—try to understand! If you only understood how petty and degrading our life is! My eyes have been opened and I see it all now. And what about your Andrey Andreyich? He’s not a bit clever, Mama! Oh God, he’s nothing more than a fool!”

  Nina Ivanovna sat up with a jerk.

  “You and your grandmother keep torturing me,” she sobbed. “I want to live—to live!” she repeated, and she struck her breast twice with her little fist. “Let me free! I’m still young and I want to live, and you’re making an old woman out of me!”

  She cried bitterly and lay down, rolling herself up in the blanket, looking very silly, small, and pathetic. Nadya went to her room, dressed, and sat at the window to wait for the dawn. All night she sat there thinking, while someone down below in the courtyard seemed to be tapping the shutters and whistling.

  The next morning Grandmother complained that during the night the wind had blown down all the apples in the garden and thrown down an old plum tree. It was a dull gray desolate day: one
of those mornings when you want to light the lamps; everyone complained of the cold, and the raindrops kept tapping on the windowpanes. After breakfast Nadya went to Sasha’s room, and without saying a word she fell on her knees before a chair in the corner and covered her face with her hands.

  “What’s the matter?” Sasha asked.

  “I can’t go on,” she said. “I don’t know how I was able to live here before. I don’t understand it. I despise my fiancé, I despise myself, I despise all idle, nonsensical life!”

  “What’s come over you?” said Sasha, who was still unable to understand what it was all about. “You know … everything will turn out all right.”

  “I am disgusted with my life,” Nadya went on. “I can’t endure the thought of another day here! I’m leaving here tomorrow. Take me with you, for God’s sake!”

  For a moment Sasha gazed at her in astonishment. At last the truth dawned on him, and he was as delighted as a child. He waved his arms and began to shuffle around the room in his slippers, like someone dancing for joy.

  “Wonderful!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “God, how wonderful!”

  And she gazed at him steadily with wide-open eyes full of love, like someone spellbound, and she waited for him to say something important, something which would have infinite meaning for her. He had told her nothing yet, but already it seemed to her that something new and great, something she had never known before, was opening before her, and already she was gazing at him with a look of expectation, prepared for everything, even for death.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he told her after some thought. “You can come to the station to see me off.… I’ll have your baggage in my trunk and get your ticket, and then when the third bell rings you can jump on the train, and we’ll go away. You can come with me to Moscow and then go off alone to St. Petersburg. Have you a passport?”

  “Yes.”

  “I swear you’ll never regret it, never repent,” Sasha said with enthusiasm. “You can leave here and study, and then go where-ever fate beckons. When your life is completely revolutionized, then everything will change. The important thing is to revolutionize your life, and nothing else is of any importance. Shall we leave tomorrow?”

  “Yes, for God’s sake, let’s leave tomorrow!”

  Nadya, who imagined that she was deeply moved and that her heart had never felt so heavy, was quite sure she would spend all the time before her departure in anguish and torment. Yet she had scarcely reached her room and lain down on the bed when she was overcome with sleep; and she slept soundly, her face wet with tears and a smile on her lips, till evening came.

  V

  They sent for a cab. Nadya went upstairs, in her hat and coat, to take one last look at her mother, at all the things that had belonged to her for so long. First she went to her own room and stood beside the bed, which was still warm, and for a while she looked around her; then she went softly into her mother’s room. After kissing her mother and smoothing her hair, she remained there a few moments before walking slowly downstairs.

  A heavy rain fell. In front of the porch stood a droshky, the hood up, drenched with rain.

  “There’s no room for you, Nadya,” said Grandmother while a servant was stowing the luggage. “I wonder you want to see him off in this weather! Much better to stay at home! Oh, look at the rain!”

  Nadya tried to say something, but words failed her. Sasha helped her into the droshky, and covered her legs with a rug. Then he sat down beside her.

  “Good luck! May God keep you!” Grandmother shouted from the steps. “Write to us when you get to Moscow!”

  “Yes, of course. Good-by, Granny!”

  “May the Queen of Heaven have you in her keeping.”

  “What rotten weather!” Sasha said.

  At this point Nadya burst out sobbing. Now for the first time she realized she was really going away, and this was something she had not permitted herself to believe when she was gazing at her mother or saying good-by to her grandmother. Good-by, town! It all came back to her with a rush: Andrey, the father, the new house, the naked lady with the vase; but these things no longer oppressed her, no longer frightened her, but on the contrary seemed naïve and unimportant, fading deeper and deeper into the distance. And when they were sitting in the railroad carriage and the train started, the whole of the past, once so huge and imposing, shrank almost to nothing: instead the broad roads of the future, scarcely perceptible until this moment, opened out to her. The rain rapped on the carriage windows, nothing could be seen but the green fields and the telegraph poles flashing past—the birds sitting on the wires. Quite suddenly she found she was almost choking with joy. It seemed to her she would soon enter her freedom, spending her time studying, “running wild,” as people used to say. She was simultaneously laughing and crying and saying her prayers.

  “Everything is going to be all right,” Sasha was saying with a broad smile. “You’ll see.…”

  VI

  Autumn had gone, and winter, too, had passed away. Nadya was now very homesick, and every day she thought of her mother and her grandmother; she thought of Sasha, too. Letters from home were resigned and kindly, everything seemed to have been forgiven and forgotten. In May after the examinations she went home in good health and high spirits, breaking her journey in Moscow to see Sasha. He had changed very little since the previous summer—the same beard, the same disheveled hair, the same large and beautiful eyes, and he wore the same coat and the same canvas trousers. Yet he looked ill and troubled, and seemed much older and thinner, and coughed incessantly. He struck Nadya at first as oddly colorless and provincial.

  “Good heavens, Nadya is here!” he exclaimed with a burst of gay laughter. “My dear child …”

  They sat in the lithography shop, which was full of tobacco smoke and the suffocating smell of paint and India ink, and then they went to his room, which was filthy and also reeked of tobacco. The samovar on the table had turned cold; beside it lay a shattered plate with dark paper on it, and there were heaps of dead flies on the table and on the floor. Everything about the room suggested that Sasha led a completely slovenly existence, living anyhow, and despising comfort; and if anyone had spoken to him about his private joys, about his personal life and whether anyone loved him, he would have understood nothing and would only have laughed.

  “Everything went off all right,” Nadya said hurriedly. “Mama came to see me in Petersburg during the autumn. She tells me Granny isn’t angry any more, but keeps going to my room and making the sign of the cross over the walls.”

  Sasha seemed cheerful, but he coughed continually and spoke in an oddly broken voice. Nadya was watching him closely, unable to make up her mind whether he was seriously ill or whether she was just imagining it.

  “Dear Sasha,” she said. “How ill you are!”

  “Nonsense. Maybe I’m not well, but I’m all right!”

  “Dear God!” Nadya exclaimed, suddenly overwhelmed. “You ought to see a doctor. Why don’t you take care of yourself? Oh, dear darling Sasha,” she said as tears rushed to her eyes, and for some reason she thought of Andrey Andreyich and the naked lady with the vase and the whole of her past life, which seemed as distant as childhood, and she began to cry because Sasha no longer seemed so original, so intelligent, and so interesting as the year before. “Sasha dear, you are very, very ill. I don’t know what I wouldn’t do to keep you from being thin and pale. I owe you so much! Dear kind Sasha, you can’t imagine how much you have done for me! Your are really the closest and dearest person in my whole life!”

  They sat there and went on talking. After her winter in St. Petersburg she found his words, his smile, the man himself and everything about him, curiously old-fashioned and out of date, as though the time of maturity had passed long ago, and perhaps he was already in his grave.

  “I’m going down the Volga the day after tomorrow,” Sasha said. “That way I can drink some koumiss. I’m going to try koumiss seriously. A friend of mine and his w
ife are coming with me. His wife is wonderful. I’ve been trying to make her study. I think she ought to revolutionize herself.”

  When they had talked themselves to a standstill, Sasha drove her to the station. He treated her to tea and bought her apples, and when the train began to move out he smiled and waved his handkerchief, but even his thin legs showed that he was very ill and not long for this world.

  Nadya arrived at her native town at midday. As she drove home from the station, the streets seemed unusually wide, but the houses looked curiously squat and very small. There were no people about, and the only person she met was the German piano tuner with the rust-colored coat. All the houses seemed covered in dust. Her grandmother, who looked very old, and as fat and ugly as ever, threw her arms round Nadya and wept interminably, with her face against Nadya’s shoulder, and she was completely unable to tear herself away. Nina Ivanovna looked much older and plainer; she seemed shrunken and as strait-laced as ever; and the diamonds glittered on her fingers.

  “My dearest,” she said, trembling all over. “My darling …”

  Then they sat down and wept silently together. It was evident that both the mother and the grandmother realized that the past would never return, was irrevocably lost: their social position, their prestige in the community, their right to invite guests to stay with them, all this had gone. So it happens sometimes that the police burst into a house at night, one of those houses accustomed to an easy, leisurely existence, and the master of the house is discovered to be a forger and an embezzler, and then farewell forever to the easy, leisurely existence!