Selected short stories -1892-1895- translated by Constance Garnett

by Anton Chekhov

  Andrey Yefimitch assured himself that there was nothing special about the moon or the prison, that even sane persons wear orders, and that everything in time will decay and turn to earth, but he was suddenly overcome with desire; he clutched at the grating with both hands and shook it with all his might. The strong grating did not yield.

  Then that it might not be so dreadful he went to Ivan Dmitritch's bed and sat down.

  "I have lost heart, my dear fellow," he muttered, trembling and wiping away the cold sweat, "I have lost heart."

  "You should be philosophical," said Ivan Dmitritch ironically.

  "My God, my God. . . . Yes, yes. . . . You were pleased to say once that there was no philosophy in Russia, but that all people, even the paltriest, talk philosophy. But you know the philosophizing of the paltriest does not harm anyone," said Andrey Yefimitch in a tone as if he wanted to cry and complain. "Why, then, that malignant laugh, my friend, and how can these paltry creatures help philosophizing if they are not satisfied? For an intelligent, educated man, made in God's image, proud and loving freedom, to have no alternative but to be a doctor in a filthy, stupid, wretched little town, and to spend his whole life among bottles, leeches, mustard plasters! Quackery, narrowness, vulgarity! Oh, my God!"

  "You are talking nonsense. If you don't like being a doctor you should have gone in for being a statesman."

  "I could not, I could not do anything. We are weak, my dear friend. . . . I used to be indifferent. I reasoned boldly and soundly, but at the first coarse touch of life upon me I have lost heart. . . . Prostration. . . . . We are weak, we are poor creatures . . . and you, too, my dear friend, you are intelligent, generous, you drew in good impulses with your mother's milk, but you had hardly entered upon life when you were exhausted and fell ill. . . . Weak, weak!"

  Andrey Yefimitch was all the while at the approach of evening tormented by another persistent sensation besides terror and the feeling of resentment. At last he realized that he was longing for a smoke and for beer.

  "I am going out, my friend," he said. "I will tell them to bring a light; I can't put up with this. . . . I am not equal to it. . . ."

  Andrey Yefimitch went to the door and opened it, but at once Nikita jumped up and barred his way.

  "Where are you going? You can't, you can't!" he said. "It's bedtime."

  "But I'm only going out for a minute to walk about the yard," said Andrey Yefimitch.

  "You can't, you can't; it's forbidden. You know that yourself."

  "But what difference will it make to anyone if I do go out?" asked Andrey Yefimitch, shrugging his shoulders. "I don't understand. Nikita, I must go out!" he said in a trembling voice. "I must."

  "Don't be disorderly, it's not right," Nikita said peremptorily.

  "This is beyond everything," Ivan Dmitritch cried suddenly, and he jumped up. "What right has he not to let you out? How dare they keep us here? I believe it is clearly laid down in the law that no one can be deprived of freedom without trial! It's an outrage! It's tyranny!"

  "Of course it's tyranny," said Andrey Yefimitch, encouraged by Ivan Dmitritch's outburst. "I must go out, I want to. He has no right! Open, I tell you."

  "Do you hear, you dull-witted brute?" cried Ivan Dmitritch, and he banged on the door with his fist. "Open the door, or I will break it open! Torturer!"

  "Open the door," cried Andrey Yefimitch, trembling all over; "I insist!"

  "Talk away!" Nikita answered through the door, "talk away. . . ."

  "Anyhow, go and call Yevgeny Fyodoritch! Say that I beg him to come for a minute!"

  "His honour will come of himself to-morrow."

  "They will never let us out," Ivan Dmitritch was going on meanwhile. "They will leave us to rot here! Oh, Lord, can there really be no hell in the next world, and will these wretches be forgiven? Where is justice? Open the door, you wretch! I am choking!" he cried in a hoarse voice, and flung himself upon the door. "I'll dash out my brains, murderers!"

  Nikita opened the door quickly, and roughly with both his hands and his knee shoved Andrey Yefimitch back, then swung his arm and punched him in the face with his fist. It seemed to Andrey Yefimitch as though a huge salt wave enveloped him from his head downwards and dragged him to the bed; there really was a salt taste in his mouth: most likely the blood was running from his teeth. He waved his arms as though he were trying to swim out and clutched at a bedstead, and at the same moment felt Nikita hit him twice on the back.

  Ivan Dmitritch gave a loud scream. He must have been beaten too.

  Then all was still, the faint moonlight came through the grating, and a shadow like a net lay on the floor. It was terrible. Andrey Yefimitch lay and held his breath: he was expecting with horror to be struck again. He felt as though someone had taken a sickle, thrust it into him, and turned it round several times in his breast and bowels. He bit the pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and all at once through the chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible unbearable thought that these people, who seemed now like black shadows in the moonlight, had to endure such pain day by day for years. How could it have happened that for more than twenty years he had not known it and had refused to know it? He knew nothing of pain, had no conception of it, so he was not to blame, but his conscience, as inexorable and as rough as Nikita, made him turn cold from the crown of his head to his heels. He leaped up, tried to cry out with all his might, and to run in haste to kill Nikita, and then Hobotov, the superintendent and the assistant, and then himself; but no sound came from his chest, and his legs would not obey him. Gasping for breath, he tore at the dressing-gown and the shirt on his breast, rent them, and fell senseless on the bed.

  XIX

  Next morning his head ached, there was a droning in his ears and a feeling of utter weakness all over. He was not ashamed at recalling his weakness the day before. He had been cowardly, had even been afraid of the moon, had openly expressed thoughts and feelings such as he had not expected in himself before; for instance, the thought that the paltry people who philosophized were really dissatisfied. But now nothing mattered to him.

  He ate nothing; he drank nothing. He lay motionless and silent.

  "It is all the same to me, he thought when they asked him questions. "I am not going to answer. . . . It's all the same to me."

  After dinner Mihail Averyanitch brought him a quarter pound of tea and a pound of fruit pastilles. Daryushka came too and stood for a whole hour by the bed with an expression of dull grief on her face. Dr. Hobotov visited him. He brought a bottle of bromide and told Nikita to fumigate the ward with something.

  Towards evening Andrey Yefimitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his finger-tips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefimitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitritch, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality -- and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter. . . . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion for ever.

  The hospital porters came, took him by his arms and legs, and carried him away to the chapel.

  There he lay on the table, with open eyes, and the moon shed its light upon him at night. In the morning Sergey Sergeyitch came, prayed piously before the crucifix, and closed his former chief's eyes.

  Next day Andrey Yefimitch was buried. Mihail Averyanitch and Daryushka were the only people at the funeral.

  NOTES

  provincial secretary: the 12th rank in the Table of Ranks for the Russian Civil Service

  gendarmes: the political police

  laurel drops:
used to calm patients

  Stanislav order: most frequently given non-military order; it had an 8-pointed star

  Swedish 'Polar Star': Swedish metal established in 1748 and given to both Swedes and non-Swedes

  erysipelas: severe skin infection

  Zemstvo: a district council with locally elected members

  Pushkin: Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) was killed in a duel and died after two days

  Heine: the German poet and wit (1797-1856) was confined to his bed for the last 8 years of his life

  senator: the Russian Senate functioned as a Supreme Court and interpreted the laws

  white tie: Russian doctors traditionally wore white ties

  The Doctor: medical journal published in St. Petersburg

  he knocks and it is not opened to him: cf. Matthew 7:7

  the great Pirogov: N. I. Pirogov (1810-1881) was a famous surgeon and teacher

  in spe: in hope or expectation

  stone: kidney stone

  Pasteur and of Koch: Louis Pasteur (1822-1910) was a French chemist who developed vaccination techniques; Robert Koch (1843-1910) was a German bacteriologist

  Elborus: Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe

  strait-waistcoats: straitjacket

  Bastille: French royal fortress and prison in Paris; its fall signaled the beginning of the French Revolution

  bobbery: dillydallying

  cupping: an outdated medical treatment in which blood is removed by placing evacuated glass cups on the skin; bleeding the patient by cupping, applying leeches, or cutting was accepted medical practice from the middle ages until the middle of the 19th century

  midden-pit: latrine

  Dostoevsky or Voltaire: F. M. Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a famous Russian novelist; in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, he quotes the phrase from Voltaire about inventing God; François Voltaire was a major figure in the French Enlightenment; the phrase Chekhov refers to comes from a 1769 work; the exact phrase is "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer"

  Diogenes lived in a tub: Diogenes (412 B.C. - 323 B.C.) was a Greek cynic philosopher

  Marcus Aurelius: Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180) was a Roman emperor and stoic philosopher

  Stoics: a philosophy founded by Zeno around 308 B.C. believing that humans should be free from passion and should calmly accept whatever fate has in store

  Garden of Gethsemane: where Judas betrayed Jesus; see Matthew 26:36-42

  vanity of vanities: Ecclesiastes 1:1

  bromide: bromide of potassium was used in the nineteenth century as a sedative

  Poland: Poland at this time was part of the Russian Empire

  third-class: the cheapest and most uncomfortable seats

  Iversky Madonna: alleged wonder-working icon

  Tsar-cannon and Tsar-bell: 40-ton cannon cast in 1586 and 200-ton bell cast in 1735

  St. Saviour's and the Rumyantsev museum: Church of the Savior, built to mark victory of Russians over French invaders in 1812; Rumiantsev Museum, built in 1787, housed nearly a million books

  Tyestov's: a fancy Moscow restaurant

  Austrian spies: at that time part of what is now Poland was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

  rhubarb pills: used as a purgative

  mauvais ton: ill-bred, lacking in manners

  bone-charring factory: animal bones were burned to produce fertilizer

  * * *

  Terror

  My Friend's Story

  by Anton Chekhov

  DMITRI PETROVITCH SILIN had taken his degree and entered the government service in Petersburg, but at thirty he gave up his post and went in for agriculture. His farming was fairly successful, and yet it always seemed to me that he was not in his proper place, and that he would do well to go back to Petersburg. When sunburnt, grey with dust, exhausted with toil, he met me near the gates or at the entrance, and then at supper struggled with sleepiness and his wife took him off to bed as though he were a baby; or when, overcoming his sleepiness, he began in his soft, cordial, almost imploring voice, to talk about his really excellent ideas, I saw him not as a farmer nor an agriculturist, but only as a worried and exhausted man, and it was clear to me that he did not really care for farming, but that all he wanted was for the day to be over and "Thank God for it."

  I liked to be with him, and I used to stay on his farm for two or three days at a time. I liked his house, and his park, and his big fruit garden, and the river -- and his philosophy, which was clear, though rather spiritless and rhetorical. I suppose I was fond of him on his own account, though I can't say that for certain, as I have not up to now succeeded in analysing my feelings at that time. He was an intelligent, kind-hearted, genuine man, and not a bore, but I remember that when he confided to me his most treasured secrets and spoke of our relation to each other as friendship, it disturbed me unpleasantly, and I was conscious of awkwardness. In his affection for me there was something inappropriate, tiresome, and I should have greatly preferred commonplace friendly relations.

  The fact is that I was extremely attracted by his wife, Marya Sergeyevna. I was not in love with her, but I was attracted by her face, her eyes, her voice, her walk. I missed her when I did not see her for a long time, and my imagination pictured no one at that time so eagerly as that young, beautiful, elegant woman. I had no definite designs in regard to her, and did not dream of anything of the sort, yet for some reason, whenever we were left alone, I remembered that her husband looked upon me as his friend, and I felt awkward. When she played my favourite pieces on the piano or told me something interesting, I listened with pleasure, and yet at the same time for some reason the reflection that she loved her husband, that he was my friend, and that she herself looked upon me as his friend, obtruded themselves upon me, my spirits flagged, and I became listless, awkward, and dull. She noticed this change and would usually say:

  "You are dull without your friend. We must send out to the fields for him."

  And when Dmitri Petrovitch came in, she would say:

  "Well, here is your friend now. Rejoice."

  So passed a year and a half.

  It somehow happened one July Sunday that Dmitri Petrovitch and I, having nothing to do, drove to the big village of Klushino to buy things for supper. While we were going from one shop to another the sun set and the evening came on -- the evening which I shall probably never forget in my life. After buying cheese that smelt like soap, and petrified sausages that smelt of tar, we went to the tavern to ask whether they had any beer. Our coachman went off to the blacksmith to get our horses shod, and we told him we would wait for him near the church. We walked, talked, laughed over our purchases, while a man who was known in the district by a very strange nickname, "Forty Martyrs," followed us all the while in silence with a mysterious air like a detective. This Forty Martyrs was no other than Gavril Syeverov, or more simply Gavryushka, who had been for a short time in my service as a footman and had been dismissed by me for drunkenness. He had been in Dmitri Petrovitch's service, too, and by him had been dismissed for the same vice. He was an inveterate drunkard, and indeed his whole life was as drunk and disorderly as himself. His father had been a priest and his mother of noble rank, so by birth he belonged to the privileged class; but however carefully I scrutinized his exhausted, respectful, and always perspiring face, his red beard now turning grey, his pitifully torn reefer jacket and his red shirt, I could not discover in him the faintest trace of anything we associate with privilege. He spoke of himself as a man of education, and used to say that he had been in a clerical school, but had not finished his studies there, as he had been expelled for smoking; then he had sung in the bishop's choir and lived for two years in a monastery, from which he was also expelled, but this time not for smoking but for "his weakness." He had walked all over two provinces, had presented petitions to the Consistory, and to various government offices, and had been four times on his trial. At last, being stranded in our district, he had served as a footman, as a foreste
r, as a kennelman, as a sexton, had married a cook who was a widow and rather a loose character, and had so hopelessly sunk into a menial position, and had grown so used to filth and dirt, that he even spoke of his privileged origin with a certain scepticism, as of some myth. At the time I am describing, he was hanging about without a job, calling himself a carrier and a huntsman, and his wife had disappeared and made no sign.

  From the tavern we went to the church and sat in the porch, waiting for the coachman. Forty Martyrs stood a little way off and put his hand before his mouth in order to cough in it respectfully if need be. By now it was dark; there was a strong smell of evening dampness, and the moon was on the point of rising. There were only two clouds in the clear starry sky exactly over our heads: one big one and one smaller; alone in the sky they were racing after one another like mother and child, in the direction where the sunset was glowing.

  "What a glorious day!" said Dmitri Petrovitch.

  "In the extreme . . ." Forty Martyrs assented, and he coughed respectfully into his hand. "How was it, Dmitri Petrovitch, you thought to visit these parts?" he asked in an ingratiating voice, evidently anxious to get up a conversation.

  Dmitri Petrovitch made no answer. Forty Martyrs heaved a deep sigh and said softly, not looking at us:

  "I suffer solely through a cause to which I must answer to Almighty God. No doubt about it, I am a hopeless and incompetent man; but believe me, on my conscience, I am without a crust of bread and worse off than a dog. . . . Forgive me, Dmitri Petrovitch."

  Silin was not listening, but sat musing with his head propped on his fists. The church stood at the end of the street on the high river-bank, and through the trellis gate of the enclosure we could see the river, the water-meadows on the near side of it, and the crimson glare of a camp fire about which black figures of men and horses were moving. And beyond the fire, further away, there were other lights, where there was a little village. They were singing there. On the river, and here and there on the meadows, a mist was rising. High narrow coils of mist, thick and white as milk, were trailing over the river, hiding the reflection of the stars and hovering over the willows. Every minute they changed their form, and it seemed as though some were embracing, others were bowing, others lifting up their arms to heaven with wide sleeves like priests, as though they were praying. . . . Probably they reminded Dmitri Petrovitch of ghosts and of the dead, for he turned facing me and asked with a mournful smile: