Tales of Chekhov Page 8

  Five minutes later I was sitting on a big, soft, warm lounge in the drawing-room listening to the “Ach!” echoing all down the street. There was a smell of moth powder, and of goatskin shoes, a pair of which lay on a chair beside me wrapped in a handkerchief. In the windows were geraniums, and muslin curtains, and on the curtains were torpid flies. On the wall hung the portrait of some bishop, painted in oils, with the glass broken at one corner, and next to the bishop a row of ancestors with lemon-coloured faces of a gipsy type. On the table lay a thimble, a reel of cotton, and a half-knitted stocking, and paper patterns and a black blouse, tacked together, were lying on the floor. In the next room two alarmed and fluttered old women were hurriedly picking up similar patterns and pieces of tailor’s chalk from the floor.

  “You must, please, excuse us; we are dreadfully untidy,” said the little lady.

  While she talked to me, she stole embarrassed glances towards the other room where the patterns were still being picked up. The door, too, seemed embarrassed, opening an inch or two and then shutting again.

  “What’s the matter?” said the little lady, addressing the door.

  “Où est mon cravatte lequel mon père m’avait envoyé de Koursk?” asked a female voice at the door.

  “Ah, est-ce que, Marie . . . que. . . Really, it’s impossible . . . . Nous avons donc chez nous un homme peu connu de nous. Ask Lukerya.”

  “How well we speak French, though!” I read in the eyes of the little lady, who was flushing with pleasure.

  Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen, in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a mother-of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson. Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.

  “My daughter,” chanted the little lady, “and, Manetchka, this is a young gentleman who has come,” etc.

  I was introduced, and expressed my surprise at the number of paper patterns. Mother and daughter dropped their eyes.

  “We had a fair here at Ascension,” said the mother; “we always buy materials at the fair, and then it keeps us busy with sewing till the next year’s fair comes around again. We never put things out to be made. My husband’s pay is not very ample, and we are not able to permit ourselves luxuries. So we have to make up everything ourselves.”

  “But who will ever wear such a number of things? There are only two of you?”

  “Oh . . . as though we were thinking of wearing them! They are not to be worn; they are for the trousseau!”

  “Ah, mamam, what are you saying?” said the daughter, and she crimsoned again. “Our visitor might suppose it was true. I don’t intend to be married. Never!”

  She said this, but at the very word “married” her eyes glowed.

  Tea, biscuits, butter, and jam were brought in, followed by raspberries and cream. At seven o’clock, we had supper, consisting of six courses, and while we were at supper I heard a loud yawn from the next room. I looked with surprise towards the door: it was a yawn that could only come from a man.

  “That’s my husband’s brother, Yegor Semyonitch,” the little lady explained, noticing my surprise. “He’s been living with us for the last year. Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an unsociable person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a monastery. He was unfairly treated in the service, and the disappointment has preyed on his mind.”

  After supper the little lady showed the vestment which Yegor Semyonitch was embroidering with his own hands as an offering for the Church. Manetchka threw off her shyness for a moment and showed me the tobacco-pouch she was embroidering for her father. When I pretended to be greatly struck by her work, she flushed crimson and whispered something in her mother’s ear. The latter beamed all over, and invited me to go with her to the store-room. There I was shown five large trunks, and a number of smaller trunks and boxes.

  “This is her trousseau,” her mother whispered; “we made it all ourselves.”

  After looking at these forbidding trunks I took leave of my hospitable hostesses. They made me promise to come and see them again some day.

  It happened that I was able to keep this promise. Seven years after my first visit, I was sent down to the little town to give expert evidence in a case that was being tried there.

  As I entered the little house I heard the same “Ach!” echo through it. They recognised me at once. . . . Well they might! My first visit had been an event in their lives, and when events are few they are long remembered.

  I walked into the drawing-room: the mother, who had grown stouter and was already getting grey, was creeping about on the floor, cutting out some blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa, embroidering.

  There was the same smell of moth powder; there were the same patterns, the same portrait with the broken glass. But yet there was a change. Beside the portrait of the bishop hung a portrait of the Colonel, and the ladies were in mourning. The Colonel’s death had occurred a week after his promotion to be a general.

  Reminiscences began. . . . The widow shed tears.

  “We have had a terrible loss,” she said. “My husband, you know, is dead. We are alone in the world now, and have no one but ourselves to look to. Yegor Semyonitch is alive, but I have no good news to tell of him. They would not have him in the monastery on account of—of intoxicating beverages. And now in his disappointment he drinks more than ever. I am thinking of going to the Marshal of Nobility to lodge a complaint. Would you believe it, he has more than once broken open the trunks and . . . taken Manetchka’s trousseau and given it to beggars. He has taken everything out of two of the trunks! If he goes on like this, my Manetchka will be left without a trousseau at all.”

  “What are you saying, mamam?” said Manetchka, embarrassed. “Our visitor might suppose . . . there’s no knowing what he might suppose . . . . I shall never—never marry.”

  Manetchka cast her eyes up to the ceiling with a look of hope and aspiration, evidently not for a moment believing what she said.

  A little bald-headed masculine figure in a brown coat and goloshes instead of boots darted like a mouse across the passage and disappeared. “Yegor Semyonitch, I suppose,” I thought.

  I looked at the mother and daughter together. They both looked much older and terribly changed. The mother’s hair was silvered, but the daughter was so faded and withered that her mother might have been taken for her elder sister, not more than five years her senior.

  “I have made up my mind to go to the Marshal,” the mother said to me, forgetting she had told me this already. “I mean to make a complaint. Yegor Semyonitch lays his hands on everything we make, and offers it up for the sake of his soul. My Manetchka is left without a trousseau.”

  Manetchka flushed again, but this time she said nothing.

  “We have to make them all over again. And God knows we are not so well off. We are all alone in the world now.”

  “We are alone in the world,” repeated Manetchka.

  A year ago fate brought me once more to the little house.

  Walking into the drawing-room, I saw the old lady. Dressed all in black with heavy crape pleureuses, she was sitting on the sofa sewing. Beside her sat the little old man in the brown coat and the goloshes instead of boots. On seeing me, he jumped up and ran out of the room.

  In response to my greeting, the old lady smiled and said:

  “Je suis charmée de vous revoir, monsieur.”

  “What are you making?” I asked, a little later.

  “It’s a blouse. When it’s finished I shall take it to the priest’s to be put away, or else Yegor Semyonitch would carry it off. I store everything at the priest’s now,” she added in a whisper.

  And looking at the portrait of her daughter which stood before her on the table, she sighed and said:

  “We are all alone in the world.”

  And where was the daughter? Whe
re was Manetchka? I did not ask. I did not dare to ask the old mother dressed in her new deep mourning. And while I was in the room, and when I got up to go, no Manetchka came out to greet me. I did not hear her voice, nor her soft, timid footstep. . . .

  I understood, and my heart was heavy.

  The Helpmate

  “

  I’ve asked you not to tidy my table,” said Nikolay Yevgrafitch. “There’s no finding anything when you’ve tidied up. Where’s the telegram? Where have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it. It’s from Kazan, dated yesterday.”

  The maid—a pale, very slim girl with an indifferent expression —found several telegrams in the basket under the table, and handed them to the doctor without a word; but all these were telegrams from patients. Then they looked in the drawing-room, and in Olga Dmitrievna’s room.

  It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five o’clock at least. He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her looking-glass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the lilies of the valley which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist’s shop all over the house. On such nights he became petty, ill-humoured, irritable, and he fancied now that it was very necessary for him to have the telegram he had received the day before from his brother, though it contained nothing but Christmas greetings.

  On the table of his wife’s room under the box of stationery he found a telegram, and glanced at it casually. It was addressed to his wife, care of his mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel . . . . The doctor did not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign language, apparently English.

  “Who is this Michel? Why Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her mother?”

  During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to being suspicious, guessing, catching at clues, and it had several times occurred to him, that his exercise at home had qualified him to become an excellent detective. Going into his study and beginning to reflect, he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in Petersburg a year and a half ago, and had lunched with an old school-fellow, a civil engineer, and how that engineer had introduced to him and his wife a young man of two or three and twenty, called Mihail Ivanovitch, with rather a curious short surname—Riss. Two months later the doctor had seen the young man’s photograph in his wife’s album, with an inscription in French: “In remembrance of the present and in hope of the future.” Later on he had met the young man himself at his mother-in-law’s. And that was at the time when his wife had taken to being very often absent and coming home at four or five o’clock in the morning, and was constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept refusing to do; and a continual feud went on in the house which made him feel ashamed to face the servants.

  Six months before, his colleagues had decided that he was going into consumption, and advised him to throw up everything and go to the Crimea. When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much alarmed; she began to be affectionate to her husband, and kept assuring him that it would be cold and dull in the Crimea, and that he had much better go to Nice, and that she would go with him, and there would nurse him, look after him, take care of him.

  Now, he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to Nice: her Michel lived at Monte Carlo.

  He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence: “I drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival.” He pictured the pitiable, ludicrous part he would play if he had agreed to go to Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and began pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat in great agitation. His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted. Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain, straightforward man, a surgeon by profession—how could he have let himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak, worthless, mercenary, low creature.

  “‘Little foot’!” he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram; “‘little foot’!”

  Of the time when he fell in love and proposed to her, and the seven years that he had been living with her, all that remained in his memory was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet, which certainly were very small, beautiful feet; and even now it seemed as though he still had from those old embraces the feeling of lace and silk upon his hands and face—and nothing more. Nothing more—that is, not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats, and lies—brazen, treacherous lies. He remembered how in his father’s house in the village a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house and would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset things; so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into his life and made complete havoc of it. The best years of his life had been spent as though in hell, his hopes for happiness shattered and turned into a mockery, his health gone, his rooms as vulgar in their atmosphere as a cocotte’s, and of the ten thousand he earned every year he could never save ten roubles to send his old mother in the village, and his debts were already about fifteen thousand. It seemed that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this woman.

  He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed and got warm, but he could not. He kept walking about the rooms, or sat down to the table, nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling mechanically on a paper.

  “Trying a pen. . . . A little foot.”

  By five o’clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself. It seemed to him now that if Olga Dmitrievna had married some one else who might have had a good influence over her—who knows?— she might after all have become a good, straightforward woman. He was a poor psychologist, and knew nothing of the female heart; besides, he was churlish, uninteresting. . . .

  “I haven’t long to live now,” he thought. “I am a dead man, and ought not to stand in the way of the living. It would be strange and stupid to insist upon one’s rights now. I’ll have it out with her; let her go to the man she loves. . . . I’ll give her a divorce. I’ll take the blame on myself.”

  Olga Dmitrievna came in at last, and she walked into the study and sank into a chair just as she was in her white cloak, hat, and overboots.

  “The nasty, fat boy,” she said with a sob, breathing hard. “It’s really dishonest; it’s disgusting.” She stamped. “I can’t put up with it; I can’t, I can’t!”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Nikolay Yevgrafitch, going up to her.

  “That student, Azarbekov, was seeing me home, and he lost my bag, and there was fifteen roubles in it. I borrowed it from mamma.”

  She was crying in a most genuine way, like a little girl, and not only her handkerchief, but even her gloves, were wet with tears.

  “It can’t be helped!” said the doctor. “If he’s lost it, he’s lost it, and it’s no good worrying over it. Calm yourself; I want to talk to you.”

  “I am not a millionaire to lose money like that. He says he’ll pay it back, but I don’t believe him; he’s poor . . .”

  Her husband begged her to calm herself and to listen to him, but she kept on talking of the student and of the fifteen roubles she had lost.

  “Ach! I’ll give you twenty-five roubles to-morrow if you’ll only hold your tongue!” he said irritably.

  “I must take off my things!” she said, crying. “I can’t talk seriously in my fur coat! How strange you are!”

  He helped her off with her coat and overboots, detecting as he did so the smell of the white wine she liked to drink with oysters (in spite of her eth
erealness she ate and drank a great deal). She went into her room and came back soon after, having changed her things and powdered her face, though her eyes still showed traces of tears. She sat down, retreating into her light, lacy dressing-gown, and in the mass of billowy pink her husband could see nothing but her hair, which she had let down, and her little foot wearing a slipper.

  “What do you want to talk about?” she asked, swinging herself in a rocking-chair.

  “I happened to see this;” and he handed her the telegram.

  She read it and shrugged her shoulders.

  “Well?” she said, rocking herself faster. “That’s the usual New Year’s greeting and nothing else. There are no secrets in it.”

  “You are reckoning on my not knowing English. No, I don’t know it; but I have a dictionary. That telegram is from Riss; he drinks to the health of his beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let us leave that,” the doctor went on hurriedly. “I don’t in the least want to reproach you or make a scene. We’ve had scenes and reproaches enough; it’s time to make an end of them. . . . This is what I want to say to you: you are free, and can live as you like.”

  There was a silence. She began crying quietly.

  “I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretences,” Nikolay Yevgrafitch continued. “If you love that young man, love him; if you want to go abroad to him, go. You are young, healthy, and I am a wreck, and haven’t long to live. In short . . . you understand me.”

  He was agitated and could not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and speaking in a voice of self-pity, acknowledged that she loved Riss, and used to drive out of town with him and see him in his rooms, and now she really did long to go abroad.

  “You see, I hide nothing from you,” she added, with a sigh. “My whole soul lies open before you. And I beg you again, be generous, get me a passport.”

  “I repeat, you are free.”