Love and Other Stories written by Anton Chekhov

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THE TALES OF CHEKHOV

VOLUME 13

LOVE AND OTHER STORIES

BY

ANTON TCHEKHOV

Translated by CONSTANCE GARNETT

CONTENTS

LOVE
LIGHTS
A STORY WITHOUT AN END
MARI D'ELLE
A LIVING CHATTEL
THE DOCTOR
TOO EARLY!
THE COSSACK
ABORIGINES
AN INQUIRY
MARTYRS
THE LION AND THE SUN
A DAUGHTER OF ALBION
CHORISTERS
NERVES
A WORK OF ART
A JOKE
A COUNTRY COTTAGE
A BLUNDER
FAT AND THIN
THE DEATH OF A GOVERNMENT CLERK
A PINK STOCKING
AT A SUMMER VILLA

LOVE

"THREE o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in
at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't
sleep, I am so happy!

"My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange,
incomprehensible feeling. I can't analyse it just now--I haven't
the time, I'm too lazy, and there--hang analysis! Why, is a man
likely to interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost
from a belfry, or has just learned that he has won two hundred
thousand? Is he in a state to do it?"

This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girl
of nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times,
and as often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, and
copied it all over again. I spent as long over the letter as if it
had been a novel I had to write to order. And it was not because I
tried to make it longer, more elaborate, and more fervent, but
because I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing,
when one sits in the stillness of one's study and communes with
one's own day-dreams while the spring night looks in at one's window.
Between the lines I saw a beloved image, and it seemed to me that
there were, sitting at the same table writing with me, spirits as
naively happy, as foolish, and as blissfully smiling as I. I wrote
continually, looking at my hand, which still ached deliciously where
hers had lately pressed it, and if I turned my eyes away I had a
vision of the green trellis of the little gate. Through that trellis
Sasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I was saying
good-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply admiring
her figure as every decent man admires a pretty woman; when I saw
through the trellis two big eyes, I suddenly, as though by inspiration,
knew that I was in love, that it was all settled between us, and
fully decided already, that I had nothing left to do but to carry
out certain formalities.

It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly
putting on one's hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and
to carry the treasure to the post. There are no stars in the sky
now: in their place there is a long whitish streak in the east,
broken here and there by clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses;
from that streak the whole sky is flooded with pale light. The town
is asleep, but already the water-carts have come out, and somewhere
in a far-away factory a whistle sounds to wake up the workpeople.
Beside the postbox, slightly moist with dew, you are sure to see
the clumsy figure of a house porter, wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin
and carrying a stick. He is in a condition akin to catalepsy: he
is not asleep or awake, but something between.

If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decision
of their fate, they would not have such a humble air. I, anyway,
almost kissed my postbox, and as I gazed at it I reflected that the
post is the greatest of blessings.

I beg anyone who has ever been in love to remember how one usually
hurries home after dropping the letter in the box, rapidly gets
into bed and pulls up the quilt in the full conviction that as soon
as one wakes up in the morning one will be overwhelmed with memories
of the previous day and look with rapture at the window, where the
daylight will be eagerly making its way through the folds of the
curtain.

Well, to facts. . . . Next morning at midday, Sasha's maid brought
me the following answer: "I am delited be sure to come to us to day
please I shall expect you. Your S."

Not a single comma. This lack of punctuation, and the misspelling
of the word "delighted," the whole letter, and even the long, narrow
envelope in which it was put filled my heart with tenderness. In
the sprawling but diffident handwriting I recognised Sasha's walk,
her way of raising her eyebrows when she laughed, the movement of
her lips. . . . But the contents of the letter did not satisfy me.
In the first place, poetical letters are not answered in that way,
and in the second, why should I go to Sasha's house to wait till
it should occur to her stout mamma, her brothers, and poor relations
to leave us alone together? It would never enter their heads, and
nothing is more hateful than to have to restrain one's raptures
simply because of the intrusion of some animate trumpery in the
shape of a half-deaf old woman or little girl pestering one with
questions. I sent an answer by the maid asking Sasha to select some
park or boulevard for a rendezvous. My suggestion was readily
accepted. I had struck the right chord, as the saying is.

Between four and five o'clock in the afternoon I made my way to the
furthest and most overgrown part of the park. There was not a soul
in the park, and the tryst might have taken place somewhere nearer
in one of the avenues or arbours, but women don't like doing it by
halves in romantic affairs; in for a penny, in for a pound--if
you are in for a tryst, let it be in the furthest and most impenetrable
thicket, where one runs the risk of stumbling upon some rough or
drunken man. When I went up to Sasha she was standing with her back
to me, and in that back I could read a devilish lot of mystery. It
seemed as though that back and the nape of her neck, and the black
spots on her dress were saying: Hush! . . . The girl was wearing a
simple cotton dress over which she had thrown a light cape. To add
to the air of mysterious secrecy, her face was covered with a white
veil. Not to spoil the effect, I had to approach on tiptoe and speak
in a half whisper.

From what I remember now, I was not so much the essential point of
the rendezvous as a detail of it. Sasha was not so much absorbed
in the interview itself as in its romantic mysteriousness, my kisses,
the silence of the gloomy trees, my vows. . . . There was not a
minute in which she forgot herself, was overcome, or let the
mysterious expression drop from her face, and really if there had
been any Ivan Sidoritch or Sidor Ivanitch in my place she would
have felt just as happy. How is one to make out in such circumstances
whether one is loved or not? Whether the love is "the real thing"
or not?

From the park I took Sasha home with me. The presence of the beloved
woman in one's bachelor quarters affects one like wine and music.
Usually one begins to speak of the future, and the confidence and
self-reliance with which one does so is beyond bounds. You make
plans and projects, talk fervently of the rank of general though
you have not yet reached the rank of a lieutenant, and altogether
you fire off such high-flown nonsense that your listener must have
a great deal of love and ignorance of life to assent to it. Fortunately
for men, women in love are always blinded by their feelings and
never know anything of life. Far from not assenting, they actually
turn pale with holy awe, are full of reverence and hang greedily
on the maniac's words. Sasha listened to me with attention, but I
soon detected an absent-minded expression on her face, she did not
understand me. The future of which I talked interested her only in
its external aspect and I was wasting time in displaying my plans
and projects before her. She was keenly interested in knowing which
would be her room, what paper she would have in the room, why I had
an upright piano instead of a grand piano, and so on. She examined
carefully all the little things on my table, looked at the photographs,
sniffed at the bottles, peeled the old stamps off the envelopes,
saying she wanted them for something.

"Please collect old stamps for me!" she said, making a grave face.
"Please do."

Then she found a nut in the window, noisily cracked it and ate it.

"Why don't you stick little labels on the backs of your books?" she
asked, taking a look at the bookcase.

"What for?"

"Oh, so that each book should have its number. And where am I to
put my books? I've got books too, you know."

"What books have you got?" I asked.

Sasha raised her eyebrows, thought a moment and said:

"All sorts."

And if it had entered my head to ask her what thoughts, what
convictions, what aims she had, she would no doubt have raised her
eyebrows, thought a minute, and have said in the same way: "All
sorts."

Later I saw Sasha home and left her house regularly, officially
engaged, and was so reckoned till our wedding. If the reader will
allow me to judge merely from my personal experience, I maintain
that to be engaged is very dreary, far more so than to be a husband
or nothing at all. An engaged man is neither one thing nor the
other, he has left one side of the river and not reached the other,
he is not married and yet he can't be said to be a bachelor, but
is in something not unlike the condition of the porter whom I have
mentioned above.

Every day as soon as I had a free moment I hastened to my fiancee.
As I went I usually bore within me a multitude of hopes, desires,
intentions, suggestions, phrases. I always fancied that as soon as
the maid opened the door I should, from feeling oppressed and
stifled, plunge at once up to my neck into a sea of refreshing
happiness. But it always turned out otherwise in fact. Every time
I went to see my fiancee I found all her family and other members
of the household busy over the silly trousseau. (And by the way,
they were hard at work sewing for two months and then they had less
than a hundred roubles' worth of things). There was a smell of
irons, candle grease and fumes. Bugles scrunched under one's feet.
The two most important rooms were piled up with billows of linen,
calico, and muslin and from among the billows peeped out Sasha's
little head with a thread between her teeth. All the sewing party
welcomed me with cries of delight but at once led me off into the
dining-room where I could not hinder them nor see what only husbands
are permitted to behold. In spite of my feelings, I had to sit in
the dining-room and converse with Pimenovna, one of the poor
relations. Sasha, looking worried and excited, kept running by me
with a thimble, a skein of wool or some other boring object.

"Wait, wait, I shan't be a minute," she would say when I raised
imploring eyes to her. "Only fancy that wretch Stepanida has spoilt
the bodice of the barege dress!"

And after waiting in vain for this grace, I lost my temper, went
out of the house and walked about the streets in the company of the
new cane I had bought. Or I would want to go for a walk or a drive
with my fiancee, would go round and find her already standing in
the hall with her mother, dressed to go out and playing with her
parasol.

"Oh, we are going to the Arcade," she would say. "We have got to
buy some more cashmere and change the hat."

My outing is knocked on the head. I join the ladies and go with
them to the Arcade. It is revoltingly dull to listen to women
shopping, haggling and trying to outdo the sharp shopman. I felt
ashamed when Sasha, after turning over masses of material and
knocking down the prices to a minimum, walked out of the shop without
buying anything, or else told the shopman to cut her some half
rouble's worth.

When they came out of the shop, Sasha and her mamma with scared and
worried faces would discuss at length having made a mistake, having
bought the wrong thing, the flowers in the chintz being too dark,
and so on.

Yes, it is a bore to be engaged! I'm glad it's over.

Now I am married. It is evening. I am sitting in my study reading.
Behind me on the sofa Sasha is sitting munching something noisily.
I want a glass of beer.

"Sasha, look for the corkscrew. . . ." I say. "It's lying about
somewhere."

Sasha leaps up, rummages in a disorderly way among two or three
heaps of papers, drops the matches, and without finding the corkscrew,
sits down in silence. . . . Five minutes pass--ten. . . I begin
to be fretted both by thirst and vexation.

"Sasha, do look for the corkscrew," I say.

Sasha leaps up again and rummages among the papers near me. Her
munching and rustling of the papers affects me like the sound of
sharpening knives against each other. . . . I get up and begin
looking for the corkscrew myself. At last it is found and the beer
is uncorked. Sasha remains by the table and begins telling me
something at great length.

"You'd better read something, Sasha," I say.

She takes up a book, sits down facing me and begins moving her lips
. . . . I look at her little forehead, moving lips, and sink into
thought.

"She is getting on for twenty. . . ." I reflect. "If one takes a
boy of the educated class and of that age and compares them, what
a difference! The boy would have knowledge and convictions and some
intelligence."

But I forgive that difference just as the low forehead and moving
lips are forgiven. I remember in my old Lovelace days I have cast
off women for a stain on their stockings, or for one foolish word,
or for not cleaning their teeth, and now I forgive everything: the
munching, the muddling about after the corkscrew, the slovenliness,
the long talking about nothing that matters; I forgive it all almost
unconsciously, with no effort of will, as though Sasha's mistakes
were my mistakes, and many things which would have made me wince
in old days move me to tenderness and even rapture. The explanation
of this forgiveness of everything lies in my love for Sasha, but
what is the explanation of the love itself, I really don't know.

LIGHTS

THE dog was barking excitedly outside. And Ananyev the engineer,
his assistant called Von Schtenberg, and I went out of the hut to
see at whom it was barking. I was the visitor, and might have
remained indoors, but I must confess my head was a little dizzy
from the wine I had drunk, and I was glad to get a breath of fresh
air.

"There is nobody here," said Ananyev when we went out. "Why are you
telling stories, Azorka? You fool!"

There was not a soul in sight.

"The fool," Azorka, a black house-dog, probably conscious of his
guilt in barking for nothing and anxious to propitiate us, approached
us, diffidently wagging his tail. The engineer bent down and touched
him between his ears.

"Why are you barking for nothing, creature?" he said in the tone
in which good-natured people talk to children and dogs. "Have you
had a bad dream or what? Here, doctor, let me commend to your
attention," he said, turning to me, "a wonderfully nervous subject!
Would you believe it, he can't endure solitude--he is always
having terrible dreams and suffering from nightmares; and when you
shout at him he has something like an attack of hysterics."

"Yes, a dog of refined feelings," the student chimed in.

Azorka must have understood that the conversation was concerning
him. He turned his head upwards and grinned plaintively, as though
to say, "Yes, at times I suffer unbearably, but please excuse it!"

It was an August night, there were stars, but it was dark. Owing
to the fact that I had never in my life been in such exceptional
surroundings, as I had chanced to come into now, the starry night
seemed to me gloomy, inhospitable, and darker than it was in reality.
I was on a railway line which was still in process of construction.
The high, half-finished embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and
rubble, the holes, the wheel-barrows standing here and there, the
flat tops of the mud huts in which the workmen lived--all this
muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness, gave the earth a
strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos. There was
so little order in all that lay before me that it was somehow strange
in the midst of the hideously excavated, grotesque-looking earth
to see the silhouettes of human beings and the slender telegraph
posts. Both spoiled the ensemble of the picture, and seemed to
belong to a different world. It was still, and the only sound came
from the telegraph wire droning its wearisome refrain somewhere
very high above our heads.

We climbed up on the embankment and from its height looked down
upon the earth. A hundred yards away where the pits, holes, and
mounds melted into the darkness of the night, a dim light was
twinkling. Beyond it gleamed another light, beyond that a third,
then a hundred paces away two red eyes glowed side by side--
probably the windows of some hut--and a long series of such lights,
growing continually closer and dimmer, stretched along the line to
the very horizon, then turned in a semicircle to the left and
disappeared in the darkness of the distance. The lights were
motionless. There seemed to be something in common between them and
the stillness of the night and the disconsolate song of the telegraph
wire. It seemed as though some weighty secret were buried under the
embankment and only the lights, the night, and the wires knew of
it.

"How glorious, O Lord!" sighed Ananyev; "such space and beauty that
one can't tear oneself away! And what an embankment! It's not an
embankment, my dear fellow, but a regular Mont Blanc. It's costing
millions. . . ."

Going into ecstasies over the lights and the embankment that was
costing millions, intoxicated by the wine and his sentimental mood,
the engineer slapped Von Schtenberg on the shoulder and went on in
a jocose tone:

"Well, Mihail Mihailitch, lost in reveries? No doubt it is pleasant
to look at the work of one's own hands, eh? Last year this very
spot was bare steppe, not a sight of human life, and now look: life
. . . civilisation. . . And how splendid it all is, upon my soul!
You and I are building a railway, and after we are gone, in another
century or two, good men will build a factory, a school, a hospital,
and things will begin to move! Eh!"

The student stood motionless with his hands thrust in his pockets,
and did not take his eyes off the lights. He was not listening to
the engineer, but was thinking, and was apparently in the mood in
which one does not want to speak or to listen. After a prolonged
silence he turned to me and said quietly:

"Do you know what those endless lights are like? They make me think
of something long dead, that lived thousands of years ago, something
like the camps of the Amalekites or the Philistines. It is as though
some people of the Old Testament had pitched their camp and were
waiting for morning to fight with Saul or David. All that is wanting
to complete the illusion is the blare of trumpets and sentries
calling to one another in some Ethiopian language."

And, as though of design, the wind fluttered over the line and
brought a sound like the clank of weapons. A silence followed. I
don't know what the engineer and the student were thinking of, but
it seemed to me already that I actually saw before me something
long dead and even heard the sentry talking in an unknown tongue.
My imagination hastened to picture the tents, the strange people,
their clothes, their armour.

"Yes," muttered the student pensively, "once Philistines and
Amalekites were living in this world, making wars, playing their
part, and now no trace of them remains. So it will be with us. Now
we are making a railway, are standing here philosophising, but two
thousand years will pass--and of this embankment and of all those
men, asleep after their hard work, not one grain of dust will remain.
In reality, it's awful!"

"You must drop those thoughts . . ." said the engineer gravely and
admonishingly.

"Why?"

"Because. . . . Thoughts like that are for the end of life, not for
the beginning of it. You are too young for them."

"Why so?" repeated the student.

"All these thoughts of the transitoriness, the insignificance and
the aimlessness of life, of the inevitability of death, of the
shadows of the grave, and so on, all such lofty thoughts, I tell
you, my dear fellow, are good and natural in old age when they come
as the product of years of inner travail, and are won by suffering
and really are intellectual riches; for a youthful brain on the
threshold of real life they are simply a calamity! A calamity!"
Ananyev repeated with a wave of his hand. "To my mind it is better
at your age to have no head on your shoulders at all than to think
on these lines. I am speaking seriously, Baron. And I have been
meaning to speak to you about it for a long time, for I noticed
from the very first day of our acquaintance your partiality for
these damnable ideas!"

"Good gracious, why are they damnable?" the student asked with a
smile, and from his voice and his face I could see that he asked
the question from simple politeness, and that the discussion raised
by the engineer did not interest him in the least.

I could hardly keep my eyes open. I was dreaming that immediately
after our walk we should wish each other good-night and go to bed,
but my dream was not quickly realised. When we had returned to the
hut the engineer put away the empty bottles and took out of a large
wicker hamper two full ones, and uncorking them, sat down to his
work-table with the evident intention of going on drinking, talking,
and working. Sipping a little from his glass, he made pencil notes
on some plans and went on pointing out to the student that the
latter's way of thinking was not what it should be. The student sat
beside him checking accounts and saying nothing. He, like me, had
no inclination to speak or to listen. That I might not interfere
with their work, I sat away from the table on the engineer's
crooked-legged travelling bedstead, feeling bored and expecting
every moment that they would suggest I should go to bed. It was
going on for one o'clock.

Having nothing to do, I watched my new acquaintances. I had never
seen Ananyev or the student before. I had only made their acquaintance
on the night I have described. Late in the evening I was returning
on horseback from a fair to the house of a landowner with whom I
was staying, had got on the wrong road in the dark and lost my way.
Going round and round by the railway line and seeing how dark the
night was becoming, I thought of the "barefoot railway roughs," who
lie in wait for travellers on foot and on horseback, was frightened,
and knocked at the first hut I came to. There I was cordially
received by Ananyev and the student. As is usually the case with
strangers casually brought together, we quickly became acquainted,
grew friendly and at first over the tea and afterward over the wine,
began to feel as though we had known each other for years. At the
end of an hour or so, I knew who they were and how fate had brought
them from town to the far-away steppe; and they knew who I was,
what my occupation and my way of thinking.

Nikolay Anastasyevitch Ananyev, the engineer, was a broad-shouldered,
thick-set man, and, judging from his appearance, he had, like
Othello, begun the "descent into the vale of years," and was growing
rather too stout. He was just at that stage which old match-making
women mean when they speak of "a man in the prime of his age," that
is, he was neither young nor old, was fond of good fare, good liquor,
and praising the past, panted a little as he walked, snored loudly
when he was asleep, and in his manner with those surrounding him
displayed that calm imperturbable good humour which is always
acquired by decent people by the time they have reached the grade
of a staff officer and begun to grow stout. His hair and beard were
far from being grey, but already, with a condescension of which he
was unconscious, he addressed young men as "my dear boy" and felt
himself entitled to lecture them good-humouredly about their way
of thinking. His movements and his voice were calm, smooth, and
self-confident, as they are in a man who is thoroughly well aware
that he has got his feet firmly planted on the right road, that he
has definite work, a secure living, a settled outlook. . . . His
sunburnt, thicknosed face and muscular neck seemed to say: "I am
well fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will come
when you young people too, will be wellfed, healthy, and satisfied
with yourselves. . . ." He was dressed in a cotton shirt with the
collar awry and in full linen trousers thrust into his high boots.
From certain trifles, as for instance, from his coloured worsted
girdle, his embroidered collar, and the patch on his elbow, I was
able to guess that he was married and in all probability tenderly
loved by his wife.

Baron Von Schtenberg, a student of the Institute of Transport, was
a young man of about three or four and twenty. Only his fair hair
and scanty beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and frigidity
in his features showed traces of his descent from Barons of the
Baltic provinces; everything else--his name, Mihail Mihailovitch,
his religion, his ideas, his manners, and the expression of his
face were purely Russian. Wearing, like Ananyev, a cotton shirt and
high boots, with his round shoulders, his hair left uncut, and his
sunburnt face, he did not look like a student or a Baron, but like
an ordinary Russian workman. His words and gestures were few, he
drank reluctantly without relish, checked the accounts mechanically,
and seemed all the while to be thinking of something else. His
movements and voice were calm, and smooth too, but his calmness was
of a different kind from the engineer's. His sunburnt, slightly
ironical, dreamy face, his eyes which looked up from under his
brows, and his whole figure were expressive of spiritual stagnation
--mental sloth. He looked as though it did not matter to him in
the least whether the light were burning before him or not, whether
the wine were nice or nasty, and whether the accounts he was checking
were correct or not. . . . And on his intelligent, calm face I read:
"I don't see so far any good in definite work, a secure living, and
a settled outlook. It's all nonsense. I was in Petersburg, now I
am sitting here in this hut, in the autumn I shall go back to
Petersburg, then in the spring here again. . . . What sense there
is in all that I don't know, and no one knows. . . . And so it's
no use talking about it. . . ."

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