Selected early short stories 1887 Page 17

  " 'I haven't long to live now, nurse,' she would say. 'As soon as my confinement is over I shall die. I did not want to die so early, but it seems it's my fate.'

  "The nurse and the cook were in tears, of course. Sometimes the priest's wife or some lady from a neighbouring estate would come and see her and she would take them aside and open her soul to them, always harping on the same subject, her approaching death. She spoke gravely with an unpleasant smile, even with an angry face which would not allow any contradiction. She had been smart and fashionable in her dress, but now in view of her approaching death she became slovenly; she did not read, she did not laugh, she did not dream aloud. What was more she drove with her aunt to the cemetery and selected a spot for her tomb. Five days before her confinement she made her will. And all this, bear in mind, was done in the best of health, without the faintest hint of illness or danger. A confinement is a difficult affair and sometimes fatal, but in the case of which I am telling you every indication was favourable, and there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of. Her husband was sick of the whole business at last. He lost his temper one day at dinner and asked her:

  " 'Listen, Natasha, when is there going to be an end of this silliness?'

  " 'It's not silliness, I am in earnest.'

  " 'Nonsense, I advise you to give over being silly that you may not feel ashamed of it afterwards.'

  "Well, the confinement came. The husband got the very best midwife from the town. It was his wife's first confinement, but it could not have gone better. When it was all over she asked to look at her baby. She looked at it and said:

  " 'Well, now I can die.'

  "She said good-bye, shut her eyes, and half an hour later gave up her soul to God. She was fully conscious up to the last moment. Anyway when they gave her milk instead of water she whispered softly:

  " 'Why are you giving me milk instead of water?'

  "So that is what happened. She died as she predicted."

  The examining magistrate paused, gave a sigh and said:

  "Come, explain why she died. I assure you on my honour, this is not invented, it's a fact."

  The doctor looked at the sky meditatively.

  "You ought to have had an inquest on her," he said.

  "Why?"

  "Why, to find out the cause of her death. She didn't die because she had predicted it. She poisoned herself most probably."

  The examining magistrate turned quickly, facing the doctor, and screwing up his eyes, asked:

  "And from what do you conclude that she poisoned herself?"

  "I don't conclude it, but I assume it. Was she on good terms with her husband?"

  "H'm, not altogether. There had been misunderstandings soon after their marriage. There were unfortunate circumstances. She had found her husband on one occasion with a lady. She soon forgave him however."

  "And which came first, her husband's infidelity or her idea of dying?"

  The examining magistrate looked attentively at the doctor as though he were trying to imagine why he put that question.

  "Excuse me," he said, not quite immediately. "Let me try and remember." The examining magistrate took off his hat and rubbed his forehead. " Yes, yes . . . it was very shortly after that incident that she began talking of death. Yes, yes."

  "Well, there, do you see? . . . In all probability it was at that time that she made up her mind to poison herself, but, as most likely she did not want to kill her child also, she put it off till after her confinement."

  "Not likely, not likely! . . . it's impossible. She forgave him at the time."

  "That she forgave it quickly means that she had something bad in her mind. Young wives do not forgive quickly."

  The examining magistrate gave a forced smile, and, to conceal his too noticeable agitation, began lighting a cigarette.

  "Not likely, not likely," he went on. "No notion of anything of the sort being possible ever entered into my head. . . . And besides . . . he was not so much to blame as it seems. . . . He was unfaithful to her in rather a queer way, with no desire to be; he came home at night somewhat elevated, wanted to make love to somebody, his wife was in an interesting condition . . . then he came across a lady who had come to stay for three days -- damnation take her -- an empty-headed creature, silly and not good-looking. It couldn't be reckoned as an infidelity. His wife looked at it in that way herself and soon . . . forgave it. Nothing more was said about it. . . ."

  "People don't die without a reason," said the doctor.

  "That is so, of course, but all the same . . . I cannot admit that she poisoned herself. But it is strange that the idea has never struck me before! And no one thought of it! Everyone was astonished that her prediction had come to pass, and the idea . . . of such a death was far from their mind. And indeed, it cannot be that she poisoned herself! No!"

  The examining magistrate pondered. The thought of the woman who had died so strangely haunted him all through the inquest. As he noted down what the doctor dictated to him he moved his eyebrows gloomily and rubbed his forehead.

  "And are there really poisons that kill one in a quarter of an hour, gradually, without any pain?" he asked the doctor while the latter was opening the skull.

  "Yes, there are. Morphia for instance."

  "H'm, strange. I remember she used to keep something of the sort. . . . But it could hardly be."

  On the way back the examining magistrate looked exhausted, he kept nervously biting his moustache, and was unwilling to talk.

  "Let us go a little way on foot," he said to the doctor. "I am tired of sitting."

  After walking about a hundred paces, the examining magistrate seemed to the doctor to be overcome with fatigue, as though he had been climbing up a high mountain. He stopped and, looking at the doctor with a strange look in his eyes, as though he were drunk, said:

  "My God, if your theory is correct, why it's. . . it was cruel, inhuman! She poisoned herself to punish some one else! Why, was the sin so great? Oh, my God! And why did you make me a present of this damnable idea, doctor!"

  The examining magistrate clutched at his head in despair, and went on:

  "What I have told you was about my own wife, about myself. Oh, my God! I was to blame, I wounded her, but can it have been easier to die than to forgive? That's typical feminine logic -- cruel, merciless logic. Oh, even then when she was living she was cruel! I recall it all now! It's all clear to me now!"

  As the examining magistrate talked he shrugged his shoulders, then clutched at his head. He got back into the carriage, then walked again. The new idea the doctor had imparted to him seemed to have overwhelmed him, to have poisoned him; he was distracted, shattered in body and soul, and when he got back to the town he said good-bye to the doctor, declining to stay to dinner though he had promised the doctor the evening before to dine with him.

  NOTES

  idée fixé: an obsession

  ABORIGINES

  by Anton Chekhov

  BETWEEN nine and ten in the morning. Ivan Lyashkevsky, a lieutenant of Polish origin, who has at some time or other been wounded in the head, and now lives on his pension in a town in one of the southern provinces, is sitting in his lodgings at the open window talking to Franz Stepanitch Finks, the town architect, who has come in to see him for a minute. Both have thrust their heads out of the window, and are looking in the direction of the gate near which Lyashkevsky's landlord, a plump little native with pendulous perspiring cheeks, in full, blue trousers, is sitting on a bench with his waistcoat unbuttoned. The native is plunged in deep thought, and is absent-mindedly prodding the toe of his boot with a stick.

  "Extraordinary people, I tell you," grumbled Lyashkevsky, looking angrily at the native, "here he has sat down on the bench, and so he will sit, damn the fellow, with his hands folded till evening. They do absolutely nothing. The wastrels and loafers! It would be all right, you scoundrel, if you had money lying in the bank, or had a farm of your own where others would be working for you, but here you have not a
penny to your name, you eat the bread of others, you are in debt all round, and you starve your family -- devil take you! You wouldn't believe me, Franz Stepanitch, sometimes it makes me so cross that I could jump out of the window and give the low fellow a good horse-whipping. Come, why don't you work? What are you sitting there for?"

  The native looks indifferently at Lyashkevsky, tries to say something but cannot; sloth and the sultry heat have paralysed his conversational faculties. . . . Yawning lazily, he makes the sign of the cross over his mouth, and turns his eyes up towards the sky where pigeons fly, bathing in the hot air.

  "You must not be too severe in your judgments, honoured friend," sighs Finks, mopping his big bald head with his handkerchief. "Put yourself in their place: business is slack now, there's unemployment all round, a bad harvest, stagnation in trade."

  "Good gracious, how you talk!" cries Lyashkevsky in indignation, angrily wrapping his dressing gown round him. "Supposing he has no job and no trade, why doesn't he work in his own home, the devil flay him! I say! Is there no work for you at home? Just look, you brute! Your steps have come to pieces, the plankway is falling into the ditch, the fence is rotten; you had better set to and mend it all, or if you don't know how, go into the kitchen and help your wife. Your wife is running out every minute to fetch water or carry out the slops. Why shouldn't you run instead, you rascal? And then you must remember, Franz Stepanitch, that he has six acres of garden, that he has pigsties and poultry houses, but it is all wasted and no use. The flower garden is overgrown with weeds and almost baked dry, while the boys play ball in the kitchen garden. Isn't he a lazy brute? I assure you, though I have only the use of an acre and a half with my lodgings, you will always find radishes, and salad, and fennel, and onions, while that blackguard buys everything at the market."

  "He is a Russian, there is no doing anything with him," said Finks with a condescending smile; "it's in the Russian blood. . . . They are a very lazy people! If all property were given to Germans or Poles, in a year's time you would not recognise the town."

  The native in the blue trousers beckons a girl with a sieve, buys a kopeck's worth of sunflower seeds from her and begins cracking them.

  "A race of curs!" says Lyashkevsky angrily. "That's their only occupation, they crack sunflower seeds and they talk politics! The devil take them!"

  Staring wrathfully at the blue trousers, Lyashkevsky is gradually roused to fury, and gets so excited that he actually foams at the mouth. He speaks with a Polish accent, rapping out each syllable venomously, till at last the little bags under his eyes swell, and he abandons the Russian "scoundrels, blackguards, and rascals," and rolling his eyes, begins pouring out a shower of Polish oaths, coughing from his efforts. "Lazy dogs, race of curs. May the devil take them!"

  The native hears this abuse distinctly, but, judging from the appearance of his crumpled little figure, it does not affect him. Apparently he has long ago grown as used to it as to the buzzing of the flies, and feels it superfluous to protest. At every visit Finks has to listen to a tirade on the subject of the lazy good-for-nothing aborigines, and every time exactly the same one.

  "But . . . I must be going," he says, remembering that he has no time to spare. "Good-bye!"

  "Where are you off to?"

  "I only looked in on you for a minute. The wall of the cellar has cracked in the girls' high school, so they asked me to go round at once to look at it. I must go."

  "H'm. . . . I have told Varvara to get the samovar," says Lyashkevsky, surprised. "Stay a little, we will have some tea; then you shall go."

  Finks obediently puts down his hat on the table and remains to drink tea. Over their tea Lyashkevsky maintains that the natives are hopelessly ruined, that there is only one thing to do, to take them all indiscriminately and send them under strict escort to hard labour.

  "Why, upon my word," he says, getting hot, "you may ask what does that goose sitting there live upon! He lets me lodgings in his house for seven roubles a month, and he goes to name-day parties, that's all that he has to live on, the knave, may the devil take him! He has neither earnings nor an income. They are not merely sluggards and wastrels, they are swindlers too, they are continually borrowing money from the town bank, and what do they do with it? They plunge into some scheme such as sending bulls to Moscow, or building oil presses on a new system; but to send bulls to Moscow or to press oil you want to have a head on your shoulders, and these rascals have pumpkins on theirs! Of course all their schemes end in smoke. . . . They waste their money, get into a mess, and then snap their fingers at the bank. What can you get out of them? Their houses are mortgaged over and over again, they have no other property -- it's all been drunk and eaten up long ago. Nine-tenths of them are swindlers, the scoundrels! To borrow money and not return it is their rule. Thanks to them the town bank is going smash!"

  "I was at Yegorov's yesterday," Finks interrupts the Pole, anxious to change the conversation, "and only fancy, I won six roubles and a half from him at picquet."

  "I believe I still owe you something at picquet," Lyashkevsky recollects, "I ought to win it back. Wouldn't you like one game?"

  "Perhaps just one," Finks assents. "I must make haste to the high school, you know."

  Lyashkevsky and Finks sit down at the open window and begin a game of picquet. The native in the blue trousers stretches with relish, and husks of sunflower seeds fall in showers from all over him on to the ground. At that moment from the gate opposite appears another native with a long beard, wearing a crumpled yellowish-grey cotton coat. He screws up his eyes affectionately at the blue trousers and shouts:

  "Good-morning, Semyon Nikolaitch, I have the honour to congratulate you on the Thursday."

  "And the same to you, Kapiton Petrovitch!"

  "Come to my seat! It's cool here!"

  The blue trousers, with much sighing and groaning and waddling from side to side like a duck, cross the street.

  "Tierce major . . ." mutters Lyashkevsky, "from the queen. . . . Five and fifteen. . . . The rascals are talking of politics. . . . Do you hear? They have begun about England. I have six hearts."

  "I have the seven spades. My point."

  "Yes, it's yours. Do you hear? They are abusing Beaconsfield. They don't know, the swine, that Beaconsfield has been dead for ever so long. So I have twenty-nine. . . . Your lead."

  "Eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . . Yes, amazing people, these Russians! Eleven . . . twelve. . . . The Russian inertia is unique on the terrestrial globe."

  "Thirty . . . Thirty-one. . . . One ought to take a good whip, you know. Go out and give them Beaconsfield. I say, how their tongues are wagging! It's easier to babble than to work. I suppose you threw away the queen of clubs and I didn't realise it."

  "Thirteen . . . Fourteen. . . . It's unbearably hot! One must be made of iron to sit in such heat on a seat in the full sun! Fifteen."

  The first game is followed by a second, the second by a third. . . . Finks loses, and by degrees works himself up into a gambling fever and forgets all about the cracking walls of the high school cellar. As Lyashkevsky plays he keeps looking at the aborigines. He sees them, entertaining each other with conversation, go to the open gate, cross the filthy yard and sit down on a scanty patch of shade under an aspen tree. Between twelve and one o'clock the fat cook with brown legs spreads before them something like a baby's sheet with brown stains upon it, and gives them their dinner. They eat with wooden spoons, keep brushing away the flies, and go on talking.

  "The devil, it is beyond everything," cries Lyashkevsky, revolted. "I am very glad I have not a gun or a revolver or I should have a shot at those cattle. I have four knaves -- fourteen. . . . Your point. . . . It really gives me a twitching in my legs. I can't see those ruffians without being upset."

  "Don't excite yourself, it is bad for you."

  "But upon my word, it is enough to try the patience of a stone!"

  When he has finished dinner the native in blue trousers, worn out and exhausted, stagger
ing with laziness and repletion, crosses the street to his own house and sinks feebly on to his bench. He is struggling with drowsiness and the gnats, and is looking about him as dejectedly as though he were every minute expecting his end. His helpless air drives Lyashkevsky out of all patience. The Pole pokes his head out of the window and shouts at him, spluttering:

  "Been gorging? Ah, the old woman! The sweet darling. He has been stuffing himself, and now he doesn't know what to do with his tummy! Get out of my sight, you confounded fellow! Plague take you!"

  The native looks sourly at him, and merely twiddles his fingers instead of answering. A school-boy of his acquaintance passes by him with his satchel on his back. Stopping him the native ponders a long time what to say to him, and asks:

  "Well, what now?"

  "Nothing."

  "How, nothing?"

  "Why, just nothing."

  "H'm. . . . And which subject is the hardest?"

  "That's according." The school-boy shrugs his shoulders.

  "I see -- er . . . What is the Latin for tree?"

  "Arbor."

  "Aha. . . . And so one has to know all that," sighs the blue trousers. "You have to go into it all. . . . It's hard work, hard work. . . . Is your dear Mamma well?"

  "She is all right, thank you."

  "Ah. . . . Well, run along."

  After losing two roubles Finks remembers the high school and is horrified.

  "Holy Saints, why it's three o'clock already. How I have been staying on. Good-bye, I must run. . . ."

  "Have dinner with me, and then go," says Lyashkevsky. "You have plenty of time."

  Finks stays, but only on condition that dinner shall last no more than ten minutes. After dining he sits for some five minutes on the sofa and thinks of the cracked wall, then resolutely lays his head on the cushion and fills the room with a shrill whistling through his nose. While he is asleep, Lyashkevsky, who does not approve of an afternoon nap, sits at the window, stares at the dozing native, and grumbles:

  "Race of curs! I wonder you don't choke with laziness. No work, no intellectual or moral interests, nothing but vegetating . . . . disgusting. Tfoo!"