Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov. Anton Chekhov
smoke my pipe, the only one in the whole day, the sole relic of my old bad habit of smoking from morning till night. While I am smoking my wife comes in and sits down to talk to me. Just as in the morning, I know beforehand what our conversation is going to be about.
"I must talk to you seriously, Nikolay Stepanovitch," she begins. "I mean about Liza—Why don't you pay attention to it?"
"To what?"
"You pretend to notice nothing. But that is not right. We can't shirk responsibility... Gnekker has intentions in regard to Liza... What do you say?"
"That he is a bad man I can't say, because I don't know him, but that I don't like him I have told you a thousand times already."
"But you can't... you can't!"
She gets up and walks about in excitement.
"You can't take up that attitude to a serious step," she says. "When it is a question of our daughter's happiness we must lay aside all personal feeling. I know you do not like him... Very good... if we refuse him now, if we break it all off, how can you be sure that Liza will not have a grievance against us all her life? Suitors are not plentiful nowadays, goodness knows, and it may happen that no other match will turn up... He is very much in love with Liza, and she seems to like him... Of course, he has no settled position, but that can't be helped. Please God, in time he will get one. He is of good family and well off."
"Where did you learn that?"
"He told us so. His father has a large house in Harkov and an estate in the neighborhood. In short, Nikolay Stepanovitch, you absolutely must go to Harkov."
"What for?"
"You will find out all about him there... You know the professors there; they will help you. I would go myself, but I am a woman. I cannot... "
"I am not going to Harkov," I say morosely.
My wife is frightened, and a look of intense suffering comes into her face.
"For God's sake, Nikolay Stepanovitch," she implores me, with tears in her voice—"for God's sake, take this burden off me! I am so worried!"
It is painful for me to look at her.
"Very well, Varya," I say affectionately, "if you wish it, then certainly I will go to Harkov and do all you want."
She presses her handkerchief to her eyes and goes off to her room to cry, and I am left alone.
A little later lights are brought in. The armchair and the lamp-shade cast familiar shadows that have long grown wearisome on the walls and on the floor, and when I look at them I feel as though the night had come and with it my accursed sleeplessness. I lie on my bed, then get up and walk about the room, then lie down again. As a rule it is after dinner, at the approach of evening, that my nervous excitement reaches its highest pitch. For no reason I begin crying and burying my head in the pillow. At such times I am afraid that someone may come in; I am afraid of suddenly dying; I am ashamed of my tears, and altogether there is something insufferable in my soul. I feel that I can no longer bear the sight of my lamp, of my books, of the shadows on the floor. I cannot bear the sound of the voices coming from the drawing-room. Some force unseen, uncomprehended, is roughly thrusting me out of my flat. I leap up hurriedly, dress, and cautiously, that my family may not notice, slip out into the street. Where am I to go?
The answer to that question has long been ready in my brain. To Katya.
III
As a rule she is lying on the sofa or in a lounge-chair reading. Seeing me, she raises her head languidly, sits up, and shakes hands.
"You are always lying down," I say, after pausing and taking breath. "That's not good for you. You ought to occupy yourself with something."
"What?"
"I say you ought to occupy yourself in some way."
"With what? A woman can be nothing but a simple workwoman or an actress."
"Well, if you can't be a workwoman, be an actress."
She says nothing.
"You ought to get married," I say, half in jest.
"There is no one to marry. There's no reason to, either."
"You can't live like this."
"Without a husband? Much that matters; I could have as many men as I like if I wanted to."
"That's ugly, Katya."
"What is ugly?"
"Why, what you have just said."
Noticing that I am hurt and wishing to efface the disagreeable impression, Katya says:
"Let us go; come this way."
She takes me into a very snug little room, and says, pointing to the writing-table:
"Look... I have got that ready for you. You shall work here. Come here every day and bring your work with you. They only hinder you there at home. Will you work here? Will you like to?"
Not to wound her by refusing, I answer that I will work here, and that I like the room very much. Then we both sit down in the snug little room and begin talking.
The warm, snug surroundings and the presence of a sympathetic person does not, as in old days, arouse in me a feeling of pleasure, but an intense impulse to complain and grumble. I feel for some reason that if I lament and complain I shall feel better.
"Things are in a bad way with me, my dear—very bad... "
"What is it?"
"You see how it is, my dear; the best and holiest right of kings is the right of mercy. And I have always felt myself a king, since I have made unlimited use of that right. I have never judged, I have been indulgent, I have readily forgiven everyone, right and left. Where others have protested and expressed indignation, I have only advised and persuaded. All my life it has been my endeavor that my society should not be a burden to my family, to my students, to my colleagues, to my servants. And I know that this attitude to people has had a good influence on all who have chanced to come into contact with me. But now I am not a king. Something is happening to me that is only excusable in a slave; day and night my brain is haunted by evil thoughts, and feelings such as I never knew before are brooding in my soul. I am full of hatred, and contempt, and indignation, and loathing, and dread. I have become excessively severe, exacting, irritable, ungracious, suspicious. Even things that in old days would have provoked me only to an unnecessary jest and a good-natured laugh now arouse an oppressive feeling in me. My reasoning, too, has undergone a change: in old days I despised money; now I harbor an evil feeling, not towards money, but towards the rich as though they were to blame: in old days I hated violence and tyranny, but now I hate the men who make use of violence, as though they were alone to blame, and not all of us who do not know how to educate each other. What is the meaning of it? If these new ideas and new feelings have come from a change of convictions, what is that change due to? Can the world have grown worse and I better, or was I blind before and indifferent? If this change is the result of a general decline of physical and intellectual powers—I am ill, you know, and every day I am losing weight—my position is pitiable; it means that my new ideas are morbid and abnormal; I ought to be ashamed of them and think them of no consequence... "
"Illness has nothing to do with it," Katya interrupts me; "it's simply that your eyes are opened, that's all. You have seen what in old days, for some reason, you refused to see. To my thinking, what you ought to do first of all, is to break with your family for good, and go away."
"You are talking nonsense."
"You don't love them; why should you force your feelings? Can you call them a family? Nonentities! If they died today, no one would notice their absence tomorrow."
Katya despises my wife and Liza as much as they hate her. One can hardly talk at this date of people's having a right to despise one another. But if one looks at it from Katya's standpoint and recognizes such a right, one can see she has as much right to despise my wife and Liza as they have to hate her.