THE SHOOTING PARTY. Антон Чехов
me to hear it. Having whispered this impertinence, my servant drew himself up before me and waited for me to flare up in reply, but I pretended not to have heard his words. My silence was the best and sharpest weapon I could use in my contests with Polycarp. This contemptuous custom of allowing his venomous words to pass unheeded disarmed him and cut the ground away from under his feet. As a punishment it acted better than a box on the ear or a flood of vituperation… When Polycarp had gone into the yard to saddle Zorka, I peeped into the book which he had been prevented from reading. It was The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas’ dreadful romance… My civilized fool read everything, beginning with the signboards of the public houses and finishing with Auguste Comte, which was lying in my trunk together with other neglected books that I did not read; but of the whole mass of written and printed matter he only approved of exciting, sensational novels with ‘celebrated personages’, poison and subterranean passages; all the rest he dubbed ‘nonsense’. I shall have again to refer to his reading, now I had to ride off. A quarter of an hour later the hoofs of my Zorka were raising the dust on the road from the village to the Count’s estate. The sun was near setting, but the heat and the sultriness were still felt. The hot air was dry and motionless, although my road led along the banks of an enormous lake… On my right I saw the great expanse of water, on the left my sight was caressed by the young vernal foliage of an oak forest; nevertheless, my cheeks suffered the dryness of Sahara, if there could only be a storm!’ I thought, dreaming of a good cool downpour.
The lake slept peacefully. It did not greet with a single sound the flight of my Zorka, and it was only the piping of a young snipe that broke the grave-like silence of the sleeping lake. The sun looked at itself in it as in a huge mirror, and shed a blinding light on the whole of its breadth that extended from my road to the distant banks opposite. And it seemed to my blinded eyes that nature received light from the lake and not from the sun.
The sultriness impelled to slumber the whole of that life in which the lake and its green banks so richly abounded. The birds had hidden themselves, the fish did not splash in the water, the field crickets and the grasshoppers waited in silence for coolness to set in. All around was a waste. From time to time my Zorka bore me into a thick cloud of mosquitoes along the bank of the lake, and far away on the water, scarcely moving, I could see the three black boats belonging to old Mikhey, our fisherman, who leased the fishing rights of the whole lake.
CHAPTER II
I did not ride in a straight line as I had to make a circuit along the road that skirted the circular lake. It was only possible to go in a straight line by boat, while those who went by the road had to make a large detour, the distance being almost eight versts farther. All the way, looking across the lake, I could see beyond it the muddy banks opposite, on which the bright strip of a blossoming cherry orchard gleamed white, while farther still I could see the roofs of the Count’s barns dotted all over with many coloured pigeons, and rising still higher the small white belfry of the Count’s chapel. At the foot of the muddy banks was the bathing cabin with sailcloth nailed on the sides and sheets hanging to dry on its railings. I saw all this, and it appeared to me as if only a verst separated me from my friend the Count, yet in order to reach his estate I had to ride about sixteen versts.
On the way, I thought of my strange relationship with the Count. I was interested in examining and trying to define it, but the task proved beyond me. However much I thought, I could come to no satisfactory decision, and at last I arrived at the conclusion that I was a bad judge of myself and of men in general. The people who knew both the Count and me had an explanation for our mutual connection. The narrower-minded, who see nothing beyond the tip of their nose, were fond of asserting that the illustrious Count found in the ‘poor and undistinguished’ magistrate a congenial hanger-on and boon companion. In their view I, the writer of these lines, fawned and cringed before the Count for the sake of the crumbs and scraps that fell from his table. In their opinion the illustrious millionaire, who was both the bugbear and the envy of the whole of the S — district, was very clever and liberal; otherwise his gracious condescension that went as far as friendship for an indigent magistrate and the genuine liberalism that made the Count tolerate my familiarity in addressing him as ‘thou’, would be quite incomprehensible. Cleverer people ex-
plained our intimacy by our common ‘spiritual interests’. The Count and I were of the same age. We had finished our law studies in the same university, and we both knew very little: I still had a smattering of legal lore, but the Count had forgotten and drowned in alcohol the little he had ever known. We were both proud, and by virtue of some reason which was only known to ourselves, we shunned the world like misanthropes. We were both indifferent to the opinion of the world - that is of the S — district - we were both immoral, and would certainly both end badly. These were the ‘spiritual interests’ that united us. This was all that the people who knew us could say about our relations.
They would, of course, have spoken differently had they known how weak, soft and yielding was the nature of my friend, the Count, and how strong and hard was mine. They would have had much to say had they known how fond this infirm man was of me, and how I disliked him! He was the first to offer his friendship and I was the first to say ‘thou’ to him, but with what a difference in the tone! In a fit of kindly feeling he embraced me, and asked me timidly to be his friend. I, on the other hand, once seized by a feeling of a contempt and aversion, said to him:
‘Canst thou not cease jabbering nonsense?’
And he accepted this ‘thou’ as an expression of friendship and submitted to it from that time, repaying me with an honest, brotherly ‘thou’.
Yes, it would have been better and more honest had I turned my Zorka’s head homewards and ridden back to Polycarp and my Ivan Dem’yanych.
Afterwards I often thought: ‘How much misfortune I would have avoided bearing on my shoulders, how much good I would have brought to my neighbours, if on that night I had had the resolution to turn back, if only my Zorka had gone mad and carried me far away from the immensities of the lake! What numbers of tormenting recollections which now cause my hand to quit the pen and seize my head would not have pressed so heavily on my mind!’ But I must not anticipate, all the more as farther on I shall often have to dwell on misfortunes. Now for gaiety…
My Zorka bore me into the gates of the Count’s yard. At the very gates she stumbled, and I, losing the stirrup, almost fell to the ground.
‘An ill omen, sir!’ a muzhik, who was standing at one of the doors of the Count’s long line of stables, called to me.
I believe that a man falling from a horse may break his neck, but I do not believe in prognostications. Having given the bridle to the muzhik, I beat the dust off my top-boots with my riding-whip and ran into the house. Nobody met me. All the doors and windows of the rooms were wide open, nevertheless within the house the air was heavy, and had a strange smell. It was a mixture of the odour of ancient, deserted apartments with the tart narcotic scent of hothouse plants that have but recently been brought from the conservatories into the rooms… In the drawing-room, two tumbled cushions were lying on one of the sofas that was covered with a light blue silk material, and on a round table before the sofa I saw a glass containing a few drops of a liquid that exhaled an odour of strong Riga balsam. All this denoted that the house was inhabited, but I did not meet a living soul in any of the eleven rooms that I traversed. The same desertion that was round the lake reigned in the house…
A glass door led into the garden from the so-called ‘mosaic’ drawing-room. I opened it noisily and went down the marble stairs into the garden. I had gone only a few steps along the avenue when I met Nastasia, an old woman of ninety, who had formerly been the Count’s nurse. This little wrinkled old creature, forgotten by death, had a bald head and piercing eyes. When you looked at her face you involuntarily remembered the nickname ‘Scops-Owl’ that had been given her in the village… When she saw me she trembled and almost dropped a glass of milk she was carrying in both hands.
‘How do you do, Scops?’ I said to her.
She