The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov. Anton Chekhov

      CHAPTER VIII

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      Black-eyed Tina’s letter, her large sprawling handwriting, reminded me of the mosaic room and aroused in me desires such as a drunkard has for more drink; but I overcame them, and by the strength of my will I forced myself to work. At first I found it unspeakably dull to decipher the bold handwriting of the various commissaries, but gradually my attention became fixed on a burglary, and I began to work with delight. All day long I sat working at my table, and Polycarp passed behind me from time to time and looked suspiciously at my work. He had no confidence in my sobriety, and at any moment he expected to see me rise from the table and order Zorka to be saddled; but towards evening, seeing my persistence, he began to give credence to my good intentions, and the expression of moroseness on his face gave place to one of satisfaction… He began to walk about on tiptoe and to speak in whispers… When some young fellows passed my house, playing on the accordion, he went into the street and shouted:

      ‘What do you young devils mean by making such a row here? Can’t you go another way? Don’t you know, you infidels, that the master is working?’

      In the evening when he served the samovar in the dining-room, he quietly opened my door and called me graciously to come to tea.

      ‘Will you please come to tea?’ he said, sighing gently and smiling respectfully.

      And while I was drinking my tea he came up behind me and kissed me on the shoulder.

      ‘Now that’s better, Sergey Petrovich,’ he mumbled. ‘Why don’t you let that white-eyebrowed devil go hang… How can you, with your great intelligence and your education, behave like this? You have a noble calling… You must behave so that people will respect you… But if you go around with that good-for-nothing Count and bathe in the lake in your clothes, everyone will say: “He has no sense! He’s an empty-headed fellow!” And so that reputation will be noised about the whole world! Foolhardiness is suitable for merchants, but not for noblemen… Noblemen must have regard to their place in the world…’

      ‘All right! Enough, enough…’

      ‘Sergey Petrovich, don’t keep company with that Count. If you want to have a friend, who could be better than Doctor Pavel Ivanovich? He goes about shabbily dressed, but how clever he is!’

      I was melted by Polycarp’s sincerity… I wanted to say an affectionate word to him…

      ‘What novel are you reading now?’ I asked.

      ‘The Count of Monte Cristo. That’s a Count for you! That’s a real Count! Not like that filthy Count you go around with.’

      After tea I again sat down to work and worked until my eyelids began to droop and my tired eyes to close… When I went to bed I ordered Polycarp to wake me at five o’clock.

      The next morning, before six o’clock, whistling gaily and knocking off the heads of the field flowers, I was walking towards Tenevo, where the church fête to which my friend ‘Screw’ had invited me to come was being celebrated that day. It was a glorious morning. Happiness itself appeared to be hanging above the earth, and, reflected in every dewdrop, enticed the soul of the passer-by to itself. The woods enwrapped in morning light were quiet and motionless as if listening to my footsteps, and the chirping brotherhood of birds met me with expressions of mistrust and alarm… The air, filled with the verdancy of spring, caressed my healthy lungs with its softness. I breathed it in, and casting my enraptured eyes over the whole distant prospect, I felt the spring and youth, and it seemed to me that the young birches, the grass at the roadside, and the ceaselessly humming cockchafers shared these feelings with me.

      ‘Why is it that out there in the world men crowd together in their miserable hovels, in their narrow and limited ideas,’ I thought, ‘while here they have so much space for life and thought? Why do they not come here?’

      And my poetic imagination refused to be disturbed by thoughts of winter and of bread, those two sorrows that drive poets into cold, prosaic Petersburg and uncleanly Moscow, where fees are paid for verse, but no inspiration can be found.

      Peasants’ carts and landowners’ britzkas hurrying to church or to market passed me constantly as I trudged along. All the time I had to take off my cap in answer to the courteous bows of the muzhiks and the landowners of my acquaintance. They all offered to give me a lift, but to walk was pleasanter than to drive, and I refused all their offers. Among others the Count’s gardener, Franz, in a blue jacket and a jockey cap, passed me on a racing droshky… He looked lazily at me with his sleepy, sour eyes and touched his cap in a still more lazy fashion. Behind him a twelve-gallon barrel with iron hoops, evidently for vodka, was tied to the droshky… Franz’s disagreeable phiz and his barrel somewhat disturbed my poetical mood, but very soon poetry triumphed again when I heard the sound of wheels behind me, and looking round I saw a heavy wagonette drawn by a pair of bays, and in the heavy wagonette, on a leathern cushion on a sort of box seat, was my new acquaintance, ‘the girl in red’, who two days before had spoken to me about the ‘electricity that had killed her mother’. Olenka’s pretty, freshly washed and somewhat sleepy face beamed and blushed slightly when she saw me striding along the footpath that separated the wood from the road. She nodded merrily to me and smiled in the affable manner of an old acquaintance.

      ‘Good morning!’ I shouted to her.

      She kissed her hand to me and disappeared from my sight, together with her heavy wagonette, without giving me enough time to admire her fresh, pretty face. This day she was not dressed in red. She wore a sort of dark green costume with large buttons and a broad-brimmed straw hat, but even in this garb she pleased me no less than she had done before. I would have talked to her with pleasure, and I would gladly have heard her voice. I wanted to gaze into her deep eyes in the brilliancy of the sun, as I had gazed into them that night by the flashes of lightning. I wanted to take her down from the ugly wagonette and propose that she should walk beside me for the rest of the way, and I certainly would have done so if it had not been for the ‘rules of society’. For some reason it appeared to me that she would have gladly agreed to this proposal. It was not without some cause that she had twice looked back at me as the wagonette disappeared behind some old alders!

      It was about six versts from the place of my abode to Tenevo — nothing of a distance for a young man on a fine morning. Shortly after six I was already making my way between loaded carts and the booths of the fair towards the Tenevo church. Notwithstanding the early hour and the fact that the liturgy in the church was not over as yet, the noise of trade was already in the air. The squeaking of cart wheels, the neighing of horses, the lowing of cattle, and the sounds of toy trumpets were intermixed with the cries OF gipsy horse-dealers and the songs of muzhiks, who had already found time to get drunk. What numbers of gay, idle faces! What types! What beauty there was in the movements of these masses, bright with brilliant coloured dresses, on which the morning sun poured its light! All this many-thousand-headed crowd swarmed, moved, made a noise in order to finish the business they had to do in a few hours, and to disperse by the evening, leaving after them, on the market place as a sort of remembrance, refuse of hay, oats spilt here