Short Fiction, Anton Chekhov [websites to read books for free .TXT] 📗

reserved and exceedingly proud and sensitive, and so this announcement surprised me. He stared a long time at the yellow clearing, warmed by the sun, watched a long string of cranes float in the azure sky, and turned facing me.

“And by the sixth of September I must have the money ready for the bank⁠ ⁠… the interest for my estate,” he said aloud, by now regardless of the coachman. “And where am I to get it? Altogether, old man, I am in a tight fix! An awfully tight fix!”

The prince examined the cock of his gun, blew on it for some reason, and began looking for the cranes which by now were out of sight.

“Sergey Ivanitch,” I asked, after a minute’s silence, “imagine if they sell your Shatilovka, what will you do?”

“I? I don’t know! Shatilovka can’t be saved, that’s clear as daylight, but I cannot imagine such a calamity. I can’t imagine myself without my daily bread secure. What can I do? I have had hardly any education; I have not tried working yet; for government service it is late to begin,⁠ ⁠… Besides, where could I serve? Where could I be of use? Admitting that no great cleverness is needed for serving in our Zemstvo, for example, yet I suffer from⁠ ⁠… the devil knows what, a sort of faintheartedness, I haven’t a ha’p’orth of pluck. If I went into the Service I should always feel I was not in my right place. I am not an idealist; I am not a Utopian; I haven’t any special principles; but am simply, I suppose, stupid and thoroughly incompetent, a neurotic and a coward. Altogether not like other people. All other people are like other people, only I seem to be something⁠ ⁠… a poor thing.⁠ ⁠… I met Naryagin last Wednesday⁠—you know him?⁠—drunken, slovenly⁠ ⁠… doesn’t pay his debts, stupid” (the prince frowned and tossed his head)⁠ ⁠… “a horrible person! He said to me, staggering: ‘I’m being balloted for as a justice of the peace!’ Of course, they won’t elect him, but, you see, he believes he is fit to be a justice of the peace and considers that position within his capacity. He has boldness and self-confidence. I went to see our investigating magistrate too. The man gets two hundred and fifty roubles a month, and does scarcely anything. All he can do is to stride backwards and forwards for days together in nothing but his underclothes, but, ask him, he is convinced he is doing his work and honourably performing his duty. I couldn’t go on like that! I should be ashamed to look the clerk in the face.”

At that moment Grontovsky, on a chestnut horse, galloped by us with a flourish. On his left arm the basket bobbed up and down with the mushrooms dancing in it. As he passed us he grinned and waved his hand, as though we were old friends.

“Blockhead!” the prince filtered through his teeth, looking after him. “It’s wonderful how disgusting it sometimes is to see satisfied faces. A stupid, animal feeling due to hunger, I expect.⁠ ⁠… What was I saying? Oh, yes, about going into the Service,⁠ ⁠… I should be ashamed to take the salary, and yet, to tell the truth, it is stupid. If one looks at it from a broader point of view, more seriously, I am eating what isn’t mine now. Am I not? But why am I not ashamed of that.⁠ ⁠… It is a case of habit, I suppose⁠ ⁠… and not being able to realize one’s true position.⁠ ⁠… But that position is most likely awful⁠ ⁠…”

I looked at him, wondering if the prince were showing off. But his face was mild and his eyes were mournfully following the movements of the chestnut horse racing away, as though his happiness were racing away with it.

Apparently he was in that mood of irritation and sadness when women weep quietly for no reason, and men feel a craving to complain of themselves, of life, of God.⁠ ⁠…

When I got out of the chaise at the gates of the house the prince said to me:

“A man once said, wanting to annoy me, that I have the face of a cardsharper. I have noticed that cardsharpers are usually dark. Do you know, it seems that if I really had been born a cardsharper I should have remained a decent person to the day of my death, for I should never have had the boldness to do wrong. I tell you frankly I have had the chance once in my life of getting rich if I had told a lie, a lie to myself and one woman⁠ ⁠… and one other person whom I know would have forgiven me for lying; I should have put into my pocket a million. But I could not. I hadn’t the pluck!”

From the gates we had to go to the house through the copse by a long road, level as a ruler, and planted on each side with thick, lopped lilacs. The house looked somewhat heavy, tasteless, like a façade on the stage. It rose clumsily out of a mass of greenery, and caught the eye like a great stone thrown on the velvety turf. At the chief entrance I was met by a fat old footman in a green swallowtail coat and big silver-rimmed spectacles; without making any announcement, only looking contemptuously at my dusty figure, he showed me in. As I mounted the soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of india-rubber. At the top I was enveloped in an atmosphere found only in museums, in signorial mansions and old-fashioned merchant houses; it seemed like the smell of something long past, which had once lived and died and had left its soul in the rooms. I passed through three or four rooms on my way from the entry to the drawing room. I remember bright yellow, shining floors, lustres wrapped in stiff muslin, narrow, striped rugs which stretched not straight from door to door, as they usually do, but