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

“The godmother was Natalya Andreyevna Velikosvyetsky, and the godfather Pavel Ivanitch Bezsonnitsin.⁠ ⁠… I⁠ ⁠… I believe, Dashenka, I am dying. And the baby has been christened Olimpiada, in honour of their kind patroness.⁠ ⁠… I⁠ ⁠… I have just drunk paraffin, Dashenka!”

“What next! You don’t say they gave you paraffin there?”

“I must own I wanted to get a drink of vodka without asking you, and⁠ ⁠… and the Lord chastised me: by accident in the dark I took paraffin.⁠ ⁠… What am I to do?”

Dashenka, hearing that the cupboard had been opened without her permission, grew more wide-awake.⁠ ⁠… She quickly lighted a candle, jumped out of bed, and in her nightgown, a freckled, bony figure in curl-papers, padded with bare feet to the cupboard.

“Who told you you might?” she asked sternly, as she scrutinized the inside of the cupboard. “Was the vodka put there for you?”

“I⁠ ⁠… I haven’t drunk vodka but paraffin, Dashenka⁠ ⁠…” muttered Strizhin, mopping the cold sweat on his brow.

“And what did you want to touch the paraffin for? That’s nothing to do with you, is it? Is it put there for you? Or do you suppose paraffin costs nothing? Eh? Do you know what paraffin is now? Do you know?”

“Dear Dashenka,” moaned Strizhin, “it’s a question of life and death, and you talk about money!”

“He’s drunk himself tipsy and now he pokes his nose into the cupboard!” cried Dashenka, angrily slamming the cupboard door. “Oh, the monsters, the tormentors! I’m a martyr, a miserable woman, no peace day or night! Vipers, basilisks, accursed Herods, may you suffer the same in the world to come! I am going tomorrow! I am a maiden lady and I won’t allow you to stand before me in your underclothes! How dare you look at me when I am not dressed!”

And she went on and on.⁠ ⁠… Knowing that when Dashenka was enraged there was no moving her with prayers or vows or even by firing a cannon, Strizhin waved his hand in despair, dressed, and made up his mind to go to the doctor. But a doctor is only readily found when he is not wanted. After running through three streets and ringing five times at Dr. Tchepharyants’s, and seven times at Dr. Bultyhin’s, Strizhin raced off to a chemist’s shop, thinking possibly the chemist could help him. There, after a long interval, a little dark and curly-headed chemist came out to him in his dressing gown, with drowsy eyes, and such a wise and serious face that it was positively terrifying.

“What do you want?” he asked in a tone in which only very wise and dignified chemists of Jewish persuasion can speak.

“For God’s sake⁠ ⁠… I entreat you⁠ ⁠…” said Strizhin breathlessly, “give me something. I have just accidentally drunk paraffin, I am dying!”

“I beg you not to excite yourself and to answer the questions I am about to put to you. The very fact that you are excited prevents me from understanding you. You have drunk paraffin. Yes?”

“Yes, paraffin! Please save me!”

The chemist went coolly and gravely to the desk, opened a book, became absorbed in reading it. After reading a couple of pages he shrugged one shoulder and then the other, made a contemptuous grimace and, after thinking for a minute, went into the adjoining room. The clock struck four, and when it pointed to ten minutes past the chemist came back with another book and again plunged into reading.

“H’m,” he said as though puzzled, “the very fact that you feel unwell shows you ought to apply to a doctor, not a chemist.”

“But I have been to the doctors already. I could not ring them up.”

“H’m⁠ ⁠… you don’t regard us chemists as human beings, and disturb our rest even at four o’clock at night, though every dog, every cat, can rest in peace.⁠ ⁠… You don’t try to understand anything, and to your thinking we are not people and our nerves are like cords.”

Strizhin listened to the chemist, heaved a sigh, and went home.

“So I am fated to die,” he thought.

And in his mouth was a burning and a taste of paraffin, there were twinges in his stomach, and a sound of boom, boom, boom in his ears. Every moment it seemed to him that his end was near, that his heart was no longer beating.

Returning home he made haste to write: “Let no one be blamed for my death,” then he said his prayers, lay down and pulled the bedclothes over his head. He lay awake till morning expecting death, and all the time he kept fancying how his grave would be covered with fresh green grass and how the birds would twitter over it.⁠ ⁠…

And in the morning he was sitting on his bed, saying with a smile to Dashenka:

“One who leads a steady and regular life, dear sister, is unaffected by any poison. Take me, for example. I have been on the verge of death. I was dying and in agony, yet now I am all right. There is only a burning in my mouth and a soreness in my throat, but I am all right all over, thank God.⁠ ⁠… And why? It’s because of my regular life.”

“No, it’s because it’s inferior paraffin!” sighed Dashenka, thinking of the household expenses and gazing into space. “The man at the shop could not have given me the best quality, but that at three farthings. I am a martyr, I am a miserable woman. You monsters! May you suffer the same, in the world to come, accursed Herods.⁠ ⁠…”

And she went on and on.⁠ ⁠…

Ivan Alexeyitch Ognev remembers how on that August evening he opened the glass door with a rattle and went out on to the verandah. He was wearing a light Inverness cape and a wide-brimmed straw hat, the very one that was lying with his top-boots in the dust under his bed. In one hand he had a big bundle of books and notebooks, in the other a thick knotted stick.

Behind the door, holding the lamp to show the way, stood