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

piano had been played by men in rags, looking hungry, gloomy, drunken, with dissipated or stupid faces, then one could have understood their presence, perhaps. As it was, Vassilyev could not understand it at all. He recalled the story of the fallen woman he had once read, and he thought now that that human figure with the guilty smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing now. It seemed to him that he was seeing not fallen women, but some different world quite apart, alien to him and incomprehensible; if he had seen this world before on the stage, or read of it in a book, he would not have believed in it.⁠ ⁠…

The woman with the white fur burst out laughing again and uttered a loathsome sentence in a loud voice. A feeling of disgust took possession of him. He flushed crimson and went out of the room.

“Wait a minute, we are coming too!” the artist shouted to him.

IV

“While we were dancing,” said the medical student, as they all three went out into the street, “I had a conversation with my partner. We talked about her first romance. He, the hero, was an accountant at Smolensk with a wife and five children. She was seventeen, and she lived with her papa and mamma, who sold soap and candles.”

“How did he win her heart?” asked Vassilyev.

“By spending fifty roubles on underclothes for her. What next!”

“So he knew how to get his partner’s story out of her,” thought Vassilyev about the medical student. “But I don’t know how to.”

“I say, I am going home!” he said.

“What for?”

“Because I don’t know how to behave here. Besides, I am bored, disgusted. What is there amusing in it? If they were human beings⁠—but they are savages and animals. I am going; do as you like.”

“Come, Grisha, Grigory, darling⁠ ⁠…” said the artist in a tearful voice, hugging Vassilyev, “come along! Let’s go to one more together and damnation take them!⁠ ⁠… Please do, Grisha!”

They persuaded Vassilyev and led him up a staircase. In the carpet and the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels that decorated the hall, the same S⁠⸺ Street style was apparent, but carried to a greater perfection, more imposing.

“I really will go home!” said Vassilyev as he was taking off his coat.

“Come, come, dear boy,” said the artist, and he kissed him on the neck. “Don’t be tiresome.⁠ ⁠… Gri-gri, be a good comrade! We came together, we will go back together. What a beast you are, really!”

“I can wait for you in the street. I think it’s loathsome, really!”

“Come, come, Grisha.⁠ ⁠… If it is loathsome, you can observe it! Do you understand? You can observe!”

“One must take an objective view of things,” said the medical student gravely.

Vassilyev went into the drawing room and sat down. There were a number of visitors in the room besides him and his friends: two infantry officers, a bald, gray-haired gentleman in spectacles, two beardless youths from the institute of land-surveying, and a very tipsy man who looked like an actor. All the young ladies were taken up with these visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev.

Only one of them, dressed à la Aida, glanced sideways at him, smiled, and said, yawning: “A dark one has come.⁠ ⁠…”

Vassilyev’s heart was throbbing and his face burned. He felt ashamed before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and miserable. He was tormented by the thought that he, a decent and loving man (such as he had hitherto considered himself), hated these women and felt nothing but repulsion towards them. He felt pity neither for the women nor the musicians nor the flunkeys.

“It is because I am not trying to understand them,” he thought. “They are all more like animals than human beings, but of course they are human beings all the same, they have souls. One must understand them and then judge.⁠ ⁠…”

“Grisha, don’t go, wait for us,” the artist shouted to him and disappeared.

The medical student disappeared soon after.

“Yes, one must make an effort to understand, one mustn’t be like this.⁠ ⁠…” Vassilyev went on thinking.

And he began gazing at each of the women with strained attention, looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their faces, or not one of these women felt herself to be guilty; he read on every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent movements, and nothing else. Apparently each of them had in the past a romance with an accountant based on underclothes for fifty roubles, and looked for no other charm in the present but coffee, a dinner of three courses, wines, quadrilles, sleeping till two in the afternoon.⁠ ⁠…

Finding no guilty smile, Vassilyev began to look whether there was not one intelligent face. And his attention was caught by one pale, rather sleepy, exhausted-looking face.⁠ ⁠… It was a dark woman, not very young, wearing a dress covered with spangles; she was sitting in an easy-chair, looking at the floor lost in thought. Vassilyev walked from one corner of the room to the other, and, as though casually, sat down beside her.

“I must begin with something trivial,” he thought, “and pass to what is serious.⁠ ⁠…”

“What a pretty dress you have,” and with his finger he touched the gold fringe of her fichu.

“Oh, is it?⁠ ⁠…” said the dark woman listlessly.

“What province do you come from?”

“I? From a distance.⁠ ⁠… From Tchernigov.”

“A fine province. It’s nice there.”

“Any place seems nice when one is not in it.”

“It’s a pity I cannot describe nature,” thought Vassilyev. “I might touch her by a description of nature in Tchernigov. No doubt she loves the place if she has been born there.”

“Are you dull here?” he asked.

“Of course I am dull.”

“Why don’t you go away from here if you are dull?”

“Where should I go to? Go begging or what?”

“Begging would be easier than living here.”

“How do you know that?