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

with her legs and nose, looking round to see whether the puppy were coming, but the smell of the warm steam and manure had hardly reached her nose before she heard a gleeful burst of barking behind her. It was the puppy. He leapt up to the wolf on the roof, then into the hole, and, feeling himself at home in the warmth, recognising his sheep, he barked louder than ever.⁠ ⁠… Arapka woke up in the barn, and, scenting a wolf, howled, the hens began cackling, and by the time Ignat appeared in the porch with his single-barrelled gun the frightened wolf was already far away.

“Fuite!” whistled Ignat. “Fuite! Full steam ahead!”

He pulled the trigger⁠—the gun missed fire; he pulled the trigger again⁠—again it missed fire; he tried a third time⁠—and a great blaze of flame flew out of the barrel and there was a deafening boom, boom. It kicked him violently on the shoulder, and, taking his gun in one hand and his axe in the other, he went to see what the noise was about.

A little later he went back to the hut.

“What was it?” a pilgrim, who was staying the night at the hut and had been awakened by the noise, asked in a husky voice.

“It’s all right,” answered Ignat. “Nothing of consequence. Our Whitebrow has taken to sleeping with the sheep in the warm. Only he hasn’t the sense to go in at the door, but always tries to wriggle in by the roof. The other night he tore a hole in the roof and went off on the spree, the rascal, and now he has come back and scratched away the roof again.”

“Stupid dog.”

“Yes, there is a spring snapped in his brain. I do detest fools,” sighed Ignat, clambering on to the stove. “Come, man of God, it’s early yet to get up. Let us sleep full steam!⁠ ⁠…”

In the morning he called Whitebrow, smacked him hard about the ears, and then showing him a stick, kept repeating to him:

“Go in at the door! Go in at the door! Go in at the door!”

Ariadne

On the deck of a steamer sailing from Odessa to Sevastopol, a rather good-looking gentleman, with a little round beard, came up to me to smoke, and said:

“Notice those Germans sitting near the shelter? Whenever Germans or Englishmen get together, they talk about the crops, the price of wool, or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects⁠—but especially women.”

This gentleman’s face was familiar to me already. We had returned from abroad the evening before in the same train, and at Volotchisk when the luggage was being examined by the Customs, I saw him standing with a lady, his travelling companion, before a perfect mountain of trunks and baskets filled with ladies’ clothes, and I noticed how embarrassed and downcast he was when he had to pay duty on some piece of silk frippery, and his companion protested and threatened to make a complaint. Afterwards, on the way to Odessa, I saw him carrying little pies and oranges to the ladies’ compartment.

It was rather damp; the vessel swayed a little, and the ladies had retired to their cabins.

The gentleman with the little round beard sat down beside me and continued:

“Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract subjects and women. We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter nothing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order. The Russian actor does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity even in a farce. We’re just the same: when we have got to talk of trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view. It comes from a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. We talk so often about women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied. We take too ideal a view of women, and make demands out of all proportion with what reality can give us; we get something utterly different from what we want, and the result is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, and inward suffering, and if anyone is suffering, he’s bound to talk of it. It does not bore you to go on with this conversation?”

“No, not in the least.”

“In that case, allow me to introduce myself,” said my companion, rising from his seat a little:

“Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort.⁠ ⁠… You I know very well.”

He sat down and went on, looking at me with a genuine and friendly expression:

“A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slaveowners and so on; I take quite a different view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. When we are young we adore and poeticize those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms. Among us in Russia marriage without love is despised, sensuality is ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and exalted; and if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over Raphael’s Madonna, or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure you there is no affectation about it. But the trouble is that when we have been married or been intimate with a woman for some two or three years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with others, and again⁠—disappointment, again⁠—repulsion, and in the long run we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undeveloped, cruel⁠—in fact, far from being superior, are immeasurably inferior to us men. And in our dissatisfaction and disappointment there is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk about