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

My days I spent in this stillness in the twilight of the church, and in the long evenings I played billiards or went to the theatre in the gallery wearing the new trousers I had bought out of my own earnings. Concerts and performances had already begun at the Azhogins’; Radish used to paint the scenes alone now. He used to tell me the plot of the plays and describe the tableaux vivants which he witnessed. I listened to him with envy. I felt greatly drawn to the rehearsals, but I could not bring myself to go to the Azhogins’.

A week before Christmas Dr. Blagovo arrived. And again we argued and played billiards in the evenings. When he played he used to take off his coat and unbutton his shirt over his chest, and for some reason tried altogether to assume the air of a desperate rake. He did not drink much, but made a great uproar about it, and had a special faculty for getting through twenty roubles in an evening at such a poor cheap tavern as the Volga.

My sister began coming to see me again; they both expressed surprise every time on seeing each other, but from her joyful, guilty face it was evident that these meetings were not accidental. One evening, when we were playing billiards, the doctor said to me:

“I say, why don’t you go and see Miss Dolzhikov? You don’t know Mariya Viktorovna; she is a clever creature, a charmer, a simple, good-natured soul.”

I described how her father had received me in the spring.

“Nonsense!” laughed the doctor, “the engineer’s one thing and she’s another. Really, my dear fellow, you mustn’t be nasty to her; go and see her sometimes. For instance, let’s go and see her tomorrow evening. What do you say?”

He persuaded me. The next evening I put on my new serge trousers, and in some agitation I set off to Miss Dolzhikov’s. The footman did not seem so haughty and terrible, nor the furniture so gorgeous, as on that morning when I had come to ask a favour. Mariya Viktorovna was expecting me, and she received me like an old acquaintance, shaking hands with me in a friendly way. She was wearing a grey cloth dress with full sleeves, and had her hair done in the style which we used to call “dogs’ ears,” when it came into fashion in the town a year before. The hair was combed down over the ears, and this made Mariya Viktorovna’s face look broader, and she seemed to me this time very much like her father, whose face was broad and red, with something in its expression like a sledge-driver. She was handsome and elegant, but not youthful looking; she looked thirty, though in reality she was not more than twenty-five.

“Dear Doctor, how grateful I am to you,” she said, making me sit down. “If it hadn’t been for him you wouldn’t have come to see me. I am bored to death! My father has gone away and left me alone, and I don’t know what to do with myself in this town.”

Then she began asking me where I was working now, how much I earned, where I lived.

“Do you spend on yourself nothing but what you earn?” she asked.

“No.”

“Happy man!” she sighed. “All the evil in life, it seems to me, comes from idleness, boredom, and spiritual emptiness, and all this is inevitable when one is accustomed to living at other people’s expense. Don’t think I am showing off, I tell you truthfully: it is not interesting or pleasant to be rich. ‘Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness’ is said, because there is not and cannot be a mammon that’s righteous.”

She looked round at the furniture with a grave, cold expression, as though she wanted to count it over, and went on:

“Comfort and luxury have a magical power; little by little they draw into their clutches even strong-willed people. At one time father and I lived simply, not in a rich style, but now you see how! It is something monstrous,” she said, shrugging her shoulders; “we spend up to twenty thousand a year! In the provinces!”

“One comes to look at comfort and luxury as the invariable privilege of capital and education,” I said, “and it seems to me that the comforts of life may be combined with any sort of labour, even the hardest and dirtiest. Your father is rich, and yet he says himself that it has been his lot to be a mechanic and an oiler.”

She smiled and shook her head doubtfully: “My father sometimes eats bread dipped in kvass,” she said. “It’s a fancy, a whim!”

At that moment there was a ring and she got up.

“The rich and well-educated ought to work like everyone else,” she said, “and if there is comfort it ought to be equal for all. There ought not to be any privileges. But that’s enough philosophizing. Tell me something amusing. Tell me about the painters. What are they like? Funny?”

The doctor came in; I began telling them about the painters, but, being unaccustomed to talking, I was constrained, and described them like an ethnologist, gravely and tediously. The doctor, too, told us some anecdotes of working men: he staggered about, shed tears, dropped on his knees, and, even, mimicking a drunkard, lay on the floor; it was as good as a play, and Mariya Viktorovna laughed till she cried as she looked at him. Then he played on the piano and sang in his thin, pleasant tenor, while Mariya Viktorovna stood by and picked out what he was to sing, and corrected him when he made a mistake.

“I’ve heard that you sing, too?” I enquired.

“Sing, too!” cried the doctor in horror. “She sings exquisitely, a perfect artist, and you talk of her ‘singing too’! What an idea!”

“I did study in earnest at one time,” she said, answering my question, “but now I have