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

other thoughts, and flickered timidly like a faraway light in foggy weather. And he felt that this suicide and the peasant’s sufferings lay upon his conscience, too; to resign himself to the fact that these people, submissive to their fate, should take up the burden of what was hardest and gloomiest in life⁠—how awful it was! To accept this, and to desire for himself a life full of light and movement among happy and contented people, and to be continually dreaming of such, means dreaming of fresh suicides of men crushed by toil and anxiety, or of men weak and outcast whom people only talk of sometimes at supper with annoyance or mockery, without going to their help.⁠ ⁠… And again:

“We go on, and on, and on⁠ ⁠…” as though someone were beating with a hammer on his temples.

He woke early in the morning with a headache, roused by a noise; in the next room Von Taunitz was saying loudly to the doctor:

“It’s impossible for you to go now. Look what’s going on outside. Don’t argue, you had better ask the coachman; he won’t take you in such weather for a million.”

“But it’s only two miles,” said the doctor in an imploring voice.

“Well, if it were only half a mile. If you can’t, then you can’t. Directly you drive out of the gates it is perfect hell, you would be off the road in a minute. Nothing will induce me to let you go, you can say what you like.”

“It’s bound to be quieter towards evening,” said the peasant who was heating the stove.

And in the next room the doctor began talking of the rigorous climate and its influence on the character of the Russian, of the long winters which, by preventing movement from place to place, hinder the intellectual development of the people; and Lyzhin listened with vexation to these observations and looked out of window at the snow drifts which were piled on the fence. He gazed at the white dust which covered the whole visible expanse, at the trees which bowed their heads despairingly to right and then to left, listened to the howling and the banging, and thought gloomily:

“Well, what moral can be drawn from it? It’s a blizzard and that is all about it.⁠ ⁠…”

At midday they had lunch, then wandered aimlessly about the house; they went to the windows.

“And Lesnitsky is lying there,” thought Lyzhin, watching the whirling snow, which raced furiously round and round upon the drifts. “Lesnitsky is lying there, the witnesses are waiting.⁠ ⁠…”

They talked of the weather, saying that the snowstorm usually lasted two days and nights, rarely longer. At six o’clock they had dinner, then they played cards, sang, danced; at last they had supper. The day was over, they went to bed.

In the night, towards morning, it all subsided. When they got up and looked out of window, the bare willows with their weakly drooping branches were standing perfectly motionless; it was dull and still, as though nature now were ashamed of its orgy, of its mad nights, and the license it had given to its passions. The horses, harnessed tandem, had been waiting at the front door since five o’clock in the morning. When it was fully daylight the doctor and the examining magistrate put on their fur coats and felt boots, and, saying goodbye to their host, went out.

At the steps beside the coachman stood the familiar figure of the constable, Ilya Loshadin, with an old leather bag across his shoulder and no cap on his head, covered with snow all over, and his face was red and wet with perspiration. The footman who had come out to help the gentlemen and cover their legs looked at him sternly and said:

“What are you standing here for, you old devil? Get away!”

“Your honor, the people are anxious,” said Loshadin, smiling naively all over his face, and evidently pleased at seeing at last the people he had waited for so long. “The people are very uneasy, the children are crying.⁠ ⁠… They thought, your honor, that you had gone back to the town again. Show us the heavenly mercy, our benefactors!⁠ ⁠…”

The doctor and the examining magistrate said nothing, got into the sledge, and drove to Syrnya.

The Lady with the Dog I

It was said that a new person had appeared on the seafront: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney’s pavilion, he saw, walking on the seafront, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a beret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her.

And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same beret, and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she was, and everyone called her simply “the lady with the dog.”

“If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn’t be amiss to make her acquaintance,” Gurov reflected.

He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago⁠—had been unfaithful to her often, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them “the lower race.”

It seemed to him that he had