The Greatest Novellas & Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. Anton Chekhov
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not the point. You have no delicacy, really…. At the least thing you drag in money. The great thing is to be exact, Ivan Matveyitch, to be exact is the great thing. You ought to train yourself to be exact.”
The maidservant brings in a tray with two glasses of tea on it, and a basket of rusks…. Ivan Matveyitch takes his glass awkwardly with both hands, and at once begins drinking it. The tea is too hot. To avoid burning his mouth Ivan Matveyitch tries to take a tiny sip. He eats one rusk, then a second, then a third, and, looking sideways, with embarrassment, at the man of learning, timidly stretches after a fourth…. The noise he makes in swallowing, the relish with which he smacks his lips, and the expression of hungry greed in his raised eyebrows irritate the man of learning.
“Make haste and finish, time is precious.”
“You dictate, I can drink and write at the same time…. I must confess I was hungry.”
“I should think so after your walk!”
“Yes, and what wretched weather! In our parts there is a scent of spring by now…. There are puddles everywhere; the snow is melting.”
“You are a southerner, I suppose?”
“From the Don region…. It’s quite spring with us by March. Here it is frosty, everyone’s in a fur coat,… but there you can see the grass… it’s dry everywhere, and one can even catch tarantulas.”
“And what do you catch tarantulas for?”
“Oh!… to pass the time …” says Ivan Matveyitch, and he sighs. “It’s fun catching them. You fix a bit of pitch on a thread, let it down into their hole and begin hitting the tarantula on the back with the pitch, and the brute gets cross, catches hold of the pitch with his claws, and gets stuck…. And what we used to do with them! We used to put a basinful of them together and drop a bihorka in with them.”
“What is a bihorka?”
“That’s another spider, very much the same as a tarantula. In a fight one of them can kill a hundred tarantulas.”
“H’m!… But we must write,… Where did we stop?”
The man of learning dictates another twenty lines, then sits plunged in meditation.
Ivan Matveyitch, waiting while the other cogitates, sits and, craning his neck, puts the collar of his shirt to rights. His tie will not set properly, the stud has come out, and the collar keeps coming apart.
“H’m! …” says the man of learning. “Well, haven’t you found a job yet, Ivan Matveyitch?”
“No. And how is one to find one? I am thinking, you know, of volunteering for the army. But my father advises my going into a chemist’s.”
“H’m!… But it would be better for you to go into the university. The examination is difficult, but with patience and hard work you could get through. Study, read more…. Do you read much?”
“Not much, I must own …” says Ivan Matveyitch, lighting a cigarette.
“Have you read Turgenev?”
“N-no… .”
“And Gogol?”
“Gogol. H’m!… Gogol…. No, I haven’t read him!”
“Ivan Matveyitch! Aren’t you ashamed? Aie! aie! You are such a nice fellow, so much that is original in you… you haven’t even read Gogol! You must read him! I will give you his works! It’s essential to read him! We shall quarrel if you don’t!”
Again a silence follows. The man of learning meditates, half reclining on a soft lounge, and Ivan Matveyitch, leaving his collar in peace, concentrates his whole attention on his boots. He has not till then noticed that two big puddles have been made by the snow melting off his boots on the floor. He is ashamed.
“I can’t get on to-day …” mutters the man of learning. “I suppose you are fond of catching birds, too, Ivan Matveyitch?”
“That’s in autumn,… I don’t catch them here, but there at home I always did.”
“To be sure… very good. But we must write, though.”
The man of learning gets up resolutely and begins dictating, but after ten lines sits down on the lounge again.
“No…. Perhaps we had better put it off till tomorrow morning,” he says. “Come tomorrow morning, only come early, at nine o’clock. God preserve you from being late!”
Ivan Matveyitch lays down his pen, gets up from the table and sits in another chair. Five minutes pass in silence, and he begins to feel it is time for him to go, that he is in the way; but in the man of learning’s study it is so snug and light and warm, and the impression of the nice rusks and sweet tea is still so fresh that there is a pang at his heart at the mere thought of home. At home there is poverty, hunger, cold, his grumbling father, scoldings, and here it is so quiet and unruffled, and interest even is taken in his tarantulas and birds.
The man of learning looks at his watch and takes up a book.
“So you will give me Gogol?’ says Ivan Matveyitch, getting up.
“Yes, yes! But why are you in such a hurry, my dear boy? Sit down and tell me something …”
Ivan Matveyitch sits down and smiles broadly. Almost every evening he sits in this study and always feels something extraordinarily soft, attracting him, as it were akin, in the voice and the glance of the man of learning. There are moments when he even fancies that the man of learning is becoming attached to him, used to him, and that if he scolds him for being late, it’s simply because he misses his chatter about tarantulas and how they catch goldfinches on the Don.
THE WITCH
Translation By Constance Garnett
IT was approaching nightfall. The sexton, Savély Gykin, was lying in his huge bed in the hut adjoining the church. He was not asleep, though it was his habit to go to sleep at the same time as the hens. His coarse red hair peeped from under one end of the greasy patchwork quilt, made up of coloured rags, while his big unwashed feet stuck out from the other. He was listening. His hut adjoined the wall that encircled the church and the solitary window in it looked out upon the open country. And out there a regular battle was going on. It was hard to say who was being wiped off the face of the earth, and for the sake of whose destruction nature was being churned up into such a ferment; but, judging from the unceasing malignant roar, someone was getting it very hot. A victorious force was in full chase over the fields, storming in the forest and on the church roof, battering spitefully with its fists upon the windows, raging and tearing, while something vanquished was howling and wailing…. A plaintive lament sobbed at the window, on the roof, or in the stove. It sounded not like a call for help, but like a cry of misery, a consciousness that it was too late, that there was no salvation. The snowdrifts were covered with a thin coating of ice; tears quivered on them and on the trees; a dark slush of mud and melting snow flowed along the roads and paths. In short, it was thawing, but through the dark night the heavens failed to see it, and flung flakes of fresh snow upon the melting earth at a terrific rate. And the wind staggered like a drunkard. It would not let the snow settle on the ground, and whirled it round in the darkness at random.
Savély listened to all this din and frowned. The fact was that he knew, or at any rate suspected, what all this racket outside the window was tending to and whose handiwork it was.
“I know!” he muttered, shaking his finger menacingly under the bedclothes; “I know all about it.”
On a stool by the window sat the sexton’s wife, Raïssa Nilovna. A tin lamp standing on