Tales of Chekhov 05- The Wife and other stories

respectfulness, and hatred on his face, that the train was twenty minutes late, and asked me would I not like to wait in the warm?

'Thank you,' I answered, 'but I am probably not going. Send word to my coachman to wait; I have not made up my mind.'

I walked to and fro on the platform and thought, should I go away or not? When the train came in I decided not to go. At home I had to expect my wife's amazement and perhaps her mockery, the dismal upper storey and my uneasiness; but, still, at my age that was easier and as it were more homelike than travelling for two days and nights with strangers to Petersburg, where I should be conscious every minute that my life was of no use to any one or to anything, and that it was approaching its end. No, better at home whatever awaited me there.... I went out of the station. It was awkward by daylight to return home, where every one was so glad at my going. I might spend the rest of the day till evening at some neighbour's, but with whom? With some of them I was on strained relations, others I did not know at all. I considered and thought of Ivan Ivanitch.

'We are going to Bragino!' I said to the coachman, getting into the sledge.

'It's a long way,' sighed Nikanor; 'it will be twenty miles, or maybe twenty-five.'

'Oh, please, my dear fellow,' I said in a tone as though Nikanor had the right to refuse. 'Please let us go!'

Nikanor shook his head doubtfully and said slowly that we really ought to have put in the shafts, not Circassian, but Peasant or Siskin; and uncertainly, as though expecting I should change my mind, took the reins in his gloves, stood up, thought a moment, and then raised his whip.

'A whole series of inconsistent actions...' I thought, screening my face from the snow. 'I must have gone out of my mind. Well, I don't care....'

In one place, on a very high and steep slope, Nikanor carefully held the horses in to the middle of the descent, but in the middle the horses suddenly bolted and dashed downhill at a fearful rate; he raised his elbows and shouted in a wild, frantic voice such as I had never heard from him before:

'Hey! Let's give the general a drive! If you come to grief he'll buy new ones, my darlings! Hey! look out! We'll run you down!'

Only now, when the extraordinary pace we were going at took my breath away, I noticed that he was very drunk. He must have been drinking at the station. At the bottom of the descent there was the crash of ice; a piece of dirty frozen snow thrown up from the road hit me a painful blow in the face.

The runaway horses ran up the hill as rapidly as they had downhill, and before I had time to shout to Nikanor my sledge was flying along on the level in an old pine forest, and the tall pines were stretching out their shaggy white paws to me from all directions.

'I have gone out of my mind, and the coachman's drunk,' I thought. 'Good!'

I found Ivan Ivanitch at home. He laughed till he coughed, laid his head on my breast, and said what he always did say on meeting me:

'You grow younger and younger. I don't know what dye you use for your hair and your beard; you might give me some of it.'

'I've come to return your call, Ivan Ivanitch,' I said untruthfully. 'Don't be hard on me; I'm a townsman, conventional; I do keep count of calls.'

'I am delighted, my dear fellow. I am an old man; I like respect.... Yes.'

From his voice and his blissfully smiling face, I could see that he was greatly flattered by my visit. Two peasant women helped me off with my coat in the entry, and a peasant in a red shirt hung it on a hook, and when Ivan Ivanitch and I went into his little study, two barefooted little girls were sitting on the floor looking at a picture-book; when they saw us they jumped up and ran away, and a tall, thin old woman in spectacles came in at once, bowed gravely to me, and picking up a pillow from the sofa and a picture-book from the floor, went away. From the adjoining rooms we heard incessant whispering and the patter of bare feet.

'I am expecting the doctor to dinner,' said Ivan Ivanitch. 'He promised to come from the relief centre. Yes. He dines with me every Wednesday, God bless him.' He craned towards me and kissed me on the neck. 'You have come, my dear fellow, so you are not vexed,' he whispered, sniffing. 'Don't be vexed, my dear creature. Yes. Perhaps it is annoying, but don't be cross. My only prayer to God before I die is to live in peace and harmony with all in the true way. Yes.'

'Forgive me, Ivan Ivanitch, I will put my feet on a chair,' I said, feeling that I was so exhausted I could not be myself; I sat further back on the sofa and put up my feet on an arm-chair. My face was burning from the snow and the wind, and I felt as though my whole body were basking in the warmth and growing weaker from it.

'It's very nice here,' I went on—'warm, soft, snug... and goose-feather pens,' I laughed, looking at the writing-table; 'sand instead of blotting-paper.'

'Eh? Yes... yes.... The writing-table and the mahogany cupboard here were made for my father by a self- taught cabinet-maker—Glyeb Butyga, a serf of General Zhukov's. Yes... a great artist in his own way.'

Listlessly and in the tone of a man dropping asleep, he began telling me about cabinet-maker Butyga. I listened. Then Ivan Ivanitch went into the next room to show me a polisander wood chest of drawers remarkable for its beauty and cheapness. He tapped the chest with his fingers, then called my attention to a stove of patterned tiles, such as one never sees now. He tapped the stove, too, with his fingers. There was an atmosphere of good- natured simplicity and well-fed abundance about the chest of drawers, the tiled stove, the low chairs, the pictures embroidered in wool and silk on canvas in solid, ugly frames. When one remembers that all those objects were standing in the same places and precisely in the same order when I was a little child, and used to come here to name-day parties with my mother, it is simply unbelievable that they could ever cease to exist.

I thought what a fearful difference between Butyga and me! Butyga who made things, above all, solidly and substantially, and seeing in that his chief object, gave to length of life peculiar significance, had no thought of death, and probably hardly believed in its possibility; I, when I built my bridges of iron and stone which would last a thousand years, could not keep from me the thought, 'It's not for long....it's no use.' If in time Butyga's cupboard and my bridge should come under the notice of some sensible historian of art, he would say: 'These were two men remarkable in their own way: Butyga loved his fellow-creatures and would not admit the thought that they might die and be annihilated, and so when he made his furniture he had the immortal man in his mind. The engineer Asorin did not love life or his fellow-creatures; even in the happy moments of creation, thoughts of death, of finiteness and dissolution, were not alien to him, and we see how insignificant and finite, how timid and poor, are these lines of his....'

'I only heat these rooms,' muttered Ivan Ivanitch, showing me his rooms. 'Ever since my wife died and my son was killed in the war, I have kept the best rooms shut up. Yes... see...'

He opened a door, and I saw a big room with four columns, an old piano, and a heap of peas on the floor; it smelt cold and damp.

'The garden seats are in the next room...' muttered Ivan Ivanitch. 'There's no one to dance the mazurka now.... I've shut them up.'

We heard a noise. It was Dr. Sobol arriving. While he was rubbing his cold hands and stroking his wet beard, I had time to notice in the first place that he had a very dull life, and so was pleased to see Ivan Ivanitch and me; and, secondly, that he was a naive and simple-hearted man. He looked at me as though I were very glad to see him and very much interested in him.

'I have not slept for two nights,' he said, looking at me naively and stroking his beard. 'One night with a confinement, and the next I stayed at a peasant's with the bugs biting me all night. I am as sleepy as Satan, do you know.'

With an expression on his face as though it could not afford me anything but pleasure, he took me by the arm and led me to the dining-room. His naive eyes, his crumpled coat, his cheap tie and the smell of iodoform made an unpleasant impression upon me; I felt as though I were in vulgar company. When we sat down to table he filled my glass with vodka, and, smiling helplessly, I drank it; he put a piece of ham on my plate and I ate it submissively.

'Repetitia est mater studiorum,' said Sobol, hastening to drink off another wineglassful. 'Would you believe it, the joy of seeing good people has driven away my sleepiness? I have turned into a peasant, a savage in the wilds; I've grown coarse, but I am still an educated man, and I tell you in good earnest, it's tedious without company.'

They served first for a cold course white sucking-pig with horse-radish cream, then a rich and very hot