Selected early short stories 1887

The blue trousers, with much sighing and groaning and waddling from side to side like a duck, cross the street.

'Tierce major . . .' mutters Lyashkevsky, 'from the queen. . . . Five and fifteen. . . . The rascals are talking of politics. . . . Do you hear? They have begun about England. I have six hearts.'

'I have the seven spades. My point.'

'Yes, it's yours. Do you hear? They are abusing Beaconsfield. They don't know, the swine, that Beaconsfield has been dead for ever so long. So I have twenty-nine. . . . Your lead.'

'Eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . . Yes, amazing people, these Russians! Eleven . . . twelve. . . . The Russian inertia is unique on the terrestrial globe.'

'Thirty . . . Thirty-one. . . . One ought to take a good whip, you know. Go out and give them Beaconsfield. I say, how their tongues are wagging! It's easier to babble than to work. I suppose you threw away the queen of clubs and I didn't realise it.'

'Thirteen . . . Fourteen. . . . It's unbearably hot! One must be made of iron to sit in such heat on a seat in the full sun! Fifteen.'

The first game is followed by a second, the second by a third. . . . Finks loses, and by degrees works himself up into a gambling fever and forgets all about the cracking walls of the high school cellar. As Lyashkevsky plays he keeps looking at the aborigines. He sees them, entertaining each other with conversation, go to the open gate, cross the filthy yard and sit down on a scanty patch of shade under an aspen tree. Between twelve and one o'clock the fat cook with brown legs spreads before them something like a baby's sheet with brown stains upon it, and gives them their dinner. They eat with wooden spoons, keep brushing away the flies, and go on talking.

'The devil, it is beyond everything,' cries Lyashkevsky, revolted. 'I am very glad I have not a gun or a revolver or I should have a shot at those cattle. I have four knaves -- fourteen. . . . Your point. . . . It really gives me a twitching in my legs. I can't see those ruffians without being upset.'

'Don't excite yourself, it is bad for you.'

'But upon my word, it is enough to try the patience of a stone!'

When he has finished dinner the native in blue trousers, worn out and exhausted, staggering with laziness and repletion, crosses the street to his own house and sinks feebly on to his bench. He is struggling with drowsiness and the gnats, and is looking about him as dejectedly as though he were every minute expecting his end. His helpless air drives Lyashkevsky out of all patience. The Pole pokes his head out of the window and shouts at him, spluttering:

'Been gorging? Ah, the old woman! The sweet darling. He has been stuffing himself, and now he doesn't know what to do with his tummy! Get out of my sight, you confounded fellow! Plague take you!'

The native looks sourly at him, and merely twiddles his fingers instead of answering. A school-boy of his acquaintance passes by him with his satchel on his back. Stopping him the native ponders a long time what to say to him, and asks:

'Well, what now?'

'Nothing.'

'How, nothing?'

'Why, just nothing.'

'H'm. . . . And which subject is the hardest?'

'That's according.' The school-boy shrugs his shoulders.

'I see -- er . . . What is the Latin for tree?'

'Arbor.'

'Aha. . . . And so one has to know all that,' sighs the blue trousers. 'You have to go into it all. . . . It's hard work, hard work. . . . Is your dear Mamma well?'

'She is all right, thank you.'

'Ah. . . . Well, run along.'

After losing two roubles Finks remembers the high school and is horrified.

'Holy Saints, why it's three o'clock already. How I have been staying on. Good-bye, I must run. . . .'

'Have dinner with me, and then go,' says Lyashkevsky. 'You have plenty of time.'

Finks stays, but only on condition that dinner shall last no more than ten minutes. After dining he sits for some five minutes on the sofa and thinks of the cracked wall, then resolutely lays his head on the cushion and fills the room with a shrill whistling through his nose. While he is asleep, Lyashkevsky, who does not approve of an afternoon nap, sits at the window, stares at the dozing native, and grumbles:

'Race of curs! I wonder you don't choke with laziness. No work, no intellectual or moral interests, nothing but vegetating . . . . disgusting. Tfoo!'

At six o'clock Finks wakes up.

'It's too late to go to the high school now,' he says, stretching. 'I shall have to go to-morrow, and now. . . . How about my revenge? Let's have one more game. . . .'

After seeing his visitor off, between nine and ten, Lyashkevsky looks after him for some time, and says:

'Damn the fellow, staying here the whole day and doing absolutely nothing. . . . Simply get their salary and do no work; the devil take them! . . . The German pig. . . .'

He looks out of the window, but the native is no longer there. He has gone to bed. There is no one to grumble at, and for the first time in the day he keeps his mouth shut, but ten minutes passes and he cannot restrain the depression that overpowers him, and begins to grumble, shoving the old shabby armchair:

'You only take up room, rubbishly old thing! You ought to have been burnt long ago, but I keep forgetting to tell them to chop you up. It's a disgrace!'

And as he gets into bed he presses his hand on a spring of the mattress, frowns and says peevishly:

'The con--found--ed spring! It will cut my side all night. I will tell them to rip up the mattress to-morrow and get you out, you useless thing.'

He falls asleep at midnight, and dreams that he is pouring boiling water over the natives, Finks, and the old armchair.

NOTES

sign of the cross over his mouth: so that the devil cannot enter his soul through his open mouth

name-day parties: Russians celebrate the feast day of the saint after whom they are named

Volodya

by Anton Chekhov

AT five o'clock one Sunday afternoon in summer, Volodya, a plain, shy, sickly-looking lad of seventeen, was sitting in the arbour of the Shumihins' country villa, feeling dreary. His despondent thought flowed in three directions. In the first place, he had next day, Monday, an examination in mathematics; he knew that if he did not get through the written examination on the morrow, he would be expelled, for he had already been two years in the sixth form and had two and three-quarter marks for algebra in his annual report. In the second place, his presence at the villa of the Shumihins, a wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions, was a continual source of mortification to his amour-propre. It seemed to him that Madame Shumihin looked upon him and his maman as poor relations and dependents, that they laughed at his maman and did not respect her. He had on one occasion accidently overheard Madame Shumihin, in the verandah, telling her cousin Anna Fyodorovna that his maman still tried to look young and got herself up, that she never paid her losses at cards, and had a partiality for other people's shoes and tobacco. Every day Volodya besought his maman not to go to the Shumihins', and drew a picture of the humiliating part she played with these gentlefolk. He tried to persuade her, said rude things, but she -- a frivolous, pampered woman, who had run through two fortunes, her own and her husband's, in her time, and always gravitated towards acquaintances of high rank -- did not understand him, and twice a week