Selected short stories -1896-1904- translated by Constance Garnett

Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with moustaches, threw himself into an attitude, flung up his arm, and said in a tragic voice:

'Unhappy woman, die!'

All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage, and looking at the dark house and garden which had once been so precious and so dear, he thought of everything at once -- Vera Iosifovna's novels and Kitten's noisy playing, and Ivan Petrovitch's jokes and Pava's tragic posturing, and thought if the most talented people in the town were so futile, what must the town be?

Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.

'You don't come and see us -- why?' she wrote to him. 'I am afraid that you have changed towards us. I am afraid, and I am terrified at the very thought of it. Reassure me; come and tell me that everything is well.

'I must talk to you.-- Your E. I.'

----

He read this letter, thought a moment, and said to Pava:

'Tell them, my good fellow, that I can't come to-day; I am very busy. Say I will come in three days or so.'

But three days passed, a week passed; he still did not go. Happening once to drive past the Turkins' house, he thought he must go in, if only for a moment, but on second thoughts . . . did not go in.

And he never went to the Turkins' again.

V

Several more years have passed. Startsev has grown stouter still, has grown corpulent, breathes heavily, and already walks with his head thrown back. When stout and red in the face, he drives with his bells and his team of three horses, and Panteleimon, also stout and red in the face with his thick beefy neck, sits on the box, holding his arms stiffly out before him as though they were made of wood, and shouts to those he meets: 'Keep to the ri-i- ight!' it is an impressive picture; one might think it was not a mortal, but some heathen deity in his chariot. He has an immense practice in the town, no time to breathe, and already has an estate and two houses in the town, and he is looking out for a third more profitable; and when at the Mutual Credit Bank he is told of a house that is for sale, he goes to the house without ceremony, and, marching through all the rooms, regardless of half-dressed women and children who gaze at him in amazement and alarm, he prods at the doors with his stick, and says:

'Is that the study? Is that a bedroom? And what's here?'

And as he does so he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his brow.

He has a great deal to do, but still he does not give up his work as district doctor; he is greedy for gain, and he tries to be in all places at once. At Dyalizh and in the town he is called simply 'Ionitch': 'Where is Ionitch off to?' or 'Should not we call in Ionitch to a consultation?'

Probably because his throat is covered with rolls of fat, his voice has changed; it has become thin and sharp. His temper has changed, too: he has grown ill-humoured and irritable. When he sees his patients he is usually out of temper; he impatiently taps the floor with his stick, and shouts in his disagreeable voice:

'Be so good as to confine yourself to answering my questions! Don't talk so much!'

He is solitary. He leads a dreary life; nothing interests him.

During all the years he had lived at Dyalizh his love for Kitten had been his one joy, and probably his last. In the evenings he plays vint at the club, and then sits alone at a big table and has supper. Ivan, the oldest and most respectable of the waiters, serves him, hands him Lafitte No. 17, and every one at the club -- the members of the committee, the cook and waiters -- know what he likes and what he doesn't like and do their very utmost to satisfy him, or else he is sure to fly into a rage and bang on the floor with his stick.

As he eats his supper, he turns round from time to time and puts in his spoke in some conversation:

'What are you talking about? Eh? Whom?'

And when at a neighbouring table there is talk of the Turkins, he asks:

'What Turkins are you speaking of? Do you mean the people whose daughter plays on the piano?'

That is all that can be said about him.

And the Turkins? Ivan Petrovitch has grown no older; he is not changed in the least, and still makes jokes and tells anecdotes as of old. Vera Iosifovna still reads her novels aloud to her visitors with eagerness and touching simplicity. And Kitten plays the piano for four hours every day. She has grown visibly older, is constantly ailing, and every autumn goes to the Crimea with her mother. When Ivan Petrovitch sees them off at the station, he wipes his tears as the train starts, and shouts:

'Good-bye, if you please.'

And he waves his handkerchief.

NOTES

Ascension Day: the day 40 days after Easter when Christ is supposed to have gone to heaven

goblet: song with words from the poem 'An Elegy' by Anton A. Delvig (1798-1831)

Othello: title character of Shakespeare's play; example of an unjustly jealous husband

Petit Jean: Chekhov uses the word Zhanchik which is the French name Jean, plus a Russian-type diminutive

Die, Denis; you won't write anything better: remark made to playwright Denis I. Fonvizin by Potemkin after a performance of the play The Brigadier

caressing: from the first lines of Pushkin's poem 'Night' (1823)

A Thousand Souls: a novel (1858) by Alexis F. Pisemsky (1820-1881); the author's patronymic would nowadays be written 'Feofilaktovich,' and it does sound funny to Russians