Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (119 page)

When the procession was getting near the Monastery, I noticed Alexandr Ivanitch among the elect. He was standing in front of them all, and, his mouth wide open with pleasure and his right eye now? cocked up, was gazing at the procession. His face was beaming; probably at such moments, when there were so many people round him and it was so bright, he was satisfied with himself, his new religion, and his conscience.

When a little later we were sitting in our room, drinking tea, he still beamed with satisfaction; his face showed that he was satisfied both with the tea and with me, that he fully appreciated my being an intellectual,” but that he would know how to play his part with credit if any intellectual topic turned up. . . .

“Tell me, what psychology ought I to read?” he began an intellectual conversation, wrinkling up his nose.

“Why, what do you want it for?”

“One cannot be a teacher without a knowledge of psychology. Before teaching a boy I ought to understand his soul.”

I told him that psychology alone would not be enough to make one understand a boy’s soul, and moreover psychology for a teacher who had not yet mastered the technical methods of instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic would be a luxury as superfluous as the higher mathematics. He readily agreed with me, and began describing how hard and responsible was the task of a teacher, how hard it was to eradicate in the boy the habitual tendency to evil and superstition, to make him think honestly and independently, to instil into him true religion, the ideas of personal dignity, of freedom, and so on. In answer to this I said something to him. He agreed again. He agreed very readily, in fact. Obviously his brain had not a very firm grasp of all these “intellectual subjects.”

Up to the time of my departure we strolled together about the Monastery, whiling away the long hot day. He never left my side a minute; whether he had taken a fancy to me or was afraid of solitude, God only knows! I remember we sat together under a clump of yellow acacia in one of the little gardens that are scattered on the mountain side.

“I am leaving here in a fortnight,” he said; “it is high time.”

“Are you going on foot?”

“From here to Slavyansk I shall walk, then by railway to Nikitovka; from Nikitovka the Donets line branches off, and along that branch line I shall walk as far as Hatsepetovka, and there a railway guard, I know, will help me on my way.

I thought of the bare, deserted steppe between Nikitovka and Hatsepetovka, and pictured to myself Alexandr Ivanitch striding along it, with his doubts, his homesickness, and his fear of solitude. . . . He read boredom in my face, and sighed.

“And my sister must be married by now,” he said, thinking aloud, and at once, to shake off melancholy thoughts, pointed to the top of the rock and said:

“From that mountain one can see Izyum.”

As we were walking up the mountain he had a little misfortune. I suppose he stumbled, for he slit his cotton trousers and tore the sole of his shoe.

“Tss!” he said, frowning as he took off a shoe and exposed a bare foot without a stocking. “How unpleasant! . . . That’s a complication, you know, which . . . Yes!”

Turning the shoe over and over before his eyes, as though unable to believe that the sole was ruined for ever, he spent a long time frowning, sighing, and clicking with his tongue.

I had in my trunk a pair of boots, old but fashionable, with pointed toes and laces. I had brought them with me in case of need, and only wore them in wet weather. When we got back to our room I made up a phrase as diplomatic as I could and offered him these boots. He accepted them and said with dignity:

“I should thank you, but I know that you consider thanks a convention.”

He was pleased as a child with the pointed toes and the laces, and even changed his plans.

“Now I shall go to Novotcherkassk in a week, and not in a fortnight,” he said, thinking aloud.

In shoes like these I shall not be ashamed to show myself to my godfather. I was not going away from here just because I hadn’t any decent clothes. . . .”

When the coachman was carrying out my trunk, a lay brother with a good ironical face came in to sweep out the room. Alexandr Ivanitch seemed flustered and embarrassed and asked him timidly:

“Am I to stay here or go somewhere else?”

He could not make up his mind to occupy a whole room to himself, and evidently by now was feeling ashamed of living at the expense of the Monastery. He was very reluctant to part from me; to put off being lonely as long as possible, he asked leave to see me on my way.

The road from the Monastery, which had been excavated at the cost of no little labour in the chalk mountain, moved upwards, going almost like a spiral round the mountain, over roots and under sullen overhanging pines. . . .

The Donets was the first to vanish from our sight, after it the Monastery yard with its thousands of people, and then the green roofs. . . . Since I was mounting upwards everything seemed vanishing into a pit. The cross on the church, burnished by the rays of the setting sun, gleamed brightly in the abyss and vanished. Nothing was left but the oaks, the pines, and the white road. But then our carriage came out on a level country, and that was all left below and behind us. Alexandr Ivanitch jumped out and, smiling mournfully, glanced at me for the last time with his childish eyes, and vanished from me for ever. . . .

The impressions of the Holy Mountains had already become memories, and I saw something new: the level plain, the whitish-brown distance, the way side copse, and beyond it a windmill which stood with out moving, and seemed bored at not being allowed to wave its sails because it was a holiday.

NOTES

St. Nikolay: Nicholas the Wonder-Worker was a popular saint in pre-1917 Russia; his day was December 6 (Julian Calendar)

Little Russians: Ukrainians

kvass: a Russian beer made from rye or barley

à livre ouvert
: from an open book

Jules Verne: 1828-1905, French science adventure novelist

A MATTER OF CLASSICS

Translated by
Marian Fell 1915

BEFORE going to take his Greek examination, Vania Ottopeloff devoutly kissed every icon in the house. He felt a load on his chest and his blood ran cold, while his heart beat madly and sank into his boots for fear of the unknown. What would become of him to-day? Would he get a B or a C? He asked his mother’s blessing six times over, and, as he left the house, he begged his aunt to pray for him. On his way to school he gave two copecks to a beggar, hoping that these two coins might redeem him from ignorance and that God would not let those numeral nouns with their terrible “Tessarakontas” and “Oktokaidekas” get in his way.

He came back from school late, at five o’clock, and went silently to his room to lie down. His thin cheeks were white and dark circles surrounded his eyes.

“Well? What happened? What did you get?” asked his mother coming to his bedside.

Vania blinked, made a wry face, and burst into tears. Mamma’s jaw dropped, she grew pale and threw up her hands, letting fall a pair of trousers which she had been mending.

“What are you crying for? You have failed, I suppose?” she asked.

“Yes, I’ve--I’ve been plucked. I got a C.”

“I knew that would happen, I had a presentiment that it would!” his mother exclaimed. “The Lord have mercy on us! What did you fail in?” “In Greek-- Oh, motherÄthey asked me the future of Phero and, instead of answering Oisomai, I answered Opsomai; and then--and then the accent is not used if the last syllable is a diphthong, but--but I got confused, I forgot that the alpha was long and put on the accent. Then we had to decline Artaxerxes and I got muddled and made a mistake in the ablative--so he gave me a C-- Oh, I’m the unhappiest boy in the whole world! I worked all last night--I have got up at four every morning this week--”

“No, it is not you who are unhappy, you good-for-nothing boy, it is I! You have worn me as thin as a rail, you monster, you thorn in my flesh, you wicked burden on your parents! I have wept for you, I have broken my back working for you, you worthless trifler, and what is my reward? Have you learned a thing?”

“I--I study--all night--you see that yourself--”

“I have prayed God to send death to deliver me, poor sinner, but death will not come. You bane of my existence! Other people have decent children, but my only child isn’t worth a pin. Shall I beat you? I would if I could, but where shall I get the strength to do it? Mother of God, where shall I get the strength?”

Mamma covered her face with the hem of her dress and burst into tears. Vania squirmed with grief and pressed his forehead against the wall. His aunt came in.

“There, now, I had a presentiment of this!” she exclaimed, turning pale and throwing up her hands as she guessed at once what had happened. “I felt low in my mind all this morning; I knew we should have trouble, and here it is!”

“You viper! You bane of my existence!” exclaimed Vania’s mother.

“Why do you abuse him?” the boy’s aunt scolded the mother, nervously pulling off the coffee-coloured kerchief she wore on her head. “How is he to blame? It is your fault! Yours! Why did you send him to that school? What sort of lady are you? Do you want to climb up among the gentlefolk? Aha! You will certainly get there at this rate! If you had done as I told you, you would have put him into business as I did my Kuzia. There’s Kuzia now making five hundred roubles a year. Is that such a trifle that you can afford to laugh at it? You have tortured yourself and tortured the boy with all this book-learning, worse luck to it! See how thin he is! Hear him cough! He is thirteen years old and he looks more like ten.”

“No, Nastenka, no, darling, I haven’t beaten that tormentor of mine much, and beating is what he needs. Ugh! You Jesuit! You Mohammedan! You thorn in my flesh!” she cried, raising her hand as if to strike her son. “I should thrash you if I had the strength. People used to say to me when he was still little: ‘Beat him! Beat him!’ But I didn’t listen to them, unhappy woman that I am! So now I have to suffer for it. But wait a bit, I’ll have your ears boxed! Wait a bit--”

His mother shook her fist at him and went weeping into the room occupied by her lodger, Eftiki Kuporosoff. The lodger was sitting at his table reading “Dancing Self-Taught.” This Kuporosoff was considered a clever and learned person. He spoke through his nose, washed with scented soap that made every one in the house sneeze, ate meat on fast-days, and was looking for an enlightened wife; for these reasons he thought himself an extremely intellectual lodger. He also possessed a tenor voice.

“Dear me!” cried Vania’s mother, running into his room with the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Do be so very kind as to thrash my boy! Oh, do do me that favour! He has failed in his examinations! Oh, misery me! Can you believe it, he has failed! I can’t punish him myself on account of being so weak and in bad health, so do thrash him for me! Be kind, be chivalrous and do it for me, Mr. Kuporosoff! Have mercy on a sick woman!”

Kuporosoff frowned and heaved a very deep sigh through his nostrils. He reflected, drummed on the table with his fingers, sighed once more, and went into Vania’s room.

“Look here!” he began his harangue. “Your parents are trying to educate you, aren’t they, and give you a start in life, you miserable young man? Then why do you act like this?”

He held forth for a long time, he made quite a speech. He referred to science, and to darkness and light.

“Yes, indeed, young man!” he exclaimed from time to time.

When he had concluded, he took off his belt and caught hold of Vania’s ear.

“This is the only way to treat you!” he exclaimed.

Vania knelt down obediently and put his head on Kuporosoff’s knees. His large pink ears rubbed against Kuporosoff’s new brown-striped trousers.

Vania made not a sound. That evening at a family conclave it was decided to put him into business at once.