Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (464 page)

THE SHOOTING PARTY

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EXAMINING MAGISTRATE

CHAPTER I

‘The husband killed his wife! Oh, how stupid you are! Give me some sugar!’

These cries awoke me. I stretched myself, feeling indisposition and heaviness in every limb. One can lie upon one’s legs or arms until they are numb, but now it seemed to me that my whole body, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, was benumbed. An afternoon snooze in a sultry, dry atmosphere amid the buzzing and humming of flies and mosquitoes does not act in an invigorating manner but has an enervating effect. Broken and bathed in perspiration, I rose and went to the window. The sun was still high and baked with the same ardour it had done three hours before. Many hours still remained until sunset and the coolness of evening.

‘The husband killed his wife!’

‘Stop lying, Ivan Dem’yanych!’ I said as I gave a slight tap to Ivan Dem’yanych’s nose. ‘Husbands kill their wives only in novels and in the tropics, where African passions boil over, my dear. For us such horrors as thefts and burglaries or people living on false passports are quite enough.’

‘Thefts and burglaries!’ Ivan Dem’yanych murmured through his hooked nose. ‘Oh, how stupid you are!’

‘What’s to be done, my dear? In what way are we mortals to blame for our brain having its limits? Besides, Ivan Dem’yanych, it is no sin to be a fool in such a temperature. You’re my clever darling, but doubtless your brain, too, gets addled and stupid in such heat.’

My parrot is not called Polly or by any other of the names given to birds, but he is called Ivan Dem’yanych. He got this name quite by chance. One day, when my man Polycarp was cleaning the cage, he suddenly made a discovery without which my noble bird would still have been called Polly. My lazy servant was suddenly blessed with the idea that my parrot’s beak was very like the nose of our village shopkeeper, Ivan Dem’yanych, and from that time the name and patronymic of our long-nosed shopkeeper stuck to my parrot. From that day Polycarp and the whole village christened my extraordinary bird ‘Ivan Dem’yanych’. Thanks to Polycarp the bird became a personage, and the shopkeeper lost his own name, and to the end of his days he will be known among the villagers by the nickname of the ‘magistrate’s parrot’.

I had bought Ivan Dem’yanych from the mother of my predecessor, the examining magistrate, Pospelov, who had died shortly before my appointment. I bought him together with some old oak furniture, various rubbishy kitchen utensils, and in general the whole of the household goods that remained after Pospelov’s death. My walls are still decorated with photographs of his relatives, and the portrait of the former occupant is still hanging above my bed. The departed, a lean, muscular man with a red moustache and a thick under-lip, sits looking at me with staring eyes from his faded nutwood frame all the time I am lying on his bed... I had not taken down a single photograph, I had left the house just as I found it. I am too lazy to think of my own comfort, and I don’t prevent either corpses or living men from hanging on my walls if the latter wish to do so.

Ivan Dem’yanych found it as sultry as I did. He fluffed out his feathers, spread his wings, and shrieked out the phrases he had been taught by my predecessor, Pospelov, and by Polycarp. To occupy in some way my after-dinner leisure, I sat down in front of the cage and began to watch the movements of my parrot, who was industriously trying, but without success, to escape from the torments he suffered from the suffocating heat and the insects that dwelt among his feathers... The poor thing seemed very unhappy...

‘At what time does he awake?’ was borne to me in a bass voice from the lobby.

‘That depends!’ Polycarp’s voice answered. ‘Sometimes he wakes at five o’clock, and sometimes he sleeps like a log till morning... Everybody knows he has nothing to do.’

‘You’re his valet, I suppose?’

‘His servant. Now don’t bother me; hold your tongue. Don’t you see I’m reading?’

I peeped into the lobby. My Polycarp was there, lolling on the large red trunk, and, as usual, reading a book. With his sleepy, unblinking eyes fixed attentively on his book, he was moving his lips and frowning. He was evidently irritated by the presence of the stranger, a tall, bearded muzhik, who was standing near the trunk persistently trying to inveigle him into conversation. At my appearance the muzhik took a step away from the trunk and drew himself up to attention. Polycarp looked dissatisfied, and without removing his eyes from the book he rose slightly.

‘What do you want?’ I asked the muzhik.

‘I have come from the Count, your honour. The Count sends you his greetings, and begs you to come to him at once...’

‘Has the Count arrived?’ I asked, much astonished.

‘Just so, your honour... He arrived last night... Here’s a letter, sir...’

‘What the devil has brought him back!’ my Polycarp grumbled. ‘Two summers we’ve lived peacefully without him and this year he’ll again make a pigsty of the district. It reflects on us, it’s shameful.’

‘Hold your tongue, your opinion is not asked!’

‘I need not be asked... You’ll come home drunk again, and go in the lake just as you are, in all your clothes... It’s I who have the job of cleaning them afterwards! And it takes three days and more!’

‘What’s the Count doing now?’ I asked the muzhik.

‘He was just sitting down to dinner when he sent me to you... Before dinner he was fishing from the bathing cabin, sir... What answer can I take?’

I opened the letter and read the following:

My Dear Lecoq,

If you are still alive, well, and have not forgotten your ever-drunken friend, do not delay a moment. Get dressed immediately and come to me. I only arrived last night and am already dying from ennui. The impatience I feel to see you knows no bounds. I wanted to drive over to see you and carry you off to my den, but the heat has utterly exhausted me. I simply sit about, fanning myself. Well, how are you? How is your clever Ivan Dem’yanych? Are you still at war with your scolding Polycarp? Come quickly and tell me everything.

Your A. K.

It was not necessary to look at the signature to recognize the drunken, sprawling, ugly handwriting of my friend, Count Alexey Karnéev. The shortness of the letter, its pretension to a certain playfulness and vivacity proved that my friend, with his limited capacities, must have torn up much notepaper before he was able to compose this epistle.

The pronoun ‘which’ was absent from this letter, and adverbs were carefully avoided - both being grammatical forms that were seldom achieved by the Count at a single sitting. ‘What answer can I take, sir?’ the muzhik repeated. At first I did not reply to this question, and every decent, honest man in my place would have hesitated too. The Count was fond of me, and quite sincerely obtruded his friendship on me. I, on my part, felt nothing like friendship for the Count; I even disliked him. It would therefore have been more honest to reject his friendship once for all than to go to him and dissimulate. Besides, to go to the Count’s meant to plunge once more into the life my Polycarp had characterized as a ‘pigsty’, which two years before during the Count’s residence on his estate and until he left for Petersburg had injured my health and dried up my brain. That loose, unaccustomed life so full of show and drunken madness, had not yet shattered my constitution, but it had made me known throughout the province... Yet I was popular...

My reason told me the whole truth, a blush of shame for the not distant past suffused my face, my heart sank with fear that I would not possess sufficient manliness to refuse to go to the Count’s, but I did not hesitate long. The struggle lasted not more than a minute.

‘Give my compliments to the Count,’ I said to his messenger, ‘and thank him for thinking of me... Tell him I am busy, and that... Tell him that I...’

And at the very moment my tongue was about to pronounce a decisive ‘No’, I was suddenly overpowered by a feeling of dullness... Here I was, a young man, full of life, strength and desires, who by the decrees of fate had been cast into this forest village, seized by a sensation of ennui, of loneliness...

I remembered the Count’s gardens with the exuberant vegetation of their cool conservatories, and the semi-darkness of the narrow, neglected avenues... Those avenues protected from the sun by arches of the entwined branches of old limes know me well; they also know the women who sought my love in semi-darkness... I remembered the luxurious drawing-room with the sweet indolence of its velvet sofas, heavy curtains and thick carpets, soft as down, with the laziness so common to young healthy animals... I recalled my drunken audacity, limitless in its scope, its satanic pride and its contempt for life. My large body wearied by sleep again longed for movement...

‘Tell him I’ll come!’

The muzhik bowed and retired.

‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let that devil in!’ Polycarp grumbled, quickly turning over the pages of his book in a purposeless manner.

‘Put that book away and go and saddle Zorka,’ I said. ‘Look sharp!’

‘Look sharp! Oh, of course, certainly... I’m just going to rush off... It would be all right if he were going on business, but he’s just off on some spree!’

This was said in an undertone, but loud enough for me to hear it. Having whispered this impertinence, my servant drew himself up before me and waited for me to flare up in reply, but I pretended not to have heard his words. My silence was the best and sharpest weapon I could use in my contests with Polycarp. This contemptuous custom of allowing his venomous words to pass unheeded disarmed him and cut the ground away from under his feet. As a punishment it acted better than a box on the ear or a flood of vituperation... When Polycarp had gone into the yard to saddle Zorka, I peeped into the book which he had been prevented from reading. It was
The Count of Monte Cristo,
Dumas’ dreadful romance... My civilized fool read everything, beginning with the signboards of the public houses and finishing with Auguste Comte, which was lying in my trunk together with other neglected books that I did not read; but of the whole mass of written and printed matter he only approved of exciting, sensational novels with ‘celebrated personages’, poison and subterranean passages; all the rest he dubbed ‘nonsense’. I shall have again to refer to his reading, now I had to ride off. A quarter of an hour later the hoofs of my Zorka were raising the dust on the road from the village to the Count’s estate. The sun was near setting, but the heat and the sultriness were still felt. The hot air was dry and motionless, although my road led along the banks of an enormous lake... On my right I saw the great expanse of water, on the left my sight was caressed by the young vernal foliage of an oak forest; nevertheless, my cheeks suffered the dryness of Sahara, if there could only be a storm!’ I thought, dreaming of a good cool downpour.

The lake slept peacefully. It did not greet with a single sound the flight of my Zorka, and it was only the piping of a young snipe that broke the grave-like silence of the sleeping lake. The sun looked at itself in it as in a huge mirror, and shed a blinding light on the whole of its breadth that extended from my road to the distant banks opposite. And it seemed to my blinded eyes that nature received light from the lake and not from the sun.

The sultriness impelled to slumber the whole of that life in which the lake and its green banks so richly abounded. The birds had hidden themselves, the fish did not splash in the water, the field crickets and the grasshoppers waited in silence for coolness to set in. All around was a waste. From time to time my Zorka bore me into a thick cloud of mosquitoes along the bank of the lake, and far away on the water, scarcely moving, I could see the three black boats belonging to old Mikhey, our fisherman, who leased the fishing rights of the whole lake.

CHAPTER II

I did not ride in a straight line as I had to make a circuit along the road that skirted the circular lake. It was only possible to go in a straight line by boat, while those who went by the road had to make a large detour, the distance being almost eight versts farther. All the way, looking across the lake, I could see beyond it the muddy banks opposite, on which the bright strip of a blossoming cherry orchard gleamed white, while farther still I could see the roofs of the Count’s barns dotted all over with many coloured pigeons, and rising still higher the small white belfry of the Count’s chapel. At the foot of the muddy banks was the bathing cabin with sailcloth nailed on the sides and sheets hanging to dry on its railings. I saw all this, and it appeared to me as if only a verst separated me from my friend the Count, yet in order to reach his estate I had to ride about sixteen versts.

On the way, I thought of my strange relationship with the Count. I was interested in examining and trying to define it, but the task proved beyond me. However much I thought, I could come to no satisfactory decision, and at last I arrived at the conclusion that I was a bad judge of myself and of men in general. The people who knew both the Count and me had an explanation for our mutual connection. The narrower-minded, who see nothing beyond the tip of their nose, were fond of asserting that the illustrious Count found in the ‘poor and undistinguished’ magistrate a congenial hanger-on and boon companion. In their view I, the writer of these lines, fawned and cringed before the Count for the sake of the crumbs and scraps that fell from his table. In their opinion the illustrious millionaire, who was both the bugbear and the envy of the whole of the S — district, was very clever and liberal; otherwise his gracious condescension that went as far as friendship for an indigent magistrate and the genuine liberalism that made the Count tolerate my familiarity in addressing him as ‘thou’, would be quite incomprehensible. Cleverer people ex-

plained our intimacy by our common ‘spiritual interests’. The Count and I were of the same age. We had finished our law studies in the same university, and we both knew very little: I still had a smattering of legal lore, but the Count had forgotten and drowned in alcohol the little he had ever known. We were both proud, and by virtue of some reason which was only known to ourselves, we shunned the world like misanthropes. We were both indifferent to the opinion of the world - that is of the S — district - we were both immoral, and would certainly both end badly. These were the ‘spiritual interests’ that united us. This was all that the people who knew us could say about our relations.

They would, of course, have spoken differently had they known how weak, soft and yielding was the nature of my friend, the Count, and how strong and hard was mine. They would have had much to say had they known how fond this infirm man was of me, and how I disliked him! He was the first to offer his friendship and I was the first to say ‘thou’ to him, but with what a difference in the tone! In a fit of kindly feeling he embraced me, and asked me timidly to be his friend. I, on the other hand, once seized by a feeling of a contempt and aversion, said to him:

‘Canst thou not cease jabbering nonsense?’

And he accepted this ‘thou’ as an expression of friendship and submitted to it from that time, repaying me with an honest, brotherly ‘thou’.

Yes, it would have been better and more honest had I turned my Zorka’s head homewards and ridden back to Polycarp and my Ivan Dem’yanych.

Afterwards I often thought: ‘How much misfortune I would have avoided bearing on my shoulders, how much good I would have brought to my neighbours, if on that night I had had the resolution to turn back, if only my Zorka had gone mad and carried me far away from the immensities of the lake! What numbers of tormenting recollections which now cause my hand to quit the pen and seize my head would not have pressed so heavily on my mind!’ But I must not anticipate, all the more as farther on I shall often have to dwell on misfortunes. Now for gaiety...

My Zorka bore me into the gates of the Count’s yard. At the very gates she stumbled, and I, losing the stirrup, almost fell to the ground.

‘An ill omen, sir!’ a muzhik, who was standing at one of the doors of the Count’s long line of stables, called to me.

I believe that a man falling from a horse may break his neck, but I do not believe in prognostications. Having given the bridle to the muzhik, I beat the dust off my top-boots with my riding-whip and ran into the house. Nobody met me. All the doors and windows of the rooms were wide open, nevertheless within the house the air was heavy, and had a strange smell. It was a mixture of the odour of ancient, deserted apartments with the tart narcotic scent of hothouse plants that have but recently been brought from the conservatories into the rooms... In the drawing-room, two tumbled cushions were lying on one of the sofas that was covered with a light blue silk material, and on a round table before the sofa I saw a glass containing a few drops of a liquid that exhaled an odour of strong Riga balsam. All this denoted that the house was inhabited, but I did not meet a living soul in any of the eleven rooms that I traversed. The same desertion that was round the lake reigned in the house...

A glass door led into the garden from the so-called ‘mosaic’ drawing-room. I opened it noisily and went down the marble stairs into the garden. I had gone only a few steps along the avenue when I met Nastasia, an old woman of ninety, who had formerly been the Count’s nurse. This little wrinkled old creature, forgotten by death, had a bald head and piercing eyes. When you looked at her face you involuntarily remembered the nickname ‘Scops-Owl’ that had been given her in the village... When she saw me she trembled and almost dropped a glass of milk she was carrying in both hands.

‘How do you do, Scops?’ I said to her.

She gave me a sidelong glance and silently went on her way... I seized her by the shoulder.

‘Don’t be afraid, fool... Where’s the Count?’

The old woman pointed to her ear.

‘Are you deaf? How long have you been deaf?’

Despite her great age, the old woman heard and saw very well, but she found it useful to pretend otherwise. I shook my finger at her and let her go.

Having gone on a few steps farther, I heard voices, and soon after saw people. At the spot where the avenue widened out and formed an open space surrounded by iron benches and shaded by tall white acacias, stood a table on which a samovar shone brightly. People were seated at the table, talking. I went quietly across the grass towards the gathering and, hiding behind a lilac bush, began to peer about for the Count.

My friend, Count Karnéev, was seated at the table on a cane-bottomed folding chair, drinking tea. He was dressed in the same many-coloured dressing-gown in which I had seen him two years before, and he wore a straw hat. His face had a troubled, concentrated expression, and it was very wrinkled, so that a man not acquainted with him might have imagined he was troubled at that moment by some serious thought or anxiety... The Count had not changed at all in appearance during the two years since last we met. He had the same small thin body, as frail and wizened as the body of a corncrake. He had the same narrow, consumptive shoulders, surmounted by a small red-haired head. His small nose was as red as formerly, and his cheeks were flabby and hanging like rags, as they had been two years before. On his face there was nothing of boldness, strength or manliness... All was weak, apathetic and languid. The only imposing thing about him was his long, drooping moustache. Somebody had told my friend that a long moustache was very becoming to him. He believed it, and every morning since then he had measured how much longer the growth on his pale lips had become. With this moustache he reminded you of a moustached but very young and puny kitten.

Sitting next to the Count at the table was a stout man with a large closely-cropped head and very dark eyebrows, who was unknown to me. His face was fat and shone like a ripe melon. His moustache was longer than the Count’s, his forehead was low, his lips were compressed, and his eyes gazed lazily into the sky... The features of his face were bloated, but nevertheless they were as hard as dried-up skin. He did not look like a Russian... The stout man was without his coat or waistcoat, and on his shirt there were dark spots caused by perspiration. He was not drinking tea but Seltzer water.

At a respectful distance from the table a short, thick-set man with a stout red neck and protruding ears was standing. This man was Urbenin, the Count’s bailiff. In honour of the Count’s arrival he was dressed in a new black suit and was now suffering torments. The perspiration was pouring in streams from his red, sunburnt face. Next to the bailiff stood the muzhik, who had come to me with the letter. It was only here I noticed that this muzhik had only one eye. Standing at attention, not allowing himself the slightest movement, he was like a statue, and waited to be questioned.

‘Kuz’ma, you deserve to be thrashed black and blue with your own whip,’ the bailiff said to him in his reproachful soft bass voice, pausing between each word, is it possible to execute the master’s orders in such a careless way. You ought to have requested him to come here at once and to have found out when he could be expected.’

‘Yes, yes, yes...’ the Count exclaimed nervously. ‘You ought to have found out everything! He said: “I’ll come!” But that’s not enough! I want him at once! Pos-i-tively at once! You asked him to come, but he did not understand!’

‘What do you want with him?’ the fat man asked the Count.

‘I want to see him!’

‘Only that? To my mind, Alexey, that magistrate would do far better if he remained at home today. I have no wish for guests.’

I opened my eyes. What was the meaning of that masterful, authoritative T?

‘But he’s not a guest!’ my friend said in an imploring tone. ‘He won’t prevent you from resting after the journey. I beg you not to stand on ceremonies with him... You’ll like him at once, my dear boy, and you’ll soon be friends with him!’

I came out of my hiding place behind the lilac bushes and went up to the tables. The Count saw and recognized me, and his face brightened with a pleased smile.

‘Here he is! Here he is!’ he exclaimed, getting red with pleasure, and he jumped up from the table. ‘How good of you to come!’

He ran towards me, seized me in his arms, embraced me and scratched my cheeks several times with his bristly moustache. These kisses were followed by lengthy shaking of my hand and long looks into my eyes.

‘You, Sergey, have not changed at all! You’re still the same! The same handsome strong fellow! Thank you for accepting my invitation and coming at once!’

When released from the Count’s embrace, I greeted the bailiff, who was an old friend of mine, and sat down at the table.

‘Oh, golubchek!’ the Count continued in an excitedly anxious tone, if you only knew how delighted I am to see your serious countenance again. You are not acquainted? Allow me to introduce you - my good friend, Kaetan Kazimirovich Pshekhotsky. And this,’ he continued, introducing me to the fat man, ‘is my good old friend, Sergey Petrovich Zinov’ev! Our magistrate.’

The stout, dark-browed man rose slightly from his seat and offered me his fat, and extremely sweaty hand.

‘Very pleased,’ he mumbled, examining me from head to foot. ‘Very glad!’

Having given vent to his feelings and become calm again, the Count filled a glass with cold, dark brown tea for me and moved a box of biscuits towards my hand.

‘Eat... When passing through Moscow I bought them at Einem’s. I’m very angry with you, Serezha, so angry that I wanted to quarrel with you! Not only have you not written me a line during the whole of the past two years, but you did not even think a single one of my letters worth answering! That’s not friendly!’

‘I don’t know how to write letters,’ I said. ‘Besides, I have no time for letter writing. Can you tell me what could I have written to you about?’

‘There must have been many things!’

‘Indeed, there was nothing. I admit of only three sorts of letters: love, congratulatory, and business letters. The first I did not write to you because you are not a woman, and I am not in love with you; the second you don’t require; and from the third category we are relieved as from our birth we have never had any business connection together.’

‘That’s perfectly true,’ the Count said, agreeing readily and quickly with everything; ‘but all the same, you might have written, if only a line... And what’s more, as Pëtr Egorych tells me, all these two years you’ve not set foot here, as though you were living a thousand versts away or disdained my property. You could have made your home here, shot over my grounds. Many things might have happened here while I was away.’