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A.P. Chekhov -
The Party
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AFTER the festive dinner with its eight
courses and its endless conversation, Olga Mihalovna, whose
husband's name-day was being celebrated, went out into the
garden. The duty of smiling and talking incessantly, the clatter
of the crockery, the stupidity of the servants, the long
intervals between the courses, and the stays she had put on to
conceal her condition from the visitors, wearied her to
exhaustion. She longed to get away from the house, to sit in the
shade and rest her heart with thoughts of the baby which was to
be born to her in another two months. She was used to these
thoughts coming to her as she turned to the left out of the big
avenue into the narrow path. Here in the thick shade of the
plums and cherry-trees the dry branches used to scratch her neck
and shoulders; a spider's web would settle on her face, and
there would rise up in her mind the image of a little creature
of undetermined sex and undefined features, and it began to seem
as though it were not the spider's web that tickled her face and
neck caressingly, but that little creature. When, at the end of
the path, a thin wicker hurdle came into sight, and behind it
podgy beehives with tiled roofs; when in the motionless,
stagnant air there came a smell of hay and honey, and a soft
buzzing of bees was audible, then the little creature would take
complete possession of Olga Mihalovna. She used to sit down on a
bench near the shanty woven of branches, and fall to thinking.
This time, too, she went on as far as the seat, sat down, and
began thinking; but instead of the little creature there rose up
in her imagination the figures of the grown-up people whom she
had just left. She felt dreadfully uneasy that she, the hostess,
had deserted her guests, and she remembered how her husband,
Pyotr Dmitritch, and her uncle, Nikolay Nikolaitch, had argued
at dinner about trial by jury, about the press, and about the
higher education of women. Her husband, as usual, argued in
order to show off his Conservative ideas before his visitors --
and still more in order to disagree with her uncle, whom he
disliked. Her uncle contradicted him and wrangled over every
word he uttered, so as to show the company that he, Uncle
Nikolay Nikolaitch, still retained his youthful freshness of
spirit and free-thinking in spite of his fifty-nine years. And
towards the end of dinner even Olga Mihalovna herself could not
resist taking part and unskilfully attempting to defend
university education for women -- not that that education stood
in need of her defence, but simply because she wanted to annoy
her husband, who to her mind was unfair. The guests were wearied
by this discussion, but they all thought it necessary to take
part in it, and talked a great deal, although none of them took
any interest in trial by jury or the higher education of women.
. . .
Olga Mihalovna was sitting on the nearest side of the hurdle
near the shanty. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. The trees
and the air were overcast as before rain, but in spite of that
it was hot and stifling. The hay cut under the trees on the
previous day was lying ungathered, looking melancholy, with here
and there a patch of colour from the faded flowers, and from it
came a heavy, sickly scent. It was still. The other side of the
hurdle there was a monotonous hum of bees. . . .
Suddenly she heard footsteps and voices; some one was coming
along the path towards the beehouse.
"How stifling it is!" said a feminine voice. "What do you think
-- is it going to rain, or not?"
"It is going to rain, my charmer, but not before night," a very
familiar male voice answered languidly. "There will be a good
rain."
Olga Mihalovna calculated that if she made haste to hide in the
shanty they would pass by without seeing her, and she would not
have to talk and to force herself to smile. She picked up her
skirts, bent down and crept into the shanty. At once she felt
upon her face, her neck, her arms, the hot air as heavy as
steam. If it had not been for the stuffiness and the close smell
of rye bread, fennel, and brushwood, which prevented her from
breathing freely, it would have been delightful to hide from her
visitors here under the thatched roof in the dusk, and to think
about the little creature. It was cosy and quiet.
"What a pretty spot!" said a feminine voice. "Let us sit here,
Pyotr Dmitritch."
Olga Mihalovna began peeping through a crack between two
branches. She saw her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and Lubotchka
Sheller, a girl of seventeen who had not long left
boarding-school. Pyotr Dmitritch, with his hat on the back of
his head, languid and indolent from having drunk so much at
dinner, slouched by the hurdle and raked the hay into a heap
with his foot; Lubotchka, pink with the heat and pretty as ever,
stood with her hands behind her, watching the lazy movements of
his big handsome person.
Olga Mihalovna knew that her husband was attractive to women,
and did not like to see him with them. There was nothing out of
the way in Pyotr Dmitritch's lazily raking together the hay in
order to sit down on it with Lubotchka and chatter to her of
trivialities; there was nothing out of the way, either, in
pretty Lubotchka's looking at him with her soft eyes; but yet
Olga Mihalovna felt vexed with her husband and frightened and
pleased that she could listen to them.
"Sit down, enchantress," said Pyotr Dmitritch, sinking down on
the hay and stretching. "That's right. Come, tell me something."
"What next! If I begin telling you anything you will go to
sleep."
"Me go to sleep? Allah forbid! Can I go to sleep while eyes like
yours are watching me?"
In her husband's words, and in the fact that he was lolling with
his hat on the back of his head in the presence of a lady, there
was nothing out of the way either. He was spoilt by women, knew
that they found him attractive, and had adopted with them a
special tone which every one said suited him. With Lubotchka he
behaved as with all women. But, all the same, Olga Mihalovna was
jealous.
"Tell me, please," said Lubotchka, after a brief silence -- "is
it true that you are to be tried for something?"
"I? Yes, I am . . . numbered among the transgressors, my
charmer."
"But what for?"
"For nothing, but just . . . it's chiefly a question of
politics," yawned Pyotr Dmitritch -- "the antagonisms of Left
and Right. I, an obscurantist and reactionary, ventured in an
official paper to make use of an expression offensive in the
eyes of such immaculate Gladstones as Vladimir Pavlovitch
Vladimirov and our local justice of the peace -- Kuzma
Grigoritch Vostryakov."
Pytor Dmitritch yawned again and went on:
"And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of
the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you
from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid! A Liberal is like the
poisonous dry fungus which covers you with a cloud of dust if
you accidentally touch it with your finger."
"What happened to you?"
"Nothing particular. The whole flare-up started from the merest
trifle. A teacher, a detestable person of clerical associations,
hands to Vostryakov a petition against a tavern-keeper, charging
him with insulting language and behaviour in a public place.
Everything showed that both the teacher and the tavern-keeper
were drunk as cobblers, and that they behaved equally badly. If
there had been insulting behaviour, the insult had anyway been
mutual. Vostryakov ought to have fined them both for a breach of
the peace and have turned them out of the court -- that is all.
But that's not our way of doing things. With us what stands
first is not the person -- not the fact itself, but the
trade-mark and label. However great a rascal a teacher may be,
he is always in the right because he is a teacher; a
tavern-keeper is always in the wrong because he is a
tavern-keeper and a money-grubber. Vostryakov placed the
tavern-keeper under arrest. The man appealed to the Circuit
Court; the Circuit Court triumphantly upheld Vostryakov's
decision. Well, I stuck to my own opinion. . . . Got a little
hot. . . . That was all."
Pyotr Dmitritch spoke calmly with careless irony. In reality the
trial that was hanging over him worried him extremely. Olga
Mihalovna remembered how on his return from the unfortunate
session he had tried to conceal from his household how troubled
he was, and how dissatisfied with himself. As an intelligent man
he could not help feeling that he had gone too far in expressing
his disagreement; and how much lying had been needful to conceal
that feeling from himself and from others! How many unnecessary
conversations there had been! How much grumbling and insincere
laughter at what was not laughable! When he learned that he was
to be brought up before the Court, he seemed at once harassed
and depressed; he began to sleep badly, stood oftener than ever
at the windows, drumming on the panes with his fingers. And he
was ashamed to let his wife see that he was worried, and it
vexed her.
"They say you have been in the province of Poltava?" Lubotchka
questioned him.
"Yes," answered Pyotr Dmitritch. "I came back the day before
yesterday."
"I expect it is very nice there."
"Yes, it is very nice, very nice indeed; in fact, I arrived just
in time for the haymaking, I must tell you, and in the Ukraine
the haymaking is the most poetical moment of the year. Here we
have a big house, a big garden, a lot of servants, and a lot
going on, so that you don't see the haymaking; here it all
passes unnoticed. There, at the farm, I have a meadow of
forty-five acres as flat as my hand. You can see the men mowing
from any window you stand at. They are mowing in the meadow,
they are mowing in the garden. There are no visitors, no fuss
nor hurry either, so that you can't help seeing, feeling,
hearing nothing but the haymaking. There is a smell of hay
indoors and outdoors. There's the sound of the scythes from
sunrise to sunset. Altogether Little Russia is a charming
country. Would you believe it, when I was drinking water from
the rustic wells and filthy vodka in some Jew's tavern, when on
quiet evenings the strains of the Little Russian fiddle and the
tambourines reached me, I was tempted by a fascinating idea --
to settle down on my place and live there as long as I chose,
far away from Circuit Courts, intellectual conversations,
philosophizing women, long dinners. . . ."
Pyotr Dmitritch was not lying. He was unhappy and really longed
to rest. And he had visited his Poltava property simply to avoid
seeing his study, his servants, his acquaintances, and
everything that could remind him of his wounded vanity and his
mistakes.
Lubotchka suddenly jumped up and waved her hands about in
horror.
"Oh! A bee, a bee!" she shrieked. "It will sting!"
"Nonsense; it won't sting," said Pyotr Dmitritch. "What a coward
you are!"
"No, no, no," cried Lubotchka; and looking round at the bees,
she walked rapidly back.
Pyotr Dmitritch walked away after her, looking at her with a
softened and melancholy face. He was probably thinking, as he
looked at her, of his farm, of solitude, and -- who knows? --
perhaps he was even thinking how snug and cosy life would be at
the farm if his wife had been this girl -- young, pure, fresh,
not corrupted by higher education, not with child. . . .
When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Olga Mihalovna
came out of the shanty and turned towards the house. She wanted
to cry. She was by now acutely jealous. She could understand
that her husband was worried, dissatisfied with himself and
ashamed, and when people are ashamed they hold aloof, above all
from those nearest to them, and are unreserved with strangers;
she could understand, also, that she had nothing to fear from
Lubotchka or from those women who were now drinking coffee
indoors. But everything in general was terrible,
incomprehensible, and it already seemed to Olga Mihalovna that
Pyotr Dmitritch only half belonged to her.
"He has no right to do it!" she muttered, trying to formulate
her jealousy and her vexation with her husband. "He has no right
at all. I will tell him so plainly!"
She made up her mind to find her husband at once and tell him
all about it: it was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he
was attractive to other women and sought their admiration as
though it were some heavenly manna; it was unjust and
dishonourable that he should give to others what belonged by
right to his wife, that he should hide his soul and his
conscience from his wife to reveal them to the first pretty face
he came across. What harm had his wife done him? How was she to
blame? Long ago she had been sickened by his lying: he was for
ever posing, flirting, saying what he did not think, and trying
to seem different from what he was and what he ought to be. Why
this falsity? Was it seemly in a decent man? If he lied he was
demeaning himself and those to whom he lied, and slighting what
he lied about. Could he not understand that if he swaggered and
posed at the judicial table, or held forth at dinner on the
prerogatives of Government, that he, simply to provoke her
uncle, was showing thereby that he had not a ha'p'orth of
respect for the Court, or himself, or any of the people who were
listening and looking at him?
Coming out into the big avenue, Olga Mihalovna assumed an
expression of face as though she had just gone away to look
after some domestic matter. In the verandah the gentlemen were
drinking liqueur and eating strawberries: one of them, the
Examining Magistrate -- a stout elderly man, blagueur and wit --
must have been telling some rather free anecdote, for, seeing
their hostess, he suddenly clapped his hands over his fat lips,
rolled his eyes, and sat down. Olga Mihalovna did not like the
local officials. She did not care for their clumsy, ceremonious
wives, their scandal-mongering, their frequent visits, their
flattery of her husband, whom they all hated. Now, when they
were drinking, were replete with food and showed no signs of
going away, she felt their presence an agonizing weariness; but
not to appear impolite, she smiled cordially to the Magistrate,
and shook her finger at him. She walked across the dining-room
and drawing-room smiling, and looking as though she had gone to
give some order and make some arrangement. "God grant no one
stops me," she thought, but she forced herself to stop in the
drawing-room to listen from politeness to a young man who was
sitting at the piano playing: after standing for a minute, she
cried, "Bravo, bravo, M. Georges!" and clapping her hands twice,
she went on.
She found her husband in his study. He was sitting at the table,
thinking of something. His face looked stern, thoughtful, and
guilty. This was not the same Pyotr Dmitritch who had been
arguing at dinner and whom his guests knew, but a different man
-- wearied, feeling guilty and dissatisfied with himself, whom
nobody knew but his wife. He must have come to the study to get
cigarettes. Before him lay an open cigarette-case full of
cigarettes, and one of his hands was in the table drawer; he had
paused and sunk into thought as he was taking the cigarettes.
Olga Mihalovna felt sorry for him. It was as clear as day that
this man was harassed, could find no rest, and was perhaps
struggling with himself. Olga Mihalovna went up to the table in
silence: wanting to show that she had forgotten the argument at
dinner and was not cross, she shut the cigarette-case and put it
in her husband's coat pocket.
"What should I say to him?" she wondered; "I shall say that
lying is like a forest -- the further one goes into it the more
difficult it is to get out of it. I will say to him, 'You have
been carried away by the false part you are playing; you have
insulted people who were attached to you and have done you no
harm. Go and apologize to them, laugh at yourself, and you will
feel better. And if you want peace and solitude, let us go away
together.' "
Meeting his wife's gaze, Pyotr Dmitritch's face immediately
assumed the expression it had worn at dinner and in the garden
-- indifferent and slightly ironical. He yawned and got up.
"It's past five," he said, looking at his watch. "If our
visitors are merciful and leave us at eleven, even then we have
another six hours of it. It's a cheerful prospect, there's no
denying!"
And whistling something, he walked slowly out of the study with
his usual dignified gait. She could hear him with dignified
firmness cross the dining-room, then the drawing-room, laugh
with dignified assurance, and say to the young man who was
playing, "Bravo! bravo!" Soon his footsteps died away: he must
have gone out into the garden. And now not jealousy, not
vexation, but real hatred of his footsteps, his insincere laugh
and voice, took possession of Olga Mihalovna. She went to the
window and looked out into the garden. Pyotr Dmitritch was
already walking along the avenue. Putting one hand in his pocket
and snapping the fingers of the other, he walked with confident
swinging steps, throwing his head back a little, and looking as
though he were very well satisfied with himself, with his
dinner, with his digestion, and with nature. . . .
Two little schoolboys, the children of Madame Tchizhevsky, who
had only just arrived, made their appearance in the avenue,
accompanied by their tutor, a student wearing a white tunic and
very narrow trousers. When they reached Pyotr Dmitritch, the
boys and the student stopped, and probably congratulated him on
his name-day. With a graceful swing of his shoulders, he patted
the children on their cheeks, and carelessly offered the student
his hand without looking at him. The student must have praised
the weather and compared it with the climate of Petersburg, for
Pyotr Dmitritch said in a loud voice, in a tone as though he
were not speaking to a guest, but to an usher of the court or a
witness:
"What! It's cold in Petersburg? And here, my good sir, we have a
salubrious atmosphere and the fruits of the earth in abundance.
Eh? What?"
And thrusting one hand in his pocket and snapping the fingers of
the other, he walked on. Till he had disappeared behind the nut
bushes, Olga Mihalovna watched the back of his head in
perplexity. How had this man of thirty-four come by the
dignified deportment of a general? How had he come by that
impressive, elegant manner? Where had he got that vibration of
authority in his voice? Where had he got these "what's," "to be
sure's," and "my good sir's"?
Olga Mihalovna remembered how in the first months of her
marriage she had felt dreary at home alone and had driven into
the town to the Circuit Court, at which Pyotr Dmitritch had
sometimes presided in place of her godfather, Count Alexey
Petrovitch. In the presidential chair, wearing his uniform and a
chain on his breast, he was completely changed. Stately
gestures, a voice of thunder, "what," "to be sure," careless
tones. . . . Everything, all that was ordinary and human, all
that was individual and personal to himself that Olga Mihalovna
was accustomed to seeing in him at home, vanished in grandeur,
and in the presidential chair there sat not Pyotr Dmitritch, but
another man whom every one called Mr. President. This
consciousness of power prevented him from sitting still in his
place, and he seized every opportunity to ring his bell, to
glance sternly at the public, to shout. . . . Where had he got
his short-sight and his deafness when he suddenly began to see
and hear with difficulty, and, frowning majestically, insisted
on people speaking louder and coming closer to the table? From
the height of his grandeur he could hardly distinguish faces or
sounds, so that it seemed that if Olga Mihalovna herself had
gone up to him he would have shouted even to her, "Your name?"
Peasant witnesses he addressed familiarly, he shouted at the
public so that his voice could be heard even in the street, and
behaved incredibly with the lawyers. If a lawyer had to speak to
him, Pyotr Dmitritch, turning a little away from him, looked
with half-closed eyes at the ceiling, meaning to signify thereby
that the lawyer was utterly superfluous and that he was neither
recognizing him nor listening to him; if a badly-dressed lawyer
spoke, Pyotr Dmitritch pricked up his ears and looked the man up
and down with a sarcastic, annihilating stare as though to say:
"Queer sort of lawyers nowadays!"
"What do you mean by that?" he would interrupt.
If a would-be eloquent lawyer mispronounced a foreign word,
saying, for instance, "factitious" instead of "fictitious,"
Pyotr Dmitritch brightened up at once and asked, "What? How?
Factitious? What does that mean?" and then observed
impressively: "Don't make use of words you do not understand."
And the lawyer, finishing his speech, would walk away from the
table, red and perspiring, while Pyotr Dmitritch; with a
self-satisfied smile, would lean back in his chair triumphant.
In his manner with the lawyers he imitated Count Alexey
Petrovitch a little, but when the latter said, for instance,
"Counsel for the defence, you keep quiet for a little!" it
sounded paternally good-natured and natural, while the same
words in Pyotr Dmitritch's mouth were rude and artificial.
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