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A.P. Chekhov -
Gooseberries
THE whole sky had been overcast with
rain-clouds from early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but
heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when the clouds have been
hanging over the country for a long while, when one expects rain
and it does not come. Ivan Ivanovitch, the veterinary surgeon,
and Burkin, the high-school teacher, were already tired from
walking, and the fields seemed to them endless. Far ahead of
them they could just see the windmills of the village of
Mironositskoe; on the right stretched a row of hillocks which
disappeared in the distance behind the village, and they both
knew that this was the bank of the river, that there were
meadows, green willows, homesteads there, and that if one stood
on one of the hillocks one could see from it the same vast
plain, telegraph-wires, and a train which in the distance looked
like a crawling caterpillar, and that in clear weather one could
even see the town. Now, in still weather, when all nature seemed
mild and dreamy, Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were filled with
love of that countryside, and both thought how great, how
beautiful a land it was.
"Last time we were in Prokofy's barn," said Burkin, "you were
about to tell me a story."
"Yes; I meant to tell you about my brother."
Ivan Ivanovitch heaved a deep sigh and lighted a pipe to begin
to tell his story, but just at that moment the rain began. And
five minutes later heavy rain came down, covering the sky, and
it was hard to tell when it would be over. Ivan Ivanovitch and
Burkin stopped in hesitation; the dogs, already drenched, stood
with their tails between their legs gazing at them feelingly.
"We must take shelter somewhere," said Burkin. "Let us go to
Alehin's; it's close by."
"Come along."
They turned aside and walked through mown fields, sometimes
going straight forward, sometimes turning to the right, till
they came out on the road. Soon they saw poplars, a garden, then
the red roofs of barns; there was a gleam of the river, and the
view opened on to a broad expanse of water with a windmill and a
white bath-house: this was Sofino, where Alehin lived.
The watermill was at work, drowning the sound of the rain; the
dam was shaking. Here wet horses with drooping heads were
standing near their carts, and men were walking about covered
with sacks. It was damp, muddy, and desolate; the water looked
cold and malignant. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were already
conscious of a feeling of wetness, messiness, and discomfort all
over; their feet were heavy with mud, and when, crossing the
dam, they went up to the barns, they were silent, as though they
were angry with one another.
In one of the barns there was the sound of a winnowing machine,
the door was open, and clouds of dust were coming from it. In
the doorway was standing Alehin himself, a man of forty, tall
and stout, with long hair, more like a professor or an artist
than a landowner. He had on a white shirt that badly needed
washing, a rope for a belt, drawers instead of trousers, and his
boots, too, were plastered up with mud and straw. His eyes and
nose were black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanovitch and
Burkin, and was apparently much delighted to see them.
"Go into the house, gentlemen," he said, smiling; "I'll come
directly, this minute."
It was a big two-storeyed house. Alehin lived in the lower
storey, with arched ceilings and little windows, where the
bailiffs had once lived; here everything was plain, and there
was a smell of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harness. He went
upstairs into the best rooms only on rare occasions, when
visitors came. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were met in the house
by a maid-servant, a young woman so beautiful that they both
stood still and looked at one another.
"You can't imagine how delighted I am to see you, my friends,"
said Alehin, going into the hall with them. "It is a surprise!
Pelagea," he said, addressing the girl, "give our visitors
something to change into. And, by the way, I will change too.
Only I must first go and wash, for I almost think I have not
washed since spring. Wouldn't you like to come into the
bath-house? and meanwhile they will get things ready here."
Beautiful Pelagea, looking so refined and soft, brought them
towels and soap, and Alehin went to the bath-house with his
guests.
"It's a long time since I had a wash," he said, undressing. "I
have got a nice bath-house, as you see -- my father built it --
but I somehow never have time to wash."
He sat down on the steps and soaped his long hair and his neck,
and the water round him turned brown.
"Yes, I must say," said Ivan Ivanovitch meaningly, looking at
his head.
"It's a long time since I washed . . ." said Alehin with
embarrassment, giving himself a second soaping, and the water
near him turned dark blue, like ink.
Ivan Ivanovitch went outside, plunged into the water with a loud
splash, and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He
stirred the water into waves which set the white lilies bobbing
up and down; he swam to the very middle of the millpond and
dived, and came up a minute later in another place, and swam on,
and kept on diving, trying to touch the bottom.
"Oh, my goodness!" he repeated continually, enjoying himself
thoroughly. "Oh, my goodness!" He swam to the mill, talked to
the peasants there, then returned and lay on his back in the
middle of the pond, turning his face to the rain. Burkin and
Alehin were dressed and ready to go, but he still went on
swimming and diving. "Oh, my goodness! . . ." he said. "Oh,
Lord, have mercy on me! . . ."
"That's enough!" Burkin shouted to him.
They went back to the house. And only when the lamp was lighted
in the big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch,
attired in silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were sitting
in arm-chairs; and Alehin, washed and combed, in a new coat, was
walking about the drawing-room, evidently enjoying the feeling
of warmth, cleanliness, dry clothes, and light shoes; and when
lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly on the carpet and smiling
softly, handed tea and jam on a tray -- only then Ivan
Ivanovitch began on his story, and it seemed as though not only
Burkin and Alehin were listening, but also the ladies, young and
old, and the officers who looked down upon them sternly and
calmly from their gold frames.
"There are two of us brothers," he began --"I, Ivan Ivanovitch,
and my brother, Nikolay Ivanovitch, two years younger. I went in
for a learned profession and became a veterinary surgeon, while
Nikolay sat in a government office from the time he was
nineteen. Our father, Tchimsha-Himalaisky, was a kantonist, but
he rose to be an officer and left us a little estate and the
rank of nobility. After his death the little estate went in
debts and legal expenses; but, anyway, we had spent our
childhood running wild in the country. Like peasant children, we
passed our days and nights in the fields and the woods, looked
after horses, stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so
on. . . . And, you know, whoever has once in his life caught
perch or has seen the migrating of the thrushes in autumn,
watched how they float in flocks over the village on bright,
cool days, he will never be a real townsman, and will have a
yearning for freedom to the day of his death. My brother was
miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went
on sitting in the same place, went on writing the same papers
and thinking of one and the same thing -- how to get into the
country. And this yearning by degrees passed into a definite
desire, into a dream of buying himself a little farm somewhere
on the banks of a river or a lake.
"He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him,
but I never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for
the rest of his life in a little farm of his own. It's the
correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of
earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they
say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to
the land and yearn for a farm, it's a good thing. But these
farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from
town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and
bury oneself in one's farm -- it's not life, it's egoism,
laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without
good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but
the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display
all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit.
"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed
of how he would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole
yard with such a savoury smell, take his meals on the green
grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on the seat by the
gate gazing at the fields and the forest. Gardening books and
the agricultural hints in calendars were his delight, his
favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading newspapers,
too, but the only things he read in them were the advertisements
of so many acres of arable land and a grass meadow with
farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and
millponds, for sale. And his imagination pictured the
garden-paths, flowers and fruit, starling cotes, the carp in the
pond, and all that sort of thing, you know. These imaginary
pictures were of different kinds according to the advertisements
which he came across, but for some reason in every one of them
he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a
homestead, he could not picture an idyllic nook, without
gooseberries.
" 'Country life has its conveniences,' he would sometimes say.
'You sit on the verandah and you drink tea, while your ducks
swim on the pond, there is a delicious smell everywhere, and . .
. and the gooseberries are growing.'
"He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there
were the same things -- (a) house for the family, (b) servants'
quarters, (c) kitchen-garden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He lived
parsimoniously, was frugal in food and drink, his clothes were
beyond description; he looked like a beggar, but kept on saving
and putting money in the bank. He grew fearfully avaricious. I
did not like to look at him, and I used to give him something
and send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he used to
save that too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no
doing anything with him.
"Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was
over forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the
papers and saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still with
the same object of buying a farm and having gooseberries, he
married an elderly and ugly widow without a trace of feeling for
her, simply because she had filthy lucre. He went on living
frugally after marrying her, and kept her short of food, while
he put her money in the bank in his name.
"Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him she was
accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with her second
husband she did not get enough black bread; she began to pine
away with this sort of life, and three years later she gave up
her soul to God. And I need hardly say that my brother never for
one moment imagined that he was responsible for her death.
Money, like vodka, makes a man queer. In our town there was a
merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful of honey and
ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so that
no one might get the benefit of it. While I was inspecting
cattle at a railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an
engine and had his leg cut off. We carried him into the
waiting-room, the blood was flowing -- it was a horrible thing
-- and he kept asking them to look for his leg and was very much
worried about it; there were twenty roubles in the boot on the
leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they would be
lost."
"That's a story from a different opera," said Burkin.
"After his wife's death," Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after
thinking for half a minute, "my brother began looking out for an
estate for himself. Of course, you may look about for five years
and yet end by making a mistake, and buying something quite
different from what you have dreamed of. My brother Nikolay
bought through an agent a mortgaged estate of three hundred and
thirty acres, with a house for the family, with servants'
quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no
gooseberry-bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the
water in it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of the
estate there was a brickyard and on the other a factory for
burning bones. But Nikolay Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he
ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes, planted them, and began living
as a country gentleman.
"Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and
see what it was like. In his letters my brother called his
estate 'Tchumbaroklov Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.' I reached
'alias Himalaiskoe' in the afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere
there were ditches, fences, hedges, fir-trees planted in rows,
and there was no knowing how to get to the yard, where to put
one's horse. I went up to the house, and was met by a fat red
dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too
lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the
kitchen, and she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her
master was resting after dinner. I went in to see my brother. He
was sitting up in bed with a quilt over his legs; he had grown
older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks, his nose, and his mouth all
stuck out -- he looked as though he might begin grunting into
the quilt at any moment.
"We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at
the thought that we had once been young and now were both
grey-headed and near the grave. He dressed, and led me out to
show me the estate.
" 'Well, how are you getting on here?' I asked.
" 'Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.'
"He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a
gentleman. He was already accustomed to it, had grown used to
it, and liked it. He ate a great deal, went to the bath-house,
was growing stout, was already at law with the village commune
and both factories, and was very much offended when the peasants
did not call him 'Your Honour.' And he concerned himself with
the salvation of his soul in a substantial, gentlemanly manner,
and performed deeds of charity, not simply, but with an air of
consequence. And what deeds of charity! He treated the peasants
for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his
name-day had a thanksgiving service in the middle of the
village, and then treated the peasants to a gallon of vodka --
he thought that was the thing to do. Oh, those horrible gallons
of vodka! One day the fat landowner hauls the peasants up before
the district captain for trespass, and next day, in honour of a
holiday, treats them to a gallon of vodka, and they drink and
shout 'Hurrah!' and when they are drunk bow down to his feet. A
change of life for the better, and being well-fed and idle
develop in a Russian the most insolent self-conceit. Nikolay
Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid
to have any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not
gospel truth, and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime
minister. 'Education is essential, but for the peasants it is
premature.' 'Corporal punishment is harmful as a rule, but in
some cases it is necessary and there is nothing to take its
place.'
" 'I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,' he
would say. 'The peasants like me. I need only to hold up my
little finger and the peasants will do anything I like.'
"And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent
smile. He repeated twenty times over 'We noblemen,' 'I as a
noble'; obviously he did not remember that our grandfather was a
peasant, and our father a soldier. Even our surname
Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so incongruous, seemed to him
now melodious, distinguished, and very agreeable.
"But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell
you about the change that took place in me during the brief
hours I spent at his country place. In the evening, when we were
drinking tea, the cook put on the table a plateful of
gooseberries. They were not bought, but his own gooseberries,
gathered for the first time since the bushes were planted.
Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence at
the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for
excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at
me with the triumph of a child who has at last received his
favourite toy, and said:
" 'How delicious!'
"And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, 'Ah, how
delicious! Do taste them!'
"They were sour and unripe, but, as Pushkin says:
" 'Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts
Than hosts of baser truths.'
"I saw a happy man whose cherished dream was so obviously
fulfilled, who had attained his object in life, who had gained
what he wanted, who was satisfied with his fate and himself.
There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled
with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at
the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling
that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at
night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's
bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept
getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking
one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really
are! 'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the
insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and
brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us,
overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying. . . .
Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets;
of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who
would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We
see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day,
sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting
married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the
cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer,
and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the
scenes. . . . Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing
protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their
minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead
from malnutrition. . . . And this order of things is evidently
necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because
the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that
silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of general
hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy,
contented man some one standing with a hammer continually
reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that
however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or
later, trouble will come for him -- disease, poverty, losses,
and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor
hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man
lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him
like the wind in the aspen-tree -- and all goes well.
"That night I realized that I, too, was happy and contented,"
Ivan Ivanovitch went on, getting up. "I, too, at dinner and at
the hunt liked to lay down the law on life and religion, and the
way to manage the peasantry. I, too, used to say that science
was light, that culture was essential, but for the simple people
reading and writing was enough for the time. Freedom is a
blessing, I used to say; we can no more do without it than
without air, but we must wait a little. Yes, I used to talk like
that, and now I ask, 'For what reason are we to wait?' " asked
Ivan Ivanovitch, looking angrily at Burkin. "Why wait, I ask
you? What grounds have we for waiting? I shall be told, it can't
be done all at once; every idea takes shape in life gradually,
in its due time. But who is it says that? Where is the proof
that it's right? You will fall back upon the natural order of
things, the uniformity of phenomena; but is there order and
uniformity in the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand
over a chasm and wait for it to close of itself, or to fill up
with mud at the very time when perhaps I might leap over it or
build a bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of what?
Wait till there's no strength to live? And meanwhile one must
live, and one wants to live!
"I went away from my brother's early in the morning, and ever
since then it has been unbearable for me to be in town. I am
oppressed by its peace and quiet; I am afraid to look at the
windows, for there is no spectacle more painful to me now than
the sight of a happy family sitting round the table drinking
tea. I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am not even
capable of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated
and vexed; but at night my head is hot from the rush of ideas,
and I cannot sleep. . . . Ah, if I were young!"
Ivan Ivanovitch walked backwards and forwards in excitement, and
repeated: "If I were young!"
He suddenly went up to Alehin and began pressing first one of
his hands and then the other.
"Pavel Konstantinovitch," he said in an imploring voice, "don't
be calm and contented, don't let yourself be put to sleep! While
you are young, strong, confident, be not weary in well-doing!
There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there
is a meaning and an object in life, that meaning and object is
not our happiness, but something greater and more rational. Do
good!"
And all this Ivan Ivanovitch said with a pitiful, imploring
smile, as though he were asking him a personal favour.
Then all three sat in arm-chairs at different ends of the
drawing-room and were silent. Ivan Ivanovitch's story had not
satisfied either Burkin or Alehin. When the generals and ladies
gazed down from their gilt frames, looking in the dusk as though
they were alive, it was dreary to listen to the story of the
poor clerk who ate gooseberries. They felt inclined, for some
reason, to talk about elegant people, about women. And their
sitting in the drawing-room where everything -- the chandeliers
in their covers, the arm-chairs, and the carpet under their feet
-- reminded them that those very people who were now looking
down from their frames had once moved about, sat, drunk tea in
this room, and the fact that lovely Pelagea was moving
noiselessly about was better than any story.
Alehin was fearfully sleepy; he had got up early, before three
o'clock in the morning, to look after his work, and now his eyes
were closing; but he was afraid his visitors might tell some
interesting story after he had gone, and he lingered on. He did
not go into the question whether what Ivan Ivanovitch had just
said was right and true. His visitors did not talk of groats,
nor of hay, nor of tar, but of something that had no direct
bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on.
"It's bed-time, though," said Burkin, getting up. "Allow me to
wish you good-night."
Alehin said good-night and went downstairs to his own domain,
while the visitors remained upstairs. They were both taken for
the night to a big room where there stood two old wooden beds
decorated with carvings, and in the corner was an ivory
crucifix. The big cool beds, which had been made by the lovely
Pelagea, smelt agreeably of clean linen.
Ivan Ivanovitch undressed in silence and got into bed.
"Lord forgive us sinners!" he said, and put his head under the
quilt.
His pipe lying on the table smelt strongly of stale tobacco, and
Burkin could not sleep for a long while, and kept wondering
where the oppressive smell came from.
The rain was pattering on the window-panes all night.
NOTES
kantonist: a soldier's son was automatically destined for the
lower ranks of the army
stripped the bark off the trees: to make shoes, baskets, etc.
six feet of earth: as Tolstoy suggested in his short story "How
Much Land Does a Man Need?"
gooseberries: European gooseberries are usually large, pink, and
sweet
burning bones: in order to make fertilizer
truths: an inexact quotation from Pushkin's 1830 poem "The Hero"
(about Napoleon)
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