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A.P. Chekhov
- The Wife
I
II
III IV
V
VI
VII
I
I RECEIVED the following letter:
"DEAR SIR, PAVEL ANDREITCH!
"Not far from you -- that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo
-- very distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which
I feel it my duty to write to you. All the peasants of that
village sold their cottages and all their belongings, and set
off for the province of Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting
there, and have come back. Here, of course, they have nothing
now; everything belongs to other people. They have settled three
or four families in a hut, so that there are no less than
fifteen persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the
young children; and the long and the short of it is, there is
nothing to eat. There is famine and there is a terrible
pestilence of hunger, or spotted, typhus; literally every one is
stricken. The doctor's assistant says one goes into a cottage
and what does one see? Every one is sick, every one delirious,
some laughing, others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no
one to fetch them water, no one to give them a drink, and
nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo
doctor) and his lady assistant do when more than medicine the
peasants need bread which they have not? The District Zemstvo
refuses to assist them, on the ground that their names have been
taken off the register of this district, and that they are now
reckoned as inhabitants of Tomsk; and, besides, the Zemstvo has
no money.
"Laying these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg
you not to refuse immediate help.
"Your well-wisher."
Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal
name* or his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their
assistants go on for years growing more and more convinced every
day that they can do nothing, and yet continue to receive their
salaries from people who are living upon frozen potatoes, and
consider they have a right to judge whether I am humane or not.
*Sobol in Russian means "sable-marten."- TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants
came every morning to the servants' kitchen and went down on
their knees there, and that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen
at night out of the barn, the wall having first been broken in,
and by the general depression which was fostered by
conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather -- worried by
all this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing
"A History of Railways"; I had to read a great number of Russian
and foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to
make calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to
write; then again to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as
I took up a book or began to think, my thoughts were in a
muddle, my eyes began blinking, I would get up from the table
with a sigh and begin walking about the big rooms of my deserted
country-house. When I was tired of walking about I would stand
still at my study window, and, looking across the wide
courtyard, over the pond and the bare young birch-trees and the
great fields covered with recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw
on a low hill on the horizon a group of mud-coloured huts from
which a black muddy road ran down in an irregular streak through
the white field. That was Pestrovo, concerning which my
anonymous correspondent had written to me. If it had not been
for the crows who, foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated
cawing over the pond and the fields, and the tapping in the
carpenter's shed, this bit of the world about which such a fuss
was being made would have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all
so still, motionless, lifeless, and dreary!
My uneasiness hindered me from working and concentrating myself;
I did not know what it was, and chose to believe it was
disappointment. I had actually given up my post in the
Department of Ways and Communications, and had come here into
the country expressly to live in peace and to devote myself to
writing on social questions. It had long been my cherished
dream. And now I had to say good-bye both to peace and to
literature, to give up everything and think only of the
peasants. And that was inevitable, because I was convinced that
there was absolutely nobody in the district except me to help
the starving. The people surrounding me were uneducated,
unintellectual, callous, for the most part dishonest, or if they
were honest, they were unreasonable and unpractical like my
wife, for instance. It was impossible to rely on such people, it
was impossible to leave the peasants to their fate, so that the
only thing left to do was to submit to necessity and see to
setting the peasants to rights myself.
I began by making up my mind to give five thousand roubles to
the assistance of the starving peasants. And that did not
decrease, but only aggravated my uneasiness. As I stood by the
window or walked about the rooms I was tormented by the question
which had not occurred to me before: how this money was to be
spent. To have bread bought and to go from hut to hut
distributing it was more than one man could do, to say nothing
of the risk that in your haste you might give twice as much to
one who was well-fed or to one who was making money out of his
fellows as to the hungry. I had no faith in the local officials.
All these district captains and tax inspectors were young men,
and I distrusted them as I do all young people of today, who are
materialistic and without ideals. The District Zemstvo, the
Peasant Courts, and all the local institutions, inspired in me
not the slightest desire to appeal to them for assistance. I
knew that all these institutions who were busily engaged in
picking out plums from the Zemstvo and the Government pie had
their mouths always wide open for a bite at any other pie that
might turn up.
The idea occurred to me to invite the neighbouring landowners
and suggest to them to organize in my house something like a
committee or a centre to which all subscriptions could be
forwarded, and from which assistance and instructions could be
distributed throughout the district; such an organization, which
would render possible frequent consultations and free control on
a big scale, would completely meet my views. But I imagined the
lunches, the dinners, the suppers and the noise, the waste of
time, the verbosity and the bad taste which that mixed
provincial company would inevitably bring into my house, and I
made haste to reject my idea.
As for the members of my own household, the last thing I could
look for was help or support from them. Of my father's
household, of the household of my childhood, once a big and
noisy family, no one remained but the governess Mademoiselle
Marie, or, as she was now called, Marya Gerasimovna, an
absolutely insignificant person. She was a precise little old
lady of seventy, who wore a light grey dress and a cap with
white ribbons, and looked like a china doll. She always sat in
the drawing-room reading.
Whenever I passed by her, she would say, knowing the reason for
my brooding:
"What can you expect, Pasha? I told you how it would be before.
You can judge from our servants."
My wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, lived on the lower storey, all the
rooms of which she occupied. She slept, had her meals, and
received her visitors downstairs in her own rooms, and took not
the slightest interest in how I dined, or slept, or whom I saw.
Our relations with one another were simple and not strained, but
cold, empty, and dreary as relations are between people who have
been so long estranged, that even living under the same roof
gives no semblance of nearness. There was no trace now of the
passionate and tormenting love -- at one time sweet, at another
bitter as wormwood -- which I had once felt for Natalya
Gavrilovna. There was nothing left, either, of the outbursts of
the past -- the loud altercations, upbraidings, complaints, and
gusts of hatred which had usually ended in my wife's going
abroad or to her own people, and in my sending money in small
but frequent instalments that I might sting her pride oftener.
(My proud and sensitive wife and her family live at my expense,
and much as she would have liked to do so, my wife could not
refuse my money: that afforded me satisfaction and was one
comfort in my sorrow.) Now when we chanced to meet in the
corridor downstairs or in the yard, I bowed, she smiled
graciously. We spoke of the weather, said that it seemed time to
put in the double windows, and that some one with bells on their
harness had driven over the dam. And at such times I read in her
face: "I am faithful to you and am not disgracing your good name
which you think so much about; you are sensible and do not worry
me; we are quits."
I assured myself that my love had died long ago, that I was too
much absorbed in my work to think seriously of my relations with
my wife. But, alas! that was only what I imagined. When my wife
talked aloud downstairs I listened intently to her voice, though
I could not distinguish one word. When she played the piano
downstairs I stood up and listened. When her carriage or her
saddlehorse was brought to the door, I went to the window and
waited to see her out of the house; then I watched her get into
her carriage or mount her horse and ride out of the yard. I felt
that there was something wrong with me, and was afraid the
expression of my eyes or my face might betray me. I looked after
my wife and then watched for her to come back that I might see
again from the window her face, her shoulders, her fur coat, her
hat. I felt dreary, sad, infinitely regretful, and felt inclined
in her absence to walk through her rooms, and longed that the
problem that my wife and I had not been able to solve because
our characters were incompatible, should solve itself in the
natural way as soon as possible -- that is, that this beautiful
woman of twenty-seven might make haste and grow old, and that my
head might be grey and bald.
One day at lunch my bailiff informed me that the Pestrovo
peasants had begun to pull the thatch off the roofs to feed
their cattle. Marya Gerasimovna looked at me in alarm and
perplexity.
"What can I do?" I said to her. "One cannot fight single-handed,
and I have never experienced such loneliness as I do now. I
would give a great deal to find one man in the whole province on
whom I could rely."
"Invite Ivan Ivanitch," said Marya Gerasimovna.
"To be sure!" I thought, delighted. "That is an idea! C'est
raison," I hummed, going to my study to write to Ivan Ivanitch.
"C'est raison, c'est raison."
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