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Chekhov -
An Anonymous Story
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III Every Thursday we had visitors.
I ordered a piece of roast beef from the restaurant and
telephoned to Eliseyev's to send us caviare, cheese, oysters,
and so on. I bought playing-cards. Polya was busy all day
getting ready the tea-things and the dinner service. To tell the
truth, this spurt of activity came as a pleasant change in our
idle life, and Thursdays were for us the most interesting days.
Only three visitors used to come. The most important and perhaps
the most interesting was the one called Pekarsky -- a tall, lean
man of five and forty, with a long hooked nose, with a big black
beard, and a bald patch on his head. His eyes were large and
prominent, and his expression was grave and thoughtful like that
of a Greek philosopher. He was on the board of management of
some railway, and also had some post in a bank; he was a
consulting lawyer in some important Government institution, and
had business relations with a large number of private persons as
a trustee, chairman of committees, and so on. He was of quite a
low grade in the service, and modestly spoke of himself as a
lawyer, but he had a vast influence. A note or card from him was
enough to make a celebrated doctor, a director of a railway, or
a great dignitary see any one without waiting; and it was said
that through his protection one might obtain even a post of the
Fourth Class, and get any sort of unpleasant business hushed up.
He was looked upon as a very intelligent man, but his was a
strange, peculiar intelligence. He was able to multiply 213 by
373 in his head instantaneously, or turn English pounds into
German marks without help of pencil or paper; he understood
finance and railway business thoroughly, and the machinery of
Russian administration had no secrets for him; he was a most
skilful pleader in civil suits, and it was not easy to get the
better of him at law. But that exceptional intelligence could
not grasp many things which are understood even by some stupid
people. For instance, he was absolutely unable to understand why
people are depressed, why they weep, shoot themselves, and even
kill others; why they fret about things that do not affect them
personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or
Shtchedrin. . . . Everything abstract, everything belonging to
the domain of thought and feeling, was to him boring and
incomprehensible, like music to one who has no ear. He looked at
people simply from the business point of view, and divided them
into competent and incompetent. No other classification existed
for him. Honesty and rectitude were only signs of competence.
Drinking, gambling, and debauchery were permissible, but must
not be allowed to interfere with business. Believing in God was
rather stupid, but religion ought be safeguarded, as the common
people must have some principle to restrain them, otherwise they
would not work. Punishment is only necessary as deterrent. There
was no need to go away for holidays, as it was just as nice in
town. And so on. He was a widower and had no children, but lived
on a large scale, as though he had a family, and paid thousand
roubles a year for his flat.
The second visitor, Kukushkin, an actual civil councillor though
a young man, was short, and was conspicuous for his extremely
unpleasant appearance, which was due to the disproportion
between his fat, puffy body and his lean little face. His lips
were puckered up suavely, and his little trimmed moustaches
looked as though they had been fixed on with glue. He was a man
with the manners of a lizard. He did not walk, but, as it were,
crept along with tiny steps, squirming and sniggering, and when
he laughed he showed his teeth. He was a clerk on special
commissions, and did nothing, though he received a good salary,
especially in the summer, when special and lucrative jobs were
found for him. He was a man of personal ambition, not only to
the marrow of his bones, but more fundamentally -- to the last
drop of his blood; but even in his ambitions he was petty and
did not rely on himself, but was building his career on the
chance favour flung him by his superiors. For the sake of
obtaining some foreign decoration, or for the sake of having his
name mentioned in the newspapers as having been present at some
special service in the company of other great personages, he was
ready to submit to any kind of humiliation, to beg, to flatter,
to promise. He flattered Orlov and Pekarsky from cowardice,
because he thought they were powerful; he flattered Polya and me
because we were in the service of a powerful man. Whenever I
took off his fur coat he tittered and asked me: "Stepan, are you
married?" and then unseemly vulgarities followed -- by way of
showing me special attention. Kukushkin flattered Orlov's
weaknesses, humoured his corrupted and blas?ways; to please him
he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company
criticised persons before whom in other places he would
slavishly grovel. When at supper they talked of love and women,
he pretended to be a subtle and perverse voluptuary. As a rule,
one may say, Petersburg rakes are fond of talking of their
abnormal tastes. Some young actual civil councillor is perfectly
satisfied with the embraces of his cook or of some unhappy
street-walker on the Nevsky Prospect, but to listen to him you
would think he was contaminated by all the vices of East and
West combined, that he was an honourary member of a dozen
iniquitous secret societies and was already marked by the
police. Kukushkin lied about himself in an unconscionable way,
and they did not exactly disbelieve him, but paid little heed to
his incredible stories.
The third guest was Gruzin, the son of a worthy and learned
general; a man of Orlov's age, with long hair, short-sighted
eyes, and gold spectacles. I remember his long white fingers,
that looked like a pianist's; and, indeed, there was something
of a musician, of a virtuoso, about his whole figure. The first
violins in orchestras look just like that. He used to cough,
suffered from migraine, and seemed invalidish and delicate.
Probably at home he was dressed and undressed like a baby. He
had finished at the College of Jurisprudence, and had at first
served in the Department of Justice, then he was transferred to
the Senate; he left that, and through patronage had received a
post in the Department of Crown Estates, and had soon afterwards
given that up. In my time he was serving in Orlov's department;
he was his head-clerk, but he said that he should soon exchange
into the Department of Justice again. He took his duties and his
shifting about from one post to another with exceptional levity,
and when people talked before him seriously of grades in the
service, decorations, salaries, he smiled good-naturedly and
repeated Prutkov's aphorism: "It's only in the Government
service you learn the truth." He had a little wife with a
wrinkled face, who was very jealous of him, and five
weedy-looking children. He was unfaithful to his wife, he was
only fond of his children when he saw them, and on the whole was
rather indifferent to his family, and made fun of them. He and
his family existed on credit, borrowing wherever they could at
every opportunity, even from his superiors in the office and
porters in people's houses. His was a flabby nature; he was so
lazy that he did not care what became of himself, and drifted
along heedless where or why he was going. He went where he was
taken. If he was taken to some low haunt, he went; if wine was
set before him, he drank -- if it were not put before him, he
abstained; if wives were abused in his presence, he abused his
wife, declaring she had ruined his life -- when wives were
praised, he praised his and said quite sincerely: "I am very
fond of her, poor thing!" He had no fur coat and always wore a
rug which smelt of the nursery. When at supper he rolled balls
of bread and drank a great deal of red wine, absorbed in
thought, strange to say, I used to feel almost certain that
there was something in him of which perhaps he had a vague
sense, though in the bustle and vulgarity of his daily life he
had not time to understand and appreciate it. He played a little
on the piano. Sometimes he would sit down at the piano, play a
chord or two, and begin singing softly:
"What does the coming day bring to me?"
But at once, as though afraid, he would get up and walk from the
piano.
The visitors usually arrived about ten o'clock. They played
cards in Orlov's study, and Polya and I handed them tea. It was
only on these occasions that I could gauge the full sweetness of
a flunkey's life. Standing for four or five hours at the door,
watching that no one's glass should be empty, changing the
ash-trays, running to the table to pick up the chalk or a card
when it was dropped, and, above all, standing, waiting, being
attentive without venturing to speak, to cough, to smile -- is
harder, I assure you, is harder than the hardest of field
labour. I have stood on watch at sea for four hours at a stretch
on stormy winter nights, and to my thinking it is an infinitely
easier duty.
They used to play cards till two, sometimes till three o'clock
at night, and then, stretching, they would go into the
dining-room to supper, or, as Orlov said, for a snack of
something. At supper there was conversation. It usually began by
Orlov's speaking with laughing eyes of some acquaintance, of
some book he had lately been reading, of a new appointment or
Government scheme. Kukushkin, always ingratiating, would fall
into his tone, and what followed was to me, in my mood at that
time, a revolting exhibition. The irony of Orlov and his friends
knew no bounds, and spared no one and nothing. If they spoke of
religion, it was with irony; they spoke of philosophy, of the
significance and object of life -- irony again, if any one began
about the peasantry, it was with irony.
There is in Petersburg a species of men whose specialty it is to
jeer at every aspect of life; they cannot even pass by a
starving man or a suicide without saying something vulgar. But
Orlov and his friends did not jeer or make jokes, they talked
ironically. They used to say that there was no God, and
personality was completely lost at death; the immortals only
existed in the French Academy. Real good did not and could not
possibly exist, as its existence was conditional upon human
perfection, which was a logical absurdity. Russia was a country
as poor and dull as Persia. The intellectual class was hopeless;
in Pekarsky's opinion the overwhelming majority in it were
incompetent persons, good for nothing. The people were drunken,
lazy, thievish, and degenerate. We had no science, our
literature was uncouth, our commerce rested on swindling -- "No
selling without cheating." And everything was in that style, and
everything was a subject for laughter.
Towards the end of supper the wine made them more good-humoured,
and they passed to more lively conversation. They laughed over
Gruzin's family life, over Kukushkin's conquests, or at
Pekarsky, who had, they said, in his account book one page
headed Charity and another Physiological Necessities. They said
that no wife was faithful; that there was no wife from whom one
could not, with practice, obtain caresses without leaving her
drawing-room while her husband was sitting in his study close
by; that girls in their teens were perverted and knew
everything. Orlov had preserved a letter of a schoolgirl of
fourteen: on her way home from school she had "hooked an officer
on the Nevsky," who had, it appears, taken her home with him,
and had only let her go late in the evening; and she hastened to
write about this to her school friend to share her joy with her.
They maintained that there was not and never had been such a
thing as moral purity, and that evidently it was unnecessary;
mankind had so far done very well without it. The harm done by
so-called vice was undoubtedly exaggerated. Vices which are
punished by our legal code had not prevented Diogenes from being
a philosopher and a teacher. C?ar and Cicero were profligates
and at the same time great men. Cato in his old age married a
young girl, and yet he was regarded as a great ascetic and a
pillar of morality.
At three or four o'clock the party broke up or they went off
together out of town, or to Officers' Street, to the house of a
certain Varvara Ossipovna, while I retired to my quarters, and
was kept awake a long while by coughing and headache.
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