LiteraryJoint is
proud to present the full text edition of "The Chorus Girl and other
stories," a collection of short stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, many
of them not yet very well known by the general public. Every month, we
will commit one of our weekly post to these stories, in their English
translation by Constance Garnett. After
On the Road, The Chorus Girl, and Verotchka, we now continue with "My Life", which will be followed by: At a Country House, A
Father, Rothschild's Fiddle, Ivan
Matveyitch,
Zinotchka, Bad
Weather, A
Gentleman Friend, and A
Trivial Incident.
 |
| Anton Chekhov, portrait by Osip Braz, 1898 |
THE STORY OF A PROVINCIAL
I
THE Superintendent said to me: "I only keep you out of regard for
your worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long
ago." I replied to him: "You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in
assuming that I am capable of flying." And then I heard him say: "Take
that gentleman away; he gets upon my nerves."
Two days later I was dismissed. And in this way I have, during the
years I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine situations, to the
great mortification of my father, the architect of our town. I have
served in various departments, but all these nine jobs have been as
alike as one drop of water is to another: I had to sit, write, listen to
rude or stupid observations, and go on doing so till I was dismissed.
When I came in to my father he was sitting buried in a low arm-chair
with his eyes closed. His dry, emaciated face, with a shade of dark blue
where it was shaved (he looked like an old Catholic organist),
expressed meekness and resignation. Without responding to my greeting or
opening his eyes, he said:
"If my dear wife and your mother were living, your life would have
been a source of continual distress to her. I see the Divine Providence
in her premature death. I beg you, unhappy boy," he continued, opening
his eyes, "tell me: what am I to do with you?"
In the past when I was younger my friends and relations had known
what to do with me: some of them used to advise me to volunteer for the
army, others to get a job in a pharmacy, and others in the telegraph
department; now that I am over twenty-five, that grey hairs are
beginning to show on my temples, and that I have been already in the
army, and in a pharmacy, and in the telegraph department, it would seem
that all earthly possibilities have been exhausted, and people have
given up advising me, and merely sigh or shake their heads.
"What do you think about yourself?" my father went on. "By the time
they are your age, young men have a secure social position, while look
at you: you are a proletarian, a beggar, a burden on your father!"
And as usual he proceeded to declare that the young people of to-day
were on the road to perdition through infidelity, materialism, and
self-conceit, and that amateur theatricals ought to be prohibited,
because they seduced young people from religion and their duties.
"To-morrow we shall go together, and you shall apologize to the
superintendent, and promise him to work conscientiously," he said in
conclusion. "You ought not to remain one single day with no regular
position in society."
"I beg you to listen to me," I said sullenly, expecting nothing good
from this conversation. "What you call a position in society is the
privilege of capital and education. Those who have neither wealth nor
education earn their daily bread by manual labour, and I see no grounds
for my being an exception."
"When you begin talking about manual labour it is always stupid and
vulgar!" said my father with irritation. "Understand, you dense
fellow--understand, you addle-pate, that besides coarse physical
strength you have the divine spirit, a spark of the holy fire, which
distinguishes you in the most striking way from the ass or the reptile,
and brings you nearer to the Deity! This fire is the fruit of the
efforts of the best of mankind during thousands of years. Your
great-grandfather Poloznev, the general, fought at Borodino; your
grandfather was a poet, an orator, and a Marshal of Nobility; your uncle
is a schoolmaster; and lastly, I, your father, am an architect! All the
Poloznevs have guarded the sacred fire for you to put it out!"
"One must be just," I said. "Millions of people put up with manual labour."
"And let them put up with it! They don't know how to do anything
else! Anybody, even the most abject fool or criminal, is capable of
manual labour; such labour is the distinguishing mark of the slave and
the barbarian, while the holy fire is vouchsafed only to a few!"
To continue this conversation was unprofitable. My father worshipped
himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself.
Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of
physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire
as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should set the
whole town talking about me; what was worse, all my contemporaries had
long ago taken their degrees and were getting on well, and the son of
the manager of the State Bank was already a collegiate assessor, while
I, his only son, was nothing! To continue the conversation was
unprofitable and unpleasant, but I still sat on and feebly retorted,
hoping that I might at last be understood. The whole question, of
course, was clear and simple, and only concerned with the means of my
earning my living; but the simplicity of it was not seen, and I was
talked to in mawkishly rounded phrases of Borodino, of the sacred fire,
of my uncle a forgotten poet, who had once written poor and artificial
verses; I was rudely called an addlepate and a dense fellow. And how I
longed to be understood! In spite of everything, I loved my father and
my sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them-- a
habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever have got rid of
it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I was in constant dread
of wounding them, constantly afraid that my father's thin neck would
turn crimson and that he would have a stroke.
"To sit in a stuffy room," I began, "to copy, to compete with a
typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age. What can
the sacred fire have to do with it?"
"It's intellectual work, anyway," said my father. "But that's enough;
let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I warn you: if you
don't go back to your work again, but follow your contemptible
propensities, then my daughter and I will banish you from our hearts. I
shall strike you out of my will, I swear by the living God!"
With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by which I wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said:
"The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me. I shall renounce it all beforehand."
For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were deeply resented by my father. He turned crimson.
"Don't dare to talk to me like that, stupid!" he shouted in a thin,
shrill voice. "Wastrel!" and with a rapid, skilful, and habitual
movement he slapped me twice in the face. "You are forgetting yourself."
When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight, with my
hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him straight in the
face. And now when he hit me I was utterly overwhelmed, and, as though I
were still a child, drew myself up and tried to look him in the face.
My father was old and very thin but his delicate muscles must have been
as strong as leather, for his blows hurt a good deal.
I staggered back into the passage, and there he snatched up his
umbrella, and with it hit me several times on the head and shoulders; at
that moment my sister opened the drawing-room door to find out what the
noise was, but at once turned away with a look of horror and pity
without uttering a word in my defence.
My determination not to return to the Government office, but to begin
a new life of toil, was not to be shaken. All that was left for me to
do was to fix upon the special employment, and there was no particular
difficulty about that, as it seemed to me that I was very strong and
fitted for the very heaviest labour. I was faced with a monotonous life
of toil in the midst of hunger, coarseness, and stench, continually
preoccupied with earning my daily bread. And--who knows?--as I returned
from my work along Great Dvoryansky Street, I might very likely envy
Dolzhikov the, engineer, who lived by intellectual work, but, at the
moment, thinking over all my future hardships made me light-hearted. At
times I had dreamed of spiritual activity, imagining myself a teacher, a
doctor, or a writer, but these dreams remained dreams. The taste for
intellectual pleasures--for the theatre, for instance, and for
reading--was a passion with me, but whether I had any ability for
intellectual work I don't know. At school I had had an unconquerable
aversion for Greek, so that I was only in the fourth class when they had
to take me from school. For a long while I had coaches preparing me for
the fifth class. Then I served in various Government offices, spending
the greater part of the day in complete idleness, and I was told that
was intellectual work. My activity in the scholastic and official sphere
had required neither mental application nor talent, nor special
qualifications, nor creative impulse; it was mechanical. Such
intellectual work I put on a lower level than physical toil; I despise
it, and I don't think that for one moment it could serve as a
justification for an idle, careless life, as it is indeed nothing but a
sham, one of the forms of that same idleness. Real intellectual work I
have in all probability never known.
Evening came on. We lived in Great Dvoryansky Street; it was the
principal street in the town, and in the absence of decent public
gardens our _beau monde_ used to use it as a promenade in the evenings.
This charming street did to some extent take the place of a public
garden, as on each side of it there was a row of poplars which smelt
sweet, particularly after rain, and acacias, tall bushes of lilac,
wild-cherries and apple-trees hung over the fences and palings. The May
twilight, the tender young greenery with its shifting shades, the scent
of the lilac, the buzzing of the insects, the stillness, the warmth--how
fresh and marvellous it all is, though spring is repeated every year! I
stood at the garden gate and watched the passers-by. With most of them I
had grown up and at one time played pranks; now they might have been
disconcerted by my being near them, for I was poorly and unfashionably
dressed, and they used to say of my very narrow trousers and huge,
clumsy boots that they were like sticks of macaroni stuck in boats.
Besides, I had a bad reputation in the town because I had no decent
social position, and used often to play billiards in cheap taverns, and
also, perhaps, because I had on two occasions been hauled up before an
officer of the police, though I had done nothing whatever to account for
this.
In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at
Dolzhikov's. It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in
the sky. Here my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim,
walked slowly by with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to
greetings.
"Look up," he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same
umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. "Look up at the
sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant is man in
comparison with the universe!"
And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly
agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant. How
absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! Sad to say, he was
the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty years that I
could remember not one single decent house had been built in it. When
any one asked him to plan a house, he usually drew first the reception
hall and drawing-room: just as in old days the boarding-school misses
always started from the stove when they danced, so his artistic ideas
could only begin and develop from the hall and drawing-room. To them he
tacked on a dining-room, a nursery, a study, linking the rooms together
with doors, and so they all inevitably turned into passages, and every
one of them had two or even three unnecessary doors. His imagination
must have been lacking in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed. As
though feeling that something was lacking, he invariably had recourse to
all sorts of outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I can see
now the narrow entries, the poky little passages, the crooked staircases
leading to half-landings where one could not stand upright, and where,
instead of a floor, there were three huge steps like the shelves of a
bath-house; and the kitchen was invariably in the basement with a brick
floor and vaulted ceilings. The front of the house had a harsh, stubborn
expression; the lines of it were stiff and timid; the roof was
low-pitched and, as it were, squashed down; and the fat,
well-fed-looking chimneys were invariably crowned by wire caps with
squeaking black cowls. And for some reason all these houses, built by my
father exactly like one another, vaguely reminded me of his top-hat and
the back of his head, stiff and stubborn-looking. In the course of
years they have grown used in the town to the poverty of my father's
imagination. It has taken root and become our local style.
This same style my father had brought into my sister's life also,
beginning with christening her Kleopatra (just as he had named me
Misail). When she was a little girl he scared her by references to the
stars, to the sages of ancient times, to our ancestors, and discoursed
at length on the nature of life and duty; and now, when she was
twenty-six, he kept up the same habits, allowing her to walk arm in arm
with no one but himself, and imagining for some reason that sooner or
later a suitable young man would be sure to appear, and to desire to
enter into matrimony with her from respect for his personal qualities.
She adored my father, feared him, and believed in his exceptional
intelligence.
It was quite dark, and gradually the street grew empty. The music had
ceased in the house opposite; the gate was thrown wide open, and a team
with three horses trotted frolicking along our street with a soft
tinkle of little bells. That was the engineer going for a drive with his
daughter. It was bedtime.
I had my own room in the house, but I lived in a shed in the yard,
under the same roof as a brick barn which had been built some time or
other, probably to keep harness in; great hooks were driven into the
wall. Now it was not wanted, and for the last thirty years my father had
stowed away in it his newspapers, which for some reason he had bound in
half-yearly volumes and allowed nobody to touch. Living here, I was
less liable to be seen by my father and his visitors, and I fancied that
if I did not live in a real room, and did not go into the house every
day to dinner, my father's words that I was a burden upon him did not
sound so offensive.
My sister was waiting for me. Unseen by my father, she had brought me
some supper: not a very large slice of cold veal and a piece of bread.
In our house such sayings as: "A penny saved is a penny gained," and
"Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves,"
and so on, were frequently repeated, and my sister, weighed down by
these vulgar maxims, did her utmost to cut down the expenses, and so we
fared badly. Putting the plate on the table, she sat down on my bed and
began to cry.
"Misail," she said, "what a way to treat us!"
She did not cover her face; her tears dropped on her bosom and hands,
and there was a look of distress on her face. She fell back on the
pillow, and abandoned herself to her tears, sobbing and quivering all
over.
"You have left the service again . . ." she articulated. "Oh, how awful it is!"
"But do understand, sister, do understand . . . ." I said, and I was overcome with despair because she was crying.
As ill-luck would have it, the kerosene in my little lamp was
exhausted; it began to smoke, and was on the point of going out, and the
old hooks on the walls looked down sullenly, and their shadows
flickered.
"Have mercy on us," said my sister, sitting up. "Father is in
terrible distress and I am ill; I shall go out of my mind. What will
become of you?" she said, sobbing and stretching out her arms to me. "I
beg you, I implore you, for our dear mother's sake, I beg you to go back
to the office!"
"I can't, Kleopatra!" I said, feeling that a little more and I should give way. "I cannot!"
"Why not?" my sister went on. "Why not? Well, if you can't get on
with the Head, look out for another post. Why shouldn't you get a
situation on the railway, for instance? I have just been talking to
Anyuta Blagovo; she declares they would take you on the railway-line,
and even promised to try and get a post for you. For God's sake, Misail,
think a little! Think a little, I implore you."
We talked a little longer and I gave way. I said that the thought of a
job on the railway that was being constructed had never occurred to me,
and that if she liked I was ready to try it.
She smiled joyfully through her tears and squeezed my hand, and then
went on crying because she could not stop, while I went to the kitchen
for some kerosene.
