Читать книгу THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ANTON CHEKHOV - Anton Chekhov - Страница 8

Table of Contents

‘The husband killed his wife! Oh, how stupid you are! Give me some sugar!’

These cries awoke me. I stretched myself, feeling indisposition and heaviness in every limb. One can lie upon one’s legs or arms until they are numb, but now it seemed to me that my whole body, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, was benumbed. An afternoon snooze in a sultry, dry atmosphere amid the buzzing and humming of flies and mosquitoes does not act in an invigorating manner but has an enervating effect. Broken and bathed in perspiration, I rose and went to the window. The sun was still high and baked with the same ardour it had done three hours before. Many hours still remained until sunset and the coolness of evening.

‘The husband killed his wife!’

‘Stop lying, Ivan Dem’yanych!’ I said as I gave a slight tap to Ivan Dem’yanych’s nose. ‘Husbands kill their wives only in novels and in the tropics, where African passions boil over, my dear. For us such horrors as thefts and burglaries or people living on false passports are quite enough.’

‘Thefts and burglaries!’ Ivan Dem’yanych murmured through his hooked nose. ‘Oh, how stupid you are!’

‘What’s to be done, my dear? In what way are we mortals to blame for our brain having its limits? Besides, Ivan Dem’yanych, it is no sin to be a fool in such a temperature. You’re my clever darling, but doubtless your brain, too, gets addled and stupid in such heat.’

My parrot is not called Polly or by any other of the names given to birds, but he is called Ivan Dem’yanych. He got this name quite by chance. One day, when my man Polycarp was cleaning the cage, he suddenly made a discovery without which my noble bird would still have been called Polly. My lazy servant was suddenly blessed with the idea that my parrot’s beak was very like the nose of our village shopkeeper, Ivan Dem’yanych, and from that time the name and patronymic of our long-nosed shopkeeper stuck to my parrot. From that day Polycarp and the whole village christened my extraordinary bird ‘Ivan Dem’yanych’. Thanks to Polycarp the bird became a personage, and the shopkeeper lost his own name, and to the end of his days he will be known among the villagers by the nickname of the ‘magistrate’s parrot’.

I had bought Ivan Dem’yanych from the mother of my predecessor, the examining magistrate, Pospelov, who had died shortly before my appointment. I bought him together with some old oak furniture, various rubbishy kitchen utensils, and in general the whole of the household goods that remained after Pospelov’s death. My walls are still decorated with photographs of his relatives, and the portrait of the former occupant is still hanging above my bed. The departed, a lean, muscular man with a red moustache and a thick under-lip, sits looking at me with staring eyes from his faded nutwood frame all the time I am lying on his bed… I had not taken down a single photograph, I had left the house just as I found it. I am too lazy to think of my own comfort, and I don’t prevent either corpses or living men from hanging on my walls if the latter wish to do so.

Ivan Dem’yanych found it as sultry as I did. He fluffed out his feathers, spread his wings, and shrieked out the phrases he had been taught by my predecessor, Pospelov, and by Polycarp. To occupy in some way my after-dinner leisure, I sat down in front of the cage and began to watch the movements of my parrot, who was industriously trying, but without success, to escape from the torments he suffered from the suffocating heat and the insects that dwelt among his feathers… The poor thing seemed very unhappy…

‘At what time does he awake?’ was borne to me in a bass voice from the lobby.

‘That depends!’ Polycarp’s voice answered. ‘Sometimes he wakes at five o’clock, and sometimes he sleeps like a log till morning… Everybody knows he has nothing to do.’

‘You’re his valet, I suppose?’

‘His servant. Now don’t bother me; hold your tongue. Don’t you see I’m reading?’

I peeped into the lobby. My Polycarp was there, lolling on the large red trunk, and, as usual, reading a book. With his sleepy, unblinking eyes fixed attentively on his book, he was moving his lips and frowning. He was evidently irritated by the presence of the stranger, a tall, bearded muzhik, who was standing near the trunk persistently trying to inveigle him into conversation. At my appearance the muzhik took a step away from the trunk and drew himself up to attention. Polycarp looked dissatisfied, and without removing his eyes from the book he rose slightly.

‘What do you want?’ I asked the muzhik.

‘I have come from the Count, your honour. The Count sends you his greetings, and begs you to come to him at once…’

‘Has the Count arrived?’ I asked, much astonished.

‘Just so, your honour… He arrived last night… Here’s a letter, sir…’

‘What the devil has brought him back!’ my Polycarp grumbled. ‘Two summers we’ve lived peacefully without him and this year he’ll again make a pigsty of the district. It reflects on us, it’s shameful.’

‘Hold your tongue, your opinion is not asked!’

‘I need not be asked… You’ll come home drunk again, and go in the lake just as you are, in all your clothes… It’s I who have the job of cleaning them afterwards! And it takes three days and more!’

‘What’s the Count doing now?’ I asked the muzhik.

‘He was just sitting down to dinner when he sent me to you… Before dinner he was fishing from the bathing cabin, sir… What answer can I take?’

I opened the letter and read the following:

My Dear Lecoq,

If you are still alive, well, and have not forgotten your ever-drunken friend, do not delay a moment. Get dressed immediately and come to me. I only arrived last night and am already dying from ennui. The impatience I feel to see you knows no bounds. I wanted to drive over to see you and carry you off to my den, but the heat has utterly exhausted me. I simply sit about, fanning myself. Well, how are you? How is your clever Ivan Dem’yanych? Are you still at war with your scolding Polycarp? Come quickly and tell me everything.

Your A. K.

It was not necessary to look at the signature to recognize the drunken, sprawling, ugly handwriting of my friend, Count Alexey Karnéev. The shortness of the letter, its pretension to a certain playfulness and vivacity proved that my friend, with his limited capacities, must have torn up much notepaper before he was able to compose this epistle.

The pronoun ‘which’ was absent from this letter, and adverbs were carefully avoided - both being grammatical forms that were seldom achieved by the Count at a single sitting. ‘What answer can I take, sir?’ the muzhik repeated. At first I did not reply to this question, and every decent, honest man in my place would have hesitated too. The Count was fond of me, and quite sincerely obtruded his friendship on me. I, on my part, felt nothing like friendship for the Count; I even disliked him. It would therefore have been more honest to reject his friendship once for all than to go to him and dissimulate. Besides, to go to the Count’s meant to plunge once more into the life my Polycarp had characterized as a ‘pigsty’, which two years before during the Count’s residence on his estate and until he left for Petersburg had injured my health and dried up my brain. That loose, unaccustomed life so full of show and drunken madness, had not yet shattered my constitution, but it had made me known throughout the province… Yet I was popular…

My reason told me the whole truth, a blush of shame for the not distant past suffused my face, my heart sank with fear that I would not possess sufficient manliness to refuse to go to the Count’s, but I did not hesitate long. The struggle lasted not more than a minute.

‘Give my compliments to the Count,’ I said to his messenger, ‘and thank him for thinking of me… Tell him I am busy, and that… Tell him that I…’

And at the very moment my tongue was about to pronounce a decisive ‘No’, I was suddenly overpowered by a feeling of dullness… Here I was, a young man, full of life, strength and desires, who by the decrees of fate had been cast into this forest village, seized by a sensation of ennui, of loneliness…

I remembered the Count’s gardens with the exuberant vegetation of their cool conservatories, and the semi-darkness of the narrow, neglected avenues… Those avenues protected from the sun by arches of the entwined branches of old limes know me well; they also know the women who sought my love in semi-darkness… I remembered the luxurious drawing-room with the sweet indolence of its velvet sofas, heavy curtains and thick carpets, soft as down, with the laziness so common to young healthy animals… I recalled my drunken audacity, limitless in its scope, its satanic pride and its contempt for life. My large body wearied by sleep again longed for movement…

‘Tell him I’ll come!’

The muzhik bowed and retired.

‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let that devil in!’ Polycarp grumbled, quickly turning over the pages of his book in a purposeless manner.

‘Put that book away and go and saddle Zorka,’ I said. ‘Look sharp!’

‘Look sharp! Oh, of course, certainly… I’m just going to rush off… It would be all right if he were going on business, but he’s just off on some spree!’

This was said in an undertone, but loud enough for me to hear it. Having whispered this impertinence, my servant drew himself up before me and waited for me to flare up in reply, but I pretended not to have heard his words. My silence was the best and sharpest weapon I could use in my contests with Polycarp. This contemptuous custom of allowing his venomous words to pass unheeded disarmed him and cut the ground away from under his feet. As a punishment it acted better than a box on the ear or a flood of vituperation… When Polycarp had gone into the yard to saddle Zorka, I peeped into the book which he had been prevented from reading. It was The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas’ dreadful romance… My civilized fool read everything, beginning with the signboards of the public houses and finishing with Auguste Comte, which was lying in my trunk together with other neglected books that I did not read; but of the whole mass of written and printed matter he only approved of exciting, sensational novels with ‘celebrated personages’, poison and subterranean passages; all the rest he dubbed ‘nonsense’. I shall have again to refer to his reading, now I had to ride off. A quarter of an hour later the hoofs of my Zorka were raising the dust on the road from the village to the Count’s estate. The sun was near setting, but the heat and the sultriness were still felt. The hot air was dry and motionless, although my road led along the banks of an enormous lake… On my right I saw the great expanse of water, on the left my sight was caressed by the young vernal foliage of an oak forest; nevertheless, my cheeks suffered the dryness of Sahara, if there could only be a storm!’ I thought, dreaming of a good cool downpour.

The lake slept peacefully. It did not greet with a single sound the flight of my Zorka, and it was only the piping of a young snipe that broke the grave-like silence of the sleeping lake. The sun looked at itself in it as in a huge mirror, and shed a blinding light on the whole of its breadth that extended from my road to the distant banks opposite. And it seemed to my blinded eyes that nature received light from the lake and not from the sun.

The sultriness impelled to slumber the whole of that life in which the lake and its green banks so richly abounded. The birds had hidden themselves, the fish did not splash in the water, the field crickets and the grasshoppers waited in silence for coolness to set in. All around was a waste. From time to time my Zorka bore me into a thick cloud of mosquitoes along the bank of the lake, and far away on the water, scarcely moving, I could see the three black boats belonging to old Mikhey, our fisherman, who leased the fishing rights of the whole lake.