Russian Silhouettes: More Stories of Russian Life

by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Not knowing that it was a trained bird, the poodle had been dreadfully dismayed; he had slunk away in perplexity and had afterward begun to howl.

“Yes, I think I shall have to love Gruzdieff,” Nadia decided, and she tore up the letter.

So she began to muse on the student, and on his love and hers, but her thoughts were soon rambling, and she found herself thinking of many things: of her mother, of the street, of the pencil, and of the piano.... She thought of all this with pleasure, and everything seemed to her to be beautiful and good, but her happiness told her that this was not all, there was a great deal more to come in a little while, which would be much better even than this. Spring would soon be here, and then summer would come, and she would go with her mother to Gorbiki, and there Gorni would come on his holidays, and would take her walking in the garden and make love to her.

Gruzdieff would come, too; he would play croquet and bowls with her, and tell her funny and thrilling stories. She longed for the garden, the darkness, the clear sky, and the stars. Once more her shoulders shook with laughter; the room seemed to her to be filled with the scent of lavender, and a twig tapped against the window-pane.

She went across to the bed, sat down, and, not knowing what to do because of the great happiness that filled her heart, she fixed her eyes on the little icon that hung at the head of her bed, and murmured:

“Oh! Lord! Lord! Lord!”

VOLODIA

One Sunday evening in spring Volodia, a plain, shy, sickly lad of seventeen, was sitting, a prey to melancholy, in a summer-house on the country place of the Shumikins. His gloomy reflections flowed in three different channels. In the first place, to-morrow, Monday, he would have to take an examination in mathematics. He knew that if he did not pass he would be expelled from school, as he had already been two years in the sixth grade. In the second place, his pride suffered constant agony during his visits to the Shumikins, who were rich people with aristocratic pretensions. He imagined that Madame Shumikin and her nieces looked down upon his mother and himself as poor relations and dependents, and that they made fun of his mother and did not respect her. He had once overheard Madame Shumikin saying on the terrace to her cousin Anna Feodorovna that she was still pretending to be young, and that she never paid her debts and had a great hankering after other people’s shoes and cigarettes. Every day Volodia would implore his mother not to go to the Shumikins’ again. He painted for her the humiliating rôle which she played among these people, he entreated her and spoke rudely to her, but the spoiled, frivolous woman, who had wasted two fortunes in her day, her own and her husband’s, yearned for high life and refused to understand him, so that twice every week Volodia was obliged to accompany her to the hated house.

In the third place, the lad could not free himself for a moment from a certain strange, unpleasant feeling that was entirely new to him. He imagined himself to be in love with Anna Feodorovna, the cousin and guest of Madame Shumikin. Anna Feodorovna was a talkative, lively, laughing little lady of thirty; healthy, rosy, and strong, with plump shoulders, a plump chin, and an eternal smile on her thin lips. She was neither pretty nor young. Volodia knew this perfectly well, and for that very reason he was unable to refrain from thinking of her, from watching her as she bent her plump shoulders over her croquet mallet, or, as she, after much laughter and running up and down-stairs, sank all out of breath into a chair, and with half-closed eyes pretended that she felt a tightness and strangling across the chest. She was married, and her husband was a staid architect who came down into the country once a week, had a long sleep, and then returned to the city. This feeling on Volodia’s part began with an unreasoning hatred of the architect, and a sensation of joy whenever he returned to the city.

And now, as he sat in the summer-house thinking about to-morrow’s examination and his mother, whom every one laughed at, he felt a great longing to see Nyuta, as the Shumikins called Anna Feodorovna, and to hear her laughter and the rustling of her dress. This longing did not resemble the pure, poetic love of which he had read in novels, and of which he dreamed every night as he went to bed. It was a strange and incomprehensible thing, and he was ashamed and afraid of it as of something wicked and wrong which he hardly dared to acknowledge even to himself.