The Tales of Chekhov, vol 5 | Page 9

listlessly, and I
did not listen but waited for him to go. At last, with an expression that
suggested that he had only come to me to take a cup of tea, he got up
and began to take leave. As I saw him out I said:
"And so you have given me no advice."

"Eh? I am a feeble, stupid old man," he answered. "What use would my
advice be? You shouldn't worry yourself. . . . I really don't know why
you worry yourself. Don't disturb yourself, my dear fellow! Upon my
word, there's no need," he whispered genuinely and affectionately,
soothing me as though I were a child. "Upon my word, there's no
need."
"No need? Why, the peasants are pulling the thatch off their huts, and
they say there is typhus somewhere already."
"Well, what of it? If there are good crops next year, they'll thatch them
again, and if we die of typhus others will live after us. Anyway, we
have to die -- if not now, later. Don't worry yourself, my dear."
"I can't help worrying myself," I said irritably.
We were standing in the dimly lighted vestibule. Ivan Ivanitch
suddenly took me by the elbow, and, preparing to say something
evidently very important, looked at me in silence for a couple of
minutes.
"Pavel Andreitch!" he said softly, and suddenly in his puffy, set face
and dark eyes there was a gleam of the expression for which he had
once been famous and which was truly charming. "Pavel Andreitch, I
speak to you as a friend: try to be different! One is ill at ease with you,
my dear fellow, one really is!"
He looked intently into my face; the charming expression faded away,
his eyes grew dim again, and he sniffed and muttered feebly:
"Yes, yes. . . . Excuse an old man. . . . It's all nonsense . . . yes."
As he slowly descended the staircase, spreading out his hands to
balance himself and showing me his huge, bulky back and red neck, he
gave me the unpleasant impression of a sort of crab.
"You ought to go away, your Excellency," he muttered. "To Petersburg
or abroad. . . . Why should you live here and waste your golden days?
You are young, wealthy, and healthy. . . . Yes. . . . Ah, if I were
younger I would whisk away like a hare, and snap my fingers at
everything."
III
My wife's outburst reminded me of our married life together. In old
days after every such outburst we felt irresistibly drawn to each other;
we would meet and let off all the dynamite that had accumulated in our
souls. And now after Ivan Ivanitch had gone away I had a strong

impulse to go to my wife. I wanted to go downstairs and tell her that
her behaviour at tea had been an insult to me, that she was cruel, petty,
and that her plebeian mind had never risen to a comprehension of what
I was saying and of what I was doing. I walked about the rooms a long
time thinking of what I would say to her and trying to guess what she
would say to me.
That evening, after Ivan Ivanitch went away, I felt in a peculiarly
irritating form the uneasiness which had worried me of late. I could not
sit down or sit still, but kept walking about in the rooms that were
lighted up and keeping near to the one in which Marya Gerasimovna
was sitting. I had a feeling very much like that which I had on the
North Sea during a storm when every one thought that our ship, which
had no freight nor ballast, would overturn. And that evening I
understood that my uneasiness was not disappointment, as I had
supposed, but a different feeling, though what exactly I could not say,
and that irritated me more than ever.
"I will go to her," I decided. "I can think of a pretext. I shall say that I
want to see Ivan Ivanitch; that will be all."
I went downstairs and walked without haste over the carpeted floor
through the vestibule and the hall. Ivan Ivanitch was sitting on the sofa
in the drawing-room; he was drinking tea again and muttering
something. My wife was standing opposite to him and holding on to the
back of a chair. There was a gentle, sweet, and docile expression on her
face, such as one sees on the faces of people listening to crazy saints or
holy men when a peculiar hidden significance is imagined in their
vague words and mutterings. There was something morbid, something
of a nun's exaltation, in my wife's expression and attitude; and her
low-pitched, half-dark rooms with their old-fashioned