Short Fiction by Anton Chekhov (libby ebook reader .txt) 📕

out, and there was a peasant woman in nothing but her shift and with her feet bare.⁠ ⁠… ‘What do you want, good woman?’ I asked. And she was all of a tremble; her face was terror-stricken⁠ ⁠… ‘Get up, good man,’ said she; ‘the people are plotting evil.⁠ ⁠… They mean to kill your merchant. With my own ears I heard the master whispering with his wife.⁠ ⁠…’ So it was not for nothing, the foreboding of my heart! ‘And who are you?’ I asked. ‘I am their cook,’ she said.⁠ ⁠… Right!⁠ ⁠… So I got out of the chaise and went to the merchant. I waked him up and said: ‘Things aren’t quite right, Pyotr Grigoritch.⁠ ⁠… Make haste and rouse yourself from sleep, your worship, and dress now while there is still time,’ I said; ‘and to save our skins, let us get away from trouble.’ He had no sooner begun dressing when the door opened and, mercy on us! I saw, Holy Mother! the innkeeper and his wife come into the room with three labourers.⁠ ⁠… So they had persuaded the labourers to join them. ‘The merchant has a lot of money, and we’ll go shares,’ they told them. Every one of the five had a long knife in their hand each a knife. The innkeeper locked the door and said: ‘Say your prayers, travellers,⁠ ⁠… and if you begin screaming,’ they said, ‘we won’t let you say your prayers before you die.⁠ ⁠…’ As though we could scream! I had such a lump in my throat I could not cry out.⁠ ⁠… The merchant wept and said: ‘Good Christian people! you have resolved to kill me because my money tempts you. Well, so be it; I shall not be the first nor shall I be the last. Many of us merchants have been murdered at inns. But why, good Christian brothers,’ says he, ‘murder my driver? Why should he have to suffer for my money?’ And he said that so pitifully! And the innkeeper answered him: ‘If we leave him alive,’ said he, ‘he will be the first to bear witness against us. One may just as well kill two as one. You can but answer once for seven misdeeds⁠ ⁠… Say your prayers, that’s all you can do, and it is no good talking!’ The merchant and I knelt down side by side and wept and said our prayers. He thought of his children. I was young in those days; I wanted to live.⁠ ⁠… We looked at the images and prayed, and so pitifully that it brings a tear even now.⁠ ⁠… And the innkeeper’s wife looks at us and says: ‘Good people,’ said she, ‘don’t bear a grudge against us in the other world and pray to God for our punishment, for it is want that drives us to it.’ We prayed and wept and prayed and wept, and God heard us. He had pity on us, I suppose.⁠ ⁠… At the very minute when the innkeeper had taken the merchant by the beard to rip open his throat with his knife suddenly someone seemed to tap at the window from the yard! We all started, and the innkeeper’s hands dropped.⁠ ⁠… Someone was tapping at the window and shouting: ‘Pyotr Grigoritch,’ he shouted, ‘are you here? Get ready and let’s go!’ The people saw that someone had come for the merchant; they were terrified and took to their heels.⁠ ⁠… And we made haste into the yard, harnessed the horses, and were out of sight in a minute⁠ ⁠…”

“Who was it knocked at the window?” asked Dymov.

“At the window? It must have been a holy saint or angel, for there was no one else.⁠ ⁠… When we drove out of the yard there wasn’t a soul in the street.⁠ ⁠… It was the Lord’s doing.”

Panteley told other stories, and in all of them “long knives” figured and all alike sounded made up. Had he heard these stories from someone else, or had he made them up himself in the remote past, and afterwards, as his memory grew weaker, mixed up his experiences with his imaginations and become unable to distinguish one from the other? Anything is possible, but it is strange that on this occasion and for the rest of the journey, whenever he happened to tell a story, he gave unmistakable preference to fiction, and never told of what he really had experienced. At the time Yegorushka took it all for the genuine thing, and believed every word; later on it seemed to him strange that a man who in his day had travelled all over Russia and seen and known so much, whose wife and children had been burnt to death, so failed to appreciate the wealth of his life that whenever he was sitting by the camp fire he was either silent or talked of what had never been.

Over their porridge they were all silent, thinking of what they had just heard. Life is terrible and marvellous, and so, however terrible a story you tell in Russia, however you embroider it with nests of robbers, long knives and such marvels, it always finds an echo of reality in the soul of the listener, and only a man who has been a good deal affected by education looks askance distrustfully, and even he will be silent. The cross by the roadside, the dark bales of wool, the wide expanse of the plain, and the lot of the men gathered together by the camp fire⁠—all this was of itself so marvellous and terrible that the fantastic colours of legend and fairytale were pale and blended with life.

All the others ate out of the cauldron, but Panteley sat apart and ate his porridge out of a wooden bowl. His spoon was not like those the others had, but was made of cypress wood, with a little cross on it. Yegorushka, looking at him, thought of the little icon glass and asked Styopka softly:

“Why does Grandfather sit apart?”

“He is an Old Believer,” Styopka and Vassya answered in a whisper. And as