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

whistling; his pigeons were right up in the clouds, but it wasn’t enough for him, and he’d want them to go higher yet. Siskins and starlings, too, he used to catch, and he made cages for sale. All trifles, but, mind you, he’d pick up some ten roubles a month over such trifles. Well, as time went on, the old lady lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. In consequence of which event the house was left without a woman to look after it, and that’s for all the world like a man without an eye. The old lady bestirred herself and made up her mind to marry Vasya. They called in a matchmaker at once, the women got to talking of one thing and another, and Vasya went off to have a look at the girls. He picked out Mashenka, a widow’s daughter. They made up their minds without loss of time and in a week it was all settled. The girl was a little slip of a thing, seventeen, but fair-skinned and pretty-looking, and like a lady in all her ways; and a decent dowry with her, five hundred roubles, a cow, a bed.⁠ ⁠… Well, the old lady⁠—it seemed as though she had known it was coming⁠—three days after the wedding, departed to the Heavenly Jerusalem where is neither sickness nor sighing. The young people gave her a good funeral and began their life together. For just six months they got on splendidly, and then all of a sudden another misfortune. It never rains but it pours: Vasya was summoned to the recruiting office to draw lots for the service. He was taken, poor chap, for a soldier, and not even granted exemption. They shaved his head and packed him off to Poland. It was God’s will; there was nothing to be done. When he said goodbye to his wife in the yard, he bore it all right; but as he glanced up at the hayloft and his pigeons for the last time, he burst out crying. It was pitiful to see him.

“At first Mashenka got her mother to stay with her, that she mightn’t be dull all alone; she stayed till the baby⁠—this very Kuzka here⁠—was born, and then she went off to Oboyan to another married daughter’s and left Mashenka alone with the baby. There were five peasants⁠—the carriers⁠—a drunken saucy lot; horses, too, and dray-carts to see to, and then the fence would be broken or the soot afire in the chimney⁠—jobs beyond a woman, and through our being neighbours, she got into the way of turning to me for every little thing.⁠ ⁠… Well, I’d go over, set things to rights, and give advice.⁠ ⁠… Naturally, not without going indoors, drinking a cup of tea and having a little chat with her. I was a young fellow, intellectual, and fond of talking on all sorts of subjects; she, too, was well-bred and educated. She was always neatly dressed, and in summer she walked out with a sunshade. Sometimes I would begin upon religion or politics with her, and she was flattered and would entertain me with tea and jam.⁠ ⁠… In a word, not to make a long story of it, I must tell you, old man, a year had not passed before the Evil One, the enemy of all mankind, confounded me. I began to notice that any day I didn’t go to see her, I seemed out of sorts and dull. And I’d be continually making up something that I must see her about: ‘It’s high time,’ I’d say to myself, ‘to put the double windows in for the winter,’ and the whole day I’d idle away over at her place putting in the windows and take good care to leave a couple of them over for the next day too.

“ ‘I ought to count over Vasya’s pigeons, to see none of them have strayed,’ and so on. I used always to be talking to her across the fence, and in the end I made a little gate in the fence so as not to have to go so far round. From womankind comes much evil into the world and every kind of abomination. Not we sinners only; even the saints themselves have been led astray by them. Mashenka did not try to keep me at a distance. Instead of thinking of her husband and being on her guard, she fell in love with me. I began to notice that she was dull without me, and was always walking to and fro by the fence looking into my yard through the cracks.

“My brains were going round in my head in a sort of frenzy. On Thursday in Holy Week I was going early in the morning⁠—it was scarcely light⁠—to market. I passed close by her gate, and the Evil One was by me⁠—at my elbow. I looked⁠—she had a gate with open trellis work at the top⁠—and there she was, up already, standing in the middle of the yard, feeding the ducks. I could not restrain myself, and I called her name. She came up and looked at me through the trellis.⁠ ⁠… Her little face was white, her eyes soft and sleepy-looking.⁠ ⁠… I liked her looks immensely, and I began paying her compliments, as though we were not at the gate, but just as one does on name-days, while she blushed, and laughed, and kept looking straight into my eyes without winking.⁠ ⁠… I lost all sense and began to declare my love to her.⁠ ⁠… She opened the gate, and from that morning we began to live as man and wife.⁠ ⁠…”

The hunchback Alyoshka came into the yard from the street and ran out of breath into the house, not looking at anyone. A minute later he ran out of the house with a concertina. Jingling some coppers in his pocket, and cracking sunflower seeds as he ran, he went out at the gate.

“And who’s that, pray?” asked Matvey Savitch.

“My son Alexey,” answered Dyudya.