The Witch and Other Stories

A >> Anton Chekhov >> The Witch and Other Stories


"No doubt you have been at the reading of the Twelve Gospels?"

"Yes, I have," answered Vasilisa.

"If you remember at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, 'I am ready to
go with Thee into darkness and unto death.' And our Lord answered him
thus: 'I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have
denied Me thrice.' After the supper Jesus went through the agony of
death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and
faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep.
He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and
betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest
and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm,
hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going
to happen on earth, followed behind.... He loved Jesus passionately,
intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten..."

Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.

"They came to the high priest's," he went on; "they began to question
Jesus, and meantime the labourers made a fire in the yard as it was
cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire
and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: 'He was
with Jesus, too'--that is as much as to say that he, too, should be
taken to be questioned. And all the labourers that were standing near
the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he
was confused and said: 'I don't know Him.' A little while after again
someone recognized him as one of Jesus' disciples and said: 'Thou, too,
art one of them,' but again he denied it. And for the third time someone
turned to him: 'Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden to-day?'
For the third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the
cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the
words He had said to him in the evening.... He remembered, he came to
himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly--bitterly. In the Gospel
it is written: 'He went out and wept bitterly.' I imagine it: the
still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible,
smothered sobbing..."

T he student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa
suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she
screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her
tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson,
and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone
enduring intense pain.

The labourers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse
was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon him. The
student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again the
darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind
was blowing, winter really had come back and it did not feel as though
Easter would be the day after to-morrow.

Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears
all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must
have some relation to her....

He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness
and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that
if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it
was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had
happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present--to both
women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman
had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because
Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what
was passing in Peter's soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute
to take breath. "The past," he thought, "is linked with the present by
an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another." And it seemed
to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he
touched one end the other quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the
hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson
sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty
which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the
high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had
evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly
life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour--he was only
twenty-two--and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of
unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little,
and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty
meaning.




IN THE RAVINE

I

THE village of Ukleevo lay in a ravine so that only the belfry and the
chimneys of the printed cottons factories could be seen from the high
road and the railway-station. When visitors asked what village this was,
they were told:

"That's the village where the deacon ate all the caviare at the
funeral."

It had happened at the dinner at the funeral of Kostukov that the old
deacon saw among the savouries some large-grained caviare and began
eating it greedily; people nudged him, tugged at his arm, but he seemed
petrified with enjoyment: felt nothing, and only went on eating. He ate
up all the caviare, and there were four pounds in the jar. And years had
passed since then, the deacon had long been dead, but the caviare was
still remembered. Whether life was so poor here or people had not been
clever enough to notice anything but that unimportant incident that had
occurred ten years before, anyway the people had nothing else to tell
about the village Ukleevo.

The village was never free from fever, and there was boggy mud there
even in the summer, especially under the fences over which hung old
willow-trees that gave deep shade. Here there was always a smell from
the factory refuse and the acetic acid which was used in the finishing
of the cotton print.

The three cotton factories and the tanyard were not in the village
itself, but a little way off. They were small factories, and not more
than four hundred workmen were employed in all of them. The tanyard
often made the water in the little river stink; the refuse contaminated
the meadows, the peasants' cattle suffered from Siberian plague, and
orders were given that the factory should be closed. It was considered
to be closed, but went on working in secret with the connivance of the
local police officer and the district doctor, who was paid ten roubles
a month by the owner. In the whole village there were only two decent
houses built of brick with iron roofs; one of them was the local court,
in the other, a two-storied house just opposite the church, there lived
a shopkeeper from Epifan called Grigory Petrovitch Tsybukin.

Grigory kept a grocer's shop, but that was only for appearance' sake:
in reality he sold vodka, cattle, hides, grain, and pigs; he traded in
anything that came to hand, and when, for instance, magpies were wanted
abroad for ladies' hats, he made some thirty kopecks on every pair
of birds; he bought timber for felling, lent money at interest, and
altogether was a sharp old man, full of resources.

He had two sons. The elder, Anisim, was in the police in the detective
department and was rarely at home. The younger, Stepan, had gone in for
trade and helped his father: but no great help was expected from him as
he was weak in health and deaf; his wife Aksinya, a handsome woman with
a good figure, who wore a hat and carried a parasol on holidays, got up
early and went to bed late, and ran about all day long, picking up her
skirts and jingling her keys, going from the granary to the cellar and
from there to the shop, and old Tsybukin looked at her good-humouredly
while his eyes glowed, and at such moments he regretted she had not been
married to his elder son instead of to the younger one, who was deaf,
and who evidently knew very little about female beauty.

The old man had always an inclination for family life, and he loved
his family more than anything on earth, especially his elder son, the
detective, and his daughter-in-law. Aksinya had no sooner married the
deaf son than she began to display an extraordinary gift for business,
and knew who could be allowed to run up a bill and who could not: she
kept the keys and would not trust them even to her husband; she kept the
accounts by means of the reckoning beads, looked at the horses' teeth
like a peasant, and was always laughing or shouting; and whatever she
did or said the old man was simply delighted and muttered:

"Well done, daughter-in-law! You are a smart wench!"

He was a widower, but a year after his son's marriage he could not
resist getting married himself. A girl was found for him, living twenty
miles from Ukleevo, called Varvara Nikolaevna, no longer quite young,
but good-looking, comely, and belonging to a decent family. As soon as
she was installed into the upper-storey room everything in the house
seemed to brighten up as though new glass had been put into all the
windows. The lamps gleamed before the ikons, the tables were covered
with snow-white cloths, flowers with red buds made their appearance in
the windows and in the front garden, and at dinner, instead of eating
from a single bowl, each person had a separate plate set for him.
Varvara Nikolaevna had a pleasant, friendly smile, and it seemed as
though the whole house were smiling, too. Beggars and pilgrims, male and
female, began to come into the yard, a thing which had never happened
in the past; the plaintive sing-song voices of the Ukleevo peasant
women and the apologetic coughs of weak, seedy-looking men, who had been
dismissed from the factory for drunkenness were heard under the windows.
Varvara helped them with money, with bread, with old clothes, and
afterwards, when she felt more at home, began taking things out of the
shop. One day the deaf man saw her take four ounces of tea and that
disturbed him.

"Here, mother's taken four ounces of tea," he informed his father
afterwards; "where is that to be entered?"

The old man made no reply but stood still and thought a moment, moving
his eyebrows, and then went upstairs to his wife.

"Varvarushka, if you want anything out of the shop," he said
affectionately, "take it, my dea r. Take it and welcome; don't
hesitate."

And the next day the deaf man, running across the yard, called to her:

"If there is anything you want, mother, take it."

There was something new, something gay and light-hearted in her giving
of alms, just as there was in the lamps before the ikons and in the red
flowers. When at Carnival or at the church festival, which lasted for
three days, they sold the peasants tainted salt meat, smelling so strong
it was hard to stand near the tub of it, and took scythes, caps, and
their wives' kerchiefs in pledge from the drunken men; when the factory
hands stupefied with bad vodka lay rolling in the mud, and sin seemed to
hover thick like a fog in the air, then it was a relief to think that
up there in the house there was a gentle, neatly dressed woman who
had nothing to do with salt meat or vodka; her charity had in those
burdensome, murky days the effect of a safety valve in a machine.

The days in Tsybukin's house were spent in business cares. Before the
sun had risen in the morning Aksinya was panting and puffing as she
washed in the outer room, and the samovar was boiling in the kitchen
with a hum that boded no good. Old Grigory Petrovitch, dressed in a long
black coat, cotton breeches and shiny top boots, looking a dapper little
figure, walked about the rooms, tapping with his little heels like the
father-in-law in a well-known song. The shop was opened. When it was
daylight a racing droshky was brought up to the front door and the old
man got jauntily on to it, pulling his big cap down to his ears; and,
looking at him, no one would have said he was fifty-six. His wife and
daughter-in-law saw him off, and at such times when he had on a good,
clean coat, and had in the droshky a huge black horse that had cost
three hundred roubles, the old man did not like the peasants to come up
to him with their complaints and petitions; he hated the peasants and
disdained them, and if he saw some peasants waiting at the gate, he
would shout angrily:

"Why are you standing there? Go further off."

Or if it were a beggar, he would say:

"God will provide!"

He used to drive off on business; his wife, in a dark dress and a black
apron, tidied the rooms or helped in the kitchen. Aksinya attended to
the shop, and from the yard could be heard the clink of bottles and of
money, her laughter and loud talk, and the anger of customers whom she
had offended; and at the same time it could be seen that the secret sale
of vodka was already going on in the shop. The deaf man sat in the
shop, too, or walked about the street bare-headed, with his hands in
his pockets looking absent-mindedly now at the huts, now at the sky
overhead. Six times a day they had tea; four times a day they sat down
to meals; and in the evening they counted over their takings, put them
down, went to bed, and slept soundly.

All the three cotton factories in Ukleevo and the houses of the
factory owners--Hrymin Seniors, Hrymin Juniors, and Kostukov--were on
a telephone. The telephone was laid on in the local court, too, but it
soon ceased to work as bugs and beetles bred there. The elder of the
rural district had had little education and wrote every word in the
official documents in capitals. But when the telephone was spoiled he
said:

"Yes, now we shall be badly off without a telephone."

The Hrymin Seniors were continually at law with the Juniors, and
sometimes the Juniors quarrelled among themselves and began going to
law, and their factory did not work for a month or two till they were
reconciled again, and this was an entertainment for the people of
Ukleevo, as there was a great deal of talk and gossip on the occasion of
each quarrel. On holidays Kostukov and the Juniors used to get up races,
used to dash about Ukleevo and run over calves. Aksinya, rustling her
starched petticoats, used to promenade in a low-necked dress up and down
the street near her shop; the Juniors used to snatch her up and carry
her off as though by force. Then old Tsybukin would drive out to show
his new horse and take Varvara with him.

In the evening, after the races, when people were going to bed, an
expensive concertina was played in the Juniors' yard and, if it were a
moonlight night, those sounds sent a thrill of delight to the heart, and
Ukleevo no longer seemed a wretched hole.

II

The elder son Anisim came home very rarely, only on great holidays, but
he often sent by a returning villager presents and letters written in
very good writing by some other hand, always on a sheet of foolscap in
the form of a petition. The letters were full of expressions that Anisim
never made use of in conversation: "Dear papa and mamma, I send you a
pound of flower tea for the satisfaction of your physical needs."

At the bottom of every letter was scratched, as though with a broken
pen: "Anisim Tsybukin," and again in the same excellent hand: "Agent."

The letters were read aloud several times, and the old father, touched,
red with emotion, would say:

"Here he did not care to stay at home, he has gone in for an
intellectual line. Well, let him! Every man to his own job!"

It happened just before Carnival there was a heavy storm of rain mixed
with hail; the old man and Varvara went to the window to look at it,
and lo and behold! Anisim drove up in a sledge from the station. He was
quite unexpected. He came indoors, looking anxious and troubled about
something, and he remained the same all the time; there was something
free and easy in his manner. He was in no haste to go away, it seemed,
as though he had been dismissed from the service. Varvara was pleased at
his arrival; she looked at him with a sly expression, sighed, and shook
her head.

"How is this, my friends?" she said. "Tut, tut, the lad's in his
twenty-eighth year, and he is still leading a gay bachelor life; tut,
tut, tut...."

From the other room her soft, even speech sounded like tut, tut, tut.
She began whispering with her husband and Aksinya, and their faces wore
the same sly and mysterious expression as though they were conspirators.

It was decided to marry Anisim.

"Oh, tut, tut... the younger brother has been married long ago," said
Varvara, "and you are still without a helpmate like a cock at a fair.
What is the meaning of it? Tut, tut, you will be married, please God,
then as you choose--you will go into the service and your wife will
remain here at home to help us. There is no order in your life, young
man, and I see you have forgotten how to live properly. Tut, tut, it's
the same trouble with all you townspeople."

When the Tsybukins married, the most handsome girls were chosen as
brides for them as rich men. For Anisim, too, they found a handsome one.
He was himself of an uninteresting and inconspicuous appearance; of a
feeble, sickly build and short stature; he had full, puffy cheeks which
looked as though he were blowing them out; his eyes looked with a keen,
unblinking stare; his beard was red and scanty, and when he was thinking
he always put it into his mouth and bit it; moreover he often drank too
much, and that was noticeable from his face and his walk. But when he
was informed that they had found a very beautiful bride for him, he
said:

"Oh well, I am not a fright myself. All of us Tsybukins are handsome, I
may say."

The village of Torguevo was near the town. Half of it had lately been
incorporated into the town, the other half remained a village. In the
first--the town half--there was a widow living in her own little house;
she had a sister living with her who was quite poor and went out to work
by the day, and this sister had a daughter called Lipa, a girl who went
out to work, too. People in Torguevo were already talking about Lipa's
good looks, but her terrible poverty put everyone off; people opined
that some widower or elderly man would marry her regardless of her
poverty, or would perhaps take her to himself without marriage, and that
her mother would get enough to eat living with her. Varvara heard about
Lipa from the matchmakers, and she drove over to Torguevo.

Then a visit of inspection was arranged at the aunt's, with lunch and
wine all in due order, and Lipa wore a new pink dress made on purpose
for this occasion, and a crimson ribbon like a flame gleamed in her
hair. She was pale-faced, thin, and frail, with soft, delicate features
sunburnt from working in the open air; a shy, mournful smile always
hovered about her face, and there was a childlike look in her eyes,
trustful and curious.

She was young, quite a little girl, her bosom still scarcely
perceptible, but she could be married because she had reached the legal
age. She really was beautiful, and the only thing that might be thought
unattractive was her big masculine hands which hung idle now like two
big claws.

"There is no dowry--and we don't think much of that," said Tsybukin to
the aunt. "We took a wife from a poor family for our son Stepan, too,
and now we can't say too much for her. In house and in business alike
she has hands of gold."

Lipa stood in the doorway and looked as though she would say: "Do with
me as you will, I trust you," while her mother Praskovya the work-woman
hid herself in the kitchen numb with shyness. At one time in her youth
a merchant whose floors she was scrubbing stamped at her in a rage; she
went chill with terror and there always was a feeling of fear at the
bottom of her heart. When she was frightened her arms and legs trembled
and her cheeks twitched. Sitting in the kitchen she tried to hear what
the visitors were saying, and she kept crossing herself, pressing her
fingers to her forehead, and gazing at the ikons. Anisim, slightly
drunk, opened the door into the kitchen and said in a free-and-easy way:

"Why are you sitting in here, precious mamma? We are dull without you."

And Praskovya, overcome with timidity, pressing her hands to her lean,
wasted bosom, said:

"Oh, not at all.... It's very kind of you."

After the visit of inspection the wedding day was fixed. Then Anisim
walked about the rooms at home whistling, or suddenly thinking of
something, would fall to brooding and would look at the floor fixedly,
silently, as though he would probe to the depths of the earth. He
expressed neither pleasure that he was to be married, married so
soon, on Low Sunday, nor a desire to see his bride, but simply went on
whistling. And it was evident he was only getting married because his
father and stepmother wished him to, and because it was the custom in
the village to marry the son in order to have a woman to help in the
house. When he went away he seemed in no haste, and behaved altogether
not as he had done on previous visits--was particularly free and easy,
and talked inappropriately.

III

In the village Shikalovo lived two dressmakers, sisters, belonging to
the Flagellant sect. The new clothes for the wedding were ordered
from them, and they often came to try them on, and stayed a long while
drinking tea. They were making Varvara a brown dress with black lace and
bugles on it, and Aksinya a light green dress with a yellow front, with
a train. When the dressmakers had finished their work Tsybukin paid them
not in money but in goods from the shop, and they went away depressed,
carrying parcels of tallow candles and tins of sardines which they did
not in the least need, and when they got out of the village into the
open country they sat down on a hillock and cried.

Anisim arrived three days before the wedding, rigged out in new clothes
from top to toe. He had dazzling india-rubber goloshes, and instead of a
cravat wore a red cord with little balls on it, and over his shoulder
he had hung an overcoat, also new, without putting his arms into the
sleeves.

After crossing himself sedately before the ikon, he greeted his father
and gave him ten silver roubles and ten half-roubles; to Varvara he gave
as much, and to Aksinya twenty quarter-roubles. The chief charm of the
present lay in the fact that all the coins, as though carefully matched,
were new and glittered in the sun. Trying to seem grave and sedate he
pursed up his face and puffed out his cheeks, and he smelt of spirits.
Probably he had visited the refreshment bar at every station. And again
there was a free-and-easiness about the man--something superfluous and
out of place. Then Anisim had lunch and drank tea with the old man,
and Varvara turned the new coins over in her hand and inquired about
villagers who had gone to live in the town.

"They are all right, thank God, they get on quite well," said Anisim.
"Only something has happened to Ivan Yegorov: his old wife Sofya
Nikiforovna is dead. From consumption. They ordered the memorial dinner
for the peace of her soul at the confectioner's at two and a half
roubles a head. And there was real wine. Those who were peasants from
our village--they paid two and a half roubles for them, too. They ate
nothing, as though a peasant would understand sauce!"

"Two and a half," said his father, shaking his head.

"Well, it's not like the country there, you go into a restaurant to have
a snack of something, you ask for one thing and another, others join
till there is a party of us, one has a drink--and before you know where
you are it is daylight and you've three or four roubles each to pay.
And when one is with Samorodov he likes to have coffee with brandy in it
after everything, and brandy is sixty kopecks for a little glass."

"And he is making it all up," said the old man enthusiastically; "he is
making it all up, lying!"

"I am always with Samorodov now. It is Samorodov who writes my letters
to you. He writes splendidly. And if I were to tell you, mamma," Anisim
went on gaily, addressing Varvara, "the sort of fellow that Samorodov
is, you would not believe me. We call him Muhtar, because he is black
like an Armenian. I can see through him, I know all his affairs like
the five fingers of my hand, and he feels that, and he always follows
me about, we are regular inseparables. He seems not to like it in a way,
but he can't get on without me. Where I go he goes. I have a correct,
trustworthy eye, mamma. One sees a peasant selling a shirt in the market
place. 'Stay, that shirt's stolen.' And really it turns out it is so:
the shirt was a stolen one."

"What do you tell from?" asked Varvara.

"Not from anything, I have just an eye for it. I know nothing about the
shirt, only for some reason I seem drawn to it: it's stolen, and that's
all I can say. Among us detectives it's come to their saying, 'Oh,
Anisim has gone to shoot snipe!' That means looking for stolen goods.
Yes.... Anybody can steal, but it is another thing to keep! The earth is
wide, but there is nowhere to hide stolen goods."