Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov & Robert Payne

Author:Anton Chekhov & Robert Payne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780679733751
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1914-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

July 1885

The Malefactor

THE tiny and extraordinarily skinny peasant, wearing patched drawers and a shirt of striped linen, stood facing the investigating magistrate. His hairy face was pitted with smallpox, and his eyes, scarcely visible under thick overhanging brows, conveyed an expression of sullen resentment. He wore his hair in a tangled unkempt thatch which somehow emphasized his sullen spiderlike character. He was barefoot.

“Denis Grigoryev!” the magistrate began. “Step closer, and answer my questions. On the morning of July 7 the linesman Ivan Semyonov Akinfov, while performing the duty of examining the tracks, found you in proximity to the one-hundred-and-forty-first mile post unscrewing one of the nuts from the bolt securing the rail to the tie. The nut is here. He thereupon arrested you with the nut in your possession. Do you testify to the truth of this statement?”

“Wha-at?”

“Did all this happen as stated by Akinfov?”

“Sure—yes, it did.”

“Excellent. Now why were you unscrewing the nut?”

“Wha-at?”

“Stop saying what’ and answer the question! Why were you unscrewing the nut?”

“I wouldn’t have unscrewed it, would I, if I hadn’t wanted it?” Denis said hoarsely, squinting up at the ceiling.

“What on earth was the good of the nut to you?”

“The nut, eh? Well, we make sinkers out of ’em.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“We—the people in the village. The peasants of Klimovo.…”

“Listen, fellow. Don’t play the fool with me. Learn to talk sense. Don’t tell me any lies about sinkers!”

“Me, tell lies? All my life I haven’t told any lies, and now …” Denis muttered, his eyes blinking. “Your Honor, I ask you, what can you do without sinkers? Now, if you put live worms on the hook, how do you think it touches bottom without a sinker? So I’m lying, am I?” he smirked. “Then what is the good of live bait floating on the surface? The perch and pike and eelpout always go along the bottom, while if the bait floats on the surface there’s only the snapper will bite, and that doesn’t happen often.… And there are no snappers in our part of the country.… Our fish like a lot of space.…”

“What’s all this talk about snappers?”

“Wha-at? Why, you asked me that yourself! I’m telling how the gentry catch fish, but the very stupidest child wouldn’t try to catch anything without a sinker. Maybe a man without a brain in his head might try to catch a fish without a sinker, but there’s no accounting for people like that!”

“According to you, the nut was unscrewed so you could use it as a sinker. Is that right?”

“Well, it couldn’t be anything else, could it? I wasn’t playing knucklebones with it, was I?”

“Instead of a nut, you could have used a bit of lead or a bullet—perhaps a nail would have served the same purpose?”

“Well, Your Honor, as for that, you don’t find lead lying about in the street, and it has to be paid for, and a nail—a nail’s no use at all. There’s nothing better than a nut.… It is heavy, and has a hole in it.

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