Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892-1895 by Anton Chekhov

Author:Anton Chekhov
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2002-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

IV

On the morning of the Monday in Passion Week, Matvey was in his room and could hear Dashutka saying to Aglaya, ‘A few days ago Uncle Matvey was telling me I don’t need to fast.’

Matvey remembered the whole conversation he’d had with Dashutka the previous day and suddenly felt insulted.

‘That’s a sinful way to speak, girl’, he said in the moaning voice of a sick man. ‘There has to be fasting. Our Lord Himself fasted forty days. I was just trying to tell you even fasting won’t help the wicked.’

‘Just hark at him with his tile-work sermons, trying to teach us to be good’, scoffed Aglaya as she washed the floor (she normally washed the floors on weekdays and lost her temper with everyone in the process). ‘We know how they fast at the tile-works! Just ask that old uncle of yours about his little darling, how him and that filthy bitch guzzled milk in Lent. Likes preaching to others all right but forgets that slut quick enough. Ask him who he left the money with. Who?’

Matvey took pains to hide the fact, as though it were a festering sore, that when he’d been frisking about and making merry with those old women and young girls at prayer meetings he had had an affair with a woman from the town, who bore him a child. Before he went home he gave her everything he had saved up at the tile-works and borrowed the money for his fare from the boss. And now he had only a few roubles for tea and candles. Later on his ‘darling’ informed him that the baby had died, and wrote to ask what she should do with the money. The workman brought the letter from the station but Aglaya intercepted it and read it, and every day after that kept reproaching Matvey about his ‘darling’.

‘Mere chicken-feed, only nine hundred roubles!’ Aglaya continued. ‘Gave nine hundred to a stranger, that bitch, that factory tart! Damn you!’ She flew off the handle and shrieked, ‘Nothing to say for yourself then? I could tear you to pieces, you spineless wretch! Nine hundred roubles, like chicken-feed! You should have left it to Dashutka, she’s your own flesh and blood. Or sent it to the poor orphans’ home in Belyov. Why couldn’t she choke, that cow of yours, blast her! Bloody bitch, damn her eyes! May she rot in hell!’

Yakov Ivanych called her, as it was time to begin lauds. She washed, put on a white kerchief and now went quietly and meekly to her beloved brother in the chapel. When she spoke to Matvey or served tea to peasants at the inn she was a skinny, sharp-eyed old hag, but in chapel she looked pure and radiant. Making elaborate curtsies, coyly pursing her lips even, she looked so much younger.

As always during Lent, Yakov Ivanych began to read the offices in a soft, mournful voice. After a little while he stopped to savour the calm that reigned over the whole house.

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