Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov

Author:Anton Chekhov [Chekhov, Anton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101573594
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2003-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

V

The Laptevs had a wholesale notions business in Moscow; they dealt in fringe, braid, trimmings, crochet cotton, buttons, and so on. The gross receipts reached two million a year; what the net profits were, no one but the old man knew. His sons and the clerks estimated them to be approximately three hundred thousand, and said it would have been at least a hundred thousand more if the old man had not “spread it around,” by which they meant, had he not extended credit indiscriminately. In the last ten years alone the accumulation of bad debts amounted to almost a million, and whenever the subject was mentioned the senior clerk would wink slyly and assert, “The psychological consequences of the age”—the meaning of which was not clear to everyone.

The chief commercial operations were conducted in the city market in a building that was known as the warehouse. The entrance to it was through a yard where it was always dusk, smelled of bast matting, and resounded with the clatter of dray horses’ hooves on the asphalt. An unpretentious-looking iron-studded door led from the yard into a room with walls that had turned brown with damp and were all written over in charcoal; the light came from a narrow window with an iron grating over it. To the left was another room, somewhat larger and cleaner, with a cast-iron stove, two tables, and the same prisonlike window; this was the office, and from here a narrow stone staircase led to the second story, where the main room was located. It was a rather large room, but owing to the perpetual gloom, the low ceiling, the cramming together of boxes and bales, and people shoving their way through, it produced as disagreeable an impression on a newcomer as did the other two rooms. Upstairs, as well as in the office, goods lay on the shelves in piles, bundles, and cardboard boxes, displaying neither order nor artistry in the arrangement, and if one had not caught a glimpse here and there of a crimson thread, a tassel, or a tail of fringe, it would have been impossible to guess what sort of trade was carried on here. It was inconceivable, glancing at these crumpled paper bundles and boxes, that from such trifles millions were made, or that in this warehouse fifty men were employed daily, to say nothing of the buyers who came in

When Laptev went to the warehouse at noon on the day after his arrival in Moscow, the packers were hammering so loudly no one in the first room or the office heard him enter. A postman he knew was coming down the stairs with a bundle of letters in his hand, his face screwed up at the noise, and he, too, failed to notice Laptev. The first person to meet him upstairs was his brother, Fyodor Fyodorych, who looked so exactly like him that they were frequently thought to be twins. This resemblance had been a constant reminder to Laptev

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