Short Fiction by Anton Chekhov

Author:Anton Chekhov
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Chekhov, Russia -- Social life and customs -- Fiction, 1860-1904 -- Translations into English, Anton Pavlovich
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2016-06-20T19:22:37+00:00

The Beauties

I

I re­mem­ber, when I was a high school boy in the fifth or sixth class, I was driv­ing with my grand­father from the vil­lage of Bolshoe Kryep­koe in the Don re­gion to Rostov-on-the-Don. It was a sul­try, lan­guidly dreary day of August. Our eyes were glued to­gether, and our mouths were parched from the heat and the dry burn­ing wind which drove clouds of dust to meet us; one did not want to look or speak or think, and when our drowsy driver, a Little Rus­sian called Karpo, swung his whip at the horses and lashed me on my cap, I did not protest or ut­ter a sound, but only, rous­ing my­self from half-slum­ber, gazed mildly and de­jec­tedly into the dis­tance to see whether there was a vil­lage vis­ible through the dust. We stopped to feed the horses in a big Ar­menian vil­lage at a rich Ar­menian’s whom my grand­father knew. Never in my life have I seen a greater ca­ri­ca­ture than that Ar­menian. Ima­gine a little shaven head with thick over­hanging eye­brows, a beak of a nose, long gray mus­taches, and a wide mouth with a long cherry-wood chi­bouk stick­ing out of it. This little head was clum­sily at­tached to a lean hunch­back car­cass at­tired in a fant­astic garb, a short red jacket, and full bright blue trousers. This fig­ure walked strad­dling its legs and shuff­ling with its slip­pers, spoke without tak­ing the chi­bouk out of its mouth, and be­haved with truly Ar­menian dig­nity, not smil­ing, but star­ing with wide-open eyes and try­ing to take as little no­tice as pos­sible of its guests.

There was neither wind nor dust in the Ar­menian’s rooms, but it was just as un­pleas­ant, stifling, and dreary as in the steppe and on the road. I re­mem­ber, dusty and ex­hausted by the heat, I sat in the corner on a green box. The un­painted wooden walls, the fur­niture, and the floors colored with yel­low ocher smelt of dry wood baked by the sun. Wherever I looked there were flies and flies and flies. … Grand­father and the Ar­menian were talk­ing about graz­ing, about ma­nure, and about oats. … I knew that they would be a good hour get­ting the sam­o­var; that grand­father would be not less than an hour drink­ing his tea, and then would lie down to sleep for two or three hours; that I should waste a quarter of the day wait­ing, after which there would be again the heat, the dust, the jolt­ing cart. I heard the mut­ter­ing of the two voices, and it began to seem to me that I had been see­ing the Ar­menian, the cup­board with the crock­ery, the flies, the win­dows with the burn­ing sun beat­ing on them, for ages and ages, and should only cease to see them in the far-off fu­ture, and I was seized with hatred for the steppe, the sun, the flies. …

A Little Rus­sian peas­ant wo­man in a ker­chief brought in a tray of tea-things, then the sam­o­var. The Ar­menian went slowly out into the

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