Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,12

ripe rye … His face is red and sweaty. A white cap with a straight jockey’s visor, apparently the gift of some generous squire, sits dashingly on his handsome blond head. Over his shoulder hangs a game bag with a crumpled black grouse in it. The man is carrying a cocked double-barreled shotgun and squinting his eyes at his old, skinny dog, who runs ahead, sniffing about in the bushes. It is quiet, not a sound anywhere … Everything alive is hiding from the heat.

“Yegor Vlasych!” the hunter suddenly hears a soft voice.

He gives a start and turns around, scowling. Beside him, as if sprung from the ground, stands a pale-faced woman of about thirty with a sickle in her hand. She tries to peer into his face and smiles shyly.

“Ah, it’s you, Pelageya!” says the hunter, stopping and slowly un-cocking his gun. “Hm! … How did you turn up here?”

“The women from our village are working here, so I’m here with them … Hired help, Yegor Vlasych.”

“So-o …” Yegor Vlasych grunts and slowly goes on.

Pelageya follows him. They go about twenty steps in silence.

“I haven’t seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlasych …” says Pelageya, gazing tenderly at the hunter’s moving shoulders and shoulder blades. “You stopped by our cottage for a drink of water on Easter day, and we haven’t seen you since … You stopped for a minute on Easter day, and that God knows how … in a drunken state … You swore at me, beat me, and left … I’ve been waiting and waiting … I’ve looked my eyes out waiting for you … Eh, Yegor Vlasych, Yegor Vlasych! If only you’d come one little time!”

“What’s there for me to do at your place?”

“There’s nothing to do there, of course, just … anyway there’s the household … Things to be seen to … You’re the master … Look at you, shot a grouse, Yegor Vlasych! Why don’t you sit down and rest …”

As she says all this, Pelageya laughs like a fool and looks up at Yegor’s face … Her own face breathes happiness …

“Sit down? Why not …” Yegor says in an indifferent tone and picks a spot between two pine saplings. “Why are you standing? Sit down, too!”

Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with her hand. Two minutes pass in silence.

“If only you’d come one little time,” Pelageya says softly.

“What for?” sighs Yegor, taking off his cap and wiping his red forehead with his sleeve. “There’s no need. To stop by for an hour or two—dally around, get you stirred up—and my soul can’t stand living all the time in the village … You know I’m a spoiled man … I want there to be a bed, and good tea, and delicate conversation … I want to have all the degrees, and in the village there you’ve got poverty, soot … I couldn’t even live there a day. Suppose they issued a decree that I absolutely had to live with you, I’d either burn down the cottage or lay hands on myself. From early on I’ve been spoiled like this, there’s no help for it.”

“Where do you live now?”

“At the squire Dmitri Ivanych’s, as a hunter. I furnish game for his table, but it’s more like … he keeps me because he’s pleased to.”

“It’s not a dignified thing to do, Yegor Vlasych … For people it’s just toying, but for you it’s like a trade … a real occupation …”

“You don’t understand, stupid,” says Yegor, dreamily looking at the sky. “In all your born days you’ve never understood and never will understand what kind of a man I am … To you, I’m a crazy, lost man, but for somebody who understands, I’m the best shot in the whole district. The gentlemen feel it and even printed something about me in a magazine. Nobody can match me in the line of hunting … And if I scorn your village occupations, it’s not because I’m spoiled or proud. Right from infancy, you know, I’ve never known any occupation but guns and dogs. Take away my gun, I’ll get a fishing pole, take away the fishing pole, I’ll hunt bare-handed. Well, and I also did some horse-trading, roamed around the fairs whenever I had some money, and you know yourself, if any peasant gets in with hunters or horse traders, it’s good-bye to the plough. Once a free spirit