Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,214

nothing to drink—where’s he to go? It’s the third day he hasn’t eaten.”

“The third day!” Crutch said in surprise.

“He just sits like that, saying nothing. He’s grown weak. And why say nothing? If he goes to court, the court’s not going to praise her for it.”

“What’s the court going to praise?” asked Crutch, who had not heard well.

“Eh?”

“She’s an all-right woman, works hard. In that business you can’t get by without it … sin, I mean …”

“From his ownest house,” Yakov went on in vexation. “Earn yourself a house, then drive people out. Eh, she’s a fine one, she is! A pla-a-ague!”

Tsybukin listened without stirring.

“Your own house or somebody else’s, it makes no difference, so long as it’s warm and the women don’t yell at you …” said Crutch, and he laughed. “When I was still a young man, I pitied my Nastasya very much. She was a quiet little woman. She used to say: ‘Buy a house, Makarych! Buy a house, Makarych! And buy a horse, Makarych!’ She was dying, and she kept saying: ‘Buy yourself a droshky, Makarych, so as not to go on foot.’ But I only ever bought her gingerbread.”

“Her husband’s deaf and stupid,” Yakov went on, not listening to Crutch, “a fool of fools, the same as a goose. Does he understand anything? Hit a goose on the head with a stick—it still won’t understand.”

Crutch got up to go home to the factory. Yakov also got up, and the two went off together, still talking. When they were fifty paces away, old Tsybukin also got up and trudged after them, stepping uncertainly, as if on slippery ice.

The village was already sunk in evening twilight, and the sun shone only up above, on the road that ran snakelike down the slope. The old women were coming back from the forest, and the children with them; they were carrying baskets of mushrooms. Women and girls were coming in a crowd from the station, where they had been loading bricks on the cars, and their noses and cheeks under their eyes were covered with red brick dust. They were singing. Ahead of them all went Lipa, and she sang in a high voice, pouring out her song as she looked up at the sky, as if celebrating and rejoicing that the day, thank God, was over and they could rest. Her mother was in the crowd, the day laborer Praskovya, walking with a bundle in her arms and breathing heavily as always.

“Good evening, Makarych!” said Lipa, seeing Crutch. “Good evening, dear heart!”

“Good evening, Lipynka!” said Crutch, delighted. “Dear women, dear girls, love the rich carpenter! Ho, ho! Little ones, my little ones,” Crutch sobbed. “My gentle little hatchets.”

Crutch and Yakov walked on, and could still be heard talking. After them the crowd met with old Tsybukin, and it suddenly became very quiet. Lipa and Praskovya had dropped behind a little, and when the old man came abreast of them, Lipa bowed low and said:

“Good evening, Grigory Petrovich!”

And her mother also bowed. The old man stopped and looked at the two women without saying anything; his lips trembled and his eyes were filled with tears. Lipa took a piece of kasha pie from her mother’s bundle and gave it to him. He took it and began to eat.

The sun had set completely; its glow had gone out even on the road above. It was growing dark and cool. Lipa and Praskovya walked on and kept crossing themselves for a long time.

JANUARY 1900

THE BISHOP

I

On the eve of Palm Sunday the vigil was going on in the Old Petrovsky Convent. It was almost ten o’clock when they began to hand out the pussywillows,1 the lights were dim, the wicks were sooty, everything was as if in a mist. In the twilight of the church, the crowd heaved like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for three days, it seemed that all the faces—old and young, men’s and women’s—were alike, that everyone who came up to get a branch had the same expression in their eyes. The doors could not be seen in the mist, the crowd kept moving, and it looked as if there was and would be no end to it. A women’s choir was singing, a nun was reading the canon.

How hot it was, how stifling! How long the vigil was! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was labored, short, dry, his shoulders ached with fatigue, his legs trembled. And it was unpleasantly disturbing that