Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,33

son, the officer in Warsaw. He’s an intelligent, honest, and sober man. But I don’t find that enough. I think if I had an old father and if I knew that he had moments when he was ashamed of his poverty, I would give my officer’s post to someone else and go to do day labor. Such thoughts about my children poison me. What’s the point? To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man. But enough of that.

At a quarter to ten I must go to my dear boys and give a lecture. I get dressed and follow a road that has been familiar to me for thirty years now and has its own history for me. Here is a big gray house with a pharmacy; a small house once stood there, and in it there was a beer parlor; in that beer parlor I thought over my dissertation and wrote my first love letter to Varya. I wrote it in pencil, on a page with the heading “Historia morbi.”5 Here is the grocery shop; it was formerly run by a little Jew who sold me cigarettes on credit, then by a fat woman who loved students because “each of them has a mother”; now there’s a red-haired shopkeeper sitting there, a very indifferent man, who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy university gates, which have long needed repair; the bored caretaker in a sheepskin coat, his besom, the heaps of snow … Such gates cannot make a healthy impression on a fresh boy, come from the provinces, who imagines that the temple of learning really is a temple. In the history of Russian pessimism, the general decrepitude of the university buildings, the gloomy corridors, the grimy walls, the inadequate light, the dismal look of the stairs, cloakrooms and benches, occupy one of the foremost places in the series of causes predisposing … And here is our garden. It seems to have become neither better nor worse since I was a student. I don’t like it. It would be much smarter if, instead of consumptive lindens, yellow acacias, and sparse trimmed lilacs, there were tall pines and handsome oaks growing here. The student, whose mood is largely created by the surroundings of his place of learning, should see at every step only the lofty, the strong, the graceful … God save him from scrawny trees, broken windows, gray walls, and doors upholstered with torn oilcloth.

When I come to my entrance, the door opens wide, and I am met by my old colleague, coeval, and namesake, the porter Nikolai. Letting me in, he grunts and says:

“Freezing, Your Excellency!”

Or else, if my coat is wet:

“Raining, Your Excellency!”

Then he runs ahead of me and opens all the doors on my way. In the office, he carefully helps me off with my coat, and meanwhile manages to tell me some university news. Owing to the close acquaintance that exists among all university porters and caretakers, he knows everything that goes on in the four faculties, in the chancellery, in the rector’s office, in the library What doesn’t he know! For instance, when the latest news is the retirement of the rector or a dean, I hear him name the candidates as he talks with the young caretakers, and explain straight off that so-and-so will not be approved by the minister, that so-and-so will decline, and then go into fantastic detail about some mysterious papers received in the chancellery, about a secret talk that supposedly took place between the minister and a member of the board, and so on. Generally, apart from these details, he almost always turns out to be right. The character references he gives for each candidate are original, but also correct. If you need to know in which year someone defended his thesis, or took up his post, or retired, or died, avail yourself of the vast memory of this old soldier, and he will tell you not only the year, the month, and the day, but also the details that accompanied this or that circumstance. Only one who loves can remember so well.

He is the guardian of university tradition. From his porter predecessors he has inherited many legends of university life, has added to this wealth a considerable quantity of his own goods, acquired during his service, and, if you wish, will tell you many tales both long and short. He can tell