Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [121]
Then Belokurov began to talk at great length, with his drawling “er-er-er,” about the disease of the age—pessimism. He spoke with confidence, and by his tone it might be thought I was having an argument with him. Hundreds of miles of empty, monotonous, burned-out steppe were no drearier than this man who sat and talked and gave no sign of ever going away.
“It’s not a question of pessimism or optimism,” I said irritably. “It’s just that ninety-nine out of a hundred people don’t have any brains.”
Belukurov took this as a personal remark, and he walked out, deeply insulted.
III
“The prince is staying at Malozyomovo and sends you his greetings,” Leda said, coming in and taking off her gloves. “He had a lot of interesting things to say. He promised to raise the question of a medical center at Malozyomovo at the provincial assembly, but he says there’s not much hope.” And then, turning to me, she said: “Please excuse me, I was forgetting that this cannot be of the slightest interest to you.”
I was irritated by her remark.
“Why shouldn’t it be interesting to me?” I asked with a shrug. “You don’t care to know my opinion, but I assure you the question interests me greatly.”
“Yes?”
“It does indeed. In my opinion a medical center at Malozyomovo is quite unnecessary.”
My irritation was communicated to her. She looked at me, half closed her eyes, and said: “Then what is necessary? Paintings of landscapes?”
“No, landscapes aren’t necessary. You don’t need anything there!”
She finished taking off her gloves and opened a newspaper, which had just come in the mail. A moment later she said quietly, evidently restraining her deep feelings: “Last week Anna died in childbirth. If there had been a medical center near by, she would still be alive. Even landscape painters, I should think, might have convictions on this subject.”
“I have very definite convictions, I assure you,” I answered, while she took refuge behind her newspaper as though unwilling to listen to me. “In my opinion, medical centers, schools, libraries, dispensaries—all these under present conditions only serve to keep the people enslaved. They are being held down with heavy chains, and you are not breaking the chains, you are only adding new links to them. That’s what I think!”
She raised her eyes to me and smiled scornfully, but I went on, trying to catch the thread of my ideas: “What matters is not that Anna died in childbirth, but that all those Annas, Mouras, Pelageyas, bend their backs from early morning to late at night, fall ill from working beyond their strength, spend their whole lives worrying about their sick and starving children, always dreading death and disease, always having to doctor themselves, fading early and aging quickly and dying in foul-smelling filth! Their children grow up, and then it is the same story all over again, and hundreds of years pass by, and millions of people are still living worse than the beasts—in perpetual fear, for the sake of a crust of bread. The whole horror of their position lies in their never having time to think about their souls, never having time to remember they are made in the image and likeness of God. Cold, hunger, animal fear, the heavy burden of toil—these are like the drifts of snow, cutting them off from the pathways leading them to spiritual activity, to everything that distinguishes a man from a beast, to the only thing that makes life worth living. You come to their aid with your hospitals and schools, but you are not delivering them from their shackles. On the contrary, you are forcing them deeper and deeper into slavery, for by introducing new prejudices into their lives you increase the number of their wants, not to mention the fact that they have to pay the zemstvo for the drugs and the books, and so they have to work harder than ever!”
“I’m not going to argue with you,” Leda said, putting down her newspaper. “I’ve heard all that before.