Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [65]
At home Klimov was met by his aunt and his sister Katya, a girl of eighteen. While Katya greeted him, she was holding a copybook and a pencil in her hands and he remembered that she was preparing for her teacher’s examination. He paid no attention to her questions and her greetings, but gasped in the heat and walked aimlessly through all the rooms until he reached his bedroom, and then he threw himself down on the bed. The Finn, the red cap, the lady with the white teeth, the smell of fried meat, the shifting blurs of light in the compartment, filled his consciousness, and he no longer knew where he was, and did not hear the frightened voices near him.
When he recovered consciousness he found he was in his bed, and undressed. He could see Pavel and the carafe of water, but the bed was no cooler, no softer, and no more comfortable. His legs and arms felt just as cramped as before. His tongue was clinging to the roof of his mouth, and he could hear the groaning of the Finn’s pipe.… Beside the bed a stout, black-bearded doctor was bustling about and brushing against Pavel’s broad back.
“It’s all right, me lad,” the doctor murmured. “Wery good! Yies indeed!”
The doctor called Klimov “me lad,” and said “wery” instead of “very,” and “yies” instead of “yes.”
“Yies, yies, yies,” he said. “Wery good, me lad! Don’t take it too much to heart!”
The doctor’s quick, careless way of speaking, his well-fed face, and the condescending way he said “me lad” infuriated Klimov.
“Why do you call me ‘me lad’?” he moaned. “What familiarity! Go to hell!”
And he was frightened by the sound of his own voice. It was so dry, so weak, so muted, that he could not recognize it.
“Excellent, excellent,” murmured the doctor, not in the least offended. “No use to get angry now. Yies, yies …”
At home, time flew by with the same startling speed as in the train. In the bedroom, daylight was continually giving place to shadowy darkness. The doctor seemed never to leave the bedside; and every minute he could be heard saying: “Yies, yies …” A continual stream of faces plunged across the room—the doctor, the Finn, Pavel, Captain Yaroshevich, Sergeant-Major Maximenko, the red cap, the lady with the white teeth. They were all talking and waving their arms, smoking and eating. Once in broad daylight Klimov saw Father Alexander, his regimental chaplain, standing by the bed. The priest was wearing a stole and holding a prayer book in his hands, and he was muttering something with a grave expression such as Klimov had never encountered before. The lieutenant remembered that Father Alexander, in the most friendly way possible, had the habit of calling all the Catholic officers Poles, and to amuse him the lieutenant cried out: “Father, the Pole Yaroshevich has climbed up a pole!”
But Father Alexander, usually so jolly and lighthearted, did not laugh, but instead looked graver than ever as he made the sign of the cross over Klimov. And then at night two shadows came flitting silently across the room, one after another. They were his aunt and his sister. The sister’s shadow knelt and prayed. She bowed low before the icon, and her gray shadow on the wall also bowed low: both shadows were praying to God. And all the time there was the smell of fried meat and the Finn’s pipe. Once Klimov detected the strong smell of incense. He shuddered with nausea, and began shouting: “The incense! Take the incense away!”
There was no answer. He heard only the subdued chanting of priests and the sound of someone running up the stairs.
When Klimov recovered from his delirium there was no one in the bedroom. The morning sunlight streamed through the window and through the drawn curtains, and a quivering