Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [84]
He plunged rapidly to the bottom. Did he reach it? The sea, they say, is three miles deep at this point. Falling sixty or seventy feet, he started to fall more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though hesitating, at the mercy of the currents, sliding sideways more quickly than he sank down.
Then he fell among a shoal of pilot fish. When they saw the dark body they were astounded and rooted to the spot, and they suddenly turned tail and fled. In less than a minute they came hurrying back to him, quick as a shot, and they began zigzagging round him in the water.
Then still another dark body appeared. This was a shark. It swam below Gusev with dignity and reserve, seeming not to notice him; and when he, descending, fell against the back of the shark, then the shark turned belly upwards, basking in the warm transparent water and lazily opening its jaws with their two rows of teeth. The pilot fish were in ecstasy; they stopped to see what would happen next. After playing around with the body for a while, the shark calmly laid its jaws on it, tapped it with its teeth, and ripped open the sailcloth along the whole length of the body from head to foot; one of the fire bars fell out, frightened the pilot fish, struck the shark in the ribs, and sank rapidly to the bottom.
Meanwhile in the heavens clouds came and massed themselves against the sunset, and one cloud resembled a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors.… There came a great beam of green light transpiercing the clouds and stretching to the center of the sky, and a little while later a violetcolored beam lay beside it, and then there was a golden beam, and then a rose-colored beam. The heavens turned lilac, very soft. Gazing up at the enchanted heavens, magnificent in their splendor, the sea fumed darkly at first, but soon assumed the sweet, joyous, passionate colors for which there are scarcely any names in the tongue of man.
December 1890
The Peasant Women
IN the village of Raibuzh, just opposite the church, there is a two-story house with stone foundations and an iron roof. The owner of the house, Philip Ivanov Kamin, and his family live in the lower story. Kamin’s nickname is Dyudya. On the upper floor, where it is very hot in summer and very cold in winter, there are lodgings for officials, merchants, and country gentlemen passing through the town. Dyudya rents out some parcels of land, runs a tavern along the main road, trades in tar, honey, cattle, and magpies, and has amassed some eight thousand rubles, which he keeps in the town bank.
Fedor, his elder son, is a foreman mechanic in a factory, and as the peasants say, he has climbed so high that no one can follow after him. Fedor’s wife, Sophia, is a plain sickly woman who lives at home with her father-in-law, weeps continually, and every Sunday drives over to the hospital for treatment. The second son, Alyoshka, is a hunchback and lives at home with his father. He has only lately married Varvara, a girl from a poor family, young, pretty, healthy, fond of dressing up. When officials and merchants stay at the house, they always demand that Varvara bring in the samovar and make up their beds.
One evening in June when the sun was setting and the air smelled of hay and warm manure and steaming milk, a plain cart came driving into Dyudya’s courtyard with three people sitting in it. One was a man of about thirty who wore a canvas suit, and sitting beside him was a boy of seven or eight in a long black coat with big bone buttons, and there was a young fellow in a red shirt sitting on the driver’s seat.
This young fellow unhitched the horses and walked them up and down the street, while the man washed himself, said a prayer with his face turned toward the church, and spreading out a fur cloak on the ground, sat down