Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [96]
Semyon, even in Siberia people live!’ Well, thought I, he won’t always be showing a happy face to the world. From that time he went riding almost every week to Gyrino to find out whether the money was being sent from Russia. He needed a pile of money. He would tell me: ‘She is ruining her youth and beauty in Siberia for my sake, and sharing my miserable fate, and so I ought to provide her with every comfort.’ And to make life more cheerful for his lady, he made the acquaintance of officials and all sorts of riffraff, and of course he had to provide food and drink for the whole crowd, and there had to be a piano and a shaggy dog sitting on the sofa—a plague on such nonsense!… Luxury and self-indulgence, that’s what it was! The lady did not stay long with him. How could she? Clay, water, cold weather, no vegetables for you, no fruit, surrounded by ignorant and drunken people, and she a pampered darling from the capital.… Of course she got bored. Besides, her husband was no gentleman any longer: he was in exile, and there’s no honor in that. Three years later, I remember, on the eve of the Assumption, there was the sound of shouting from the other bank. I went over on the ferry and saw the lady herself—she was all muffled up, and there was a young gentleman with her, one of the officials. There was a troika, too.… I ferried them across, and they got into the troika and vanished into thin air! That was the last we saw of them. Toward morning Vassily Sergeich came galloping down to the ferry. ‘Semyon, tell me,’ he said, ‘didn’t my wife pass this way with a gentleman in spectacles?’ ‘Yes, she did,’ I told him. ‘Run after the wind in the fields.…’ So he galloped after them, and for five days and nights he was pursuing them. Later, when I took him over to the other side, he flung himself down in the ferry and beat his head against the planking and howled. ‘So that’s how it is!’ said I, and I laughed and reminded him how he had said: ‘People can live even in Siberia.’ And he beat his head all the more.… After that he began to long for his freedom. His wife had gone back to Russia, and so naturally he was drawn there, so that he could see her and take her away from her lover. And then, brother, what did he do but ride off nearly every day to the post office or the town to see the authorities. He kept sending them petitions begging them to have mercy on him and to let him return home, and he used to say he spent two hundred rubles on telegrams alone. He sold his land and mortgaged his house to a Jew. He grew gray, stooped, and his face turned yellow like a consumptive’s. He would talk to you and go: hee-hee-hee … and there would be tears in his eyes. He wasted away with all those petitions for eight years, but recently he has recovered his spirits and shows a more cheerful face to the world: he has thought up a new self-indulgence. His daughter, you see, was growing up. He was always looking at her and doting on her. To tell the truth, there’s nothing wrong with her—she’s a pretty thing, with black eyebrows, and high-spirited. Every Sunday he would go to church with her at Gyrino. They would be standing side by side on the ferryboat, and the girl would be laughing, and he would never look away from her. ‘Yes, Semyon,’ he would say, ‘people can live in Siberia. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Look what a daughter I have! I don’t believe that if you traveled a thousand miles you would find another like her!’ And I’d say to him: ‘Your daughter’s all right, there’s no question at all.…’ And I’d find myself thinking: ‘Wait a bit.… The girl is still young, the blood is dancing in her veins, she wants to live, and what kind of life is there here?’ And, brother, she began to pine away. She withered and wasted away and fell into a decline until she was too weak to stand on her feet. Consumption! There’s your Siberian happiness for you, a curse on it! That’s how people live in Siberia.… Now he spends his time running after doctors and taking them home with him. As soon as he hears of a doctor or a quack two or three hundred miles away, he