The Chekhov Collection: Novellas, Short Stories, Plays, Letters & Diary. Anton Chekhov

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СКАЧАТЬ had said “No,” but the latter, instead of answering ushered her into the hall, and helped her off with her coat. The staircase impressed her as luxurious, and magnificent, but of all its splendours what caught her eye most was an immense looking-glass, in which she saw a ragged figure without a fashionable jacket, without a big hat, and without bronze shoes. And it seemed strange to Vanda that, now that she was humbly dressed and looked like a laundress or sewing girl, she felt ashamed, and no trace of her usual boldness and sauciness remained, and in her own mind she no longer thought of herself as Vanda, but as the Nastasya Kanavkin she used to be in the old days….

      “Walk in, please,” said a maidservant, showing her into the consulting-room. “The doctor will be here in a minute. Sit down.”

      Vanda sank into a soft armchair.

      “I’ll ask him to lend it me,” she thought; “that will be quite proper, for, after all, I do know him. If only that servant would go. I don’t like to ask before her. What does she want to stand there for?”

      Five minutes later the door opened and Finkel came in. He was a tall, dark Jew, with fat cheeks and bulging eyes. His cheeks, his eyes, his chest, his body, all of him was so well fed, so loathsome and repellent! At the “Renaissance” and the German Club he had usually been rather tipsy, and would spend his money freely on women, and be very long-suffering and patient with their pranks (when Vanda, for instance, poured the beer over his head, he simply smiled and shook his finger at her): now he had a cross, sleepy expression and looked solemn and frigid like a police captain, and he kept chewing something.

      “What can I do for you?” he asked, without looking at Vanda.

      Vanda looked at the serious countenance of the maid and the smug figure of Finkel, who apparently did not recognize her, and she turned red.

      “What can I do for you?” repeated the dentist a little irritably.

      “I’ve got toothache,” murmured Vanda.

      “Aha!… Which is the tooth? Where?”

      Vanda remembered she had a hole in one of her teeth.

      “At the bottom… on the right …” she said.

      “Hm!… Open your mouth.”

      Finkel frowned and, holding his breath, began examining the tooth.

      “Does it hurt?” he asked, digging into it with a steel instrument.

      “Yes,” Vanda replied, untruthfully.

      “Shall I remind him?” she was wondering. “He would be sure to remember me. But that servant! Why will she stand there?”

      Finkel suddenly snorted like a steam-engine right into her mouth, and said:

      “I don’t advise you to have it stopped. That tooth will never be worth keeping anyhow.”

      After probing the tooth a little more and soiling Vanda’s lips and gums with his tobacco-stained fingers, he held his breath again, and put something cold into her mouth. Vanda suddenly felt a sharp pain, cried out, and clutched at Finkel’s hand.

      “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he muttered; “don’t you be frightened! That tooth would have been no use to you, anyway… you must be brave…”

      And his tobacco-stained fingers, smeared with blood, held up the tooth to her eyes, while the maid approached and put a basin to her mouth.

      “You wash out your mouth with cold water when you get home, and that will stop the bleeding,” said Finkel.

      He stood before her with the air of a man expecting her to go, waiting to be left in peace.

      “Good-day,” she said, turning towards the door.

      “Hm!… and how about my fee?” enquired Finkel, in a jesting tone.

      “Oh, yes!” Vanda remembered, blushing, and she handed the Jew the rouble that had been given her for her ring.

      When she got out into the street she felt more overwhelmed with shame than before, but now it was not her poverty she was ashamed of. She was unconscious now of not having a big hat and a fashionable jacket. She walked along the street, spitting blood, and brooding on her life, her ugly, wretched life, and the insults she had endured, and would have to endure tomorrow, and next week, and all her life, up to the very day of her death.

      “Oh! how awful it is! My God, how fearful!”

      Next day, however, she was back at the “Renaissance,” and dancing there. She had on an enormous new red hat, a new fashionable jacket, and bronze shoes. And she was taken out to supper by a young merchant up from Kazan.

      A HAPPY MAN

       Table of Contents

      Translation By Constance Garnett

      THE passenger train is just starting from Bologoe, the junction on the Petersburg-Moscow line. In a second-class smoking compartment five passengers sit dozing, shrouded in the twilight of the carriage. They had just had a meal, and now, snugly ensconced in their seats, they are trying to go to sleep. Stillness.

      The door opens and in there walks a tall, lanky figure straight as a poker, with a ginger-coloured hat and a smart overcoat, wonderfully suggestive of a journalist in Jules Verne or on the comic stage.

      The figure stands still in the middle of the compartment for a long while, breathing heavily, screwing up his eyes and peering at the seats.

      “No, wrong again!” he mutters. “What the deuce! It’s positively revolting! No, the wrong one again!”

      One of the passengers stares at the figure and utters a shout of joy:

      “Ivan Alexyevitch! what brings you here? Is it you?”

      The poker-like gentleman starts, stares blankly at the passenger, and recognizing him claps his hands with delight.

      “Ha! Pyotr Petrovitch,” he says. “How many summers, how many winters! I didn’t know you were in this train.”

      “How are you getting on?”

      “I am all right; the only thing is, my dear fellow, I’ve lost my compartment and I simply can’t find it. What an idiot I am! I ought to be thrashed!”

      The poker-like gentleman sways a little unsteadily and sniggers.

      “Queer things do happen!” he continues. “I stepped out just after the second bell to get a glass of brandy. I got it, of course. Well, I thought, since it’s a long way to the next station, it would be as well to have a second glass. While I was thinking about it and drinking it the third bell rang…. I ran like mad and jumped into the first carriage. I am an idiot! I am the son of a hen!”

      “But you seem in very good spirits,” observes Pyotr Petrovitch. “Come and sit down! There’s room and a welcome.”

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