Gooseberries

Anton Chekhov

THE whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early morning; it was a still day,

not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the

country for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not come. Ivan Ivanovitch, the

veterinary surgeon, and Burkin, the high-school teacher, were already tired from walking,

and the fields seemed to them endless. Far ahead of them they could just see the windmills

of the village of Mironositskoe; on the right stretched a row of hillocks which disappeared

in the distance behind the village, and they both knew that this was the bank of the river,

that there were meadows, green willows, homesteads there, and that if one stood on one of

"Yes; I meant to tell you about my brother."

Ivan Ivanovitch heaved a deep sigh and lighted a pipe to begin to tell his story, but just at

that moment the rain began. And five minutes later heavy rain came down, covering the

sky, and it was hard to tell when it would be over. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin stopped in

hesitation; the dogs, already drenched, stood with their tails between their legs gazing at

them feelingly.

"We must take shelter somewhere," said Burkin. "Let us go to Alehin's; it's close by."

"Come along."

They turned aside and walked through mown fields, sometimes going straight forward,

sometimes turning to the right, till they came out on the road. Soon they saw poplars, a

malignant. Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin were already conscious of a feeling of wetness,

messiness, and discomfort all over; their feet were heavy with mud, and when, crossing the

dam, they went up to the barns, they were silent, as though they were angry with one

another.

In one of the barns there was the sound of a winnowing machine, the door was open, and

clouds of dust were coming from it. In the doorway was standing Alehin himself, a man of

Milhares de livros grátis para download.

forty, tall and stout, with long hair, more like a professor or an artist than a landowner. He

had on a white shirt that badly needed washing, a rope for a belt, drawers instead of

trousers, and his boots, too, were plastered up with mud and straw. His eyes and nose were

black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanovitch and Burkin, and was apparently much

delighted to see them.

"Go into the house, gentlemen," he said, smiling; "I'll come directly, this minute."

It was a big two-storeyed house. Alehin lived in the lower storey, with arched ceilings and

little windows, where the bailiffs had once lived; here everything was plain, and there was a

something to change into. And, by the way, I will change too. Only I must first go and

wash, for I almost think I have not washed since spring. Wouldn't you like to come into the

bath-house? and meanwhile they will get things ready here."

Beautiful Pelagea, looking so refined and soft, brought them towels and soap, and Alehin

went to the bath-house with his guests.

"It's a long time since I had a wash," he said, undressing. "I have got a nice bath-house, as

you see -- my father built it -- but I somehow never have time to wash."

He sat down on the steps and soaped his long hair and his neck, and the water round him

turned brown.

"Yes, I must say," said Ivan Ivanovitch meaningly, looking at his head.

bottom.

"Oh, my goodness!" he repeated continually, enjoying himself thoroughly. "Oh, my

goodness!" He swam to the mill, talked to the peasants there, then returned and lay on his

back in the middle of the pond, turning his face to the rain. Burkin and Alehin were dressed

and ready to go, but he still went on swimming and diving. "Oh, my goodness! . . ." he said.

"Oh, Lord, have mercy on me! . . ."

"That's enough!" Burkin shouted to him.

They went back to the house. And only when the lamp was lighted in the big drawing-room

upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers,

were sitting in arm-chairs; and Alehin, washed and combed, in a new coat, was walking

about the drawing-room, evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry clothes,

and light shoes; and when lovely Pelagea, stepping noiselessly on the carpet and smiling

softly, handed tea and jam on a tray -- only then Ivan Ivanovitch began on his story, and it

seemed as though not only Burkin and Alehin were listening, but also the ladies, young and

old, and the officers who looked down upon them sternly and calmly from their gold

frames.

estate and the rank of nobility. After his death the little estate went in debts and legal

horses, stripped the bark off the trees, fished, and so on. . . . And, you know, whoever has

once in his life caught perch or has seen the migrating of the thrushes in autumn, watched

how they float in flocks over the village on bright, cool days, he will never be a real

miserable in the government office. Years passed by, and he went on sitting in the same

place, went on writing the same papers and thinking of one and the same thing -- how to get

buying himself a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake.

this desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life in a little farm of his own. It's the correct

thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse

land and yearn for a farm, it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of

on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the

fields and the forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were his

delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading newspapers, too, but the only

things he read in them were the advertisements of so many acres of arable land and a grass

meadow with farm-houses and buildings, a river, a garden, a mill and millponds, for sale.

And his imagination pictured the garden-paths, flowers and fruit, starling cotes, the carp in

the pond, and all that sort of thing, you know. These imaginary pictures were of different

kinds according to the advertisements which he came across, but for some reason in every

one of them he had always to have gooseberries. He could not imagine a homestead, he

could not picture an idyllic nook, without gooseberries.

" 'Country life has its conveniences,' he would sometimes say. 'You sit on the verandah and

you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond, there is a delicious smell everywhere,

and . . . and the gooseberries are growing.'

"He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were the same things -- (a)

house for the family, (b) servants' quarters, (c) kitchen-garden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He

lived parsimoniously, was frugal in food and drink, his clothes were beyond description; he

looked like a beggar, but kept on saving and putting money in the bank. He grew fearfully

avaricious. I did not like to look at him, and I used to give him something and send him

reading the advertisements in the papers and saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still

on living frugally after marrying her, and kept her short of food, while he put her money in

the bank in his name.

home-made wines, while with her second husband she did not get enough black bread; she

began to pine away with this sort of life, and three years later she gave up her soul to God.

responsible for her death. Money, like vodka, makes a man queer. In our town there was a

merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful of honey and ate up all his money and

inspecting cattle at a railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an engine and had his leg cut

off. We carried him into the waiting-room, the blood was flowing -- it was a horrible thing

were twenty roubles in the boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they

hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family, with servants' quarters, with a park,

but with no orchard, no gooseberry-bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the

water in it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a brickyard

and on the other a factory for burning bones. But Nikolay Ivanovitch did not grieve much;

he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes, planted them, and began living as a country

gentleman.

"Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what it was like. In his

letters my brother called his estate 'Tchumbaroklov Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.' I reached

'alias Himalaiskoe' in the afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences,

hedges, fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the yard, where to

put one's horse. I went up to the house, and was met by a fat red dog that looked like a pig.

It wanted to bark, but it was too lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the

kitchen, and she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after dinner. I

went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a quilt over his legs; he had grown

older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks, his nose, and his mouth all stuck out -- he looked as

though he might begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.

"We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the thought that we had

once been young and now were both grey-headed and near the grave. He dressed, and led

" 'Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.'

accustomed to it, had grown used to it, and liked it. He ate a great deal, went to the bath-

house, was growing stout, was already at law with the village commune and both factories,

and was very much offended when the peasants did not call him 'Your Honour.' And he

performed deeds of charity, not simply, but with an air of consequence. And what deeds of

charity! He treated the peasants for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his

peasants to a gallon of vodka -- he thought that was the thing to do. Oh, those horrible

gallons of vodka! One day the fat landowner hauls the peasants up before the district

and they drink and shout 'Hurrah!' and when they are drunk bow down to his feet. A change

of life for the better, and being well-fed and idle develop in a Russian the most insolent

have any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel truth, and uttered

over 'We noblemen,' 'I as a noble'; obviously he did not remember that our grandfather was

a peasant, and our father a soldier. Even our surname Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so

incongruous, seemed to him now melodious, distinguished, and very agreeable.

"But the point just now is not he, but myself. I want to tell you about the change that took

place in me during the brief hours I spent at his country place. In the evening, when we

were drinking tea, the cook put on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They were not

bought, but his own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were planted.

Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence at the gooseberries, with

tears in his eyes; he could not speak for excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his

mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a child who has at last received his favourite toy,

and said:

" 'How delicious!'

"And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, 'Ah, how delicious! Do taste them!'

"They were sour and unripe, but, as Pushkin says:

object in life, who had gained what he wanted, who was satisfied with his fate and himself.

oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A

bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he

was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking

it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and

brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration,

streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who

would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions,

serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those

who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. . . .

gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from

faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree -- and all goes well.

"That night I realized that I, too, was happy and contented," Ivan Ivanovitch went on,

getting up. "I, too, at dinner and at the hunt liked to lay down the law on life and religion,

and the way to manage the peasantry. I, too, used to say that science was light, that culture

was essential, but for the simple people reading and writing was enough for the time.

Freedom is a blessing, I used to say; we can no more do without it than without air, but we

must wait a little. Yes, I used to talk like that, and now I ask, 'For what reason are we to

wait?' " asked Ivan Ivanovitch, looking angrily at Burkin. "Why wait, I ask you? What

grounds have we for waiting? I shall be told, it can't be done all at once; every idea takes

shape in life gradually, in its due time. But who is it says that? Where is the proof that it's

right? You will fall back upon the natural order of things, the uniformity of phenomena; but

is there order and uniformity in the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand over a chasm

and wait for it to close of itself, or to fill up with mud at the very time when perhaps I might

leap over it or build a bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of what? Wait till

there's no strength to live? And meanwhile one must live, and one wants to live!

"I went away from my brother's early in the morning, and ever since then it has been

unbearable for me to be in town. I am oppressed by its peace and quiet; I am afraid to look

at the windows, for there is no spectacle more painful to me now than the sight of a happy

Ivan Ivanovitch walked backwards and forwards in excitement, and repeated: "If I were

He suddenly went up to Alehin and began pressing first one of his hands and then the other.

let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young, strong, confident, be not weary in well-

doing! There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an

rational. Do good!"

him a personal favour.

Ivanovitch's story had not satisfied either Burkin or Alehin. When the generals and ladies

Alehin was fearfully sleepy; he had got up early, before three o'clock in the morning, to

look after his work, and now his eyes were closing; but he was afraid his visitors might tell

some interesting story after he had gone, and he lingered on. He did not go into the question

whether what Ivan Ivanovitch had just said was right and true. His visitors did not talk of

groats, nor of hay, nor of tar, but of something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he

was glad and wanted them to go on.

"It's bed-time, though," said Burkin, getting up. "Allow me to wish you good-night."

Alehin said good-night and went downstairs to his own domain, while the visitors remained

upstairs. They were both taken for the night to a big room where there stood two old

wooden beds decorated with carvings, and in the corner was an ivory crucifix. The big cool

beds, which had been made by the lovely Pelagea, smelt agreeably of clean linen.

Ivan Ivanovitch undressed in silence and got into bed.

"Lord forgive us sinners!" he said, and put his head under the quilt.

His pipe lying on the table smelt strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin could not sleep for a

long while, and kept wondering where the oppressive smell came from.