Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904 -- Translations into English; Russia -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
When he has finished dinner the native in blue trousers, worn out
and exhausted, staggering with laziness and repletion, crosses the
street to his own house and sinks feebly on to his bench. He is
struggling with drowsiness and the gnats, and is looking about him
as dejectedly as though he were every minute expecting his end. His
helpless air drives Lyashkevsky out of all patience. The Pole pokes
his head out of the window and shouts at him, spluttering:
"Been gorging? Ah, the old woman! The sweet darling. He has been
stuffing himself, and now he doesn't know what to do with his tummy!
Get out of my sight, you confounded fellow! Plague take you!"
The native looks sourly at him, and merely twiddles his fingers
instead of answering. A school-boy of his acquaintance passes by
him with his satchel on his back. Stopping him the native ponders
a long time what to say to him, and asks:
"Well, what now?"
"Nothing."
"How, nothing?"
"Why, just nothing."
"H'm. . . . And which subject is the hardest?"
"That's according." The school-boy shrugs his shoulders.
"I see--er . . . What is the Latin for tree?"
"Arbor."
"Aha. . . . And so one has to know all that," sighs the blue trousers.
"You have to go into it all. . . . It's hard work, hard work. . . .
Is your dear Mamma well?"
"She is all right, thank you."
"Ah. . . . Well, run along."
After losing two roubles Finks remembers the high school and is
horrified.
"Holy Saints, why it's three o'clock already. How I have been staying
on. Good-bye, I must run. . . ."
"Have dinner with me, and then go," says Lyashkevsky. "You have
plenty of time."
Finks stays, but only on condition that dinner shall last no more
than ten minutes. After dining he sits for some five minutes on the
sofa and thinks of the cracked wall, then resolutely lays his head
on the cushion and fills the room with a shrill whistling through
his nose. While he is asleep, Lyashkevsky, who does not approve of
an afternoon nap, sits at the window, stares at the dozing native,
and grumbles:
"Race of curs! I wonder you don't choke with laziness. No work, no
intellectual or moral interests, nothing but vegetating . . . .
disgusting. Tfoo!"
At six o'clock Finks wakes up.
"It's too late to go to the high school now," he says, stretching.
"I shall have to go to-morrow, and now. . . . How about my revenge?
Let's have one more game. . . ."
After seeing his visitor off, between nine and ten, Lyashkevsky
looks after him for some time, and says:
"Damn the fellow, staying here the whole day and doing absolutely
nothing. . . . Simply get their salary and do no work; the devil
take them! . . . The German pig. . . ."
He looks out of the window, but the native is no longer there. He
has gone to bed. There is no one to grumble at, and for the first
time in the day he keeps his mouth shut, but ten minutes passes and
he cannot restrain the depression that overpowers him, and begins
to grumble, shoving the old shabby armchair:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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