The Chorus Girl and Other StoriesChekhov, Anton Pavlovich
General
The Chorus Girl and Other Stories
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904 -- Translations into English; Russia -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
As there was not enough work in the lodge for one, Tcheprakov did
nothing, but simply dozed, or went with his gun to shoot ducks on
the millpond. In the evenings he drank too much in the village or
the station, and before going to bed stared in the looking-glass
and said: "Hullo, Ivan Tcheprakov."
When he was drunk he was very pale, and kept rubbing his hands and
laughing with a sound like a neigh: "hee-hee-hee!" By way of bravado
he used to strip and run about the country naked. He used to eat
flies and say they were rather sour.
IV
One day, after dinner, he ran breathless into the lodge and said:
"Go along, your sister has come."
I went out, and there I found a hired brake from the town standing
before the entrance of the great house. My sister had come in it
with Anyuta Blagovo and a gentleman in a military tunic. Going up
closer I recognized the latter: it was the brother of Anyuta Blagovo,
the army doctor.
"We have come to you for a picnic," he said; "is that all right?"
My sister and Anyuta wanted to ask how I was getting on here, but
both were silent, and simply gazed at me. I was silent too. They
saw that I did not like the place, and tears came into my sister's
eyes, while Anyuta Blagovo turned crimson.
We went into the garden. The doctor walked ahead of us all and said
enthusiastically:
"What air! Holy Mother, what air!"
In appearance he was still a student. And he walked and talked like
a student, and the expression of his grey eyes was as keen, honest,
and frank as a nice student's. Beside his tall and handsome sister
he looked frail and thin; and his beard was thin too, and his voice,
too, was a thin but rather agreeable tenor. He was serving in a
regiment somewhere, and had come home to his people for a holiday,
and said he was going in the autumn to Petersburg for his examination
as a doctor of medicine. He was already a family man, with a wife
and three children, he had married very young, in his second year
at the University, and now people in the town said he was unhappy
in his family life and was not living with his wife.
"What time is it?" my sister asked uneasily. "We must get back in
good time. Papa let me come to see my brother on condition I was
back at six."
"Oh, bother your papa!" sighed the doctor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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