The Schoolmaster and Other StoriesChekhov, Anton Pavlovich
General
The Schoolmaster and Other Stories
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 1860-1904 -- Translations into English; Russia -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Abogin and the doctor remained in silence waiting for the carriage.
The first regained his expression of sleekness and his refined
elegance. He paced up and down the room, tossed his head elegantly,
and was evidently meditating on something. His anger had not cooled,
but he tried to appear not to notice his enemy. . . . The doctor
stood, leaning with one hand on the edge of the table, and looked
at Abogin with that profound and somewhat cynical, ugly contempt
only to be found in the eyes of sorrow and indigence when they are
confronted with well-nourished comfort and elegance.
When a little later the doctor got into the victoria and drove off
there was still a look of contempt in his eyes. It was dark, much
darker than it had been an hour before. The red half-moon had sunk
behind the hill and the clouds that had been guarding it lay in
dark patches near the stars. The carriage with red lamps rattled
along the road and soon overtook the doctor. It was Abogin driving
off to protest, to do absurd things. . . .
All the way home the doctor thought not of his wife, nor of his
Andrey, but of Abogin and the people in the house he had just left.
His thoughts were unjust and inhumanly cruel. He condemned Abogin
and his wife and Paptchinsky and all who lived in rosy, subdued
light among sweet perfumes, and all the way home he hated and
despised them till his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning
those people took shape in his mind.
Time will pass and Kirilov's sorrow will pass, but that conviction,
unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will
remain in the doctor's mind to the grave.
THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE
A DISTRICT doctor and an examining magistrate were driving one fine
spring day to an inquest. The examining magistrate, a man of five
and thirty, looked dreamily at the horses and said:
"There is a great deal that is enigmatic and obscure in nature; and
even in everyday life, doctor, one must often come upon phenomena
which are absolutely incapable of explanation. I know, for instance,
of several strange, mysterious deaths, the cause of which only
spiritualists and mystics will undertake to explain; a clear-headed
man can only lift up his hands in perplexity. For example, I know
of a highly cultured lady who foretold her own death and died without
any apparent reason on the very day she had predicted. She said
that she would die on a certain day, and she did die."
"There's no effect without a cause," said the doctor. "If there's
a death there must be a cause for it. But as for predicting it
there's nothing very marvellous in that. All our ladies--all our
females, in fact--have a turn for prophecies and presentiments."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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