Home (Chekhov/Garnett)
"SOMEONE came from the Grigoryevs' to fetch a book, but I said you
were not at home. The postman brought the newspaper and two letters.
By the way, Yevgeny Petrovitch, I should like to ask you to speak
to Seryozha. To-day, and the day before yesterday, I have noticed
that he is smoking. When I began to expostulate with him, he put
his fingers in his ears as usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice."

Yevgeny Petrovitch Bykovsky, the prosecutor of the circuit court,
who had just come back from a session and was taking off his gloves
in his study, looked at the governess as she made her report, and
laughed.

"Seryozha smoking . . ." he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I can
picture the little cherub with a cigarette in his mouth! Why, how
old is he?"

"Seven. You think it is not important, but at his age smoking is a
bad and pernicious habit, and bad habits ought to be eradicated in
the beginning."

"Perfectly true. And where does he get the tobacco?"

"He takes it from the drawer in your table."

"Yes? In that case, send him to me."

When the governess had gone out, Bykovsky sat down in an arm-chair
before his writing-table, shut his eyes, and fell to thinking. He
pictured his Seryozha with a huge cigar, a yard long, in the midst
of clouds of tobacco smoke, and this caricature made him smile; at
the same time, the grave, troubled face of the governess called up
memories of the long past, half-forgotten time when smoking aroused
in his teachers and parents a strange, not quite intelligible horror.
It really was horror. Children were mercilessly flogged and expelled
from school, and their lives were made a misery on account of
smoking, though not a single teacher or father knew exactly what
was the harm or sinfulness of smoking. Even very intelligent people
did not scruple to wage war on a vice which they did not understand.
Yevgeny Petrovitch remembered the head-master of the high school,
a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when
he found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he
turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the
teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion. This was probably
a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more
fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.

The prosecutor remembered two or three boys who had been expelled
and their subsequent life, and could not help thinking that very
often the punishment did a great deal more harm than the crime
itself. The living organism has the power of rapidly adapting itself,
growing accustomed and inured to any atmosphere whatever, otherwise
man would be bound to feel at every moment what an irrational basis
there often is underlying his rational activity, and how little of
established truth and certainty there is even in work so responsible
and so terrible in its effects as that of the teacher, of the lawyer,
of the writer. . . .

And such light and discursive thoughts as visit the brain only when
it is weary and resting began straying through Yevgeny Petrovitch's
head; there is no telling whence and why they come, they do not
remain long in the mind, but seem to glide over its surface without
sinking deeply into it. For people who are forced for whole hours,
and even days, to think by routine in one direction, such free
private thinking affords a kind of comfort, an agreeable solace.

It was between eight and nine o'clock in the evening. Overhead, on
the second storey, someone was walking up and down, and on the floor
above that four hands were playing scales. The pacing of the man
overhead who, to judge from his nervous step, was thinking of
something harassing, or was suffering from toothache, and the
monotonous scales gave the stillness of the evening a drowsiness
that disposed to lazy reveries. In the nursery, two rooms away, the
governess and Seryozha were talking.

"Pa-pa has come!" carolled the child. "Papa has co-ome. Pa! Pa!
Pa!"

"Votre pere vous appelle, allez vite!" cried the governess, shrill
as a frightened bird. "I am speaking to you!"

"What am I to say to him, though?" Yevgeny Petrovitch wondered.

But before he had time to think of anything whatever his son Seryozha,
a boy of seven, walked into the study.

He was a child whose sex could only have been guessed from his
dress: weakly, white-faced, and fragile. He was limp like a hot-house
plant, and everything about him seemed extraordinarily soft and
tender: his movements, his curly hair, the look in his eyes, his
velvet jacket.

"Good evening, papa!" he said, in a soft voice, clambering on to
his father's knee and giving him a rapid kiss on his neck. "Did you
send for me?"

"Excuse me, Sergey Yevgenitch," answered the prosecutor, removing
him from his knee. "Before kissing we must have a talk, and a serious
talk . . . I am angry with you, and don't love you any more. I tell
you, my boy, I don't love you, and you are no son of mine. . . ."

Seryozha looked intently at his father, then shifted his eyes to
the table, and shrugged his shoulders.

"What have I done to you?" he asked in perplexity, blinking. "I
haven't been in your study all day, and I haven't touched anything."

"Natalya Semyonovna has just been complaining to me that you have
been smoking. . . . Is it true? Have you been smoking?"

"Yes, I did smoke once. . . . That's true. . . ."

"Now you see you are lying as well," said the prosecutor, frowning
to disguise a smile. "Natalya Semyonovna has seen you smoking twice.
So you see you have been detected in three misdeeds: smoking, taking
someone else's tobacco, and lying. Three faults."

"Oh yes," Seryozha recollected, and his eyes smiled. "That's true,
that's true; I smoked twice: to-day and before."

"So you see it was not once, but twice. . . . I am very, very much
displeased with you! You used to be a good boy, but now I see you
are spoilt and have become a bad one."

Yevgeny Petrovitch smoothed down Seryozha's collar and thought:

"What more am I to say to him!"

"Yes, it's not right," he continued. "I did not expect it of you.
In the first place, you ought not to take tobacco that does not
belong to you. Every person has only the right to make use of his
own property; if he takes anyone else's . . . he is a bad man!" ("I
am not saying the right thing!" thought Yevgeny Petrovitch.) "For
instance, Natalya Semyonovna has a box with her clothes in it.
That's her box, and we--that is, you and I--dare not touch it,
as it is not ours. That's right, isn't it? You've got toy horses
and pictures. . . . I don't take them, do I? Perhaps I might like
to take them, but . . . they are not mine, but yours!"

"Take them if you like!" said Seryozha, raising his eyebrows. "Please
don't hesitate, papa, take them! That yellow dog on your table is
mine, but I don't mind. . . . Let it stay."

"You don't understand me," said Bykovsky. "You have given me the
dog, it is mine now and I can do what I like with it; but I didn't
give you the tobacco! The tobacco is mine." ("I am not explaining
properly!" thought the prosecutor. "It's wrong! Quite wrong!") "If
I want to smoke someone else's tobacco, I must first of all ask his
permission. . . ."

Languidly linking one phrase on to another and imitating the language
of the nursery, Bykovsky tried to explain to his son the meaning
of property. Seryozha gazed at his chest and listened attentively
(he liked talking to his father in the evening), then he leaned his
elbow on the edge of the table and began screwing up his short-sighted
eyes at the papers and the inkstand. His eyes strayed over the table
and rested on the gum-bottle.

"Papa, what is gum made of?" he asked suddenly, putting the bottle
to his eyes.

Bykovsky took the bottle out of his hands and set it in its place
and went on:

"Secondly, you smoke. . . . That's very bad. Though I smoke it does
not follow that you may. I smoke and know that it is stupid, I blame
myself and don't like myself for it." ("A clever teacher, I am!"
he thought.) "Tobacco is very bad for the health, and anyone who
smokes dies earlier than he should. It's particularly bad for boys
like you to smoke. Your chest is weak, you haven't reached your
full strength yet, and smoking leads to consumption and other illness
in weak people. Uncle Ignat died of consumption, you know. If he
hadn't smoked, perhaps he would have lived till now."

Seryozha looked pensively at the lamp, touched the lamp-shade with
his finger, and heaved a sigh.

"Uncle Ignat played the violin splendidly!" he said. "His violin
is at the Grigoryevs' now."

Seryozha leaned his elbows on the edge of the table again, and sank
into thought. His white face wore a fixed expression, as though he
were listening or following a train of thought of his own; distress
and something like fear came into his big staring eyes. He was most
likely thinking now of death, which had so lately carried off his
mother and Uncle Ignat. Death carries mothers and uncles off to the
other world, while their children and violins remain upon the earth.
The dead live somewhere in the sky beside the stars, and look down
from there upon the earth. Can they endure the parting?

"What am I to say to him?" thought Yevgeny Petrovitch. "He's not
listening to me. Obviously he does not regard either his misdoings
or my arguments as serious. How am I to drive it home?"

The prosecutor got up and walked about the study.

"Formerly, in my time, these questions were very simply settled,"
he reflected. "Every urchin who was caught smoking was thrashed.
The cowardly and faint-hearted did actually give up smoking, any
who were somewhat more plucky and intelligent, after the thrashing
took to carrying tobacco in the legs of their boots, and smoking
in the barn. When they were caught in the barn and thrashed again,
they would go away to smoke by the river . . . and so on, till the
boy grew up. My mother used to give me money and sweets not to
smoke. Now that method is looked upon as worthless and immoral. The
modern teacher, taking his stand on logic, tries to make the child
form good principles, not from fear, nor from desire for distinction
or reward, but consciously."

While he was walking about, thinking, Seryozha climbed up with his
legs on a chair sideways to the table, and began drawing. That he
might not spoil official paper nor touch the ink, a heap of
half-sheets, cut on purpose for him, lay on the table together with
a blue pencil.

"Cook was chopping up cabbage to-day and she cut her finger," he
said, drawing a little house and moving his eyebrows. "She gave
such a scream that we were all frightened and ran into the kitchen.
Stupid thing! Natalya Semyonovna told her to dip her finger in cold
water, but she sucked it . . . And how could she put a dirty finger
in her mouth! That's not proper, you know, papa!"

Then he went on to describe how, while they were having dinner, a
man with a hurdy-gurdy had come into the yard with a little girl,
who had danced and sung to the music.

"He has his own train of thought!" thought the prosecutor. "He has
a little world of his own in his head, and he has his own ideas of
what is important and unimportant. To gain possession of his
attention, it's not enough to imitate his language, one must also
be able to think in the way he does. He would understand me perfectly
if I really were sorry for the loss of the tobacco, if I felt injured
and cried. . . . That's why no one can take the place of a mother
in bringing up a child, because she can feel, cry, and laugh together
with the child. One can do nothing by logic and morality. What more
shall I say to him? What?"

And it struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as strange and absurd that he, an
experienced advocate, who spent half his life in the practice of
reducing people to silence, forestalling what they had to say, and
punishing them, was completely at a loss and did not know what to
say to the boy.

"I say, give me your word of honour that you won't smoke again,"
he said.

"Word of hon-nour!" carolled Seryozha, pressing hard on the pencil
and bending over the drawing. "Word of hon-nour!"

"Does he know what is meant by word of honour?" Bykovsky asked
himself. "No, I am a poor teacher of morality! If some schoolmaster
or one of our legal fellows could peep into my brain at this moment
he would call me a poor stick, and would very likely suspect me of
unnecessary subtlety. . . . But in school and in court, of course,
all these wretched questions are far more simply settled than at
home; here one has to do with people whom one loves beyond everything,
and love is exacting and complicates the question. If this boy were
not my son, but my pupil, or a prisoner on his trial, I should not
be so cowardly, and my thoughts would not be racing all over the
place!"

Yevgeny Petrovitch sat down to the table and pulled one of Seryozha's
drawings to him. In it there was a house with a crooked roof, and
smoke which came out of the chimney like a flash of lightning in
zigzags up to the very edge of the paper; beside the house stood a
soldier with dots for eyes and a bayonet that looked like the figure
4.

"A man can't be taller than a house," said the prosecutor.

Seryozha got on his knee, and moved about for some time to get
comfortably settled there.

"No, papa!" he said, looking at his drawing. "If you were to draw
the soldier small you would not see his eyes."

Ought he to argue with him? From daily observation of his son the
prosecutor had become convinced that children, like savages, have
their own artistic standpoints and requirements peculiar to them,
beyond the grasp of grown-up people. Had he been attentively observed,
Seryozha might have struck a grown-up person as abnormal. He thought
it possible and reasonable to draw men taller than houses, and to
represent in pencil, not only objects, but even his sensations.
Thus he would depict the sounds of an orchestra in the form of smoke
like spherical blurs, a whistle in the form of a spiral thread. . . .
To his mind sound was closely connected with form and colour,
so that when he painted letters he invariably painted the letter L
yellow, M red, A black, and so on.

Abandoning his drawing, Seryozha shifted about once more, got into
a comfortable attitude, and busied himself with his father's beard.
First he carefully smoothed it, then he parted it and began combing
it into the shape of whiskers.

"Now you are like Ivan Stepanovitch," he said, "and in a minute you
will be like our porter. Papa, why is it porters stand by doors?
Is it to prevent thieves getting in?"

The prosecutor felt the child's breathing on his face, he was
continually touching his hair with his cheek, and there was a warm
soft feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his hands but
his whole soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha's jacket.

He looked at the boy's big dark eyes, and it seemed to him as though
from those wide pupils there looked out at him his mother and his
wife and everything that he had ever loved.

"To think of thrashing him . . ." he mused. "A nice task to devise
a punishment for him! How can we undertake to bring up the young?
In old days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled
problems boldly. But we think too much, we are eaten up by logic
. . . . The more developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives
himself up to subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he
becomes, and the more timidity he shows in taking action. How much
courage and self-confidence it needs, when one comes to look into
it closely, to undertake to teach, to judge, to write a thick
book. . . ."

It struck ten.

"Come, boy, it's bedtime," said the prosecutor. "Say good-night and
go."

"No, papa," said Seryozha, "I will stay a little longer. Tell me
something! Tell me a story. . . ."

"Very well, only after the story you must go to bed at once."

Yevgeny Petrovitch on his free evenings was in the habit of telling
Seryozha stories. Like most people engaged in practical affairs,
he did not know a single poem by heart, and could not remember a
single fairy tale, so he had to improvise. As a rule he began with
the stereotyped: "In a certain country, in a certain kingdom," then
he heaped up all kinds of innocent nonsense and had no notion as
he told the beginning how the story would go on, and how it would
end. Scenes, characters, and situations were taken at random,
impromptu, and the plot and the moral came of itself as it were,
with no plan on the part of the story-teller. Seryozha was very
fond of this improvisation, and the prosecutor noticed that the
simpler and the less ingenious the plot, the stronger the impression
it made on the child.

"Listen," he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. "Once upon a
time, in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived an
old, very old emperor with a long grey beard, and . . . and with
great grey moustaches like this. Well, he lived in a glass palace
which sparkled and glittered in the sun, like a great piece of clear
ice. The palace, my boy, stood in a huge garden, in which there
grew oranges, you know . . . bergamots, cherries . . . tulips,
roses, and lilies-of-the-valley were in flower in it, and birds of
different colours sang there. . . . Yes. . . . On the trees there
hung little glass bells, and, when the wind blew, they rang so
sweetly that one was never tired of hearing them. Glass gives a
softer, tenderer note than metals. . . . Well, what next? There
were fountains in the garden. . . . Do you remember you saw a
fountain at Auntie Sonya's summer villa? Well, there were fountains
just like that in the emperor's garden, only ever so much bigger,
and the jets of water reached to the top of the highest poplar."

Yevgeny Petrovitch thought a moment, and went on:

"The old emperor had an only son and heir of his kingdom--a boy
as little as you. He was a good boy. He was never naughty, he went
to bed early, he never touched anything on the table, and altogether
he was a sensible boy. He had only one fault, he used to
smoke. . . ."

Seryozha listened attentively, and looked into his father's eyes
without blinking. The prosecutor went on, thinking: "What next?"
He spun out a long rigmarole, and ended like this:

"The emperor's son fell ill with consumption through smoking, and
died when he was twenty. His infirm and sick old father was left
without anyone to help him. There was no one to govern the kingdom
and defend the palace. Enemies came, killed the old man, and destroyed
the palace, and now there are neither cherries, nor birds, nor
little bells in the garden. . . . That's what happened."

This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naive, but the
whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes
were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute
he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a
sinking voice:

"I am not going to smoke any more. . . ."

When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and
down the room and smiled to himself.

"They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,"
he meditated. "It may be so, but that's no comfort. It's not the
right way, all the same. . . . Why must morality and truth never
be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments,
sweetened and gilded like pills? It's not normal. . . . It's
falsification . . . deception . . . tricks . . . ."

He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to
make a "speech," of the general public who absorb history only from
legends and historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered
an understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables,
novels, poems.

"Medicine should be sweet, truth beautiful, and man has had this
foolish habit since the days of Adam . . . though, indeed, perhaps
it is all natural, and ought to be so. . . . There are many deceptions
and delusions in nature that serve a purpose."

He set to work, but lazy, intimate thoughts still strayed through
his mind for a good while. Overhead the scales could no longer be
heard, but the inhabitant of the second storey was still pacing
from one end of the room to another.

Russian short stories