Then a corncrake is up, flying with the wind, not against it, not like the rooks “grown old in the steppe.” Then “the cloud vanished, the sun-baked hills frowned and the air grew calm, and only somewhere the troubled lapwings wailed and lamented their destiny.”
It irks us at first to see Chekhov personifying and moralizing nature in the romantic nineteenth-century way, but we know that a boy might very well do this. When night falls, “as though because the grass cannot see in the dark that it has grown old, a gay youthful twitter rises from it.” Chekhov, the onetime chorister, hears the “whistling, scratching, the basses, tenors and sopranos of the steppe, all mingling in an incessant monotonous roar.”
There is a haze; a solitary bush or boulder will look like a man. Such immobile waiting figures stand on the hills, hide behind the ancient barrows, peep out of the grass. The moon rises and the night grows pale and languid. The effect is eerie. The legends of the steppe come to the boy’s mind, folktales told by some old nurse.
Up to now Chekhov is mostly evoking the steppe as the boy simply sees it. Presently, as in his short stories, Chekhov enters fully into the feelings of the boy he once was. The party has had a roadside meal, and while his elders sleep it off, the boy wanders about, hears someone singing one of those long plaintive, passionate songs, meaningless to a child. First of all, he thinks no one is there and that the grass is singing; then he suddenly sees that a woman is singing and this bores him, but now there is a startling sight. Another boy! He is standing nearby. The two boys stare at each other awkwardly, unbelieving, in a long silence, like two animals staring at their own kind. Suddenly Yegorushka calls, ‘What’s your name?”
The stranger’s cheeks puffed out more than ever; he pressed his back against the rock, opened his eyes wide, moved his lips and answered in a husky bass: “Tit!”
The boys said not another word to each other; after a brief silence, still keeping his eyes fixed on Yegorushka, the mysterious Tit kicked up one leg, felt with his heel for a niche and clambered up the rock; from that point he ascended to the next rock, staggering backwards and looking intently at Yegorushka as though afraid he might hit him from behind, and so made his way upwards till he disappeared altogether behind the crest of the hill.
The melancholy song has died away. Time drags on.
[To Yegorushka] it seemed as though a hundred years had passed since the morning…. God’s world [had] come to a standstill…. with smarting eyes [he] looked before him; the lilac distance, which till then had been motionless, began heaving, and with the sky floated away into the distance. … It drew after it the brown grass, the sedge, and with extraordinary swiftness Yegorushka floated after the flying distance. Some force noiselessly drew him onwards, and … the wearisome song flew after in pursuit.
He comes out of his dream when Deniska, the driver, incurably boyish himself, distracts him by teaching him how to hop on one leg.
The narrative has scores of these little incidents. The most striking things are the encounters with people on the road. The priest is eager for gossip. The party arrive at a dirty inn run by an hysterically excited Jew and Solomon, his satanic and resentful brother. We remember that once when Chekhov was a boy he was rushed to such an inn when, after a swim, he collapsed with acute peritonitis, and a doctor saved his life. The young brother, Solomon, resents the older one because he had been treated as a servant in the past. Solomon’s only moments of liberation have come to him when he had run off to do funny Jewish turns at local fairs, but at present he is all bitterness:
“What am I doing? … The same as everyone else. … I am my brother’s servant; my brother’s the servant of the visitors; the visitors are Varlamov’s servants; and if I had ten millions, Varlamov would be my servant. … because there isn’t a gentleman … who isn’t ready to lick the hand of a scabby Jew for the sake of making a kopeck…. Everybody looks at me as though I were a dog, but if I had money Varlamov would play the fool before me just as my brother Moysey does before you.”
And he goes on to say: “I throw my money into the stove! … I don’t want money, or land, or sheep.”
Moysey says his brother is mad, never sleeps at night and is always thinking and thinking and when you ask him what he is thinking he is angry and laughs. They are all having tea, and Yegorushka is astounded to see Solomon counting his money, a huge pile of ruble notes. And then, as if in a dream, a beautiful and elegant woman comes in, a Polish countess with a huge estate, asking for the mysterious, powerful Varlamov; because she loves haggling in her deals with him, she laughs, doesn’t mind if she is swindled. She is a legend for miles around. Everyone has fantastic stories of her wealth. Yegorushka will never forget that she kissed him, and he is left with the idea that the unseen Varlamov must be an all-powerful wonder. It is a blow to him later on when he at last sees the real Varlamov: he is a nondescript moneyed merchant who swanks about, giving orders to everyone.
The journey crawls on and suddenly the boy has a shock. They catch up with a long procession of wagons carrying wool, and the stern uncle calmly hands the scared boy over to a carter. The uncle has heard that the powerful Varlamov, with whom he and the priest are going to do a deal, has left the high road for a distant village. They will pick the boy up in a day or two. Now the boy is scared and alone. Still, the carters are a jolly lot. They stop to swim naked in a pool; they catch fish and tell frightening stories of robberies and murders.
And the boy finds for the first time in his life a real enemy—one of Chekhov’s sinister and best-drawn characters, a bully named Dymov. He has heard the boy is being taken to “a gentleman’s school” and treats him with provoking contempt. Dymov is the handsome son of well-to-do peasants but has run wild in his youth, spent his money and been forced to start at the bottom and become a laborer. He has dangerous fits of resentment and takes his resentment out on the boy. “You can’t eat with your cap on, and you a gentleman, too!” he sneers. With no uncle or priest to protect him the boy faces a man he fears. He hates Dymov. In one of his sadistic fits Dymov sees a snake, jumps off his wagon and beats it to death, saying it is a viper. It is not; it is a harmless grass snake. To the carters and the boy this act is a terrible sin. Later on in his life Chekhov told the novelist Bunin that Dymov was the sort of déclassé who would either become a revolutionary or go to pieces— “but there will be no revolution in Russia.”
Soon the sky puts on one of its grand scenes: an appalling thunderstorm—and evokes one of Chekhov’s most famous descriptive images. There is a flash of lightning— “someone seemed to strike a match in the sky”—exactly the image a boy would use. The whole steppe is lit up, a hulking black cloud comes over, the wind tears the steppe to pieces, the thunder rolls across the sky. There is a downpour and the boy, alone in his wagon, covers himself with a straw mat and at one point sees a flash “so broad that [he] suddenly saw through a slit in the mat the whole highroad to the very horizon, all the waggoners and even Kiryukha’s waistcoat.”
The end of the story is flat, as life is for us when waking up from a long dream. Reality returns. His elders abruptly hand him over, at a cottage in a small town, to a woman who will take him to the school he dreads. The stern uncle and the jolly priest go off.