And as the banquet continues, everyone, as if in a dream, ignores his horrible behavior; their failure to note his angry complaining in itself confuses him and dimly, frighteningly awakens in him the awareness that he is in fact about to die. His sense of taste is off; food is unpleasant. He gives a surly, embittered speech:
He several times referred to certain enemies of his, tried to drop hints, repeated himself, coughed, and flourished his fingers unbecomingly. At last he was exhausted and in a perspiration, and he began talking jerkily, in a low voice as though to himself, and finished his speech not quite coherently: “And so I propose the health of Bruni, that is Adolf Andreyich, who is here, among us… generally speaking… you understand…”
When he finished everyone gave a faint sigh, as though someone had sprinkled cold water and cleared the air. Bruni alone apparently had no unpleasant feeling. Beaming and rolling his sentimental eyes, the German shook Sysoev’s hand with feeling and was again as friendly as a dog.
Chekhov himself had to lie about or disguise his own tuberculosis, though friends regularly noticed his symptoms and coughing fits.
After the German owner of the factory-school lauds Sysoev to the skies, the praises from all come raining down:
And all present at the dinner began as one man talking of Sysoev’s extraordinary talent. And as though a dam had been burst, there followed a flood of sincere, enthusiastic words such as men do not utter when they are restrained by prudent and cautious sobriety. Sysoev’s speech and his intolerable temper and the horrid, spiteful expression on his face were all forgotten. Everyone talked freely, even the shy and silent new teachers, poverty-stricken, down-trodden youths who never spoke to the inspector without addressing him as “your honor.” It was clear that in his own circle Sysoev was a person of consequence.
Having been accustomed to success and praise for the fourteen years that he had been schoolmaster, he listened with indifference to the noisy enthusiasm of his admirers.
This indifference cracks, however, when the factory boss concludes the round of praises:
“In response to your words I ought to tell you that… Fyodor Lukich’s family will be provided for and that a sum of money was placed in the bank a month ago for that object.”
Sysoev looked enquiringly at the German, at his colleagues, as though unable to understand why his family should be provided for and not he himself. And at once on all the faces, in all the motionless eyes bent upon him, he read not the sympathy, not the commiseration which he could not endure, but something else, something soft, tender, but at the same time intensely sinister, like a terrible truth, something which in one instant turned him cold all over and filled his soul with unutterable despair. With a pale, distorted face he suddenly jumped up and clutched at his head. For a quarter of a minute he stood like that, stared with horror at a fixed point before him as though he saw the swiftly coming death of which Bruni was speaking, then sat down and burst into tears.
Chekhov himself shuddered to think of a roomful of pitying well-wishers with “motionless eyes bent upon him.”
No one ever saw Chekhov weep, but they would have seen him mortified while being lauded at the premiere of The Cherry Orchard, just six months before his death in 1904: “Chekhov found himself compelled to take the stage and remain standing at length, weak and coughing, to be celebrated. He was presented with such gifts as an antique laurel wreath, […] adorned with portraits of actors and students”; he had to listen to speeches of gratitude from the theater group that “owed so much to Chekhov’s ‘talent,’ ‘tender heart,’ and ‘pure soul’ that Chekhov should consider it his own. Endless bombast arrived in telegrams from all over Russia. Chekhov, who had mocked such sententiousness all his writing life, could only submit to being its object.”7
When Sysoev gets home, he tries to restore his faith in his recovery. Meanwhile, “the district doctor was sitting in the next room and telling his wife in a whisper that a man ought not to have been allowed to go out to dinner who had not in all probability more than a week to live.”
Chekhov later touched up this story, even more than he had “The Chorus Girl”; he excised paragraphs and an entire scene after Sysoev’s breakdown at the banquet, wherein Lyapunov catches up with him and profusely apologizes.
Commentator after commentator point out how little revising Chekhov did after publication. This occurrence of editing was unusual, and yet in each of these July stories that he later edited, he did not change the tone or feeling, as he had in “A Little Joke.”
“A Troublesome Visitor” (“Bespokoinyi Gost’ ”) came out in the middle of July, when Chekhov had happy and untroublesome visitors at Babkino. He was even trying to get Leykin to come for a stay. The nightmarish story’s troublesome visitor, on the other hand, is a hunter who has stopped in bad weather at a forester’s hut. The forester is skittish and declares: “I am not afraid of wolves or bears, or wild beasts of any sort, but I am afraid of man. You can save yourself from beasts with a gun or some other weapon, but you have no means of saving yourself from a wicked man.”8 As they sit in uneasy company with each other, they hear a cry for help, but the forester refuses to investigate.
The hunter and the forester fell to listening with their eyes fixed on the window. Through the noise of the forest they could hear sounds such as the strained ear can always distinguish in every storm, so that it was difficult to make out whether people were calling for help or whether the wind was wailing in the chimney. But the wind tore at the roof, tapped at the paper on the window, and brought a distinct shout of “Help!”
The hunter can’t persuade the forester to go out with him to look, so he goes himself. Minutes later he returns, having encountered a woman who had run into difficulties with her cart. The hunter is now doubly contemptuous of his host and at the same time becomes suspicious and menacing:
“You must have money to be afraid of people! A man who is poor is not likely to be afraid….”
“For those words you will answer before God,” Artyom said hoarsely from the stove. “I have no money.”
“I dare say! Scoundrels always have money…. Why are you afraid of people, then? So you must have! I’d like to take and rob you for spite, to teach you a lesson!…”
Disgusted with the timid forester, the threatening hunter leaves the hut, and the forester bolts the door. The story ends here, but Dostoevsky (to bring in an expert on nightmares) would have kept it going toward a violent or dramatic resolution.
Chekhov published only two more pieces this month, both of them quite moralistic. “A Rare Bird” (July 19) is a twenty-line tale, published under the Latin title “Rara Avis,” wherein a crime novelist asks a detective to show him various types of criminals, which the detective finds easy, but when the novelist wants to see a few good “ideal and honest” folks for contrast, the detective is stumped.
“Other People’s Misfortune” (“Chuzhaya Beda,” July 28) is an unusually simple tale: a rich conservative expresses his contempt for a down-on-their-luck traditional family, whose estate he and his wife are buying:
“Of course I’m sorry for them, but it’s their own fault. Who forced them to mortgage their estate? Why have they neglected it so? We really oughtn’t to feel sorry for them…. He’s probably a drunkard and a gambler—did you see his mug?—and she is a woman of fashion and a spendthrift. I know these characters!”
“How do you know them, Styopa?”
“I know!…”9
Not only are we cheap with financial charity, suggests Chekhov, we’re cheap with our moral charity. Sympathetic understanding is a moral exercise, and morally flabby Styopa doesn’t do that kind of exercise.