Instead, as I reread “In the Coach-House” (“V Sarae,” August 3) I decided that Chekhov was just as creative and ingenious as ever. Why had I doubted him? What I’ve learned is that Chekhov wrote so many gems that I took them for granted and couldn’t keep track of them all. The story is about servants of a grand house discussing the suicide of a married father, a “gentleman.” But before we know or realize any of that, Chekhov presents the coach-house as a kind of stage set: the light, the darkness, the people, the smelclass="underline"
It was between nine and ten o’clock in the evening. Stepan the coachman, Mihailo the house-porter, Alyoshka the coachman’s grandson, who had come up from the village to stay with his grandfather, and Nikandr, an old man of seventy, who used to come into the yard every evening to sell salt herrings, were sitting around a lantern in the big coach-house, playing “kings.” Through the wide-open door could be seen the whole yard, the big house, where the master’s family lived, the gates, the cellars, and the porter’s lodge. It was all shrouded in the darkness of night, and only the four windows of one of the lodges which was let were brightly lit up. The shadows of the coaches and sledges with their shafts tipped upward stretched from the walls to the doors, quivering and cutting across the shadows cast by the lantern and the players…. On the other side of the thin partition that divided the coach-house from the stable were the horses. There was a scent of hay, and a disagreeable smell of salt herrings coming from old Nikandr.
Once Chekhov has the scene vibrant to all his senses, he can move the story in seemingly any direction. Only in the midst of the card game do we learn of the incident in the “big house.”
“It’s a nasty business,” said the porter, sitting down to the cards again. “I have just let the doctors out. They have not extracted it.”
“How could they? Just think, they would have to pick open the brains. If there is a bullet in the head, of what use are doctors?”
“He is lying unconscious,” the porter went on. “He is bound to die. Alyoshka, don’t look at the cards, you little puppy, or I will pull your ears! Yes, I let the doctors out, and the father and mother in…. They have only just arrived. Such crying and wailing, Lord preserve us! They say he is the only son…. It’s a grief!”
Was Volodya Suvorin’s suicide in Chekhov’s thoughts? A month ago Chekhov had teased Maria Kiseleva about her story “Stray Bullets” and putting a gun to one’s head. We have noticed Chekhov continually joking about wanting to shoot himself in despair, and it has happened in this story. But instead of relating it in a context that was familiar to him as a doctor and a friend, he tells it from the point of view of the servants.
The porter sums up the suicide for his companions:
“I have orders to go to the police station tomorrow,” said the porter. “There will be an inquiry… But what do I know about it? I saw nothing of it. He called me this morning, gave me a letter, and said: ‘Put it in the letter-box for me.’ And his eyes were red with crying. His wife and children were not at home. They had gone out for a walk. So when I had gone with the letter, he put a bullet into his forehead from a revolver. When I came back his cook was wailing for the whole yard to hear.”
“It’s a great sin,” said the fish-hawker in a husky voice, and he shook his head, “a great sin!”
They agree on that judgment, and they speculate on the suicide’s reasoning:
“From too much learning,” said the porter, taking a trick; “his wits outstripped his wisdom. Sometimes he would sit writing papers all night…. Play, peasant!… But he was a nice gentleman. And so white skinned, black-haired and tall!… He was a good lodger.”
“It seems the fair sex is at the bottom of it,” said the coachman, slapping the nine of trumps on the king of diamonds. “It seems he was fond of another man’s wife and disliked his own; it does happen.”
With Maria Kiseleva in mind, Chekhov could have written this as a lesson: If she was going to attempt to write about suicide, and if someone shoots himself in the head, then this is what happens. Grief overwhelms the family and the terror of death infects others. The old man remembers the old days:
“It was the same thing at our lady’s,” he said, pulling his cap on further. “We were serfs in those days; the younger son of our mistress, the General’s lady, shot himself through the mouth with a pistol, from too much learning, too. It seems that by law such have to be buried outside the cemetery, without priests, without a requiem service; but to save disgrace our lady, you know, bribed the police and the doctors, and they gave her a paper to say her son had done it when delirious, not knowing what he was doing. You can do anything with money. So he had a funeral with priests and every honor, the music played, and he was buried in the church; for the deceased General had built that church with his own money, and all his family were buried there. Only this is what happened, friends. One month passed, and then another, and it was all right. In the third month they informed the General’s lady that the watchmen had come from that same church. What did they want? They were brought to her, they fell at her feet. ‘We can’t go on serving, your excellency,’ they said. ‘Look out for other watchmen and graciously dismiss us.’ ‘What for?’ ‘No,’ they said, ‘we can’t possibly; your son howls under the church all night.’ ”
We see in the prohibition of burying suicides in the church cemetery the natural birth of a ghost story. As the account of that incident goes on, the men and the boy get the creeps; the boy becomes almost hysterical with fear. “The General’s lady” eventually believed various testimonials about the howling and she ordered that her son be reburied outside the cemetery.
The old man tells of an intriguing custom concerning the lone exception to the prohibition against praying for the souls of those who have committed suicide:
“There is only one day in the year when one may pray for such people: the Saturday before Trinity…. You mustn’t give alms to beggars for their sake, it is a sin, but you may feed the birds for the rest of their souls.”4
Chekhov knows eerie and what it is to be spooked:
“The man was living and is dead!” said the coachman, looking toward the windows where shadows were still flitting to and fro. “Only this morning he was walking about the yard, and now he is lying dead.”
“The time will come and we shall die too,” said the porter, walking away with the fish-hawker, and at once they both vanished from sight in the darkness.
Chekhov has us and himself stand at a respectful distance from the family’s grief. This may as well be the Suvorin family:
The coachman, and Alyoshka after him, somewhat timidly went up to the lighted windows. A very pale lady with large tear-stained eyes, and a fine-looking gray-headed man were moving two card-tables into the middle of the room, probably with the intention of laying the dead man upon them, and on the green cloth of the table numbers could still be seen written in chalk. The cook who had run about the yard wailing in the morning was now standing on a chair, stretching up to try and cover the looking glass with a towel.
“Grandfather, what are they doing?” asked Alyoshka in a whisper.
“They are just going to lay him on the tables,” answered his grandfather. “Let us go, child, it is bedtime.”
There is more grieving and more howling by the parents. After the card game resumes, the terrified Alyoshka falls asleep, has a nightmare, but wakes up to comforting daylight.