He said this and expected that the postman would tell him something, but the latter preserved a sullen silence and retreated into his collar.
The student’s spirits are light. He can’t imagine, however, anyone’s spirits ever dampening or that his own excitement would not prove infectious. He receives the postman’s brutal simple comeuppance:
“How fond you are of talking, upon my word!” he said. “Can’t you keep quiet when you are traveling?”
Here’s what Chekhov can do: simultaneously have us sympathize with the young man and completely understand the grouchy postman.
The sensitive student has been knocked into a grim mood. Chekhov makes us conscious of what has happened, but the boy doesn’t know: “The chill of the morning and the surliness of the postman gradually infected the student. He looked apathetically at the country around him, waited for the warmth of the sun, and thought of nothing but how dreadful and horrible it must be for the poor trees and the grass to endure the cold nights.”
Just before they arrive at the station, we realize that the postman has been wrestling with his feelings of discourtesy. He explains:
“It’s against the regulations to take anyone with the post….” the postman said unexpectedly. “It’s not allowed! And since it is not allowed, people have no business… to get in…. Yes. It makes no difference to me, it’s true, only I don’t like it, and I don’t wish it.”
Chekhov doesn’t allow us to simplify our conclusions about postmen or even about age versus youth. The violation of regulations has rankled the postman, and two people have been made unhappy. Chekhov concludes with questions, ones that the sore, put-out student isn’t asking about the postman, but that we can: “With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn nights?”
In a different mood, Chekhov describes the comically chaotic wedding-day preparations by a bride’s parents in “The Wedding” (“Svadba,” September 21). Chekhov seems to have taken in all the details from the weddings he attended during his trip in the spring; he describes the confusion of the elaborate but necessary marriage customs. When he himself finally married fourteen years later, he avoided absolutely all of it.
On or about September 21, Chekhov began writing the four-act Ivanov. Two weeks later, he had a complete draft, and in November it was staged. Probably he finished writing “The Runaway” (“Beglets,” September 28) first. Chekhov had so far not mentioned any medical work since his return to Moscow from the summer house on September 2. The story is told for the most part from the point of view of seven-year-old Pashka, whose mother has led him on a long walk to a regional hospital clinic. (The age of most of the children, primarily boys, in the short stories these two years has been in the range of six to ten.) The presiding doctor is overwhelmed and sarcastic:
The doctor began seeing the patients. He sat in his little room, and called up the patients in turn. Sounds were continually coming from the little room, piercing wails, a child’s crying, or the doctor’s angry words:
“Come, why are you bawling? Am I murdering you, or what? Sit quiet!”
The doctor knows what’s what and he cannot hold himself back from expressing his frustration. We should regard him as a bad guy. But he actually has Chekhov’s sympathy. When the doctor realizes Pashka’s situation, he blows up at the mother, who, we have learned, is husbandless, and, we will learn, very poor:
The doctor examined his elbow, pressed it, heaved a sigh, clicked with his lips, then pressed it again.
“You ought to be beaten, woman, but there is no one to do it,” he said. “Why didn’t you bring him before? Why, the whole arm is done for. Look, foolish woman. You see, the joint is diseased!”
“You know best, kind sir…” sighed the woman.
“Kind sir…. She’s let the boy’s arm rot, and now it is ‘kind sir.’ What kind of workman will he be without an arm? You’ll be nursing him and looking after him for ages. I bet if you had had a pimple on your nose, you’d have run to the hospital quick enough, but you have left your boy to rot for six months. You are all like that.”
The doctor lighted a cigarette. While the cigarette smoked, he scolded the woman, and shook his head in time to the song he was humming inwardly, while he thought of something else.
Chekhov knows you can’t say “You are all like that.” It’s not true. It’s prejudiced…. It’s certainly not true! But the doctor knows that if it’s not the fault of life itself, it’s the hard-pressed impoverished mother’s fault. Knowing the doctor’s situation, providing care every day to all and sundry, we cannot blame him for his agonized and accusatory response. Unlike the doctor in last month’s “The Doctor,” this doctor is “good” with children. He knows how to speak to them:
“You stop with me, Pashka,” said the doctor, slapping Pashka on the shoulder. “Let mother go home, and you and I will stop here, old man. It’s nice with me, old boy, it’s first-rate here. I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Pashka, we will go catching finches together. I will show you a fox! We will go visiting together! Shall we? And mother will come for you tomorrow! Eh?”
Pashka looked inquiringly at his mother.
“You stay, child!” she said.
“He’ll stay, he’ll stay!” cried the doctor gleefully. “And there is no need to discuss it. I’ll show him a live fox! We will go to the fair together to buy candy! Marya Denisovna, take him upstairs!”
The doctor, apparently a light-hearted and friendly fellow, seemed glad to have company; Pashka wanted to oblige him, especially as he had never in his life been to a fair, and would have been glad to have a look at a live fox, but how could he do without his mother?
Unfortunately, knowing how to speak to children also means the doctor knows how to lie to them. Pashka is fed well and well-bedded, better than he has ever known. He observes the other patients, old and sick and damaged, and something of the direness of his situation seems to be dawning on him. A patient dies in the night, and amid the bustle of the hospital staff hauling the man away, Pashka and some of the other patients awaken.
We already know that Chekhov, according to his little brother Mikhail, had a fear of the dark and preferred having someone sleep in the same room or close by. Mikhail was that someone sleeping in an adjoining ground floor room at the house on Sadovaya in Moscow. “I positively cannot live without guests,” Chekhov later wrote Suvorin. “When I’m alone, for some reason I become terrified, just as though I were alone in a frail little boat on a great ocean.”10 The following scene could have been inspired by one of his own nightmares:
“Ma-a-mka!” he moaned […].
And without waiting for an answer, he rushed into the next ward. There the darkness was dimly lighted up by a night-light and the ikon lamp; the patients, upset by the death of Mihailo, were sitting on their bedsteads: their dishevelled figures, mixed up with the shadows, looked broader, taller, and seemed to be growing bigger and bigger; on the furthest bedstead in the corner, where it was darkest, there sat the peasant moving his head and his hand.
Pashka, without noticing the doors, rushed into the smallpox ward, from there into the corridor, from the corridor he flew into a big room where monsters, with long hair and the faces of old women, were lying and sitting on the beds. Running through the women’s wing he found himself again in the corridor, saw the banisters of the staircase he knew already, and ran downstairs. There he recognized the waiting-room in which he had sat that morning, and began looking for the door into the open air.
The latch creaked, there was a whiff of cold wind, and Pashka, stumbling, ran out into the yard. He had only one thought—to run, to run! He did not know the way, but felt convinced that if he ran he would be sure to find himself at home with his mother. The sky was overcast, but there was a moon behind the clouds. Pashka ran from the steps straight forward, went around the barn and stumbled into some thick bushes; after stopping for a minute and thinking, he dashed back again to the hospital, ran around it, and stopped again undecided; behind the hospital there were white crosses.