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Anyuta
By Anton Chekhov
BIOGRAPHY
IN the cheapest room of a big block of furnished
apartments Stepan Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking
to and fro, zealously conning his anatomy. His mouth was dry and his forehead
perspiring from the unceasing effort to learn it by heart.
In the window, covered by
patterns of frost, sat on a stool the girl who shared his room — Anyuta, a thin
little brunette of five-and-twenty, very pale with mild grey eyes. Sitting with
bent back she was busy embroidering with red thread the collar of a man’s
shirt. She was working against time... The clock in the passage
struck two drowsily, yet the little room had not been put to rights for the morning.
Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, books, clothes, a big filthy
slop-pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette ends were swimming, and the
litter on the floor — all seemed as though purposely jumbled together in one
confusion...
“The right lung consists of
three parts...” Klotchkov repeated. “Boundaries! Upper part on anterior wall
of thorax reaches the fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth
rib... behind to the spina scapulæ...”
Klotchkov raised his eyes
to the ceiling, striving to visualise what he had just read. Unable to form a
clear picture of it, he began feeling his upper ribs through his waistcoat.
“These ribs are like the
keys of a piano,” he said. “One must familiarise oneself with them somehow, if one
is not to get muddled over them. One must study them in the skeleton and the
living body... I say, Anyuta, let me pick them out.”
Anyuta put down her sewing,
took off her blouse, and straightened herself up. Klotchkov sat down facing
her, frowned, and began counting her ribs.
“H’m!... One
can’t feel the first rib; it’s behind the shoulder-blade... This
must be the second rib. . . . Yes . . . this is the third
. . . this is the fourth. . . . H’m! . . . yes.
. . . Why are you wriggling?”
“Your fingers are cold!”
“Come, come . . .
it won’t kill you. Don’t twist about. That must be the third rib, then... this is the fourth... You look such a skinny
thing, and yet one can hardly feel your ribs. That’s the second.. that’s the third... Oh, this is muddling, and one can’t see it
clearly... I must draw it... Where’s my crayon?”
Klotchkov took his crayon
and drew on Anyuta’s chest several parallel lines corresponding with the ribs.
“First-rate. That’s all
straightforward.. Well, now I can sound you. Stand up!”
Anyuta stood up and raised
her chin. Klotchkov began sounding her, and was so absorbed in this occupation
that he did not notice how Anyuta’s lips, nose, and fingers turned blue with
cold. Anyuta shivered, and was afraid the student, noticing it, would leave off
drawing and sounding her, and then, perhaps, might fail in his exam.
“Now it’s all clear,” said
Klotchkov when he had finished. “You sit like that and don’t rub off the
crayon, and meanwhile I’ll learn up a little more.”
And the student again began
walking to and fro, repeating to himself. Anyuta, with black stripes across her
chest, looking as though she had been tattooed, sat thinking, huddled up and
shivering with cold. She said very little as a rule; she was always silent,
thinking and thinking ...
In the six or seven years
of her wanderings from one furnished room to another, she had known five
students like Klotchkov. Now they had all finished their studies, had gone out
into the world, and, of course, like respectable people, had long ago forgotten
her. One of them was living in Paris, two were doctors, the fourth was an
artist, and the fifth was said to be already a professor. Klotchkov was the
sixth... Soon he, too, would finish his studies and go out into
the world. There was a fine future before him, no doubt, and Klotchkov probably
would become a great man, but the present was anything but bright; Klotchkov
had no tobacco and no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left. She
must make haste and finish her embroidery, take it to the woman who had ordered
it, and with the quarter rouble she would get for it, buy tea and tobacco.
“Can I come in?” asked a
voice at the door.
Anyuta quickly threw a woollen
shawl over her shoulders. Fetisov, the artist, walked in.
“I have come to ask you a
favour,” he began, addressing Klotchkov, and glaring like a wild beast from
under the long locks that hung over his brow. “Do me a favour; lend me your
young lady just for a couple of hours! I’m painting a picture, you see, and I
can’t get on without a model.”
“Oh, with pleasure,”
Klotchkov agreed. “Go along, Anyuta.”
“The things I’ve had to put
up with there,” Anyuta murmured softly.
“Rubbish! The man’s asking
you for the sake of art, and not for any sort of nonsense. Why not help him if
you can?”
Anyuta began dressing.
“And what are you
painting?” asked Klotchkov.
“Psyche; it’s a fine
subject. But it won’t go, somehow. I have to keep painting from different
models. Yesterday I was painting one with blue legs. ‘Why are your legs blue?’
I asked her. ‘It’s my stockings stain them,’ she said. And you’re still
grinding! Lucky fellow! You have patience.”
“Medicine’s a job one can’t
get on with without grinding.”
“H’m!... Excuse me, Klotchkov, but you do live like a pig! It’s awful the way you live!”
“How do you mean? I can’t
help it... I only get twelve roubles a month from my father, and
it’s hard to live decently on that.”
“Yes... yes...” said the artist, frowning with an air of disgust; “but, still, you might
live better... An educated man is in duty bound to have taste,
isn’t he? And goodness knows what it’s like here! The bed not made, the slops,
the dirt... yesterday’s porridge in the plates ... Tfoo!”
“That’s true,” said the
student in confusion; “but Anyuta has had no time today to tidy up; she’s been
busy all the while.”
When Anyuta and the artist
had gone out Klotchkov lay down on the sofa and began learning, lying down;
then he accidentally dropped asleep, and waking up an hour later, propped his
head on his fists and sank into gloomy reflection. He recalled the artist’s
words that an educated man was in duty bound to have taste, and his
surroundings actually struck him now as loathsome and revolting. He saw, as it
were in his mind’s eye, his own future, when he would see his patients in his
consulting-room, drink tea in a large dining-room in the company of his wife, a
real lady. And now that slop-pail in which the cigarette ends were swimming looked
incredibly disgusting. Anyuta, too, rose before his imagination — a plain,
slovenly, pitiful figure . . . and he made up his mind to part with
her at once, at all costs.
When, on coming back from
the artist’s, she took off her coat, he got up and said to her seriously:
“Look here, my good girl... sit down and listen. We must part! The fact is, I don’t want to
live with you any longer.”
Anyuta had come back from
the artist’s worn out and exhausted. Standing so long as a model had made her
face look thin and sunken, and her chin sharper than ever. She said nothing in
answer to the student’s words, only her lips began to tremble.
“You know we should have to
part sooner or later, anyway,” said the student. “You’re a nice, good girl, and
not a fool; you’ll understand . . . .”
Anyuta put on her coat
again, in silence wrapped up her embroidery in paper, gathered together her
needles and thread: she found the screw of paper with the four lumps of sugar
in the window, and laid it on the table by the books.
“That’s . . .
your sugar . . .” she said softly, and turned away to conceal her tears.
“Why are you crying?” asked
Klotchkov.
He walked about the room in
confusion, and said:
“You are a strange girl,
really... Why, you know we shall have to part. We can’t stay
together for ever.”
She had gathered together
all her belongings, and turned to say good-bye to him, and he felt sorry for
her.
“Shall I let her stay on
here another week?” he thought. “She really may as well stay, and I’ll tell her
to go in a week;” and vexed at his own weakness, he shouted to her roughly:
“Come, why are you standing
there? If you are going, go; and if you don’t want to, take off your coat and
stay! You can stay!”
Anyuta took off her coat,
silently, stealthily, then blew her nose also stealthily, sighed, and
noiselessly returned to her invariable position on her stool by the window.
The student drew his
textbook to him and began again pacing from corner to corner. “The right lung
consists of three parts,” he repeated; “the upper part, on anterior wall of
thorax, reaches the fourth or fifth rib . . . .”
In the passage some one
shouted at the top of his voice: “Grigory! The
samovar!”
1886.
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Short Stories
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