Excellent People Page #3

"Excellent People" is a short story by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov that delves into the lives and dilemmas of various characters, capturing the complexity of human nature and social interactions. The narrative revolves around a gathering at a summer estate where discussions about morality, society, and personal ambitions unfold. With Chekhov's signature wit and keen observations, the story explores themes of hypocrisy, the search for meaning, and the often conflicting desires of individuals, all while highlighting the peculiarities of the human condition. Through sharp dialogue and nuanced character portrayals, Chekhov invites readers to reflect on what it truly means to be 'excellent' in a flawed world.

								

and who loved her, a man both wealthy and intellectual, simply because
marriage made her work as a schoolmistress impossible. Vera Semyonovna
lay on the sofa and brooded.

"My God, how slow it is!" she said, stretching. "How insipid and empty
life is! I don't know what to do with myself, and you are wasting your
best years in goodness knows what. Like some alchemist, you are
rummaging in old rubbish that nobody wants. My God!"

Vladimir Semyonitch dropped his pen and slowly looked round at his
sister.

"It's depressing to look at you!" said his sister. "Wagner in 'Faust'
dug up worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you are
looking for worms for the sake of the worms."

"That's vague!"

"Yes, Volodya; all these days I've been thinking, I've been thinking
painfully for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that you
are hopelessly reactionary and conventional. Come, ask yourself what is
the object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me, what is it?
Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can be extracted from
that rubbish in which you are always rummaging. You may pound water in a
mortar and analyse it as long as you like, you'll make nothing more of
it than the chemists have made already. . . ."

"Indeed!" drawled Vladimir Semyonitch, getting up. "Yes, all this is old
rubbish because these ideas are eternal; but what do you consider new,
then?"

"You undertake to work in the domain of thought; it is for you to think
of something new. It's not for me to teach you."

"Me--an alchemist!" the critic cried in wonder and indignation, screwing
up his eyes ironically. "Art, progress--all that is alchemy?"

"You see, Volodya, it seems to me that if all you thinking people had
set yourselves to solving great problems, all these little questions
that you fuss about now would solve themselves by the way. If you go up
in a balloon to see a town, you will incidentally, without any effort,
see the fields and the villages and the rivers as well. When stearine is
manufactured, you get glycerine as a by-product. It seems to me that
contemporary thought has settled on one spot and stuck to it. It is
prejudiced, apathetic, timid, afraid to take a wide titanic flight, just
as you and I are afraid to climb on a high mountain; it is
conservative."

Such conversations could not but leave traces. The relations of the
brother and sister grew more and more strained every day. The brother
became unable to work in his sister's presence, and grew irritable when
he knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back; while the
sister frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to bring back the
past, he attempted to share his enthusiasms with her. Every evening she
complained of being bored, and talked about independence of mind and
those who are in the rut of tradition. Carried away by her new ideas,
Vera Semyonovna proved that the work that her brother was so engrossed
in was conventional, that it was a vain effort of conservative minds to
preserve what had already served its turn and was vanishing from the
scene of action. She made no end of comparisons. She compared her
brother at one time to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who
would sooner die than listen to reason. By degrees there was a
perceptible change in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying
on the sofa all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a
cold, dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong
faith. She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and
tidied her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes.
Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred at
her cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work, which
was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something strained
and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected. And knowing
he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her and teased her
like a schoolboy.

"You won't resist evil, but you resist my having servants!" he taunted
her. "If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That's
inconsistent!"

He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when his
sister began doing odd things before strangers.

"It's awful, my dear fellow," he said to me in private, waving his hands
in despair. "It seems that our ingénue has remained to play a part in
the farce, too. She's become morbid to the marrow of her bones! I've
washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but why does she
talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what it means for me to
listen to her. What I feel when in my presence she has the effrontery to
support her errors by blasphemously quoting the teaching of Christ! It
chokes me! It makes me hot all over to hear my sister propounding her
doctrines and trying to distort the Gospel to suit her, when she
purposely refrains from mentioning how the moneychangers were driven out
of the Temple. That's, my dear fellow, what comes of being half
educated, undeveloped! That's what comes of medical studies which
provide no general culture!"

One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found his
sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed, wringing
her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks. The critic's
good heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his eyes, too, and he
longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg her forgiveness, and to
live as they used to before. . . . He knelt down and kissed her head,
her hands, her shoulders. . . . She smiled, smiled bitterly,
unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped up, seized the magazine
from the table and said warmly:

"Hurrah! We'll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God's blessing! And
I've such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the occasion
with champagne, let us read it together! A splendid, wonderful thing!"

"Oh, no, no!" cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm.
"I've read it already! I don't want it, I don't want it!"

"When did you read it?"

"A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it, I
know it!"

"H'm! . . . You're a fanatic!" her brother said coldly, flinging the
magazine on to the table.

"No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!" And Vera Semyonovna dissolved into
tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her quivering
shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness
endured by any one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of
the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the
outrage of his programme, the outrage to his author's vanity.

From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony, and he
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