Note-Book of Anton Chekhov Part 11

Conservative people do so little harm because they are timid and have no confidence in themselves; harm is done not by conservative but by malicious people.

One of two things: either sit in the carriage or get out of it.

For a play: an old woman of radical views dresses like a girl, smokes, cannot exist without company, sympathetic.

In a Pullman car--these are the dregs of society.

On the lady's bosom was the portrait of a fat German.

A man who at all elections all his life long always voted against the Left.

They undressed the corpse, but had no time to take the gloves off; a corpse in gloves.

A farmer at dinner boasts: "Life in the country is cheap--one has one's own chickens, one's own pigs--life is cheap."

A customs official, from want of love for his work, searches the pa.s.sengers, looking for doc.u.ments of a suspicious political nature, and makes even the gendarmes indignant.

A real male (mouzhtchina) consists of man (mouzh) and t.i.tle (tchin).

Education: "Masticate your food properly," their father told them. And they masticated properly, and walked two hours every day, and washed in cold water, and yet they turned out unhappy and without talent.

Commercial and industrial medicine.

N. forty years old married a girl seventeen. The first night, when they returned to his mining village, she went to bed and suddenly burst into tears, because she did not love him. He is a good soul, is overwhelmed with distress, and goes off to sleep in his little working room.

On the spot where the former manor house stood there is no trace left; only one lilac bush remains and that for some reason does not bloom.

Son: "To-day I believe is Thursday."

Mother: (not having heard) "What?"

Son: (angrily) "Thursday!" (quietly) "I ought to take a bath."

Mother: "What?"

Son: (angry and offended) "Bath!"

N. goes to X. every day, talks to him, and shows real sympathy in his grief; suddenly X. leaves his house, where he was so comfortable. N.

asks X.'s mother why he went away. She answers: "Because you came to see him every day."

It was such a romantic wedding, and later--what fools! what babies!

Love. Either it is a remnant of something degenerating, something which once has been immense, or it is a particle of what will in the future develop into something immense; but in the present it is unsatisfying, it gives much less than one expects.

A very intellectual man all his life tells lies about hypnotism, spiritualism--and people believe him; yet he is quite a nice man.

In Act I, X., a respectable man, borrows a hundred roubles from N., and in the course of all four acts he does not pay it back.

A grandmother has six sons and three daughters, and best of all she loves the failure, who drinks and has been in prison.

N., the manager of a factory, rich, with a wife and children, happy, has written "An investigation into the mineral spring at X." He was much praised for it and was invited to join the staff of a newspaper; he gave up his post, went to Petersburg, divorced his wife, spent his money--and went to the dogs.

(Looking at a photograph alb.u.m): "Whose ugly face is that?"