Note-Book of Anton Chekhov Part 18

After the inspection of the building, the Commission, which was bribed, lunched heartily, and it was precisely a funeral feast over honesty.

He who tells lies is dirty.

At three o'clock in the morning they wake him: he has to go to his job at the railway station, and so every day for the last fourteen years.

A lady grumbles: "I write to my son that he should change his linen every Sat.u.r.day. He replies: 'Why Sat.u.r.day, not Monday?' I answer: 'Well, all right, let it be Monday.' And he: 'Why Monday, not Tuesday?' He is a nice honest man, but I get worried by him."

A clever man loves learning but is a fool at teaching.

The sermons of priests, archimandrites, and bishops are wonderfully like one another.

One remembers the arguments about the brotherhood of man, public good, and work for the people, but really there were no such arguments, one only drank at the University. They write: "One feels ashamed of the men with University degrees who once fought for human rights and freedom of religion and conscience"--but they never fought.

Every day after dinner the husband threatens his wife that he will become a monk, and the wife cries.

Mordokhvostov.

Husband and wife have lived together and quarreled for eighteen years.

At last he makes a confession, which was in fact untrue, of having been false to her, and they part to his great pleasure and to the wrath of the whole town.

A useless thing, an alb.u.m with forgotten, uninteresting photographs, lies in the corner on a chair; it has been lying there for the last twenty years and no one makes up his mind to throw it away.

N. tells how forty years ago X., a wonderful and extraordinary man, had saved the lives of five people, and N. feels it strange that every one listened with indifference, that the history of X. is already forgotten, uninteresting....

They fell upon the soft caviare greedily, and devoured it in a minute.

In the middle of a serious conversation he says to his little son: "b.u.t.ton up your trousers."

Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.

Dove-colored face.

The squire feeds his pigeons, canaries, and fowls on pepper, acids, and all kinds of rubbish in order that the birds may change their color--and that is his sole occupation: he boasts of it to every visitor.

They invited a famous singer to recite the Acts of the Apostles at the wedding; he recited it, but they have not paid his fee.

For a farce: I have a friend by name Krivomordy (crooked face) and he's all right. Not crooked leg or crooked arm but crooked face: he was married and his wife loved him.

N. drank milk every day, and every time he put a fly in the gla.s.s and then, with the air of a victim, asked the old butler: "What's that?"

He could not live a single day without that.

She is surly and smells of a vapor bath.

N. learned of his wife's adultery. He is indignant, distressed, but hesitates and keeps silent. He keeps silence and ends by borrowing money from Z., the lover, and continues to consider himself an honest man.

When I stop drinking tea and eating bread and b.u.t.ter, I say: "I have had enough." But when I stop reading poems or novels, I say: "No more of that, no more of that."

A solicitor lends money at a high rate of interest, and justifies himself because he is leaving everything to the University of Moscow.