Meanwhile, the heavy Siberian rains had set in and as he approached the Irtysh River natives tried to persuade him, because of news of floods, to wait at the tiny station he had reached. But Chekhov had decided that two of his faults on this journey, which had already cost him extra expense, trouble, and inconvenience, were his tendency to listen to persuaders and his readiness to give in. Stubbornly he disregarded the advice. Soon there loomed up before him what seemed like an immense lake, from which patches of earth appeared and bushes stuck up. However, he refused to turn back. At times he and his driver had to get out and lead the horses through the water over broken bridges on the road while the wind and rain whipped about them. When he finally reached the ferry station of the Irysh, after heroic efforts, the boatmen refused to budge because of the high winds. Disconsolate, he had to remain there for the night, watching the white waves splash on the clay bank and imagining that the river gave forth a strange sound as though someone were nailing up coffins under the water.
The same vile weather continued to bedevil him during the remainder of the way to Tomsk. The River Ob had also overflowed its banks and he got across with difficulty; and on the River Tom a violent wind blew up which threatened to swamp the rowboat. The boatman advised waiting in the willow bushes nearby, but the passengers urged him to go on lest they have to spend the night there. The river became more sinister as a gale-driven rain lashed sideways. His heart was heavy, Chekhov wrote, and he kept thinking that if the boat capsized, he would first throw off his sheepskin coat, then his jacket. As the opposite bank drew nearer, the rowers pulled at the oars more cheerfully. Little by little his heart grew light, and when the bank was only twenty feet away, he was suddenly filled with joy. "It's good to be a coward," he reflected. "You don't need much to feel very happy all of a sudden!"
So bad were the roads that in the last two days of his trip to Tomsk, Chekhov had not been able to travel much more than a total of forty miles. He arrived in the city on the evening of May 15, and he regarded it as no compensation for his laborious journey to be told at the hotel that there had not been as cold and rainy a spring as this one since 1842. Chekhov decided to remain in Tomsk till the rains were over.
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He found Tomsk a dull and intemperate town, devoid of attractive women, and with an Asiatic disregard for justice. The few intellectuals Chekhov met were also dull, including the editor of the local newspaper who drank him out of six roubles' worth of vodka. The Assistant Chief of Police paid a call, not to make any charges but with the manuscript of a play which he wished to promote. They had drinks together and he invited Chekhov downtown to inspect the brothels. "I have just returned from these houses," he wrote Suvorin. "Revolting. Two o'clock in the morning." (May 20,1890.)
Much of the five days he spent at Tomsk was devoted to letter writing and to the first of the articles on his trip which he had undertaken to do for New Times. They are chatty, informative sketches, nine in number, containing perfect little genre pictures of situations and vivid portrayals of people he encountered 011 the road, as well as passages of sharp criticism of bureaucratic officials and of the hopeless lives of Siberian exiles. Chekhov also used the stay at Tomsk to replenish his travel equipment. The trunk he had carted all the way from Moscow was dispensed with in favor of a large folding leather sack that would not stick in his ribs. And for a hundred and thirty roubles he also bought a small carriage, in the belief that he would save money if only he could sell it at the end of his journey.
In his new carriage Chekhov left Tomsk on May 21 for his next major stopping place, Irkutsk, another thousand miles away. Accompanying him in their own vehicle were two lieutenants and an army doctor. Bad as the roads had been so far, they were as paved highways compared to the ferocious ruts and liquid mud on the way to Irkutsk. Ilis carriage repeatedly broke down and the heavy repair costs set him to wondering whether his money would hold out. "I pay more than I need to," he wrote his sister in a mood of self-criticism. "I do the wrong thing, and I say the wrong thing, and I'm always expecting what does not happen." (May 28, i8go.) As he emerged from the interminable forest before Krasnoyarsk to glimpse a mountain range in the distance, his spirits rose. The sun shone on budding birch trees and there were no more cold driving winds and rains. Summer had at last come to Siberia. When he arrived at Irkutsk on June 4 he decided, in this cheerful mood, that it was the best of all Siberian towns.
The bliss of a steam bath, profound sleep in a comfortable bed in a decent hotel, a change to clean clothes from his messed and dirty outfit of the road, and then a stroll around remote Irkutsk with its theater, museum, and a park that sported a band concert — all these ordinary pleasures somehow minimized the physical hardships and the dangers through flood and field which Chekhov had undergone. He now looked back on it all with the satisfied wonder of accomplishment. In a letter to Alexander, he thanked God that he had been given the strength and opportunity to make this journey, for he had experienced a great deal, he said, that was new, important, and interesting. He could now dwell in his letters and articles on the mysteriousness of the illimitable forest, the taiga, that he had passed through, the misty and dreamy mountains beyond, which had reminded him of the Caucasus, and the wild beauty of the Yenisei, that "fierce and mighty warrior" of rivers which he had crossed to get to Irkutsk. If man began boldly on the banks of the Russian Volga — Chekhov wrote in his last sketch for New Times — he may end with a moan that is called song, his bright golden hopes replaced by what goes under the name of "Russian pessimism." However, if life began with a moan on the banks of the Siberian Yenesei, it may end, he prophetically predicted, with an audacity which we Russians have never dreamed of.
In a moment of homesickness during this pause from travel, Chekhov had wired the family to pool its resources and send him a long telegram. (Shortly after his departure they had given up the house on
Sadovaya Kudrinskaya as too expensive to maintain during his long absence, and had moved to the summer dacha on the Lintvarev estate.) The response informed him that his mother and Misha were off on1 a trip south to Holy Mountains; his sister, accompanied by Natalya Lintvareva, was in the Crimea; and his father at Ivan's in Moscow, where they were presumably following the stages of his journey on the large wall map he had procured for them. Chekhov wrote his mother from Irkutsk a long and interesting letter about his trip, gave her directions about money matters, and pleaded for details about the family. Was she taking good care of her bad leg? What had happened: to Auntie Fedosiya and her son? How was Misha's love-life going? He himself, he declared, must be in love with the beautiful Lika, for he dreamed of her the other night. She was a queen, he insisted, compared to the Siberian women and girls, who were like frozen fish — "You'd' have to be a walrus or a seal to have an affair with them." And in an expansive mood he urged upon her the wisdom of searching for a farm which he could buy. "When I return to Russia I'm going to rest for five years — that is, I'm going to stay in one place and twiddle my thumbs. A farm would be most appropriate. I think the money can be found, for my affairs are not in a bad way. If I work off the advance (half of it is worked off already), next spring I shall certainly obtain another advance of two or three thousand to be paid off in installments over a five-year period. This won't trouble my conscience, since the bookstores of New Times have already earned 011 my books more than two or three thousand, and I shall earn still more for them. I don't think I shall undertake anything serious until I'm thirty-five; I want a taste of personal life which I once had but did not pay enough attention to because of various circumstances!" (June 7, i8go.)