Who Was To Blame?

Anton Chekhov

As my uncle Pyotr Demyanitch, a lean, bilious collegiate councillor, exceedingly like a stale

smoked fish with a stick through it, was getting ready to go to the high school, where he

taught Latin, he noticed that the corner of his grammar was nibbled by mice.

"I say, Praskovya," he said, going into the kitchen and addressing the cook, "how is it we

have got mice here? Upon my word! yesterday my top hat was nibbled, to-day they have

disfigured my Latin grammar. . . . At this rate they will soon begin eating my clothes!

"What can I do? I did not bring them in!" answered Praskovya.

"We must do something! You had better get a cat, hadn't you?"

Saying this, Pyotr Demyanitch sighed with a careworn air and went out of the kitchen. The

kitten raised his head, looked lazily after him, and shut his eyes again.

The kitten lay awake thinking. Of what? Unacquainted with real life, having no store of

accumulated impressions, his mental processes could only be instinctive, and he could but

picture life in accordance with the conceptions that he had inherited, together with his flesh

and blood, from his ancestors, the tigers (vide Darwin). His thoughts were of the nature of

day-dreams. His feline imagination pictured something like the Arabian desert, over which

flitted shadows closely resembling Praskovya, the stove, the broom. In the midst of the

shadows there suddenly appeared a saucer of milk; the saucer began to grow paws, it began

moving and displayed a tendency to run; the kitten made a bound, and with a thrill of

from the following fact: under the influence of his day-dreams the kitten suddenly leaped

up, looked with flashing eyes at Praskovya, ruffled up his coat, and making one bound,

thrust his claws into the cook's skirt. Obviously he was born a mouse catcher, a worthy son

Livros Grátis

and cornbins, and had it not been for education . . . we will not anticipate, however.

On his way home from the high school, Pyotr Demyanitch went into a general shop and

bought a mouse-trap for fifteen kopecks. At dinner he fixed a little bit of his rissole on the

hook, and set the trap under the sofa, where there were heaps of the pupils' old exercise-

books, which Praskovya used for various domestic purposes. At six o'clock in the evening,

when the worthy Latin master was sitting at the table correcting his pupils' exercises, there

was a sudden "klop!" so loud that my uncle started and dropped his pen. He went at once to

the sofa and took out the trap. A neat little mouse, the size of a thimble, was sniffing the

wires and trembling with fear.

"Aha," muttered Pyotr Demyanitch, and he looked at the mouse malignantly, as though he

tigers in her arms.

"Capital!" said Pyotr Demyanitch, rubbing his hands. "We will give him a lesson. . . . Put

him down opposite the mouse-trap . . . that's it. . . . Let him sniff it and look at it. . . . That's

it. . . ."

The kitten looked wonderingly at my uncle, at his arm-chair, sniffed the mouse-trap in

bewilderment, then, frightened probably by the glaring lamplight and the attention directed

to him, made a dash and ran in terror to the door.

"Stop!" shouted my uncle, seizing him by the tail, "stop, you rascal! He's afraid of a mouse,

the idiot! Look! It's a mouse! Look! Well? Look, I tell you!"

Pyotr Demyanitch took the kitten by the scruff of the neck and pushed him with his nose

on being released darted under the table with his tail in the air.

"It has got away! got away!" cried Pyotr Demyanitch, looking ferocious. "Where is he, the

scoundrel? Under the table? You wait. . ."

"Wretched little beast," he muttered, smacking him on the ear. "Take that, take that! Will

you shirk it next time? Wr-r-r-etch. . . ."

Next day Praskovya heard again the summons.

"Praskovya, there is a mouse caught! Bring the kitten here!"

After the outrage of the previous day the kitten had taken refuge under the stove and had

not come out all night. When Praskovya pulled him out and, carrying him by the scruff of

the neck into the study, set him down before the mouse-trap, he trembled all over and

mewed piteously.

Look and learn! Stop, plague take you!" he shouted, noticing that the kitten was backing

the kitten, flung itself against Praskovya's hand and fled under the cupboard; the kitten,

"He's let another mouse go!" bawled Pyotr Demyanitch. "Do you call that a cat? Nasty little

beast! Thrash him! thrash him by the mousetrap!"

When the third mouse had been caught, the kitten shivered all over at the sight of the

mousetrap and its inmate, and scratched Praskovya's hand. . . . After the fourth mouse my

uncle flew into a rage, kicked the kitten, and said:

"Take the nasty thing away! Get rid of it! Chuck it away! It's no earthly use!"

A year passed, the thin, frail kitten had turned into a solid and sagacious tom-cat. One day

he was on his way by the back yards to an amatory interview. He had just reached his

destination when he suddenly heard a rustle, and thereupon caught sight of a mouse which

ran from a water-trough towards a stable; my hero's hair stood on end, he arched his back,