“By the way, Yevgeny Petrovitch, I should like to ask you to
speak to Seryozha. To-day, and the day before yesterday, I have noticed that he
is smoking. When I began to expostulate with him, he put his fingers in his
ears as usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice."
Yevgeny Petrovitch Bykovsky, the prosecutor of the circuit
court, who had just come back from a session and was taking off his gloves in
his study, looked at the governess as she made her report, and laughed.
"Seryozha smoking... " he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I can
picture the little cherub with a cigarette in his mouth! Why, how old is
he?"
"Seven. You think it is not important, but at his age
smoking is a bad and pernicious habit, and bad habits ought to be eradicated in
the beginning."
"Perfectly true. And where does he get the
tobacco?"
"He takes it from the drawer in your table."
"Yes? In that case, send him to me." When the
governess had gone out, Bykovsky sat down in an arm-chair before his
writing-table, shut his eyes, and fell to thinking. He pictured his Seryozha
with a huge cigar, a yard long, in the midst of clouds of tobacco smoke, and
this caricature made him smile; at the same time, the grave, troubled face of
the governess called up memories of the long past, half-forgotten time when
smoking aroused in his teachers and parents a strange, not quite intelligible
horror.
It really was horror. Children were mercilessly flogged and
expelled from school, and their lives were made a misery on account of smoking,
though not a single teacher or father knew exactly what was the harm or
sinfulness of smoking. Even very intelligent people did not scruple to wage war
on a vice which they did not understand.
Yevgeny Petrovitch remembered the head-master of the high
school, a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when he
found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale,
immediately summoned an emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the
sinner to expulsion.
This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was
understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.
Anton Chekhov – Home (short story published in 1887)
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