Forty Stories (39 page)

In later years Anna Alexeyevna paid frequent visits to her mother and sister, suffered from spells of melancholia, and came to realize that there were no satisfactions in her life, which was now ruined, and at such times she had no desire to see either her husband or her children. She was also being treated for a nervous breakdown.

We continued to say nothing, to be silent, and in the presence of strangers she displayed toward me a strange irritation: she would contradict everything I said, no matter what it was, and if I engaged in an argument, she would take the side of my opponent. If I dropped something, she would say coldly: “Congratulations!” Or else if I forgot to take the opera glasses when we were going to the theater, she would say later: “I knew you would forget!”

Luckily or unluckily there is nothing in our lives which does not sooner or later come to an end. At last the time for parting came, when Luganovich was appointed chief justice in one of the western provinces. They sold their furniture, their summer villa, and their horses. When for the last time they drove out to the villa and then turned and looked back at the garden and the green roof, everyone was sad, and I realized that the time had come to say good-by not only to the villa. It was decided that at the end of August we should see Anna Alexeyevna off to the Crimea, where the doctors were sending her, and a little while later Luganovich and the children would set off for the western province.

A great crowd of us came to see Anna Alexeyevna off. She said good-by to her husband and children, and then there were only a few moments left before the ringing of the third bell, and I ran into her compartment to put on the rack one of her baskets which she had almost forgotten; and then it was time to say good-by. There, in the compartment, our eyes met, our spiritual fortitude deserted us, I threw my arms round her, and she pressed her face against my chest, and wept. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands all wet with tears—oh, how unhappy
we were!—I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how needless and petty and deceptive were all those things which had kept us from loving one another. I came to realize that when you are in love, then in all your judgments about love you should start from something higher and more important than happiness or unhappiness, virtue and sin in all their accepted meanings, or you should make no judgments at all.

I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and we parted—forever. The train was already in motion. I went into the next compartment, which was empty, and stayed there crying until we came to the next station. Then I got out and walked back to Sofino.

While Alyokhin was telling his story, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanich went out on the balcony, and from there gazed on the beautiful view over the garden and the river gleaming in the sun like a mirror. They admired the view, and at the same time they were full of pity for the man with the kind, intelligent eyes who had told them his story with so much forthrightness, and they were sorry he was rushing hither and thither over his vast estate like a squirrel in a cage instead of devoting himself to science or to some similar occupation which would have made his life more pleasant; and they thought of the sorrowful face the young woman must have shown when he said good-by to her in the compartment and kissed her face and shoulders. Both of them had met her in the town, and Burkin was well acquainted with her and thought her quite beautiful.

1898

THEY were saying a new face had been seen on the esplanade: a lady with a pet dog. Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, who had already spent two weeks in Yalta and regarded himself as an old hand, was beginning to show an interest in new faces. He was sitting in Vernet’s coffeehouse when he saw a young lady, blonde and fairly tall, wearing a beret and walking along the esplanade. A white Pomeranian was trotting behind her.

Later he encountered her several times a day in the public gardens or in the square. She walked alone, always wearing the same beret, and always accompanied by the Pomeranian. No one knew who she was, and people called her simply “the lady with the pet dog.”

“If she is here alone without a husband or any friends,” thought Gurov, “then it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make her acquaintance.”

He was under forty, but he already had a twelve-year-old daughter and two boys at school. He had married young, when still a second-year student at college, and by now his wife looked nearly twice as old as he did. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, dignified and imposing, who called herself a thinking person. She read a good deal, used simplified spelling in her letters, and called her husband Dimitry instead of Dmitry. Though he secretly regarded her as a woman of limited intelligence,
narrow-minded and rather dowdy, he stood in awe of her and disliked being at home. Long ago he had begun being unfaithful to her, and he was now constantly unfaithful, and perhaps that was why he nearly always spoke ill of women, and whenever they were discussed in his presence he would call them “the lower race.”

It seemed to him that he had been so schooled by bitter experience that he was entitled to call them anything he liked, but he was unable to live for even two days without “the lower race.” In the company of men he was bored, cold, ill at ease, and uncommunicative, but felt at home among women, and knew what to say to them and how to behave; and even when he was silent in their presence he felt at ease. In his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature, there was something charming and elusive, which made him attractive to women and cast a spell over them. He knew this, and was himself attracted to them by some mysterious power.

Repeated and bitter experience had taught him that every fresh intimacy, which at first seems to give the spice of variety to life and a sense of delightful and easy conquest, inevitably ends by introducing excessively complicated problems, and creating intolerable situations—this is particularly true of the well-intentioned Moscow people, who are irresolute and slow to embark on adventures. But with every new encounter with an interesting woman he forgot all about his former experiences, and the desire to live surged in him, and everything suddenly seemed simple and amusing.

One evening when he was dining in the public gardens, the lady in the beret came strolling up and sat down at the next table. Her expression, her clothes, her way of walking, the way she did her hair, suggested that she belonged to the upper classes, that she was married, that she was paying her first visit to Yalta, and that she was alone and bored.… Stories told about immorality in Yalta are largely untrue, and for his part Gurov despised them, knowing they were mostly invented
by people who were only too ready to sin, if they had the chance.… But when the lady sat down at the next table a few yards away from him, he remembered all those stories of easy conquests and trips to the mountains, and he was suddenly possessed with the tempting thought of a quick and temporary liaison, a romance with an unknown woman of whose very name he was ignorant.

He beckoned invitingly at the Pomeranian, and when the little dog came up to him, he shook his finger at it. The Pomeranian began to bark. Then Gurov wagged his finger again.

The lady glanced up at him and immediately lowered her eyes.

“He doesn’t bite!” she said, and blushed.

“May I give him a bone?” Gurov said, and when she nodded, he asked politely: “Have you been long in Yalta?”

“Five days.”

“And I am dragging through my second week.”

There was silence for a while.

“Time passes so quickly, and it is so dull here,” she said without looking at him.

“It’s quite the fashion to say it is boring here,” he replied. “People who live out their lives in places like Belevo or Zhizdro are not bored, but when they come here they say: ‘How dull! All this dust!’ One would think they live in Granada!”

She laughed. Then they both went on eating in silence, like complete strangers, but after dinner they walked off together and began to converse lightly and playfully like people who are completely at their ease and contented with themselves, and it is all the same to them where they go or what they talk about. They walked and talked about the strange light of the sea, the soft warm lilac color of the water, and the golden pathway made by the moonlight. They talked of how sultry it was after a hot day. Gurov told her he came from Moscow, that he had been trained as a philologist, though he now worked in a bank, that at one time he had trained to be an opera singer, but had given it up,
and he told her about the two houses he owned in Moscow. From her he learned that she grew up in St. Petersburg and had been married in the town of S––, where she had been living for the past two years, that she would stay another month in Yalta, and perhaps her husband, who also needed a rest, would come to join her. She was not sure whether her husband was a member of a government board or on the zemstvo council, and this amused her. Gurov learned that her name was Anna Sergeyevna.

Afterwards in his room at the hotel he thought about her, and how they would surely meet on the following day. It was inevitable. Getting into bed, he recalled that only a little while ago she was a schoolgirl, doing lessons like his own daughter, and he remembered how awkward and timid she was in her laughter and in her manner of talking with a stranger—it was probably the first time in her life that she had found herself alone, in a situation where men followed her, gazed at her, and talked with her, always with a secret purpose she could not fail to guess. He thought of her slender and delicate throat and her lovely gray eyes.

“There’s something pathetic about her,” he thought, as he fell asleep.

A week had passed since they met. It was a holiday. Indoors it was oppressively hot, but the dust rose in clouds out of doors, and the people’s hats whirled away. All day long Gurov was plagued with thirst, and kept going to the soft-drink stand to offer Anna Sergeyevna a soft drink or an ice cream. There was no refuge from the heat.

In the evening when the wind dropped they walked to the pier to watch the steamer come in. There were a great many people strolling along the pier: they had come to welcome friends, and they carried bunches of flowers. Two peculiarities of a festive Yalta crowd stood out distinctly: the elderly ladies
were dressed like young women, and there were innumerable generals.

Because there was a heavy sea, the steamer was late, and already the sun was going down. The steamer had to maneuver for a long time before it could take its place beside the jetty. Anna Sergeyevna scanned the steamer and the passengers through her lorgnette, as though searching for someone she knew, and when she turned to Gurov her eyes were shining. She talked a good deal, with sudden abrupt questions, and quickly forgot what she had been saying; and then she lost her lorgnette in the crush.

The smartly dressed people went away, and it was now too dark to recognize faces. The wind had dropped, but Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna still stood there as though waiting for someone to come off the steamer. Anna Sergeyevna had fallen silent, and every now and then she would smell her flowers. She did not look at Gurov.

“The weather is better this evening,” he said. “Where shall we go now? We might go for a drive.”

He gazed at her intently and suddenly embraced her and kissed her on the lips, overwhelmed by the perfume and moisture of the flowers. And then, frightened, he looked around—had anyone observed them?

“Let us go to your …” he said softly.

They walked away quickly.

Her room was oppressively hot, and there was the scent of the perfume she had bought at a Japanese shop. Gurov gazed at her, and all the while he was thinking: “How strange are our meetings!” Out of the past there came to him the memory of other careless, good-natured women, happy in their love-making, grateful for the joy he gave them, however short, and then he remembered other women, like his wife, whose caresses were insincere and who talked endlessly in an affected and hysterical manner, with an expression which said this was not love or passion but something far more meaningful; and then he thought
of the few very beautiful cold women on whose faces there would suddenly appear the glow of a fierce flame, a stubborn desire to take, to wring from life more than it can give: women who were no longer in their first youth, capricious, imprudent, unreflecting, and domineering, and when Gurov grew cold to them, their beauty aroused his hatred, and the lace trimming of their lingerie reminded him of fish scales.

But here there was all the shyness and awkwardness of inexperienced youth: a feeling of embarrassment, as though someone had suddenly knocked on the door. Anna Sergeyevna, “the lady with the pet dog,” accepted what had happened in her own special way, gravely and seriously, as though she had accomplished her own downfall, an attitude which he found odd and disconcerting. Her features faded and drooped away, and on both sides of her face the long hair hung mournfully down, while she sat musing disconsolately like an adulteress in an antique painting.

“It’s not right,” she said. “You’re the first person not to respect me.”

There was a watermelon on the table. Gurov cut off a slice and began eating it slowly. For at least half an hour they were silent.

There was something touching about Anna Sergeyevna, revealing the purity of a simple and naïve woman who knew very little about life. The single candle burning on the table barely illumined her face, but it was clear that she was deeply unhappy.

“Why should I not respect you?” Gurov said. “You don’t know what you are saying.”

“God forgive me!” she said, and her eyes filled with tears. “It’s terrible!”

“You don’t have to justify yourself.”

“How can I justify myself? No, I am a wicked, fallen woman! I despise myself, and have no desire to justify myself! It isn’t my husband I have deceived, but myself! And not only now, I
have been deceiving myself for a long time. My husband may be a good, honest man, but he is also a flunky! I don’t know what work he does, but I know he is a flunky! When I married him I was twenty. I was devoured with curiosity. I longed for something better! Surely, I told myself, there is another kind of life! I wanted to live! To live, only to live! I was burning with curiosity. You won’t understand, but I swear by God I was no longer in control of myself! Something strange was going on in me. I could not hold back. I told my husband I was ill, and I came here.… And now I have been walking about as though in a daze, like someone who has gone out of his senses.… And now I am nothing else but a low, common woman, and anyone may despise me!”