“Yes, I have had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy weather I sleep atrociously.”
“You look worn out. When you came to dinner with us in the spring, you seemed younger, livelier. You were excited, and you talked a good deal, and you were very interesting, and I confess I was a little carried away by you. For some reason during the summer I often found myself thinking about you, and today when I was getting ready for the theater I felt sure I would see you.”
And she laughed.
“You look tired tonight,” she repeated. “It makes you look older.”
The next day I had lunch at the Luganoviches’, and after lunch they drove out to their summer villa to make arrangements for the winter, and I went with them. And then we all returned to town, and at midnight drank tea together in quiet domesticity, while the fire blazed and the young mother kept going to see if her little girl was asleep. And after that, whenever I went to town, I would always visit with the Luganoviches. They became accustomed to me, and I to them. I would usually go unannounced, as one of the family.
“Who is there?” would come a voice from some distant room, a soft lingering voice which seemed very sweet to me.
“It is Pavel Konstantinovich,” the maid or the nurse would answer.
And then Anna Alexeyevna would come out to meet me with a preoccupied air, and invariably she would say: “Why is it so long since you came? Is something wrong?”
Her gaze, and the elegant, aristocratic hands she offered me, her house dress, her hair style, her voice, her step, all these always produced on me the impression of something new and quite extraordinary in my life, and very meaningful. We would talk for a long time, and for a long time we would surrender to silences, thinking our own thoughts, or else she would play for me on the piano. If there was no one at home, I stayed and waited till they returned, talked to the nurse, played with the child, or lay down on the Turkish divan in the study to read the newspaper, and when Anna Alexeyevna returned I would go out and meet her in the hall and take all her parcels from her, and for some reason I always found myself carrying these parcels with as much love, as much pride, as though I were a boy.
There is a proverb which runs: “Women with no worries go off and buy pigs.” The Luganoviches had no worries, so they made friends with me. If there were long intervals between my visits to town, they would think I was ill or something had happened to me, and they would be worried to death. It distressed them that I, an educated man with a knowledge of languages, instead of devoting myself to scholarship or literary work, lived in the country, ran around like a squirrel in a cage, and worked hard without a penny to show for it. They thought I was unhappy, and that I only talked, laughed, and ate in order to conceal my sufferings, and even during those happy moments when everything went well with me, I was aware of their searching gaze. They were especially touching at times when I was really depressed, when I was being hounded by creditors, or when it happened that I was unable to make a payment which fell due. Then husband and wife could be seen whispering together by the window, and afterward they would come over to me with grave faces and say: “If you are in any need of money, Pavel Konstantinovich, I and my wife beg you not to stand on ceremony, and to borrow from us.”
As he spoke, his ears would turn red with emotion. Sometimes, after whispering with her at the window, he would approach me with red ears and say: “My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this little present from us.”
Then he would give me studs, a cigar case, or a lamp, and in return I would send them flowers, poultry, and butter from the country. Both of them, by the way, possessed considerable private means. In those early days I was often borrowing money and was not very particular where it came from, borrowing wherever I could, but nothing in the world would have induced me to borrow from the Luganoviches. But why talk about that?
I was unhappy. At home, in the fields, in the barn, I would find myself dreaming about her and trying to understand the mystery of a beautiful and intelligent young woman marrying such a dull man verging on old age (her husband was over forty) and having children by him—to understand the mystery of this dull, kindly, simple- minded man, who reasoned with such a boring and wholesome good sense, and who at balls and evening parties kept close to the solid citizens, looking listless and superfluous, wearing a submissive and apathetic expression, as though he had been brought there to be put on sale, even though he believed in his right to happiness, his right to have children by her; and I kept trying to understand why she had met him first and not me, and why it was necessary that such a terrible mistake should have occurred in our lives.
Every time I came to town I saw in her eyes that she had been waiting for me, and she would confess to me herself that from the early morning she had had a peculiar feeling and had guessed that I would come. We talked for a long time and fell into silences, and we never confessed our love for one another, but instead timidly and jealously concealed it. We were afraid of everything that would reveal our secret even to ourselves. I loved her tenderly, deeply, but I reflected and kept asking myself what our love could lead to if we lacked the strength to fight against it: it seemed to me beyond belief that my gentle and melancholy love could crudely obliterate the happy course of their lives, the lives of her husband and her children and the entire household where I was loved and trusted. Would it be honorable? She would go away with me, but where? Where could I take her? It would have been a different matter if I led a beautiful and interesting life, or if I had been struggling for the emancipation of my country, or if I were a famous scholar, actor, or painter; but as things stood, it meant removing her from one humdrum life to another which was equally humdrum, or perhaps more so. How long would our happiness last? What would happen to her if I became ill or died, or if we no longer loved one another?
I had the feeling that she was reasoning in the same way. She thought of her husband, her children, and her mother, who loved the husband like a son. If she surrendered to her feelings, she would be forced to lie or tell the truth, and in her position both would have been equally inconvenient and terrible. She was tormented, too, by the question whether her love would bring me happiness—whether she would not complicate my life, which was already difficult enough and filled with all sorts of troubles. She imagined she was not young enough for me, nor sufficiently energetic and industrious to begin a new life, and she often spoke to her husband about how I needed to marry some worthy and intelligent girl who would make a good housekeeper and companion for me—and she would immediately add that such a girl was unlikely to be found in the whole town.
Meanwhile the years passed. Anna Alexeyevna already had two children. Whenever I arrived at the Luganoviches’, the servants put on cheerful smiles, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel Konstantinovich had come, and hung on my neck; everyone was happy. They did not understand what was going on inside me, and thought that I, too, must be happy. They all regarded me as a gentlemanly person. Grownups and children alike felt that a fine gentleman was walking about the room, and this gave a peculiar charm to their relationship with me, as though in my presence their lives became purer and more beautiful. Anna Alexeyevna and I would go to the theater together, always on foot, and we would sit side by side, our shoulders touching, and without saying a word I would take the opera glasses from her hands, and feel her very close to me, knowing she was mine and that we could not live without one another, but when we left the theater, by some misunderstanding, we always said good-by and went our separate ways like complete strangers. God knows what people were saying about us in the town, but there was not a word of truth in it all.
