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.
T
I
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.
