He sat up in the bed, which was covered with a cheap gray blanket of the kind seen in hospitals, and he taunted himself with anger and vexation.
“You and your lady with the pet dog.… There’s a fine adventure for you! You’re in a nice fix now!”
However, at the railroad station that morning his eye had been caught by a playbill advertising in enormous letters the first performance of
“It’s very likely that she goes to first nights,” he told himself.
The theater was full. There, as so often in provincial theaters, a thick haze hung above the chandeliers, and the crowds in the gallery were fidgeting noisily. In the first row of the orchestra the local dandies were standing with their hands behind their backs, waiting for the curtain to rise, while in the governor’s box the governor’s daughter, wearing a boa, sat in front, the governor himself sitting modestly behind the drapes, with only his hands visible. The curtain was swaying; the orchestra spent a long time tuning up. While the audience was coming in and taking their seats, Gurov was looking impatiently around him.
And then Anna Sergeyevna came in. She sat in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart seemed to stop, and he understood clearly that the whole world contained no one nearer, dearer, and more important than Anna. This slight woman, lost amid a provincial rabble, in no way remarkable, with her silly lorgnette in her hands, filled his whole life: she was his sorrow and his joy, the only happiness he desired for himself; and to the sounds of the wretched orchestra, with its feeble provincial violins, he thought how beautiful she was. He thought and dreamed.
There came with Anna Sergeyevna a young man with small side whiskers, very tall and stooped, who inclined his head at every step and seemed to be continually bowing. Probably this was the husband she once described as a flunky one day in Yalta when she was in a bitter mood. And indeed in his lanky figure, his side whiskers, his small bald patch, there was something of a flunky’s servility. He smiled sweetly, and in his buttonhole there was an academic badge like the number worn by a waiter.
During the first intermission the husband went away to smoke, and she remained in her seat. Gurov, who was also sitting in the orchestra, went up to her and said in a trembling voice, with a forced smile: “How are you?”
She looked up at him and turned pale, then glanced at him again in horror, unable to believe her eyes, tightly gripping the fan and the lorgnette, evidently fighting to overcome a feeling of faintness. Both were silent. She sat, he stood, and he was frightened by her distress, and did not dare sit beside her. The violins and flutes sang out as they were tuned. Suddenly he was afraid, as it occurred to him that all the people in the boxes were staring down at them. She stood up and walked quickly to the exit; he followed her, and both of them walked aimlessly up and down the corridors, while crowds of lawyers, teachers, and civil servants, all wearing the appropriate uniforms and badges, flashed past; and the ladies, and the fur coats hanging from pegs, also flashed past; and the draft blew through the place, bringing with it the odor of cigar stubs. Gurov, whose heart was beating wildly, thought: “Oh Lord, why are these people here and this orchestra?”
At that moment he recalled how, when he saw Anna Sergeyevna off at the station in the evening, he had told himself it was all over and they would never meet again. But how far away the end seemed to be now!
Anna paused on a narrow dark stairway which bore the inscription: “This way to the upper balcony.”
“How you frightened me!” she said, breathing heavily, pale and stunned. “How you frightened me! I am half dead! Why did you come? Why?”
“Do try to understand, Anna—please understand …” he said in a hurried whisper. “I implore you, please understand …”
She looked at him with dread, with entreaty, with love, intently, to retain his features all the more firmly in her memory.
“I’ve been so unhappy,” she went on, not listening to him. “All this time I’ve thought only of you, I’ve lived on thoughts of you. I tried to forget, to forget—why, why have you come?”
A pair of schoolboys were standing on the landing above them, smoking and peering down, but Gurov did not care, and drawing Anna to him, he began kissing her face, her cheeks, her hands.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?” she said in terror, pushing him away from her. “We have both lost our senses! Go away now—tonight!… I implore you by everything you hold sacred.… Someone is coming!”
Someone was climbing up the stairs.
“You must go away …” Anna Sergeyevna went on in a whisper. “Do you hear, Dmitry Dmitrich? I’ll come and visit you in Moscow. I have never been happy. I am miserable now, and I shall never be happy again, never! Don’t make me suffer any more! I swear I’ll come to Moscow! We must separate now. My dear precious darling, we have to separate!”
She pressed his hand and went quickly down the stairs, all the while gazing back at him, and it was clear from the expression in her eyes that she was miserable. For a while Gurov stood there, listening to her footsteps, and then all sounds faded away, and he went to look for his coat and left the theater.
IV
And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Every two or three months she would leave the town of S––, telling her husband she was going to consult a specialist in women’s disorders, and her husband neither believed her nor disbelieved her. In Moscow she always stayed at the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel, and the moment she arrived she would send a red-capped hotel messenger to Gurov. He would visit her, and no one in Moscow ever knew about their meetings.
One winter morning he was going to visit her as usual. (The messenger from the hotel had come the evening before, but he was out.) His daughter accompanied him. He was taking her to school, and the school lay on the way to the hotel. Great wet flakes of snow were falling.
“Three degrees above freezing, and it’s still snowing,” he told his daughter. “That’s only the surface temperature of the earth—the other layers of the atmosphere have other temperatures.”
“Yes, Papa. But why are there no thunderstorms in winter?”
He explained that, too. He talked, and all the while he was thinking about his meeting with the beloved, and not a living soul knew of it, and probably no one would ever know. He was living a double life: an open and public life visible to all who had any need to know, full of conventional truth and conventional lies, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another which followed a secret course. And by one of those Strange and perhaps
