interested her only in its external aspect and I was wasting time in displaying my plans and projects before her. She was keenly interested in knowing which would be her room, what paper she would have in the room, why I had an upright piano instead of a grand piano, and so on. She examined carefully all the little things on my table, looked at the photographs, sniffed at the bottles, peeled the old stamps off the envelopes, saying she wanted them for something.
'Please collect old stamps for me!' she said, making a grave face. 'Please do.'
Then she found a nut in the window, noisily cracked it and ate it.
'Why don't you stick little labels on the backs of your books?' she asked, taking a look at the bookcase.
'What for?'
'Oh, so that each book should have its number. And where am I to put my books? I've got books too, you know.'
'What books have you got?' I asked.
Sasha raised her eyebrows, thought a moment and said:
'All sorts.'
And if it had entered my head to ask her what thoughts, what convictions, what aims she had, she would no doubt have raised her eyebrows, thought a minute, and have said in the same way: 'All sorts.'
Later I saw Sasha home and left her house regularly, officially engaged, and was so reckoned till our wedding. If the reader will allow me to judge merely from my personal experience, I maintain that to be engaged is very dreary, far more so than to be a husband or nothing at all. An engaged man is neither one thing nor the other, he has left one side of the river and not reached the other, he is not married and yet he can't be said to be a bachelor, but is in something not unlike the condition of the porter whom I have mentioned above.
Every day as soon as I had a free moment I hastened to my fiancee. As I went I usually bore within me a multitude of hopes, desires, intentions, suggestions, phrases. I always fancied that as soon as the maid opened the door I should, from feeling oppressed and stifled, plunge at once up to my neck into a sea of refreshing happiness. But it always turned out otherwise in fact. Every time I went to see my fiancee I found all her family and other members of the household busy over the silly trousseau. (And by the way, they were hard at work sewing for two months and then they had less than a hundred roubles' worth of things). There was a smell of irons, candle grease and fumes. Bugles scrunched under one's feet. The two most important rooms were piled up with billows of linen, calico, and muslin and from among the billows peeped out Sasha's little head with a thread between her teeth. All the sewing party welcomed me with cries of delight but at once led me off into the dining-room where I could not hinder them nor see what only husbands are permitted to behold. In spite of my feelings, I had to sit in the dining- room and converse with Pimenovna, one of the poor relations. Sasha, looking worried and excited, kept running by me with a thimble, a skein of wool or some other boring object.
'Wait, wait, I shan't be a minute,' she would say when I raised imploring eyes to her. 'Only fancy that wretch Stepanida has spoilt the bodice of the barege dress!'
And after waiting in vain for this grace, I lost my temper, went out of the house and walked about the streets in the company of the new cane I had bought. Or I would want to go for a walk or a drive with my fiancee, would go round and find her already standing in the hall with her mother, dressed to go out and playing with her parasol.
'Oh, we are going to the Arcade,' she would say. 'We have got to buy some more cashmere and change the hat.'
My outing is knocked on the head. I join the ladies and go with them to the Arcade. It is revoltingly dull to listen to women shopping, haggling and trying to outdo the sharp shopman. I felt ashamed when Sasha, after turning over masses of material and knocking down the prices to a minimum, walked out of the shop without buying anything, or else told the shopman to cut her some half rouble's worth.
When they came out of the shop, Sasha and her mamma with scared and worried faces would discuss at length having made a mistake, having bought the wrong thing, the flowers in the chintz being too dark, and so on.
Yes, it is a bore to be engaged! I'm glad it's over.
Now I am married. It is evening. I am sitting in my study reading. Behind me on the sofa Sasha is sitting munching something noisily. I want a glass of beer.
'Sasha, look for the corkscrew. . . .' I say. 'It's lying about somewhere.'
Sasha leaps up, rummages in a disorderly way among two or three heaps of papers, drops the matches, and without finding the corkscrew, sits down in silence. . . . Five minutes pass -- ten. . . I begin to be fretted both by thirst and vexation.
'Sasha, do look for the corkscrew,' I say.
Sasha leaps up again and rummages among the papers near me. Her munching and rustling of the papers affects me like the sound of sharpening knives against each other. . . . I get up and begin looking for the corkscrew myself. At last it is found and the beer is uncorked. Sasha remains by the table and begins telling me something at great length.
'You'd better read something, Sasha,' I say.
She takes up a book, sits down facing me and begins moving her lips. . . . I look at her little forehead, moving lips, and sink into thought.
'She is getting on for twenty. . . .' I reflect. 'If one takes a boy of the educated class and of that age and compares them, what a difference! The boy would have knowledge and convictions and some intelligence.'
But I forgive that difference just as the low forehead and moving lips are forgiven. I remember in my old Lovelace days I have cast off women for a stain on their stockings, or for one foolish word, or for not cleaning their teeth, and now I forgive everything: the munching, the muddling about after the corkscrew, the slovenliness, the long talking about nothing that matters; I forgive it all almost unconsciously, with no effort of will, as though Sasha's mistakes were my mistakes, and many things which would have made me wince in old days move me to tenderness and even rapture. The explanation of this forgiveness of everything lies in my love for Sasha, but what is the explanation of the love itself, I really don't know.
NOTES
Lovelace: Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) was an English poet
LADIES
by Anton Chekhov
FYODOR PETROVITCH the Director of Elementary Schools in the N. District, who considered himself a just and generous man, was one day interviewing in his office a schoolmaster called Vremensky.
'No, Mr. Vremensky,' he was saying, 'your retirement is inevitable. You cannot continue your work as a schoolmaster with a voice like that! How did you come to lose it?'
'I drank cold beer when I was in a perspiration. . .' hissed the schoolmaster.
'What a pity! After a man has served fourteen years, such a calamity all at once! The idea of a career being ruined by such a trivial thing. What are you intending to do now?'
The schoolmaster made no answer.
'Are you a family man?' asked the director.
'A wife and two children, your Excellency . . .' hissed the schoolmaster.
A silence followed. The director got up from the table and walked to and fro in perturbation.
'I cannot think what I am going to do with you!' he said. 'A teacher you cannot be, and you are not yet entitled to a pension. . . . To abandon you to your fate, and leave you to do the best you can, is rather awkward. We look on you as one of our men, you have served fourteen years, so it is our business to help you. . . . But how are we to help you? What can I do for you? Put yourself in my place: what can I do for you?'
A silence followed; the director walked up and down, still thinking, and Vremensky, overwhelmed by his trouble, sat on the edge of his chair, and he, too, thought. All at once the director began beaming, and even snapped his fingers.
'I wonder I did not think of it before!' he began rapidly. 'Listen, this is what I can offer you. Next week our
