squabbles. It's your duty to make peace, and not to growl at everything.
VOYNITSKY. Help me first to make peace with myself. My darling! [Seizes her hand and kisses it.]
HELENA. Let go! [She drags her hand away] Go away!
VOYNITSKY. Soon the rain will be over, and all nature will sigh and awake refreshed. Only I'm not refreshed by the storm. Day and night the thought haunts me like a fiend, that my life is lost for ever. My past does not count, because I frittered it away on trifles, and the present has so terribly miscarried! What shall I do with my life and my love? What can I do with them? This wonderful feeling of mine will be wasted and lost as a ray of sunlight is lost that falls into a dark chasm, and my life will go with it.
HELENA. I somehow can't think or feel when you speak to me of your love, and I don't know how to answer you. Forgive me, I have nothing to say to you. [She tries to go out] Good-night!
VOYNITSKY. [Barring the way] If you only knew how I'm tortured by the thought that beside me in this house is another life that's being lost forever -- it's yours! What are you waiting for? What damned philosophy stands in your way? Oh, understand, understand ---
HELENA. [Looking at him intently] Ivan, you're drunk!
VOYNITSKY. Perhaps. Perhaps.
HELENA. Where's the doctor?
VOYNITSKY. In there, spending the night in my room. Perhaps I'm drunk, perhaps I am; nothing is impossible.
HELENA. Have you been drinking today? Why do you do that?
VOYNITSKY. Because in that way I get a taste of being alive. Don't try to stop me, Helena!
HELENA. You never used to drink, and you never used to talk so much. Go to bed, I'm tired of you.
VOYNITSKY. [Bending down to kiss her hand] My sweetheart, my beautiful one ---
HELENA. [Angrily] Leave me alone! Really, this has become too disagreeable.
HELENA goes out.
VOYNITSKY [Alone] She's gone! [A pause] I met her first ten years ago, at my sister's house, when she was seventeen and I was thirty-seven. Why didn't I fall in love with her then and propose to her? It would've been so easy! And now she would have been my wife. Yes, we would both have been waked tonight by the thunderstorm, and she would've been frightened, but I would have held her in my arms and whispered: 'Don't be afraid! I'm here.' Oh, enchanting dream, so sweet that I laugh to think of it. [He laughs] But my God! My head reels! Why am I so old? Why won't she understand me? I hate all that rhetoric of hers, that morality of indolence, that absurd talk about the destruction of the world -- I hate it all -- [A pause] Oh, how I've been deceived! For years I've worshipped that miserable gout-ridden professor -- worked like an ox for him. Sonya and I have squeezed this estate dry for his sake. We've bartered our butter and curds and peas like misers, and have never kept a morsel for ourselves, so that we could scrape enough money together to send to him. I was proud of him and of his learning; I received all his words and writings as inspired, and, dear God, now? Now he's retired, and what's the total of his life? Not a page of his work will survive! He's absolutely unknown, and his fame has burst like a soap-bubble. I've been deceived; I see that now, foolishly deceived.
