Short Stories by Chekhov
the other.
"I am afraid you are cold," said Ognev. "It's not at all wise to sit in
the mist. Let me see you back nach-haus."
Vera sat mute.
"What is the matter?" asked Ognev, with a smile. "You sit silent and
don't answer my questions. Are you cross, or don't you feel well?"
Vera pressed the palm of her hand to the cheek nearest to Ognev, and
then abruptly jerked it away.
"An awful position!" she murmured, with a look of pain on her face.
"Awful!"
"How is it awful?" asked Ognev, shrugging his shoulders and not
concealing his surprise. "What's the matter?"
Still breathing hard and twitching her shoulders, Vera turned her back
to him, looked at the sky for half a minute, and said:
"There is something I must say to you, Ivan Alexeyitch. . . ."
"I am listening."
"It may seem strange to you. . . . You will be surprised, but I don't
care. . . ."
Ognev shrugged his shoulders once more and prepared himself to listen.
"You see . . ." Verotchka began, bowing her head and fingering a ball on
the fringe of her shawl. "You see . . . this is what I wanted to tell
you. . . . You'll think it strange . . . and silly, but I . . . can't
bear it any longer."
Vera's words died away in an indistinct mutter and were suddenly cut
short by tears. The girl hid her face in her handkerchief, bent lower
than ever, and wept bitterly. Ivan Alexeyitch cleared his throat in
confusion and looked about him hopelessly, at his wits' end, not knowing
what to say or do. Being unused to the sight of tears, he felt his own
eyes, too, beginning to smart.
"Well, what next!" he muttered helplessly. "Vera Gavrilovna, what's this
for, I should like to know? My dear girl, are you . . . are you ill? Or
has someone been nasty to you? Tell me, perhaps I could, so to say . . .
help you. . . ."
When, trying to console her, he ventured cautiously to remove her hands
from her face, she smiled at him through her tears and said:
"I . . . love you!"
These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human
language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera, and
got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.
The sad, warm, sentimental mood induced by leave-taking and the home-
made wine suddenly vanished, and gave place to an acute and unpleasant
feeling of awkwardness. He felt an inward revulsion; he looked askance
at Vera, and now that by declaring her love for him she had cast off the
aloofness which so adds to a woman's charm, she seemed to him, as it
were, shorter, plainer, more ordinary.
"What's the meaning of it?" he thought with horror. "But I . . . do I
love her or not? That's the question!"
And she breathed easily and freely now that the worst and most difficult
thing was said. She, too, got up, and looking Ivan Alexeyitch straight
in the face, began talking rapidly, warmly, irrepressibly.
As a man suddenly panic-stricken cannot afterwards remember the
succession of sounds accompanying the catastrophe that overwhelmed him,
so Ognev cannot remember Vera's words and phrases. He can only recall
the meaning of what she said, and the sensation her words evoked in him.
He remembers her voice, which seemed stifled and husky with emotion, and
the extraordinary music and passion of her intonation. Laughing, crying
with tears glistening on her eyelashes, she told him that from the first
day of their acquaintance he had struck her by his originality, his
intelligence, his kind intelligent eyes, by his work and objects in
life; that she loved him passionately, deeply, madly; that when coming
into the house from the garden in the summer she saw his cape in the
hall or heard his voice in the distance, she felt a cold shudder at her
heart, a foreboding of happiness; even his slightest jokes had made her
laugh; in every figure in his note-books she saw something
extraordinarily wise and grand; his knotted stick seemed to her more
beautiful than the trees.
The copse and the wisps of mist and the black ditches at the side of the
road seemed hushed listening to her, whilst something strange and
unpleasant was passing in Ognev's heart. . . . Telling him of her love,
Vera was enchantingly beautiful; she spoke eloquently and passionately,
but he felt neither pleasure nor gladness, as he would have liked to; he
felt nothing but compassion for Vera, pity and regret that a good girl
should be distressed on his account. Whether he was affected by
generalizations from reading or by the insuperable habit of looking at
things objectively, which so often hinders people from living, but
Vera's ecstasies and suffering struck him as affected, not to be taken
seriously, and at the same time rebellious feeling whispered to him that
all he was hearing and seeing now, from the point of view of nature and
personal happiness, was more important than any statistics and books and
truths. . . . And he raged and blamed himself, though he did not
understand exactly where he was in fault.
To complete his embarrassment, he was absolutely at a loss what to say,
and yet something he must say. To say bluntly, "I don't love you," was
beyond him, and he could not bring himself to say "Yes," because however
much he rummaged in his heart he could not find one spark of feeling in
it. . . .
He was silent, and she meanwhile was saying that for her there was no
greater happiness than to see him, to follow him wherever he liked this
very moment, to be his wife and helper, and that if he went away from
her she would die of misery.
"I cannot stay here!" she said, wringing her hands. "I am sick of the
house and this wood and the air. I cannot bear the everlasting peace and
aimless life, I can't endure our colourless, pale people, who are all as
like one another as two drops of water! They are all good-natured and
warm-hearted because they are all well-fed and know nothing of struggle
or suffering, . . . I want to be in those big damp houses where people
suffer, embittered by work and need. . ."
And this, too, seemed to Ognev affected and not to be taken seriously.
When Vera had finished he still did not know what to say, but it was
impossible to be silent, and he muttered:
"Vera Gavrilovna, I am very grateful to you, though I feel I've done
nothing to deserve such . . . feeling . . . on your part. Besides, as an
honest man I ought to tell you that . . . happiness depends on equality-
that is, when both parties are . . . equally in love. . . ."
But he was immediately ashamed of his mutterings and ceased. He felt
that his face at that moment looked stupid, guilty, blank, that it was
strained and affected. . . . Vera must have been able to read the truth
on his countenance, for she suddenly became grave, turned pale, and bent
her head.
"You must forgive me," Ognev muttered, not able to endure the silence.
"I respect you so much that . . . it pains me. . . ."
Vera turned sharply and walked rapidly homewards. Ognev followed her.
"No, don't!" said Vera, with a wave of her hand. "Don't come; I can go
alone."
"Oh, yes . . . I must see you home anyway."
Whatever Ognev said, it all to the last word struck him as loathsome and
flat. The feeling of guilt grew greater at every step. He raged
inwardly, clenched his fists, and cursed his coldness and his stupidity
with women. Trying to stir his feelings, he looked at Verotchka's
beautiful figure, at her hair and the traces of her little feet on the
dusty road; he remembered her words and her tears, but all that only
touched his heart and did not quicken his pulse.
"Ach! one can't force oneself to love," he assured himself, and at the
same time he thought, "But shall I ever fall in love without? I am
nearly thirty! I have never met anyone better than Vera and I never
shall. . . . Oh, this premature old age! Old age at thirty!"
Vera walked on in front more and more rapidly, without looking back at
him or raising her head. It seemed to him that sorrow had made her
thinner and narrower in the shoulders.
"I can imagine what's going on in her heart now!" he thought, looking at
her back. "She must be ready to die with shame and mortification! My
God, there's so much life, poetry, and meaning in it that it would move
a stone, and I . . . I am stupid and absurd!"
At the gate Vera stole a glance at him, and, shrugging and wrapping her
shawl round her walked rapidly away down the avenue.
Ivan Alexeyitch was left alone. Going back to the copse, he walked
slowly, continually standing still and looking round at the gate with an
expression in his whole figure that suggested that he could not believe
his own memory. He looked for Vera's footprints on the road, and could
not believe that the girl who had so attracted him had just declared her
love, and that he had so clumsily and bluntly "refused" her. For the
first time in his life it was his lot to learn by experience how little
that a man does depends on his own will, and to suffer in his own person
the feelings of a decent kindly man who has against his will caused his
neighbour cruel, undeserved anguish.
His conscience tormented him, and when Vera disappeared he felt as
though he had lost something very precious, something very near and dear
which he could never find again. He felt that with Vera a part of his
youth had slipped away from him, and that the moments which he had
passed through so fruitlessly would never be repeated.
When he reached the bridge he stopped and sank into thought. He wanted
to discover the reason of his strange coldness. That it was due to
something within him and not outside himself was clear to him. He
frankly acknowledged to himself that it was not the intellectual
coldness of which clever people so often boast, not the coldness of a
conceited fool, but simply impotence of soul, incapacity for being moved
by beauty, premature old age brought on by education, his casual
existence, struggling for a livelihood, his homeless life in lodgings.
From the bridge he walked slowly, as it were reluctantly, into the wood.
Here, where in the dense black darkness glaring patches of moonlight
gleamed here and there, where he felt nothing except his thoughts, he
longed passionately to regain what he had lost.
And Ivan Alexeyitch remembers that he went back again. Urging himself on
with his memories, forcing himself to picture Vera, he strode rapidly
towards the garden. There was no mist by then along the road or in the
garden, and the bright moon looked down from the sky as though it had
just been washed; only the eastern sky was dark and misty. . . . Ognev
remembers his cautious steps, the dark windows, the heavy scent of
heliotrope and mignonette. His old friend Karo, wagging his tail
amicably, came up to him and sniffed his hand. This was the one living
creature who saw him walk two or three times round the house, stand near
Vera's dark window, and with a deep sigh and a wave of his hand walk out
of the garden.
An hour later he was in the town, and, worn out and exhausted, leaned
his body and hot face against the gatepost of the inn as he knocked at
the gate. Somewhere in the town a dog barked sleepily, and as though in
response to his knock, someone clanged the hour on an iron plate near
the church.
"You prowl about at night," grumbled his host, the Old Believer, opening
the door to him, in a long nightgown like a woman's. "You had better be
saying your prayers instead of prowling about."
When Ivan Alexeyitch reached his room he sank on the bed and gazed a
long, long time at the light. Then he tossed his head and began packing.
MY LIFE THE STORY OF A PROVINCIAL I
THE Superintendent said to me: "I only keep you out of regard for your
worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago." I
replied to him: "You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming