Short Stories by Chekhov
myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all up. Then I
sobbed in the barn. Then I took a sum of money from my father and set
off for the Caucasus without saying good-bye.
Of course, a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that be as
simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be that I, a
cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation, ought to
explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact
that her bodily formation is different from mine? Oh, how awful that
would be! I want to believe that in his struggle with nature the genius
of man has struggled with physical love too, as with an enemy, and that,
if he has not conquered it, he has at least succeeded in tangling it in
a net-work of illusions of brotherhood and love; and for me, at any
rate, it is no longer a simple instinct of my animal nature as with a
dog or a toad, but is real love, and every embrace is spiritualised by a
pure impulse of the heart and respect for the woman. In reality, a
disgust for the animal instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of
generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of my
nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as natural and inevitable in
our day as my ears' not being able to move and my not being covered with
fur? I fancy that's how the majority of civilised people look at it, so
that the absence of the moral, poetical element in love is treated in
these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of atavism; they say it is a
symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of insanity. It is true that, in
poetizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in
them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries
for us. But to my thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better
to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and
man being man.
In Tiflis I received a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne
Grigoryevna had on such a day gone abroad, intending to spend the whole
winter away. A month later I returned home. It was by now autumn. Every
week Ariadne sent my father extremely interesting letters on scented
paper, written in an excellent literary style. It is my opinion that
every woman can be a writer. Ariadne described in great detail how it
had not been easy for her to make it up with her aunt and induce the
latter to give her a thousand roubles for the journey, and what a long
time she had spent in Moscow trying to find an old lady, a distant
relation, in order to persuade her to go with her. Such a profusion of
detail suggested fiction, and I realised, of course, that she had no
chaperon with her.
Soon afterwards I, too, had a letter from her, also scented and
literary. She wrote that she had missed me, missed my beautiful,
intelligent, loving eyes. She reproached me affectionately for wasting
my youth, for stagnating in the country when I might, like her, be
living in paradise under the palms, breathing the fragrance of the
orange-trees. And she signed herself "Your forsaken Ariadne." Two days
later came another letter in the same style, signed "Your forgotten
Ariadne." My mind was confused. I loved her passionately, I dreamed of
her every night, and then this "your forsaken," "your forgotten"--what
did it mean? What was it for? And then the dreariness of the country,
the long evenings, the disquieting thoughts of Lubkov. . . . The
uncertainty tortured me, and poisoned my days and nights; it became
unendurable. I could not bear it and went abroad.
Ariadne summoned me to Abbazzia. I arrived there on a bright warm day
after rain; the rain-drops were still hanging on the trees and
glistening on the huge, barrack-like dépendance where Ariadne and
Lubkov were living.
They were not at home. I went into the park; wandered about the avenues,
then sat down. An Austrian General, with his hands behind him, walked
past me, with red stripes on his trousers such as our generals wear. A
baby was wheeled by in a perambulator and the wheels squeaked on the
damp sand. A decrepit old man with jaundice passed, then a crowd of
Englishwomen, a Catholic priest, then the Austrian General again. A
military band, only just arrived from Fiume, with glittering brass
instruments, sauntered by to the bandstand--they began playing.
Have you ever been at Abbazzia? It's a filthy little Slav town with only
one street, which stinks, and in which one can't walk after rain without
goloshes. I had read so much and always with such intense feeling about
this earthly paradise that when afterwards, holding up my trousers, I
cautiously crossed the narrow street, and in my ennui bought some hard
pears from an old peasant woman who, recognising me as a Russian, said:
"Tcheeteery" for "tchetyry" (four)--"davadtsat" for "dvadtsat" (twenty),
and when I wondered in perplexity where to go and what to do here, and
when I inevitably met Russians as disappointed as I was, I began to feel
vexed and ashamed. There is a calm bay there full of steamers and boats
with coloured sails. From there I could see Fiume and the distant
islands covered with lilac mist, and it would have been picturesque if
the view over the bay had not been hemmed in by the hotels and their
dépendances--buildings in an absurd, trivial style of architecture,
with which the whole of that green shore has been covered by greedy
money grubbers, so that for the most part you see nothing in this little
paradise but windows, terraces, and little squares with tables and
waiters' black coats. There is a park such as you find now in every
watering-place abroad. And the dark, motionless, silent foliage of the
palms, and the bright yellow sand in the avenue, and the bright green
seats, and the glitter of the braying military horns--all this sickened
me in ten minutes! And yet one is obliged for some reason to spend ten
days, ten weeks, there!
Having been dragged reluctantly from one of these watering-places to
another, I have been more and more struck by the inconvenient and
niggardly life led by the wealthy and well-fed, the dulness and
feebleness of their imagination, the lack of boldness in their tastes
and desires. And how much happier are those tourists, old and young,
who, not having the money to stay in hotels, live where they can, admire
the view of the sea from the tops of the mountains, lying on the green
grass, walk instead of riding, see the forests and villages at close
quarters, observe the customs of the country, listen to its songs, fall
in love with its women. . . .
While I was sitting in the park, it began to get dark, and in the
twilight my Ariadne appeared, elegant and dressed like a princess; after
her walked Lubkov, wearing a new loose-fitting suit, bought probably in
Vienna.
"Why are you cross with me?" he was saying. "What have I done to you?"
Seeing me, she uttered a cry of joy, and probably, if we had not been in
the park, would have thrown herself on my neck. She pressed my hands
warmly and laughed; and I laughed too and almost cried with emotion.
Questions followed, of the village, of my father, whether I had seen her
brother, and so on. She insisted on my looking her straight in the face,
and asked if I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels, the picnics.
. . .
"How nice it all was really!" she sighed. "But we're not having a slow
time here either. We have a great many acquaintances, my dear, my best
of friends! To-morrow I will introduce you to a Russian family here, but
please buy yourself another hat." She scrutinised me and frowned.
"Abbazzia is not the country," she said; "here one must be _comme il
faut_."
Then we went to the restaurant. Ariadne was laughing and mischievous all
the time; she kept calling me "dear," "good," "clever," and seemed as
though she could not believe her eyes that I was with her. We sat on
till eleven o'clock, and parted very well satisfied both with the supper
and with each other.
Next day Ariadne presented me to the Russian family as: "The son of a
distinguished professor whose estate is next to ours."
She talked to this family about nothing but estates and crops, and kept
appealing to me. She wanted to appear to be a very wealthy landowner,
and did, in fact, succeed in doing so. Her manner was superb like that
of a real aristocrat, which indeed she was by birth.
"But what a person my aunt is!" she said suddenly, looking at me with a
smile. "We had a slight tiff, and she has bolted off to Meran. What do
you say to that?"
Afterwards when we were walking in the park I asked her:
"What aunt were you talking of just now? What aunt is that?"
"That was a saving lie," laughed Ariadne. "They must not know I'm
without a chaperon."
After a moment's silence she came closer to me and said:
"My dear, my dear, do be friends with Lubkov. He is so unhappy! His wife
and mother are simply awful."
She used the formal mode of address in speaking to Lubkov, and when she
was going up to bed she said good-night to him exactly as she did to me,
and their rooms were on different floors. All this made me hope that it
was all nonsense, and that there was no sort of love affair between
them, and I felt at ease when I met him. And when one day he asked me
for the loan of three hundred roubles, I gave it to him with the
greatest pleasure.
Every day we spent in enjoying ourselves and in nothing but enjoying
ourselves; we strolled in the park, we ate, we drank. Every day there
were conversations with the Russian family. By degrees I got used to the
fact that if I went into the park I should be sure to meet the old man
with jaundice, the Catholic priest, and the Austrian General, who always
carried a pack of little cards, and wherever it was possible sat down
and played patience, nervously twitching his shoulders. And the band
played the same thing over and over again.
At home in the country I used to feel ashamed to meet the peasants when
I was fishing or on a picnic party on a working day; here too I was
ashamed at the sight of the footmen, the coachmen, and the workmen who
met us. It always seemed to me they were looking at me and thinking:
"Why are you doing nothing?" And I was conscious of this feeling of
shame every day from morning to night. It was a strange, unpleasant,
monotonous time; it was only varied by Lubkov's borrowing from me now a
hundred, now fifty guldens, and being suddenly revived by the money as a
morphia-maniac is by morphia, beginning to laugh loudly at his wife, at
himself, at his creditors.
At last it began to be rainy and cold. We went to Italy, and I
telegraphed to my father begging him for mercy's sake to send me eight
hundred roubles to Rome. We stayed in Venice, in Bologna, in Florence,
and in every town invariably put up at an expensive hotel, where we were
charged separately for lights, and for service, and for heating, and for
bread at lunch, and for the right of having dinner by ourselves. We ate
enormously. In the morning they gave us _café complet_; at one o'clock
lunch: meat, fish, some sort of omelette, cheese, fruits, and wine. At
six o'clock dinner of eight courses with long intervals, during which we
drank beer and wine. At nine o'clock tea. At midnight Ariadne would
declare she was hungry, and ask for ham and boiled eggs. We would eat to
keep her company.
In the intervals between meals we used to rush about the museums and
exhibitions in continual anxiety for fear we should be late for dinner
or lunch. I was bored at the sight of the pictures; I longed to be at
home to rest; I was exhausted, looked about for a chair and
hypocritically repeated after other people: "How exquisite, what
atmosphere!" Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only the most