Five Great Short Stories Read online

  In the first entr’acte the husband went out to smoke, and she was left alone. Gomov, who was also in the pit, came up to her and said in a trembling voice with a forced smile:

  “How do you do?”

  She looked up at him and went pale. Then she glanced at him again in terror, not believing her eyes, clasped her fan and lorgnette tightly together, apparently struggling to keep herself from fainting. Both were silent. She sat, he stood; frightened by her emotion, not daring to sit down beside her. The fiddles and flutes began to play and suddenly it seemed to them as though all the people in the boxes were looking at them. She got up and walked quickly to the exit; he followed, and both walked absently along the corridors, down the stairs, up the stairs, with the crowd shifting and shimmering before their eyes; all kinds of uniforms, judges, teachers, crown-estates, and all with badges; ladies shone and shimmered before them, like fur coats on moving rows of clothes-pegs, and there was a draught howling through the place laden with the smell of tobacco and cigar-ends. And Gomov, whose heart was thudding wildly, thought:

  “Oh, Lord! Why all these men and that beastly orchestra?”

  At that very moment he remembered how when he had seen Anna Sergueyevna off that evening at the station he had said to himself that everything was over between them, and they would never meet again. And now how far off they were from the end!

  On a narrow, dark staircase over which was written: “This Way to the Amphitheatre,” she stopped:

  “How you frightened me!” she said, breathing heavily, still pale and apparently stupefied. “Oh! how you frightened me! I am nearly dead. Why did you come? Why?”

  “Understand me, Anna,” he whispered quickly. “I implore you to understand. . . .”

  She looked at him fearfully, in entreaty, with love in her eyes, gazing fixedly to gather up in her memory every one of his features.

  “I suffer so!” she went on, not listening to him. “All the time, I thought only of you. I lived with thoughts of you. . . . And I wanted to forget, to forget, but why, why did you come?”

  A little above them, on the landing, two schoolboys stood and smoked and looked down at them, but Gomov did not care. He drew her to him and began to kiss her cheeks, her hands.

  “What are you doing? What are you doing?” she said in terror, thrusting him away. . . . “We were both mad. Go away to-night. You must go away at once. . . . I implore you, by everything you hold sacred, I implore you. . . . The people are coming——”

  Some one passed them on the stairs.

  “You must go away,” Anna Sergueyevna went on in a whisper. “Do you hear, Dimitri Dimitrich? I’ll come to you in Moscow. I never was happy. Now I am unhappy and I shall never, never be happy, never! Don’t make me suffer even more! I swear, I’ll come to Moscow. And now let us part. My dear, dearest darling, let us part!”

  She pressed his hand and began to go quickly downstairs, all the while looking back at him, and in her eyes plainly showed that she was most unhappy. Gomov stood for a while, listened, then, when all was quiet he found his coat and left the theatre.

  IV

  AND ANNA SERGUEYEVNA began to come to him in Moscow. Once every two or three months she would leave S., telling her husband that she was going to consult a specialist in women’s diseases. Her husband half believed and half disbelieved her. At Moscow she would stay at the “Slaviansky Bazaar” and send a message at once to Gomov. He would come to her, and nobody in Moscow knew.

  Once as he was going to her as usual one winter morning—he had not received her message the night before—he had his daughter with him, for he was taking her to school which was on the way. Great wet flakes of snow were falling.

  “Three degrees above freezing,” he said, “and still the snow is falling. But the warmth is only on the surface of the earth. In the upper strata of the atmosphere there is quite a different temperature.”

  “Yes, papa. Why is there no thunder in winter?”

  He explained this too, and as he spoke he thought of his assignation, and that not a living soul knew of it, or ever would know. He had two lives; one obvious, which every one could see and know, if they were sufficiently interested, a life full of conventional truth and conventional fraud, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another, which moved underground. And by a strange conspiracy of circumstances, everything that was to him important, interesting, vital, everything that enabled him to be sincere and denied self-deception and was the very core of his being, must dwell hidden away from others, and everything that made him false, a mere shape in which he hid himself in order to conceal the truth, as for instance his work in the bank, arguments at the club, his favourite gibe about women, going to parties with his wife—all this was open. And, judging others by himself, he did not believe the things he saw, and assumed that everybody else also had his real vital life passing under a veil of mystery as under the cover of the night. Every man’s intimate existence is kept mysterious, and perhaps, in part, because of that civilised people are so nervously anxious that a personal secret should be respected.

  When he had left his daughter at school, Gomov went to the “Slaviansky Bazaar.” He took off his fur coat down-stairs, went up and knocked quietly at the door. Anna Sergueyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress, tired by the journey, had been expecting him to come all night. She was pale, and looked at him without a smile, and flung herself on his breast as soon as he entered. Their kiss was long and lingering as though they had not seen each other for a couple of years.

  “Well, how are you getting on down there?” he asked. “What is your news?”

  “Wait. I’ll tell you presently. . . . I cannot.”

  She could not speak, for she was weeping. She turned her face from him and dried her eyes.

  “Well, let her cry a bit . . . . I’ll wait,” he thought, and sat down.

  Then he rang and ordered tea, and then, as he drank it, she stood and gazed out of the window. . . . She was weeping in distress, in the bitter knowledge that their life had fallen out so sadly; only seeing each other in secret, hiding themselves away like thieves! Was not their life crushed?

  “Don’t cry. . . . Don’t cry,” he said.

  It was clear to him that their love was yet far from its end, which there was no seeing. Anna Sergueyevna was more and more passionately attached to him; she adored him and it was inconceivable that he should tell her that their love must some day end; she would not believe it.

  He came up to her and patted her shoulder fondly and at that moment he saw himself in the mirror.

  His hair was already going grey. And it seemed strange to him that in the last few years he should have got so old and ugly. Her shoulders were warm and trembled to his touch. He was suddenly filled with pity for her life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably beginning to fade and wither, like his own. Why should she love him so much? He always seemed to women not what he really was, and they loved in him, not himself, but the creature of their imagination, the thing they hankered for in life, and when they had discovered their mistake, still they loved him. And not one of them was happy with him. Time passed; he met women and was friends with them, went further and parted, but never once did he love; there was everything but love.

  And now at last when his hair was grey he had fallen in love—real love—for the first time in his life.

  Anna Sergueyevna and he loved one another, like dear kindred, like husband and wife, like devoted friends; it seemed to them that Fate had destined them for one another, and it was inconceivable that he should have a wife, she a husband; they were like two birds of passage, a male and a female, which had been caught and forced to live in separate cages. They had forgiven each other all the past of which they were ashamed; they forgave everything in the present, and they felt that their love had changed both of them.

  Formerly, when he felt a melancholy compunction, he used to comfort himself with all kinds of arguments, just as they happened to cross his mind, but
now he was far removed from any such ideas; he was filled with a profound pity, and he desired to be tender and sincere. . . .

  “Don’t cry, my darling,” he said. “You have cried enough. . . . Now let us talk and see if we can’t find some way out.”

  Then they talked it all over, and tried to discover some means of avoiding the necessity for concealment and deception, and the torment of living in different towns, and of not seeing each other for a long time. How could they shake off these intolerable fetters?

  “How? How?” he asked, holding his head in his hands. “How?”

  And it seemed that but a little while and the solution would be found and there would begin a lovely new life; and to both of them it was clear that the end was still very far off, and that their hardest and most difficult period was only just beginning.

  1 [Verstá, slightly over a kilometer; about of a mile.]

  2 [Light carriage.]

  3 [Local elective assembly.]

  4 [A long, close-fitting pleated coat.]

  5 [See page 1.]

  6 [Peasant.]

  7 [Words in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language.]

  9 [“Little father.” Batiushki, which occurs later, is the plural.]

  8 [Jocular names implying that inn personnel are cads and toadies.]

  10 [Village head.]

  11 [Cabbage soup.]

  12 [Meat dumplings.]

  13 [See page 31.]

  14 [Village community or meeting.]

  15 [Covered traveling wagon.]

  16 [That is, the polite form of “you,” vy rather than ty.]

  17 [Doctor’s assistant.]

  18 [House porter, concierge.]

  19 [See page 60.]

  20 [See page 31.]

  21 [See page 31.]

  22 [Thick soup, or steamed cabbage, with meat or fish.]