|
|
|
A.P. Chekhov -
About Love
AT lunch next day there were very nice pies,
crayfish, and mutton cutlets; and while we were eating, Nikanor,
the cook, came up to ask what the visitors would like for
dinner. He was a man of medium height, with a puffy face and
little eyes; he was close-shaven, and it looked as though his
moustaches had not been shaved, but had been pulled out by the
roots. Alehin told us that the beautiful Pelagea was in love
with this cook. As he drank and was of a violent character, she
did not want to marry him, but was willing to live with him
without. He was very devout, and his religious convictions would
not allow him to "live in sin"; he insisted on her marrying him,
and would consent to nothing else, and when he was drunk he used
to abuse her and even beat her. Whenever he got drunk she used
to hide upstairs and sob, and on such occasions Alehin and the
servants stayed in the house to be ready to defend her in case
of necessity.
We began talking about love.
"How love is born," said Alehin, "why Pelagea does not love
somebody more like herself in her spiritual and external
qualities, and why she fell in love with Nikanor, that ugly
snout -- we all call him 'The Snout' -- how far questions of
personal happiness are of consequence in love -- all that is
known; one can take what view one likes of it. So far only one
incontestable truth has been uttered about love: 'This is a
great mystery.' Everything else that has been written or said
about love is not a conclusion, but only a statement of
questions which have remained unanswered. The explanation which
would seem to fit one case does not apply in a dozen others, and
the very best thing, to my mind, would be to explain every case
individually without attempting to generalize. We ought, as the
doctors say, to individualize each case."
"Perfectly true," Burkin assented.
"We Russians of the educated class have a partiality for these
questions that remain unanswered. Love is usually poeticized,
decorated with roses, nightingales; we Russians decorate our
loves with these momentous questions, and select the most
uninteresting of them, too. In Moscow, when I was a student, I
had a friend who shared my life, a charming lady, and every time
I took her in my arms she was thinking what I would allow her a
month for housekeeping and what was the price of beef a pound.
In the same way, when we are in love we are never tired of
asking ourselves questions: whether it is honourable or
dishonourable, sensible or stupid, what this love is leading up
to, and so on. Whether it is a good thing or not I don't know,
but that it is in the way, unsatisfactory, and irritating, I do
know."
It looked as though he wanted to tell some story. People who
lead a solitary existence always have something in their hearts
which they are eager to talk about. In town bachelors visit the
baths and the restaurants on purpose to talk, and sometimes tell
the most interesting things to bath attendants and waiters; in
the country, as a rule, they unbosom themselves to their guests.
Now from the window we could see a grey sky, trees drenched in
the rain; in such weather we could go nowhere, and there was
nothing for us to do but to tell stories and to listen.
"I have lived at Sofino and been farming for a long time,"
Alehin began, "ever since I left the University. I am an idle
gentleman by education, a studious person by disposition; but
there was a big debt owing on the estate when I came here, and
as my father was in debt partly because he had spent so much on
my education, I resolved not to go away, but to work till I paid
off the debt. I made up my mind to this and set to work, not, I
must confess, without some repugnance. The land here does not
yield much, and if one is not to farm at a loss one must employ
serf labour or hired labourers, which is almost the same thing,
or put it on a peasant footing -- that is, work the fields
oneself and with one's family. There is no middle path. But in
those days I did not go into such subtleties. I did not leave a
clod of earth unturned; I gathered together all the peasants,
men and women, from the neighbouring villages; the work went on
at a tremendous pace. I myself ploughed and sowed and reaped,
and was bored doing it, and frowned with disgust, like a village
cat driven by hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen-garden. My
body ached, and I slept as I walked. At first it seemed to me
that I could easily reconcile this life of toil with my cultured
habits; to do so, I thought, all that is necessary is to
maintain a certain external order in life. I established myself
upstairs here in the best rooms, and ordered them to bring me
there coffee and liquor after lunch and dinner, and when I went
to bed I read every night the Yyesnik Evropi. But one day our
priest, Father Ivan, came and drank up all my liquor at one
sitting; and the Yyesnik Evropi went to the priest's daughters;
as in the summer, especially at the haymaking, I did not succeed
in getting to my bed at all, and slept in the sledge in the
barn, or somewhere in the forester's lodge, what chance was
there of reading? Little by little I moved downstairs, began
dining in the servants' kitchen, and of my former luxury nothing
is left but the servants who were in my father's service, and
whom it would be painful to turn away.
"In the first years I was elected here an honourary justice of
the peace. I used to have to go to the town and take part in the
sessions of the congress and of the circuit court, and this was
a pleasant change for me. When you live here for two or three
months without a break, especially in the winter, you begin at
last to pine for a black coat. And in the circuit court there
were frock-coats, and uniforms, and dress-coats, too, all
lawyers, men who have received a general education; I had some
one to talk to. After sleeping in the sledge and dining in the
kitchen, to sit in an arm-chair in clean linen, in thin boots,
with a chain on one's waistcoat, is such luxury!
"I received a warm welcome in the town. I made friends eagerly.
And of all my acquaintanceships the most intimate and, to tell
the truth, the most agreeable to me was my acquaintance with
Luganovitch, the vice-president of the circuit court. You both
know him: a most charming personality. It all happened just
after a celebrated case of incendiarism; the preliminary
investigation lasted two days; we were exhausted. Luganovitch
looked at me and said:
" 'Look here, come round to dinner with me.'
"This was unexpected, as I knew Luganovitch very little, only
officially, and I had never been to his house. I only just went
to my hotel room to change and went off to dinner. And here it
was my lot to meet Anna Alexyevna, Luganovitch's wife. At that
time she was still very young, not more than twenty-two, and her
first baby had been born just six months before. It is all a
thing of the past; and now I should find it difficult to define
what there was so exceptional in her, what it was in her
attracted me so much; at the time, at dinner, it was all
perfectly clear to me. I saw a lovely young, good, intelligent,
fascinating woman, such as I had never met before; and I felt
her at once some one close and already familiar, as though that
face, those cordial, intelligent eyes, I had seen somewhere in
my childhood, in the album which lay on my mother's chest of
drawers.
"Four Jews were charged with being incendiaries, were regarded
as a gang of robbers, and, to my mind, quite groundlessly. At
dinner I was very much excited, I was uncomfortable, and I don't
know what I said, but Anna Alexyevna kept shaking her head and
saying to her husband:
" 'Dmitry, how is this?'
"Luganovitch is a good-natured man, one of those simple-hearted
people who firmly maintain the opinion that once a man is
charged before a court he is guilty, and to express doubt of the
correctness of a sentence cannot be done except in legal form on
paper, and not at dinner and in private conversation.
" 'You and I did not set fire to the place,' he said softly,
'and you see we are not condemned, and not in prison.'
"And both husband and wife tried to make me eat and drink as
much as possible. From some trifling details, from the way they
made the coffee together, for instance, and from the way they
understood each other at half a word, I could gather that they
lived in harmony and comfort, and that they were glad of a
visitor. After dinner they played a duet on the piano; then it
got dark, and I went home. That was at the beginning of spring.
"After that I spent the whole summer at Sofino without a break,
and I had no time to think of the town, either, but the memory
of the graceful fair-haired woman remained in my mind all those
days; I did not think of her, but it was as though her light
shadow were lying on my heart.
"In the late autumn there was a theatrical performance for some
charitable object in the town. I went into the governor's box (I
was invited to go there in the interval); I looked, and there
was Anna Alexyevna sitting beside the governor's wife; and again
the same irresistible, thrilling impression of beauty and sweet,
caressing eyes, and again the same feeling of nearness. We sat
side by side, then went to the foyer.
" 'You've grown thinner,' she said; 'have you been ill?'
" 'Yes, I've had rheumatism in my shoulder, and in rainy weather
I can't sleep.'
" 'You look dispirited. In the spring, when you came to dinner,
you were younger, more confident. You were full of eagerness,
and talked a great deal then; you were very interesting, and I
really must confess I was a little carried away by you. For some
reason you often came back to my memory during the summer, and
when I was getting ready for the theatre today I thought I
should see you.'
"And she laughed.
" 'But you look dispirited today,' she repeated; 'it makes you
seem older.'
"The next day I lunched at the Luganovitchs'. After lunch they
drove out to their summer villa, in order to make arrangements
there for the winter, and I went with them. I returned with them
to the town, and at midnight drank tea with them in quiet
domestic surroundings, while the fire glowed, and the young
mother kept going to see if her baby girl was asleep. And after
that, every time I went to town I never failed to visit the
Luganovitchs. They grew used to me, and I grew used to them. As
a rule I went in unannounced, as though I were one of the
family.
" 'Who is there?' I would hear from a faraway room, in the
drawling voice that seemed to me so lovely.
" 'It is Pavel Konstantinovitch,' answered the maid or the
nurse.
"Anna Alexyevna would come out to me with an anxious face, and
would ask every time:
" 'Why is it so long since you have been? Has anything
happened?'
"Her eyes, the elegant refined hand she gave me, her indoor
dress, the way she did her hair, her voice, her step, always
produced the same impression on me of something new and
extraordinary in my life, and very important. We talked together
for hours, were silent, thinking each our own thoughts, or she
played for hours to me on the piano. If there were no one at
home I stayed and waited, talked to the nurse, played with the
child, or lay on the sofa in the study and read; and when Anna
Alexyevna came back I met her in the hall, took all her parcels
from her, and for some reason I carried those parcels every time
with as much love, with as much solemnity, as a boy.
"There is a proverb that if a peasant woman has no troubles she
will buy a pig. The Luganovitchs had no troubles, so they made
friends with me. If I did not come to the town I must be ill or
something must have happened to me, and both of them were
extremely anxious. They were worried that I, an educated man
with a knowledge of languages, should, instead of devoting
myself to science or literary work, live in the country, rush
round like a squirrel in a rage, work hard with never a penny to
show for it. They fancied that I was unhappy, and that I only
talked, laughed, and ate to conceal my sufferings, and even at
cheerful moments when I felt happy I was aware of their
searching eyes fixed upon me. They were particularly touching
when I really was depressed, when I was being worried by some
creditor or had not money enough to pay interest on the proper
day. The two of them, husband and wife, would whisper together
at the window; then he would come to me and say with a grave
face:
" 'If you really are in need of money at the moment, Pavel
Konstantinovitch, my wife and I beg you not to hesitate to
borrow from us.'
"And he would blush to his ears with emotion. And it would
happen that, after whispering in the same way at the window, he
would come up to me, with red ears, and say:
" 'My wife and I earnestly beg you to accept this present.'
"And he would give me studs, a cigar-case, or a lamp, and I
would send them game, butter, and flowers from the country. They
both, by the way, had considerable means of their own. In early
days I often borrowed money, and was not very particular about
it -- borrowed wherever I could -- but nothing in the world
would have induced me to borrow from the Luganovitchs. But why
talk of it?
"I was unhappy. At home, in the fields, in the barn, I thought
of her; I tried to understand the mystery of a beautiful,
intelligent young woman's marrying some one so uninteresting,
almost an old man (her husband was over forty), and having
children by him; to understand the mystery of this
uninteresting, good, simple-hearted man, who argued with such
wearisome good sense, at balls and evening parties kept near the
more solid people, looking listless and superfluous, with a
submissive, uninterested expression, as though he had been
brought there for sale, who yet believed in his right to be
happy, to have children by her; and I kept trying to understand
why she had met him first and not me, and why such a terrible
mistake in our lives need have happened.
"And when I went to the town I saw every time from her eyes that
she was expecting me, and she would confess to me herself that
she had had a peculiar feeling all that day and had guessed that
I should come. We talked a long time, and were silent, yet we
did not confess our love to each other, but timidly and
jealously concealed it. We were afraid of everything that might
reveal our secret to ourselves. I loved her tenderly, deeply,
but I reflected and kept asking myself what our love could lead
to if we had not the strength to fight against it. It seemed to
be incredible that my gentle, sad love could all at once
coarsely break up the even tenor of the life of her husband, her
children, and all the household in which I was so loved and
trusted. Would it be honourable? She would go away with me, but
where? Where could I take her? It would have been a different
matter if I had had a beautiful, interesting life -- if, for
instance, I had been struggling for the emancipation of my
country, or had been a celebrated man of science, an artist or a
painter; but as it was it would mean taking her from one
everyday humdrum life to another as humdrum or perhaps more so.
And how long would our happiness last? What would happen to her
in case I was ill, in case I died, or if we simply grew cold to
one another?
"And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She thought of her
husband, her children, and of her mother, who loved the husband
like a son. If she abandoned herself to her feelings she would
have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and in her position
either would have been equally terrible and inconvenient. And
she was tormented by the question whether her love would bring
me happiness -- would she not complicate my life, which, as it
was, was hard enough and full of all sorts of trouble? She
fancied she was not young enough for me, that she was not
industrious nor energetic enough to begin a new life, and she
often talked to her husband of the importance of my marrying a
girl of intelligence and merit who would be a capable housewife
and a help to me -- and she would immediately add that it would
be difficult to find such a girl in the whole town.
"Meanwhile the years were passing. Anna Alexyevna already had
two children. When I arrived at the Luganovitchs' the servants
smiled cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel
Konstantinovitch had come, and hung on my neck; every one was
overjoyed. They did not understand what was passing in my soul,
and thought that I, too, was happy. Every one looked on me as a
noble being. And grown-ups and children alike felt that a noble
being was walking about their rooms, and that gave a peculiar
charm to their manner towards me, as though in my presence their
life, too, was purer and more beautiful. Anna Alexyevna and I
used to go to the theatre together, always walking there; we
used to sit side by side in the stalls, our shoulders touching.
I would take the opera-glass from her hands without a word, and
feel at that minute that she was near me, that she was mine,
that we could not live without each other; but by some strange
misunderstanding, when we came out of the theatre we always said
good-bye and parted as though we were strangers. Goodness knows
what people were saying about us in the town already, but there
was not a word of truth in it all!
"In the latter years Anna Alexyevna took to going away for
frequent visits to her mother or to her sister; she began to
suffer from low spirits, she began to recognize that her life
was spoilt and unsatisfied, and at times she did not care to see
her husband nor her children. She was already being treated for
neurasthenia.
"We were silent and still silent, and in the presence of
outsiders she displayed a strange irritation in regard to me;
whatever I talked about, she disagreed with me, and if I had an
argument she sided with my opponent. If I dropped anything, she
would say coldly:
" 'I congratulate you.'
"If I forgot to take the opera-glass when we were going to the
theatre, she would say afterwards:
" 'I knew you would forget it.'
"Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives that does
not end sooner or later. The time of parting came, as
Luganovitch was appointed president in one of the western
provinces. They had to sell their furniture, their horses, their
summer villa. When they drove out to the villa, and afterwards
looked back as they were going away, to look for the last time
at the garden, at the green roof, every one was sad, and I
realized that I had to say goodbye not only to the villa. It was
arranged that at the end of August we should see Anna Alexyevna
off to the Crimea, where the doctors were sending her, and that
a little later Luganovitch and the children would set off for
the western province.
"We were a great crowd to see Anna Alexyevna off. When she had
said good-bye to her husband and her children and there was only
a minute left before the third bell, I ran into her compartment
to put a basket, which she had almost forgotten, on the rack,
and I had to say good-bye. When our eyes met in the compartment
our spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms,
she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her
eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears
-- oh, how unhappy we were! -- I confessed my love for her, and
with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how
petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving
was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your
reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from
what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or
virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.
"I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and parted
for ever. The train had already started. I went into the next
compartment -- it was empty -- and until I reached the next
station I sat there crying. Then I walked home to Sofino. . . ."
While Alehin was telling his story, the rain left off and the
sun came out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch went out on the
balcony, from which there was a beautiful view over the garden
and the mill-pond, which was shining now in the sunshine like a
mirror. They admired it, and at the same time they were sorry
that this man with the kind, clever eyes, who had told them this
story with such genuine feeling, should be rushing round and
round this huge estate like a squirrel on a wheel instead of
devoting himself to science or something else which would have
made his life more pleasant; and they thought what a sorrowful
face Anna Alexyevna must have had when he said good-bye to her
in the railway-carriage and kissed her face and shoulders. Both
of them had met her in the town, and Burkin knew her and thought
her beautiful.
NOTES
mystery: Ephesians 5:32
Yyesnik Evropi: European Herald, a liberal monthly
congress: a congress of justices of the peace, which acted as a
court of appeals
gang: being part of a gang made the offence more serious
pig: that is, she will ask for trouble
|
|
|
