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Three Years
by Chekhov
I
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III IV
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VII
VIII
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XIV
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XVI
XVII
VII On a Saturday in November Anton Rubinstein was conducting in a
symphony concert. It was very hot and crowded. Laptev stood
behind the columns, while his wife and Kostya Kotchevoy were
sitting in the third or fourth row some distance in front. At
the very beginning of an interval a "certain person," Polina
Nikolaevna Razsudin, quite unexpectedly passed by him. He had
often since his marriage thought with trepidation of a possible
meeting with her. When now she looked at him openly and
directly, he realised that he had all this time shirked having
things out with her, or writing her two or three friendly lines,
as though he had been hiding from her; he felt ashamed and
flushed crimson. She pressed his hand tightly and impulsively
and asked:
"Have you seen Yartsev?"
And without waiting for an answer she went striding on
impetuously as though some one were pushing her on from behind.
She was very thin and plain, with a long nose; her face always
looked tired, and exhausted, and it seemed as though it were an
effort to her to keep her eyes open, and not to fall down. She
had fine, dark eyes, and an intelligent, kind, sincere
expression, but her movements were awkward and abrupt. It was
hard to talk to her, because she could not talk or listen
quietly. Loving her was not easy. Sometimes when she was alone
with Laptev she would go on laughing for a long time, hiding her
face in her hands, and would declare that love was not the chief
thing in life for her, and would be as whimsical as a girl of
seventeen; and before kissing her he would have to put out all
the candles. She was thirty. She was married to a schoolmaster,
but had not lived with her husband for years. She earned her
living by giving music lessons and playing in quartettes.
During the ninth symphony she passed again as though by
accident, but the crowd of men standing like a thick wall behind
the columns prevented her going further, and she remained beside
him. Laptev saw that she was wearing the same little velvet
blouse she had worn at concerts last year and the year before.
Her gloves were new, and her fan, too, was new, but it was a
common one. She was fond of fine clothes, but she did not know
how to dress, and grudged spending money on it. She dressed so
badly and untidily that when she was going to her lessons
striding hurriedly down the street, she might easily have been
taken for a young monk.
The public applauded and shouted encore.
"You'll spend the evening with me," said Polina Nikolaevna,
going up to Laptev and looking at him severely. "When this is
over we'll go and have tea. Do you hear? I insist on it. You owe
me a great deal, and haven't the moral right to refuse me such a
trifle."
"Very well; let us go," Laptev assented.
Endless calls followed the conclusion of the concert. The
audience got up from their seats and went out very slowly, and
Laptev could not go away without telling his wife. He had to
stand at the door and wait.
"I'm dying for some tea," Polina Nikolaevna said plaintively.
"My very soul is parched."
"You can get something to drink here," said Laptev. "Let's go to
the buffet."
"Oh, I've no money to fling away on waiters. I'm not a
shopkeeper."
He offered her his arm; she refused, in a long, wearisome
sentence which he had heard many times, to the effect that she
did not class herself with the feebler fair sex, and did not
depend on the services of gentlemen.
As she talked to him she kept looking about at the audience and
greeting acquaintances; they were her fellow-students at the
higher courses and at the conservatorium, and her pupils. She
gripped their hands abruptly, as though she were tugging at
them. But then she began twitching her shoulders, and trembling
as though she were in a fever, and at last said softly, looking
at Laptev with horror:
"Who is it you've married? Where were your eyes, you mad fellow?
What did you see in that stupid, insignificant girl? Why, I
loved you for your mind, for your soul, but that china doll
wants nothing but your money!"
"Let us drop that, Polina," he said in a voice of supplication.
"All that you can say to me about my marriage I've said to
myself many times already. Don't cause me unnecessary pain."
Yulia Sergeyevna made her appearance, wearing a black dress with
a big diamond brooch, which her father-in-law had sent her after
the service. She was followed by her suite -- Kotchevoy, two
doctors of their acquaintance, an officer, and a stout young man
in student's uniform, called Kish.
"You go on with Kostya," Laptev said to his wife. "I'm coming
later."
Yulia nodded and went on. Polina Nikolaevna gazed after her,
quivering all over and twitching nervously, and in her eyes
there was a look of repulsion, hatred, and pain.
Laptev was afraid to go home with her, foreseeing an unpleasant
discussion, cutting words, and tears, and he suggested that they
should go and have tea at a restaurant. But she said:
"No, no. I want to go home. Don't dare to talk to me of
restaurants."
She did not like being in a restaurant, because the atmosphere
of restaurants seemed to her poisoned by tobacco smoke and the
breath of men. Against all men she did not know she cherished a
strange prejudice, regarding them all as immoral rakes, capable
of attacking her at any moment. Besides, the music played at
restaurants jarred on her nerves and gave her a headache.
Coming out of the Hall of Nobility, they took a sledge in
Ostozhenka and drove to Savelovsky Lane, where she lodged. All
the way Laptev thought about her. It was true that he owed her a
great deal. He had made her acquaintance at the flat of his
friend Yartsev, to whom she was giving lessons in harmony. Her
love for him was deep and perfectly disinterested, and her
relations with him did not alter her habits; she went on giving
her lessons and wearing herself out with work as before. Through
her he came to understand and love music, which he had scarcely
cared for till then.
"Half my kingdom for a cup of tea!" she pronounced in a hollow
voice, covering her mouth with her muff that she might not catch
cold. "I've given five lessons, confound them! My pupils are as
stupid as posts; I nearly died of exasperation. I don't know how
long this slavery can go on. I'm worn out. As soon as I can
scrape together three hundred roubles, I shall throw it all up
and go to the Crimea, to lie on the beach and drink in ozone.
How I love the sea -- oh, how I love the sea!"
"You'll never go," said Laptev. "To begin with, you'll never
save the money; and, besides, you'd grudge spending it. Forgive
me, I repeat again: surely it's quite as humiliating to collect
the money by farthings from idle people who have music lessons
to while away their time, as to borrow it from your friends."
"I haven't any friends," she said irritably. "And please don't
talk nonsense. The working class to which I belong has one
privilege: the consciousness of being incorruptible -- the right
to refuse to be indebted to wretched little shopkeepers, and to
treat them with scorn. No, indeed, you don't buy me! I'm not a
Yulitchka!"
Laptev did not attempt to pay the driver, knowing that it would
call forth a perfect torrent of words, such as he had often
heard before. She paid herself.
She had a little furnished room in the flat of a solitary lady
who provided her meals. Her big Becker piano was for the time at
Yartsev's in Great Nikitsky Street, and she went there every day
to play on it. In her room there were armchairs in loose covers,
a bed with a white summer quilt, and flowers belonging to the
landlady; there were oleographs on the walls, and there was
nothing that would have suggested that there was a woman, and a
woman of university education, living in it. There was no toilet
table; there were no books; there was not even a writing-table.
It was evident that she went to bed as soon as she got home, and
went out as soon as she got up in the morning.
The cook brought in the samovar. Polina Nikolaevna made tea,
and, still shivering -- the room was cold -- began abusing the
singers who had sung in the ninth symphony. She was so tired she
could hardly keep her eyes open. She drank one glass of tea,
then a second, and then a third.
"And so you are married," she said. "But don't be uneasy; I'm
not going to pine away. I shall be able to tear you out of my
heart. Only it's annoying and bitter to me that you are just as
contemptible as every one else; that what you want in a woman is
not brains or intellect, but simply a body, good looks, and
youth. . . . Youth!" she pronounced through her nose, as though
mimicking some one, and she laughed. "Youth! You must have
purity, reinheit! reinheit!" she laughed, throwing herself back
in her chair. "Reinheit!"
When she left off laughing her eyes were wet with tears.
"You're happy, at any rate?" she asked.
"No."
"Does she love you?"
Laptev, agitated, and feeling miserable, stood up and began
walking about the room.
"No," he repeated. "If you want to know, Polina, I'm very
unhappy. There's no help for it; I've done the stupid thing, and
there's no correcting it now. I must look at it philosophically.
She married me without love, stupidly, perhaps with mercenary
motives, but without understanding, and now she evidently sees
her mistake and is miserable. I see it. At night we sleep
together, but by day she is afraid to be left alone with me for
five minutes, and tries to find distraction, society. With me
she feels ashamed and frightened."
"And yet she takes money from you?"
"That's stupid, Polina!" cried Laptev. "She takes money from me
because it makes absolutely no difference to her whether she has
it or not. She is an honest, pure girl. She married me simply
because she wanted to get away from her father, that's all."
"And are you sure she would have married you if you had not been
rich?" asked Polina.
"I'm not sure of anything," said Laptev dejectedly. "Not of
anything. I don't understand anything. For God's sake, Polina,
don't let us talk about it."
"Do you love her?"
"Desperately."
A silence followed. She drank a fourth glass, while he paced up
and down, thinking that by now his wife was probably having
supper at the doctors' club.
"But is it possible to love without knowing why?" asked Polina,
shrugging her shoulders. "No; it's the promptings of animal
passion! You are poisoned, intoxicated by that beautiful body,
that reinheit! Go away from me; you are unclean! Go to her!"
She brandished her hand at him, then took up his hat and hurled
it at him. He put on his fur coat without speaking and went out,
but she ran after him into the passage, clutched his arm above
the elbow, and broke into sobs.
"Hush, Polina! Don't!" he said, and could not unclasp her
fingers. "Calm yourself, I entreat you."
She shut her eyes and turned pale, and her long nose became an
unpleasant waxy colour like a corpse's, and Laptev still could
not unclasp her fingers. She had fainted. He lifted her up
carefully, laid her on her bed, and sat by her for ten minutes
till she came to herself. Her hands were cold, her pulse was
weak and uneven.
"Go home," she said, opening her eyes. "Go away, or I shall
begin howling again. I must take myself in hand."
When he came out, instead of going to the doctors' club where
his friends were expecting him, he went home. All the way home
he was asking himself reproachfully why he had not settled down
to married life with that woman who loved him so much, and was
in reality his wife and friend. She was the one human being who
was devoted to him; and, besides, would it not have been a
grateful and worthy task to give happiness, peace, and a home to
that proud, clever, overworked creature? Was it for him, he
asked himself, to lay claim to youth and beauty, to that
happiness which could not be, and which, as though in punishment
or mockery, had kept him for the last three months in a state of
gloom and oppression. The honeymoon was long over, and he still,
absurd to say, did not know what sort of person his wife was. To
her school friends and her father she wrote long letters of five
sheets, and was never at a loss for something to say to them,
but to him she never spoke except about the weather or to tell
him that dinner was ready, or that it was supper-time. When at
night she said her lengthy prayers and then kissed her crosses
and ikons, he thought, watching her with hatred, "Here she's
praying. What's she praying about? What about?" In his thoughts
he showered insults on himself and her, telling himself that
when he got into bed and took her into his arms, he was taking
what he had paid for; but it was horrible. If only it had been a
healthy, reckless, sinful woman; but here he had youth, piety,
meekness, the pure eyes of innocence. . . . While they were
engaged her piety had touched him; now the conventional
definiteness of her views and convictions seemed to him a
barrier, behind which the real truth could not be seen. Already
everything in his married life was agonising. When his wife,
sitting beside him in the theatre, sighed or laughed
spontaneously, it was bitter to him that she enjoyed herself
alone and would not share her delight with him. And it was
remarkable that she was friendly with all his friends, and they
all knew what she was like already, while he knew nothing about
her, and only moped and was dumbly jealous.
When he got home Laptev put on his dressing-gown and slippers,
and sat down in his study to read a novel. His wife was not at
home. But within half an hour there was a ring at the hall door,
and he heard the muffled footsteps of Pyotr running to open it.
It was Yulia. She walked into the study in her fur coat, her
cheeks rosy with the frost,
"There's a great fire in Pryesnya," she said breathlessly.
"There's a tremendous glow. I'm going to see it with Konstantin
Ivanovitch."
"Well, do, dear!"
The sight of her health, her freshness, and the childish horror
in her eyes, reassured Laptev. He read for another half-hour and
went to bed.
Next day Polina Nikolaevna sent to the warehouse two books she
had borrowed from him, all his letters and his photographs; with
them was a note consisting of one word -- "basta."
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