It was reported that a new face had been seen on the quay; a lady with a
little dog. Dimitri Dimitrich Gomov, who had been a fortnight at Talta
and had got used to it, had begun to show an interest in new faces. As
he sat in the pavilion at Verné's he saw a young lady, blond and fairly
tall, and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, pass along the quay. After her
ran a white Pomeranian.
Later he saw her in the park and in the square several times a day. She
walked by herself, always in the same broad-brimmed hat, and with this
white dog. Nobody knew who she was, and she was spoken of as the lady
with the toy dog.
"If," thought Gomov, "if she is here without a husband or a friend, it
would be as well to make her acquaintance."
He was not yet forty, but he had a daughter of twelve and two boys at
school. He had married young, in his second year at the University, and
now his wife seemed half as old again as himself. She was a tall woman,
with dark eyebrows, erect, grave, stolid, and she thought herself an
intellectual woman. She read a great deal, called her husband not
Dimitri, but Demitri, and in his private mind he thought her
short-witted, narrow-minded, and ungracious. He was afraid of her and
disliked being at home. He had begun to betray her with other women long
ago, betrayed her frequently, and, probably for that reason nearly
always spoke ill of women, and when they were discussed in his presence
he would maintain that they were an inferior race.
It seemed to him that his experience was bitter enough to give him the
right to call them any name he liked, but he could not live a couple of
days without the "inferior race." With men he was bored and ill at ease,
cold and unable to talk, but when he was with women, he felt easy and
knew what to talk about, and how to behave, and even when he was silent
with them he felt quite comfortable. In his appearance as in his
character, indeed in his whole nature, there was something attractive,
indefinable, which drew women to him and charmed them; he knew it, and
he, too, was drawn by some mysterious power to them.
His frequent, and, indeed, bitter experiences had taught him long ago
that every affair of that kind, at first a divine diversion, a delicious
smooth adventure, is in the end a source of worry for a decent man,
especially for men like those at Moscow who are slow to move,
irresolute, domesticated, for it becomes at last an acute and
extraordinary complicated problem and a nuisance. But whenever he met
and was interested in a new woman, then his experience would slip away
from his memory, and he would long to live, and everything would seem so
simple and amusing.
And it so happened that one evening he dined in the gardens, and the
lady in the broad-brimmed hat came up at a leisurely pace and sat at the
next table. Her expression, her gait, her dress, her coiffure told him
that she belonged to society, that she was married, that she was paying
her first visit to Talta, that she was alone, and that she was bored....
There is a great deal of untruth in the gossip about the immorality of
the place. He scorned such tales, knowing that they were for the most
part concocted by people who would be only too ready to sin if they had
the chance, but when the lady sat down at the next table, only a yard or
two away from him, his thoughts were filled with tales of easy
conquests, of trips to the mountains; and he was suddenly possessed by
the alluring idea of a quick transitory liaison, a moment's affair with
an unknown woman whom he knew not even by name.
He beckoned to the little dog, and when it came up to him, wagged his
finger at it. The dog began to growl. Gomov again wagged his finger.
The lady glanced at him and at once cast her eyes down.
"He won't bite," she said and blushed.
"May I give him a bone?"--and when she nodded emphatically, he asked
affably: "Have you been in Talta long?"
"About five days."
"And I am just dragging through my second week."
They were silent for a while.
"Time goes quickly," she said, "and it is amazingly boring here."
"It is the usual thing to say that it is boring here. People live quite
happily in dull holes like Bieliev or Zhidra, but as soon as they come
here they say: 'How boring it is! The very dregs of dullness!' One would
think they came from Spain."
She smiled. Then both went on eating in silence as though they did not
know each other; but after dinner they went off together--and then
began an easy, playful conversation as though they were perfectly happy,
and it was all one to them where they went or what they talked of. They
walked and talked of how the sea was strangely luminous; the water
lilac, so soft and warm, and athwart it the moon cast a golden streak.
They said how stifling it was after the hot day. Gomov told her how he
came from Moscow and was a philologist by education, but in a bank by
profession; and how he had once wanted to sing in opera, but gave it up;
and how he had two houses in Moscow.... And from her he learned that she
came from Petersburg, was born there, but married at S. where she had
been living for the last two years; that she would stay another month at
Talta, and perhaps her husband would come for her, because, he too,
needed a rest. She could not tell him what her husband was--Provincial
Administration or Zemstvo Council--and she seemed to think it funny. And
Gomov found out that her name was Anna Sergueyevna.
In his room at night, he thought of her and how they would meet next
day. They must do so. As he was going to sleep, it struck him that she
could only lately have left school, and had been at her lessons even as
his daughter was then; he remembered how bashful and gauche she was when
she laughed and talked with a stranger--it must be, he thought, the
first time she had been alone, and in such a place with men walking
after her and looking at her and talking to her, all with the same
secret purpose which she could not but guess. He thought of her slender
white neck and her pretty, grey eyes.
"There is something touching about her," he thought as he began to fall
asleep.