A week passed. It was a blazing day. Indoors it was stifling, and in the
streets the dust whirled along. All day long he was plagued with thirst
and he came into the pavilion every few minutes and offered Anna
Sergueyevna an iced drink or an ice. It was impossibly hot.
In the evening, when the air was fresher, they walked to the jetty to
see the steamer come in. There was quite a crowd all gathered to meet
somebody, for they carried bouquets. And among them were clearly marked
the peculiarities of Talta: the elderly ladies were youngly dressed and
there were many generals.
The sea was rough and the steamer was late, and before it turned into
the jetty it had to do a great deal of manoeuvring. Anna Sergueyevna
looked through her lorgnette at the steamer and the passengers as though
she were looking for friends, and when she turned to Gomov, her eyes
shone. She talked much and her questions were abrupt, and she forgot
what she had said; and then she lost her lorgnette in the crowd.
The well-dressed people went away, the wind dropped, and Gomov and Anna
Sergueyevna stood as though they were waiting for somebody to come from
the steamer. Anna Sergueyevna was silent. She smelled her flowers and
did not look at Gomov.
"The weather has got pleasanter toward evening," he said. "Where shall
we go now? Shall we take a carriage?"
She did not answer.
He fixed his eyes on her and suddenly embraced her and kissed her lips,
and he was kindled with the perfume and the moisture of the flowers; at
once he started and looked round; had not some one seen?
"Let us go to your--" he murmured.
And they walked quickly away.
Her room was stifling, and smelled of scents which she had bought at the
Japanese shop. Gomov looked at her and thought: "What strange chances
there are in life!" From the past there came the memory of earlier
good-natured women, gay in their love, grateful to him for their
happiness, short though it might be; and of others--like his wife--who
loved without sincerity, and talked overmuch and affectedly,
hysterically, as though they were protesting that it was not love, nor
passion, but something more important; and of the few beautiful cold
women, into whose eyes there would flash suddenly a fierce expression, a
stubborn desire to take, to snatch from life more than it can give; they
were no longer in their first youth, they were capricious, unstable,
domineering, imprudent, and when Gomov became cold toward them then
their beauty roused him to hatred, and the lace on their lingerie
reminded him of the scales of fish.
But here there was the shyness and awkwardness of inexperienced youth, a
feeling of constraint; an impression of perplexity and wonder, as though
some one had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergueyevna, "the lady
with the toy dog" took what had happened somehow seriously, with a
particular gravity, as though thinking that this was her downfall and
very strange and improper. Her features seemed to sink and wither, and
on either side of her face her long hair hung mournfully down; she sat
crestfallen and musing, exactly like a woman taken in sin in some old
picture.
"It is not right," she said. "You are the first to lose respect for me."
There was a melon on the table. Gomov cut a slice and began to eat it
slowly. At least half an hour passed in silence.
Anna Sergueyevna was very touching; she irradiated the purity of a
simple, devout, inexperienced woman; the solitary candle on the table
hardly lighted her face, but it showed her very wretched.
"Why should I cease to respect you?" asked Gomov. "You don't know what
you are saying."
"God forgive me!" she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "It is
horrible."
"You seem to want to justify yourself."
"How can I justify myself? I am a wicked, low woman and I despise
myself. I have no thought of justifying myself. It is not my husband
that I have deceived, but myself. And not only now but for a long time
past. My husband may be a good honest man, but he is a lackey. I do not
know what work he does, but I do know that he is a lackey in his soul. I
was twenty when I married him. I was overcome by curiosity. I longed for
something. 'Surely,' I said to myself, 'there is another kind of life.'
I longed to live! To live, and to live.... Curiosity burned me up....
You do not understand it, but I swear by God, I could no longer control
myself. Something strange was going on in me. I could not hold myself
in. I told my husband that I was ill and came here.... And here I have
been walking about dizzily, like a lunatic.... And now I have become a
low, filthy woman whom everybody may despise."
Gomov was already bored; her simple words irritated him with their
unexpected and inappropriate repentance; but for the tears in her eyes
he might have thought her to be joking or playing a part.
"I do not understand," he said quietly. "What do you want?"
She hid her face in his bosom and pressed close to him.
"Believe, believe me, I implore you," she said. "I love a pure, honest
life, and sin is revolting to me. I don't know myself what I am doing.
Simple people say: 'The devil entrapped me,' and I can say of myself:
'The Evil One tempted me.'"
"Don't, don't," he murmured.
He looked into her staring, frightened eyes, kissed her, spoke quietly
and tenderly, and gradually quieted her and she was happy again, and
they both began to laugh.
Later, when they went out, there was not a soul on the quay; the town
with its cypresses looked like a city of the dead, but the sea still
roared and broke against the shore; a boat swung on the waves; and in
it sleepily twinkled the light of a lantern.
They found a cab and drove out to the Oreanda.
"Just now in the hall," said Gomov, "I discovered your name written on
the board--von Didenitz. Is your husband a German?"
"No. His grandfather, I believe, was a German, but he himself is an
Orthodox Russian."
At Oreanda they sat on a bench, not far from the church, looked down at
the sea and were silent. Talta was hardly visible through the morning
mist. The tops of the hills were shrouded in motionless white clouds.
The leaves of the trees never stirred, the cicadas trilled, and the
monotonous dull sound of the sea, coming up from below, spoke of the
rest, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So the sea roared when there was
neither Talta nor Oreanda, and so it roars and will roar, dully,
indifferently when we shall be no more. And in this continual
indifference to the life and death of each of us, lives pent up, the
pledge of our eternal salvation, of the uninterrupted movement of life
on earth and its unceasing perfection. Sitting side by side with a young
woman, who in the dawn seemed so beautiful, Gomov, appeased and
enchanted by the sight of the fairy scene, the sea, the mountains, the
clouds, the wide sky, thought how at bottom, if it were thoroughly
explored, everything on earth was beautiful, everything, except what we
ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and
our own human dignity.
A man came up--a coast-guard--gave a look at them, then went away. He,
too, seemed mysterious and enchanted. A steamer came over from
Feodossia, by the light of the morning star, its own lights already put
out.
"There is dew on the grass," said Anna Sergueyevna after a silence.
"Yes. It is time to go home."
They returned to the town.
Then every afternoon they met on the quay, and lunched together, dined,
walked, enjoyed the sea. She complained that she slept badly, that her
heart beat alarmingly. She would ask the same question over and over
again, and was troubled now by jealousy, now by fear that he did not
sufficiently respect her. And often in the square or the gardens, when
there was no one near, he would draw her close and kiss her
passionately. Their complete idleness, these kisses in the full
daylight, given timidly and fearfully lest any one should see, the heat,
the smell of the sea and the continual brilliant parade of leisured,
well-dressed, well-fed people almost regenerated him. He would tell Anna
Sergueyevna how delightful she was, how tempting. He was impatiently
passionate, never left her side, and she would often brood, and even
asked him to confess that he did not respect her, did not love her at
all, and only saw in her a loose woman. Almost every evening, rather
late, they would drive out of the town, to Oreanda, or to the waterfall;
and these drives were always delightful, and the impressions won during
them were always beautiful and sublime.
They expected her husband to come. But he sent a letter in which he said
that his eyes were bad and implored his wife to come home. Anna
Sergueyevna began to worry.
"It is a good thing I am going away," she would say to Gomov. "It is
fate."
She went in a carriage and he accompanied her. They drove for a whole
day. When she took her seat in the car of an express-train and when the
second bell sounded, she said:
"Let me have another look at you.... Just one more look. Just as you
are."
She did not cry, but was sad and low-spirited, and her lips trembled.
"I will think of you--often," she said. "Good-bye. Good-bye. Don't think
ill of me. We part for ever. We must, because we ought not to have met
at all. Now, good-bye."
The train moved off rapidly. Its lights disappeared, and in a minute or
two the sound of it was lost, as though everything were agreed to put an
end to this sweet, oblivious madness. Left alone on the platform,
looking into the darkness, Gomov heard the trilling of the grasshoppers
and the humming of the telegraph-wires, and felt as though he had just
woke up. And he thought that it had been one more adventure, one more
affair, and it also was finished and had left only a memory. He was
moved, sad, and filled with a faint remorse; surely the young woman,
whom he would never see again, had not been happy with him; he had been
kind to her, friendly, and sincere, but still in his attitude toward
her, in his tone and caresses, there had always been a thin shadow of
raillery, the rather rough arrogance of the successful male aggravated
by the fact that he was twice as old as she. And all the time she had
called him kind, remarkable, noble, so that he was never really himself
to her, and had involuntarily deceived her....
Here at the station, the smell of autumn was in the air, and the evening
was cool.
"It is time for me to go North," thought Gomov, as he left the platform.
"It is time."