The Tales of Chekhov, vol 3 | Page 6

you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance
of in Yalta!"
The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned
suddenly and shouted:
"Dmitri Dmitritch!"
"What?"
"You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!"
These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation,
and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what
people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days!
The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual
talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations
always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the
better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling
and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting
away from it--just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.
Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And he
had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly; he sat
up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was sick of his
children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of
anything.
In the holidays in December he prepared for a journey, and told his
wife he was going to Petersburg to do something in the interests of a
young friend--and he set off for S----. What for? He did not very well
know himself. He wanted to see Anna Sergeyevna and to talk with
her--to arrange a meeting, if possible.
He reached S---- in the morning, and took the best room at the hotel, in
which the floor was covered with grey army cloth, and on the table was
an inkstand, grey with dust and adorned with a figure on horseback,
with its hat in its hand and its head broken off. The hotel porter gave
him the necessary information; Von Diderits lived in a house of his
own in Old Gontcharny Street--it was not far from the hotel: he was

rich and lived in good style, and had his own horses; every one in the
town knew him. The porter pronounced the name "Dridirits."
Gurov went without haste to Old Gontcharny Street and found the
house. Just opposite the house stretched a long grey fence adorned with
nails.
"One would run away from a fence like that," thought Gurov, looking
from the fence to the windows of the house and back again.
He considered: to-day was a holiday, and the husband would probably
be at home. And in any case it would be tactless to go into the house
and upset her. If he were to send her a note it might fall into her
husband's hands, and then it might ruin everything. The best thing was
to trust to chance. And he kept walking up and down the street by the
fence, waiting for the chance. He saw a beggar go in at the gate and
dogs fly at him; then an hour later he heard a piano, and the sounds
were faint and indistinct. Probably it was Anna Sergeyevna playing.
The front door suddenly opened, and an old woman came out, followed
by the familiar white Pomeranian. Gurov was on the point of calling to
the dog, but his heart began beating violently, and in his excitement he
could not remember the dog's name.
He walked up and down, and loathed the grey fence more and more,
and by now he thought irritably that Anna Sergeyevna had forgotten
him, and was perhaps already amusing herself with some one else, and
that that was very natural in a young woman who had nothing to look at
from morning till night but that confounded fence. He went back to his
hotel room and sat for a long while on the sofa, not knowing what to do,
then he had dinner and a long nap.
"How stupid and worrying it is!" he thought when he woke and looked
at the dark windows: it was already evening. "Here I've had a good
sleep for some reason. What shall I do in the night?"
He sat on the bed, which was covered by a cheap grey blanket, such as
one sees in hospitals, and he taunted himself in his vexation:
"So much for the lady with the dog . . . so much for the adventure . . . .
You're in a nice fix. . . ."
That morning at the station a poster in large letters had caught his eye.
"The Geisha" was to be performed for the first time. He thought of this
and went to the theatre.
"It's quite possible she may go to the first performance," he thought.

The theatre was full. As