The Tales of Chekhov, vol 3 | Page 9

last
few years. The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and
quivering. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but
probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own.
Why did she love him so much? He always seemed to women different
from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man
created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all
their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved
him all the same. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time

passed, he had made their acquaintance, got on with them, parted, but
he had never once loved; it was anything you like, but not love.
And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really in
love--for the first time in his life.
Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and
akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that
fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not
understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though
they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in
different cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of
in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this
love of theirs had changed them both.
In moments of depression in the past he had comforted himself with
any arguments that came into his mind, but now he no longer cared for
arguments; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and
tender. . . .
"Don't cry, my darling," he said. "You've had your cry; that's
enough. . . . Let us talk now, let us think of some plan."
Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to
avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different
towns and not seeing each other for long at a time. How could they be
free from this intolerable bondage?
"How? How?" he asked, clutching his head. "How?"
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found,
and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both
of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the
most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
A DOCTOR'S VISIT
THE Professor received a telegram from the Lyalikovs' factory; he was
asked to come as quickly as possible. The daughter of some Madame
Lyalikov, apparently the owner of the factory, was ill, and that was all
that one could make out of the long, incoherent telegram. And the
Professor did not go himself, but sent instead his assistant, Korolyov.
It was two stations from Moscow, and there was a drive of three miles
from the station. A carriage with three horses had been sent to the
station to meet Korolyov; the coachman wore a hat with a peacock's
feather on it, and answered every question in a loud voice like a soldier:

"No, sir!" "Certainly, sir!"
It was Saturday evening; the sun was setting, the workpeople were
coming in crowds from the factory to the station, and they bowed to the
carriage in which Korolyov was driving. And he was charmed with the
evening, the farmhouses and villas on the road, and the birch-trees, and
the quiet atmosphere all around, when the fields and woods and the sun
seemed preparing, like the workpeople now on the eve of the holiday,
to rest, and perhaps to pray. . . .
He was born and had grown up in Moscow; he did not know the
country, and he had never taken any interest in factories, or been inside
one, but he had happened to read about factories, and had been in the
houses of manufacturers and had talked to them; and whenever he saw
a factory far or near, he always thought how quiet and peaceable it was
outside, but within there was always sure to be impenetrable ignorance
and dull egoism on the side of the owners, wearisome, unhealthy toil on
the side of the workpeople, squabbling, vermin, vodka. And now when
the workpeople timidly and respectfully made way for the carriage, in
their faces, their caps, their walk, he read physical impurity,
drunkenness, nervous exhaustion, bewilderment.
They drove in at the factory gates. On each side he caught glimpses of
the little houses of workpeople, of the faces of women, of quilts and
linen on the railings. "Look out!" shouted the coachman, not pulling up
the horses. It was a wide courtyard without grass, with five immense
blocks of