Fifty-Two Stories

“I was unhappy. At home, and in the fields, and in the shed I thought about her, I tried to understand the mystery of a young, beautiful, intelligent woman who has married an uninteresting man, almost old (the husband was over forty), has children by him—to understand the mystery of this uninteresting man, a kindly, simple soul, who reasoned with such boring sobriety, who kept company at balls with staid people, listless, useless, with a submissive, apathetic expression, as if he had been brought there to be sold, who believed, however, in his right to be happy, to have children with her; and I kept trying to understand why she had met precisely him, and not me, and what made it necessary for such a terrible mistake to happen in our life.

“And coming to town, I saw each time by her eyes that she was expecting me; and she herself would confess to me that she had had some special feeling since morning, that she had guessed I was coming. We had long talks, then fell silent, but we did not declare our love to each other, we concealed it timidly, jealously. We were afraid of everything that might reveal our secret to our own selves. I loved her tenderly, deeply, but I reasoned, I asked myself what our love could lead to, if we had no strength to fight it; it seemed incredible to me that this quiet, sad love of mine should suddenly, crudely interrupt the happy course of the life of her husband, her children, this whole household, where I was so loved and where I was so trusted. Was that honorable? She would have followed me, but where? Where could I take her? It would have been a different thing if I had a beautiful, interesting life, if, for instance, I were fighting for the freedom of my motherland, or was a famous scholar, artist, painter, but as it was I would be taking her from one ordinary, humdrum situation to another just like it, or even more humdrum. And how long would our happiness last? What would become of her in case of my illness, death, or if we simply fell out of love with each other?

“And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She was thinking about her husband, her children, her mother, who loved her husband like her own son. If she were to surrender to her feeling, she would have to lie, or to tell the truth, and in her situation either one would be equally terrible and awkward. And the question tormented her: would her love bring me happiness, would she not complicate my life, difficult and filled with all sorts of misfortunes as it was? It seemed to her that she was no longer young enough for me, not industrious and energetic enough to start a new life, and she often talked with her husband about my needing to marry an intelligent, worthy girl, who would be a good housewife, a helpmate—and immediately added that there was scarcely such a girl to be found in the whole town.

“Meanwhile the years passed. Anna Alexeevna now had two children. When I visited the Luganoviches, the servants smiled affably, the children shouted that Uncle Pavel Konstantinych had come and hung on my neck; everyone was glad. They didn’t understand what was going on in my soul, and thought that I was glad, too. They all saw me as a noble being. Both the adults and the children thought that a noble being was walking through the rooms, and that lent a special charm to their attitude towards me, as if in my presence their life became more pure and beautiful. Anna Alexeevna and I went to the theater together, always on foot; we sat next to each other in the stalls, our shoulders touched, I silently took the opera glasses from her hands and at the same time felt that she was close to me, that she was mine, that we could not be without each other, yet, by some strange misunderstanding, on leaving the theater, we said goodbye each time and parted like strangers. God knows what they were already saying about us in town, but there wasn’t a word of truth in anything they said.

“In later years Anna Alexeevna started going more often to visit her mother or her sister; she was already having bad moods, resulting from the awareness of an unfulfilled, ruined life, when she didn’t want to see either her husband or her children. She was already being treated for a nervous disorder.

“We said nothing, and went on saying nothing, but in front of other people she felt some strange vexation with me; she disagreed with whatever I said, and if I got into an argument, she would take my opponent’s side. When I dropped something, she would say coldly:

“ ‘My congratulations.’

“If I forgot the opera glasses when we went to the theater, she would say afterwards:

“ ‘I just knew you’d forget them.’