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ANTON CHEKHOV [1860–1904]
The Lady with the Dog
TRANSLATED BY IVY LITVINOV, N.D.
Born the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf in Taganrog, a sea- coast town in southern Russia, Anton Chekhov^ (1860–1904) began writing humorous tales to support himself while studying medicine at Moscow University. In 1884 he received his medical degree and pub- lished his first collection of short stories, Tales of Melpomene. Other early collections are Motley Tales (1886), At Twilight (1887), and Stones (1888). Besides being a masterful writer of short stories, Chekhov is probably Russia’s most esteemed playwright. In 1898 the Moscow Art Theatre produced his play The Seagull, followed by Uncle Vanya in 1899, The Three Sisters in 1901, and The Cherry Orchard in 1904. Chekhov, known for his sad and subtle exploration of people’s inability to communicate as well as for his humanitarian activities, died at age 44 of tuberculosis, which he had contracted in his student days.
I
People were telling one another that a newcomer had been seen on the promenade — a lady with a dog. Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov had been a fort- night in Yalta, and was accustomed to its ways, and he, too, had begun to take an interest in fresh arrivals. From his seat in Vernet’s outdoor café, he caught sight of a young woman in a toque, passing along the prome- nade; she was fair and not very tall; after her trotted a white pomeranian. Later he encountered her in the municipal park, and in the square, several times a day. She was always alone, wearing the same toque, and the pomeranian always trotted at her side. Nobody knew who she was, and people referred to her simply as “the lady with the dog.” “If she’s here without her husband, and without any friends,” thought Gurov, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make her acquaintance.” He was not yet forty, but had a twelve-year-old daughter and two schoolboy sons. He had been talked into marrying in his second year at college, and his wife now looked nearly twice as old as he was. She was a tall, black-browed woman, erect, dignified, imposing, and, as she said of herself, a “thinker.” She was a great reader, omitted the “hard sign” at the end of words in her letters, and called her husband “Dimitri” instead of
Dmitri; and though he secretly considered her shallow, narrowminded, and dowdy, he stood in awe of her, and disliked being at home. It was long since he had first begun deceiving her and he was now constantly unfaithful to her, and this was no doubt why he spoke slightingly of women, to whom he referred as the lower race. He considered that the ample lessons he had received from bitter experience entitled him to call them whatever he liked, but without this “lower race” he could not have existed a single day. He was bored and ill- at-ease in the company of men, with whom he was always cold and reserved, but felt quite at home among women, and knew exactly what to say to them, and how to behave; he could even be silent in their com- pany without feeling the slightest awkwardness. There was an elusive charm in his appearance and disposition which attracted women and caught their sympathies. He knew this and was himself attracted to them by some invisible force. Repeated and bitter experience had taught him that every fresh inti- macy, while at first introducing such pleasant variety into everyday life, and offering itself as a charming, light adventure, inevitably developed, among decent people (especially in Moscow, where they are so irresolute and slow to move), into a problem of excessive complication leading to an intolerably irksome situation. But every time he encountered an attractive woman he forgot all about this experience, the desire for life surged up in him, and everything suddenly seemed simple and amusing. One evening, then, while he was dining at the restaurant in the park, the lady in the toque came strolling up and took a seat at a neighbouring table. Her expression, gait, dress, coiffure, all told him that she was from the upper classes, that she was married, that she was in Yalta for the first time, alone and bored.... The accounts of the laxity of morals among visitors to Yalta are greatly exaggerated, and he paid no heed to them, knowing that for the most part they were invented by people who would gladly have transgressed themselves, had they known how to set about it. But when the lady sat down at a neighbouring table a few yards away from him, these stories of easy conquests, of excursions to the mountains, came back to him, and the seductive idea of a brisk transitory liaison, an affair with a woman whose very name he did not know, suddenly took possession of his mind. He snapped his fingers at the pomeranian, and when it trotted up to him, shook his forefinger at it. The pomeranian growled. Gurov shook his finger again. The lady glanced at him and instantly lowered her eyes. “He doesn’t bite,” she said, and blushed. “May I give him a bone?” he asked, and on her nod of consent added in friendly tones: “Have you been long in Yalta?”
and people’s hats blew off. It was a thirsty day and Gurov kept going to the outdoor café for fruit-drinks and ices to offer Anna Sergeyevna. The heat was overpowering. In the evening, when the wind had dropped, they walked to the pier to see the steamer in. There were a great many people strolling about the landing-place; some, bunches of flowers in their hands, were meeting friends. Two peculiarities of the smart Yalta crowd stood out distinctly — the elderly ladies all tried to dress very young, and there seemed to be an inordinate number of generals about. Owing to the roughness of the sea the steamer arrived late, after the sun had gone down, and it had to manoeuvre for some time before it could get alongside the pier. Anna Sergeyevna scanned the steamer and passengers through her lorgnette, as if looking for someone she knew, and when she turned to Gurov her eyes were glistening. She talked a great deal, firing off abrupt questions and forgetting immediately what it was she had wanted to know. Then she lost her lorgnette in the crush. The smart crowd began dispersing, features could no longer be made out, the wind had quite dropped, and Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna stood there as if waiting for someone else to come off the steamer. Anna Sergeyevna had fallen silent, every now and then smelling her flowers, but not looking at Gurov. “It’s turning out a fine evening,” he said. “What shall we do? We might go for a drive.” She made no reply. He looked steadily at her and suddenly took her in his arms and kissed her lips, and the fragrance and dampness of the flowers closed round him, but the next moment he looked behind him in alarm — had anyone seen them? “Let’s go to your room,” he murmured. And they walked off together, very quickly. Her room was stuffy and smelt of some scent she had bought in the Japanese shop. Gurov looked at her, thinking to himself: “How full of strange encounters life is!” He could remember carefree, good-natured women who were exhilarated by love-making and grateful to him for the happiness he gave them, however shortlived; and there had been others — his wife among them — whose caresses were insincere, affected, hysterical, mixed up with a great deal of quite unnecessary talk, and whose expres- sion seemed to say that all this was not just love-making or passion, but something much more significant; then there had been two or three beautiful, cold women, over whose features flitted a predatory expres- sion, betraying a determination to wring from life more than it could give, women no longer in their first youth, capricious, irrational, despotic, brainless, and when Gurov had cooled to these, their beauty aroused in
him nothing but repulsion, and the lace trimming on their underclothes reminded him of fish-scales. But here the timidity and awkwardness of youth and inexperience were still apparent; and there was a feeling of embarrassment in the atmosphere, as if someone had just knocked at the door. Anna Ser- geyevna, “the lady with the dog,” seemed to regard the affair as some- thing very special, very serious, as if she had become a fallen woman, an attitude he found odd and disconcerting. Her features lengthened and drooped, and her long hair hung mournfully on either side of her face. She assumed a pose of dismal meditation, like a repentant sinner in some classical painting. “It isn’t right,” she said. “You will never respect me any more.” On the table was a water-melon. Gurov cut himself a slice from it and began slowly eating it. At least half an hour passed in silence. Anna Sergeyevna was very touching, revealing the purity of a decent, naive woman who had seen very little of life. The solitary candle burning on the table scarcely lit up her face, but it was obvious that her heart was heavy. “Why should I stop respecting you?” asked Gurov. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” “May God forgive me!” she exclaimed, and her eyes filled with tears. “It’s terrible.” “No need to seek to justify yourself.” “How can I justify myself? I’m a wicked, fallen woman, I despise myself and have not the least thought of self-justification. It isn’t my hus- band I have deceived, it’s myself. And not only now, I have been deceiv- ing myself for ever so long. My husband is no doubt an honest, worthy man, but he’s a flunkey. I don’t know what it is he does at his office, but I know he’s a flunkey. I was only twenty when I married him, and I was devoured by curiosity, I wanted something higher. I told myself that there must be a different kind of life. I wanted to live, to live.... I was burning with curiosity... you’ll never understand that, but I swear to God I could no longer control myself, nothing could hold me back, I told my husband I was ill, and I came here.... And I started going about like one possessed, like a madwoman... and now I have become an ordi- nary, worthless woman, and everyone has the right to despise me.” Gurov listened to her, bored to death. The naive accents, the remorse, all was so unexpected, so out of place. But for the tears in her eyes, she might have been jesting or play-acting. “I don’t understand,” he said gently. “What is it you want?” She hid her face against his breast and pressed closer to him. “Do believe me, I implore you to believe me,” she said. “I love all that is honest and pure in life, vice is revolting to me. I don’t know what I’m
of sleeplessness, of palpitations, asked the same questions over and over again, alternately surrendering to jealousy and the fear that he did not really respect her. And often, when there was nobody in sight in the square or the park, he would draw her to him and kiss her passionately. The utter idleness, these kisses in broad daylight, accompanied by furtive glances and the fear of discovery, the heat, the smell of the sea, and the idle, smart, well-fed people continually crossing their field of vision, seemed to have given him a new lease on life. He told Anna Ser- geyevna she was beautiful and seductive, made love to her with impetu- ous passion, and never left her side, while she was always pensive, always trying to force from him the admission that he did not respect her, that he did not love her a bit, and considered her just an ordinary woman. Almost every night they drove out of town, to Oreanda, the waterfall, or some other beauty-spot. And these excursions were in- variably a success, each contributing fresh impressions of majestic beauty. All this time they kept expecting her husband to arrive. But a letter came in which he told his wife that he was having trouble with his eyes, and implored her to come home as soon as possible. Anna Sergeyevna made hasty preparations for leaving. “It’s a good thing I’m going,” she said to Gurov. “It’s the intervention of fate.” She left Yalta in a carriage, and he went with her as far as the railway station. The drive took nearly a whole day. When she got into the express train, after the second bell had been rung, she said: “Let me have one more look at you.... One last look. That’s right.” She did not weep, but was mournful, and seemed ill, the muscles of her cheeks twitching. “I shall think of you... I shall think of you all the time,” she said. “God bless you! Think kindly of me. We are parting for ever, it must be so, because we ought never to have met. Good-bye — God bless you.” The train steamed rapidly out of the station, its lights soon disappear- ing, and a minute later even the sound it made was silenced, as if every- thing were conspiring to bring this sweet oblivion, this madness, to an end as quickly as possible. And Gurov, standing alone on the platform and gazing into the dark distance, listened to the shrilling of the grasshoppers and the humming of the telegraph wires, with a feeling that he had only just waked up. And he told himself that this had been just one more of the many adventures in his life, and that it, too, was over, leaving nothing but a memory.... He was moved and sad, and felt a slight remorse. After all, this young woman whom he would never again see had not been really happy with him. He had been friendly and affectionate with her, but in his whole behaviour, in the tones of his voice, in his very caresses, there had been a shade of irony, the insulting
indulgence of the fortunate male, who was, moreover, almost twice her age. She had insisted in calling him good, remarkable, high-minded. Evi- dently he had appeared to her different from his real self, in a word he had involuntarily deceived her.... There was an autumnal feeling in the air, and the evening was chilly. “It’s time for me to be going north, too,” thought Gurov, as he walked away from the platform. “High time!”
III
When he got back to Moscow it was beginning to look like winter, the stoves were heated every day, and it was still dark when the children got up to go to school and drank their tea, so that the nurse had to light the lamp for a short time. Frost had set in. When the first snow falls, and one goes for one’s first sleigh-ride, it is pleasant to see the white ground, the white roofs; one breathes freely and lightly, and remembers the days of one’s youth. The ancient lime-trees and birches, white with rime, have a good-natured look, they are closer to the heart than cypresses and palms, and beneath their branches one is no longer haunted by the memory of mountains and the sea. Gurov had always lived in Moscow, and he returned to Moscow on a fine frosty day, and when he put on his fur-lined overcoat and thick gloves, and sauntered down Petrovka Street, and when, on Saturday evening, he heard the church bells ringing, his recent journey and the places he had visited lost their charm for him. He became gradually immersed in Moscow life, reading with avidity three newspapers a day, while declaring he never read Moscow newspapers on principle. Once more he was caught up in a whirl of restaurants, clubs, banquets, and celebrations, once more glowed with the flattering consciousness that well-known lawyers and actors came to his house, that he played cards in the Medical Club opposite a professor. He had believed that in a month’s time Anna Sergeyevna would be nothing but a wistful memory, and that hereafter, with her wistful smile, she would only occasionally appear to him in dreams, like others before her. But the month was now well over and winter was in full swing, and all was as clear in his memory as if he had only parted with Anna Sergeyevna the day before. And his recollections grew ever more insis- tent. When the voices of his children at their lessons reached him in his study through the evening stillness, when he heard a song, or the sounds of a musical-box in a restaurant, when the wind howled in the chimney, it all came back to him: early morning on the pier, the misty mountains,
of his children, sick of the bank, felt not the slightest desire to go any- where or talk about anything. When the Christmas holidays came, he packed his things, telling his wife he had to go to Petersburg in the interests of a certain young man, and set off for the town of S. To what end? He hardly knew himself. He only knew that he must see Anna Sergeyevna, must speak to her, arrange a meeting, if possible. He arrived at S. in the morning and engaged the best room in the hotel, which had a carpet of grey military frieze, and a dusty ink-pot on the table, surmounted by a headless rider, holding his hat in his raised hand. The hall porter told him what he wanted to know: von Diederitz had a house of his own in Staro-Goncharnaya Street. It wasn’t far from the hotel, he lived on a grand scale, luxuriously, kept carriage-horses, the whole town knew him. The hall porter pronounced the name “Drideritz.” Gurov strolled over to Staro-Goncharnaya Street and discovered the house. In front of it was a long grey fence with inverted nails hammered into the tops of the palings. “A fence like that is enough to make anyone want to run away,” thought Gurov, looking at the windows of the house and the fence. He reasoned that since it was a holiday, her husband would probably be at home. In any case it would be tactless to embarrass her by calling at the house. And a note might fall into the hands of the husband, and bring about catastrophe. The best thing would be to wait about on the chance of seeing her. And he walked up and down the street, hover- ing in the vicinity of the fence, watching for his chance. A beggar entered the gate, only to be attacked by dogs, then, an hour later, the faint, vague sounds of a piano reached his ears. That would be Anna Sergeyevna playing. Suddenly the front door opened and an old woman came out, followed by a familiar white pomeranian. Gurov tried to call to it, but his heart beat violently, and in his agitation he could not remember its name. He walked on, hating the grey fence more and more, and now ready to tell himself irately that Anna Sergeyevna had forgotten him, had already, perhaps, found distraction in another — what could be more natural in a young woman who had to look at this accursed fence from morning to night? He went back to his hotel and sat on the sofa in his room for some time, not knowing what to do, then he ordered dinner, and after dinner, had a long sleep. “What a foolish, restless business,” he thought, waking up and looking towards the dark window-panes. It was evening by now. “Well, I’ve had my sleep out. And what am I to do in the night?”
He sat up in bed, covered by the cheap grey quilt, which reminded him of a hospital blanket, and in his vexation he fell to taunting himself. “You and your lady with a dog... there’s adventure for you! See what you get for your pains.” On his arrival at the station that morning he had noticed a poster announcing in enormous letters the first performance at the local theatre of The Geisha. Remembering this, he got up and made for the theatre. “It’s highly probable that she goes to first-nights,” he told himself. The theatre was full. It was a typical provincial theatre, with a mist collecting over the chandeliers, and the crowd in the gallery fidgeting noisily. In the first row of the stalls the local dandies stood waiting for the curtain to go up, their hands clasped behind them. There, in the front seat of the Governor’s box, sat the Governor’s daughter, wearing a boa, the Governor himself hiding modestly behind the drapes, so that only his hands were visible. The curtain stirred, the orchestra took a long time tuning up their instruments. Gurov’s eyes roamed eagerly over the audience as they filed in and occupied their seats. Anna Sergeyevna came in, too. She seated herself in the third row of the stalls, and when Gurov’s glance fell on her, his heart seemed to stop, and he knew in a flash that the whole world contained no one nearer or dearer to him, no one more important to his happiness. This little woman, lost in the provincial crowd, in no way remarkable, holding a silly lorgnette in her hand, now filled his whole life, was his grief, his joy, all that he desired. Lulled by the sounds coming from the wretched orchestra, with its feeble, amateurish violinists, he thought how beauti- ful she was... thought and dreamed.... Anna Sergeyevna was accompanied by a tall, round-shouldered young man with small whiskers, who nodded at every step before taking the seat beside her and seemed to be continually bowing to someone. This must be her husband, whom, in a fit of bitterness, at Yalta, she had called a “flunkey.” And there really was something of the lackey’s servility in his lanky figure, his side-whiskers, and the little bald spot on the top of his head. And he smiled sweetly, and the badge of some scientific society gleaming in his buttonhole was like the number on a footman’s livery. The husband went out to smoke in the first interval, and she was left alone in her seat. Gurov, who had taken a seat in the stalls, went up to her and said in a trembling voice, with a forced smile: “How d’you do?” She glanced up at him and turned pale, then looked at him again in alarm, unable to believe her eyes, squeezing her fan and lorgnette in one hand, evidently struggling to overcome a feeling of faintness. Neither of them said a word. She sat there, and he stood beside her, disconcerted
IV
And Anna Sergeyevna began going to Moscow to see him. Every two or three months she left the town of S., telling her husband that she was going to consult a specialist on female diseases, and her husband believed her and did not believe her. In Moscow she always stayed at the “Slavyanski Bazaar,” sending a man in a red cap to Gurov the moment she arrived. Gurov went to her, and no one in Moscow knew anything about it. One winter morning he went to see her as usual (the messenger had been to him the evening before, but had not found him at home). His daughter was with him for her school was on the way, and he thought he might as well see her to it. “It is three degrees above zero,” said Gurov to his daughter, “and yet it is snowing. You see it is only above zero close to the ground, the temper- ature in the upper layers of the atmosphere is quite different.” “Why doesn’t it ever thunder in winter, Papa?” He explained this, too. As he was speaking, he kept reminding himself that he was going to a rendezvous and that not a living soul knew about it, or, probably, ever would. He led a double life — one in public, in the sight of all whom it concerned, full of conventional truth and conven- tional deception, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another which flowed in secret. And, owing to some strange, pos- sibly quite accidental chain of circumstances, everything that was im- portant, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself, everything that composed the kernel of his life, went on in secret, while everything that was false in him, everything that composed the husk in which he hid himself and the truth which was in him — his work at the bank, discussions at the club, his “lower race,” his attendance at anniversary celebrations with his wife — was on the sur- face. He began to judge others by himself, no longer believing what he saw, and always assuming that the real, the only interesting life of every individual goes on as under cover of night, secretly. Every individual existence revolves around mystery, and perhaps that is the chief reason that all cultivated individuals insisted so strongly on the respect due to personal secrets. After leaving his daughter at the door of her school Gurov set off for the “Slavyanski Bazaar.” Taking off his overcoat in the lobby, he went up- stairs and knocked softly on the door. Anna Sergeyevna, wearing the grey dress he liked most, exhausted by her journey and by suspense, had been expecting him since the evening before. She was pale and looked at him without smiling, but was in his arms almost before he was fairly in the room. Their kiss was lingering, prolonged, as if they had not met for years.
“Well, how are you?” he asked. “Anything new?” “Wait, I’ll tell you in a minute.... I can’t... .” She could not speak, because she was crying. Turning away, she held her handkerchief to her eyes. “I’ll wait till she’s had her cry out,” he thought, and sank into a chair. He rang for tea, and a little later, while he was drinking it, she was still standing there, her face to the window. She wept from emotion, from her bitter consciousness of the sadness of their life; they could only see one another in secret, hiding from people, as if they were thieves. Was not their life a broken one? “Don’t cry,” he said. It was quite obvious to him that this love of theirs would not soon come to an end, and that no one could say when this end would be. Anna Sergeyevna loved him ever more fondly, worshipped him, and there would have been no point in telling her that one day it must end. Indeed, she would not have believed him. He moved over and took her by the shoulders, intending to fondle her with light words, but suddenly he caught sight of himself in the looking- glass. His hair was already beginning to turn grey. It struck him as strange that he should have aged so much in the last few years. The shoulders on which his hands lay were warm and quivering. He felt a pity for this life, still so warm and exquisite, but probably soon to fade and droop like his own. Why did she love him so? Women had always believed him differ- ent from what he really was, had loved in him not himself but the man their imagination pictured him, a man they had sought for eagerly all their lives. And afterwards when they discovered their mistake, they went on loving him just the same. And not one of them had ever been happy with him. Time had passed, he had met one woman after another, become intimate with each, parted with each, but had never loved. There had been all sorts of things between them, but never love. And only now, when he was grey-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life. He and Anna Sergeyevna loved one another as people who are very close and intimate, as husband and wife, as dear friends love one another. It seemed to them that fate had intended them for one another, and they could not understand why she should have a husband, and he a wife. They were like two migrating birds, the male and the female, who had been caught and put into separate cages. They forgave one another all that they were ashamed of in the past, in their present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both. Formerly, in moments of melancholy, he had consoled himself by the
