Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [108]
And suddenly his soul was filled with joy, and for a moment he had to pause to recover his breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events all flowing from one to the other.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain, and when he touched one end the other trembled.
When he took the raft across the river, and afterward when he was climbing the hill and looking back in the direction of his native village and toward the west, where the cold purple sunset was no more than a thin streak of light, it occurred to him that the same truth and the same beauty which reigned over humankind in the garden and in the courtyard of the high priest had endured uninterruptedly until the present time, and always they were the most important influences working on human life and everything on the earth; and the feeling of youth, health, and vigor—he was only twenty-two—and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of an unknown and secret happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life suddenly seemed to him ravishing, marvelous, and full of deep meaning.
April 1894
Anna Round the Neck
I
AFTER the wedding not even a light lunch was served. The young couple drank their champagne, changed their clothes, and set off for the station. Instead of attending a gay ball and a wedding supper, instead of music and dancing, they went off on a pilgrimage to a place a hundred and fifty miles away. There were many who approved of this, saying that Modest Alexeich was a fairly high-ranking official and no longer young, and that a noisy wedding would not have been altogether proper: music would obviously bore the fifty-two-year-old official married to a girl who had just turned eighteen. They said that Modest Alexeich, being a man of principle, really arranged this journey to a monastery so that his young bride would clearly understand that in marriage the first place must be given to religion and morality.
The couple was seen off at the station. Crowds of relatives together with the groom’s colleagues stood there with champagne glasses in their hands, waiting to shout “hurrah” when the train pulled away. Pyotr Leontyich, the bride’s father, stood there wearing a top hat and the frock coat of a schoolmaster, already drunk and very pale, and he kept peering up at the window with a glass in his hand, saying in an imploring voice: “Anyuta! Anna! Anna, just one last word …”
Anna leaned out of the window while he whispered something to her, enveloping her in the smell of brandy, blowing in her ear—she understood nothing at all—and he made the sign of the cross over her face, her breast, and her hands, his breath coming in gasps and tears shining in his eyes. Anna’s brothers, the schoolboys Petya and Andryusha, were pulling at his coat-tails and whispering shamefacedly: “Papa, that’s enough.… Papa, don’t do it …”
When the train started, Anna saw her father running a little way after the carriage, staggering and spilling wine, and it seemed to her that his face was pitiful, guilty, and very kind.
“Hu-hu-hurrah!” he shouted.
Then the young couple were left alone. Modest Alexeich looked round the compartment, arranged their things on the racks, and sat down opposite his young wife. He was an official of medium height, rather stout, puffy, well fed, with long whiskers but no mustache, and his round, clean-shaven, and sharply outlined chin resembled the heel of a foot. The most characteristic thing about his face was the absence of a mustache, his freshly shaven and naked upper lip merging imperceptibly into the fat cheeks, which quivered like jelly. His deportment was dignified, his movements unhurried, his manner suave.
“At this particular moment,” he