Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [143]
At that moment he recalled how, when he saw Anna Sergeyevna off at the station in the evening, he had told himself it was all over and they would never meet again. But how far away the end seemed to be now!
Anna paused on a narrow dark stairway which bore the inscription: “This way to the upper balcony.”
“How you frightened me!” she said, breathing heavily, pale and stunned. “How you frightened me! I am half dead! Why did you come? Why?”
“Do try to understand, Anna—please understand …” he said in a hurried whisper. “I implore you, please understand …”
She looked at him with dread, with entreaty, with love, intently, to retain his features all the more firmly in her memory.
“I’ve been so unhappy,” she went on, not listening to him. “All this time I’ve thought only of you, I’ve lived on thoughts of you. I tried to forget, to forget—why, why have you come?”
A pair of schoolboys were standing on the landing above them, smoking and peering down, but Gurov did not care, and drawing Anna to him, he began kissing her face, her cheeks, her hands.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?” she said in terror, pushing him away from her. “We have both lost our senses! Go away now—tonight!… I implore you by everything you hold sacred.… Someone is coming!”
Someone was climbing up the stairs.
“You must go away …” Anna Sergeyevna went on in a whisper. “Do you hear, Dmitry Dmitrich? I’ll come and visit you in Moscow. I have never been happy. I am miserable now, and I shall never be happy again, never! Don’t make me suffer any more! I swear I’ll come to Moscow! We must separate now. My dear precious darling, we have to separate!”
She pressed his hand and went quickly down the stairs, all the while gazing back at him, and it was clear from the expression in her eyes that she was miserable. For a while Gurov stood there, listening to her footsteps, and then all sounds faded away, and he went to look for his coat and left the theater.
IV
And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Every two or three months she would leave the town of S––, telling her husband she was going to consult a specialist in women’s disorders, and her husband neither believed her nor disbelieved her. In Moscow she always stayed at the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel, and the moment she arrived she would send a red-capped hotel messenger to Gurov. He would visit her, and no one in Moscow ever knew about their meetings.
One winter morning he was going to visit her as usual. (The messenger from the hotel had come the evening before, but he was out.) His daughter accompanied him. He was taking her to school, and the school lay on the way to the hotel. Great wet flakes of snow were falling.
“Three degrees above freezing, and it’s still snowing,” he told his daughter. “That’s only the surface temperature of the earth—the other layers of the atmosphere have other temperatures.”
“Yes, Papa. But why are there no thunderstorms in winter?”
He explained that, too. He talked, and all the while he was thinking about his meeting with the beloved, and not a living soul knew of it, and probably no one would ever know. He was living a double life: an open and public life visible to all who had any need to know, full of conventional truth and conventional lies, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another which followed a secret course. And by one of those Strange and perhaps accidental circumstances everything that was to him meaningful, urgent, and important, everything about which he felt sincerely and did