IV
And Anna Sergeyevna
began coming to see him in Moscow. Once in two or three months she left
S----, telling her husband that she was going to consult a doctor about
an internal complaint -- and her husband believed her, and did not
believe her. In Moscow she stayed at the Slaviansky Bazaar hotel, and
at once sent a man in a red cap to Gurov. Gurov went to see her, and no
one in Moscow knew of it.
Once he was going to see her in this
way on a winter morning (the messenger had come the evening before when
he was out). With him walked his daughter, whom he wanted to take to
school: it was on the way. Snow was falling in big wet flakes.
"It's
three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing," said Gurov
to his daughter. "The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there
is quite a different temperature at a greater height in the
atmosphere."
"And why are there no thunderstorms in the winter, father?"
He
explained that, too. He talked, thinking all the while that he was
going to see her, and no living soul knew of it, and probably never
would know. He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who
cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood,
exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another
life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps
accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was
essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was
sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of
his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him,
the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth -- such, for
instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his
"lower race," his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities --
all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in
what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most
interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of
night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly
on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that
personal privacy should be respected.
After leaving his
daughter at school, Gurov went on to the Slaviansky Bazaar. He took off
his fur coat below, went upstairs, and softly knocked at the door. Anna
Sergeyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress, exhausted by the journey
and the suspense, had been expecting him since the evening before. She
was pale; she looked at him, and did not smile, and he had hardly come
in when she fell on his breast. Their kiss was slow and prolonged, as
though they had not met for two years.
"Well, how are you getting on there?" he asked. "What news?"
"Wait; I'll tell you directly. . . . I can't talk."
She could not speak; she was crying. She turned away from him, and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.
"Let her have her cry out. I'll sit down and wait," he thought, and he sat down in an arm-chair.
Then
he rang and asked for tea to be brought him, and while he drank his tea
she remained standing at the window with her back to him. She was
crying from emotion, from the miserable consciousness that their life
was so hard for them; they could only meet in secret, hiding themselves
from people, like thieves! Was not their life shattered?
"Come, do stop!" he said.
It
was evident to him that this love of theirs would not soon be over,
that he could not see the end of it. Anna Sergeyevna grew more and more
attached to him. She adored him, and it was unthinkable to say to her
that it was bound to have an end some day; besides, she would not have
believed it!
He went up to her and took her by the shoulders
to say something affectionate and cheering, and at that moment he saw
himself in the looking-glass.
His hair was already beginning
to turn grey. And it seemed strange to him that he had grown so much
older, so much plainer during the 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.
Zodiac
Subject: The Lady with the Dog {Act IV} 
Thu 11 Jun 2009 - 15:17
