The Chorus Girl and Other Stories. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

furnished rooms has always seemed to me a mistake."

      Twenty paces from the copse the road was crossed by a small narrow bridge with posts at the corners, which had always served as a resting-place for the Kuznetsovs and their guests on their evening walks. From there those who liked could mimic the forest echo, and one could see the road vanish in the dark woodland track.

      "Well, here is the bridge!" said Ognev. "Here you must turn back."

      Vera stopped and drew a breath.

      "Let us sit down," she said, sitting down on one of the posts. "People generally sit down when they say good-bye before starting on a journey."

      Ognev settled himself beside her on his bundle of books and went on talking. She was breathless from the walk, and was looking, not at Ivan Alexeyitch, but away into the distance so that he could not see her face.

      "And what if we meet in ten years' time?" he said. "What shall we be like then? You will be by then the respectable mother of a family, and I shall be the author of some weighty statistical work of no use to anyone, as thick as forty thousand such works. We shall meet and think of old days… Now we are conscious of the present; it absorbs and excites us, but when we meet we shall not remember the day, nor the month, nor even the year in which we saw each other for the last time on this bridge. You will be changed, perhaps.. Tell me, will you be different?"

      Vera started and turned her face towards him.

      "What?" she asked.

      "I asked you just now.."

      "Excuse me, I did not hear what you were saying."

      Only then Ognev noticed a change in Vera. She was pale, breathing fast, and the tremor in her breathing affected her hands and lips and head, and not one curl as usual, but two, came loose and fell on her forehead… Evidently she avoided looking him in the face, and, trying to mask her emotion, at one moment fingered her collar, which seemed to be rasping her neck, at another pulled her red shawl from one shoulder to the other.

      "I am afraid you are cold," said Ognev. "It's not at all wise to sit in the mist. Let me see you back nach-haus."

      Vera sat mute.

      "What is the matter?" asked Ognev, with a smile. "You sit silent and don't answer my questions. Are you cross, or don't you feel well?"

      Vera pressed the palm of her hand to the cheek nearest to Ognev, and then abruptly jerked it away.

      "An awful position!" she murmured, with a look of pain on her face.

      "Awful!"

      "How is it awful?" asked Ognev, shrugging his shoulders and not concealing his surprise. "What's the matter?"

      Still breathing hard and twitching her shoulders, Vera turned her back to him, looked at the sky for half a minute, and said:

      "There is something I must say to you, Ivan Alexeyitch.."

      "I am listening."

      "It may seem strange to you… You will be surprised, but I don't care.."

      Ognev shrugged his shoulders once more and prepared himself to listen.

      "You see." Verotchka began, bowing her head and fingering a ball on the fringe of her shawl. "You see.. this is what I wanted to tell you… You'll think it strange.. and silly, but I.. can't bear it any longer."

      Vera's words died away in an indistinct mutter and were suddenly cut short by tears. The girl hid her face in her handkerchief, bent lower than ever, and wept bitterly. Ivan Alexeyitch cleared his throat in confusion and looked about him hopelessly, at his wits' end, not knowing what to say or do. Being unused to the sight of tears, he felt his own eyes, too, beginning to smart.

      "Well, what next!" he muttered helplessly. "Vera Gavrilovna, what's this for, I should like to know? My dear girl, are you.. are you ill? Or has someone been nasty to you? Tell me, perhaps I could, so to say.. help you.."

      When, trying to console her, he ventured cautiously to remove her hands from her face, she smiled at him through her tears and said:

      "I.. love you!"

      These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera, and got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.

      The sad, warm, sentimental mood induced by leave-taking and the home-made wine suddenly vanished, and gave place to an acute and unpleasant feeling of awkwardness. He felt an inward revulsion; he looked askance at Vera, and now that by declaring her love for him she had cast off the aloofness which so adds to a woman's charm, she seemed to him, as it were, shorter, plainer, more ordinary.

      "What's the meaning of it?" he thought with horror. "But I.. do I love her or not? That's the question!"

      And she breathed easily and freely now that the worst and most difficult thing was said. She, too, got up, and looking Ivan Alexeyitch straight in the face, began talking rapidly, warmly, irrepressibly.

      As a man suddenly panic-stricken cannot afterwards remember the succession of sounds accompanying the catastrophe that overwhelmed him, so Ognev cannot remember Vera's words and phrases. He can only recall the meaning of what she said, and the sensation her words evoked in him. He remembers her voice, which seemed stifled and husky with emotion, and the extraordinary music and passion of her intonation. Laughing, crying with tears glistening on her eyelashes, she told him that from the first day of their acquaintance he had struck her by his originality, his intelligence, his kind intelligent eyes, by his work and objects in life; that she loved him passionately, deeply, madly; that when coming into the house from the garden in the summer she saw his cape in the hall or heard his voice in the distance, she felt a cold shudder at her heart, a foreboding of happiness; even his slightest jokes had made her laugh; in every figure in his note-books she saw something extraordinarily wise and grand; his knotted stick seemed to her more beautiful than the trees.

      The copse and the wisps of mist and the black ditches at the side of the road seemed hushed listening to her, whilst something strange and unpleasant was passing in Ognev's heart… Telling him of her love, Vera was enchantingly beautiful; she spoke eloquently and passionately, but he felt neither pleasure nor gladness, as he would have liked to; he felt nothing but compassion for Vera, pity and regret that a good girl should be distressed on his account. Whether he was affected by generalizations from reading or by the insuperable habit of looking at things objectively, which so often hinders people from living, but Vera's ecstasies and suffering struck him as affected, not to be taken seriously, and at the same time rebellious feeling whispered to him that all he was hearing and seeing now, from the point of view of nature and personal happiness, was more important than any statistics and books and truths… And he raged and blamed himself, though he did not understand exactly where he was in fault.

      To complete his embarrassment, he was absolutely at a loss what to say, and yet something he must say. To say bluntly, "I don't love you," was beyond him, and he could not bring himself to say "Yes," because however much he rummaged in his heart he could not find one spark of feeling in it..

      He was silent, and she meanwhile was saying that for her there was no greater happiness than to see him, to follow him wherever he liked this very moment, to be his wife and helper, and that if he went away from her she would die of misery.

      "I cannot stay here!" she said, wringing her hands. "I am sick of the house and this wood and the air. I cannot bear the everlasting peace and aimless life, I can't endure our colourless, pale people, who are all as like one another as two drops of water! They are all good-natured and warm-hearted because they are all well-fed and know nothing of struggle or suffering… I want to be in those big damp houses where people suffer, embittered by work and need.."

      And this, too, seemed to Ognev affected and not to be taken seriously. When Vera had finished he still did not know what to say, but it was impossible to be silent, and he muttered:

      "Vera Gavrilovna, I am very grateful to you, though I feel I've done nothing to deserve such.. feeling.. on your part. Besides, as an honest man I ought to tell you that.. happiness depends on equality – that is, when both parties are.. equally in love.."

      But he