He stood up to go back to his house. She took hold of his arm.
‘You are the best person I’ve ever known in my life,’ she went on. ‘We’ll see each other, we’ll talk, won’t we? Promise me. I’m no concert pianist, I’ve no illusions about myself and when you’re with me I shall neither play nor talk about music.’
Three days later Peacock brought him a letter from Yekaterina Ivanovna.
‘You never come and see us. Why?’ she wrote. ‘I’m afraid that you don’t feel the same towards us any more. I’m afraid – and this thought alone terrifies me. Please set my mind at rest, please come and tell me that everything’s all right. I must talk to you. Your Y.T.’
After reading this letter he pondered for a moment and then he told Peacock:
‘Tell them, dear chap, that I can’t come today, I’m too busy. Tell them I’ll come and see them in about three days.’
But three days passed, a week passed and still he didn’t go. Once, when he was driving past the Turkins’ house, he remembered that he really should call on them, if only for a few minutes, but on reflection he decided against it.
And he never visited the Turkins again.
V
Several years have passed. Startsev has put on even more weight, grown flabby, has difficulty breathing and walks with his head thrown back. When he drives along in his carriage with three-horse team and bells, puffy and red-faced, and Panteleymon, likewise puffy and red-faced, with fleshy neck, sits on the box with his straight, seemingly wooden arms thrust forward, shouting at passers-by ‘Keep to the right!’, the effect is truly awe-inspiring and it seems that here comes a pagan god and no ordinary mortal. He has an enormous practice in town, he has no time for relaxation, and now he owns an estate, and two houses in town: he’s looking for a third house that would bring in more income and whenever they talk of some house up for auction at the Mutual Credit Bank, then, without standing on ceremony, he marches right into the house, goes through all the rooms, ignoring half-naked women and children, who look at him in fear and trembling, pokes every door with his stick and says:
‘Is this the study? Is this the bedroom? And what’s this?’
And he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his brow.
He has much to preoccupy him, but he still doesn’t give up his place on the local council. Greed has triumphed and he always wants to be everywhere at the right time. He’s called simply Ionych in Dyalizh and in town. ‘Where’s old Ionych going?’ or ‘Shall we invite Ionych to a committee meeting?’ they say.
Probably because his throat is bloated his voice has changed and become reedy and harsh. His personality has changed too: he’s heavy-going now, irritable. When he sees patients he normally gets angry and impatiently bangs his stick on the floor.
‘Please reply to the question! Don’t argue!’ he shouts in his jarring voice. In fact, he’s a real lone wolf. Life is a bore, nothing interests him.
The whole time he lived in Dyalizh his love for Pussycat was his only joy and probably his last. He plays whist every evening at the club and then he sits on his own at the big table and has supper. He’s waited upon by Ivan, the oldest and most venerable club servant. He’s served the Lafite No. 17 and every single person there – the senior members and the footmen – knows his likes and dislikes and does his utmost to please him, otherwise he might suddenly lose his temper and start banging his stick on the floor.
When he has supper he turns round from time to time and joins in some conversation: ‘Who are you talking about? Eh? Who?’
And when someone at a neighbouring table happens to start discussing the Turkins he asks: ‘Which Turkins do you mean? The ones whose daughter plays the piano?’
And that’s all one can say about him.
And the Turkins? Ivan Petrovich hasn’t aged, hasn’t changed one bit and he’s joking and telling his funny stories as always. And Vera Iosifovna reads her novels to her guests as eagerly as ever, with warmth and unpretentiousness. Pussycat plays the piano every day, for hours at a time. She has aged noticeably, suffers from ill health and every autumn she goes to the Crimea with her mother. When he sees them off at the station, Ivan Petrovich wipes the tears from his eyes as the train pulls out.
‘Goodbye – if you please!’ he shouts.
And he waves his handkerchief.
The Lady with the Little Dog
I
People said that there was a new arrival on the Promenade: a lady with a little dog. Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, who had already spent a fortnight in Yalta and who was by now used to the life there, had also begun to take an interest in new arrivals. As he sat on the terrace of Vernet’s restaurant he saw a young, fair-haired woman walking along the Promenade, not very tall and wearing a beret. A white Pomeranian trotted after her.
And then he came across her several times a day in the municipal park and the square. She was always alone, always wearing that beret, always with the white Pomeranian. No one knew who she was and people simply called her ‘The lady with the little dog’.
‘If she’s here without husband or friends,’ Gurov reasoned, ‘then it wouldn’t be a bad idea if I got to know her.’
He was not yet forty, but already he had a twelve-year-old daughter and two schoolboy sons. He had been married off while still quite young, as a second-year student, and now his wife seemed about half as old again as he was. She was a tall, black-browed woman, plain-spoken, pretentious, respectable and – as she was fond of claiming – ‘a thinking woman’. She was an avid reader, followed the latest reforms in spelling, called her husband Demetrius instead of Dmitry. But in secret he considered her not very bright, narrow-minded and unrefined. He was afraid of her and disliked being at home. He had begun deceiving her a long time ago, had frequently been unfaithful – which was probably why he always spoke disparagingly of women and whenever they were discussed in his company he would call them an ‘inferior breed’.
He felt that he had learnt sufficiently from bitter experience to call them by whatever name he liked, yet, for all that, he could not have survived two days without his ‘inferior breed’. He was bored in male company, not very talkative and offhand. But with women he felt free, knowing what to talk to them about and how to behave. Even saying nothing at all to them was easy for him. There was something attractive, elusive in his appearance, in his character – in his whole personality – that appealed to women and lured them to him. He was well aware of this and some power similarly attracted him.
Repeated – and in fact bitter – experience had long taught him that every affair, which at first adds spice and variety to life and seems such a charming, light-hearted adventure, inevitably develops into an enormous, extraordinarily complex problem with respectable people – especially Muscovites, who are so hesitant, so inhibited – until finally the whole situation becomes a real nightmare. But on every new encounter with an interesting woman all this experience was somehow forgotten and he simply wanted to enjoy life – and it all seemed so easy and amusing.
So, late one afternoon, he was dining at an open-air restaurant when the lady in the beret wandered over and sat at the table next to him. Her expression, the way she walked, her clothes, her hairstyle – all this told him that she was a socially respectable, married woman, that she was in Yalta for the first time, alone and bored.