In the first interval the husband went out for a smoke, while she remained in her seat. Gurov, who was also in the stalls, went up to her and forced a smile as he said in a trembling voice:
‘Good evening!’
She looked at him and turned pale. Then she looked again, was horrified and could not believe her eyes, tightly clasping her fan and lorgnette and obviously trying hard to stop herself fainting. Neither said a word. She sat there, he stood, alarmed at her embarrassment and not daring to sit next to her. The fiddles and flutes began to tune up and suddenly they felt terrified – it seemed they were being scrutinized from every box. But then she stood up and quickly went towards the exit. He followed her and they both walked aimlessly along the corridors, up and down staircases, caught glimpses of people in all kinds of uniforms – lawyers, teachers, administrators of crown estates, all of them wearing insignia. They glimpsed ladies, fur coats on hangers; a cold draught brought the smell of cigarette ends. Gurov’s heart was throbbing. ‘God in heaven!’ he thought. ‘Why these people, this orchestra?’
And at that moment he suddenly remembered saying to himself, after he had seen Anna Sergeyevna off at the station that evening, that it was all over and that they would never see one another again. But how far they still were from the end!
On the narrow, gloomy staircase with the sign ‘Entrance to Circle’ she stopped.
‘What a fright you gave me!’ she exclaimed, breathing heavily, still pale and stunned. ‘Oh, what a fright you gave me. I’m barely alive! Why have you come? Why?’
‘Please understand, Anna, please understand,’ he said hurriedly in an undertone. ‘I beg you, please understand!’
She looked at him in fear, in supplication – and with love, staring at his face to fix his features more firmly in her mind.
‘It’s such hell for me!’ she went on without listening to him. ‘The whole time I’ve thought only of you. I’ve existed only by thinking about you. And I wanted to forget, forget. But why have you come?’
On a small landing above them two schoolboys were smoking and looking down, but Gurov didn’t care. He drew Anna Sergeyevna to him and started kissing her face, her cheeks, her arms.
‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ she cried out in horror, pushing him away. ‘We’ve both gone out of our minds! You must leave tonight … you must go now … I implore you, by all that’s holy, I beg you … Someone’s coming … !’
Someone was coming up the staircase.
‘You must go,’ Anna Sergeyevna continued, whispering. ‘Do you hear, Dmitry Dmitrich? I’ll come and see you in Moscow. I’ve never been happy, I’m unhappy now and I shall never, never be happy! Never! Don’t make me suffer even more! I swear I’ll come to Moscow. But now we must say goodbye … My dear, kind darling, we must part!’
She pressed his hand and swiftly went downstairs, constantly looking back at him – and he could see from her eyes that she really was unhappy. Gurov stayed a while longer, listening hard. And then, when all was quiet, he found his peg and left the theatre.
IV
And Anna Sergeyevna began to visit him in Moscow. Two or three times a month she left S—, telling her husband that she was going to consult a professor about some women’s complaint – and her husband neither believed nor disbelieved her. In Moscow she stayed at the Slav Fair Hotel, and the moment she arrived she would send a messenger with a red cap over to Gurov. He would go to her hotel and no one in Moscow knew a thing.
One winter’s morning he went to see her as usual (the messenger had called the previous evening but he had been out). With him walked his daughter, whom he wanted to take to school, as it was on the way. A thick wet snow was falling.
‘It’s three degrees above zero, yet it’s snowing,’ Gurov told his daughter. ‘But it’s only warm on the surface of the earth, the temperature’s quite different in the upper layers of the atmosphere.’
‘Papa, why isn’t there thunder in winter?’
And he explained this too, conscious as he spoke that here he was on his way to an assignation, that not a soul knew about it and that probably no one would ever know. He was leading a double life: one was undisguised, plain for all to see and known to everyone who needed to know, full of conventional truths and conventional deception, identical to the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another which went on in secret. And by some strange, possibly fortuitous chain of circumstances, everything that was important, interesting and necessary for him, where he behaved sincerely and did not deceive himself and which was the very essence of his life – that was conducted in complete secrecy; whereas all that was false about him, the front behind which he hid in order to conceal the truth – for instance, his work at the bank, those quarrels at the club, his notions of an ‘inferior breed’, his attending anniversary celebrations with his wife – that was plain for all to see. And he judged others by himself, disbelieving what he saw, invariably assuming that everyone’s true, most interesting life was carried on under the cloak of secrecy, under the cover of night, as it were. The private, personal life of everyone is grounded in secrecy and this perhaps partly explains why civilized man fusses so neurotically over having this personal secrecy respected.
After taking his daughter to school, Gurov went to the Slav Fair Hotel. He took off his fur coat downstairs, went up and gently tapped at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress, exhausted by the journey and by the wait, had been expecting him since the previous evening. She was pale and looked at him unsmiling; but the moment he entered the room she flung herself on his chest. Their kiss was long and lingering, as though they had not seen one another for two years.
‘Well, how are things?’ he asked. ‘What’s the news?’
‘Wait, I’ll tell you in a moment. But not now …’
She was unable to speak for crying. Turning away from him she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.
‘Well, let her have a good cry … I’ll sit down in the meantime’, he thought as he sat in the armchair.
Then he rang and ordered some tea. After he had drunk it she was still standing there, facing the window. She wept from the mournful realization that their lives had turned out so sadly. They were meeting in secret, hiding from others, like thieves! Surely their lives were ruined?
‘Please stop crying!’ he said.
Now he could see quite clearly that this was no short-lived affair – and it was impossible to say when it would finish. Anna Sergeyevna had become even more attached to him, she adored him and it would have been unthinkable of him to tell her that some time all this had to come to an end. And she would not have believed him even if he had.
He went over to her and put his hands on her shoulders, intending to caress her, to joke a little – and then he caught sight of himself in the mirror.
He was already going grey. And he thought it strange that he had aged so much over the past years, had lost his good looks. The shoulders on which his hands were resting were warm and trembling. He felt pity for this life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably about to fade and wither like his own. Why did she love him so? Women had never taken him for what he really was – they didn’t love the man himself, but someone who was a figment of their imagination, someone they had been eagerly seeking all their lives. And then, when they realized their mistake, they still loved him. Not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he met new women, had affairs, parted, but never once had he been in love. There had been everything else, but there had been no love.