“Evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible…. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that … life will show him her claws sooner or later, trouble will come for him.”
Then Alyokhin tells the final story, About Love. It begins with a reference to Pelageya, the beautiful and graceful servant, who is in love with the bestial cook, a man who is fanatically religious and a drunk, and who beats her. She had not wanted to marry but simply wanted to live with him, which his religion forbade.
“How love is born [says Alyokhin], why Pelageya does not love somebody more like herself in her spiritual and external qualities, and why she fell in love with Nikanor, that ugly snout… how far questions of personal happiness are of consequence in love—all that is unknown…. We Russians of the educated class have a partiality for these questions that remain unanswered.”
Alyokhin’s own story is not of stormy attractions. It is simple and sad. He had become a close friend of a neighboring couple, a judge and his wife, who have been more than generous to him. He was a constant visitor. The result was that he and the judge’s wife slowly fell in love, without admitting it to each other or disturbing the husband. They were often alone together. This unacknowledged love went on for years.
“Anna Alekseyevna and I used to go to the theater together, always walking there; we used to sit side by side in the stalls, our shoulders touching. I would take the opera glass from her hand without a word, and feel … that we could not live without each other…. When we came out of the theater we always said goodbye and parted as though we were strangers. Goodness knows what people were saying about us in the town already, but there was not a word of truth in it all.”
Years go by and in time Anna becomes irritable; she is becoming ill. “If I dropped anything, she would say coldly ‘If I congratulate you.’”
One evening when he is dining with the family Alyokhin bursts out with indignation about a political scandal. Four Jews have been falsely charged with incendiarism in some town or other. The wife appeals to her husband, the judge, and asks how such a thing could happen. The judge is one of those simpleminded men who firmly believe that once a man is charged before a court he is guilty, that doubt about guilt can only be expressed in legal form on paper. Certainly not at a private dinner. “You and I did not set fire to the place,” he explains gently to his wife, “and you see we are not condemned and not put in prison.” In short, the judge, his wife and indeed Alyokhin are as much “encased” as the grotesque Belikov was.
The judge is transferred to a distant province, and his wife follows later. Alyokhin joins the large crowd who go to the station to see her off. At the last moment he dashes into her compartment and they both declare dieir feelings as they part. And here we see a variation of Chekhov’s classic goodbyes. The train moves off; Alyokhin escapes alone to the empty compartment next door and sits weeping and gets off at the next station. At that moment (Alyokhin tells his friends) he “understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhap-piness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.”
The rain has stopped, the sun comes out, the schoolmaster and the veterinarian leave the handsome drawing room, where the family portraits have seemed to be alive and even listening to the talkers. The sportsmen gaze at the garden and the millpond, which is no longer dark and malignant but shines like a mirror. They think of the sorrow that must have been on Anna’s face when Alyokhin declared his love too late. In the last line of the story she comes doubly to life:
Both of them had met her in the town, and Burkin knew her and thought her beautiful.
For Chekhov the story had an exasperating consequence. Lydia Avilova wrote to him that it portrayed her and an incident in their imaginary romance. The clinching fact was that he had once put her and her children on a train somewhere. Chekhov did his best to disillusion her and their exchange of letters was tart. Nevertheless, after his death she went back to romanticizing a love affair which had not existed.
Chekhov did not continue with the conversational series. He had tired of his talkers. To talk of love in this fashion was a too comfortable, too wistful, even generalizing, device, too close to the manner of Turgenev. His best stories are not safely framed: they are direct and open. He was mature enough to say good-bye to good-byes. If in early life he had been evasive, now, in middle life, he is willing to see love as a continuing gift, surviving its difficulties. In the delightful, well-known The Darling there is no need of discussion. The simple heroine is a woman who loves by nature, cannot think or speak for herself, but instinctively echoes the opinions of a husband. If he ignores or tricks her, she will adopt his worries or interests as if they were hers. When he runs a puppet show and the public is driven off by bad weather, she groans with him at his failures as if they were hers. When he dies she will take up with a timber merchant and her talk will be about the terrible anxieties of the timber trade. If she is deserted she will look for someone else whose miseries she can take over. At the famous end of the story, when there is no man left, she takes over a small boy who is not her son and gives herself to all his troubles in his lessons, learns them herself and denounces the schools for making the boy’s life a misery. A simpleton, a mindless fool, a comic echo without personality or interests? Is she without will? No, she is no one unless she loves. It is not a matter of charity, nor of subservience or possessive nullity. It is not even a talent. Without loving she has no self. Tolstoy admired this story more than any other Chekhov had written and, of course, imposed his own theories on it in a well-known introduction.
Chapter Fifteen
Chekhov was bored at Yalta and was tired of living in two rooms as a lodger, of going every day for his meals to the little restaurants of the town. He was bored with food and drifted into eating less and less. Local acquaintances told him he ought to buy a house, but he was not rich. He was supporting his parents at Melikhovo and in his letters he is still talking about his debts! There is an expansive Balzac in Chekhov’s nature. For the moment, he buys a cheap cottage of two or three rooms in the mountains outside the town, on the excuse that his parents and sister can stay there if they come to see him. He was never to live there. The early improvement in his health did not last: his other lung was now infected. Presently a dramatic event changed his situation. A garbled telegram arrived at the post office, undelivered because it was misaddressed. “All Yalta” knew what it said before he did. The proud and seemingly immortal tyrant Pavel had suffered a rupture while lifting a heavy box of his son’s books at Melikhovo. He had been rushed to a Moscow clinic and had died. Chekhov’s first words were “If I had been there to operate I could have saved his life.” He saw at once that his mother could not stay at Melikhovo alone. His sister was there only at weekends because she was still teaching in Moscow. In any family crisis Anton had always taken his mother’s part and now he at once resumed his responsibility as head of the family. It was clear that Melikhovo must be sold, that his mother and sister must come to Yalta and live with him. Responsibility renewed his will. Where would he put his mother? Not in lodgings. He was tired of lodgings. He must get a house. Rent it? No. Melikhovo must be sold, and he would build a house in Yalta and so provide for his mother and sister, after his own death.