Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

SCENE VI

The same and KHROUSCHOV

KHROUSCHOV: Elena Andreyevna, Alexander V’ladimirovich

is asking for you.

ELENA ANDREYEVNA (tearing away her hand from VOYNITSKY)

: In a moment! out.

KHROUSCHOV (to VOYNITSKY): Nothing is sacred to you!

You and the dear lady who has just gone out ought to remember that her husband was once the husband of your own sister, and that there is a young girl living under the same roof! The whole district is speaking of the affair.

What a disgrace! [Goes out to the patient.

VOYNITSKY (alone): She’s gone... (After a pause.) Ten years ago I used to meet her at the house of my dead sister She was seventeen then, and I thirty-seven. Why didn’t I fall in love with her then and propose to her? It was all so possible! She would now be my wife... Yes... We two would now be awakened by the storm. Frightened of the thunder, she would cling to me, and I should keep her in my embrace and whisper: “ Don’t be afraid, I am here with you.” Oh, wonderful thoughts! How fine! I laugh even.

. . . But, my God, my ideas are getting mixed... Why am I old? Why does she not understand me? Her rhetoric,

her lazy morality, her absurd lazy ideas of the world’s ruin —

all this is profoundly hateful to me. ... (A pause.) Why am I so wrongly made? How much I envy that gay dog Fyodor,

or that silly Wood Demon! They’re direct, sincere, silly.

. . . They’re free from this cursed, poisonous irony. . . .

Enter FYODOR IVANOVICH, wrapped in a blanket.