The Essential Chekhov: Plays, Short Stories, Novel & Biography. Anton Chekhov
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Urbenin closed his eyes and, despite his fifty years, he blushed like a boy… I found it quite disgusting.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, looking at us with happy, kind eyes, ‘why don’t you get married? Why are you wasting your lives, throwing them out of the window? Why do you shun that which is the greatest blessing of all who live upon the earth? The delight that debauchery gives is not a hundredth part of what a quiet family life would give you! Young men, your Excellency and you, Sergey Petrovich… I am happy now, and… God knows how I love you both! Forgive me for giving stupid advice, but… I want you both to be happy! Why don’t you get married? Family life is a blessing… It’s every man’s duty!..
The happy and fond look on the face of the old man, who was about to marry a young girl and was advising us to alter our dissolute existence for a quiet family life, became unbearable to me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘family life is a duty. I agree with you. So you are discharging yourself of this duty for a second time?’
‘Yes, for a second time. I am fond of family life in general. To be a bachelor or a widower is only half of a life for me. Whatever you may say, gentlemen, wedlock is a great thing!’
‘Certainly… even when the husband is almost three times as old as his wife?’
Urbenin blushed. The hand that was lifting a spoonful of soup to his mouth trembled, and the soup spilled back into the plate.
‘I understand what you mean, Sergey Petrovich,’ he mumbled, I thank you for your frankness. I ask myself: Am I not being unfair? The thought torments me. But there seems no time to ask oneself such questions when every moment one feels happy, when one forgets one’s age, ugliness… everything. Homo sum, Sergey Petrovich! And when for a second, thoughts about the inequalities of our ages come to me, I don’t worry about finding an answer, but try to stay calm. I think I have made Olga happy. I have given her a father and my children a mother. Besides, all this is like a novel, and… my head feels giddy. It was wrong to make me drink sherry.’
Urbenin rose, wiped his face with his napkin, and sat down again. A minute later he gulped down another glass of sherry and looked at me for a long time with an imploring glance as if he were begging me for mercy, and suddenly his shoulders began to shake, and quite unexpectedly he burst into sobs like a boy.
‘It’s nothing… nothing!’ he mumbled, trying to master his sobs. ‘Don’t be uneasy. After your words my heart grew sick with a strange foreboding. But it is nothing.’
Urbenin’s foreboding was realized, realized so soon that I have not time to change my pen and begin a new page. From the next chapter my calm muse will change the expression of calmness on her face for one of passion and affliction. The introduction is finished and the drama begins.
The criminal will of man enters upon its rights.
CHAPTER XIII
I remember a fine Sunday morning. Through the windows of the Count’s church the diaphanous blue sky could be seen and the whole of the church, from its painted cupola to its floor, was flooded by soft sunrays in which little clouds of incense played about gaily… The songs of swallows and starlings were borne in through the open doors and windows… One sparrow, evidently a very bold little fellow, flew in at the door, and having circled, chirping, several times round and round above our heads, flew out again through one of the windows… In the church itself there was also singing… They sang sweetly, with feeling, and with the enthusiasm for which our Little Russian singers are so celebrated when they feel themselves the heroes of the moment, and that all eyes are bent upon them… The melodies were all gay and playful, like the soft, bright sunspots that played upon the walls and the clothes of the congregation… In the unschooled but soft and fresh notes of the tenor my ear seemed to catch, despite the gay wedding melodies, deep, melancholy chords. It appeared as if this tenor was sorry to see that next to young, pretty and poetical Olenka there stood Urbenin, heavy, bearlike, and getting on in years… And it was not only the tenor who was sorry to see this ill-assorted pair… On many of the faces that lay within my field of vision, notwithstanding all their efforts to appear gay and unconcerned, even an idiot could have read an expression of compassion.
Arrayed in a new dress suit, I stood behind Olenka, holding the crown over her head. I was pale and felt unwell… I had a racking headache, the result of the previous night’s carouse and a pleasure party on the lake, and the whole time I was looking to see if the hand that held the crown did not tremble… My soul felt the disagreeable presentiment of dread that is felt in a forest on a rainy autumn night. I was vexed, disgusted, sorry… Cats seemed to be scratching at my heart, somewhat resembling qualms of conscience… There in the depths, at the very bottom of my heart, a little devil was seated who obstinately, persistently whispered to me that if Olenka’s marriage with clumsy Urbenin was a sin, I was the cause of that sin… Where did such thoughts come from? How could I have saved this little fool from the unknown risks of her indubitable mistake?…
‘Who knows?’ whispered the little devil. ‘Who should know better than you?’
In my time I have known many ill-assorted marriages. I have often stood before Pukirev’s picture. I have read countless novels based on disagreements between husband and wife; besides, I have known the physical differences that inevitably punish ill-assorted marriages, but never once in my whole life had I experienced that terrible spiritual condition from which I was unable to escape all the time I was standing behind Olenka, executing the functions of best man.
‘If my soul is agitated only by commiseration, how is it that I never felt that compassion before when I assisted at other weddings?…’
‘There is no commiseration here,’ the little devil whispered, ‘but jealousy…’
One can only be jealous of those one loves, but do I love the girl in red? If I loved all the girls I met in the course of my life, my heart wouldn’t be able to stand it; besides, it would be too much of a good thing…
My friend Count Karnéev was standing right at the back near the door behind the churchwarden’s counter, selling wax tapers. He was well groomed, with well smoothed hair, and exhaled a narcotic, suffocating odour of scents. That day he looked such a darling that when I greeted him in the morning I could not refrain from saying:
‘Alexey, today you are looking like the perfect quadrille dancer!’
He greeted everybody who entered or left with the sweetest of smiles, and I heard the ponderous compliments with which he rewarded each lady who bought a candle from him. He, the spoilt child of Fortune, who never had copper coins, did not know how to handle them, and was constantly dropping on the floor five and three-kopeck pieces. Near him, leaning against the counter, Kalinin stood majestically with a Stanislav decoration on a ribbon round his neck. His countenance shone and beamed. He was pleased that his idea of ‘at homes’ had fallen on good soil, and was already beginning to bear fruit. In the depths of his soul he was showering on Urbenin a thousand thanks; his marriage was an absurdity, but it was a good opportunity to get the first ‘at home’ arranged.
Vain Olenka must have rejoiced… From the nuptial lectern to the doors of the high altar stretched out two rows of the most representative ladies of our district flower garden. The guests were decked out as smartly as they would have been if the Count himself was being married: more elegant toilettes could not have been desired The assembly consisted almost exclusively of aristocrats… Not a single priest’s wife, not a single tradesman’s wife… There were even among them ladies to whom Olenka would formerly never have considered herself entitled to bow… And Olenka’s bridegroom - a bailiff, a privileged retainer; but there was no threat to her vanity in this. He was a nobleman and the possessor of a mortgaged estate in the neighbouring district… His father had been marshal of the district and he himself had for more than nine years been a magistrate in his own native district… What more could have been desired by the ambitious daughter of a self-made nobleman?