Short Fiction, Anton Chekhov [websites to read books for free .TXT] 📗

is insulted or not. Today one insults her dignity as a human being and pays her blutgeld, and next day thinks no more of her.

“So I sat in the summerhouse and watched the young ladies. Another woman’s figure appeared in the avenue, with fair hair, her head uncovered and a white knitted shawl on her shoulders. She walked along the avenue, then came into the summerhouse, and taking hold of the parapet, looked indifferently below and into the distance over the sea. As she came in she paid no attention to me, as though she did not notice me. I scrutinised her from foot to head (not from head to foot, as one scrutinises men) and found that she was young, not more than five-and-twenty, nice-looking, with a good figure, in all probability married and belonging to the class of respectable women. She was dressed as though she were at home, but fashionably and with taste, as ladies are, as a rule, in N⁠⸺.

“ ‘This one would do nicely,’ I thought, looking at her handsome figure and her arms; ‘she is all right.⁠ ⁠… She is probably the wife of some doctor or schoolmaster.⁠ ⁠…’

“But to make up to her⁠—that is, to make her the heroine of one of those impromptu affairs to which tourists are so prone⁠—was not easy and, indeed, hardly possible. I felt that as I gazed at her face. The way she looked, and the expression of her face, suggested that the sea, the smoke in the distance, and the sky had bored her long, long ago, and wearied her sight. She seemed to be tired, bored, and thinking about something dreary, and her face had not even that fussy, affectedly indifferent expression which one sees in the face of almost every woman when she is conscious of the presence of an unknown man in her vicinity.

“The fair-haired lady took a bored and passing glance at me, sat down on a seat and sank into reverie, and from her face I saw that she had no thoughts for me, and that I, with my Petersburg appearance, did not arouse in her even simple curiosity. But yet I made up my mind to speak to her, and asked: ‘Madam, allow me to ask you at what time do the wagonettes go from here to the town?’

“ ‘At ten or eleven, I believe.⁠ ⁠…’ ”

“I thanked her. She glanced at me once or twice, and suddenly there was a gleam of curiosity, then of something like wonder on her passionless face.⁠ ⁠… I made haste to assume an indifferent expression and to fall into a suitable attitude; she was catching on! She suddenly jumped up from the seat, as though something had bitten her, and examining me hurriedly, with a gentle smile, asked timidly:

“ ‘Oh, aren’t you Ananyev?’

“ ‘Yes, I am Ananyev,’ I answered.

“ ‘And don’t you recognise me? No?’

“I was a little confused. I looked intently at her, and⁠—would you believe it?⁠—I recognised her not from her face nor her figure, but from her gentle, weary smile. It was Natalya Stepanovna, or, as she was called, Kisotchka, the very girl I had been head over ears in love with seven or eight years before, when I was wearing the uniform of a high school boy. The doings of far, vanished days, the days of long ago.⁠ ⁠… I remember this Kisotchka, a thin little high school girl of fifteen or sixteen, when she was something just for a schoolboy’s taste, created by nature especially for Platonic love. What a charming little girl she was! Pale, fragile, light⁠—she looked as though a breath would send her flying like a feather to the skies⁠—a gentle, perplexed face, little hands, soft long hair to her belt, a waist as thin as a wasp’s⁠—altogether something ethereal, transparent like moonlight⁠—in fact, from the point of view of a high school boy a peerless beauty.⁠ ⁠… Wasn’t I in love with her! I did not sleep at night. I wrote verses.⁠ ⁠… Sometimes in the evenings she would sit on a seat in the park while we schoolboys crowded round her, gazing reverently; in response to our compliments, our sighing, and attitudinising, she would shrink nervously from the evening damp, screw up her eyes, and smile gently, and at such times she was awfully like a pretty little kitten. As we gazed at her every one of us had a desire to caress her and stroke her like a cat, hence her nickname of Kisotchka.

“In the course of the seven or eight years since we had met, Kisotchka had greatly changed. She had grown more robust and stouter, and had quite lost the resemblance to a soft, fluffy kitten. It was not that her features looked old or faded, but they had somehow lost their brilliance and looked sterner, her hair seemed shorter, she looked taller, and her shoulders were quite twice as broad, and what was most striking, there was already in her face the expression of motherliness and resignation commonly seen in respectable women of her age, and this, of course, I had never seen in her before.⁠ ⁠… In short, of the school-girlish and the Platonic her face had kept the gentle smile and nothing more.⁠ ⁠…

“We got into conversation. Learning that I was already an engineer, Kisotchka was immensely delighted.

“ ‘How good that is!’ she said, looking joyfully into my face. ‘Ah, how good! And how splendid you all are! Of all who left with you, not one has been a failure⁠—they have all turned out well. One an engineer, another a doctor, a third a teacher, another, they say, is a celebrated singer in Petersburg.⁠ ⁠… You are all splendid, all of you.⁠ ⁠… Ah, how good that is!’

“Kisotchka’s eyes shone with genuine goodwill and gladness. She was admiring me like an elder sister or a former governess. While I looked at her sweet face and thought, ‘It wouldn’t be bad to get hold of her today!’

“ ‘Do you remember, Natalya Stepanovna,’ I asked her, ‘how I once brought you in the park a bouquet