IRINA. And he made that frame there, on the piano as well.
OLGA. He’s got a degree, and plays the violin, and cuts all sorts of things out of wood, and is really a domestic Admirable Crichton. Don’t go away, Andrey! He’s got into a habit of always going away. Come here!
MASHA. Come on, come on!
ANDREY. Please leave me alone.
MASHA. You are funny. Alexander Ignateyevitch used to be called the lovelorn Major, but he never minded.
VERSHININ. Not the least.
MASHA. I’d like to call you the lovelorn fiddler!
IRINA. Or the lovelorn professor!
OLGA. He’s in love! little Andrey is in love!
IRINA. Bravo, Bravo! Encore! Little Andrey is in love.
CHEBUTIKIN. Nature only brought us into the world that we should love!
ANDREY. That’s enough, quite enough… I couldn’t sleep all night and now I can’t quite find my feet, so to speak. I read until four o’clock, then tried to sleep, but nothing happened. I thought about one thing and another, and then it dawned and the sun crawled into my bedroom. This summer, while I’m here, I want to translate a book from the English…
VERSHININ. Do you read English?
ANDREY. Yes father, rest his soul, educated us almost violently. It may seem funny and silly, but it’s nevertheless true, that after his death I began to fill out and get rounder, as if my body had had some great pressure taken off it. Thanks to father, my sisters and I know French, German, and English, and Irina knows Italian as well. But we paid dearly for it all!
MASHA. A knowledge of three languages is an unnecessary luxury in this town. It isn’t even a luxury but a sort of useless extra, like a sixth finger. We know a lot too much.
VERSHININ. Well, I say! You know a lot too much! I don’t think there can really be a town so dull and stupid as to have no place for a clever, cultured person. Let us suppose even that among the hundred thousand inhabitants of this backward and uneducated town, there are only three persons like yourself. It stands to reason that you won’t be able to conquer that dark mob around you; little by little as you grow older you will be bound to give way and lose yourselves in this crowd of a hundred thousand human beings; their life will suck you up in itself, but still, you won’t disappear having influenced nobody; later on, others like you will come, perhaps six of them, then twelve, and so on, until at last your sort will be in the majority. In two or three hundred years’ time life on this earth will be unimaginably beautiful and wonderful. Mankind needs such a life, and if it is not ours to-day then we must look ahead for it, wait, think, prepare for it. We must see and know more than our fathers and grandfathers saw and knew. And you complain that you know too much.
MASHA. I’ll stay to lunch.
IRINA. Yes, all that ought to be written down.
TUZENBACH. You say that many years later on, life on this earth will be beautiful and wonderful. That’s true. But to share in it now, even though at a distance, we must prepare by work…
VERSHININ. Yes. What a lot of flowers you have. It’s a beautiful flat. I envy you! I’ve spent my whole life in rooms with two chairs, one sofa, and fires which always smoke. I’ve never had flowers like these in my life… Well, well!
TUZENBACH. Yes, we must work. You are probably thinking to yourself: the German lets himself go. But I assure you I’m a Russian, I can’t even speak German. My father belonged to the Orthodox Church…
VERSHININ. I often wonder: suppose we could begin life over again, knowing what we were doing? Suppose we could use one life, already ended, as a sort of rough draft for another? I think that every one of us would try, more than anything else, not to repeat himself, at the very least he would rearrange his manner of life, he would make sure of rooms like these, with flowers and light… I have a wife and two daughters, my wife’s health is delicate and so on and so on, and if I had to begin life all over again I would not marry… No, no!
KULIGIN. Dear sister, allow me to congratulate you on the day sacred to your good angel and to wish you, sincerely and from the bottom of my heart, good health and all that one can wish for a girl of your years. And then let me offer you this book as a present. It is the history of our High School during the last fifty years, written by myself. The book is worthless, and written because I had nothing to do, but read it all the same. Good day, gentlemen! My name is Kuligin, I am a master of the local High School. [Note: He adds that he is a
Nadvorny Sovetnik
(almost the same as a German
Hofrat
), an undistinguished civilian title with no English equivalent.] In this book you will find a list of all those who have taken the full course at our High School during these fifty years.
Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes
.
IRINA. But you gave me one of these at Easter.
KULIGIN. I couldn’t have, surely! You’d better give it back to me in that case, or else give it to the Colonel. Take it, Colonel. You’ll read it some day when you’re bored.
VERSHININ. Thank you. I am extremely happy to have made the acquaintance of…
OLGA. Must you go? No, not yet?
IRINA. You’ll stop and have lunch with us. Please do.
OLGA. Yes, please!
VERSHININ. I seem to have dropped in on your name-day. Forgive me, I didn’t know, and I didn’t offer you my congratulations.
KULIGIN. To-day is Sunday, the day of rest, so let us rest and rejoice, each in a manner compatible with his age and disposition. The carpets will have to be taken up for the summer and put away till the winter… Persian powder or naphthaline… The Romans were healthy because they knew both how to work and how to rest, they had
mens sana in corpore sano
. Their life ran along certain recognized patterns. Our director says: “The chief thing about each life is its pattern. Whoever loses his pattern is lost himself” – and it’s just the same in our daily life. Masha loves me. My wife loves me. And you ought to put the window curtains away with the carpets… I’m feeling awfully pleased with life to-day. Masha, we’ve got to be at the director’s at four. They’re getting up a walk for the pedagogues and their families.
MASHA. I shan’t go.
KULIGIN. My dear Masha, why not?
MASHA. I’ll tell you later… All right, I’ll go, only please stand back…
KULIGIN. And then we’re to spend the evening at the director’s. In spite of his ill-health that man tries, above everything else, to be sociable. A splendid, illuminating personality. A wonderful man. After yesterday’s committee he said to me: “I’m tired, Feodor Ilitch, I’m tired!” Your clock is seven minutes fast. “Yes,” he said, “I’m tired.”
OLGA. Let’s go and have lunch! There’s to be a masterpiece of baking!
KULIGIN. Oh my dear Olga, my dear. Yesterday I was working till eleven o’clock at night, and got awfully tired. To-day I’m quite happy. My dear…
CHEBUTIKIN. A pie? Splendid!
MASHA. Only mind; you’re not to drink anything to-day. Do you hear? It’s bad for you.
CHEBUTIKIN. Oh, that’s all right. I haven’t been drunk for two years. And it’s all the same, anyway!
MASHA. You’re not to dare to drink, all the same. Another dull evening at the Director’s, confound it!
TUZENBACH. I shouldn’t go if I were you… It’s quite simple.
CHEBUTIKIN. Don’t go.
MASHA. Yes, “don’t go…” It’s a cursed, unbearable life…
CHEBUTIKIN. It’s not so bad.
SOLENI. There, there, there…
TUZENBACH. Vassili Vassilevitch, that’s enough. Be quiet!
SOLENI. There, there, there…
KULIGIN. Your health, Colonel! I’m a pedagogue and not quite at home here. I’m Masha’s husband… She’s a good sort, a very good sort.
VERSHININ. I’ll have some of this black vodka… Your health! I’m very comfortable here!
IRINA. Masha’s out of sorts to-day. She married when she was eighteen, when he seemed to her the wisest of men. And now it’s different. He’s the kindest man, but not the wisest.
OLGA. Andrey, when are you coming?
ANDREY. One minute.
TUZENBACH. What are you thinking about?
IRINA. I don’t like this Soleni of yours and I’m afraid of him. He only says silly things.
TUZENBACH. He’s a queer man. I’m sorry for him, though he vexes me. I think he’s shy. When there are just the two of us he’s quite all right and very good company; when other people are about he’s rough and hectoring. Don’t let’s go in, let them have their meal without us. Let me stay with you. What are you thinking of? You’re twenty. I’m not yet thirty. How many years are there left to us, with their long, long lines of days, filled with my love for you…
IRINA. Nicolai Lvovitch, don’t speak to me of love.
TUZENBACH. I’ve a great thirst for life, struggle, and work, and this thirst has united with my love for you, Irina, and you’re so beautiful, and life seems so beautiful to me! What are you thinking about?
IRINA. You say that life is beautiful. Yes, if only it seems so! The life of us three hasn’t been beautiful yet; it has been stifling us as if it was weeds… I’m crying. I oughtn’t… We must work, work. That is why we are unhappy and look at the world so sadly; we don’t know what work is. Our parents despised work…
NATASHA. They’re already at lunch… I’m late… I think my hair’s done all right… Dear Irina Sergeyevna, I congratulate you! You’ve so many visitors, I’m really ashamed… How do you do, Baron!
OLGA. Here’s Natalia Ivanovna. How are you, dear!
NATASHA. Happy returns. I’m awfully shy, you’ve so many people here.
OLGA. All our friends. You’re wearing a green sash! My dear, you shouldn’t!
NATASHA. Is it a sign of anything?
OLGA. No, it simply doesn’t go well… and it looks so queer.
NATASHA. Yes? But it isn’t really green, it’s too dull for that.
KULIGIN. I wish you a nice fiancée, Irina. It’s quite time you married.
CHEBUTIKIN. Natalia Ivanovna, I wish you the same.
KULIGIN. Natalia Ivanovna has a fiancé already.
MASHA. Let’s all get drunk and make life purple for once!
KULIGIN. You’ve lost three good conduct marks.
VERSHININ. This is a nice drink. What’s it made of?
SOLENI. Blackbeetles.
IRINA. Phoo! How disgusting!
OLGA. There is to be a roast turkey and a sweet apple pie for dinner. Thank goodness I can spend all day and the evening at home. You’ll come in the evening, ladies and gentlemen…
VERSHININ. And please may I come in the evening!
IRINA. Please do.
NATASHA. They don’t stand on ceremony here.
CHEBUTIKIN. Nature only brought us into the world that we should love!
ANDREY. Please don’t! Aren’t you tired of it?
FEDOTIK. They’re lunching already.
RODE. Lunching? Yes, so they are…
FEDOTIK. Wait a minute! That’s one. No, just a moment… That’s two. Now we’re ready!
RODE. Congratulations and best wishes! Lovely weather to-day, simply perfect. Was out walking with the High School students all the morning. I take their drills.
FEDOTIK. You may move, Irina Sergeyevna! You look well to-day. Here’s a humming-top, by the way. It’s got a lovely note!
IRINA. How awfully nice!
MASHA.
“There stands a green oak by the sea,
And a chain of bright gold is around it…
And a chain of bright gold is around it…”
What am I saying that for? I’ve had those words running in my head all day…
KULIGIN. There are thirteen at table!
RODE. Surely you don’t believe in that superstition?
KULIGIN. If there are thirteen at table then it means there are lovers present. It isn’t you, Ivan Romanovitch, hang it all…
CHEBUTIKIN. I’m a hardened sinner, but I really don’t see why Natalia Ivanovna should blush…
ANDREY. Don’t pay any attention to them! Wait… do stop, please…
NATASHA. I’m shy… I don’t know what’s the matter with me and they’re all laughing at me. It wasn’t nice of me to leave the table like that, but I can’t… I can’t.
ANDREY. My dear, I beg you. I implore you not to excite yourself. I assure you they’re only joking, they’re kind people. My dear, good girl, they’re all kind and sincere people, and they like both you and me. Come here to the window, they can’t see us here…
NATASHA. I’m so unaccustomed to meeting people!
ANDREY. Oh your youth, your splendid, beautiful youth! My darling, don’t be so excited! Believe me, believe me… I’m so happy, my soul is full of love, of ecstasy… They don’t see us! They can’t! Why, why or when did I fall in love with you – Oh, I can’t understand anything. My dear, my pure darling, be my wife! I love you, love you… as never before…
Curtain
ACT II
NATASHA. What are you doing, Andrey? Are you reading? It’s nothing, only I… Isn’t there any fire…
ANDREY. What are you doing, Natasha?
NATASHA. I was looking to see if there wasn’t a fire. It’s Shrovetide, and the servant is simply beside herself; I must look out that something doesn’t happen. When I came through the dining-room yesterday midnight, there was a candle burning. I couldn’t get her to tell me who had lighted it. What’s the time?
ANDREY. A quarter past eight.
NATASHA. And Olga and Irina aren’t in yet. The poor things are still at work. Olga at the teacher’s council, Irina at the telegraph office… I said to your sister this morning, “Irina, darling, you must take care of yourself.” But she pays no attention. Did you say it was a quarter past eight? I am afraid little Bobby is quite ill. Why is he so cold? He was feverish yesterday, but to-day he is quite cold… I am so frightened!
ANDREY. It’s all right, Natasha. The boy is well.
NATASHA. Still, I think we ought to put him on a diet. I am so afraid. And the entertainers were to be here after nine; they had better not come, Audrey.
ANDREY. I don’t know. After all, they were asked.
NATASHA. This morning, when the little boy woke up and saw me he suddenly smiled; that means he knew me. “Good morning, Bobby!” I said, “good morning, darling.” And he laughed. Children understand, they understand very well. So I’ll tell them, Andrey dear, not to receive the entertainers.
ANDREY. But what about my sisters. This is their flat.
NATASHA. They’ll do as I want them. They are so kind… I ordered sour milk for supper. The doctor says you must eat sour milk and nothing else, or you won’t get thin. Bobby is so cold. I’m afraid his room is too cold for him. It would be nice to put him into another room till the warm weather comes. Irina’s room, for instance, is just right for a child: it’s dry and has the sun all day. I must tell her, she can share Olga’s room. It isn’t as if she was at home in the daytime, she only sleeps here… Andrey, darling, why are you so silent?
ANDREY. I was just thinking… There is really nothing to say…
NATASHA. Yes… there was something I wanted to tell you… Oh, yes. Ferapont has come from the Council offices, he wants to see you.
ANDREY. Call him here.
ANDREY. Good morning, grandfather. What have you to say?
FERAPONT. The Chairman sends a book and some documents or other. Here…
ANDREY. Thank you. It’s all right. Why couldn’t you come earlier? It’s past eight now.
FERAPONT. What?
ANDREY. . I say you’ve come late, it’s past eight.
FERAPONT. Yes, yes. I came when it was still light, but they wouldn’t let me in. They said you were busy. Well, what was I to do. If you’re busy, you’re busy, and I’m in no hurry. What?
ANDREY. Nothing. To-morrow’s Friday. I’m not supposed to go to work, but I’ll come – all the same… and do some work. It’s dull at home. Oh, my dear old man, how strangely life changes, and how it deceives! To-day, out of sheer boredom, I took up this book – old university lectures, and I couldn’t help laughing. My God, I’m secretary of the local district council, the council which has Protopopov for its chairman, yes, I’m the secretary, and the summit of my ambitions is – to become a member of the council! I to be a member of the local district council, I, who dream every night that I’m a professor of Moscow University, a famous scholar of whom all Russia is proud!
FERAPONT. I can’t tell… I’m hard of hearing…
ANDREY. If you weren’t, I don’t suppose I should talk to you. I’ve got to talk to somebody, and my wife doesn’t understand me, and I’m a bit afraid of my sisters – I don’t know why unless it is that they may make fun of me and make me feel ashamed… I don’t drink, I don’t like public-houses, but how I should like to be sitting just now in Tyestov’s place in Moscow, or at the Great Moscow, old fellow!
FERAPONT. Moscow? That’s where a contractor was once telling that some merchants or other were eating pancakes; one ate forty pancakes and he went and died, he was saying. Either forty or fifty, I forget which.
ANDREY. In Moscow you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don’t know anybody and where nobody knows you, and you don’t feel all the same that you’re a stranger. And here you know everybody and everybody knows you, and you’re a stranger… and a lonely stranger.
FERAPONT. What? And the same contractor was telling – perhaps he was lying – that there was a cable stretching right across Moscow.
ANDREY. What for?
FERAPONT. I can’t tell. The contractor said so.
ANDREY. Rubbish. Were you ever in Moscow?
FERAPONT. No. God did not lead me there. Shall I go?
ANDREY. You may go. Good-bye. Good-bye. You can come to-morrow and fetch these documents… Go along… He’s gone. Yes, yes…
MASHA. I don’t know. I don’t know. Of course, habit counts for a great deal. After father’s death, for instance, it took us a long time to get used to the absence of orderlies. But, apart from habit, it seems to me in all fairness that, however it may be in other towns, the best and most-educated people are army men.
VERSHININ. I’m thirsty. I should like some tea.
MASHA. They’ll bring some soon. I was given in marriage when I was eighteen, and I was afraid of my husband because he was a teacher and I’d only just left school. He then seemed to me frightfully wise and learned and important. And now, unfortunately, that has changed.
VERSHININ. Yes… yes.
MASHA. I don’t speak of my husband, I’ve grown used to him, but civilians in general are so often coarse, impolite, uneducated. Their rudeness offends me, it angers me. I suffer when I see that a man isn’t quite sufficiently refined, or delicate, or polite. I simply suffer agonies when I happen to be among schoolmasters, my husband’s colleagues.
VERSHININ. Yes… It seems to me that civilians and army men are equally interesting, in this town, at any rate. It’s all the same! If you listen to a member of the local intelligentsia, whether to civilian or military, he will tell you that he’s sick of his wife, sick of his house, sick of his estate, sick of his horses… We Russians are extremely gifted in the direction of thinking on an exalted plane, but, tell me, why do we aim so low in real life? Why?
MASHA. Why?
VERSHININ. Why is a Russian sick of his children, sick of his wife? And why are his wife and children sick of him?
MASHA. You’re a little downhearted to-day.
VERSHININ. Perhaps I am. I haven’t had any dinner, I’ve had nothing since the morning. My daughter is a little unwell, and when my girls are ill, I get very anxious and my conscience tortures me because they have such a mother. Oh, if you had seen her to-day! What a trivial personality! We began quarrelling at seven in the morning and at nine I slammed the door and went out. I never speak of her, it’s strange that I bear my complaints to you alone. Don’t be angry with me. I haven’t anybody but you, nobody at all…
MASHA. What a noise in the oven. Just before father’s death there was a noise in the pipe, just like that.
VERSHININ. Are you superstitious?
MASHA. Yes.
VERSHININ. That’s strange. You are a splendid, wonderful woman. Splendid, wonderful! It is dark here, but I see your sparkling eyes.
MASHA. There is more light here.
VERSHININ. I love you, love you, love you… I love your eyes, your movements, I dream of them… Splendid, wonderful woman!
MASHA. When you talk to me like that, I laugh; I don’t know why, for I’m afraid. Don’t repeat it, please… No, go on, it’s all the same to me… Somebody’s coming, let’s talk about something else.
TUZENBACH. My surname is really triple. I am called Baron Tuzenbach-Krone-Altschauer, but I am Russian and Orthodox, the same as you. There is very little German left in me, unless perhaps it is the patience and the obstinacy with which I bore you. I see you home every night.
IRINA. How tired I am!
TUZENBACH. And I’ll come to the telegraph office to see you home every day for ten or twenty years, until you drive me away. Is that you? How do you do.
IRINA. Well, I am home at last. A lady came to-day to telegraph to her brother in Saratov that her son died to-day, and she couldn’t remember the address anyhow. So she sent the telegram without an address, just to Saratov. She was crying. And for some reason or other I was rude to her. “I’ve no time,” I said. It was so stupid. Are the entertainers coming to-night?
MASHA. Yes.
IRINA. I want a rest. I am tired.
TUZENBACH. When you come home from your work you seem so young, and so unfortunate…
IRINA. I am tired. No, I don’t like the telegraph office, I don’t like it.
MASHA. You’ve grown thinner… And you look younger, and your face has become like a boy’s.
TUZENBACH. That’s the way she does her hair.
IRINA. I must find another job, this one won’t do for me. What I wanted, what I hoped to get, just that is lacking here. Labour without poetry, without ideas… The doctor is knocking. Will you knock, dear. I can’t… I’m tired… He’ll come in a minute. Something ought to be done. Yesterday the doctor and Andrey played cards at the club and lost money. Andrey seems to have lost 200 roubles.
MASHA. What can we do now?
IRINA. He lost money a fortnight ago, he lost money in December. Perhaps if he lost everything we should go away from this town. Oh, my God, I dream of Moscow every night. I’m just like a lunatic. We go there in June, and before June there’s still… February, March, April, May… nearly half a year!
MASHA. Only Natasha mustn’t get to know of these losses.
IRINA. I expect it will be all the same to her.
MASHA. Here he is… Has he paid his rent?
IRINA. No. He’s been here eight months and hasn’t paid a copeck. Seems to have forgotten.
MASHA. What dignity in his pose!
IRINA. Why are you so silent, Alexander Ignateyevitch?
VERSHININ. I don’t know. I want some tea. Half my life for a tumbler of tea: I haven’t had anything since morning.
CHEBUTIKIN. Irina Sergeyevna!
IRINA. What is it?
CHEBUTIKIN. Please come here, Venez ici. I can’t do without you.
VERSHININ. Well, if we can’t have any tea, let’s philosophize, at any rate.
TUZENBACH. Yes, let’s. About what?
VERSHININ. About what? Let us meditate… about life as it will be after our time; for example, in two or three hundred years.
TUZENBACH. Well? After our time people will fly about in balloons, the cut of one’s coat will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and develop it, but life will remain the same, laborious, mysterious, and happy. And in a thousand years’ time, people will still be sighing: “Life is hard!” – and at the same time they’ll be just as afraid of death, and unwilling to meet it, as we are.
VERSHININ. How can I put it? It seems to me that everything on earth must change, little by little, and is already changing under our very eyes. After two or three hundred years, after a thousand – the actual time doesn’t matter – a new and happy age will begin. We, of course, shall not take part in it, but we live and work and even suffer to-day that it should come. We create it – and in that one object is our destiny and, if you like, our happiness.
TUZENBACH. What is it?
MASHA. I don’t know. I’ve been laughing all day, ever since morning.
VERSHININ. I finished my education at the same point as you, I have not studied at universities; I read a lot, but I cannot choose my books and perhaps what I read is not at all what I should, but the longer I love, the more I want to know. My hair is turning white, I am nearly an old man now, but I know so little, oh, so little! But I think I know the things that matter most, and that are most real. I know them well. And I wish I could make you understand that there is no happiness for us, that there should not and cannot be… We must only work and work, and happiness is only for our distant posterity. If not for me, then for the descendants of my descendants.
TUZENBACH. According to you, one should not even think about happiness! But suppose I am happy!
VERSHININ. No.
TUZENBACH. We do not seem to understand each other. How can I convince you? Yes, laugh! Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly…
MASHA. Still, is there a meaning?
TUZENBACH. A meaning… Now the snow is falling. What meaning?
MASHA. It seems to me that a man must have faith, or must search for a faith, or his life will be empty, empty… To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why babies are born, why there are stars in the sky… Either you must know why you live, or everything is trivial, not worth a straw.
VERSHININ. Still, I am sorry that my youth has gone.
MASHA. Gogol says: life in this world is a dull matter, my masters!
TUZENBACH. And I say it’s difficult to argue with you, my masters! Hang it all.
CHEBUTIKIN. Balzac was married at Berdichev. That’s worth making a note of. Balzac was married at Berdichev.
IRINA. Balzac was married at Berdichev.
TUZENBACH. The die is cast. I’ve handed in my resignation, Maria Sergeyevna.
MASHA. So I heard. I don’t see what good it is; I don’t like civilians.
TUZENBACH. Never m