THE TALES OF CHEKHOV VOLUME 13 LOVE AND OTHER STORIES BY ANTON TCHEKHOV Translated by CONSTANCE GARNETT CONTENTS LOVE LIGHTS A STORY WITHOUT AN END MARI D'ELLE A LIVING CHATTEL THE DOCTOR TOO EARLY! THE COSSACK ABORIGINES AN INQUIRY MARTYRS THE LION AND THE SUN A DAUGHTER OF ALBION CHORISTERS NERVES A WORK OF ART A JOKE A COUNTRY COTTAGE A BLUNDER FAT AND THIN THE DEATH OF A GOVERNMENT CLERK A PINK STOCKING AT A SUMMER VILLA LOVE "THREE o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy! "My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange, incomprehensible feeling. I can't analyse it just now--I haven't the time, I'm too lazy, and there--hang analysis! Why, is a man likely to interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost from a belfry, or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand? Is he in a state to do it?" This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girl of nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times, and as often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, and copied it all over again. I spent as long over the letter as if it had been a novel I had to write to order. And it was not because I tried to make it longer, more elaborate, and more fervent, but because I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of one's study and communes with one's own day-dreams while the spring night looks in at one's window. Between the lines I saw a beloved image, and it seemed to me that there were, sitting at the same table writing with me, spirits as naïvely happy, as foolish, and as blissfully smiling as I. I wrote continually, looking at my hand, which still ached deliciously where hers had lately pressed it, and if I turned my eyes away I had a vision of the green trellis of the little gate. Through that trellis Sasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I was saying good-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply admiring her figure as every decent man admires a pretty woman; when I saw through the trellis two big eyes, I suddenly, as though by inspiration, knew that I was in love, that it was all settled between us, and fully decided already, that I had nothing left to do but to carry out certain formalities.