‘Lady with a Little Dog’ (Concluded)

Waves breaking on the rocks at Yalta, c. 1900, from a tourist brochure

And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Every two or three months she

would leave S., telling her husband she was going to consult a professor about her female

complaint – and her husband believed her and did not believe her. On her arrival in

Moscow, she put up at the ‘Slavyansky Bazaar’ hotel, and immediately sent a messenger in

a red cap round to Gurov. Gurov walked round to see her, and no one in Moscow knew

anything about it.

On one such occasion he was walking round one winter morning, the messenger

having called the previous evening and not found him in. With him was his daughter, as he

wanted to drop her off at school, it was on his way. Snow was falling heavily, in thick wet

flakes.

‘The temperature is three degrees above freezing,’ Gurov was saying to his daughter,

‘and yet it’s snowing. That’s because the warmth is only on the earth’s surface, in the upper

layers of the atmosphere the temperature is quite different.’

‘Papa, why isn’t there any thunder in winter?’

He explained that, too. As he talked, he was thinking that here he was on his way to an

assignation, and not a single living soul knew about it, and probably ever would know. He

had two lives: one that was out in the open, and everyone who needed to could see it and

knew about it, a life full of conventional truth and conventional deceit, a life that was

indistinguishable from the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another life, running

its course in secret. And by some strange, perhaps chance, combination of circumstances,

everything that was important, interesting, and essential to him, in which he was sincere

and did not deceive himself, that constituted the core of his life, was taking place in secret

from other people – whereas everything that was false, a façade he hid behind so as to

conceal the truth, like his work at the bank, for example, the arguments in the club, his

‘lower breed’ talk, attending jubilee celebrations with his wife, all that was out in the open.

And he judged other people by himself, did not believe what he saw, and always assumed

that each person’s real, most interesting, life was taking place under a veil of secrecy, like

the veil of night. Each private existence rests on a secret, and it may partly be for this

reason that a cultivated man is so nervously anxious that his private secret should be

respected.

After seeing his daughter off at school, Gurov made his way to the ‘Slavyansky Bazaar’.

He took his coat off downstairs, walked up and knocked quietly on the door. Anna

Sergeyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress, was tired by the journey and by waiting, as

she’d been expecting him from the previous evening; she was pale, looked at him without

smiling, and as soon as he came in, threw herself onto his breast. Their kiss was long and

lingering, as if they’d not seen each other for a couple of years.

‘Well, how’s life with you?’ he asked. ‘Any news?’

‘Wait, I’ll tell you in a moment… I can’t now.’

She could not speak for crying. She turned away from him and pressed a handkerchief

to her eyes.

‘Let her have a little cry, I’ll sit down for a while,’ he thought and sat down in an

armchair.

Then he rang the bell and ordered tea for himself, and while he was drinking, she still

went on standing by the window with her back to him… She was crying from emotion,

from the miserable realisation of how sadly their lives had worked out; they could only

meet in secret, hiding from people like thieves! Hadn’t their lives been ruined?

‘Do stop crying now!’ he said.

It was obvious to him that the end of this love of theirs was still very distant, and who

knew when that end might be. Anna Sergeyevna had become attached to him more and

more strongly, she worshipped him, and it would be unthinkable to say to her that at some

time all this would have to come to an end; and she wouldn’t have believed it in any case.

He went up to her and took her by the shoulders, so as to caress her and have a little

joke, and at that moment he caught sight of himself in the mirror.

His hair was already beginning to turn grey. And it struck him as strange that in the

last few years he’d become so old and lost his good looks. The shoulders on which his

hands rested were warm and trembling. He felt compassion for this life, so warm and

beautiful now, but which was probably close to the point when it would begin to fade and

wither like his own. What makes her love him as she does? He had always appeared to

women other than he was and it was not him they loved, but an imaginary person they’d

created and been eagerly searching for all their lives; and then, when they noticed their

mistake, they went on loving him just the same. And not one of them had been happy with

him. Time went on, he struck up an acquaintance, became intimate, parted, but not once

had he loved; there was everything you might want, only not love.

And it was only now when his hair had turned grey that he had fallen well and truly in

love – for the first time in his life.

Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like very close relatives, like husband and

wife, like bosom friends; fate itself, it seemed, had predestined them for each other, and it

did not make sense that he should have a wife and she a husband; and they were like two

migratory birds, male and female, which had been caught and forced to live in separate

cages. They had forgiven each other for what they were ashamed of in their past lives, they

forgave each other for everything in the present, and they felt that this love of theirs had

changed them both.

At sad moments earlier he had calmed himself down with whatever rational

considerations came into his head, but he was in no mood now for such considerations, he

felt a deep sense of compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender…

‘Please don’t cry, my darling,’ he said, ‘you’ve had a little cry – and that’s enough…

Now let’s have a talk, we’ll think of something.’

Then they had a long discussion, talking of how to escape from the need to hide, to

deceive, to live in different towns and not see each other for long periods. How could they

free themselves from these intolerable chains?

‘How? How?’ he kept asking, clutching his head. ‘How?’

And it seemed that in a short time the solution would be found and then a beautiful

new life would begin, and it was clear to both of them that the end was still a very long way

off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.