Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,138

drank a glass, changed their clothes, and went to the station. Instead of a gay wedding ball and dinner, instead of music and dancing—a two-hundred-mile pilgrimage.1 Many approved of it, saying that Modest Alexeich was of high rank and no longer young, and a noisy wedding might perhaps not seem quite proper; and then, too, it was boring to listen to music, when a fifty-two-year-old official married a girl barely over eighteen. It was also said that Modest Alexeich, as a man of principle, undertook this trip to the monastery, essentially, to let his young wife know that in marriage, too, he gave first place to religion and morality.

The newlyweds were seen off. A crowd of colleagues and relatives stood with glasses, waiting to shout “hurrah” as the train left, and Pyotr Leontyich, the father of the bride, in a top hat and a schoolmaster’s tailcoat, already drunk and very pale, kept holding out his glass towards the window and saying imploringly:

“Anyuta! Anya! Anya, just one word!”

Anya leaned out the window towards him, and he whispered something to her, breathing winy fumes on her, blowing in her ear—she understood none of it—and made a cross over her face, breast, hands; his breath trembled and tears glistened in his eyes. And Anya’s brothers, Petya and Andryusha, both high-school students, pulled him from behind by the tailcoat and whispered in embarrassment:

“Papa, that will do … Papa, you mustn’t …”

When the train set off, Anya saw her father run a little way after their car, staggering and spilling his wine, and what a pathetic, kind, and guilty face he had.

“Hur-ra-a-ah!” he shouted.

The newlyweds were left alone. Modest Alexeich looked around the compartment, put their things on the racks, and sat down opposite his young wife, smiling. He was an official of average height, rather stout, plump, very well fed, with long side-whiskers and no mustache, and his clean-shaven, round, sharply outlined chin resembled a heel. What most characterized his face was the missing mustache, that freshly shaven, bare space which gradually turned into fat cheeks quivering like jelly. His bearing was dignified, his movements were not quick, his manners were gentle.

“I can’t help recalling one circumstance now,” he said, smiling. “Five years ago, when Kosorotov got the Order of St. Anna second degree2 and went to say thank you, His Excellency expressed himself thus: ‘So now you have three Annas: one in your buttonhole and two on your neck.’ And I should mention that at that time Kosorotov’s wife had just come back to him, a shrewish and frivolous person whose name was Anna. I hope that when I get the Anna second degree, His Excellency will have no reason to say the same to me.”

He smiled with his little eyes. And she also smiled, troubled by the thought that this man might at any moment kiss her with his full, moist lips, and she no longer had the right to deny him that. The soft movements of his plump body frightened her, she felt afraid and squeamish. He got up, unhurriedly removed his decoration from his neck, took off his tailcoat and waistcoat, and put on his dressing gown.

“There,” he said, sitting down beside Anya.

She recalled how painful the wedding ceremony had been, when it had seemed to her that the priest, the guests, and all the people in the church were looking at her sorrowfully: why, why was she, such a sweet, nice girl, marrying this middle-aged, uninteresting gentleman? That morning she had still been delighted that everything was turning out so well, but during the wedding, and now on the train, she felt guilty, deceived, and ridiculous. Here she had married a rich man, yet she still had no money, the wedding dress had been made on a loan, and when her father and brothers were seeing her off today, she could tell by their faces that they did not have a kopeck. Would they have any supper tonight? And tomorrow? And for some reason it seemed to her that her father and the boys were now sitting there without her, hungry and feeling exactly the same anguish as they had the first evening after their mother’s funeral.

“Oh, how unhappy I am!” she thought. “Why am I so unhappy?”

With the awkwardness of a dignified man unused to dealing with women, Modest Alexeich touched her waist and patted her shoulder, while she thought about money, about her mother and her death. When her mother died, her father, Pyotr Leontyich, a teacher