Love, and Other Stories

Love, and Other Stories

THREE oclock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I cant sleep, I am so happy! My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange, incomprehensible feeling. I cant analyse it just nowI havent the time, Im too lazy, and therehang 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 ones study and communes with ones own day-dreams while the spring night looks in at ones 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 navely 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. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 13414
Author: Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich
Release Date: Sep 9, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Garnett, Constance, 1861-1946