Transcript of The Tales of Chekhov, Vol. 13, Love and Other Stories
Section 1 of The Tales of Chekhov, Volume 13. Love and Other Stories. Translated by Constant Garnet. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox .org. Read by Frederick O 'Brien. Section 1 of The Tales of Chekhov, Volume 13. Love and Other Stories. 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'm 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 in their...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 200 ,000? 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 daydreams 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 naively 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 goodbye 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. It is a great delight also to seal up a love letter, and, slowly putting on one's hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the treasure to the post. There are no stars in the sky now. In their place there is a long whitish streak in the east, broken here and there by clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses. From that
The Tales of Chekhov, Vol. 13, Love and Other Stories
द्वारा Anton Chekhov
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