Free Five Great Short Stories by ANTON CHEKHOV Page B

overcoat and covered her childish shoulders. Fearing that she would look queer and ugly in a man’s coat, she began to laugh and threw it off, and as she did so, I embraced her and began to cover her face, her shoulders, her arms with kisses.
    â€œTill to-morrow,” she whispered timidly as though she was afraid to break the stillness of the night. She embraced me: “We have no secrets from one another. I must tell mamma and my sister. . . . Is it so terrible? Mamma will be pleased. Mamma loves you, but Lyda!”
    She ran to the gates.
    â€œGood-bye,” she called out.
    For a couple of minutes I stood and heard her running. I had no desire to go home, there was nothing there to go for. I stood for a while lost in thought, and then quietly dragged myself back, to have one more look at the house in which she lived, the dear, simple, old house, which seemed to look at me with the windows of the mezzanine for eyes, and to understand everything. I walked past the terrace, sat down on a bench by the lawn-tennis court, in the darkness under an old elm-tree, and looked at the house. In the windows of the mezzanine, where Missyuss had her room, shone a bright light, and then a faint green glow. The lamp had been covered with a shade. Shadows began to move. . . . I was filled with tenderness and a calm satisfaction, to think that I could let myself be carried away and fall in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy at the thought that only a few yards away in one of the rooms of the house lay Lyda who did not love me, and perhaps hated me. I sat and waited to see if Genya would come out. I listened attentively and it seemed to me they were sitting in the mezzanine.
    An hour passed. The green light went out, and the shadows were no longer visible. The moon hung high above the house and lit the sleeping garden and the avenues: I could distinctly see the dahlias and roses in the flower-bed in front of the house, and all seemed to be of one colour. It was very cold. I left the garden, picked up my overcoat in the road, and walked slowly home.
    Next day after dinner when I went to the Volchaninovs’, the glass door was wide open. I sat down on the terrace expecting Genya to come from behind the flower-bed or from out of the rooms; then I went into the drawing-room and the dining-room. There was not a soul to be seen. From the dining-room I went down a long passage into the hall, and then back again. There were several doors in the passage and behind one of them I could hear Lyda’s voice:
    â€œTo the crow somewhere . . . God . . .”—she spoke slowly and distinctly, and was probably dictating—“. . . God sent a piece of cheese . . . To the crow . . . somewhere . . . Who is there?” she called out suddenly as she heard my footsteps.
    â€œIt is I.”
    â€œOh! excuse me. I can’t come out just now. I am teaching Masha.”
    â€œIs Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?”
    â€œNo. She and my sister left today for my Aunt’s in Penza, and in the winter they are probably going abroad.” She added after a short silence: “To the crow somewhere God sent a pi-ece of cheese. Have you got that?”
    I went out into the hall, and, without a thought in my head, stood and looked out at the pond and the village, and still I heard:
    â€œA piece of cheese . . . To the crow somewhere God sent a piece of cheese.”
    And I left the house by the way I had come the first time, only reversing the order, from the yard into the garden, past the house, then along the lime-walk. Here a boy overtook me and handed me a note: “I have told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you,” I read. “I could not hurt her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. If you knew how bitterly mamma and I have cried.”
    Then through the fir avenue and the rotten fence. . . . Over the fields where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled