Act II
The lawn in front of Sorin’s house. The house stands in the background, on a broad terrace. The lake, brightly reflecting the rays of the sun, lies to the left. There are flower-beds here and there. It is noon; the day is hot. Arkadina, Dorn, and Masha are sitting on a bench on the lawn, in the shade of an old linden. An open book is lying on Dorn’s knees.
Arkadina
To Masha
Come, get up.
They both get up
Stand beside me. You are twenty-two and I am almost twice your age. Tell me, Doctor, which of us is the younger looking?
Dorn
You are, of course.
Arkadina
You see! Now why is it? Because I work; my heart and mind are always busy, whereas you never move off the same spot. You don’t live. It is a maxim of mine never to look into the future. I never admit the thought of old age or death, and just accept what comes to me.
Masha
I feel as if I had been in the world a thousand years, and I trail my life behind me like an endless scarf. Often I have no desire to live at all. Of course that is foolish. One ought to pull oneself together and shake off such nonsense.
Dorn
Sings softly
“Tell her, oh flowers—”
Arkadina
And then I keep myself as correct-looking as an Englishman. I am always well-groomed, as the saying is, and carefully dressed, with my hair neatly arranged. Do you think I should ever permit myself to leave the house half-dressed, with untidy hair? Certainly not! I have kept my looks by never letting myself slump as some women do.
She puts her arms akimbo, and walks up and down on the lawn
See me, tripping on tiptoe like a fifteen-year-old girl.
Dorn
I see. Nevertheless, I shall continue my reading.
He takes up his book
Let me see, we had come to the grain-dealer and the rats.
Arkadina
And the rats. Go on.
She sits down
No, give me the book, it is my turn to read.
She takes the book and looks for the place
And the rats. Ah, here it is.
She reads
“It is as dangerous for society to attract and indulge authors as it is for grain-dealers to raise rats in their granaries. Yet society loves authors. And so, when a woman has found one whom she wishes to make her own, she lays siege to him by indulging and flattering him.” That may be so in France, but it certainly is not so in Russia. We do not carry out a programme like that. With us, a woman is usually head over ears in love with an author before she attempts to lay siege to him. You have an example before your eyes, in me and Trigorin.
Sorin comes in leaning on a cane, with Nina beside him. Medviedenko follows, pushing an arm-chair.
Sorin
In a caressing voice, as if speaking to a child
So we are happy now, eh? We are enjoying ourselves to-day, are we? Father and stepmother have gone away to Tver, and we are free for three whole days!
Nina
Sits down beside Arkadina, and embraces her
I am so happy. I belong to you now.
Sorin
Sits down in his arm-chair
She looks lovely to-day.
Arkadina
Yes, she has put on her prettiest dress, and looks sweet. That was nice of you.
She kisses Nina
But we mustn’t praise her too much; we shall spoil her. Where is Trigorin?
Nina
He is fishing off the wharf.
Arkadina
I wonder he isn’t bored.
She begins to read again.
Nina
What are you reading?
Arkadina
“On the Water,” by Maupassant.
She reads a few lines to herself
But the rest is neither true nor interesting.
She lays down the book
I am uneasy about my son. Tell me, what is the matter with him? Why is he so dull and depressed lately? He spends all his days on the lake, and I scarcely ever see him any more.
Masha
His heart is heavy.
Timidly, to Nina
Please recite something from his play.
Nina
Shrugging her shoulders
Shall I? Is it so interesting?
Masha
With suppressed rapture
When he recites, his eyes shine and his face grows pale. His voice is beautiful and sad, and he has the ways of a poet.
Sorin begins to snore.
Dorn
Pleasant dreams!
Arkadina
Peter!
Sorin
Eh?
Arkadina
Are you asleep?
Sorin
Not a bit of it.
A pause.
Arkadina
You don’t do a thing for your health, brother, but you really ought to.
Dorn
The idea of doing anything for one’s health at sixty-five!
Sorin
One still wants to live at sixty-five.
Dorn
Crossly
Ho! Take some camomile tea.
Arkadina
I think a journey to some watering-place would be good for him.
Dorn
Why, yes; he might go as well as not.
Arkadina
You don’t understand.
Dorn
There is nothing to understand in this case; it is quite clear.
Medviedenko
He ought to give up smoking.
Sorin
What nonsense!
A pause.
Dorn
No, that is not nonsense. Wine and tobacco destroy the individuality. After a cigar or a glass of vodka you are no longer Peter Sorin, but Peter Sorin plus somebody else. Your ego breaks in two: you begin to think of yourself in the third person.
Sorin
It is easy for you to condemn smoking and drinking; you have known what life is, but what about me? I have served in the Department of Justice for twenty-eight years, but I have never lived, I have never had any experiences. You are satiated with life, and that is why you have an inclination for philosophy, but I want to live, and that is why I drink my wine for dinner and smoke cigars, and all.
Dorn
One must take life seriously, and to take a cure at sixty-five and regret that one did not have more pleasure in youth is, forgive my saying so, trifling.
Masha
It must be lunch-time.
She walks away languidly, with a dragging step
My foot has gone to sleep.
Dorn
She is going to have a couple of drinks before lunch.
Sorin
The poor soul is unhappy.
Dorn
That is a trifle, your honour.
Sorin
You judge her like a man who has obtained all he wants in life.
Arkadina
Oh, what could be duller than this dear tedium of the country? The air is hot and still, nobody does anything but sit and philosophise about life. It is pleasant, my friends, to sit and listen to you here, but I had rather a thousand times sit alone in the room of a hotel learning a role by heart.
Nina
With enthusiasm
You are quite right. I understand how you feel.
Sorin
Of course it is pleasanter to live in town. One can sit in one’s library with a telephone at one’s elbow, no one comes in without being first announced by the footman, the streets are full of cabs, and all—
Dorn
Sings
“Tell her, oh flowers—”
Shamraeff comes in, followed by Paulina.
Shamraeff
Here they are. How do you do?
He kisses Arkadina’s hand and then Nina’s
I am delighted to see you looking so well.
To Arkadina
My wife tells me that you mean to go to town with her to-day. Is that so?
Arkadina
Yes, that is what I had planned to do.
Shamraeff
Hm—that is splendid, but how do you intend to get there, madam? We are hauling rye to-day, and all the men are busy. What horses would you take?
Arkadina
What horses? How do I know what horses we shall have?
Sorin
Why, we have the carriage horses.
Shamraeff
The carriage horses! And where am I to find the harness for them? This is astonishing! My dear madam, I have the greatest respect for your talents, and would gladly sacrifice ten years of my life for you, but I cannot let you have any horses to-day.
Arkadina
But if I must go to town? What an extraordinary state of affairs!
Shamraeff
You do not know, madam, what it is to run a farm.
Arkadina
In a burst of anger
That is an old story! Under these circumstances I shall go back to Moscow this very day. Order a carriage for me from the village, or I shall go to the station on foot.
Shamraeff
Losing his temper
Under these circumstances I resign my position. You must find yourself another manager.
He goes out.
Arkadina
It is like this every summer: every summer I am insulted here. I shall never set foot here again.
She goes out to the left, in the direction of the wharf. In a few minutes she is seen entering the house, followed by Trigorin, who carries a bucket and fishing-rod.
Sorin
Losing his temper
What the deuce did he mean by his impudence? I want all the horses brought here at once!
Nina
To Paulina
How could he refuse anything to Madame Arkadina, the famous actress? Is not every wish, every caprice even, of hers, more important than any farm work? This is incredible.
Paulina
In despair
What can I do about it? Put yourself in my place and tell me what I can do.
Sorin
To Nina
Let us go and find my sister, and all beg her not to go.
He looks in the direction in which Shamraeff went out
That man is insufferable; a regular tyrant.
Nina
Preventing him from getting up
Sit still, sit still, and let us wheel you.
She and Medviedenko push the chair before them
This is terrible!
Sorin
Yes, yes, it is terrible; but he won’t leave. I shall have a talk with him in a moment.
They go out. Only Dorn and Paulina are left.
Dorn
How tiresome people are! Your husband deserves to be thrown out of here neck and crop, but it will all end by this old granny Sorin and his sister asking the man’s pardon. See if it doesn’t.
Paulina
He has sent the carriage horses into the fields too. These misunderstandings occur every day. If you only knew how they excite me! I am ill; see! I am trembling all over! I cannot endure his rough ways.
Imploringly
Eugene, my darling, my beloved, take me to you. Our time is short; we are no longer young; let us end deception and concealment, even though it is only at the end of our lives.
A pause.
Dorn
I am fifty-five years old. It is too late now for me to change my ways of living.
Paulina
I know that you refuse me because there are other women who are near to you, and you cannot take everybody. I understand. Excuse me—I see I am only bothering you.
Nina is seen near the house picking a bunch of flowers.
Dorn
No, it is all right.
Paulina
I am tortured by jealousy. Of course you are a doctor and cannot escape from women. I understand.
Dorn
To Nina, who comes toward him
How are things in there?
Nina
Madame Arkadina is crying, and Sorin is having an attack of asthma.
Dorn
Let us go and give them both some camomile tea.
Nina
Hands him the bunch of flowers
Here are some flowers for you.
Dorn
Thank you.
He goes into the house.
Paulina
Following him
What pretty flowers!
As they reach the house she says in a low voice
Give me those flowers! Give them to me!
Dorn hands her the flowers; she tears them to pieces and flings them away. They both go into the house.
Nina
Alone
How strange to see a famous actress weeping, and for such a trifle! Is it not strange, too, that a famous author should sit fishing all day? He is the idol of the public, the papers are full of him, his photograph is for sale everywhere, his works have been translated into many foreign languages, and yet he is overjoyed if he catches a couple of minnows. I always thought famous people were distant and proud; I thought they despised the common crowd which exalts riches and birth, and avenged themselves on it by dazzling it with the inextinguishable honour and glory of their fame. But here I see them weeping and playing cards and flying into passions like everybody else.
Treplieff comes in without a hat on, carrying a gun and a dead seagull.
Treplieff
Are you alone here?
Nina
Yes.
Treplieff lays the sea-gull at her feet.
Nina
What do you mean by this?
Treplieff
I was base enough to-day to kill this gull. I lay it at your feet.
Nina
What is happening to you?
She picks up the gull and stands looking at it.
Treplieff
After a pause
So shall I soon end my own life.
Nina
You have changed so that I fail to recognise you.
Treplieff
Yes, I have changed since the time when I ceased to recognise you. You have failed me; your look is cold; you do not like to have me near you.
Nina
You have grown so irritable lately, and you talk so darkly and symbolically that you must forgive me if I fail to follow you. I am too simple to understand you.
Treplieff
All this began when my play failed so dismally. A woman never can forgive failure. I have burnt the manuscript to the last page. Oh, if you could only fathom my unhappiness! Your estrangement is to me terrible, incredible; it is as if I had suddenly waked to find this lake dried up and sunk into the earth. You say you are too simple to understand me; but, oh, what is there to understand? You disliked my play, you have no faith in my powers, you already think of me as commonplace and worthless, as many are.
Stamping his foot
How well I can understand your feelings! And that understanding is to me like a dagger in the brain. May it be accursed, together with my stupidity, which sucks my life-blood like a snake!
He sees Trigorin, who approaches reading a book
There comes real genius, striding along like another Hamlet, and with a book, too.
Mockingly
“Words, words, words.” You feel the warmth of that sun already, you smile, your eyes melt and glow liquid in its rays. I shall not disturb you.
He goes out.
Trigorin
Making notes in his book
Takes snuff and drinks vodka; always wears black dresses; is loved by a schoolteacher—
Nina
How do you do?
Trigorin
How are you, Miss Nina? Owing to an unforeseen development of circumstances, it seems that we are leaving here today. You and I shall probably never see each other again, and I am sorry for it. I seldom meet a young and pretty girl now; I can hardly remember how it feels to be nineteen, and the young girls in my books are seldom living characters. I should like to change places with you, if but for an hour, to look out at the world through your eyes, and so find out what sort of a little person you are.
Nina
And I should like to change places with you.
Trigorin
Why?
Nina
To find out how a famous genius feels. What is it like to be famous? What sensations does it give you?
Trigorin
What sensations? I don’t believe it gives any.
Thoughtfully
Either you exaggerate my fame, or else, if it exists, all I can say is that one simply doesn’t feel fame in any way.
Nina
But when you read about yourself in the papers?
Trigorin
If the critics praise me, I am happy; if they condemn me, I am out of sorts for the next two days.
Nina
This is a wonderful world. If you only knew how I envy you! Men are born to different destinies. Some dully drag a weary, useless life behind them, lost in the crowd, unhappy, while to one out of a million, as to you, for instance, comes a bright destiny full of interest and meaning. You are lucky.
Trigorin
I, lucky?
He shrugs his shoulders
H-m—I hear you talking about fame, and happiness, and bright destinies, and those fine words of yours mean as much to me—forgive my saying so—as sweetmeats do, which I never eat. You are very young, and very kind.
Nina
Your life is beautiful.
Trigorin
I see nothing especially lovely about it.
He looks at his watch
Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry.
He laughs
You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though.
After a few moments’ thought
Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth—I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can’t help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!
Nina
But don’t your inspiration and the act of creation give you moments of lofty happiness?
Trigorin
Yes. Writing is a pleasure to me, and so is reading the proofs, but no sooner does a book leave the press than it becomes odious to me; it is not what I meant it to be; I made a mistake to write it at all; I am provoked and discouraged. Then the public reads it and says: “Yes, it is clever and pretty, but not nearly as good as Tolstoi,” or “It is a lovely thing, but not as good as Turgenieff’s ‘Fathers and Sons,’” and so it will always be. To my dying day I shall hear people say: “Clever and pretty; clever and pretty,” and nothing more; and when I am gone, those that knew me will say as they pass my grave: “Here lies Trigorin, a clever writer, but he was not as good as Turgenieff.”
Nina
You must excuse me, but I decline to understand what you are talking about. The fact is, you have been spoilt by your success.
Trigorin
What success have I had? I have never pleased myself; as a writer, I do not like myself at all. The trouble is that I am made giddy, as it were, by the fumes of my brain, and often hardly know what I am writing. I love this lake, these trees, the blue heaven; nature’s voice speaks to me and wakes a feeling of passion in my heart, and I am overcome by an uncontrollable desire to write. But I am not only a painter of landscapes, I am a man of the city besides. I love my country, too, and her people; I feel that, as a writer, it is my duty to speak of their sorrows, of their future, also of science, of the rights of man, and so forth. So I write on every subject, and the public hounds me on all sides, sometimes in anger, and I race and dodge like a fox with a pack of hounds on his trail. I see life and knowledge flitting away before me. I am left behind them like a peasant who has missed his train at a station, and finally I come back to the conclusion that all I am fit for is to describe landscapes, and that whatever else I attempt rings abominably false.
Nina
You work too hard to realise the importance of your writings. What if you are discontented with yourself? To others you appear a great and splendid man. If I were a writer like you I should devote my whole life to the service of the Russian people, knowing at the same time that their welfare depended on their power to rise to the heights I had attained, and the people should send me before them in a chariot of triumph.
Trigorin
In a chariot? Do you think I am Agamemnon?
They both smile.
Nina
She covers her face with her hands
Whew! My head reels!
The Voice of Arkadina
From inside the house
Boris! Boris!
Trigorin
She is calling me, probably to come and pack, but I don’t want to leave this place.
His eyes rest on the lake
What a blessing such beauty is!
Nina
Do you see that house there, on the far shore?
Trigorin
Yes.
Nina
That was my dead mother’s home. I was born there, and have lived all my life beside this lake. I know every little island in it.
Trigorin
This is a beautiful place to live.
He catches sight of the dead sea-gull
What is that?
Nina
A gull. Constantine shot it.
Trigorin
What a lovely bird! Really, I can’t bear to go away. Can’t you persuade Irina to stay?
He writes something in his note-book.
Nina
What are you writing?
Trigorin
Nothing much, only an idea that occurred to me.
He puts the book back in his pocket
An idea for a short story. A young girl grows up on the shores of a lake, as you have. She loves the lake as the gulls do, and is as happy and free as they. But a man sees her who chances to come that way, and he destroys her out of idleness, as this gull here has been destroyed.
A pause. Arkadina appears at one of the windows.
Arkadina
Boris! Where are you?
Trigorin
I am coming this minute.
He goes toward the house, looking back at Nina. Arkadina remains at the window.
Trigorin
What do you want?
Arkadina
We are not going away, after all.
Trigorin goes into the house. Nina comes forward and stands lost in thought.
Nina
It is a dream!
The curtain falls.