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Sitting side by side with a young woman, who in the dawn seemed so beautiful, Gomov, appeased and enchanted by the sight of the fairy scene, the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky, thought how at bottom, if it were thoroughly explored, everything on earth was beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
The old lime-trees and birches, white with hoarfrost, have a kindly expression; they are nearer to the heart than cypresses and palm-trees, and with the dear familiar trees there is no need to think of mountains and the sea. Gomov was a native of Moscow.
"If," thought Gomov, "if she is here without a husband or a friend, it would be as well to make her acquaintance." He was not yet forty, but he had a daughter of twelve and two boys at school. He had married young, in his second year at the University, and now his wife seemed half as old again as himself.
Her room was stifling, and smelled of scents which she had bought at the Japanese shop. Gomov looked at her and thought: "What strange chances there are in life!"
She took her seat in the third row, and when Gomov glanced at her his heart ached and he knew that for him there was no one in the whole world nearer, dearer, and more important than she; she was lost in this provincial rabble, the little undistinguished woman, with a common lorgnette in her hands, yet she filled his whole life; she was his grief, his joy, his only happiness, and he longed for her; and through the noise of the bad orchestra with its tenth-rate fiddles, he thought how dear she was to him.
"It's the Tartar crying." "Oh! he's a queer fish." "He'll get used to it!" said Simeon, and at once he fell asleep. Soon the others slept too and the door was left open. It was reported that a new face had been seen on the quay; a lady with a little dog. Dimitri Dimitrich Gomov, who had been a fortnight at Talta and had got used to it, had begun to show an interest in new faces.
Later, when they went out, there was not a soul on the quay; the town with its cypresses looked like a city of the dead, but the sea still roared and broke against the shore; a boat swung on the waves; and in it sleepily twinkled the light of a lantern. They found a cab and drove out to the Oreanda. "Just now in the hall," said Gomov, "I discovered your name written on the board von Didenitz.
And Gomov, whose heart was thudding wildly, thought: "Oh, Lord! Why all these men and that beastly orchestra?" At that very moment he remembered how when he had seen Anna Sergueyevna off that evening at the station he had said to himself that everything was over between them, and they would never meet again. And now how far off they were from the end!
And all the time she had called him kind, remarkable, noble, so that he was never really himself to her, and had involuntarily deceived her.... Here at the station, the smell of autumn was in the air, and the evening was cool. "It is time for me to go North," thought Gomov, as he left the platform. "It is time."
"It is a good thing I am going away," she would say to Gomov. "It is fate." She went in a carriage and he accompanied her. They drove for a whole day. When she took her seat in the car of an express-train and when the second bell sounded, she said: "Let me have another look at you.... Just one more look. Just as you are." She did not cry, but was sad and low-spirited, and her lips trembled.
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