SORIN. Miss Masha, will you kindly ask your father to leave the dog unchained? It howled so last night that my sister was unable to sleep.
MASHA. You must speak to my father yourself. Please excuse me; I can’t do so. [To MEDVIEDENKO] Come, let us go.
MEDVIEDENKO. You will let us know when the play begins?
MASHA and MEDVIEDENKO go out.
SORIN. I foresee that that dog is going to howl all night again. It is always this way in the country; I have never been able to live as I like here. I come down for a month’s holiday, to rest and all, and am plagued so by their nonsense that I long to escape after the first day. [Laughing] I have always been glad to get away from this place, but I have been retired now, and this was the only place I had to come to. Willy-nilly, one must live somewhere.
JACOB. [To TREPLIEFF] We are going to take a swim, Mr. Constantine.
TREPLIEFF. Very well, but you must be back in ten minutes.
JACOB. We will, sir.
TREPLIEFF. [Looking at the stage] Just like a real theatre! See, there we have the curtain, the foreground, the background, and all. No artificial scenery is needed. The eye travels direct to the lake, and rests on the horizon. The curtain will be raised as the moon rises at half-past eight.
SORIN. Splendid!
TREPLIEFF. Of course the whole effect will be ruined if Nina is late. She should be here by now, but her father and stepmother watch her so closely that it is like stealing her from a prison to get her away from home. [He straightens SORIN’S collar] Your hair and beard are all on end. Oughtn’t you to have them trimmed?
SORIN. [Smoothing his beard] They are the tragedy of my existence. Even when I was young I always looked as if I were drunk, and all. Women have never liked me. [Sitting down] Why is my sister out of temper?
TREPLIEFF. Why? Because she is jealous and bored. [Sitting down beside SORIN] She is not acting this evening, but Nina is, and so she has set herself against me, and against the performance of the play, and against the play itself, which she hates without ever having read it.
SORIN. [Laughing] Does she, really?
TREPLIEFF. Yes, she is furious because Nina is going to have a success on this little stage. [Looking at his watch] My mother is a psychological curiosity. Without doubt brilliant and talented, capable of sobbing over a novel, of reciting all Nekrasoff’s poetry by heart, and of nursing the sick like an angel of heaven, you should see what happens if any one begins praising Duse to her! She alone must be praised and written about, raved over, her marvellous acting in “La Dame aux Camelias” extolled to the skies. As she cannot get all that rubbish in the country, she grows peevish and cross, and thinks we are all against her, and to blame for it all. She is superstitious, too. She dreads burning three candles, and fears the thirteenth day of the month. Then she is stingy. I know for a fact that she has seventy thousand roubles in a bank at Odessa, but she is ready to burst into tears if you ask her to lend you a penny.
SORIN. You have taken it into your head that your mother dislikes your play, and the thought of it has excited you, and all. Keep calm; your mother adores you.
TREPLIEFF. [Pulling a flower to pieces] She loves me, loves me not; loves — loves me not; loves — loves me not! [Laughing] You see, she doesn’t love me, and why should she? She likes life and love and gay clothes, and I am already twenty-five years old; a sufficient reminder to her that she is no longer young. When I am away she is only thirty-two, in my presence she is forty-three, and she hates me for it. She knows, too, that I despise the modern stage. She adores it, and imagines that she is working on it for the benefit of humanity and her sacred art, but to me the theatre is merely the vehicle of convention and prejudice. When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff, then I must needs run from it, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower that was about to crush him by its vulgarity.
SORIN. But we can’t do without a theatre.
TREPLIEFF. No, but we must have it under a new form. If we can’t do that, let us rather not have it at all. [Looking at his watch] I love my mother, I love her devotedly, but I think she leads a stupid life. She always has this man of letters of hers on her mind, and the newspapers are always frightening her to death, and I am tired of it. Plain, human egoism sometimes speaks in my heart, and I regret that my mother is a famous actress. If she were an ordinary woman I think I should be a happier man. What could be more intolerable and foolish than my position, Uncle, when I find myself the only nonentity among a crowd of her guests, all celebrated authors and artists? I feel that they only endure me because I am her son. Personally I am nothing, nobody. I pulled through my third year at college by the skin of my teeth, as they say. I have neither money nor brains, and on my passport you may read that I am simply a citizen of Kiev. So was my father, but he was a well-known actor. When the celebrities that frequent my mother’s drawing-room deign to notice me at all, I know they only look at me to measure my insignificance; I read their thoughts, and suffer from humiliation.
SORIN. Tell me, by the way, what is Trigorin like? I can’t understand him, he is always so silent.
TREPLIEFF. Trigorin is clever, simple, well-mannered, and a little, I might say, melancholic in disposition. Though still under forty, he is surfeited with praise. As for his stories, they are — how shall I put it? — pleasing, full of talent, but if you have read Tolstoi or Zola you somehow don’t enjoy Trigorin.
SORIN. Do you know, my boy, I like literary men. I once passionately desired two things: to marry, and to become an author. I have succeeded in neither. It must be pleasant to be even an insignificant author.
TREPLIEFF. [Listening] I hear footsteps! [He embraces his uncle] I cannot live without her; even the sound of her footsteps is music to me. I am madly happy. [He goes quickly to meet NINA, who comes in at that moment] My enchantress! My girl of dreams!
NINA. [Excitedly] It can’t be that I am late? No, I am not late.
TREPLIEFF. [Kissing her hands] No, no, no!
NINA. I have been in a fever all day, I was so afraid my father would prevent my coming, but he and my stepmother have just gone driving. The sky is clear, the moon is rising. How I hurried to get here! How I urged my horse to go faster and faster! [Laughing] I am so glad to see you! [She shakes hands with SORIN.]
SORIN. Oho! Your eyes look as if you had been crying. You mustn’t do that.
NINA. It is nothing, nothing. Do let us hurry. I must go in half an hour. No, no, for heaven’s sake do not urge me to stay. My father doesn’t know I am here.
TREPLIEFF. As a matter of fact, it is time to begin now. I must call the audience.
SORIN. Let me call them — and all — I am going this minute. [He goes toward the right, begins to sing “The Two Grenadiers,” then stops.] I was singing that once when a fellow-lawyer said to me: “You have a powerful voice, sir.” Then he thought a moment and added, “But it is a disagreeable one!” [He goes out laughing.]
NINA. My father and his wife never will let me come here; they call this place Bohemia and are afraid I shall become an actress. But this lake attracts me as it does the gulls. My heart is full of you. [She glances about her.]
TREPLIEFF. We are alone.
NINA. Isn’t that some one over there?
TREPLIEFF. No. [They kiss one another.]
NINA. What is that tree?
TREPLIEFF. An elm.
NINA. Why does it look so dark?
TREPLIEFF. It is evening; everything looks dark now. Don’t go away early, I implore you.
NINA. I must.
TREPLIEFF.