FERAPONT. Moscow? That’s where a contractor was once telling that some merchants or other were eating pancakes; one ate forty pancakes and he went and died, he was saying. Either forty or fifty, I forget which.
ANDREY. In Moscow you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don’t know anybody and where nobody knows you, and you don’t feel all the same that you’re a stranger. And here you know everybody and everybody knows you, and you’re a stranger... and a lonely stranger.
FERAPONT. What? And the same contractor was telling—perhaps he was lying—that there was a cable stretching right across Moscow.
ANDREY. What for?
FERAPONT. I can’t tell. The contractor said so.
ANDREY. Rubbish. [He reads] Were you ever in Moscow?
FERAPONT. [After a pause] No. God did not lead me there. [Pause] Shall I go?
ANDREY. You may go. Good-bye. [FERAPONT goes] Good-bye. [Reads] You can come to-morrow and fetch these documents.... Go along.... [Pause] He’s gone. [A ring] Yes, yes.... [Stretches himself and slowly goes into his own room.]
[Behind the scene the nurse is singing a lullaby to the child. MASHA and VERSHININ come in. While they talk, a maidservant lights candles and a lamp.]
MASHA. I don’t know. [Pause] I don’t know. Of course, habit counts for a great deal. After father’s death, for instance, it took us a long time to get used to the absence of orderlies. But, apart from habit, it seems to me in all fairness that, however it may be in other towns, the best and most-educated people are army men.