CHEBUTIKIN. Please come here, Venez ici. [IRINA goes and sits by the table] I can’t do without you. [IRINA begins to play patience.]
VERSHININ. Well, if we can’t have any tea, let’s philosophize, at any rate.
TUZENBACH. Yes, let’s. About what?
VERSHININ. About what? Let us meditate... about life as it will be after our time; for example, in two or three hundred years.
TUZENBACH. Well? After our time people will fly about in balloons, the cut of one’s coat will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and develop it, but life will remain the same, laborious, mysterious, and happy. And in a thousand years’ time, people will still be sighing: “Life is hard!”—and at the same time they’ll be just as afraid of death, and unwilling to meet it, as we are.
VERSHININ. [Thoughtfully] How can I put it? It seems to me that everything on earth must change, little by little, and is already changing under our very eyes. After two or three hundred years, after a thousand—the actual time doesn’t matter—a new and happy age will begin. We, of course, shall not take part in it, but we live and work and even suffer to-day that it should come. We create it—and in that one object is our destiny and, if you like, our happiness.
[MASHA laughs softly.]
TUZENBACH. What is it?
MASHA. I don’t know. I’ve been laughing all day, ever since morning.
VERSHININ. I finished my education at the same point as you, I have not studied at universities; I read a lot, but I cannot choose my books and perhaps what I read is not at all what I should, but the longer I love, the more I want to know. My hair is turning white, I am nearly an old man now, but I know so little, oh, so little! But I think I know the things that matter most, and that are most real. I know them well. And I wish I could make you understand that there is no happiness for us, that there should not and cannot be.... We must only work and work, and happiness is only for our distant posterity. [Pause] If not for me, then for the descendants of my descendants.