TROFIMOV. Why are you angry, Varya? Hm! These aren’t my goloshes!
LOPAKHIN. In the spring I sowed three thousand acres of poppies, and now I’ve made forty thousand roubles net profit. And when my poppies were in flower, what a picture it was! So I, as I was saying, made forty thousand roubles, and I mean I’d like to lend you some, because I can afford it. Why turn up your nose at it? I’m just a simple peasant....
TROFIMOV. Your father was a peasant, mine was a chemist, and that means absolutely nothing. [LOPAKHIN takes out his pocket-book] No, no.... Even if you gave me twenty thousand I should refuse. I’m a free man. And everything that all you people, rich and poor, value so highly and so dearly hasn’t the least influence over me; it’s like a flock of down in the wind. I can do without you, I can pass you by. I’m strong and proud. Mankind goes on to the highest truths and to the highest happiness such as is only possible on earth, and I go in the front ranks!
LOPAKHIN. Will you get there?
TROFIMOV. I will. [Pause] I’ll get there and show others the way. [Axes cutting the trees are heard in the distance.]
LOPAKHIN. Well, good-bye, old man. It’s time to go. Here we stand pulling one another’s noses, but life goes its own way all the time. When I work for a long time, and I don’t get tired, then I think more easily, and I think I get to understand why I exist. And there are so many people in Russia, brother, who live for nothing at all. Still, work goes on without that. Leonid Andreyevitch, they say, has accepted a post in a bank; he will get sixty thousand roubles a year.... But he won’t stand it; he’s very lazy.
ANYA. [At the door] Mother asks if you will stop them cutting down the orchard until she has gone away.
TROFIMOV. Yes, really, you ought to have enough tact not to do that. [Exit.]
LOPAKHIN, All right, all right... yes, he’s right. [Exit.]
ANYA. Has Fiers been sent to the hospital?