“That's good. But it is past nine…. You will catch cold.”
“Young man, don't quibble!”
Ten minutes later I was at Antka. The house, where during the winter Chekhov lived alone with his mother, was dark and silent, save that a light came through the key-hole of his mother's room, and two little candles burnt in the semi-darkness of his study. My heart shrank as usual at the sight of that quiet study, where Chekhov passed so many lonely winter nights, thinking bitterly perhaps on the fate which had given him so much and mocked him so cruelly.
“What a night!” he said to me with even more than his usual tenderness and pensive gladness, meeting me in the doorway. “It is so dull here! The only excitement is when the telephone rings and Sophie Pavlovna asks what I am doing, and I answer: ‘I am catching mice.’ Come, let us drive to Orianda. I don't care a hang if I do catch cold!”
The night was warm and still, with a bright moon, light clouds, and a few stars in the deep blue sky. The carriage rolled softly along the white road, and, soothed by the stillness of the night, we sat silent looking at the sea glowing a dim gold…. Then came the forest cobwebbed over with shadows, but already spring-like and beautiful…. Black troops of giant cypresses rose majestically into the sky. We stopped the carriage and walked beneath them, past the ruins of the castle, which were pale blue in the moonlight. Chekhov suddenly said to me:
“Do you know for how many years I shall be read? Seven.”
“Why seven?” I asked.
“Seven and a half, then.”
“No,” I said. “Poetry lives long, and the longer it lives the better it becomes—like wine.”
He said nothing, but when we had sat down on a bench from which we could see the sea shining in the moonlight, he took off his glasses and said, looking at me with his kind, tired eyes: