The Seagull

Yakov

Yes, sir goes out.

Treplev

Looking round the stage. Here is our theatre. The curtain, then the first wing, then the second, and beyond that⁠—open space. No scenery of any sort. There is an open view of the lake and the horizon. We shall raise the curtain at exactly half-past eight, when the moon rises.

Sorin

Magnificent.

Treplev

If Nina is late it will spoil the whole effect. It is time she was here. Her father and her stepmother keep a sharp eye on her, and it is as hard for her to get out of the house as to escape from prison puts his uncle’s cravat straight. Your hair and your beard are very untidy. They want clipping or something.⁠ ⁠…

Sorin

Combing out his beard. It’s the tragedy of my life. Even as a young man I looked as though I had been drinking for days or something of the sort. I was never a favourite with the ladies sitting down. Why is your mother out of humour?

Treplev

Why? Because she is bored sitting down beside him. She is jealous. She is set against me, and against the performance, and against my play because Nina is acting in it, and she is not. She does not know my play, but she hates it.

Sorin

Laughs. What an idea!

Treplev

She is annoyed to think that even on this little stage Nina will have a triumph and not she looks at his watch. My mother is a psychological freak. Unmistakably talented, intelligent, capable of sobbing over a book, she will reel off all Nekrassov by heart; as a sick nurse she is an angel; but just try praising Duse in her presence! O‑ho!

Ladies and gentlemen, we begin! I beg you to attend a pause. I begin taps with a stick and recites aloud. Oh, you venerable old shadows that float at nighttime over this lake, lull us to sleep and let us dream of what will be in two hundred thousand years!

Sorin

There will be nothing in two hundred thousand years.

Treplev

Then let them present that nothing to us.

Madame Arkadin

Let them. We are asleep.

The curtain rises; the view of the lake is revealed; the moon is above the horizon, its reflection in the water; Nina Zaretchny, all in white, is sitting on a big stone.

Nina

Men, lions, eagles and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the water, starfishes and creatures which cannot be seen by the eye⁠—all living things, all living things, all living things, having completed their cycle of sorrow, are extinct.⁠ ⁠… For thousands of years the earth has borne no living creature on its surface, and this poor moon lights its lamp in vain. On the meadow the cranes no longer waken with a cry, and there is no sound of the May beetles in the lime trees. It is cold, cold, cold! Empty, empty, empty! Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful! A pause. The bodies of living creatures have vanished into dust, and eternal matter has transformed them into rocks, into water, into clouds, while the souls of all have melted into one. That world-soul I am⁠—I⁠ ⁠…

Nina

Alone. How strange it is to see a famous actress cry, and about such a trivial thing! And isn’t it strange? A famous author, adored by the public, written about in all the papers, his photographs for sale, his works translated into foreign languages⁠—and he spends the whole day fishing and is delighted that he has caught two gudgeon. I thought famous people were proud, unapproachable, that they despised the crowd, and by their fame and the glory of their name, as it were, revenged themselves on the vulgar herd for putting rank and wealth above everything. But here they cry and fish, play cards, laugh and get cross like everyone else!

Treplev

Comes in without a hat on, with a gun and a dead seagull. Are you alone here?

Nina

Yes.

Treplev lays the seagull at her feet.

Nina

What does that mean?

Treplev

I was so mean as to kill this bird today. I lay it at your feet.

Nina

What is the matter with you? Picks up the bird and looks at it.

Treplev

After a pause. Soon I shall kill myself in the same way.

Nina

You have so changed, I hardly know you.

Treplev

Yes, ever since the day when I hardly knew you. You have changed to me, your eyes are cold, you feel me in the way.

Nina

You have become irritable of late, you express yourself so incomprehensibly, as it were in symbols. This bird is a symbol too, I suppose, but forgive me, I don’t understand it lays the seagull on the seat. I am too simple to understand you.

You are very young and very good-natured.

Nina

Your life is splendid!

Trigorin

What is there particularly nice in it? Looks at his watch. I must go and write directly. Excuse me, I mustn’t stay⁠ ⁠… laughs. You have stepped on my favourite corn, as the saying is, and here I am beginning to get excited and a little cross. Let us talk though. We will talk about my splendid bright life.⁠ ⁠… Well, where shall we begin? After thinking a little. There are such things as fixed ideas, when a man thinks day and night for instance, of nothing but the moon. And I have just such a moon. I am haunted day and night by one persistent thought: I ought to be writing, I ought to be writing, I ought⁠ ⁠… I have scarcely finished one novel when, for some reason, I must begin writing another, then a third, after the third a fourth. I write incessantly, post haste, and I can’t write in any other way. What is there splendid and bright in that, I ask you? Oh, it’s an absurd life! Here I am with you; I am excited, yet every moment I remember that my unfinished novel is waiting for me. Here I see a cloud that looks like a grand piano. I think that I must put into a story somewhere that a cloud sailed by that looked like a grand piano. There is a scent of heliotrope. I hurriedly make a note: a sickly smell, a widow’s flower, to be mentioned in the description of a summer evening.

Trigorin

It’s very delightful here! Seeing the seagull. And what’s this?

Nina

A seagull. Konstantin Gavrilitch shot it.

Trigorin

A beautiful bird. Really, I don’t want to go away. Try and persuade Irina Nikolayevna to stay makes a note in his book.

Nina

What are you writing?

Trigorin

Oh, I am only making a note. A subject struck me putting away the notebook. A subject for a short story: a young girl, such as you, has lived all her life beside a lake; she loves the lake like a seagull, and is as free and happy as a seagull. But a man comes by chance, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her like that seagull here a pause.

Madame Arkadin appears at the window.

Madame Arkadin