Romance with a Double Bass

by Anton Chekhov (1886)

T he musician Bowzinsky was walking from town to the country house of Prince
Bibulov, where an evening of music and dance was to “take place,” as they say,
for an engagement party. On his back was an enormous double bass in a leather
case. Bowzinsky walked along a river where cool water flowed — not majestically,
it must be said, but at least quite poetically.
Suddenly he had an idea: “Why don’t I take a swim?”
Without a second thought, he stripped down and submerged his body into the cool
stream. It was a magnificent evening. Bowzinsky’s poetic soul began to attune itself
in harmony with his surroundings, but as he swam a hundred feet or so to the side,
a sweet feeling engulfed his soul when saw a beautiful young woman sitting on the
steep river bank and fishing. He went still and held his breath as a flood of disparate
emotions came over him: childhood memories, a painful yearning for the past,
awakening love… Good Lord! Here he’d thought that he was no longer capable of
love! After he’d lost faith in humanity — his dearly beloved wife ran off with his
friend, Cursky the bassoon player — his heart had been filled with a feeling of
emptiness. He had become a misanthrope.
“What is life?” he had asked himself many times. “What do we live for? Life is a
myth… a dream… a type of ventriloquism…”
But standing before this sleeping beauty (for it was easy to see that she was
asleep), he suddenly felt, against his will, something in his heart like love. He stood
before her for a long while, devouring her with his eyes…
“But enough of that…” he thought, sighing deeply. “Farewell, marvelous vision! I
must be off to His Grace for a ball…”
After one last look at this beauty, he was about to swim off when an idea came to
him.
“I should leave her with something to remember me by!” he thought. “I’ll tie
something to her line — a surprise from an ‘unknown admirer’.”
Bowzinsky soundlessly swam to the bank, picked a large bouquet of field and water
flowers, tied them together with goosefoot and then fastened it to the line.
The bouquet sank down to the river bottom, taking the pretty fishing float along with
it.
Reason, the laws of nature and the social standing of my hero  demand that this
romance end right here, but — alas! — a writer’s fate is uncompromising: due to
circumstances beyond the writer’s control, the romance did not end with the
bouquet. Contrary to common sense and the nature of things, the poor and
undistinguished double bass player was to play an important role in the life of this
high-born and wealthy beauty.
When he swam to shore, Bowzinsky got a nasty surprise: his clothes were gone.
Stolen! While he was admiring the beautiful young woman, some miscreants had
taken everything save his double bass and top hat.
“Curses!” Bowzinsky shouted. “Oh, humanity — a brood of vipers! I am not as
distressed by the loss of my clothes (for all is vanity, including clothing), but by the
thought that I must walk on naked and, as such, offend public morality!”
He sat on his instrument case and tried to think of a way out of his terrible situation.
“I certainly can’t go naked to Prince Bibulov!” he thought. “There will be ladies
present! Besides, along with my trousers, the thieves stole the bow rosin that was
in the pocket!”
He agonized for so long that his head ached.
“I’ve got it!” he finally thought. “There’s a little bridge in a thicket close to the
riverbank… I can sit under the bridge until it’s nightfall, and then in the evening,
when it’s dark, I can make my way to the nearest cottage…”
Having decided on a path of action, Bowzinsky put on his top hat, hoisted the
double bass onto his back and trundled off into the thicket. Naked, with that musical
instrument on his back, he looked like an ancient, mythical demigod.
And now, gentle reader, as my hero sits under the bridge and gives in to sorrow, we
shall leave him for a while and see about the girl who was fishing. What happened
to her? When the beauty woke up and didn’t see her fishing float on the water, she
gave a tug on the line. The line pulled tight, but the hook and float didn’t rise to the
surface. Bowzinsky’s bouquet must have become water-logged and weighted down.
“Either I’ve caught a big fish,” the young woman thought, “or my line has gotten
caught on something.”
After tugging on the line some more, she decided that the hook was snagged.
“What a shame!” she thought. “Fish start biting towards dusk. What can I do?”
After thinking a minute, the eccentric girl threw off her diaphanous clothing and
submerged her lovely body in the stream of water up to her marble shoulders. It
wasn’t easy to unsnag the hook from the bouquet that the line was tangled in, but
her patience and effort paid off. After a quarter of an hour the beauty, glowing and
happy, came out of the water holding the hook in her hand.
But a cruel fate awaited her. The miscreants who stole Bowzinsky’s clothing took
her clothes, too, leaving only her can of worms.
“What am I to do now?” she wept. “How can I go home like this? No! Never! I’d
rather die! I’ll wait until it’s dark and then, under cover of darkness, I’ll get to Aunt
Agafia’s and send her to my house for some clothing… And in the meantime, I’ll go
and hide under the bridge.”
Crouching down, my heroine dashed along a path through tall grass to the little
bridge. But when she crawled under the bridge, she saw a naked man with a
theatrical mane of hair and a hairy chest. She screamed and fell into a faint.
Bowzinsky took a fright, too. At first he took the girl for a naiad.
“Are you a siren, come to seduce me?” he thought. Given his customary a high
opinion of his appearance, he found the notion flattering. “If she is not a siren but a
human being, then how can her strange transfiguration be explained? Why is she
here, under the bridge? And what is wrong with her?”
While he was pondering these questions, the beauty came to her senses.
“Don’t kill me!” she whispered. “I’m Princess Bibulova. I beg of you! You’ll get a lot
of money! I was untangling my fishing line when some thieves took my clothing,
boots and all!”
“My good lady!” Bowzinsky said pleadingly. “My clothes were stolen, too. And along
with my trousers, they took the bow rosin in my pocket!”
Musicians who play the double bass or the trombone are not usually very
resourceful, but Bowzinsky was the pleasant exception to the rule.
“My good lady!” he said after a moment. “I see you are embarrassed by my
appearance. But you must agree that I cannot leave here for the same reason that
you cannot. So, here’s my thought: would you like to lie down inside my double
bass case and close the lid? That would hide my appearance from your sight…”
With that, Bowzinsky took his double bass out of its case. For just a moment as he
emptied the case, he wondered if this was a profanation of his sacred art, but his
qualms did not linger. The beauty lay down in the case and curled up into a ball, he
tightened the strap and was delighted that nature had bestowed him with such a
great mind.
“Now, my good lady, you can’t see me,” he said. “You can lie there peacefully. When
it is dark, I’ll carry you to your parents’ home. I can return for my double bass later.”
When twilight fell, Bowzinsky hoisted the case containing the beauty up over his
shoulder and trundled toward Bibulov’s country house. His plan was this: first he’d
walk to the nearest cottage and get some clothes, and then he’d walk on…
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” he thought, bent under the weight of his load and
kicking up dust with his bare feet. “For the noble role I’ve played in the life of the
princess, Bibulov will surely reward me generously.” 
“My good lady, are you comfortable?” he asked in the tone of a cavalier
galant inviting a lady to dance the cadrille. “Don’t stand on ceremony. Do make
yourself at home in there!”
Suddenly the gallant Bowzinsky thought that he saw two figures ahead, obscured
by the darkness. He peered at them. It wasn’t an optical illusion, he was certain;
there were, in fact, two figures walking along the road, and they were even carrying
some bundles…
“Are those the thieves?” he thought. “They’re carrying something! It must be our
clothes!”
Bowzinsky put the case on the road and ran after the figures.
“Stop!” he cried. “Stop! Seize them!”
The figures glanced behind them, and when they saw they were being chased, they
took off… For a long time the princess could hear the sound of people running and
shouts of “Stop!” Finally, the sounds fell silent.
With Bowzinsky caught up in the chase, the beauty would have lain there in a field
by the side of the road for a long time, if not for another happy turn of fate. It so
happened that at just that time and along just that road Bowzinsky’s comrades were
also walking to Bibulov’s country house — Skutlovsky on flute and Grandzhestov
on clarinet. When they tripped over the case they looked around in consternation
and then shrugged their shoulders.
“A double bass!” Skutlovsky said. “It must be our Bowzinsky’s double bass! But
why on earth is it here?”
“Something must have happened to Bowzinsky,” Grandzhestov said. “Either he got
drunk or got robbed… in any case, we can’t leave it here. We’ll take it with us.”
Skutlovsky hoisted the case onto his back, and the musicians continued along their
way.
“What a bloody weight this is,” the flautist complained the whole way. “I wouldn’t
play this hellish monstrosity for anything…Whew!”
When the musicians got to Prince Bibulov’s house, they put the case in the area set
up for the orchestra and headed to the buffet.
By then the chandeliers and sconces were already being lit. The fiancé, the
handsome and personable Court Counselor Lakeyvich, who worked in the
Transportation Ministry, stood in the center of the hall with his hands in his pockets
and chatted with Count Flassky. They were discussing music.
“Once when I was in Naples,” Lakeyvich was saying, “I personally knew a violinist
who could literally perform miracles. You wouldn’t believe it! On the double bass…
damned if he didn’t pull trills out of an ordinary double bass — it gave you the
chills. He played Strauss waltzes!”
The Count couldn’t believe it. “Nonsense! That’s impossible!” he said.
“It’s the truth! He even played one of Liszt’s rhapsodies. I shared a hotel room with
him, and once, when I had nothing better to do, he taught me how to play Liszt’s
rhapsody on the double bass.”
“Liszt’s rhapsody!  Humph! Surely you are joking…”
“You don’t believe me?” Lakeyvich said, laughing. “I’ll prove it to you! Let’s go to
the orchestra pit!”
The fiancé and the Count went to the orchestra pit. They went up to the double bass
case, quickly untied the strap, and… Oh, the horror!
As the reader gives his imagination free rein to picture how that musical discussion
ended, we’ll go back to Bowzinsky… The poor musician couldn’t catch the thieves,
so he returned to the spot where he left his case. But he didn’t see his precious
burden. Completely at a loss, he walked up and down the road, and when he didn’t
find it, he decided that he was on the wrong road.
“Oh, how horrible!” he though, clutching his head and shivering. “She suffocated in
the case! I’m a murderer!”
Until midnight Bowzinsky walked along the roads, looking for his case, but finally,
when he had no more strength, he went back under the bridge.
“I’ll start looking again at dawn,” he decided.
The search at daybreak produced the same result, and Bowzinsky decided the wait
for nightfall under the bridge…
“I’ll find her,” he muttered, taking off his top hat and tugging at his hair. “Even if it
takes me a year, I’ll find her!”
***
Even today, peasants who live in these parts still tell how you might see a naked
man with long hair and a top hat at night by the bridge. And sometimes you might
even hear the wheeze of a double bass from under the bridge.