Act One: The Return

A room that was still called the nursery, at dawn in May. The cherry trees were in blossom, but it was cold in the orchard; there was frost. The windows were closed.

Lopakhin, a merchant, and Dunyasha, the maid, waited up for the family, who were coming back from abroad by the night train. Lopakhin had fallen asleep, and missed meeting them at the station. He remembered Lyubov Andreyevna, the mistress of the estate, from when he was a boy of fifteen: his father, a peasant, had hit him in the face, and his nose bled, and she had taken him to wash it in this very room. "Don't cry, little peasant, it'll heal before your wedding." "Little peasant . . . My father was a peasant, it's true, and here I am in a white waistcoat and yellow shoes. A pig in a pastry shop . . . I'm rich, I've got plenty of money, but if you think about it and work it out, I'm a peasant through and through." He had been reading a book, and fallen asleep over it.

Epikhodov, the estate clerk, came in with a bunch of flowers, his boots squeaking: every day some misfortune happened to him — they called him "Twenty-two Misfortunes." He was in love with Dunyasha, and had proposed to her. Old Firs, the manservant, eighty-seven, deaf, mumbled about.

The carriages arrived. Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya came in, with her seventeen-year-old daughter Anya, who had gone to Paris to bring her home; her adopted daughter Varya, twenty-four, who ran the estate; her brother Gaev; the governess Charlotta Ivanovna, with a little dog; and the young footman Yasha, who had been abroad with his mistress and now despised everything Russian.

"The nursery!" said Lyubov, laughing and weeping. "My dear, beautiful room . . . I used to sleep here when I was little . . . And now I'm like a little girl again . . ." She kissed her brother, and Varya, and old Firs.

Anya told Varya, in a whisper, of their journey and of Paris: her mother had sold her villa at Mentone; she had nothing left, not a penny; in Paris she lived on the fifth floor, in a room full of smoke, among strange Frenchmen, a priest with a book; she spent everything, ordered the most expensive dishes, tipped the waiters a rouble each. And the estate was to be sold at auction in August, for the interest owed on the mortgage.

Lyubov had gone abroad five years before, after her husband died, and after her little son Grisha drowned in the river here — and she had followed a man to Paris, who had robbed her and left her.

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Lopakhin, who had come to welcome her, had to go to Kharkov at five; but first he had something to tell them. He had found a way to save the estate. It stood near the river, close to the town, and the railway now ran within twenty versts; if the cherry orchard and the land along the river were divided into plots and leased for summer villas, they would bring in at least twenty-five thousand a year. "Of course, you'd have to tidy up, clear away — for instance, pull down all the old buildings, this house, which is no use to anyone any more, and cut down the old cherry orchard."

Lyubov was horrified: "Cut it down? My dear, forgive me, you don't understand anything. If there's one thing in the whole district that's interesting, even remarkable, it's our cherry orchard." "The only remarkable thing about the orchard is that it's very big. There's a crop of cherries once every two years, and even that nobody knows what to do with; nobody buys them." Gaev added: "The orchard is mentioned in the encyclopaedia." Old Firs remembered how in the old days they used to dry the cherries, and pickle them, and make jam, and send them to Moscow and Kharkov by the cartload. "Do you remember the recipe?" "It's forgotten. Nobody remembers it."

Gaev, an elderly gentleman who talked too much, and whose answer to every embarrassment was to murmur imaginary billiard shots — "Cannon off the white . . . pot the red" — made a speech to an old bookcase, which had stood in the house for a hundred years: "Dear, honoured bookcase! I salute your existence, which for more than a hundred years has been directed towards the radiant ideals of goodness and justice . . ." Everyone was embarrassed.

Lopakhin left, reminding them: the auction was set for the twenty-second of August. "Think it over!"

Lyubov looked out of the window at the dawn, and the orchard, all white with blossom. "Oh, my childhood, my innocence! I slept in this nursery, and looked out at the orchard from here, and happiness woke with me every morning, and it was just as it is now; nothing has changed. All, all white! O my orchard! After the dark, foul autumn and the cold winter, you are young again, full of happiness; the heavenly angels have not left you . . . Look — our dead mother is walking in the orchard . . . in a white dress! . . . No, there's no one. It only seemed so. On the right, by the turn to the summer-house, a white tree is bending, like a woman . . ."

And then Trofimov came in: a young man in a shabby student's uniform, with spectacles — "the eternal student," who had been sent down from the university more than once. He had been tutor to her drowned son, Grisha. When she recognised him, she wept: "Grisha . . . my boy . . . drowned. Why? Why, my friend?" And then: "How you've changed, Petya! Why have you got so ugly? Why have you grown old?"

Varya had told Anya, earlier that morning, that she had heard nothing yet from Lopakhin, whom everyone expected her to marry. Gaev, alone, told Anya his plans: he would borrow money; he would get a position in a bank; their rich old aunt in Yaroslavl, the Countess, would help. "I swear on my honour, the estate will not be sold!"