Selected Stories

The Darling

OLENKA, THE DAUGHTER of the retired collegiate assessor Plemyannikov, was sitting on the little porch that faced the courtyard, lost in thought. It was hot, the flies were an-noyingly persistent, and it was pleasant to think that it would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were gathering from the east, bringing with them an occasional breath of moisture.

Kukin, a theater manager who ran an amusement garden known as the Tivoli, and who lodged in the wing of the house, was standing in the middle of the courtyard staring up at the sky.

“Again!” he said in despair. “It’s going to rain again! Every day it rains; every day, as if to spite me! I might just as well put a noose around my neck! It’s ruin! Every day terrible losses!”

He clasped his hands, turned to Olenka and went on, “That’s our life for you, Olga Semyonovna. It’s enough to make you weep! You work, you do your very best, you worry and lose sleep, always thinking how to make it better—and what happens? On the one hand, the public is ignorant, barbarous. I give them the very best operetta, a pantomime, magnificent vaudeville artists—but do you think that’s what they want? Do you think they understand it? What they want is slapstick! Give them trash! And then, look at the weather! Rain almost every evening. It started the tenth of May and it’s been raining incessantly ever since—all May and June. Simply dreadful! The public doesn’t come, but I still have to pay the rent, don’t I—and the artists?”

The next day toward evening the clouds again appeared, and, laughing hysterically, Kukin said, “Well, go on, rain! Flood the whole park, drown me! Bad luck to me in this world and the next! Let the artists sue me! Let them send me to prison—to Siberia—to the scaffold! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

And the third day it was the same. …

Olenka listened to Kukin gravely, silently, and sometimes tears would come into her eyes. She was so moved by his misfortunes that she ended by falling in love with him. He was an emaciated little man with a yellow face and hair combed down over his temples; he spoke in a thin tenor voice, twisting his mouth to one side, and despair was permanently engraved on his face; nevertheless, he aroused a deep and genuine feeling in her. She was always in love with someone and could not live otherwise. First it had been her papa, who was now ill and sat in an armchair in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; then it had been her aunt, who used to come from Bryansk every other year; and before that, when she was at school, she had been in love with her French teacher. She was a quiet, good-natured, compassionate girl with meek, gentle eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full, rosy cheeks, her soft, white neck with a dark little mole on it, and the kind, ingenuous smile that came over her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, “Yes, not bad!” and smiled too, while the ladies present could not refrain from suddenly seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation and exclaiming in an outburst of delight, “You darling!”

The house she had lived in since birth, and which, ac cording to her father’s will, was to be hers, was located on the outskirts of the city on Gypsy Road, not far from the Tivoli. In the evenings and at night when she heard the band playing and skyrockets exploding, it seemed to her that it was Kukin at war with his fate, assaulting his chief enemy, the apathetic public; then her heart melted, she had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at daybreak she would tap softly at her bedroom window and, letting him see only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, would smile tenderly at him. …

He proposed to her and they were married. And when he had a good look at her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he clapped his hands together and exclaimed, “Darling!”

He was happy, but as it rained both the day and the night of the wedding, his expression of despair remained unchanged.

They got on well together. She presided over the box office, looked after things in the garden, kept the accounts and paid the salaries; and her rosy cheeks, her sweet, artless smile, shone now in the box-office window, now in the wings of the theater, now at the buffet. She began telling her friends that the most remarkable, the most important and essential thing in the whole world was the theater—that only through the theater could one derive true pleasure and become a cultivated and humane person.

“But do you suppose the public understands that?” she would ask. “What it wants is slapstick! Yesterday we gave Faust Inside Out, and almost every box was empty, but if Vanichka and I had put on some kind of trash, then, believe me, the theater would have been packed. Tomorrow Vanichka and I are putting on Orpheus in Hell. Do come.”

Whatever Kukin said about the theater and the actors she repeated. Like him she despised the public for its ignorance and indifference to art; she took a hand in the rehearsals, correcting the actors, kept an eye on the conduct of the musicians, and when there was an unfavorable notice in the local newspaper, shed tears, and then went to the editor for an explanation.

The actors loved her and called her “Vanichka and I” and “the darling.” She was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums of money, and if they deceived her she wept in secret but did not complain to her husband.

They got on well in the winter too. They leased the municipal theater for the season and sublet it for short periods to a Ukrainian troupe, a magician, or a local dramatic club. Olenka grew plumper and was always beaming with satisfaction, while Kukin grew thinner and yellower and complained of terrible losses, although business was not bad during the winter. He coughed at night and she would give him an infusion of raspberries and linden blossoms, rub him with eau de Cologne, and wrap him in her soft shawls.

“What a sweet precious you are!” she would say with perfect sincerity, as she stroked his hair. “My handsome pet!”

At Lent he went to Moscow to gather a hew troupe, and without him she would not sleep, but sat all night at the window looking at the stars. She likened herself to the hens, which also stay awake all night and are uneasy when the cock is not in the henhouse. Kukin was detained in Moscow, wrote that he would return by Easter, and in his letters sent instructions regarding the Tivoli. But on the Monday of Passion Week, late in the evening, there was a sudden, ominous knocking at the gate; someone was hammering at the wicket as if it were a barrel—boom! boom! boom! The sleepy cook, splashing through the puddles in her bare feet, ran to open the gate.

“Open, please!” said someone on the other side of the gate in a deep bass voice. ‘There is a telegram for you!”

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time for some reason she felt numb with fright She opened the telegram with trembling hands and read:

IVAN PETROVICH DIED SUDDENLY TODAY AWAITING

THISD INSTRUCTIONS FUFUNERAL TUESDAY.

That was exactly the way the telegram had it: “fufuneral” and the incomprehensible word “thisd” it was signed by the director of the operetta company.

“My precious!” Olenka sobbed. “Vanichka, my precious, my dearest! Why did we ever meet? Why did I know you and love you? Whom can your poor forsaken Olenka turn to now?”

Kukin was buried on Tuesday in the Vagankovo cemetery in Moscow. Olenka returned home on Wednesday, and as soon as she reached her room sank onto the bed and sobbed so loudly that she could be heard in the street and in the neighboring courtyards.

“The darling!” said the neighbors, crossing themselves. “Darling Olga Semyonovna! Poor soul, how she grieves!”

Three months later Olenka was returning from mass one day, in deep mourning and very sad. It happened that one of her neighbors, Vasily Andreich Pustovalov, the manager of Babakayev’s lumberyard, was also returning from church and walked with her. He wore a straw hat, a white waistcoat with a gold watch chain, and looked more like a landowner than a merchant.

“Everything happens as it is ordained, Olga Semyonovna,” he said gravely, with a note of sympathy in his voice, “and if one of our dear ones passes on, we must take ourselves in hand and bear it submissively.”

Having seen Olenka to her gate, he said good-bye and went on. All day long she seemed to hear his grave voice, and as soon as she closed her eyes she dreamed of his dark beard. She liked him very much. And apparently she had made an impression on him too, because not long afterwards an elderly lady whom she scarcely knew came to have coffee with her, and as soon as she was seated at the table began to talk of Pustovalov, saying that he was a fine steady man and that any marriageable woman would be happy to marry him. Three days later Pustovalov himself paid her a visit. He did not stay long, not more than ten minutes, and said little, but Olenka fell in love with him—she was so much in love that she lay awake all night, inflamed as with a fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The betrothal was arranged, and the wedding followed soon afterwards.

After they were married Pustovalov and Olenka got on very well together. As a rule he was in the lumberyard till dinnertime, then he went out on business and Olenka took his place and sat in the office till evening, making out bills and dispatching orders.

“Every year the price of lumber rises twenty per cent,” she would say to customers and acquaintances. “Why, we used to deal in local timber, but now Vasichka has to travel to the province of Mogilev every year for wood. And the freight!” she would add, covering her cheeks with her hands in horror. “The freight!”

It seemed to her that she had been in the lumber business for ages and ages, that lumber was the most important and essential thing in life, and she found something touching, dear to her, in such words as girder, beam, plank, batten, boxboard, lath, scantling, slab. … At night she would dream of whole mountains of boards and planks, long endless caravans of wagons carrying lumber to some distant place; she dreamed of a whole regiment of 8-inch beams 28 feet long standing on end, marching on the lumberyard, beams, girders, slabs, striking against one another with the hollow sound of dry wood, all falling, then rising, piling themselves one upon another. … When she cried out in her sleep, Pustovalov would speak to her tenderly, saying, “Olenka, what’s the matter, darling? Cross yourself!” Whatever ideas her husband had became her own. If he thought the room was hot or business was slow, she thought so too. Her husband did not care for entertainment of any kind, and on holidays stayed at home, and so did she.

“You are always at home or in the office,” her friends said to her. “You ought to go to the theater, darling, or to the circus.”

“Vasichka and I have no time for the theater,” she would reply sedately. “We are working people, we’re not interested in such foolishness. What’s the good of those theaters?”

On Saturday evenings they would go to vespers, on holidays to early mass, and as they walked home side by side their faces reflected the emotion of the service. There was an agreeable aroma about them both, and her silk dress rustled pleasantly. At home they had tea and buns with various kinds of jam, and afterwards a pie. Every day at noon, in the yard and beyond the gate in the street, there was a. delicious smell of borsch and roast lamb or duck and, on fast days, fish; no one could pass their gate without feeling hungry. In the office the samovar was always boiling and the customers were treated to tea and cracknels. Once a week they went to the baths and returned side by side, both very red.

“Yes, everything goes well with us, thank God,” Olenka would say to her friends. “I wish everyone were as happy as Vasichka and I.”

When Pustovalov went to the province of Mogilev to buy timber, she missed him dreadfully, and lay awake nights crying. Sometimes in the evening Smirnin, a young army veterinarian to whom they rented the wing of the house, came to see her. They chatted or played cards, and this diverted her. She was especially interested in what he told her of his domestic life. He was married and had a son, but was separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her; he sent forty rubles a month for the support of the child. Listening to all this, Olenka sighed, shook her head, and was sorry for him.

“Well, God keep you,” she would say, accompanying him to the stairs with a candle. “Thank you for passing the time with me, and may the Queen of Heaven give you health.”

She always expressed herself in this grave, circumspect manner in imitation of her husband. Just as the veterinarian was about to disappear behind the door below, she would call to him and say, “You know, Vladimir Platonych, you ought to make it up with your wife. For your son’s sake, you should forgive her! The little fellow probably understands everything.”

When Pustovalov returned she would tell him in a low voice all about the veterinarian and his unhappy life, and they both would sigh, shake their heads, and talk about the little boy, who very likely missed his father. Then, by some strange association of ideas, they both stood before the ikons, bowed to the ground, and prayed that God would send them children.

Thus the Pustovalovs lived quietly and peaceably, in love and complete harmony for six years. Then one winter day, after drinking hot tea in the office, Vasily Andreich went out without his cap to dispatch some lumber, caught cold, and was taken ill. He was treated by the best doctors, but the illness had its way with him, and after four months he died. And again Olenka was a widow.

“Whom can I turn to, my darling?” she sobbed, after burying her husband. “How can I live without you, miserable and unhappy as I am? Good people, pity me!”

She went about in a black dress with weepers, gave up wearing a hat and gloves for good, seldom went out of the house except to go to church or to visit her husband’s grave, and at home she lived like a nun. Only after six months did she take off her widow’s weeds and open the shutters of her windows. Occasionally she was seen in the mornings, going with her cook to the market, but how she lived and what went on in her house could only be surmised. People based their conjectures on the fact that she was seen drinking tea in her garden with the veterinarian, that he read the newspaper aloud to her, and that, on meeting an acquaintance in the post office, she said, “There is no proper veterinary inspection in our city, and that’s why there is so much sickness around. You often hear of people getting ill from milk or catching infections from horses and cows. The health of domestic animals ought to be just as well looked after as the health of human beings.”

She repeated the ideas of the veterinarian, and now was of the same opinion as he about everything. It was clear that she could not live even a year without some attachment, and had found new happiness in the wing of her own house. Another woman would have been censured for this, but no one could think ill of Olenka; everything about her was so natural. Neither she nor the veterinarian spoke to anyone of the change in their relations, and tried, indeed, to conceal it, but they did not succeed because Olenka could not keep a secret. When his regimental colleagues visited him, while she poured tea for them or served supper she would talk of the cattle plague, the pearl disease, the municipal slaughterhouses. He would be dreadfully embarrassed, and when the guests had gone, would seize her by the arm and hiss angrily, “I’ve asked you before not to talk about things you don’t understand! When we veterinarians are talking among ourselves, please don’t interfere! It’s really annoying!”

She would look at him in amazement and anxiously inquire, “But, Volodochka, what am I to talk about?” Then, with tears in her eyes, she would embrace him, begging him not to be angry, and they were both happy.

This happiness did not last long. The veterinarian went away with his regiment, went away forever, as the regiment was transferred to some distant place—it may even have been Siberia. And Olenka was left alone.

Now she was quite alone. Her father had died long ago; his armchair lay in the attic, covered with dust and with one leg missing. She grew thin and plain, and when people met her in the street they did not glance at her and smile as they used to; clearly, her best years were over and behind her, and now a new, uncertain life was beginning, one that did not bear thinking of. In the evening, as she sat on her porch, Olenka could hear the band playing and skyrockets going off at the Tivoli, but this no longer called up anything to her mind. She gazed indifferently into her empty courtyard, thought of nothing, wished for nothing, and later, when darkness fell, she went to bed and dreamed of the empty courtyard. She ate and drank as though involuntarily.

Above all—and worst of all—she no longer had any opinions whatever. She saw objects about her, understood what was going on, but could not form an opinion about anything and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it is to have no opinions! You see a bottle, for instance, or rain, or a peasant driving a cart, but what the bottle, the rain, or the peasant may be for, what the significance of them is, you cannot say, and could not even for a thousand rubles. When Kukin was with her, or Pustovalov, or later, the veterinarian, Olenka could explain everything, could express an opinion on anything you like, but now there was the same emptiness in her mind and heart as in her courtyard. It was painful, and bitter as wormwood in the mouth.

Little by little the town was spreading in all directions; Gypsy Road was now a street, and where the gardens of the Tivoli and the lumberyards had been, houses sprang up and lanes formed. How swiftly time passes! Olenka’s house grew shabby, the roof was rusty, the shed sloped, and the whole yard was overgrown with tall grass and prickly nettles. Olenka herself had aged and grown plain; in the summer she sat on the porch, and her soul was empty, bleak, and bitter; in the winter she sat at the window and stared at the snow. There were times when a breath of spring or the sound of church bells brought to her on the wind would suddenly provoke a rush of memories; then her heart melted, her eyes brimmed with tears, but this lasted only a moment, and there was again emptiness and uncertainty as to the purpose of life. Bryska, the black kitten, rubbed against her, purring softly, but Olenka was not affected by these feline caresses.

Was that what she needed? She wanted a love that would take possession of her whole soul, her mind, that would give her ideas, a direction in life, that would warm her old blood. She shook the black kitten off her lap and said irritably, “Get away! Go on! There’s nothing for you here!”

And so it was, day after day, year after year, no joy whatsoever, no opinions of any sort. Whatever Mavra the cook said, she accepted.

One hot July day, toward evening, when the cattle were being driven home and the whole yard was filled with clouds of dust, someone unexpectedly knocked at the gate. Olenka went to open it herself and was astounded at what she saw: there stood Smirnin, the veterinarian, his hair gray, and in civilian dress. All at once she remembered everything and, unable to control herself, burst into tears, dropping her head onto his breast without a word. She was so moved that she scarcely was aware of going into the house and sitting down to tea with him.

“My dear!” she murmured, trembling with joy. “Vladimir Platonych! What brings you here?”

“I have come here for good,” he said. “I’ve retired from the army and I want to settle down and try my luck on my own. And besides, it’s time for my son to go to high school. He’s growing up. I am reconciled with my wife, you know.”

“Where is she?” asked Olenka.

“She’s at the hotel with the boy, and I’m out looking for lodgings.”

“Good heavens, my dear, take my house! Lodgings! Goodness, I wouldn’t take any rent for it,” cried Olenka, growing excited and weeping again. “You live here, and the wing will do for me. Heavens, how glad I am!”

The next day they began painting the roof and white-washing the walls, and Olenka, with her arms akimbo, walked about the yard giving orders. Her face beamed with her old smile, and she was animated and fresh, as though she had waked from a long sleep. The veterinarian’s wife arrived, thin and homely, with short hair and a capricious expression. With her came the little boy, Sasha, small for his age (he was going on ten), chubby, with bright blue eyes and dimples in his cheeks. No sooner had he entered the courtyard than he began chasing the cat, and immediately his gay and joyous laughter could be heard.

“Auntie, is that your cat?” he asked Olenka. “When she has little ones, please give us one of her kittens. Mama is terribly afraid of mice.”

Olenka talked to him, gave him tea, and her heart grew suddenly warm and there was a sweet ache in her bosom, as if this little boy were her own son. In the evening when he sat in the dining room doing his homework, she gazed at him with tenderness and pity as she whispered, “My darling, my pretty one. … How clever you are, my little one, and so fair!”

“An island,” he read aloud from the book, “is a body of land entirely surrounded by water.”

“An island is a body of land …” she repeated, and this was the first opinion she had uttered with conviction after years of silence and emptiness of mind.

She now had opinions of her own, and at supper she talked to Sasha’s parents about how difficult the lessons were for children in the high school, but that, nevertheless, a classical education was better than a technical course, because it opened all avenues—you could be a doctor … an engineer. …

Sasha started going to high school. His mother went to Kharkov to visit her sister and did not come back; his father used to go away every day to inspect herds, and he sometimes was away for three days together. It seemed to Olenka that Sasha was quite forsaken, that he was unwanted, that he was being starved to death, and she moved him into the wing with her and settled him in a little room there.

For six months now Sasha has been living in her wing. Every morning Olenka goes into his room where he lies fast asleep, his hand under his cheek, breathing quietly. She is always sorry to wake him.

“Sashenka,” she says sadly, “get up, darling. It’s time for school.”

He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, and sits down to breakfast; he drinks three glasses of tea, eats two large cracknels and half a buttered roll. He is still not quite awake and consequently ill-humored.

“Now, Sashenka, you have not learned your fable very well,” Olenka says, gazing at him as if she were seeing him off on a long journey. “You are such a worry to me! You must do your best, darling; you must study. … Pay attention to your teachers.”

“Oh, leave me alone, please!” he says.

Then he walks down the street to school, a little figure in a big cap, with a knapsack on his back. Olenka silently follows him.

“Sashenka-a!” she calls. And when he looks round she thrusts a date or a caramel into his hand. When they turn in to the school lane he feels ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout lady; he looks back and says, “You’d better go home, Auntie. I can go alone now.”

She stops, but does not take her eyes off him until he has disappeared into the school entrance. Ah, how she loves him! Not one of her former attachments had been so deep; never before had her soul surrendered itself so devotedly and with such joy as now, when her maternal feelings have been quickened. For this little boy who is not her own, for the dimples in his cheeks, for his cap, she would give her whole life, would give it with joy and tears of tenderness. Why? But who knows why?

Having seen Sasha off to school she goes quietly home, contented, serene, full of love; her face, grown younger in the last six months, beams with joy; people meeting her look at her with pleasure and say, “Good morning, Olga Sem-yonovna, darling. How are you, darling?”

“The lessons in school are so difficult nowadays,” she says, as she goes about her marketing. “It’s no joke. Yesterday in the first class they gave him a fable to learn by heart, a Latin translation, and a problem. …You know, it’s too much for the little fellow.”

And she begins talking about the teachers, the lessons, the textbooks—saying just what Sasha says about them.

At three o’clock they have dinner together; in the evening they do the homework together, and cry. When she puts him to bed she takes a long time making the sign of the cross over him and whispering a prayer. Then she goes to bed and dreams of that faraway, misty future when Sasha, having finished his studies, will become a doctor or an engineer, will have a large house of his own, horses, a carriage, when he will marry and have children of his own. … She falls asleep, still thinking of the same thing, and the tears run down her cheeks from under closed eyelids, while the black cat lies beside her purring: mrr … mrr … mrr ….

Suddenly there is a loud knock at the gate and Olenka wakes up, breathless with fear, her heart pounding. Half a minute later there is another knock.

“It’s a telegram from Kharkov,” she thinks, her whole body trembling. “Sasha’s mother is sending for him. … Oh, Lord!”

She is in despair, her head, hands, and feet are cold, and it seems to her that she is the most unfortunate woman in the whole world. But another moment passes, she hears voices: it is the veterinarian coming home from the club.

“Well, thank God!” she thinks. Gradually the weight on her heart lifts, and she feels relieved; she goes back to bed and thinks of Sasha, who is fast asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep, “I’ll give it to you! Go on! No fighting!”

—1898