Part 20 — APPENDIX

DARLING

By Antón Chékhov

Olenka, the daughter of a retired civil servant, Plemyánnikov, sat musing in her back porch. It was hot, the flies were pertinaciously teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it would soon be evening. Dark rain-clouds were coming up from the east and bringing with them an occasional whiff of moisture.

In the middle of the courtyard Kúkin, who lived in a small house in the same courtyard and was manager and proprietor of the Tivoli Gardens, stood looking at the sky.

“Again!” he exclaimed despairingly. “It’s going to rain again! Rain every day, every day, as though to spite me. One might as well hang oneself! It’s ruination! Fearful losses every day!”

He raised and clasped his hands in despair, and turning to Olenka continued:

“There, Olenka Semënovna, that’s the life we lead. It’s enough to make one cry. One works, tries hard, wears oneself out, gets no sleep at night, and racks one’s brains what to do for the best—and what’s the result? On the one hand there’s the ignorant boorish public! I give them the very best operetta, a fairy-like masque, splendid comic singers, but is that what they want? Do you suppose they understand anything of all that? What they want is what is given in a booth at a fair! Trash, is what they demand! On the other hand, look at the weather! Rain almost every evening. As it started on the 10th May, so it went on the whole of May and June. It’s simply awful! The public don’t come, but I have to pay the rent and the artistes!”

Next evening the clouds again began to gather, and Kúkin said with an hysterical laugh:

“Well, what of it? Rain away! Let it flood the whole garden with me in it! Let me have no luck in this world or the next! Let the artistes take proceedings against me! What is a trial? Even if I go as a convict to Siberia! Or to the scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!”

The next day it was the same again.

Olenka listened to Kúkin silently and seriously, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end Kúkin’s misfortunes touched her and she came to love him. He was short and lean, with a sallow complexion, twists of hair were curled on his temples, he spoke in a thin tenor voice, and when he spoke his mouth twisted, and his face always expressed despair, but still he aroused in her a real and profound affection. She always loved someone and could not exist without it. Formerly she had loved her papa, who now sat in an armchair in a dark room, ill, and breathing with difficulty; she loved her aunt, who sometimes—once in two years—came from Byansk; and before that, when she was at the secondary school, she had loved her French master. She was a quiet, soft-hearted, compassionate young woman, with a mild tender look in her eyes and very good health. At the sight of her plump rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a dark little mole on it, and the kind naïve smile which appeared on her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, “Yes, she’s all right,” and smiled too, and lady-visitors could not refrain from suddenly seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation and exclaiming with a gush of delight: “You darling!”

The house in which she had lived since her birth and which had been left her in her father’s will, was on the outskirts of the town in the Gipsy Suburb, not far from the Tivoli Gardens. In the evenings and at night she could hear the band playing and rockets going off with a bang in the Gardens, and it seemed to her that Kúkin was fighting his fate and taking his chief foe, the indifferent public, by assault: her heart melted tenderly, she had no wish to sleep, and when he returned home towards morning she tapped softly at her bedroom window and, letting him see only her face and one shoulder through the curtains, gave him a friendly smile.

He proposed, and they were married. And when he had a good view of her neck and her plump healthy shoulders, he threw up and clasped his hands and said: “Darling!”

He was happy but, as it rained on their wedding day and the whole of the following night, the despairing expression never left his face.

After the wedding they lived happily together. She sat in his booking-office, saw that the Tivoli Gardens were in order, entered up the accounts and paid the salaries; and her rosy cheeks, her sweet naïve smile, shining like a halo, appeared now at the window of the booking-office, now behind the scenes, now at the refreshment-bar. And she began to tell her acquaintances that the theatre was the most remarkable, most important, and most necessary thing in the world—that only at the theatre could one obtain true pleasure and become cultivated and humane.

“But do you think the public understands that?” she said. “They want a common booth! Yesterday we put on ‘Faust Inside Out,’ and almost all the boxes were empty, but if Vánichka and I were to give some common trash, believe me the theatre would be packed. To-morrow Vánichka and I are giving ‘Orpheus in Hell’; mind you come!” And what Kúkin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated; she despised the public as he did, for their indifference to art and their ignorance; she took part in the rehearsals, corrected the actors, kept an eye on the behaviour of the musicians, and when the local paper criticised their theatre unfavourably she cried, and afterwards went to the newspaper office for explanations.

The actors were fond of her and called her “Vánichka and I,” and “the Darling.” She was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums, and if it happened that they did not pay her, she cried in secret, but made no complaint to her husband.

And in the winter they got on quite well. They took a theatre in the town for the whole winter and sub-let it for short periods, now to an Ukrainian troupe, now to a conjuror, now to a local dramatic company. Olenka grew plumper and was all beaming with pleasure, but Kúkin grew thinner and sallower and complained of terrible losses, though business had not been bad all winter. He used to cough at night, and she gave him raspberry or lime-blossom tea, rubbed him with eau-de-Cologne, and wrapped him up in her soft shawls.

“What a splendid dear you are!” she said, quite sincerely, smoothing his hair. “What a good-looking pet you are!”

In Lent he went to Moscow to gather a troupe, and without him she could not sleep, but sat by the window looking at the stars. She compared herself, at the time, to the hens who keep awake all night and are restless when the cock is not in the hen-house. Kúkin was detained in Moscow and wrote that he would return for Easter, and his letters already contained arrangements about the Tivoli Gardens. But on the Monday in Passion Week, late in the evening, an ominous knock was suddenly heard at the gate; someone was hammering at the gate as if on a barrel: boom, boom, boom! The sleepy cook, splashing with her bare feet through the puddles, ran to open the gate.

“Open for goodness’ sake!” said someone in a thick bass voice. “There’s a telegram for you!”

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time for some reason she grew quite faint. She opened the telegram with trembling hands, and read as follows:

“Iván Kúkin passed away to-day suddenly pasway awaiting instructions fuferal Tuesday.”

It was typed “fuferal” in the telegram, and there was also the incomprehensible word ‘pasway.’ The signature was that of the manager of an operatic troupe.

“My precious!” sobbed Olenka. “Vánichka, my dearest, my precious. Why did I ever meet you? Why did I ever know and love you? Whom have I left? Why have you deserted your poor, unfortunate Olenka?”

Kúkin was buried on Tuesday in the Vagánkov cemetery in Moscow. Olenka returned home on Wednesday and as soon as she entered her house she fell on her bed and sobbed so loud that she could be heard in the street and in the neighbouring houses.

“The darling!” said the neighbours, as they crossed themselves. “Darling Olga Semënovna, how she does take on!”

Three months later Olenka was returning from Mass, melancholy and in deep mourning. It happened that a neighbour, Vasíli Andréich Pusloválov, who was also returning from church, walked beside her. He was manager of the merchant Babakáev’s timber-yard. He wore a straw hat, a white waistcoat and a gold watch-chain, and looked more like a squire than a tradesman.

“Everything has its own order, Olga Semënovna,” he said gravely, in a tone of sympathy, “and if any one of those near us dies, it must be that God willed it so, and so we must not forget ourselves but must bear it submissively.”

Having accompanied Olenka to the gate he took his leave of her and went on. All day after that she seemed to hear his dignified voice, and whenever she closed her eyes she saw his dark beard. He pleased her very much. And apparently she had also made an impression on him, for shortly afterwards an elderly lady with whom she was but slightly acquainted came to drink coffee with her, and as soon as she was seated at the table began to talk about Pustoválov and say what a good and reliable man he was, whom anyone would be glad to marry. Three days after that, Pustoválov himself came to call on her; he did not stay long, not more than ten minutes, and did not say much, but Olenka fell in love with him, so much in love that as if she were in a fever she did not sleep all night, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was soon arranged, and then came the wedding.

Pustoválov and Olenka lived happily after their marriage. He was usually in the timber-yard till dinner and then went out on business, and Olenka took his place and sat in the office till the evening, writing out accounts and despatching goods.

“Now timber rises twenty per cent in price every year,” she said to customers and acquaintances. “Just think, we used to sell local timber, but now Vánichka has to go to Mogilév province every year to buy timber. And the freights!” she went on, covering both her cheeks with her hands in horror, “what freights!”

She felt as if she had dealt in timber quite a long time; that the most important and most necessary thing in life was timber; and there was something intimate and touching to her in the words: “balk, joist, pole, plank, scantling, batten, beam....”

At night when she slept, she dreamed of whole mountains of planks and boards, and long unending rows of carts conveying timber to distant places beyond the town. She dreamed of how a whole regiment of twenty-eight foot, nine-inch beams was marching on end to attack the timber-yard; joists, beams and boards knocked against one another with a resounding crash of dry wood, all falling down and rising again, piling themselves on one another. Olenka cried out in her sleep and Pustoválov said tenderly: “Olenka, what’s the matter, darling? Cross yourself!”

Her husband’s thoughts were hers too. If he thought the room too hot, or business slack, she thought so too. Her husband did not care for any entertainments and stayed at home on holidays, and so did she.

“You are always at home or in the office,” her acquaintances said to her. “You should go to the theatre, darling, or the circus.”

“Vánichka and I have no time to go to theatres,” she answered sedately. “We are hard-working people and have no time for trifling. What good are those theatres?”

On Saturdays Pustoválov and she went to evening service, on holidays to early service, and they returned from church side by side with a softened expression on their faces, both diffusing an agreeable perfume, and her silk dress rustling pleasantly. At home they had tea with fancy bread and different kinds of jam, and then cake. Every day at noon an appetising smell of beet-root soup and roast mutton or duck, or on fast days of fish, was noticeable in their yard and in the street outside, and one could not pass their gate without beginning to feel an appetite. In the office a samovar was always boiling, and customers were treated to tea and biscuits. Once a week the couple went to the baths and returned from there together, both red in the face.

“Yes, we get on all right,” Olenka used to say. “Thank heaven! God grant everyone a life such as Vánichka’s and mine.”

When Pustoválov went to the Mogilév province to buy timber she was much depressed and lay awake at night, crying. Sometimes in the evening the regimental veterinary surgeon, Smírnin, who rented their lodge, used to come to see her. He would tell her some news, or play cards with her, and that distracted her a little. She was specially interested in what he told her of his own family life: he was married and had a boy, but was separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her but sent her forty roubles a month for his son’s maintenance. As she listened to this Olenka sighed, shook her head, and felt sorry for him.

“Well, God be with you,” she would say when he took his leave, and as she lighted him with a candle to the staircase. “Thank you for sharing my dullness. May the Queen of Heaven grant you good health!”

She always expressed herself thus sedately and sagaciously, imitating her husband, and when the veterinary surgeon was already disappearing beyond the door below, she would call after him:

“Do you know, Vladímir Platónych, you should make it up with your wife. Forgive her, if only for your son’s sake! The little boy no doubt understands.”

And when Pustoválov returned she told him in a low voice about the veterinary surgeon and his unhappy family life, and they both sighed, shook their heads, and spoke of the boy who no doubt pined for his father, and then, by some strange sequence of ideas, they went up to the icons, bowed to the ground, and prayed that God would send them children.

So the Pustoválovs lived quietly and peaceably in love and full accord for six years. But then one winter Pustoválov at the timber-yard went out without his cap, after drinking hot tea, to send off some timber, and caught cold and fell ill. He was treated by the best doctors, but got worse, and died after four months’ illness. And Olenka was again a widow.

“Whom have I now that you have forsaken me, my precious?” she sobbed, after she had buried her husband. “How am I to live without you, grief-stricken and wretched! Pity me, good people, utterly forlorn....”

She wore a black dress with weepers, gave up hats and gloves for good, and hardly ever went out except to go to church and to her husband’s grave, and at home she lived like a nun. It was only after six months had passed that she left off the weepers and opened the shutters of the windows. She was sometimes seen going to market with her cook to buy provisions, but how she now lived, and what went on in her house, could only be conjectured. People made conjectures, for instance, from seeing her drinking tea in her little garden with the veterinary surgeon, who read the newspaper aloud to her, and also from the fact that, meeting a lady she knew at the post-office, she had said to her:

“There is no regular veterinary inspection in our town, and therefore there is much illness. One is always hearing of people falling ill from the milk, and being infected by cows and horses. The health of domestic animals should really be looked after as carefully as the health of human beings.”

She repeated the veterinary’s thoughts and was now of his opinion about everything. It was clear that she could not live a year without some attachment and had found her new happiness in the lodge of her own house.

Another would have been censured for this, but no one could think ill of Olenka; everything she did was so natural. The veterinary surgeon and she never spoke to anybody about the change in their relations to one another, and they tried to conceal it, but did not succeed in this, for Olenka could have no secrets. When visitors, his comrades in the service, came to see him, she while pouring out the tea or serving supper would begin to speak about cattle-plague, or bovine tuberculosis and municipal slaughter-houses, while he would become dreadfully confused, and after the visitors had gone would seize her hand and hiss angrily:

“Didn’t I ask you not to speak of what you don’t understand? When we veterinaries talk among ourselves, please don’t join in. It’s really annoying!”

And she would look at him with amazement and agitation and would ask:

“Volódichka dear, what am I to speak about?”

And she would embrace him and with tears in her eyes entreat him not to be angry, and they would both be happy.

That happiness however did not last long. The veterinary left with his regiment and left for good, as the regiment was ordered to some very distant place, perhaps to Siberia. And Olenka was left alone.

She was entirely alone now. Her father had died long ago, and his armchair lay covered with dust and with a leg broken off, in the garret. She grew thinner and paler and people she met in the street no longer looked at her as they used to do; it was evident that her best years were over and left behind, and that a new unknown life was beginning about which it was better not to think. In the evenings she sat in her porch and could hear the music playing and the rockets bursting in the Tivoli Gardens, but they did not now awaken any thought in her. She looked indifferently at her empty yard, thought of nothing, wished for nothing, and afterwards when night came on she went to sleep, and saw in her dreams the empty yard. She ate and drank as if unwillingly.

But the principal thing and the worst of all was that she no longer had any opinions whatever. She saw the objects around her, and understood all that took place, but could form no opinions and did not know what to speak about. And how awful it is not to have any opinions! One sees, for instance, how a bottle is standing, or rain falling, or a peasant is driving his cart, but what the bottle, or rain, or peasant, is for, what sense there is in them, you can’t say—not even if someone gave you a thousand roubles to do so.

While she had Kúkin, Pustoválov, and afterwards the veterinary surgeon Olenka was able to explain everything and express her opinions about anything you liked; but now there was the same void in her mind and heart as in her yard. And it was harsh and bitter as wormwood in the mouth.

The town was gradually expanding on all sides; the Gipsy Suburb was now called a street, and where the Tivoli Gardens and the timber-yard had been, houses had sprung up, and several side streets had formed. How fast time flies! Olenka’s house had grown dingy, the roof had rusted, the outhouse had a slant to one side, and the whole yard was overgrown with docks and stinging nettles. Olenka herself had grown elderly and plain; in summer she sat in the porch, and her soul as before was empty, oppressed, and savoured of wormwood; in winter she sat at a window looking at the snow. When there was a scent of spring, or the wind brought the sound of the church bells, a flood of memories from the past would well up, her heart would contract with tender emotion and tears would flow freely from her eyes, but this was only for a moment, then again emptiness returned and she did not know why she lived. Brýska, her black cat, would rub against her softly and purr, but these feline caresses did not touch Olenka. Were they what she needed? She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason, would give her ideas and a purpose in life, and would warm her ageing blood. And she brushed away black Brýska, and told her crossly:

“Get away ... you’ve no business here!”

And so she went on day after day, year after year, without a single joy, and without any opinions. Whatever Martha the cook said, that was right.

Towards the evening of a very hot July day, just as the town herd of cows was being driven through the streets and the whole yard was filled with clouds of dust, someone suddenly knocked at the gate. Olenka went herself to open it and was dumbfounded by what she saw: at the gate stood the veterinary Smírnin, now grey-haired and in civilian dress. She suddenly remembered everything, could not restrain herself, began crying, and let her head fall on his breast without saying a word, and in her great excitement did not notice how they both entered the house and sat down to tea.

“My dearest!” she muttered, trembling with joy. “Vladímir Platónych! From where has heaven sent you?”

“I want to settle here for good,” he told her. “I have left the army, and want to try my luck as a free man, and to live a settled life. Besides it is time to send my son to the high school. He’s a big boy. Do you know, I have made it up with my wife.”

“And where is she?” asked Olenka.

“She is at the hotel with our son, and I am hunting round looking for a lodging.”

“Oh goodness, my dear soul, take my house! What’s wrong with it? Oh, Lord, why, I won’t charge you anything,” said Olenka, excitedly, and again began to cry. “You live here, and the lodge will do well for me. What joy, oh, my goodness!”

Next day the roof of the house was already being painted and the wall whitewashed, and Olenka, her arms akimbo, went about the yard giving directions. The old smile beamed on her face and she was fresh and full of life again, as though she had waked up from a long sleep. The veterinary’s wife arrived—a thin, plain lady with short hair and a peevish face, and with her came the boy, Sásha, small for his age (he was going on for ten), plump, with clear blue eyes and dimples in his cheeks. Scarcely had the boy entered the yard before he rushed after the cat, and his merry joyous laughter immediately filled the air.

“Auntie, is this your cat?” he asked Olenka. “When she pups let me have a kitten. Mama is awfully afraid of mice.”

Olenka talked to him, gave him tea, and her heart suddenly grew warm and contracted tenderly, just as if he were her own son. And in the evening, when he sat down in her dining-room and prepared his lessons, she looked at him with emotion and pity and whispered:

“My pretty one, my precious ..., my little child! Fancy your being born so clever and so fair!”

“An island is a portion of dry land surrounded on all sides by water,” he read.

“An island is a portion of dry land ...” she repeated, and that was the first opinion she expressed with conviction after so many years of silence and absence of thought.

And she already had opinions of her own, and at supper she spoke to Sásha’s parents of how difficult it was for children nowadays to learn in the high-schools, but that a classical high-school education was, all the same, better than a commercial one, as after finishing at the high-school all careers were open to you, whether you wished to be a doctor or an engineer.

Sásha began going to the high-school. His mother went to stay with her sister in Khárkov, and did not return; his father went away somewhere every day to inspect herds of cattle, and would sometimes be away from home for three days at a time; it seemed to Olenka that they had quite abandoned Sásha, that he was not wanted at home, that he was being starved, and she took him to her lodge and arranged a little room there for him.

Half-a-year has already passed now since Sásha came to live in her lodge. Every morning Olenka comes into his room; he is fast asleep with his hand under his cheek, scarcely breathing. She is sorry to wake him.

“Sáshenka,” she would say sadly, “get up, dear! Time to go to school.”

He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, and then sits down to breakfast. He drinks three tumblers of tea and eats two big plain cakes and half a French roll with butter. He is not quite awake yet, and therefore not in a good temper.

“But, Sáshenka, you did not quite learn your fable,” Olenka says, gazing at him as if she was seeing him off on a long journey. “I am troubled about you. You must take pains to learn, dearest ... and obey your masters.”

“Oh, do leave me alone!” says Sásha.

When he goes along the street to school, himself small but wearing a big cap and with a satchel on his back, Olenka follows him noiselessly.

“Sáshenka!” she calls.

He turns round and she slips a date or a caramel into his hand. When they turn into the side street where the school stands he feels ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman; he looks round and says:

“You go home, auntie; I can go on alone now.”

She stops, and follows him with her eyes fixedly until he disappears into the school doorway. Oh, how she loves him! Not one of her former attachments had been so deep, never before had her soul surrendered itself so freely, so disinterestedly, and so joyously, as it did now when the maternal feelings grew more and more ardent within her. For this boy, who was not hers, for the dimples in his cheeks, for his peaked cap, she would have laid down her life, given it gladly and with tears of emotion. Why? Who can tell why?

Having seen Sásha to school she returns home quietly, so content, serene, and full of love. Her face, which has grown younger-looking during the last half-year, is smiling and radiant, those she meets look at her with pleasure, and say:

“Good morning, Olga Semënovna, darling! How are you, darling?”

“The work at the high-school is very difficult nowadays,” she relates when she goes marketing. “It’s no joke,—in the first class yesterday they had a fable to learn by heart, a Latin translation, and a sum as well.... How is a little fellow to do it all?”

And she begins talking about teachers, lessons, and the lesson-books, saying just what Sásha says about them.

After two o’clock they dine together, and in the evening they do Sásha’s home work and cry together. When tucking him up in bed, she spends a long time making the sign of the cross over him and whispering a prayer; then, when she goes to bed, she dreams of the dim and distant future when Sásha, having finished the course and become a doctor or an engineer, will have a big house of his own with a carriage and horses, and will marry, and children will be borne to him.... She falls asleep still thinking of the same thing, and the tears roll down her cheeks from under her closed eye-lids. The black cat lies at her side and purrs. “Prr ... prr ... prr....”

Suddenly there is a loud knock at the gate. Olenka wakes up breathless with fear, and her heart beats violently. Half-a-minute passes and the knocking is repeated.

“It’s a telegram from Khárkov,” she thinks, beginning to tremble all over. “His mother demands that Sásha should be sent to her in Khárkov.... Oh, God!”

She is in despair. Her head, her feet and hands, grow cold; there is nobody in the world more unhappy than she. But another minute passes, voices are heard: it is the veterinary surgeon returning from the club.

“Well, thank God!” she thinks.

The weight is gradually lifted from her heart, and it feels light again. She lies down and thinks about Sásha, who is fast asleep in the next room and sometimes mutters in his dream:

“I’ll give it you! Be off! Don’t fight!”

THE END

FOOTNOTES: