"I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and we parted forever. The train was already moving. I walked into the next compartment—it was empty—and until I reached the next station I sat there crying. Then I walked home to Sofyino. . . ."
While Alyohin was telling his story, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Burkin and Ivan Ivanych went out on the balcony, from which there was a fine view of the garden and the river, which was shining now in the sunshine like a mirror. They admired it, and at the same time they were sorry that this man with the kind, intelligent eyes who had told them his story with such candor should be rushing round and round on this huge estate like a squirrel in a cage instead of devoting him- self to some scholarly pursuit or something else which would have made his life pleasanter; and they thought what a sorrowful face Anna Alexeyevna must have had when he said good-by to her in the compartment and kissed her face and shoulders. Both of them had come across her in the town, and Burkin was acquainted with her and thought she was beautiful.
The Darling
O
LENKA PLEMYANNIKOVA, the daughter of a retired collegiate assessor, was sitting on her porch, which gave on the courtyard; deep in thought. It was hot, the flies were persistent and annoying, and it was pleasant to think that it would soon be evening. Dark rainclouds were gathering in the east and there was a breath of moisture in the wind that occasionally blew from that direction.
Kukin, a theater manager who ran a summer garden kno^ as The Tivoli and lodged in the wing of the house, was standing in the middle of the courtyard, star- ing at the sky.
"Again!" he was saying in despair. "It's going to rain again! Rain every day, every day, as if to spite mel It will be the death of me! It's ruin! Such a frightful loss every dayl"
He struck his hands together and continued, turning to Olenka:
"There, Olga Semyonovna, that's our life. It's enough to make you weep! You work, you try your utmost, you wear yourself out, you lie awake nights, you rack your brains trying to make a better thing of it, and what's the upshot? In the first place, the public is ignorant, bar- barous. I give them the very best operetta, an elaborate spectacle, first-rate vaudeville artists. But do you think they want that? It's all above their heads. All they want is slapstick! Give them trash! And then look at the weather! Rain almost every evening. It started raining on the tenth of May, and it has kept it up all May and June. It's simply terrible! The public doesn't come, but don't I have to pay the rent? Don't I have to pay the artists?"
The next day toward evening the sky would again be overcast and Kukin would say, laughing hysterically:
"Well, go on, rain! Flood the garden, 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!"
The next day it was the same thing all over again.
Olenka listened to Kukin silently, gravely, and some- times tears would come to her eyes. In the end his mis- fortunes moved her and she fell in love with him. He was a short, thin man with a sallow face, and wore his hair combed down over his temples. He had a thin tenor voice and when he spoke, his mouth twisted, and his face perpetually wore an expression of despair. Never- theless he aroused a genuine, deep feeling in her. She was always enamored of someone and could not live otherwise. At first it had been her papa, who was now ill and sat in an armchair in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty. Then she had devoted her affections to her aunt, who used to come from Bryansk every other year. Still earlier, when she went to school, she had been in love with her French teacher. She was a quiet, kind, soft-hearted girl, with meek, gentle eyes, and she en- joyed very good health. At the sight of her full pink cheeks, her soft white neck with a dark birthmark on it, and the kind artless smile that came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men said to themselves, "Yes, not half bad," and smiled too, while the ladies present could not refrain from suddenly seiz- ing her hand in the middle of the conversation and ex- claiming delightedly, "You darling!"
The house in which she lived all her life and which was to be hers by her father's will, was situated on the outskirts of the city on what was known as Gypsy Road, not far from The Tivoli. In the evening and at night she could hear the band play and the skyrockets go off, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin fighting his fate and assaulting his chief enemy, the apathetic public. Her heart contracted sweetly, she had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at dawn, she would tap softly at her bedroom window and, showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, give him a friendly smile.
He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a good look at her neck and her plump firm shoulders, he struck his hands together, and ex- claimed, "Darling!"
He was happy, but as it rained on their wedding day and the night that followed, the expression of despair did not leave his face.
As a married couple, they got on well together. She presided over the box office, looked after things in the summer garden, kept accounts and paid salaries; and her rosy cheeks, the radiance of her sweet artless smile showed now in the box office window, now in the wings of the theater, now at the buffet. And she was already telling her friends that the theater was the most remark- able, the most important, and the most essential thing in the world, and that it was only the theater that could give true pleasure and make you a cultivated and hu- mane 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 all the boxes were empty, and if Vanichka and I had put on some- thing vulgar, I assure you the theater would have been packed. Tomorrow Vanichka and I are giving 'Orpheus in Hell.' Do come."
And what Kukin said about artists and the theater she would repeat. 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 musicians, and when there was an unfavorable notice in the local paper, she wept and went to see the editor about it.
The actors were fond of her and called her "the dar- ling," and "Vanichka-and-1." She was sorry for them and would lend them small sums, and if they cheated her, she cried in private but did not complain to her husband.
The pair got on just as well together when winter came. 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 was gaining weight and beamed with happiness, but Kukin was getting thinner and more sallow and complained of ter- rible losses, although business was fairly good during the winter. He coughed at night, and she would make him drink an infusion of raspberries and linden blos- soms, rub him with eau de Cologne and wrap him in her soft shawls.
'What a sweet thing you are!" she would say quite sincerely, smoothing his hair. "My handsome sweet!"
At Lent he left for Moscow to engage a company of actors for the summer season, and she could not sleep with him away. She sat at the window and watched the stars. It occurred to her that she had something in com- mon with the hens: they too stayed awake all night and were disturbed when the cock was absent from the hen- house. Kukin was detained in Moscow, and wrote that he would return by Easter, and in his letters he sent in- structions about The Tivoli. But on the Monday of Pas- sion Week, late in the evening, there was a sudden ominous knock at the gate; someone was banging at the wicket as though it were a barrel—boom, boom, boom! The sleepy cook, her bare feet splashing through the puddles, ran to open the gate.