Anton Chekhov
The Darling
Translated by Constance Garnett
Print Version:
Chekhov, Anton
"The Darling"
The Darling and Other Stories
Trans. Constance Garnett
New York: Macmillan, 1916. 3-22
THE DARLING
OLENKA, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor, Plemyanniakov, was
sitting in her back porch, lost in thought. It was hot, the flies were
persistent and teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it would soon be
evening. Dark rainclouds were gathering from the east, and bringing from time to
time a breath of moisture in the air.
Kukin, who was the manager of an open-air theatre called the Tivoli, and who
lived in the lodge, was standing in the middle of the garden looking at the sky.
"Again!" he observed despairingly. "It's going to rain again! Rain every day, as
though to spite me. I might as well hang myself! It's ruin! Fearful losses every
day."
He flung up his hands, and went on, addressing Olenka:
"There! that's the life we lead, Olga Semyonovna. It's enough to make one cry.
One works and does one's utmost; one wears oneself out, getting no sleep at
night, and racks one's brain what to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one's public is
ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first
rate music-hall artists. But do you suppose that's what they want! They don't
understand anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is
vulgarity. And then look at the weather! Almost every evening it rains. It
started on the tenth of May, and it's kept it up all May and June. It's simply
awful! The public doesn't come, but I've to pay the rent just the same, and pay
the artists."
The next evening the clouds would gather again, and Kukin would say with an
hysterical laugh:
"Well, rain away, then! Flood the garden, drown me! Damn my luck in this world
and the next! Let the artists have me up! Send me to prison! -- to Siberia! --
the scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!"
And next day the same thing.
Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came into her
eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him. He was a
small thin man, with a yellow face, and curls combed forward on his forehead. He
spoke in a thin tenor; as he talked his mouth worked on one side, and there was
always an expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine
affection in her. She was always fond of some one, and could not exist without
loving. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who now sat in a darkened room, breathing with
difficulty; she had loved her aunt who used to come every other year from
Bryansk; and before that, when she was at school, she had loved her French
master. She was a gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender
eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks, her soft white
neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind, naïve smile, which came into
her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, "Yes, not half
bad," and smiled too, while lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her
hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, "You
darling!"
The house in which she had lived from her birth upwards, and which was left her
in her father's will, was at the extreme end of the town, not far from the
Tivoli. In the evenings and at night she could hear the band playing, and the
crackling and banging of fireworks, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin
struggling with his destiny, storming the entrenchments of his chief foe, the
indifferent public; there was a sweet thrill at her heart, she had no desire to
sleep, and when he returned home at daybreak, she tapped softly at her bedroom
window, and showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, she
gave him a friendly smile. . . .
He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a closer view of her
neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hands, and said:
"You darling!"
He was happy, but as it rained on the day and night of his wedding, his face
still retained an expression of despair.
They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office, to look after
things in the Tivoli, to put down the accounts and pay the wages. And her rosy
cheeks, her sweet, naïve, radiant smile, were to be seen now at the office
window, now in the refreshment bar or behind the scenes of the theatre. And
already she used to say to her acquaintances that the theatre was the chief and
most important thing in life, and that it was only through the drama that one
could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane.
"But do you suppose the public understands that?" she used to say. "What they
want is a clown. Yesterday we gave 'Faust Inside Out,' and almost all the boxes
were empty; but if Vanitchka and I had been producing some vulgar thing, I
assure you the theatre would have been packed. To-morrow Vanitchka and I are
doing 'Orpheus in Hell.' Do come."
And what Kukin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like him she
despised the public for their ignorance and their indifference to art; she took
part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the
behaviour of the musicians, and when there was an unfavourable notice in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to the editor's office to
set things right.
The actors were fond of her and used to call her "Vanitchka 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 used to shed a few tears in private, but did not
complain to her husband.
They got on well in the winter too. They took the theatre in the town for the
whole winter, and let it for short terms to a Little Russian company, or to a
conjurer, or to a local dramatic society. Olenka grew stouter, and was always
beaming with satisfaction, while Kukin grew thinner and yellower, and
continually complained of their terrible losses, although he had not done badly
all the winter. He used to cough at night, and she used to give him hot
raspberry tea or lime-flower water, to rub him with eau-de-Cologne and to wrap
him in her warm shawls.
"You're such a sweet pet!" she used to say with perfect sincerity, stroking his
hair. "You're such a pretty dear!"
Towards Lent he went to Moscow to collect a new troupe, and without him she
could not sleep, but sat all night at her window, looking at the stars, and she
compared herself with the hens, who are awake all night and uneasy when the cock
is not in the hen-house. Kukin was detained in Moscow, and wrote that he would
be back at Easter, adding some instructions about the Tivoli. But on the Sunday before Easter, late in the
evening, came a sudden ominous knock at the gate; some one was hammering on the
gate as though on a barrel -- boom, boom, boom! The drowsy cook went flopping
with her bare feet through the puddles, as she ran to open the gate.
"Please open," said some one outside in a thick bass. "There is a telegram for
you."
Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time for some
reason she felt numb with terror. With shaking hands she opened the telegram and
read as follows:
"Ivan Petrovitch died suddenly to-day. Awaiting immate instructions fufuneral
Tuesday."
That was how it was written in the telegram -- "fufuneral," and the utterly
incomprehensible word "immate." It was signed by the stage manager of the
operatic company.
"My darling!" sobbed Olenka. "Vanitchka, my precious, my darling! Why did I ever
meet you! Why did I know you and love you! Your poor heart-broken Olenka is all
alone without you!"
Kukin's funeral took place on Tuesday in Moscow, Olenka returned home on
Wednesday, and as soon as she got indoors she threw herself on her bed and
sobbed so loudly that it could be heard next door, and in the street.
"Poor darling!" the neighbours said, as they crossed themselves. "Olga Semyonovna, poor darling! How she does take on!"
Three months later Olenka was coming home from mass, melancholy and in deep
mourning. It happened that one of her ...
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