Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,170

to have a look.”

“And what will the children and grandchildren do?” asked Liza.

“I don’t know … They’ll probably drop it all and leave.”

“For where?”

“Where? … Why, wherever they like,” said Korolev, and he laughed. “As if there weren’t lots of places a good, intelligent person can go.”

He glanced at his watch.

“The sun is up, however,” he said. “It’s time you slept. Get undressed and have a good sleep. I’m very glad to have met you,” he went on, pressing her hand. “You are a nice, interesting person. Good night!”

He went to his room and slept.

Next morning, when the carriage drove up, everybody came out on the porch to see him off. Liza was festive in a white dress, with a flower in her hair, pale, languid; she looked at him, as yesterday, sadly and intelligently, smiled, talked, and all with an expression as if she would have liked to say something special, important—to him alone. One could hear the larks singing, the church bells ringing. The windows of the factory shone merrily, and, driving through the yard and then on the way to the station, Korolev no longer remembered the workers, or the pile-dwellings, or the devil, but thought about the time, perhaps close at hand, when life would be as bright and joyful as this quiet Sunday morning; and he thought about how nice it was, on such a morning, in springtime, to ride in a good carriage with a troika and feel the warmth of the sun.

DECEMBER 1898

THE DARLING

Olenka, daughter of the retired collegiate assessor Plemyannikov, was sitting on the back porch in her courtyard, deep in thought. It was hot, the flies were naggingly persistent, and it was so pleasant to think that it would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were gathering from the east, and an occasional breath of moisture came from there.

Kukin, an entrepreneur and owner of the Tivoli amusement garden, who lodged there in the yard, in the wing, was standing in the middle of the yard and looking at the sky.

“Again!” he said in despair. “Again it’s going to rain! Every day it rains, every day—as if on purpose! It’s a noose! It’s bankruptcy! Every day terrible losses!”

He clasped his hands and went on, addressing Olenka:

“There’s our life for you, Olga Semyonovna. It could make you weep! You work, you do your utmost, you suffer, you don’t sleep, thinking how to do your best—and what then? On the one hand, the public is ignorant, savage. I give them the very best in operetta, fairy pageants, excellent music-hall singers, but is that what they want? Do they understand anything about it? They want buffoonery! Give them banality! On the other hand, look at the weather. It rains almost every evening. It started on the tenth of May, and it’s gone on nonstop all of May and June—simply awful! The public doesn’t come, but don’t I pay the rent? Don’t I pay the artists?”

The next day towards evening the clouds gathered again, and Kukin said, laughing hysterically:

“Well, so? Let it rain! Let the whole garden be flooded out, and me along with it! Let me not have any happiness either in this world or in the next! Let the artists sue me! What, sue? Hard labor in Siberia! The scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!”

And the third day it was the same …

Olenka listened to Kukin silently, seriously, and tears occasionally came to her eyes. In the end, Kukin’s misfortunes touched her, and she fell in love with him. He was small, skinny, with a yellow face and brushed-up temples; he spoke in a thin little tenor and when he spoke, his mouth went askew; and despair was always written on his face, but even so he aroused deep, true feeling in her. She forever loved someone, and could not live without it. Earlier she had loved her father, who now sat ill, in a dark room, in an armchair, and breathed heavily; she had loved her aunt, who occasionally, once or twice a year, had come from Briansk; and earlier still, while in high school, she had loved her French teacher. She was a quiet, good-natured, pitiful young lady, with meek, soft eyes, and very healthy. Looking at her plump pink cheeks, at her soft white neck with its dark birthmark, at the kind, naïve smile her face bore when she listened to something pleasant, men thought: “Yes, not bad at all …” and also smiled, and lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her