Stories (42 page)

Strange sounds suddenly rang out, the same that Korolev had heard before supper. Near one of the buildings someone banged on a metal bar, banged and stopped the sound at once, so that what came out were short, sharp, impure sounds, like “derr … derr … derr …” Then a half minute of silence, and then sounds rang out by another building, as sharp and unpleasant, but lower now, more bass—“drinn … drinn … drinn …” Eleven times. Evidently this was the watchman banging out eleven o’clock.

From near another building came a “zhak… zhak… zhak …” And so on near all the buildings and then beyond the barracks and the gates. And in the silence of the night it seemed as if these sounds were being produced by the crimson-eyed monster, the devil himself, who ruled here over both owners and workers and deceived the ones like the others.

Korolev went out of the yard to the fields.

“Who goes there?” a coarse voice called to him by the gates.

“Just like a prison …” he thought and did not answer.

Here the nightingales and frogs could be heard better, you could feel the May night. The noise of a train came from the station; sleepy cocks crowed somewhere, but even so the night was still, the world slept peacefully. In the field, not far from the factory, a house-frame stood, with building materials piled by it. Korolev sat on some planks and went on thinking:

“Nobody feels good here except the governess, and the factory works for her satisfaction. But it just seems so, she’s only a straw man here. The main one that everything here is done for is—the devil.”

And he thought about the devil, in whom he did not believe, and kept glancing back at the two windows gleaming with fire. It seemed to him that the devil himself was gazing at him through those crimson eyes, the unknown power that created the relations between strong and weak, the grave mistake that now could in no way be set right. It had to be that the strong hinder the life of the weak, such was the law of nature, but this thought could be clearly and easily formulated only in a newspaper article or a textbook, while in the mishmash that is everyday life, in the tangle of all th
e trifles of which
human relations are woven, it was not a law but a logical incongruity, when strong and weak alike fell victim to their mutual relations, inadvertently obeying some controlling power, unknown, extraneous to life, alien to man. So thought Korolev as he sat on the planks, and the feeling gradually came over him that this unknown, mysterious power was in fact close by and watching. Meanwhile the east grew paler, the time passed quickly. Against the gray background of the dawn, with not a soul around, as if everything had died out, the five buildings and smokestacks had a peculiar look,
different from in the daytime; the steam engines, electricity, telephones inside them left one’s m
ind, and one somehow kept thinking of pile-dwellings, of the Stone Age, one sensed the presence of crude, unconscious power …

And again came the banging:

“Derr … derr … derr … derr …”

Twelve times. Then stillness, half a minute of stillness, and from the other end of the yard came:

“Drinn … drinn … drinn …”

“Terribly unpleasant!” thought Korolev.

“Zhak … zhak …” came from a third place, abruptly, sharply, as if in vexation, “zhak … zhak …”

And it took them about four minutes to strike twelve. Then it was still; and again the impression was as if everything around had died out.

Korolev sat a while longer and then went back to the house, but he did not go to bed for a long time. There was whispering in the neighboring rooms, a shuffling of slippers and bare feet.

“Is she having another fit?” thought Korolev.

He went to have a look at the patient. It was already quite light in the rooms, and on the walls and floor of the reception room sunlight trembled faintly, having broken through the morning mist. The door to Liza’s room was open, and she was sitting in an armchair by the bed, in a robe, a shawl around her shoulders, her hair undone. The window blinds were drawn.

“How are you feeling?” asked Korolev.

“Well, thank you.”

He took her pulse, then straightened the hair that had fallen across her forehead.

“You’re not asleep,” he said. “The weather is wonderful outside, it’s spring, the nightingales are singing, and you sit in the dark and brood on something.”

She listened and looked into his face; her eyes were sad, intelligent, and it was clear that she wanted to say something to him.

“Does this happen to you often?” he asked.

She moved her lips and answered:

“Often. I feel oppressed almost every night.”

Just then the watchmen in the yard began striking two: “Derr … derr …” and she gave a start.

“Does this rapping upset you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Everything here upsets me,” she said, and thought a little. “Everything. I hear sympathy in your voice, at the first sight of you I thought for some reason that I could talk with you about everything.”

“Please do talk.”

“I want to tell you my opinion. It seems to me that I’m not ill, but I’m upset and afraid because that’s how it should be and it can’t be otherwise. Even the healthiest person can’t help being upset if, for instance, a robber is prowling under his windows. I’ve been treated often,” she went on, looking into her lap and smiling bashfully. “I’m very grateful, of course, and I don’t deny the benefits of the treatment, but I’d like to talk, not to a doctor, but to someone close to me, a friend who would understand me, who could convince me that I’m either right or wrong.”

“You don’t have any friends?” asked Korolev.

“I’m lonely. I have my mother, I love her, but still I’m lonely. Life has worked out this way … Lonely people read a lot, but talk little and hear little, life is mysterious for them; they’re mystics and often see the devil where he’s not. Lermontov’s Tamara was lonely and saw the devil.”
²

“And you read a lot?”

“Yes. My time is all free, from morning till evening. During the day I read, but in the night my head is empty, there are some sort of shadows instead of thoughts.”

“Do you see things at night?” asked Korolev.

“No, but I feel …”

Again she smiled and raised her eyes to the doctor, and looked at him so sadly, so intelligently; and it seemed to him that she trusted him, wanted to talk openly with him, and that she thought as he did. But she was silent, perhaps waiting for him to speak.

And he knew what to tell her. It was clear to him that she ought quickly to leave those five buildings and the million, if she had it,
to leave that devil who watched at night; it was also clear to him that she herself thought so, too, and was only waiting for someone she trusted to confirm it.

But he did not know how to say it. How? It was mortifying to ask condemned people what they were condemned for; just as it was awkward to ask very rich people what they needed so much money for, why they disposed of their wealth so badly, why they would not abandon it, even when they could see it was to their own misfortune; and if such a conversation began, it usually turned out to be embarrassing, awkward, long.

“How to say it?” pondered Korolev. “And need I say it?”

And he said what he wanted to say, not directly, but in a roundabout way:

“You’re not content in your position as a factory owner and a rich heiress, you don’t believe in your right to it, and now you can’t sleep, which, of course, is certainly better than if you were content, slept soundly, and thought everything was fine. Your insomnia is respectable; in any event, it’s a good sign. In fact, for our parents such a conversation as we’re having now would have been unthinkable; they didn’t talk at night, they slept soundly, but we, our generation, sleep badly, are anguished, talk a lot, and keep trying to decide if we’re right or not. But for our chil
dren or grandchildren this question—whether they’re right or not—will be decided. They’ll see better than we do. Life will be good in fifty years or so, it’s only a pity we won’t make it that far. It would be interesting 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 h
ow 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.

D
ECEMBER
1898

O
lenka, 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 oc
casionally, 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 hand in the middle of the conversation and saying, in a burst of pleasure:

“You darling!”

The house, which she had lived in since the day she was born, and which had been put in her name in the will, stood at the edge of town, in the Gypsy quarter, not far from the Tivoli garden; in the evening and at night she could hear music playing in the garden; rockets burst and crackled, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin wrestling with his fate and taking by storm his chief enemy—the indifferent public; her heart sank with sweetness, she did not feel sleepy at all, and when he came home towards morning, she
tapped softly on her bedroom window and, showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtains, smiled tenderly …

He proposed, and they were married. And when he had a proper look at her neck and her plump, healthy shoulders, he clasped his hands and said:

“You darling!”

He was happy, but since it rained on the day of the wedding and later that night, the look of despair never left his face.

After the wedding they had a good life. She sat in his box office, looked after things in the garden, recorded the expenses, handed out the pay, and her pink cheeks and sweet, naïve, radiant-looking smile flashed now in the box-office window, now backstage, now in the buffet. And she told her acquaintances that the most remarkable, the most important and necessary thing in the world was the theater, and that only in the theater could one find true pleasure and become educated and humane.

“But does the public understand that?” she said. “They want buffoonery! Yesterday we showed
Faust Inside Out,
and nearly all the boxes were empty, but if Vanechka and I produced some sort of banality, believe me, the theater would be packed. Tomorrow Vanechka and I are showing
Orpheus in the Underworld.
¹
Do come.”

And whatever Kukin said about the theater and actors, she repeated. She despised the public just as he did, for its ignorance and indifference to art; she interfered at rehearsals, corrected the actors, looked after the conduct of the musicians, and when the local newspaper spoke disapprovingly of the theater, she wept, and then went to the editorial offices for an explanation.

The actors loved her and called her “Vanechka and I” and “the darling.” She felt sorry for them and would lend them small su
ms of money, and if they happened to cheat her, she merely wept quietly, but did not complain to her husband.

In the winter they also had a good life. They rented the town theater for the whole winter and leased it for short terms, now to a Ukrainian troupe, now to a conjuror, now to local amateurs. Olenka gained weight and was all radiant with contentment, while Kukin grew skinnier and yellower and complained about terrible losses, though business was not bad all winter. He coughed at night, and she gave him raspberry and linden-blossom infusions, rubbed him with eau de cologne, and wrapped him in her soft shawls.

“Aren’t you my sweetie!” she said with complete sincerity, smoothing his hair. “Aren’t you my pretty one!”

During Lent he went to Moscow to recruit a company, and without him she could not sleep, but sat all night at the window and looked at the stars. And during that time she compared herself
to the hens, who also do not sleep all night and feel anxious when the cock is not in the chicken coop. Kukin was detained in Moscow and wrote that he would come for Easter, and in his letters gave orders concerning the Tivoli. But on the eve of Holy Monday, late at night, there suddenly came a sinister knocking at the gate; someone banged on the wicket as on a barrel: boom! boom! boom! The sleep
y cook, splashing barefoot through the puddles, ran to open.

“Open up, please!” someone outside the gates said in a muted bass. “There’s a telegram for you!”

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but now for some reason she went numb. With trembling hands she opened the telegram and read:

“Ivan Petrovich died unexpectedly today mirst awaiting orders huneral Tuesday.”

That was how it was written in the telegram—“huneral” and also the incomprehensible word “mirst.” It was signed by the director of the operetta troupe.

“My little dove!” wept Olenka. “My sweet Vanechka, my little dove! Why did I meet you? Why did I know and love you? How could you go and leave your poor Olenka, poor, wretched me? …”

Kukin was buried on Tuesday, in Moscow, at the Vagankovo cemetery; Olenka came back on Wednesday, and as soon as she entered her room, she collapsed on the bed and wept so loudly that it could be heard in the street and the neighboring courtyards.

“The darling!” said the neighbor women, crossing themselves. “Darling Olga Semyonovna, the dear heart, how she grieves!”

Three months later Olenka was returning from church one day, sad, in deep mourning. One of her neighbors, Vassily Andreich Pustovalov, manager of the merchant Babakaev’s lumberyard, happened to be walking beside her, also returning from church. He was wearing a straw hat and a white waistcoat with a gold chain, and looked more like a landowner than a dealer.

“There is order in all things, Olga Semyonovna,” he said gravely, with sympathy in his voice, “and if one of our relations dies, it means that it’s God’s will, and in that case we must recollect ourselves and bear it with submission.”

Having accompanied Olenka to the gate, he said good-bye and went on. After that she heard his grave voice all day, and the moment she closed her eyes, she pictured his dark beard. She liked him
very much. And apparently she had also made an impression on him, because shortly afterwards an elderly lady with whom she was barely acquainted came to have coffee with her, and had only just sat down at the table when she immediately began talking about Pustovalov, what a good, solid man he was, and how any bride would be pleased to marry him. Three days later Pustovalov hi
mself came for a visit; he did not stay long, about ten minutes, and spoke little, but Olenka fell in love with him, so much so that she did not sleep all night and burned as in a fever, and in the morning sent for the elderly lady. The match was soon made, after which came the wedding.

Pustovalov and Olenka, once they were married, had a good life. He usually sat in the lumberyard till dinnertime, then left on business and was replaced by Olenka, who sat in the office till evening and there kept the accounts and filled orders.

“Nowadays the price of lumber goes up twenty percent a year,” she would say to customers and acquaintances. “Gracious, before we dealt in local lumber, and now every year Vasechka has to go for lumber to Mogilev province. And the taxes!” she said, covering both cheeks with her hands in horror. “The taxes!”

It seemed to her that she had been dealing in lumber for a very, very long time, that lumber was the most important and necessary thing in life, and for her there was something dear and touching in the sound of the words beam, post, board, plank, batten, slat, lath, slab … At night, when she slept, she dreamed of whole mountains of boards and planks, of long, endless lines of carts carrying lumber somewhere far out of town; she dreamed of a whole regiment of ten-yard-long, ten-inch-thick logs marching upended against the lumberyard, of beams, posts, and slabs striking together, mak
ing the ringing sound of dry wood, all falling and rising up again, piling upon each other. Olenka cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said tenderly to her:

“Olenka, dear, what’s the matter? Cross yourself!”

Whatever her husband thought, she thought, too. If he thought the room was hot or business was slow, she thought the same. Her husband did not like entertainment of any sort and stayed at home on Sundays, and so did she.

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

“Vasechka and I have no time for going to theaters,” she replied gravely. “We’re working people, we can’t be bothered with trifles. What’s the good of these theaters?”

On Saturdays she and Pustovalov went to the evening vigil, on Sundays to the early liturgy, and returning from church, they walked side by side, looking moved, a nice smell came from both of them, and her silk dress rustled pleasantly; and at home they had tea with fancy bread and various preserves, and then ate pastry. Each day at noon, in the yard and in the street outside the gates, there was a savory smell of borscht and roast lamb or duck, or, on fast days, of fish, and one could not pass the gate without feeling hungry. The samovar was always boiling in the office, and custom
ers were treated to tea and bagels. Once a week the spouses went to the baths and came back side by side, both bright red.

“Still, we have a good life,” Olenka said to her acquaintances, “thank God. God grant everyone a life like Vasechka’s and mine.”

When Pustovalov left for Mogilev province to buy lumber, she missed him very much and at night did not sleep but wept. Sometimes in the evening the regimental veterinarian Smirnin, a young man who was renting her wing, came to visit her. He told her some story or played cards with her, and that diverted her. Especially interesting were his stories about his own family life; he was married and had a son, but he was separated from his wife, because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her and sent her forty roubles every month for his son’s keep. And, listening to that, Olenka sighed an
d shook her head, and felt sorry for him.

“Well, God save you,” she said, seeing him to the stairs with a candle as he took his leave. “Thank you for sharing my boredom, God grant you good health, and may the Queen of Heaven …”

And she always spoke so gravely, so sensibly, imitating her husband; the veterinarian was already disappearing through the door below when she called out to him and said:

“You know, Vladimir Platonych, you ought to make peace with your wife. Forgive her, if only for your son’s sake! … The boy must understand everything.”

And when Pustovalov came back, she told him in a low voice about the veterinarian and his unhappy family life, and they both sighed and shook their heads, and talked about the boy, who probably missed his father, and then, by some strange train of thought,
they both stood before the icons, bowed to the ground, and prayed to God to send them children.

And so the Pustovalovs lived quietly and placidly, in love and perfect harmony, for six years. Then one winter day Vassily Andreich, after drinking hot tea in the lumberyard, went out to deliver some lumber, caught cold, and fell ill. He was treated by the best doctors, but the disease took its toll, and after four months of illness, he died. And Olenka was widowed again.