Душечка: сборник рассказов

THE DARLING
sELEcTED sHoRT sToRIEs

Translated by C. Garnett

Anton CHEKHOV

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
Ч56

ISBN 978-5-9925-1149-9

 
Чехов, Антон Павлович.
Ч56 
Душечка : Сборник рассказов / А. П. Чехов; 
[пер. с рус. К. Гарнетт]. — Санкт-Петербург : 
КАРО, 2016. — 288 с. — (Русская классическая 
литература на иностранных языках).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1149-9.

Предлагаем вниманию читателей сборник рассказов 
великого русского писателя А. П. Чехова (1860–1904). Перевод Констанс Гарнетт дополнен комментарием.

УДК 372.8 
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© КАРО, 2016

The DarlINg

Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate 
assessor1, 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! It is raining 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 

1 assessor — a person which advises a judge or official 
com mittee on matters that demand special knowledge

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 round rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little 
dark mole on it, and the kind, naїve 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 head 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 day-break, 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, naїve, 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. Tomorrow 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 limeflower water, to rub him with eau-de-Cologne1 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 henhouse. 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.”

1 eau-de-Cologne — (French) light perfume

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. “Vanka, my precious, 
my darling! Why did I ever meet you! Why did I know 
you and love you! Your poor heart-broken Olenka is 
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 neighbours, Vassily Andreitch 
Pustovalov, returning home from church, walked 
back beside her. He was the manager at Babakayev’s, 
the timber merchant’s. He wore a straw hat, a white 

waistcoat, and a gold watch-chain, and looked more a 
country gentleman than a man in trade.
“Everything happens as it is ordained, Olga Semyonovna,” he said gravely, with a sympathetic note in 
his voice; “and if any of our dear ones die, it must be 
because it is the will of God, so we ought have fortitude 
and resign to our fate.”
After seeing Olenka to her gate, he said good-bye 
and went on. All day afterwards she heard his sedately 
dignified voice, and whenever she shut her eyes she 
saw his dark beard. She liked him very much. And 
apparently she had made an impression on him too, 
for not long afterwards an elderly lady, with whom she 
was only slightly acquainted, came to drink coffee with 
her, and as soon as she was seated at table began to talk 
about Pustovalov, saying that he was an excellent man 
whom one could thoroughly depend upon, and that 
any girl would be glad to marry him. Three days later 
Pustovalov came himself. He did not stay long, only 
about ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when 
he left, Olenka loved him — loved him so much that 
she lay awake all night in a perfect fever, and in the 
morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was 
quickly arranged, and then came the wedding.
Pustovalov and Olenka got on very well together 
when they were married.
Usually he sat in the office till dinner-time, then 
he went out on business, while Olenka took his place, 
and sat in the office till evening, making up accounts 
and booking orders.

“Timber gets more expensive every year; the price 
rises twenty per cent,” she would say to her customers 
and friends. “Only fancy we used to sell local timber, 
and now Vassitchka always has to go for wood to the 
Mogilev district. And the freight!” she would add, 
covering her cheeks with her hands in horror. “The 
freight!”
It seemed to her that she had been in the timber 
trade for ages and ages, and that the most important 
and necessary thing in life was timber; and there was 
something intimate and touching to her in the very 
sound of words such as “baulk,” “post,” “beam,” “pole,” 
“scantling,” “batten,” “lath,” “plank,” etc.
At night when she was asleep she dreamed of 
perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long 
strings of wagons, carting timber somewhere far 
away. She dreamed that a whole regiment of sixinch beams forty feet high, standing on end, was 
marching upon the timber-yard; that logs, beams, 
and boards knocked together with the resounding 
crash of dry wood, kept falling and getting up again, 
piling themselves on each other. Olenka cried out 
in her sleep, and Pustovalov said to her tenderly: 
“Olenka, what’s the matter, darling? Cross yourself!”
Her husband’s ideas became hers. If he thought 
the room was too hot, or that business was slack, 
she thought the same. Her husband did not care for 
entertainments, and on holidays he stayed at home. 
She did likewise.