Антон Чехов - The darling / Душечка. Сборник рассказов

Yulia Sergeyevna got up and held out her hand to Laptev.

“Excuse me,” she said, “it’s time for me to go. Please give my love to your sister.”

“Ru-ru-ru-ru,” hummed the doctor. “Ru-ru-ru-ru.”

Yulia Sergeyevna went out, and after staying a little longer Laptev said good-bye to the doctor and went home. When a man is dissatisfied and feels unhappy, how trivial seem to him the shapes of the lime-trees, the shadows, the clouds, all the beauties of nature, so complacent, so indifferent! By now the moon was high up in the sky, and the clouds were scudding quickly below. “But how naїve and provincial the moon is, how threadbare and paltry the clouds!” thought Laptev. He felt ashamed of the way he had talked just now about medicine and the night-refuge. He felt with horror that next day he would not have will enough to resist trying to see her and talk to her again, and would again be convinced that he was nothing to her. And the day after it would be the same. What was the aim of it? And how and when would it all end?

At home he went in to see his sister. Nina Fyodorovna still looked strong and gave the impression of being a well-built, vigorous woman, but her striking pallor made her look like a corpse, especially when, as now, she was lying on her back with her eyes closed; her eldest daughter Sasha, a girl of ten years old, was sitting beside her reading aloud from her reading-book.

“Alyosha has come,” the invalid said softly to herself.

There had long been established between Sasha and her uncle a tacit compact, to take turns in sitting with the patient. On this occasion Sasha closed her reading-book, and without uttering a word went softly out of the room. Laptev took an historical novel from the chest of drawers, and looking for the right page sat down and began reading it aloud.

Nina Fyodorovna was born in Moscow of a merchant family. She and her two brothers had spent their childhood and early youth living at home in Pyatnitsky Street. Their childhood was long and wearisome; her father treated her sternly, and had even on two or three occasions flogged her, and her mother had been ill for a long time and died. The servants were coarse, dirty, and hypocritical; the house was frequented by priests and monks, also hypocritical; they ate and drank and crudely flattered her father, whom they did not like. The boys were lucky to go to school, while Nina was left practically uneducated. All her life she wrote an illegible scrawl, and had read nothing but historical novels. Seventeen years ago, when she was twenty-two, on a summer holiday at Himki, she made acquaintance of her present husband, a landowner called Panaurov, had fallen in love with him, and married him secretly against her father’s will. Panaurov, a handsome, rather impudent fellow, who whistled and lighted his cigarette from the icon-lamp, struck the father as an absolutely worthless person. And when the son-in-law in his letters began demanding a dowry, the old man wrote to his daughter that he would send her furs, silver, and various articles that had been left after her mother’s death, as well as thirty thousand roubles, but without his paternal blessing. Later he sent another twenty thousand. This money, as well as the dowry, was spent; the estate had been sold and Panaurov moved with his family to the town and got a job at a provincial government office. In the town he formed another liaison , and had a second family, and this was the subject of much talk, as his illicit family was not a secret.

Nina Fyodorovna adored her husband. And now, listening to the historical novel, she was thinking how much she had gone through in her life, how much she had suffered, and that if any one were to describe her life it would make a very pathetic story. As the tumour was in her breast, she was persuaded that love and her domestic grief were the cause of her illness, and that jealousy and tears had brought her to her hopeless state.

At last Alexey Fyodorovitch closed the book and said:

“That’s the end, and thank God for it. To-morrow we’ll begin a new one.”

Nina Fyodorovna laughed. She had always been given to laughter, but of late Laptev had begun to notice that at moments her mind seemed weakened by illness, and she would laugh at the smallest trifle, and even without any cause at all.

“Yulia came before dinner while you were out,” she said. “So far as I can see, she hasn’t much faith in her papa. ‘Let papa go on treating you,’ she said, ‘but write in secret to the confessor to pray for you, too.’ There is a pilgrim somewhere here. Yulia forgot her parasol here; you must take it to her to-morrow,” she went on after a brief pause. “No, when the end comes, neither doctors nor pilgrims are any help.”

“Nina, why can’t you sleep at night?” Laptev asked, to change the subject.

“Oh, well, I don’t go to sleep – that’s all. I lie and think.”

“What do you think about, dear?”

“About the children, about you … about my life. I’ve gone through a great deal, Alyosha, you know. When one begins to remember and remember … My God!” She laughed. “It’s no joke to have borne five children as I have, to have buried three … Sometimes I was expecting to be confined while my Grigory Nikolaitch would be sitting at that very time with another woman. There would be no one to send for the doctor or the midwife. I would go into the passage or the kitchen for the servant, and there Jews, tradesmen, moneylenders, would be waiting for him to come home. My head used to go round … He did not love me, though he never said so openly. Now I’ve grown calmer – it doesn’t weigh on my heart; but in old days when I was younger it hurt me – ach! how it hurt me, darling! Once – while we were still in the country – I found him in the garden with a lady, and I walked away … I walked on aimlessly, and I don’t know how, but I found myself on the church porch. I fell on my knees: ‘Queen of Heaven!’ I said. And it was night, the moon was shining …”

She was exhausted, she began gasping for breath. Then, after resting a little, she took her brother’s hand and went on in a weak, toneless voice:

“How kind you are, Alyosha! … And how clever! … What a good man you’ve grown up into!”

At midnight Laptev said good night to her, and as he went away he took with him the parasol that Yulia Sergeyevna had forgotten. In spite of the late hour, the servants, male and female, were drinking tea in the dining-room. How disorderly! The children were not in bed, but were there in the dining-room, too. They were all talking softly in undertones, and had not noticed that the lamp was smoking and would soon go out. All these people, big and little, were disturbed by a whole succession of bad omens and were in an oppressed mood. The glass in the hall had been broken, the samovar had been buzzing every day, and as though on purpose was even buzzing now. They were describing how a mouse had jumped out of Nina Fyodorovna’s boot when she was dressing. And the children were quite aware of the terrible significance of these omens. The elder girl, Sasha, a thin little brunette, was sitting motionless at the table, and her face looked scared and woebegone, while the younger, Lida, a chubby fair child of seven, stood beside her sister looking from under her brows at the light.

Laptev went downstairs to his own rooms in the lower storey, where under the low ceilings it was always close and smelt of geraniums. In his sitting-room, Panaurov, Nina Fyodorovna’s husband, was sitting reading the newspaper. Laptev nodded to him and sat down opposite him. Both sat still and said nothing. They used to spend whole evenings like this without speaking, and neither of them was in the least put out by this silence.