Best Russian Short Stories written by Various

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"Where are you off to?" cried Semyon.

Vasily came quite close. He was very pale, white as chalk, and his
eyes had a wild look. Almost choking, he muttered: "To town--to
Moscow--to the head office."

"Head office? Ah, you are going to complain, I suppose. Give it up!
Vasily Stepanych, forget it."

"No, mate, I will not forget. It is too late. See! He struck me in the
face, drew blood. So long as I live I will not forget. I will not
leave it like this!"

Semyon took his hand. "Give it up, Stepanych. I am giving you good
advice. You will not better things..."

"Better things! I know myself I shan't better things. You were right
about Fate. It would be better for me not to do it, but one must stand
up for the right." "But tell me, how did it happen?"

"How? He examined everything, got down from the trolley, looked into
the hut. I knew beforehand that he would be strict, and so I had put
everything into proper order. He was just going when I made my
complaint. He immediately cried out: 'Here is a Government inquiry
coming, and you make a complaint about a vegetable garden. Here are
privy councillors coming, and you annoy me with cabbages!' I lost
patience and said something--not very much, but it offended him, and
he struck me in the face. I stood still; I did nothing, just as if
what he did was perfectly all right. They went off; I came to myself,
washed my face, and left."

"And what about the hut?"

"My wife is staying there. She will look after things. Never mind
about their roads."

Vasily got up and collected himself. "Good-bye, Ivanov. I do not know
whether I shall get any one at the office to listen to me."

"Surely you are not going to walk?"

"At the station I will try to get on a freight train, and to-morrow I
shall be in Moscow."

The neighbours bade each other farewell. Vasily was absent for some
time. His wife worked for him night and day. She never slept, and wore
herself out waiting for her husband. On the third day the commission
arrived. An engine, luggage-van, and two first-class saloons; but
Vasily was still away. Semyon saw his wife on the fourth day. Her face
was swollen from crying and her eyes were red.

"Has your husband returned?" he asked. But the woman only made a
gesture with her hands, and without saying a word went her way.

Semyon had learnt when still a lad to make flutes out of a kind of
reed. He used to burn out the heart of the stalk, make holes where
necessary, drill them, fix a mouthpiece at one end, and tune them so
well that it was possible to play almost any air on them. He made a
number of them in his spare time, and sent them by his friends amongst
the freight brakemen to the bazaar in the town. He got two kopeks
apiece for them. On the day following the visit of the commission he
left his wife at home to meet the six o'clock train, and started off
to the forest to cut some sticks. He went to the end of his
section--at this point the line made a sharp turn--descended the
embankment, and struck into the wood at the foot of the mountain.
About half a verst away there was a big marsh, around which splendid
reeds for his flutes grew. He cut a whole bundle of stalks and started
back home. The sun was already dropping low, and in the dead stillness
only the twittering of the birds was audible, and the crackle of the
dead wood under his feet. As he walked along rapidly, he fancied he
heard the clang of iron striking iron, and he redoubled his pace.
There was no repair going on in his section. What did it mean? He
emerged from the woods, the railway embankment stood high before him;
on the top a man was squatting on the bed of the line busily engaged
in something. Semyon commenced quietly to crawl up towards him. He
thought it was some one after the nuts which secure the rails. He
watched, and the man got up, holding a crow-bar in his hand. He had
loosened a rail, so that it would move to one side. A mist swam before
Semyon's eyes; he wanted to cry out, but could not. It was Vasily!
Semyon scrambled up the bank, as Vasily with crow-bar and wrench slid
headlong down the other side.

"Vasily Stepanych! My dear friend, come back! Give me the crow-bar. We
will put the rail back; no one will know. Come back! Save your soul
from sin!"

Vasily did not look back, but disappeared into the woods.

Semyon stood before the rail which had been torn up. He threw down his
bundle of sticks. A train was due; not a freight, but a
passenger-train. And he had nothing with which to stop it, no flag. He
could not replace the rail and could not drive in the spikes with his
bare hands. It was necessary to run, absolutely necessary to run to
the hut for some tools. "God help me!" he murmured.

Semyon started running towards his hut. He was out of breath, but
still ran, falling every now and then. He had cleared the forest; he
was only a few hundred feet from his hut, not more, when he heard the
distant hooter of the factory sound--six o'clock! In two minutes' time
No. 7 train was due. "Oh, Lord! Have pity on innocent souls!" In his
mind Semyon saw the engine strike against the loosened rail with its
left wheel, shiver, careen, tear up and splinter the sleepers--and
just there, there was a curve and the embankment seventy feet high,
down which the engine would topple--and the third-class carriages
would be packed ... little children... All sitting in the train now,
never dreaming of danger. "Oh, Lord! Tell me what to do!... No, it is
impossible to run to the hut and get back in time."

Semyon did not run on to the hut, but turned back and ran faster than
before. He was running almost mechanically, blindly; he did not know
himself what was to happen. He ran as far as the rail which had been
pulled up; his sticks were lying in a heap. He bent down, seized one
without knowing why, and ran on farther. It seemed to him the train
was already coming. He heard the distant whistle; he heard the quiet,
even tremor of the rails; but his strength was exhausted, he could run
no farther, and came to a halt about six hundred feet from the awful
spot. Then an idea came into his head, literally like a ray of light.
Pulling off his cap, he took out of it a cotton scarf, drew his knife
out of the upper part of his boot, and crossed himself, muttering,
"God bless me!"

He buried the knife in his left arm above the elbow; the blood spurted
out, flowing in a hot stream. In this he soaked his scarf, smoothed it
out, tied it to the stick and hung out his red flag.

He stood waving his flag. The train was already in sight. The driver
would not see him--would come close up, and a heavy train cannot be
pulled up in six hundred feet.

And the blood kept on flowing. Semyon pressed the sides of the wound
together so as to close it, but the blood did not diminish. Evidently
he had cut his arm very deep. His head commenced to swim, black spots
began to dance before his eyes, and then it became dark. There was a
ringing in his ears. He could not see the train or hear the noise.
Only one thought possessed him. "I shall not be able to keep standing
up. I shall fall and drop the flag; the train will pass over me. Help
me, oh Lord!"

All turned black before him, his mind became a blank, and he dropped
the flag; but the blood-stained banner did not fall to the ground. A
hand seized it and held it high to meet the approaching train. The
engineer saw it, shut the regulator, and reversed steam. The train
came to a standstill.

People jumped out of the carriages and collected in a crowd. They saw
a man lying senseless on the footway, drenched in blood, and another
man standing beside him with a blood-stained rag on a stick.

Vasily looked around at all. Then, lowering his head, he said: "Bind
me. I tore up a rail!"

THE DARLING

BY ANTON P. CHEKOV

Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor Plemyanikov,
was sitting on the back-door steps of her house doing nothing. It was
hot, the flies were nagging and teasing, and it was pleasant to think
that it would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were gathering from
the east, wafting a breath of moisture every now and then.

Kukin, who roomed in the wing of the same house, was standing in the
yard looking up at the sky. He was the manager of the Tivoli, an
open-air theatre.

"Again," he said despairingly. "Rain again. Rain, rain, rain! Every
day rain! As though to spite me. I might as well stick my head into a
noose and be done with it. It's ruining me. Heavy losses every day!"
He wrung his hands, and continued, addressing Olenka: "What a life,
Olga Semyonovna! It's enough to make a man weep. He works, he does his
best, his very best, he tortures himself, he passes sleepless nights,
he thinks and thinks and thinks how to do everything just right. And
what's the result? He gives the public the best operetta, the very
best pantomime, excellent artists. But do they want it? Have they the
least appreciation of it? The public is rude. The public is a great
boor. The public wants a circus, a lot of nonsense, a lot of stuff.
And there's the weather. Look! Rain almost every evening. It began to
rain on the tenth of May, and it's kept it up through the whole of
June. It's simply awful. I can't get any audiences, and don't I have
to pay rent? Don't I have to pay the actors?"

The next day towards evening the clouds gathered again, and Kukin said
with an hysterical laugh:

"Oh, I don't care. Let it do its worst. Let it drown the whole
theatre, and me, too. All right, no luck for me in this world or the
next. Let the actors bring suit against me and drag me to court.
What's the court? Why not Siberia at hard labour, or even the
scaffold? Ha, ha, ha!"

It was the same on the third day.

Olenka listened to Kukin seriously, in silence. Sometimes tears would
rise to her eyes. At last Kukin's misfortune touched her. She fell in
love with him. He was short, gaunt, with a yellow face, and curly hair
combed back from his forehead, and a thin tenor voice. His features
puckered all up when he spoke. Despair was ever inscribed on his face.
And yet he awakened in Olenka a sincere, deep feeling.

She was always loving somebody. She couldn't get on without loving
somebody. She had loved her sick father, who sat the whole time in his
armchair in a darkened room, breathing heavily. She had loved her
aunt, who came from Brianska once or twice a year to visit them. And
before that, when a pupil at the progymnasium, she had loved her
French teacher. She was a quiet, kind-hearted, compassionate girl,
with a soft gentle way about her. And she made a very healthy,
wholesome impression. Looking at her full, rosy cheeks, at her soft
white neck with the black mole, and at the good naive smile that
always played on her face when something pleasant was said, the men
would think, "Not so bad," and would smile too; and the lady visitors,
in the middle of the conversation, would suddenly grasp her hand and
exclaim, "You darling!" in a burst of delight.

The house, hers by inheritance, in which she had lived from birth, was
located at the outskirts of the city on the Gypsy Road, not far from
the Tivoli. From early evening till late at night she could hear the
music in the theatre and the bursting of the rockets; and it seemed to
her that Kukin was roaring and battling with his fate and taking his
chief enemy, the indifferent public, by assault. Her heart melted
softly, she felt no desire to sleep, and when Kukin returned home
towards morning, she tapped on her window-pane, and through the
curtains he saw her face and one shoulder and the kind smile she gave
him.

He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a good look
of her neck and her full vigorous shoulders, he clapped his hands and
said:

"You darling!"

He was happy. But it rained on their wedding-day, and the expression
of despair never left his face.

They got along well together. She sat in the cashier's box, kept the
theatre in order, wrote down the expenses, and paid out the salaries.
Her rosy cheeks, her kind naive smile, like a halo around her face,
could be seen at the cashier's window, behind the scenes, and in the
cafe. She began to tell her friends that the theatre was the greatest,
the most important, the most essential thing in the world, that it was
the only place to obtain true enjoyment in and become humanised and
educated.

"But do you suppose the public appreciates it?" she asked. "What the
public wants is the circus. Yesterday Vanichka and I gave _Faust
Burlesqued_, and almost all the boxes were empty. If we had given some
silly nonsense, I assure you, the theatre would have been overcrowded.
To-morrow we'll put _Orpheus in Hades_ on. Do come."

Whatever Kukin said about the theatre and the actors, she repeated.
She spoke, as he did, with contempt of the public, of its indifference
to art, of its boorishness. She meddled in the rehearsals, corrected
the actors, watched the conduct of the musicians; and when an
unfavourable criticism appeared in the local paper, she wept and went
to the editor to argue with him.

The actors were fond of her and called her "Vanichka and I" and "the
darling." She was sorry for them and lent them small sums. When they
bilked her, she never complained to her husband; at the utmost she
shed a few tears.

In winter, too, they got along nicely together. They leased a theatre
in the town for the whole winter and sublet it for short periods to a
Little Russian theatrical company, to a conjuror and to the local
amateur players.

Olenka grew fuller and was always beaming with contentment; while
Kukin grew thinner and yellower and complained of his terrible losses,
though he did fairly well the whole winter. At night he coughed, and
she gave him raspberry syrup and lime water, rubbed him with eau de
Cologne, and wrapped him up in soft coverings.

"You are my precious sweet," she said with perfect sincerity, stroking
his hair. "You are such a dear."

At Lent he went to Moscow to get his company together, and, while
without him, Olenka was unable to sleep. She sat at the window the
whole time, gazing at the stars. She likened herself to the hens that
are also uneasy and unable to sleep when their rooster is out of the
coop. Kukin was detained in Moscow. He wrote he would be back during
Easter Week, and in his letters discussed arrangements already for the
Tivoli. But late one night, before Easter Monday, there was an
ill-omened knocking at the wicket-gate. It was like a knocking on a
barrel--boom, boom, boom! The sleepy cook ran barefooted, plashing
through the puddles, to open the gate.

"Open the gate, please," said some one in a hollow bass voice. "I have
a telegram for you."

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before; but this time,
somehow, she was numbed with terror. She opened the telegram with
trembling hands and read:

"Ivan Petrovich died suddenly to-day. Awaiting propt orders for
wuneral Tuesday."

That was the way the telegram was written--"wuneral"--and another
unintelligible word--"propt." The telegram was signed by the manager
of the opera company.

"My dearest!" Olenka burst out sobbing. "Vanichka, my dearest, my
sweetheart. Why did I ever meet you? Why did I ever get to know you
and love you? To whom have you abandoned your poor Olenka, your poor,
unhappy Olenka?"

Kukin was buried on Tuesday in the Vagankov Cemetery in Moscow. Olenka
returned home on Wednesday; and as soon as she entered her house she
threw herself on her bed and broke into such loud sobbing that she
could be heard in the street and in the neighbouring yards.

"The darling!" said the neighbours, crossing themselves. "How Olga
Semyonovna, the poor darling, is grieving!"

Three months afterwards Olenka was returning home from mass,
downhearted and in deep mourning. Beside her walked a man also
returning from church, Vasily Pustovalov, the manager of the merchant
Babakayev's lumber-yard. He was wearing a straw hat, a white vest with
a gold chain, and looked more like a landowner than a business man.

"Everything has its ordained course, Olga Semyonovna," he said
sedately, with sympathy in his voice. "And if any one near and dear to
us dies, then it means it was God's will and we should remember that
and bear it with submission."

He took her to the wicket-gate, said good-bye and went away. After
that she heard his sedate voice the whole day; and on closing her eyes
she instantly had a vision of his dark beard. She took a great liking
to him. And evidently he had been impressed by her, too; for, not long
after, an elderly woman, a distant acquaintance, came in to have a cup
of coffee with her. As soon as the woman was seated at table she began
to speak about Pustovalov--how good he was, what a steady man, and any
woman could be glad to get him as a husband. Three days later
Pustovalov himself paid Olenka a visit. He stayed only about ten
minutes, and spoke little, but Olenka fell in love with him, fell in
love so desperately that she did not sleep the whole night and burned
as with fever. In the morning she sent for the elderly woman. Soon
after, Olenka and Pustovalov were engaged, and the wedding followed.

Pustovalov and Olenka lived happily together. He usually stayed in the
lumber-yard until dinner, then went out on business. In his absence
Olenka took his place in the office until evening, attending to the
book-keeping and despatching the orders.

"Lumber rises twenty per cent every year nowadays," she told her
customers and acquaintances. "Imagine, we used to buy wood from our
forests here. Now Vasichka has to go every year to the government of
Mogilev to get wood. And what a tax!" she exclaimed, covering her
cheeks with her hands in terror. "What a tax!"

She felt as if she had been dealing in lumber for ever so long, that
the most important and essential thing in life was lumber. There was
something touching and endearing in the way she pronounced the words,
"beam," "joist," "plank," "stave," "lath," "gun-carriage," "clamp." At
night she dreamed of whole mountains of boards and planks, long,
endless rows of wagons conveying the wood somewhere, far, far from the
city. She dreamed that a whole regiment of beams, 36 ft. x 5 in., were
advancing in an upright position to do battle against the lumber-yard;
that the beams and joists and clamps were knocking against each other,
emitting the sharp crackling reports of dry wood, that they were all
falling and then rising again, piling on top of each other. Olenka
cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said to her gently:

"Olenka my dear, what is the matter? Cross yourself."

Her husband's opinions were all hers. If he thought the room was too
hot, she thought so too. If he thought business was dull, she thought
business was dull. Pustovalov was not fond of amusements and stayed
home on holidays; she did the same.

"You are always either at home or in the office," said her friends.
"Why don't you go to the theatre or to the circus, darling?"

"Vasichka and I never go to the theatre," she answered sedately. "We
have work to do, we have no time for nonsense. What does one get out
of going to theatre?"

On Saturdays she and Pustovalov went to vespers, and on holidays to
early mass. On returning home they walked side by side with rapt
faces, an agreeable smell emanating from both of them and her silk
dress rustling pleasantly. At home they drank tea with milk-bread and
various jams, and then ate pie. Every day at noontime there was an
appetising odour in the yard and outside the gate of cabbage soup,
roast mutton, or duck; and, on fast days, of fish. You couldn't pass
the gate without being seized by an acute desire to eat. The samovar
was always boiling on the office table, and customers were treated to
tea and biscuits. Once a week the married couple went to the baths and
returned with red faces, walking side by side.

"We are getting along very well, thank God," said Olenka to her
friends. "God grant that all should live as well as Vasichka and I."

When Pustovalov went to the government of Mogilev to buy wood, she was
dreadfully homesick for him, did not sleep nights, and cried.
Sometimes the veterinary surgeon of the regiment, Smirnov, a young man
who lodged in the wing of her house, came to see her evenings. He
related incidents, or they played cards together. This distracted her.
The most interesting of his stories were those of his own life. He was
married and had a son; but he had separated from his wife because she
had deceived him, and now he hated her and sent her forty rubles a
month for his son's support. Olenka sighed, shook her head, and was
sorry for him.

"Well, the Lord keep you," she said, as she saw him off to the door by
candlelight. "Thank you for coming to kill time with me. May God give
you health. Mother in Heaven!" She spoke very sedately, very
judiciously, imitating her husband. The veterinary surgeon had
disappeared behind the door when she called out after him: "Do you
know, Vladimir Platonych, you ought to make up with your wife. Forgive
her, if only for the sake of your son. The child understands
everything, you may be sure."

When Pustovalov returned, she told him in a low voice about the
veterinary surgeon and his unhappy family life; and they sighed and
shook their heads, and talked about the boy who must be homesick for
his father. Then, by a strange association of ideas, they both stopped
before the sacred images, made genuflections, and prayed to God to
send them children.

And so the Pustovalovs lived for full six years, quietly and
peaceably, in perfect love and harmony. But once in the winter Vasily
Andreyich, after drinking some hot tea, went out into the lumber-yard
without a hat on his head, caught a cold and took sick. He was treated
by the best physicians, but the malady progressed, and he died after
an illness of four months. Olenka was again left a widow.

"To whom have you left me, my darling?" she wailed after the funeral.
"How shall I live now without you, wretched creature that I am. Pity
me, good people, pity me, fatherless and motherless, all alone in the
world!"

She went about dressed in black and weepers, and she gave up wearing
hats and gloves for good. She hardly left the house except to go to
church and to visit her husband's grave. She almost led the life of a
nun.

It was not until six months had passed that she took off the weepers
and opened her shutters. She began to go out occasionally in the
morning to market with her cook. But how she lived at home and what
went on there, could only be surmised. It could be surmised from the
fact that she was seen in her little garden drinking tea with the
veterinarian while he read the paper out loud to her, and also from
the fact that once on meeting an acquaintance at the post-office, she
said to her:

"There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town. That is why
there is so much disease. You constantly hear of people getting sick
from the milk and becoming infected by the horses and cows. The health
of domestic animals ought really to be looked after as much as that of
human beings."

She repeated the veterinarian's words and held the same opinions as he
about everything. It was plain that she could not exist a single year
without an attachment, and she found her new happiness in the wing of
her house. In any one else this would have been condemned; but no one
could think ill of Olenka. Everything in her life was so transparent.
She and the veterinary surgeon never spoke about the change in their
relations. They tried, in fact, to conceal it, but unsuccessfully; for
Olenka could have no secrets. When the surgeon's colleagues from the
regiment came to see him, she poured tea, and served the supper, and
talked to them about the cattle plague, the foot and mouth disease,
and the municipal slaughter houses. The surgeon was dreadfully
embarrassed, and after the visitors had left, he caught her hand and
hissed angrily:

"Didn't I ask you not to talk about what you don't understand? When we
doctors discuss things, please don't mix in. It's getting to be a
nuisance."

She looked at him in astonishment and alarm, and asked:

"But, Volodichka, what _am_ I to talk about?"

And she threw her arms round his neck, with tears in her eyes, and
begged him not to be angry. And they were both happy.

But their happiness was of short duration. The veterinary surgeon went
away with his regiment to be gone for good, when it was transferred to
some distant place almost as far as Siberia, and Olenka was left
alone.

Now she was completely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his
armchair lay in the attic covered with dust and minus one leg. She got
thin and homely, and the people who met her on the street no longer
looked at her as they had used to, nor smiled at her. Evidently her
best years were over, past and gone, and a new, dubious life was to
begin which it were better not to think about.

In the evening Olenka sat on the steps and heard the music playing and
the rockets bursting in the Tivoli; but it no longer aroused any
response in her. She looked listlessly into the yard, thought of
nothing, wanted nothing, and when night came on, she went to bed and
dreamed of nothing but the empty yard. She ate and drank as though by
compulsion.

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