The Darling and Other Stories

'Rubbish! The man's asking you for the sake of art, and not for any sort of nonsense. Why not help him if you can?'

Anyuta began dressing.

'And what are you painting?' asked Klotchkov.

'Psyche; it's a fine subject. But it won't go, somehow. I have to keep painting from different models. Yesterday I was painting one with blue legs. 'Why are your legs blue?' I asked her. 'It's my stockings stain them,' she said. And you're still grinding! Lucky fellow! You have patience.'

'Medicine's a job one can't get on with without grinding.'

'H'm! . . . Excuse me, Klotchkov, but you do live like a pig! It's awful the way you live!'

'How do you mean? I can't help it. . . . I only get twelve roubles a month from my father, and it's hard to live decently on that.'

'Yes . . . yes . . .' said the artist, frowning with an air of disgust; 'but, still, you might live better. . . . An educated man is in duty bound to have taste, isn't he? And goodness knows what it's like here! The bed not made, the slops, the dirt . . . yesterday's porridge in the plates. . . Tfoo!'

'That's true,' said the student in confusion; 'but Anyuta has had no time to-day to tidy up; she's been busy all the while.'

When Anyuta and the artist had gone out Klotchkov lay down on the sofa and began learning, lying down; then he accidentally dropped asleep, and waking up an hour later, propped his head on his fists and sank into gloomy reflection. He recalled the artist's words that an educated man was in duty bound to have taste, and his surroundings actually struck him now as loathsome and revolting. He saw, as it were in his mind's eye, his own future, when he would see his patients in his consulting-room, drink tea in a large dining-room in the company of his wife, a real lady. And now that slop-pail in which the cigarette ends were swimming looked incredibly disgusting. Anyuta, too, rose before his imagination—a plain, slovenly, pitiful figure . . . and he made up his mind to part with her at once, at all costs.

When, on coming back from the artist's, she took off her coat, he got up and said to her seriously:

'Look here, my good girl . . . sit down and listen. We must part!

The fact is, I don't want to live with you any longer.'

Anyuta had come back from the artist's worn out and exhausted. Standing so long as a model had made her face look thin and sunken, and her chin sharper than ever. She said nothing in answer to the student's words, only her lips began to tremble.

'You know we should have to part sooner or later, anyway,' said the student. 'You're a nice, good girl, and not a fool; you'll understand. . . .'

Anyuta put on her coat again, in silence wrapped up her embroidery in paper, gathered together her needles and thread: she found the screw of paper with the four lumps of sugar in the window, and laid it on the table by the books.

'That's . . . your sugar . . .' she said softly, and turned away to conceal her tears.

'Why are you crying?' asked Klotchkov.

He walked about the room in confusion, and said:

'You are a strange girl, really. . . . Why, you know we shall have to part. We can't stay together for ever.'

She had gathered together all her belongings, and turned to say good-bye to him, and he felt sorry for her.

'Shall I let her stay on here another week?' he thought. 'She really may as well stay, and I'll tell her to go in a week;' and vexed at his own weakness, he shouted to her roughly:

'Come, why are you standing there? If you are going, go; and if you don't want to, take off your coat and stay! You can stay!'

Anyuta took off her coat, silently, stealthily, then blew her nose also stealthily, sighed, and noiselessly returned to her invariable position on her stool by the window.

The student drew his textbook to him and began again pacing from corner to corner. 'The right lung consists of three parts,' he repeated; 'the upper part, on anterior wall of thorax, reaches the fourth or fifth rib . . . .'

In the passage some one shouted at the top of his voice: 'Grigory!

The samovar!'

THE TWO VOLODYAS

'LET me; I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver!' Sofya Lvovna said in a loud voice. 'Wait a minute, driver; I'll get up on the box beside you.'

She stood up in the sledge, and her husband, Vladimir Nikititch, and the friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, held her arms to prevent her falling. The three horses were galloping fast.

'I said you ought not to have given her brandy,' Vladimir Nikititch whispered to his companion with vexation. 'What a fellow you are, really!'

The Colonel knew by experience that in women like his wife, Sofya Lvovna, after a little too much wine, turbulent gaiety was followed by hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they got home, instead of being able to sleep, he would have to be administering compresses and drops.

'Wo!' cried Sofya Lvovna. 'I want to drive myself!'

She felt genuinely gay and triumphant. For the last two months, ever since her wedding, she had been tortured by the thought that she had married Colonel Yagitch from worldly motives and, as it is said, par depit; but that evening, at the restaurant, she had suddenly become convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years, he was so slim, agile, supple, he made puns and hummed to the gipsies' tunes so charmingly. Really, the older men were nowadays a thousand times more interesting than the young. It seemed as though age and youth had changed parts. The Colonel was two years older than her father, but could there be any importance in that if, honestly speaking, there were infinitely more vitality, go, and freshness in him than in herself, though she was only twenty-three?

'Oh, my darling!' she thought. 'You are wonderful!'

She had become convinced in the restaurant, too, that not a spark of her old feeling remained. For the friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, or simply Volodya, with whom only the day before she had been madly, miserably in love, she now felt nothing but complete indifference. All that evening he had seemed to her spiritless, torpid, uninteresting, and insignificant, and the sangfroid with which he habitually avoided paying at restaurants on this occasion revolted her, and she had hardly been able to resist saying, 'If you are poor, you should stay at home.' The Colonel paid for all.

Perhaps because trees, telegraph posts, and drifts of snow kept flitting past her eyes, all sorts of disconnected ideas came rushing into her mind. She reflected: the bill at the restaurant had been a hundred and twenty roubles, and a hundred had gone to the gipsies, and to-morrow she could fling away a thousand roubles if she liked; and only two months ago, before her wedding, she had not had three roubles of her own, and had to ask her father for every trifle. What a change in her life!

Her thoughts were in a tangle. She recalled, how, when she was a child of ten, Colonel Yagitch, now her husband, used to make love to her aunt, and every one in the house said that he had ruined her. And her aunt had, in fact, often come down to dinner with her eyes red from crying, and was always going off somewhere; and people used to say of her that the poor thing could find no peace anywhere. He had been very handsome in those days, and had an extraordinary reputation as a lady-killer. So much so that he was known all over the town, and it was said of him that he paid a round of visits to his adorers every day like a doctor visiting his patients. And even now, in spite of his grey hair, his wrinkles, and his spectacles, his thin face looked handsome, especially in profile.

Sofya Lvovna's father was an army doctor, and had at one time served in the same regiment with Colonel Yagitch. Volodya's father was an army doctor too, and he, too, had once been in the same regiment as her father and Colonel Yagitch. In spite of many amatory adventures, often very complicated and disturbing, Volodya had done splendidly at the university, and had taken a very good degree. Now he was specialising in foreign literature, and