The darling / Душечка. Сборник рассказов

I have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water —”

I heard no more, for I fell asleep.

Next morning when we were approaching Sevastopol, it was damp, unpleasant weather; the ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me, brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea, men with their coat-collars turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below; a young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with the expression of a naughty, fretful child:

“Jean, your birdie’s been sea-sick.

”

Afterwards when I was at Yalta I saw the same beautiful lady dashing about on horseback with a couple of officers hardly able to keep up with her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a Phrygian cap, sketching on the sea-front with a great crowd admiring her a little way off. I was introduced to her. She pressed my hand with great warmth, and looking at me ecstatically, thanked me in honeyed cadences for the pleasure I had given her by my writings.

“Don’t you believe her,” Shamohin whispered to me, “she has never read a word of them.”

When I was walking on the sea-front in the early evening Shamohin met me with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties.

“Prince Maktuev is here!” he said joyfully. “He came yesterday with her brother, the spiritualist! Now I understand what she was writing to him about! Oh, Lord!” he went on gazing up to heaven and pressing his parcels to his bosom.

“If she hits it off with the prince it means freedom, then I can go back to the country with my father!”

And he ran on.

“I begin to believe in spirits,” he called to me, looking back. “The spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the truth! Oh, if only it be so!”

The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamohin’s story ended I don’t know.

POLINKA

It is one o’clock in the afternoon.

Shopping is at its height at the “Nouveauté’s de Paris[23 - Nouveauté’s de Paris – (French) Novelties of Paris],” a drapery establishment in one of the Arcades. There is a monotonous hum of shopmen’s voices, the hum one hears at school when the teacher sets the boys to learn something by heart. This regular sound is not interrupted by the laughter of lady customers nor the slam of the glass door, nor the scurrying of the boys.