The Darling. Afterword to Chekhov’s Story “The Darling”Душечка. Послесловие к рассказу Чехова «Душечка»

Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor Plemyannikov, was sitting on the porch in her yard, lost in thought. It was hot, the flies were tiresomely persistent, and it was so pleasant to think that it would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were moving in from the east, and from there, now and then, came a breath of moisture.

In the middle of the yard stood Kukin, an impresario and the proprietor of the Tivoli pleasure garden, who rented the lodge in that same yard; he was looking at the sky.

“Again!” he was saying in despair. “It’s going to rain again! Rain every day, rain every day — as if on purpose! It’s a noose around my neck! It’s ruin! Terrible losses every day!”

He threw up his hands and went on, turning to Olenka:

“There you have it, Olga Semyonovna: that’s our life. It’s enough to make you weep! You work, you try your best, you wear yourself out, you lie awake nights, always thinking how to do better — and what comes of it? On the one hand, the public is ignorant, savage. I give them the very best operetta, an extravaganza, magnificent singers of comic songs — but is that what they want? Do they understand any of it? What they want is a fairground show! Give them vulgarity! On the other hand, look at the weather. Rain almost every evening. Ever since it set in on the tenth of May, it has gone on all through May and June — simply dreadful! The public doesn’t come, but I still pay the rent, don’t I? I pay the performers, don’t I?”

The next day, toward evening, the clouds were moving in again, and Kukin said with a hysterical laugh:

“Well, what of it? Let it! Let it flood the whole garden, and me too! May I have no happiness in this world or the next! Let the performers take me to court! What’s a court? Send me to hard labor in Siberia, for all I care! To the scaffold, even! Ha-ha-ha!”

And on the third day the same…

Olenka listened to Kukin silently, gravely, and at times tears came into her eyes. In the end Kukin’s misfortunes touched her, and she fell in love with him. He was short and thin, with a sallow face and his hair combed down at the temples; he spoke in a thin little tenor, and despair was always written on his face; but all the same he awakened in her a real, deep feeling. She was always loving someone and could not do without it. Before, she had loved her papa, who now sat ill in an armchair in a dark room, breathing heavily; she had loved her aunt, who sometimes, once every two years, came from Bryansk; and before that, when she was at the progymnasium, she had loved her French teacher. She was a quiet, good-natured, tender-hearted young lady with a meek, soft gaze, and very healthy. Looking at her full pink cheeks, at her soft white neck with its dark mole, at the kind, naive smile that came over her face when she listened to something pleasant, men smiled too, and the lady visitors could not keep from suddenly seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation and saying in a burst of pleasure:

“You darling!”

The house in which she had lived since the day she was born, and which the will had put in her name, stood on the outskirts of the town, in the Gypsy Settlement, not far from the Tivoli; in the evenings and at night she could hear the music playing in the garden and the rockets bursting with a crack, and it seemed to her that this was Kukin waging war with his fate and taking his chief enemy, the indifferent public, by storm; her heart would sweetly stand still, she did not feel at all like sleeping, and when he came home toward morning, she would tap softly on her bedroom window and, showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtains, smile tenderly…

He proposed, and they were married.

He was happy, but since it rained on the wedding day and then that night too, the look of despair never left his face.

After the wedding they lived well. She sat in his box office, saw to things in the garden, wrote down the expenses, paid out the wages, and her pink cheeks and her sweet, naive smile, like a radiance, flashed now in the box-office window, now in the wings, now at the refreshment bar. And she was already telling her acquaintances that the most remarkable, the most important and necessary thing in the world was the theater, and that only in the theater could one find true enjoyment and become educated and humane.

“But does the public understand that?” she would say. “What they want is a fairground show! Yesterday we were giving ‘Faust Inside Out,’ and almost all the boxes were empty, but if Vanechka and I had put on some piece of vulgarity, believe me, the theater would have been packed. Tomorrow Vanechka and I are putting on ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’; do come.”

And whatever Kukin said about the theater and the actors, she repeated too. Like him, she despised the public for its indifference to art and for its ignorance; at rehearsals she interfered, corrected the actors, kept an eye on the musicians’ behavior, and when the local newspaper spoke unfavorably of the theater, she wept and then went to the newspaper office to have it out.

The actors loved her and called her “Vanechka and I” and “the darling”; she pitied them and lent them small sums, and if, as happened at times, they cheated her, she only wept quietly and did not complain to her husband.

They lived well in the winter too. They took the town theater for the whole winter and let it for short terms, now to a Little Russian troupe, now to a conjurer, now to local amateurs. Olenka grew plumper and beamed all over with pleasure, while Kukin grew thinner and yellower and complained of terrible losses, though business went quite well all winter. At night he coughed, and she gave him raspberry and linden-flower tea, rubbed him with eau de cologne, and wrapped him in her soft shawls.

“How sweet you are, my own!” she would say quite sincerely, smoothing his hair. “How handsome you are, my own!”

In Lent he went to Moscow to gather a troupe, and without him she could not sleep, but kept sitting at the window, looking at the stars. And at that time she compared herself to the hens, which also do not sleep all night and feel uneasy when there is no rooster in the henhouse. Kukin was held up in Moscow and wrote that he would be back by Easter, and in his letters he was already giving orders about the Tivoli. But on the eve of Holy Monday, late in the evening, there was suddenly an ominous knocking at the gate; someone was beating on the wicket gate as if it were a barrel: boom! boom! boom! The sleepy cook, slapping through the puddles in her bare feet, ran to open it.

“Open up, be so kind!” someone was saying behind the gate in a hollow bass. “A telegram for you!”

Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time, for some reason, she simply froze. With trembling hands she opened the telegram and read the following:

“Ivan Petrovich passed away suddenly today stchala await instructions funferal Tuesday.”

That is just how it was printed in the telegram: “funferal,” and another incomprehensible word as well, “stchala”; it was signed by the stage director of the operetta troupe.

“My dear one!” Olenka sobbed. “My sweet Vanechka, my dear one! Why did I ever meet you? Why did I come to know you and love you? To whom have you left your poor Olenka, your poor, unhappy Olenka?…”

Kukin was buried on Tuesday, in Moscow, in the Vagankovo cemetery; Olenka came home on Wednesday, and as soon as she was inside she fell onto her bed and sobbed so loudly that she could be heard in the street and in the neighboring yards.

“The darling!” said the neighbor women, crossing themselves. “Darling Olga Semyonovna, the poor dear, how she grieves!”

Three months later, Olenka was coming home from Mass one day, sad, in deep mourning. It happened that one of her neighbors, who was also coming home from church, walked beside her: Vasily Andreich Pustovalov, the manager of the merchant Babakaev’s lumberyard. He wore a straw hat and a white vest with a gold chain and looked more like a landowner than a tradesman.

“Everything has its own order, Olga Semyonovna,” he was saying sedately, with sympathy in his voice, “and if anyone near to us dies, it means that is how God wills it, and in such a case we must keep hold of ourselves and bear it with submission.”

Having seen Olenka to her wicket gate, he said goodbye and walked on. After that, all day long she heard his sedate voice, and as soon as she closed her eyes she seemed to see his dark beard. She liked him very much. And apparently she had made an impression on him too, because a little while later an elderly lady whom she barely knew came to have coffee with her, and the moment she sat down at the table began without delay to talk about Pustovalov, saying that he was a good, solid man and that any bride would be glad to marry him. Three days later Pustovalov himself came to call; he did not stay long, ten minutes or so, and said little, but Olenka fell in love with him, so in love that she did not sleep all night and burned as if in a fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. Soon she was betrothed, and then came the wedding.

Pustovalov and Olenka, once married, lived well. Usually he sat in the lumberyard until dinner, then went out on business, and Olenka took his place, sitting in the office until evening, making out bills and dispatching goods.

“Lumber goes up twenty percent every year now,” she would say to customers and acquaintances. “Goodness, we used to deal in local lumber, but now Vasechka has to go every year to Mogilev province for lumber. And the freight rates!” she would say, covering both cheeks with her hands in horror. “The freight rates!”

It seemed to her that she had been dealing in lumber for ages and ages, that the most important and necessary thing in life was lumber, and she heard something dear and touching in the words: beam, round log, planking, sheathing board, nameless, batten, cant, slab…

Whatever thoughts her husband had, she had too. If he thought the room was hot or that business had grown slow, she thought so too. Her husband did not care for amusements of any kind and stayed home on holidays, and so did she.

“You’re always at home or in the office,” her acquaintances would say. “You should go to the theater, darling, or to the circus.”

“Vasechka and I have no time to go to theaters,” she would answer sedately. “We are working people; we have no time for trifles. What good is there in those theaters?”

On Saturdays Pustovalov and she went to the all-night vigil, and on holidays to early Mass, and coming home from church they walked side by side, their faces full of tender emotion; they both smelled nice, and her silk dress rustled pleasantly; and at home they drank tea with rich sweet bread and various jams, and then ate pie. Every day at noon, in the yard and out in the street beyond the gate, there was a delicious smell of borscht and roast mutton or duck, and on fast days of fish, and no one could pass the gate without feeling hungry. In the office the samovar was always boiling, and customers were treated to tea with bread rings. Once a week the couple went to the bathhouse and came back side by side, both of them red.

“We’re all right, we live well,” Olenka would say to acquaintances, “thank God! God grant everyone may live as Vasechka and I do.”

When Pustovalov went off to Mogilev province for lumber, she was very lonely and did not sleep at night, but wept. Sometimes in the evenings the regimental veterinarian Smirnin, a young man who rented her lodge, came to see her. He would tell her something or play cards with her, and that diverted her. Especially interesting were the stories from his own family life; he was married and had a son, but had separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her and sent her forty rubles every month for the son’s keep. And, listening to this, Olenka would sigh and shake her head, and she felt sorry for him.

“Well, the Lord keep you,” she would say, taking leave of him and lighting his way to the stairs with a candle. “Thank you for putting up with my dull company; God give you health, Queen of Heaven…”

And she always expressed herself so sedately, so sensibly, imitating her husband; the veterinarian would already be disappearing through the door below, and she would call him back and say:

“You know, Vladimir Platonych, you ought to make it up with your wife. You should forgive her, if only for your son’s sake!… The little fellow understands everything, I daresay.”

And when Pustovalov came back, she would tell him in a low voice about the veterinarian and his unhappy family life, and they would both sigh and shake their heads and talk about the boy, who was probably missing his father; then, by some strange train of thought, they would both stand before the icons, bow down to the ground, and pray that God would send them children.

And so the Pustovalovs lived quietly and peaceably, in love and complete harmony, for six years. But then one winter Vasily Andreich, having drunk hot tea in the lumberyard, went out without his cap to dispatch some lumber, caught cold, and fell ill. He was treated by the best doctors, but the illness had its way, and he died after four months of illness. And Olenka was widowed again.

“To whom have you left me, my dear one?” she sobbed, when she had buried her husband. “How am I to live without you now, wretched, unhappy woman that I am! Good people, have pity on me, an orphan all alone in the world…”

She went about in a black dress with weepers and had already given up hats and gloves forever; she rarely left the house, only to go to church or to her husband’s grave, and lived at home like a nun. And only when six months had passed did she take off the weepers and begin opening the shutters on the windows. Sometimes she was already seen in the mornings, going to market for provisions with her cook, but how she lived at home now and what went on in her house could only be guessed. People guessed, for instance, from having seen her drinking tea in her little garden with the veterinarian while he read the newspaper aloud to her, and also from what she said when she met a lady she knew at the post office:

“There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town, and that is why there is so much disease. Again and again you hear of people falling ill from milk and catching infections from horses and cows. Really, the health of domestic animals must be cared for just as much as the health of people.”

She repeated the veterinarian’s thoughts and now held the same opinion as he did about everything. It was clear that she could not live even a year without an attachment, and that she had found her new happiness in her own lodge. Another woman would have been condemned for this, but no one could think ill of Olenka, and everything in her life was so understandable. She and the veterinarian told no one of the change that had come about in their relations and tried to hide it, but they did not succeed, because Olenka could have no secrets. When guests came to see him, his colleagues from the regiment, she would begin, as she poured their tea or served supper, to talk about the cattle plague, about pearl disease, about the town slaughterhouses, and he would be dreadfully embarrassed, and when the guests had gone he would seize her by the arm and hiss angrily:

“I asked you, didn’t I, not to talk about things you don’t understand! When we veterinarians are talking among ourselves, please don’t interfere. It’s getting tiresome, really!”

And she would look at him in astonishment and alarm and ask:

“Volodechka, then what am I to talk about?!”

And with tears in her eyes she would embrace him and beg him not to be angry, and they were both happy.

But this happiness did not last long. The veterinarian left with his regiment, left for good, since the regiment was transferred somewhere very far away, practically to Siberia. And Olenka was left alone.

Now she was completely alone. Her father had died long ago, and his armchair lay in the attic, dusty, missing a leg. She had grown thin and plain, and people who met her in the street no longer looked at her as before and did not smile at her; evidently her best years were over, left behind, and now some new life was beginning, unknown, which it was better not to think about. In the evenings Olenka sat on her porch and could hear the music playing at the Tivoli and the rockets bursting, but it no longer called up any thoughts. She looked listlessly at her empty yard, thought of nothing, wanted nothing; she ate and drank as if against her will.

And the main thing, the worst of all, was that she no longer had any opinions. She saw the objects around her and understood everything that went on around her, but she could not form an opinion about anything and did not know what to talk about. She sees, for instance, a bottle standing, or rain falling, or a peasant driving by in a cart, but what the bottle is for, or the rain, or the peasant, what sense there is in them, she cannot say. In Kukin’s and Pustovalov’s time, and later in the veterinarian’s, Olenka could explain everything and would have given her opinion about anything at all, but now there was the same emptiness among her thoughts and in her heart as in her yard.

The town was gradually spreading out on all sides; the Gypsy Settlement was already called a street, and where the Tivoli garden and the lumberyards had been, houses had already gone up and a row of lanes had formed. How quickly time runs! Olenka’s house has grown dark, the roof has rusted, the shed has gone crooked, and the whole yard is overgrown with tall weeds and stinging nettles. Olenka herself has grown older and plainer; in summer she sits on the porch, and in winter she sits at the window and looks at the snow. A breath of spring in the air, or the wind carrying the ringing of the cathedral bells, and suddenly memories of the past come flooding in, her heart contracts sweetly, and tears pour from her eyes; but this is only for a minute, and then there is emptiness again, and no knowing what one lives for. The little black cat Bryska rubs against her and purrs softly, but these feline caresses do not move Olenka. Is that what she needs? What she would like is a love that would take hold of her whole being, her whole soul, her reason, that would give her thoughts and a direction in life, that would warm her aging blood. And she shakes black Bryska off her skirt and says to her in vexation:

“Go on, go on… Nothing for you here!”

And so it goes, day after day, year after year — and not a single joy, and no opinion of any kind. Whatever Mavra the cook has said is all right.

One hot July day, toward evening, when the town herd was being driven down the street and the whole yard was filled with clouds of dust, someone suddenly knocked at the wicket gate. Olenka went to open it herself, and the moment she looked, she froze: outside the gate stood the veterinarian Smirnin, gray-haired now and in civilian clothes. Suddenly it all came back to her; she could not hold back, began to weep, and laid her head on his chest without saying a single word, and in her great agitation she did not notice how they both went into the house afterward and sat down to tea.

“My dear one!” she murmured, trembling with joy. “Vladimir Platonych! Where has God brought you from?”

“I want to settle here for good,” he told her. “I’ve resigned from the service and come to try my luck as a free man, to live a settled life. And besides, it’s time to send my son to the gymnasium. He’s grown. I’ve made it up with my wife, you know.”

“And where is she?” asked Olenka.

“She’s at the hotel with my son, and I’m going about looking for lodgings.”

“Lord, my dear sir, take my house! Why shouldn’t it do for lodgings? Oh, Lord, I won’t even take anything from you,” Olenka said in a flutter, and began to weep again. “Live here, and the lodge is enough for me. Lord, what joy!”

The next day they were already painting the roof of the house and whitewashing the walls, and Olenka, her hands on her hips, walked about the yard giving orders. Her old smile lit up her face, and she came alive all over, grew fresh again, as though she had woken from a long sleep. The veterinarian’s wife arrived, a thin, plain lady with short hair and a capricious expression, and with her the boy, Sasha, small for his age (he was already going on ten), plump, with clear blue eyes and dimples in his cheeks. And no sooner had the boy come into the yard than he ran after the cat, and at once his merry, joyful laughter rang out.

“Auntie, is that your cat?” he asked Olenka. “When she has her puppies, please give us one little kitten. Mama is very afraid of mice.”

Olenka talked with him, gave him tea, and the heart in her breast suddenly grew warm and contracted sweetly, as though this boy were her own son. And in the evening, when he sat in the dining room going over his lessons, she looked at him with tender emotion and with pity and whispered:

“My dear one, my handsome boy… My little child, how clever you were born, and how fair!”

“An island,” he read, “is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by water.”

“An island is a piece of land…” she repeated, and this was the first opinion she had uttered with confidence after so many years of silence and emptiness in her thoughts.

And now she had opinions of her own, and at supper she talked with Sasha’s parents about how hard it is for children to study at the gymnasium nowadays, but that a classical education is still better than a modern one, since from the gymnasium every road is open: if you like, become a doctor; if you like, an engineer.

Sasha began going to the gymnasium. His mother went off to her sister in Kharkov and did not come back; his father went off somewhere every day to inspect herds and at times was not at home for three days together, and it seemed to Olenka that Sasha was utterly neglected, that he was unwanted in the house, that he was dying of hunger; and she moved him over to her lodge and settled him there in a little room.

And now half a year has gone by since Sasha came to live in her lodge. Every morning Olenka goes into his room; he is fast asleep, his hand under his cheek, and does not seem to breathe. She is sorry to wake him.

“Sashenka,” she says sadly, “get up, my dear! It’s time for the gymnasium.”

He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, then sits down to tea; he drinks three glasses of tea and eats two large bread rings and half a French loaf with butter. He is not yet quite awake and so is out of sorts.

“You haven’t learned your fable properly, Sashenka,” says Olenka, and looks at him as though she were seeing him off on a long journey. “What a worry you are to me. Do try hard, my dear, study… Mind your teachers.”

“Oh, leave me alone, please!” says Sasha.

Then he walks down the street to the gymnasium, small himself but in a big cap, with a satchel on his back. Behind him, noiselessly, walks Olenka.

“Sashenka-a!” she calls.

He looks around, and she thrusts a date or a caramel into his hand. When they turn into the lane where the gymnasium stands, he feels ashamed that a tall, stout woman is walking behind him; he looks around and says:

“You go home, Aunt; I can get there by myself now.”

She stops and looks after him without blinking until he disappears into the entrance of the gymnasium. Ah, how she loves him! Of her former attachments not one had been so deep; never before had her soul surrendered so wholeheartedly, so unselfishly, and with such delight as now, when the maternal feeling in her was kindling more and more. For this boy who was no kin of hers, for his dimples, for his cap, she would have given her whole life, given it with joy, with tears of tender emotion. Why? But who can say why?

Having seen Sasha off to the gymnasium, she goes back home quietly, so content, so at peace, so full of love; her face, which has grown younger in the last half year, smiles and shines; people who meet her feel pleasure as they look at her and say to her:

“Good morning, darling Olga Semyonovna! How are you, darling?”

“It’s become so hard to study at the gymnasium nowadays,” she tells people at the market. “It’s no joke: yesterday the first class was given a fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation, and a problem… Well, how is a little one to manage?”

And she begins to talk about the teachers, about the lessons, about the textbooks — the very same things that Sasha says about them.

Between two and three they dine together; in the evening they do the lessons together and weep. Putting him to bed, she makes the sign of the cross over him for a long time and whispers a prayer; then, going to bed herself, she dreams of that future, distant and misty, when Sasha, having finished his studies, will become a doctor or an engineer, will have a big house of his own, horses, a carriage, will marry, and children will be born to him… She falls asleep still thinking of the same thing, and tears run down her cheeks from her closed eyes. And the little black cat lies at her side and purrs:

“Purr… purr… purr…”

Suddenly a loud knocking at the wicket gate. Olenka wakes up and holds her breath in fright; her heart is pounding. Half a minute goes by, and again a knock.

“It’s a telegram from Kharkov,” she thinks, beginning to tremble all over. “His mother is sending for Sasha to come to her in Kharkov… O Lord!”

She is in despair; her head, her feet, her hands turn cold, and it seems to her that there is no one in all the world more unhappy than she. But another minute passes, voices are heard: it is the veterinarian coming home from the club.

“Well, thank God!” she thinks.

Little by little the weight lifts from her heart, and she feels light again; she lies down and thinks of Sasha, who is fast asleep in the next room and now and then talks in his sleep:

“I’ll sh-show you! Get out! Don’t fight!”

There is a story, deep in meaning, in the Book of Numbers, of how Balak, the king of Moab, invited Balaam to come to him to curse the people of Israel, who had drawn near to his borders. Balak promised Balaam many gifts for this, and Balaam, tempted, set out for Balak, but on the way he was stopped by an angel, whom the ass saw but Balaam did not. In spite of this halt, Balaam came to Balak and went up with him onto the mountain, where an altar had been prepared with slaughtered bullocks and sheep for the curse. Balak waited for the curse, but instead of cursing, Balaam blessed the people of Israel.

Chapter 23 (11) “And then Balak said to Balaam, What are you doing to me? I took you to curse my enemies, and here you are, blessing?

(12) “And Balaam answered and said, Must I not speak in full what the Lord puts into my mouth?

(13) “And Balak said to him, Come with me to another place… and curse them from there.”

And he took him to another place, where sacrifices had also been prepared.

But again, instead of cursing, Balaam blessed.

So it was at the third place too.

Chapter 24 (10) “And Balak’s anger was kindled against Balaam, and he threw up his hands, and Balak said to Balaam, I called you to curse my enemies, and you are blessing, and this is the third time now.

(11) “So go back to your place; I meant to honor you, but see, the Lord deprives you of honor.”

And so Balaam went away without receiving the gifts, because instead of cursing he had blessed Balak’s enemies.

What happened to Balaam very often happens to true poet-artists. Tempted, whether by Balak’s promises — popularity — or by his own false view, one breathed into him by others, the poet does not see even the angel who stops him and whom the ass sees, and he wants to curse, and lo, he blesses.

This very thing happened to the true poet-artist Chekhov when he wrote this delightful story, “The Darling.”

The author evidently wants to laugh at the “Darling,” a being pitiful by his reasoning (but not by his feeling), who now shares Kukin’s cares about his theater, now is immersed in the interests of the lumber trade, now under the veterinarian’s influence considers the fight against pearl disease the most important business, and now, finally, is absorbed in questions of grammar and the interests of a little schoolboy in a big peaked cap. Kukin’s surname is ridiculous, even his illness is ridiculous, and the telegram announcing his death; the lumber merchant with his sedateness is ridiculous, the veterinarian is ridiculous, the boy is ridiculous too; but the soul of the “Darling,” with its capacity to give itself with all its being to the one it loves, is not ridiculous but holy, astonishing.

I think that in the author’s reasoning, not in his feeling, when he was writing “The Darling,” there hovered a vague notion of the new woman, of her equal rights with man — the developed, learned, independent woman, working for the good of society no worse than a man, if not better — of that very woman who has raised the woman question and sustains it; and, having begun to write “The Darling,” he wanted to show what a woman ought not to be. The Balak of public opinion invited Chekhov to curse the weak, submissive, undeveloped woman devoted to man, and Chekhov went up the mountain, and the bullocks and rams were laid out, but, having begun to speak, the poet blessed what he had wanted to curse. I, at least, for all the marvelous, merry comedy of the whole work, cannot read some passages of this astonishing story without tears. I am moved by the account of how she loves Kukin with complete self-renunciation, and all that Kukin loves, and likewise the lumber merchant, and likewise the veterinarian, and still more by the account of how she suffers when she is left alone and has no one to love, and how at last, with all the strength of both womanly and maternal feeling (which she had not experienced directly), she gave herself up to boundless love for the man-to-be, the little schoolboy in the big cap.

The author makes her love the ridiculous Kukin, the insignificant lumber merchant, and the unpleasant veterinarian, but love is no less holy whether its object is Kukin or Spinoza, Pascal, Schiller, and whether its objects change as quickly as with the “Darling,” or the object is one for the whole of life.

Once, long ago, I happened to read in “New Times” a fine column by Mr. Ata about women. In this column the author expressed a remarkably intelligent and deep thought about women. “Women,” he says, “try to prove to us that they can do everything that we men do. I not only do not dispute this,” the author says, “but am ready to agree that women can do everything that men do, and perhaps even better; but the trouble is that men cannot do anything that comes close to what women can do.”

Yes, this is undoubtedly so, and it concerns not only the bearing, nursing, and early upbringing of children; men cannot do that highest, best work, the work that brings a human being nearest to God — the work of love, of giving yourself wholly to the one you love — which good women have done, do, and will do so well and so naturally. What would become of the world, what would become of us men, if women did not have this quality and did not show it? We can do without women doctors, telegraph operators, lawyers, scientists, authoresses, but without mothers, helpers, companions, comforters, who love in a man all that is best in him and by imperceptible suggestion call forth and sustain all that is best in him — without such women it would be hard to live in this world. Christ would have had no Mary and Magdalene, Francis of Assisi no Clare; the Decembrists would have had no wives with them at hard labor, the Doukhobors would not have had their wives, who did not hold their husbands back but sustained them in their martyrdom for the truth; there would not be the thousands and thousands of unknown women, the very best, as everything unknown is, the comforters of drunken, weak, dissolute people, of those who need the comfort of love more than anyone. In this love, whether it is turned toward Kukin or toward Christ, lies the chief, the great, the irreplaceable strength of woman.

An astonishing misunderstanding, this whole so-called woman question, which, as must happen with every vulgarity, has gripped the majority of women and even of men!

“Woman wants to perfect herself” — what could be more legitimate and more just than that?

But woman’s work, by her very calling, is different from man’s. And so the ideal of woman’s perfection cannot be the same as the ideal of man’s perfection. Let us grant that we do not know what this ideal consists in; in any case, it is beyond doubt that it is not the ideal of man’s perfection. And meanwhile all that ridiculous and unkind activity of the fashionable women’s movement, which now so confuses women, is directed at present toward attaining this masculine ideal.

I fear that Chekhov, when he was writing “The Darling,” was under the influence of this misunderstanding.

Like Balaam, he intended to curse, but the god of poetry forbade him and commanded him to bless, and he blessed, and unintentionally clothed this dear being in such a marvelous light that it will remain forever a model of what a woman can be in order to be happy herself and to make happy those with whom fate brings her together.

This story is so fine because it came about unconsciously.

I was learning to ride a bicycle in a riding hall where divisions are reviewed. At the other end of the hall a lady was learning to ride. I thought about how not to get in this lady’s way and began to watch her. And, watching her, I unintentionally began to come closer and closer to her, and although she, noticing the danger, hurried to get away, I ran into her and knocked her down; that is, I did exactly the opposite of what I wanted, only because I had directed concentrated attention at her.

The same thing, only the reverse, happened to Chekhov: he wanted to knock the Darling down, and he turned a poet’s concentrated attention on her, and exalted her.