The darling / Душечка. Сборник рассказов

“There are tears in your eyes,” says Nikolay Timofeitch in dismay. “Why is that? Come to the corset department, I’ll screen you – it looks awkward.”

With a forced smile and exaggeratedly free and easy manner, the shopman rapidly conducts Polinka to the corset department and conceals her from the public eye behind a high pyramid of boxes.

“What sort of corset may I show you?” he asks aloud, whispering immediately: “Wipe your eyes!”

“I want … I want … size forty-eight centimetres. Only she wanted one, lined … with real whalebone … I must talk to you, Nikolay Timofeitch. Come to-day!”

“Talk? What about? There’s nothing to talk about.” “You are the only person who … cares about me, and I’ve no one to talk to but you.”

“These are not reed or steel, but real whalebone … What is there for us to talk about? It’s no use talking … You are going for a walk with him to-day, I suppose?”

“Yes; I … I am.”

“Then what’s the use of talking? Talk won’t help … You are in love, aren’t you?”

“Yes …” Polinka whispers hesitatingly, and big tears gush from her eyes.

“What is there to say?” mutters Nikolay Timofeitch, shrugging his shoulders nervously and turning pale. “There’s no need of talk … Wipe your eyes, that’s all. I … I ask for nothing.”

At that moment a tall, lanky shopman comes up to the pyramid of boxes, and says to his customer:

“Let me show you some good elastic garters that do not impede the circulation, they are certified by medical authorities …”

Nikolay Timofeitch screens Polinka, and, trying to conceal her emotion and his own, wrinkles his face into a smile and says aloud:

“There are two kinds of lace, madam: cotton and silk! Oriental, English, Valenciennes, crochet, torchon, are cotton. And rococo, soutache, Cambray, are silk … For God’s sake, wipe your eyes! They’re coming this way!”

And seeing that her tears are still gushing he goes on louder than ever:

“Spanish, rococo, soutache, Cambray … stockings, thread, cotton, silk …”

ANYUTA

In the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro, zealously conning his Anatomy lesson. His mouth was dry and his forehead perspiring from the unceasing effort to learn it by heart.

In the window, covered by patterns of frost, on a stool the girl sat who shared his room – Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very pale with mild grey eyes. Sitting with bent back she was busy embroidering with red thread the collar of a man’s shirt. She was working against time … The clock in the passage drowsily struck two, yet the little room had not been put to rights for the morning. Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, books, clothes, a big filthy slop-pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor – all seemed as though purposely jumbled together in one confusion …

“The right lung consists of three parts …” Klotchkov repeated. “Boundaries! Upper part on anterior wall of thorax reaches the fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib … behind to the spina scapulae.[25 - spina scapulae – (Latin) shoulder-blade]

Klotchkov raised his eyes to the ceiling, striving to visualise what he had just read. Unable to form a clear picture of it, he began feeling his upper ribs through his waistcoat.

“These ribs are like the keys of a piano,” he said. “One must familiarise oneself with them somehow, if one is not to get muddled over them. One must study them in the skeleton and the living body … I say, Anyuta, let me pick them out.”

Anyuta put down her sewing, took off her blouse, and straightened herself up. Klotchkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began counting her ribs.

“H’m! … One can’t feel the first rib; it’s behind the shoulder-blade … This must be the second rib … Yes … this is the third … this is the fourth … H’m! … yes … Why are you wriggling?”

“Your fingers are cold!”

“Come, come … it won’t kill you. Don’t twist about. That must be the third rib, then … this is the fourth … You look such a skinny thing, and yet one can hardly feel your ribs. That’s the second … that’s the third … Oh, this is muddling, and one can’t see it clearly … I must draw it … Where’s my crayon?”