The Cooks Wedding and Other Stories | Page 6

and smiles,
though she does not know why. The dusk of evening caresses her eyes
that will hardly keep open, and promises her sound sleep soon. In the
evening visitors come.
"Varka, set the samovar!" shouts her mistress. The samovar is a little
one, and before the visitors have drunk all the tea they want, she has to
heat it five times. After tea Varka stands for a whole hour on the same
spot, looking at the visitors, and waiting for orders.
"Varka, run and buy three bottles of beer!"
She starts off, and tries to run as quickly as she can, to drive away
sleep.
"Varka, fetch some vodka! Varka, where's the corkscrew? Varka, clean
a herring!"
But now, at last, the visitors have gone; the lights are put out, the
master and mistress go to bed.
"Varka, rock the baby!" she hears the last order.
The cricket churrs in the stove; the green patch on the ceiling and the
shadows from the trousers and the baby-clothes force themselves on
Varka's half-opened eyes again, wink at her and cloud her mind.
"Hush-a-bye, my baby wee," she murmurs, "and I will sing a song to
thee."
And the baby screams, and is worn out with screaming. Again Varka
sees the muddy high road, the people with wallets, her mother Pelageya,
her father Yefim. She understands everything, she recognises everyone,
but through her half sleep she cannot understand the force which binds
her, hand and foot, weighs upon her, and prevents her from living. She
looks round, searches for that force that she may escape from it, but she

cannot find it. At last, tired to death, she does her very utmost, strains
her eyes, looks up at the flickering green patch, and listening to the
screaming, finds the foe who will not let her live.
That foe is the baby.
She laughs. It seems strange to her that she has failed to grasp such a
simple thing before. The green patch, the shadows, and the cricket
seem to laugh and wonder too.
The hallucination takes possession of Varka. She gets up from her stool,
and with a broad smile on her face and wide unblinking eyes, she walks
up and down the room. She feels pleased and tickled at the thought that
she will be rid directly of the baby that binds her hand and foot. . . . Kill
the baby and then sleep, sleep, sleep. . . .
Laughing and winking and shaking her fingers at the green patch,
Varka steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby. When she has
strangled him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughs with delight
that she can sleep, and in a minute is sleeping as sound as the dead.
CHILDREN
PAPA and mamma and Aunt Nadya are not at home. They have gone
to a christening party at the house of that old officer who rides on a
little grey horse. While waiting for them to come home, Grisha, Anya,
Alyosha, Sonya, and the cook's son, Andrey, are sitting at the table in
the dining-room, playing at loto. To tell the truth, it is bedtime, but how
can one go to sleep without hearing from mamma what the baby was
like at the christening, and what they had for supper? The table, lighted
by a hanging lamp, is dotted with numbers, nutshells, scraps of paper,
and little bits of glass. Two cards lie in front of each player, and a heap
of bits of glass for covering the numbers. In the middle of the table is a
white saucer with five kopecks in it. Beside the saucer, a half-eaten
apple, a pair of scissors, and a plate on which they have been told to put
their nutshells. The children are playing for money. The stake is a
kopeck. The rule is: if anyone cheats, he is turned out at once. There is
no one in the dining-room but the players, and nurse, Agafya Ivanovna,
is in the kitchen, showing the cook how to cut a pattern, while their
elder brother, Vasya, a schoolboy in the fifth class, is lying on the sofa
in the drawing-room, feeling bored.
They are playing with zest. The greatest excitement is expressed on the
face of Grisha. He is a small boy of nine, with a head cropped so that

the bare skin shows through, chubby cheeks, and thick lips like a
negro's. He is already in the preparatory class, and so is regarded as
grown up, and the cleverest. He is playing entirely for the sake of the
money. If there had been no kopecks in the saucer, he would have been
asleep long ago. His brown eyes stray uneasily and jealously over the
other players' cards. The fear that he may not