Olenka, the daughter of retired collegiate assessor Plemennikov, was sitting on the porch in her yard, thinking. It was hot and pesky, and it was so pleasant to think that soon the evening was over. Dark clouds of rain were coming from the east and occasionally sipping moisture from there.
Among the courtyard stood Cookin, an entrepreneur and owner of the entertainment garden "Tivoli", who immediately quartered in the yard, in the wing, and looked at the sky.
- Again! - He spoke with despair. - It would rain again! Every day it rains, every day it rains - on purpose! It is a noose! This is ruin! Every day there are terrible losses!
He splashed his hands and continued to address Olenka:
- Here you are, Olga Semenovna, our life. At least cry! You work, try, suffer, do not sleep at night, think everything, as if it were better - so what? On the one hand, the audience is ignorant and wild. I'm giving her the best operetta, a fairy tale, great verse takers, but does she need it? Does she understand anything about it? She needs a showdown! Serve her vulgarity! On the other hand, look at the weather. It rains almost every night. As it has charged since May 10th, so then all May and June are terrible! The audience does not go, but I pay for rent, right? Do I pay the artists?
The next day, the clouds were coming again, and Cookin spoke with hysterical laughter:
- Well? And let it go! At least let the whole garden flood me, even though I myself! So that I wouldn't be happy neither in this nor in the other world! Let the artists sue me! What is the trial? Even if it's a hard labor in Siberia! At least to the scaffold! Ha-ha-ha-ha!
And on the third day the same ... Olenka listened to Cookin silently, seriously, and, it happened, tears appeared before her eyes. Finally, Cookin's misfortunes touched her, she fell in love with him. He was short, skinny, with a yellow face, with combed temples, spoke with a liquid tenor, and when he spoke, he spoke, he curled his mouth; and on his face was always written despair, but still he excited in her a real, deep feeling. She loved someone all the time and couldn't do without it. Previously, she loved her father, who now sat sick, in a dark room, in a chair, and breathed heavily; loved her aunt, who sometimes, once every two years, came from Bryansk; and even earlier, when she studied at a gymnasium, loved her French teacher. It was a quiet, good-natured, pitiful young lady with a gentle, gentle look, very healthy. Looking at her full pink cheeks, her soft white neck with a dark mole, at the kind naive smile that was on her face when she listened to something pleasant, men thought: "Yes, wow..." and smiled too, and the guest ladies couldn't help but grab her hand in the middle of a conversation and not talk in a burst of pleasure:
- Sweetheart!
The house in which she lived since her birthday and which was written in her will was on the outskirts of the city, in the Gypsy Slobodka, near the garden "Tivoli", in the evenings and at night she could hear the music playing in the garden, how burst into flames with the crack of a rocket, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin who was at war with his destiny and taking the attack of his main enemy - an indifferent audience; Her heart stopped sweetly, she did not want to sleep, and when he returned home at dawn, she quietly knocked at the window from her bedroom and, showing him through the curtains only the face and one shoulder, gently smiled ...
He proposed, and they got married. And when he saw her neck and full of healthy shoulders, he splashed his hands and spoke:
- Sweetheart!
He was happy, but since it rained on the day of the wedding and then at night, his face did not go out of despair. After the wedding, they lived well. She sat in his cash register, watched the order in the garden, wrote down the costs, gave out salaries, and her pink cheeks, cute, naive, like a glow smile flashed through the window of the register, behind the scenes, in the buffet. And she has already told her friends that the most wonderful, most important and necessary thing in the world - is the theater and that to get a true pleasure and become educated and humane can only be in the theater.
- But does the public understand this? - she said. - She needs a showdown! Yesterday we had "Faust inside out", and almost all the boxes were empty, and if Vanichka and I had staged some vulgarity, believe me, the theater would have been full. Tomorrow Vanichka and I are putting "Orpheus in Hell", come.
And what he said about the theater and Cookin's actors, so did she. The audience, like him, she despised for indifference to art and ignorance, in rehearsals intervened, corrected the actors, watched over the behavior of musicians, and when the local newspaper disapproved of the theater, she cried and then went to the editorial office to explain.
Actors loved her and called her "Vanichka and I" and "sweetheart", she felt sorry for them and gave them a little loan, and if, incidentally, she was deceived, she just quietly cried, but not complained to her husband.
To be continued...