The Little Angel

eating a boy as thin as a match with a rolling pin. Below in a large scrawling hand would be written the legend: “Beg forgiveness, puppy!” and the reply, “Hell no!”

Before Christmas, Sashka was expelled from school, and when his mother tried to thrash him, he bit her finger. This action gave him his liberty. He stopped washing in the morning, ran about all day bullying the other boys, and had just one fear — hunger, for his mother entirely gave up feeding him, and he came to depend upon the pieces of bread and potatoes which his father secreted for him. In these conditions Sashka found existence tolerable.

One Friday (it was Christmas Eve) he had been playing with the other boys, until they had dispersed to their homes, followed by the squeak of the rusty frozen wicket gate as it closed behind the last of them. It was already growing dark, and a grey snowy mist was traveling up from the country, along a dark alley; in a low black building, which stood fronting the end of the alley, a lamp was burning with a reddish, unblinking light. The frost had become more intense, and when Sashka reached the circle of light cast by the lamp, he saw that fine dry flakes of snow were floating slowly on the air. It was high time to be getting home.

“Where have you been knocking about all night, puppy?” exclaimed his mother, doubling her fist, without, however, striking. Her sleeves were turned up, exposing her fat white arms. Beads of perspiration stood on her forehead, almost devoid of eyebrows. As Sashka passed by her he recognized the familiar smell of vodka. His mother scratched her head with the short dirty nail of her thick forefinger, and since it was no good scolding, she merely spat, and cried: “Statisticians! that’s what they are!”

Sashka shuffled contemptuously, and went behind the partition, from which came  the heavy breathing of his father, Ivan Savvich, who was in a chronic state of shivering, and was now trying to warm himself by sitting on the heated bench of the stove with his hands under him, palms downwards.

“Sashka! the Svechnikovs have invited you to the Christmas tree. The housemaid came,” he whispered.

“You’re pulling my leg!” said Sashka with incredulity.

“It’s true! The old witch purposely didn’t tell you, but she’s mended your jacket all the same.”

“Non—sense,” Sashka, replied, still more surprised.

The Svechnikovs were rich people, who had put him into the grammar school, and after his expulsion had banned him from their house.

His father swore once more that he was telling the truth, and Sashka fell deep into thought.

“Well then, move, shift a bit,” he said to his father, as he leapt upon the short bench, adding: “I won’t go to those devils. I’ll be too much for them if I turn up. Depraved boy,” drawled Sashka in imitation of his patrons, “They’re no good themselves, the smug-faced prigs!”

“Oh! Sashka, Sashka,” his father complained, sitting hunched up with cold, “you’ll come to a bad end.”

“What about yourself, then?” was Sashka’s rude rejoinder. “Better shut up. Afraid of the old woman. You wimp!”

His father sat on in silence and shivered. A faint light found its way through a broad chink at the top, where the partition failed to meet the ceiling by a quarter of an inch, and lay in a bright patch upon his high forehead, beneath which the deep cavities of his eyes showed black. At one time Ivan Savvich used to drink heavily, and his wife feared and hated him. But when he began to develop unmistakable signs of consumption, and could drink no longer, she took to vodka in her turn. Then she avenged herself for all she had suffered at the hands of that tall narrow-chested man, who used incomprehensible words, had lost his place through disobedience and drunkenness, and who brought home with him just such long-haired, debauched and conceited fellows as himself.

Unlike her husband, the more Feoktista Petrovna drank, the healthier she became, and the harder her fists became. Now she said what she pleased, brought men and women to the house just as she chose, and sang noisy songs with them, while he lay silent behind the partition huddled up in perpetual cold, meditating on the injustice and sorrow of human life. To everyone with whom she talked, she complained that she had no enemies in the world like her husband and son, they were stuck-up statisticians!

For the space of an hour his mother kept drumming into Sashka’s ears:

“But I say you shall go,” punctuating each word with a heavy blow on the table, which made the tumblers, placed on it after washing, jump and rattle again.

“But I say I won’t!” Sashka replied coolly, dragging down the corners of his mouth as he tried to show his teeth — a habit which at school had earned him the nickname of Wolfkin.

“I’ll thrash you, won’t I just!” cried his mother.

“Go on then! thrash away!”

But Feoktista Petrovna knew that she could no longer strike her son now that he had begun to retaliate by biting, and that if she drove him into the street he would go off larking, and sooner get frost-bitten than go to the Svechnikovs, so she appealed to her husband’s authority.

“Calls himself a father, and can’t protect the mother from insult!”

“Really, Sashka, go. Why are you so obstinate?” he retorted from the bench. “Perhaps they’ll take you up again. They’re kind people.” Sashka just laughed in an insulting manner.

His father, long ago, before Sashka was born, had been tutor at the Svechnikovs’, and had ever since looked on them as the best people in the world. At that time he had a position in the statistical office of the Zemstvo*, and had not yet taken to drink. Eventually he was forced to marry his landlady’s daughter, whom he had made pregnant. From then on he severed his connection with the Svechnikovs, and took to drink. Indeed, he let himself go to such an extent that he was several times picked up drunk in the streets and taken to the police station. But the Svechnikovs did not cease to assist him with money, and Feoktista Petrovna, although she hated them, together with books and everything connected with her husband’s past, still valued their acquaintance, and was in the habit of boasting about it.

“Perhaps you might bring something for me too from the Christmas tree,” continued his father. He was using guile to induce his son to go, and Sashka knew it, and despised his father for his weakness and want of straightforwardness; though he really did want to bring back something for the poor sickly old man, who had for a long time been without even good tobacco.

“All right!” he blurted out; “give me my jacket. Have you put the buttons on? Of course not! I know you too well!”

II

The children had not yet been admitted to the drawing-room, where the Christmas tree stood, but remained chattering in the nursery. Sashka, with lofty superciliousness, stood listening to their naive talk, and fingering in his trouser pockets the broken cigarettes which he had managed to filch from his host’s study. At that moment, the youngest of the Svechnikovs, Kolya, came up to him and stood motionless before him, a look of surprise on his face, his toes turned in, and a finger stuck in the corner of his pouting mouth. Six months ago, at the insistence of his relatives, he had given up this bad habit of putting his finger in his mouth, but he could not quite stop altogether. He had blond hair cut in a fringe and falling in ringlets on his shoulders, and blue, wondering eyes; in fact, he was just the kind of boy in appearance that Sashka particularly loved to bully.

“Are ‘oo weally a naughty boy?” he inquired of Sashka. “Miss said ‘oo was. I’m a dood boy.”

“You sure are!” replied Sashka, considering the other’s short velvet trousers and great turn-down collars.

“Would ‘oo like to have a dun? Here!” and he pointed a little pop-gun with a cork tied to it at Sashka. The Wolfkin took the gun, pressed down the spring, and, aiming at the nose of the unsuspecting Kolya, pulled the trigger. The cork struck his nose, and rebounding, hung by the string. Kolya’s blue eyes opened wider than ever, and filled with tears. Transferring his finger from his mouth to his reddening nose he blinked his long eyelashes and whispered:

“Bad, bad boy!”

A young lady of striking appearance, with her hair arranged in the simplest and the most becoming fashion, now entered the nursery. She was the sister of the lady of the house, the same one to whom Sashka’s father had formerly given lessons.

“Here’s the boy,” said she, pointing out Sashka to the bald-headed man who accompanied her. “Bow, Sashka, you shouldn’t be so rude!”

But Sashka would bow neither to her, nor to her companion of the bald head. She little suspected how much he knew. But in fact Sashka did know that his miserable father had loved her, and that she had married another; and, though this had taken place subsequent to his father’s marriage, Sashka could not bring himself to forgive what seemed to him like treachery.

“Takes after his father!” sighed Sofia Dmitriyevna. “Couldn’t you do something for him, Plutov Mikhailovich? My husband says that a commercial school would suit him better than the grammar school. Sashka, would you like to go to a technical school?”

“No!” replied Sashka curtly — he had caught the offensive word ‘husband.’

“Do you want to be a shepherd, then?” asked the gentleman.

“Not likely! “ said Sashka, in an offended tone.

“What then?”

Sashka did not know what he wanted to be, but upon reflection replied: “Well, it’s all the same to me, I could even be a shepherd, I suppose.”

The bald-headed gentleman regarded the strange boy with a look of perplexity. When his eyes had traveled up from his patched boots to his face, Sashka put out his tongue and quickly drew it back again, so that Sofia Dmitriyevna did not notice anything, while the old gentleman displayed an irritation that she could not understand.

“I wouldn’t mind going to a commercial school,” suggested Sashka bashfully.

The lady was overjoyed at Sashka’s decision, and meditated with a sigh on the beneficial influence exercised by an old love.

“I don’t know whether there’ll be a vacancy,” remarked the old man dryly, avoiding looking at Sashka and smoothing down the ridge of hair which stuck up on the back of his head. “However, we shall see.”

Meanwhile the children were getting noisy, and waiting impatiently for the Christmas tree. The incident with the pop-gun, perpetrated by  a boy who commanded respect both for his stature and for his reputation for naughtiness, found imitators, and many a little button of a nose was made red. The little girls almost split their sides with laughter, as their little beaux, with manly contempt of fear and pain but all the same wincing in suspense, received the impact of the cork.

At length the doors were opened, and a voice said: “Come in, children; gently, not so fast!” Opening their little eyes wide, and holding their breath in anticipation, the children filed into the brightly illumined drawing-room in orderly pairs, and quietly walked round the glittering tree. It cast a strong, shadowless light on their eager faces, with rounded eyes and mouths. For a minute there reigned a silence of profound enchantment, which all at once broke out into a chorus of delighted exclamation. One of the little girls, unable to restrain her delight, kept dancing up and down on the spot, her little tress braided with blue ribbon beating rhythmically against her shoulders. Sashka remained morose and gloomy — something evil was working in his little wounded breast. The tree blinded him with its red, shriekingly insolent glitter of countless candles. It was foreign, hostile to him, even as the crowd of smart, pretty children which surrounded it. He would have liked to give it a shove, and topple it over on their shining heads. It seemed as though some iron hand were gripping his heart, and wringing out of it every drop of blood. He crept behind the piano, and sat down there in a corner unconsciously crumpling to pieces in his pocket the last of the cigarettes, and thinking that though he had a father and mother and a home, he might as well have none, and nowhere to go to. He tried to imagine his little penknife, which he had acquired by a swap not long ago and was very fond of; but his knife all at once seemed to him very poor, with its ground-down blade and only half of a yellow haft. Tomorrow he would smash it up, and then he would have nothing left at all!

But suddenly Sashka’s narrow eyes g1eamed with astonishment, and his face immediately resumed its ordinary expression of audacity and self-confidence. On the side of the tree turned towards him — which was the back of it, and less brightly illumined than the other side — he discovered something such that had never come within the circle of his existence, and without which all his surroundings appeared as empty as though peopled by persons without life. It was a little angel in wax carelessly hung in the thickest of the dark boughs, and looking as if it were floating in the air. His transparent dragonfly wings trembled in the light, and he seemed altogether alive and ready to fly away. The rosy fingers of his exquisitely formed hands were stretched upwards, and from his head there floated just such locks as Kolya’s. But there was something here that was missing from Kolya’s face, and from all other faces and things. The face of the little angel did not shine with joy, nor was it clouded by grief; but there lay on it the impress of another feeling, not explainable in words, nor defined by thought, but attainabdrawing the little angel to his bosom, he kept his shining eyes on the hostess, with a quiet, tender smile which died away in a feeling of unearthly bliss. It seemed, when the dainty wings of the little angel touched Sashka’s sunken breast, as if he experienced something so blissful, so bright, the like of which had never before been experienced in this sorrowful, sinful, suffering world.

“A-h-h!” he sighed once more as the little angel’s wings touched him. And at the shining of his face the absurdly decorated and insolently growing tree seemed to be extinguished, and the grey-haired, portly dame smiled joyfully, and the parchment-like face of the bald-headed gentleman twitched, and the children fell into a vivid silence as though touched by a breath of human happiness.

For one short moment all observed a mysterious likeness between the awkward boy who had outgrown his clothes, and the facial features of the little angel, spiritualized by the hand of an unknown artist.

But the next moment the picture was entirely changed. Crouching like a panther preparing to spring, Sashka surveyed the surrounding company, on the lookout for someone who might dare wrest his little angel from him.

“I’m going home,” he said in a dull voice, noticing a path of escape through the crowd, “home to Father.”

III

His mother was asleep, worn out by a full day’s work and vodka-drinking. In the little room behind the partition stood a small cooking-lamp burning on the table. Its feeble yellow light, with difficulty penetrating the sooty glass, threw a strange shadow over the faces of Sashka and his father.

“Isn’t it pretty?” asked Sashka, in a whisper, holding the little angel at a distance from his father, so as not to allow him to touch it.

“Yes, there’s something most remarkable about him,” whispered the father, gazing thoughtfully at the toy. And his face expressed the same concentrated attention and delight as Sashka’s.

“Look, he’s going to fly.”

“I see it too,” replied Sashka in an ecstasy. “You think I’m blind? But look at his little wings! Hey! don’t touch! “

The father withdrew his hand, and with troubled eyes studied the details of the little angel, while Sashka whispered with the air of a pedagogue:

“Father, what a bad habit you have of touching everything! You might break it.”

The shadows of two grotesque, motionless heads bending towards one another, one big and shaggy, the other small and round, fell upon the wall.

Within the big head strange torturing thoughts, though at the same time full of delight, were seething. His eyes watched the little angel unblinkingly, and under his steadfast gaze it seemed to grow larger and brighter, its wings trembling with a noiseless trepidation, and all the surroundings — the timber-built, soot-stained wall, the dirty table, Sashka — everything became fused into one level grey mass without light or shade. It seemed to the broken man that he heard a pitying voice from the world of wonders, where once he had dwelt, and from which he had been cast out forever. There they knew nothing of dirt, of weary quarrelling, of the blindly cruel strife of egotism, there they knew nothing of the tortures of a man arrested on the streets with callous laughter, and beaten by the rough hand of the night-watchman. There everything is pure, joyful, bright. And all this purity found asylum in the soul of her whom he loved more than life, and lost — to keep his hold on his own useless life. With the smell of wax, which emanated from the toy, was mingled a subtle aroma, and it seemed to the broken man that her dear fingers had touched the angel, those fingers which he would gladly have caressed in one long kiss, till death should close his lips forever. This was why the little toy was so beautiful, this was why there was in it something specially attractive, which defied description. The little angel had descended from that heaven which her soul was to him, and had brought a ray of light into the damp room, steeped in sulphurous fumes, and to the dark soul of the man from whom had been taken all: love, and happiness, and life.

On a level with the eyes of the man who had lived his life, sparkled the eyes of the boy who was just beginning his, and embraced the little angel in their caress. For them present and future had disappeared: the ever-sorrowful, pathetic father, the rough, unbearable mother, the black darkness of insults, of cruelty, of humiliations, and of spiteful grief. Sashka’s thoughts were formless and nebulous, but because of that they moved his agitated soul all the more deeply. Everything that is good and bright in the world, all profound grief, and the hope of a soul that yearns for God — the little angel absorbed them all into himself, and that was why he glowed with such a soft divine radiance, that was why his little dragonfly wings trembled with a noiseless trepidation.

The father and son did not look at one another: their sick hearts grieved, wept, and rejoiced apart. But there was something in their thoughts which fused their hearts, and annihilated that bottomless abyss which separates man from man and makes him so lonely, unhappy and weak. The father, with an unconscious motion, put his arm around the neck of his son, and the son’s head rested equally without conscious volition upon his father’s consumptive chest.

“Did she give it to you?” whispered the father, without taking his eyes off the little angel.

At any other time Sashka would have replied with a rude negation, but now the only reply possible resounded within his soul by itself, and he calmly pronounced the pious fib:

“Who else? of course she did.”

The father made no reply, and Sashka relapsed into silence. Something grated in the adjoining room, then clicked, and then was silent for a moment, and then noisily and hurriedly the clock struck “One, two, three.”

“Sashka, do you ever dream?” asked the father in a meditative tone.

“No! Oh, yes,” he admitted, “once I had one where I fell off the roof. We were climbing after pigeons, and I fell.”

“I always dream. Strange things, dreams. You see the whole past, you love and suffer as if it were real.”

Again he was silent, and Sashka felt the arm tremble as it rested on his neck. The trembling and pressure of his father’s arm became stronger and stronger, and the sensitive silence of the night was all at once broken by the pitiful sobbing sound of suppressed weeping. Sashka sternly puckered his brow, and cautiously — so as not to disturb the heavy trembling arm — wiped away a tear from his eyes. It was so strange to see a big old man crying.

“Ah! Sashka, Sashka,” sobbed his father, “what does it all mean?”

“Why, what’s the matter?” whispered Sashka sternly. “You’re crying just like a little boy.”

“Well, I won’t then,” said the father, excusing himself with a piteous smile. “What’s the point?”

Feoktista Petrovna turned on her bed. She sighed, cleared her throat, and mumbled incoherent sounds in a loud and strangely persistent manner.

It was time to go to bed. But before doing so the little angel must be put somewhere for the night. He could not be left on the floor, so he was hung up by his string, which was fastened to the flue of the stove. There it stood out silhouetted  against the white Dutch-tiles. So they could both see him, Sashka and his father.

Hurriedly throwing the various rags on which he was in the habit of sleeping into a corner, Sashka lay down on his back, in order to look at the little angel again as quickly as possible.

“Why don’t you undress?” asked his father as he shivered and wrapped himself up in his tattered blanket, and arranged his clothes, which he had thrown over his feet.

“What’s the point? I’ll soon be up again.”

Sashka wished to add that he did not want to go to sleep at all, but he had no time to do so, since he fell asleep as suddenly as though he had sunk to the bottom of a deep swift river.

His father presently fell asleep also. And gentle sleep and restfulness lay upon the weary face of the man who had lived his life, and upon the brave face of the little man who was just beginning his.

But the little angel hanging by the hot stove began to melt. The lamp, which had been left burning at Sashka’s insistence, filled the room with the smell of kerosene, and through its smoked glass threw a melancholy light upon a scene of gradual dissolution. The little angel seemed to stir. Over his rosy fingers rolled thick drops which fell on the bench. To the smell of kerosene was added the stifling scent of melting wax. The little angel gave a tremble, as though on the point of flight, and fell with a soft thud upon the hot flags.

An inquisitive cockroach singed its wings as it ran round the formless lump of melted wax, climbed up the dragonfly wings, and twitching its feelers went on its way.

Through the curtained window the grey-blue light of coming day crept in, and the chilly water-carrier was already making a noise in the courtyard with his iron scoop.

This story was translated by W.H. Lowe and appeared in a collection of stories of the same name in 1916, published by Alfred A. Knopf (New York).