VIII
The rehearsal ended. People were going away. The actors were joking, playing on words: Mercia-Commercia. Lara-Larsky was telling Boev meaningly to come “there.” I caught up with Valerianov in one of the alleys and, scarcely able to keep pace with his long strides, I said:
“Victor Victorovitch … I want very much to ask you for some money … if only a little.”
He stopped and seemed quite stupefied.
“What? What money? Why money? For whom?”
I began to explain my position to him, but, without hearing me to the end, he turned his back on me and went on. Then suddenly he stopped and called out:
“I say, you there … what’s your name? … Vassiliev. You’d better go to that man, your proprietor, and tell him to come and enquire for me here. I shall remain at the box-office for another half-hour. I’ll have a word with him.”
I didn’t go to the hotel, I flew to it. The Ukrainian listened with gloomy distrust; however, he put on his brown jacket and crawled slowly to the theatre. I waited for him. A quarter of an hour later he returned. His face was like a stormy cloud, and a bundle of theatre passes was sticking out of his right hand. He shoved them right under my nose and said in a muffled bass:
“There you are! I thought he’d give me coins and he gives me bits of paper. What good are they to me?”
I stood confused. However, the bits of paper had a certain utility. After long exhortations, the proprietor consented to share my belongings: he kept as a deposit my beautiful new English leather portmanteau and I took my underclothes, my passport and, what was more precious to me than anything else, my travelling notebooks. By way of goodbye, the Ukrainian asked me:
“What—are you, too, going to play the fool over there?”
“Yes, I, too,” I said with dignity.
“Ho, ho, you be careful. As soon as I set eyes on you on the stage, I’ll shout out: ‘What about my twenty roubles?’ ”
For the next three days, I didn’t venture to trouble Valerianov, and slept on the little green bench with my small parcel of underclothes under my head as a pillow. Two nights, thank God, were warm; I even felt, as I lay on the bench, a dry heat mounting up from the pavement that had been well warmed during the day. But on the third night there was a fine, continuous rain and I took shelter on a doorstep and was unable to sleep till the morning. The town gardens were open at eight. I stole in behind the scenes, lay down on an old curtain, and slept soundly for two hours. Of course I came under Samoilenko’s eyes and he, at great length and stingingly, informed me that a theatre was the temple of art and not at all a dormitory or a boudoir or a dosshouse. Then I decided to overtake the manager again in the alley and ask him for some money, however little, as I had nowhere to sleep.
“I beg your pardon,” he said waving his arms apart, “what has it got to do with me? You’re not a child, are you? And in any case I’m not your nurse.”
I kept silent. His half-closed eyes wandered over the bright, sunny sand of the footpath and then he said thoughtfully:
“Suppose … look here … suppose you spend the nights in the theatre. I suggested that to the night watch, but the fool was afraid.”
I thanked him.
“But only on one condition. No smoking in the theatre. If you want to smoke, go out into the gardens.”
After that I was guaranteed a sleeping place under a roof. Sometimes, in the daytime, I would go some three miles along the river and wash my clothes in a modest little corner and dry them on the branches of the willows. My linen was of great help to me. From time to time I would go to the bazaar and sell there a shirt or something. On the twenty or thirty kopecks acquired in this way I would feed myself for two whole days. Things were taking visibly a favourable turn for me. Once I even managed, in a happy moment, to get a rouble out of Valerianov and immediately I dispatched a telegram to Ilia:
“Dying from hunger. Wire money C. Theatre.—Leontovitch.”