Short Fiction, Aleksandr Kuprin [the speed reading book txt] 📗

his hand.⁠ ⁠… The most critical moment had arrived. The fishermen stood each on the prow of his boat, all half-naked, bending forward in impatient expectation.

The priest again raised his voice and the chorus joined in harmoniously and joyfully: “On the river Jordan.” At last, the cross rose for the third time above the crowd, and suddenly, sent flying by the priest’s hand, it described a shining arc in the air and fell into the sea with a splash.

At the same moment dozens of strong, muscular bodies leaped from the boats into the sea, head first, shouting and splashing the water. Three, four seconds passed. The empty boats rocked and bowed; the churned-up water pitched and tossed.⁠ ⁠… Then one after the other, shaking, snorting heads, with hair falling over their eyes, began to appear above the water. The last one to emerge was young Yani Lipiadi. He held the cross in his hand.

The gay Italians could not remain serious at the sight of this extraordinary, half-sportlike, half-religious rite, hallowed by immemorial antiquity. They met the winner with such noisy applause that even the kindly priest shook his head disapprovingly:

“Very unseemly.⁠ ⁠… Very unseemly, indeed.⁠ ⁠… Is this a theatrical performance for them?”

The snow sparkled dazzlingly, the blue water caressed the eye, the sun flooded with its gold the bay, the hills, and the people, and the sea exhaled a strong, thick, and powerful odor. Fine!

The Park of Kings (A Fantasy)

It was the beginning of the twenty-sixth century of the Christian era. The life of men on earth had changed beyond recognition. The colored races of mankind had already blended completely with the white races, adding to their blood that health, firmness, and longevity which are so characteristic of all hybrids and mongrels among animals. Wars ceased forever in the middle of the twentieth century, after dreadful slaughters in which the whole civilized world took part and which cost mankind tens of millions of human lives and hundreds of billions in money. Man’s genius had rendered mild the severest climates, had drained swamps, had dug tunnels through mountains, transformed the earth into a luxuriant garden and a gigantic machine-shop, the productivity of which had increased tenfold. Improvements in machinery reduced the working day to four hours, while work became compulsory for everybody. Vices disappeared entirely and virtue blossomed out. To tell the truth, however, all this was tiresome enough. And it was no wonder that in the middle of the thirty-second century, after the great South African insurrection, which took the form of a protest against the existing wearisome order of things, the whole of humanity, in a frenzy of intoxication, entered again upon the road of war, blood, plots, corruption, and cruel despotism, and, for Lord knows which time in the long history of our planet, destroyed and turned into dust and ashes all the great achievements of the world’s civilization.

But the contented prosperity which preceded this elemental destruction came as by itself, without blood or violence.

The rulers of the earth obediently and silently gave in to the spirit of the times; voluntarily they came down from their thrones in order to lose themselves in the masses of the people, and take a part in its creative work. They realized that the charm of their power had long since become an empty phrase. It was not for nothing that for centuries in succession their princesses had been running away from the palaces with servants, grooms, gypsies, and wandering magicians. And it was not for nothing that their princes and grand dukes pawned their hereditary sceptres and laid their thousand-year-old crowns at the feet of courtesans, who used them as ornaments for their false hair.

But some of their descendants, blindly, haughtily, fearlessly, and, in a way, tragically certain of the divine and endless character of their power, which rests upon them by reason of heredity, contemptuously refused to live in common with the masses of the people and never ceased to regard themselves the rulers and the fathers of the people. They considered it below their dignity to commit suicide, which in their minds was a degrading weakness, unworthy of persons of royal blood. They refused to dim the halo of their escutcheons by contracting marriages below their rank, and their effeminate, thin, white hands were never made dirty by physical work, which they still considered the lot of slaves.

Then the popular government, which had long since abolished prisons, violence, and punishment, decided to build for them in a beautiful public park a large, light, and comfortable house with a common sittingroom, dining-room, and parlor, and with smaller but comfortable living-rooms. Their food and clothes had to come from voluntary contributions of the people, and the former rulers tacitly agreed to regard these small gifts as the legal tribute of their vassals. And in order that the existence of these grand personages should not be wholly aimless, the practical government decided to permit school children to study the history of the past by observing these living fragments of past times.

And so, gathered in one place, left to themselves and to their inactivity, they soon began to deteriorate in body and become degraded in soul within the walls of this public asylum. Their external appearance still retained an afterglow of their former grandeur. Their fine faces, rendered noble by careful selection in the course of hundreds of generations, still retained their sloping foreheads, their eagle noses, their strong chins, fit for medal profiles. Their hands and feet were still small and shapely, as formerly. Their movements were still majestic, and their smiles charming.

But they were such only in the presence of strangers who came to visit the park. When left alone within the walls of their asylum, they changed into wrinkled, groaning, sickly old men, envious, suspicious, quarrelsome, and unfeeling. In the evenings they usually played cards, two kings and two grand dukes. When dealing, they would be polite and calm. But their mutual dislike, which always accumulates among men