Short Fiction, Vladimir Korolenko [finding audrey TXT] 📗

say goodbye to my little girl. She⁠—she is dead.”

Tiburtsi’s voice trembled, and he winked his eyes queerly, but he at once rose quickly to his feet, set me down on the floor, pulled himself together, and left the room.

I raised my eyes inquiringly to my father’s face. Another man was standing before me now, and there was something lovable about him which I had sought in vain before. He was looking at me with his usual pensive gaze, but there was a shade of surprise in his eyes, and what might have been a question. The storm which had just passed over our heads seemed to have dispelled the heavy mist that had lain on my father’s soul and frozen the gentle, kind expression on his face. He now seemed to recognise in me the familiar features of his own son.

I took his hand trustfully, and said:

“I didn’t steal it. Sonia lent it to me herself.”

“Yes,” he answered thoughtfully. “I know; I am guilty before you, boy, but you will try to forget it sometime, won’t you?”

I seized his hand and kissed it. I knew that he would never again look at me with the dreadful eyes which I had seen only a few moments before, and my long pent-up love burst forth in a torrent. I did not fear him now.

“Will you let me go to the hill?” I suddenly asked, remembering Tiburtsi’s invitation.

“Ye-es⁠—go, boy, and say goodbye,” he answered tenderly, but with still the same shade of hesitation in his voice. “No, wait a minute; wait a minute, boy, please.”

He went into his bedroom and came back in a minute with a few bills which he thrust into my hand.

“Give these to Tiburtsi. Tell him that I beg him⁠—do you understand?⁠—that I beg him to accept this money from you. Do you understand? And say, too,” added my father, “say that if he knows anyone called Feodorovich he had better tell that Feodorovich to leave this town. And now run along boy, quickly.”

Panting and incoherent, I overtook Tiburtsi on the hill and gave him my father’s message.

“My father begs you to⁠—” I said, and pressed the money which I had received into his hand.

I did not look at his face. He took the money, and gloomily listened to my message concerning Feodorovich.

In the crypt, on a bench in a dark corner, I found Marusia lying. The word death has little meaning for a child, but bitter tears choked me at the sight of her lifeless body. My little friend was lying there looking very serious and sad, and her tiny face was pitifully drawn. Her closed eyes were a little sunken and the blue circles around them were darker than before. Her little mouth was slightly open, and wore an expression of childish grief. This little grimace was Marusia’s answer to our tears.

The Professor was standing at her bedside, indifferently shaking his head. The Grenadier was hammering in a corner, making a coffin out of some old boards torn from the chapel roof. Lavrovski, sober and with a look of perfect understanding, was strewing Marusia’s body with autumn flowers which he himself had gathered. Valek was lying asleep in a corner, shuddering all over in his dreams, and crying out restlessly from time to time.

X Conclusion

Soon after this the members of the “bad company” dispersed to the four corners of the earth. There remained behind only the Professor, who until his death continued to haunt the streets of the town, and Turkevich, to whom my father would give a little writing to do from time to time. For my part, I lost not a little blood in combats with the Jewish boys who tormented the Professor by reminding him of sharp and pointed instruments.

The Grenadier and the other suspicious characters went elsewhere to seek their fortunes. Tiburtsi and Valek suddenly and completely vanished, and no one could say whither they had gone, as no one knew whence they had come.

The old chapel has suffered much since then from the onslaughts of Time. First the roof fell in, breaking down the ceiling of the crypt. Then landslides began to form around the building, and the place grew more dismal than ever. The owls now hoot more loudly than before among its ruins, and the will-o’-the-wisps on the graves still glow with a malign blue fire on dark autumn nights.

One grave only, surrounded by a little fence, grows green with fresh grass every spring, and lies bedecked with brilliant flowers.

Sonia and I used often to visit this little grave, and sometimes our father would go with us. We liked to sit there in the shade of the whispering birch trees, with the town below us shimmering placidly in the sunlight. Here my sister and I read and dreamed together, sharing our first young thoughts and our first premonitions of upright, winged youth.

And when at last the time came for us to leave the quiet city of our birth, it was here, over this little grave, in the Springtime of life and hope, that we made our last compacts with one another on the last day that we spent at home.

The Day of Atonement A Tale of Little Russia62

The lights are out, the moon is rising.
The werewolf in the wood is feeding.

Shevchenko I

Listen to me, man; go out of your khata on a clear night, or better still walk to the top of some little hill, and look well at the sky and the earth. Watch the bright moon climbing the heavens, and the stars winking and twinkling, and the light clouds of mist rising from the earth and wandering off somewhere one behind the other like belated travellers on a night journey. The woods will lie as if bewitched, listening to the spells that rise from them after the midnight hour, and the sleepy river will flow murmuring by you, whispering