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

“Why should one man have such a lot?” the captain asked naively, apparently struck by the colossal figures of income and expenditure that Falstaff was pouring out so generously.

Falstaff made a cunning face.

“Everything will go to the only daughter. Well, there you are, young man”⁠—he gave me a playful dig in the ribs with his thumb. “Make up your mind to marry, and then don’t forget the old man.”

I asked with the careless air of one who has seen too much:

“And is she pretty?”

Falstaff grew purple with laughter.

“Ha, ha! He’s biting. Excellent, my warrior. Excellent. Prepare to rush⁠—rush! Tra-ta-ta-ta. I like the military way.” Then suddenly, as if a spring had been pressed, he stopped laughing. “How can I answer you? It depends on one’s taste. She is⁠ ⁠… too subtle⁠ ⁠… too thinnish⁠ ⁠…”

“Nobility,” put in the captain with a grimace.

“As much as you like of that. And she’s proud. She doesn’t want to know any of the neighbours. Oh, and she’s unmanageable. The servants dread her more than fire. Not that she’s one to shout at you or rebuke you. There’s none of that about her. With her it’s just: ‘Bring me this⁠ ⁠… Do this⁠ ⁠… Go!’ and all so coldly, without moving her lips.”

“Nobility,” said the captain, putting his nose in the air spitefully.

We sat like this till eleven o’clock.

Towards the end, Falstaff was quite knocked out and went to sleep on his chair, snoring lightly and with a peaceful smile round his eyes. We woke him up with difficulty and he went home, respectfully supported under the elbow by our boy. I have forgotten to mention that he is a bachelor, a fact which, to tell the truth, upsets my own plans.

It’s an odd fact how terribly a day at a new place drags and, at the same time, how few impressions remain from it. Here I am writing these lines and I seem to have been living in Olkhovatka for a long, long time, two months at least, and my tired memory cannot recall any definite event.

September 12th.

Today I have been looking over the whole place. The owner’s house, or, as the peasants about here call it, the Palace, is a long stone building of one storey, with plate-glass windows, balconies, and two lions at the entrance. Yesterday it did not strike me as so big as it did today. Flowerbeds lie in front of the house; the paths separating them are spread with reddish sand. In the middle there is a fountain with shiny globes on pedestals, and a light prickly hedge runs round the front. Behind the house are the pavilion, the offices, the cattle and fowl-yards, the stud boxes, the barns, the orangery, and, last of all, a thick shady garden of some eleven acres, with streams, grottos, pretty little hanging bridges, and a lake with swans.

It is the first time in my life that I have lived side by side with people who spend on themselves tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands, people who scarcely know the meaning of “not able to do something.”

Wandering aimlessly through the garden, I could not take my thoughts off this, to me, incomprehensible, strange, and at the same time attractive existence. Do they think and feel just as we do? Are they conscious of the superiority of their position? Do the trifles which burden our lives ever come into their heads? Do they know what we go through when we come in contact with their higher sphere? I am inclined to think that all that means nothing to them, that they ask themselves no inquisitive questions, that the grey monotony of our lives seems just as uninteresting to them, just as natural and ordinary for us, as for example the sight of my orderly, Parkhomenko, is to me. All this, of course, is in the nature of things, but for some reason or other it hurts my pride. I am revolted by the consciousness that in the society of these people, polished up and well-glossed by a hundred years of luxurious habits and refined etiquette, I, yes I, no one else, will appear funny, odd, unpleasant even by my way of eating, and making gestures, by my expressions and appearance, perhaps even by my tastes and acquaintances⁠—in a word, in me rings the protest of a human being who, created in the image and resemblance of God, has either lost one and the other in the Flight of Time, or has been robbed of them by someone.

I can imagine how Vassili Akinfievitch would snort if I read these reflections to him.

September 13th.

Although today is the fatal number⁠—the devil’s dozen⁠—it has turned out very interesting.

I have been wandering about the garden again. I don’t remember where I read a comparison of Nature in autumn with the astonishing, unexpected charm which sometimes permeates the faces of young women who are condemned to a swift and certain death from consumption. Today I cannot get this strange comparison out of my head.

There is in the air a strong and delicate aroma of fading maple trees, which is like the bouquet of good wine. One’s feet bruise the dead yellow leaves which lie in thick layers over the path. The trees have a bright and fantastic covering as though decked out for a banquet of death. Green branches, surviving here and there, are curiously blended with autumn tints of lemon, or straw, or orange, or pink and blood-crimson, sometimes passing into mauve and purple. The sky is dense and cold, but its cloudless blue caresses the eye. And in all this bright death-feast one catches an indefinable, languid sadness which contracts one’s heart in a pain that is lingering and sweet.

I was walking along a pathway beneath acacias, interlaced so as to form a thick, almost dark arch. Suddenly my ear caught a woman’s voice saying something with great animation and laughter. On a seat, just where the thick wall of acacias curved into something like