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

her, didn’t you? and then there was someone to chatter with.⁠ ⁠…”

“Have you no acquaintances among the landowners about here?”

“No. Papa won’t call on anyone. It’s fearfully dull. In the morning I have to read the Moscow News aloud to my grandmother. You can’t imagine what a bore it is. It’s so nice in the garden and I have to read there about conflicts between civilised Powers and about the agricultural crisis⁠ ⁠… and sometimes, in despair, I decide to skip some twenty or thirty lines, so that there is no sense at all left. Grandmother, however, never suspects anything and often expresses surprise: ‘Do you notice, Kate, that they write quite incomprehensibly nowadays?’

“Of course I agree: ‘Indeed they do, Grandmother, utterly incomprehensibly.’ But when the reading is over I feel like a schoolgirl let out for the holidays.”

Talking like this we roll along over the lake until it begins to get dark. As we say goodbye, Kate, in a little parenthesis, gives me to understand that she is accustomed to stroll about the garden every morning and every evening.

All this happened yesterday, but I have had no time to write anything in my diary, because I spent the rest of the evening up to midnight in lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, and giving myself up to unrealisable, impossible reveries which, in spite of their innocence, I am ashamed to put down on paper.

We met again today, already without the least embarrassment, just like old acquaintances. Kate is extraordinarily good and kind. When, in the course of conversation, I expressed, among other things, my regret that the unlucky incident of the boat made me seem comic in her eyes, she stretched out her hand to me with a sincere gesture and pronounced these unforgettable words:

“Let us be friends, M. Lapshine, and let us forget that story.”

And I know the kind tone of those words will never be effaced from my memory by words of any other sort for all eternity.

September 20th.

Oh, I was not mistaken! Kate indeed hinted yesterday that we can meet in the garden every morning and every evening. It is a pity though that she was not in a good humour today; the reason was a bad headache.

She looked very tired and she had black marks under her eyes and her cheeks were paler than usual.

“Don’t take any notice of my health,” she said in reply to my expressions of sympathy. “This will pass. I have got into the bad habit of reading in bed. One gets entranced, without noticing it, and then there comes insomnia. You can’t hypnotise, can you?” she added half jokingly.

I answered that I had never tried, but that I probably could.

“Take my hand,” Kate said, “and look intently into my eyes.”

Gazing into Kate’s large black pupils, I endeavoured to concentrate and gather all my force of will, but my eyes fell confusedly from her eyes to her lips. There was one moment when my fingers involuntarily trembled and gave a faint pressure to Kate’s hand. As if in answer to my unconscious movement, I also felt a faint pressure in return. But naturally this was only by chance, because she immediately withdrew her hand.

“No, you can’t help me. You’re thinking of something quite different.”

“On the contrary, I was thinking of you, Mademoiselle Kate,” I retorted.

“Quite possibly. But doctors never look at one with eyes like that. You are a bad one.”

“I a bad one! God is my witness that no evil thought, even the shadow of an evil thought, has ever come into my head. But possibly my unlucky face has expressed something utterly different from what I feel.”

The strange part of it is that Kate’s observation suddenly made me feel the woman in her for the first time, and I felt awkward.

So my experiment in hypnotism was a failure. Kate’s migraine not only did not vanish but grew worse every minute. When she went away she was probably sorry for the disappointment in my face. She allowed me to hold her hand for a second longer than was necessary.

“I’m not coming in the evening,” she said. “Wait until tomorrow.”

But how well this was said! What an abyss of meaning a woman can sometimes put into the most ordinary, the most commonplace, sentence! This “wait” I translated like this: “I know that it is a great pleasure for you to see me; it is not unpleasant to me either, but then we can meet each other every day, and there is ever so much time ahead of us⁠—isn’t there?” Kate gives me the right to wait for her. At the very thought of it my head swims in transport.

What if mere curiosity, an acquaintance made out of boredom, chance meetings⁠—what if all this were to pass into something deeper and more tender? As I wandered along the garden paths, after Kate’s departure, I began to dream about it involuntarily. Anyone may dream about anything, may he not? And I was imagining the springing up between us of a love, at once passionate, timid, and confident, her first love, and though not my first, still my strongest and my last. I was picturing a stolen meeting at night, a bench bathed in the gentle moonlight, a head confidently leaning upon my shoulder, the sweet, scarcely audible, “I love you,” pronounced timidly in answer to my passionate confession. “Yes, I love you, Kate,” I say with a suppressed sigh, “but we must part. You are rich; I am just a poor officer who has nothing except an immeasurable love for you. An unequal marriage will bring you only unhappiness. Afterwards you would reproach me.” “I love you and cannot live without you,” she answers; “I will go with you to the ends of the earth.” “No, my dear one, we must part. Another life is waiting for you. Remember one thing only, that I will never, never in my life stop loving you.”

The night, the bench, the moon, the drooping