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

villas built by the local millionaires. We passed impressive cast-iron railings and high stone walls behind which the thick green of platanes hung down over the road; enormous gateways carved like lace work; gardens with wreaths of many coloured lanterns; magnificent verandahs, brilliantly illuminated; exotic plants in the flower gardens in front of villas which seemed like magic palaces. The white acacias had such a strong odour, that the aroma of their luscious sweetness could be felt, even on one’s lips. Sometimes we experienced, for a second, a damp chilliness, but immediately afterwards we passed once more into the perfumed warmth of the quiet spring night.

The horses were running fast, their hoof-beats falling loudly in even time. We swayed gently on the carriage springs, as we sat silent. When we were nearing the town, I felt your arm cautiously, slowly, winding round my waist and quietly but insistently it drew me to you. I made no resistance but did not yield to this embrace. And you understood, and you were ashamed. You withdrew your arm and I groped in the dark for your hand, gratefully pressing it, and it answered me with a friendly, apologetic pressure.

But I knew that your wounded male pride would assert itself all the same. And I was not wrong. Just before we parted, at the entrance to the hotel, you asked permission to come to see me. I fixed a day, and then⁠—forgive me⁠—I stealthily ran away from you. My darling! If not tomorrow, then in another two days, in a week perhaps, there would have flamed up in us merely sensuality, against which honour and will and mind are powerless. We would have robbed those two dead people by substituting for our love of the past a false and ludicrous make-believe. And the dead people would have cruelly avenged themselves by creating between us quarrels, distrust, coldness, and⁠—what is more terrible than all the rest⁠—a ceaseless jealous comparison of the present with the past.

Goodbye. In the heat of writing I have not noticed how I have passed on to the old “tu” of lovers. I am sure that in a few days, when the first ache of your wounded pride has passed, you will share my opinion and will stop being angry at my escape.

The first bell has just sounded. But I am sure now that I shall resist temptation and shall not jump out of the train.

All the same, our brief meeting is beginning, in my imagination, to clothe itself in a little cloud of smoke, a kind of tender, quiet, poetic, submissive sadness. Do you remember that beautiful verse of Pouchkine: “Autumn flowers are dearer than the beautiful newborn ones of the fields.⁠ ⁠… So, sometimes the hour of parting is more vivid than the meeting itself⁠ ⁠…”?

Yes, my darling, these very autumn flowers. Have you ever been out in a garden late in autumn on a wet, morose morning? The almost naked trees are threadbare and swing to and fro; the fallen leaves rot on the paths; on all sides is death and desolation. And only in the flowerbeds, above the drooping yellow stalks of the other flowers, the autumn asters and dahlias bloom brightly. Do you remember their sharp, grassy odour? You are standing, perhaps in a strange listlessness, near the flowerbeds, shivering with cold; you smell this melancholy, purely autumnal, odour and you are distressed. There is everything in this distress: regret for the summer that has fled so quickly, expectation of the cold winter, with its snow, and the wind howling through the chimneys, and regret for one’s own summer that has so swiftly rushed away. My dearest one, my only one! Exactly that feeling has taken hold of my soul at this moment. In a little time, your recollection of our meeting will become for you just as tender, sweet, sad, and poignant. Goodbye, then. I kiss you on your clever, beautiful eyes.

Your Z⁠⸺⁠.

Emerald

“I dedicate this story to the memory of that incomparable piebald racehorse, Kholstomer.”

I

Emerald, the four-year-old, a full-grown racehorse of American breed, of a uniform grey, steel-like colour, woke up as usual at about midnight in his loose box. The other horses, his neighbours on the left and right and opposite on the other side of the passage, were chewing hay with quick regularity, as though they were keeping time, crunching it with relish between their teeth and, every now and then, sniffing on account of the dust. On a heap of hay in a corner, slept the stable-boy on duty. Emerald knew by the sequence of days and by the particular snore that it was Vassili, a lad whom the horses disliked, because he smoked a reeking tobacco in the stables, frequently came in drunk, pounded their bellies with his knees, shook his fists in their eyes, tugged their halters roughly, and always addressed them in an unnatural, hoarse, threatening voice.

Emerald went up to the railed entrance opposite which, facing him in her stable, stood a young black, not yet full-grown, mare, named Chegolikha. Emerald could not see her body in the dark, but every time that she left off munching the hay and turned her head her large eyes would gleam for a few seconds with a pretty purple fire. Emerald drew a long breath with delicate dilated nostrils as he took in the scarcely noticeable, but insistent, agitating, odour of her skin and gave a short neigh.

The mare turned round quickly and answered with a light, trembling, and playful neighing.

From the box, immediately on his right, Emerald heard a jealous, angry breathing. It came from old Onieguine, a vicious chestnut, who still appeared from time to time in the town races.

The two horses were separated by a light board partition and could not see each other, but, by placing his nose on the rail, Emerald could catch easily the warm odour of the chewed hay as it came from