Short Fiction, Leonid Andreyev [good e books to read .TXT] 📗

and his hand responded with a quiver to the trembling of those pitiable shoulders.

“I can’t hear what you say, Liuba?”

Then something distant, dull, soaked in tears:

“Wait⁠—before you go⁠ ⁠… over there⁠ ⁠… some officers have arrived. They might see you⁠ ⁠… My God⁠—to think⁠ ⁠… !”

She sat up quickly on the bed, clasping her hands, eyes wide open staring into space in sudden fear. The terror lasted a moment, and then she again lay down and wept. Outside the spurs were jingling rhythmically, and the pianist with revived energy was conscientiously beating out a vigorous mazurka.

“Take a drink of water, Liuba, do! You really must⁠ ⁠… please⁠ ⁠…” he whispered as he bent over her. Her ear was covered with her hair, and fearing that she could not hear, he carefully brushed aside those dark curling locks, and discovered a hot little red shell of an ear.

“Please drink! I beg you!”

“No, I don’t want a drink. There’s no need.⁠ ⁠… It’s all over.”

She had quieted down by now. The sobbing stopped; one more long throe, and the shuddering shoulders were pathetically still; he was gently stroking her neck down to the lace of the chemise.

“Are you better, Liuba?”

She said nothing, but heaved a long sigh and turned round, quickly glancing at him. Then she relaxed and sat up, looked up at him again, and rubbed his face and eyes with the plaits of her hair. She breathed another long sigh and quite gently and simply laid her head on his shoulder, and he as simply put an arm round her and drew her silently closer to him. His fingers touched her naked shoulder, but this no longer disturbed him. And thus they sat a long while without speaking, but with now and then a sigh, staring straight ahead of them into space with unseeing eyes.

Suddenly there was a sound of voices and steps in the corridor, a jingling of spurs, quite gentle and elegant, like that of young officers. The sound came nearer and halted at the door. He rose promptly. Someone was knocking at the door, first tapping with knuckles and then banging with their fists, and a woman’s voice called out:

“Liubka, open the door!”

He looked at her and waited.

“Give me a handkerchief,” she said, without looking at him, and put her hand out. She rubbed her face hard, blew her nose noisily, threw the handkerchief on his knees, and went to the door. He watched and waited. On her way to the door she turned out the light, and it was all at once so dark that he could hear his own rather laboured breathing. And for some reason he sat down again on the creaking bed.

“Well? What is it? What do you want?” she asked through the door, without opening it, her voice calm, but still betraying some uneasiness.

Feminine voices were heard in argument and, cutting through them as scissors cut through a tangle of silk, a male voice, young, persuasive, seeming to proceed from behind strong white teeth and a soft moustache. Spurs jingled as though the speaker were responding with a bow. And⁠—strange!⁠—Liuba smiled.

“No. No! I don’t want to come⁠—Very well, do as you like. No, not for all your ‘lovely Liubas’. I won’t come.” Another knock at the door, laughter, a sound of scolding, more jingling of spurs, and it all moved away from the door, and died out somewhere down the corridor. In the dark, fumbling for his knee with her hand, Liuba sat down by him, but did not lay her head on his shoulder. She explained briefly:

“The officers are starting a dance. They are summoning everybody. They are going to have a cotillion.”

“Liuba,” he said, pleadingly, “please turn on the light. Don’t be angry.”

She got up without a word and switched it on. And now she no longer sat with him but, as before, on the chair facing the bed. Her face was surly, uninviting, but courteous⁠—like that of a hostess who cannot help sitting through an uninvited and overlong visit.

“You are not angry with me, Liuba?”

“No. Why should I be?”

“I wondered just now when you laughed so merrily.”

She laughed without looking up.

“When I feel merry, I laugh. But you can’t leave just now. You’ll have to wait until the officers get away. It won’t be long.”

“Very well. I will wait, thank you, Liuba.”

She laughed again.

“How courteous you are!”

“Don’t you like it?”

“Not too well. What are you by birth?”

“My father is a doctor in the military service. My grandfather was a peasant. We are old-ritualists.”

Liuba, surprised, looked up at him.

“Really? But you don’t wear a cross round your neck.”

“A cross!” he laughed. “We wear our cross on our backs.”

The girl frowned slightly.

“You want to go to sleep? You’d better lie down than waste time in this way.”

“No, I won’t lie down. I don’t want to sleep any more.”

“As you wish.”

There was a long and awkward silence. Liuba gazed downwards and fixed her attention on turning a ring on her finger. He looked round the room; each time be conspicuously avoided meeting the girl’s glance, and rested his eyes on the unfinished glass of cognac. Then, all at once, it became overwhelmingly clear to him, even palpably evident, that all this was no longer what it seemed⁠—that little yellow glass with the cognac, the girl so absorbed in twiddling her ring⁠—and he himself, too, he was no longer himself, but someone else, someone alien and quite apart.⁠ ⁠… Just then the music stopped and there followed a quiet jingle of spurs.⁠ ⁠… He seemed to himself to have lived at some time, not in this house, but in a place very much like it; and that he had been an active and even important person to whom something was now happening. That strange feeling was so powerful that he shuddered and shook his head; and the feeling soon left him, but not altogether; there remained some faint inexpungible trace of the turbulent memories of that which had never been. And quite often, in the course of this unusual night, he caught himself