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

going to say? I’ve heard that too from my author, more than once. But, my dear, that is not the truth. I’m just an ordinary girl, and you will stay and then you will know it.”

“I will not stay,” he cried aloud, between his teeth.

“Don’t shriek, my dear. Shrieks avail nothing against the truth⁠—I know that for myself.” And then in a whisper, looking straight in his eyes, she added: “For God, too, is fine!”

“Well, and then?”

“There’s no more to be said. Think it out for yourself, and I’ll stop talking. It’s only five years since I went to church. That’s the truth.”

Truth? What truth? What was this unexplored terror, that he had never met before either in the face of death or in life itself? Truth?

Square-cheeked, hardheaded, conscious only of the conflict in his soul, he sat there resting his head on his hands and slowly turning his eyes as though from one extreme of life to the other. And life was collapsing⁠—as a badly glued chest, rained upon in the autumn, falls into unrecognisable fragments of what had been so beautiful. He remembered the good fellows with whom he had lived his life and worked in a marvellous union of joy and sorrow⁠—and they seemed strange to him and their life incomprehensible and their work senseless. It was as though someone with mighty fingers had taken hold of his soul and snapped it in two, as one snaps a stick across one’s knee, and flung the fragments far apart. It was only a few hours since he left there⁠—and all his life seemed to have been spent here, in front of this half-naked woman, listening to the distant music and the jingling of spurs; and that it would always be so. And he did not know which side to turn, up or down, but only that he was opposed, tormentingly opposed, to all that had that day become part of his very life and soul. Shameful to be fine.⁠ ⁠…

He recalled the books which had taught him how to live, and he smiled bitterly. Books! There before him was one book, sitting with bare shoulders, closed eyes, an expression of beatitude on a pale distracted face, waiting patiently to be read to the end. Shameful to be fine.⁠ ⁠…

And, all at once, with unbearable pain, grief-stricken, affrighted, he realized once and for all that that life was done with, that it had already become impossible for him to be fine!

He had only lived in that he was fine, it had been his only joy, and his only weapon in the battle of life and death.

All this was gone. Nothing was left. The Dark! Whether he stayed there or returned to his own people⁠ ⁠… now, for him, his comrades were no more.

Why had he come to this accursed house! Better had he remained on the street, surrendered to the police, gone to prison where it was possible and even not disgraceful to be fine. And now it was too late even for prison.

“Are you crying?” the girl asked, perturbed.

“No,” he answered curtly. “I never cry.”

“And no need, dearie; we women can weep; you needn’t. If you wept, too, who would there be to give an answer to God?”

She was his? This woman was his?

“Liuba,” he cried in anguish, “what can I do? What can I do?”

“Stay with me. You can stay with me, for now you are mine.”

“And They?”

The girl frowned.

“What sort of people are They?”

“Men! Men!” he exclaimed in a frenzy. “Men with whom I used to work. It was not for myself⁠—no, not for self-satisfaction that I bore all this, that I was getting ready to carry out this assassination!”

“Don’t talk to me about those people,” she said sternly, though her lips trembled. “Don’t mention them to me or I shall quarrel with you again. You hear me?”

“But what are you?” he asked amazed.

“I?⁠—perhaps a cur! And all of us curs! But dearie, be careful! You’ve been able to take shelter behind us, and so be it. But do not try to hide from Truth; you will never elude her. If you must love mankind, then pity our sorry brotherhood.”

She was sitting with her hands clasped behind her head, in an attitude of blissful repose, foolishly happy, almost beside herself. She moved her head from side to side, her eyes half closed in a daydream, spoke slowly, almost chanting her words.

“My own! My love! We will drink together! We will weep together. Oh, how delightful it will be to weep with you, dear one. I would so weep all my life. He has stayed with me. He has not gone away. When I saw him today, in the glass, it burst upon me at once: This is he!⁠—my betrothed!⁠—my darling! And I do not know who you are, brother or bridegroom of mine. But oh, so closely kin, so much desired.⁠ ⁠…”

He, too, remembered that black dumb pair in the gilded mirror⁠—and the passing thought: as at a funeral. And all at once the whole thing became so intolerably painful, seemed so wild a nightmare, that he ground his teeth in his grief. His thoughts travelled farther back; he remembered his treasured revolver in his pocket, the two days of constant flight, the plain door that had no handle, and how he looked for a bell, and how a fat lackey who had not yet got his coat on straight had come out in a dirty printed linen shirt, and how he had entered with the proprietress into that white hall and seen those three strange girls.

And with it all a feeling of growing freedom came over him and at last he grasped that he was, as he had ever been, free⁠—absolutely free⁠—that he could go wherever he liked.

Sternly now he surveyed that strange room, severely, with the conviction of a man aroused for an instant from a debauch, seeing himself in foreign surroundings and condemning what he sees.

“What is all this? How idiotic! What a senseless nightmare!”

But⁠—the music was