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

companion? For they’ll accept me, won’t they? Just as you did when you came here? Surely you were driven here for some purpose! But⁠—to stay here⁠—you would simply drop into the cesspool. As for me, I⁠—I⁠—I will try. Why don’t you say anything?”

Grim silence again, in which could be heard the beating of two hearts⁠—one rapid, hurried, excited; the other hard and slow, strongely slow.

“Would you be shamed to go back with such as me?”

A stern prolonged silence, and then a reply, solid and inflexible as unpolished rock:

“I am not going back. I don’t want to be fine.”

Silence. Then presently:

“They are gentlemen,” he said, and his voice sounded solitary and strained.

“Who?” she asked, dully.

“They⁠—Those who were.”

A long silence⁠—this time as though a bird had thrown itself down and was falling, whirling through the air on its pliant wings, but unable to reach the earth, unable to strike the ground and lie at rest.

In the dark he knew that Liuba, silently, carefully, making the least stir possible, passed over him; was busying herself with something.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t like lying there like that. I want to get dressed.”

Then she must have put something on and sat down; for the chair creaked ever so little; and it became so still⁠—as silent as though the room were empty. The stillness lasted a long time; and then the calm, serious voice spoke:

“I think, Liuba, there is still one cognac left on the table. Take a drink and come and lie down again.”

VII

Day was already dawning, and in the house all was as quiet as in any other house, when the police appeared. After long arguments and hesitations Mark had been dispatched to the police station with the revolver and cartridges and a circumstantial account of the strange visitor. The police at once guessed who he was. For three days they had had him on their nerves. They had been seeing him here, there, and everywhere; but finally, all trace of him had been lost. Somebody had suggested searching the brothels of the district; but just then somebody else got another false clue, so the public resorts were forgotten.

The telephone tinkled excitedly. Half an hour later, in the chill of the October morning, heavy boots were scrunching the hoarfrost and along the empty streets moved in silence a company of policemen and detectives. In front of them, feeling in every inch of his body what a mistake it was to take the risks of such exposure, marched the district superintendent, an elderly man, very tall, in a thick official overcoat, the shape of a sack. He was yawning, burying his flabby red nose in his grey whiskers; and he was thinking that he ought to wait for the military; that it was nonsense to go for such a man without soldiers, with nothing but stupid drowsy policemen who didn’t know how to shoot. More than once he reached the point of calling himself the slave of duty, yawning every time long and heavily.

The superintendent was a drunkard, a regular debauchee of the resorts of his district; and they paid him heavily for the right to exist. He had no desire to die. When they called him from his bed, he had nursed his revolver for a long time from one greasy palm to the other, and although there was little time to spare he had ordered them to clean his jacket, as though for a review. That very night at the police station, he remembered, conversation had turned on this same man who had been dodging them all, and the superintendent, with the cynicism of an old sot, had called the man a hero and himself an old police trollop. When his assistants laughed, he had assured them that such heroes must exist, if only to be hanged. “You hang him⁠—and it pleases you both: him because he is going straight to the Kingdom of Heaven, and you as a demonstration that brave men still exist. Don’t snigger⁠—it’s true.”

On that chill October morning, marching along the cold streets, he appreciated clearly that the talk of yesterday was lies; that the man was nothing but a rascal. He was ashamed of his own boyish extravagance.

“A hero, indeed!” the superintendent prayerfully recanted. “Lord, if he so much as stirs a finger, the blackguard, I’ll kill him like a dog. By God, I will!”

And that set him thinking why he, the superintendent, an old man full of gout, so much desired to live. Because there was hoar frost on the streets? He turned round and shouted savagely: “Quick march, there! Don’t go like sheep!”

The wind blew into his overcoat. His jacket was too wide and his whole body quivered in it like the yolk of an egg in a stirring basin. He felt as if he was suddenly shrinking. The palms of his hands, despite the cold, were still sweaty.

They surrounded the house as though they had come to take not one sleeper but a host in ambush. Then some of them crept along the dark corridor on tiptoe to the fearsome door.

A desperate knock⁠—a shout⁠—threats to shoot through the door. And when, almost knocking Liuba, half naked, off her feet, they burst into the little room in close formation and filled it with their boots and cloaks and rifles⁠—then they saw him⁠—sitting on the bed in his shirt, with his bare hairy legs hanging down⁠—sitting there silent. No bomb⁠—nothing terrible⁠—nothing but the ordinary room of a prostitute, filthy and repulsive in the early morning light, with its stretch of tattered carpet and scattered clothes, the table smeared and stained with liquor⁠—and sitting on the bed a man, clean shaven and with drowsy eyes, high cheekbones, a swollen face, hairy legs⁠—silent.

“Hands up!” shouted the superintendent, holding his revolver tighter in his damp hand.

But the man neither raised his arms nor made any answer.

“Search him!” the superintendent ordered.

“There’s nothing to search! I took his revolver away. Oh, my God!” Liuba cried, her teeth chattering