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

The second rehearsal was the full-dress one. In this, by the way, I was stuck for two new roles: that of an ancient Christian and that of Tigellius. I accepted them without a murmur.

Our tragedian, Timofeev-Soumskoi, took part in this. He was a broad-shouldered man, about five feet high, no longer young, with red curly hair, the whites of his eyes sticking out, and with a pockmarked face⁠—a regular butcher, or rather an executioner. He had an enormous voice and he acted in an old-fashioned, hectoring manner.

He didn’t know his lines at all (he was taking the part of Nero), and he had difficulty even in reading it from his copybook with the aid of his powerful spectacles. When people said to him: “You ought to study your part just a little, Fedot Pamfylytch,” he would reply in a low octavo:

“Oh, let it go. It’ll do. I’ll stand near the prompter. It isn’t the first time. In any case the public understands nothing. The public’s a fool.”

He was constantly having trouble with my name. He simply couldn’t pronounce “Tigellius,” but called me either Tigelini or Tinegil. Every time that he was corrected, he would bark out:

“Let it go. Rot. I’m not going to fill my brain with rubbish.”

If he had a difficult phrase or several foreign words coming together, he would simply cross it out in pencil in his book and declare:

“I’m cutting that.”

However, everyone used to cut. From the soup of our play there remained only the thickness. Out of the long role of Tigellius there survived in the end only one reply.

Nero asks:

“Tigellius, in what state are the lions?”

And I answer on my knees:

“Divine Caesar, Rome has never seen such wild beasts. They are ravenous and ferocious.”

That was all.

The opening night arrived. The theatre was crammed. Outside, round the barriers, the crowd of the non-paying public was thick and black. I was nervous.

My God, how horribly they all acted! Just as if they had all acquiesced in Timofeev’s verdict, “The public’s a fool.” Every word, every gesture, recalled something old-fashioned, which has become stale through the repetition of generations. These servants of art seemed to me to have at their disposal altogether about two dozen intonations, learned by heart, and about three dozen gestures, also learned by heart, as, for example, the one that Samoilenko fruitlessly tried to teach me. And I was wondering how it was, through what moral fall had these people become so lost to all shame of their faces, of their bodies, of their movements!

Timofeev-Soumskoi was magnificent. Leaning over the right side of the throne, during which process his extended left leg protruded right into the middle of the stage, his fool’s crown all awry, he was fixing the mobile whites of his eyes on the prompter’s box and yelling in such a way that the little urchins behind the barriers shrieked with delight. Naturally he didn’t remember my name. He simply bawled at me like a Russian merchant at the Russian baths:

“Teliantin! Bring along my lions and tigers. Qui‑ick!”

I submissively swallowed my reply and went. Of course, the worst of the lot was Mark the Magnificent, Lara-Larsky, because he was more shameless, careless, trivial, and self-confident than the others. Instead of pathos he gave shrieks, instead of tenderness, sickliness. Through the authoritative speeches of a Roman patrician there peeped out the chief of a Russian fire-brigade. But then Adrossova was really beautiful. Everything about her was charming: her inspired face, delightful arms, her elastic, musical voice, even her long wavy hair which, in the last scene, she let loose over her shoulders. She acted just as simply, naturally, and beautifully as a bird sings.

With real artistic delight, sometimes even with tears, I followed her through the small holes in the cloth background of the stage. But I did not foresee that a few minutes later she would touch me, not artistically but in a quite different manner.

In this play I was so multi-figured that really the management might have added, in their advertisement list, to the names of Petrov, Sidorov, Grigoriev, Ivanov and Vassiliev, the names of Dmitriev and Alexandrov. In the first act, I appeared first of all as an old man with a white robe and with a hood on my head; then I ran behind the scenes, threw off my things and came on again as a centurion with armour and a helmet, my feet naked; then I disappeared again and crawled out as the ancient Christian. In the second act, I was a centurion and a slave. In the third act, two new slaves. In the fourth, a centurion and someone else’s two new slaves. I was also a steward and a new slave. Then I was Tigellius and, finally, a voiceless knight who with an imperative gesture indicates to Marcia and Mark the way to the arena where they are going to be eaten by lions.

Even the simpleton, Akimenko, tapped me on the shoulder and said amiably:

“Devil take it, you are a quick-change artist and no mistake!”

But I earned this praise at too great cost. I could scarcely stand on my feet.

The performance was over. The caretaker was putting out the lights. I was walking about the stage waiting for the last actors to remove their makeup so that I might be able to lie down on my old threadbare sofa. I was also thinking of that morsel of fried liver which was hanging in my little corner between the property room and the general dressing-room. (For since the rats robbed me of a piece of bacon I used to hang all eatables on a string.) Suddenly I heard a voice behind me:

“Good night, Vassiliev.”

I turned round. Androssova was standing with her hand stretched out; her delightful face looked tired.

I must say that in the whole troupe she alone, not counting the insignificant ones, Doukhovskoi and Nelioubov-Olguine, used to shake hands with me (the others despised me). And even to this day I can