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

other pressed it still more tightly and continued to whisper, his laughing eyes playing all the time:

“You queer fellow, you’ve no notion of taste. The woman is thirty-five years old, in full bloom, all fire⁠—and her figure! Haven’t you had enough of playing Joseph? She looks at you the way a cat looks at cream. Why be too scrupulous in your own country? Remember the aphorism: A woman with experience is like a cherry picked by a sparrow⁠—it’s all the sweeter. Ah, where is my youth?” he began theatrically in a high-pitched, bleating, throaty voice. “Where is my youth? Where is my thick crop of hair, my thirty-two teeth in my mouth, my⁠—”

Voskresenski managed at last to free himself from the doctor’s clutch, but he did this so roughly that they both felt awkward.

“Forgive me, Ivan Nikolaevitch, but I simply can’t listen to such meanness. It isn’t bashfulness, it isn’t chastity, but it merely feels dirty, and⁠—speaking generally⁠—I don’t like it. I can’t⁠—”

The doctor threw up his arms mockingly and slapped his thighs: “My dear fellow, you mean that you can’t take a joke? Personally, I have the greatest respect for other people’s convictions and, honestly, I rejoice to see among the youth of today so many who look on these matters cleanly and honestly. But why can’t one joke a little without your spreading your tail like a peacock immediately? Why?”

“Forgive me,” the student said, in a muffled voice.

“Ah, my dear fellow, that’s not why I am saying all this. The fact is, you’ve got into a twitching state, the whole lot of you young fellows. Look at you, a strong man with a big chest and shoulders⁠—why, your nerves are like a schoolgirl’s. By the by, look here,” the doctor went on in a businesslike tone, “you oughtn’t to bathe quite so often, particularly in such a hot spell. Not being used to it, you know, you might bathe yourself into a serious illness. One of my patients contracted a nervous eczema through overdoses of sea-bathing.”

They were now walking along the last open stretch of the path, which had become practically smooth. To their right, the mountain rose almost to a perpendicular, while behind them, in the distance, the boiling sea seethed endlessly. To their left, bushes of dog-roses, covered with tender pink blossoms, clung to the slope, projecting above the reddish-yellow earth and the grey corked stones that resembled the backs of recumbent animals. The student was glancing at the ground between his feet with a look of angry confusion.

“It has turned out so badly,” he thought with a frown. “Yes, somehow it has turned out stupidly. As a matter of fact, the doctor’s a good sort, always attentive, patient, even-tempered. It’s true that he’s sometimes a bit of a clown, a chatterbox, reads nothing, uses bad language and has got slack, thanks to his easygoing practice at a healthresort.⁠ ⁠… But all the same, he’s a good fellow and I’ve been brusque and rude to him⁠—”

In the meanwhile, Iliashenko was carelessly knocking off with his walking-stick the little thin white flowers that smelt like bitter almonds, while he sang to himself in an undertone:

“In your hou⁠ ⁠… se I knew fi⁠ ⁠… rst
The sweetness of a pure and tender love.”

II

They turned out on to the road. Over a high white wall, as massive as that of a fortress, rose a villa, ingeniously and stridently built after the pattern of a stylish Russian gynaeceum, with seahorses and dragons on the roof, the shutters ornamented with variegated flowers and herbs, and carved doorways, with twisted little bottle-shaped colonnades on the balconies. This pretentious, gingerbread-like construction produced a ponderous and incoherent impression in the full blaze of the Crimean sky, against the background of the aerial grey-bluish mountains, amid the dark, pensive, elegant cypresses and powerful plane-trees, covered from top to bottom with plush-like moss, in proximity to the beautiful joyous sea. But the owner of the villa, Pavel Arkadievitch Zavalishine⁠—an ex-cornet of cavalry, afterwards an estate-agent, later on an attorney in a big port town in the south, and now a well-known dealer in naphtha, a shipowner, and the president of the stock exchange committee⁠—was conscious of no incongruity.

“I am a Russian, and I have the right to despise all those renaissances, rococos, and gothics,” he would shout sometimes, striking his chest. “We’re not bound by what they think abroad. We’ve had enough of that in the past. We’ve bowed down to them enough. We have our own strong, original, creative power, and for a Russian gentleman like me there is only one thing to do, and that is to spit on all this foreignness.”

The table was already laid on the enormous lower balcony. They were waiting for Zavalishine, who had just arrived from town and was changing his clothes in his bedroom. Anna Georgievna was leaning languidly back in a rocking-chair, overcome with the heat. She wore a light peignoir of Moldavian stuff, gold-embroidered with large sleeves slit up underneath almost to the shoulders. She was still very handsome, with a heavy, assured, superb beauty⁠—the beauty of a plump, well-preserved brunette of the southern type.

“Good morning, Doctor,” she said in a deep voice, and with a slight burr. “Why didn’t you guess that we wanted you yesterday? I had such a migraine.”

Without raising herself from the armchair, she lazily stretched out her hand to Ivan Nikolaevitch, while her drooping sleeve revealed her round, full shoulder with its white vaccination mark, the small blue veins in the inner curve of the elbow, and a dark, pretty little mole slightly higher up the arm. Anna Georgievna (she insisted for some reason or other on being called “Nina” instead of Anna) knew the value of her hands and liked to show them.

The doctor leaned over the outstretched hand so respectfully that she had to pull it away by force.

“You see what a gallant doctor we have,” she said as she glanced at Voskresenski with laughing, caressing eyes. “You