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

his face that their contour seemed indefinite, blurred, and they themselves became enormous, fixed, monstrously shiny, and quite strange to him. Hot rocking waves broke on him, drowning his reason, burning him as with fiery circling coils.⁠ ⁠…

Later on he woke up and heard with surprise her voice, which seemed to be imploring him about something:

“I adore you⁠ ⁠… my young, strong, beautiful⁠ ⁠…”

She was sitting on his bed beside him, leaning her head against his shoulder with a submissive, fawning air and trying to catch his eye. But he was looking away, frowning and pulling nervously with a shaking hand at the fringe of his rug which was hanging on the foot of the bed. An invincible disgust was growing in him every second towards this woman, who had just given herself to him. He himself understood the injustice and selfishness of this feeling, but he could not overcome it, even out of gratitude, even out of compassion. Her proximity was physically repulsive to him, her touch, the noise of her rapid, jerky breathing; and though he blamed only himself for everything that had happened, a blind, senseless hatred and spite towards her was filling his soul.

“Oh, what a scoundrel I am! What a scoundrel!” he was thinking, and at the same time he was afraid of her reading his thoughts and feelings on his face.

“My darling adored one,” she was saying tenderly, “why have you turned away from me? Are you angry? Is anything the matter with you? Oh, my dear one, didn’t you really notice that I loved you? From the very beginning, from the very first day.⁠ ⁠… Ah, but no. When you came to us in Moscow I didn’t like you. What an angry one, I thought. But then afterwards⁠ ⁠… But, dearie, won’t you look at me?”

The student mastered himself and managed to give her awkwardly from under his eyebrows aside glance. His very throat contracted, so disgusting seemed the reddened face, splashed with powder at the nostrils and chin, the small wrinkles round the eyes and the upper lip, never noticed until this moment, and, above all, her suppliant, anxious, culpable devotion⁠—a sort of dog’s look. A shudder of repulsion came over him as he turned his head away.

“But why am I not repulsive to her?” he was thinking in despair. “Why? Ah, what a scoundrel I am!”

“Anna Georgievna⁠—Nina,” he stammered out in an unnatural, wooden voice, “you’ll forgive me.⁠ ⁠… You’ll excuse me. I’m agitated. I don’t know what I’m saying.⁠ ⁠… Understand me. Don’t be angry.⁠ ⁠… I must be by myself. My head is going round and round.”

He made an involuntary movement, as if to turn away from her, and she understood it. Her arms, that had been clinging round his neck, fell helplessly along her knees and her head bent down. She sat like this for a few more minutes and then rose silently with a resigned expression.

She understood better than the student what was happening to him now. She knew that for men the first steps in sensual passion produced the same terrible sickly sensation on beginners as the first draughts of opium, the first cigarette, the first drunken bout. She knew, too, that until this he had been intimate with no other woman, that for him she was the first; knew this from his own words before, felt it by his savage, severe shyness, his awkwardness and roughness with her.

She wanted to console, to calm him, to explain in tender motherly words the cause of his suffering, for she knew that he suffered. But she⁠—ordinarily so bold, so self-assured⁠—could find no words. She felt confused and shy like a young girl and she felt at fault for his fall, for his silent anxiety, for her thirty-five years, and because she did not know, and was unable to discover, how she could help him.

“Sacha, this will pass,” she said at last, almost under her breath. “This will pass, believe me. Calm yourself. But don’t go away. You hear me? You’ll tell me if you want to go away, won’t you?”

“Yes.⁠ ⁠… All right, yes⁠—yes,” he repeated impatiently, looking at the door all the time.

She sighed and left the room noiselessly. Then Voskresenski clutched his hair with both hands and fell with a groan face downwards on the pillow.

IV

The next day Voskresenski was on his way to Odessa on the large steamship Xenia. Disgracefully and weakly he had run away from the Zavalishines, unable to bear his cruel remorse, unable to force himself to meet Anna Georgievna again face to face. After lying on his bed until dusk, he had put his things together as soon as it was dark and then noiselessly, stealthily, like a thief, he had stolen through the back entrance into the vineyard, and from there had clambered out into the road. And all the time, on his way to the post station, when driving in the diligence that was packed with silent Turks and Tartars, all through the night at the Yalta Hotel, his shame, his merciless disgust for himself, for Anna Georgievna, for everything that had happened the day before, and for his own boyish flight, never left him for a single second.

“It has all turned out as if it were a quarrel, as if it were out of revenge. I have stolen something from the Zavalishines and have run away from them,” he thought, angrily grinding his teeth.

It was a hot windless day. The sea lay quiet, caressing, of a pale emerald round the shore, light blue further out and touched only here and there by lazy little wrinkles of purple. Beneath the steamer, it was bright green, bottomless, light and transparent as air. Side by side with the steamer raced a flight of dolphins. From above, one could see perfectly how in the depths the powerful winding movements of their bodies cut through the thin water, and how, at intervals, one after the other, in quick dark semicircles, they leaped to the surface.

The shore receded