Short Fiction, Ivan Bunin [reading women .TXT] 📗

clatter of a train constantly increasing its momentum, and wound up with a riotous gallop. The sexton, having imbibed too much cognac at the feast, died on his way home. The deacon, having fallen down in his own yard into some half-liquid manure, was almost trampled to death by his sheep. The nastiest of autumn dawns, pallidly blue, looked in through the fog into the smoke-filled seigniorial halls⁠—but the lights were still burning there; the talking machine, now grown hoarse, was still gurgling out now the Lezguinka, now The Lancers; the ushers, all moist from the heat and their exertions, were still yelling as they supervised the dances; while the eyes of the young ladies grew glazed from fatigue, and the soles of their white slippers flew off as they danced.⁠ ⁠… But Shasha did not spare even his own high celebration; having convinced himself that he was infernally jealous of his young wife and a certain rather young landowner, he, feigning intoxication, suddenly stepped upon the long train of her dress during a waltz, and tore it off with a ripping sound. And after that he made a rush for a knife, trying to cut his own throat, and, upon being disarmed, he sobbed wildly, tearing off his starched collar and his white tie, calling upon the memory of his departed mother.⁠ ⁠… As for his behaviour after the wedding⁠—Shasha did everything that lay in his power to wreck his own domestic well-being, and to hasten the ruin of Roman.

Having attained the zenith, Roman was inevitably bound, as is always the case in Russia, to start rolling downward again, toward his former lowly lair. Soon after the wedding it turned out that he was entirely entangled, head and foot, in the toils of debt. He became awesome. His grizzled beard turned white. His face came to resemble a dirty-gray, milked-out udder. His eyes died out. His belly, grown flabby, hung down. But Shasha rejoiced malignantly: “I told you so! I told you so!”⁠—and was finishing him off; he rioted, kicked up rows, demanded a winding up of Roman’s affairs. And Roman, turning green from wrath, would rise up against him like a bear, thirsting to maim him⁠—but he no longer could; he no longer could! Crushed down by the thought of approaching disgrace, of approaching poverty, he took to drinking harder and harder. Having lost all shame, he got his mistress (a cook and a soldier’s wife), into his own house. Shasha, not being contented with his wife, lived with her too, just to spite him. As for his wife, he used to exhaust her with his jealousy and his scares; he used to stay away from the house and to send muzhiks with notes to her, upon which notes would be written: “Forgive me in death; I send my blessings to the children,”⁠—and below there would be drawn a grave with a cross. His wife was for a long while deluged with tears. And then she got together with the teacher, and now gave Shasha every reason to be saying “All r-r-right! Only my ashes when I’m bid in my grave will know it all!” The upshot of it all was, that Roman was laid low by a stroke of paralysis; that only the windmill beyond the settlement was left out of all his wealth; that Shasha’s wife, taking the children with her, fled to her father, who had gone to the city of Skopin. The while Shasha, drinking deep of the delicious draught of his misfortunes, treating everything and everybody with merciless criticism and opprobrium, was absenting himself in the village, drinking every bit as hard as his father, she pulled up stakes and disappeared.

Roman left the settlement for his mill beggared and barely alive. Beggared and widowed, gnashing his teeth with rage, Shasha followed him out of the village. What with toiling and moiling, even the mill would not have been a bad thing to live by. But how was Shasha to be bothered with it! How could you expect him to have the strength of getting up on his feet after the awful finishing stroke fate had dealt him! Even formerly he⁠—not understood, not appreciated, condemned to live in the midst of enemies and ill-wishers⁠—had had but one recourse left him: to say nothing, and again to say nothing, and to say nothing without end. And now? Why, he could have piled up thousands from this mill alone; there would have been no getting into it for the carts full of grain surrounding it⁠—if he only had two or three hundred to get him a new shaft and new millstones.⁠ ⁠… Yes, but where was a body to get that money? It’s only into the hands of fools that good luck plays; but you take an able, sensible man, and Fate will twist him into a ram’s horn. Well, let it⁠—let it! “I say nothing,” Shasha would say, malignantly rejoicing; “I always say nothing!”

The broken trough,8 familiar to him and appropriate to his former status of a muzhik, again appeared before Roman in place of palatial chambers. Nor did the rub lie at all in the fact that, instead of smoked sprats and Tsimliyan wine, a big slice of black bread and a wooden vessel of water turned up on his table⁠—he would have eaten such food with his former relish; the rub was in the torments of his pride⁠—the most cruel of all human torments. In a big hut, leaning all to one side, with an earthen floor and with holes in its corners, atop the bare oven⁠—there did Roman sleep now. In the morning he would crawl out beyond the threshold, with a tall staff in his hands. With pigweeds and high rank grass was the outside of the hut overgrown; stinging nettles choked up the huge shell of the wide-open windmill. All this stood out on the bare ridge of the plains, nigh the highway. And Roman would go out to the