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

after him. Exactly at noon the Englishman gave him a rupee to buy himself some food, while he himself went into the office of a big European steamship line. The rickshaw-man bought some cigarettes, started smoking, inhaling deeply, watching his cigarette, as women do⁠—and smoked five of them, one after the other. In a delectable daze he sat in the fretted shade, opposite the three-story building where the office was, and suddenly, having raised his eyes, saw that his passenger, and also five other Europeans, had appeared on the balcony under the white awning. They were all looking through binoculars at the harbour⁠—and now, beyond the roofs of the wharf, appeared two tall, slender masts, slightly inclined backward. The people on the balcony started waving their handkerchiefs, while from beyond the roofs, morosely, mightily and majestically, a whistle began to roar, echoed all over the roadstead and in the city⁠—the steamer from faraway Europe that the passenger of rickshaw number seven had been awaiting had arrived. With English punctuality did it enter after twenty days’ sail to Colombo⁠—and that which the rickshaw-man, still filled with hopes and desires, did not at all expect⁠—that dinner, so fatal for him, to be held in the house near the lagoon, at the steamship agent’s home⁠—was decided upon.

But until dinner, until evening, there still remained much time. And again this man in spectacles who saw nothing came out into the street. He said goodbye to the two men who had come out with him and who had gone in the direction of the white statue of Victoria, toward the covered wharf; and again the rickshaw-man started ambling through the street⁠—this time toward the hotel, where at this time many tourists and rich residents were eating and drinking in a semi-dark hall, whose sultry stuffiness was stirred and mixed with the odours of the food by blades turning near the ceiling. And again, like a dog, the rickshaw-man squatted down upon the pavement, upon the petals of the ketmias. The fretted shade of trees whose light-green tips were interlaced spread over the street, and in this shade went past him the womanish Senegalese, thrusting upon the Europeans coloured postal cards, tortoiseshell combs, precious stones⁠—one native was even dragging after him by a cord a little beast in a coat of long quills, trying to sell it⁠—and these half-savages, these rickshaw-men, kept up their ceaseless racing through this rich European thoroughfare.⁠ ⁠… In the distance, in the centre of an open square, a woman of heroic size, in marble⁠—proud, double-chinned, in crown and royal mantle, seated on her throne upon a high pedestal of marble⁠—was blazing in her whiteness. And those who had just arrived from Europe were trooping from that direction. Black and dove-coloured servants jumped out upon the entrance to the hotel; bowing, they snatched the canes and small baggage from the hands of the arrivals, who were also met by the bows, restrained and graceful, of a man resplendent with the parting of his pomatumed hair, with his eyes, his teeth, his cuffs, his starched linen, his piqué dinner jacket, his piqué trousers, and his white footgear. “Men are forever going to feasts, to excursions, to diversions,” saith the Exalted One, Who had at one time visited this paradisaical corner of the first men who had come to know desire. “The sight, sounds, taste, and odours of things intoxicate them,” He had said; “desire entwines them, even as a creeping plant, green, beautiful, and death-bearing, entwines the tree Shala.” Traces of fatigue, of exhaustion from heat, from the rocking of the boat at sea and from maladies, were upon the ashen faces of those going to the hotel. They all had the appearance of being half-dead, they spoke without moving their lips; but they all walked on, looking about them, and one after the other disappeared within the darkness of the vestibule, in order to go to their rooms, to wash up and refresh themselves. And then, having intoxicated themselves with food, drink, cigars and coffee, until their faces flushed crimson, they would roll away in rickshaws to the shore of the ocean, into the Cinnamon Gardens, to the Hindu temples and the Buddhistic sanctuaries. Everyone of them⁠—everyone!⁠—had within his soul that which compels a man to live and to desire the sweet deception of life! And was not this deception doubly sweet to the rickshaw-man, born in the land of the first people? Ladies and gentlemen walked to and fro before him⁠—elderly, ugly, just as buck-toothed as his black mother, sitting in the distant forest hut; but at times young women also went past him⁠—pleasant to look upon, in white raiment, in small helmets wound with light veils, and, arousing desire within him, they looked intently upon his splendid, upraised eyelashes, upon the rag around his pitch-black head, and upon his blood stained mouth. But then, was she who had disappeared in the city inferior to them? The warmth of the tropical sun had made her grow. She seemed darker on account of her short blouse, white, with little blue flowers, and her skirt, just as short and of the same material, both put directly upon her naked body⁠—just a trifle full, but strong and small. She had a little rounded head, a convex little forehead, round shining eyes in which childish timidity was already being commingled with a joyous curiosity about life, with a hidden muliebrity, both tender and passionate; there was a coral necklace upon her rounded neck; her little hands and feet were braceletted with silver.⁠ ⁠… Jumping up from his place, the rickshaw-man ran into one of the nearest by-streets, where, in an old, one-storied house under brick tiles, with thick wooden pillars, there was a bar for the lower classes. There he put twenty-five cents on the bar, and for that price gulped down a whole glass of whiskey. Having mixed this fire with the betel, he had assured himself of a beatific exaltation almost until the very evening,