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

until the time when the forests near Colombo, filling with black, sultry darkness, would begin to resound mysteriously with murmurings and moanings of countless cicadas and tree toads, and the thickets of bamboo would be aquiver with myriads of fiery sparks.

The Englishman, too, was intoxicated, as he walked out of the hotel with a cigar⁠—his eyes were drowsy, his face, heightened in colour, seemed to have become fuller. Glancing at his watch from time to time and thinking of something, apparently not knowing how to kill time, he stood a while near the hotel in indecision. Then he ordered himself carried first to the post office, where he dropped three postal cards into the box, and from the post office to Gordon’s Garden, which he did not even enter⁠—he simply glanced in at the gates at the monument and the pathways; and from the garden he went at random: to Black Town, to the market place in Black Town, to the Kellani River.⁠ ⁠… And then he was whirled on and on, hither and thither, by the intoxicated rickshaw-man, who was bathed in sweat from head to foot, aroused both by whiskey and by betel, and by the hope of receiving a whole heap of pennies, and by certain other dreams that stir the body and soul and that never forsake a man. At the most oppressive hour of the afternoon heat and glare, when, after having sat on a bench under a tree for two minutes one leaves upon it a dark ring of perspiration, he, to please the Englishman, who did not know what to do until dinner, ran all over Black Town⁠—ancient, populous, redolent of spicy odours; and many naked coloured bodies and many bright stuffs girt about hips did the sleepy Englishman see; many Parsees, Hindus, yellow faced Malayans; malodorous Chinese shops, brick-tiled and bamboo-covered roofs, temples, minarets and idol-temples; sailors from Europe on shore leave, as well as Buddhistic monks⁠—shaven, thin, with insane eyes, clad in canary-coloured toga-like garments, with the right shoulder bared, and carrying fans made out of the foliage of the sacred palm. Rapidly, rapidly, did the rickshaw-man and his passenger dash through this teeming density and dirt of the ancient East, as though they were escaping from someone. Up to the very river Kellani did they run⁠—the narrow, turbid, and deep Kellani, made too warm by the sun, half-covered with impenetrable green overgrowths that bent low from its banks; the river beloved of crocodiles, who retreat farther and farther into the depths of the virgin forests before the barges with straw-thatched arched covers; barges laden with bales of tea, with rice, cinnamon, precious stones still in the rough⁠—barges floating with especial deliberation in the golden deep glitter of the sun before evening.⁠ ⁠… Then the Englishman gave orders to return to the Fort, by now deserted, with all its offices, agencies and banks closed; he was shaved in a barber shop and grew unpleasantly younger; he bought cigars, dropped into an apothecary’s.⁠ ⁠… The rickshaw-man, grown thinner, all bathed in sweat, was by now gazing upon him inimically, with the eyes of a dog that feels attacks of madness coming on.⁠ ⁠… At six o’clock, having run past the lighthouse at the end of Queen’s Street, having run through the quiet and clean military streets, he ran out upon the shore of the ocean, that struck his eyes with its freedom, with its glaucously aureate sheen from the low-lying sun, and started running over Gull Face Place toward Slave Island.

“From longing is born the desire for joy,” the Exalted One hath said, “from happiness is born sorrow; out of joy and sorrow doth fear arise.” And now within the eyes of the rickshaw-man had already appeared sorrow, and fear, and malice. He had grown daft from running, had more than once, with sad weariness, turned around toward his tormentor; he breathed heavily, putting behind him with his long legs the broad, well-laid road of the Place. At the setting of the sun this Place is vast, empty and melancholy. Having done with business, the Englishmen stroll here before dinner, are driven in costly horse equipages, or drive their wives, mistresses, and children; play tennis and football; and admire the ocean and the magnificent beauty of the tropical sunset⁠—a sunset not like that of their own land. The rickshaw-man ran on, looking wildly upon these sinewy, red-haired men in short white trunks and gay sweaters, who careered over the Place of their own free will, racing after one another with all their might, jumping up after the soaring balls and kicking them resoundingly with the rough tips of their heavy shoes. The sun was sinking; the sky above the setting sun was growing green; a light, downy cloud, that had been lurking in the skyey depths, became entirely roseate.⁠ ⁠… “Carlton Hotel!” in a lifeless voice said the Englishman, who had all the time been sadly and drowsily gazing toward the west, upon the ocean, upon its softly murmurous surge, scattering into heliotrope foam upon the boulders on shore.⁠ ⁠… The rickshaw-man, as he ran, would bare his teeth; by now he wanted to gnaw this man who had driven him so hard⁠—but it was impossible not to run: the Englishman, without changing the expression of his drowsily sad face, more and more often prodded the rickshaw-man with the tip of his cane. And besides, the rickshaw’s beatific exaltation had already passed into something else⁠—into a tense submissiveness, into a coma of ceaseless running. All the hotels in the Fort were filled up, and the Englishman lived in a common one beyond Slave Island⁠—and now the rickshaw-man once more ran past the banyan tree, under which he had sat down this very morning in his greed of earning money from these merciless and enigmatic white men, in his obstinate hope of happiness. Once more the familiar gardens, one after another; the stone enclosures; the Dutch-tile roofs of bungalows⁠—low, squat, by comparison with the trees spreading over them.⁠ ⁠… Having