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

had disappeared he instantly jumped to his feet, caught the shafts that had been lying on the ground, and flew like a bird through the yard and out of the gates; again did he start running, on and on⁠—this time knowing unerringly whither he was running, and wherefore, and now himself directing his suddenly liberated will.

“Awake, awake!” clamoured within him the thousands of soundless voices of his mournful ancestors, mouldered for hundreds of generations in this paradisaical earth. “Shake off thee the seductions of Mara, the dream of this brief life! Is sleep for thee⁠—thou who hast been empoisoned with venom, pierced through with an arrow! An hundredfold doth he suffer who hath that which is an hundredfold dear; all sorrows, all complaints, come from love, from the attachments of the heart⁠—therefore, slay thou them! Not for long shalt thou be in the tranquillity of rest; anew and anew, in a thousand incarnations, shalt thou be put forth by this thy land of Eden, the shelter of the first men who had come to know desire. But still this brief rest shall come to thee, thou that hast too early run forth upon the path of life, passionately setting out after happiness, and that hast been wounded by the sharpest of all arrows⁠—by the yearning for love and for new inceptions in this ancient universe, where from time out of mind the conqueror stands with a heavy sole upon the throat of the conquered!”

The lights of the open air stalls of Slave Island appeared under the canopies of the trees whose tops were interlaced. The rickshaw-man hungrily ate in one of these stalls a small bowl of rice over-spiced with pepper, and then darted on. He knew where the old man from Madura lived, who had an hour ago entered the yard of the hotel: he dwelt with his nephew, at his large fruit store, in a low house with wooden columns. The nephew, in a dirty European suit of duck, with an enormous mane of black twining wool upon his head, was dragging in the baskets of fruits into the interior of the store, his eyes puckering from the smoke of a cigarette that had stuck to his lower lip. He paid no attention to the insane appearance of the perspiring, heated rickshaw-man. And the rickshaw-man silently hopped up under the shelter of the awning, among the pillars, went to the left, and with his foot pushed a small door behind which he hoped to find the old mute. In his perspiring hand he was clutching a treasured gold-piece, which, while he was still running, he had taken out of a leather pouch that hung at his belt, beneath his apron. And the gold-piece speedily did its work. When the rickshaw-man jumped out again, he bore a large cigar box, tied with a cord. He had paid a great price for it, but then, it was not empty: that which it contained was struggling, writhing, knocking against the lid with its tensed coils, swishingly.

Why did he take the little carriage along with him? For take it along he did⁠—and at an even, powerful pace flew for the shore of the ocean, toward Gull Face Place. The place was empty; darkly did it extend into the distance under the light of the stars. Beyond it were scattered the small and infrequent lights of the Fort, and against the sky was slowly turning the watchtower of the lighthouse, with its reflectors, throwing fumid stripes of white light in the direction of the roadstead only. The rickshaw-man felt a faint cool breeze blowing from the ocean, whose drowsy murmur was barely audible. Having reached at a run the shore, the middle of the road, the rickshaw-man for the last time threw down the slender shafts, into which at such an early age, but not for long, life had harnessed him, and sat down⁠—this time not upon the ground, but on a bench; sat down without fear, as though he were a white resident.

In giving a whole pound to the Hindu, he had demanded the smallest and the strongest, the most deathbearing one. And it was⁠—besides having a faery beauty, being all in black rings, with green edgings, with a dark blue rounded head, with an emerald stripe back of its head, and with a funereal tail⁠—it was, despite its small size, unusually powerful and malignant; but now, after it had been coiled up in a smelly wooden box, it was especially so. It coiled convulsively, like a steel spring; it writhed, rustled, and knocked against the lid of the box. And he rapidly untied, unwound the cord.⁠ ⁠… However, who knows just how he did it? Were his hands steady, or did they tremble? Was he rapid, resolute, or no? And did he waver long after untying the cord? Did he gaze for long at the murmurous dark ocean, upon the faint starlight, upon the Southern Cross, the Crow, upon Canopus? Did he bare his teeth in a canine snarl in the direction of the residential quarter, in the direction of the rich hotel with its entrance shining in the distance? Most probably, he had at once unhesitatingly opened the box, and had laid his left hand firmly upon those springy coils, icy as a dead body, that were writhing in the box; he was bitten right in the palm.

And that bite is intolerably searing⁠—it is like the shock of an electric current, and transpierces a man’s entire body with untold pain, with such torture that after feeling it even monkeys cry out piteously and burst into sobs⁠—childish, passionate, despairingly-imploring. The rickshaw-man, most probably, did neither cry out nor burst into sobs; full well did he know what he had set out to do. But there is no doubt that, having felt this fiery shock, he turned a pinwheel on the bench, and that the box flew aside. And then, instantly, a bottomless darkness spread out beneath him, and all things darted off