The Duel, Aleksandr Kuprin [if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT] 📗

She bent lower towards him, gazed into his eyes, and all her lovely countenance was for once visible to Romashov.

“Wonderful, divine Shurochka, you have never been so beautiful as now. There is something about you that sings and shines⁠—something new and mysterious which I cannot understand. But, Alexandra Petrovna, don’t be angry now at the question. Are you not afraid that someone may come?”

She smiled without speaking, and that soft, low, caressing laugh aroused in Romashov’s heart a tremor of ineffable bliss.

“My dearest Romochka⁠—my good, fainthearted, simple, timorous Romochka⁠—have I not already told you that this day is ours? Think only of that, Romochka. Do you know why I am so brave and reckless today? No, you do not know the reason. Well, it’s because I am in love with you today⁠—nothing else. No, no⁠—don’t, please, get any false notions into your head. Tomorrow it will have passed.”

Romashov tried to take her in his arms.

“Alexandra Petrovna⁠—Shurochka⁠—Sascha,”18 he moaned beseechingly.

“Don’t call me Shurochka⁠—do you hear? I don’t like it. Anything but that. By the way,” she stopped abruptly as if considering something, “what a charming name you have⁠—Georgi. It’s much prettier than Yuri⁠—oh, much, much, much prettier. Georgi,” she pronounced the name slowly with an accent on each syllable as though it afforded her delight to listen to the sound of every letter in the word. “Yes, there is a proud ring about that name.”

“Oh, my beloved,” Romashov exclaimed, interrupting her with passionate fervour.

“Wait and listen. I dreamt of you last night⁠—a wonderful, enchanting dream. I dreamt we were dancing together in a very remarkable room. Oh, I should at any time recognize that room in its minutest details. It was lighted by a red lamp that shed its radiance on handsome rugs, a bright new cottage piano, and two windows with drawn red curtains. All within was red. An invisible orchestra played, we danced close-folded in each other’s arms. No, no. It’s only in dreams that one can come so intoxicatingly close to the object of one’s love. Our feet did not touch the floor; we hovered in the air in quicker and quicker circles, and this ineffably delightful enchantment lasted so very, very long. Listen, Romochka, do you ever fly in your dreams?”

Romashov did not answer immediately. He was in an exquisitely beautiful world of wonders, at the same time magic and real. And was not all this then merely a dream, a fairy tale? This warm, intoxicating spring night; these dark, silent, listening trees; this rare, beautiful, white-clad woman beside him. He only succeeded, after a violent effort of will, in coming back to consciousness and reality.

“Yes, sometimes, but, with every passing year my flight gets weaker and lower. When I was a child, I used to fly as high as the ceiling, and how funny it seemed to me to look down on the people on the floor. They walked with their feet up, and tried in vain to reach me with the long broom. I flew off, mocking them with my exultant laughter. But now the force in my wings is broken,” added Romashov, with a sigh. “I flap my wings about for a few strokes, and then fall flop on the floor.”

Shurochka sank into a semi-recumbent position, with her elbow resting on the ground and her head resting in the palm of her hand. After a few moments’ silence she continued in an absent tone⁠—

“This morning, when I awoke, a mad desire came over me to meet you. So intense was my longing that I do not know what would have happened if you had not come. I almost think I should have defied convention, and looked you up at your house. That was why I told you not to come before five o’clock. I was afraid of myself. Darling, do you understand me now?”

Hardly half an arshin from Romashov’s face lay her crossed feet⁠—two tiny feet in very low shoes, and stockings clocked with white embroidery in the form of an arrow over the instep. With his temples throbbing and a buzzing in his ears, he madly pressed his eager lips against this elastic, live, cool part of her body, which he felt through the stocking.

“No, Romochka⁠—stop.” He heard quite close above his head her weak, faltering, and somewhat lazy voice.

Romashov raised his head. Once more he was the fairytale prince in the wonderful wood. In scattered groups along the whole extensive slope in the dark grass stood the ancient, solemn oaks, motionless, but attentive to every sound that disturbed Nature’s holy, dream-steeped slumbers. High up, above the horizon and through the dense mass of tree trunks and crests, one could still discern a slender streak of twilight glow, not, as usual, light red or changing into blue, but of dark purple hue, reminiscent of the last expiring embers in the hearth, or the dull flames of deep red wine drawn out by the sun’s rays. And as it were, framed in all this silent magnificence, lay a young, lovely, white-clad woman⁠—a dryad lazily reclining.

Romashov came closer to her. To him it seemed as if from Shurochka’s countenance there streamed a pale, faint radiance. He could not distinguish her eyes; he only saw two large black spots, but he felt that she was gazing at him steadily.

“This is a poem, a fairytale⁠—a fairytale,” he whispered, scarcely moving his lips.

“Yes, my friend, it is a fairytale.”

He began to kiss her dress; he hid his face in her slender, warm, sweet-smelling hand, and, at the same time, stammered in a hollow voice⁠—

“Sascha⁠—I love you⁠—love you.”

When she now raised herself somewhat up, he clearly saw her eyes, black, piercing, now unnaturally dilated, at another moment closed altogether, by which the whole of her face was so strangely altered that it became unrecognizable. His eager, thirsty lips sought her mouth, but she turned away, shook her head sadly, and at last whispered again and again⁠—

“No, no, no, my dear, my darling⁠—not that.”

“Oh, my adored one,