Short Fiction, Leonid Andreyev [good e books to read .TXT] 📗

for nine years; in the winter he occasionally went to the theatre; in the summer he visited at the bungalow of an acquaintance; and twice he was ill with the influenza⁠—the second time immediately before Easter.

And just as he was mounting the stairs at the Vasilyevskys’, in evening dress and with his opera-hat under his arm, he remembered that he would see him there, the other, and felt very much surprised that he could not in the least recall his face and figure. Petrov himself was below the average height and somewhat round-shouldered, so that many took him for a hunchback; he had large black eyes with yellowish whites. In other respects he did not differ from the rest, who paid a visit to the Vasilyevskys twice a year, and when they forgot his surname they used to speak of him as the “little hunchback.”

He, the other, was already there, and on the point of going away; but when he recognized Petrov, he smiled politely, and remained. He was also in evening dress and had an opera-hat, and Petrov failed to examine him further since he was occupied with talking, and eating, and drinking tea.

They went out together, and helped one another on with their coats, like friends: they politely made way the one for the other, and each gave the porter a half-rouble. They stood still a short time in the street, and then he, the other, said:

“Well, tipping’s become a regular tax. But it can’t be helped.”

Petrov replied:

“Yes, quite true.”

And since there was nothing more to be said, they smiled in a friendly manner, and Petrov said:

“Which way are you going?”

“I turn to the left. And you?”

“I to the right.”

In the cab Petrov remembered that he had again failed either to ask his name, or to observe him particularly. He turned round: carriages were passing in both directions, the pavements were black with pedestrians, and in that closely moving mass it was as impossible to distinguish him, the other, as to find a particular grain of sand amongst other grains. And again Petrov forgot him, and did not think of him again for a whole year.

Petrov had lived for many years in the same furnished apartments, and he was not much liked there, because he was grumpy and irritable; and they also called him behind his back “Humpty.” He used often to sit in his apartment alone, and none knew what work he did, since Fedot, the upstairs servant, did not look on books and letters as “work.” At night Petrov sometimes went for a walk, and Ivan the porter could not understand these walks, since Petrov always returned sober, and⁠—alone.

But Petrov used to walk about at night, because he was very much afraid of the city in which he lived, and he feared it more than ever in the daytime, when the streets were full of people.

The city was immense and populous, and there was in its populousness and immensity something stubborn, unconquerable, and callously cruel. With the colossal weight of its bloated stone houses, it crushed the earth on which it stood; and the streets between the houses were narrow, crooked, and deep like fissures in a rock. It seemed as though they were all seized with a panic of fear, and were endeavouring to run away from the centre to the open country, and that they could not find the road, and losing their way had rolled themselves in a ball like a serpent, and were intersecting one another, and looking back in hopeless despair.

One might walk for hours about these streets, which seemed broken-down, choked, and faint with a terrible convulsion, and never emerge from the line of fat stone houses. Some high, others low, some flushed with the cold thin blood of new bricks, others painted with a dark or light colour, they stood in unswaying solidity on both sides, callously met, and personally conducted one, and pressing together in a dense crowd, in this direction and in that, lost their individuality and become like one another⁠—and the walker grew frightened: it was as though he had become rooted to the spot, and the houses kept going past him in an endless truculent file.

Once Petrov was walking quietly about the street, when suddenly he felt what a thickness of stone houses separated him from the wide, open country, where the free earth breathed softly in the sunshine, and man’s eyes might look round to the distant horizon.

It seemed to him that he was suffocating and being blinded, and he felt a desire to run and get quickly out from the stony embrace⁠—and it became a horror to him to think, however fast he might run, still houses, ever houses, would go with him on both sides, and he would be suffocated before he could run beyond the city. Petrov ensconced himself in the first restaurant he came across, but even there he seemed for a long time to be suffocating; so he drank cold water, and wiped his eyes with his handkerchief.

But the most terrible thing of all was, that in all the houses there lived human beings, and about all the streets were moving human beings. There were a multitude of them, and all of them were unknown to him⁠—strangers; and all of them lived their own separate life, hidden from the eyes of others; they were without interruption being born, and dying, and there was no beginning nor end to this stream. Whenever Petrov went to the bank, or out for a walk, he saw the same familiar, well-known houses, and everything appeared to him simply an old acquaintance; if, however, he stood still, but for a moment, to fix his attention on some face, then all was quickly and terribly changed. With a feeling of terror and impotence Petrov would look at all the faces, and understand that he saw them for the first time, that yesterday he had seen other people, and tomorrow would see yet others; and so