FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71  
72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   >>   >|  
Vassilyev's rooms were crowded with old women and mutes, when the coffin had been moved and carried out of the yard, I advised him to remain at home. But he would not obey me, in spite of the pain and the grey, rainy morning. He walked bareheaded and in silence behind the coffin all the way to the cemetery, hardly able to move one leg after the other, and from time to time clutching convulsively at his wounded side. His face expressed complete apathy. Only once when I roused him from his lethargy by some insignificant question he shifted his eyes over the pavement and the grey fence, and for a moment there was a gleam of gloomy anger in them. "'Weelright,'" he read on a signboard. "Ignorant, illiterate people, devil take them!" I led him home from the cemetery. ---- Only one year has passed since that night, and Vassilyev has hardly had time to wear out the boots in which he tramped through the mud behind his wife's coffin. At the present time as I finish this story, he is sitting in my drawing-room and, playing on the piano, is showing the ladies how provincial misses sing sentimental songs. The ladies are laughing, and he is laughing too. He is enjoying himself. I call him into my study. Evidently not pleased at my taking him from agreeable company, he comes to me and stands before me in the attitude of a man who has no time to spare. I give him this story, and ask him to read it. Always condescending about my authorship, he stifles a sigh, the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an armchair and begins upon it. "Hang it all, what horrors," he mutters with a smile. But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face becomes. At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns terribly pale, he gets up and goes on reading as he stands. When he has finished he begins pacing from corner to corner. "How does it end?" I ask him. "How does it end? H'm. . . ." He looks at the room, at me, at himself. . . . He sees his new fashionable suit, hears the ladies laughing and . . . sinking on a chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night. "Wasn't I right when I told you it was all absurd? My God! I have had burdens to bear that would have broken an elephant's back; the devil knows what I have suffered--no one could have suffered more, I think, and where are the traces? It's astonishing. One would have thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies woul
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71  
72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

laughing

 
begins
 

coffin

 
ladies
 

corner

 

stands

 
reading
 

suffered

 

Vassilyev

 

cemetery


astonishing

 
armchair
 

reader

 

absurd

 

horrors

 

traces

 

thought

 
stifles
 

agonies

 

attitude


condescending

 

authorship

 

Always

 

imprint

 

mutters

 
burdens
 
pacing
 

finished

 
broken
 

fashionable


elephant
 

sinking

 

graver

 

laughed

 
stress
 

terribly

 

painful

 

memories

 
roused
 

lethargy


apathy

 
complete
 

wounded

 

expressed

 

insignificant

 
question
 

moment

 
pavement
 

shifted

 

convulsively