Short Fiction - Vladimir Korolenko (easy books to read in english txt) 📗

“He slammed the gate and left the garden.

“He stopped and waited for me in the yard, took my arm, and came up to my rooms. On the way, and in my apartments, he kept talking confusedly and incoherently. He did not conceal the fact that he had had some affection for a certain woman. This might be still ‘alive under the ashes.’⁠ ⁠… On the other hand he was dreaming of union and the possibility of friendship with his humblest brother. Although both of these feelings had led to his disillusionment, he could show something, so that everyone would feel it.⁠ ⁠… But in general, magnanimity and the finer feelings belong only to highly cultured people.⁠ ⁠…

“He was nervous and under his rather artificial pathos, I could see his real exasperation and anger.

“I later had a chance to see his diary. These were separate pages, written like letters to his distant friend.⁠ ⁠… Apparently he hadn’t sent any letters for a long time, but these pages were like lights in the darkness. Under the approximate day of the conversation with Gavrilo was a passionate note. He told the whole story of Yelena, and wrote that he had made a mistake, and that he now loved her.⁠ ⁠… And that he would try once more.⁠ ⁠… This ended with a sudden burst of poetry: ‘My distant friend, you, of course, do not doubt that I will do what I consider the duty of magnanimity.⁠ ⁠…’

“Then, sending Gavrilo one day with the horse somewhere outside the city, M. Budnikov went to the wing where Yelena still lived.

“ ‘Yelena! You should come to me. You must fix up something.⁠ ⁠…’

“A few days before this he had been thoughtful and solemn, but now he dressed in style, went to the wing, and entered Yelena’s room, without heeding the inquisitive looks of his tenants.

“No one knew what happened in that room, but a half-hour later M. Budnikov came out, stubborn, affected, but apparently dazed. Everyone began to say that he had formally proposed to Yelena and⁠—she had rejected him.

“After this he left for Petersburg, where he had a lawsuit before the Senate. He lost it, and when he returned, Gavrilo and Yelena were already married.

“This made a great impression upon him, like some great spiritual conversion. One apparently insignificant circumstance especially surprised him. Every spring flowers grew by the wall under M. Budnikov’s windows. This Yelena did regularly, and it was put down as an annual source of expense: seed, a watering pot, to a blacksmith for mending the spade.⁠ ⁠… In the early spring Yelena used to set to work at it, gladly and merrily, and M. Budnikov took a delighted interest in it. Now that wing was neglected, the flower bed languished, M. Budnikov’s windows seemed blind.⁠ ⁠… But the other wing, where Gavrilo and his wife lived, bloomed and flourished. A symbol. When M. Budnikov came back from the station and took one look at this unexpected contrast his face changed, and for a short time he lost his usual aristocratic air. I suddenly felt sorry for him. I went out and invited him into my room. He sat with me a long time and gave me his impressions of the capital⁠—verbose, rambling, insincere. I kept feeling that M. Budnikov’s soul was thinking of something very far removed from his impressions of the capital.

“Gradually everything drifted back into the old channels. M. Budnikov still went twice a week to his farm, still visited his tenants on certain days, still prepared his dinner on an oil stove. But there were more trifles in his diary; for example, he began to note down how many steps he took each day, and apparently counted thereby the use and value of various things.

“In a short time another change took place: M. Budnikov felt attracted to religion.

“I remember one fall evening.⁠ ⁠… It was one of those evenings when nature touches your soul especially. The stars seem to be waving and whispering in the heavens, and the earth is covered with light and shade.⁠ ⁠… Our little city, as you know, is quiet and filled with foliage. You go out in the evening and sit down on your steps. And so with the other houses along the street; here’s one person on a bench by the gate, another on the dirt bank, another on the grass.⁠ ⁠… People are whispering about themselves, the trees about themselves⁠—and there’s a hardly perceptible hum. Yes, and something’s whispering in your soul. You unconsciously review your whole life. What was and what is left, where you came from, what’s going to happen? Then, everything⁠ ⁠… the meaning of your life in the general economy of nature, so to speak,⁠ ⁠… nature, where all the stars sink, unnumbered, unlimited,⁠ ⁠… they gleam and shine.⁠ ⁠… And speak to your soul. Sometimes it’s sad and deep and quiet.⁠ ⁠… You feel you’re going to the wrong place. You begin to think what’s there above.⁠ ⁠… You want to run away from this reproving beauty, this exalted calm, with your load of confusion, and you want to melt away in it.⁠ ⁠… You’ve no place to go.⁠ ⁠… You enter your office, look at all your things in the lamplight⁠ ⁠… textbooks, copybooks with answers written by your pupils.⁠ ⁠… And you ask: where’s there anything alive?⁠ ⁠…”

Petr Petrovich muttered something and the narrator stopped again.

“Well⁠ ⁠… that was the way I felt and I was sitting on my steps and thinking: here’s the people coming from vespers.⁠ ⁠… What of it? That’s the way they find their relations to the infinite.⁠ ⁠… Or else it’s nothing but habit, mere automatic motion. I prefer it to be real. Suddenly I saw one man leave the crowd and come towards me. It turned out to be M. Budnikov. He had been to vespers. He sat down beside me.

“I felt that M. Budnikov was waiting, you know, for me to ask him why he went to church. He never had gone and was always sarcastic about religion, but now he had suddenly