Short Fiction - Aleksandr Kuprin (best ebook reader for ubuntu .TXT) 📗

mite playing the part of a peasant, wearing a huge cap of dogskin and his father’s great leather gloves with only places for hand and thumb, was delightful, with his serious face and hoarse little bass voice⁠—a born artist.

The remainder was very disgusting. All done in the false popular style.

I had long been familiar with the usual entertainment items: Little-Russian songs mispronounced to an impossible point; verses and silly embroidery patterns: “There’s a Christmas tree, there’s Petrushka, there’s a horse, there’s a steam-engine.” The teacher, a little consumptive fellow, got up for the occasion in a long frock-coat and stiff shirt, played the fiddle in fits and starts, or beat time with his bow, or tapped a child on the head with it now and then.

The honorary guardian of the school, a notary from another town, chewed his gums all the time and stuck out his short parrot’s tongue with sheer delight, feeling that the whole show had been got up in his honour.

At last the teacher got to the most important item on his programme. We had laughed up till then, our turn was coming to weep. A little girl of twelve or thirteen came out, the daughter of a watchman, her face, by the way, not at all like his horse-like profile. She was the top girl in the school and she began her little song:

“The jumping little grasshopper sang the summer through,
Never once considering how the winter would blow in his eyes.”

Then a shaggy little boy of seven, in his father’s felt boots, took up his part, addressing the watchman’s daughter:

“That’s strange, neighbour. Didn’t you work in the summer?”
“What was there to work for? There was plenty of grass.”

Where was our famous Russian hospitality?

To the question, “What did you do in the summer?” the grasshopper could only reply, “I sang all the time.”

At this answer the teacher, Kapitonitch, waved his bow and his fiddle at one and the same time⁠—oh, that was an effect rehearsed long before that evening!⁠—and suddenly in a mysterious half-whisper the whole choir began to sing:

“You’ve sung your song, you call that doing,
You’ve sung all the summer, then dance all the winter,
You’ve sung your song, then dance all the winter,
Dance all the winter, dance all the winter.
You’ve sung the song, then dance the dance.”

I confess that my hair stood on end as if each individual hair were made of glass, and it seemed to me as if the eyes of the children and of the peasants packing the schoolroom were all fixed on me as if repeating that d⁠⸺⁠d phrase:

“You’ve sung the song, you call that doing,
You’ve sung the song, then dance the dance.”

I don’t know how long this drone of evil boding and sinister recitation went on. But I remember clearly that during those minutes an appalling idea went through my brain. “Here we stand,” thought I, “a little band of intelligentsia, face to face with an innumerable peasantry, the most enigmatical, the greatest, and the most abased people in the world. What connects us with them? Nothing. Neither language, nor religion, nor labour, nor art. Our poetry would be ridiculous to their ears, absurd, incomprehensible. Our refined painting would be simply useless and senseless smudging in their eyes. Our quest for gods and making of gods would seem to them stupidity, our music merely a tedious noise. Our science would not satisfy them. Our complex work would seem laughable or pitiful to them, the austere and patient labourers of the fields. Yes. On the dreadful day of reckoning what answer shall we give to this child, wild beast, wise man, and animal, to this many-million-headed giant?” We shall only be able to say sorrowfully, “We sang all the time. We sang our song.”

And he will reply with an artful peasant smile, “Then go and dance the dance.”

And I know that my companions felt as I did. We went out of the entertainment-room silent, not exchanging opinions.

Three days later we said goodbye, and since that time have been rather cold towards one another. We had been suddenly chilled in our consciences and made ashamed, as if these innocent mouths of sleepy children had pronounced death sentence upon us. And when I returned from the post of Ivan Karaulof to Goreli, and from Goreli to Koslof, and from Koslof to Zintabrof, and then further by railroad there followed me all the time that ironical, seemingly malicious phrase, “Then dance the dance.”

God alone knows the destiny of the Russian people.⁠ ⁠… Well, I suppose, if it should be necessary, we’ll dance it!

I travelled a whole night to the railway station.

On the bare frosted branches of the birches sat the stars, as if the Lord Himself had with His own hands decorated the trees. And I thought, “Yes, it’s beautiful.” But I could not banish that ironical thought, “Then dance the dance.”

Easter Day

On his way from Petersburg to the Crimea Colonel Voznitsin purposely broke his journey at Moscow, where his childhood and youth had been spent, and stayed there two days. It is said that some animals when they feel that they are about to die go round to all their favourite and familiar haunts, taking leave of them, as it were. Voznitsin was not threatened by the near approach of death; at forty years of age he was still strong and well-preserved. But in his tastes and feelings and in his relations with the world he had reached the point from which life slips almost imperceptibly into old age. He had begun to narrow the circle of his enjoyments and pleasures; a habit of retrospection and of sceptical suspicion was manifest in his behaviour; his dumb, unconscious, animal love of Nature had become less and was giving place to a more refined appreciation of the shades of beauty; he was no longer agitated and disturbed by the adorable loveliness of women, but chiefly⁠—and this was the first sign of spiritual blight⁠—he began to think about