Short Fiction - Fyodor Sologub (best romance ebooks .txt) 📗

of fine friable pale yellow sand, dotted here and there with large stones and some small pebbles. The rugged boulders were ornamental, the pebbles were rather a hindrance to walking, but the sand was delightful and the bathing excellent, and on the shore in front of the villas was a row of clean-looking dressing-rooms.

The water of the gulf was of many varying tints and colours, from the palest and most delicate blue in the sunshine to the gloomiest purple in dull weather. Sometimes it was perfectly calm. Then the broad waters of the gulf lay like an enormous expanse of steel along which stripes of fleeting colour streamed.

Sometimes the waves lashed noisily along the sandy shore. The long wearisome sound like the roar of a tired and hungry animal kept nervous visitors from sleeping, flurried the hysterical, and delighted the serious fifteen-year-old schoolboys. On such days they would come down to the shore and meditate upon the “accursed” questions of life and being⁠—those questions familiar to every progressive schoolboy of that age.

The sunsets were wonderful, each evening different. Every evening the sky arrayed itself in a new way, sometimes covering itself with clouds, sometimes appearing clear and cloudless.

If there were few clouds, or none at all, the sky showed itself in an exquisite austerity of beauty as its adornment. Then the sun, solitary, weary, purple in colour, hiding itself behind pale purple veils, sank majestically down towards the hardly distinguishable line of the horizon, sinking slowly, dying away in sadness and beauty, till at length, with a last faint gleam shining for a moment in the misty bed of the far and melancholy distance, it went out like the last sigh of an expiring universe. And then came on an undisturbed serenity both in the heavens and upon the earth, and a spell of deepening shadows was cast upon the warm sand and the cold pebbles, on the dreaming trees and on the humble roofs of the villagers, gradually chilling all.

When the sunset sky was massed with dark heavy lowering clouds, and bright foam-like cloudlets were scattered like a whimsical pattern on the blue enamel of the heavens, the departing sun was attended by a magnificence of flame and colour and radiance and delicate gold-edged beams of light. The enraptured gaze did not then behold the setting sun in the majesty of its departure, for the sun appeared as only one of the heavenly marvels, and not the most beautiful of all⁠—only a monotonously glowing disk of a uniform crimson incandescence. All the broad and beauteous West was filled with slow streams of wavering and glimmering molten many-toned liquid gold, blazing with all the yellows of amber and half-transparent topaz, flaming through the innocent blue of heaven with all the passions and crimsons of blood, trembling and unconsumed in the flames of jasper, onyx and emerald and the glowing carmine of rubies. It seemed then as if a gigantic rainbow, glowing in the heat of the heavenly furnace, suddenly tore apart its thin half-transparent veil, poured itself through and spread out along the heavens its many-coloured stream, which broke out into innumerable fires.

Sometimes in dull weather opal clouds would appear in the sky, and the pale angel of death would look down upon the earth with his unswerving gaze, right into the eyes of people who cannot perceive him.

But it is impossible to describe all the sunsets, because the diversity of them is endless, endless as the diversity of human life itself.

The most pleasant feature of Très-joli was its delightful combination of sea and forest, the trees in some places coming down nearly to the water’s edge. Firs and leafy trees were about equal in number, the stern and stately pines and firs mingling with white-trunked birches, trembling aspens, dull alders, bitter rowans, and proud maples. One rich merchant from Vishgorod had even planted chestnuts and oaks on his estate. The whole place was delightful, and all the visitors rejoiced in its beauty.

The villagers industriously ploughed their barren, stone-bestrewn fields, they prophesied the weather according to the appearance of the sky and the direction of the wind, they caught sprats in the sea, but didn’t bathe themselves in it, and they let their cows wander in the forest and all along the seashore. In short, they behaved as the villagers in such places always do.

“Aborigines,” they were called contemptuously by Professor Roggenfeldt’s grandson, the schoolboy Eddy, who was an unwearied seeker after fossils.

But Madame Roggenfeldt, a grey-haired old lady, with a sweet attractive face of great former beauty, said:

“The Estonians here are so cultured. They play Molière in their public hall, they have a choir and a band, and many of them have pianos. Their children sing and play very nicely, and on holidays they look quite like young ladies.”

II

In this idyllic place one beautiful summer’s day Madame Roggenfeldt was celebrating her birthday. Everything was very gay. The families of her son and daughter had all come, and the grandchildren had presented her with flowers and congratulated her prettily. Guests had come in from town, and they expected to have music and singing in the evening.

After luncheon, about three o’clock in the afternoon, there was dancing in the meadow that lay between the cliff of Très-joli and the wood on the seashore. The local band had been invited to play.

Only one old friend of the family was absent⁠—Professor Bernard Horn⁠—and Professor Roggenfeldt could not imagine why he had not come. He had intended to send a message to his house, but there had been no time, all the servants and everybody in the house had been very busy.

But Madame Roggenfeldt had been in a nervous and disturbed state all the morning. While the young folks were dancing she sat with her husband on a seat in the garden on the cliff and looked down at the scene below.

The sun was not too bright, the sound of the music was softened by distance, the laughter and chatter