The Duel - Aleksandr Kuprin (best summer reads of all time TXT) 📗

Again Romashov felt, half-unconsciously, that he had sunk back into impenetrable darkness, until he, as suddenly, found himself standing in a large room with parqueted floor and Vienna chairs along the walls. Over the entrance to the room, and over three other doors leading to small, dark chambers, lay hangings of red and yellow flowered cotton. Curtains of the same stuff and colour flickered in the draught from the windows opened on a gloomy backyard. Lamps were burning on the walls, but the great room was filled with smoke and the smell of meat from the adjacent kitchen; and the fumes were only dispersed occasionally by the balmy spring air entering through the window, and by the fresh scent of the white acacias that bloomed outside the house.

About ten officers took part in this excursion. All seemed bent on solving the delicate problem of contriving to shriek, laugh, and bawl at the same time. Romashov strolled about the room with a feeling of naive, unreflecting enjoyment, and, with a certain astonishment and delight, gradually recognized all his boon-companions⁠—Biek-Agamalov, Lbov, Viätkin, Epifanov, Artschakovski, Olisár, etc. Even Staff-Captain Lieschtschenko was discovered there. He sat huddled up in a window with his usual, eternal, resigned Weltschmerz grin. On a table stood a respectable row of bottles containing ale and a dark, thick, syrupy cherry-cordial. No one knew who had ordered all these bottles. They were thought⁠—like so much else that night⁠—to have come of their own accord. Romashov drank, proposed healths, and embraced everyone he met, and began to feel sticky and messy about his lips and fingers.

There were five or six women in the room. One of them⁠—a girl of fourteen dressed as a page, with rose-coloured stockings⁠—sat on Biek-Agamalov’s knee and played with his epaulettes. Another⁠—a big, coarse blonde in a red silk basquine and dark skirt, and with powdered face, and broad, black, painted eyebrows⁠—went straight up to Romashov.

“Gracious, my good sir, why do you look so miserable? Come with me into that room,” she added in a whisper.

She threw herself carelessly on a table, and there sat with one leg over the other. Romashov noticed how the strong outlines of her well-formed knee were shown off by the thin skirt. A shudder thrilled him, and his hands trembled.

“What’s your name?”

“Mine? Malvina.” She turned away with an air of indifference, and began swinging her legs. “Order me a cigarette.”

Two Jewish musicians came on the scene, one with a violin, the other with a tambourine. Soon a vulgar, hackneyed, screeching polka tune was heard in the room, whereupon Olisár and Artschakovski at once began to dance the cancan. They hopped round the room first on one leg, then on the other, snapped their fingers, wagged their hips, and bent backwards and forwards with vulgar, cynical gestures. This unattractive ballet was suddenly interrupted by Biek-Agamalov, who jumped off the table, shrieking in his sharp, penetrating voice⁠—

“To hell with the starar! Out with the ragtag and bobtail!”

Down by the door stood two young exquisites, both of whom had many acquaintances among officers, and had even been guests at the regimental soirées. One of them was a Treasury official, the other a landed proprietor and brother of the police magistrate of the town. They both belonged to the so-called “cream” of Society.

The Treasury official turned white, but forced a smile, and answered in an affable tone⁠—

“Excuse me, gentlemen, but can’t we join? We are old acquaintances, you know. My name is Dubiezki. We should not interfere with you at all.”

“Possibly in making love, but not when the fight begins,” added the magistrate’s brother, who tried to adopt a good-humoured tone.

“Out of this!” screamed Biek-Agamalov. “March to the door!”

“Gentlemen, by all means, put the starar out,” sneered Artschakovski.

A horrible confusion arose in the room. Tables and chairs were thrown over; the men shrieked, laughed, and stamped with all their might. The flames of the lamps rose like fiery tongues on high. The cold night air penetrated through the open windows, but without any cooling or calming effect on all these half-demented fighting-cocks. The two civilians had already been thrown into the backyard, where they were heard fiercely screeching and threatening with tears in their voices⁠—

“Opritschniker,20 brigands! This affair will cost you dear. We shall lodge a complaint with your commander, with the Governor.”

“Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo,” Viätkin sneered in mockery, whilst stretching out of the window. “Go to blazes!”

It seemed to Romashov as if all the events of the day had followed one another without a break, but also without the least intelligible connection, just as if a series of wild pictures in loud and motley colours had been unrolled before his eyes. Again were heard the scraping of the violin and the tambourine’s blustering noise. One of the “partners” had now gone so far as to pirouette on the floor with nothing but his shirt on. A pretty, slender woman, who had up to then escaped Romashov’s notice, with dishevelled hair over her bare neck, and sharp, prominent shoulder-blades, wound her arms round poor Lieschtschenko’s neck and sang in his ear in her shrill soprano, and in unison with the violin’s awful melody:

“When consumption sets its mark,
And you’re lying pale and stark,
And doctors are seen fumbling round your couch.”

Bobetinski slung a glass of ale between the curtains of one of the little, dark cabinets, whence very soon proceeded an angry, but sleepy, thick voice⁠—

“Aren’t you ashamed, sir? Who dares⁠ ⁠… ? Such a low swine!”

“I say! how long have you been here?” asked Romashov of the lady in the red basquine, whilst, as it were, in an absentminded way, he rested his hand on her strong, warm knee.

She made some answer, but he did not hear it. A fresh scene of savagery had absorbed all his attention. Sublieutenant Lbov was driving before him one of the musicians, and banging him on the head all the time with the