Short Fiction Aleksandr Kuprin (free novel reading sites TXT) 📖

men⁠ ⁠… and it all comes out very naturally and charmingly, and all that sort of thing.”

Having finished this accusing speech, Vassili Akinfievitch turned round and went off to his room.

Well, perhaps he’s right in his own way, but all the same it seems to me rather bad taste to laugh at strangers behind their backs.

September 14th.

Today I met them both again in the garden. They walked with their arms round each other’s waists. The little one, her head on her companion’s shoulder, was humming something with half-closed eyes. Seeing them it suddenly occurred to me that these chance rambles of mine might be misinterpreted. I turned quickly into a side-path. I don’t know that they saw me, but apparently I must choose another time for my walks or risk seeming an army intruder.

September 15th.

Lydia Ivanovna started this evening for the station. She will probably not return to Olkhovatka. First of all, because she has been followed by a respectable quantity of luggage, secondly, because she and the daughter of the house said goodbye to each other rather long and affectionately. Apropos of this, I saw for the first time from my window André Alexandrovitch himself with his wife. He’s quite a fine-looking type, stately, broad-shouldered, with the cut of an old Hussar; his grey hair is worn à la russe, his chin is clean-shaven, his moustache long, downy and silvery, and his eyes are like a hawk’s, only blue, but just the same as the hawk’s⁠—round, sunken, motionless and cold. His wife gives one the impression of a frightened and modest person. She holds her head a little on one side, and a smile, half guilty and half pitiful, is always on her lips. The face is yellow but kind. In her youth she was probably very beautiful, but now she looks much older than her age. There was also a bent old woman on the balcony. She wore a black headdress and greenish curls, and she came out leaning on a stick, and hardly able to drag her feet after her. She wanted, I think, to say something, but she began coughing, shook her stick in a despairing sort of way and disappeared.

September 16th.

Vassili Akinfievitch has asked me to look after the work until he can get rid of his fit of Balkan rheumatism,

“Pay particular attention,” he said, “to the delivery of the beetroot; the soldiers are already complaining because the foreman here gives them overweight. To tell the truth, I am rather afraid that in the end there’ll be trouble over this.”

The soldiers have been working in threes. They have already practically finished their contract. One digs out the beetroot from the ground with a shovel, while two cut it with knives and clean it. These sets of three are usually formed from soldiers of the same strength and skill. There’s no point in choosing a bad one, as he would only be in the way of the others.

I’ve read somewhere or other, I think in the Indicator, the reflections of a leisurely thinker, who says that there is no advantage at all in this sort of work: that clothes get torn, and soldiers undisciplined. This is absolutely false. Never is there such a confident, almost relation-like feeling between officers and privates as at this sort of free work. And if one admits that the soldier needs holidays during his hard military training, there is no better rest for him than the toil in the fields which he loves. But all the money earned in this way must go to the soldiers without any middleman⁠ ⁠… each knows where the shoe pinches. And our people are admirable workers; hired peasants wouldn’t do half the work. There’s only one exception, Zamochnikov, who, as usual, does nothing. Zamochnikov is the spoilt favourite of the whole squad, from the captain down to the last private, Nikifor Spassob (this same Spassob, with his lame leg and the white spot on his right eye, has been for the last four years a walking and a crying reproach to the military service). It is true that during his whole period of service Zamochnikov has been unable to master the vowels in the alphabet and has shown a really exceptional stupidity in regard to book-learning, but you could not find in the whole regiment such a spirited singing-leader, such a good teller of stories, such a jack-of-all-trades and a Merry Andrew to boot. He apparently knows what his role is very well and looks upon it in the light of a military duty. On march he sings almost without stopping, and his lashing, spirited talk often wrings a laugh of appreciation from the tired soldiers and gives them a moral shakeup. Vassili Akinfievitch, though he keeps Zamochnikov under arms more often than the rest, for which Zamochnikov bears him no grudge, confessed to me once that a stirrer-up like him is a perfect treasure in wartime and difficult circumstances.

Zamochnikov, however, is no mere clown and sham, and for this I like him particularly. Life in him simply boils up unrestrainedly and never allows him to sit quiet for a minute.

Here he was today, passing from work-party to work-party and finally arriving at a women’s department. He started a long dialogue with the Ukrainians, which made the soldiers near him leave their work and roll on the ground with laughter. I can hear from a distance his imitations of the brisk, shrill quarrels of women, and then again the lazy talk of an old Ukrainian. On catching sight of me, he puts on a preoccupied look and fumbles on the ground. “Well, my fellow-country-women,” he asks, “which of you has sent my shovel to perdition?” I shout at him and endeavour to make my face severe. He stands to attention, carrying himself, as he always does before an officer, with a graceful vigour, but in his kind blue eyes there still trembles the little fire of his interrupted