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

enormous and bad restaurant. The room, with its colours, the Romanians, the plush furniture, the electric lights, the mirrors, the monumental head waiter, and particularly the spectacle of the heavy, impudent, frock-coated waiters, with their enormous moustaches⁠—all this overwhelmed my country friend. During the whole meal, he sat bewildered, awkward, winding his feet round the front legs of his chair, and it was only when we were having coffee that he said with a sigh, shaking his head slowly:

“Y‑e‑es, a restaurant! They wouldn’t have believed it at home. It’s a regular temple of Baal with his priests. You’d better take me to a place where it’s simpler. Here I see only the aristocracy. Probably they’re all princes and counts.”

But in the evening, in my rooms, he brightened up again. I asked him for the first time seriously what he intended to do with himself. Up to this, we had only touched on this question in a hurried, rather diffuse way.

He puffed himself out like a young bantam and answered proudly:

“I have come to conquer Petersburg.”

These very words are often uttered by the young heroes of French novelists, who, just arrived in Paris, are looking out at it from the heights of some garret. I smiled sceptically. He noticed it and began with special warmth, the comic side of which was heightened by his southern accent, to convince me of the fact that he represented the gifted, large, provincial South which was going to be victorious over the anaemic, untemperamental, dry, capital-like North. It was the inevitable law of struggle between two temperaments, and its result is always easily guessed. Oh, one can cite any number of names: ministers, writers, painters, barristers. Beware, withered, cold, pale, dull Petersburg. The South is coming!

I wished to believe him, or rather I didn’t wish to disillusion him. We dreamt a little together, lie produced from his basket-trunk a bottle of good old homemade plum liqueur which we began to drink in friendly fashion.

“Eh, what? Eh, what? Do they make in Petersburg here such old plum liqueur?” he kept asking proudly; and then scornfully: “There you are! And you still discuss⁠ ⁠…”

Little by little, he settled down. I established him in furnished rooms next my own, for the time being on credit, in anticipation of the trophies to be won in victories over the withered North. It is extraordinary how at once he won the general goodwill of the establishment, pushing into the background the former favourite⁠—a poet with red curly hair who looked like a deacon in a picture. The landlady (everyone knows the Petersburg landlady of furnished rooms: a lady of full figure, forty-five years old, with corkscrew curls on her forehead, always in black and very tightly laced)⁠—the landlady used often to invite him to her apartments in the morning, to have coffee, a high honour to which many, even of the old lodgers, never dared to aspire. In return for this amiability, he would give her the contents of the morning papers, as well as business advice in her innumerable pettifogging transactions (“Everyone wants to get the better of a poor widow”).

Deuce take it! like a true Southern Russian, for all his apparent simplicity, he was a very adroit and practical fellow, with a quick comprehension and a certain benevolent shrewdness. Even Irisha got used to him and regarded him, I believe, with a sort of⁠—well, I don’t want to gossip. All I will say is that in those days he was very good-looking: tall, strong, with dark, melancholy eyes and young laughing red lips under his Ukrainian moustache.

He was nearer the truth than I was, I, the old Petersburg sceptic. The luck was with him; probably because a bold, self-confident man can control destiny though destiny whirls and scatters in different directions perplexed and weak people. Perhaps, too, he was assisted by those original traits of character which he brought with him from the heart of his provincial South: shrewdness, observation, a tranquil and open manner of speech, an innate tendency to humour, strong nerves that refused to be troubled by the chaos of life in the capital. It may have been this or that, but in any case the South, as represented by him, obviously and successfully conquered the North.

My friend, quickly, in three or four days, found work for himself in connection with one of the largest railways and, a month later, had attracted the attention of the authorities. He was entrusted with the revision of some plans of railway traffic, or something of the sort. The whole thing might have been easily finished in a week or two, but, for some reason or other, Boris got particularly interested in it in his stubbornly insistent way. He took it into his head to frequent the public library, dragged home enormous reference books, stuffed with figures, and devoted his evenings to mysterious mathematical calculations. The result of all this was that he presented the authorities with a scheme of passenger and goods trains that combined simplicity and obviousness with many other practical signs of efficiency. He was praised, and attracted special attention. Six months later, he was already in receipt of a hundred and fifty roubles a month and was employed on independent work.

But apart from this, he gave frequent music lessons⁠—he was an excellent musician⁠—wrote articles for the newspapers and technical articles on railway questions, and sang on Saturdays and Sundays in a well-known church choir as well as sometimes in opera and light opera choruses. He was capable of an amazing amount of work, but without strain, without any effort; it came to him somehow naturally, easily, as though he were wading through it, as though it were all a joke, with that externally lazy manner of his. And always, with his shrewd little smile, he would be observing something, keeping his eye on something, as though, after all, he were only playing with the present, merely testing his untouched force while, at the same time, vigilantly and