Short Fiction by Vladimir Korolenko (ready player one ebook TXT) 📕

When I raised my head, the two women were both gone. I was alone on the dark road; the dry leaves were fluttering on the trees, and the wind moaned high above my head a long wail of sorrow and regret.

I sank down helplessly on a heap of stones. It was as if something were gone out of me and something else was again expanding within me. I had recovered the power of sorrowing; and I grieved for myself, and because I was alone in the darkness. And now at last I could grieve for Urmánov, who had been, and whom now I could deeply pity; and for Titus, whom I had repelled; and for her whom I had insulted, and who had gone her lonely way without help, without hope, without love; and I sorrowed for this too, that I could believe once more, and that the flower buried in dust, my love, had burst into full blossom in my soul. But faith was come and love had blossomed, too late; for I should perish here alone in the darkness on a heap of cold stones.⁠ ⁠… And the darkness thickened about me: the wind moaned over my head, rising higher and higher; then it died away and at last I heard it no more.

Titus, still continuing his discussion with some of my fellow-students as they walked home in company, found me lying insensible on the road and carried me home. I was delirious and in a state of high fever. The last saying which I remember, as through a fog, was his despairing exclamation:⁠—

“Oh! this philosophy! See what it comes to! May the devil take it for good and all! I have had enough.⁠ ⁠…”

And the first face that I saw, when I awoke long afterwards, was my dear comrade’s.

He was sitting with his head resting on his hands; and whispering his lecture over to himself softly, so as not to disturb me. I looked at him with the old feeling. How long it was since I had seen my Titus!⁠ ⁠… Ah! And the Titus that shouted at the students’ meetings!⁠ ⁠… Or was that a dream?

“Titus!” I called. And when, beaming with delight, he came to my bedside on tiptoe, I asked:⁠—“Tell me; is it true what happened to Urmánov, or did I dream it?” Titus, as he straightened my pillow, said, with ill-concealed terror:⁠—

“Don’t think about that; you will only fall ill again.”

So then it was true; but I knew that I should not fall ill again. For even as bespoke, a sense of quiet sadness flooded my soul, it was a feeling to which I had been so long a stranger!⁠ ⁠…

Another question arose in my mind. It made me still more sorrowful; but now I was afraid, terribly afraid that it would prove to be a dream.

“And⁠ ⁠… Tonia?”

Titus was silent.

“She went away? Is it true?”

“She left here the next morning.”

I sighed, with mingled sorrow and relief. Then, after all, my love and her confession were not a dream.⁠ ⁠… Neither is it a dream that I repulsed her, insulted her, and that she, too, had left me, although the last to do so.

“You don’t know where she is gone? You told her of my illness⁠ ⁠… and still, she⁠ ⁠…”

“I did not find her.⁠ ⁠… And where she is gone I don’t know; and, so far, no one knows.”

“I know.”

Titus again looked at me in terror.

“No; don’t be frightened, Titushka; I really know. I might have held her back that evening,⁠ ⁠… but, you see.⁠ ⁠… By the by, look in my coat; there ought to be a letter.”

Titus thought that I was rambling. I confess that I too was half afraid as I watched him. What if the idea of the letter were really only a continuation of my delirium?

But when Titus put his hand into the pocket of my coat, he found an unopened letter, to his great surprise, the same which the porter gave me as I was going in to Byelichka’s lecture. I had thought then it was from my friend in the country.

It was from Tonia.

“Open it and read it,” I said to Titus, motioning him to sit down beside me.

Titus sat down and began to read in a timidly hesitating voice, which seemed to make the letter still dearer to me.

The contents of the letter were almost childishly naive. The girl told me her impressions and her new ideas about herself, about us all, and about the people which had come into her mind. When I took the little sheet of paper in my hand and looked at it, all the tenderness and the hope of the old days breathed on me once more. The letter ended with the request that I would meet her at the station on a day which she named. She wanted to talk over everything with me before speaking to anybody else, and to ask my advice as to how she ought to shape her life.

“You know I am an orphan; I have no one belonging to me in the world.” Thus ended the letter; and I felt that in these half-jesting words the girl had made to me a shy half-confession.⁠ ⁠…

A few grammatical mistakes looked innocently at me out of the letter. And this child is putting forth her feeble hands to stop the tremendous wheel of life.⁠ ⁠… What a mistake, and yet, what truth and earnest faith.⁠ ⁠…

She appealed to me to help her to decide, And I.⁠ ⁠… What have I done? Instead of showing her the mistake in the form, I tried to tear up by the roots her faith in that in which if we would live we must believe.

And she is gone her way⁠ ⁠… alone.⁠ ⁠…

I fell into deep thought and my eyes filled with tears. But they were tears of joy as well as of grief. In thought I can again wander freely over the world. Somewhere in its wide expanse my love is lost to ken among unknown dangers. But now