Short Fiction by Aleksandr Kuprin (nonfiction book recommendations .txt) 📕

outhouses of the estate. He himself occupied a large hollow-sounding, empty room, with a Gothic fireplace, in which a bed, taken from the local clergyman, had been placed.

A dark, starless night, windy and sleety, came down upon the farm, swiftly and almost unnoticeably. Alone in his immense empty chamber, Markof sat in front of the fireplace, in which some palings from the plundered estate were burning brightly. He put his feet on the grate and spread out a military map upon his bony knees, attentively studying the neighbourhood between the farm and the town. In the red firelight his face, with its high forehead, turned-up moustaches and firm, obstinate chin, seemed more severe than ever.

The sergeant-major came into the room. The water trickled down on to the floor from his waterproof cloak. He stood still for a moment or two, and then, convinced that the captain had not noticed his entrance, coughed discreetly.

“Is it you?” said the captain, bending his head back. “What is it?”

“Everything is in order, your honour. The third platoon is on guard, the first division at the church wall, the second.⁠ ⁠…”

“All right! What else? Is the password given?”

“Yes, your honour.⁠ ⁠…” The sergeant was silent, as if waiting to hear more, but as the captain said nothing, he began in a lower tone,

“What’s to be done, your honour, with the three who.⁠ ⁠…”

“Shoot them at dawn,” interrupted the captain sharply, not allowing the sergeant to finish his sentence, “And afterwards”⁠—he frowned and looked meaningly at the soldier⁠—“don’t ask me any more questions about them. Do you understand?”

“Certainly, your honour,” answered the soldier emphatically.⁠ ⁠… And they were both silent again. The captain lay down on the bed without undressing, and the sergeant remained at the door in the shadow. For some reason or other he delayed his departure.

“Is that all?” asked the captain impatiently, without turning his head.

“Yes, that’s all, your honour.” The soldier fidgeted from one foot to another, and then said suddenly, with a determined resolution,

“Your honour⁠ ⁠… the soldiers want to know⁠ ⁠… what’s to be done with⁠ ⁠… the old man?”

“Get out!” shouted the captain with sudden anger, jumping up from the bed and making as if to strike him.

The sergeant-major turned dexterously in double-quick time, and opened the door. But on the threshold he stopped for a moment and said in an official voice,

“Ah, your honour, permit me to congratulate your honour on the New Year, and to wish.⁠ ⁠…”

“Thanks, brother,” answered the captain dryly. “Don’t forget to have the rifles examined more carefully tomorrow.”

Left alone in the room, Markof, neither undressing nor taking off his sword, flung himself down upon the bed and lay with his face toward the fire. His countenance changed suddenly, taking on an appearance of age, and his closely-cropped head drooped on his shoulders; his half-closed eyes wore an expression of pain and weariness. For a whole week he had suffered tortures of fever and had only overcome his illness by force of will. No one in the company knew that at nights he tossed about in fierce paroxysms, shivering in ague, delirious, only losing consciousness for moments, and then in fantastic hideous nightmares.

He lay on his back and watched the blue flames of the dying fire, feeling every moment the stealthy approaches of dizziness and weakness, the accompaniments of his usual attack of malaria. His thoughts were connected in a strange fashion with the old man who had been taken prisoner that morning, about whom the sergeant-major had just been speaking. Markof’s better judgment divined that the sergeant-major had been right: there was, indeed, something extraordinary about the old man, a certain magnificent indifference to life, mingled with gentleness and a deep melancholy. People of his type, people resembling this old man, though only in a very slight degree, the captain had seen at Lao-Yan and Mukden, among the unmurmuring soldiers dying on the fields of battle. When the three men had been brought before Markof that morning and he had explained to them by the help of cynically-eloquent gestures that they would be dealt with as spies, the faces of the two others had at once turned pale and been distorted by a deadly terror; but the old man had only laughed with a certain strange expression of weariness, indifference, and even⁠ ⁠… even as it were of gentle condescending compassion towards the captain himself, the head of the punitive expedition.

“If he is really one of the rebels,” Markof reflected, closing his inflamed eyes, and feeling as if a soft and bottomless abyss of darkness yawned before him, “then there is no doubt that he occupies an important position among them, and I’ve acted very wisely in ordering him to be shot. But suppose the old man is quite innocent? So much the worse for him. I can’t spare two men to guard him, especially considering what we’ve got to do tomorrow. In any case, why should he escape the destiny of those fifteen whom we shot yesterday? No, it wouldn’t be fair to spare him after what we have done to others.”

The captain’s eyes opened slowly, and he started up suddenly in mortal terror.

Seated on a low stool by the bedside, with bent head, and the palms of his hands resting upon his knees, in a quiet and sadly thoughtful attitude, was the old man who had been sentenced to death.

Markof, though he believed in the supernatural and wore on his breast a little bag containing certain holy bones, was no coward in the general sense of the word. To retire in terror, even in the face of the most mysterious and immaterial phenomenon, the captain would have reckoned as much a disgrace as if he had fled before an enemy or uttered a humiliating appeal for mercy. With a quick, accustomed movement he drew his revolver from its leathern case and pointed it at the head of his unknown visitant, and he shouted like a madman,

“If you move, you’ll go to the devil!”

The old man slowly turned his head. Across