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

We stopped. Kate’s arms went round my neck. My lips were moistened and burned by a kiss, so long, so passionate that the blood mounted to my head and I staggered. The moon was shining tenderly right into Kate’s face, into that pale, almost blanched face. Her eyes had grown larger, had become enormous, and, at the same time, so dark, so deep under their long eyelashes, like mysterious abysses. And her moist lips were clamouring for still more of those insatiable torturing kisses.

“Kate, darling.⁠ ⁠… You are mine?⁠ ⁠… quite mine?”

“Yes⁠ ⁠… quite⁠ ⁠… quite.”

“Forever?”

“Yes, yes, my dear one.”

“We will never part, Kate?”

Her expression changed. “Why do you ask that? Are you not happy with me just now?”

“Oh, Kate!”

“Well then, why ask about what will come later? Live in the present, dear.”

Time ceased. I could not realise how many minutes or hours had passed, Kate was the first to come back to reality and, as she slipped out of my arms, she said:

“It’s late. They’ll discover my absence. See me home, Alesha.”

While we walked once more through the dark alley of acacias, she nestled against me, like a graceful kitten that dreads the cold.

“I should be frightened to be alone here, Alesha. How strong you are! Put your arms round me. Again⁠ ⁠… tighter, tighter.⁠ ⁠… Take me up in your arms, Alesha⁠ ⁠… Carry me.”

She was as light as a little feather. As I held her, I almost ran with her along the alley, and Kate’s arms wound round my neck still more clingingly, still more nervously. Kissing my neck and temples, and enveloping my face with her quick, burning breath, she kept whispering:

“Faster, faster still.⁠ ⁠… Ah, how nice, how exquisite! Alesha, faster!”

At the garden door we said goodbye.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked, while I, after bowing, began to kiss her hands one after the other.

“I’m going to write my diary,” I answered.

“A diary?” Her face expressed surprise, and⁠—as it seemed to me⁠—annoyed surprise. “Do you write a diary?”

“Yes. Perhaps you don’t like that?”

She gave a forced laugh.

“It depends on how you do it.⁠ ⁠… Of course you’ll show me this diary of yours, some time or other?”

I tried to refuse, but Kate insisted so strongly that at last I had to promise.

“Now, understand,” she said, as we parted and she held up her finger threateningly, “if I see even a single correction, look out!”

When I got home, I banged the door and the captain woke up, grumbling.

“Where are you always gallivanting about like this, Lieutenant? It’s a rendezvous, I suppose? Nobility and all that sort of thing.⁠ ⁠…”

I’ve just read over all the nonsense that I’ve been scribbling in this book from the very beginning of September. No, no, Kate shall not see my diary, or I should have to blush for myself every time that I remembered it. Tomorrow I shall destroy it.

September 25th.

Once more night, once more moon, and again the strange and, for me, inexplicable mingling of the intoxication of love and the torture of wounded pride. It is no dream. Someone’s footsteps are sounding under the window.⁠ ⁠…

Kate to Lydia.

September 28th.

My Angel, Lidotchka,

My little romance is coming to a peaceful end. Tomorrow we leave Olkhovatka. I purposely did not tell Lapshine because⁠—one never knows⁠—he might turn up at the station. He is a very sensitive young man and, on the top of it all, he hasn’t the faintest notion of controlling his feelings. I think he would be quite capable of bursting into tears at the station. Our romance turned out a very simple and, at the same time, a very original one. It was original because the man and woman had exchanged their conventional roles, I was attacking; he was defending himself. He was asking from me oaths of fidelity, almost beyond the tomb. At the end, he bored me a good deal. He is a man who does not belong to our circle. His manners and habits are not ours. His very language is different. At the same time, he is too exacting. To spare his feelings, I never even hinted to him how impossible it would have been for Papa to receive him, if he had presented himself in the light of a prospective son-in-law.

The foolish fellow! He himself did not want to prolong these oppressive delights of unsatisfied love. There is something charming in them. To lose one’s breath in tight embraces and burn slowly with passion⁠—what can be better than this? But then how do I know? Perhaps there are caresses more daring, more languishing, of which I have no idea. Ah, if he had only had in him a touch of that daring, that inventiveness, and⁠ ⁠… that depravity which I have divined in many of my Petersburg acquaintances!

But he, instead of becoming every day more and more enterprising, whined, sighed, talked bitterly about the difference in our positions (as if I would ever consent to marry him!), hinted almost at suicide. As I said before, it was becoming almost intolerable. Only one, one solitary meeting has remained vividly in my memory⁠—that was when he carried me in his arms along the garden, and he, at all events, was silent. Lidotchka, among other things, he blurted out to me that he keeps a diary. This frightened me. Heaven knows into whose hands this diary might fall later on. I insisted that he should give it to me. He promised, but he did not keep his word. Then (a few days ago), after a long night walk and after having said goodbye to him, I crept up to his window. I caught him in the very act. He was writing, and when I called out he was startled. His first movement was to conceal the paper, but, you understand, I ordered him to hand over all that was written. Well, my dear, it’s so funny and touching, and there are so many pitiful words.⁠ ⁠… I’ll keep this diary for