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

“What’s this you’re giving me, you rascal? Don’t you know that I like it red?”

Serguei ventured to remark that it was not his fault, but the cook’s, and that he would go and change it at once. He even added timidly:

“Excuse me, Mister.”

This apology maddened the officer. He struck Serguei with his beefsteak on the cheek, and turning purple, he yelled out:

“Wha‑at! I am a mister to you, am I? I am not a mister to you, I am staff captain of cavalry to my emperor! Where’s the proprietor? Call the proprietor. Ivan Lukianytch, I want this idiot cleaned out of here today. I don’t want a trace of him here. If there is, I’ll never set foot in your pothouse again.”

The staff captain of cavalry, von Bradke, was a man of big sprees and for this reason Serguei was dismissed that very day. The proprietor spent the whole evening in calming the officer. I myself, when I came out between the acts for a breath of fresh air in the gardens, heard for a long time the enraged, bellowing voice issuing from the arbour.

“What a scoundrel the fellow is! Mister! If it hadn’t been for the ladies I would have shown him the meaning of mister!”

In the meantime the actors had gradually drifted in and at half-past twelve the rehearsal, due at eleven, began. They were giving a play entitled The New World, a kind of insipid sideshow transformation of Senkevicz’s novel Quo Vadis. Doukhovskoi gave me a typewritten sheet of paper containing my lines. I had the part of the Centurion in the division of Mark the Magnificent. They were pompous, loud lines, as, for example: “Thy orders, O Mark the Magnificent, have been punctually obeyed,” or “She will wait for thee at the pedestal of the statue of Pompeii, Mark the Magnificent.” I liked the part, and I was already preparing a manly voice of a sort of old swashbuckler, stern and faithful.

But as the rehearsal proceeded, an odd thing happened to me; to my surprise I began to get divided and multiplied. For instance, at the end of the Matron Veronica’s speech, Samoilenko, who followed the play with the full text in front of him, claps his hands and shouts:

“A slave comes in.”

No one comes in.

“But who is the slave? Doukhovskoi, see who is the slave.”

Doukhovskoi rummages hastily through some sheets of paper. “There is no slave!”

“Cut him out, what about it!” lazily advises Boev, the argumentative person with a forehead of a thinker, into whose paintbox I had stuck my fingers the day before.

But Mark the Magnificent (Lara-Larsky) suddenly takes offence at this:

“No, that won’t do, please. I have an effective entrance here⁠ ⁠… I don’t play this scene without a slave.”

Samoilenko’s eyes gallop round the stage and halt at me.

“There you are, I mean⁠ ⁠… I mean⁠ ⁠… Vassiliev, are you on in this act?”

I consult my copybook.

“Yes, at the very end.”

“Then here’s another part for you⁠—Veronica’s slave. Read it from the book.” He claps his hands. “A little less noise, gentlemen, please. Enter the slave.⁠ ⁠… ‘Noble dame,’⁠ ⁠… Speak up, speak up, one couldn’t hear you from the first row.”

A few minutes later they couldn’t find a slave for the divine Marcia (in Senkevicz’s text she is Ligia), and this part is dumped on to me. Then some kind of house steward is missing. Me again! In this way, by the end of the rehearsal, I had, without counting the Centurion, five additional parts.

It wouldn’t go all at the beginning. I come out and pronounce my first words:

“Mark the Magnificent⁠ ⁠…”

Then Samoilenko stretches his legs wide apart, bends forward, and puts his hands to his ears:

“Wha‑at! What’s that you’re mumbling? I understand nothing.”

“O Mark the Magnificent⁠ ⁠…”

“What’s that? I can hear nothing⁠ ⁠… Louder!” He comes quite close to me. “This is the way to do it,” and in a guttural goat’s voice he shouts out loud enough to be heard all over the gardens:

“ ‘O Mark the Magnificent, thy order’⁠ ⁠… That’s how it’s got to be done. Remember, young man, the immortal apothegm of one of the greatest of our Russian artists: ‘On the stage one doesn’t speak, one declaims; one doesn’t walk, one struts.’ ” He looked round with a self-satisfied air. “Repeat.”

I repeated, but it was still worse. Then, one after the other, they began to coach me, and positively the whole lot of them instructed me to the very end of the rehearsal: Lara-Larsky with a careless and disgusted manner; the old, swollen, noble father Gontcharov, whose flabby red-veined cheeks were hanging down below his chin; the argumentative Boev; the idiot Akimenko, who was made up as a sort of Ivan the Simpleton. I was getting like a worried, steaming horse, around whom a street crowd of advisers had gathered, or a new boy who had fallen from his safe family nest into a circle of cunning, experienced, and merciless schoolboys.

At this rehearsal I made a petty, but persistent, enemy who afterwards poisoned every day of my existence. It happened like this:

I was repeating endlessly: “O Mark the Magnificent,” when suddenly Samoilenko rushed up to me.

“Allow me, allow me, my friend; allow me, allow me. Not like that, not like that. Think whom you’re addressing⁠—Mark the Magnificent himself. Well, you haven’t got the faintest notion how subordinates in ancient Rome addressed their supreme chief. Watch me; here’s the gesture.”

He shot his right leg forward half a pace, bent his trunk at a right angle, and hung down his right arm, after manipulating his palm into the shape of a little boat.

“Do you see what the gesture is? Do you understand? Repeat.”

I repeated, but with me the gesture proved so stupid and ugly that I decided on a timid objection:

“I beg your pardon, but it seems to me that military training⁠ ⁠… it generally avoids somehow the bent position⁠ ⁠… and, apart from that, there’s a stage direction⁠ ⁠… he comes out in his armour⁠ ⁠… and you will admit that in armour⁠ ⁠…”

“Kindly be quiet!” Samoilenko shouted