Short Fiction by Leonid Andreyev (fastest ebook reader TXT) 📕

Sashenka is another person who surprises me. Filled as I was with a burning desire to communicate my strange, new impressions about these painful events, I naturally thought of her as someone who would like to share my thoughts, and even pictured the solemn, profound conversation we would have; or perhaps no conversation at all; we might commune in silence, I thought, a silence that would convey more than words, all that was in our hearts.⁠ ⁠… But it turned out differently. When I opened my eyes wide in astonishment and asked, “You’ve read about it, I suppose?” she looked alarmed at my expression, and said, “What?”

“How what? I’m referring to the speeches in the Duma.”

“What speeches?⁠ ⁠… Oh, yes, I just glanced at them. I’m too busy to read. The Lord knows what they are after.”

Failing to notice her indifference, I began to expound the situation with warmth, explaining everything with great detail; but suddenly I realised by the expression of pensiveness on her face, by her downcast eyes, and the strange compression of her lips, that she was not listening to me, but was engrossed in some thoughts of her own. I was hurt and angry. I didn’t mind on my own account so much, as that she should ignore a thing so vital for all Russia.

“I don’t think much of your patriotic spirit, Sashenka,” I said coldly, and impressibly.

She blushed, and a pang went through my heart as I saw the colour spread over her pale, worn features.

“Don’t be angry with me, Ilenka dear, for having wandered off and missed part of what you said. It’s not so very important, is it?”

“Not important!” I exclaimed angrily. “You can hardly be aware of what you are saying, Sasha! Surely only a traitor who rejoiced in Russia’s downfall could say a thing like that! Don’t you understand? We have no shells! Aren’t you sorry for our poor, patient, unarmed soldiers whom the well-armed Germans can defeat with a smile on their faces?”

She was impressed by that. Her eyes opened wide, and she said with alarm in her voice, “It is dreadful, but what can we do?”

“That’s what everyone is trying to decide, and you say it is not important. It’s horribly important, Sashenka! It’s so important that it makes you go mad to think of it!”

At that point someone came from the hospital to fetch her to attend to some man who had both arms amputated, and refused to eat unless Sashenka fed him. She instantly forgot everything, and with a guilty look, she gave me a hasty kiss on the ear, and whispered, “Don’t be angry with me, dear; I can’t.⁠ ⁠…” And she was gone.

What couldn’t she?⁠ ⁠…

11th September.

An unexpected thing has happened. Nikolai, my brother-in-law, who appears to be in Moscow, sent me a polite letter, offering me money. It has taken him a whole year to remember his mother, and now he proposes to take a share in supplying her wants. He never mentioned Sashenka or Pavel, or little Lidotchka.

His letter sent me into a fury, and I wrote a reply that he won’t be in a hurry to forget. I didn’t want to bother Sashenka, so I never said anything to her about it. The blackguard! I knew he had been contracting lately, and made about a million. I heard about it from the fellows in my office. A million! We know the things necessary to make such a sum! And this unscrupulous traitor, in the largeness of his heart, offers me one of his thirty pieces of silver! No, Nikolai, I would sooner starve than touch a penny of your money! Your filthy lucre is tainted with blood; you could never wash your hands clean again when you had touched it! It doesn’t become your mother to live on your contaminated money! She has lost a dearly-beloved, honest son at the front!

God! Why dost Thou let the weight of Thy anger fall on the weak? Wreak Thy vengeance on men like these, the rich and the strong, the traitors, the liars and the swindlers! How long will they be permitted to mock at us and show their golden teeth, riding over us in their motorcars with derisive laughter? They are so shameless in their security that it drives one mad with despair to think of one’s own impotence. When you remonstrate with them, they smile; when you try to make them see the disgrace, it amuses them; when you entreat and implore, they laugh in your very face. After robbing and betraying the country, they sleep soundly in their beds as on the softest pillows of eiderdown.

It makes one’s blood boil to think that no punishment awaits them. It is not right that blackguards should be triumphant in this world! It takes away respect for honesty, it kills justice, it makes life meaningless. It is blackguards like these against whom we ought to declare war, and not break each other’s heads because one man happens to be a German and another a Frenchman. Mild as I am by nature, I would be the first to take up arms in such a war, and would delight in sending a bullet into one of their brazen foreheads!

What’s the good of patience? Nikolai’s letter has stirred my blood. And why did my Lidotchka die, my poor innocent child, eternally and beloved, divine flower from Thy garden, oh Lord? Was she an ill-gotten million to be snatched from my beggarly? It’s horrible, horrible! Many are the people who are cursing in torment as I am! Perish, miserable worm, that’s all you’re good for! Perish, and then you can rest! Have not enough of you Dementevs perished cursing, to be sure, and crying aloud in the hope that justice might be done, and the golden crown set upon their brows? But who bothers about them now? They have perished, and there’s an end of them.