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

at night it might be. But when I left off and went comfortably to bed, Titus, with a sigh, would light the lamp on his table, put his fingers in his ears, and try to make up for lost time. And if I awoke, even after a long sleep, I could still hear his weary but persistent buzzing.

Now while my anxious friend was busying himself about me, I sat looking at him with a dim, unsteady gaze. My general feeling of isolation and estrangement included even him, who seemed to have strangely altered and to be no longer the old Titus.

Did you ever, when looking at a man while your thoughts were elsewhere, lose consciousness of the distance between you and him? The figure of the living man becomes like a blurred mark, the size and position of which you are unable to determine. The optic image forms itself in your eyes divested of all the impressions which usually accompany it. The sensation is a curious one; and it has sometimes happened to me, especially in childhood, to detain it for several seconds. I was interested in this arbitrary conversion of living people into mental phantasmagoria.

For several minutes my friend had been moving about before me in this way, but now I did not find it amusing. I tried to shake off the sensation. I failed. For there was something else which I saw at the same time whether I would or no⁠—the image of the broken fragments and what lay in them⁠—the image which had fallen into my mind on the platform. I instinctively felt that it was this that rendered Titus so different and divested him in my eyes of the quality for which I had previously esteemed him. His love for me, my tenderness for him, the recollection of his old mother, of the bitterness of her homeless life among strangers in a strange country, of her expectations and hopes⁠—all this was gone, far away, where Urmánov’s tragedy and my late exalted enthusiasms were gone.

I was even half surprised when Titus suddenly offered me a glass of hot tea. I felt surprised that he could hold a glass, and that I could take it in my hand and find it hot and heavy.

“What on earth is the matter with you, Gavrik?” asked Titus regarding me anxiously.

“What?” I asked, not knowing how to answer, averting my eyes.

“You look so⁠ ⁠… strange.”

“No, it is nothing.”

I put the glass to my lips, but drink I could not. The tea scalded me; to cool it appeared a difficult matter, and not worth the trouble. I set the glass on the table and lay down. In a few minutes I was asleep.

I slept long and awoke just as I had gone to sleep, suddenly, without any of that twilight of awakening consciousness which, in youth, is sweeter than sleep itself. It appeared as if I suddenly remembered something and opened my eyes at once.

Titus was sitting at his table, with his side face towards me writing. The sense of strangeness touching his personality had now disappeared; for though I had not resumed my normal condition, I was getting accustomed to my new mood.

Titus was tall and spare, the muscles and sinews stood out sharply on his long neck. His head was bent to the left, and he nodded it regularly as he wrote, slightly swaying his long back, while his lips unconsciously formed the words that he wrote. All his muscles were tense, and he seemed to be writing with his whole body. He was evidently copying out a lecture. Sometimes, on finishing a sentence, he would lay down his pen with a sigh and look round at me, on which I shut my eyes tight and waited impatiently till he returned to his work.

Directly I heard his pen squeaking along the paper, I would begin to watch him again, in imagination tracing his muscular action back to his anatomical component parts. From the movement of the wrist I went on⁠ ⁠… muscular biceps, shoulder⁠ ⁠… reflex movements of the lips and neck⁠ ⁠… and all this guided by “a secretion of the brain.” For some reason the process of secretion in this case is difficult. The thought which moves under Titus’ light hair creeps along very slowly; it is therefore perhaps quite in vain that the old mother and the invalid sister look forward to help from their Titushka; the engine is none of the best.

Now Urmánov’s engine was better. The movements in the brain were stronger and more definite; the boiler worked under high pressure. Herein, of course, lay the danger; there was no safety-valve; the passions began to boil too hard and blew up the machinery. That is Urmánov’s whole history in a nutshell. The American went away. Urmánov died. How simple it all is, how very simple!

How lean and bony Titus is! Evidently the brain, which he forces to perform labor beyond its strength, sucks into itself the other parts of my poor Titus. The central machine is overworked, and the levers and cogwheels are wearing out.

And still under all these thoughts lay the thing that had fallen into me on the platform. I had only to look at it, and the whole picture would rise before me⁠—the boiler smashed, its contents spilt, and the cogwheels and levers scattered about, an utter breakdown. That means that a man is dead.

And this is life.⁠ ⁠… And this death.

There is some physical law moving it. This is life; you may surround it with as many decorations as you like. Stop the movement with a mere touch⁠ ⁠… death! You can dress it up in gorgeous and funereal fictions. For my part, it seemed to me at that moment that I saw both sides of the medal; both with the same meaning; both leading to the same result. It is quite simple, clear, and⁠ ⁠… disgusting.

Titus left off writing, looked at his watch, and carefully put up his notes.

“What time is it?” I asked.

Titus started and looked round.

“Ah