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

I sometimes felt towards him as I felt towards Titus. The “crust-of-bread” question⁠—for himself and his family⁠—was a perpetual cause of anxiety for the old man. For this he would agitate and worry himself, even to the extent of equivocating and twisting his mind inside out, assuming an air of pedagogic severity, and trying to hide his inborn good-nature. “Ah!” he would say at times, sighing deeply, “it is difficult to get on with you students; I tell you so, in confidence, truthfully;” and then we would both smile sympathetically.

Just now he had an official and careworn expression.

“Look here, Mr. Gavrilov,” he said, “what’s going on among you in there?” And as he spoke he listened again.

“Do you hear that noise?”

I, too, listened; and then answered:⁠—

“Yes, they are making a terrible row.”

“What tricks are you up to? Tell an old man honestly.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“What is it to me? However, I can tell you⁠ ⁠… Don’t be anxious. It is because something unpleasant has happened to one of them⁠—to Urmánov.”

“Why, what on earth do you mean? How unpleasant? They mean to hiss the Bohemian; that is it, nothing more.”

“Yes; it is true. Have you ever been to a slaughterhouse? Have you heard when the butcher kills an ox what a row the other beasts kick up?”

The old man edged away from me, drew his arm from mine and looked at me with astonished eyes, even putting out his lips with a startled expression.

At that moment the figure of Professor Byelichka appeared on the landing; and as the old man hurried up to him, I burst out laughing and went into the lecture-hall.

Several students surrounded me at once, pouring out confused questions; some asking what I knew about Urmánov; others speaking of the Bohemian. I stood looking at them all; and I felt that I was smiling in a strange way. I had, somehow, completely lost the power of hearing the din with understanding, and the once familiar excitement seemed strange to me and incomprehensible. I only saw moving lips and gesticulating arms, and again laughed.

To my delight, the door opened again and the Professor appeared on the threshold, the subinspector’s anxious face peeping in after him.

The students went to their benches. The Professor, going to his place, stood leaning with two fingers on the table, and waiting composedly for the noise to cease. Then his rich, even voice began:⁠—

“The last time, gentleman, we stopped at⁠—”

At the first sounds of this fine, passionless, and rather oily barytone I felt a certain sense of relief. The Bohemian was a first-rate lecturer; but it was all the same to me; I was quite indifferent to the subject of the lecture. Lately, there had been dark rumors concerning Byelichka. People talked of certain reform projects of his, of a character so utterly obscurantist as to render them incapable of adoption, and proposed merely to prove the author’s servile devotion to those in power. There were other vague rumors of like import. None of the students had any authentic information, for the Reports of the Council-meetings were kept secret, and the Professors knew how to hold their tongues. Hence, there were only dim conjectures, quite sufficient, however, to rouse angry discussions; some taking the Bohemian’s part; others vehemently attacking him.

To me, in my then mood, all this was utterly indifferent: but I could not help admiring the sangfroid with which the Bohemian began his lecture. Though he must have known of the incipient hostility of his audience, yet he began at the point where he had previously left off and lectured as calmly as if nothing had happened. Only on entering, he raised his long, thick eyelashes, and cast from under them a rapid and watchful glance.

“… Thus the monad of the species previously described may be defined as a simple sac devoid of even the most elementary organs. Taking up its abode in the stomach of a higher animal, it becomes completely surrounded with a nutritive environment.”

“In this nutritive environment, gentlemen,” proceeded the Bohemian meditately and in a singularly dulcet tone, raising his eyes to the ceiling as though seeking for better and still more dulcet words, “In this nutritive environment its existence is in many respects highly satisfactory. For it receives from Nature the utmost possible good, with the least possible expenditure of energy; and is not this the aim of many aspirations?”

Having made this slight excursion into the domain of generalization the Bohemian again glanced at the students. A low murmur, expressive of awakening interest, ran through the lecture-room, slight digressions from a dry exposition having always the effect of enlivening an audience.

The Bohemian’s voice flowed on still more smoothly, like a stream of oil. Rolling out his rounded periods, he mounted gradually higher and higher till, towards the end of the lecture, he passed from individual facts to broad generalizations. I believe he really loved science; he worked hard too, and was now himself carried away by his exposition. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling; the wording of his phrases became more and more flowing; the peculiar, unctuous notes of his voice grew more pronounced.

On the walls hung pictures, representing anatomical sections and cells, “leading a satisfactory existence.” Two skeletons stood, one on each side of the platform, with hanging arms, bent knees, and skulls drooping on one side, listening, as it were, with piteous attention, while the Professor knocked down one after another the barriers between the traditional “Kingdoms,” and placed a mere nutriment-absorbing cell in a recognized place among other “satisfactory existences.”

The audience had long since been carried away. I looked back and saw rows of eager faces and dilated eyes. Of the two contending influences⁠—science on the one hand and indignation on the other⁠—the former had obviously got the best of it; and the Bohemian, as representing science, held for the moment, not alone the attention but the hearts of his hearers.

But I felt myself equally a stranger to both these influences. While listening to the full, vibrating voice with