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

students coming along, hurrying to dinner, laughing and discussing the lecture and the unexpected ovation. I turned into a side-street to avoid meeting them.

Am I really ill? Why, only yesterday I too, should have gone tearing along, delighted with everything⁠—the ovation and the lecture, and the prospective “oiling of the machine.” And now? For that matter, the real reason is that my sight is grown so much keener that I have gained the power of seeing things in their true light. And if my nerves are a little upset, it merely shows that no man can digest the truth about himself.⁠ ⁠… There they are, quite cock-a-hoop, and for no other reason than that they cannot understand the meaning of the simplest phenomena. Schmidt, the fat machine, when he oils himself merely opens his mouth from ear to ear. That is it; they are all merely so many Schmidts.⁠ ⁠…

Having no wish to see Titus I did not go home; turning instead into the park where I walked about the deserted paths till evening.

The park was very lifeless; the bare trees looked desolate, and here and there, from under the slushy, melting snow, rotting leaves peeped out. The sight of this dying Nature soothed and calmed me. Its dismal appearance harmonized with my mental condition; but in this decay of the fallen leaves, in the mournfully drooping yellow grass, in the faint scent of rottenness hanging in the air, there was nothing that offended and jarred on my inner sensations. I walked till I was tired out, trying to forget myself, listening to the tears dripping from the trees, and the damp, fallen branches rustling on the ground, and watching the twilight unfolding everything, until night came and covered all the melancholy and corruption of dying or slumbering Nature.

I went home late. Titus was asleep, but he had left the lamp alight for me. The burner had got out of order, and the gas was escaping with a continuous thin hissing, which Titus accompanied by a rythmic nasal wheeze, the result being a peculiar but not very harmonious duet in the otherwise silent room. Our large cupboard and bookshelf seemed to be listening with ironical attention to this absurd and useless wheezing. The whining hiss of the gas irritated me far less than my friend’s hard breathing. The wheeze gradually passed into a snore; as always happened when he lay on his back.

I could not sleep; and so took up my notes. Perhaps this wise stuff will serve to send one to sleep, I thought. But I could not understand a single sentence. The words stood separately in my mind; and, when my eyes passed on further, scattered and vanished. In a sudden fit of vexation with my “idiotic head,” I tried to humiliate it by sitting down in the attitude which Titus always assumed when he was cramming. Like Titus, I stopped my ears and began whispering the words and sentences of my self-imposed task, mechanically repeating them, and rhythmically nodding my head.

I must have unnecessarily raised my voice and so disturbed the sleeper; for after a while he moved suddenly, sat up in his bed, and stared at me with astonished eyes.

“Ah! what is it?” he asked in a voice like a sleepwalker’s.

“It is nothing; it is nothing,” I answered, ironically soothing him; “go to sleep,⁠ ⁠… machine⁠ ⁠…”

Titus does as he is told. His face becomes passive again; his mouth slightly opens, and the sounds recommence. I sit still on my chair, and a kind of terror creeps over me. The feeling of loneliness and isolation grows more and more intense. The gas hisses; Titus snores,⁠ ⁠… but, after all, they are only two machines.⁠ ⁠… If you lower the light the noise will cease; if you roll Titus over on his side he will stop snoring. I think of his vacant look and the automatic way in which he obeyed my command and instantly went to sleep, and a sense of dread comes over me.

A machine?⁠ ⁠… In my childhood, I was afraid of ghosts in the dark; now, when in the darkness of this night I am surrounded by machines, when even my poor Titus is transformed for me into a complicated automaton, I feel again the same old horror, only it is deeper and more fearful than the horror of my childhood.

Though I had forgotten all about my notes I sat mechanically rocking my chair and waiting for something to come out of the silence and half shadows of the faintly lighted room. I had gradually slipped away from myself into that strange, desolate, inhospitable darkness peopled only by machines.

There is nothing, nothing!⁠ ⁠… The night, the cupboards, the dark corners and gray walls⁠ ⁠… the black windows, and the wind moaning in the chimney.⁠ ⁠… The machine called a gaslight squeaks like a gnat buzzing against my ear, and so piteously withal that I felt ready to weep. The machine called Titus snores and wheezes through its nose so senselessly that I want to smash it in pieces. And the machine that I call “I” lies without movement, without thought, merely feeling that the something cold, slimy, horrible and disgusting which dripped into my soul in the morning had become I myself, that whatever I felt in myself was it alone and that there was nothing else in me at all.⁠ ⁠…

Cold, empty, dead.⁠ ⁠…

Thus ended the first day of my new mood. The next morning, I woke up more composed, yet still with the consciousness that this mood had taken up a larger space in my soul.

The clouds continued to spread, and I remember the following days only as a mist without light and shadow, like an autumn twilight.

XX

“Won’t you come to the meeting today, Gavrik?” asked Titus one day, without looking at me; “come along, do!”

“What for?”

“There now, do come; you will see,” he said in a brighter tone; and then added significantly:⁠—“The question is of the very highest interest.”

He pronounced the word “question” half-shyly, with his eyes turned