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

away and in the conscientious tone affected by unaccustomed persons when speaking of “high matters.” At any other time I should have understood his pathetic impulse; but now I only burst out laughing right in his face.

“Ah! How long have you been interested in ‘questions’?” and I laid an ironical emphasis on the last word.

This saying affected Titus like the stroke of a whip. He raised his head and looked at me, and our eyes met. A whole dialogue may be comprehended in a momentary interchange of glances. Titus meekly asked me whether I really believed that he cared for me, and knew that I was treating him with a coldness and a cruelty which he had not deserved.

It sometimes happens when you are looking at an object or a person on which your attention is concentrated, you realize that somebody is standing behind you, looking at you, thinking, about you, perhaps smiling and holding out his hand to you yet you are unable to turn your eyes thither-ward; and the other presence fades into the misty background of consciousness.

It was thus with me. My attention was fixed on that gray spot which imparted its sinister hue to Nature and Life. Yet I could easily distinguish the manifestation of lower instincts, find meanness in noble actions and see in man an animal consisting of elementary physical processes. I was even rather proud of the keenness of my insight, and soon acquired the trick of indicating unpleasant characteristics by two or three words, an obscure hint or a subtle innuendo. In the result I gradually formed about myself a sort of solitude, and people⁠—women especially⁠—when they met my steady, analyzing look, would lower their eyes and hurry on.

I began to repel Titus in the same way. Again he cast on me an inquiring and imploring look, a look which reawakened within me a passing tenderness, yet I merely shrugged my shoulders and answered his gaze with a half-contemptuous, half-cynical glance.

Titus turned away gloomily, with a lowering face.

“Look here, Gavrik,” he said angrily; “lately you have acted just like a mad dog.”

“Just like a mad dog,” I thought ironically; one might have found a better simile; but Titus’s ideas are not freely secreted and mould themselves into wrong forms.

It appeared, however, that this time I had struck home; I was however no more sorry for Titus, than for Urmánov, or myself. I had hurt my friend deeply, but I simply watched him as an artillery man watches the effect of a shot; and caring as little for the sufferings of my victim as he would care for the sufferings of his victim.

Meanwhile, Titus pulled his cap over his eyes, and put on his overcoat; then, tossing my books about, took from among them a work on sociology which he had lately bought for me. Thrusting it under his arm, he went out without looking back. He had the air of a man who surprises himself by resolving on a desperate undertaking.

I afterwards heard that, on the same day, Titus, for the first time, made a speech at the meeting. He returned late with a flushed face and looking like a half-tipsy man, although he had not drunk a single drop of spirits. He came to my bedside and stood there for several minutes as if he wanted to say something, then turning hastily away he went to bed. In the night he moaned piteously and cried out several times in his sleep.

As for myself, I felt neither grief nor pity, being as I said to myself, “above all that,” because I knew what others did not know. Though I had then no desire to resume my normal condition, I cannot look back to that time without an involuntary shudder. It was as if I walked, moved, and lived in a gray cloud, cold and formless, darkening the dawning light of my young life.

I remember how a cloud on the horizon once suggested to me thoughts of this kind. It was a somewhat frosty evening, the sinking sun had tipped the edges of the cloud with purple and gold. All the central part of it was of that dim blue in which unknown shapes form and disappear, and you cannot tell whether they are really clouds or only the creation of your own fancy. You know that at sunset, suchlike clouds can be very beautiful; that dusky blue and soft rays fading in a golden mist kindle within you a whole flood of sensations. Night is at hand; soon, it will hide everything and you will not have found out what was really there and what were the shapes forming themselves in the tremulous mist above the horizon. The night will fall; and the cloud, it may be, will spread over all the sky; and lightning will flash through the still darkness; and thunder will crash over the earth. Or else the cloud will float away, following the retreating daylight, and flash, instead, on some other body’s horizon; and some other body’s eyes will look upon it; and similar thoughts and dreams will arise in some other body’s mind. In a word, there is in that cloud a something which reflects itself in every human mind: either as vague dreams, or sadness, or a throng of fancies dim as the mist. Hence, the cloud contains an element of the thoughts and feelings which start into life within you, like sparks from the contact of flint and steel.

But when I looked at the cloud that evening, I felt that it was deceiving me, as all the world deceives.

It is a lie, I thought; a lie and an empty, glittering illusion. Reality has none of that beauty, of that gold, of that “Imperial purple.” These are loud and empty words! Climb up to that tinsel loveliness, enter into it, and you are surrounded only by cold, penetrating mist. It is the same with life: once you look at it from the inside, it, too, is