Phantoms by Ivan Turgenev--Delphi Classics (Illustrated) by Ivan Turgenev

Phantoms by Ivan Turgenev--Delphi Classics (Illustrated) by Ivan Turgenev

Author:Ivan Turgenev [TURGENEV, IVAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Parts Edition 16 of 53 by Delphi Classics
Publisher: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
Published: 2017-08-09T00:00:00+00:00


XVIII

The night was cold, dull, grey; there was a feeling of rain in the air. To my amazement, I found no one under the oak; I walked several times round it, went up to the edge of the wood, turned back again, peered anxiously into the darkness…. All was emptiness. I waited a little, then several times I uttered the name, Alice, each time a little louder,… but she did not appear. I felt sad, almost sick at heart; my previous apprehensions vanished; I could not resign myself to the idea that my companion would not come back to me again.

‘Alice! Alice! come! Can it be you will not come?’ I shouted, for the last time.

A crow, who had been waked by my voice, suddenly darted upwards into a tree - top close by, and catching in the twigs, fluttered his wings…. But Alice did not appear.

With downcast head, I turned homewards. Already I could discern the black outlines of the willows on the pond’s edge, and the light in my window peeped out at me through the apple - trees in the orchard — peeped at me, and hid again, like the eye of some man keeping watch on me — when suddenly I heard behind me the faint swish of the rapidly parted air, and something at once embraced and snatched me upward, as a buzzard pounces on and snatches up a quail…. It was Alice sweeping down upon me. I felt her cheek against my cheek, her enfolding arm about my body, and like a cutting cold her whisper pierced to my ear, ‘Here I am.’ I was frightened and delighted both at once…. We flew at no great height above the ground.

‘You did not mean to come to - day?’ I said.

‘And you were dull without me? You love me? Oh, you are mine!’

The last words of Alice confused me…. I did not know what to say.

‘I was kept,’ she went on; ‘I was watched.’

‘Who could keep you?’

‘Where would you like to go?’ inquired Alice, as usual not answering my question.

‘Take me to Italy — to that lake, you remember.’

Alice turned a little away, and shook her head in refusal. At that point I noticed for the first time that she had ceased to be transparent. And her face seemed tinged with colour; there was a faint glow of red over its misty whiteness. I glanced at her eyes … and felt a pang of dread; in those eyes something was astir — with the slow, continuous, malignant movement of the benumbed snake, twisting and turning as the sun begins to thaw it.

‘Alice,’ I cried, ‘who are you? Tell me who you are.’

Alice simply shrugged her shoulders.

I felt angry … I longed to punish her; and suddenly the idea occurred to me to tell her to fly with me to Paris. ‘That’s the place for you to be jealous,’ I thought. ‘Alice,’ I said aloud, ‘you are not afraid of big towns — Paris, for instance?’

‘No.’

‘Not even those parts where it is as light as in the boulevards?’

‘It is not the light of day.



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