Short Fiction by Ivan Bunin

Author:Ivan Bunin [Bunin, Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Soviet Union -- Social life and customs -- Fiction, Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich, 1870-1953 -- Translations into English
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2019-03-11T19:02:37+00:00

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Some ten days later, on a dark, sultry dusk before a thunderstorm, two pair of oarsmen were racing in a small boat through the harbour of Colombo, toward a great Russian steamship that was about to sail for Suez. The passenger whom rickshaw-man number seven had once carried was half-reclining in the boat. The steamer was already booming with the rattling of the rising anchor chain, when, getting near the enormous iron wall of the ship’s side, he ran up the long trap-ladder to the deck. The captain at first flatly refused to take him on board: the steamer carried freight only, he declared; the agent had already gone away—the thing was impossible. “But I beg you—very, very much!” retorted the Englishman. The captain looked at him with wonder; he was apparently strong, energetic, but there was the tint of an unwholesome tan upon his face, while the eyes behind the glistening spectacles were unmoving, seeming to see nothing, and perturbed. “Wait until the day after tomorrow,” said the captain; “there will be a German mail-packet then.” “Yes, but to spend two more nights at Colombo would be very hard for me,” answered the Englishman. “This climate exhausts me—my nerves trouble me. Besides that, the German packet, as is always the case, will be packed to overflowing, whereas I desire to be alone. I am done up by these Ceylon nights, by insomnia, and by all that which a nervous man experiences before thunderstorms at dusk. But just glance at this darkness, at these clouds that have obscured the horizon everywhere: the night will again be a horrible one, the rain season has, properly speaking, already set in. …” And, with a shrug of his shoulders, upon reflection, the captain gave in. And a minute later the Senegalese, thin as eels, were already dragging up the trap-ladder a trunk covered with shining black leather, all gay with varicoloured labels and marked with red initials.

The surgeon’s vacant cabin, which was put at the disposal of the Englishman, was very small and stuffy; but the Englishman found it splendid. Having hurriedly disposed his things about it, he passed through the dining cabin up to the deck. Everything was rapidly sinking in the darkness. The ship had already weighed anchor and was heading for the open sea. To the right, other ships, with lights on their masts, seemed to be sailing toward them—these were the lights of the Fort. To the left, under the high taffrail, the shifting level expanse of the dark water rushed toward the low shore, toward the mounds of coal, and the dark density of the groves of slender trunked palms that were beyond the coal mounds. The water still bounded the darkness and the mournfulness of the clouds, and its shifting rapidity made one’s head reel. Constantly veering, constantly increasing, a humid, nauseatingly-fragrant wind was blowing from somewhere. The taciturn clouds suddenly burst into such an abysmal pale-blue light, that, lit up by it, in the very

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