.. only of the aunt. Olya could not think of the pain or
the joy or the suffering--she was only thinking how she could pass
her aunt unnoticed; Agrenev felt cold and sickened at the thought of
a possible scandal.
They discovered there was a light at the aunt's window, and Olya
began to tremble like a reed, whispering hoarsely--almost crying:
"I won't go in! I won't go in!"
But all the same she did--a willow-reed blown in the wind. Agrenev
arranged to meet her the next day in the factory office, so that he
might hear whether the aunt had created a scene or not, although he
did not admit that reason, even to himself.
In the ravine when Olya--after yielding all--wept and clung to his
knees, Agrenev's heart had been pierced with pangs of remorse. In the
pitchblack darkness overhead the wild-geese could be heard rustling
their wings as they flew southward, scared by his cigarette--the
tenth in succession.
"Southward, geese, southward!... But you shall go nowhere, slave,
useless among the useless!" Then he remembered that slap in the face
Nina Kallistratovna had given for her husband--nobody would give Olya
Golovkina one for him! "Olya is a useless accidental burden," he
thought.
Then Agrenev dismissed her from his mind; and, as he bicycled from
Golovkinskaya Street through the whole length of the town, past the
factory to the engineers' quarters--there was no need to hide now it
was dark--he thought only of Olya's aunt: of how she was an old maid
with nothing else in her life but her niece, and that Olya was hiding
her tragedy from her; of how she spent the entire evenings sitting
alone by the window in the dark--assuredly not on Olya's account, but
because she was dying; all her life she had been dying, as the town
was dying where Kozlov was read; as he, Agrenev, was dying; as the
maidenhood of Olya had died.
Pages:
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120