Short Fiction

of the steps stood the post horses, their heads hanging dejectedly.

They passed another village, crossed a little river over the ice and once more the long, melancholy road stretched itself out with its dead white fields to right and left. Kashintzev dozed. Immediately the strange, misleading sounds in front and behind and on both sides of the sledge, began to speak and sing. The band of dogs broke out into barks and yelps, the human crowd murmured, the children’s silvery laughter rang out, the little bells chattered madly, pronouncing distinct words: “One’s first duty⁠—severity, severity,” shouted the inspector’s voice.

Kashintzev knocked his elbow against the side of the sledge and returned to consciousness.

On both sides of the road were running to meet him the tall, dark trunks of the pines, stretching out over the road their snow-laden branches, like enormous white paws. Among them, a long way off, in front, there seemed to gleam stately, slender columns, official walls and balconies, high white walls with black gothic windows, fantastic outlines of some sleeping, enchanted castle. But the sledge turned with the winding of the road and the phantom castle transformed itself into black files of trees and arches shaped by their snowy branches.

“Where am I? Where am I driving to?” Kashintzev asked himself in perplexity and fear. “What has just happened to me? Something so big, so joyful, so important?”

In his memory there swam out, with amazing clearness, a charming feminine face, a delicate outline of cheeks and chin, liquid, tranquilly passionate eyes, a beautiful curve in the blossoming lips. And suddenly the whole of his life⁠—all that had passed and all that lay in front⁠—outlined itself to him in a sad loneliness, like this night journey with its boredom, cold, emptiness, and isolation, with its enervating, dreamy delusions.

In passing, the superb beauty of this unknown woman had lit up and warmed his soul, had filled it with happiness, with beautiful thoughts, with a sweet unrest. But this strip of life had already run away from him, disappearing behind him, and from it there was left only a memory, like the light in a chance station that disappears in the distance. And in front one sees no other light; the horses continue their regular trot, and the indifferent driver⁠—Time⁠—dozes indifferently on his seat.

Le Coq d’Or

That morning⁠—I no longer remember the day, but it was the summer solstice⁠—I awoke at the very point of dawn, awoke sharply, suddenly, without any slow transition between the states of sleep and waking. I awoke fresh and cheerful, knowing that down there beneath my windows, in the clear light of the newborn day, some simple yet exquisite marvel was waiting. Already, even before the dawn, the joyous song of the starling had reached me, and the pert, melodious whistle of the blackbird.

I threw open a window and sat down upon the sill. The air, still cool, was impregnated with the fine, spicy odor of herbs, of flowers, of leaves. In the thick foliage of the chestnut trees, like diaphanous wisps of muslin, traces of the night mists still lingered; but the trees were already stretching out their branches, grown heavy in sleep, and opening gladly yet lazily their millions of eyes. Who, then, has ventured to pretend that trees can neither see nor hear?

But now the starling, joyous prattler that he is, and even that bold, careless whistler, the blackbird, were silent. Perhaps they lent an astonished attention, like myself, to those strange noises, incomprehensible, unheard till now, whose powerful bursts of sound seemed to set every particle of the atmosphere to vibrating. For a few seconds I felt as though from all the earth trumpets of gold and silver were sending up to heaven appeals of unthinkable purity and sonorous beauty. At length I understood: the cocks were crowing.

I recognized the vigor and the keenness of their song. Once, long ago, when I was hunting grouse in the immense Russian forests, ten or fifteen miles from any dwelling, I trained my hearing to so high a pitch that I could make out, just before the sun rose, the only two sounds that recalled mankind⁠—the distant whistling of the locomotives and the crowing of the cocks in far-off villages. The last sounds from earth that reached my ears during the silence of balloon ascensions used to be the whistles of little boys and, more persistent still, the triumphant cries of the cocks. And now, in this modest hour, when earth and trees and heaven, coming forth from their life-giving immersion in the freshness of night, were silently resuming their dresses for the day, I fell to musing, greatly moved: “See, all the cocks are singing here; all of them, to the very last one, young and old; all those that live within the immense space lighted by the sun, and upon which, in a few moments more, the solar rays will gleam in splendor.”

In all the country round about, as far as ear could hear, there was not a village, not a single farm, where every cock, with his head stretched out to heaven and the feathers of his neck bristling, was not hurling forth the sounds of fine, triumphal fury. Everywhere: at Versailles, at St.-Germain, at Malmaison, at Rueil, Suresnes, Garches, Marnes-la-Coquette, Vaucresson, Meudon, in every suburb, simultaneously, were ringing forth the morning songs of hundreds of thousands of inspired cocks. What human orchestra would not seem pitiable, compared to this magic chorus, in which the tone of reddish purple was the dominant?

There were instants when the nearest cocks were silent for a few moments, as if observing a rest rigorously fixed in advance; then I would hear the wave of sound roll out, ever farther and farther, to the extreme limit of hearing, and then, as if rebounding, come rolling back to crash more loudly still upon my windows, the roofs, the summits of the trees; and these great waves of sound rolled from north to south,