Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи. Книга для чтения на английском языке

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In June, a student set off from his mother’s estate for his uncle and aunt’s – he needed to pay them a visit, find out how they were, about the health of his uncle, a general who had lost the use of his legs. The student performed this service every summer and was travelling now with submissive serenity, unhurriedly reading a new book by Averchenko[85 - a new book by Averchenko: Arkady Timofeyevich Averchenko (1881–1925), a Russian humorist, author of short stories, plays and pamphlets. (прим. перев.

)] in a second-class carriage, with a young, rounded thigh set on the edge of the couch, absent-mindedly watching through the window as the telegraph poles dipped and rose with their white porcelain cups in the shape of lilies-of-the-valley. He looked like a young officer – only his white peaked cap with a blue band was a student’s, everything else was to the military model: a white tunic, greenish breeches, boots with patent-leather tops, a cigarette case with an orange lighting wick.

His uncle and aunt were rich. When he came home from Moscow, a heavy tarantass was sent out to the station for him, a pair of draught horses and not a coachman but a workman. But at his uncle’s station he always stepped for a certain time into a completely different life, into the pleasure of great prosperity, he began feeling handsome, jaunty, affected. So it was now too. With involuntary foppishness he got into a light carriage on rubber wheels with three lively dark-bay horses in harness, driven by a young coachman in a blue, sleeveless poddyovka and a yellow silk shirt.

A quarter of an hour later, with a sprinkling of little bells softly playing and its tyres hissing across the sand around the flower bed, the troika flew into the round yard of an extensive country estate towards the perron of a spacious new house of two storeys. Onto the perron to take his things emerged a strapping servant wearing half-whiskers, a red-and-black striped waistcoat and gaiters. The student took an agile and improbably big leap out of the carriage: smiling and rocking as she walked, on the threshold of the vestibule there appeared his aunt – a loose, shapeless, tussore day coat[86 - tussore day coat – чесучовый балахон (из плотной шелковой ткани, обычно желтовато-песочного цвета)] on a big, flaccid body, a large, drooping face, a nose like an anchor and yellow bags beneath brown eyes.