The Chorus Girl and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 268 pages of information about The Chorus Girl and Other Stories.

The Chorus Girl and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 268 pages of information about The Chorus Girl and Other Stories.
been disconcerted by my being near them, for I was poorly and unfashionably dressed, and they used to say of my very narrow trousers and huge, clumsy boots that they were like sticks of macaroni stuck in boats.  Besides, I had a bad reputation in the town because I had no decent social position, and used often to play billiards in cheap taverns, and also, perhaps, because I had on two occasions been hauled up before an officer of the police, though I had done nothing whatever to account for this.

In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at Dolzhikov’s.  It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in the sky.  Here my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim, walked slowly by with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to greetings.

“Look up,” he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon.  “Look up at the sky!  Even the tiniest stars are all worlds!  How insignificant is man in comparison with the universe!”

And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant.  How absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was!  Sad to say, he was the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty years that I could remember not one single decent house had been built in it.  When any one asked him to plan a house, he usually drew first the reception hall and drawing-room:  just as in old days the boarding-school misses always started from the stove when they danced, so his artistic ideas could only begin and develop from the hall and drawing-room.  To them he tacked on a dining-room, a nursery, a study, linking the rooms together with doors, and so they all inevitably turned into passages, and every one of them had two or even three unnecessary doors.  His imagination must have been lacking in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed.  As though feeling that something was lacking, he invariably had recourse to all sorts of outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I can see now the narrow entries, the poky little passages, the crooked staircases leading to half-landings where one could not stand upright, and where, instead of a floor, there were three huge steps like the shelves of a bath-house; and the kitchen was invariably in the basement with a brick floor and vaulted ceilings.  The front of the house had a harsh, stubborn expression; the lines of it were stiff and timid; the roof was low-pitched and, as it were, squashed down; and the fat, well-fed-looking chimneys were invariably crowned by wire caps with squeaking black cowls.  And for some reason all these houses, built by my father exactly like one another, vaguely reminded me of his top-hat and the back of his head, stiff and stubborn-looking.  In the course of years they have grown used in the town to the poverty of my father’s imagination.  It has taken root and become our local style.

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Project Gutenberg
The Chorus Girl and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.