Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Other Stories / Леди Макбет Мценского уезда и другие повести. Книга для чтения на английском языке

It was all gilded by these intricate bright spots, which flashed and trembled on it like live, fiery butterflies, or as if all the grass under the trees had been caught in a lunar net and were swaying from side to side.

“Ah, Seryozhechka, how lovely!” Katerina Lvovna exclaimed, looking around.

Sergei looked around indifferently.

“Why are you so joyless, Seryozha? Or are you already tired of my love?”

“Why this empty talk!” Sergei answered drily, and, bending down, he lazily kissed Katerina Lvovna.

“You’re a deceiver, Seryozha,” Katerina Lvovna said jealously, “you’re insubstantial.”

“Such words don’t even apply to me,” Sergei replied in a calm tone.

“Then why did you kiss me that way?”

Sergei said nothing at all.

“It’s only husbands and wives,” Katerina Lvovna went on, playing with his curls, “who shake the dust off each other’s lips like that. Kiss me so that these young apple blossoms over us fall to the ground. Like this, like this,” Katerina Lvovna whispered, twining around her lover and kissing him with passionate abandon.

“Listen to what I tell you, Seryozha,” Katerina Lvovna began a little later. “Why is it that the one and only word they say about you is that you’re a deceiver?”

“Who’s been yapping about me like that?”

“Well, people talk.”

“Maybe I deceived the unworthy ones.”

“And why were you fool enough to deal with unworthy ones? With unworthy ones there shouldn’t be any love.

“Go on, talk! Is that sort of thing done by reasoning? It’s all temptation. You break the commandment with her quite simply, without any of these intentions, and then she’s there hanging on your neck. That’s love for you!”

“Now listen, Seryozha! How it was with those others I don’t know and don’t want to know; only since you cajoled me into this present love of ours, and you know yourself that I agreed to it as much by my own will as by your cunning, if you deceive me, Seryozha, if you exchange me for anybody else, no matter who, then – forgive me, friend of my heart – I won’t part with you alive.

Sergei gave a start.

“But Katerina Lvovna, my bright light!” he began. “Look at how things are with us. You noticed just now that I’m pensive today, but you don’t consider how I could help being pensive. It’s like my whole heart’s drowned in clotted blood!”

“Tell me, Sergei, tell me your grief.