KASIMIR STANISLAVOVITCH.
BY IVAN BUNIN
Translated from the Russian by Leonard Woolf and
S. S. Koteliansky
ON the yellow card with a nobleman's coronet the young porter at the Hotel Versailles somehow managed to read the Christian name and patronymic: Kasimir Stanislavovitch; there followed something still more complicated and still more difficult to pronounce. The porter turned the card this way and that in his hand, looked at the passport which the visitor had given him with it, shrugged his shoulders—none of those who stayed at the Versailles gave their cards—then he threw both on the table and began again to examine himself in the silvery, milky mirror which hung above the table, whipping up his thick hair with a comb. He wore an overcoat and shiny top-boots; the gold braid on his cap was greasy with age—the hotel was a bad one.
Kasimir Stanislavovitch left Kiev for Moscow on April 8th, Good Friday, on receiving a telegram with the one word: "tenth." Somehow or other he managed to get the money for his fare and took his seat in a second class compartment, grey and dim, but really giving him the sensation of comfort and luxury. The train was heated, and that railway-carriage heat and the smell of the heating apparatus and the sharp tapping of the little hammers in it reminded Kasimir Stanislavovitch of other times. At times it seemed to him that winter had returned, that in the fields the white, very white drifts of snow had covered up the yellowish bristle of stubble and the large leaden pools where the wild duck swam. But often the snow-storm stopped suddenly and melted; the fields grew bright, and one felt that behind the clouds was much light, and the wet platforms of the railway-stations looked black, and the rooks called from the naked poplars. At each big station Kasimir Stanislavovitch went to the refreshment-room for a drink, and returned to his carriage with newspapers in his hands; but he did not read them; he only sat sunk into the thick smoke of his cigarettes which burned and
