Encounters from africa short stories pdf free

I waited to see what would come of all this, and I saw and felt that, apparently, I had made a great mistake in suspecting her of wishing to draw me from the path of righteousness. вЂ‹And suddenly she grew strangely terrified and distraught she began to shift from foot to foot without moving from the place, and spluttered comically, as if she wanted to say something and couldn't. I have no wish whatever to cultivate your acquaintance. Don't you come sneaking about me any longer. 'Look here, my lady,' I said, 'there are no Boleses or Teresas at all, and you've been telling me a pack of lies. I was a bit fogged at first-and then I guessed how it was. I looked at her-her face was troubled, her fingers were trembling. Will you, sir, write a letter to this Teresa?' He has a sweetheart just like me here, Teresa. It is for a friend of mine, that is to say, not a friend but an acquaintance-a man acquaintance. 'I was going to ask you, sir, to write me another letter.' Student, you have no pressing business, I hope?' This also was dull enough work, but I didn't care about doing anything else.

I didn't want to go out, and out of sheer ennui I began a course of self-analysis and reflection. I was sitting at my window whistling and thinking of some expedient for enabling me to get away from myself. I felt that this mastodon in petticoats had made me grow quite red with shame, and I told her pretty sharply that I had no need whatever of her services.ДЄ week or two passed away. 'Perhaps, sir, your shirts or your trousers may want a little mending?' 'No, I most humbly thank you all the same.' 'Perhaps I can show you some service, eh?'

вЂ‹'I thank you most heartily, sir, for your kind services,' said Teresa to me, with a curtsey. 'Well, let us write your letter.'ДЄnd I tell you plainly that I would willingly have changed places with this Boles if his fair correspondent had been not Teresa but something less than she. 'Why are you so surprised, sir? Cannot I, a girl, have a young man?' Student,' she said, as if offended with me for blundering over the name, 'he is Boles-my young man.' 'A sorrowing little dove!' more than five feet high, with fists a stone and more in weight, and as black a face as if the little dove had lived all its life in a chimney, and had never once washed itself! Restraining myself somehow, I asked: May the Mother of God protect thee! Thou heart of gold, why hast thou not written for such a long time to thy sorrowing little dove, Teresa?' 'To Boleslav Kashput, at the town of Svieptziana, on the Warsaw Road.' She came, sat down very gingerly on a chair, and looked at me with a guilty look. 'Deuce take you!' I thought but up I jumped, sat down at my table, took a sheet of paper, and said: 'I want to send a letter home, that's what it is,' she said her voice was beseeching, soft, timid. I lay there silent, and thought to myself: It was a very unusual sort of face for her. I saw that her face was confused and supplicatory. I should have liked to have changed my quarters in order to have avoided such encounters and greetings but my little chamber was a nice one, and there was such a wide view from the window, and it was always so quiet in the street below-so I endured.ДЄnd one morning I was sprawling on my couch, trying to find some sort of excuse for not attending my class, when the door opened, and the bass voice of Teresa the loathsome resounded from my threshold: Student!' and her stupid laugh would still further intensify my loathing of her. Occasionally, I saw her drunk, with bleary eyes, tousled hair, and a particularly hideous grin 0n such occasions she would speak to me. Sometimes I chanced to meet her on the staircase or in the yard, and she would smile upon me with a smile which seemed to me to be sly and cynical. But this, after all, was a very rare occurrence. I never left my door open when I knew her to be at home. I lived on the top flight and her garret was opposite to mine. She was a tallish, powerfully-built brunette, with black, bushy eye-brows and a large coarse face as if carved out by a hatchet-the bestial gleam of her dark eyes, her thick bass voice, her cabman-like gait and her immense muscular vigour, worthy of a fishwife, inspired me with horror. She was a Pole, and they called her Teresa. When I was a student at Moscow I happened to live alongside one of those ladies whose repute is questionable. AN acquaintance of mine once told me the following story.

Encounters from africa short stories pdf free