Short Fiction - Fyodor Sologub (best romance ebooks .txt) 📗

better if you paid for your board and lodging. A letter won’t feed your hunger; you ought to go among people, look for a job and not expect things to come to you.”

He read:

“Be so good as to come in for a talk, between 6 and 7 in the evening, at Row 6, House 78, Apartment 57.”

There was no signature.

Moshkin glanced angrily at his landlady. She was broad and erect, and as she stood there at the door quite calm, with lowered arms, she was like a doll; she seemed deliberately malicious, and she looked at him with her motionless, anger-provoking eyes.

Moshkin exclaimed: “Basta!”

He hit the table with his fist. Then he rose, and paced up and down the room. He kept on repeating: “Basta!”

The landlady asked quietly and spitefully: “Are you going to pay or not, you Kazan and Astrakhan correspondent, you impudent face?”

Moshkin stopped in front of her, put out his empty palm, and said: “That’s all I have.”

He said nothing about his last three-rouble note. The landlady hissed: “I’m not hard on you, but I need money. Wood’s seven roubles a load now, how am I to pay it? You can’t live on nothing. Can’t you find someone to look after you? You’re a young man of ability, and you have quite a charming appearance. You can always get hold of some goose or other. But how am I to pay? Whichever way you turn you’ve got to put down money.”

Moshkin replied: “Don’t worry, Praskovya Petrovna, I am getting a job tonight, and I’ll pay what I owe you.”

He began to pace the room again, making a flapping noise with his slippers.

The landlady paused at the door, and kept on with her grumbling. When she went at last, she cried out: “Another in my place would have shown you the door long ago.”

For some time after she had left there still remained in his memory her strange, erect figure, with relaxed arms; her broad, yellow forehead, shaped like a triangle under her smoothly-oiled hair; her worn yellow dress, cut away like a narrow triangle, and her red, sniffling nose shaped like a small triangle. Three triangles in all.

All day long Moshkin was hungry, cheerful, and indignant. He walked aimlessly in the streets. He looked at the girls, and they all seemed to him to be lovable, happy, and accessible⁠—to the rich. He stopped before the shop windows, where expensive goods were displayed. The glimmer of hunger in his eyes grew keener and keener.

He bought a newspaper. He read as he sat on a form in the square, where the children laughed and ran, where the nurses tried to look fashionable, where there was a smell of dust and of consumptive trees⁠—and where the smells of the street and of the garden mingled unpleasantly, reminding him of the smell of gutta-percha. Moshkin was very much struck by an account in the newspaper of a hungry fanatic who had slashed a picture by a celebrated artist in the museum.

“Now that’s something I can understand!”

Moshkin walked briskly along the path. He repeated: “Now that’s something I can understand!”

And afterwards, as he walked in the streets and looked at the huge and stately houses, at the exposed wealth of the shops, at the elegant dress of the people of fashion, at the swiftly moving carriages, at all these beauties and comforts of life, accessible to all who have money, and inaccessible to him⁠—as he looked and observed and envied, he felt more and more keenly the mood of destructive rage.

“Now that’s something I can understand!”

He walked up to a stout and pompous house-porter, and shouted: “Now that’s something I can understand!”

The porter looked at him with silent scorn. Moshkin laughed joyously, and said: “Clever chaps those anarchists!”

“Be off with you!” exclaimed the porter angrily. “And see that you don’t overeat yourself.”

Moshkin was about to leave him but stopped short in fright. There was a policeman quite near, and his white gloves stood out with startling sharpness. Moshkin thought in his sadness:

“A bomb might come in handy here.”

The porter spat angrily after him, and turned away.

Moshkin walked on. At six o’clock he entered a restaurant of the middle rank. He chose a table by the window. He had some vodka, and followed it with anchovies. He ordered a seventy-five copeck dinner. He had a bottle of chablis on ice; after dinner a liqueur. He got slightly intoxicated. His head went round at the sound of music. He did not take his change. He left, reeling slightly, accompanied respectfully by a porter, into whose hand he stuck a twenty-copeck piece.

He looked at his nickelled watch. It was just past seven. It was time to go. He had to make haste. They might hire another. He strode impetuously toward his destination.

He was hindered by: dug up pavements; superannuated, eternally somnolent cabbies, at street crossings; passersby, especially muzhiks and women; those who came toward him, without stepping aside at all, or who stepped aside more often to the left than to the right⁠—while those whom he had to overtake joggled along indifferently on the narrow way, and it was hard to tell at once on which side to pass them; beggars⁠—these clung to him; and the mechanical process of walking itself.

How difficult to conquer space and time when one is in a hurry! Truly the earth drew him to itself and he purchased every step with violence and exhaustion. He felt pains in his legs. This increased his spite, and intensified the glimmer of hunger in his eyes.

Moshkin thought:

“I’d like to chuck it all to the devil! To all the devils!”

At last he got there.

Here was the Row, and here was House No. 78. It was a four-storey house, in a state of neglect; the two approaches had a gloomy look, the gates in the middle stood wide agape. He looked at the plates at the approaches; the first numbers were here, and there was no No. 57. No one was in sight. There was a