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

occupation. She called him by a strange nickname⁠—taken from the opera⁠—Lohengrin.

“My Lohengrin is coming today,” she used to say to her mother.

“That’s your Lohengrin’s ring,” her mother would say when they heard a timid, uncertain little sound from the doorbell.

“Your Lohengrin’s a silly,” said her little brother Serezha frankly. He liked to tease Mashenka sometimes. Only occasionally, of course. He was only twelve years old, and just a little afraid of his sister.

At first Mashenka called her friend Lohengrin because she met him first in the gallery of the Marinsky Theatre one evening when Lohengrin was being performed. And afterwards there were other reasons why he still kept so strange a nickname.

II

Mashenka had gone to the theatre that evening with a girl friend and two student acquaintances. “Lohengrin” sat behind her, just a little to one side, and before the beginning of the second act Mashenka noticed that he was looking at her very intently. She began to feel awkward, and looked round angrily at the young man.

She did not much like the look of him. His persistent gaze seemed rude and tiresome. And she disliked him still more when, after turning on him for the second time a more severe glance and a more decided frown, the young man averted his gaze with such guilty haste that it seemed to her he must be accustomed to stare rudely at people and then suddenly turn away.

She wanted to point him out to her companions and ask whether they knew the young man, but just then the orchestra began to play, and everyone was silent. Mashenka, under the spell of the incomparable music, quickly forgot all about the tiresome person behind her.

In the next entr’acte Mashenka walked up and down the corridor with her friends, and did not think of the young man until she became conscious that he was walking behind and staring at her. For a long time afterwards she felt his gaze upon her neck, just on the line where the bare neck shows between the top of the white collar and the hair above it. It was so annoying and embarrassing that she didn’t know what to do.

The entr’acte was at an end, and they were all crowding back through the narrow doors when Mashenka took advantage of the general noise and confusion to say to the student beside her:

“Do you know the young man next to us? His seat is just behind ours.”

She spoke in a low voice so that the young man behind should not hear. But the student looked round and said aloud:

“No, I don’t know him. Why do you ask?”

It was a little difficult to reply.

“He stares at me all the time,” she whispered.

“You’ve made a conquest of him,” said the student calmly, still speaking loudly.

When they were in their places again and preparing to listen, Mashenka for some reason or other felt vexed that the student had treated the matter so lightly. As if to spite him she looked attentively at the young man behind, and thought to herself with a condescending pity:

“Poor thing! Perhaps he thinks himself handsome and irresistible.”

A faint smile played about her lips, and she noticed with some satisfaction that the young man blushed a little, and that in his eyes there was a gleam of pleasure. But she quickly recollected herself and frowned again, looked angrily at him, and turned away, thinking:

“He’s no business to think anything of himself. He’s quite ugly.”

In the third entr’acte he walked behind her again, not at all disconcerted, though somewhat timid and confused, looking like an amusing reddish-coloured shadow stealing along the wall.

After the opera was over Mashenka saw him again while she was putting on her cloak. He was evidently hurrying to get out before she did, and was already dressed in a long coat with an astrakhan collar and a fur hat. He stood and looked across at her, searching through the crowd as if boring through it with his pointed beetle-like whiskers⁠—looked at her with a sadly strange and furtive glance, as if he wished to notice particularly and remember every little fold of her dress and her cloak.

Once more Mashenka felt vexed and awkward, and she made up her mind not to tell anyone about this young man.

“Nuisance!” said she angrily to herself.

III

Mashenka went home with a whole crowd of young people, all talking and laughing gaily. She tried hard not to look behind her, but she was certain that the young man was following them. She didn’t want to hear it, and yet she found herself listening involuntarily to the light footfall⁠—a cautious, stealthy tread.

When she said goodbye to her friends at the gate, Mashenka saw the stranger once more. He went quietly past the house, crossed over to the other side of the road, and turned back in the direction from which they had come.

The clumsy dvornik, wearing an immense shaggy overcoat and his cap pulled low down over his forehead and ears, flung open the creaking little door in the heavy gate. Mashenka’s companions, still talking noisily all together, went away up the street. Mashenka went into the yard, and the little door was slammed behind her. She waited by the gate and listened.

Someone came along with stealthy little steps, stopped outside, and began to speak in a whisper to the dvornik. The latter muttered something indistinctly, as if unwilling to answer, but presently Mashenka heard him thanking the other for something, and then he went on talking. She tried hard to hear what was said, but could not catch a word, partly at first because they spoke so softly, but afterwards she was too much overwhelmed with confusion to listen; her heart beat rapidly, the blood coursed through her veins and drummed in her ears.

There was not much sleep for Mashenka that night. In her dreams she saw the beautiful knight, the bright-haired Lohengrin in shining armour, and heard his