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

to do. He thought that perhaps dvorniks and policemen, dreadful fantastic beings, would come from all directions and seize him and drag him away somewhere.

By the side of the lady stood a young man, very much overdressed, wearing a top hat and horrible yellow gloves. He looked down upon Grishka with his fierce protruding reddish eyes, and everything about him looked red and angry.

“Good-for-nothing little hooligan,” he hissed through his teeth.

With a careless movement he knocked off the child’s cap from his head, gave him a box on the ear, and turning again to the lady, said:

“Come along, mamma. It’s not worth having anything more to do with such a creature.”

“But what a rude and daring boy he is,” said the lady, turning away. “Dirty little ragamuffin, where were you pushing yourself? You’ve quite upset me. Fancy not being able to walk quietly along the streets. What can the policemen be doing?”

The lady and her companion, talking angrily to one another, walked away. Grishka picked up his cap and collected as many as he could of the scattered cakes and biscuits, putting them into the torn paper bag, and ran off home. He felt ashamed and he wanted to weep, but no tears came. He could no longer dream about Turandina, and he thought:

“She’s just as bad as everybody here. She cast me into a terrible dream, and I shall never wake out of that dream, and forever I shall be unable to remember my real name. And I shall never be able to answer truly the question, ‘Who am I?’ ”

Who am I, sent into this world by an unknown will for an unknown end? If I am a slave, then whence have I the power to judge and to condemn, and whence come my lofty desires? If I am more than a slave, then why does all the world around me lie in wickedness, ugliness, and falsehood?

Who am I?

The cruel but still beautiful Turandina laughs at poor Grishka, at his dreams and his vain questionings.

The Dress of the Lily and of the Cabbage

In a flowerbed in a garden grew a lily. She was all white and red⁠—proud and beautiful.

She spoke gently to the wind passing over her. “Be more careful,” said she. “I am a royal lily, and even Solomon, the wisest of men, was not clothed so luxuriously and so beautifully as I.”

Not far away, in the kitchen garden, a cabbage was growing.

She heard the lily’s words, and she laughed and said:

“That old Solomon, in my opinion, was just a sans-culotte. How did they clothe themselves, these ancients? They cut out somehow or other a garment to cover their nakedness, and they imagined that they were arrayed in the very best fashion. But I taught people how to dress themselves, and the credit ought to be given to me.

“You take a bare cabbage-stalk and you put on it the first covering, an under-vest; over that something to fasten it; then an underskirt and fastenings for it; over this you put a skirt and its fastenings, and then a buckle. After the buckle you put on another vest and skirt and fastenings and bodice and buckle. Then you cover it all up from the sides, over the top and up from the bottom, so that the cabbage-stalk is quite hidden. And then it’s quite warm and decent.”

She Who Wore a Crown

It was a very ordinary, poorly furnished room in St. Petersburg. Elèna Nikolàevna stood at the window and looked out into the street.

There was nothing interesting to look at in the noisy and somewhat dirty town street, but Elèna Nikolàevna did not look out because she wanted to look at anything interesting. True, it would soon be time for her little son to come round the corner on his way home from school, but Elèna Nikolàevna would not have gone to the window just for that. She had such confident pride in him and in herself. He would come at the right time, as he always did⁠—as everything in life would come at its own appointed time.

Standing there, erect and proudly confident, there was an expression on her beautiful pale face as if she wore a crown.

She was remembering something which had happened ten years ago, in that year when her husband had died, leaving her so soon after their wedded life had begun.

How terrible his death had been! One fine spring morning he had gone out of the house quite well and happy, and before evening he had been brought home dead⁠—run over on the highway. It had seemed then to Elèna Nikolàevna that life could never more bring her happiness. She might have died from grief, but the fingers of her little child drew her back to life, and in the old dreams of her childhood she was able to find consolation. Yet how difficult it had been to live; how poor she had been!

The summer after her husband’s death she had spent in the country with her younger sister and her own little child. And today she remembered with a marvellous distinctness one bright day on which had happened something delightful and strange⁠—something apparently insignificant in itself, yet shedding upon her soul a wonderful light, illuminating all the rest of her life. On that wonderful day, long past, had happened that which ever afterwards made Elèna Nikolàevna as proudly calm as if she had been crowned queen of a great and glorious land.

But this well-remembered day had dawned in the darkness of grief, and like every day of that summer it had been watered by her tears.

She had quickly accomplished the little household duties that were necessary and had gone into the forest so as to be far away from everybody. She loved to wander in the depths of the forest and dream there. Often she wept there, remembering the happiness that had been hers.

There was one glade which she especially loved. The soft moist