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

me for hours. He cannot be restrained. He goes away, and I am free till the following year. This time he has chosen you. But I can see that you are astounded⁠—you are ready to think that I am mad.”

“Pardon me, Irene Vladimirovna,” Kragaef was beginning to say.

The lady stopped him with a slight movement of her head, and said:

“No, I’m not out of my mind. Listen! I’ll tell you all about it, and you will understand me. It’s not possible that such a sensitive and responsive person as yourself⁠—such a wonderful and delicate artist⁠—should not understand.”

Now, when a man is appealed to as a sensitive and delicate person, of course he is prepared to understand all that is wanted. And Kragaef began to feel himself in sympathy with the spiritual condition of the lady. He wanted to kiss her hand in token of his sympathy, and he thought with pleasure of raising her small delicate hand to his lips. But this he could not do⁠—he contented himself with gently squeezing her elbow in his hand.

The lady responded by an inclination of her head. Smiling uncertainly and strangely, so that it was impossible to know whether it were for happiness or a desire to weep, she said:

“My husband was a weak and a wicked man. I cannot understand even now why I loved him and couldn’t leave him.

“He tortured me⁠—at first timidly, but every year more openly and cruelly. He inflicted all kinds of torture on me, and he soon discovered a very simple and ordinary way. I can’t think why I put up with it. Perhaps I expected something from it⁠—but, however it may be, I became weak and wicked before him, as a humble slave.”

And then she calmly began to tell in detail how her husband had treated her. She spoke as if it were of someone other than herself who had endured all his cruelty and mockery.

Kragaef listened with pity and indignation, but her voice sounded so unmoved, and there was so much evil contagion in her words, that he suddenly began to feel within himself a wild desire to throw her on to the ground and beat her as her husband had done. The longer she talked and the more she described in detail how her husband had treated her, the stronger became his feeling and the greater his desire. At first it seemed to him that his anger at the shameless frankness with which she told of her sufferings, with her quiet, almost innocent cynicism, aroused this wild desire in him. But soon he understood that there was a much deeper reason for this wicked feeling.

Was it not, in truth, the soul of the dead husband becoming incarnate in himself, the monstrous spirit of an evil, weak torturer? He was terrified at first, but soon this momentary pang of terror died away in his soul, and more powerfully there arose in him the lust for torture⁠—the evil and mean infection.

“I endured all this,” continued the lady, “and never once did I complain. Even my spirit was unmurmuring. But one day in Springtime I became just as weak as he. A strong desire arose in me that he should die. Perhaps his cruelty was greater just then, or it may be that the beautiful white nights of Spring acted upon me in this way. I don’t know how the desire arose within me. So strange it was! I had never before been weak or wicked. Some days I struggled with the shameful wish. I sat at the window at night, and looked out at the quiet twilight of the night of our northern city, and in grief and anger I pressed my hands together and thought with insistent evil force, ‘Die, cursed one, die!’ And it happened that he did die suddenly, on this very day, exactly at two o’clock. But I didn’t kill him⁠—oh, don’t think it was I who killed him.”

“Mercy on us, I don’t think it!” said Kragaef, though his voice sounded almost angry.

“He died of his own accord,” continued she. “Or perhaps it was the force of my will that sent him to his grave. Perhaps the will of man is sometimes as strong as that, eh? I don’t know. But I did not feel repentant. My conscience was clear. And I lived calmly on until the next Spring. But then my mind grew disturbed, and the clearer became the nights the worse it was with me. My distress increased more and more. At last, on the anniversary of his death, he suddenly came to me and spent many hours torturing me as he had done in life.”

“Ah-ha, he came!” said Kragaef, with sudden malice.

“Of course you understand,” said Mme. Omejina, “that it was not the deceased come from his grave. He was too well brought up and too much of a townsman for such a fraud as that. He knew how to arrange it differently. He took possession of the will and spirit of a man who, like yourself, came to me that night and tortured me long and cruelly. And when he went away and left me powerless from suffering, I wept as if I had been a ruined girl. But my soul was calm, and I did not think of him again until the following year. But every year when the white nights come on I am tormented with distress, and on the night of his death my torturer comes to me.”

“Every year?” asked Kragaef, his voice hoarse with malice or agitation.

“Every year,” said she, “somebody comes to me at this time, and every year it is as if the actual soul of my husband rejoiced in my accidental tormentor. Then, after my dreadful night, my anguish leaves me and I can live again in the world. It happens so every year. This year he wanted you to come to me. He desired me to wait for you here in this garden, dressed as I am, barefoot and with my