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

not give him many sweets in order not to spoil his teeth.

He thought of a way of begging some from her⁠—he knew that she had some bonbons, and so he would begin to kiss her and coax her:

“You are my sweet little bonbon, my handsome little bonbon.”

His mother would laugh and give Sasha a bonbon.

Once his pockmarked uncle came and brought some honey-cakes. Sasha got up on his knees, and said coaxingly:

“You are my lovely little honey-cake, my handsome little honey-cake!”

But the pockmarked uncle replied:

“I don’t like little beggars.”

And he put the honey-cakes back into his pocket.

They

We could see them if we liked to, though they are not at all as we are, and almost do not notice us. How indeed can we interest them?

Once I caught sight of one.

It was evening, and I was together with my sadness in the silent embrace of my walls.

The minutes burned, because I did not yet know how to extinguish their consuming flame.

And my reverie struggled helplessly on the yellow, shining boards of my floor.

The objects importuned me, and I believed them.

Then there was one brief moment⁠ ⁠…

Oh, if I could only find words to describe him!

Everything visionary, everything habitual was lit up by his light, and departed from my attention⁠—and there fell on me his unspeakable glance.

And answering my dread, he merely said to me:

“Don’t be afraid.”

Then again the time came on, and the objects once more bewitched me.

The Tiny Man I

Yakov Alexeyevitch Saranin scarcely reached medium size; his wife, Aglaya Nikiforovna, who came of trades-folk, was tall and capacious. Even now, in the first year after their marriage, the twenty-year-old woman was so corpulent that beside her tiny and lean husband, she seemed a very giantess.

“What if she gets still bigger?” thought Yakov Alexeyevitch. He thought this, although he had married for love⁠—of her and of the dowry.

The difference in the size of husband and wife not seldom evoked derisive remarks from their acquaintances. These frivolous jests poisoned Saranin’s peace of mind and embarrassed Aglaya Nikiforovna.

Once, after an evening spent with his colleagues, when he had to hear no small amount of banter, Saranin returned home thoroughly out of temper.

Lying in bed beside Aglaya, he growled and began wrangling with his wife. Aglaya lazily and unwillingly replied in a drowsy voice: “What am I to do? It’s not my fault.”

She was of a very placid and peaceful temper.

Saranin growled: “Don’t gorge yourself with meat, and don’t gobble up so much floury food; the whole day you’re stuffing yourself with sweets.”

“Then I can’t eat anything, if I’ve got a good appetite,” said Aglaya. “When I was single, I had a better appetite still!”

“So I should think! Why, you ate up an ox at one go, didn’t you?”

“It’s impossible to eat up an ox at one go,” replied Aglaya, placidly.

She quickly fell asleep, but Saranin could not get to sleep in this strange autumn night.

For a long time he tossed about from side to side.

When a Russian cannot sleep, he thinks about things. Saranin, too, devoted himself to that activity, which was so little peculiar to him at any other time. For he was an official⁠—and so had little reason to think about this and that.

“There must be some means or other,” pondered Saranin. “Science makes marvellous discoveries every day; in America they make people noses of any shape they like, and put a new skin on their faces. That’s the kind of operations they perform⁠—they bore holes in the skull, they cut into the bowels and the heart, and sew them up again. Can’t there be a way of making me grow, or else of reducing Aglaya’s size? Some secret way or other? But how to find it? How? You won’t find it by lying here. Even water won’t flow under a stone at rest. But to look for this secret remedy.⁠ ⁠… It may be that the inventor is actually walking the streets and looking for a purchaser. Yes, of course. He can’t advertise in the papers.⁠ ⁠… But in the streets hawking things round, selling what he likes from under his coat⁠—that’s quite possible. He goes round and offers it on the quiet. If anyone wants a secret remedy, he doesn’t stay tossing about in bed.”

Having arrived at this conclusion, Saranin began to dress quickly, mumbling to himself:

“Twelve o’clock at night⁠ ⁠…”

He was not afraid that he would wake his wife. He knew that Aglaya slept soundly.

“Just like a huxter,” he said aloud.⁠—“Just like a clodhopper,” he thought to himself.

He finished dressing and went into the street. He had not the slightest wish for slumber. His spirits were light, and he was in the mood peculiar to a seeker of adventure when he has some new and interesting experience before him.

The law-abiding official, who had lived quietly and colourlessly for the third of a century, suddenly felt within him the spirit of a venturesome and untrammelled hunter in wild deserts⁠—a hero of Cooper or Mayne-Reid.

But when he had gone a few steps along his accustomed road⁠—towards his office, he stopped and reflected. Wherever was he to go? All was still and peaceful, so peaceful that the street seemed to be the corridor of a huge building, ordinary, free from danger, shut off from all that was external and abrupt. The house-porters were dozing by the doors. At the crossroads, a constable made his appearance. The street lamps glimmered. The paving-stones and the cobbles in the road shone faintly with the dampness of rain that had recently fallen.

Saranin considered, and in his unruffled hesitance he turned to the right and walked straight ahead.

II

At a point where two streets crossed, in the lamplight, he saw a man walking towards him, and his heart throbbed with a joyful foreboding.

It was an odd figure. A gown of bright colours, with a broad girdle. A large speckled cap, with a pointed tip. A saffron-coloured tuft of beard, long and narrow. White, glittering