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

teeth. Dark, piercing eyes. Slippered feet.

“An Armenian!” thought Saranin at once.

The Armenian came up to him and said:

“My dear man, what are you looking for at this hour of the night? You should go and sleep, or else visit the fair ladies. If you like, I will guide you there.”

“No, my own fair lady is ample enough for me,” said Saranin.

And confidingly he acquainted the Armenian with his trouble.

The Armenian showed his teeth and made a neighing sound.

“Big wife, tiny husband⁠—to kiss, put up a ladder. Phew, not good!”

“What would be good for it, then?”

“Come with me. I will help a good man.”

For a long time they went through the quiet, corridor-like streets, the Armenian in front, Saranin behind.

From lamp to lamp the Armenian underwent an odd change. In the darkness he grew, and the farther he went from the lamp, the higher did he become. Sometimes it seemed as if the sharp tip of his cap rose up higher than the houses into the cloudy sky. Then, as he approached the light, he became smaller, and by the lamp he assumed his former dimensions, and seemed a simple and ordinary hawker of gowns. And, strange to say, Saranin felt no astonishment at this phenomenon. He was in such a trustful mood that the gaudy wonders of the Arabian Nights themselves would have seemed ordinary to him, even as the tedious passage of workaday drabness.

At the door of a house, quite an ordinary five-storied yellow building, they stopped. The lamp at the door clearly outlined its unpretentious sign. Saranin noticed:

“No. 41.”

They entered the courtyard. To the staircase of the back wing. The staircase was in semidarkness. But on the door before which the Armenian stopped, fell the light of a small dim lamp, and Saranin distinguished the figures:

“No. 43.”

The Armenian thrust his hand into his pocket, drew from thence a tiny bell, of the kind that is used in country-houses to summon the servants, and rang it. Clear and silvery was the sound of the little bell.

The door opened immediately. Behind the door stood a barefooted lad, well-favoured, brown-skinned, with very full-coloured lips. His white teeth glistened because he kept smiling, now joyfully, now mockingly. And it seemed that he was smiling the whole time. The comely lad’s eyes gleamed with a greeny lustre. He was all lithe as a cat and blurred as the phantom of a peaceful nightmare. He looked at Saranin and smiled. Saranin felt uneasy.

They entered. The lad closed the door, bending forward lithely and adroitly, and went before them into the passage, bearing a lamp in his hand. He opened a door, and again that blurred movement and mirth.

An uncanny, dark narrow room, along the walls of which were arranged cupboards with certain alembics and phials. There was a strangely irritating and perplexing odour.

The Armenian lit the lamp, opened a cupboard, fumbled about there and fetched down an alembic with a greenish liquid.

“Good droplets,” he said; “you give one drop in a glass of water, go to sleep quietly, and not wake up.”

“No, I don’t want that,” said Saranin, vexedly. “You don’t think I’ve come for that!”

“My dear man,” said the Armenian in a wheedling voice, “you will take another wife, after your own size, very simple matter.”

“I don’t want to,” cried Saranin.

“Well, don’t shout,” the Armenian cut him short. “Why are you getting angry, dear man? You are spoiling your temper for nothing. You don’t want it, then don’t take it. I’ll give you other things. But they are dear, ah, ah, dear.”

The Armenian, squatting down on his haunches, which gave his long figure a comical appearance, fetched out a square-shaped bottle. In it glittered a transparent liquid. The Armenian said softly, with a mysterious look:

“You drink one drop, you lose a pound; you drink forty drops, you lose forty pounds’ weight. A drop, a pound. A drop, a rouble. Count the drops, give the roubles.”

Saranin was inflamed with joy.

“How much shall I want, now?” pondered Saranin. “She must be about two hundred pounds, for certain. If she loses a hundred and twenty pounds, she’ll be quite a tiny little woman. That will be fine!”

“Give me a hundred and twenty drops.”

The Armenian shook his head.

“You want a lot, that will be bad!”

Saranin flared up.

“Well, that’s my business.”

The Armenian looked at him searchingly.

“Count out the money.”

Saranin took out his pocketbook.

“All today’s winnings, and you’ve got to add some of your own as well,” he reflected.

The Armenian in the meantime took out a cutglass phial, and began to count out the drops.

A sudden doubt was enkindled in Saranin’s mind.

A hundred and twenty roubles, a tidy sum of money. And supposing he cheats.

“They really will work?” he asked, undecidedly.

“We don’t sell a pig in a poke,” said the master of the house. “I’ll show you now how it works. Gaspar⁠—” he shouted.

The same barefooted lad entered. He had on a red jacket and short blue trousers. His brown legs were bare to above the knees. They were shapely, handsome, and moved adroitly and swiftly.

The Armenian beckoned with his hand. Gaspar speedily threw aside his garments. He went up to the table.

The lights dimly shone upon his yellow body, shapely, powerful, beautiful. His smile was subservient, depraved. His eyes were dark, with blue marks under them.

The Armenian said:

“Drink the pure drops, and it will work at once. Mix with water or wine, and then slowly, you will not notice it with your eyes. Mix it badly, and it will act in jerks, not nicely.”

He took a narrow glass with indentations, poured out some of the liquid and gave it to Gaspar. Gaspar, with the gesture of a spoilt child who is being given sweets, drank the liquid to the dregs, threw his head backwards, licked out the last sweet drops with his long, pointed tongue which was like a serpent’s fangs, and immediately, before Saranin’s eyes, he began to get smaller. He stood erect, looked at Saranin, laughed, and changed in size like a puppet bought at a fair, which