Short Fiction, Vsevolod Garshin [howl and other poems .txt] 📗

be better? Would it not be the same depravity, only not less frank? There he sits asleep, his head hanging backwards. Mouth open, face pale as death. His clothes are all stained. He must have fallen down somewhere. How heavily he is breathing⁠ ⁠… sometimes even snoring.⁠ ⁠… Yes, but this will all pass, and he will become once more a decent, self-respecting man. No, it isn’t that. It seems to me that if I let this man get the upper hand of me he will torment me with recollections⁠ ⁠… and I could not endure it. No, I’ll stay what I am.⁠ ⁠… Yes, it won’t be for much longer.”

She threw a shawl around her shoulders and left the room, slamming the door behind her. Ivan Ivanovich woke from the noise, looked around him with unmeaning eyes, and feeling it uncomfortable to sleep on a chair, with difficulty staggered to the bed, fell on to it, and dropped off into a dead sleep. He awoke with his head aching, but sober, late in the evening, and, seeing where he was, fled.

I left the house not knowing where I was going. The weather was bad. The day gloomy and dull. A wet snow was falling on my face and hands. It would have been much better to stay indoors, but could I sit there with him? He is going absolutely to ruin. What can I do to keep him? Can I change my relations towards him? My whole soul, my whole inner being revolts and burns at the thought. I do not myself know why I do not wish to take advantage of this opportunity to have done with this awful life, to rid myself of this nightmare. If I were to marry him? A new life, new hopes.⁠ ⁠… Surely the feeling of pity which I nevertheless have for him would turn to love?

But no! Now he is ready to lick my hand, but afterwards will trample me underfoot and say: “And you still oppose me, contemptible creature! You despised me!”

Would he say this? I think so.

There is one means of salvation for me, an excellent one, on which I have long made up my mind, and to which I expect I shall eventually have recourse. But I think it is still too soon. I am too young, I feel too much that I am alive. I want to live, to breathe, to feel, hear, see. I want to be able, even if rarely, to see the sky and the Neva.

Here is the Quay. On the one side enormous buildings, and on the other⁠—the blackening, icebound Neva. The ice will soon move, and then the river will be blue. The park on the opposite side is becoming green. The islands, too, are becoming covered with foliage. Although it is a Petersburg spring, still, it is spring.

And suddenly I remembered my last happy spring. I was then a girl of seven years, and lived with my father and mother in the country in the steppe. They paid little heed to what I did, and I ran about where and as much as I chose. I remember in the beginning of March how the rivers rushed along the gullies, roaring with the melted snow, how the steppe became darker, how wonderful the air became, how moist and joyous. First the top of the mounds showed themselves with the short grass on them becoming green. Then afterwards the whole steppe became green, although drift snow still lay in the gullies and ravines. Rapidly, in a few days, literally as if they had sprung already freed from out of the earth, bunches of peonies grew up and on them, their gaudy bright crimson blooms. The larks began to sing.

Oh Lord! What have I done that even in this life I have been thrown into hell? Surely all that I go through is worse than any hell!

The stone steps lead straight down to a prorub.6 Something impelled me to go down these steps and look at the water. But is it too soon? Of course it is. I will wait a little.

All the same, it would be nice to stand on the slippery wet edge of the prorub. It would be so easy to slip in. It would only be cold.⁠ ⁠… One second⁠—and I should float under the ice down the river. A mad beating of the ice above with hands, feet, head, face. It would be interesting to know if daylight is visible through the ice.

I stood motionless over the prorub, and so long that I had got to the state when one thinks of nothing.

My feet had long been wet through, yet I did not move from the spot. It was not a cold wind, but it pierced right through me, so that I was shivering all over; but still I stood there. I do not know how long this would have lasted if somebody had not called out from the Quay:

“Heh, Madame! Lady!”

I did not turn round.

“Lady, please come back on to the pavement!”

Somebody behind me began to come down the steps. In addition to the shuffling of feet along the steps sprinkled with sand, I heard a sort of dull noise. I turned round. It was a gorodovoi, who had come down, and it was his sword I had heard. When he saw my face, the respectful expression on his face abruptly changed to one of coarse insolence. He came up to me and seized me by the shoulder.

“Get out of this, you! The likes of you are everywhere. You will be fool enough to throw yourself into the prorub, and then I shall lose my billet through you.”

He knew by my face what I am.

IV

All is the same as before. It is not possible to be one minute alone without being seized with melancholy. What shall I do so as to forget?

Annushka has brought me a letter.