Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

“Yes, I could love a man like that⁠—such eyes and such a simple noble face, and passionate too despite all the prayers he mutters!” thought she. “You can’t deceive a woman in these things. As soon as he put his face to the window and saw me, he understood and knew. The glimmer of it was in his eyes and remained there. He began to love me and desired me. Yes⁠—desired!” said she, getting her overshoe and her boot off at last and starting to take off her stockings. To remove those long stockings fastened with elastic it was necessary to raise her skirts. She felt embarrassed and said:

“Don’t come in!”

But there was no reply from the other side of the wall. The steady muttering continued and also a sound of moving.

“He is prostrating himself to the ground, no doubt,” thought she. “But he won’t bow himself out of it. He is thinking of me just as I am thinking of him. He is thinking of these feet of mine with the same feeling that I have!” And she pulled off her wet stockings and put her feet up on the bench, pressing them under her. She sat a while like that with her arms round her knees and looking pensively before her. “But it is a desert, here in this silence. No one would ever know.⁠ ⁠…”

She rose, took her stockings over to the stove, and hung them on the damper. It was a queer damper, and she turned it about, and then, stepping lightly on her bare feet, returned to the bench and sat down there again with her feet up.

There was complete silence on the other side of the partition. She looked at the tiny watch that hung round her neck. It was two o’clock. “Our party should return about three!” She had not more than an hour before her. “Well, am I to sit like this all alone? What nonsense! I don’t want to. I will call him at once.”

“Father Sergius, Father Sergius! Sergéy Dmítrich! Prince Kasátsky!”

Beyond the partition all was silent.

“Listen! This is cruel. I would not call you if it were not necessary. I am ill. I don’t know what is the matter with me!” she exclaimed in a tone of suffering. “Oh! Oh!” she groaned, falling back on the bench. And strange to say she really felt that her strength was failing, that she was becoming faint, that everything in her ached, and that she was shivering with fever.

“Listen! Help me! I don’t know what is the matter with me. Oh! Oh!” She unfastened her dress, exposing her breast, and lifted her arms, bare to the elbow. “Oh! Oh!”

All this time he stood on the other side of the partition and prayed. Having finished all the evening prayers, he now stood motionless, his eyes looking at the end of his nose, and mentally repeated with all his soul: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me!”

But he had heard everything. He had heard how the silk rustled when she took off her dress, how she stepped with bare feet on the floor, and had heard how she rubbed her feet with her hand. He felt his own weakness, and that he might be lost at any moment. That was why he prayed unceasingly. He felt rather as the hero in the fairytale must have felt when he had to go on and on without looking round. So Sergius heard and felt that danger and destruction were there, hovering above and around him, and that he could only save himself by not looking in that direction for an instant. But suddenly the desire to look seized him. At the same instant she said:

“This is inhuman. I may die.⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes, I will go to her, but like the Saint who laid one hand on the adulteress and thrust his other into the brazier. But there is no brazier here.” He looked round. The lamp! He put his finger over the flame and frowned, preparing himself to suffer. And for a rather long time, as it seemed to him, there was no sensation, but suddenly⁠—he had not yet decided whether it was painful enough⁠—he writhed all over, jerked his hand away, and waved it in the air. “No, I can’t stand that!”

“For God’s sake come to me! I am dying! Oh!”

“Well⁠—shall I perish? No, not so!”

“I will come to you directly,” he said, and having opened his door, he went without looking at her through the cell into the porch where he used to chop wood. There he felt for the block and for an axe which leant against the wall.

“Immediately!” he said, and taking up the axe with his right hand he laid the forefinger of his left hand on the block, swung the axe, and struck with it below the second joint. The finger flew off more lightly than a stick of similar thickness, and bounding up, turned over on the edge of the block and then fell to the floor.

He heard it fall before he felt any pain, but before he had time to be surprised he felt a burning pain and the warmth of flowing blood. He hastily wrapped the stump in the skirt of his cassock, and pressing it to his hip went back into the room, and standing in front of the woman, lowered his eyes and asked in a low voice: “What do you want?”

She looked at his pale face and his quivering left cheek, and suddenly felt ashamed. She jumped up, seized her fur cloak, and throwing it round her shoulders, wrapped herself up in it.

“I was in pain⁠ ⁠… I have caught cold⁠ ⁠… I⁠ ⁠… Father Sergius⁠ ⁠… I⁠ ⁠…”

He let his eyes, shining with a quiet light of joy, rest upon her, and said:

“Dear sister, why did you wish to ruin your immortal soul? Temptations must come into the world, but woe to him by whom temptation comes. Pray that God may forgive us!”

She listened and looked at