Short Fiction, Fyodor Sologub [most popular novels of all time .txt] 📗

read for very long. He climbed up on the window-seat and looked out upon the children in the yard. Presently, trying to forget a slight headache, he let himself dream a little.

To dream⁠—that was Grishka’s favourite occupation. He imagined all sorts of things in all sorts of ways, but he himself was always in the centre⁠—he dreamed about himself and the world. When he went to bed Grishka always tried to think of something tender, joyful, a little painful and shameful perhaps, and sometimes dreadful. Then a pleasant feeling stole over him, though the day might have been an unpleasant one. Many unpleasant things often fell to his lot in the daytime, this poor little boy, brought up in the kitchen with his poor, irritable, capricious, discontented mother. But the more unpleasantnesses there were, the pleasanter it was to console himself by his fancies. It was with a mixture of feelings that he snuggled his head into the pillow and imagined terrible things.

When he woke in the morning Grishka never hurried to get up. It was dark and stuffy in the corridor where he slept; the box on which his bed was made up was not so soft as the spring mattress on the mistress’s bed where he had sometimes thrown himself when his mother wasn’t looking and the people of the house were away. But all the same it was comfortable and quiet there as long as he didn’t remember that it was time to go to school, or on a holiday, until his mother called to him to get up. And this only happened when it was necessary to send him to a shop to buy something, or for him to help in some way. At other times his mother didn’t trouble about him, and she was even glad to think he was asleep and not bothering her, not getting in her way or staring at what she was doing.

“It’s tiring enough without you,” she often said to him.

And so Grishka often lay in bed quite a long time, nestling under the torn wadded quilt covering him both winter and summer, though in summer, and when there was a big fire in the kitchen, it was very hot for him. And again he would dream of something pleasant, joyful, gay, but not at all dreadful.

The most insignificant reasons gave rise to Grishka’s varied dreams. Sometimes he had enjoyed reading a story or a fairy tale from some old and torn book, one of those given out by the teacher at school once a week from the school library; sometimes he remembered a curious episode from a book he had been reading aloud to his mother. Everything that happened, everything heard by him from somebody or other that excited his imagination, set him dreaming and imagining in his own way.

He went every day to a school in the town and learnt easily but moderately, only⁠—he had no time. There was so much to dream about. Also, whenever his mother was free to sit down with some sewing or knitting, Grishka had to read aloud to her some novel or other. She was very fond of novels, though she had never learnt to read herself, and she liked to listen to stories of adventure, and was greatly attracted by the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Key of Happiness. But she also listened greedily to old novels of Dickens and Thackeray and Eliot. Anushka got some books to read from her mistress, some from the girl student who lived in No. 14.

Anushka had a good memory for the stories she had heard, and she loved to tell them in detail to her friends⁠—to the seamstress Dusha, and to the housemaid of the general’s wife at No. 3.

And so very often in the evenings, planting his elbows affectedly on the white wooden kitchen table, pressing his thin little chest in his blue cotton shirt up against it, crossing under the table his spindly legs that were too short to reach the floor, Grishka used to read aloud, quickly and clearly, not understanding all he read, but often very much agitated by the love passages. He was much interested in situations of difficulty and danger, but still more in the scenes of love or jealousy or tenderness, in caressing words, in words expressing the passion, the torture, and the languor of lovers whose happiness was frustrated by the evil of others.

And most of all in his dreams Grishka pictured to himself beautiful ladies who smiled and were tender and gentle, though occasionally cruel, and graceful, fair-haired, blue-eyed pages. The beautiful ladies had ruby lips, and they kissed so sweetly and smiled so tenderly and spoke so gently, and yet their words were sometimes without mercy; they had soft white hands with long thin fingers⁠—soft hands, though they were sometimes strong and cruel, and they could promise all the joy and pain that one human being can give to another. The sweet young pages all had long golden curls reaching to their shoulders; their blue eyes sparkled; they wore pointed slippers and white silk stockings on their shapely legs. Grishka heard their careless laughter, their rosy lips bloomed tranquilly, the crimson of their cheeks glowed brightly; if there were any tears shed sometimes, they came only from the eyes of the sweet little pages. The ladies themselves, beautiful and merciless as they were, never wept, they could only laugh and caress and torture.

For some days past Grishka had been occupied in dreaming about some far-off beautiful and happy land in which wise people dwelt⁠—people, of course, quite unlike all those he saw about him in this dull house that seemed to him like a prison, in these stifling roads and side-streets, everywhere in this dull northern metropolis. What sort of people lived in it? Here were no beautiful and affectionate ladies like those of his dreams, but self-important and rude mistresses and peasant servants, women and girls, noisy, quarrelsome, bad. There were no knights