The Little Demon, Fyodor Sologub [reading the story of the TXT] 📗

“You’ll get nothing out of me,” he thought, consoling himself, but he was tormented by dread.

Her hints did not seem very satisfactory to Prepolovenskaya. But she did not want to tell him everything in plain words. Why should she quarrel with Varvara? From time to time she sent Peredonov anonymous letters in which the hints were clearer. But Peredonov misunderstood them.

Sofya once wrote him:

“You had better see whether that Princess, who wrote you the letter, doesn’t live here.”

Peredonov thought that perhaps the Princess had really come to the town to watch his movements.

“It’s obvious,” he thought, “that she’s in love with me and wants to get me away from Varvara.”

And these letters both frightened and angered him. He kept asking Varvara:

“Where is the Princess? I hear that she has come to the town.”

Varvara, to get even with him for what had happened before the marriage, tormented him with vague hints, taunts and half-timid, malignant insinuations. She smiled insolently, and said to him in that strained voice which is usually heard from a person who lies knowingly without the hope of being believed:

“How should I know where the Princess lives now?”

“You’re lying⁠—you do know!” said Peredonov in terror.

He did not know what to believe⁠—the meaning of her words, or the lie betrayed in the sound of her voice⁠—and this, like everything he did not understand, terrified him. Varvara retorted:

“What an idea! Perhaps she left Peter for somewhere else. She doesn’t have to ask me when she goes away.”

“But perhaps she really has come here?” asked Peredonov timidly.

“Perhaps she really has come here!” Varvara mimicked him. “She’s smitten with you and she’s come here to see you.”

“You’re a liar! Is it likely that she’d fall in love with me?”

Varvara laughed spitefully.

From that time Peredonov began to look about attentively for the Princess. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was looking in at the window, through the door, eavesdropping, and whispering with Varvara.

Time passed by and the paper, announcing his appointment as inspector, so eagerly expected day after day, still did not come. He had no private information of the situation. Peredonov did not dare to find out from the Princess herself⁠—Varvara constantly frightened him by saying that the Princess was a very great lady, and he thought that if he wrote to her it might cause him extreme unpleasantness. He did not know precisely what they could do to him if the Princess complained of him, but this made him think of dreadful possibilities. Varvara said to him:

“Don’t you know aristocrats? You must wait until they act of themselves. But once you remind them, they get offended, and it’ll be the worse for you. They’re so touchy. They’re proud, and they like to be taken at their word.”

And Peredonov was still credulous. But he got angry with the Princess. Sometimes he even thought that the Princess would inform against him in order to rid herself of her obligations to him. Or else she would inform against him because he had married Varvara when perhaps she herself was in love with him. That was why she had surrounded him with spies, he thought, who kept an eye on him everywhere. They had so hemmed him in that he had no air to breathe, no light. She was not an eminent lady for nothing. She could do whatever she liked. From spite he invented most unlikely stories about the Princess. He told Routilov and Volodin that he had formerly been her lover and that she had given him large sums of money.

“But I’ve drunk it all away,” he said. “Why the devil should I save it! She also promised me a pension for life, but she took me in over that.”

“And would you have accepted it?” asked Routilov with a snigger.

Peredonov was silent. He did not understand the question. But Volodin answered for him gravely and judiciously:

“Why not accept it, if she’s rich? She’s gratified herself with pleasures and she ought to pay for them.”

“If she were at least a beauty,” said Peredonov mournfully. “She’s freckled and pug-nosed. She paid very well, otherwise I wouldn’t even want to spit at the hag! She must attend to my request.”

“You’re a liar, Ardalyon Borisitch,” said Routilov.

“A liar! What an idea! Do you suppose she paid me for nothing? She’s jealous of Varvara, and that’s why she doesn’t give me the job at once.”

Peredonov did not feel any shame when he said that the Princess paid him. Volodin was a credulous listener, and did not notice the absurdities and contradictions in his stories. Routilov protested, but thought that without fire there can be no smoke. He thought there must have been something between Peredonov and the Princess.

“She’s older than the priest’s dog,”40 said Peredonov convincingly, as if it were to the point; “but see that you don’t blab about it, because it might come to her ears and do no good. She paints herself, and she tries to make herself as young as a sucking-pig by injecting things in her veins. And you know that she’s old. She’s really a hundred.”

Volodin nodded his head and clicked his tongue affirmatively. He believed it all.

It so happened that on the day after this conversation Peredonov read Krilov’s fable, The Liar. And for several days afterwards he was afraid to go over the bridge, but crossed the river in a boat, for fear that the bridge should tumble down.41

He explained to Volodin:

“What I said about the Princess was the truth, only the bridge might take a sudden notion not to believe my story, and tumble down to the devil.”

Rumours of the forged letters spread about the town. Conversations about them preoccupied the townsmen and gave them great pleasure. Nearly everyone took Varvara’s part and was glad that Peredonov had been made a fool of. And all those who had seen the letters asserted as with one voice that they had guessed it at once.