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

shrivels up when they remove the wind from it.

The Armenian took him by the elbow and placed him on the table. The lad was about the size of a candle. He danced and performed antics.

“What will happen to him now?” asked Saranin.

“My dear man, we will make him grow again,” replied the Armenian.

He opened a cupboard and from the top shelf he took another vessel likewise of strange shape. The liquid in it was green. Into a tiny goblet, the size of a thimble, the Armenian poured a little of the liquid. He gave it to Gaspar.

Again Gaspar drank it, just as the first time.

With the unwavering slowness of water filling a bath, the naked lad became bigger and bigger. Finally, he reached his previous dimensions.

The Armenian said:

“Drink with wine, with water, with milk, drink it with whatever you please, only do not drink it with Russian kvass, or you will begin to moult badly.”

III

A few days elapsed.

Saranin beamed with joy. He smiled mysteriously.

He was waiting for an opportunity.

He was biding his time.

Aglaya complained of a headache.

“I have a remedy,” said Saranin. “It acts wonderfully.”

“No remedies are any good,” said Aglaya, with a sour grimace.

“No, but this one will be. I got it from an Armenian.”

He spoke so confidently that Aglaya had faith in the efficacy of the Armenian’s medicine.

“Oh, all right then; give it me.”

He produced the phial.

“Is it nasty?” asked Aglaya.

“It’s delightful stuff to taste, and it acts wonderfully. Only it will cause you a little inconvenience.”

Aglaya made a wry face.

“Drink, drink.”

“Can it be taken in Madeira?”

“Yes.”

“Then you drink the Madeira with me,” said Aglaya, prompted by caprice.

Saranin poured out two glasses of Madeira, and into his wife’s glass he poured the admixture.

“I feel a bit cold,” said Aglaya softly and sluggishly. “I should like my wrap.”

Saranin ran to fetch the wrap. When he returned, the glasses stood as before. Aglaya sat down and smiled.

He laid the wrap round her.

“I feel as if I were better,” said she. “Am I to drink?”

“Drink, drink,” cried Saranin. “Your health!”

He seized his glass. They drank.

She burst out laughing.

“What is it?” asked Saranin.

“I changed the glasses. You’ll have the inconvenience, not me.”

He shuddered. He grew pale.

“What have you done?” he shouted in desperation.

Aglaya laughed. To Saranin her laughter seemed loathsome and cruel.

Suddenly he remembered that the Armenian had an antidote.

He ran to find the Armenian.

“He’ll make me pay dearly for it,” he thought, gingerly. “But what of the money! Let him take all, if only he saves me from the horrible effects of this nostrum.”

IV

But obviously an evil destiny was flinging itself upon Saranin.

On the door of the lodging where the Armenian lived, there hung a lock. In desperation Saranin seized the bell. A wild hope inspirited him. He rang desperately.

Behind the door the bell tinkled loudly, distinctly, clearly, with that inexorable clearness peculiar to the ringing of bells in empty lodgings.

Saranin ran to the house-porter. He was pallid. Small drops of sweat, exceedingly small, like dew on a cold stone, broke out on his face and specially on his nose.

He dashed hastily into the porter’s lodge and cried:

“Where is Khalatyantz?”

The porter in charge, a listless, black-bearded bumpkin, was drinking tea from a saucer. He eyed Saranin askance. He asked with unruffled calm:

“And what do you want of him?”

Saranin looked blankly at the porter and did not know what to say.

“If you’ve got any business with him,” said the porter, looking at Saranin suspiciously, “then, sir, you had better go away. For as he’s an Armenian, keep out of the way of the police.”

“Yes, but where is the cursed Armenian?” cried Saranin, in desperation. “From number 43?”

“There is no Armenian,” replied the porter. “There was, it’s true, I won’t deny it, but there isn’t now.”

“Where is he, then?”

“He’s gone away.”

“Where to?” shouted Saranin.

“Who can say?” replied the porter, placidly. “He got a foreign passport and went abroad.”

Saranin turned pale.

“Understand,” he said in a trembling voice, “I must get hold of him, come what may.”

He burst out crying.

The porter looked at him sympathetically. He said:

“Why, don’t upset yourself, sir. If you do want the cursed Armenian so badly, why then, take a trip abroad yourself, go to the registration office there, and you’ll find him by the address.”

Saranin did not consider the absurdity of what the porter said. He became cheerful.

He at once rushed home, flew like a hurricane into the local office, and requested the man in charge to make him out a foreign passport without delay. But suddenly he remembered:

“But where am I to go?”

V

The cursed nostrum did its evil work with fateful slowness, but inexorably. Saranin became smaller and smaller every day. His clothes dangled round him like a sack.

His acquaintances marvelled. They said:

“How is it that you seem a bit smaller. Have you stopped wearing heels?”

“Yes, and a bit thinner.”

“You’re working too hard.”

“Fancy taking it out of yourself like that!”

Finally, on meeting him, they would sigh: “Whatever is the matter with you?”

Behind his back, Saranin’s acquaintances began to make fun of him.

“He’s growing downwards.”

“He’s trying to break the record for smallness.”

His wife noticed it somewhat later. Being always in her sight, he grew smaller too gradually for her to see anything. She noticed it by the baggy look of his clothes.

At first she laughed at the queer diminution in size of her husband. Then she began to lose her temper.

“This is going from bad to worse,” she said. “And to think that I actually married such a midget.”

Soon all his clothes had to be remade⁠—all the old ones were dropping off him; his trousers reached his ears, and his hat fell on to his shoulder.

The head porter happened to go into the kitchen.

“What’s up here?” he asked the cook, sternly.

“Is that any business of mine?” the plump and comely Matrena was on the point of shouting irascibly, but she remembered just in time and said:

“There’s nothing up here at all. Everything’s as usual.”

“Why, your master’s beginning to