The Petty Demon

by Sologub, Fyodor

  “Well, thank God, they’ve gone. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known what to say to them. That’s the way it is with people you don’t know very well. You don’t know how to deal with them.”

  Suddenly she remembered that as the Khripaches were saying goodbye, they hadn’t invited them to come for a visit. That dismayed her at first, but then she realized what it meant:

  “They’ll send a card with a timetable of when to come. Everything has its time with these kind of people. Now I suppose I have to learn how to be witty in French, otherwise I don’t know my p’s and q’s in French.”

  Returning home, the headmaster’s wife said to her husband:

  “She’s pitiful and hopelessly vulgar. There isn’t the slightest possibility of being on equal terms with her. There’s nothing in her that corresponds to her position.”

  Khripach replied:

  “She corresponds completely to her husband. I’m waiting impatiently for the moment when they remove him from here.”

  After the wedding Varvara started to drink from joy, particularly often with Grushina. Once, when she was tipsy and Prepolovenskaya was sitting in her place, Varvara let slip about the letter. She didn’t tell everything, but made a fairly clear hint. That was plenty for the cunning Sofiya. It suddenly seemed to dawn on her and she mentally reproached herself: how could she not have guessed it right away! She told Vershina in secret about the forged letters, and from there it made the rounds of the entire town.

  Whenever she met Peredonov, Prepolovenskaya couldn’t help but make fun of his gullibility. She said:

  “How naive you are, Ardalyon Borisych.”

  “I’m not naive at all,” he replied. “I’m a university graduate.”

  “You might be a graduate, but anyone who wishes can make a fool of you.”

  “I make a fool of everyone myself,” Peredonov argued.

  Prepolovenskaya would smile craftily and leave. Peredonov would be dully perplexed: what was she doing that for? For spite! he thought. Everyone was his enemy.

  And he made a rude gesture behind her back.

  “You won’t get away with it,” he thought, consoling himself. But fear tormented him.

  Prepolovenskaya’s hints seemed insufficient. She didn’t want to tell him the whole truth in straightforward words. Why embroil him with Varvara? From time to time she would send Peredonov anonymous letters in which the hints were made clearer. But Peredonov misinterpreted them.

  Sofiya once wrote him:

  “Why don’t you look to see whether the Princess that sent you the letters doesn’t live here?”

  Peredonov thought that truly the Princess herself had come there to keep an eye on him. “Obviously,” he thought, “she’s madly in love with me and wants to get me away from Varvara.”

  These letters terrified and angered Peredonov. He started in on Varvara:

  “Where’s the Princess? People say that she’s come here.”

  Taking revenge for the past, Varvara tormented him with intimations, taunts and cowardly, spiteful circumlocutions. Smirking insolently, she would speak in the false kind of voice that people used when they were deliberately lying and had no hope of being believed:

  “How should I know where the Princess is living now?”

  “You’re lying; you know!” Peredonov said in horror.

  He didn’t understand what he was supposed to believe: the sense of her words, or the tone of her voice that betrayed the falsehood. This too, like everything else that he couldn’t understand, induced a feeling of horror in him. Varvara protested:

  “What next! Maybe she left St. Petersburg to go somewhere, she’s hardly going to ask me.”

  “But maybe in fact she has come here?” Peredonov asked timidly.

  “Maybe she did,” Varvara said in a taunting voice. “She’s madly in love with you and has come here to feast her eyes.”

  Peredonov exclaimed:

  “You’re lying! But what if she is madly in love with me?”

  Varvara laughed maliciously.

  From that time Peredonov started to keep a close eye out for the whereabouts of the Princess. At times it seemed to him that she was peeking through a window, eavesdropping at the door and speaking in hushed whispers with Varvara.

  Time passed and the document bearing the inspector’s appointment, which was anticipated daily, still didn’t arrive. Nor was there any private information about the post. He didn’t dare make inquiries to the Princess herself—Varvara was constantly frightening him with the fact that she was a distinguished lady. And it seemed to him that if he himself had taken it into his head to write to her, then very serious troubles might have ensued. He had no precise idea of what might be done to him on the basis of a complaint from the Princess, but that was particularly frightening for him. Varvara said:

  “Don’t you know aristocrats? Just wait, they’ll do what has to be done. And if you go reminding them then they’ll be offended and it’ll be worse. They have so much honor! They’re proud people, they like people to believe them.”

  And for the time being Peredonov still believed. But he was furious with the Princess. Sometimes he even thought that the Princess was denouncing him in order to evade her promises. Or she was denouncing him because she was angry at him for marrying Varvara whereas the Princess herself was in love with him. That was why, so he thought, she had surrounded him with spies who followed him everywhere and who assailed him from all sides to such a degree that there was no longer either air or light. It was not for nothing that she was a distinguished lady. She could do everything she wanted.

  Out of spitefulness he made up absurd lies about the Princess. He told Rutilov and Volodin that he had once been her lover and that she had paid him a great deal of money.

  “Only I wasted it on drink. What the devil was I supposed to do with it! She also promised to pay me a pension till the day I died, but she duped me.”

  “Would you have taken it?” Rutilov asked with a giggle.

  Peredonov was silent for a moment. He didn’t understand the question, but Volodin responded gravely and soberly on his behalf:

  “Why not take it if she’s rich. If she profited by her pleasures then she ought to pay for it.”

  “If at least she had been beautiful!” Peredonov said with melancholy. “She was pockmarked and stub-nosed. The only thing was that she paid well, otherwise I wouldn’t have given a damn for her, the devil. She ought to carry out my request.”

  “You’re lying, Ardalyon Borisych,” Rutilov said.

  “So I’m lying, am I? And did she pay me for nothing, then? She’s jealous of Varvara, that’s why she hasn’t given me the position for so long.”

  Peredonov experienced no shame when he was telling how the Princess had supposedly paid him. Volodin was a trusting listener and didn’t notice the absurdities and contradictions in his stories. Rutilov would object, but he thought that where there was smoke there was fire—there had been something between Peredonov and the Princess, he thought.

  “She’s older than a priest’s dog,” Peredonov said with conviction, as though it bore some relation. “Just mind, though, that you don’t go blabbing that to anyone. If it were to reach her, it could be bad. She smears herself with makeup and injects a piggy’s youthfulness into her veins. And you wouldn’t know that she’s old. But she’s already a hundred.”

  Volodin nodded his head and smacked his lips. He believed everything.

  It happened that on the day following this conversation Peredonov had to read Krylov’s fable “The Liar”* in one of his classes. And for several days afterwards he was afraid to walk over the bridge. He would take a boat and cross over, otherwise the bridge might be apt to collapse. He explained to Volodin:

  “I was telling the truth about the Princess, only what if suddenly the bridge doesn’t believe me and it collapses all to hell?”

  XXV

  THE RUMORS ABOUT the forged letters circulated through the town.

  Conversatio
n on the subject occupied the townsfolk and made them happy. Almost all praised Varvara and were happy about the fact that Peredonov had been made a fool of. And all those who had seen the letters were vocal in their assurances that they had guessed at once.

  The feeling of malice was particularly great in the home of Vershina. Even though Marta was going to marry Murin, nevertheless she had been rejected by Peredonov; Vershina had wanted to take Murin for herself, but had been forced to give him up to Marta; Vladya had his own appreciable reasons for hating Peredonov and rejoiced over his misfortune. Although he was annoyed that Peredonov was still going to remain at the gymnasium, nevertheless this annoyance was outweighed by the joy over the fact that Peredonov had been made a fool of. Moreover, a stubborn rumor persisted lately among the students at the gymnasium that the headmaster had supposedly reported to the district educational trustee that Peredonov had gone mad and that supposedly he would soon be sent for an examination and thereafter would be removed from the gymnasium.

  Whenever acquaintances met Varvara they would begin to talk more or less directly about her ruse and wink insolently. She would produce a brazen smirk, but she would neither confirm nor deny it.

  Others hinted to Grushina that they knew about her participation in the forgery. She took fright and went to Varvara to reproach her for blabbing. Varvara said to her with a smirk:

  “Why all the tomfoolery, it never entered my mind to tell anyone.”

  “Then from whom did everyone find out?” Grushina asked vehemently. “I certainly would never tell anyone, I’m not that kind of a fool.”

  “And I didn’t tell anyone,” Varvara tried to convince her brazenly.

  “Give me the letter back,” Grushina demanded. “Otherwise he’ll start to examine it and see from the signature that it’s a forgery.”

  “Well, let him find out!” Varvara said with annoyance. “I’ll look the fool in the face.”

  Grushina’s uneven eyes flashed and she cried:

  “It’s fine for you to say, you’ve got what you wanted, but they’ll put me in jail because of you! No, you do as you like, but give me the letter back. Otherwise it’s possible to have the marriage annulled.”

  “Well, that’s a good one. Just forget it,” Varvara replied, putting her hands on her hips. “Even if you go and publicize it on the town square, the marriage will still stand.”

  “Don’t tell me to forget it!” Grushina cried. “There’s no law that says you can get married by deceit. If Ardalyon Borisych takes the whole matter to the authorities and it goes to the Senate, then they can annul the marriage.”

  Varvara took fright and said:

  “What are you getting angry for, I’ll get the letter for you. There’s nothing to be afraid of, I won’t give you away. Do you think I’m that kind of a brute? I do have a soul after all.”

  “What kind of soul are you talking about!” Grushina said rudely. “All a person has is his breath, same as a dog, and there’s no soul. When you die, you’re gone.”

  Varvara decided to steal the letter although it was going to be difficult. Grushina pressed her. There was one hope: to pinch the letter from Peredonov while he was drunk. And he was drinking a great deal. It wasn’t rare for him to show up at the gymnasium tight and to deliver shameless speeches that induced revulsion even in the most wicked boys.

  Once Peredonov returned from the billiard room drunker than usual. They had been celebrating the acquisition of new billiard balls. Nevertheless, he still didn’t part company with his wallet. Somehow, while undressing, he slipped it under his pillow.

  He slept restlessly but deeply and was delirious, and in his delirium all his words were about something terrible and ugly. They induced an eerie terror in Varvara.

  “Well, no matter,” she tried to bolster her spirits, “as long as he doesn’t wake up.”

  She tried to wake him up and kept poking him. He would mutter something, curse loudly, but he wouldn’t wake up. Varvara lit a candle and set it up so that the light wouldn’t fall in Peredonov’s eyes. Rigid with fear, she got out of bed and carefully crept under Peredonov’s pillow. The wallet lay close by, but it kept eluding her fingers for a long while. The candle threw a murky light. The flame wavered. Tremulous shadows—wicked little devils darting about—flitted over the walls and bed. The air was stuffy and motionless. There was a smell of raw vodka. The entire bedroom was filled with the sound of snoring and a drunken delirium. The whole room was like a delirium that had materialized.

  With trembling hands Varvara pulled the letter out and slipped the wallet back into its former place.

  In the morning Peredonov missed the letter; he couldn’t find it. He took fright and started to shout:

  “Where’s my letter, Varya?”

  Varvara, horribly afraid, but concealing it, said:

  “How should I know, Ardalyon Borisych? You’re always showing it to everyone, you must have dropped it somewhere. Or it got pinched. You have a lot of friends and acquaintances with whom you go carousing at night.”

  Peredonov thought that his enemies had stolen the letter, most likely Volodin. Now Volodin had the letter and later he could get his claws on all the documents and the appointment and join the ranks of the inspectors, while Peredonov would remain a miserable tramp here.

  Peredonov made up his mind to defend himself. Every day he compiled one denunciation against his enemies: Vershina, the Rutilovs, Volodin, and his fellow teachers, who, so it seemed to him, were aspiring for the very same position as he. In the evenings he took these denunciations to Rubovsky.

  The chief of police lived in a prominent place on the square, near the gymnasium. From their windows many people noticed how Peredonov would enter the chief of police’s home through the gates. But Peredonov thought that no one had an inkling. After all, it wasn’t for nothing that he chose the evenings to bring the denunciations and used the back entrance by way of the kitchen. He would hold the paper under his coat flap. It was immediately noticeable that he was holding something. If he had to take his hand out to greet someone, he would hold the paper under his coat with his left hand and think that no one could guess. If the people he met asked him where he was going, then he would lie quite inexpertly, yet he himself would be satisfied with his unskilled inventions.

  He explained to Rubovsky:

  “They’re all traitors. They pretend to be friends, but they’re actually trying to deceive me. But they don’t think that I know the kind of things about them all that would make Siberia too good a place for them.”

  Rubovsky would listen to him in silence. He sent the first denunciation, which was obviously absurd, to the headmaster. He did likewise with several others. Yet others he kept just in case. The director wrote the educational trustee that Peredonov was displaying obvious signs of mental depression.

  At home Peredonov was constantly hearing rustling sounds that were incessant, tiresome and mocking. He said with melancholoy to Varvara:

  “Someone is tiptoing about there, spies are hanging around everywhere here. Varka, you’re not guarding me.”

  Varvara didn’t understand the meaning of Peredonov’s delirium. First she would make fun of him, then she would be frightened. She said in a voice that was both spiteful and cowardly:

  “Who knows what you fancy you see when you’re drunk.”

  The door into the front hall seemed particularly suspicious to Peredonov. It wouldn’t close solidly. The crack between the two halves of the door suggested the presence of something lurking outside. Could it be a knave spying there? Someone’s eye, wicked and sharp, was flashing.

  The cat followed Peredonov everywhere with its wide green eyes. Sometimes it would blink, sometimes it would miaow frighteningly. It was immediately obvious that it wanted to catch Peredonov out in something and that was the only reason it didn’t lose its temper. Peredonov would spit in disgust at the cat but it wouldn’t leave him.

  The nedotykomka ran about under the chairs and in the corners and squ
ealed. It was filthy, repulsive, frightening and reeked. By that time it was clear that it was hostile to Peredonov and had come specifically on his account, because earlier it had never existed anywhere. They had created it and then cast a spell over it. And now, to his terror and ruin, it was living right here, magic and omnipresent, following him, deceiving him and laughing. First it would roll around the floor, then it would pretend to be a rag, a ribbon, a branch, a flag, a cloud, a dog, a column of dust in the street. And it crept and ran everywhere after Peredonov, exhausting him and wearing him out with its vacillating dance. If only someone could get rid of it, either with a word or a solid whack. But he had no friends there, no one would come to save him and he himself would have to extricate himself before the malicious thing ruined him.

  Peredonov conceived a means: he smeared the entire floor with glue so that the nedotykomka would stick to it. But the soles of Varvara’s shoes and the hems of her dresses also got stuck, while the nedotykomka rolled around freely and laughed shrilly. Varvara swore spitefully.

  Relentless notions of persecution held constant sway over Peredonov and terrified him. More and more he became plunged into a world of wild fantasies. It was reflected in his face: it had become a frozen mask of terror.

  By this time Peredonov no longer went to play billiards in the evenings. After dinner he would lock himself up in the bedroom, barricade the door with articles—a chair on the table—and diligently circumscribe himself with crosses and counter-spells and sit down to write his denunciations against everyone he could remember. He wrote denunciations not only against people, but against the queens on the playing cards. Once he finished writing he would immediately take it to the chief of police. And that was how he spent every evening.

  Playing card figures—the kings, queens and knaves—walked around everywhere before his eyes as though they were alive. Even the ordinary cards were walking around. These were people with bright buttons: the students at the gymnasium, the town police. The ace was a fat person with a puffed-out belly, almost nothing more than a belly. At times the cards turned into familiar people. Live people and these strange changelings became all mixed up.