Political fiction; Russia -- History -- 1801-1917 -- Fiction; Russia -- Officials and employees -- Fiction
the cord, you rascal.’ ‘It’s all right as it is.’ ‘All right, is it?
Why, she’s on her side! She was a fellow-creature, after all! But,
never mind, throw the earth on her.’ And they won’t care to waste much
time quarrelling over you. They will scatter the wet blue clay as quick
as they can and go off to the tavern ... and there your memory on earth
will end; other women have children to go to their graves, fathers,
husbands. While for you neither tear, nor sigh, nor remembrance; no one
in the whole world will ever come to you, your name will vanish from
the face of the earth—as though you had never existed, never been born
at all! Nothing but filth and mud, however you knock at your coffin lid
at night, when the dead arise, however you cry: ‘Let me out, kind
people, to live in the light of day! My life was no life at all; my
life has been thrown away like a dish-clout; it was drunk away in the
tavern at the Haymarket; let me out, kind people, to live in the world
again.’”
And I worked myself up to such a pitch that I began to have a lump in
my throat myself, and ... and all at once I stopped, sat up in dismay
and, bending over apprehensively, began to listen with a beating heart.
I had reason to be troubled.
I had felt for some time that I was turning her soul upside down and
rending her heart, and—and the more I was convinced of it, the more
eagerly I desired to gain my object as quickly and as effectually as
possible. It was the exercise of my skill that carried me away; yet it
was not merely sport....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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