The Created Legend by Fyodor Sologub (ebook reader color screen TXT) 📕

to believe that the ways of Trirodov were fair and clean. Piotr closed his eyes⁠—and the radiant vision appeared before him of the semi-nude girls of the wood, who filed past him, and sanctified him by the serenity and the peace of their chaste eyes. Piotr sighed and said quietly, as if fatigued:

“I have no cause to say these malicious words. Perhaps you are right. But it is so hard for me!”

Nevertheless this conversation did much to soothe Piotr. Thoughts about Elena returned to him oftener and oftener, and became more and more tender.

It so happened that, acting upon some unspoken yet understood agreement, everyone tried to direct Piotr’s attention to Elena. Piotr submitted to this general influence, and was affectionate and gentle with Elena. Elena expectantly waited for his love; and at night, turning her blazing face and loosened locks in the direction of the nymph’s laughter, she would whisper:

“I love you, I love you, I love you!”

And when left alone with Piotr, she would look at him with love-frightened eyes, all rosy like the spring, and pulsating with expectancy; and with every sigh of her tender breast, and with all the life of her passionate body she would repeat the same unspoken words: “I love you, I love you, I love you.” And Piotr began to understand that he had met his fate in Elena, and that whether he willed it or not he would grow to love her. This presentiment of a new love was like a sweet gnawing in a heart wounded by treacherous love.

XXVIII

The local police department was not very skilful in tracking down thieves and murderers. And it did not occupy itself much with this ungrateful business. It had other things to think of in those turbulent days. Instead, it turned its ill-disposed attention to Trirodov’s educational colony⁠—thanks to the efforts of Ostrov and his friends and patrons.

The neighbourhood of Trirodov’s estate began to teem with detectives. They assumed various guises, and though they employed all their cunning to escape observation they did not succeed in fooling anyone. Of limited intelligence, they fulfilled their duties without inspiration, tediously, greyly, and dully.

Soon the children learned to recognize the detectives. Even at a distance they would say at the sight of a suspicious character:

“There goes a detective!”

Upon seeing him again they would say:

“There goes our detective!”

Of the uniformed police the first to make inquiries at Trirodov’s colony was a sergeant. He was fairly drunk. It happened on the same day that Egorka returned home to his mother.

The sergeant entered the outer courtyard, the gates of which happened to have been left open by chance. A strong smell of vodka came from him. With the suspicious eye of an inexperienced spy he examined the barns, the ice-cellar, and the kitchen. He wondered stupidly at the cleanliness of the yard and the tidiness of the new buildings.

The sergeant was about to enter the kitchen in order to talk with someone about the business on which he had been sent, when quite suddenly he saw a young girl, one of the instructresses, Zinaida. She walked without haste in the yard, in a white-blue costume that reached to her knees. Zinaida had a cheerful, simple, sunburnt face. Her strong, bare arms swung lightly as she walked. It seemed as if the graceful girl were carried upon the earth without visible effort.

The chaste openness of her chaste body naturally aroused hideous thoughts in the half-drunken idiot. And was it possible to be otherwise in our dark days? Even in the tale of a poet in love with beauty, the nudity of a chaste body calls out the judgment of hypocrites and the rage of people with perverted imaginations, as if it were the arrogant nudity of a prostitute. The austere virtue of these people is attached to them externally. It cannot withstand any kind of temptation or enticement. They know this, and cautiously guard themselves from seduction. But in secret they console their miserable imaginations with unclean pictures of back-street lewdness, cheap, and regulated, and almost undangerous for their health and the welfare of their families.

The police sergeant, upon seeing the young girl, so lightly dressed, gave a lewd smile. His unclean desire stirred in his coarse body under its slovenly sweaty dress. He beckoned Zinaida to him with his crooked dirty finger and gave an idiotic laugh. He pushed his faded cap down to the back of his head.

The young girl walked up to the police sergeant with a light easy gait. Thus walk queens of beloved free lands, barefoot virgins crowned with white flowers, queens of lands of which our too Parisian age does not know.

The police sergeant whiffed his shag, vodka, and garlic at Zinaida, and smiling lasciviously, so that the green and the yellow of his crooked teeth showed conspicuously, he said:

“Look-a-here, my pretty girl⁠—d’ye live here?”

Zinaida ingenuously marvelled at his red, dirty hands, at his red, provokingly perspiring face, his big, heavy, mud-bedraggled boots, and all those external tokens of the deformity of our poor, coarse life. They so quickly became unused to this deformity here in the valley of their beloved, innocent, tranquil life.

Zinaida replied with an involuntary smile:

“Yes, I live here in this colony.”

The police sergeant asked:

“Are you the cook? Or the laundress? What a nice piece of sugar-candy you are!”

He burst into a shrill, neighing laugh, and was about to begin his offensively affectionate tactics⁠—he lifted his open, tawny hand, and aimed his forefinger with a black border on a thick yellow fingernail towards a place where he might jab, pinch, or tickle the barefoot, bare-armed girl. But Zinaida, smiling and frowning at the same time, edged away from him and answered:

“I’m an instructress in this school⁠—Zinaida Ouzlova.”

The sergeant drawled out:

“An instructress! You are fibbing!”

He did not believe at first that she was an instructress. He thought that she was the cook, or the washerwoman, who had tucked up her dress in order to wash, scour, or