FullReads

All at once he started; he had heard a sound, a high pipe. Was it the kingfisher? He paused and listened. Distinctly, and not far off in the undergrowth, he heard a laugh, a woman’s laugh. It flashed across his mind that it might be Tatiana, but it was not her laugh. Something rustled in the bushes to the left of him; he followed the rustling and it led him through the bushes–he had now passed the ditch–to the river bank. The sun had set behind the woods from which he had just emerged; the sky was as grey as the water, and there was no reflection of the sunset in the east. Except the water and the trees he saw nothing; there was not a sound to be heard, not a ripple on the river, not a whisper from the woods.

Then all at once the stillness was broken again by quick rippling laughs immediately behind him. He turned sharply round, and saw a woman in the bushes: her eyes were large and green and sad; her hair straggling and dishevelled; she was dressed in reeds and leaves; she was very pale. She stared at him fixedly, and smiled, showing gleaming teeth, and when she smiled there was no light nor laughter in her eyes, which remained sad and green and glazed like those of a drowned person. She laughed again and ran into the bushes. Petrushka ran after her, but although he was quite close to her he lost all trace of her immediately. It was as if she had vanished under the earth or into the air.

“It’s a Russalka,” thought Petrushka, and he shivered. Then he added to himself, with the pride of the new scepticism he had learnt from the factory hands: “There is no such thing; only women believe in such things. It was some drunken woman.”

Petrushka walked quickly back to the edge of the wood, where he had left his cart, and drove home. The next day was Sunday, and Tatiana noticed that he was different–moody, melancholy, and absent-minded. She asked him what was the matter; he said his head ached. Towards five o’clock he told her–they were standing outside her cottage–that he was obliged to go to the river to work.

“To-day is holiday,” she said quietly.

“I left something there yesterday: one of my tools. I must fetch it,” he explained.

Tatiana looked at him, and her intuition told her, firstly, that this was not true, and, secondly, that it was not well for Petrushka to go to the river. She begged him not to go. Petrushka laughed and said he would be back quickly. Tatiana cried, and implored him on her knees not to go. Then Petrushka grew irritable and almost rough, and told her not to vex him with foolishness. Reluctantly and sadly she gave in at last.

Petrushka went to the river, and Tatiana watched him go with a heavy heart. She felt quite certain some disaster was about to happen.

At seven o’clock Petrushka had not yet returned, and he did not return that night. The next morning the carpenter and two others went to the river to look for him. They found his body in the shallow water, entangled in the ropes of the raft he had made. He had been drowned, no doubt, in setting the raft straight.

During all that Sunday night, Tatiana had said no word, nor had she moved from her doorstep: it was only when they brought back the dripping body to the village that she stirred, and when she saw it she laughed a dreadful laugh, and the spirit went from her eyes, leaving a fixed stare.