Chapter XVII

All the following morning my head ached, and I could scarcely move my legs; but I cared little for my bodily discomfort; I was devoured by regret, overwhelmed with vexation.

I was excessively annoyed with myself. ‘Coward!’ I repeated incessantly; ‘yes--Alice was right. What was I frightened of? how could I miss such an opportunity?... I might have seen Cæsar himself--and I was senseless with terror, I whimpered and turned away, like a child at the sight of the rod. Razin, now--that’s another matter. As a nobleman and landowner ... though, indeed, even then what had I really to fear? Coward! coward!’...

‘But wasn’t it all a dream?’ I asked myself at last. I called my housekeeper.

‘Marfa, what o’clock did I go to bed yesterday--do you remember?’

‘Why, who can tell, master?... Late enough, surely. Before it was quite dark you went out of the house; and you were tramping about in your bedroom when the night was more than half over. Just on morning--yes. And this is the third day it’s been the same. You’ve something on your mind, it’s easy to see.’

‘Aha-ha!’ I thought. ‘Then there’s no doubt about the flying. Well, and how do I look to-day?’ I added aloud.

‘How do you look? Let me have a look at you. You’ve got thinner a bit. Yes, and you’re pale, master; to be sure, there’s not a drop of blood in your face.’

I felt a slight twinge of uneasiness.... I dismissed Marfa.

‘Why, going on like this, you’ll die, or go out of your mind, perhaps,’ I reasoned with myself, as I sat deep in thought at the window. ‘I must give it all up. It’s dangerous. And now my heart beats so strangely. And when I fly, I keep feeling as though some one were sucking at it, or as it were drawing something out of it--as the spring sap is drawn out of the birch-tree, if you stick an axe into it. I’m sorry, though. And Alice too.... She is playing cat and mouse with me ... still she can hardly wish me harm. I will give myself up to her for the last time--and then.... But if she is drinking my blood? That’s awful. Besides, such rapid locomotion cannot fail to be injurious; even in England, I’m told, on the railways, it’s against the law to go more than one hundred miles an hour....’

So I reasoned with myself--but at ten o’clock in the evening, I was already at my post before the old oak-tree.