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.