“Well, but yours are roughened.”
“That is done by my needle. I do a lot of sewing.”
After a few minutes she suggested, looking round:
“I say, let’s hide ourselves somewhere and read ‘Kamchadalka.’ Would you like it?”
We were a long time finding a place to hide in, for every place seemed uncomfortable.
At length we decided that the best place was the wash-house. It was dark there, but we could sit at the window, which over-looked a dirty corner between the shed and the neigh — boring slaughter-house. People hardly ever looked that way.
There she used to sit sidewise to the window, with her bad foot on a stool and the sound one resting on the floor, and, hiding her face with the torn book, nervously pronounced many unintelligible and dull words.
But I was stirred.
Sitting on the floor, I could see how the grave eyes with the two pale-blue flames moved across the pages of the book. Sometimes they were filled with tears, and the girl’s voice trembled as she quickly uttered the unfamiliar words, running them into one another unintelligibly.
However, I grasped some of these words, and tried to make them into verse, turning them about in all sorts of ways, which effectually prevented me from understanding what the book said.
On my knees slumbered the dog, which I had named “Wind,” because he was rough and long, swift in running, and howled like the autumn wind down the chimney.
“Are you listening?” the girl would ask.
I nodded my head.
The mixing up of the words excited me more and more, and my desire to arrange them as they would sound in a song, in which each word lives and shines like a star in the sky, became more insistent.
When it grew dark Ludmilla would let her pale hand fall on the book and ask:
“Isn’t it good?
You will see.”
After the first evening we often sat in the wash-house.
Ludmilla, to my joy, soon gave up reading
“Kamchadalka.”
I could not answer her questions about what she had read from that endless book — endless, for there was a third book after the second part which we had begun to read, and the girl said there was a fourth.
What we liked best was a rainy day, unless it fell on a Saturday, when the bath was heated.
The rain drenched the yard.
No one came out or looked at us in our dark comer.
Ludmilla was in great fear that they would discover us.
I also was afraid that we should be discovered.
We used to sit for hours at a time, talking about one thing and another. Sometimes I told her some of grandmother’s tales, and Ludmilla told me about the lives of the Kazsakas, on the River Medvyedietz.
“How lovely it was there!” she would sigh.
“Here, what is it?
Only beggars live here.”
Soon we had no need to go to the wash-house. Ludmilla’s mother found work with a fur-dresser, and left the house the first thing in the morning. Her sister was at school, and her brother worked at a tile factory.
On wet days I went to the girl and helped her to cook, and to clean the sitting-room and kitchen. She said laughingly:
“We live together — just like a husband and wife.
In fact, we live better; a husband does not help his wife.”
If I had money, I bought some cakes, and we had tea, afterward cooling the samovar with cold water, lest the scolding mother of Ludmilla should guess that it had been heated.
Sometimes grandmother came to see us, and sat down, making lace, sewing, or telling us wonderful stories, and when grandfather went to the town, Ludmilla used to come to us, and we feasted without a care in the world.
Grandmother said:
“Oh, how happily we live!
With our own money we can do what we like.”
She encouraged our friendship.
“It is a good thing when a boy and girl are friends.
Only there must be no tricks,” and she explained in the simplest words what she meant by “tricks.”
She spoke beautifully, as one inspired, and made me understand thoroughly that it is wrong to pluck the flower before it opens, for then it will have neither fragrance nor fruit.
We had no inclination for “tricks,” but that did not hinder Ludmilla and me from speaking of that subject, on which one is supposed to be silent.
Such subjects of conversation were in a way forced upon us because the relationship of the sexes was so often and tiresomely brought to our notice in their coarsest form, and was very offensive to us.
Ludmilla’s father was a handsome man of forty, curly-headed and whiskered, and had an extremely masterful way of moving his eyebrows.
He was strangely silent; I do not remember one word uttered by him.
When he caressed his children he uttered unintelligible sounds, like a dumb person, and even when he beat his wife he did it in silence.
On the evenings of Sundays and festivals, attired in a light-blue shirt, with wide plush trousers and highly polished boots, he would go out to the gate with a harmonica slung with straps behind his back, and stand there exactly like a soldier doing sentry duty.
Presently a sort of “promenade” would be — gin past our gate. One after the other girls and women would pass, glancing at Evsyenko furtively from under their eyelashes, or quite openly, while he stood sticking out his lower lip, and also looking with discriminating glances from his dark eyes.