They are for dark eyes, and yours are light,” he explained, and began to imitate the mistress scolding; but suddenly he stopped, and looked about the kitchen with an expression of fear.
In a blacking tin lay many different kinds of buttons, and he explained to me with pride:
“I picked up all these in the street.
All by myself!
I already have thirty-seven.”
In the third box was a large brass pin, also found in the street; hobnails, worn-out, broken, and whole; buckles off shoes and slippers; brass door-handles, broken bone cane-heads; girls’ fancy combs,
“The Dream Book and Oracle”; and many other things of similar value.
When I used to collect rags I could have picked up ten times as many such useless trifles in one month.
Sascha’s things aroused in me a feeling of disillusion, of agitation, and painful pity for him.
But he gazed at every single article with great attention, lovingly stroked them with his fingers, and stuck out his thick lips importantly. His protruding eyes rested on them affectionately and solicitously; but the spectacles made his childish face look comical.
“Why have you kept these things?”
He flashed a glance at me through the frame of the spectacles, and asked:
“Would you like me to give you something?”
“No; I don’t want anything.”
He was obviously offended at the refusal and the poor impression his riches had made. He was silent a moment; then he suggested quietly:
“Get a towel and wipe them all; they are covered with dust.”
When the things were all dusted and replaced, he turned over in the bed, with his face to the wall.
The rain was pouring down. It dripped from the roof, and the wind beat against the window.
Without turning toward me, Sascha said:
“You wait! When it is dry in the garden I will show you a thing — something to make you gasp.”
I did not answer, as I was just dropping off to sleep.
After a few seconds he started up, and began to scrape the wall with his hands. With quivering earnestness, he said:
“I am afraid — Lord, I am afraid!
Lord, have mercy upon me!
What is it?”
I was numbed by fear at this. I seemed to see the cook standing at the window which looked on the yard, with her back to me, her head bent, and her forehead pressed against the glass, just as she used to stand when she was alive, looking at a cock-fight.
Sascha sobbed, and scraped on the wall.
I made a great effort and crossed the kitchen, as if I were walking on hot coals, without daring to look around, and lay down beside him.
At length, overcome by weariness, we both fell asleep.
A few days after this there was a holiday. We were in the shop till midday, had dinner at home, and when the master had gone to sleep after dinner, Sascha said to me secretly:
“Come along!”
I guessed that I was about to see the thing which was to make me gasp.
We went into the garden.
On a narrow strip of ground between two houses stood ten old lime-trees, their stout trunks covered with green lichen, their black, naked branches sticking up lifelessly, and not one rook’s nest between them.
They looked like monuments in a graveyard. There was nothing besides these trees in the garden; neither bushes nor grass. The earth on the pathway was trampled and black, and as hard as iron, and where the bare ground was visible under last year’s leaves it was also flattened, and as smooth as stagnant water.
Sascha went to a corner of the fence which hid us from the street, stood under a lime-tree, and, rolling his eyes, glanced at the dirty windows of the neighboring house.
Squatting on his haunches, he turned over a heap of leaves with his hands, disclosing a thick root, close to which were placed two bricks deeply embedded in the ground.
He lifted these up, and beneath them appeared a piece of roof iron, and under this a square board. At length a large hole opened before my eyes, running under the root of the tree.
Sascha lit a match and applied it to a small piece of wax candle, which he held over the hole as he said to me:
“Look in, only don’t be frightened.”
He seemed to be frightened himself. The piece of candle in his hand shook, and he had turned pale. His lips drooped unpleasantly, his eyes were moist, and he stealthily put his free hand behind his back.
He infected me with his terror, and I glanced very cautiously into the depths under the root, which he had made into a vault, in the back of which he had lit three little tapers that filled the cave with a blue light. It was fairly broad, though in depth no more than the inside of a pail.
But it was broad, and the sides were closely covered with pieces of broken glass and broken earthenware.
In the center, on an elevation, covered with a piece of red cloth, stood a little coffin ornamented with silver paper, half covered with a fragment of material which looked like a brocaded pall. From beneath this was thrust out a little gray bird’s claw and the sharp-billed head of a sparrow.
Behind the coffin rose a reading-stand, upon which lay a brass baptismal cross, and around which burned three wax tapers, fixed in candlesticks made out of gold and silver paper which had been wrapped round sweets.
The thin flames bowed toward the entrance to the cave. The interior was faintly bright with many colored gleams and patches of light.
The odor of wax, the warm smell of decay and soil, beat against my face, made my eyes smart, and conjured up a broken rainbow, which made a great display of color.
All this aroused in me such an overwhelming astonishment that it dispelled my terror.
“Is it good?”
“What is it for?”