“A good idea! I will see to it, and you will go to bed.”
“Good-by till tomorrow,” said the little girl, holding out her hand to me.
“God preserve you till to — morrow!”
The lady exclaimed in surprise:
“Who taught you to say that? Grandmother?’
“Ye-es.”
When the child had left the room the lady beckoned to me.
“What shall we give you?”
I told her that I did not want anything; but could she let me have a book to read?
She lifted my chin with her warm, scented fingers, and asked, with a pleasant smile:
“So you are fond of reading?
Yes; what books have you read?”
When she smiled she looked more beautiful than ever. I confusedly told her the names of several books.
“What did you find to like in them?” she asked, laying her hand on the table and moving her fingers slightly.
A strong, sweet smell of some sort of flowers came from her, mixed with the odor of horse-sweat.
She looked at me through her long eyelashes, thoughtfully grave. No one had ever looked at me like that before.
The room was packed as tightly as a bird’s nest with beautiful, soft furniture. The windows were covered with thick green curtains; the snowy white tiles of the stove gleamed in the half-light; beside the stove shone the glossy surface of a black piano; and from the walls, in dull-gold frames, looked dark writings in large Russian characters. Under each writing hung a large dark seal by a cord.
Everything about her looked at that woman as humbly and timidly as I did.
I explained to her as well as I could that my life was hard and uninteresting and that reading helped me to forget it.
“Yes; so that’s what it is,” she said, standing up.
“It is not a bad idea, and, in fact, it is quite right.
Well, what shall we do?
I will get some books for you, but just now I have none.
But wait! You can have this one.”
She took a tattered book with a yellow cover from the couch.
“When you have read this I will give you the second volume; there are four.”
I went away with the
“Secrets of Peterburg,” by Prince Meshtcheski, and began to read the book with great attention. But before I had read many pages I saw that the Peterburgian “secrets” were considerably less interesting than those of Madrid, Lon — don, or Paris.
The only part which took my fancy was the fable of Svoboda (Liberty) and Palka (stick).
“I am your superior,” said Svoboda, “because I am cleverer.”
But Palka answered her:
“No, it is I who am your superior, because I am stronger than you.”
They disputed and disputed and fought about it. Palka beat Svoboda, and, if I remember rightly, Svoboda died in the hospital as the result of her injuries.
There was some talk of nihilists in this book.
I remember that, according to Prince Meshtcheski, a ni — hilist was such a poisonous person that his very glance would kill a fowl.
What he wrote about nihilists struck me as being offensive and rude, but I un derstood nothing else, and fell into a state of melan — choly. It was evident that I could not appreciate good books; for I was convinced that it was a good book. Such a great and beautiful lady could never read bad books.
“Well, did you like it?” she asked me when I took back the yellow novel by Meshtcheski.
I found it very hard to answer no; I thought it would make her angry.
But she only laughed, and going behind the portiere which led into her sleeping-chamber, brought back a little volume in a binding of dark — blue morocco leather.
“You will like this one, only take care not to soil it.”
This was a volume of Pushkin’s poems.
I read all of them at once, seizing upon them with a feeling of greed such as I experienced whenever I happened to visit a beautiful place that I had never seen before. I always tried to run all over it at once.
It was like roaming over mossy hillocks in a marshy wood, and suddenly seeing spread before one a dry plain covered with flowers and bathed in sunrays.
For a second one gazes upon it enchanted, and then one begins to race about happily, and each contact of one’s feet with the soft growth of the fertile earth sends a thrill of joy through one.
Pushkin had so surprised me with the simplicity and music of poetry that for a long time prose seemed unnatural to me, and it did not come easy to read it.
The prologue to
“Ruslan” reminded me of grandmother’s best stories, all wonderfully compressed into one, and several lines amazed me by their striking truth.
There, by ways which few observe, Are the trails of invisible wild creatures.
I repeated these wonderful words in my mind, and I could see those footpaths so familiar to me, yet hardly visible to the average being. I saw the mysterious footprints which had pressed down the grass, which had not had time to shake off the drops of dew, as heavy as mercury.
The full, sounding lines of poetry were easily remembered. They adorned everything of which they spoke as if for a festival. They made me happy, my life easy and pleasant. The verses rang out like bells heralding me into a new life.