The three hours of waiting passed unnoticed. I felt that I had not had enough time to feast my eyes on Masha when Karpo rode off to the river, bathed the horse, and began to hitch it up. The wet animal snorted with pleasure and kicked his hoof against the shafts.
'Get back!' Karpo shouted.
Grandfather woke up, Masha opened the creaking gates, and we got into the carriage and drove out of the yard—in silence, as if angry with one another.
Rostov and Nakhichevan appeared in the distance a couple of hours later, Karpo, who had said nothing all that time, looked rotmd quickly.
'Splendid girl, the old Armenian's daughter,' said he, and whipped the horse.
II
On another occasion, after I had become a student, I was travelling south by rail. It was May. At a station—between Belgorod and Kharkov, I think—1 got out of the carriage to stroll on the platform.
Evening shadows had already fallen on the station garden, on the plarform and on the fields. The station building hid the stmset, but you could tell that the stm had not yet vanished completely by the topmost, delicately pink puffs of smoke from the engine.
While pacing the platform, I noticed that, of the other passengers who were taking an airing, the majority were strolling or standing near one of the secona-class carriages, their attitude conveying the impression that someone of consequence must be sitting in it. Among these inquisitive persons I saw the anillery officer who was my travelling companion—an intelligent, cordial, likeable fellow, as is everybody with whom one strikes up a brief acquaintance on one's journeys.
I askcd him what he was looking at.
He said nothing in reply, but just indicated a feminine figure with his eyes. It was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen in Ruuian national costume, bare-headed, with a lace shawl thro^ carelessly over one shoulder. She was not a passenger, and I suppose she was the station- master's daughter or sister. She stood near a carriage window, talking to an elderly female passenger. Before I knew what was happening I was suddenly overwhelmed by the same sensation that I had once experienced in the Armenian village.
That the girl was strikingly beautiful neither I nor the othets gazing at her could doubt.
Were one to describe her appearance item by item, as is co^mon practice, then the only truly lovely feature was her thick, fair, undu- lating hair—loose on her shoulders and held back on her head by a dark ribbon. All her other features were either irregular or very ordinary. Her eyes were screwed up, either as a flirtatious mannerism or through short-sightedness, her nose was faintly retroussi, her mouth was small, her profile was feeble and insipid, her shoulders were narrow for her age. And yet the girl produced the impresion of true loveli- ness. Gazing at her, I realized that a Russian face does not require strict regularity of feature to seem handsome. Indeed, had this young woman's up-tilted nose been replaced by another—regular and impeccably formed, like the Armenian girl's—1 fancy her face would have lost all its charm.
Standing at the window, talking and shivering in the cool of the evening, the girl kept looking round at us. Now she placed her hands on her hips, now raised them to her head to pat her hair. She spoke, she laughed, she expresed surprise at one moment and horror at the next, and I don't recall a moment when her face and body were at rest. It was in these tiny, infmitely exquisite movements, in her smile, in the play of her expression, in her rapid glances at us that the whole mystery and magic of her beauty consisted—and also in the way this subtle grace of movement was combined with the fresh spontaneity and innocence that throbbed in her laughter and speech, together with the helplessness that so appeals to us in children, birds, young
trees.
This was the beauty of a butterfly. It goes with waltzing, fluttering about the garden, laughing and merry-making. It does not go with serious thought, grief and repose. Had a gust of wind blo^ do^ the platform, had it started raining, then the fragile body would suddenly, it seemed, have faded, and the wayward loveliness would have been dispersed like pollen from a flower.
'Ah, well,' muttered the officer, sighing, as we went to our carriage after the second bell, but what his inteijection meant I do not pretend to judge.
Perhaps he felt sad and did not want to leave the girl and the spring evening for the stuffy train. Or perhaps, like me, he was irrationally sorry for the lovely girl, for himself, for me, and for all the passengers as they drifted limply and reluctantly back to their compartments. We walked past a station window behind which a wan, whey-faced telegraphist, with upstanding red curls and high cheek-bones, sat at his apparatus.
Tll bet the telegraph operator is in love with the pretty little miss,' sighed the officer. 'To live out in the wi!ds under the same roof as that ethereal creature and not fall in love—it's beyond the power of man. And what a misfortune, my dear chap, what a mockery to be round- shouldered, unkempt, dreary, respectable and intelligent, and to be in love with that pretty, silly little girl who never pays you a scrap of attention! Or, even worse: suppose the lovesick telegraphist is married, suppose his wife is as round-shouldered, unkempt and respectable as himself. What agony!'
A guard stood on the small open platform between our carriage and the next. Resting his elbows on the railing, he was gazing towards the girl, and his flabby, disagreeably beefy face, exhausted by sleepless nights and the train's jostling, expressed ecstasy combined with the most profound sorrow, as ifhe could see his o^ youth, his happi- ness, his sobriety, his purity, his wife, his children reflected in the girl. He seemed to be repenting his sins, and to be conscious with every fibre of his being that the girl was not his, and that for him—prema- turely aged, clumsy, fat-visaged—the happiness of an ordinary human being and train passenger was as far away as heaven.
The third bell rang, whistles sounded, the train trundled off. Past our window flashed another guard, the station-master, the garden, and then the lovely girl with her marvellous, childishly sly smile.
Putting my head out and looking back, I saw her watching the train as she walked along the platform past the window with the telegraph clerk, then patted her hair and ran into the garden. No longer did the station buildings hide the s^et. We were in open country, but the sun had already set and black pufs of smoke were settling over the green, velvety young com. The spring air, the dark sky, the railway ^rnage—all seemed sad.
Our g^d, that familiar figure, came in and began lighting the
THE COBBLER AND THE DEVIL
It was Christmas Eve. Marya had long been snoring on the stove, and the paraffin in the little lamp had burnt out, but Theodore Nilov still sat over his work. He would have stopped long ago and gone out into the street, but a customer from Kolokolny Road, who had ordered some new vamps for his boots a fortnight ago, had come in on the previous day, sworn at him and told him to finish the work at once without fail, before morning service.
'It's a rotten life,' grumbled Theodore as he worked. 'Some folks have been asleep for ages, others are enjoying themselves, while I'm just a dogsbody cobbling away for every Tom, Dick or Harry.'
To stop hi^^lf falting asleep he kept taking a bottle from under the table and drinking, flexing his neck after each swallow. 'Pray tell me this,' he said in a loud voice. 'Why can my customers enjoy themselves while I'm forced to work for them. What sense is there in it? Is it because they have money and I'm a beggar?'