Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

I was eleven, and he still said “thou” to me, and played with me, and called me by the pet-name of “violet”⁠—even then I sometimes asked myself in a fright, “What shall I do, if he suddenly wants to marry me?”

Before our dinner, to which Kátya made an addition of sweets and a dish of spinach, Sergéy Mikháylych arrived. From the window I watched him drive up to the house in a small sleigh; but as soon as it turned the corner, I hastened to the drawing room, meaning to pretend that his visit was a complete surprise. But when I heard his tramp and loud voice and Kátya’s footsteps in the hall, I lost patience and went to meet him myself. He was holding Kátya’s hand, talking loud, and smiling. When he saw me, he stopped and looked at me for a time without bowing. I was uncomfortable and felt myself blushing.

“Can this be really you?” he said in his plain decisive way, walking towards me with his arms apart. “Is so great a change possible? How grown-up you are! I used to call you ‘violet,’ but now you are a rose in full bloom!”

He took my hand in his own large hand and pressed it so hard that it almost hurt. Expecting him to kiss my hand, I bent towards him, but he only pressed it again and looked straight into my eyes with the old firmness and cheerfulness in his face.

It was six years since I had seen him last. He was much changed⁠—older and darker in complexion; and he now wore whiskers which did not become him at all; but much remained the same⁠—his simple manner, the large features of his honest open face, his bright intelligent eyes, his friendly, almost boyish, smile.

Five minutes later he had ceased to be a visitor and had become the friend of us all, even of the servants, whose visible eagerness to wait on him proved their pleasure at his arrival.

He behaved quite unlike the neighbours who had visited us after my mother’s death. They had thought it necessary to be silent when they sat with us, and to shed tears. He, on the contrary, was cheerful and talkative, and said not a word about my mother, so that this indifference seemed strange to me at first and even improper on the part of so close a friend. But I understood later that what seemed indifference was sincerity, and I felt grateful for it. In the evening Kátya poured out tea, sitting in her old place in the drawing room, where she used to sit in my mother’s lifetime; our old butler Grigóri had hunted out one of my father’s pipes and brought it to him; and he began to walk up and down the room as he used to do in past days.

“How many terrible changes there are in this house, when one thinks of it all!” he said, stopping in his walk.

“Yes,” said Kátya with a sigh; and then she put the lid on the samovar and looked at him, quite ready to burst out crying.

“I suppose you remember your father?” he said, turning to me.

“Not clearly,” I answered.

“How happy you would have been together now!” he added in a low voice, looking thoughtfully at my face above the eyes. “I was very fond of him,” he added in a still lower tone, and it seemed to me that his eyes were shining more than usual.

“And now God has taken her too!” said Kátya; and at once she laid her napkin on the teapot, took out her handkerchief, and began to cry.

“Yes, the changes in this house are terrible,” he repeated, turning away. “Sónya, show me your toys,” he added after a little and went off to the parlour. When he had gone, I looked at Kátya with eyes full of tears.

“What a splendid friend he is!” she said. And, though he was no relation, I did really feel a kind of warmth and comfort in the sympathy of this good man.

I could hear him moving about in the parlour with Sónya, and the sound of her high childish voice. I sent tea to him there; and I heard him sit down at the piano and strike the keys with Sónya’s little hands.

Then his voice came⁠—“Márya Alexándrovna, come here and play something.”

I liked his easy behaviour to me and his friendly tone of command; I got up and went to him.

“Play this,” he said, opening a book of Beethoven’s music at the adagio of the Moonlight Sonata. “Let me hear how you play,” he added, and went off to a corner of the room, carrying his cup with him.

I somehow felt that with him it was impossible to refuse or to say beforehand that I played badly: I sat down obediently at the piano and began to play as well as I could; yet I was afraid of criticism, because I knew that he understood and enjoyed music. The adagio suited the remembrance of past days evoked by our conversation at tea, and I believe that I played it fairly well. But he would not let me play the scherzo. “No,” he said, coming up to me; “you don’t play that right; don’t go on; but the first movement was not bad; you seem to be musical.” This moderate praise pleased me so much that I even reddened. I felt it pleasant and strange that a friend of my father’s, and his contemporary, should no longer treat me like a child but speak to me seriously. Kátya now went upstairs to put Sónya to bed, and we were left alone in the parlour.

He talked to me about my father, and about the beginning of their friendship and the happy days they had spent together, while I was still busy with lesson-books and toys; and his talk put my father before me in quite a new light, as a man of simple and delightful character. He asked me