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

given him that conceited, convincing flow of words and enjoys the exercise of it? That’s what it must be.”

And for some reason I recall the pond, and the tired house-serfs, knee-deep in the water, dragging the draw-net, and again Fyodor Filippitch running along the bank with the watering-pot, shouting to all of them, and only approaching the water at intervals to take hold of the golden carp, to let out the muddy water, and to pour over them fresh.

And again it is midday in July. I am wandering over the freshly-mown grass of the garden, under the burning sun straight above my head. I am still very young; there is an emptiness, a yearning for something in my heart. I walk to my favourite spot near the pond, between a thicket of wild rose and the birch-tree avenue, and lie down to go to sleep. I remember the sensation with which, as I lay there, I looked through the red, thorny stems of the rose at the black earth, dried into little clods, and at the shining, bright blue mirror of the pond. It was with a feeling of naive self-satisfaction and melancholy. Everything around me was so beautiful; its beauty had such an intense effect on me that it seemed to me I was beautiful myself, and my only vexation was that there was no one to admire me.

It is hot. I try to console myself by going to sleep. But the flies, the intolerable flies, will not even here give me any peace; they begin to gather together about me and persistently, stolidly, as it were like pellets, they shoot from forehead to hand. A bee buzzes not far from me, right in the hottest spot; yellow butterflies flutter languidly, it seems, from stalk to stalk. I look upwards, it makes my eyes ache; the sun is too dazzling through the bright foliage of the leafy birch-tree, that gently swings its branches high above me, and I feel hotter than ever. I cover my face with my handkerchief; it becomes stifling, and the flies simply stick to my moist hands. Sparrows are twittering in the thickest of the clump of roses. One of them hops on the ground a yard from me; twice he makes a feint of pecking vigorously at the earth, and with a snapping of twigs and a merry chirrup flies out of the bush. Another, too, hops on the ground, perks up his tail, looks round, and with a chirrup he too flies out like an arrow after the first. From the pond come the sounds of wet linen being beaten with washing-bats in the water, and the blows seem to echo and be carried over the surface of the pond. There is the sound of laughter, chatter, and the splashing of bathers. A gust of wind rustles in the treetops at a distance; it comes closer, and I hear it ruffling up the grass, and now the leaves of the wild roses tremble and beat upon the stems; and now it lifts the corner of the handkerchief and a fresh breath of air passes over me, tickling my moist face. A fly flies in under the lifted kerchief and buzzes in a frightened way about my damp mouth. A dead twig sticks into me under my spine. No, it’s no good lying down; I’ll go and have a bathe. But suddenly close to my nook, I hear hurried footsteps and the frightened voices of women.

“Oh, mercy on us! What can we do! and not a man here!”

“What is it, what is it?” I ask, running out into the sunshine and addressing a serf-woman, who runs past me, groaning. She simply looks round, wrings her hands and runs on. But here comes Matrona, an old woman of seventy, holding on her kerchief as it falls back off her head, limping and dragging one leg in a worsted stocking, as she runs towards the pond. Two little girls run along, hand in hand, and a boy of ten, wearing his father’s coat, hurries behind, clinging to the hempen skirt of one of them.

“What has happened?” I inquire of them.

“A peasant is drowning.”

“Where?”

“In our pond.”

“Who? one of ours?”

“No; a stranger.”

The coachman Ivan, struggling over the newly-mown grass in his big boots, and the stout bailiff, Yakov, breathing hard, run towards the pond, and I run after them.

I recall the feeling that said to me, “Come, jump in, and pull out the man, save him, and they will all admire you,” which was just what I was desiring.

“Where? where is he?” I ask of the crowd of house-serfs gathered together on the bank.

“Over yonder, near the deepest pool, towards that bank, almost at the bathhouse,” says a washerwoman, getting in her wet linen on a yoke. “I saw him plunge in; and he comes up so and goes down again, and comes up again and screams, ‘I’m drowning, mercy!’ and again he went down to the bottom, and only bubbles came up. Then I saw the man was drowning. And I yelled, ‘Mercy on us, the peasant’s drowning!’ ”

And the washerwoman hoists the yoke onto her shoulder, and bending on one side, walks along the path away from the pond.

“My word, what a shame!” says Yakov Ivanov, the bailiff, in a voice of despair: “what a to-do we shall have now with the district court⁠—we shall never hear the last of it!”

A peasant with a scythe makes his way through the throng of women, children, and old people crowding about the bank, and hanging his scythe in the branches of a willow, begins deliberately pulling off his boots.

“Where, where did he sink?” I keep on asking, longing to throw myself in, and do something extraordinary.

But they point to the smooth surface of the pond, broken into ripples here and there by the rushing wind. It is inconceivable to me that he is drowned while the water stands just as smooth and beautiful and untroubled over him, shining with