Old Izergil and other stories / Старуха Изергиль и другие рассказы. Книга для чтения на английском языке

We told her nothing, however, about the wager. We never asked her any questions and treated her in the same good-natured loving way. But something new had crept into our attitude, something that was alien to our former feelings for Tanya – and that new element was keen curiosity, keen and cold like a blade of steel…

“Boys! Time’s up today!” said the baker one morning as he began work.

We were well aware of it without his reminder. Yet we all started.

“You watch her… She’ll soon come in!” suggested the baker. Some one exclaimed in a tone of regret:

“It’s not a thing the eye can catch!”

And again a lively noisy argument sprang up. Today, at length, we would know how clean and incontaminate was the vessel in which we had laid all the treasure that we possessed. That morning we suddenly realized for the first time that we were gambling for high stakes, that this test of our idol might destroy it for us altogether. All these days we had been hearing that the soldier was doggedly pursuing Tanya with his attentions, but for some reason none of us asked her what her attitude was towards him. She continued regularly to call on us every morning for her pretzels and was always her usual self.

On that day, too, we soon heard her voice:

“Jail-birdies! I’ve come…”

We hastened to let her in, and when she came in we greeted her, contrary to our custom, with silence. We looked hard at her and were at a loss what to say to her. what to ask her. We stood before her in a silent sullen crowd. She was obviously surprised at the unusual reception, and suddenly we saw her turn pale, look anxious and stir restlessly. Then in a choky voice she asked:

“Why are you all so… strange!”

“What about you?” threw in the baker in a grim tone, his eyes fixed on her face.

“What about me?”

“Nothing…”

“Well, give me the pretzels, quick…”

“Plenty of time!” retorted the baker without stirring, his eyes still glued on her face.

She suddenly turned and disappeared through the door.

The baker picked up his shovel, and turning to the oven, let fall calmly:

“Well – she’s fixed! The soldier’s done it… the blighter!..”

We shambled back to the table like a herd of jostling sheep, sat down in silence and apathetically set to our work. Presently some one said: “Maybe it isn’t…”

“Shut up! Enough of that!” shouted the baker.

We all knew him for a clever man, cleverer than any of us. And that shout of his we understood as meaning that he was convinced of the soldier’s victory… We felt sad and perturbed…

At twelve o’clock – the lunch hour – the soldier came in. He was as always, clean and spruce and – as always – looked us straight in the eyes. We felt too ill at ease to look at him.

“Well, my dear sirs, d’you want me to show you what a soldier can do?” he said with a proud sneer. “You go out into the passage and peep through the cracks… get me?”

We trooped into the passage, and tumbling over each other, pressed our faces to the chinks in the wooden wall looking onto the yard. We did not have to wait long. Soon Tanya came through the yard with a hurried step and anxious look, skipping over puddles of thawed snow and mud. She disappeared through the door of the cellar. Presently the soldier sauntered past whistling, and he went in too. His hands were thrust into his pockets and he twitched his moustache…

It was raining and we saw the drops falling into the puddles which puckered up at the impacts. It was a grey wet day – a very bleak day. Snow still lay on the roofs, while on the ground dark patches of slush stood out here and there. On the roofs too the snow was covered with a brownish coating of dirt. It was cold and disagreeable, waiting in that passage…

The first to come out of the cellar was the soldier. He walked leisurely across the yard, twitching his moustache, his hands deep in his pockets – much the same he always was.

Then Tanya came out. Her eves… her eyes shone with joy and happiness, and her lips smiled. And she walked as though in a dream, swaying, with uncertain gait…

It was more than we could endure. We all made a sudden rush for the door, burst into the yard and began yelling and whistling at her in a fierce, loud, savage uproar.

She started when she saw us and stood stock-still, her feet in a dirty puddle. We surrounded her and cursed her with a sort of malicious glee in a torrent of profanity and shameless taunts.

We did it unhurriedly, quietly, seeing that she had no way of escape from the circle around her and that we could jeer at her to our heart’s content. It is strange, but we did not hit her.

She stood amid us and turned her head from side to side, listening to our insults. And we ever more fiercely, ever more furiously, flung at her the dirt and poison of our wrath.

Her face drained of life. Her blue eyes, which the moment before had looked so happy, were dilated, her breath came in gasps and her lips quivered.

And we, having surrounded her, were wreaking our vengeance on her – for had she not robbed us? She had belonged to us, we had spent our best sentiments on her, and though that best was a mere beggar’s pittance, we were twenty-six and she was one, and there was no anguish we could inflict that was fit to meet her guilt! How we insulted her!.. She said not a word, but simply gazed at us with a look of sheer terror and a long shudder went through her body.

We guffawed, we howled, we snarled… Other people joined us… One of us pulled the sleeve of Tanya’s blouse…

Suddenly her eyes blazed: she raised her hands in a slow gesture to put her hair straight, and said loudly but calmly, straight into our faces:

“Oh, you miserable jail-birds!..”

And she bore straight down on us, just as if we had not been there, had not stood in her path. Indeed, that is why none of us proved to be in her path.

When she was clear of our circle she added just as loudly without turning round, in a tone of scorn and pride “Oh, you filthy swine… You beasts… And she departed – straight, beautiful, and proud.

We were left standing in the middle of the yard amid the mud, under the rain and a grey sky that had no sun in it…

Then we too shuffled back to our damp stony dungeon. As of old, the sun never peered through our window, and Tanya came never more!..

1899

The Romancer

There was a man named Foma Varaxin, a cabinetmaker, aged twenty-five, a most absurd man with a large skull, flattened at the temples and elongated behind above the nape; this top-heavy skull tilted up his cropped head, and Foma walked the earth with his broad nose stuck up in the air, so that from a distance he gave the jaunty impression of wishing to cry out:

“Here, touch me, you just try!”

A single glance, however, at his nondescript face with its mouth of generous proportions and neutral-tinted eyes showed him to be just a good-natured fellow looking happily embarrassed over something or other.

His comrade, Alexei Somov, who was also a cabinet-maker, once told Foma:

“Your mug looks awful dreary! Why don’t you stick on a pair of eyebrows or something. There’s nothing on the whole panel except a nose, and that’s as bad a job I’ve ever seen!”

“That is so,” agreed Foma, fingering his upper lip. “Features couldn’t exactly be called handsome, but then didn’t Polly say I had fine eyes!”

“Don’t you believe it. She says that to get you to treat her to an extra bottle of beer.”

Alexei was two years Foma’s junior, but he had spent five months in prison for politics, read many books, and when he was loath or unable or too lazy to understand a comrade he used to say:

“That’s a bourgeois prejudice. Utopia. You must know the history of culture. You don’t understand the class contradictions.”

He introduced Foma into a circle where little sharp-nosed Comrade Mark, waving hands that resembled bird’s feet, rattled off an account of the labour movement in the West. These narrations had an instant appeal for Foma, and after several lectures he pressed a varnish-stained hand to his chest and gushed:

“That’s the stuff, Alexei! That’s just about right! It does exist…”

Dry sardonic Somov, screwing up his greenish eyes and pursing his lips, asked:

“What does?”

“That same attraction people have towards unity – it does! Now take me. It’s all the same to me whether it’s a fire, or a religious procession, or a public fair – I always feel myself drawn terribly strong to any kind of place where people are gathered. People! Now take the church – why do I like to go to church? A gathering of souls, that’s why!”

“You’ll get over that!” Alexei assured him with an ironical grin. “When you grasp the idea…”

Foma thumped himself on the chest and cried joyously:

“I have grasped it! Here’s where it is! I grasped it from the very first. Now it’s a joy to me like Our Lady of all the afflicted…”

“Off he goes!”

“No, wait a minute. ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ Isn’t that it? Thai’s the idea!”

“Don’t be silly – that’s the Gospel!”

“What of that? The idea is always the same, it strikes me. It may take on different shapes and different forms but the image is the same! It’s the Mother of Love! Isn’t that so?”

When Alexei was angry his upper lip curled, his sharp nose quivered, and his green pupils grew round like a bird’s. In a dry voice that crackled oddly on its high notes, and in words that sounded like snaps, Alexei impressively and at great length tried to prove to his comrade that he was a Utopian, that his class consciousness was dormant and would probably never be awakened because Foma had been brought up in a clergyman’s home where his mother served as cook and where his soul was poisoned by bourgeois prejudices and superstitions.

“But Alexei!” Foma exclaimed in an earnest tone, “it wasn’t poisoned – so help me God! Quite the contrary! When I was a kid, frinstance, I didn’t go to church at all. Good Lord, you don’t think I’m lying, do you? That happened afterwards, when I began to read books, and in general was drawn towards people! It isn’t a matter of church-going, but a – you know – communion of souls! That’s the idea! Now, what’s it all about? Brothers, shame on you, how can you live like that? You’re not beasts, are you? It’s a matter of inspiring love and conscience, Alexei, that’s the important thing it seems to me! Isn’t that right?”

“No, it isn’t right!” snapped Alexei, his anger rising and his cheeks breaking out in patches of red, and Foma often had the impression that Alexei’s words rapped his nose like cards in that game people played.

Foma maintained an embarrassed silence, stroking his head and now and then making a timid attempt in a guilty voice to appease Ms comrade:

“I understand, Alexei. I really do! Of course – there’s the struggle! Nobody’s denying that – that’s where you’ve got to sit tight!”

Then he would suddenly meander off, and begin to argue in an earnest tone:

“You see, I was only thinking about man. Now, what is man. generally speaking? I’m not a chisel, am I? Now, say some one began using you as a chisel, they’d start using a mallet on you – that’s what I mean, don’t you see! A man’s not a tool, is he? Then, there’s the struggle, to be sure – you can’t get away from that! By all means – the struggle! But the apostolic, you know, idea – that er… general er… universal concord… peace on earth and goodwill among men…”

Sometimes Alexei would say nothing and fix his comrade with a long contemptuous stare. Then he would begin in a cutting voice, as though he were snipping off Foma’s ears:

“No you’re stupid! It’s a muddle-head you are, a hopeless muddle-head!”

Or he would threaten him, icily and impressively:

“You wait – we’ll soon begin to read the history of culture – you’ll see.”

Foma then felt very small. Incomprehensible words always exercised a depressing effect on him, inspired a reverential awe for the people who used them and elicited strange associations of ideas. Utopia he visualized as a hummocky swamp all covered with a stunted overgrowth, while over the chilly knolls, with arms outstretched, walks a woman clad all in white with the face of Our Lady, as always, filled with the vast sadness of the Mother – and she walks in silence with mute tears in her eyes. He had more than once heard the words “religious cult,” and culture he envisaged as a divine service, something in the nature of a solemn matins at Easter. It slowly dawned on him that this wise science could untie all the knots of life’s tangled problems, reduce all thoughts to proper order and bathe the variegated tints of life in a single steady mellow light. He spoke a lot, rapturously and breathlessly and always looked his interlocutor straight in the face with lack-lustre, tipsy-looking eyes. Every new thought that entered his mind evoked a torrent of words – he would wave his arras and cry in low and delighted tones:

“Wonderful! That’s just it! So simple!”

At first his comrades of the circle and workshop lent him an attentive ear out of curiosity, but they soon discovered that Foma was simply a chatterbox, and Yegor Kashin, the dour-faced fitter, advised him more than once:

“Cut your tongue in halves, windbag!”

Rut this did not cool Foma’s ardour – he surveyed everyone with a friendly glance and babbled on like a gushing spring brook.

When he came to the first lesson on the history of culture and found that it was to be given by a plump little blue-eyed young lady with smooth hair and a thick braid hanging down her back he was sadly puzzled, and tried all the time to avoid looking at the young lady.

He noticed, however, that she was ill at ease, trying in vain to impart a serious expression to her childish face, speaking hurriedly, incoherently, and when asked a question her face blushed crimson and her eyes blinked swiftly in confusion. She was so white and dainty that she stirred in him a feeling of pity.

“Clearly the first time,” thought Foma, studiously examining the dark damp wall above her head. He was surprised to hear her speak about lightning, the clouds, sunset, the heroes of fables and Greek myths – he could not see the connection and complained about it to Alexei on their way home:

“That was a flop, Alexei! On a subject like that they should have put a different person entirely, a serious man, some one with grey in his hair like… and a deep voice… make it sound like some one was reading the Twelve Gospels!”

Somov too was disgruntled and snorted:

“Fancy appointing that froggish little thing for such a job! A fat lot I care who the Evil Serpent is… We know who he is all right – tell us better how to destroy him…”

“Better she’d had just read straight off that thick little book!” said Foma deprecatingly, but soon forgetting the unfortunate lesson, he rambled on in his usual tone of benign dreamer: “Isn’t it wonderful, brother, a little person like that coming into our rough company – here, sec you, this is what I know, will you just listen! Wonderful! By getting closer to each other…”

“Talking drivel again!” Alexei brusquely stemmed the verbal tide.

“Why is it drivel?” Foma persisted gently, kindly. “You talk about class – now what kind of class is she? Simply a generous-hearted little girl. She feels sort of conscious-stricken living among people of our like, and so she…”

“When will all that treacle ooze out of you?” cried Somov in annoyance. “What’s conscience got to do with it? Simply necessity – conscience be hanged! If she had another place to go to, she’d find something easier and wouldn’t come to us, don’t kid yourself!”

Foma looked down the street at the flaming beads of the lamp lights and asked:

“So you think she does it because she’s obliged to?”

“Of course…”

“You think so?” said Varaxin with a backward toss of his head. “I don’t believe it somehow!”

“Why not?”

“What’s the sense in doing a thing because you’re obliged to? If I’m a cabinet-maker and used to my job – why should I do the work of a common carpenter? She’s kind of whittling logs…”

Alexei spat, saying:

“Let her whittle logs…”

At the second lesson Foma seemed to catch a glimpse of interesting ideas in the girl’s words which stirred his heart, and when she had finished he asked:

“Comrade Liza, will you lend me that book until next time?”

“Certainly,” she said, looking obviously pleased.

Then Foma walked by her side through the streets of the town, and was careful not to touch her with his elbow. They walked up a hilly street, on both sides of which the little houses of the suburb gazed at them through darkened windows. A lamp burned at the top of the street, casting a trembling patch of dull yellow around, and the damp gloom of the autumn night was filled with the odours of rotting wood and refuse.

Foma, coughing discreetly and trying to express himself elegantly, asked Liza:

“Then, I can take it for granted that in ancient times man spoke a single language – is that so?”

“Yes, the Aryans,” a low voice answered him.

“And that’s been proved, has it?”

“Definitely proved.”

“Fine! Thai’s wonderful! Then all the nations that are now scattered were once devoted to the unity of life, hence in ancient times people were united by a single common idea – y-yes…”

His words, however, shaped themselves laboriously, and he was thinking not of ancient limes but of the little figure of the girl hurrying uphill half a pace in front of him on his left. Cloaked in the darkness she looked smaller than she was. Foma noticed that every time she passed a lighted window she bent her head and tried to slip quickly out of the patch of light.

“Wonderful!” he thought, not ceasing to talk and seeming to become a dual personality, as it were. “Such a little person, without fear, amid strange men, at night, in such a lonely spot… Wonderful!”

To keep his hands from gesticulating he thrust them into his pockets. This was uncustomary and constraining.

“Aren’t you afraid of drunks?” he asked.

She answered quickly, softly:

“Oh, I’m dreadfully afraid! There are so many of them around here…”

“Yes,” said Foma with a sigh, “they drink an unconscionable lot! The point is – life wants filling up, but there isn’t anything to fill it with! I mean life in the sense of the soul. Wine, we know, enriches the fancy. You can’t blame people harshly – is it a man’s fault that he’s obliged to sustain life by fancies?”

“I don’t blame them!” exclaimed Liza, slowing her pace. “I understand. What you said is so true, so very true!”

That cheered Foma up – he never remembered any one ever having agreed with him. Drawing his hands out of his pockets and tapping the book under his jacket he resumed in earnest confidential tones:

“Now, frinstance, if books were more accessible – that would be a different matter! Generally speaking, there’s no reason to be afraid of people, I assure you they deserve the fullest interest and compassion in the empty lives they lead. The fact of the matter is there is very little of everything, as you know, and that’s why everybody’s wild. No comforts of any kind, a man’s only friend is just naked fate with the awful face of poverty and vice, as the poet has it. But then, of course, when people like you will come down in large numbers from the summit – it’ll certainly give to life something that’ll make it worthy of man…”

Liza walked still more slowly, holding her skirt with one hand, while she passed the other hand across her face, saying with a sigh:

“Yes, yes, that’s true!”

“Fyodor Grigorievich,” Foma went on, interrupting her, “the son of the clergyman in whose place my mother lived – a good woman, my mother was, but she’s dead – Fyodor Grigorievich who’ll now soon be a professor, he used to say, when arguing with his father: ‘To live is to know!’ Very simple! Supposing I live and don’t know what I am, the why and wherefore and all that – now could you call that living? Just eking out an existence under the exploitation of all kinds of sinister forces originating in man and prejudices created by him – isn’t that so?”

“To live is to know!” repeated Liza. “That’s just the thing, comrade – you have such a wonderfully broad outlook…”

Foma did not remember what else he said, but this was the first time in his life that he had spoken so much, so boldly and ardently. They parted at the gate of a large two-storied house with columns on the façade, and Liza, shaking his hand, earnestly asked him:

“Thursday and Monday – don’t forget! After seven I’m at home, I’ll wait till nine – you won’t forget?”

“With the greatest pleasure!” cried Foma, stamping his foot on the pavement. “Awfully grateful! Splendid!”

All night long till morning he roamed about the streets with his head reared in the air, mentally composing ardent invocatory speeches about the necessity of rendering aid by word and deed to people who had still failed to grasp the intrinsic ideas: to live and to know. He felt very happy. The grey sky of autumn seemed to yawn before him and out of the deep blue gulf words tumbled like falling stars, beautiful rich words that formed themselves into shining ranks of good and kindly thoughts on life and men, and these thoughts left Foma astonished before their unconquerable simplicity, their truth and force.

Thursday found Foma sitting in Liza’s room, seeing nothing except the tense glance of her blue eyes which, he could see, were trying to follow the drift of his words, while he looked into their blue depths and spoke:

“Then it looks, figurely speaking, as if the idea about the triumph of light over darkness is of heavenly origin?”

“If you like, yes – but – still – why must you have the heavenly?”

“It kind of looks nicer! And so – the main idea is the Sun that sheds around it the force of life! That’s wonderful and quite right. I went out of town yesterday – to Yarillo

3

  An allusion to the ancient Slavonic sun-god called Yarillo. – Trans.

, you know – to watch the sunset! Quite easy and simple to imagine the way it’s all described – serpent, swords, the struggle, the defeat of darkness and then the sunrise in a triumphant blaze! There wasn’t any sunrise, though, it was raining, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve seen the sunrise many a time, and I’ll make it a point to see it on a clear day, I will!”

He looked round and took a liking to the clean cosy little room with the white bed in the corner chastely screened in a soft veil of gloom. On a table before Foma lay numerous books, others stood slanting on a shelf, the walls were hung with familiar photographs of writers and learned men with long hair and melancholy faces. Rubbing his palms covered with callouses and stained with varnish, Foma laughed softly to himself and went on:

“Wonderful, comrade, there I was sitting on a steep bank with my legs over the side, when a dog comes up, kind of beggarly looking dog it was, you know, all covered with dirt and burs, with grey whiskers on its face. Hungry, old and homeless. Comes up and sits down near me and also watches: there was the sky flaming yellow and red, blue figures kept on changing, the rays broke ’em up and set ’em alight again, golden rivers flowed past – and we, a man and a dog, sat watching, just like that. Generally speaking, comrade, nobody knows for certain what a dog really is, you know, and what it’s attitude is to the sun? Maybe it also – mind you, I don’t know, it’s just fantasy – but why shouldn’t a dog be able to understand what the sun means, if it feels cold and warmth and can look at the sky? Now, a pig – that’s another matter, of course! D’you know, I even joked with it – d’you understand, says I, who the real creator of life is, eh? It looked at me out of the corner of its e)e and moved off a little… Surprising how every living thing on earth is mistrustful and cautious of one another – very sad, when you come to think of it! Mind you, maybe it’s silly, but when I read those two chapters I all of a sudden, you know, seemed to realize it for the first time – why, the sun! The sun – extraordinary simple!”

“You’ve read two chapters?” Foma heard her ask.

The question struck him as sounding sort of strict.

“Only two,” he returned, and for some reason began fingering the chair on which he sat. “We’ve got a lot of work just now, you know, an urgent job. Klobistyaev, the merchant, is giving his daughter away in marriage– the son-in-law’s going to live with them – and we’re touching up a dining room suite. Splendid furniture he bought, fine antique workmanship – solid oak, you know…”

He saw the girl’s eyes close wearily, and that instantly made him tongue-tied and threw him into confusion. Foma resumed not without an effort, smiling embarrassedly:

“Maybe I’m chattering too much – pardon me please!”

The young lady exclaimed hastily:

“Oh no! Your talk is so interesting. I’ve only just started work, and it’s very important for me to study the mentality of people who… people of your class.”

Foma brightened up again, became emboldened, and, waving his arms in the air, broke into song, like a bird at sunrise.

“Allow me to say that people of my kind are like little children – timid, you know! Between ourselves, frinstance, we crafts men very rarely have heart to heart talks. Yet every one would like to say something about himself – because – well, you know, a man sees very little kindness, and… if you bear in mind that every one had a mother… and was used to being caressed, it’s… a very sad thing!”

He moved up to the little hostess with his chair – something creaked with a snap and a thick book dropped on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” said Foma. “Very little elbow-room in here!” Dropping his voice, he continued in a mysterious undertone: “I want to tell you how remarkably true it is that it’s no good for a man to live by himself! Of course, unity of interests among the workers is a very good thing – I understand that – but interest is not the whole story – there’s a mighty lot in a man’s soul besides that! A man definitely wants to lay bare his soul, show it in full dress parade, in all its magnitude… A man’s a young creature, as you know! Not in years, of course, but taking it as life as a whole – life’s not an old story, is it? Eh? And suddenly, there you are, nobody wants to listen to anything – and there you have it – loneliness of the soul… dumbness and death of thought! I don’t agree with it – the unity of people is absolutely necessary, isn’t it? Unity of interests – all right… but how can one explain the loneliness and the awful misery at times? You see…”

“I don’t quite follow you,” said Liza, and her voice once more sounded teacher-like and strict.

Foma regarded her smilingly, and she, with knitted brows, returned his look with a very intent stare that once more dampened his enthusiasm. With a lift of her shoulders she drew her plait over her breast and her fingers moved swiftly twining and untwining the black ribbon, while she said in an unnaturally deep voice:

“That’s rather a strange argument. While admitting the unity of interests…”

“You see, the point is,” broke in Foma, “if one ray is here, another there, there won’t be any warmth… all the rays must be merged into one, isn’t that so?”

“Well, yes, but what do you call a ray?”

“My soul, and yours – there you have the rays of the sun, figurely speaking.”

When Foma took his leave he thought Liza looked at him suspiciously and shrank back, and when he shook her hand she tried to pull it back.

And again he wandered nearly all night through the deserted streets of the sleepy town, rousing the night watchmen dozing at the house entrances, and exciting the interest of the policemen on their night rounds.

He recalled the things he had spoken and made a wry face, feeling that he had bungled things and had not said what he wanted to.

“Funny!” he thought, “when I went to her I had everything so pat in my head. Next time I’ll rehearse it properly…

He suddenly stopped, remembering that Liza had not told him when he could come again.

“She’s forgotten! I’ve been speaking too much!”

And then again he escorted her home at nights, and all the way he bombarded her with his rapturous speeches, confided to her, before he was aware of it, the secrets of an awakened soul, not noticing that she listened to him in silence, answered his questions in monosyllables and no longer invited him to come to her warm little room.

“Why, I believe you’re a romancer!” she once exclaimed with a feeling akin to regret, and looking him squarely in the face she shook her head deprecatingly.

Foma was disconcerted by a word that was reminiscent of romance and love, and he laughed softly while Liza continued:

“How strange! Of course, I understand romanticism, but…”

She spoke long and didactically, and Foma could not understand what it was all about.

And gradually it became a necessity for him to see Liza – her eyes produced on him a heady pleasant sensation and elicited new words, kindled oddly fervent thoughts. Seeing her surrounded by a close ring of workers listening attentively and thoughtfully to her low persuasive voice, seeing her white hands fluttering like little doves in the semi-dusk of the room, her dark brows moving above the blue eyes and rosy lips quivering like budding petals.

Foma thought:

“That’s the Idea! To all the afflicted I bring joy…”

And he pictured to himself a cool babbling brook meandering down the hillside to a parched valley where the trees stand forlorn and dusty, their faded leaves drooping wearily, while the living water makes its way to their roots.

And he recalled the lovely fairy tale of the little girl lost in the woods – how she wandered into the cave of the dwarfs and sat among them trustfully, filled with love and goodwill to every living thing.

Sometimes Liza, warming to her subject, grew excited, stammered, found difficulty in choosing her words, and her eyes darted anxiously over the faces of her audience. At such moments Foma sat