Two days later he returned for his next lesson, in the dusk of a snowy
February afternoon. This time he found her waiting for him, sitting
before the table in the little room. They smiled in friendly fashion.
“I was thinking, as I came,” he said, “that this must be like a Russian
winter afternoon.”
“Oh, no!” she said. “It isn’t! It has not the--the _feeling_. There
is--how shall I tell you?--a sort of excitement about our snowy days.
But I must not waste your time. Let us begin!”
For ten minutes or so she worked industriously, teaching him Russian
words for chair, table, wall, floor, ceiling.
“You are really learning now?” she asked solicitously.
“Yes,” he answered, very much pleased.
“It seems, however, that as a teacher I am not successful,” she said,
with a melancholy little smile. “To you I give my first lesson, and to
you I give my last. After this I have finished.”
“Why? Is your husband coming back?”
“No,” she said. “He is not well--yet.”
She got up, went over to the window, and stood there looking out. He
couldn’t help thinking, as he regarded her round form in profile, that
she looked like the little wooden figures of Noah’s wife in the arks
that children play with. And then he saw her face, and was sorry for his
fancy. She was gazing out across the dark, snow-covered expanse of
Madison Square, wonderfully misty in the falling snow, and she was
silently weeping.
“No,” she said. “He is not coming back. He is very ill.”
He felt terribly sorry for her, but he could think of nothing at all to
say. She came back and sat down in the full glare of the electric light.
She looked intolerably pitiful, her scanty eyebrows red with weeping,
her mouth compressed and trembling a little.
“And they tell me this morning that there will be no more lessons for
me. It seems that I talk too much English to the pupils, and that must
not be. I must talk only in Russian, and I always forget.”
She shrugged her shoulders, while she wiped her eyes, quite
unaffectedly, with an elaborate little lace handkerchief.
“And now,” she said, “do you remember the word for ‘table’?”
But he couldn’t bear that.
“About your husband,” he began respectfully. “Are you sure you have a
good doctor? Being in a strange country, you know--”
“I don’t need a doctor, my friend!” she told him, with a stern smile. “I
have seen too much of illness and death. A doctor can tell me nothing
and can do nothing for me.”
“But,” he said, “in other ways--if you’re leaving here, can’t I help you
to find some other sort of--occupation? I’m a newspaper man; I know all
sorts of people. I should be more than happy to help you.”
She bowed her head gravely.
“Thank you! I know enough of the world to appreciate kindness. You are
very good--very kind. I had a little plan. I thought perhaps I would
give private lessons in my home, if I could find pupils.”
“I’d like to come, very much.”
“Oh, no! With you that is not possible. At least, not now. You have paid
for a course of twenty lessons here.”
“I’d rather take them from you.”
“But you have paid!” she cried, with a sort of horror. “You must not
waste that money!”
He smiled, with a slight feeling of superiority toward this foreign
thrift.
“I’ll arrange it,” he said.
So before the end of the lesson she gave him a card on which was
engraved: