"What? What do they say? What--on the Day of Unanimity?"
The coziness of my room, its very walls, seemed to have vanished. I
felt myself thrown outside, where the tremendous, shaggy wind was
tossing about and where the slanting clouds of dusk were descending
lower and lower....
U- boldly and firmly grasped me by the shoulders. I even noticed how
her fingers, responding to my emotion, trembled slightly.
"Sit down, dear, and don't be upset. They say many things; must we
believe them all? Moreover, if only you need me, I shall be near you
on that day. I shall leave the school-children with someone else and
I shall stay with you, for you, dear, you too are a child and you
need...."
"No, no!" (I raised my hands in protest). "Not for anything! You
really think then that I am a child and that I cannot do without
a.... Oh, no! Not for anything in the world." (I must confess I had
other plans for that day!)
She smiled. The wording of that smile apparently was: "Oh, what a
stubborn, what a stubborn boy!" She sat down, eyelids lowered. Her
hands modestly busied themselves with fixing the fold of the unif
which fell again between her knees, and suddenly, about something
entirely different, she said:
"I think I must decide ... for your sake.... But I implore you, do
not hurry me. I must think it over."
I did not hurry her, although I realized that I ought to have been
delighted, as there is no greater honor than to crown someone's
evening years.
... All night strange wings were about. I walked and protected my
head with my hands from those wings. And a chair, not like ours, but
an ancient chair, came in with a horse-like gait: first the right
fore- and left hind-leg, then the left fore- and right hind-leg. It
rushed to my bed and crawled into it, and I liked that wooden chair,
although it made me uncomfortable and caused me some pain.
It is very strange; is it really impossible to find any cure for
this dream-sickness, or to make it rational, perhaps even useful?