The children had not yet been admitted to the drawing-room, where the
Christmas tree stood, but remained chattering in the nursery. Sashka,
with lofty superciliousness, stood listening to their naive talk, and
fingering in his breeches pocket the broken cigarettes which he had
managed to abstract from his host’s study. At this moment there came up
to him the youngest of the Svetchnikovs, Kolya, and stood motionless
before him, a look of surprise on his face, his toes turned in, and a
finger stuck in the corner of his pouting mouth. Six months ago, at the
instance of his relatives, he had given up this bad habit of putting
his finger in his mouth, but he could not quite break himself of it. He
had blonde locks cut in a fringe on his forehead and falling in
ringlets on his shoulders, and blue, wondering eyes; in fact, he was
just such a boy in appearance as Sashka particularly loved to bully.
“Are ”oo weally a naughty boy?” he inquired of Sashka. “Miss said ”oo
was. I’m a dood boy.”
“That you are!” replied Sashka, considering the other’s short velvet
trousers and great turndown collars.
“Would ”oo like to have a dun? There!” and he pointed at him a little
pop-gun with a cork tied to it. The Wolfkin took the gun, pressed down
the spring, and, aiming at the nose of the unsuspecting Kolya, pulled
the trigger. The cork struck his nose, and rebounding, hung by the
string. Kolya’s blue eyes opened wider than ever, and filled with
tears. Transferring his finger from his mouth to his reddening nose he
blinked his long eyelashes and whispered:
“Bad—bad boy!”
A young lady of striking appearance, with her hair dressed in the
simplest and the most becoming fashion, now entered the nursery. She
was sister to the lady of the house, the very one indeed to whom
Sashka’s father had formerly given lessons.
“Here’s the boy,” said she, pointing out Sashka to the bald-headed man
who accompanied her. “Bow, Sashka, you should not be so rude!”
But Sashka would bow neither to her, nor to her companion of the bald
head. She little suspected how much he knew. But, as a fact, Sashka did
know that his miserable father had loved her, and that she had married
another; and, though this had taken place subsequent to his father’s
marriage, Sashka could not bring himself to forgive what seemed to him
like treachery.
“Takes after his father!” sighed Sofia Dmitrievna. “Could not you,
Plutov Michailovich, do something for him? My husband says that a
commercial school would suit him better than the grammar school.
Sashka, would you like to go to a technical school?”
“No!” curtly replied Sashka, who had caught the offensive word
“husband.”
“Do you want to be a shepherd, then?” asked the gentleman.
“Not likely!” said Sashka, in an offended tone.
“What then?”
Now Sashka did not know what he would like to be, but upon reflection
replied: “Well, it’s all the same to me, even a shepherd, if you like.”
The bald-headed gentleman regarded the strange boy with a look of
perplexity. When his eyes had travelled up from his patched boots to
his face, Sashka put out his tongue and quickly drew it back again, so
that Sofia Dmitrievna did not notice anything, but the old gentleman
showed an amount of irascibility that she could not understand.
“I should not mind going to a commercial school,” bashfully suggested
Sashka.
The lady was overjoyed at Sashka’s decision, and meditated with a sigh
on the beneficial influence exercised by an old love.
“I don’t know whether there will be a vacancy,” dryly remarked the old
man avoiding looking at Sashka, and smoothing down the ridge of hair
which stuck up on the back of his head. “However, we shall see.”
Meanwhile the children were becoming noisy, and in a great state of
excitement were waiting impatiently for the Christmas tree.
The excellent practice with the pop-gun made in the hands of a boy, who
commanded respect both for his stature and for his reputation for
naughtiness, found imitators, and many a little button of a nose was
made red. The tiny maids, holding their sides, bent almost double with
laughter, as their little cavaliers with manly contempt of fear and
pain, but all the same wrinkling up their faces in suspense, received
the impact of the cork.
At length the doors were opened, and a voice said: “Come in, children;
gently, not so fast!” Opening their little eyes wide, and holding their
breath in anticipation, the children filed into the brightly illumined
drawing-room in orderly pairs, and quietly walked round the glittering
tree. It cast a strong, shadowless light on their eager faces, with
rounded eyes and mouths. For a minute there reigned the silence of
profound enchantment, which all at once broke out into a chorus of
delighted exclamation. One of the little girls, unable to restrain her
delight, kept dancing up and down in the same place, her little tress
braided with blue ribbon beating meanwhile rhythmically against her
shoulders. Sashka remained morose and gloomy—something evil was working
in his little wounded breast. The tree blinded him with its red,
shriekingly insolent glitter of countless candles. It was foreign,
hostile to him, even as the crowd of smart, pretty children which
surrounded it. He would have liked to give it a shove, and topple it
over on their shining heads. It seemed as though some iron hand were
gripping his heart, and wringing out of it every drop of blood. He
crept behind the piano, and sat down there in a corner unconsciously
crumpling to pieces in his pocket the last of the cigarettes, and
thinking that though he had a father and mother and a home, it came to
the same thing as if he had none, and nowhere to go to. He tried to
recall to his imagination his little penknife, which he had acquired by
a swap not long ago, and was very fond of; but his knife all at once
seemed to him a very poor affair with its ground-down blade and only
half of a yellow haft. To-morrow he would smash it up, and then he
would have nothing left at all!
But suddenly Sashka’s narrow eyes gleamed with astonishment, and his
face in a moment resumed its ordinary expression of audacity and
self-confidence. On the side of the tree turned towards him—which was
the back of it, and less brightly illumined than the other side—he
discovered something such as had never come within the circle of his
existence, and without which all his surroundings appeared as empty as
though peopled by persons without life. It was a little angel in wax
carelessly hung in the thickest of the dark boughs, and looking as if
it were floating in the air. His transparent dragon-fly wings trembled
in the light, and he seemed altogether alive and ready to fly away. The
rosy fingers of his exquisitely formed hands were stretched upwards,
and from his head there floated just such locks as Kolya’s. But there
was something here that was wanting in Kolya’s face, and in all other
faces and things. The face of the little angel did not shine with joy,
nor was it clouded by grief; but there lay on it the impress of another
feeling, not to be explained in words, nor defined by thought, but to
be attained only by the sympathy of a kindred feeling. Sashka was not
conscious of the force of the mysterious influence which attracted him
towards the little angel, but he felt that he had known him all his
life, and had always loved him, loved him more than his penknife, more
than his father, more than anything else. Filled with doubt, alarm, and
a delight which he could not comprehend, Sashka clasped his hands to
his bosom and whispered:
“Dear—dear little angel!”
The more intently he looked the more fraught with significance the
expression of the little angel’s face became. He was so infinitely far
off, so unlike everything which surrounded him there. The other toys
seemed to take a pride in hanging there pretty, and decked out, upon
the glittering tree, but he was pensive, and fearing the intrusive
light purposely hid himself in the dark greenery, so that none might
see him. It would be a mad cruelty to touch his dainty little wings.
“Dear—dear!” whispered Sashka.
His head became feverish. He clasped his hands behind his back, and in
full readiness to fight to the death to win the little angel, he walked
to and fro with cautious, stealthy steps. He avoided looking at the
little angel, lest he should direct the attention of others towards
him, but he felt that he was still there, and had not flown away.
Now the hostess appeared in the doorway, a tall, stately lady with a
bright aureole of grey hair dressed high upon her head. The children
trooped round her with expressions of delight, and the little girl—the
same that had danced about in her place—hung wearily on her hand,
blinking heavily with sleepy eyes.
As Sashka approached her he seemed almost choking with emotion.
“Auntie—auntie!”[1] said he, trying to speak caressingly, but his voice
sounded harsher than ever. “Auntie, dear!”
She did not hear him, so he tugged impatiently at her dress.
“What’s the matter with you? Why are you pulling my dress?” said the
grey-haired lady in surprise. “It’s rude.”
“Auntie—auntie, do give me one thing from the tree; give me the little
angel.”
“Impossible,” replied the lady in a tone of indifference. “We are going
to keep the tree decorated till the New Year. But you are no longer a
child; you should call me by name—Maria Dmitrievna.”
Sashka, feeling as if he were falling down a precipice, grasped the
last means of saving himself.
“I am sorry I have been naughty. I’ll be more industrious for the
future,” he blurted out. But this formula, which had always paid with
his masters, made no impression upon the lady of the grey hair.
“A good thing, too, my friend,” she said, as unconcernedly as before.
“Give me the little angel,” demanded Sashka, gruffly.
“But it’s impossible. Can’t you understand that?”
But Sashka did not understand, and when the lady turned to go out of
the room he followed her, his gaze fixed without conscious thought upon
her black silk dress. In his surging brain there glimmered a
recollection of how one of the boys in his class had asked the master
to mark him 3,[2] and when the master refused he had knelt down before
him, and putting his hands together as in prayer, had begun to cry. The
master was angry, but gave him 3 all the same. At the time Sashka had
immortalised this episode in a caricature, but now his only means left
was to follow the boy’s example. Accordingly he plucked at the lady’s
dress again, and when she turned round, dropped with a bang on to his
knees, and folded his hands as described above. But he could not
squeeze out a single tear!
“Are you out of your mind?” exclaimed the grey-haired lady, casting a
searching look round the room; but luckily no one was present.
“What is the matter with you?”
Kneeling there with clasped hands, Sashka looked at her with dislike,
and rudely repeated:
“Give me the little angel.”
His eyes, fixed intently on the lady to catch the first word she should
utter, were anything but good to look at, and the hostess answered
hurriedly:
“Well, then, I’ll give it to you. Ah! what a stupid you are! I will
give you what you want, but why could you not wait till the New Year?”
“Stand up! And never,” she added in a didactic tone, “never kneel to
any one: it is humiliating. Kneel before God alone.”
“Talk away!” thought Sashka, trying to get in front of her, and merely
succeeding in treading on her dress.
When she had taken the toy from the tree, Sashka devoured her with his
eyes, but stretched out his hands for it with a painful pucker of the
nose. It seemed to him that the tall lady would break the little angel.
“Beautiful thing!” said the lady, who was sorry to part with such a
dainty and presumably expensive toy. “Who can have hung it there? Well,
what do you want with such a thing? Are you not too big to know what to
do with it? Look, there are some picture-books. But this I promised to
give to Kolya; he begged so earnestly for it.” But this was not the
truth.
Sashka’s agony became unbearable. He clenched his teeth convulsively,
and seemed almost to grind them. The lady of the grey hair feared
nothing so much as a scene, so she slowly held out the little angel to
Sashka.
“There now, take it!” she said in a displeased tone; “what a persistent
boy you are!”
Sashka’s hands as they seized the little angel seemed like tentacles,
and were tense as steel springs, but withal so soft and careful that
the little angel might have imagined himself to be flying in the air.
“A-h-h!” escaped in a long _diminuendo_ sigh from Sashka’s breast,
while in his eyes glistened two little tear-drops, which stood still
there as though unused to the light. Slowly drawing the little angel to
his bosom, he kept his shining eyes on the hostess, with a quiet,
tender smile which died away in a feeling of unearthly bliss. It
seemed, when the dainty wings of the little angel touched Sashka’s
sunken breast, as if he experienced something so blissful, so bright,
the like of which had never before been experienced in this sorrowful,
sinful, suffering world.
“A-h-h!” sighed he once more as the little angel’s wings touched him.
And at the shining of his face the absurdly decorated and insolently
growing tree seemed to be extinguished, and the grey-haired, portly
dame smiled with gladness, and the parchment-like face of the
bald-headed gentleman twitched, and the children fell into a vivid
silence as though touched by a breath of human happiness.
For one short moment all observed a mysterious likeness between the
awkward boy who had outgrown his clothes, and the lineaments of the
little angel, which had been spiritualised by the hand of an unknown
artist.
But the next moment the picture was entirely changed. Crouching like a
panther preparing to spring, Sashka surveyed the surrounding company,
on the look-out for some one who should dare wrest his little angel
from him.
“I’m going home,” he said in a dull voice, having in view a way of
escape through the crowd, “home to Father.”
[1] This is, of course, only a child’s way of addressing an
elder.—_Tr._]
[2] In Russian schools 5 is the maximum mark.—TV.]