Family Happiness by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (ereader with android txt) 📕

and the ripe black cherries hanging straight and heavy among the foliage;

then I pushed my head under the net, and from under the knotted bough of an

old cherry tree I caught sight of Sergey Mikhaylych. He evidently thought

that I had gone away and that no one was watching him. With his hat off and

his eyes shut, he was sitting on the fork of an old tree and carefully

rolling into a ball a lump of cherry tree gum. Suddenly he shrugged his

shoulders, opened his eyes, muttered something, and smiled. Both words and

smile were so unlike him that I felt ashamed of myself for eavesdropping. It

seemed to me that he had said, “Masha!” “Impossible,” i thought. “Darling

Masha!” he said again, in a lower and more tender tone. There was possible

doubt about the two words this time. My heart beat hard, and such a

passionate joy — illicit joy, as I felt — took hold of me, that I clutched

at the wall, fearing to fall and betray myself. Startled by the sound of my

movement, he looked round — he dropped his eyes instantly, and his face

turned red, even scarlet, like a child’s. He tried to speak, but in vain;

again and again his face positively flamed up. Still he smiled as he looked

at me, and I smiled too. Then his whole face grew radiant with happiness. He

had ceased to be the old uncle who spoiled or scolded me; he was a man on my

level, who loved and feared me as I loved and feared him. We looked at one

another without speaking. But suddenly he frowned; the smile and light in

his eyes disappeared, and he resumed his cold paternal tone, just as if we

were doing something wrong and he was repenting and calling on me to repent.

“You had better get down, or you will hurt yourself,” he said; “and do put

your hair straight; just think what you look like?”

“What makes him pretend? what makes him want to give me pain?” I thought in

my vexation. And the same instant brought an irresistible desire to upset

his composure again and test my power over him.

“No,” I said; “I mean to pick for myself.” I caught hold of the nearest

branch and climbed to the top of the wall; then, before he had time to catch

me, I jumped down on the other side.

“What foolish things you do!” he muttered, flushing again and trying to hide

his confusion under a pretence of annoyance; “you might really have hurt

yourself. But how do you mean to get out of this?”

He was even more confused than before, but this time his confusion

frightened rather than pleased me. It infected me too and made me blush;

avoiding his eye and not knowing what to say, I began to pick cherries

though I had nothing to put them in. I reproached myself, I repented of what

I had done, I was frightened; I felt that I had lost his good opinion for

ever by my folly. Both of us were silent and embarrassed. From this

difficult situation Sonya rescued us by running back with the key in her

hand. For some time we both addressed our conversation to her and said

nothing to each other. When we returned to Katya, who assured us that she

had never been asleep and was listening all the time, I calmed down, and he

tried to drop into his fatherly patronizing manner again, but I was not

taken in by it. A discussion which we had had some days before came back

clear before me.

Katya had been saying that it was easier for a man to be in love and declare

his love than for a woman.

“A man may say that he is in love, and a woman can’t,” she said.

“I disagree,” said he; “a man has no business to say, and can’t say that he

is in love.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it never can be true. What sort of a revelation is that, that a man

is in love? A man seems to think that whenever he says the word, something

will go pop! — that some miracle will be worked, signs and wonders, with all

the big guns firing at once! In my opinion,” he went on, “whoever solemnly

brings out the words “I love you” is either deceiving himself or, which is

even worse, deceiving others.”

“Then how is a woman to know that a man is in love with her, unless he tells

her?” asked Katya.

“That I don’t know,” he answered; “every man has his own way of telling

things. If the feeling exists, it will out somehow. But when I read novels,

I always fancy the crestfallen look of Lieut. Strelsky or Alfred, when he

says, “I love you, Eleanora”, and expects something wonderful to happen at

once, and no change at all takes place in either of them — their eyes and

their noses and their whole selves remain exactly as they were.”

Even then I had felt that this banter covered something serious that had

reference to myself. But Katya resented his disrespectful treatment of the

heroes in novels.

“You are never serious,” she said; “but tell me truthfully, have you never

yourself told a woman that you loved her?”

“Never, and never gone down on one knee,” he answered, laughing; “and never

will.”

This conversation I now recalled, and i reflected that there was no need for

him to tell me that he loved me. “I know that he loves me,” I thought, “and

all his endeavors to seem indifferent will not change my opinion.”

He said little to me throughout the evening, but in every word he said to

Katya and Sonya and in every look and movement of his I saw love and felt no

doubt of it. I was only vexed and sorry for him, that he thought it

necessary still to hide his feelings and pretend coldness, when it was all

so clear, and when it would have been so simple and easy to be boundlessly

happy. But my jumping down to him in the orchard weighed on me like a crime.

I kept feeling that he would cease to respect me and was angry with me.

After tea I went to the piano, and he followed me.

“Play me something — it is long since I heard you,” he said, catching me up

in the parlor.

“I was just going to,” I said. Then I looked straight in his face and said

quickly, “Sergey Mikhaylych, you are not angry with me, are you?”

“What for?” he asked.

“For not obeying you this afternoon,” I said, blushing.

He understood me: he shook his head and made a grimace, which implied that I

deserved a scolding but that he did not feel able to give it.

“So it’s all right, and we are friends again?” I said, sitting down at the

piano.

“Of course!” he said.

In the drawing room, a large lofty room, there were only two lighted candles

on the piano, the rest of the room remaining in half-darkness. Outside the

open windows the summer night was bright. All was silent, except when the

sound of Katya’s footsteps in the unlighted parlor was heard occasionally,

or when his horse, which was tied up under the window, snorted or stamped

his hoof on the burdocks that grew there. He sat behind me, where I could

not see him; but everywhere — in the half-darkness of the room, in every

sound, in myself — I felt his presence. Every look, every movement of his,

though I could not see them, found an echo in my heart. I played a sonata of

Mozart’s which he had brought me and which I had learnt in his presence and

for him. I was not thinking at all of what I was playing, but I believe that

I played it well, and I thought that he was pleased. I was conscious of his

pleasure, and conscious too, though I never looked at him, of the gaze fixed

on me from behind. Still moving my fingers mechanically. I turned round

quite involuntarily and looked at him. The night had grown brighter, and his

head stood out on a background of darkness. He was sitting with his head

propped on his hands, and his eyes shone as they gazed at me. Catching his

look, I smiled and stopped playing. He smiled too and shook his head

reproachfully at the music, for me to go on. When I stopped, the moon had

grown brighter and was riding high in the heavens; and the faint light of

the candles was supplemented by a new silvery light which came in through

the windows and fell on the floor. Katya called out that it was really too

bad — that I had stopped at the best part of the piece, and that I was

playing badly. But he declared that I had never played so well; and then he

began to walk about the rooms — through the drawing room to the unlighted

parlor and back again to the drawing room, and each time he looked at me and

smiled. I smiled too; I wanted even to laugh with no reason; I was so happy

at something that had happened that very day. Katya and I were standing by

the piano; and each time that he vanished through the drawing room door, I

started kissing her in my favorite place, the soft part of her neck under

the chin; and each time he came back, I made a solemn face and refrained

with difficulty from laughing.

“What is the matter with her today?” Katya asked him.

He only smiled at me without answering; he knew what was the matter with me.

“Just look what a night it is!” he called out from the parlor, where he had

stopped by the open French window looking into the garden.

We joined him; and it really was such a night as I have never seen since.

The full moon shone above the house and behind us, so that we could not see

it, and half the shadow, thrown by the roof and pillars of the house and by

the veranda awning, lay slanting and foreshortened on the gravel-path and

the strip of turf beyond. Everything else was bright and saturated with the

silver of the dew and the moonlight. The broad garden path, on one side of

which the shadows of the dahlias and their supports lay aslant, all bright

and cold, and shining on the inequalities of the gravel, ran on till it

vanished in the mist. Through the trees the roof of the greenhouse shone

bright, and a growing mist rose from the dell. The lilac bushes, already

partly leafless, were all bright to the center. Each flower was

distinguishable apart, and all were drenched with dew. In the avenues light

and shade were so mingled that they looked, not like paths and trees but

like transparent houses, swaying and moving. To our right, in the shadow of

the house, everything was black, indistinguishable, and uncanny. But all the

brighter for the surrounding darkness was the top of a poplar, with a

fantastic crown of leaves, which for some strange reason remained there

close to the house, towering into the bright light, instead of flying away

into the dim distance, into the retreating dark blue of the sky.

“Let us go for a walk,” I said.

Katya agreed, but said I must put on galoshes.

“I don’t want them, Katya,”