At first she kept on scrutinizing him; whenever he began talking to her she blushed heavily and replied with sarcastic mutterings; at table she often annoyed him, addressing her father loudly:
“Don’t give him food to no purpose, Papa, he doesn’t like fruit dumplings. And he doesn’t like kvas soup either, nor does he like noodles, and he despises yoghurt, and hates curd cheese[70].”
In the mornings he was busy with the boy, she with housekeeping – the whole house was down to her. They had dinner at one, and after dinner she would go off to her room on the mezzanine or, if there was no rain, into the garden, where her easel stood under a birch tree, and, waving away the mosquitoes, she would paint from nature. Later she began going out onto the balcony, where he sat in a crooked cane armchair with a book after dinner, standing with her hands behind her back and casting glances at him with an indefinite grin:
“Might one learn what subtleties you’re so good as to be studying?”
“The history of the French Revolution.”
“Oh my God! I didn’t even know we had a revolutionary in the house!”
“But why ever have you given up your painting?”
“I’ll be giving it up completely at any time. I’ve become convinced of my lack of talent.”
“Show me something of your paintings.”
“And do you think you understand anything about painting?”
“You’re terribly proud.”
“I do have that fault…”
Finally one day she proposed going boating on the lake to him, and suddenly said decisively:
“The rainy season in our tropical parts seems to have ended. Let’s enjoy ourselves. True, our dugout’s quite rotten and the bottom has holes in it, but Petya and I have stopped up all the holes with sedge…”
The day was hot, it was sultry, the grasses on the bank, speckled with little yellow buttercup flowers had been stiflingly heated up by the moist warmth, and low above them circled countless pale-green butterflies.
He had adopted her constant mocking tone for himself and, approaching the boat, said:
“At long last[71] you’ve deigned to speak to me!”
“At long last you’ve collected your thoughts and answered me!” she replied briskly, and jumped onto the bow of the boat, scaring away the frogs, which plopped into the water from all directions, but suddenly she gave a wild shriek and caught her sarafan right up to her knees, stamping her feet:
“A grass snake[72]! A grass snake!”
He glimpsed the gleaming swarthiness of her bare legs, grabbed the oar from the bow, hit the grass snake wriggling along the bottom of the boat with it and, hooking the snake up, threw it far away into the water.
She was pale with an Indian sort of pallor, the moles on her face had become darker, the blackness of her hair and eyes seemingly even blacker. She drew breath in relief:
“Oh, how disgusting! Not for nothing is a snake in the grass named after the grass snake[73]. We have them everywhere here, in the garden and under the house… And Petya, just imagine, picks them up in his hands!”
For the first time she had begun speaking to him unaffectedly, and for the first time they glanced directly into one another’s eyes.
“But what a good fellow you are! What a good whack you gave it!”
She had recovered herself completely, she smiled and, running back from the bow to the stern, sat down cheerfully. She had struck him with her beauty in her fright, and now he thought with tenderness: but she’s still quite a little girl! Yet putting on an indifferent air, he took a preoccupied step across into the boat and, leaning the oar against the jelly-like lakebed, turned its bow forwards and pulled it across the tangled thicket of underwater weeds towards the green brushes of sedge and the flowering water lilies which covered everything ahead with an unbroken layer of their thick, round foliage, brought the boat out into the water and sat down on the thwart in the middle, paddling to the right and to the left.
“Nice, isn’t it?” she cried.
“Very!” he replied, taking off his cap, and turned round towards her: “Be so kind as to drop this down beside you, or else I’ll knock it off into this here tub, which, forgive me, does after all leak, and is full of leeches.”
She put the cap on her knees.
“Oh, don’t worry, drop it down anywhere.”
She pressed the cap to her breast:
“No, I’m going to take care of it!”
Again his heart stirred tenderly, but again he turned away and began intensifying his thrusting of the oar into the water that shone between the sedge and the water lilies. Mosquitoes stuck to his face and hands, the warm silver of everything all around was dazzling: the sultry air, the undulating sunlight, the curly whiteness of the clouds shining softly in the sky and in the clear patches of water between islands of sedge and water lilies; it was so shallow everywhere that the lakebed with its underwater weeds was visible, but somehow that did not preclude that bottomless depth into which the reflected sky and clouds receded. Suddenly she shrieked again – and the boat toppled sideways: she had put her hand into the water from the stern and, catching a water-lily stalk, had jerked it towards her so hard that she had tipped over along with the boat – he was scarcely in time to leap up and catch her by the armpits. She began roaring with laughter and, falling onto her back in the stern, she splashed water right into his eyes with her wet hand. Then he grabbed her again and, without understanding what he was doing, kissed her laughing lips. She quickly clasped her arms around his neck and kissed him clumsily on the cheek…
From then on they began boating at night. The next day she called him out into the garden after dinner and asked:
“Do you love me?”
He replied ardently, remembering the kisses of the day before in the boat:
“Since the first day we met!”
“Me too,” she said. “No, at first I hated you – I didn’t think you noticed me at all. But all that’s already in the past, thank God! This evening, as soon as everyone goes to bed, go there again and wait for me. Only leave the house as cautiously as possible – Mama watches my every step, she’s madly jealous.”
In the night she came to the shore with a plaid on her arm. In joy he greeted her confusedly, only asking:
“And why the plaid?”
“How silly you are! We’ll be cold. Well, get in quickly and paddle to the other bank…”
They were silent all the way. When they floated up to the wood on the other side, she said:
“There we are. Now come here to me. Where’s the plaid? Ah, it’s underneath me. Cover me up, I’m cold, and sit down. That’s right… No, wait, yesterday we kissed awkwardly somehow, now I’ll kiss you myself to begin with, only gently, gently. And you put your arms around me… everywhere…”
She had only a petticoat on under the sarafan. Tenderly, scarcely touching, she kissed the edges of his lips. He, with his head in a spin[74], threw her onto the stern. She embraced him frenziedly…
After lying for a while in exhaustion, she raised herself a little and, with a smile of happy tiredness and pain that had not yet abated,