To this day I can see Foka’s bald head and wrinkled set face and the bent figure of the kindly old woman with the grey hair showing beneath her cap. They sat squeezed together on the one chair, and both of them felt awkward.

I continued to feel unconcerned and impatient. The ten seconds we sat with the doors shut seemed like a whole hour. At last everybody got up, crossed themselves and began to say good-bye. Papa embraced mamma and kissed her several times.

‘Don’t, my dear,’ said papa. ‘We are not parting for ever.’

‘All the same it is painful!’ said mamma, her voice choking with tears.

When I heard that voice and saw her quivering lips and tear-filled eyes I forgot everything else: I felt so sad and miserable and terrible that I wanted to run away rather than say good-bye to her. At that moment I realized that when she embraced papa she was taking leave of us all.

She started kissing Volodya and making the sign of the cross over him so many times that I pushed forward, thinking she would now turn to me; but she kept on blessing him and hugging him to her breast. At last I put my arms round her and clinging to her I wept and wept, thinking of nothing in the world but my grief.

When we were ready to take our seats in the vehicles the tiresome domestics waylaid us in the hall. Their ‘Let me kiss your hand, please, sir’, the resounding kisses they imprinted on our shoulders1 and the smell of tallow from their heads excited in me something like the annoyance irritable people feel. Under the influence of this feeling I kissed Natalya Savishna very coldly on the cap when bathed in tears she came up to bid me farewell.

It is strange that I can see the faces of all those servants as if it were today, and could draw them in the minutest detail; but mamma’s face as she looked at that moment escapes me entirely: perhaps because while all this was happening I could not once summon up enough courage to give her a glance. It seemed to me that if I did so her misery and mine would burst all bounds.

I flung myself into the carriage before anyone else and sat down on the back seat. As the hood was raised I could see nothing, but some instinct told me that mamma was still there.

‘Shall I look at her again or not?… Well, for the last time then!’ I said to myself, and leaned out of the carriage on the porch side. At that instant mamma, with the same thought, came to the opposite side of the carriage and called me by name. Hearing her voice behind me, I turned to her so quickly that our heads bumped together. She gave a mournful smile and kissed me convulsively for the last time.

When we had gone a few yards I made up my mind to look at her again. The wind was lifting the small blue kerchief which was tied round her head; with her head down and her face buried in her hands she was slowly climbing the steps of the porch. Foka was supporting her.

Papa sat beside me without speaking. I was choking with tears and there was a sensation in my throat that made me afraid I should stifle… As we drove out on to the highway we saw a white handkerchief someone was waving from the balcony. I started to wave mine and the action of doing so calmed me a little. I continued to cry and the thought that my tears were a proof of my sensitiveness pleased and consoled me.

After we had gone about three-quarters of a mile I settled down more comfortably and began gazing steadily at the nearest object which presented itself to my eyes – the flanks of the trace-horse trotting on my side. I watched how the piebald trace-horse flicked his tail, how he struck one hoof against the other, how the driver’s plaited whip reached him and his hooves began to leap together. I looked at the harness shaking on his neck, and the rings on the harness jerking too. And I stared and stared until the harness near the piebald’s tail became covered with lather. I began to look about me at the waving fields of ripe rye, at the dark fallow where I could see a plough, a peasant and a mare with a foal. I looked at the mile-posts, I even glanced at the coachman’s box to find out who was driving us; and before the tears had dried on my face my mind was already far from my mother, from whom I had parted perhaps for ever. But my every recollection led to thoughts of her. I remembered the mushroom I had found in the birch avenue the day before, and how Lyuba and Katya had squabbled as to who should pick it, and I remembered how they had cried when saying good-bye to us.

‘I am sorry to have left them! And sorry to have left Natalya Savishna, and the birch avenue, and Foka. Even that nasty Mimi – I am sorry to have left her. I am sorry about everything, everything! And poor mamma, what about her?’ And the tears rushed to my eyes again; but it was not for long.

15 • CHILDHOOD

Oh the happy, happy, never-to-be-recalled days of childhood! How could one fail to love and cherish memories of such a time? Those memories refresh and elevate the soul and are a source of my best enjoyment.

Having run about to your heart’s content you sit in your high chair at the tea-table. It is late, you have long ago finished your cup of milk with sugar in.