I
Some fifteen boys and girls and several young men and women had gathered in the garden belonging to the Semiboyarinov cottage to celebrate the birthday of one of the sons of the house, Lesha by name, a student of the second class. Lesha’s birthday was made indeed an occasion for bringing eligible young men to the house for his grown sisters’ sake.
All were merry and smiling—the older members of the party as well as the young boys and girls, who ran up and down the yellow sand of the well-kept footpaths; a pale, unimpressive boy, who was sitting alone on a bench under a lilac bush and looking silently at the other boys, was also smiling. His loneliness, his silence, and his well-worn though clean clothes, all pointed to his poverty and to his embarrassment in the company of these lively, well-dressed children. His face was timid and thin, his chest sunken, and his lean hands lay so meekly that it aroused one’s pity to look at him. Still, he smiled; but even his smile seemed pitiful; it was as though it depressed him to watch the games and the happiness of other children, or as though he were afraid to annoy others by his sad looks and his poor dress.
He was called Grisha Igumnov. His father had died not long ago; Grisha’s mother occasionally sent her son to her rich relatives with whom he always felt depressed and uneasy.
“Why do you sit alone? Get up and run about!” said the blue-eyed Lydochka Semiboyarinov as she passed him.
Grisha did not dare to disobey; his heart beat violently, his face became covered with small beads of perspiration. He approached the happy, red-cheeked boys timidly. They looked at him unfriendlily as at a stranger, and Grisha himself felt at once that he was not like them: he could not speak so boldly and so loudly; and he had neither such yellow boots, nor such a round little cap with a woolly red visor turned jauntily upwards as the boy nearest to him had.
The boys continued to talk among themselves as though there were no Grisha. Grisha stood near them in an uneasy pose; his thin shoulders stooped somewhat, his slender fingers held fast to his narrow girdle, and he smiled timidly. He did not know what to do, and in his confusion did not hear what the lively boys were saying. They finished their conversation and scattered suddenly. Grisha, his timid, guilty smile still on his face, walked back uneasily on the sandy path and sat down once more on the bench. He was ashamed because he had walked up to the boys, yet had not spoken to anyone, and because nothing had come of it. As he sat down he looked timidly round him—no one paid him the slightest attention, and no one laughed at him. Grisha grew calm.
Just then two little girls, their arms round each other, passed him. Under their fixed stare Grisha shrank, grew red, and smiled guiltily.
When the little girls had passed by the youngest of them, with fair hair, asked loudly: “Who’s this ugly duckling?”
The elder girl, who was red-cheeked and black-browed, laughed and answered: “I don’t know. We had better ask Lydochka. It’s most likely a poor relation.”
“What an absurd boy,” said the little blonde. “He spreads his ears out, and sits there and smiles.”
They disappeared behind the bushes at the turn of the path, and Grisha no longer heard their voices. He felt hurt, and when he thought that he might have to sit there a long time, until his mother should come for him, he was sick at heart.
A big-eyed, slender student with a stubborn crest of hair sticking up from his high forehead noticed that Grisha was sitting alone there like an orphan, and he wished to be kind to him, and to make him feel more at his ease; so he sat down near him.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Grisha told him quietly.
“And my name is Mitya,” said the student. “Are you here alone, or with anyone?”
“With mother,” whispered Grisha.
“Why do you sit here all by yourself?” asked Mitya.
Grisha stirred nervously, and did not know what to say.
“Why don’t you play?”
“I don’t want to.”
Mitya did not hear him so he asked: “What did you say?”
“I don’t feel like it,” said Grisha somewhat more loudly.
The student, astonished, continued: “Why don’t you feel like it?”
Grisha again did not know what to say; he smiled in a lost way. Mitya was looking at him attentively. Glances of strangers always embarrassed Grisha; it was as though he feared that they might find something absurd in his appearance.
Mitya was silent for a while, as he thought of something else that he might ask.
“What do you collect?” he asked. “You’ve got a collection of something, haven’t you? We all collect: I—stamps, Katya Pokrivalova—shells, Lesha—butterflies. What do you collect?”
“Nothing,” said Grisha, flushing.
“Well, well,” said Mitya with artless astonishment. “So you collect nothing! That’s very curious.”
Grisha felt ashamed that he was not collecting anything, and that he had disclosed the fact.
“I, too, must collect something!” he thought to himself, but he could not decide to say this aloud.
Mitya sat a little longer, then left him. Grisha felt a relief. But a new ordeal was in store for him.
The nurse engaged by the Semiboyarinovs for their youngest son was strolling along the garden paths with the one-year-old child in her arms. She wished to rest, and chose the same bench upon which Grisha was sitting. He again felt uneasy. He looked straight before him, and could not even decide to move away from the nurse to the other end of the bench.
The infant’s attention soon became drawn to Grisha’s protruding ears, and he leant forward towards one of them. The nurse, a robust, red-cheeked woman, concluded that Grisha would not mind. She brought her charge nearer to Grisha, and the pink infant caught Grisha’s ear with his fat little hand. Grisha was paralysed with confusion, but could not decide to protest. The child, laughing loudly and merrily, now let go Grisha’s ear, now caught hold of it again. The red-cheeked nurse, who enjoyed the game not less than the infant, kept on repeating: “Let’s go for him! Let’s give it to him!”
One of the boys saw the scene, and told the other boys that little Georgik was obstreperous with the quiet boy who was sitting so long on the bench. The children gathered round Georgik and Grisha, and laughed noisily. Grisha tried to show that he didn’t mind, that he felt no pain, and that he also enjoyed the fun. But it grew harder and harder for him to smile, and he had a very strong desire to cry. He knew that he ought not to cry, that it was a disgrace, and he restrained himself with an effort.
Happily he was soon delivered. The blue-eyed Lydochka, upon hearing the children’s boisterous laughter, went to see what had happened. She reproached the nurse: “Aren’t you ashamed to go on like this?”
She herself had difficulty to keep from laughing at Grisha’s pitiful, confused face. But she restrained herself, and upheld her dignity as a grown young woman before the nurse and the children.
The nurse rose and said, laughing: “Georginka did it quite gently. The boy himself didn’t say that it hurt him.”
“You mustn’t do such things,” said Lydochka sternly.
Georgik, unhappy because they had taken him away from Grisha, raised a cry. Lydochka took him in her arms and carried him away to quiet him. The nurse followed her. But the boys and the girls remained. They thronged round Grisha and eyed him unceremoniously.
“Perhaps he’s got stuck-on ears,” suggested one of the boys, “that’s why he doesn’t feel any pain.”
“I rather think you like to be held by your ears,” said another.
“Tell us,” said the little girl with the large blue eyes, “which ear does your mother catch hold of most?”
“His ears have been stretched out to order in a workshop,” cried a merry youngster, and laughed loudly at his own joke.
“No,” another corrected him, “he was born like that. When he was very small he was led not by his hand but by his ear.”
Grisha looked at his tormentors like a small beast at bay, with a fixed smile on his face, when, suddenly, wholly unexpectedly to the cheerful company, he burst into tears. Many small drops fell on his jacket. The children grew quiet at once. They became uneasy. They exchanged embarrassed glances, and looked silently at Grisha as he wiped the tears from his face with his thin hands; he appeared to be ashamed of his tears.
“Why should he be offended?” said the beautiful, flaxen-haired Katya angrily. “Who’s done him any harm? The ugly duckling!”
“He’s not an ugly duckling. You’re an ugly duckling yourself,” intervened Mitya.
“I can’t stand rude people,” said Katya, growing red with vexation.
A little, brown-faced girl in a red dress looked long at Grisha, and knitted her brows as in reflection. Then she scanned the other children with her perplexed eyes, and asked quietly:
“Why then did he smile?”