Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 01.djvu/132

100 danced, noticed me, while making a figure, and, smiling treacherously, — probably, because she wished to please grandmother by it, — brought Sónichka and one of the numberless princesses to me. "Rose ou hortie," she said to me.

"Oh, you are here!" said grandmother, turning around in her chair. "Go, my dear, go!"

Although I then felt more like hiding my head behind grandmother's chair than issuing from it, there was no refusing. I got up, said "Rose," and timidly looked at Sónichka. I had no time to come to my senses, when somebody's hand in a white glove passed through my arm, and the princess with the pleasantest smile rushed ahead, not suspecting in the least that I was completely ignorant of what I was to do with my feet.

I knew that "pas de Basques" was out of place and indecent, and might bring shame upon me; but the familiar sounds of the mazurka, acting upon my hearing, gave a certain direction to my acoustic nerves, which, in their turn, transmitted the motion to my legs; and these, quite involuntarily and to the surprise of the spectators, began to evolve the fatal round and even figures on the tiptoes. As long as we proceeded in a straight direction, things went fairly well, but at turning I noticed that if I did not use proper precaution I should fly ahead. To avoid such an unpleasantness, I stopped with the intention of producing the same figures which the young man had so beautifully produced in the leading pair. But the very moment I spread my legs and was about to leap up, the princess hurriedly ran about me, and looked at my legs with an expression of blank surprise and curiosity. That look undid me. I so completely lost myself, that instead of dancing, I began, in the strangest manner and entirely out of keeping with the measure of the dance or anything else, to wriggle my feet in one spot, and finally stopped entirely. Everybody was looking at me, some in wonder-