Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/43

 I am scarcely more bookish than he, and at the time I thought him a cruel rationalist despite all his pleasant little phrases.

T times he gives one the impression of having just arrived from some distant country, where people think and feel differently and their relations and language are different. He sits in a corner tired and grey, as though the dust of another earth were on him, and he looks attentively at everything with the look of a foreigner or of a dumb man.

Yesterday, before dinner, he came into the drawing-room, just like that, his thoughts far away. He sat down on the sofa, and, after a moment's silence, suddenly said, swaying his body a little, rubbing the palm of his hand on his knee, and wrinkling up his face:

"Still that is not all—not all."

Someone, always stolidly stupid as a flat-iron, asked: "What do you say?"

He looked at him fixedly, and then, bending forward and looking on the terrace where I was sitting with Doctor Nikitin and Yelpatievsky, he said: "What are you talking about?"

"Plehve."

"Plehve . . . Plehve . . . ," he repeated musingly after a pause, as though he heard the name for the first time. Then he shook himself like a bird, and said, with a faint smile: "To-day from early morning I have had a silly