Page:More Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/16

Biography “These are my first recollections (which I cannot arrange in their proper sequence, not knowing which come first and which later, of some I cannot even say whether they were seen asleep or awake). Here, at any rate, they are:—I was tied up in a bundle, I wanted to stretch out my arms and I couldn’t do it, and I cried and wept and my crying was disagreeable to myself, yet I couldn’t leave off. Someone or other seemed to be bending over me. I don’t remember who. And all this was happening in a semi-gloom. But I remember there were two persons present, and my crying had the same effect upon them; they were troubled by my crying, but they did not take me out of my bandages as I wanted them to do, and I cried all the louder. My being tied up seemed to them to be a necessary thing, whereas I knew that it was not necessary, and I wanted to prove it to them, and I spent myself in crying, and this crying was disagreeable to myself but unrestrainable. I felt the injustice and cruelty—not of people, for they had compassion on me, but of fate, and I felt pity for myself. I know not and never could make out how exactly it was, that is to say, whether they had swathed me so when I was a suckling and I stretched out my arms, or whether they had swathed me when I was years older in order that I might not scratch myself. Whether, as is often the case in dreams, I concentrated many impressions in this one recollection I cannot say, but it is certain that this was my first and strongest impression of life. And what I remember about it most is not my crying, or my