Page:More Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/17

Rh suffering, but the complicity, the contrariety of the impression. I wanted liberty, that liberty interfered with nobody, and I who wanted strength was weak while the others were strong.

“My second impression is a joyous one. I am sitting in a trough and surrounded by the novel and unpleasant odour of some substance or other with which my little body comes in contact. Possibly it was bran, and possibly this bran was in the water and the trough, but the novelty of the impression of the bran awoke my faculties, and for the first time I observed, and loved my little body with its ribs visible on its trunk, and the smooth dark trough and the bare arms of my nurse, and the warm, steamy, terrifying water and the sound of it, and, in particular, the sensation of the wetness of the smooth sides of the trough when I drew my tiny hands along it.

“It is strange and terrible to reflect that, from my birth to my third year, at the very time when I was being nourished at the breast, taken from the breast—at the very time when I was beginning to crawl, to walk, to speak—it is strange, I say, that, search my memory as I will, I can find therein no impressions whatever save these two.

“What was the beginning? When did I begin to live? Did I not live indeed when I learnt to see, to hear, to speak, when I slept, sucked the breast and kissed the breast, and laughed and delighted my mother? I lived and lived gloriously! Did not I then acquire everything whereby I live now?—and did I not acquire so much so quickly, that in all the remainder of my life I have not acquired a