Page:More Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/20

Biography my first consciousness of the fact that our house had an upper storey. How I got up there, whether I went there myself, or whether someone carried me, I don’t recollect at all. I only recollect that there were a good many of us there, and we were all dancing, holding each other’s hands, and there were some strange women amongst us (I have a dim recollection that they were washerwomen), and we all began to leap and caper, and Theodor Ivanovich also leaped, lifting his feet too high and too noisily and boisterously, and the same instant I felt that this was not right but excessive, and I looked at him, and meseems I began to cry, and the whole thing came to an end.

“That is all I can recollect up to my fifth year. I remember nothing of my nurse, my aunts, my brothers, my sisters, my father, my rooms, and my games. My recollections grow more distinct from the time when they brought me downstairs to Theodor Ivanovich and to the older children.

“On being taken downstairs to Theodor Ivanovich and the children, I experienced for the first time, and consequently more strongly than at any subsequent period, the feeling which we call the sense of duty, the feeling of the cross which everyone is called upon to bear. It was painful to me to forsake what I had been accustomed to (accustomed to from eternity, as it then seemed to me); it was painful, poetically painful, to part not only from people, from my sister, my aunt, but also from my little bed with the curtains, from my little pillow, and frightful to me was the new life on which I was entering