Then we would boldly make to kiss her on the lips, which we did in spite of feigned resistance and screams.
And we would make a circle. One day there were a lot of us there; four students on holiday from an ecclesiastical college, the psalm-singer, a housekeeper from a neighbouring estate, the two school-mistresses, the policeman in his uniform, the deacon, the local horse-doctor, and we three æsthetes. We went round and round in a dance, and sang, roared, swinging now this way, now that, and the lion of the company, a student named Vozdvizhensky, stood in the middle and ordered our movements, dancing himself the while and snapping his fingers over his head:
“The queen was in the town, yes, the town,
And the prince, the little prince, ran away.
Found a bride, did the prince, found a bride.
She was nice, yes she was, she was nice,
And a ring got the prince for her, a ring.”
After a while the giddy whirl of the dance came to an end, and we stopped and began to sing to one another, in solemn tones:
“The royal gates were opened,
Bowed the king to the queen,
And the queen to the king,
But lower bowed the queen.”
And then the horse-doctor and the psalm-singer had a competition as to who should bow lower to the other.
Our visiting continued, and at last came to the school-house at Tuma. That was inevitable, since there had been long rehearsals of an entertainment which the children were going to give entirely for our benefit—Petersburg guests. We went in. The Christmas tree was lit simultaneously by a touch-paper. As for the programme, I knew it by heart before we went in. There were several little tableaux, illustrative of songs of the countryside. It was all poorly done, but it must be confessed that one six-year-old mite playing the part of a peasant, wearing a huge cap of dog-skin and his father’s great leather gloves with only places for hand and thumb, was delightful, with his serious face and hoarse little bass voice—a born artist.
The remainder was very disgusting. All done in the false popular style.
I had long been familiar with the usual entertainment items: Little-Russian songs mispronounced to an impossible point; verses and silly embroidery patterns: “There’s a Christmas tree, there’s Petrushka, there’s a horse, there’s a steam-engine.” The teacher, a little consumptive fellow, got up for the occasion in a long frock-coat and stiff shirt, played the fiddle in fits and starts, or beat time with his bow, or tapped a child on the head with it now and then.