The honorary guardian of the school, a notary from another town, chewed his gums all the time and stuck out his short parrot’s tongue with sheer delight, feeling that the whole show had been got up in his honour.
At last the teacher got to the most important item on his programme. We had laughed up till then, our turn was coming to weep. A little girl of twelve or thirteen came out, the daughter of a watchman, her face, by the way, not at all like his horse-like profile. She was the top girl in the school and she began her little song:
“The jumping little grasshopper sang the summer through,
Never once considering how the winter would blow in
his eyes.”
Then a shaggy little boy of seven, in his father’s felt boots, took up his part, addressing the watchman’s daughter:
“That’s strange, neighbour. Didn’t you work in the summer?”
“What was there to work for? There was plenty of grass.”
Where was our famous Russian hospitality?
To the question, “What did you do in the summer?” the grasshopper could only reply, “I sang all the time.”
At this answer the teacher, Kapitonitch, waved his bow and his fiddle at one and the same time—oh, that was an effect rehearsed long before that evening!—and suddenly in a mysterious half-whisper the whole choir began to sing:
“You’ve sung your song, you call that doing,
You’ve sung all the summer, then dance all the winter,
You’ve sung your song, then dance all the winter,
Dance all the winter, dance all the winter.
You’ve sung the song, then dance the dance.”
I confess that my hair stood on end as if each individual hair were made of glass, and it seemed to me as if the eyes of the children and of the peasants packing the schoolroom were all fixed on me as if repeating that d——d phrase: