"What's the matter with you? I'm not interfering with you!"
And immediately she took up the song at the very place she had left off. Larissa said amiably:
"Let her sing."
"It's raining hard on me,
There's no roof for a girl like me—"
bawled Darya, imitating the sounds and drawing out the syllables as the simple folk-singers do to make a song more pathetic. For example, it sounded like this:
"O-o-oh; it's a-rai-ai-ning ha-a-a-rd on me-e-e!"
Particularly unpleasant were the sounds stretched out where the accents did not fall. It produced a superlative impression: it would have brought a mortal depression on a new listener. A sadness resounding through our native fields and villages, a sadness consuming with a hideous flame the living word, debasing a once living song with senseless howling....
Suddenly Darya sprang up, put her hand on her hips and began to shout out a gay song,[3] dancing and snapping her fingers:
"Go away, young fellow, go away—
I am a robber's daughter
A fig for your good looks—
I'll stick a knife in your belly.
I'll not have a muzhik.
I'm going to love a bossiak."[4]
Darya danced and sang, and her eyes seemed as motionless as the dead moon in its orbit. Liudmilla laughed loudly—and her heart now felt faint, now felt oppressed, from gay joyousness or from the cherry-sweet cherry brandy. Valeria laughed quietly with glass-sounding laughter, and looked enviously at her sisters; she wished she were as cheerful as they, but somehow she felt anything but cheerful—she thought that she was the last, the youngest, "the left-over"; hence her frailty and her unhappiness. And though she was laughing she was almost on the point of bursting into tears.