Tears came into his eyes. He wiped them away, and, smiling, he looked at his handkerchief, while the tears again ran down his wrinkles. "I am crying," he said. "I am an old man. It cuts me to the heart when I remember something horrible."
And very gently touching me with his elbow, he said: "You, too—you will have lived your life, and everything will remain exactly as it was, and then you, too, will cry worse than I, more streamingly,' as the peasant women say. And everything must be written about, everything; otherwise that bright little boy might be hurt, he might reproach us—'it's untrue, it's not the whole truth,' he will say. He's strict for the truth."
Suddenly he gave himself a shake and said in a kind voice: "Now, tell me a story; you tell them well. Something about a child, about your childhood. It's not easy to believe that you were once a child. You are a strange creature, exactly as if you were born grown-up. In your ideas there is a good deal of the child-like and the immature, but you know more than enough of life—and one cannot ask for more. Well, tell me a story....'
He lay down comfortably upon the bare roots of a pine tree and watched the ants moving busily among the grey spines.
In the South, which, with its self-asserting luxuriance and flaunting, unbridled vegetation, seems so strangely incongruous to a man from the North, he, Leo Tolstoi—even his name speaks of his inner power—seemed a small man, but knitted and knotted out of very strong roots deep in the earth —in the flaunting scenery of the Crimea, I say, he was at once both out of place and in his place. He seemed a very ancient man, master of all his surroundings—a master-builder who, after centuries of absence, has arrived in the mansion built by him. He has forgotten a great deal which it contains; much is new to him; everything is as it should be, and yet not entirely so, and he has at once to find out what is amiss and why it is amiss.
He walked the roads and paths with a businesslike, quick step of the skilled explorer of the earth, and with sharp eyes, from which neither a single pebble nor a single thought could hide itself, he looked, measured, tested, compared. And he scattered about him the living seeds of indomitable thoughts. He said to Suler once: "You, Liovushka, read nothing which is not good out of self-conceit, while Gorky reads a lot which is not good, because he distrusts himself. I write much which is not good, because of an old man's ambition, a desire that all should think as I do. Of course, I think it is good, and Gorky thinks it is not good, and you think nothing at all; you simply blink and watch what you may clutch. One day you will clutch something which does not belong to you—it has happened to you before. You will put your claws into it, hold on for a bit, and when it begins to get loose, you won't try to stop it. Tchekhov has a superb story, The Darling—you are rather like her."
"In what?" asked Suler, laughing.
"You can love well, but to choose—no, you can't, and you will waste yourself on trifles."
"Is everyone like that?"
"Everyone?" Leo Nicolayevitch repeated.