"Say when I smoothed thy hair,
Showed I not tender care?
Say when I dressed my child,
Was I not fond and mild?"[1]
[1] These lines have been kindly translated from the original by Miss Troutbeck.
It was very pretty, and the voice wonderful—so sweet and clear and melodious. To-morrow evening she might be at the pit's mouth again, and then he would find out her name. Even if she were not there, the other girls would know; there were not so many singers among them.
"Say when I smoothed thy hair"—
Oh, he could settle down to nothing with this tiresome song!—
"Showed I not tender care?"
He wished he had seen her face, merely to know if it matched the voice. Very likely not. She would be hard-featured, like the other girls—bold, unwomanly creatures; beauty and modesty were rare gifts in Bondavara.
The next day Ivan was early at the pit. The opening of the air-oven had done its work; there was only a fractional quantity of hydrogen mixed with the pit air. The ventilators could be shut, and Ivan was able to spend some time in the open.
At twelve o'clock the bell rang to leave off work. As the girls came from the wheelbarrows, he again heard the clear young voice singing the same song. He had not been wrong as to the voice; it was fresh and lovely, like the blackbird in the woods, uneducated and unspoiled, but full of natural charm, tender and joyous as the feathered songster. He could now see the singer—a very young girl, not more than sixteen. The common blue bodice she wore showed every undulation of her girlish figure, untrammelled by any fashionable stays. Her short red skirt, tucked up on one side, and fastened to her waist, disclosed her still shorter chemise, which only reached to her knees, so that her legs were uncovered. They might have been modelled for a statue of Hebe, so perfect were they in shape—the ankles small, and little feet beautifully rounded, like a child's. About her head the girl had wound a colored cloth, and under this she had tucked away her hair; her face, like those of her companions, was blackened by the coal-dust, but even this enemy to beauty could not disfigure her. You could see that her features were regular, her eyebrows thick and dark, her lips red. There was a mixture of earthly dirt and supernatural beauty about this child; besides, she had one thing that even coal-dust could not conceal or dim, her eyes—her large black eyes—shining like two diamonds, which lit up the darkness as two stars.
As these wonderful eyes met Ivan's glance, it seemed to that philosopher as if these diamonds cut away a portion of the glass phial in which he had preserved his heart, and so kept it untouched up to this. But he did not know that this was only the beginning; his glass protector will soon lie in fragments all round him.