Her dry voice was full of hatred and she longed to strike the kneeling woman with her foot.
“Ugh! heartless wretches! You would be glad to take even my only child from me!” she wrathfully whispered, and pulled Valia away by his hand. “Come! Don’t be like your father, who abandoned me.”
“Ta-ke ca-re of him,” Nastasia called after them.
The hired sleigh which stood waiting for them flew softly and lightly over the snow and noiselessly carried Valia away from the quiet house with its wonderful plants and flowers, its mysterious fairy-tale world, immeasurable and deep as the sea, with its windows gently screened by the boughs of the tall trees of the garden. Soon the house was lost in the mass of other houses, as similar to each other as the letters in Valia’s book, and vanished forever from Valia.
It seemed to him as if they were swimming in a river, the banks of which were constituted of rows of lanterns as close to each other as beads on a string, but when they approached nearer, the beads were scattered, forming large, dark spaces and merging behind into just such a line of light. And then Valia thought that they were standing motionless on the very same spot; and everything began to be like a fairy tale—he himself and the tall woman who was pressing him to her with her bony hand, and everything around him.
The hand in which he carried his book was getting stiff with cold, but he would not ask his mother to take the book from him.
The small room into which Valia’s mother had taken him was untidy and hot; in a corner near the large bed stood a little curtained bed such as Valia had not slept in for a long, long time.
“You are frozen! Well, wait, we shall soon have some tea! Well, now you are with your mama. Are you glad?” his mother asked with the hard, unpleasant look of one who has been forced to smile beneath blows all her life long.
“No,” Valia replied shyly, frightened at his own frankness.
“No? And I had bought some toys for you. Just look, there they are on the window.”