'Is it wild ecstasy?' I asked, looking into his laughing eyes, and feeling that the 'wild ecstasy' was infecting me.
'Yes,' he answered, winking and checking a smile. 'But I don't see why you need hit Katerina Karlovna on the nose.'
With my eyes on him I had gone on waving the branch, without noticing that I had knocked the handkerchief off Katya's face and was now brushing her with the leaves. I laughed.
'She will say she was awake all the time,' I whispered, as if not to awake Katya; but that was not my real reason – it was only that I liked to whisper to him.
He moved his lips in imitation of me, pretending that my voice was too low for him to hear. Catching sight of the dish of cherries, he pretended to steal it, and carried it off to Sonya under the lime tree, where he sat down on her dolls. Sonya was angry at first, but he soon made his peace with her by starting a game, to see which of them could eat cherries faster.
'If you like, I will send for more cherries,' I said; 'or let us go ourselves.'
He took the dish and set the dolls on it, and we all three started for the orchard. Sonya ran behind us, laughing and pulling at his coat, to make him surrender the dolls. He gave them up and then turned to me, speaking more seriously.
'You really are a violet,' he said, still speaking low, though there was no longer any fear of waking anybody; 'when I came to you out of all that dust and heat and toil, I positively smelt violets at once. But not the sweet violet – you know, that early dark violet that smells of melting snow and spring grass.'
'Is harvest going on well?' I asked, in order to hide the happy agitation which his words produced in me.
'First rate! Our people are always splendid. The more you know them, the better you like them.'
'Yes,' I said; 'before you came I was watching them from the garden, and suddenly I felt ashamed to be so comfortable myself while they were hard at work, and so . . .'
He interrupted me, with a kind but grave look: 'Don't talk like that, my dear; it is too sacred a matter to talk of lightly. God forbid that you should use fine phrases about that!'
'But it is only to you I say this.'
'All right, I understand. But what about those cherries?'
The orchard was locked, and no gardener to be seen: he had sent them all off to help with the harvest. Sonya ran to fetch the key. But he would not wait for her: climbing up a corner of the wall, he raised the net and jumped down on the other side.
His voice came over the wall – 'If you want some, give me the dish.'
'No,' I said; 'I want to pick for myself. I shall fetch the key; Sonya won't find it.'
But suddenly I felt that I must see what he was doing there and what he looked like – that I must watch his movements while he supposed that no one saw him. Besides I was simply unwilling just then to lose sight of him for a single minute. running on tiptoe through the nettles to the other side of the orchard where the wall was lower, I mounted on an empty cask, till the top of the wall was on a level with my waist, and then leaned over into the orchard. I looked at the gnarled old trees, with their broad dented leaves and the ripe black cherries hanging straight and heavy among the foliage; then I pushed my head under the net, and from under the knotted bough of an old cherry tree I caught sight of Sergey Mikhaylych. He evidently thought that I had gone away and that no one was watching him. With his hat off and his eyes shut, he was sitting on the fork of an old tree and carefully rolling into a ball a lump of cherry tree gum. Suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, opened his eyes, muttered something, and smiled. Both words and smile were so unlike him that I felt ashamed of myself for eavesdropping. It seemed to me that he had said, 'Masha!' 'Impossible,' i thought. 'Darling Masha!' he said again, in a lower and more tender tone. There was possible doubt about the two words this time. My heart beat hard, and such a passionate joy – illicit joy, as I felt – took hold of me, that I clutched at the wall, fearing to fall and betray myself. Startled by the sound of my movement, he looked round – he dropped his eyes instantly, and his face turned red, even scarlet, like a child's. He tried to speak, but in vain; again and again his face positively flamed up. Still he smiled as he looked at me, and I smiled too. Then his whole face grew radiant with happiness. He had ceased to be the old uncle who spoiled or scolded me; he was a man on my level, who loved and feared me as I loved and feared him. We looked at one another without speaking. But suddenly he frowned; the smile and light in his eyes disappeared, and he resumed his cold paternal tone, just as if we were doing something wrong and he was repenting and calling on me to repent.
'You had better get down, or you will hurt yourself,' he said; 'and do put your hair straight; just think what you look like?'
'What makes him pretend? what makes him want to give me pain?' I thought in my vexation. And the same instant brought an irresistible desire to upset his composure again and test my power over him.
'No,' I said; 'I mean to pick for myself.' I caught hold of the nearest branch and climbed to the top of the wall; then, before he had time to catch me, I jumped down on the other side.
'What foolish things you do!' he muttered, flushing again and trying to hide his confusion under a pretence of annoyance; 'you might really have hurt yourself. But how do you mean to get out of this?'
He was even more confused than before, but this time his confusion frightened rather than pleased me. It infected me too and made me blush; avoiding his eye and not knowing what to say, I began to pick cherries though I had nothing to put them in. I reproached myself, I repented of what I had done, I was frightened; I felt that I had lost his good opinion for ever by my folly. Both of us were silent and embarrassed. From this difficult situation Sonya rescued us by running back with the key in her hand. For some time we both addressed our conversation to her and said nothing to each other. When we returned to Katya, who assured us that she had never been asleep and was listening all the time, I calmed down, and he tried to drop into his fatherly patronizing manner again, but I was not taken in by it. A discussion which we had had some days before came back clear before me.
Katya had been saying that it was easier for a man to be in love and declare his love than for a woman.
'A man may say that he is in love, and a woman can't,' she said.
'I disagree,' said he; 'a man has no business to say, and can't say that he is in love.'
'Why not?' I asked.
'Because it never can be true. What sort of a revelation is that, that a man is in love? A man seems to think that whenever he says the word, something will go pop! – that some miracle will be worked, signs and wonders, with all the big guns firing at once! In my opinion,' he went on, 'whoever solemnly brings out the words 'I love you' is either deceiving himself or, which is even worse, deceiving others.'
'Then how is a woman to know that a man is in love with her, unless he tells her?' asked Katya.
'That I don't know,' he answered; 'every man has his own way of telling things. If the feeling exists, it will out somehow. But when I read novels, I always fancy the crestfallen look of Lieut. Strelsky or Alfred, when he says, 'I love you, Eleanora', and expects something wonderful to happen at once, and no change at all takes place in either of them – their eyes and their noses and their whole selves remain exactly as they were.'
Even then I had felt that this banter covered something serious that had reference to myself. But Katya resented his disrespectful treatment of the heroes in novels.
'You are never serious,' she said; 'but tell me truthfully, have you never yourself told a woman that you loved her?'
'Never, and never gone down on one knee,' he answered, laughing; 'and never will.'
This conversation I now recalled, and i reflected that there was no need for him to tell me that he loved me. 'I know that he loves me,' I thought, 'and all his endeavors to seem indifferent will not change my opinion.'
He said little to me throughout the evening, but in every word he said to Katya and Sonya and in every look and movement of his I saw love and felt no doubt of it. I was only vexed and sorry for him, that he thought it necessary still to hide his feelings and pretend coldness, when it was all so clear, and when it would have been so simple and easy to be boundlessly happy. But my jumping down to him in the orchard weighed on me like a crime. I kept feeling that he would cease to respect me and was angry with me.
After tea I went to the piano, and he followed me.
'Play me something – it is long since I heard you,' he said, catching me up in the parlor.
'I was just going to,' I said. Then I looked straight in his face and said quickly, 'Sergey Mikhaylych, you are not angry with me, are you?'
'What for?' he asked.
'For not obeying you this afternoon,' I said, blushing.
