Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral TalesTolstoy, Leo, graf
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Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral Tales
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Russian literature -- Translations into English
"We will have tea, Natásha. Yes? Tea, then, if you please! We will have
some other talks, my dear monsieur! What a charming man!"
"And the bath, papa?"
"Oh, yes, then we shall have no tea."
Thus the only result from the conversation with the newly arrived guests
was taken from the landlord. But Peter Ivánovich was now proud and happy
of his arrangements. The drivers, who came to ask a _pourboire_, vexed
him, because Serézha had no change, and Peter Ivánovich was on the point
of sending once more for the landlord, but the happy thought that
others, too, ought to be happy on that evening helped him out of that
predicament. He took two three-rouble bills, and, sticking one bill into
the hand of one of the drivers, he said, "This is for you" (Peter
Ivánovich was in the habit of saying "you" to all without exception,
unless to a member of his family); "and this is for you," he said,
transferring the other bill from the palm of his hand to that of the
driver, in some such manner as people do when paying a doctor for a
visit. After attending to all these things, he was taken to the
bath-house.
Sónya, who was sitting on the divan, put her hand under her head and
burst out laughing.
"Oh, how nice it is, mamma! Oh, how nice!"
Then she placed her feet on the divan, stretched herself, adjusted
herself, and fell into the sound, calm sleep of a healthy girl of
eighteen years of age, after six weeks on the road. Natálya Nikoláevna,
who was still busy taking out things in her sleeping-room, heard, no
doubt with her maternal ear, that Sónya was not stirring, and went out
to take a look at her. She took a pillow and, raising the girl's
reddened, dishevelled head with her large white hand, placed her on the
pillow. Sónya drew a deep, deep sigh, shrugged her shoulders, and put
her head on the pillow, without saying "_Merci_," as though that had all
been done of its own accord.
"Not on that bed, not on that, Gavrílovna, Kátya," Natálya Nikoláevna
immediately turned to the maids who were making a bed, and with one
hand, as though in passing, she adjusted the straying hair of her
daughter. Without stopping and without hurrying, Natálya Nikoláevna
dressed herself, and upon the arrival of her husband and her son
everything was ready: the trunks were no longer in the rooms; in
Pierre's sleeping-room everything was arranged as it had been for
several decades in Irkútsk: the morning-gown, the pipe, the
tobacco-pouch, the sugared water, the Gospel, which he read at night,
and even the image stuck to the rich wall-paper in the rooms of
Chevalier, who never used such adornments, but on that evening they
appeared in all the rooms of the third division of the hotel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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