The Precipice | Page 4

he rose tired, exhausted, and unable for a long time to resume normal life.
People called him an idler. He feared this accusation, and wept over it in secret, though he was convinced that he was no idler, but something different, that no one but himself comprehended.
Unfortunately, there was no one to guide him in a definite direction. On the one hand, his guardian merely saw to it that his masters came at stated times and that Boris did not avoid school; on the other, his aunt contented herself with seeing that he was in good health, ate and slept well, was decently dressed, and as a well-brought-up boy should, did not consort with every village lout.
Nobody cared to see what he read; his aunt gave him the keys of his father's library in the old house, where he shut himself in, now to read Spinoza, now a novel, and another day Voltaire or Boccaccio.
He made better progress in the arts than in the sciences. Here too he had his tricks. One day the teacher set the pupils to draw eyes, but Raisky grew tired of that, and proceeded to add a nose and a moustache. The master surprised him, and seized him by the hair. When he looked closer at the drawing, however, he asked: "Where did you learn to do that?"
"Nowhere," was the reply.
"But it is well done, my lad. See yourself what this hurry to get on leads to; the forehead and nose are good enough, but the ear you have put in the wrong place, and the hair looks like tow."
Raisky was triumphant. The words, "But it is well done; the forehead and nose are good enough," were for him a crown of laurel.
He walked round the school yard proud in the consciousness that he was the best in the drawing class; this mood lasted to the next day, when he came to grief in the ordinary lessons. But he conceived a passion for drawing, and during the month that followed drew a curly-headed boy, then the head of Fingal. His fancy was caught by a woman's head which hung in the master's room; it leaned a little towards one shoulder, and looked away into the distance with melancholy, meditative eyes. "Allow me to make a copy," he begged with a gentle, tremulous voice, and with a nervous quiver of the upper lip.
"Don't break the glass," the master warned him, and gave him the picture. Boris was happy. For a whole week his masters did not secure a single intelligent answer from him. He sat silently in his corner and drew. At night he took the drawing to his bedroom, and as he looked into its gracious eyes, followed the lines of the delicately bent neck, he shivered, his heart stood still, there was a catch in his breath, and he closed his eyes; with a faint sigh he pressed the picture to his breast where the breath came so painfully--and then there was a crash and the glass fell clattering on the floor.
When he had drawn the head his pride knew no bounds. His work was exhibited with the drawings of pupils of the top class, the teacher had made few corrections, had only here and there put broad strokes in the shading, had drawn three or four more decided lines, had put a point in each eye--and the eyes were now like life.
"How lifelike and bold it is!" thought Raisky, as he looked at the strokes inserted by his master, and more especially at the points in the eyes, which had so suddenly given them the look of life. This step forward intoxicated him. "Talent! Talent!" sang in his ears.
He sketched the maids, the coachman, the peasants of the countryside. He was particularly successful with the idiot Feklusha, seated in a cavern with her bust in the shade, and the light on her wild hair; he had not the patience nor the skill to finish bust, hands and feet. How could anybody be expected to sit still all the morning, when the sun was shedding its rays so gaily and so generously on stream and meadow?
Within three days the picture had faded in his imagination, and new images were thronging his brain. He would like to have drawn a round dance, a drunken old man, the rapid passage of a tro?ka. For two days he was taken up with this picture, which stood before his mind's eye in every detail; the peasants and the women were finished, but not the waggon with its three fleet horses.
In a week he had forgotten this picture also.
He loved music to distraction. At school he had an enduring affection for the dull Vassyvkov, who was the laughing stock of the other boys. A boy would seize Vassyvkov by the