Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/129

mendous, shaggy wind was tossing about and where the slanting clouds of dusk were descending lower and lower. . . .

U- boldly and firmly grasped me by the shoulders. I even noticed how her fingers, responding to my emotion, trembled slightly.

“Sit down, dear, and don’t be upset. They say many things; must we believe them all? Moreover, if only you need me, I shall be near you on that day. I shall leave the school children with someone else and I shall stay with you, for you, dear, you, too, are a child and you need . . .”

“No, no!” I raised my hands in protest. “Not for anything! You really think then that I am a child and that I cannot do without a Oh, no! Not for anything in the world.” (I must confess I had other plans for that day!)

She smiled. The wording of that smile apparently was: “Oh, what a stubborn, what a stubborn boy!” She sat down, eyelids lowered. Her hands modestly busied themselves with fixing the fold of the unif which fell again between her knees, and suddenly, about something entirely different, she said:

“I think I must decide . . . for your sake. . . . But I implore you, do not hurry me. I must think it over.”

I did not hurry her, although I realized that I ought to have been delighted, as there is no greater honor than to crown someone’s evening years.

. . . All night strange wings were about. I walked and protected my head with my hands from those wings. And a chair, not like ours, but an ancient chair, came in with a horse-like gait; first the right foreleg and left hind leg, then the left foreleg and right hind leg. It rushed to my bed and crawled into it, and I liked that wooden chair, although it made me uncomfortable and caused me some pain.

It is very strange; is it really impossible to find any cure for this dream sickness, or to make it rational, perhaps even useful?