ort bursts
of  escaping steam, a chain rattled,  and  steel  rods moved in their  oiled
grooves  along the sides, slightly turning the rudder.  That  meant that the
ship had yawed and the helmsman was bringing her back.
     There was something strange about the fact that the ship sailing on its
course should suddenly  yaw. What  mysterious  forces of nature could affect
its simple mechanical movement? The wind? Currents? The motion of the Earth?
Petya did not know the answer, but the realization that these unknown forces
existed and were constantly at work all around him, and that it was possible
to overcome them,  instilled in Petya a great respect for the helmsman and a
still greater respect for the compass at which he glanced from time to time.
     For the first time in his life Petya really grasped the full meaning of
this wonderful,  simple  instrument,  invented  by  man's genius  to  battle
against the dark  forces of nature. A brass bowl on a cast-iron stand  stood
alongside  the wheel, and a brightly illumined dial set on a thin pin seemed
to be  floating freely inside  it under  a glass cover. The disk, or compass
card,  was divided into  points,  degrees, and  fractions  of  degrees.  The
navigator had laid a copper ruler to point out their course,  and the moment
the  ship  veered ever  so slightly  the  markings on the  disk moved out of
place:  then the helmsman, by turning the wheel, would bring them into place
again.
     The copper ruler was now pointing  towards Naples.  Although everything
around them was as black as  the bottom of la coal-pit, the ship raced ahead
unerringly,  at  full  speed,   making  up  for  the  time  lost  at   their
ports-of-call.
     Suddenly Petya noticed a strange light away on the  horizon. It did not
look  like a lighthouse  or like  the glow  of an  approaching ship. It  was
almost red and very uneven. It shone  for a while  and went out; two minutes
later  it would flare up again,  shine and go out again; and so it continued
at regular  intervals-a  rhythmic  appearing and  disappearing, but  growing
bigger all the  time. It was as if someone had  put a smouldering matchstick
in his mouth, and the breathing- made the little ember glow brightly.
     By now the waves and the edges of a dark night  cloud were brushed with
light, and a blast of heat seemed to come from the direction of the glow.
     "What can it be?" Petya exclaimed in a frightened voice.
     "Stromboli," a familiar voice answered. This was the first mate who had
just  come up on the  spar-deck. "Il  famoso vulcano Stromboli"  he repeated
solemnly and handed Petya his large sea binoculars, the dark lenses of which
reflected the red glow of Stromboli.
     They were  passing the volcano  now and Petya looked at  it through the
binoculars. Just then  a flame shot up,  as if  coming from  the  pipe  of a
samovar. The fire illuminated the edge of the crater, and Petya even thought
he heard an underwater rumbling and felt a wave of volcanic heat, but it was
only his fancy.
     Before  long Stromboli had  slipped  behind; however, its  fiery breath
could be seen through the pitch darkness, casting a grim light on  the waves
and clouds.
     Petya  was  in  ecstasy:  he  had  just  seen  with  his  own   eyes  a
fire-spouting  mountain, a real, genuine volcano! It  wasn't every schoolboy
who could  boast  of having seen one.  Schoolboy-why,  probably not  even  a
single  teacher  had ever  been  so near  to a  real volcano!  Not even  the
geography  teacher. Not  even the head  of the school. Maybe the head of the
Education Department  had seen  one, but certainly not the school inspector.
What would Auntie say when she found out he had seen a volcano! And what  la
fuss their friends would make! This time not  even  Gavrik would wrinkle  up
his  nose  disdainfully,  spit through his  teeth  and  say,  "Now  tell  me
another." Too bad  there were no witnesses except the helmsman and the first
mate. Perhaps though  it was  even better that  Daddy and  Pavlik  had slept
through it all.  This  time  Petya would  be cock of the walk of  the Bachei
family.
     Petya  waited  until the volcano had disappeared  completely  and  then
rushed below anticipating his triumph and Pavlik's humiliation when he would
burst into the cabin and say, "I've just seen a volcano-you've slept through
the whole thing!"
     But the triumph was not to be: all the  other passengers had  long been
lining the rails, and Pavlik,  who  had been awakened by his  waiter friend,
was standing at the stern, his chin pressed against the rail, trying to look
interested while Vasily Petrovich  lectured in popular vein  on  the volcano
they had just observed.
     Thereupon  Petya went below  to the  cabin  to  be the first  to inform
Auntie of the great event. He rummaged in his  rucksack and found the nicest
of all  the  Constantinople postcards with a picture of the Galata Tower  on
it, and wrote: "Dear  Auntie! You'll never guess  what happened! Of  course,
you won't believe me, but I've just seen a  real, active volcano with my own
eyes!"
     Petya paused, made a bargain with his conscience, and resolutely added:
"It was erupting!"
     By this time  Petya  was really  convinced that  the  volcano had  been
erupting.  When  he  had  snatched  up  his  pencil,  he was  bursting  with
impressions  and was  ready  to fill up  every inch of space on the postcard
with a magnificent description of a volcano erupting in the open sea. But no
sooner  had he  written the first  majestic  sentences  than his inspiration
petered out.
     To tell the truth, Pliny the Younger had already described  an erupting
volcano and  Petya, having  read the description  in his geography textbook,
did not feel like competing with one  of Rome's  finest  writers, especially
since  Pliny  had described something that he had witnessed,  whereas  Petya
would have to describe what he had not seen.
     And so after the words "It was erupting!" he added: "Your loving nephew
Petya," and hid the postcard in the rucksack, hoping to post it at the first
opportunity.
     Thus,  if Petya's description of the erupting volcano  lacked something
of  Pliny's accuracy, its truly classical  laconism  left the great writer's
effort very much in the shade.



        NAPLES AND THE NEAPOLITANS


     A number of rocky islands  were sighted during  the day. Bathed  in the
silver light of the  noonday sun, they seemed like some ethereal silhouettes
of  varying  shades  of deep blue: the  nearer  ones a darker hue, the  more
distant-lighter.  The  Palermo  was  steaming   full  speed  ahead.  It  had
disembarked the last of the  steerage passengers, its freight decks had been
swabbed  and scrubbed white, the  copper coamings  and  ladders were shining
brightly, the  lifeboats  and  lifebuoys had  had a fresh coat of paint, the
Italian flag was fluttering in the  breeze; the Palermo again became a spick
and span ocean liner.
     "There's  Capri,  and Ischia, and Procida," Vasily Petrovich called out
the  names  of  the islands  they were passing as they  entered the  Bay  of
Naples.
     "Vesuvius!" Pavlik shouted at the top of his lungs. True enough, it was
Vesuvius. The grey-blue silhouette of the twin peaks, with  sulphurous smoke
pouring out  of one of  them,  was outlined  sharply  in the bright haze. It
melted before their eyes, vanished into thin air, and revealed a panorama of
the city and hundreds of ships at anchor in the harbour.
     A flock of gulls attacked the Palermo. The graceful white birds floated
on outspread wings, snatching at  shreds of greens thrown out of the kitchen
porthole. To  tell the  truth, Petya  was already  bored  with the ship.  At
first, when  everything had been new and mysterious, it had fascinated  him;
now, however, at the end of the long  voyage, it no longer  interested  him.
But when he set foot on the paved yard of the Naples custom-house,  he, like
the Prisoner of Chillon, suddenly regretted his prison.
     He felt, after all, that he did  not want  to part  with the ship, with
its wonderful places, strange smells, and the  long, narrow, unpainted beech
deck planks caulked with tar and scrubbed clean with sand.
     During the customs  inspection  Petya  was  terrified lest  the Italian
inspector  find  the letter in  his  rucksack. However, the more than meagre
baggage of the Bachei family was completely ignored by the customs officers.
     The official did not even glance at the unique concoction of the Odessa
harness-and-luggage industry as he passed  by. All he did was jab his  thumb
in it, and the agent following him  drew a circle in chalk  on each of their
bags. The Bacheis were now free to pick up their things and go.
     There was something humiliating in this official  disdain, for they did
examine  the other passengers' baggage.  These  were  mainly  the  expensive
trunks and suitcases of the first-class passengers,  covered with  gay hotel
labels. The  officials  minutely examined the exquisite clothing, pulled out
Syrian  shawls,  crystal humidors  of  Turkish tobacco,  and  round  jars of
Russian caviar, and respectfully demanded duty.
     Vasily Petrovich  and  the  boys  hoisted their Alpine  bags  with some
effort and hauled the bursting  sack  out  on to  the scorching square. They
were immediately  surrounded by a crowd of screeching hotel agents. Each had
a  gold-braided  cap with the name of his hotel  on the peak. Petya had once
witnessed a similar scene at the  Odessa  railway station, whither  they had
gone to meet Grandma. It had amused  him to see a swarm of vociferous agents
dragging at the coat-tails of a protesting gentleman clutching his umbrella.
     But the  Odessa agents were no match for their  Neapolitan  colleagues.
The Neapolitans were three times  more numerous and four times as audacious.
They  shrieked as they attacked Vasily Petrovich: "Grand-Hotel! Continental!
Livorno! Vesuvio! Hotel di Roma! Hotel di  Firenze! Hotel di  Venezia!" They
brandished wads of brightly illustrated prospectuses and promised fabulously
low rates, unheard-of comforts, suites facing Vesuvius, family table d'hote,
breakfasts thrown in, and excursions to Pompeii.
     Vasily  Petrovich  waved  frantically to  a  group  of porters  in blue
blouses  with  badges on  their chests  who were  sitting on the flagstones,
utterly indifferent to the massacre of defenceless tourists by hotel agents.
Vasily  Petrovich  tried to break  through to the  cabmen. He was successful
too, but they were as impassive as the porters: they sat on their high boxes
with meters, smoking long, foul-smelling cigars, and not one of them offered
Vasily Petrovich a helping hand.
     On the contrary, when  he had finally managed to gain the lower step of
one of the cabs, the cabman  glared at him, snatched off his  well-worn felt
hat, shook it menacingly at Vasily Petrovich and screamed, "No, signor, no!"
so that Vasily Petrovich was forced to retreat.
     There  was  something sinister  about  the strange indifference  of the
cabmen and porters. Vasily Petrovich did not know what to make of  it. Later
on  they  found out that they  had arrived in Naples the  day the  coachmen,
porters,  and  tramway  workers  had  struck work  in  protest  against  the
government's preparations for war with Turkey.
     But this did  not  help the Bacheis  very much,  for the hotel  agents,
apparently satisfied that Italy should conquer  Tripoli, were not on strike.
Despite his deep dislike of the police, Vasily Petrovich  was about ready to
appeal  to two carabineers  for help. They  were as alike as peas in a  pod:
both wore three-cornered  hats and black  trousers with red stripes down the
sides, both had the  same type of moustache  and both  had big noses. But at
that moment things took a different turn.
     A small, fat, shrewd hotel agent  had the bright idea that the way to a
father's heart lay through his love for his son. He hoisted a kicking Pavlik
on to one shoulder, the plaid rucksack  on to the other, and made off down a
side-street. Vasily Petrovich and Petya dashed after him, but it took them a
good forty minutes  of fast sprinting  to catch  up  with  him at  the Hotel
Esplanade.
     When he had finally deposited Pavlik and the rucksack in the lobby, the
agent hung his cap up on a peg over the desk and was immediately transformed
from agent  into owner  of  the  establishment.  It turned out  that he also
personified four  others: waiter, chef, lift-boy  and porter-in other words,
he was the entire personnel of the hotel, not counting the chamber-maid  and
cashier- posts held by his wife.
     The Hotel Esplanade was located between a second-hand clothing shop and
an eating-house in an alley so narrow that no two carriages could  ever pass
each other  there. This,  however,  was a  minor  detail, for the  alley was
actually a large stairway of  wide  and worn stone slabs.  Garments of every
hue were drying on the clotheslines strung between  the tall, narrow houses,
and  although  Naples  was  resplendent in the radiant colours  of June, the
alley was dark and damp; even a green  gas-lamp  shone in the  window of the
eating-house.
     Hotel  Esplanade  boasted  but four  rooms,  all  of  them  facing  the
glassed-in gallery of the courtyard  which was very much like the courtyards
in  the  older  parts  of Odessa-the only  difference  being that  here  the
flowering oleanders and azaleas grew not out of green tubs, but straight out
of the  ground, and the garbage heap was full of oyster shells, red crayfish
shells, and squeezed-out lemons,  in addition to green vegetable parings and
fish entrails.  When Vasily Petrovich  saw the two forbidding canopied beds,
the chipped iron wash-basin adorned with views of the Bay of Naples, and the
wallpaper which  told  only too well of bedbugs, he grabbed up his rucksack,
ready to  run from  the den, but his  tired legs failed him. He sank  into a
wobbly chair, took out  his Italian phrase-book,  and  began bargaining. The
proprietor  insisted  on ten  lire a day, Vasily Petrovich offered one. They
finally settled for three, which was only one lira more than  it should have
cost.  They  were  now free to  begin the sightseeing. But Vasily  Petrovich
suddenly felt  too  tired to get up from his chair. Now only  did he realize
how  exhausting the  long sea voyage  had  been, although  it had seemed  so
pleasant and comfortable. With  an effort he reached  the  bed and lay there
all in, wiping the glasses of his pince-nez with his handkerchief.
     "I think," he said, addressing the boys with an apologetic smile, "I'll
have a nap. You should  have forty  winks too. Take off your sandals and lie
down for a bit."
     Pavlik, who  could hardly  keep his eyes  open,  began  taking off  his
sandals. Petya, however,  was dying to see the city. He wanted  to  send off
his  correspondence: the letter Gavrik had given him and the postcard he had
written  to  Auntie,  describing  the  "eruption" of  Stromboli. Father  was
opposed  to the idea, but Petya  said with such assurance that he  wasn't  a
baby and looked so deeply pious  as he faced the crucifix,  crossed himself,
and  promised he'd  be  back the  minute he bought  the  stamp, that  Vasily
Petrovich finally agreed and gave him a silver lira for the stamps. Pavlik's
eyes turned green at  the sight of it. "What about me?" he said, buckling on
his sandals.
     "You should go to sleep," Petya answered coldly.
     "I'm not asking you, I'm asking- Daddy."
     "God forbid!" Father was aghast at the mere thought.
     "I like  that," Pavlik said, his  face all screwed  up, just in case he
might have to start crying at a moment's notice.
     "What do you mean-I like that?" Father asked sternly.
     "Petka can go and I've got to stay in?"
     "First of  all, don't say, 'I like  that.' It's about time you  learned
how to behave, and secondly, say, 'Petya, 'riot ' Petka.' "
     "All right," Pavlik agreed readily. "But if Petya can go, why can't I?"
     "Because Petya's older than you are."
     Pavlik hated that argument. No matter how much he grew, or  how hard he
tried, he was always smaller than Petya.
     "It's not my fault that Petya's older," he whined. "He goes everywhere,
but I can't go anywhere!"
     "I have a special reason  for going. I have my correspondence to attend
to, while  you just want  to come along to make mischief," Petya said in his
haughtiest voice.
     "Maybe I have correspondence too? Daddy, please, let me go!"
     "It's out  of  the  question!"  Father  said resolutely,  and  Pavlik's
spirits rose.
     As a rule, after saying, "It's out of the question," Father would pause
arid add, "but if  you give me your word that you'll behave..." or something
to that effect.  And so  to speed things up,  Pavlik shammed a fit of tears,
stealing looks at Father out of the corner of his eye. He knew his daddy.
     "However," Vasily  Petrovich said, unable to  stand the tears, "if  you
promise to-"
     "Oh, I swear by the Holy Cross!" Pavlik said quickly -and blundered.
     Father frowned.
     "How many times have I told you never  to  swear! An oath  degrades the
person who takes it. When you promise  something, it is enough to  give your
word. Any  decent  person's  word can only  be  sacred.  So',  one's word is
enough."
     "I give you my word," Pavlik said triumphantly, buckling a sandal, and,
in his haste, made another blunder.
     "What do you give me your word about?"
     "That I'll behave."
     "That's the main thing. And don't move an inch from Petya."
     "I won't."
     "You won't what?"
     "I won't move an inch from Petya," Pavlik said.
     "Very well then."
     "And  tell him  to listen to me," Petya added,  "otherwise I won't take
him, because he'll surely get lost and I'll be responsible for him."
     "I won't get lost," Pavlik said.
     "Yes, you will! You always get lost!"
     "Who got lost last time, in Odessa, when we nearly got left behind, and
when Auntie was so worried she nearly went crazy?"
     "Fibber!"
     "I'm not fibbing."
     "Now then, children, no quarrelling!"
     "It's not me, it's Petka."
     "In that case, you'll both stay in."
     "No, Daddy!" Pavlik pleaded. "I give you my word I'll behave."
     "And do what you're told?" Petya asked.
     "Yes," Pavlik answered.
     "Without fail?"
     "Yes." Pavlik sounded slightly annoyed.
     "Don't forget, now!" Petya said pompously and severely.
     "All right, run along,"  Father mumbled sleepily as he curled up on the
bed under the ridiculous canopy. "And for heaven's sake don't  get lost," he
added in a barely audible whisper.
     He was snoring before Petya and Pavlik got to the bottom of the stairs.
     Of course, they got lost.
     Once out  in the street, Petya  took  Pavlik  by the  hand. Pavlik  was
furious, but could not -say a thing, since he had memorized Father's saying,
"If you've given your word, keep it."
     The first thing was  to buy a stamp. This was not as simple a matter as
in Russia, where lots of shops sold  postage stamps. Shops  were not lacking
here, but  none of them sold stamps. In fact, the shopkeepers could not even
understand what it was that Petya wanted, although he glibly rattled off the
Italian he had learned on the ship.
     "Prego, signor,"  Petya .said  bravely, but there was a frightened look
in  his eyes, "prego, signor... una, una  ..." However, he could not explain
what the "una" he wanted was, because he did not  know  the word for "stamp"
in Italian.
     He  would then pull out  the envelope, spit on  his  finger, and give a
wonderful performance of sticking an imaginary stamp on an envelope.  "Don't
you see, una stamp.  Una stamp." At which point the shopkeeper would gesture
dramatically  in the  true  Neapolitan  manner  and  hold  forth volubly  in
language  that  left Petya  bewildered.  This scene was repeated  about  ten
times,  until, finally,  after  they  had  gone  up  and down  three or four
streets, the  owner of a wine-vault  that was  bedecked inside and out  with
clusters of mandolin-shaped  raffia-covered bottles  took them to the corner
and pointed far off into the distance. He accompanied  the gesture by a long
theatrical monologue; the  only two words Petya  was able  to  make out were
posta centrals, that is, the central post-office.
     The boys  set  out  in the  direction indicated.  Petya  would  stop  a
passer-by occasionally and, bestowing a severe look on Pavlik, would ask:
     "Prego, signor, la posta centrale?"
     Some of the passers-by understood him, some did not, but all were eager
to help the two young foreigners who wanted to buy stamps.
     The Neapolitans  proved to  be  splendid  people-kind and warm-hearted,
though somewhat  fussy. They  were  not  a bit like  the Neapolitans of  the
pictures: handsome men  in short  trousers and wide crimson  sashes with red
kerchiefs on  their  curly  heads and  ravishingly  beautiful women  in lace
mantillas.
     They were very  ordinary-looking people; the men wore black jackets and
faded hats, the women, black blouses and no hats. All the men  had one thing
in common: no shirt collars-just a stud  at the neck in front of their  open
shirts; the women wore coral ornaments.
     They took the greatest interest in Petya and Pavlik,  they forgot about
their own affairs, and a large, noisy crowd gathered to take the boys to the
post-office.  The  gathering  stopped  at  every corner  and  had  a  heated
discussion as to which street to take next.
     They  threw torrents of words at each other as they dragged the boys in
different  directions  and if the boys had not been holding on to each other
so persistently, they most certainly would have been dragged apart. More and
more people  joined the crowd. Ragged, olive-skinned street urchins,  lively
as little devils, ran before  the crowd as if they were accompanying a band.
An old  organ-grinder  with  a  long,  foul-smelling  cigar stuck under  his
yellow-white moustache trailed along at the end of the procession.
     They were now walking down the middle of  the street. People peered out
of  windows, curious to know what it was  all about;  when  they  found out,
they, too,  would  gesticulate  wildly,  pointing out  the  shortest way.  A
kind-hearted signorina  wiped Pavlik's  hot  neck  with her handkerchief and
called him bambino.
     Stray dogs, every bit  as  nasty as those  in Constantinople,  attached
themselves to the  throng. The whole business was developing  into a  street
scandal.
     Petya was becoming nervous. The only thing that kept him going  was the
knowledge  that he, as the elder brother, was responsible  to his father for
Pavlik's  safety.  He rattled off his Italian,  mixing  it with French words
from Margot's French textbook and Russian exclamations.
     "Si, signorino, si, signorino," the Neapolitans said soothingly, seeing
how excited he was.
     At the same time, Petya was taking in all he could of  the famous city.
At first they passed through narrow, dark alleys, with iron gas-lamps on the
walls  of  the houses. Then  they suddenly  came  out upon a dazzling  white
square  with a fountain and an  ancient  church, through  the open doors  of
which came the solemn sounds of an organ.
     Once they caught  a fleeting glimpse of the  unbelievably blue sea, the
beach, and a  row of stately, hairy date-palms in the distance. They crossed
a busy shopping centre. Then they skirted a bleak monastery wall with a huge
statue of a saint in a niche. They went up and down steep  street stairways,
past tall, narrow houses where  some of the windows with green shutters were
real,  the others  painted on for the sake of symmetry, but so expertly done
that one could hardly tell the difference.



        ALEXEI MAXIMOVICH


     They  reached a  street which  was blocked  completely by a long row of
empty  tram-cars. Striking  conductors  and drivers,  carrying their leather
bags and brass keys, were walking  up and down, exchanging  a few words with
the passers-by.
     The moment the crowd accompanying the boys saw the tram-cars, they lost
all interest in the young foreigners. Attention was now focussed entirely on
the  strikers, especially  as the first rows  of demonstrators, carrying red
and black flags,  portraits  and slogans, appeared  at the  far  end  of the
street.
     The people  rushed towards them, leaving the boys to their own devices.
Pavlik grasped Petya's hand and watched the demonstrators approach.
     Grim-looking bearded men in wide-brimmed hats carried a black flag with
a white inscription, and portraits of other bearded  men, among whom Pavlik,
much to his surprise, recognized Lev Tolstoi.
     Behind the bearded men came others with shaven chins and in small caps.
They carried a red flag and the portraits of two more bearded men whom Petya
had never seen before. These were Marx and Engels.
     The  people  in  the  demonstration  were  workers,  porters,  stokers,
sailors, and shop assistants. They wanted to keep  in slow step, but  it was
no good,  the more they  tried, the  more they quickened their pace to their
natural Italian tempo.
     They waved their hats and walking-sticks and shouted out slogans:
     "Long  live socialism!  Workers of  the  world,  unite!  Down  with war
expenditures! Down with the government of war! We want peace!"
     Passers-by  joined  the  demonstration.  Many  of  them  were  wheeling
bicycles. Street vendors  pushed  their handcarts. The old organ-grinder had
joined them, too. Everything was bathed  in the rosy glow of sunset, lending
a theatrical  setting to the scene, but  still Petya was greatly alarmed. He
squeezed Pavlik's hand, and his alarm was transmitted to Pavlik.
     "Petka," he shouted, "this is a revolution!"
     "No, it's a demonstration," Petya said. "Who cares-let's run!"
     But they were now caught up in the crowd and had no idea how to get out
or which way to run.
     Just then  they  heard  loud voices behind  them,  speaking Russian.  A
number  of  people, including a boy Petya's age in  a  jacket, were elbowing
their way through the crowd, closer to the marchers.  The boy  in the jacket
had a high forehead and a duck-like nose with drops of perspiration  on  it;
he was  pushing and shoving with  all his might.  A thin  man with  a yellow
moustache above  a shaven chin, wearing a cream-coloured summer coat and cap
all awry, apparently the boy's  father, had a  firm grip on his shoulder and
kept repeating in a hollow bass voice:
     "Take  it easy, Max, take it easy!" He stretched his long, sinewy  neck
over the heads of the crowd and looked sharply ahead; although urging Max to
take it easy, he himself, apparently,  was unable  to follow this advice. At
times he would turn around and shout to someone behind, accenting his o's in
a Nizhny-Novgorod fashion.
     "Come    closer,    gentlemen!    Come    closer.   Last   year   these
anarchist-syndicalists were lying on the tracks blocking the  way with their
bodies, but  look  at them  today. There's  a  world of  difference in their
tactics!"
     "Yes, you're  right!" a man in a pince-nez  and panama  replied rolling
his r's and swallowing the endings of the words. "This  proves my point that
although Russia has  become the centre of  revolution since 1905, still, the
consolidation of the European proletariat is progressing rapidly. I beg your
pardon," he said  to Petya in passing,  as the  sleeve of  his ample  jacket
brushed against the boy's head.
     He  was followed by  another Russian in a cheap, ill-fitting suit and a
new felt  hat  on his round,  firmly-set head. The  new-comer had  a  bamboo
walking-stick on his arm and forged ahead, cutting his way through the crowd
with his bulging chest; he saw only the demonstrators who seemed to draw his
whole  being irrepressibly. His knitted  eyebrows,  twitching face  muscles,
parted lips, and small angry eyes-all seemed strangely familiar to Petya.
     The arm with the bamboo cane thrust Petya aside, and the boy had a good
look at  the short fingers, the thick, square-cut nails, the white knuckles,
and an anchor tattooed on the bulging muscle between thumb and forefinger.
     Petya had no time to wonder why the little faded  blue anchor seemed so
familiar or who these Russians were  and what they were doing here,  because
the crowd swayed and surged first to the right, then to the left, and  Petya
caught a glimpse of the three-cornered hats  and narrow  red stripes on  the
trousers of  the  carabineers at the far end of the street. He saw the black
plumes of the bersaglieri's hats as they passed on the double, rifles at the
ready.
     A harsh,  menacing bugle  blast pierced the  air.  For a split second a
hush descended on the crowd. It was broken by the sound of shattering glass,
and then  everything  spun around  in a howling, screaming, wailing, running
mass.
     Several shots rang out.
     Petya  and Pavlik  were  swept away  by the stampede; they  held  hands
tightly, trying to keep together. Petya forgot that they were abroad  and at
any minute he  expected to see Cossacks gallop out of a side-street, lashing
out left and right with their whips. He thought he was running down Odessa's
Malaya Arnautskaya,  an impression heightened by  the fact that  here,  too,
they were treading on scattered chestnuts.
     Someone knocked Pavlik over.  He fell and skinned  his  knee, but Petya
pulled him to his  feet  and  dragged him on. Pavlik  was so scared  that he
forgot to cry, he kept repeating:
     "Run! Hurry, let's run!"
     Finally,  they were swept  into  a  narrow courtyard  paved  with  worn
flagstones and cluttered with dustbins. There were lovely iron grates on the
ground-floor windows. The boys ran under a dirty marble archway, where  each
step rang and resounded like a pistol shot, and found themselves out  in the
street,  opposite  a  small  park on  a  steep  slope.  Several people  were
scrambling up the dark,  weathered  stones that covered the  slope. This was
all that was left of the  crowd  that had swept them into the courtyard. The
boys began to climb  the slope too, but it was  much steeper and higher than
it had seemed. A marble lion's head jutted  out of the wall, and a stream of
water spurted from  an iron pipe in  the lion's  mouth into a marble  basin.
Petya  edged Pavlik towards the basin and  tried to  push him up. But Pavlik
could not get a grip.
     "Come  on, climb up!"  Petya  shouted. "You clumsy  ox!" Just then more
people ran out of the marble gateway. These were the Russians-the boy in the
short jacket and the three men Petya had seen in the crowd.
     The boy was tugging his father along by the sleeve, but the father kept
stopping and turning back. His fists  were clenched and his cap had slid  to
the back  of his  head; a shock of yellow hair  showed from under the tilted
peak; his moustache bristled and his blue eyes burned with an angry fire.
     "Do you  want to be killed? Come on," the boy was saying, as he hung on
to him tightly, "take it easy!"
     "Alexei Maximovich, you're much too reckless! You have no right to take
such a risk!" the man in the pince-nez said, rubbing his bruised shoulder.
     "I'll  be damned if  I don't go back and give  that long-nosed idiot in
the striped  trousers one in  the face!" Alexei Maximovich  muttered in  his
deep voice. "I'll teach him to respect women!" A fit of coughing reduced him
to silence.
     The boy  in the  short jacket  was  holding on grimly to  his  father's
sleeve. The man with the anchor on his  hand  also seemed ready to dash back
into the fray and restrained himself with difficulty.
     "Come on, climb, Pavlik!" Petya shouted  desperately. At the  sound  of
his voice the Russians turned to him.
     "Look, Russians!" the boy said.
     "What are you doing here?" the man in the pince-nez said sternly.
     The man with the anchor on his hand scaled the wall as nimbly as a cat,
extended  his  bamboo cane, and helped the others up, one  by one, including
Petya and a tear-stained Pavlik.
     It  was so calm and  peaceful there, it was difficult to imagine that a
few moments before,  somewhere  nearby, soldiers and  carabineers  had  been
breaking up  the demonstration, broken glass had  jangled  on  the pavement,
people had fallen, and the revolvers had barked in the streets.
     Alexei Maximovich looked at Petya and Pavlik quizzically.
     "Well, young gentlemen of the Russian Empire, and what may you be doing
here?"
     Feeling  that they were  now among fellow-countrymen, the boys' spirits
rose.  They kept interrupting  each other  in their  haste  to  relate their
adventures, but  all the  while  Petya had the feeling that somehow the men-
Alexei Maximovich and the one with the anchor on his hand-were familiar.  No
matter how he strained his memory he could not place  Alexei Maximovich, but
he  soon remembered and recognized the other,  although he  could  not quite
believe it at first.
     "Well, well,  you travellers, things aren't so bad," Alexei  Maximovich
said. "One skinned knee for the two of you. It could have been much worse."
     With these words he gathered Pavlik  under  his arm  ' and  carried him
over to the fountain. He washed his knee thoroughly, bandaged it swiftly and
tightly with a handkerchief, set the boy down, and  told him to walk up  and
down.
     "Fine! You can return to the ranks now. First  rinse your face and paws
in  the basin,  though, or you'll  really frighten your father. By the  way,
what's your name?"
     "Pavlik."
     "And your brother's?"
     "Petya."
     "Excellent. Max, come over here. I  have a job for  you. Take these two
Apostles-Peter and Paul-to the post-office, help them buy a stamp,  drop the
letter in the letter-box, tell them how to get back to their hotel, and come
back as fast as you can, otherwise we'll miss the boat. Arrivederci, signori
Apostles,  bon voyage!" he said, shaking  hands with  Petya and Pavlik.  His
large graceful hand was saffron-yellow from the sun.
     "Merci," the  well-brought-up  Pavlik answered, awkwardly  scraping his
bandaged leg.
     "Come on," the boy said, shepherding the two  of them. "The post-office
is only about five minutes' walk from here."
     "You probably don't remember me, but I recognized you," Petya wanted to
say as he went up to the man with the anchor on his hand; however, something
held  him back.  He said nothing and  looked -straight into the man's  eyes.
"Maybe  he'll  recognize  me  too,"  he  thought  anxiously.  But  the  man,
evidently, did not recognize him, though he noticed his blouse, fingered the
material, and said:
     "Where was it made?"
     "In the tailor's shop of the Naval Battalion," Petya answered.
     "I can see that right away. Regulation stuff!"
     It seemed to Petya that there was no mirth in his chuckle.
     "Come on, fellows, let's go!" the boy said.  "We've  got to get back to
Capri."
     The post-office really  was  a stone's throw  away;  however,  the boys
managed to talk a few things over on the way.
     "What's your name?" Petya asked.
     "Max."
     "But Max and Moritz,  seeing  that, climbed the  roof to  get the hat,"
Petya recited from a well-known  illustrated  children's book  of the day by
Wilhelm Busch.
     "Trying to  be funny?"  Max said  menacingly. He was apparently sick of
being teased about his name, and he dug Petya lightly in the ribs.
     Of  course, in other circumstances, Petya  would  never have let such a
thing pass, but this time he decided not to make a fuss about it.
     "Who's your father?" he asked, changing the subject.
     "You mean you don't know my father?" Max appeared to be surprised.
     "Why should I know him?" Petya asked.
     "Well,  because everyone seems to know him," Max mumbled in  confusion.
He had a bad habit of mumbling, and he always spoke as if he were sucking on
a sweet.
     "Who is he, then?"
     "A dyer," Max answered.
     "You're fibbing!" Petya said.
     "Honestly, he's a dyer," Max insisted,  sucking on the imaginary sweet.
"Don't you believe me? Ask anyone. He's a dyer and his name is Peshkov."
     "Quit fibbing! Dyers aren't like that."
     "There are all kinds of dyers."
     "If he's a dyer, what is he doing here, in Italy?"
     "He lives here."
     "Why doesn't he live in Russia?"
     "Curiosity killed the cat."
     There  was  something  in the  way he said  the  familiar  phrase  that
reminded Petya of Gavrik, Near Mills, Terenty,  and Sinichkin-of  everything
associated in  his  mind with the  word  "revolution." Now  it had  suddenly
reared up before him here, in Naples, in the immobile tram-cars, the running
crowd,  the sound of shattering  glass, the shots,  the sinister  blue-black
plumes on the bersaglieri's hats, the flags, the portraits, and, finally, at
the sight of the man with the anchor on his hand, for he  had recognized the
sailor from the Potetnkin.
     Petya wanted to  ask Max  how Rodion Zhukov  happened  to be in Naples,
about the man in the pince-nez, and what they were all  doing in  Italy, but
at that moment they stopped outside the post-office.
     "Let's have the correspondence," Max said.
     "What for?" Petya asked suspiciously.
     "Come on, hand it over! I haven't time to argue. Where is it going?"
     "The postcard's for my aunt in Odessa, the letter's going to Paris."
     "To Paris?"
     "Yes."
     "Then we'll send it express."
     "What's express?"
     "Hayseed!"  Max  said,  making sucking noises with his tongue. "Express
means express.  You know, by non-stop express  train. Daddy always sends his
Paris letters by express. Give me the letter."
     Petya hesitated for a moment, then pulled the creased envelope from his
pocket. Max snatched it from him, ran over to the window, and began to speak
a rapid, if lisping, Italian.
     "What  about  the money?" Petya shouted, but instead of  answering, Max
kicked out his foot several times, as much as to say: keep quiet!
     Two minutes later he walked over to Petya and handed him the receipt.
     "What about the money?" Petya repeated.
     "Silly, I send off a dozen letters every day, and 1 have  a whole  heap
of stamps. See?"  He took out a handful  of  stamps from his pocket. "When I
stay  with  Dad  I  always post  his letters for him.  But  how do you  know
Vladimir Ilyich?"
     "Who's Vladimir Ilyich?" Petya asked.
     "Lenin."
     "Who's Lenin?"
     "The man  who  lives in Paris  on Rue Marie  Rose. Ulyanov.  I read the
address on the envelope. The letter's for him, isn't it?"
     "Sure it is!" Petya said. "But I didn't write it."
     "Did  your  father tell you  to  post it?" "No. It  was  given to me in
Odessa. I was asked to post it." And Petya blushed suddenly.  Max nodded his
round head.
     "I know what you mean. Don't look so suspicious.  We often send letters
to Lenin ourselves. That is, my father writes them and I post them off.  And
we always  send them express. Now, tell me where you are  staying."  "At the
Hotel Esplanade."
     Max frowned and that made him look more like his father than ever.
     "I don't think  it's  very far from here.  Go straight down this street
till you come to a fountain, turn left, cross two more streets and you'll be
right in front of your hotel. Arrivederci, I must run now."
     He shook hands with  the two boys hurriedly, crossed the street, turned
the corner, and disappeared behind a painted statue of a Madonna in a niche,
adorned with flowers and lemon branches with tiny green lemons on them.


        VESUVIUS


     Hand it over," Pavlik said as he winced and rubbed his knee.
     "What?"
     "Hand it over!" Pavlik repeated and even stretched out his  hand. "Hand
over half the lira."
     "What are you talking about?"
     ' "About the lira. The one Daddy gave you for the stamp."
     "Oh,  so that's  what you mean! Well, let  me tell you  something." And
Petya put his thumb to his nose and waggled his fingers.
     "That's  thieving,"  Pavlik said,  whining  piteously  and throwing out
quick glances.
     "Shut up!" Petya hissed. "All the Italians are watching us."
     "I  don't care! Let them all  see  what a  thief  you are!"  And Pavlik
wailed louder. That was too much for Petya.
     "All right," he said dryly. "If that's the kind of pig you are, you can
have half of it. But we'll have to get it changed first."
     "No, you give me the  lira, and I'll give you fifty centesimos change."
Pavlik rummaged around  under his blouse, felt  something there,  and pulled
out a small silver coin.
     "Where did you  get that?" Petya asked severely in a good imitation  of
Vasily Petrovich's voice.
     "I won it from  the cook on the  Palermo!" Pavlik answered not  without
pride.
     "How many times have I told you not to gamble, you wretch!"
     "Well, what about you? Who yanked all the buttons off Daddy's uniform?"
     "That was when I was small."
     "Well, I'm small now," Pavlik reasoned.
     "Yes,  and what a  rat  you are," Petya  said angrily. "Just wait. I'll
tell Daddy all about it!"
     "And you'll be a telltale till you die!" Pavlik shouted triumphantly.
     "Gelato!  Gelato! Gelato!" a  heavenly Italian tenor sang out. The boys
saw an ice-cream vendor wheeling along the same kind of green box the Odessa
ice-cream  vendors had;  the only  difference  was  that this one  was  much
longer, it was decorated with scenes of Naples, and had  four wheels instead
of two.
     The boys' eyes met, and at that moment peace  was restored as well as a
feeling of deep affection, all based  on  a  passionate desire to  disregard
Father's iron  rule; never to buy anything in the street and never, never to
eat anything without permission.
     They read the  same burning  question in  each  other's  eyes  at  that
instant: what  was to be done  if there  were no one to give permission? The
most natural solution was: if there  is  no  one  about, we'll  have  to eat
without permission.
     Petya,  the linguist,  stepped  forward  and  opened his  mouth to  say
something that started with the words, "Prego, signor..."
     But the handsome  young ice-cream vendor,  with a  hat resembling a red
stocking on  his curly locks, was a bright fellow.  He opened the long  box,
and the boys were  astounded to  see a huge chunk of ice instead of  the two
familiar copper  containers with  tin  lids.  The  ice-cream man  took out a
little steel  plane  and  started planing  the ice  log.  Then he packed two
glasses full of ice shavings and poured an  artificially bright-green liquid
from a bottle over them.
     The boys were fascinated. For  some reason, though, it was not  at  all
sweet, and they soon felt as if they had eaten melted water-colours.
     The vendor was not wasting time. He soon had another two glasses ready;
this time he poured something  so dazzlingly  pink  over  them  that  Pavlik
turned green at the memory of the rahat-lakoum he had had in Constantinople.
Petya refused  the proffered ices. Using Vasily Petrovich's firm gesture, he
said "Basta!" in faultless Italian, paid the man ten  centesimos, and hauled
Pavlik off without another word.
     The bad taste of the strange ices was  forgotten  the  moment  the boys
came to a  booth snuggling against an old stone  wall from which a stream of
spring water flowed.
     There was a basket of enormous Neapolitan lemons on the counter next to
some jars of powdered sugar and tall glasses.
     In a twinkling of an eye the man at  the counter  had sliced two lemons
in half, put them  through a squeezer, and caught the  juice in two glasses.
He added powdered sugar to the juice and deftly placed the glasses under the
stream of  water. They filled up with something breath-takingly  pearly  and
foaming  at the rims, and the glasses became dimmed. The boys were entranced
the moment their parched lips touched the wonderful beverage.
     The  sun was setting. A round  purple-pink evening  cloud hung over the
white square  and the fountain. It was  so vast that the people, the houses,
and even the church spires seemed tiny beneath it.
     There  was something awe-inspiring  about the beautiful scene. The boys
turned left,  as Max had told them, and ran  homewards, but the weird  light
cast by the cloud  made the city still more alien and unfamiliar. They could
not recognize a single street.
     Night was falling  rapidly, although the  cloud still glowed in the now
purple  sky. Whichever way the  boys  turned,  it  followed them, its  round
crimson edges peeping out from behind the roof-tops. The narrow streets were
fast  becoming  crowded  with  people out  for  a  walk, as is the custom in
southern cities towards  evening. The air was full of the sound of  scuffing
feet on the stone pavements. The heat of the day was replaced by the heat of
the evening, not so dry perhaps, but more stifling.
     Streaks of  light fell on the pavements from the  open doorways of  the
cafes and bars. The tinkling of  mandolins  drifted down from balconies. The
mingled smells of hot coffee, gas, anisette, oysters, fried fish, and lemons
seemed twice as strong. Women fanned their faces, and  the ice-cream vendors
and news-boys sang out louder and more melodiously.
     Coral-sellers mysteriously appeared in doorways. Petya  felt there  was
something in the highest  degree dangerous and  sinful about  their bowlers,
shoved down  over their sinister eyes,  their sugary smiles beneath the dyed
moustaches, their velvet  vests  and morning coats,  their  dark  bejewelled
fingers, and about the  wide, flat  boxes hanging round their necks on stout
belts which they  supported in front of them while  they  silently displayed
their  treasures to  passing ladies: they held out blood-red corals, strings
of smaller corals, and pale-pink ones that  seemed almost  white and were as
big and smooth as beans; they displayed  mounted Pompeii cameos and clusters
of translucent gems. Set out  on black velvet and illuminated by the deathly
glare of the gas-lamps, the little stones gave Petya a strange impression of
being tiny inanimate creatures from another planet.
     Pavlik was more worried by  the hostile eyes of the  vendors; he thrust
his  hand  inside his  blouse, clenching his  fist  tightly  over the  small
Italian coins there.
     One  of the side-streets seemed  vaguely  familiar. The boys turned the
corner and ran along the  flagstones up the hill. Suddenly, the houses ended
and  they saw Vesuvius. They had apparently approached it from another side,
as it was quite different  now:  it had only one peak and was gigantic. They
were  almost alongside it. The volcano was  bathed in  the last rays of  the
dying  sunset, a monstrous cap  of  sulphurous smoke  hung  over  the  peak,
seething  with  the  scorching  heat of molten  iron,  and  it seemed as  if
Vesuvius was ready to erupt at any minute. The boys ever, thought they heard
an underground tremor.
     They were so panic-stricken that  they rushed madly downhill and bumped
right into their dishevelled father, who had  been searching the streets for
them for the past three hours.
     He was  so relieved at seeing them he even forgot to  scold  them. They
were all so exhausted after  the day that  they flopped on to their beds the
minute they  got back and did not  even bother to wash  up.  They slept like
logs,  despite the impossible heat,  the  droning mosquitoes, and the noises
and music coming from the street all night long.


        A CINDER


     Next  morning marked the  beginning of an  exciting and delightful life
which swept them up and whirled  them  through cities  and hotels  until,  a
month and a  half later,  utterly worn  out,  the  travellers  recrossed the
Russian border and found themselves home once more.
     Although they had  followed a well-planned route, whenever Petya looked
back  on that journey  it always  seemed to him to have been a mad jumble of
unrelated travelling impressions, of beautiful scenery, palaces,  fountains,
squares and, of course, museums.
     The Bacheis  had  too little  money to allow themselves  the luxury  of
stopping somewhere along the route for an extra day to rest up, look around,
and gather their thoughts and impressions.
     For instance,  they  spent only  three days in  Naples, but  into those
three days they crammed: a boat trip to the Isle of  Capri to see the famous
Blue Grotto and, on the  way hack, a walk round Sorrento and Castellamrnare;
a visit to the site of the excavations at Pompeii and  to Vesuvius, climbing
nearly as  high as the  crater;  they went  to practically every museum, art
gallery, and church in Naples, including the famous Aquarium, where the boys
beheld the magic of the submarine world behind  the glass cases, illuminated
from  above like the stage of a unique theatre. There, in the  Mediterranean
Sea water, among  the white coral trees and  polyps which resembled blue and
red  chrysanthemums, giant  lobsters crawled over lovely sea-shells and fish
swam up  and down like interplanetary dirigibles that  had reached Mars from
the Earth.
     As they sat in the stuffy railway carriage, about ready to leave Naples
for  Rome, Vasily  Petrovich  looked out of  the  window and said with  some
uncertainty:
     "If I'm not mistaken, that's  Alexei Maximovich Gorky." He adjusted his
pince-nez,  leaned  out of  the  window, and  began  to scrutinize  someone.
"Gorky!" he exclaimed confidently.
     Petya stuck his  head out under his father's arm.  A rather large group
of  people  were strolling down the  platform. They were carrying travelling
bags and speaking loudly in Russian. Petya immediately singled out the tall,
slightly stooped figure of the man who had recently bandaged Pavlik's knee.
     Now he  knew why the man had seemed so familiar, for he had  often seen
his  photographs in  magazines  and  on  postcards. It was Gorky, the famous
writer. Petya also spotted the sailor carrying a cheap suitcase.
     A woman  in mourning passed, accompanied by  a girl of about  thirteen,
evidently  her daughter. He caught a  glimpse of  a small face  with serious
eyes and  lips pressed tightly together in grief, a dark chestnut braid tied
with a black ribbon and thrown over a thin shoulder.
     Then  the  train pulled out,  and  the group  on the  platform  slipped
backward.  Petya had a last glimpse of Gorky, the sailor, the woman, and the
girl.  They were standing beside a train at the other side of  the platform.
Apparently, some of the party  were leaving, and the others were seeing them
off.
     "Gorky! Gorky!" Petya yelled, waving his hat.
     The girl turned and looked at Petya. Their  eyes met. At that instant a
cloud  of acrid  smoke enveloped him. Petya  shut his  eyes, but he was  not
quick enough, for a tiny cinder flew into1 his eye  and  became lodged under
the upper lid.
     The  subsequent torment killed  all  the  pleasure  of the journey from
Naples to Rome.
     A nail in your shoe or a cinder in your eye! We have all  suffered from
these evils at one time or other. It starts as a slightly unpleasant feeling
and gradually drives the victim frantic with pain.
     At first Petya was just uncomfortable from the alien body lodged in his
eye.  The eye was watery and he was certain the  tears would wash the cinder
out and bring a feeling of blessed relief. But the tears kept streaming down
his  face, while the cinder stayed put. It was lodged way  up under the  lid
and scratched and irritated the eyeball at the slightest movement.
     Blinded by tears and feeling that  his eye was on fire, Petya rushed up
and down the stuffy carriage, not knowing what to do. In his agony he bumped
into the other passengers. He bruised his knee, but  the new pain  could not
eliminate the old one.
     Father  insisted  he  sit  quietly  and  not  rub  his  eye  under  any
circumstances, for then the cinder would wash out by itself. But it did not.
Petya  began to  rub his eye again;  the pain  became unbearable. He moaned,
screamed, and in  his despair beat out a tattoo on the floor with his heels.
With shaking hands Father tried to  raise the eyelid  and  get at the cinder
with the  tip of his handkerchief. Petya would not let him.  He kept running
back and forth to the wash-room,  where he would pour some tepid  water from
the wash-basin into his cupped palm and bathe his eye in it. Nothing helped.
It was infinitely worse than a toothache.
     In  the  rare  moments when  the  pain subsided,  Petya saw dry, barren
hills,  white dust  on the highway, level  crossings and little huts of  the
trackmen behind  rickety  fences  made  of  old  sleepers  and surrounded by
sunflowers, hollyhocks, and dirty pigs; all  these flashed  by the  carriage
windows in  the glare of  the Italian noon. Were  it  not for the  groves of
lovely Italian pines, their spreading branches and almost black needles, one
would think the train was approaching a town in the Ukraine instead of Rome.
     All  this was  bleary and flitting, there was  but  one impression, one
scene that remained constant: the railway platform in Naples, the  group  of
people, the  woman in mourning,  and the  girl with  the black ribbon in her
chestnut hair. She was embedded in his mind as the cinder in his eye.
     All things eventually come to an end. Petya's torment ended too. An old
Italian woman with a coral cross on her wrinkled neck  sat at the far end of
the carriage. FOT baggage she had a wicker  basket with ducks' heads  poking
through the  top;  she  had  been reading  her  prayer-book  throughout  the
journey, but she had missed nothing  of what  was going on  in the carriage.
When Petya for the tenth time rushed to  the wash-room to bathe his eye, she
suddenly reached out and  grabbed him with her strong,  knotty hands, forced
him down on the bench,  got  hold of his head, and drew it towards her dark,
hairy, witch-like face.
     Without  a word she raised his eyelid with nimble  fingers,  opened her
hot mouth, stuck  out her long  tongue, and licked the cinder that  had been
rubbed into the mucous membrane. Petya instantly felt a wave of  relief. The
old woman picked the cinder off her tongue, held it triumphantly between two
fingers  for  all  to see,  and said something  in Italian; the sentence was
greeted with applause, making the ducks quack boisterously.
     Then she kissed Petya  on the head, crossed him from left to right, and
returned to her prayer-book.



        THE ETERNAL CITY


     The  train  pulled into  Rome.  Three  wandering  musicians-a mandolin,
guitar, and violin - played their last piece. Thus, to the strains of "Santa
Lucia" and the grating of brakes, they came to a stop.
     Again the Bacheis were surrounded by a noisy crowd of agents and guides
as they made their way  to an ancient phaeton.  The  driver cracked his long
whip over the nags, turned the  handle of a Large meter attached to the side
of the box, and they jogged  off over the sun-scorched squares of Rome, past
spouting fountains that left greenish strips on  the paving stones and, like
the needles of a compass, pointed in the direction  of the prevailing  south
wind.  After his recent  torture Petya sat  back and  took his fill  of  the
sights. It seemed as if his eyesight had improved threefold. He kept turning
this way and that, so as not. to miss a single detail of the famous city.
     The lean driver in a squashed black  felt hat smothered them  in clouds
of foul  smoke from his long cigar. Instead of  taking the shortest route to
the hotel, he zigzagged through every street in the  city. The centesimos in
the  window of  the meter  mounted, rapidly  turning  into lire; to distract
their attention  from the meter,  the  driver,  with  a theatrical  gesture,
called  out  the  sights. They passed  the Caracalla  thermae,  St.  Angel's
Castle, the Tiber, the Forum, St. Peter's, and the Coliseum.
     Father spread  out a map  of Rome on his lap. One would think he  could
not  believe his  eyes and was seeking  a  theoretical confirmation  of  the
obvious  fact of  the  existence  of the city  of  Rome  and all its  famous
landmarks, so well known from paintings and photographs.
     The real Rome was not as magnificent as the descriptions and paintings.
Monotonously lighted by the sun, wilted from the heat, it lay spread out  on
its ancient hills beneath the pale-blue sky and seemed much simpler and more
beautiful than one had imagined.
     The summer streets  were  deserted. Papal  guards  stood  watch at  the
entrance  to  Vatican City. They  wore uniforms  of the Middle Ages and were
armed with  halberds. Pavlik,  who had been to  the Opera with Auntie during
the previous winter, now shouted at the top of his voice:
     "Look! Look! Huguenots!"
     Before Petya could clap his hand  over his brother's  mouth he shrilled
still louder, bubbling over with joy and surprise:
     "Donbasilios! Look, Donbasilios!"
     True  enough, two Catholic priests were  making  their way  through the
colonnade of St. Peter's. They wore black soutanes and  long hats  with  the
brims rolled up,  and carried  umbrellas under their arms; no two  men could
have looked more like Don Basilio from The 'Barber of Seville than they.
     Several monks  crossed  the  square.  A  barefoot Franciscan  went  by,
wearing a  crude  hair-shirt tied  with  a  cord, for all the world like  an
ancient  prophet. Plump, jolly  Benedictines strolled along,  telling  their
beads, and the sun shone on their tonsures.
     Black-robed nuns passed  with lowered  heads; they  had  weird-looking,
huge, snow-white, firmly-starched, light-as-a-feather batiste head-dresses.
     A little grey donkey pulled  a cart. The  cart was  at least eight feel
high  and had  solid  wooden  wheels  that  creaked as  loudly  as the first
primitive carts must  have  creaked,  bringing to Petya's mind a picture  of
Hannibal's baggage train, moving through  the dust  at  the golden  gates of
Rome.
     Just then  a  carriage  on springs,  harnessed  tandem with four  black
horses, flew  out of  a side-street. The spokes  of  the  wheels spun round,
flashing  like lightning  in  the sun. A  behatted  cardinal reclined on the
leather  cushions.  Petya  caught a  glimpse  of  his  bluish cheeks,  heavy
eyebrows, and haughty, cruel eyes, pencilled like an actor's.
     The cardinal surveyed  the  Bachei family and  the  old driver, who had
whipped the hat off his bald head and folded his hands piously. There was no
telling  just what  it was the prince of  the church thought,  but he smiled
cordially,  freed  his  thin rosary-entwined hand from his  lace  cuff  and,
without  drawing his fingers together, by  an imperceptible movement  of his
palm, blessed  the travellers. His purple robe flashed past and the carriage
vanished, leaving a faint odour of incense in its wake.
     Two weeks later, having crossed and recrossed Italy from one end to the
other, the  tourists  found themselves  in Switzerland, strictly in  keeping
with Vasily Petrovich's plan. They decided to stop and rest for a bit before
setting out once more.
     To tell the truth, they had had enough of changing trains  and being on
the  go all the time, but it  was almost impossible to stop now, for  Father
had been tempted to buy some very reasonable special  tickets from  a travel
agency in Milan, that  entitled them to travel  without extra  cost  on  any
railway in Switzerland they cared to within a period of sixty days.
     Sixty days was too much as far as the Bacheis were concerned, since the
summer holidays would be over in  a  month  and a half. However, the tickets
were  valid  for sixty days,  and what they  lost in time  they made  up  on
Pavlik,  as they had  given his age as seven and  bought only  two full-fare
third-class tickets for the three of them.
     It was  cheating,  even if petty, and before Vasily Petrovich agreed to
go through  with it  he  stood for a  long time wiping  the  glasses of  his
pince-nez in embarrassment  and twisting his neck  from side to side. But in
the  end the tickets were bought and stamped with the date of purchase, thus
marking  the beginning of  a  strange,  restless period when they  felt that
every day not spent in a railway carriage was ruinous to their finances.
     However, they just had to stop for a rest.



        ON THE SHORES OF LAKE GENEVA


     Here they  were, sitting  in wicker  chairs  on the open terrace  of  a
small, inexpensive  boarding-house in Ouchy on  the  shore  of Lake  Geneva.
Tiers  of hotels, parks,  and  church spires rose on  a slant to the rear of
them and disappeared into the  clear sky over  Lausanne. A strip of sky-blue
water, dotted with winged  sails and gulls, shone through the pleasant green
of the gardens and  vineyards. Savoy lay before them across the lake, veiled
in  a haze  of  sunshine; there  were velvety meadows, gorges,  and  valleys
adorned  by tiny picturesque villages, and  above it all,  the wild mountain
range that stretched right across the horizon.
     Mont Blanc was supposed to be  somewhere in  the  vicinity,  but Vasily
Petrovich  tried in vain to locate it through  his little opera-glasses, for
the  outline of the  range  was obscured  by  clouds. This  was all the more
disappointing since their room was one "with a view of Mont Blanc."
     A  middle-aged chamber-maid wished the  travellers ban matin and  set a
tray-the complet-on the table.  It consisted of a tea-set, a straw basked of
tiny bits of toast, butter curls, jam and honey; there was also a sugar-bowl
with midget dominoes  of sugar  so brittle they had to be picked up gingerly
with sugar tongs, as they crumbled at the slightest pressure.
     Vasily  Petrovich put  on  his  pince-nez  and  examined  the  strange,
yellowish sugar closely. Then he  picked up  a cube, smelled it,  tasted it,
and announced that this was real cane-sugar.
     Cane-sugar! The discovery  astounded  the boys.  Petya  was  especially
excited, for he visualized Auntie's amazement and his friends' jealousy when
they found out that  he  had seen real cane-sugar with his own  eyes and had
even had some in  his tea, while sitting  on a terrace "with a view of  Mont
Blanc." That was worth writing  about. He pulled out his stationery box, but
the Swiss morning was so heavenly, the stillness  so  breath-taking, and the
bees hung over the  honey  pot so motionlessly, that Petya suddenly found he
could not move a finger, let alone begin writing.
     He now realized how dead tired he was and how badly he needed a rest.
     Scenes of Italy  kept flashing through his mind chaotically. He saw St.
Mark's and the lion with its paw  on a stone Bible sharply  outlined against
the intensely blue  sky, and that was Venice.  Then light-blue double-decked
tram-cars  rounded  the beautiful  square  and  the  white marble  lace-like
cathedral, adorned  by two thousand Gothic  statues,  and that was Milan. He
saw himself in  a cloud of dry white dust  passing  the  marble quarries  of
Carrara  where  huge marble panels,  cubes, slabs, and chunks that had  just
been sawn lay in piles ready for shipment; finally, the many-tiered graceful
Tower of Pisa leaning motionlessly to one side.
     Once their train had stopped at a remote siding in the middle of a hot,
beautiful valley, and they could see the cloudy purple mountain range on the
horizon and feel the slight breath of chill Alpine air. Suddenly, they dived
into the Simplon tunnel,  twenty-two miles through the heart  of a mountain;
there was a sudden darkness,  the stale smell of coal, the deafening clamour
of steel, and  the black  mirrored  surfaces  of the locked carriage windows
which  reflected  the  sinister, ghastly dimness  of the flickering electric
lights in the carriages.
     And  then,  after  an  endless  half-hour  of  depressing,  motionless,
headlong movement, when it seemed as if there was no air left to breathe and
there would never  be an end  to the infernal darkness  pressing in on every
side on the train and the two exhausted engines, then, suddenly, there  came
the dazzling rush  of  daylight, the  clatter of falling window-sashes,  the
refreshing breeze that tore through the carriages from the  Rhone Valley and
blew away  the  stale  smells of the tunnel.  Mountains.  Glaciers. Valleys.
Wooden chalets  with huge round cheeses on the roofs. Herds of red and black
Swiss cows  and  the melodious clack,  instead of tinkle, of the flat wooden
bells in the sunny  calm of the  station, the white  cross on  the red Swiss
flag, and a St. Bernard on a huge poster advertising Suchard Chocolate.
     Petya was now in a new country, a lovely, toy country.
     The voices of people arguing drifted up to them from the terrace below.
     They were speaking Russian. At the sound of his native tongue Petya sat
up and listened.
     "You cannot ignore the  main thesis  adopted unanimously at the January
meeting of the Central Committee," a woman said in a shrill voice, stressing
the words "ignore" and "meeting."
     "I'm  not ignoring  it, but..." a man's voice objected  softly,  with a
veiled note of irony in the clear baritone.
     "You're  wrong, sir.  You are either ignoring it or  pretending not  to
ignore it."
     "Where's your proof?"
     "The January  meeting was absolutely clear  as  to the  true nature  of
Social-Democratic work," a second male voice suddenly joined in.  It was the
deep, angry voice of an old  smoker  who was constantly  clearing his throat
and spitting.
     "Now, now," the sarcastic baritone said.
     The woman's voice became shriller:
     "Denial of the illegal Social-Democratic party, belittling its role and
its meaning, attempts to shorten the programme, tactical aims and slogans of
revolutionary  Social-Democracy testify to  the influence of the bourgeoisie
on the proletariat."
     Vasily  Petrovich jumped at the  words "revolutionary Social-Democracy"
and "proletariat"  which had been spoken so loudly that they  carried across
the garden. He looked at the children anxiously.
     The woman's voice persisted:
     "There  are  people who discard  such  basic  slogans of  revolutionary
Marxism  as the hegemony of the working class in the fight for socialism and
a democratic revolution!"
     "Does that mean me?"
     "Yes, it does. You and those like you."
     "God knows what's  going  on here!" Vasily Petrovich mumbled,  and  his
nose became white from excitement. "Children, go inside this minute!"
     But  Petya, burning  with curiosity,  was hanging  over the balustrade,
trying to see what was going on on the terrace below.
     Through the green  ivy-covered lattice he saw a table with a pitcher of
milk  on  it  and  several  people  sitting  around  in  wicker  chairs:  an
angry-faced woman  in  a black jacket who looked  like  a  school-teacher, a
consumptive young man in a cotton shirt  and a worn coat, and a good-looking
gentleman in a tussore  jacket,  with a shiny, steel-rimmed pince-nez on his
fleshy Roman nose, through which, at that very moment, the words "now, now,"
were being forced sarcastically.
     "You and those like you are the backers of Stolypin's 'workers'  party'
and  exponents of bourgeois influence on the proletariat, with your call for
a so-called legal or  open workers' party!" the woman continued, rapping the
table sharply with her knuckles.
     "That's   right.  Exponents  of  genuine  bourgeois   influence,"   the
consumptive young man  rattled  off in a hollow voice, as he choked in a fit
of  coughing and  spat,  then struck a match with  shaking  hands. "And your
'open'  workers'  party  while  Stolypin  is  running  things  simply  means
desertion  on  the  part  of  those who  have  renounced  the  aims  of  the
revolutionary struggle of the masses against  autocracy, the Third Duma, and
all that Stolypin stands for!"
     This  was  too  much for Vasily  Petrovich.  He grabbed  Petya  by  the
shoulders and shoved him into the room, saying:
     "Never listen to such things! Stay right here! Pavlik, come in at once!
My God, why must we suffer this! Politics, politics everywhere!"
     , When the boys were settled in the room, Vasily Petrovich  went out on
the  terrace and shouted to the people below  in  a voice that trembled with
rage:
     "I would ask you to choose your words more carefully! At least, you can
refrain from shouting. Remember, there are children here."
     The people down below stopped talking. Then a nasal voice staid:
     "Comrades, we  are  being  spied upon." His  words  were followed  by a
scraping of chairs, and the woman's voice said:
     "There's your 'open' party for you! Why, we aren't safe from the tsar's
spies even in free Switzerland!"
     "I  say!"  Vasily  Petrovich  shouted threateningly, and he  flushed an
angry red.
     However, the  glass door  downstairs  was  slammed  demonstratively;  a
confused  Vasily Petrovich muttered,  "A  fine state of affairs, this!" went
into his room, and slammed his door just as demonstratively.
     "Daddy,  they're Russians, aren't  they?" Pavlik  whispered. "Are  they
anarchists?"
     "Don't be silly, they're Social-Democrats!" Petya said.
     "I didn't ask you. Daddy, what are they doing here?"
     "Stop  asking  stupid questions!"  Father  said impatiently. "And  stop
worrying about things that don't concern you," he added, looking straight at
Petya.
     "But, Daddy,"  Pavlik persisted,  "they're Russians,  like  us,  aren't
they?"
     "Yes, yes, they're Russians all right, but they're  emigres. Let's have
no more of this," he concluded dryly.
     "What are emigres? Are they people who are against the tsar?"
     "That's enough!" Father barked resolutely.
     And so, the political  discussion was ended. That was the last they saw
of the emigres on the floor below.


        EMIGRES AND TOURISTS


     The episode made a  big impression on  Petya. Again his thoughts turned
to that strange phenomenon known as  "the Russian revolution."  His thoughts
were of Russia and the Russians.
     Until then  he had  taken  it for granted  that  all Russians-no matter
whether they were rich or poor, peasants or workers, officials or merchants,
officers or soldiers-were loyal subjects of His Majesty, the Emperor. It was
a concept that was  as natural to  him as the fact that the Black Sea  was a
large mass of salt water or that the sky was a mass of blue air.
     But the familiar concept received  a jolt during their travels when, to
Petya's surprise, they began to encounter not a few Russians.
     He noticed  that all Russians abroad  were divided into two categories:
tourists and  emigres. The tourists  were  wealthy,  very  wealthy,  and the
Bachei family never really came in contact with them, because they travelled
first-class on  the  railways and  -ships,  stayed  at  fabulously expensive
hotels,  dined  on the terraces  of fashionable restaurants and,  for  their
outings,  they  hired the  best carriages,  thoroughbred riding  horses, and
automobiles that were far more elegant than the one owned by  the Ptashnikov
brothers, which, until then, Petya had considered a miracle, the pinnacle of
wealth and luxury.
     No  matter  where  these Russian tourists  appeared,  they were  always
surrounded, in Petya's eyes, by an aura of wealth and luxury. They travelled
in  families,  with   well-dressed  children,  accompanied  by  governesses,
companions, travel agents and guides that were  as pompous and impressive as
ministers.
     The males were well-groomed, the  females squeamish, there  were  young
girls and young gallants, women whose age told and elegant old gentlemen who
smelled of strange perfumes and expensive cigars.
     Sometimes,  in  the cool semi-darkness of an art  gallery  or among the
scorching ruins of  an ancient  theatre, the  Bacheis would  find themselves
standing next  to these people,  but even  here  an invisible wall separated
them and made closer contact entirely out of the question. In their presence
Petya  smarted under  the  humiliating  feeling  of  shame,  if not  for his
family's poverty, then, at all events, for their lack of worldly things.
     Secretly,  he  was   mortified   by   his  father's  shabby  suit,  his
down-at-heel shoes,  cheap  straw hat, and celluloid collar and cuffs  which
Father carefully cleaned every night  and  then washed in  soap suds.  Petya
hated himself  for this feeling of  shame, but he could not overcome it.  He
felt all the more humiliated because he knew his father was secretly just as
ashamed as  he was. In the  presence of  the wealthy tourists, Father's face
took on  a strained expression of indifference,  his  beard twitched and his
hands made imperceptible movements, so  that the edges of his  cuffs crawled
up out of sight into his coat sleeves.
     But most humiliating  of all was that the wealthy Russians seemed never
to notice the presence of the Bacheis.
     They would simply stop  talking  Russian and switch casually to another
language - French, Italian,  or English - and continue their conversation as
naturally and easily as if they had been speaking Russian.
     The pictures of the great masters, which Vasily Petrovich regarded with
bowed head and tears in  his eyes, they examined from various angles through
lorgnettes  and  from  under  their hands, commenting knowingly and admiring
them in a dignified manner.
     They beheld the ruins of an  ancient  theatre with such looks on  their
faces  as if they expected  a Greek chorus to  appear and ancient  actors in
masks to stage a tragedy for their benefit.
     It seemed as if everything there belonged to them, on the basis of some
ancient immutable law. And Petya  felt that they  were  truly the masters of
everything.  The whole  world was theirs, or,  at  least,  belonged to their
kind, and as for Russia-it certainly was theirs.
     That is why the second category of Russians abroad, the emigres, seemed
all the more  a strange group to him. They were  the  exact opposite of  the
tourists.
     These  were   poor,  shabbily  dressed  intellectuals.  They  travelled
third-class,  went   on   foot,   and  lived   in  the   smallest,  cheapest
boarding-houses. Thus, the Bacheis  were in constant contact with  them, and
Petya was soon able to form a very definite opinion of them.
     These  were men and  women  like those the  Bacheis encountered at  the
boarding-house in Ouchy. They  were  preoccupied with  politics. Petya often
heard  them  say various  "political" words rather  loudly, much  to  Vasily
Petrovich's dismay.
     They  were  for ever arguing,  heedless of their  surroundings:  at the
railway station when seeing friends  off, in  the mountains near a waterfall
that  covered  the trembling ferns with fine spray, at dinner, in  a  museum
while examining hollow boulders  sawed  in  half and full of gleaming purple
crystals of amethyst.
     The  emigres,  in Petya's opinion, were all possessed by a single idea.
Petya  understood that  it was  a matter  of politics, but could only  guess
vaguely  at  what exactly it was all about. He knew that they were  "against
the autocracy." And if  they were constantly on  the go, it was  not because
they were touring, but because they had  to go,  in the interests  of  their
"common cause."
     Once, in  Geneva, the Bacheis came upon a rather large group of emigres
on a little island,  near  the  Rousseau  monument.  Black swans swam on the
lake,  and the bronze  Rousseau, an old man with a haggard, passionate face,
sat in his bronze chair watching them as  they plunged their  graceful necks
under the  water and snatched savagely at the pieces of bread thrown to them
from the  daintily  painted  boats. While  Vasily  Petrovich  was  standing,
bare-headed, before the statue  of the  writer and philosopher  whom he  had
worshipped  since student days, Petya heard the  loud voices of the emigres.
They were sitting in the shade of the willows, targuing as  usual. Suddenly,
Petya heard a familiar name: Ulyanov.
     "Ulyanov-Lenin is in Paris now, isn't he?"
     "Yes, he lives in Longjumeau."
     "There is a Party school there, I believe?"
     "Yes. Lenin  lectures to Party workers there on  political economy, the
agrarian question, and the theory and practice of socialism."
     "What's his attitude towards the Capri school?"
     "Utterly irreconcilable, of course."
     "After his resolution on the  situation in the Party-it was adopted  at
the  meeting  of  the  Paris  second  group  for  assistance to the  Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party-you can  be sure he will  never  agree to any
compromise."
     "I haven't read the resolution."
     "It's at the printer's already."
     "What about Plekhanov?"
     "Well, Plekhanov will always be Plekhanov."
     "So you think-"
     "I always thought and think now that there is  only one  line of action
open to the Russian revolution, and that is Lenin's line. And the sooner all
of  us  realize  this,  the sooner  the  Russian  revolution will  become  a
reality."
     Petya suddenly felt  that the  emigres, whom until  then  he had always
regarded as a bunch of eccentrics, forced into  exile after the unsuccessful
revolution of 1905, were a force  to be taken seriously. Why, they had Party
schools, central committees, assistance  groups,  and held special meetings.
They  even  printed their resolutions. Apparently, far from  giving in after
the  defeat  of  the 1905  Revolution,  many  of them were now  working hard
preparing  for another revolution.  They had  a leader too -  Lenin-Ulyanov,
probably the one Gavrik's letter  was for. Petya had heard the  name Ulyanov
several times  already. He  tried  to picture this man who  lived in a place
called Longjumeau, near Paris, preparing a new revolution in Russia.
     Now, whenever Petya saw Russian  emigres in a railway  carriage or at a
station, he was certain they were going to Paris, to Ulyanov's Party school.
Of course, that was where the emigres Gorky was seeing off at the station in
Naples were going,  including  the  woman  in mourning  and the girl who had
looked at Petya  so severely at  the very moment the train had pulled out of
the station and the cinder had flown into his eye.


        LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT


     Petya could not get the girl out of his mind. Strange as it might seem,
he often thought  of  her with  a bitter feeling of  loneliness,  and in his
heart  he  reproached  her  for  appearing   so  suddenly  and  as  suddenly
disappearing, as  if  she  were to blame. He exaggerated the meaning  of the
look that had passed between them.
     He  had  already  read Turgenev,  Lermontov's  A  Hero  of  Our  Times,
Tolstoi's War and Peace,  and,  it  goes  without saying, Pushkin's  Yevgeny
Onegin,  and most of  Goncharov. Although Vasily  Petrovich,  who chose  the
books  his  boys  read,  had  emphasized  the social  significance of  these
classical  works,  Petya  was captivated  by  an entirely  different aspect,
namely: romance.
     He literally devoured the pages devoted to love, and leafed through the
rest, which  were full of "social significance," or, as Vasily Petrovich put
it,  "the gist of  the book."  For Petya the gist of the book were the  love
scenes.
     He was a sensitive boy, given to  day-dreaming, and the exalted love in
the Russian novels  held him in thrall. However, that was theory, and it did
not seem to have its counterpart in reality. "Love at  first sight" or "cold
indifference," when applied to a girl from the fourth form in a black school
pinafore and a felt hat  with a  green school bow,  and carrying an oilcloth
satchel in her small hands, was a hopeless occupation,  since the girl would
but smile coyly at his efforts, unable to appreciate what it was all about.
     Nevertheless, Petya  often  drifted off into  a day-dream,  and then he
would become Pechorin or Onegin or Mark Volokhov, although, actually, he was
really much more like Grushnitsky, Lensky, or Raisky.
     Needless  to say, all the girls he knew would then  be transformed into
Marys, Tatyanas, and Veras, all of them lovely and all unhappy, a fact which
fed his vanity. However, the girls concerned rarely had any idea of what was
going on in his head and looked on him as a queer and conceited boy.
     At first, their travelling impressions  had been so all-consuming- that
Petya had had no time to think of love. But then, a tiny cinder had flown in
his eyes, marking the beginning of a new romance.
     It was "love  at first sight." Petya had no doubt about  that, although
he had yet to make up his mind who she was and who he himself was. Since the
thing  had taken place in a foreign country,  Turgenev would be  the closest
parallel. She might  be Asya,  or, stretching the  point  a  bit, Gemma from
Spring Torrents.  There were several pros to  these selections, as Petya, in
the role of the main hero, was the object of their ardent and devoted love.
     Petya's  intuition told him  that actually  she was  neither  Gemma nor
Asya. In  fact,  she was more the Tatyana type. But he rejected Tatyana, for
then he would have to be Onegin, and that  in no way satisfied his  need for
mutual love.
     Nor would Princess Mary or  Bela do, simply because Petya was  tired of
being Pechorin, a role he had abused considerably in recent times.
     Vera,  the heroine of Goncharov's The Precipice, was best suited. There
was something mysterious and wilful about her, too. In this case he would be
Mark  Volokhov, as he  was  definitely  opposed to the role of the  luckless
Raisky. That settled it. It was not a bad choice at all, especially since he
had never yet been Mark Volokhov.
     No sooner had Petya settled on Mark  Volokhov and Vera than he suddenly
decided the mysterious netherworld  kiss of Klara Milieh was exactly what he
wanted. She,  then, would be Klara  Milieh. What could  be  better? However,
just then an inner voice whispered that this, too, was untrue.
     Meanwhile, love could not wait, it would not stand the loss of a single
minute. Petya finally compounded  all the  women characters in his favourite
books,  retaining Klara Milich's nether-world kiss and adding the black  bow
and the chestnut braid, and found at last his own  "true love," the' girl of
his dreams-tender,  faithful,  and loving, whom  Fate had  given him for one
fleeting moment and then had snatched away so cruelly.
     Petya's soul was filled with longing.  A strange feeling of  loneliness
never left him. He loved this feeling and, far from spoiling his trip across
Switzerland, it seemed somehow to enhance it.
     He was no longer Pechorin, or Onegin, or Mark Volokhov. He was himself,
but he had changed and suddenly matured.
     Vasily  Petrovich was  rather  worried at the change that had come over
Petya, transforming him before his very eyes from  a  boy  into a  youth. He
felt that his son was experiencing something novel and  attributed it to the
mass of  new  impressions. Perhaps, that really was  the cause of it. But he
had  no  idea of  the state Petya's soul was in as a result  of  a too vivid
imagination. He would sometimes come over to him, look  into his  eyes,  and
run his big veined hand through the boy's hair.
     "How are things, my little Petya?" he would ask fondly.
     At which  Petya, who was pretty close to tears of self-pity, would hold
him off and say glumly:
     "I'm not little."
     Whenever the  opportunity offered,  Petya would  look at himself in the
mirror,  trying to  assume a  grim, manly expression.  He began brushing his
hair a new way to keep  the  cow-licks down, using  his  father's brush  and
dousing it generously with water.


        A STORM IN THE MOUNTAINS


     At Petya's insistence  they  bought  woollen capes  and  alpenstocks in
Interlaken. Then Petya began  to drop hints about a  green Tyrol hat  with a
pheasant feather and  spiked  shoes.  But  Father  was so careful  of  every
centime that he flatly refused and became angry as well.
     Petya would not part with his cape even on the hottest days; he did not
wear it  in  the usual  way, but  threw  one end  over his  shoulder in  the
classical  Spanish manner. If Pavlik's  cape looked like  a modest pelerine,
Petya's most certainly was transformed into a cloak.
     Pavlik trailed his long purple-barked staff artlessly;  Petya leaned on
his as if it were a shepherd's crook.
     At  times he would  smile sadly,  walk away and  stand on  a  cliff all
alone, peering down at a tiny village and lovely little church at the bottom
of a valley.
     Once he talked Father into climbing a mountain in.  had  weather,  when
the automatic barometer on  Fluelen Square was etching  a  sinister,  uneven
line on the paper ribbon of a barely moving spool.
     "It's misty on top and there's  a blizzard, we won't  be  able to see a
thing, and we'll only waste our money on the funicular," Father said. To his
horror, he had  just found out  that  their special tickets did  not include
trips on the funicular.
     Petya used  every  means  of  persuasion to make his  father  see  that
mountain-climbing on sunny  days was a  dull business, for there was nothing
of interest except tiresome snow-capped peaks and the glaciers, and that  it
was much more interesting in bad weather, when all the other tourists sought
the  comfort of their hotel  rooms, and when one  could actually  see a real
snow-storm in July.
     "No one but us will be seeing it!" Petya insisted.
     And  he had his way. They  set out in the slanting, stepped carriage of
the electric funicular, which pulled them upwards at  a practically vertical
angle.
     Of course, they were alone in the carriage. For some time they crept up
a  steep slope covered by pine woods which were later replaced by firs.  The
trees floated downwards diagonally and so Petya first saw the roots and then
the  pointed  crowns  hung with cones; they kept getting smaller  until they
vanished out of sight in the haze of the hot July day.
     There were foaming waterfalls lost among the ferns.
     It was  getting cooler. The tree  belt  ended.  The  last  station  was
crawling down  towards them. It was  a spotless  little  house with a  moist
roof.  The  Bacheis  descended from the  carriage, Vasily  Petrovich  leafed
through  his Baedeker, and they set  out  on  foot up the mountain,  winding
their way among black boulders covered with silvery fungi.
     There  were  signs  of  mist everywhere.  It was  hard  going  over the
slippery  quartz pebbles, especially  in  leather-soled  sandals. The  stony
ground was  overgrown  with creeping Alpine roses  and  cyclamens. Suddenly,
Petya found  his first  edelweiss among the clumps  of damp  moss.  It was a
strange, star-shaped, dead-looking flower that seemed to be cut out of white
cloth.  Petya pinned the  flower to  his chest by  sticking  the stem in the
collar of his blouse.
     The horizon was very high  and near now, and a grey mist rolled towards
them. Everything was suddenly wrapped in gloom: they had entered a cloud. It
became very chilly. In a second  their woollen capes  turned white  from the
mist. Darkness enveloped them. A  biting  wind blew stinging, icy rain  into
their faces.
     Vasily Petrovich insisted that they  turn  back  immediately, but Petya
continued  climbing  higher, gathering  his  cape round him and tapping  the
steel point of his alpenstock on the wet stones.
     The cold became more intense.
     First wet and  then dry snow-flakes appeared among the raindrops. In an
instant the rain had turned into a snow-storm.
     "Come back! Come back this minute!" Father shouted.
     Petya  did not  hear him.  He was enraptured  by the  grim  beauty of a
summer blizzard. He ran to the  edge  of the  cliff  that usually  offered a
magnificent  view of  the entire range, including the Monte Rosa,  Jungfrau,
and the Matterhorn.
     Nothing  could  be  seen  of  them  now.  The  snow  swirled  overhead,
underfoot, and on every side of him,  covering the flowers and boulders with
a white blanket.
     "All that  money thrown  away,"  Father  muttered,  trying  to catch  a
glimpse of the famous mountains.
     "Oh,  Dad, you don't understand a  thing!" Petya protested. "Don't  you
see, it's summer down there, and it's hot, while we - we're in the middle of
a snow-storm! Wasn't it worth coming up here for that alone?"
     "So  it's summer down there  and  winter up here.  A perfectly  natural
thing. What's  so  extraordinary  about that' You're  in the  mountains, you
know. You're just a dreamer."
     Petya was covered with snow, there were snow-flakes on his eyebrows and
eyelashes  as he stood with his arms folded on his chest and his cape flying
in the wind. He was  lost in melancholy rapture at  the thought of the  girl
who  had  been so cruelly  snatched away from him and taken off to Paris. He
was filled with his unrequited love and loneliness, although in his heart of
hearts he was exultant as  he  pictured himself  standing  there, suffering,
forsaken  by all, with an edelweiss pinned to  his chest  and a crude Alpine
cape that could never protect him from the cold flung over his shoulders.
     "Enough!  We've  had enough of the beautiful  view!"  Father  grumbled.
"Before you know it you'll both be down with pneumonia."
     "So what! Who  cares?" Petya answered, but he was glad to turn his back
on the piercing wind and run downhill after Pavlik.
     On the way back to the funicular they came upon a shepherd's hut-a real
Swiss chalet with stones on the flat roof.  They  warmed  up and dried their
clothes at the fireside and an old Swiss  woman gave them three  tall narrow
glasses of cold goat's milk for a small coin.
     As Vasily Petrovich was sipping the milk he was thinking: how wonderful
it is here,  how  quiet! How restful! Perhaps, this is what happiness really
means: living on a small plot, in a small hut, breeding cows, making cheese,
breathing the clear mountain air,  and not feeling  yourself a slave ,of any
government, religion,  or society. Rousseau, that great hermit and sage, was
absolutely right. These thoughts had flitted through his tired brain before,
but now  they became amazingly  clear. They were as tangible  and visible as
the drops of milk that glistened in his damp beard.
     To tell the truth, Petya was  really pleased when the funicular lowered
them slowly  into the warm, sunlit valley and the strange  excursion came to
an end, On the whole, they were satisfied with it.
     "Ah-hh, it was well  worth while," Vasily Petrovich  said  as he rubbed
his hands. "We saw real edelweiss in its natural surroundings!"
     Pavlik, although wont to conceal his feelings, was as pleased as Punch.
He  fussed around  secretively  in  a  corner  of their hotel  room,  hiding
something  carefully  as he  rummaged around  in  the  rucksack, banging and
knocking whatever it was. As it later turned out, he had not wasted his time
while in' Switzerland. Hawing seen quite a few  precious stones and crystals
in  the  shop windows, found, so it was  said, in the surrounding mountains,
the boy decided he could make his fortune if only he kept his eyes peeled on
the ground  during their  excursions-treasure was just lying around, waiting
to  be picked up.  So he  had  secretly filled  his rucksack  with stones he
considered to be of especial value. Today, while  Petya  stood  lost in  his
romantic reverie and Father  was busy exploring the Alpine flora, Pavlik had
found two rather large round stones. He was certain they were packed full of
amethysts. All he had to do was saw them in half,  and out would come a pile
of precious stones.  Pavlik was  a cautious boy and decided to postpone this
operation till he got home. Once there,  he would sell his gems on the quiet
and make his life's dream come true, that is, buy a second-hand bicycle.
     From that day on Petya began to dream of Paris with renewed passion. He
had a strange premonition that he would see "her"  there,  and  the  meeting
would be the beginning of a new, incredibly happy existence.
     Paris was included in their itinerary, but before starting out they had
to  make the  best use  of their special railway  tickets and see as much of
Switzerland as they could.
     Actually, they  were rather fed up with Switzerland, with its  cheeses,
milk,  chocolate,  boarding-houses,  funiculars.  collections  of  minerals,
wooden toys, and beautiful views-all so very much alike wherever they went.
     They could not back out now: after all, they did  not want to waste the
money  they  had  spent on  the  tickets! And so they  continued  riding and
changing  trains in every  conceivable  direction for  the  sole purpose  of
realizing their investment.
     They stood around a deep pit  in Bern,  watching  the famous bears walk
back and forth on their hind legs, begging for titbits.
     On a green meadow  on the outskirts of  Lucerne they saw  a huge yellow
dirigible, on which the words "Villa Lucerne" were inscribed.
     They  were  caught in  a  storm on  Lake  Vierwaldstatter and  saw  the
terrifying lightning flashes reflected on the surface of water that suddenly
had turned black.
     They were amazed at the truly Italian city  of Lugano, a city of noisy,
babbling  crowds,  macaroni,  mandolins,   bottles  of  Chianti,  and   iced
orangeade.
     The peaked towers of Chillon Castle  seemed to rise straight  up out of
the lake and were outlined  against the jagged  peak  of Dent du Midi. There
they  .saw the  famous  dungeon and  iron  ring, the  stone  columns  and an
inscription, attributed to Byron, scratched out on one of them.
     They bought Auntie a light silk  blanket  in one of the towns of German
Switzerland. At one of the stations a group of lively, stocky Tyrol marksmen
came into their  carriage; they  wore short  trousers and wide green braces;
tiny caps,  adorned  with pheasant feathers,  were stuck  on  the muzzles of
their guns, and they yodelled as they sang Tyrol melodies.
     There were many  other impressions, but they were all confused, leaving
them with a feeling of a constant need to keep on travelling.
     When the time  arrived  for them  to  go  on to Paris, Vasily Petrovich
hesitated. He  was  sitting  in their  small room  in  one of Geneva's cheap
hotels  and going over their  resources, covering a scrap  of notepaper with
long columns of tiny figures.
     "Well, when do we leave for Paris?" Petya asked impatiently.
     "Never!" Father snapped.
     "But you promised us."
     "I know, but I'm calling it off."
     "Why?"
     "We haven't enough money  left. How can we go to Paris when it's nearly
August; Auntie says that the entrance exams at Faig's begin on the first; in
any case, it's about time you and Pavlik stopped having a good  time and got
down to reviewing a few subjects before the new term begins. In other words,
we've had enough!"
     "Daddy, you're fooling!" Petya pleaded.
     "You heard what I said!" Father muttered.
     When Petya noticed that Father's voice had  reverted to the usual tone,
he changed his approach.
     "But you promised, and it's not honourable to go back on your word," he
said casually and rather impudently.
     "How dare you speak to your  father  like that! Be quiet! You  insolent
child!" Vasily Petrovich shouted and grabbed Petya by the shoulders,  with a
mind to give him a  good  shaking, but  then  he remembered  that  they were
abroad, and let it go at one short yank, after which they all felt relieved:
thank God, the matter had been  settled at last, there would not be any more
travelling. They would go back to dear old Odessa via Vienna.
     They  realized how  incredibly tired  they were, how bored  by  endless
jolting in railway carriages, sleeping in hotels,  buying postcards, running
to art galleries, speaking French, and eating Swiss soup and tiny pieces  of
meat with vegetables instead of borshch and vareniki.
     They wanted to swim in the  sea, eat a good slice of sweet water-melon,
drink steaming  tea from the samovar, and have strawberry  jam and hot  buns
with deliciously melting iced butter.
     Terribly homesick, they left the very next day.
     They  were  in such  a rush that  although they broke  their journey in
Vienna for two  days,  it made no impression on them whatever. They  had had
too much. The only recollection that remained was a scene  they saw from the
carriage window as they were pulling out of the station: a  crimson strip of
sunset  and  the  endlessly  drawn-out  skyline  of  steeples  and   spires,
weather-vanes  and the enormous Ferris wheel in Prater  Amusement Park which
towered over  the city and  seemed somehow to  be a strange symbol of Vienna
itself.
     The  train crawled  slowly,  and it  took them nearly two  days and two
nights  to reach the Russian  border. All because Vasily Petrovich, true  to
his principle of economizing on  tickets,  had decided not to waste money on
the express train  -SchneUzug -  and had  booked tickets on the Personenzug,
that is,  the  slow passenger train which,  despite its very appropriate and
pretty-sounding name, turned out to be a freight-and-passenger train.


        THE HOME-COMING


     Journeying across Switzerland,  Petya and Pavlik had both become expert
rail travellers and had learned to determine the  exact speed of a  train by
the telegraph  poles flashing past. For instance, if  one could count slowly
to five or six  between poles, that  meant the train was doing  about thirty
miles an hour. The Swiss trains were mostly fast trains-they counted to five
between the  poles. Sometimes there were trains that  had only four  or even
three counts between poles. But on the Austrian Personenzug they  counted up
to  ten between the poles-a tortoise speed. No longer did the poles flash by
the windows in quick succession;  each one sailed by slowly, lazily trailing
thin  wires with lonely swallows  perched on them, and the wait for the next
pole was  so long  that at  times it seemed as if there would not  be a next
pole. The train stopped at every station and  siding on the  way. There were
no sleeping-berths. They travelled day and night  on the hard wooden benches
of the closely packed third-class carriage.
     Their   fellow-passengers  were  not   the  well-dressed,  polite,  and
good-natured  tourists and farmers of the Swiss trains. These were Austria's
poor:   artisans  with   their  tools,  soldiers,   market-women,   Jews  in
old-fashioned coats and white stockings and with side whiskers  so  long and
curled that they seemed to be faked.
     There were a lot of Slavs in the carriage-Czechs,  Poles, and Serbians;
some  were  in  national  costume.  They  smoked  foul-smelling  cigars  and
porcelain pipes with long, hanging chubouks and green tassels. They ate  dry
Austrian sausage, filling the carriage  with the odour of garlic;  as Vasily
Petrovich said, sniffing the air, it had a purely local flavour.
     The passengers spoke a mixture of  Slavic  languages, and dialects, and
German was hardly heard.
     Most passengers had but  short distances to travel. People  kept coming
in and going out at every station. An old organ-grinder boarded the train at
one of the many stops. He had on a green hunting-jacket with buttons made of
a deer's antlers and was not unlike the Emperor  Franz Josef. Finding a seat
in the corner of the carriage, he began grinding out his tunes. After he had
played ten Viennese waltzes and marches, he took his battered Tyrol hat  and
passed it round,  bowing  with truly royal grace. However,  the only one who
gave him  anything was  a woman  with tear-reddened eyes who took some coins
from her purse, wrapped them in paper, and dropped them into his hat. At the
nearest  station he shouldered his  little organ with  shreds of glass  bead
ornaments hanging from it and got off the train.
     For a long  time after, the pitiful sounds of the old organ vibrated in
Petya's  ears.  His  mood blended  strangely  with  the  shabby  and forlorn
appearance of  the strangers who surrounded him, with  the twilight, and the
faint creaking of the carriage lantern; the Austrian conductor in a soft cap
had  just placed  a  lighted candle-end in it  which cast a red glow on  the
sides of the carriage and the sealed red Westinghouse brake handle.
     They  approached the Russian border the next  day, in  a state of utter
exhaustion. It was drizzling. As before people got off at every stop, but no
new passengers boarded the train.  When some people sitting next to them got
out, Vasily  Petrovich spread his raincoat on the empty seats and placed his
travelling-bag at the head for a pillow, to  make a place for Pavlik. But an
Austrian soldier suddenly loomed  up,  shoved Pavlik aside, flopped down  on
the  bench, put his  head on the travelling-bag, and  was sound asleep in an
instant, filling the carriage with his snoring.
     "How dare you!" Vasily Petrovich shouted in a high-pitched voice, livid
with rage. "You boor!"
     But the soldier lay there  as if he were made of lead; he heard nothing
and understood less. It suddenly dawned on Vasily Petrovich that the soldier
was dead drunk. This was the last straw.
     "You insolent curl Do you hear? Get up this minute! Get off our seats!"
     The soldier opened  his watery-blue eyes,  winked, belched  loudly, and
fell asleep again.
     Pavlik  began  pounding  at  the  tops  of  the double-stitched,  heavy
military boots, shouting:
     "Get out! Get out!"
     The soldier raised himself up slowly and stared  at Pavlik in amazement
for a few moments,  uncertain whether to laugh or get  angry. He decided  on
the latter. Laying his heavy hand with dirty nails on Pavlik's face, his red
moustache bristling, he spluttered and shouted in German:
     "Get  out,