the slightest sign of disagreement, pressed his argument to the point of absurdity, apologized for speaking so sharply and, his features alert and his eyes darting around the room, basked in the wonderment of his audience.
After the meal he took a walk on the grounds. But before he could start, he had to cross a barrage of suppliants. They had been sitting for hours, in front of the house, on the bench, under the old elm, patiently waiting their turn. Pilgrims on the way to the monasteries of Kiev, muzhiks from villages far and near, simpletons, professional beggars, a whole ragged little tribe who bent down and murmured words of blessing as the master drew near. He questioned them, gratified them with a few evangelical words of counsel and gave them a few kopecks. A big jar in the upstairs drawing room was kept full of coins especially for the purpose. Most of the visitors thanked him when they received their pittance. But some grumbled that he could give more, since he was so rich.
"But they told me he was a kind man!" one woman exclaimed, looking with contempt at the palm of her hand.
In addition to the poor, there were callcrs of higher degree, who had come by coach from the Yasenki station. They were all "problem" people. They had souls, and they intended to tell him about them. Sasha wrote, "One is a landowner who agrees that private property is a sin but docs not know how to expiate; one is a student wanting money as a 'revolutionary expropriation'; one is a lunatic who wants Tolstoy to support her Esperanto propaganda campaign; one is a young man who has gone astray and wants us to put him back on the path of righteousness; one is a peasant who has refused to perform his military' service on religious grounds and wants to tell his tale of woe. . . . And then there are the sight-seers, who simply comc to look at 'the great writer of the Russian nation.'"
For them all, Tolstoy was a national monument, and no one had any right to prevent them from coming to look at him. Some feigned a neophyte's admiration in his presence, but others did not even trouble to do that: they asked impertinent questions of the author and his family and snooped about the house in search of material for a "feature" story. Biographers, annalists, souvenir hunters, they all went away with their notcl>ooks full, and one subsequently heard that they had known the master intimately and were writing their memoirs. Some came back once or twice and performed some small service, and although no one liked them, they eventually edged their way into the little clan around Tolstoy. One grew accustomed to their faces, one forgot to be careful what one said in front of them; and then one day,
using what they had seen and heard, they might peacefully set about demolishing their host. "Usually," Sasha noted wistfully, "people can choose their friends and acquaintances according to their tastes. This was not so with us. Because of my father's name, we saw many people who had no value, and were simply full of their own importance."
After making his way through these groups, Tolstoy set off at last, on foot or 011 horseback, for the Zasyeka forest. Sonya worried about him during these rambles and had insisted that he be followed, at forty paccs, by a servant or his secretary or some friend. He grumblingly resigned himself to this silent escort. He often paused to take notes and, during the warm months, to pick flowers. He was always the first to appear with violets, forget-me-nots and lilies-of-the-valley. Clutching his bouquet in his fist, he sniffed at it with a sly, voluptuous expression on his face: "What a delicate fragrance! Like bitter almond!"
His companions on these jaunts through field and forest were amazed at his ability on horseback. At eighty, mounted on his faithful D<Slire, he clattered down the sides of ravines, leaped over ditches and galloped away beneath low-hanging branches. His daughter Sasha trembled with terror when he took her with him on these sylvan expeditions. From time to time he would turn back and crv out:
'Ton all right?"
"Yes, I'm still in the saddle," she would gasp.
He laughed:
"Well, hang on!"
On these occasions he usually wore a peculiar white muslin hat, stretched on a wire frame. A canvas blouse, shapeless trousers and soft boots completed his attire. Sometimes he exchanged the muslin hat for a cap. From the distance, he looked like a young man disguised as an old one, with a false beard and eyebrows made out of cotton batting. One day Ddlirc, who was very high-spirited, took fright passing by a foundry, shied and fell. Without abandoning the reins, Tolstoy slipped his foot out of the stirrup, leaped to one side and landed 011 his feet, unhurt.
"Don't say anything to Maman!" he growled, turning to Sasha.2
When he returned from his outing, around five o'clock, he drank a glass of tea, shut himself up in his study and, lying on the leather couch, daydreamed, read, took notes or napped. But at the first sign of anything amiss—a cold or excess fatigue—this all changed. He wrapped himself up in his dressing gown, covered his shoulders with a russet camel's-hair shawl, pulled a black silk skullcap down over his head and sat in semi-darkness, yawning cavernously, at such length
and so noisily that when the windows were open he could be heard in the garden.3
Toward seven he reappeared, after the rest of the family had already sat down for supper. This time his meal was more copious: borscht, rice or potato dumplings, dessert, and, on very rare occasions, a drop of white wine in a large glass of water. After supper, the women sat sewing in the drawing room under the big lamp with the pleated paper shade, while he played chess with one of his sons or a visiting friend. Writers came to see him: Dmitry Merezhkovsky and his wife Zinaida Hippius ("I would like to like them but I can't"), his translator Halperin-Kaminsky . . . Often, there was music. There were two pianos in the room and the ttagere sagged under the weight of the sheet music of Haydn, Mozart, Chopin, Glinka and Beethoven. Most often, it was the pianist Goldenweiser, a close friend of the family, whose swift fingers swept the keyboard. Or some noted guest such as Wanda Landowska, who came in 1907.* However he bewailed the evil effects of music, Tolstoy could not resist its charms. When a melody pleased him, his face softened into an expression of gentleness and suffering. Seated in the old Voltaire armchair, his head to one side and his eyes closed, he sighed and wept, unable to restrain his emotions. Under the blue light of the big paper lampshade, there was "something immaterial and seraphic" in his profile with its white beard and hair. Once the spell was broken, he resented the composer and performer who had so unsettled him:
"My tears mean nothing," he growled. "So what? There is some music I cannot listen to without weeping, that's all, just as my daughter Sasha cannot eat strawberries without getting hives! Anyway, sometimes I weep when I laugh, too. It's nerves, nothing but nerves!"4