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permission to take her share of tart to the nursery, and had taken it
instead to her brother. While still weeping over the injustice of his
punishment, he was eating the tart, and kept saying through his sobs,
“Eat yourself; let’s eat it together...together.”
Tanya had at first been under the influence of her pity for Grisha,
then of a sense of her noble action, and tears were standing in her eyes
too; but she did not refuse, and ate her share.
On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed, but, looking
into her face, they saw they were not doing wrong. They burst out
laughing, and, with their mouths full of tart, they began wiping their
smiling lips with their hands, and smearing their radiant faces all over
with tears and jam.
“Mercy! Your new white frock; Tanya! Grisha!” said their mother,
trying to save the frock, but with tears in her eyes, smiling a blissful,
rapturous smile.
The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given for the little
girls to have their blouses put on, and the boys their old jackets, and the
wagonette to be harnessed; with Brownie, to the bailiff ’s annoyance,
again in the shafts, to drive out for mushroom picking and bathing. A
roar of delighted shrieks arose in the nursery, and never ceased till they
had set off for the bathing-place.
They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even Lily found a
birch mushroom. It had always happened before that Miss Hoole
found them and pointed them out to her; but this time she found a big
one quite of herself, and there was a general scream of delight, “Lily
has found a mushroom!”
Then they reached the river, put the horses under the birch trees,
and went to the bathing-place. The coachman, Terenty, fastened the
horses, who kept whisking away the flies, to a tree, and, treading down
the grass, lay down in the shade of a birch and smoked his shag, while
the never-ceasing shrieks of delight of the children floated across to
him from the bathing-place.
Though it was hard work to look after all the children and restrain
their wild pranks, though it was difficult too to keep in one’s head and
not mix up all the stockings, little breeches, and shoes for the different
legs, and to undo and to do up again all the tapes and buttons, Darya
Alexandrovna, who had always liked bathing herself, and believed it to
be very good for the children, enjoyed nothing so much as bathing with
all the children. To go over all those fat little legs, pulling on their
stockings, to take in her arms and dip those little naked bodies, and to
hear their screams of delight and alarm, to see the breathless faces with
wide-open, scared, and happy eyes of all her splashing cherubs, was a
great pleasure to her.
When half the children had been dressed, some peasant women
in holiday dress, out picking herbs, came up to the bathing-shed and
stopped shyly. Marya Philimonovna called one of them and handed
her a sheet and a shirt that had dropped into the water for her to dry
them, and Darya Alexandrovna began to talk to the women. At first
they laughed behind their hands and did not understand her ques-
tions, but soon they grew bolder and began to talk, winning Darya
Alexandrovna’s heart at once by the genuine admiration of the chil-
dren that they showed.
“My, what a beauty! as white as sugar,” said one, admiring Tanitchka,
and shaking her head; “but thin...”
“Yes, she has been ill.”
“And so they’ve been bathing you too,” said another to the baby.
“No; he’s only three months old,” answered Darya Alexandrovna
with pride.