"Good-natured but obstinate?" I suggested.
"Yes," said Fedka; "that's the reason he will not heed his wife."
From the moment when they introduced the old man the composition began in lively earnest. Here for the first time, evidently, they began to feel the delight of putting artistic work into words. In this respect Semka was particularly brilliant; the most lifelike details followed one another. The solitary fault which might be charged against him was this: that these details pictured only the present moment, and had no relationship to the general idea of the story. I did not hurry them, but rather urged them to go slow, and not to forget what they had said.
It seemed as if Semka saw and described what went on before his eyes: the frozen, snow-covered bark shoes, and the mud which dripped down from them as they thawed out, and the biscuits into which they dried when the woman put them into the oven.
Fedka, on the other hand, saw only those particulars which aroused in him such a sentiment as he would have experienced at the sight of a real person. Fedka saw the snow which had stuck to the old man's leg-wrappers,[1] and he felt the feeling of pity which inspired the peasant to say:—
"Lord! how can he walk!"
Fedka went so far as to express in pantomime the manner in which the peasant said these words; waving his hand and shaking his head. He saw the old man's thin, tattered cloak, and his torn shirt, under which showed his emaciated body wet with melting snow. He imagined the woman, as she grumblingly obeyed her husband's command, and pulled off his lapti, and the old man's pitiful groan muttered through his teeth:—
"Easy, little mother;[2] my feet are sore there!"
Semka wanted objective pictures above all,—the
