Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи. Книга для чтения на английском языке

She drew breath in relief:

“Oh, how disgusting! Not for nothing is a snake in the grass named after the grass snake[73 - Not for nothing is a snake in the grass named after the grass snake – (РёРіСЂР° слов) Сѓ Р?. Рђ. Бунина: Недаром слово ужас РїСЂРѕРёСЃС…РѕРґРёС‚ РѕС‚ ужа.]. We have them everywhere here, in the garden and under the house… And Petya, just imagine, picks them up in his hands!”

For the first time she had begun speaking to him unaffectedly, and for the first time they glanced directly into one another’s eyes.

“But what a good fellow you are! What a good whack you gave it!”

She had recovered herself completely, she smiled and, running back from the bow to the stern, sat down cheerfully. She had struck him with her beauty in her fright, and now he thought with tenderness: but she’s still quite a little girl! Yet putting on an indifferent air, he took a preoccupied step across into the boat and, leaning the oar against the jelly-like lakebed, turned its bow forwards and pulled it across the tangled thicket of underwater weeds towards the green brushes of sedge and the flowering water lilies which covered everything ahead with an unbroken layer of their thick, round foliage, brought the boat out into the water and sat down on the thwart in the middle, paddling to the right and to the left.

“Nice, isn’t it?” she cried.

“Very!” he replied, taking off his cap, and turned round towards her: “Be so kind as to drop this down beside you, or else I’ll knock it off into this here tub, which, forgive me, does after all leak, and is full of leeches.

”

She put the cap on her knees.

“Oh, don’t worry, drop it down anywhere.”

She pressed the cap to her breast:

“No, I’m going to take care of it!”

Again his heart stirred tenderly, but again he turned away and began intensifying his thrusting of the oar into the water that shone between the sedge and the water lilies.

Mosquitoes stuck to his face and hands, the warm silver of everything all around was dazzling: the sultry air, the undulating sunlight, the curly whiteness of the clouds shining softly in the sky and in the clear patches of water between islands of sedge and water lilies; it was so shallow everywhere that the lakebed with its underwater weeds was visible, but somehow that did not preclude that bottomless depth into which the reflected sky and clouds receded.