Zoyka and Valeria

In the winter Levitsky spent all his free time at the Danilevskys’ Moscow apartment, and in the summer he started visiting them at their dacha in the pine forests along the Kazan road.

He had entered his fifth year as a student, he was twenty-four, but at the Danilevskys’ only the doctor himself referred to him as his “colleague”, while all the others called him Georges and Georgeik. By reason of solitude and susceptibility to love, he was continually becoming attached to one house of his acquaintance or another, soon becoming one of the family in it, a guest from one day to the next and even from dawn till dusk if classes permitted – and now this was what he had become at the Danilevskys’. And here not only the mistress of the house, but even the children, the very plump Zoyka and the big-eared Grishka, treated him like some distant and homeless relative. To all appearances he was very straightforward and kind, obliging and taciturn, although he would respond with great readiness to any word addressed to him.

Danilevsky’s door was opened to patients by an elderly woman in hospital dress, and they entered into a spacious hallway with rugs spread on the floor, furnished with heavy, old furniture, and the woman would put on spectacles, with pencil in hand would look sternly at her diary, and to some she would appoint a day and hour of a future surgery, while others she would lead through the high doors of the waiting room, and there they would wait a long time for a summons into the surgery next door, to a young assistant in a sugar-white coat for questioning and examination – and only after that would they get to Danilevsky himself, to his large surgery with a high bed by the rear wall, onto which he would force some of them to climb and lie down, in what fear turned into the most pitiful and awkward pose: everything troubled the patients – not only the assistant and the woman in the hallway, where, gleaming, the brass disk of the pendulum in the old long-case clock went from side to side with deathly slowness, but also all the grand order of this rich, spacious apartment, that temporizing silence of the waiting room, where nobody dared even sigh more than was necessary, and they all thought that this was some sort of utterly special, eternally lifeless apartment, and that Danilevsky himself, tall, thick-set, rather rude, was unlikely to smile even once a year. But they were mistaken: that residential part of the apartment, into which led double doors to the right from the hallway, was almost always noisy with guests, the samovar never left the table in the dining room, the housemaid ran around, adding to the table now cups and glasses, now little bowls of jam, now rusks and bread rolls, and even in surgery hours Danilevsky not infrequently ran over there on tiptoe through the hallway, and while the patients waited for him, thinking he was terribly busy with someone seriously ill, he sat, drank tea and talked about them to the guests: “Let ’em wait a bit, damn ’em!” One day, sitting like that and grinning, throwing glances at Levitsky, at his wiry thinness and the certain stoop of his body, at his slightly bowed legs and sunken stomach, at his freckled face, covered with fine skin, his hawkish eyes and ginger, tightly curling hair, Danilevsky said:

“Own up now, colleague: there is some Eastern blood in you, isn’t there – Yiddish, for example, or Caucasian?”

Levitsky replied with his invariable readiness to give answers:

“Not at all, Nikolai Grigoryevich, there’s no Yiddish. There is Polish, there is, maybe, your own Ukrainian blood – after all, there are Ukrainian Levitskys too – and I heard from Granddad that there’s apparently Turkish too, but whether that’s true, Allah alone knows.”

And Danilevsky burst out laughing with pleasure:

“There you are, I guessed right after all! So be careful, ladies and girls, he’s a Turk, and not at all as modest as you think. And as you know, he falls in love in the Turkish way too. Whose turn is it now, colleague? Who now is the lady of your true heart?”

“Darya Tadiyevna,” Levitsky replied with a simple-hearted smile, quickly flooding with delicate fire – he often blushed and smiled like that.

Charmingly embarrassed too, so that even her currants of eyes seemed to disappear somewhere for an instant, was Darya Tadiyevna, nice-looking, with bluish down on her upper lip and along her cheeks, wearing a black silk bonnet after a bout of typhus, half-lying in an armchair.

“Well, it’s no secret for anyone, and perfectly understandable,” she said, “after all, there’s Eastern blood in me too…”

And Grisha began yelling voluptuously: “Ah, hooked, you’re hooked!” while Zoyka ran out into the next room and, cross-eyed, fell backwards on the run against the end of a couch.

In the winter Levitsky had, indeed, been secretly in love with Darya Tadiyevna, and before her had experienced certain feelings for Zoyka too. She was only fourteen, but she was already very developed physically, especially at the back, although her bare, blue-grey knees under a short Scottish skirt were still childishly delicate and rounded. A year before she had been removed from grammar school, and she had not been taught at home either – Danilevsky had found the beginnings of some brain disease in her – and she lived in carefree idleness, never getting bored. She was so affectionate with everyone that she even made them smack their lips. She was steep-browed, she had a naively joyous look in her unctuous blue eyes, as though she was always surprised at something, and always moist lips. For all the plumpness of her body, there was a graceful coquetry of movement about it. A red ribbon tied in her hair with its tints of walnut made her particularly seductive. She used to sit down freely on Levitsky’s knees – as though innocently, childishly – and probably sensed what he was secretly experiencing, holding her plumpness, softness and weight and trying to keep his eyes off her bare knees under the little tartan skirt. Sometimes he could not contain himself, and he would kiss her on the cheek as if in jest, and she would close her eyes with a languorous and mocking smile. She had once whispered to him in strict confidence what she alone in all the world knew about her mother: her mother was in love with young Dr Titov! Her mother was forty, but after all, she was as slim as a girl, and terribly young-looking, and the two of them, both her mother and the doctor, were so good-looking and tall! Later Levitsky had become inattentive to her – Darya Tadiyevna had begun appearing in the house. Zoyka seemed to become even merrier, more carefree, but never took her eyes off either her or Levitsky; she would often fling herself with a cry to kiss her, but so hated her that when Darya fell ill with typhus, she awaited daily the joyous news from the hospital of her death. And then she awaited her departure – and the summer, when Levitsky, freed from classes, would begin visiting them at the dacha along the Kazan road where the Danilevskys were living in the summer for the third year now: in a certain way she was surreptitiously hunting him down.

And so the summer arrived, and he began coming every week for two or three days. But then soon Valeria Ostrogradskaya came to stay, her father’s niece from Kharkov, whom neither Zoyka nor Grishka had ever seen before. Levitsky was sent to Moscow early in the morning to meet her at the Kursk Station, and he arrived from their station not on a bicycle, but sitting with her in the station cabman’s chaise, tired, with sunken eyes, joyously excited. It was evident that he had fallen in love with her while still at the Kursk Station, and she was already treating him imperiously as he pulled her things out of the chaise. However, running up onto the porch to meet Zoyka’s mother, she immediately forgot about him, and then did not notice him all day long. She seemed incomprehensible to Zoyka – sorting out her things in her room and afterwards sitting on the balcony at lunch, she would at times talk a very great deal, then unexpectedly fall silent, thinking her own thoughts. But she was a genuine Little Russian beauty! And Zoyka pestered her with unflagging persistence:

“And have you brought morocco ankle boots with you, and a woolen shawl to wear around your waist? Will you put them on? Will you let people call you Valyechka?”

But even without the Little Russian costume she was very good-looking: strong, well-formed, with thick, dark hair, velvety eyebrows which almost met, stern eyes the colour of black blood, a hot, dark flush on her tanned face, a bright gleam of teeth and full, cherry-red lips, above which she too had a barely visible little moustache, only not down, like Darya Tadiyevna had, but pretty little black hairs, just like the ones between her eyebrows. Her hands were small but also strong and evenly tanned, as if lightly smoked. And what shoulders! And on them, how transparent were the pink silk ribbons holding the camisole beneath her fine white blouse! Her skirt was quite short, perfectly simple, but it fitted her amazingly well. Zoyka was so enraptured that she was not even jealous over Levitsky, who stopped going away to Moscow and did not leave Valeria’s side, happy that she had let him close to her, had also started calling him Georges, and was forever ordering him to do things. Thereafter the days became perfectly summery and hot, guests came more and more frequently from Moscow, and Zoyka noticed that Levitsky had been dismissed, and was sitting beside her mother more and more, helping her to prepare raspberries, and that Valeria had fallen in love with Dr Titov, with whom her mother was secretly in love. In general, something had happened to Valeria – when there were no guests, she stopped changing her smart blouses, as she had done before; she would sometimes go around from morning till evening in Zoyka’s mother’s peignoir, and she had a fastidious air. It was terribly intriguing: had she kissed Levitsky before falling in love with Dr Titov or not? Grishka swore he had seen her once before dinner walking with Levitsky down the avenue of fir trees after bathing, wrapped up in a towel like a turban, and how Levitsky, stumbling, had been dragging her wet sheet along, and saying something very, very rapidly, and how she had paused, and he had suddenly caught her by the shoulder and kissed her on the lips:

“I pressed up behind a fir tree and they didn’t see me,” said Grishka fervently with his eyes popping out, “but I saw everything. She was terribly pretty, only all red, it was still terribly hot, and, of course, she’d spent too long bathing, I mean, she always sits in the water and swims for two hours at a time – I spied on that too – naked she’s simply a naiad, and he was talking and talking, really and truly like a Turk…”

Grishka swore it, but he liked inventing all sorts of silly things, and Zoyka both did and did not believe it.

On Saturdays and Sundays, the trains that came to their station from Moscow were crammed full of people, weekend guests of the dacha-dwellers, even in the morning. Sometimes there was that delightful rain through sunshine, when the green carriages were washed down by it and shone like new, the white clouds of smoke from the steam engine seemed especially soft, and the green tops of the pines, standing elegant and thick behind the train, drew circles unusually high in the bright sky. The new arrivals vied with each other to grab the cab men’s chaises on the rutted hot sand behind the station, and drove with the joy of the dacha down the sandy roads in the cuttings of the forest under the ribbons of sky above them. The complete happiness of the dacha set in when in the forest, which endlessly hid the dry, slightly undulating land all around. Dacha-dwellers taking their Muscovite friends for a walk said that bears were the only thing lacking here, they declaimed, “Both of resin and wild strawb’rries smells the shady wood,” and hallooed one another, enjoyed their summer well-being, their idleness and freedom of dress – kosovorotkas with embroidered hems worn outside of trousers, the long braids of coloured belts, peaked canvas caps: the odd Muscovite acquaintance, some professor or journal editor, bearded and wearing glasses, was not even immediately recognizable in such a kosovorotka and such a cap.

Amidst all this dacha happiness Levitsky was doubly unhappy. Feeling himself from morning till evening pitiful, deceived, superfluous, he suffered all the more for understanding very well how vulgar his unhappiness was. Day and night he had one and the same thought: why, why had she so quickly and pitilessly let him close to her, made him not quite her friend, not quite her slave, and then her lover, who had had to be content with the rare and always unexpected happiness of kisses alone, why had she sometimes been intimate with him, sometimes formal, and how had she had the cruelty so simply and so easily to cease even noticing him all of a sudden on the very first day of her acquaintance with Titov? He was burning up with shame over his brazen loitering on the estate too. Tomorrow he should disappear, flee in secret to Moscow, hide from everyone with this ignominious unhappiness of deceived dacha love, so evident even for the servants in the house! But at this thought he was so pierced by the recollection of the velvetiness of her cherry-red lips that he lost the power of his arms and legs. If he was sitting on the balcony alone and she by chance was passing, she would with excessive naturalness say something particularly insignificant to him as she went – “Now where ever can my aunt be? You haven’t seen her?” – and he would hasten to answer her in the same tone, while ready to break into sobs with the pain. If at tea or lunch he threw glances at her in secret, she would become fastidiously absent-minded. Once, as she was passing, she saw Zoyka on his knees – what was that to do with her? But she suddenly flashed her eyes in fury and gave a ringing cry: “Don’t you dare climb all over men’s knees, you vile girl!” – and he was filled with rapture: it’s jealousy, jealousy! But Zoyka seized every moment when somewhere in an empty room she could run up and grab him round the neck and start whispering, licking her lips and with shining eyes: “Darling, darling, darling!” Once she caught his lips so deftly with her moist mouth that for the whole day he could not recall her without a voluptuous shudder – and horror: what ever is the matter with me! How can I look Nikolai Grigoryevich and Klavdia Alexandrovna in the eye now!

The yard of the dacha, which resembled a country house, was a large one. To the right of the entrance stood an empty old stable with a hayloft added above it, then a long wing for the servants adjoining the kitchen, from behind which looked birches and limes, and to the left, on hard, hilly ground, old pines grew in lots of space, and on the grass between them there rose giant’s strides and swings, and further on, right by the wall of the forest now, was a flat croquet lawn. The house, which was also large, stood just opposite the entrance, and behind it a large area was occupied by a mixture of forest and garden, with a sombrely majestic avenue of ancient firs going, in the midst of that mixture, from the rear balcony to the bathing place at the pond. And the master and mistress, alone or with guests, always sat on the front balcony, which ran into the house and was protected from the sun. That hot Sunday morning only the mistress and Levitsky were sitting on this balcony. The morning, as always when there were guests, seemed especially festive, and a lot of guests had come, and the housemaids, with their new dresses gleaming, were continually running through the yard from the kitchen into the house and from the house into the kitchen, where pressing work was going on towards lunch. Five people had come: a dark-faced, bilious writer, always excessively serious and stern, but a passionate lover of all sorts of games; a short-legged professor who looked like Socrates and who, at fifty, had just married his twenty-year-old pupil and had come with her, a slender little blonde; a small, very well-dressed lady nicknamed the Wasp for her height and thinness, her angriness and touchiness; and Titov, whom Danilevsky had nicknamed the insolent gentleman. Now all the guests, Valeria and Danilevsky himself were under the pines beside the forest, in their transparent shade – Danilevsky was smoking a cigar in an armchair, the children were busy on the giant’s strides with the writer and the professor’s wife, while the professor, Titov, Valeria and the Wasp were running about, hitting croquet balls with mallets, calling to one another, arguing, squabbling. And Levitsky and the mistress of the house were listening to them. Levitsky had wanted to go there too, but Valeria had banished him straight away: “Auntie’s preparing cherries by herself, be so good as to go and help her!” He had smiled awkwardly, had stood for a little and watched how, with a mallet in her hands, she bent towards a croquet ball, how her tussore skirt hung over her taut calves in fine stockings of pale yellow silk, how plumply and heavily her breasts stretched her transparent blouse, beneath which could be seen the tanned flesh of her rounded shoulders, seeming pinkish from the pink straps of her camisole – and had ambled off to the balcony. He was especially pitiful that morning, and the mistress of the house, equable, calm and clear as always, with her young-looking face and the gaze of her pure eyes, who was also listening with a secret pain in her heart to the voices underneath the pines, threw him the occasional sidelong glance.

“You just won’t be able to get your hands clean now,” she said, digging a gilded fork into a cherry with bloodied fingers, “and somehow, Georges, you always manage to make yourself particularly messy… Why are you still in your tunic, dear? It’s hot, isn’t it, you could perfectly well go around in just a shirt with a belt. And you haven’t shaved for ten days…”

He knew that his sunken cheeks were covered with a growth of reddish stubble, that he had made his only white tunic terribly dirty with wear, that his student trousers were shiny and his shoes uncleaned, he knew how round shouldered he was, sitting there with his narrow chest and sunken stomach, and, blushing, he replied:

“It’s true, it’s true, Klavdia Alexandrovna, I’m unshaven, like a runaway convict; in general I’ve let myself go completely, shamelessly exploiting your kindness – forgive me, for God’s sake. I’ll put myself in order this very day, all the more as it’s high time I went to Moscow; I’ve so outstayed my welcome here already that everyone’s sick of the sight of me. I’ve taken the firm decision to go tomorrow. A comrade is inviting me to visit him in Mogilyov – he writes that it’s an amazingly picturesque town…”

And he bent still lower over the table, hearing Titov shouting imperiously at Valeria from the croquet:

“No, no, madam, that’s against the rules! You don’t know how to put your foot on the ball and you’re hitting it with the mallet – that’s your fault. But it’s not done to roquet twice…”

At lunch it seemed to him that all those sitting at the table had moved inside him – were eating, talking, joking and chuckling inside him. After lunch everyone went to rest in the shade of the avenue of firs, thickly strewn with slippery conifer needles, and the housemaids dragged rugs and cushions there. He went through the hot yard towards the empty stable, climbed up the ladder on the wall to the semi-darkness of its loft, where there was old hay lying about, and collapsed into it, trying to make a decision; he began looking intently, lying on his stomach, at a fly which was sitting on the hay right in front of his eyes and, to begin with, quickly criss-crossing its front legs, as though washing – but then, unnaturally somehow, with an effort, it began kicking up the rear ones. Suddenly someone ran quickly into the loft, threw open and closed the door – and, turning round, in the light from the dormer window he saw Zoyka. She jumped towards him, sank into the hay and, gasping for breath, began whispering, lying on her stomach as well and looking him in the eyes as though in fright:

“Georgeik, darling, I have to tell you something – something you’ll find terribly interesting, something remarkable!”

“What is it, Zoyechka?” he asked, raising himself a little.

“Well, you’ll see! Only first give me a kiss for it – you have to!”

And she began kicking her legs in the hay, baring her plump thighs.

“Zoyechka,” he began, made powerless by spiritual exhaustion to suppress the unhealthy tenderness inside him, “Zoyechka, you alone love me, and I love you very much too… But don’t, don’t…”

She began kicking her legs even more.

“Do, do, you have to!”

And her head fell onto his chest. He saw beneath the red ribbon the youthful shine of her walnut hair, sensed its smell and pressed his face against it. All of a sudden, quietly and piercingly, she cried “ow!” and grabbed hold of the back of her skirt.

He leapt up:

“What is it?”

Dropping her head into the hay, she began sobbing:

“Something’s given me a terrible bite there… Take a look, take a look, quickly!”

And she tossed the skirt up onto her back, and pulled the drawers down from her plump body:

“What’s there? Blood?”

“But there’s absolutely nothing there, Zoyechka!”

“What do you mean, nothing?” she cried, breaking into sobs again. “Blow on it, blow on it, I’m in terrible pain!”

And after blowing, several times he greedily kissed the delicate cold of her backside’s broad plumpness. She leapt up in mad rapture with her eyes and tears flashing:

“Fooled you, fooled you, fooled you! And in return for that, here’s the terrible secret for you: Titov’s dismissed her! Dismissed her completely! Grishka and I heard everything from behind the armchairs in the drawing room: they’re walking along the balcony, we sat down on the floor behind the armchairs, and he says to her, terribly insultingly: ‘Madam, I’m not one of those men that can be led by the nose. And, moreover, I don’t love you. I’ll come to love you if you merit it, but for the time being, no declarations.’ Isn’t it great? That’s what she deserves!”

And, leaping up, she darted out of the door and down the ladder.

He followed her with his eyes:

“I’m a scoundrel for whom hanging’s too good!” he said loudly, still tasting her body on his lips. In the evening the estate was quiet, tranquillity set in, a sense of family life – the guests had left at six o’clock… The warm twilight, the medicinal smell of the limes in bloom behind the kitchen. The sweet smell of smoke and food from the kitchen, where dinner was being prepared. And the peaceful happiness of it all – the twilight, the smells – and the torment, still promising something, of her presence, of her existence beside him… the torment, tearing his soul apart, of love for her – and her merciless indifference, absence… Where was she? He went down from the front balcony, listening to the rhythmic shriek and creak, with intervals, of a swing under the pines, and went towards it – yes, it was her. He stopped, gazing at her flying expansively up and down, pulling the ropes ever tauter, striving to fly up to the uttermost height and pretending she had not noticed him. With a shriek of the rings, she flies horribly upwards, disappears in the branches and, as if shot and wounded, hurtles swiftly down, sinking low and with her skirt hem fluttering. Oh, to catch her! Catch and strangle, rape her!

“Valeria Andreyevna! Do be careful!”

As if not hearing, she goes at it still harder…

At dinner on the balcony under a hot, bright lamp, they laughed at the guests and argued about them. She laughed too, unnaturally and viciously, and ate curd cheese and sour cream greedily, again without a single glance in his direction. Zoyka alone was silent, and she kept looking sidelong at him with a gleam in her eyes, which knew something in common with him alone.

They all dispersed and went to bed early, and not a single light remained in the house. Everywhere became dark and dead. Slipping away unnoticed immediately after dinner to his room, the door of which opened onto the front balcony, he started shoving his bits of linen into his shoulder bag, thinking: I’ll take the bicycle out nice and quiet, get on – and off to the station. I’ll lie down on some sand somewhere in the forest beside the station until the first morning train… Although no, not like that. It’ll come out looking like God knows what – ran away like a little boy, in the night, without saying goodbye to anyone! I must wait until tomorrow – and leave carefree, as if nothing were the matter: “Goodbye, dear Nikolai Grigoryevich, goodbye, dear Klavdia Alexandrovna! Thank you, thank you for everything! Yes, yes, to Mogilyov, an amazingly beautiful town, they say… Zoyechka, good luck, dear, grow up and have fun! Grisha, let me shake your ‘honest’ hand! Valeria Andreyevna, all the best, remember me kindly…” No, “remember me kindly”’s unnecessary, silly and tactless, as if sort of hinting at something…

Sensing there was not the slightest hope of falling asleep, he quietly descended from the balcony, deciding to go out onto the road to the station and give himself a hard time, to stride out for two or three kilometres. But in the yard he stopped: the warm dusk, the sweet quietness, the milky white of the sky from the countless little stars… He set off across the yard, stopped again, raised his head: the starriness receding upwards ever deeper and deeper, and there, a terrible sort of blue-black darkness, voids leading away somewhere… and peace, silence, an incomprehensible, great wilderness, the lifeless and aimless beauty of the world… the speechless, eternal religiosity of the night… and he was alone, face to face with it all, in the abyss between sky and earth… Inwardly, without words, he began praying for some kind of heavenly mercy, for someone’s pity on him, sensing with bitter joy his union with the sky and already a certain deliverance from himself, from his body… Then, trying to retain these sensations within him, he looked at the house: the stars were reflected with flattened lustre in the black panes of the windows – and in the panes of her window… Was she sleeping, or lying in the dull numbness of ever the one thought of Titov? Yes, now it was her turn.

He went round the large house, ill-defined in the dusk, went towards the rear balcony, towards the clearing between it and the two rows, terrible in their nocturnal height and blackness, of motionless fir trees with their sharp tops in the stars. In the darkness under the firs were scattered the motionless little greenish-yellow lights of glow-worms. And something showed dimly white on the balcony… He paused, peering closely, and suddenly froze with fear and the surprise: there rang out from the balcony a soft and even expressionless voice:

“Why is it you’re wandering about in the night?”

He started forward in astonishment and immediately made out that she was sprawling in a rocking chair, wearing the old, silvery shawl that all the Danilevskys’ female guests threw over themselves in the evenings if they were staying for the night. In confusion he too asked:

“And why aren’t you asleep?”

She did not reply, was silent for a moment, then got up and inaudibly came down to him, adjusting the slipping shawl with her shoulder:

“Let’s take a walk…”

He set off after her, at first behind, then alongside, into the darkness of the avenue, which seemed as if it was concealing something in its gloomy immobility. What’s this? He’s with her again, alone together in this avenue at such an hour? And again this shawl, always slipping from her shoulders and pricking the tips of his fingers with its silk fibres when he put it right for her… Mastering a spasm in his throat, he uttered:

“Why do you torment me so terribly, to what end?”

She began shaking her head:

“I don’t know. Be quiet.”

He grew bold, raised his voice:

“Yes, why and to what end? To what end did you…”

She caught his hanging hand and gave it a squeeze:

“Be quiet…”

“Valya, I don’t understand a thing…”

She cast his hand away and glanced to the left, at the fir tree at the end of the avenue with the triangle of its mantle wide and black:

“Do you remember this place? Here I kissed you for the first time. Kiss me here for the last time…”

And, passing quickly under the branches of the fir, she impulsively flung the shawl onto the ground.

“Come here to me!”

Immediately after the final moment she sharply and disgustedly pushed him away, and she remained lying as she was, only lowering her raised and outspread knees and dropping her arms alongside her body. He lay face down next to her with his cheek stuck to the conifer needles onto which his hot tears flowed. In the frozen quietness of the night and the forests, low over a dim field, the late moon showed red in the distance like a motionless slice of melon.

In his room, with eyes swollen from crying, he glanced at the clock and took fright: twenty to two! Hurrying and trying not to make a noise, he wheeled the bicycle down from the balcony, wheeled it quietly and quickly across the yard. Outside the gates he leapt up onto the saddle and, bending sharply, began working his legs furiously, bouncing over the sandy potholes of the cutting amidst the frequent blackness of tree trunks that flew upon him from both sides, letting through the light of the pre-dawn sky. “I’ll be late!” And he worked his legs even more heatedly, wiping his sweaty brow with the crook of his arm: the express from Moscow flew by the station – without stopping – at two fifteen – he had only a few minutes left. Suddenly, in the dawn’s half-light that still resembled twilight, he glimpsed at the end of the cutting the dark building of the station. There it was! He turned decisively down the road to the left, alongside the railway track, turned right onto the crossing, under the barrier, then left again, between the rails, and sped off, bumping over the sleepers, downhill towards the roaring steam engine with its blinding lights that was bursting upwards from the bottom of the slope.

13th October 1940