“He is an American,” she said, desperately handing him the little green volume.
“A most nice little volume,” he demurred, “but I find it strandge that you offer me the book of an American.”
“It is the most perfect English you could have. He is a New Englander, a Bostonian; the Pilgrim Fathers; they kept up the English of our best period. The fifteenth century.”
“That is most interesting,” he said gravely, turning the precious pages. “Why have I not heard of this man? In Russia we know of course their Thoreau, he has a certain popularity amongst extremists, and I know also of course their great poet, Vitmann. I see that this is a kind of philosophical disquisitions.”
“You could not possibly have a better book for style and phraseology in English, quite apart from the meaning.”
“No,” he said, with reproachful gravity, “preciosity I cannot have.”
Miriam felt out of her depth. “Perhaps you won’t like Emerson,” she said, “but it will be good practice for you. You need not attend to the meaning.”
“Well, ach-ma, we shall try, but not this evanink; I have headache, we shall rather talk; let us return to the soobjects we have discussed yesterday.” He rested his elbows on the table, supporting his chin on one hand, his beard askew, one eye reduced to a slit by the bulge of his pushed up cheek, his whole face suddenly pallid and heavy, sleepy-looking.
“I am most-interested in philosophy,” he said, glowering warmly through his further, wide-open eye. “It was very good to me. I found myself most excited after our talk of yesterday. I think you too were interested?”
“Yes, wasn’t it extraordinary?” Miriam paused to choose between the desire to confess her dread of confronting a full-fledged student and a silence that would let him go on talking while she contemplated a series of reflections extending forward out of sight from his surprising admission of fellowship. It was so strange, an exhilaration so deep and throwing such wide thought-inviting illumination, to discover that he had found yesterday exceptional; that he too, with all his wonderful life, found interest scattered only here and there. Meanwhile his eagerness to rekindle without fresh fuel, the glow of yesterday, confessed an immaturity that filled her with a tumult of astonished solicitude.
“You must let me correct your English today,” she said, busily taking him with her voice by the hand in a forward rush into the empty hour that was to test, perhaps to destroy the achievement of their first meeting. “Just now you said ‘the subjects we have discussed yesterday.’ ‘Have’ is the indefinite past; ‘yesterday,’ as you used it, is a definite point of time; passé défini, we discussed yesterday. We have always discussed these things on Thursdays. We always discussed these things on Thursdays. Those two phrases have different meanings. The first indefinite because it suggests the discussions still going on, the second definite referring to a fixed period of past time.”
She had made her speech at the table and glanced up at him apologetically. Marvelling at her unexpected knowledge of the grammar of her own tongue, called into being she supposed by the jar of his inaccuracy, she had for a moment almost forgotten his presence.
“I perceive,” he said shifting his chin on his hand to face her fully, with bent head and moving beard-point; his voice came again as strange, from an immense distance; he was there like a ghost; “that you are in spite of your denials a most excellent institutrice. Ach-ma! My English is bad. You shall explain me all these complications of English verb-mixing; but tonight I am reeally too stupid.”
“It is all quite easy; it only appears to be difficult.”
“It shall be easy; you have, I remark, a more clear pure English than I have met; and I am very intelligent. It shall not be difficult.”
Miriam hid her laughter by gathering up one of his books with a random question. But how brave. Why should not people admit intelligence? … It was a sort of pamphlet, in French.
“Ah, that is most interesting; you shall at once read it. He is a most intelligent man. I have hear this lectchoor—”
“I heard, I heard,” cried Miriam.
“Yes; but excuse a moment. Really it is interstink. He is one of the most fine lecturours of Sorbonne; membre de l’Académie; the soobject is l’Attention. Ah it is better we shall speak in French.”
“Nur auf deutsch kann man gut philosophieren,” quoted Miriam disagreeing with the maxim and hoping he would not ask where she had read it.
“That is not so; that is a typical German arrogance. The French have some most distinguished p‑sychologues, Taine, and more recently, Tarde. But listen.”
Miriam listened to the description of the lecture. For a while he kept to his careful slow English and her attention was divided between her growing interest in the nature of his mistakes, her desire to tell him that she had discovered that he spoke Norman English in German idiom with an intonation that she supposed must be Russian, and the fascination of watching for the fall of the dead-white, black-fringed eyelids on to the brooding face, between the framing of each sentence. When he passed into French, led by a quotation which was evidently the core of the lecture, she saw the lecturer, and his circle of students and indignantly belaboured him for making, and them for quietly listening to the assertion that it is curious that the human faculty of attention should have originated in women.
Certainly she would not read the pamphlet. However clever the man might be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly received display of research, irritatingly valueless. And Mr. Shatov seemed to agree, quite as a matter of course. … “Why should he be surprised?” she said when he turned for her approval. “How, surprised,” he asked laughing, an
