hind legs. He obsequiously offered Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya the piano stool. Madame gathered up her skirts and sat down. The stool groaned under her weight. Madame paused with her plump bejewelled fingers raised above the keys. 'Do you Charleston?' Angelika whispered to me, but my reply was drowned by a thunderous chord. For a moment I could not decide whether this was the new dance or whether Madame had suddenly decided to break up her piano. 'Come on, it's a
Charleston!' Lika cried. 'But I don't know how...'
'Nonsense! It's a very easy dance. Just look at my feet and you'll soon learn.'
Lika dragged me out into the middle of the hall and planted her hand on my shoulder.
Several couples were already jerking to and fro around us. Bright-coloured dresses whirled before my eyes.
I looked down and watched the long brown legs of my partner intently. It was as if Angelika had got tired of having any feet at all and was trying to kick them off. Her legs seemed to be hinged in two or three places; she kept throwing a leg up, waggling it and then stepping towards me.
'Saint Vitus's dance!' I thought, waggling my legs at the knees until the bones cracked. Then an idea occurred to me. Remembering the student dances back home, I grasped Angelika wildly round the waist and started whirling her across the floor, bobbing up and down, as we used to in the 'Chinese polka.'
She looked at me with startled and rather angry eyes. But just as I was going to take a sharp turn, my right foot trod on something soft and slippery. I staggered into Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya, giving her a violent jab in the back with my elbow.
The tune of the Charleston broke off for a moment and in the silence that followed a word reached me which, though not very loud, stung me like a whip-lash.
'Lout!'
Jumping away from the piano, I saw the dancing mistress's rouged face twisted with annoyance. It must have been she who had flung that insulting word at me. But the anger on Madame's face was soon replaced by a set smile, and as if to make up for lost time, she strummed even louder and faster on the piano. Perhaps Angelika did not hear the insult directed at me, perhaps she simply pretended not to have heard it. I swung my partner to the right, towards the stream of fresh air flowing from the entrance, and led her off the floor.
'Well, you are a clod-hopper!' Lika said, halfjoking, half contemptuous. 'The music plays one thing, and you just ignore the tune completely and start dancing some sort of barn dance. You've got no ear for music at all! No idea of rhythm!'
'I don't know about that, all I know is that people who like pushing round in heat like this must be mad!'
'They can do the Charleston, and you can't. But why get angry about it?' Lika said soothingly.
'Wouldn't it be better to go out in a boat on an evening like this?'
And as I spoke, my eye rested on an apple core squashed on the floor. So that was what had earned me the title of 'lout!' All right, Madame! We'll see who's the lout. You charge fifty kopeks for admission, you old screw, and you can't even keep the place tidy!
'Do you like boating?' Lika asked, waving her scented handkerchief.
'Who doesn't?' I said unguardedly.
'Then you know what? Let's get away from here and go down to the sea!' And again Angelika seized my arm.
We had not walked five steps down Genoa Street when we ran into Zuzya.
'Where to, Lika?' the dandy asked spreading his arms.
'Down to the sea with a young man!' she flung out coquettishly. 'By the way, do you know each other?'
'Trituzny!' the dandy drawled and without so much as a glance at me held out his big paw.
I shook it without pleasure and said my name.
'A thousand pardons, my dear! Ivan Fyodorovich detained me. Temper justice with mercy and come back. Today they'll be playing that tango My Heart's in Rags. We'll learn it together. The words...'
But I had had enough. The dandy was simply refusing to acknowledge my existence.
'Come on, Angelika, let's get going, or we'll be bitten all over by the mosquitoes later on!' I said gruffly, and she went with me.
AT THE ENGINEER’S
Boats were moored along both sides of the wooden pier. Lika bent down and unlocked a chain.
'Jump!' she commanded, hauling the boat up to the pier.
I jumped without hesitating. As my feet struck the bottom of the boat it pitched so violently that I nearly fell overboard.
'Take a life-belt, Lika!' came a voice from above.
It was the Life-Saving Society man. He was standing on the pier in shorts and a yachting cap with a white flag on the band. A whistle dangled on his muscular chest.
'What for, Kolya?' said Lika, pushing off with an oar. 'I think my hidalgo can swim. But if anything goes wrong, I'll save him myself without a life-belt.'
'Up to you!' the sailor replied with a chuckle. 'Wave if you're in trouble.' And he tossed the life-belt back on to the pier.
I listened to them with a frown. My companion seemed determined to appear better than me in everything! Even in this phrase to the sailor there had been a scornful hint that I couldn't swim and would go to bottom like a kitten, if she didn't save me.
Angelika plied the oars easily and we drew away from the shore. Already the pier looked quite small, like two matches stuck to the shore in the shape of a 'T.'
'Let me take over for a bit.'
'You can try,' Lika consented, and we changed places.
The purple ball of the sun sinking somewhere beyond Kerch blinded me and stained the calm waters of the bay a reddish brown. I plunged my oars deep into the water and yanked at them with all my strength. One of the rowlocks jumped out of its socket and nearly fell into the sea.
'I know you're strong, Vasil, but why break the boat? Take it easy, as if you didn't care. The boat will go faster.'
And indeed, as soon as I relaxed and stopped digging my oars in so deeply, the boat skated across the water like a flat pebble thrown from the shore, leaving a faint, trembling wake at its stern.
'Turn a bit to the left, towards the breakwater!'
'You want to go there?'
'Don't you?'
'It's a long way.'
'You don't know what 'a long way' means! If we were making for the sand-bank at this time in the evening, it'd be different. But the breakwater's only a paddle.'
The harbour with its hump-backed warehouses was far away by now and the high granite walls of the breakwater rose above us almost as soon as we passed the signal bell.
'Yes, quite near really,' I agreed. 'Is it two versts?'
'One and a half.'
I was not used to rowing and at each pull I bunched my muscles and pressed my lips tightly together. My expression must have been rather unnatural. Angelika was now surveying me quite openly.
'You know, Vasil, your glance is like a touch. Like Lieutenant Glan's!' she said suddenly.
'What do you mean?' I grunted.
'Lieutenant Glan was the favourite hero of a Scandinavian writer. He was unlucky in love, so he went away and lived in a little hut in the forest, and to hurt the girl he loved sent her the head of his dog as a present... '
'Sounds like a savage!' I remarked. 'Real men don't run away from people.'
'Not from people, but from misfortune in love! He was tired of civilization.'
