The Same Evening
I took up my pen just now in order to write upon these pages a few thoughts which, it seems to me, will prove useful for you, my readers. These thoughts are concerned with the great Day of Unanimity which is now not far away. But as I sat down, I discovered that I cannot write at present; instead I sit and listen to the wind beating the glass with its dark wings; all the while I am busy looking about and I am waiting, expecting. … What? I do not know. So I was very glad when I saw the brownish-pink gills enter my room, heartily glad I may say. She sat down and innocently smoothed a fold of her unif that fell between her knees, and very soon she pasted upon me, all over me, a host of smiles—a bit of a smile on each crack of my face and this gave me pleasant sensations, as if I were tightly bound like an infant of the ancients in a swaddling-cloth.
“Imagine! Today, when I entered the classroom” (she works in the Child-Educational Refinery), “I suddenly noticed a caricature upon the blackboard. Indeed! I assure you! They had pictured me in the form of a fish! Perhaps I really—”
“No, no! Why do you say that?” I hastily exclaimed. When one was near her, it was clear indeed that she had nothing resembling gills. No. When I referred to gills in these pages I was certainly irreverent.
“Oh, after all it does not matter. But the act as such, think of it! Of course I called the Guardians at once. I love children very much and I think that the most difficult and the most exalted love is—cruelty. You understand me, of course.”
“Certainly!” Her sentence so closely resembled my thoughts! I could not refrain from reading to her a passage from my Record No. 20, beginning