I
didn't mind it at all. I really minded nothing whatever.... I sighed my
appreciation of my return to life. My sigh brought some one from the
corner of my room and that some one was, of course, the inevitable Eat.
He came up to my bed in his stealthy, furtive fashion, and looked at me
reproachfully. I asked him, my voice sounding to myself strange and very
far away, what he was doing there. He answered that if it had not been
for him I should be dead. He had come early one morning and found me
lying in my bed and no one in the place at all. No one--because the old
woman had vanished. Yes, the neighbours had told him. Apparently on that
very Thursday she had decided that the Revolution had given her her
freedom, and that she was never going to work for anybody ever again.
She had told a woman-neighbour that she heard that the land now was
going to be given back to everybody, and she was returning therefore to
her village somewhere in the Moscow Province. She had not been back
there for twenty years. And first, to celebrate her liberty, she would
get magnificently drunk on furniture polish.
"I did not see her of course," said the Rat.
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