When Nadya woke up it must have been two o'clock, it was beginning
to get light. A watchman was tapping somewhere far away. She was
not sleepy, and her bed felt very soft and uncomfortable. Nadya sat
up in her bed and fell to thinking as she had done every night in
May. Her thoughts were the same as they had been the night before,
useless, persistent thoughts, always alike, of how Andrey Andreitch
had begun courting her and had made her an offer, how she had
accepted him and then little by little had come to appreciate the
kindly, intelligent man. But for some reason now when there was
hardly a month left before the wedding, she began to feel dread and
uneasiness as though something vague and oppressive were before
her.
"Tick-tock, tick-tock . . ." the watchman tapped lazily. ". . .
Tick-tock."
Through the big old-fashioned window she could see the garden and
at a little distance bushes of lilac in full flower, drowsy and
lifeless from the cold; and the thick white mist was floating softly
up to the lilac, trying to cover it. Drowsy rooks were cawing in
the far-away trees.
"My God, why is my heart so heavy?"
Perhaps every girl felt the same before her wedding. There was no
knowing! Or was it Sasha's influence? But for several years past
Sasha had been repeating the same thing, like a copybook, and when
he talked he seemed naïve and queer. But why was it she could not
get Sasha out of her head? Why was it?
The watchman left off tapping for a long while. The birds were
twittering under the windows and the mist had disappeared from the
garden. Everything was lighted up by the spring sunshine as by a
smile. Soon the whole garden, warm and caressed by the sun, returned
to life, and dewdrops like diamonds glittered on the leaves and the
old neglected garden on that morning looked young and gaily decked.
Granny was already awake. Sasha's husky cough began. Nadya could
hear them below, setting the samovar and moving the chairs. The
hours passed slowly, Nadya had been up and walking about the garden
for a long while and still the morning dragged on.
At last Nina Ivanovna appeared with a tear-stained face, carrying
a glass of mineral water. She was interested in spiritualism and
homeopathy, read a great deal, was fond of talking of the doubts
to which she was subject, and to Nadya it seemed as though there
were a deep mysterious significance in all that.
Now Nadya kissed her mother and walked beside her.
"What have you been crying about, mother?" she asked.
"Last night I was reading a story in which there is an old man and
his daughter. The old man is in some office and his chief falls in
love with his daughter. I have not finished it, but there was a
passage which made it hard to keep from tears," said Nina Ivanovna
and she sipped at her glass. "I thought of it this morning and shed
tears again."
"I have been so depressed all these days," said Nadya after a pause.
"Why is it I don't sleep at night!"
"I don't know, dear. When I can't sleep I shut my eyes very tightly,
like this, and picture to myself Anna Karenin moving about and
talking, or something historical from the ancient world. . . ."
Nadya felt that her mother did not understand her and was incapable
of understanding. She felt this for the first time in her life, and
it positively frightened her and made her want to hide herself; and
she went away to her own room.
At two o'clock they sat down to dinner. It was Wednesday, a fast
day, and so vegetable soup and bream with boiled grain were set
before Granny.
To tease Granny Sasha ate his meat soup as well as the vegetable
soup. He was making jokes all through dinner-time, but his jests
were laboured and invariably with a moral bearing, and the effect
was not at all amusing when before making some witty remark he
raised his very long, thin, deathly-looking fingers; and when one
remembered that he was very ill and would probably not be much
longer in this world, one felt sorry for him and ready to weep.
After dinner Granny went off to her own room to lie down. Nina
Ivanovna played on the piano for a little, and then she too went
away.
"Oh, dear Nadya!" Sasha began his usual afternoon conversation, "if
only you would listen to me! If only you would!"
She was sitting far back in an old-fashioned armchair, with her
eyes shut, while he paced slowly about the room from corner to
corner.
"If only you would go to the university," he said. "Only enlightened
and holy people are interesting, it's only they who are wanted. The
more of such people there are, the sooner the Kingdom of God will
come on earth. Of your town then not one stone will be left,
everything will he blown up from the foundations, everything will
be changed as though by magic. And then there will be immense,
magnificent houses here, wonderful gardens, marvellous fountains,
remarkable people. . . . But that's not what matters most. What
matters most is that the crowd, in our sense of the word, in the
sense in which it exists now--that evil will not exist then,
because every man will believe and every man will know what he is
living for and no one will seek moral support in the crowd. Dear
Nadya, darling girl, go away! Show them all that you are sick of
this stagnant, grey, sinful life. Prove it to yourself at least!"
"I can't, Sasha, I'm going to be married."
"Oh nonsense! What's it for!"
They went out into the garden and walked up and down a little.
"And however that may be, my dear girl, you must think, you must
realize how unclean, how immoral this idle life of yours is," Sasha
went on. "Do understand that if, for instance, you and your mother
and your grandmother do nothing, it means that someone else is
working for you, you are eating up someone else's life, and is that
clean, isn't it filthy?"
Nadya wanted to say "Yes, that is true"; she wanted to say that she
understood, but tears came into her eyes, her spirits drooped, and
shrinking into herself she went off to her room.
Towards evening Andrey Andreitch arrived and as usual played the
fiddle for a long time. He was not given to much talk as a rule,
and was fond of the fiddle, perhaps because one could be silent
while playing. At eleven o'clock when he was about to go home and
had put on his greatcoat, he embraced Nadya and began greedily
kissing her face, her shoulders, and her hands.
"My dear, my sweet, my charmer," he muttered. "Oh how happy I am!
I am beside myself with rapture!"
And it seemed to her as though she had heard that long, long ago,
or had read it somewhere . . . in some old tattered novel thrown
away long ago. In the dining-room Sasha was sitting at the table
drinking tea with the saucer poised on his five long fingers; Granny
was laying out patience; Nina Ivanovna was reading. The flame
crackled in the ikon lamp and everything, it seemed, was quiet and
going well. Nadya said good-night, went upstairs to her room, got
into bed and fell asleep at once. But just as on the night before,
almost before it was light, she woke up. She was not sleepy, there
was an uneasy, oppressive feeling in her heart. She sat up with her
head on her knees and thought of her fiancé and her marriage. . . .
She for some reason remembered that her mother had not loved her
father and now had nothing and lived in complete dependence on her
mother-in-law, Granny. And however much Nadya pondered she could
not imagine why she had hitherto seen in her mother something special
and exceptional, how it was she had not noticed that she was a
simple, ordinary, unhappy woman.
And Sasha downstairs was not asleep, she could hear him coughing.
He is a queer, naïve man, thought Nadya, and in all his dreams, in
all those marvellous gardens and wonderful fountains one felt there
was something absurd. But for some reason in his naïveté, in this
very absurdity there was something so beautiful that as soon as she
thought of the possibility of going to the university, it sent a
cold thrill through her heart and her bosom and flooded them with
joy and rapture.
"But better not think, better not think . . ." she whispered. "I
must not think of it."
"Tick-tock," tapped the watchman somewhere far away. "Tick-tock
. . . tick-tock. . . ."