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 be 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. . . ." III
In the middle of June Sasha suddenly felt bored and made up his mind to
return to Moscow.
"I can't exist in this town," he said gloomily. "No water supply, no
drains! It disgusts me to eat at dinner; the filth in the kitchen is
incredible. . . ."
"Wait a little, prodigal son!" Granny tried to persuade him, speaking
for some reason in a whisper, "the wedding is to be on the seventh."
"I don't want to."
"You meant to stay with us until September!"
"But now, you see, I don't want to. I must get to work."
The summer was grey and cold, the trees were wet, everything in the
garden looked dejected and uninviting, it certainly did make one long to
get to work. The sound of unfamiliar women's voices was heard downstairs
and upstairs, there was the rattle of a sewing machine in Granny's room,
they were working hard at the trousseau. Of fur coats alone, six were
provided for Nadya, and the cheapest of them, in Granny's words, had
cost three hundred roubles! The fuss irritated Sasha; he stayed in his
own room and was cross, but everyone persuaded him to remain, and he
promised not to go before the first of July.
Time passed quickly. On St. Peter's day Andrey Andreitch went with Nadya
after dinner to Moscow Street to look once more at the house which had
been taken and made ready for the young couple some time before. It was
a house of two storeys, but so far only the upper floor had been
furnished. There was in the hall a shining floor painted and parqueted,
there were Viennese chairs, a piano, a violin stand; there was a smell
of paint. On the wall hung a big oil painting in a gold frame--a naked
lady and beside her a purple vase with a broken handle.
"An exquisite picture," said Andrey Andreitch, and he gave a respectful
sigh. "It's the work of the artist Shismatchevsky."
Then there was the drawing-room with the round table, and a sofa and
easy chairs upholstered in bright blue. Above the sofa was a big
photograph of Father Andrey wearing a priest's velvet cap and
decorations. Then they went into the dining-room in which there was a
sideboard; then into the bedroom; here in the half dusk stood two
bedsteads side by side, and it looked as though the bedroom had been
decorated with the idea that it would always be very agreeable there and
could not possibly be anything else. Andrey Andreitch led Nadya about
the rooms, all the while keeping his arm round her waist; and she felt
weak and conscience-stricken. She hated all the rooms, the beds, the
easy chairs; she was nauseated by the naked lady. It was clear to her
now that she had ceased to love Andrey Andreitch or perhaps had never
loved him at all; but how to say this and to whom to say it and with
what object she did not understand, and could not understand, though she
was thinking about it all day and all night. . . . He held her round the
waist, talked so affectionately, so modestly, was so happy, walking
about this house of his; while she saw nothing in it all but vulgarity,
stupid, naïve, unbearable vulgarity, and his arm round her waist felt
as hard and cold as an iron hoop. And every minute she was on the point
of running away, bursting into sobs, throwing herself out of a window.
Andrey Andreitch led her into the bathroom and here he touched a tap
fixed in the wall and at once water flowed.
"What do you say to that?" he said, and laughed. "I had a tank holding
two hundred gallons put in the loft, and so now we shall have water."
They walked across the yard and went out into the street and took a cab.
Thick clouds of dust were blowing, and it seemed as though it were just
going to rain.
"You are not cold?" said Andrey Andreitch, screwing up his eyes at the
dust.
She did not answer.
"Yesterday, you remember, Sasha blamed me for doing nothing," he said,
after a brief silence. "Well, he is right, absolutely right! I do
nothing and can do nothing. My precious, why is it? Why is it that the
very thought that I may some day fix a cockade on my cap and go into the
government service is so hateful to me? Why do I feel so uncomfortable
when I see a lawyer or a Latin master or a member of the Zemstvo? O
Mother Russia! O Mother Russia! What a burden of idle and useless people
you still carry! How many like me are upon you, long-suffering Mother!"
And from the fact that he did nothing he drew generalizations, seeing in
it a sign of the times.
"When we are married let us go together into the country, my precious;
there we will work! We will buy ourselves a little piece of land with a
garden and a river, we will labour and watch life. Oh, how splendid that
will be!"
He took off his hat, and his hair floated in the wind, while she
listened to him and thought: "Good God, I wish I were home!"
When they were quite near the house they overtook Father Andrey.
"Ah, here's father coming," cried Andrey Andreitch, delighted, and he
waved his hat. "I love my dad really," he said as he paid the cabman.
"He's a splendid old fellow, a dear old fellow."
Nadya went into the house, feeling cross and unwell, thinking that there
would be visitors all the evening, that she would have to entertain
them, to smile, to listen to the fiddle, to listen to all sorts of
nonsense, and to talk of nothing but the wedding.
Granny, dignified, gorgeous in her silk dress, and haughty as she always
seemed before visitors, was sitting before the samovar. Father Andrey
came in with his sly smile.
"I have the pleasure and blessed consolation of seeing you in health,"
he said to Granny, and it was hard to tell whether he was joking or
speaking seriously. IV
The wind was beating on the window and on the roof; there was a
whistling sound, and in the stove the house spirit was plaintively and
sullenly droning his song. It was past midnight; everyone in the house
had gone to bed, but no one was asleep, and it seemed all the while to
Nadya as though they were playing the fiddle below. There was a sharp
bang; a shutter must have been torn off. A minute later Nina Ivanovna
came in in her nightgown, with a candle.
"What was the bang, Nadya?" she asked.
Her mother, with her hair in a single plait and a timid smile on her
face, looked older, plainer, smaller on that stormy night. Nadya
remembered that quite a little time ago she had thought her mother an
exceptional woman and had listened with pride to the things she said;
and now she could not remember those things, everything that came into
her mind was so feeble and useless.
In the stove was the sound of several bass voices in chorus, and she
even heard "O-o-o my G-o-od!" Nadya sat on her bed, and suddenly she
clutched at her hair and burst into sobs.
"Mother, mother, my own," she said. "If only you knew what is happening
to me! I beg you, I beseech you, let me go away! I beseech you!"
"Where?" asked Nina Ivanovna, not understanding, and she sat down on the
bedstead. "Go where?"
For a long while Nadya cried and could not utter a word.
"Let me go away from the town," she said at last. "There must not and
will not be a wedding, understand that! I don't love that man . . . I
can't even speak about him."
"No, my own, no!" Nina Ivanovna said quickly, terribly alarmed. "Calm
yourself--it's just because you are in low spirits. It will pass, it
often happens. Most likely you have had a tiff with Andrey; but lovers'
quarrels always end in kisses!"
"Oh, go away, mother, oh, go away," sobbed Nadya.
"Yes," said Nina Ivanovna after a pause, "it's not long since you were a
baby, a little girl, and now you are engaged to be married. In nature
there is a continual transmutation of substances. Before you know where
you are you will be a mother yourself and an old woman, and will have as
rebellious a daughter as I have."
"My darling, my sweet, you are clever you know, you are unhappy," said
Nadya. "You are very unhappy; why do you say such very dull, commonplace
things? For God's sake, why?"
Nina Ivanovna tried to say something, but could not utter a word; she
gave a sob and went away to her own room. The bass voices began droning
in the stove again, and Nadya felt suddenly frightened. She jumped out
of bed and went quickly to her mother. Nina Ivanovna, with tear-stained
face, was lying in bed wrapped in a pale blue quilt and holding a book
in her hands.
"Mother, listen to me!" said Nadya. "I implore you, do understand! If
you would only understand how petty and degrading our life is. My eyes
have been opened, and I see it all now. And what is your Andrey
Andreitch? Why, he is not intelligent, mother! Merciful heavens, do
understand, mother, he is stupid!"
Nina Ivanovna abruptly sat up.
"You and your grandmother torment me," she said with a sob. "I want to
live! to live," she repeated, and twice she beat her little fist upon
her bosom. "Let me be free! I am still young, I want to live, and you
have made me an old woman between you!"
She broke into bitter tears, lay down and curled up under the quilt, and
looked so small, so pitiful, so foolish. Nadya went to her room,
dressed, and sitting at the window fell to waiting for the morning. She
sat all night thinking, while someone seemed to be tapping on the
shutters and whistling in the yard.
In the morning Granny complained that the wind had blown down all the
apples in the garden, and broken down an old plum tree. It was grey,
murky, cheerless, dark enough for candles; everyone complained of the
cold, and the rain lashed on the windows. After tea Nadya went into
Sasha's room and without saying a word knelt down before an armchair in
the corner and hid her face in her hands.
"What is it?" asked Sasha.
"I can't . . ." she said. "How I could go on living here before, I can't
understand, I can't conceive! I despise the man I am engaged to, I
despise myself, I despise all this idle, senseless existence."
"Well, well," said Sasha, not yet grasping what was meant. "That's all
right . . . that's good."
"I am sick of this life," Nadya went on. "I can't endure another day
here. To-morrow I am going away. Take me with you for God's sake!"
For a minute Sasha looked at her in astonishment; at last he understood
and was delighted as a child. He waved his arms and began pattering with
his slippers as though he were dancing with delight.
"Splendid," he said, rubbing his hands. "My goodness, how fine that is!"
And she stared at him without blinking, with adoring eyes, as though
spellbound, expecting every minute that he would say something
important, something infinitely significant; he had told her nothing
yet, but already it seemed to her that something new and great was
opening before her which she had not known till then, and already she
gazed at him full of expectation, ready to face anything, even death.
"I am going to-morrow," he said after a moment's thought. "You come to
the station to see me off. . . . I'll take your things in my
portmanteau, and I'll get your ticket, and when the third bell rings you
get into the carriage, and we'll go off. You'll see me as far as Moscow
and then go on to Petersburg alone. Have you a passport?"
"Yes."
"I can promise you, you won't regret it," said Sasha, with conviction.
"You will go, you will study, and then go where fate takes you. When you
turn your life upside down everything will be changed. The great thing
is to turn your life upside down, and all the rest is unimportant. And
so we will set off to-morrow?"
"Oh yes, for God's sake!"
It seemed to Nadya that she was very much excited, that her heart was
heavier than ever before, that she would spend all the time till she
went away in misery and agonizing thought; but she had hardly gone
upstairs and lain down on her bed when she fell asleep at once, with
traces of tears and a smile on her face, and slept soundly till evening.
V
A cab had been sent for. Nadya in her hat and overcoat went upstairs to
take one more look at her mother, at all her belongings. She stood in
her own room beside her still warm bed, looked about her, then went
slowly in to her mother. Nina Ivanovna was asleep; it was quite still in
her room. Nadya kissed her mother, smoothed her hair, stood still for a
couple of minutes . . . then walked slowly downstairs.
It was raining heavily. The cabman with the hood pulled down was
standing at the entrance, drenched with rain.
"There is not room for you, Nadya," said Granny, as the servants began
putting in the luggage. "What an idea to see him off in such weather!
You had better stop at home. Goodness, how it rains!"
Nadya tried to say something, but could not. Then Sasha helped Nadya in
and covered her feet with a rug. Then he sat down beside her.
"Good luck to you! God bless you!" Granny cried from the steps. "Mind
you write to us from Moscow, Sasha!"
"Right. Good-bye, Granny."
"The Queen of Heaven keep you!"
"Oh, what weather!" said Sasha.
It was only now that Nadya began to cry. Now it was clear to her that
she certainly was going, which she had not really believed when she was
saying good-bye to Granny, and when she was looking at her mother. Good-
bye, town! And she suddenly thought of it all: Andrey, and his father
and the new house and the naked lady with the vase; and it all no longer
frightened her, nor weighed upon her, but was naïve and trivial and
continually retreated further away. And when they got into the railway
carriage and the train began to move, all that past which had been so
big and serious shrank up into something tiny, and a vast wide future
which till then had scarcely been noticed began unfolding before her.
The rain pattered on the carriage windows, nothing could be seen but the
green fields, telegraph posts with birds sitting on the wires flitted
by, and joy made her hold her breath; she thought that she was going to
freedom, going to study, and this was just like what used, ages ago, to
be called going off to be a free Cossack.
She laughed and cried and prayed all at once.
"It's a-all right," said Sasha, smiling. "It's a-all right." VI
Autumn had passed and winter, too, had gone. Nadya had begun to be very
homesick and thought every day of her mother and her grandmother; she
thought of Sasha too. The letters that came from home were kind and
gentle, and it seemed as though everything by now were forgiven and
forgotten. In May after the examinations she set off for home in good
health and high spirits, and stopped on the way at Moscow to see Sasha.
He was just the same as the year before, with the same beard and unkempt
hair, with the same large beautiful eyes, and he still wore the same
coat and canvas trousers; but he looked unwell and worried, he seemed
both older and thinner, and kept coughing, and for some reason he struck
Nadya as grey and provincial.
"My God, Nadya has come!" he said, and laughed gaily. "My darling girl!"
They sat in the printing room, which was full of tobacco smoke, and
smelt strongly, stiflingly of Indian ink and paint; then they went to
his room, which also smelt of tobacco and was full of the traces of
spitting; near a cold samovar stood a broken plate with dark paper on
it, and there were masses of dead flies on the table and on the floor.
And everything showed that Sasha ordered his personal life in a slovenly
way and lived anyhow, with utter contempt for comfort, and if anyone
began talking to him of his personal happiness, of his personal life, of
affection for him, he would not have understood and would have only
laughed.
"It is all right, everything has gone well," said Nadya hurriedly.
"Mother came to see me in Petersburg in the autumn; she said that Granny
is not angry, and only keeps going into my room and making the sign of
the cross over the walls."
Sasha looked cheerful, but he kept coughing, and talked in a cracked
voice, and Nadya kept looking at him, unable to decide whether he really
were seriously ill or whether it were only her fancy.
"Dear Sasha," she said, "you are ill."
"No, it's nothing, I am ill, but not very . . ."
"Oh, dear!" cried Nadya, in agitation. "Why don't you go to a doctor?
Why don't you take care of your health? My dear, darling Sasha," she
said, and tears gushed from her eyes and for some reason there rose
before her imagination Andrey Andreitch and the naked lady with the
vase, and all her past which seemed now as far away as her childhood;
and she began crying because Sasha no longer seemed to her so novel, so
cultured, and so interesting as the year before. "Dear Sasha, you are
very, very ill . . . I would do anything to make you not so pale and
thin. I am so indebted to you! You can't imagine how much you have done
for me, my good Sasha! In reality you are now the person nearest and
dearest to me."
They sat on and talked, and now, after Nadya had spent a winter in
Petersburg, Sasha, his works, his smile, his whole figure had for her a
suggestion of something out of date, old-fashioned, done with long ago
and perhaps already dead and buried.
"I am going down the Volga the day after tomorrow," said Sasha, "and
then to drink koumiss. I mean to drink koumiss. A friend and his wife
are going with me. His wife is a wonderful woman; I am always at her,
trying to persuade her to go to the university. I want her to turn her
life upside down."
After having talked they drove to the station. Sasha got her tea and
apples; and when the train began moving and he waved his handkerchief at
her, smiling, it could be seen even from his legs that he was very ill
and would not live long.