her arm-chair, pace the room for a while, and end by falling senseless
to the floor.
Once, when I went to her room, she appeared to be sitting quietly in her
chair, yet with an air which struck me as curious. Though her eyes were
wide open, their glance was vacant and meaningless, and she seemed to
gaze in my direction without seeing me. Suddenly her lips parted slowly
in a smile, and she said in a touchingly, tender voice: 'Come here,
then, my dearest one; come here, my angel.' Thinking that it was myself
she was addressing, I moved towards her, but it was not I whom she was
beholding at that moment. 'Oh, my love,' she went on, 'if only you could
know how distracted I have been, and how delighted I am to see you once
more!' I understood then that she believed herself to be looking
upon Mamma, and halted where I was. 'They told me you were gone,' she
concluded with a frown; 'but what nonsense! As if you could die before
ME!' and she laughed a terrible, hysterical laugh.
Only those who can love strongly can experience an overwhelming grief.
Yet their very need of loving sometimes serves to throw off their grief
from them and to save them. The moral nature of man is more tenacious of
life than the physical, and grief never kills.
After a time Grandmamma's power of weeping came back to her, and she
began to recover. Her first thought when her reason returned was for us
children, and her love for us was greater than ever. We never left her
arm-chair, and she would talk of Mamma, and weep softly, and caress us.
Nobody who saw her grief could say that it was consciously exaggerated,
for its expression was too strong and touching; yet for some reason or
another my sympathy went out more to Natalia Savishna, and to this day
I am convinced that nobody loved and regretted Mamma so purely and
sincerely as did that simple-hearted, affectionate being.
With Mamma's death the happy time of my childhood came to an end, and
a new epoch--the epoch of my boyhood--began; but since my memories of
Natalia Savishna (who exercised such a strong and beneficial influence
upon the bent of my mind and the development of my sensibility) belong
rather to the first period, I will add a few words about her and her
death before closing this portion of my life.
I heard later from people in the village that, after our return to
Moscow, she found time hang very heavy on her hands. Although the
drawers and shelves were still under her charge, and she never ceased
to arrange and rearrange them--to take things out and to dispose of them
afresh--she sadly missed the din and bustle of the seignorial mansion to
which she had been accustomed from her childhood up. Consequently
grief, the alteration in her mode of life, and her lack of activity soon
combined to develop in her a malady to which she had always been more or
less subject.
Scarcely more than a year after Mamma's death dropsy showed itself, and
she took to her bed. I can imagine how sad it must have been for her
to go on living--still more, to die--alone in that great empty house
at Petrovskoe, with no relations or any one near her. Every one there
esteemed and loved her, but she had formed no intimate friendships in
the place, and was rather proud of the fact. That was because, enjoying
her master's confidence as she did, and having so much property
under her care, she considered that intimacies would lead to culpable
indulgence and condescension. Consequently (and perhaps, also, because
she had nothing really in common with the other servants) she kept them
