“Oh, dearest Nadya,” Sasha started his usual after-dinner conversation. “If only you would listen to me! If only you would!”
She was sitting back in an old-fashioned armchair, her eyes closed, while he paced up and down the room.
“If only you would go away and study!” he said. “Only the enlightened and holy people are interesting—they are the only ones needed. The more such people there are, the quicker will the Kingdom of Heaven descend on earth. Then it will happen little by little that not one stone will be left standing, in this town of yours everything will be shaken to its foundations, and everything will be changed, as though by magic. There will be immense and utterly magnificent houses, marvelous gardens, glorious fountains, extraordinary people.… But this is not the important thing! The most important thing is that the masses, as we understand the word, giving it its present-day meaning —they will disappear, this evil will vanish, and every man will know what he is living for, and no one any longer will look for support among the masses. My dearest darling, go away! Show them that you are sick to the stomach of this stagnant, dull, sinful life of yours! At least prove it for yourself!”
“No, Sasha, I can’t! I’m going to be married.”
“Never mind! Who cares about that?”
They went into the garden and strolled for a while.
“Anyhow, my dearest, you simply must think, you must realize how immoral and unclean your idle life is,” Sasha went on. “Can’t you realize that to enable you and your mother and your grandmother to live a life of leisure, others have to work for you, and you are devouring their lives? Is that right? Isn’t it a filthy thing to do?”
Nadya wanted to say: “Yes, you are right.” She wanted to say she understood perfectly, but tears came to her eyes, and suddenly she fell silent, and she shrank into herself, and went to her room.
Toward evening Andrey Andreyich arrived, and as usual he played the violin for a long time. He was by nature taciturn, and perhaps he enjoyed playing the violin because there was no need to speak while playing it. At eleven o’clock he had put on his overcoat and was about to go home when he took Nadya in his arms and passionately kissed her face, her shoulders, her hands.
“My dear, beautiful darling,” he murmured. “Oh, how happy I am! I am out of my mind with happiness!”
And it seemed to her that she had heard these same words long ago, or perhaps she had read them somewhere … in an old dog-eared novel thrown away a long time ago.
In the drawing room Sasha was sitting at table drinking tea, the saucer poised on his five long fingers, while Granny was spreading out the cards for a game of patience, and Nina Ivanovna was reading. The flame spluttered in the icon lamp, and it seemed that everyone was quietly happy. Nadya said good night and went upstairs to her room, and lying down on the bed, she immediately fell asleep. But just as on the night before, she awoke with the first light of dawn. She could not sleep: a restless and oppressive spirit moved in her. She sat up in bed, resting her head on her knees, and thinking about her fiance and her wedding.… For some reason she remembered that her mother had never loved her father, and now the mother possessed nothing of her own, and was completely dependent on Granny, her mother-in-law. And try as she would, Nadya could not understand why she had always regarded her mother as an exceptional and remarkable person, and why it had never occurred to her that her mother was only a simple, quite ordinary, and unhappy woman.
And Sasha, too, was awake—she heard him coughing downstairs. “What a strange naive person he is,” Nadya thought, “and those dreams of his—those marvelous gardens and glorious fountains—how absurd they are!” But for some reason she found so much that was beautiful in his naivete and his absurdity, and the moment she permitted herself to dream of going away and studying, cold shivers bathed her whole heart and breast, and she was overwhelmed with sensations of joy and ecstasy.
“Better not to think about it,” she whispered. “No, one shouldn’t think about such things.”
“Tick-tock …” the night watchman was rapping with his stick far away. “Tick-tock … tick-tock …”
III
Toward the middle of June, Sasha was suddenly overcome with boredom and made up his mind to return to Moscow.
“I can’t go on living in this town,” he said moodily. “No running water, no drains! I can hardly force myself to eat dinner—the kitchen is so indescribably filthy!”
“Wait a little while, Prodigal Son,” Grandmother said, and for some reason she lowered her voice to a whisper. “The wedding is on the seventh.”
“I don’t want to wait!”
“Didn’t you say you intended to stay until September?”
“I don’t want to any more. I want to go and work!”
The summer had turned cold and wet, the trees were damp, the garden looked somber and uninviting, and none of this caused anyone to desire to work. Unfamiliar female voices were heard in all the rooms upstairs and downstairs, and they could hear the clatter of the sewing machince in Grandmother’s room: they were rushing to get the trousseau ready. Of fur coats alone, Nadya was to have six, and the cheapest of them, according to Grandmother, cost three hundred rubles! The fuss irritated Sasha, who remained in his room, fuming with anger; but they talked him into staying, and he promised not to leave before the first of July.
Time passed quickly. On St. Peter’s day Andrey Andreyich took Nadya to Moscow Street after dinner, to have yet another look at the house which had long since been rented and made ready for the young couple. It was a two-story house, but so far only the upper floor had been furnished. On the gleaming floor of the hall, painted to resemble parquet, stood bentwood chairs, a grand piano, a music stand for the violin. There was the smell of paint. On the wall hung a large oil painting in a gold frame—a picture of a naked woman beside a lilac-colored vase with a broken handle.
“Wonderful painting,” said Andrey Andreyich with an awed sigh. “It’s by Shishmachevsky.”
Then there was the drawing room with a round table, a sofa, and armchairs upholstered in some bright blue material. Above the sofa hung a large photograph of Father Andrey in priestly skullcap and wearing his decorations. They passed into the dining room, where there was a sideboard, then into the bedroom, where two beds could be seen side by side in the half dusk: it seemed as though the bedroom had been furnished in such a way that life there would always be happy and could never be anything else. Andrey Andreyich led Nadya through the rooms, never taking his arm from her waist; but all the time she felt weak and conscience-stricken, hating these rooms and
