They sat in the lithography shop, which was full of tobacco smoke and the suffocating smell of paint and India ink, and then they went to his room, which was filthy and also reeked of tobacco. The samovar on the table had turned cold; beside it lay a shattered plate with dark paper on it, and there were heaps of dead flies on the table and on the floor. Everything about the room suggested that Sasha led a completely slovenly existence, living anyhow, and despising comfort; and if anyone had spoken to him about his private joys, about his personal life and whether anyone loved him, he would have understood nothing and would only have laughed.
“Everything went off all right,” Nadya said hurriedly. “Mama came to see me in Petersburg during the autumn. She tells me Granny isn’t angry any more, but keeps going to my room and making the sign of the cross over the walls.”
Sasha seemed cheerful, but he coughed continually and spoke in an oddly broken voice. Nadya was watching him closely, unable to make up her mind whether he was seriously ill or whether she was just imagining it.
“Dear Sasha,” she said. “How ill you are!”
“Nonsense. Maybe I’m not well, but I’m all right!”
“Dear God!” Nadya exclaimed, suddenly overwhelmed. “You ought to see a doctor. Why don’t you take care of yourself? Oh, dear darling Sasha,” she said as tears rushed to her eyes, and for some reason she thought of Andrey Andreyich and the naked lady with the vase and the whole of her past life, which seemed as distant as childhood, and she began to cry because Sasha no longer seemed so original, so intelligent, and so interesting as the year before. “Sasha dear, you are very, very ill. I don’t know what I wouldn’t do to keep you from being thin and pale. I owe you so much! Dear kind Sasha, you can’t imagine how much you have done for me! Your are really the closest and dearest person in my whole life!”
They sat there and went on talking. After her winter in St. Petersburg she found his words, his smile, the man himself and everything about him, curiously old-fashioned and out of date, as though the time of maturity had passed long ago, and perhaps he was already in his grave.
“I’m going down the Volga the day after tomorrow,” Sasha said. “That way I can drink some koumiss. I’m going to try koumiss seriously. A friend of mine and his wife are coming with me. His wife is wonderful. I’ve been trying to make her study. I think she ought to revolutionize herself.”
When they had talked themselves to a standstill, Sasha drove her to the station. He treated her to tea and bought her apples, and when the train began to move out he smiled and waved his handkerchief, but even his thin legs showed that he was very ill and not long for this world.
Nadya arrived at her native town at midday. As she drove home from the station, the streets seemed unusually wide, but the houses looked curiously squat and very small. There were no people about, and the only person she met was the German piano tuner with the rust-colored coat. All the houses seemed covered in dust. Her grandmother, who looked very old, and as fat and ugly as ever, threw her arms round Nadya and wept interminably, with her face against Nadya’s shoulder, and she was completely unable to tear herself away. Nina Ivanovna looked much older and plainer; she seemed shrunken and as strait-laced as ever; and the diamonds glittered on her fingers.
“My dearest,” she said, trembling all over. “My darling …”
Then they sat down and wept silently together. It was evident that both the mother and the grandmother realized that the past would never return, was irrevocably lost: their social position, their prestige in the community, their right to invite guests to stay with them, all this had gone. So it happens sometimes that the police burst into a house at night, one of those houses accustomed to an easy, leisurely existence, and the master of the house is discovered to be a forger and an embezzler, and then farewell forever to the easy, leisurely existence!
Nadya went upstairs and saw the familiar bed, the familiar windows and simple white curtains, and from the windows there could be seen the familiar view of the garden, brilliant with sunshine, gay and clamorous with birdsong. She ran her fingers over the table, sat down, and fell to thinking. She had enjoyed a good dinner, and the tea was served with delicious thick cream, but something was missing. She was aware of the emptiness of the room, and the ceilings were very low. In the evening when she went to bed, covering herself with the bedclothes, it somehow seemed absurd to be lying in that warm, very soft bed.
Nina Ivanovna came in for a moment and sat down, as people do when they feel guilty. She was timid and kept glancing round her.
“Tell me, Nadya, how is everything?” she asked after a moment’s silence. “Are you contented? Quite contented?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Nina Ivanovna rose and made the sign of the cross over Nadya and over the window.
“As you see, I have grown deeply religious,” she said. “You know, I am studying philosophy now, and I am always thinking, thinking.… And many things are clear as daylight now. It seems to me now that what is necessary above all is that life should pass as it were through a prism.”
“Mama, tell me, how is Grandmother?”
“Oh, she’s all right. When you went away with Sasha, and then when your telegram came, your grandmother read it and fell to the ground, and for three days she lay in bed without moving. After that she was always praying and weeping. But now it’s over.”
She got up and walked around the room.
“Tick-tock …” came the tapping of the night watchman. “Tick-tock, tick-tock …”
“What is necessary above all is that life should as it were pass through a prism,” she said. “In other words, what is necessary is that our life in consciousness should be analyzed into its simplest elements, as though into the seven primary colors, and each element must be studied separately.”
What else Nina Ivanovna said, and when she went away, Nadya did not know, for she soon fell asleep.
May passed, and June came. Nadya had grown accustomed to being at home. Grandmother fussed over the samovar, and gave deep sighs, while Nina Ivanovna spent her evenings talking about philosophy; she still lived in the house like a poor cousin, and she had to ask Grandmother for every twenty-kopeck piece. There were heaps of flies in the house, and the ceilings seemed to be falling lower and lower. For fear of meeting Father Andrey and Andrey Andreyich, Granny and Nina Ivanovna never went out into the streets. Nadya wandered through the garden and strolled down the streets, gazing at the houses and the gray fences, and it seemed to her that everything in the town had been growing old for a long time, and the town itself had outlived its day and was now waiting either for
