Moscow on her way to see Sasha. He was the same as last summer: bearded, his hair disheveled, in the same frock coat and duck trousers, with the same large, beautiful eyes; but he looked unhealthy, worn out, had aged and lost weight, and kept coughing. And for some reason Nadya found him gray, provincial.
“My God, Nadya’s come!” he said and laughed merrily. “My dearest, my darling!”
They sat for a while in the printing shop, where it was smoky and smelled strongly, suffocatingly, of India ink and paint; then they went to his room, where it was also smoky, messy; on the table, next to the cold samovar, was a cracked plate with a piece of dark paper, and on the table and the floor a multitude of dead flies.7And here everything showed that Sasha’s personal life was slovenly, that he lived anyhow, with a total disdain of comfort, and if anyone had begun talking to him about his personal happiness, about his personal life, about anyone’s love for him, he would have understood none of it and would only have laughed.
“It’s all right, everything worked out very well,” Nadya told him hurriedly. “Mama came to see me in Petersburg during the autumn and told me that my grandmother wasn’t angry, but only kept going into my room and crossing the walls.”
Sasha looked cheerful, but kept coughing and spoke in a cracked voice, and Nadya peered at him and could not understand whether he was indeed seriously ill or it only seemed so to her.
“Sasha, my dear,” she said, “you’re quite ill!”
“No, it’s nothing. I’m sick, but not very …”
“Ah, my God!” Nadya said worriedly, “why don’t you go to a doctor, why don’t you look after your health? My dear, sweet Sasha,” she said, and tears poured from her eyes, and for some reason Andrei Andreich appeared in her imagination, and the naked lady with the vase, and all her past life, which now seemed as distant as her childhood; and she wept because Sasha no longer seemed so new, intelligent, interesting to her as he had last year. “Dear Sasha, you’re very, very ill. I don’t know what I wouldn’t do to keep you from being so pale and thin. I owe you so much! You can’t even imagine how much you’ve done for me, my good Sasha! In fact, you’re now the nearest and dearest person for me.”
They sat and talked for a while; and now, after Nadya had spent a winter in Petersburg, there was in Sasha, in his words, in his smile, and in his whole figure, the air of something outlived, old-fashioned, long sung, and perhaps already gone to its grave.
“I’m leaving for the Volga the day after tomorrow,” said Sasha, “and then for a kumys cure.8 I want to drink kumys. A friend of mine and his wife are coming with me. His wife is an amazing woman; I keep whipping her up, convincing her to go and study. I want her to turn her life around.”
Having talked, they went to the station. Sasha treated her to tea and apples; and when the train started and he smiled and waved his handkerchief, she could tell even from his legs that he was very ill and would hardly live long.
Nadya arrived in her town at noon. As she drove home from the station, the streets seemed very wide and the houses very small, flattened; there were no people, and she met only the German piano tuner in his faded brown coat. And all the houses seemed covered with dust. Her grandmother, quite old now, stout and homely as before, put her arms around Nadya, and wept for a long time, pressing her face to Nadya’s shoulder, unable to tear herself away. Nina Ivanovna had also aged considerably and looked bad, somehow all pinched, but was still as tightly corseted as before, and the diamonds sparkled on her fingers.
“My dear!” she said, trembling all over. “My dear!”
Then they sat and wept silently. It was evident that both her grandmother and her mother felt that the past was lost forever and irretrievably: gone now was their position in society, gone their former honor, and their right to invite people; so it happens when, amidst a carefree, easy life, the police suddenly come at night, make a search, and it turns out that the master of the house is an embezzler, a counterfeiter—and then farewell forever to the carefree, easy life!
Nadya went upstairs and saw the same bed, the same windows with the naive white curtains, and through the windows the same garden, flooded with light, cheerful, noisy. She touched her table, sat, thought a little. And she ate well, and drank tea with rich, delicious cream, but something was lacking now, there was a feeling of emptiness in the rooms, and the ceilings were low. In the evening she went to bed, covered herself up, and for some reason it was funny to be lying in that warm, very soft bed.
Nina Ivanovna came in for a moment and sat down, as guilty people do, timidly and furtively.
“Well, how is it, Nadya?” she asked, after some silence. “Are you content? Quite content?”
“I am, mama.”
Nina Ivanovna stood up and made a cross over Nadya and over the windows.
“And I, as you see, have become religious,” she said. “You know, I’ve taken up philosophy and keep thinking, thinking … And many things have become clear as day to me now. First of all, I think, the whole of life must pass as if through a prism.”
“Tell me, mama, how is grandmother?”
“She seems all right. When you left then with Sasha, and the telegram came from you, your grandmother read it and collapsed; for three days she lay in bed without moving. Then she prayed to God and wept all the time. But now it’s all right.”
She got up and paced about the room.
“Tick-tock…” the watchman rapped. “Tick-tock, tick-tock …”
“First of all, the whole of life must pass as if through a prism,” she said, “that is, in other words, life must be broken down into the simplest elements, as if into the seven primary colors, and each element must be studied separately.”
What else Nina Ivanovna said, and when she left, Nadya did not hear, because she soon fell asleep.
May passed, June came. Nadya was accustomed to home now. Her grandmother fussed over the samovar and sighed deeply; Nina Ivanovna talked in the evenings about her philosophy; as before, she lived in the house as a hanger-on and had to turn to the grandmother for every penny. There were lots of flies in the house, and the ceilings of the rooms seemed to get lower and lower. Granny and Nina Ivanovna did not go out, for fear of meeting Father Andrei and Andrei Andreich. Nadya walked in the garden, in the street, looked at the houses, at the gray fences, and it seemed to her that everything in the town had long since grown old, outlived itself, and was only
