Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

THE FIANCÉE

I

It was ten o’clock in the evening, and a full moon was shining over the garden. In the Shumins’ house the vigil ordered by the grandmother, Marfa Mikhailovna, had just ended, and now Nadya—she had gone out to the garden for a moment—could see the table being set for a light meal in the reception room, and her grandmother bustling about in her magnificent silk dress; Father Andrei, the archpriest of the cathedral, was talking about something with Nadya’s mother, Nina Ivanovna, and now, through the window in the evening light, her mother for some reason looked very young; next to her stood Father Andrei’s son, Andrei Andreich, listening attentively

The garden was quiet, cool, and shadows lay dark and peaceful on the ground. From somewhere far away, very far, probably outside town, came the calling of frogs. May, sweet May, was in the air! She breathed deeply and wanted to think that, not here, but somewhere under the sky, above the trees, far outside town, in the fields and woods, spring’s own life was now unfolding, mysterious, beautiful, rich, and holy, inaccessible to the understanding of weak, sinful human beings. And for some reason she wanted to cry.

She, Nadya, was already twenty-three years old; since the age of sixteen she had been dreaming passionately of marriage, and now at last she was the fiancée of Andrei Andreich, the same one who was standing behind the window; she liked him, the wedding was already set for the seventh of July, and yet there was no joy, she slept badly at night, her gaiety had vanished … From the open window to the basement, where the kitchen was, came the sounds of people hurrying about, of knives chopping, of the door slamming shut on its pulley; there was a smell of roast turkey and pickled cherries. And for some reason it seemed that it would be like this all her life, without change, without end!

Now someone came out of the house and stood on the porch; it was Alexander Timofeich, or simply Sasha, a guest, come from Moscow ten days before. Long ago a distant relative, Marya Petrovna, an impoverished widow, a small, thin, ailing gentlewoman, used to come to the grandmother for charity. She had a son Sasha. For some reason he was said to be a wonderful artist, and when his mother died, the grandmother, for the salvation of her soul, sent him to Komissarov’s school in Moscow; two years later he transferred to a school of fine arts, stayed there for nearly fifteen years, and finished up none too brilliantly in architecture, but he did not go into architecture anyway, but worked in one of the Moscow printing houses. He came to the grandmother’s almost every summer, usually very sick, to rest and recuperate.

He was now wearing a buttoned-up frock coat and shabby duck trousers frayed at the bottoms. His shirt was unironed, and his entire look was somehow unfresh. Very thin, with large eyes and long, slender fingers, bearded, dark, but, for all that, handsome. He was accustomed to the Shumins, as to his own family, and felt at home with them. And the room he lived in there had long been known as Sasha’s room.

Standing on the porch, he saw Nadya and went over to her.

“It’s nice here,” he said.

“Of course it’s nice. You ought to stay till autumn.”

“Yes, that’s probably so. Perhaps I’ll stay with you till September.”

He laughed for no reason and sat down beside her.

“And I’m sitting here and looking at mama,” said Nadya. “She looks so young from here! My mama has her weaknesses, of course,” she added after a pause, “but still she’s an extraordinary woman.”

“Yes, she’s nice …” Sasha agreed. “Your mama is, of course, a very kind and dear woman in her own way, but … how shall I put it? Early this morning I went to your kitchen, and there were four servants sleeping right on the floor, no beds, rags instead of sheets, stench, bedbugs, cockroaches … The same as it was twenty years ago, no change at all. Well, your grandmother, God be with her, that’s how grandmothers are; but your mama speaks French, takes part in theatricals. It seems she might understand.”

When Sasha spoke, he held up two long, skinny fingers in front of his listener.

“I find everything here somehow wild, because I’m unused to it,” he went on. “Devil knows, nobody’s doing anything. Your mother spends the whole day strolling about like some sort of duchess, your grandmother also doesn’t do anything, and neither do you. And your fiancé, Andrei Andreich, doesn’t do anything either.”

Nadya had heard it all last year and, it seemed, the year before last, and she knew that Sasha could not think differently, and it used to make her laugh, but now for some reason she felt annoyed.

“That’s all the same old, boring stuff,” she said and got up. “Try to invent something newer.”

He laughed and also got up, and they both went towards the house. Tall, beautiful, trim, she now looked very healthy and well-dressed beside him; she sensed it and felt sorry for him and, for some reason, slightly awkward.

“And you say a lot that’s unnecessary,” she said. “You just talked about my Andrei, but you don’t know him.”

“My Andrei… God be with your Andrei! It’s your youth I feel sorry for.”

When they went into the reception room, everyone was just sitting down to supper. The grandmother, or granny, as she was known at home, very stout, homely, with thick eyebrows and a little mustache, spoke loudly, and from her voice and manner of speaking it was clear that she was the head of the household. She owned the shopping stalls in the market and the old house with columns and a garden, but every morning she prayed that God would save her from ruin, and with tears at that. Her daughter-in-law, Nadya’s mother, Nina Ivanovna, blond, tightly corseted, in a pince-nez, and with diamonds on every finger; and Father Andrei, an old man, lean, toothless, and with a look as if he were about to say something very funny; and his son, Andrei Andreich, Nadya’s fiancé, stout and handsome, with wavy hair, resembling an actor or an artist—all three were talking about hypnotism.

“You’ll recover after a week with me,” said granny, addressing Sasha, “only you must eat more. Just look at you!” she said. “It’s frightful! A real prodigal son, if I ever saw one!”

“I have scattered the riches which thou gavest me,” Father Andrei said slowly, with laughing eyes. “Accursed, I have fed with senseless swine …”¹

“I love my papa,” said Andrei Andreich, touching his father’s shoulder. “A nice old man. A kind old man.”

They all fell silent. Sasha suddenly burst out laughing and put his napkin to his mouth.

“So you believe in hypnotism?” Father Andrei asked Nina Ivanovna.

“I cannot, of course, maintain that I believe in it,” Nina Ivanovna replied, giving her face a serious, even stern, expression, “but I must admit that there is much in nature that is mysterious and incomprehensible.”

“I fully agree with you, though I must add for my own part that faith considerably diminishes the sphere of the mysterious for us.”

A big, very fat turkey was served. Father Andrei and Nina Ivanovna continued their conversation. The diamonds glittered on Nina Ivanovna’s fingers, then tears began to glitter in her eyes, she became upset.

“Though I dare not argue with you,” she said, “you must agree that there are a great many insoluble riddles in life.”

“Not a single one, I dare assure you.”

After supper Andrei Andreich played the violin and Nina Ivanovna accompanied him on the piano. Ten years ago he had graduated from the university with a degree in philology, but he did not work anywhere, had no definite occupation, and only participated occasionally in concerts of a charitable nature; and in town he was called an artiste.

Andrei Andreich played; everyone listened silently. The samovar boiled quietly on the table, and only Sasha drank tea. Then, as it struck twelve, a string suddenly broke on the violin; everyone laughed and began bustling about and saying good-bye.

After seeing her fiancé off, Nadya went to her room upstairs, where she lived with her mother (the grandmother occupied the lower floor). Below, in the reception room, the lights were being put out, but Sasha still sat and drank tea. He always drank tea for a long time, Moscow-style, up to seven glasses at a time. Long after she had undressed and gone to bed, Nadya could hear the servants tidying up downstairs, and her grandmother being angry At last everything quieted down, and all that could be heard was Sasha coughing occasionally in a bass voice downstairs in his room.

II

When Nadya woke up, it must have been about two o’clock. Dawn was breaking. Somewhere far away a night watchman was rapping. She did not want to sleep, her bed was very soft, uncomfortable. Nadya, as on all previous nights that May, sat up in bed and began to think. Her thoughts were the same as last night, monotonous, superfluous, importunate—thoughts of how Andrei Andreich had begun courting her and proposed to her, how she had accepted and had then gradually come to appreciate this kind, intelligent man. But now, for some reason, with less than a month to go till the wedding, she had begun to experience fear, anxiety, as if something uncertain and oppressive awaited her.

“Tick-tock, tick-tock …” the watchman rapped lazily. “Tick-tock …”

Through the big old window she can see the garden, and further away the densely flowering lilac bushes, sleepy and languid from the cold; and dense white mist is slowly drifting towards the lilacs, wanting to cover them. Drowsy rooks are cawing in the distant trees.

“My God, what makes it so oppressive for me?”

Perhaps every fiancée feels the same way before her wedding. Who knows! Or is it Sasha’s influence? But Sasha has been saying the same thing for several years on end, as if by rote, and when he says it, it seems naïve and strange. But, anyway, why can she not get Sasha out of her head? Why?

The watchman had stopped rapping long ago. Under the window and in the garden birds began making noise, the mist left the garden, everything around brightened up with the light of spring, as with a smile. Soon the whole garden revived, warmed and caressed by the sun, and dewdrops sparkled like diamonds on the leaves; and that morning the old, long-neglected garden seemed so young, so festive.

Granny was already awake. Sasha coughed in a rough bass. There was the sound of the samovar being prepared downstairs, of chairs being moved around.

The hours passed slowly. Nadya had long been up and strolling in the garden, but the morning still dragged on.

Then Nina Ivanovna came, teary-eyed, with a glass of mineral water. She was taken up with spiritism, homeopathy, read a lot, liked to talk of the doubts to which she was susceptible, and all that, as it seemed to Nadya, contained a deep, mysterious meaning. Now Nadya kissed her mother and walked beside her.

“What were you crying about, mother?” she asked.

“Last night I began reading a story describing an old man and his daughter. The old man works in some office and, well, so his superior falls in love with his daughter. I didn’t finish it, but there’s a passage where I couldn’t help crying,” said Nina Ivanovna, and she sipped from the glass. “This morning I remembered it and cried a little more.”

“And I’ve been feeling so cheerless all these days,” said Nadya, after some silence. “Why can’t I sleep nights?”

“I don’t know, dear. When I can’t sleep at night, I close my eyes very, very tight, like this, and picture Anna Karenina to myself, how she walks and speaks, or I picture something historical, from the ancient world …”

Nadya felt that her mother did not and could not understand her. She felt it for the first time in her life, and even became frightened, wanted to hide herself; and she went to her room.

At two o’clock they sat down to dinner. It was Wednesday, a fast day, and therefore the grandmother was served a meatless borscht and bream with kasha.

To tease the grandmother, Sasha ate both his own meat soup and the meatless borscht. He joked all the while they were eating, but his jokes came out clumsy, invariably calculated to moralize, and it came out as not funny at all when, before producing a witticism, he raised his very long, emaciated, dead-looking fingers, and the thought occurred to one that he was very ill and was perhaps not long for this world, and one pitied him to the point of tears.

After dinner the grandmother went to her room to rest. Nina Ivanovna played the piano for a little while and then she also left.

“Ah, dear Nadya,” Sasha began his usual after-dinner conversation, “if only you would listen to me! If only you would!”

She was sitting deep in an old armchair, her eyes closed, while he quietly paced up and down the room.

“If you’d just go and study!” he said. “Only enlightened and holy people are interesting, only they are needed. The more such people there are, the sooner the Kingdom of God will come on earth. Of your town then there will gradually be no stone left upon stone— everything will turn upside down, everything will change as if by magic. And there will be huge, magnificent houses here, wonderful gardens, extraordinary fountains, remarkable people … But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that the crowd as we think of it, as it is now, this evil will not exist then, because every man will have faith, and every man will know what he lives for, and no one will seek support from the crowd. My dear, my darling, go! Show them all that this stagnant, gray, sinful life is sickening to you. Show it to yourself at least!”

“Impossible, Sasha. I’m getting married.”

“Ah, enough! Who needs that?”

They went out to the garden and strolled a bit.

“And however it may be, my dear, you must perceive, you must understand, how impure, how immoral this idle life of yours is,” Sasha went on. “You must understand, for instance, that if you, and your mother, and your dear granny do nothing, it means that someone else is working for you, that you are feeding on someone else’s life, and is that pure, is it not dirty?”

Nadya wanted to say: “Yes, that’s true,” she wanted to say that she understood, but tears came to her eyes, she suddenly grew quiet, shrank into herself, and went to her room.

Towards evening Andrei Andreich came and, as usual, played his violin for a long time. Generally he was untalkative, and liked the violin, perhaps, because he could be silent while he played. After ten, going home, with his coat already on, he embraced Nadya and greedily began kissing her face, shoulders, hands.

“My dear, my sweet, my lovely! …” he murmured. “Oh, how happy I am! I’m mad with ecstasy!”

And it seemed to her that she had already heard it long ago, very long ago, or read it somewhere … in a novel, old, tattered, long since abandoned.

In the reception room Sasha sat at the table and drank tea, the saucer perched on his five long fingers; granny was playing patience, Nina Ivanovna was reading. The flame sputtered in the icon lamp, and everything seemed quiet and happy. Nadya said good night, went upstairs to her room, lay down, and fell asleep at once. But, as on the previous night, she awoke with the first light of dawn. She did not want to sleep, her soul was uneasy, heavy. She sat, her head resting on her knees, and thought about her fiancé, about the wedding … She remembered for some reason that her mother had not loved her deceased husband and now owned nothing and was totally dependent on her mother-in-law, granny. And, think as she might, Nadya could not figure out why up to now she had seen something special, extraordinary, in her mother, why she had failed to notice the simple, ordinary, unhappy woman.

And Sasha was not asleep downstairs—she could hear him coughing. He is a strange, naïve man, thought Nadya, and there is something absurd in his dreams, in all his wonderful gardens and extraordinary fountains. But for some reason there was so much that was beautiful in his naïveté, even in that absurdity, that the moment she merely thought whether she should go and study, her whole heart, her whole breast felt a cold shiver and was flooded with a feeling of joy, ecstasy.

“But better not think, better not think …” she whispered. “I mustn’t think of it.”

“Tick-tock…” the watchman rapped somewhere far away. “Tick-tock … tick-tock …”

III

In the middle of June Sasha suddenly became bored and began preparing to go to Moscow.

“I can’t live in this town,” he said glumly. “No running water, no drains! I feel queasy eating dinner—there’s the most impossible filth in the kitchen …”

“Wait a bit, prodigal son!” the grandmother persuaded him, for some reason in a whisper. “The wedding’s on the seventh!”

“I don’t want to.”

“You were going to stay with us till September.”

“But now I don’t want to. I must work!”

The summer had turned damp and cold, the trees were wet, everything in the garden looked dismal, uninviting, one did indeed feel like working. In the rooms downstairs and upstairs, unfamiliar women’s voices were heard, the grandmother’s sewing machine clattered: they were hurrying with the trousseau. Of fur coats alone Nadya was to come with six, and the cheapest of them, in the grandmother’s words, cost three hundred roubles! The fuss annoyed Sasha; he sat in his room and felt angry; but they still persuaded him to stay, and he promised not to leave before the first of July.

The time passed quickly. On St. Peter’s day,² after dinner, Andrei Andreich and Nadya went to Moscovskaya Street for one more look at the house that had been rented and long since prepared for the young couple. It was a two-story house, but so far only the upper story was furnished. In the reception room a shiny floor, painted to look like parquet, bentwood chairs, a grand piano, a music stand for the violin. It smelled of paint. On the wall hung a big oil painting in a gilt frame: a naked lady, and beside her a purple jug with the handle broken off.

“A wonderful painting,” said Andrei Andreich, sighing with respect. “By the artist Shishmachevsky.”

Further on was the drawing room, with a round table, a sofa, and armchairs upholstered in bright blue material. Over the sofa, a big photographic portrait of Father Andrei wearing a kamilavka³and medals. Then they went into the dining room with its cupboard, then into the bedroom; there in the half-darkness two beds stood next to each other, and it looked as if, when the bedroom was being decorated, it was with the idea that it should always be good there and could not be otherwise. Andrei Andreich led Nadya through the rooms, his arm all the while around her waist; and she felt herself weak, guilty, she hated all these rooms, beds, armchairs, was nauseated by the naked lady. It was clear to her now that she had stopped loving Andrei Andreich, or perhaps had never loved him; but how to say it, whom to say it to, and why, she did not and could not figure out, though she thought about it every day and every night … He held her by the waist, spoke so tenderly, so modestly, was so happy going around this apartment of his; while in all of it she saw only banality, stupid, naïve, unbearable banality, and his arm that encircled her waist seemed to her as hard and cold as an iron hoop. And she was ready to run away, to burst into tears, to throw herself out the window at any moment. Andrei Andreich brought her to the bathroom and touched the faucet built into the wall, and water suddenly flowed.

“How about that?” he said and laughed. “I ordered a hundred-bucket cistern installed in the attic, and now you and I will have water.”

They strolled through the courtyard, then went out to the street and got into a cab. Dust flew up in thick clouds, and it looked as if it was about to rain.

“You’re not cold?” asked Andrei Andreich, squinting from the dust.

She did not answer.

“Yesterday, you remember, Sasha reproached me for not doing anything,” he said after a short pause. “Well, he’s right! Infinitely right! I don’t do anything and can’t do anything. Why is that, my dear? Why am I repulsed even by the thought that one day I might stick a cockade to my forehead and go into government service?⁴Why am I so ill at ease when I see a lawyer or a Latin teacher, or a member of the town council? O Mother Russia! O Mother Russia, how many idle and useless people you still carry on your back! How many you have who are like me, O long-suffering one!”

And he generalized from the fact that he did nothing, and saw it as a sign of the times.

“When we’re married,” he went on, “we’ll go to the country together, my dear, we’ll work there! We’ll buy a small piece of land with a garden, a river, we’ll work, observe life … Oh, how good it will be!”

He took his hat off and his hair flew in the wind, and she listened to him, thinking: “God, I want to be home! God!” Almost in front of the house they overtook Father Andrei.

“There goes my father!” Andrei Andreich joyfully waved his hat. “I love my papa, I really do,” he said as he paid the cabby. “A nice old man. A kind old man.”

Nadya went into the house angry, unwell, thinking that there would be guests all night, that she would have to entertain them, smile, listen to the violin, listen to all sorts of nonsense, and talk only of the wedding. Her grandmother, imposing, magnificent in her silk dress, haughty, as she always seemed when there were guests, sat by the samovar. Father Andrei came in with his sly smile.

“I have the pleasure and blessed consolation of finding you in good health,” he said to the grandmother, and it was hard to tell whether he was joking or serious.

IV

The wind rapped on the windows, on the roof; a whistling was heard, and the household goblin in the stove sang his little song, plaintively and gloomily. It was past midnight. Everyone in the house was already in bed, but no one slept, and Nadya kept having the feeling that someone was playing the violin downstairs. There was a sharp knock, probably a blind being torn off its hinge. A moment later Nina Ivanovna came in in just her nightgown, holding a candle.

“What was that knocking, Nadya?”

Her mother, her hair plaited in a single braid, smiling timidly, seemed older, smaller, plainer on this stormy night. Nadya recalled how still recently she had considered her mother an extraordinary woman and had proudly listened to the words she spoke; and now she could not recall those words; everything that came to her mind was so weak, so useless.

From the stove came the singing of several basses, and one could even hear: “O-o-oh, my Go-o-od!” Nadya sat up in bed and suddenly seized herself strongly by the hair and broke into sobs.

“Mama, mama,” she said, “my dear mama, if only you knew what’s happening to me! I beg you, I implore you, let me go away! I implore you!”

“Where?” asked Nina Ivanovna, not understanding, and she sat on the bed. “Go away where?”

Nadya wept for a long time and could not utter a word.

“Let me go away from this town!” she said at last. “There should not be and will not be any wedding, understand that! I don’t love this man … I can’t even speak of him.”

“No, my dear, no,” Nina Ivanovna began speaking quickly, terribly frightened. “Calm yourself—it’s because you’re in a bad mood. It will pass. It happens. You’ve probably had a falling out with Andrei, but lovers’ trials end in smiles.”

“Oh, leave me, mama, leave me!” Nadya sobbed.

“Yes,” said Nina Ivanovna after a silence. “Not long ago you were a child, a little girl, and now you’re already a fiancée. There’s a constant turnover of matter in nature. And you won’t notice how you yourself become a mother and an old woman and have a daughter as rebellious as mine is.”

“My dear, kind one, you’re intelligent, you’re unhappy,” said Nadya, “you’re very unhappy—why do you talk in banalities? For God’s sake, why?”

Nina Ivanovna wanted to say something but was unable to utter a word, sobbed, and went to her room. The basses droned in the stove again, and it suddenly became frightening. Nadya jumped out of bed and went quickly to her mother. Nina Ivanovna, her face tear-stained, lay in bed with a blue blanket over her, holding a book.

“Mama, listen to me!” said Nadya. “I implore you to perceive and understand! Simply understand how shallow and humiliating our life is. My eyes have been opened and I see it all now. And what is your Andrei Andreich? He’s not intelligent, mama! Lord God! Understand, mama, he’s stupid!”

Nina Ivanovna sat up abruptly.

“You and your grandmother torment me!” she said with a sob. “I want to live! To live!” she repeated and beat her breast twice with her little fist. “Give me freedom! I’m still young, I want to live, and you’ve made an old woman out of me! …”

She wept bitterly, lay down, and curled up under her blanket, and looked so small, pitiful, silly. Nadya went to her room, got dressed, and, sitting by the window, waited for morning. She sat all night thinking, and someone outside kept rapping on the blinds and whistling away.

In the morning the grandmother complained that during the night the wind had blown down all the apples in the orchard and broken an old plum tree. It was a gray, dull, joyless day, fit for lighting the lamps; everyone complained about the cold, and rain rapped on the windows. After tea Nadya went to Sasha’s room and, without saying a word, knelt by the armchair in the corner and covered her face with her hands.

“What is it?” asked Sasha.

“I can’t …” she said. “How could I have lived here before, I can’t understand, I can’t perceive! I despise my fiancé, I despise myself, I despise all this idle, meaningless life …”

“Well, well …” said Sasha, not yet understanding what was the matter. “It’s nothing … It’s all right.”

“This life is hateful to me,” Nadya went on, “I can’t stand it here one more day. Tomorrow I’ll go away. Take me with you, for God’s sake!”

For a moment Sasha looked at her in amazement; finally he understood and was happy as a child. He waved his arms and began shuffling in his slippers, as if dancing for joy

“Splendid!” he said, rubbing his hands. “God, how good!”

And she looked at him without blinking, with big, enamoured eyes, as if spellbound, expecting him to say something significant at once, something of boundless importance; he had not said anything yet, but it seemed to her that something vast and new was opening out before her, something she had not known before, and she now looked at him, filled with expectations, ready for anything, even death.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said, after some thought, “and you will come to the station to see me off… I’ll bring your luggage in my trunk and buy you a ticket; at the third bell you’ll get on the train, and—off we’ll go. You’ll keep me company as far as Moscow and then go on by yourself to Petersburg. You have a passport?”⁵

“Yes.”

“I swear you won’t regret it and won’t repent of it,” Sasha said with enthusiasm. “You’ll go, you’ll study, and then let your destiny carry you on. Once you’ve turned your life around, the rest will change. The main thing is to turn your life around, and the rest doesn’t matter. So, then, tomorrow we go?”

“Oh, yes! For God’s sake!”

It seemed to Nadya that she was very agitated, that her soul was heavy as never before, that now, right up to their departure, she would have to suffer and have tormenting thoughts; but as soon as she went to her room upstairs and lay down on the bed, she fell asleep and slept soundly, her face tear-stained and smiling, till evening.

V

They sent for a cab. Nadya, already in her hat and coat, went upstairs to look once more at her mother and at all that had been hers; she stood in her room by the still-warm bed, looked around, then went quietly to her mother. Nina Ivanovna was asleep, it was quiet in the room. Nadya kissed her mother and straightened her hair, stood there for a minute or two … Then she unhurriedly went downstairs.

Outside it was raining hard. A cab with its top up, all wet, was standing by the porch.

“There won’t be room enough for you, Nadya,” said the grandmother, as a servant began putting in the trunks. “Who wants to go and see him off in such weather! Stay home! Look how it’s raining!”

Nadya wanted to say something and could not. Sasha helped her into the cab, and covered her legs with a plaid. Then he got in beside her.

“Have a good trip! God bless you!” the grandmother called from the porch. “And you, Sasha, write to us from Moscow!”

“All right. Good-bye, granny!”

“May the Queen of Heaven keep you!”

“Well, some weather!” said Sasha.

Only now did Nadya begin to cry. Now it was clear to her that she was bound to leave, something she had not yet believed when she was saying good-bye to her grandmother, when she was looking at her mother. Farewell, town! And suddenly she remembered everything: Andrei, and his father, and the new apartment, and the naked lady with the vase; and now it was all not frightening, not oppressive, but naïve, petty, and dropping further and further behind her. And when they got in the carriage and the train started, this whole past, so big and serious, shrank into a little lump, and a vast, expansive future, which until now had been so little noticeable, began to unfold. Rain rapped on the carriage windows, only green fields could be seen, telegraph poles with birds on the wires flashed by, and joy suddenly took her breath away: she remembered that she was on the way to freedom, on the way to study, and it was the same as what very long ago was called going to the Cossacks.⁶She laughed, and wept, and prayed.

“It’s all ri-i-ight!” said Sasha, grinning. “It’s all ri-i-ight!”

VI

Autumn passed, then winter passed. Nadya was already very homesick, and thought every day of her mother, her grandmother, thought of Sasha. The letters that came from home were quiet, kind, and everything seemed to have been forgiven and forgotten. In May after examinations she went home, healthy and cheerful, and stopped in 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 naïve 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 waiting for the end, or for the beginning of something young, fresh. Oh, if only this new, bright life would come sooner, when one could look one’s fate directly and boldly in the eye, be conscious of one’s rightness, be cheerful, free! And this life would come sooner or later! There would be a time when of grandmother’s house, where everything was so arranged that four maids could not live otherwise than in a single basement room, in filth—there would be a time when no trace of this house would remain, it would be forgotten, no one would remember it. And Nadya’s only entertainment came from the boys in the neighboring yard; when she strolled in the garden, they rapped on the fence and teased her, laughing:

“The fiancée! The fiancée!”

A letter came from Sasha in Saratov. In his merry, dancing hand he wrote that the trip down the Volga had been quite successful, but that he had fallen slightly ill in Saratov, had lost his voice, and had been in the hospital for two weeks now. She realized what it meant, and a foreboding that amounted to certainty came over her. And she found it unpleasant that this foreboding and her thoughts of Sasha did not trouble her as before. She wanted passionately to live, wanted to be in Petersburg, and her acquaintance with Sasha now seemed to her something dear, but long, long past! She did not sleep all night and in the morning sat by the window, listening. And, indeed, voices could be heard downstairs; her grandmother was quickly, anxiously asking about something. Then someone began to weep … When Nadya came downstairs, her grandmother was standing in the corner and praying, and her face was wet with tears. On the table lay a telegram.

Nadya paced the room for a long time, listening to her grandmother’s weeping, then picked up the telegram and read it. It said that on the previous morning, in Saratov, there died of consumption Alexander Timofeich, or simply Sasha.

The grandmother and Nina Ivanovna went to church to order a panikhida, but Nadya still paced the rooms for a long time, thinking. She realized clearly that her life had been turned around, as Sasha had wanted, that here she was lonely, alien, not needed, and that she needed nothing here, that all former things had been torn from her and had vanished, as if they had been burned and their ashes scattered on the wind. She went into Sasha’s room and stood there for a while.

“Farewell, dear Sasha!” she thought, and pictured before her a new, expansive, spacious life, and that life, still unclear, full of mysteries, lured and beckoned to her.

She went to her room upstairs to pack, and the next morning said good-bye to her family and, alive, cheerful, left town—as she thought, forever.

DECEMBER 1903