parting came. Three days after the funeral we returned to Moscow, and I
never saw her again.
Grandmamma received the sad tidings only on our return to her house, and
her grief was extraordinary. At first we were not allowed to see her,
since for a whole week she was out of her mind, and the doctors were
afraid for her life. Not only did she decline all medicine whatsoever,
but she refused to speak to anybody or to take nourishment, and never
closed her eyes in sleep. Sometimes, as she sat alone in the arm-chair in
her room, she would begin laughing and crying at the same time, with a
sort of tearless grief, or else relapse into convulsions, and scream out
dreadful, incoherent words in a horrible voice. It was the first dire
sorrow which she had known in her life, and it reduced her almost
to distraction. She would begin accusing first one person, and then
another, of bringing this misfortune upon her, and rail at and blame
them with the most extraordinary virulence. Finally she would rise from
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
all at a distance, and used to say that she "recognised neither kinsman
nor godfather in the house, and would permit of no exceptions with
regard to her master's property."
Instead, she sought and found consolation in fervent prayers to God. Yet
sometimes, in those moments of weakness to which all of us are
subject, and when man's best solace is the tears and compassion of his
fellow-creatures, she would take her old dog Moska on to her bed, and
talk to it, and weep softly over it as it answered her caresses by
licking her hands, with its yellow eyes fixed upon her. When Moska
began to whine she would say as she quieted it: "Enough, enough! I know
without thy telling me that my time is near." A month before her death
she took out of her chest of drawers some fine white calico, white
cambric, and pink ribbon, and, with the help of the maidservants,
fashioned the garments in which she wished to be buried. Next she put
everything on her shelves in order and handed the bailiff an inventory
which she had made out with scrupulous accuracy. All that she kept
back was a couple of silk gowns, an old shawl, and Grandpapa's military
uniform--things which had been presented to her absolutely, and which,
thanks to her care and orderliness, were in an excellent state of
preservation--particularly the handsome gold embroidery on the uniform.
Just before her death, again, she expressed a wish that one of the gowns
(a pink one) should be made into a robe de chambre for Woloda; that the
other one (a many-coloured gown) should be made into a similar garment
for myself; and that the shawl should go to Lubotshka. As for the
uniform, it was to devolve either to Woloda or to myself, according as
the one or the other of us should first become an officer. All the rest
of her property (save only forty roubles, which she set aside for her
commemorative rites and to defray the costs of her burial) was to pass
to her brother, a person with whom, since he lived a dissipated life
in a distant province, she had had no intercourse during her lifetime.
When, eventually, he arrived to claim the inheritance, and found that
its sum-total only amounted to twenty-five roubles in notes, he refused
to believe it, and declared that it was impossible that his sister-a
woman who for sixty years had had sole charge in a wealthy house, as
well as all her life had been penurious and averse to giving away even
the smallest thing should have left no more: yet it was a fact.
Though Natalia's last illness lasted for two months, she bore her
sufferings with truly Christian fortitude. Never did she fret or
complain, but, as usual, appealed continually to God. An hour before
the end came she made her final confession, received the Sacrament with
quiet joy, and was accorded extreme unction. Then she begged forgiveness