“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?”