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.