Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [103]
Near the town gate the sleigh turned back, and ten minutes later they stopped outside the nunnery gate and Olga got out. Now the church bells were ringing again.
“May God be with you,” Olga said, making a low bow as nuns always do.
“You’ll come and visit us, won’t you, Olga?”
“Yes, indeed!”
Then she left them and quickly disappeared through the dark gateway. Afterward the troika drove on again, and they were engulfed in a wave of melancholy. They were all silent. Sophia Lvovna felt as though her whole body had gone weak, and her spirits fell. It occurred to her that inviting a nun to sit in a sleigh and drive around with some drunken companions was stupid, tactless, and perhaps sacrilegious, and as her own drunkenness wore off, so she lost any desire to delude herself, and it became clear to her that she had no love for her husband and indeed could never love him, and it was all folly and stupidity. She had married him for his money, because, in the words of her school friends, he was madly rich, and because she was afraid of being an old maid like Rita, and because she was fed up with her father, the doctor, and because she wanted to annoy Little Volodya. If she could have known when she married her husband that her life would be hideous, dreadful, and burdensome, she would not have consented to the marriage for all the gold in the world. But the damage could never be undone, and she had to reconcile herself to it.
They went home. Lying in her warm soft bed and covering herself with her bedclothes, Sophia Lvovna remembered the dark doorway, the smell of incense, and the figures beside the columns, and she was terrified by the thought that these figures would remain motionless through the night, while she slept. The early service would go on forever, and would be followed by “the hours,” and then by the mass, and then by the thanksgiving service.…
“Oh, there is a God, yes, there truly is a God, and I must surely die, and that is why sooner or later I must think about my soul, about eternal life, and about Olga. Olga is saved now—she has found the answers to all the questions about herself.… But what if there is no God? Then her life has come to nothing. But how has it come to nothing? Why?”
A moment later another thought entered her head: “Yes, there is a God, and death will surely come, and I must think about my soul. If Olga saw death before her this very minute, she would not be afraid. She is ready. The important thing is that she has solved the problem of life for herself. There is a God … yes.… But is there any other way out, except by entering a nunnery? Entering a nunnery means renouncing life, reducing it to zero.…”
Sophia Lvovna began to feel a bit frightened. She hid her head under a pillow.
“I mustn’t think about it,” she muttered. “No, I mustn’t think about it.…”
Yagich was pacing the carpet in the adjoining room: there came the soft jingling sound of spurs as he surrendered to his contemplations. It occurred to Sophia Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only because he bore the name of Vladimir: that was the only reason. She sat up in bed and called out tenderly: “Volodya!”
“What’s the matter?” her husband answered.
“Nothing.”
She lay down again. She heard the pealing of a bell, and perhaps it came from the same nunnery she had been visiting. Once again she remembered the dark gateway and the figures standing there, and there came to her the idea of God and of her own inevitable death, and she put her hands to her ears to keep out the sound of the bells. It occurred to her that a