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By Root 558 0

game of patience, and Nina Ivanovna was reading. The flame spluttered in the icon lamp, and it seemed that everyone was quietly happy. Nadya said good night and went upstairs to her room, and lying down on the bed, she immediately fell asleep. But just as on the night before, she awoke with the first light of dawn. She could not sleep: a restless and oppressive spirit moved in her. She sat up in bed, resting her head on her knees, and thinking about her fiancé and her wedding.… For some reason she remembered that her mother had never loved her father, and now the mother possessed nothing of her own, and was completely dependent on Granny, her mother-in-law. And try as she would, Nadya could not understand why she had always regarded her mother as an exceptional and remarkable person, and why it had never occurred to her that her mother was only a simple, quite ordinary, and unhappy woman.

And Sasha, too, was awake—she heard him coughing downstairs. “What a strange naïve person he is,” Nadya thought, “and those dreams of his—those marvelous gardens and glorious fountains—how absurd they are!” But for some reason she found so much that was beautiful in his naïveté and his absurdity, and the moment she permitted herself to dream of going away and studying, cold shivers bathed her whole heart and breast, and she was overwhelmed with sensations of joy and ecstasy.

“Better not to think about it,” she whispered. “No, one shouldn’t think about such things.”

“Tick-tock …” the night watchman was rapping with his stick far away. “Tick-tock … tick-tock …”

III

Toward the middle of June, Sasha was suddenly overcome with boredom and made up his mind to return to Moscow.

“I can’t go on living in this town,” he said moodily. “No running water, no drains! I can hardly force myself to eat dinner—the kitchen is so indescribably filthy!”

“Wait a little while, Prodigal Son,” Grandmother said, and for some reason she lowered her voice to a whisper. “The wedding is on the seventh.”

“I don’t want to wait!”

“Didn’t you say you intended to stay until September?”

“I don’t want to any more. I want to go and work!”

The summer had turned cold and wet, the trees were damp, the garden looked somber and uninviting, and none of this caused anyone to desire to work. Unfamiliar female voices were heard in all the rooms upstairs and downstairs, and they could hear the clatter of the sewing machince in Grandmother’s room: they were rushing to get the trousseau ready. Of fur coats alone, Nadya was to have six, and the cheapest of them, according to Grandmother, cost three hundred rubles! The fuss irritated Sasha, who remained in his room, fuming with anger; but they talked him into staying, and he promised not to leave before the first of July.

Time passed quickly. On St. Peter’s day Andrey Andreyich took Nadya to Moscow Street after dinner, to have yet another look at the house which had long since been rented and made ready for the young couple. It was a two-story house, but so far only the upper floor had been furnished. On the gleaming floor of the hall, painted to resemble parquet, stood bentwood chairs, a grand piano, a music stand for the violin. There was the smell of paint. On the wall hung a large oil painting in a gold frame—a picture of a naked woman beside a lilac-colored vase with a broken handle.

“Wonderful painting,” said Andrey Andreyich with an awed sigh. “It’s by Shishmachevsky.”

Then there was the drawing room with a round table, a sofa, and armchairs upholstered in some bright blue material. Above the sofa hung a large photograph of Father Andrey in priestly skullcap and wearing his decorations. They passed into the dining room, where there was a sideboard, then into the bedroom, where two beds could be seen side by side in the half dusk: it seemed as though the bedroom had been furnished in such a way that life there would always be happy and could never be anything else. Andrey Andreyich led Nadya through the rooms, never taking his arm from her waist; but all the time she felt weak and conscience-stricken, hating these rooms