Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [160]
“Mama, Mama!” she exclaimed. “My own dear mother, if only you knew what was happening to me! I beg you, I implore you—let me go away from here!”
“Where to?” Nina Ivanovna asked in surprise, and she sat down on the bed. “Where to?”
Nadya cried for a long time and could not utter a word.
“Let me leave town,” she said at last. “The wedding mustn’t—won’t happen! Please understand that! I don’t love him!… I can’t bear to talk about him!”
“No, my darling, no!” Nina Ivanovna said quickly, frightened out of her wits. “Calm yourself. You’re in low spirits, but it will pass. It often happens. Probably you’ve been quarreling with Andrey, but then lovers’ quarrels always end in smiles!”
“Go away, Mama, go away!” Nadya sobbed.
“Yes,” said Nina Ivanovna after a pause. “Only a little while ago you were a baby, a little girl, and now you are almost a bride. In nature there are always these transformations. Before you know where you are, you will be a mother and then an old woman, with a stubborn daughter like mine on your hands!”
“My dear sweet mother, you are clever and unhappy,” said Nadya. “You are so very unhappy—why do you say such vulgar, commonplace things? For God’s sake why?”
Nina Ivanovna tried to say something but could not utter a word, and went sobbing back to her own room. Once again deep-throated voices droned in the chimney, and Nadya suddenly felt frightened. She jumped out of bed and ran to her mother. Nina Ivanovna’s eyes were red with weeping. She lay on the bed wrapped in a blue blanket, a book in her hands.
“Mama, listen to me!” Nadya cried. “I implore you—try to understand! If you only understood how petty and degrading our life is! My eyes have been opened and I see it all now. And what about your Andrey Andreyich? He’s not a bit clever, Mama! Oh God, he’s nothing more than a fool!”
Nina Ivanovna sat up with a jerk.
“You and your grandmother keep torturing me,” she sobbed. “I want to live—to live!” she repeated, and she struck her breast twice with her little fist. “Let me free! I’m still young and I want to live, and you’re making an old woman out of me!”
She cried bitterly and lay down, rolling herself up in the blanket, looking very silly, small, and pathetic. Nadya went to her room, dressed, and sat at the window to wait for the dawn. All night she sat there thinking, while someone down below in the courtyard seemed to be tapping the shutters and whistling.
The next morning Grandmother complained that during the night the wind had blown down all the apples in the garden and thrown down an old plum tree. It was a dull gray desolate day: one of those mornings when you want to light the lamps; everyone complained of the cold, and the raindrops kept tapping on the windowpanes. After breakfast Nadya went to Sasha’s room, and without saying a word she fell on her knees before a chair in the corner and covered her face with her hands.
“What’s the matter?” Sasha asked.
“I can’t go on,” she said. “I don’t know how I was able to live here before. I don’t understand it. I despise my fiancé, I despise myself, I despise all idle, nonsensical life!”
“What’s come over you?” said Sasha, who was still unable to understand what it was all about. “You know … everything will turn out all right.”
“I am disgusted with my life,” Nadya went on. “I can’t endure the thought of another day here! I’m leaving here tomorrow. Take me with you, for God’s sake!”
For a moment Sasha gazed at her in astonishment. At last the truth dawned on him, and he was as delighted as a child. He waved his arms and began to shuffle around the room in his slippers, like someone dancing for joy.
“Wonderful!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “God, how wonderful!”
And she gazed at him steadily with wide-open eyes full of love, like someone spellbound, and she waited for him to say something important, something which would have infinite meaning for her. He had told her nothing yet, but