Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [163]
Nadya went upstairs and saw the familiar bed, the familiar windows and simple white curtains, and from the windows there could be seen the familiar view of the garden, brilliant with sunshine, gay and clamorous with birdsong. She ran her fingers over the table, sat down, and fell to thinking. She had enjoyed a good dinner, and the tea was served with delicious thick cream, but something was missing. She was aware of the emptiness of the room, and the ceilings were very low. In the evening when she went to bed, covering herself with the bedclothes, it somehow seemed absurd to be lying in that warm, very soft bed.
Nina Ivanovna came in for a moment and sat down, as people do when they feel guilty. She was timid and kept glancing round her.
“Tell me, Nadya, how is everything?” she asked after a moment’s silence. “Are you contented? Quite contented?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Nina Ivanovna rose and made the sign of the cross over Nadya and over the window.
“As you see, I have grown deeply religious,” she said. “You know, I am studying philosophy now, and I am always thinking, thinking.… And many things are clear as daylight now. It seems to me now that what is necessary above all is that life should pass as it were through a prism.”
“Mama, tell me, how is Grandmother?”
“Oh, she’s all right. When you went away with Sasha, and then when your telegram came, your grandmother read it and fell to the ground, and for three days she lay in bed without moving. After that she was always praying and weeping. But now it’s over.”
She got up and walked around the room.
“Tick-tock …” came the tapping of the night watchman. “Tick-tock, tick-tock …”
“What is necessary above all is that life should as it were pass through a prism,” she said. “In other words, what is necessary is that our life in consciousness should be analyzed into its simplest elements, as though into the seven primary colors, and each element must be studied separately.”
What else Nina Ivanovna said, and when she went away, Nadya did not know, for she soon fell asleep.
May passed, and June came. Nadya had grown accustomed to being at home. Grandmother fussed over the samovar, and gave deep sighs, while Nina Ivanovna spent her evenings talking about philosophy; she still lived in the house like a poor cousin, and she had to ask Grandmother for every twenty-kopeck piece. There were heaps of flies in the house, and the ceilings seemed to be falling lower and lower. For fear of meeting Father Andrey and Andrey Andreyich, Granny and Nina Ivanovna never went out into the streets. Nadya wandered through the garden and strolled down the streets, gazing at the houses and the gray fences, and it seemed to her that everything in the town had been growing old for a long time, and the town itself had outlived its day and was now waiting either for the end or for the beginning of something fresh and young. Oh, if only this new pure life would come more quickly, a life where one could look one’s fate in the eyes boldly and straightforwardly, sure of being right, joyful and free! Sooner or later this life would come! The time would come when there would be nothing left of her grandmother’s house, that house where everything was so arranged that the four servants could only live in the basement in a single filthy room—the time would come when no trace of the house would remain, when it would be forgotten and no one would remember it. Nadya’s only distraction came from the little boys next door: when she wandered in the garden, they banged on the fence and shouted with glee: “The bride! The bride!”
A letter from Sasha arrived from Saratov. In his happy, dancing handwriting he wrote that the journey down the Volga was a complete success, but he had fallen