“He finally remembered me!” she said, this time with gentle reproach.
“Oh, what torment I’ve suffered,” answered Alexander, “and you didn’t help!”
Nadenka showed him a book. “Here’s what I would have gotten you out with if you hadn’t come in another minute,” she said. “Sit down. By now Mama won’t come any more; she’s afraid of dampness. I have so many, so many things I must tell you… Oh my!”
“And I you too… Oh my!”
Then they said nothing, or almost nothing, that is, what they had already spoken of ten times before: ordinary things, dreams, the sky, the stars, what they liked, happiness. They carried on their conversations mostly in the language of looks, smiles and exclamations. The book fell on the grass.
Night set in… no, what do you mean, night! Can you say there are nights in Petersburg in the summer? This isn’t night, but… Really you’d have to invent another name–say, half-light… Everything was quiet all around. The river Neva slept; sometimes, as if half-waking, it lapped against the bank with a slight ripple and fell silent. Then a late breeze came from somewhere and swept over the sleepy waters, but could not wake them, it only made ripples on the surface and blew a bit of coolness on Nadenka and Alexander, or brought them the sound of a distant song–and then everything was silent again, and again the Neva was still like a sleeping human who will open his eyes for a minute at a slight noise and close them again at once; and sleep will weigh down his heavy lids all the more. Then from the direction of the bridge something like distant thunder was heard and afterwards the bark of the watchdog from the nearest fishery and again everything was quiet. The trees formed a dark vault, and shook their branches just a bit, without a sound. In the cottages along the banks little lights flickered.
What special thing does the warm air carry at these times? What secret runs through the flowers, trees and grass, and breathes with ineffable languor upon the soul. Why does it give birth to thoughts and feelings so different from those that arise amid din and crowds? What an environment there is for love in this sleep of nature, this twilight, these silent trees, these flowers and this solitude! How powerfully everything attunes the mind to dreams and the heart to rare feelings which seem such useless, out-of-place and ridiculous aberrations in the everyday, proper and disciplined life… Yes! useless, but meanwhile at these moments the soul but dimly comprehends the possibility of the happiness it so diligently seeks at other times and does not find.
Alexander and Nadenka went up to the river and leaned on the gate. For a long time Nadenka looked pensively at the Neva and into the distance; Alexander looked at Nadenka. Their souls were overflowing with happiness; together their hearts yearned sweetly and somehow painfully, but they did not speak.
Now Alexander quietly touched her waist. With her elbow she quietly pushed his hand away. He put it back and she pushed it away more gently without taking her eyes off the Neva. The third time she did not push it away.
He took her by the hand–she did not take her hand away. He pressed her hand; her hand returned the pressure. So they stood in silence, but what they felt!
“Nadenka!” he said quietly.
She was silent.
With his heart standing still Alexander bent toward her. She felt his warm breath on her cheek, trembled, turned around–but did not step away in noble indignation, did not cry out–she hadn’t the strength to resist and step away. The enchantment of love forced her reason to silence, and when Alexander’s lips clung to hers, she responded to his kiss, though weakly, hardly perceptibly.
“Not proper!” the strict mamas will say. “Alone in the garden without her mother she kisses a young man!” What’s to be done! It wasn’t proper, but she responded to his kiss.
“Oh, how happy a person can be!” said Alexander to himself and again bent down to her lips and remained thus for several seconds.
She stood pale, motionless; tears glistened on her lashes. She breathed heavily, unevenly.
“Like a dream!” whispered Alexander.
Suddenly Nadenka started; the moment of forgetfulness had passed.
“What has happened? You forget yourself!” she said suddenly and threw herself several paces away from him. “I shall tell Mama!”
Alexander fell from the clouds.
“Nadezhda Alexandrovna! Don’t destroy my bliss with reproach,” he began, “don’t be like…”
She looked at him and suddenly began to laugh loudly, merrily; again she came over to him, again stood at the gate and trustingly leaned her head and hand on his shoulder.
“Do you love me very much?” she asked, wiping away the tear that rolled down her cheek.
Alexander moved his shoulders in an indescribable gesture. “A most stupid expression,” Pyotr Ivanych would have said, appeared on his face, and perhaps this was true, but at the same time how much happiness there was in this stupid expression!
They looked again in silence at the water and the sky and into the distance, as if nothing had happened between them. Only they were afraid to look at each other. Finally they did, smiled and immediately turned away again.
“Can there be sorrow in the world?” asked Nadenka after a silence.
“It’s said there is…” Aduyev answered thoughtfully, “but I don’t believe it…”
“What sorrow can there be?”
“Uncle says poverty. ”
“Poverty! Can the poor possibly not feel what we felt just now? So then they’re not poor.”
“Uncle says they don’t care about that–they need to eat and drink…”
“Pah! Eat! Your uncle doesn’t speak the truth. You can be happy without it too. I had no dinner today, and how happy I am!”
He laughed.
“Yes, at this minute I would give everything to the poor, everything, everything!” Nadenka went on. “Let the poor come. Oh! why can’t I comfort and make them all glad with some joy?”
“Angel! Angel!” solemnly declared Alexander, pressing her hand.
“Ouch, you’re squeezing so hard it hurts!” Nadenka suddenly interrupted, frowning and taking her hand away.
But he seized her hand again and heatedly began to kiss it.
“How I shall say prayers,” she continued, “today, tomorrow, always for this evening! How happy I am! And you?…”
Suddenly she stopped to think; a look of alarm came into her eyes.
“Do you know,” she said, “people say that what happens once can never happen again! Therefore will this moment too never be repeated?”
“Oh, no!” answered Alexander, “that’s not so: It will happen again. There will be better moments; yes, I feel it!…”
She shook her head in doubt. And for him his uncle’s lessons came to mind and he suddenly stopped.
“No,” he said to himself. “No, that can’t be! Uncle has never known such happiness. That’s why he’s so severe and skeptical with people. Poor man! I’m sorry for his cold, callous heart. He hasn’t known the intoxication of love. That explains his jaundiced cynicism about life. God forgive him. If he saw my bliss, he would bless it, not deprecate it with doubt. I’m sorry for him…”
“No, Nadenka, no, we shall be happy!” he continued aloud. “Look around you. Isn’t everything here rejoicing at the sight of our love? Even God blesses it. How merrily we shall go through life, hand in hand! How proud we shall be, great in our mutual love!”
“Oh, stop, stop guessing! ”she interrupted. “Don’t prophesy. I get frightened when you talk like that. Even now I feel sad…”
“What is there to be afraid of? You don’t mean we mustn’t believe in ourselves?”
“We mustn’t, we mustn’t!” she said, shaking her head. He looked at her and stopped to think.
“Why? What, indeed,” he then began, “can destroy this world of our happiness? Who will tell us what to do? We shall be alone always, shall begin to get away from others; what do we need them for, and they us? They won’t remember us, will forget us, and then
even rumors about grief and misfortunes won’t disturb us, just as now here in the garden no sound disturbs this solemn silence…”
“Nadenka! Alexander Fyodorych!” was suddenly heard from the porch, “where are you?”
“Do you hear!” said Nadenka in a prophetic tone. “That’s a sign from fate. This minute will never come again–I feel it…”
She seized his hand, pressed it, looked at him somehow strangely, sadly and suddenly dashed off into a dark path.
He remained alone in thoughts.
“Alexander Fyodorych!” came the cry again from the porch, “the clotted milk has been on the table for a long time.”
He shrugged his shoulders and went inside.
“After a moment of inexpressible bliss suddenly clotted milk!” he said to Nadenka. “Is it always like that in life?”
“If only it’s no worse,” she answered merrily. “And clotted milk is awfully good, especially for someone who had no dinner.”
Happiness lent her animation. Her cheeks were aflame, her eyes burned with an unusual gleam. How busily she played the hostess, how merrily she chatted! There wasn’t the slightest sign of her momentarily passing sorrow; joy absorbed her.
Dawn had already taken over half the sky when Aduyev boarded the boat. In expectation of the promised reward the oarsmen rowed full strength and were about to begin standing up in their places as before, pulling on the oars for all they were worth.
“Go slow!” said Alexander, “one more half-ruble tip!”
They looked at him, then at each other. One scratched his chest, the other his back, and they hardly rippled their oars, hardly touched the water. The boat glided like a swan.
“And Uncle wants to assure me that happiness is an illusion, that one must not believe anything unconditionally, that life is… without conscience! Why did he want to deceive me so cruelly? No, this is life!”
A fresh morning breeze just barely blew from the north. Alexander gave a slight shudder both from the breeze and his recollection, then yawned and wrapping himself in his cloak, plunged into dreams.
V
Aduyev reached the peak of his happiness. He had nothing more to wish for. His work at the office, his journalistic efforts were all cast aside and forgotten. He was passed by for promotion, but he hardly noticed it and only then because his uncle remarked on it. Pyotr Ivanych advised him to quit this silly nonsense, but Alexander shrugged his shoulders at the word “silly nonsense,” smiled regretfully and was silent. Realizing the futility of his admonitions, his uncle also shrugged, smiled regretfully and fell silent; he only said, “As you wish; it’s your business. But see that you don’t ask for any of the contemptible metal.”
“Don’t be afraid, Uncle,” Alexander replied. “It is bad when one doesn’t have much money. I don’t need much, but I have enough.”
“Well, I congratulate you,” Pyotr Ivanych added.
Apparently Alexander was avoiding him. He had lost all faith in his uncle’s sorry predictions and feared his cold view of love in general and his offensive remarks about Alexander’s relationship to Nadenka in particular.
He found it offensive to hear his uncle analyze his love according to general laws, as if it was the same as everyone’s, and thereby simply profane this noble and, in Alexander’s opinion, sacred matter. He kept secret his joys and the whole prospect of rosy bliss, feeling that at the slightest contact with his uncle’s analysis, before he knew it the roses would scatter in ashes or be changed to dirt. At first his uncle avoided him because, look, he thought, the boy will get lazy, run out of cash, come to him for money, or be a weight around his neck.
In Alexander’s walk, look, and whole bearing there was something solemn, mysterious. He conducted himself with others as a rich capitalist on the stock exchange would act with small business men, that is modestly and with dignity, while thinking to himself, “Poor things! Who of you has such a treasure at his disposal as I? Who knows how to feel as I do? Whose powerful soul…” and the like.
He was convinced that he alone in the world loved in this way and was so loved.
Moreover, he not only avoided his uncle, but crowds too, as he called them. He either paid court to his deity or sat at home in his study, drinking in bliss while analyzing it, breaking it down into endlessly small atoms. He called this creating a special world, and sitting in his isolation, he actually did create such a world for himself out of nothing and made himself more at home there, and rarely and unwillingly went to work, calling that a bitter necessity, a necessary evil or dreary prose. In general, he had many variants on this theme. He didn’t go to see the editor and his friends at all.
Chatting with his self was his greatest pleasure. “Alone with only himself,” he wrote in some kind of story, “a man sees himself as in a mirror. Only then does he learn to believe in human greatness and dignity. How beautiful he is in conversation with his spiritual powers! Like a military leader he inspects them strictly, disposes them according to a wisely considered plan, and pushes forward to take charge; and he takes action and shapes things. How pitiful, on the contrary, is the man who is unable to be alone, who flees himself and every-where seeks society, other people’s reasoning and inspiration…” You might imagine a thinker like this is discovering new laws about the world’s structure or human existence, but here he’s simply a man in love!
He is sitting in a winged armchair now. Before him lies a sheet of paper on which a few verses are jotted down. He bends over the sheet and makes some correction or adds two or three verses, then throws himself against the back of the chair and thinks. A smile moves on his lips; it is obvious that he has only just removed them from the brimming goblet of happiness. His eyes close languorously like a dozing cat, or flash suddenly with the fire of an inner excitement.
All around is quiet. Only the roll of carriages is heard from afar on the big street, and at times Evsei, tired of polishing boots, will say aloud: “I must remember: just now at the shop I bought a penny’s worth of vinegar and ten pennies’ worth of cabbage; I must pay tomorrow, or the storekeeper likely won’t give me credit again–the dog! He weighs bread in pounds as if in a famine year–a disgrace! At Grachi they’ll have long been asleep–it’s not like here. Sometime the good Lord will bring me to see it again…”
Here he sighed loudly, blew on the boot and began once more to run the brush back and forth. He considered this task his chief and almost his only duty, and generally he measured the worth of a servant, and even of a man, by his ability to polish boots; he himself polished with a kind of passion.
“Stop it, Evsei! You keep me from doing my business with your silly nonsense!” cried Aduyev.
“Silly nonsense,” muttered Evsei to himself. “Not at all nonsense! You may think this is nonsense, but I’m doing my business. Just look how you dirtied your boots; it’s hard to get them clean.” He put the boot on the table and gazed with love at the mirror-like shine of the leather.
“Let somebody else get a polish like that!” he said. “Nonsense, indeed!”
Alexander sank ever deeper in his dreams of Nadenka, then in his creative dreams.
The top of desk was empty. Everything that reminded him of his former business, his job, his journalistic work, lay under the desk, or in the closet or under the bed. “Just the sight of that dirt,” he said, “frightens away creative thought, and it takes flight like a nightingale that flies from the orchard at the sudden creak of ungreased wheels on the road.”
Often dawn found him still at some elegy. All the hours he didn’t spend at the Lyubetskys were dedicated to his creative work. He would write a poem and read it to Nadenka. She would copy it on good paper and learn it by heart, and he would know the highest bliss of the poet –to hear his work from beloved lips.
“You are my Muse,” he told her. “Be the Bearer of that holy flame that burns in my breast; if you abandon it, it will go out forever.” Then he sent his verses under a pseudonym to a magazine. They published them because they w
eren’t bad, some passages had energy and they all were replete with ardor and fluently written.
Nadenka was proud of his love and called him “my poet.”
“Yes, yours, eternally yours,” he added. In his future fame smiled on him, and Nadenka, he thought, would weave the wreath of myrtle and bind it on his brow, and then… “Life, oh life, how beautiful you are!” he exclaimed. “But, Uncle? Why has he disturbed my peace of soul? Is he a demon sent me by fate? Why does he poison all my well-being with bile? Isn’t it from envy because his heart does not know these pure joys, or perhaps it’s a dark urge to do harm… Oh, stay away, away from him!… He’ll crush my loving soul, infect it with his hatred, pervert it…”
And he fled his uncle, did not see him for whole weeks, months. But if the conversation turned to feeling when they met, he remained silent with a sneer or listened like a man whose convictions cannot be shaken by any proofs. He considered his own judgments unerring, his opinions and feelings unalterable and decided in future to be guided only by them, saying that he was not a boy any more and that there was no reason to hold only other people’s opinions sacred,and the like.
An Ordinary Story Page 13
