Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  She guessed at once that he had been doing wrong, but showed no sign of it, was never the first to begin on the subject, on the contrary, always redoubled her caresses and became tenderer and more lively — and this was not acting or premeditated strategy on her part. No; for her fine nature there was a sort of infinite bliss in forgiving and being merciful; as though in the very process of forgiving Alyosha she found a peculiar, subtle charm. It is true that so far it was only the question of Josephines. Seeing her kind and forgiving, Alyosha could not restrain himself and at once confessed the whole story without being asked any questions — to relieve his heart and “to be the same as before,” as she said.

  When he had received her forgiveness he grew ecstatic at once, sometimes even cried with joy and emotion kissed and embraced her. Then at once his spirits rose, and he would begin with childlike openness giving her a full account of his adventures with Josephine; he smiled and laughed, blessed Natasha, and praised her to the skies, and the evening ended happily and merrily. When all his money was spent he began selling things.

  As Natasha insisted upon it, a cheap little flat in Fontanka was found for her. Their things went on being sold; Natasha now even sold her clothes and began looking for work. When Alyosha heard of it his despair knew no bounds, he cursed himself, cried out that he despised himself, but meantime did nothing to improve the position. By now this last resource was exhausted; nothing was left for Natasha but work, and that was very poorly paid!

  At first when they lived together, there had been a violent quarrel between Alyosha and his father. Prince Valkovsky’s designs at the time to marry his son to Katerina Fyodorovna Filimonov, the countess’s stepdaughter, were so far only a project. But the project was a cherished one. He took Alyosha to see the young lady, coaxed him to try and please her, and attempted to persuade him by arguments and severity. But the plan fell through owing to the countess. Then Alyosha’s father began to shut his eyes to his son’s affair with Natasha, leaving it to time.

  Knowing Alyosha’s fickleness and frivolity he hoped that the love affair would soon be over. As for the possibility of his marrying Natasha, the prince had till lately ceased to trouble his mind about it. As for the lovers they put off the question till a formal reconciliation with his father was possible, or vaguely till some change of circumstances. And Natasha was evidently unwilling to discuss the subject. Alyosha told me in secret that his father was in a way rather pleased at the whole business. He was pleased at the humiliation of Ichmenyev. For form’s sake, he kept up a show of displeasure with his son, decreased his by no means liberal allowance (he was exceedingly stingy with him), and threatened to stop even that. But he soon went away to Poland in pursuit of the countess, who had business there. He was still as actively set on his project of the match. For though Alyosha was, it is true, rather young to be married, the girl was very wealthy, and it was too good a chance to let slip. The prince at last attained his object. The rumour reached us that the match was at last agreed upon. At the time I am describing, the prince had only just returned to Petersburg. He met his son affectionately, but the persistence of Alyosha’s connexion with Natasha was an unpleasant surprise to him. He began to have doubts, to feel nervous. He sternly and emphatically insisted on his son’s breaking it off, but soon hit upon a much more effectual mode of attack, and carried off Alyosha to the countess. Her step-daughter, though she was scarcely more than a child, was almost a beauty, gay, clever, and sweet, with a heart of rare goodness and a candid, uncorrupted soul. The prince calculated that the lapse of six months must have had some effect, that Natasha could no longer have the charm of novelty, and that his son would not now look at his proposed fiancee with the same eyes as he had six months before. He was only partly right in his reckoning … Alyosha certainly was attracted. I must add that the father became all at once extraordinarily affectionate to him (though he still refused to give him money). Alyosha felt that his father’s greater warmth covered an unchanged, inflexible determination, and he was unhappy — but not so unhappy as he would have been if he had not seen Katerina Fyodorovna every day. I knew that he had not shown himself to Natasha for five days. On my way to her from the Ichmenyevs I guessed uneasily what she wanted to discuss with me. I could see a light in her window a long way off. It had long been arranged between us that she should put a candle in the window if she were in great and urgent need of me, so that if I happened to pass by (and this did happen nearly every evening) I might guess from the light in the window that I was expected and she needed me. Of late she had often put the candle in the window…

  CHAPTER XV

  I FOUND NATASHA ALONE. She was slowly walking up and down the room, with her hands clasped on her bosom, lost in thought. A samovar stood on the table almost burnt out. It had been got ready for me long before. With a smile she held out her hand to me without speaking. Her face was pale and had an expression of suffering. There was a look of martyrdom, tenderness, patience, in her smile. Her clear blue eyes seemed to have grown bigger, her hair looked thicker from the wanness and thinness of her face.

  “I began to think you weren’t coming,” she said, giving me her hand. “I was meaning to send Mavra to inquire; I was afraid you might be ill again.”

  “No, I’m not ill. I was detained. I’ll tell you directly. But what’s the matter, Natasha, what’s happened?”

  “Nothing’s happened,” she answered, surprised. “Why?”

  “Why, you wrote … you wrote yesterday for me to come, and fixed the hour that I might not come before or after; and that’s not what you usually do.”

  “Oh, yes! I was expecting him yesterday.”

  “Why, hasn’t be been here yet?”

  “No. I thought if he didn’t come I must talk things over with you,” she added, after a pause

  “And this evening, did you expect him?”

  “No, this evening he’s there.”

  “What do you think, Natasha, won’t he come back at all?”

  “Of course he’ll come,” she answered, looking at me with peculiar earnestness. She did not like the abruptness of my question. We lapsed into silence, walking up and down the room.

  “I’ve been expecting you all this time, Vanya”, she began again with a smile. “And do you know what I was doing? I’ve been walking up and down, reciting poetry. Do you remember the bells, the

  winter road, ‘My samovar boils on the table of oak’…? We read it together: “The snowstorm is spent; there’s a glimmer of light From the millions of dim watching eyes of the night. “And then:

  “There’s the ring of a passionate voice in my ears

  In the song of the bell taking part;

  Oh, when will my loved one return from afar

  To rest on my suppliant heart?

  My life is no life! Rosy beams of the dawn

  Are at play on the pane’s icy screen;

  My samovar boils on my table of oak,

  With the bright crackling fire the dark corner awoke,

  And my bed with chintz curtains is seen.

  “How fine that is. How tormenting those verses are, Vanya. And what a vivid, fantastic picture! It’s just a canvas with a mere pattern chalked on it. You can embroider what you like! Two sensations: the earliest, and the latest. That samovar, that chintz curtain — how homelike it all is. It’s like some little cottage in our little town at home; I feel as though I could see that cottage: a new one made of logs not yet weather-boarded …

  And then another picture:

  “Of a sudden I hear the same voice ringing out

  With the bell; its sad accents I trace;

  Oh, where’s my old friend? And I fear he’ll come in

  With eager caress and embrace.

  What a life, I endure! But my tears are in vain.

  Oh, how dreary my room! Through the chinks the wind

  blows

  And outside the house but one cherry-tree grows,

  Perhaps that has perished by now though — who kno
ws?

  It’s hid by the frost on the pane.

  The flowers on the curtain have lost their gay tone,

  And I wander sick; all my kinsfolk I shun, There’s no one to scold me or love me, not one,

  The old woman grumbles alone….

  ‘I wander sick.’ That sick is so well put in. ‘There’s no one to scold me.’ That tenderness, what softness in that line; and what agonies of memory, agonies one has caused oneself, and one broods over them. Heavens, how fine it is! How true it is! …”

  She ceased speaking, as though struggling with a rising spasm in her throat.

  “Dear Vanya!” she said a minute later, and she paused again, as though she had forgotten what she meant to say, or had spoken without thinking, from a sudden feeling.

  Meanwhile we still walked up and down the room. A lamp burned before the ikon. Of late Natasha had become more and more devout, and did not like one to speak of it to her.

  “Is to-morrow a holiday?” I asked. “Your lamp is lighted.”

  “No, it’s not a holiday … but, Vanya, sit down. You must be tired. Will you have tea? I suppose you’ve not had it yet?”

  “Let’s sit down, Natasha. I’ve had tea already.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “From them.”

  That’s how we always referred to her old home.

  “From them? How did you get time? Did you go of your own accord? Or did they ask you?”

  She besieged me with questions. Her face grew still paler with emotion. I told her in detail of my meeting with her father, my conversation with her mother, and the scene with the locket.

  I told her in detail, describing every shade of feeling. I never concealed anything from her, She listened eagerly, catching every word I uttered, the tears glittered in her eyes. The scene with the locket affected her deeply.

  “Stay, stay, Vanya,” she said, often interrupting my story. “Tell me more exactly everything, everything as exactly as possible; you don’t tell me exactly enough …”

  I repeated it again and again, replying every moment to her continual questions about the details.

  “And you really think he was coming to see me?”

  “I don’t know, Natasha, and in fact I can’t make up my mind; that he grieves for you and loves you is clear; but that he was coming to you is … is …”

  “And he kissed the locket?” she interrupted. “What did he say when he kissed it?”

  “It was incoherent. Nothing but exclamations; he called you by the tenderest names; he called for you.”

  “Called for me?”

  “Yes.”

  She wept quietly.

  “Poor things!” she said. “And if he knows everything,” she added after a brief silence, “it’s no wonder…. He hears a great deal about Alyosha’s father, too.”

  “Natasha,” I said timidly, “let us go to them.”

  “When?” she asked, turning pale and almost getting up from her chair.

  She thought I was urging her to go at once.

  “No, Vanya,” she added, putting her two hands on my shoulders, and smiling sadly; “no, dear, that’s what you’re always saying, but…we’d better not talk about it.”

  “Will this horrible estrangement never be ended?” I cried mournfully. “Can you be so proud that you won’t take the first step? It’s for you to do it; you must make the first advance.

  Perhaps your father’s only waiting for that to forgive you…. He’s your father; he has been injured by you! Respect his pride — it’s justifiable, it’s natural! You ought to do it. Only try, and he will forgive you unconditionally.”

  “Unconditionally! That’s impossible. And don’t reproach me, Vanya, for nothing. I’m thinking of it day and night, and I think of it now. There’s not been a day perhaps since I left them that I haven’t thought of it. And how often we have talked about it! You know yourself it’s impossible.”

  “Try!”

  “No, my dear, it’s impossible. If I were to try I should only make him more bitter against me. There’s no bringing back what’s beyond recall. And you know what it is one can never bring back? One can never bring back those happy, childish days I spent with them. If my father forgave me he would hardly know me now. He loved me as a little girl; a grown-up child. He admired my childish simplicity. He used to pat me on the head just as when I was a child of seven and used to sit upon his knee and sing him my little childish songs. From my earliest childhood up to the last day he used to come to my bed and bless me for the night. A month before our troubles he bought me some ear-rings as a secret (but I knew all about it), and was as pleased as a child, imagining how delighted I should be with the present, and was awfully angry with everyone, and with me especially, when he found out that I had known all about him buying the ear-rings for a long time. Three days before I went away he noticed that I was depressed, and he became so depressed himself that it made him ill, and — would you believe it — to divert my mind he proposed taking tickets for the theatre! … Yes, indeed, he thought that would set me right. I tell you he knew and loved me as a little girl, and refused even to think that I should one day be a woman… It’s never entered his head. If I were to go home now he would not know me. Even if he did forgive me he’d meet quite a different person now. I’m not the same; I’m not a child now. I have gone through a great deal. Even if he were satisfied with me he still would sigh for his past happiness, and grieve that I am not the same as I used to be when he loved me as a child. The past always seems best! It’s remembered with anguish! Oh, how good the past was, Vanya!” she cried, carried away by her own words, and interrupting herself with this exclamation which broke painfully from her heart.

  “That’s all true that you say, Natasha,” I said. “So he will have to learn to know and love you afresh. To know you especially. He will love you, of course. Surely you can’t think that he’s incapable of knowing and understanding you, he, with his heart?”

  “Oh, Vanya, don’t be unfair! What is there to understand in me? I didn’t mean that. You see, there’s something else: father’s love is jealous, too; he’s hurt that all began and was settled with Alyosha without his knowledge, that he didn’t know it and failed to see it. He knows that he did not foresee it, and he puts down the unhappy consequences of our love and my flight to my ‘ungrateful’ secretiveness. I did not come to him at the beginning. I did not afterwards confess every impulse of my heart to him; on the contrary I hid it in myself. I concealed it from him and I assure you, Vanya, this is secretly a worse injury, a worse insult to him than the facts themselves — that I left them and have abandoned myself to my lover. Supposing he did meet me now like a father, warmly and affectionately, yet the seed of discord would remain. The next day, or the day after, there would be disappointments, misunderstandings, reproaches.

  What’s more, he won’t forgive without conditions, even if I say — and say it truly from the bottom of my heart — that I understand how I have wounded him and how badly I’ve behaved to him. And though it will hurt me if he won’t understand how much all this happiness with Alyosha has cost me myself, what miseries I have been through, I will stifle my feelings, I will put up with anything — but that won’t be enough for him. He will insist on an impossible atonement; he will insist on my cursing my past, cursing Alyosha and repenting of my love for him. He wants what’s impossible, to bring back the past and to erase the last six months from our life. But I won’t curse anyone, and I can’t repent. It’s no one’s doing; it just happened so…. No, Vanya, it can’t be now. The time has not come.”

  “When will the time come?”

  “I don’t know… . We shall have to work out our future happiness by suffering; pay for it somehow by fresh miseries. Everything is purified by suffering … Oh, Vanya, how much pain there is in the world!”

  I was silent and looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Why do you look at me like that, Alyosha — I mean Vanya!” she said, smiling at her own mi
stake.

  “I am looking at your smile, Natasha. Where did you get it? You used not to smile like that.”

  “Why, what is there in my smile?

  “The old childish simplicity is still there, it’s true…. But when you smile it seems as though your heart were aching dreadfully. You’ve grown thinner, Natasha, and your hair seems thicker…. What dress have you got on? You used to wear that at home, didn’t you?”

  “How you love me, Vanya,” she said, looking at me affectionately. “And what about you? What are you doing? How are things going with you?”

  “Just the same, I’m still writing my novel. But it’s difficult, I can’t get on. The inspiration’s dried up. I dare say I could knock it off somehow, and it might turn out interesting. But it’s a pity to spoil a good idea. It’s a favourite idea of mine. But it must be ready in time for the magazine. I’ve even thought of throwing up the novel, and knocking off a short story, something light and graceful, and without a trace of pessimism. Quite without a trace…. Everyone ought to be cheerful and happy.”

  “You’re such a hard worker, you poor boy! And how about Smith?”

  “But Smith’s dead.”

  “And he hasn’t haunted you? I tell you seriously, Vanya, you’re ill and your nerves are out of order; you’re always lost in such dreams. When you told me about taking that room I noticed it in you. So the room’s damp, not nice?”

  “Yes, I had an adventure there this evening…. But I’ll tell you about it afterwards.”

  She had left off listening and was sitting plunged in deep thought.

  “I don’t know how I could have left them then. I was in a fever,” she added at last, looking at me with an expression that did not seem to expect an answer.

  If I had spoken to her at that moment she would not have heard me.