II
A few minutes later Nadezhda Alexevna got into a tramcar and began her twenty minutes’ journey. She felt depressed and uncertain. Spasms of keen pity for her sister and regret for the dead boy caught at her heart.
It was terrible to think that this fifteen-year-old child, but lately a lighthearted schoolboy, should have suddenly shot himself—painful to imagine the mother’s grief. How she would weep—her life seemed always to have been unhappy and unsuccessful.
Yet Nadezhda Alexevna could not give herself up entirely to such thoughts. Her mind was dwelling on something else. It was always so with her when she came to one of those times common enough in this life of unexpected happenings—the interruption of the ordinary daily routine by some unpleasant occurrence. There was an event in the background of her own life which weighed her down with a continuous and gnawing sorrow. For her there could be no relief in tears, they seemed to have been stopped at their source; rare indeed was it for a few miserable drops to force themselves to her eyes. She generally looked out upon the world with an expression of dull indifference.
So now, once again, memory revolved before her that passionate flaming circle of her past life. She recalled once more that short time of love and self-forgetfulness, of passion and of self-abandonment.
Those bright summer days had been a festival. The blue heaven had outspread itself joyously for her delight, the summer rain had pattered down for her amusement. For her the pine odours had been more intoxicatingly sweet than roses. Roses would not grow in such a climate. Yet it was a place that the heart loved. The greeny-grey moss in the dark forest was a soft and tender couch; the forest rivulets flowing over the tumbled boulders lisped clear and sweet as streams of Arcady; their coolness gladdened and refreshed.
How quickly had the days passed in the glad rapture of love! The last day dawned, which she knew not then to be the last. The sky was cloudless, the heavens clear. Simple happiness was all around. The broad shadowy glades of the scented pine-forest were cool and dreamy, the tender moss underfoot was soft and warm. All was as it had been on other days. Only the birds had ceased to sing—they had nested and flown away with their little ones.
But there had been a shadow on the countenance of her beloved—he had received an unpleasant letter that morning.
As he himself said:
“A dreadfully unpleasant letter. I am desperate. So many days before I see you again!”
“How is that?” she had said. Sadness had not yet touched her.
“My father writes to say that my mother is ill and that I ought to go home.”
His father had written something quite different—but Nadezhda Alexevna did not know that. She had not yet learnt that it is possible to be deceived in love, that the lips that kiss may speak lies instead of truth.
With his arms around her and his lips kissing hers he had said:
“I must go, there’s nothing else to do. How lonely I shall be! I can’t think anything serious is the matter, but I shall be obliged to go.”
“Why, of course,” said she. “If your mother is ill, how could you stay! Write to me every day; it will be so dull when you are gone.”
She went with him as usual as far as the high road, and then home again along the forest path, sad at his departure, yet certain of his return. And he had never come back.
She had received two or three letters from him, strange letters, confused, full of half-expressed feelings, hints of something she could not understand. Then no more. Nadezhda Alexevna began to realise that he had ceased to love her. And when the summer had come to an end she heard a chance conversation which told her of his marriage.
“Why, haven’t you heard? Last week. They went off to Nice for the honeymoon.”
“Yes, he’s fortunate. He’s married a rich and beautiful girl.”
“She has a large dowry, I suppose.”
“Yes, indeed. Her father …”
Nadezhda Alexevna did not stay to hear about the father. She moved away.
She often remembered all that had happened afterwards. Not that she wished to remember—she had striven to stifle recollection and to forget the past. It had all been so grievous and humiliating, and there had seemed no way of escape. It was then, in those first dreadful days after she knew he was married to another, in those sweet places made dear to her by the memory of his kisses, that she had first felt the movements of her child—and linked with the first thoughts of a new life had come the forebodings of death. No child must ever be born to her!
No one at home had ever known—she had thought out some pretext for getting away. Somehow or other, with great difficulty, she had got enough money together and had managed everything—she never wished to remember how—and had returned to her home, weak and ill, with pallid face and tired body, yet with heroic strength of spirit to conceal her pain and terror.
Memory often tried to remind her of all that had taken place, but Nadezhda Alexevna refused to acknowledge its power. When sometimes in a flash she recalled everything, she would shudder with horror and repulsion and resolutely turn her mind away at once from the picture.
But in her heart there was one memory which she treasured; she had a child, though it had never come to birth, and she often saw before her a sweet yet terrible image of the little one.
Whenever she was alone and sitting quietly by herself, if she closed her eyes, the child came to her. She felt that she watched him grow. So vividly did she see him that at times it seemed to her that day after day and year after year she had lived with him as an actual mother with her living child. Her breasts were full of milk for him. At a sudden noise she trembled—perhaps the child had fallen and would be hurt.
Sometimes she put out her hand to stroke his soft, bright, golden curls, to touch his hand, to draw him nearer. But he always escaped her touch, her hand met empty air, and yet she heard his little laughing voice as if he were still near and hiding just behind her chair.
She knew his face—the face of her child who had never been born. It was quite clear to her—that dear yet terrible blending of the features of him who had taken her love and discarded it, who had taken her soul and drained it and forgotten, the blending of the features of him who, in spite of all, was still so dear with her own features.
His grey eyes and wavy golden hair and the soft outline of his lips and chin were all his father’s. The little pinky shell-like ears, the rounded limbs, the rosy dimpled cheeks were her own.
She knew all his little body—all. And his little baby ways—how he would hold his tiny hands, how he would cross one foot over the other—learning from the father he had never seen. His smile was like her own—he had just that same trick of dropping his head on one side in blushing confusion.
Painfully sweet memories. The tender, rosy fingers of her child touched her deep wounds, and were cruel though dear. So painful! But she never wished to drive him away.
“I cannot, cannot do without thee, dear little unborn son of mine. If only thou wert really living! If only I could give thee life!”
For it was only a dream-life! It was for her alone. The unborn can never rejoice or weep for himself. He lives, but not for himself. In the world of the living, in the midst of people and earthly things, he doesn’t exist at all. So full of life, so dear, so bright, and yet he is not.
Nadezhda Alexevna used to say to herself, “And this is my doing. Now he is small and he doesn’t understand. But when he grows up he will know—he will compare himself with living children, he will want to live a real life, and then he will reproach me and I shall want to die.”
She never thought how foolish were such thoughts in the light of reality. She could not imagine that the unborn child renounced by her had never been the habitation of a human soul. No—for Nadezhda Alexevna her unborn child lived, and tortured her heart with an endless grief.
To her he was as a shining one, clad in bright garments, with little white hands and feet, clear innocent eyes and pure smile. When he laughed his laugh was happy and musical. True, when she wanted to caress him he evaded her, but he never went far away, he was always hiding somewhere near. He ran away from her embraces, but all the same he often seemed to put his soft, warm little arms about her neck and press his tender lips to her cheek—at those times when she sat quietly alone and closed her eyes. But never once had he kissed her on the lips.
“When he grows up he will understand,” she thought. “He will be sorry, and he will go away and never come back any more. And then I shall die.”
And now as she sat in the noisy, crowded tramcar, in the company of strangers, pushing and jostling one another, Nadezhda Alexevna closed her eyes and remembered her own little child. Once more she looked into his clear eyes, once more she heard the tender lispings of his unuttered words … all the way to the end of her journey, when the time came for her to get out of the car.