“Let’s go,” Olya agreed.
She crossed herself three times and walked to the door together with Sofya Lvovna.
“So you say you’re happy, Sonechka?” she asked when they were outside the gate.
“Very.”
“Well, thank God.”
Big Volodya and little Volodya, seeing the nun, got out of the sledge and greeted her respectfully. They were both visibly moved by her pale face and black monastic habit, and they were both pleased that she remembered them and came to greet them. To keep her warm, Sofya Lvovna wrapped her in a plaid and put the skirt of her fur coat around her. Her recent tears had eased and brightened her heart, and she was glad that this noisy, restless, and essentially impure night had unexpectedly ended so purely and meekly. In order to keep Olya beside her for longer, she suggested:
“Let’s take her for a ride! Get in, Olya, just for a little.”
The men expected that she would refuse—nuns don’t ride in troikas—but to their surprise she accepted and got into the sledge. And as the troika raced to the gate, they were all silent and only tried to make sure she was comfortable and warm, and each of them thought of how she had been before and how she was now. Her face now was impassive, expressionless, cold and pale, transparent, as if water flowed in her veins instead of blood. Yet two or three years ago she had been plump, red-cheeked, talked about suitors, laughed at the merest trifle…
By the gate the troika turned back; ten minutes later, when it stopped at the convent, Olya got out of the sledge. The bells were already chiming.
“God save you,” said Olya, and she bowed low, in monastic fashion.
“So come to see us, Olya.”
“I will, I will.”
She quickly walked away and soon disappeared through the dark gateway. And after that, for some reason, when the troika drove on, everything became very sad. They were all silent. Sofya Lvovna felt weak all over and lost heart; that she had made the nun get into the sledge and go for a ride, in tipsy company, now seemed stupid to her, tactless, and all but blasphemous; along with intoxication, the wish to deceive herself also went away, and it was clear to her that she did not and could not love her husband, that it was all nonsense and stupidity. She had married out of convenience, because he, as her boarding-school friends put it, was insanely rich, and because she was afraid to be left an old maid, like Rita, and because she was sick of her doctor father and wanted to annoy little Volodya. If she could have foreseen, when she married, that it would be so oppressive, scary, and ugly, she would not have agreed to the marriage for anything in the world. But now the harm could not be set right. She had to reconcile to it.
They came home. Getting into her warm, soft bed and covering herself with a blanket, Sofya Lvovna remembered the dark side chapel, the smell of incense, and the figures by the columns, and it was scary for her to think that those figures would stand motionless all the while she slept. There would be the long, long matins, then the hours, then the liturgy, the prayer service…
“But there is God, surely there is, and I will certainly die, which means that sooner or later I must think about my soul, about eternal life, like Olya. Olya is saved now, she has resolved all the questions for herself…But what if there is no God? Then her life is lost. But how is it lost? Why lost?”
After a moment a thought again came to her head:
“There is God, death will certainly come, one must think of one’s soul. If Olya sees her death now, she won’t be frightened. She’s ready. And above all, she has already resolved the question of life for herself. There is God…yes…But can it be that there’s no other solution than going into a convent? Going into a convent means renouncing life, ruining it…”
Sofya Lvovna felt a little frightened; she hid her head under the pillow.
“I mustn’t think about it,” she whispered. “I mustn’t…”
Yagich was walking on the carpet in the next room, softly jingling his spurs, and thinking about something. It occurred to Sofya Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only for one thing: he was also named Vladimir. She sat up in bed and called out tenderly:
“Volodya!”
“What is it?” her husband replied.
“Nothing.”
She lay down again. She heard ringing, maybe from the same convent, she again recalled the side chapel and the dark figures, in her head wandered thoughts about God and inevitable death, and she covered her head with the blanket so as not to hear the bells. She reflected that, before the arrival of old age and death, there would drag out a long, long life, and day after day she would have to reckon with the intimacy of an unloved man, who had already come into the bedroom and was getting into bed, and to stifle in herself a hopeless love for another—young, charming, and, as it seemed to her, extraordinary. She glanced at her husband and was about to wish him good night, but instead she suddenly began to cry. She was vexed with herself.
“Well, here comes the music!” said Yagich, stressing the mu.
She calmed down, but late, only by ten o’clock in the morning; she stopped crying and trembling all over, but instead she was beginning to have a bad headache. Yagich was hurrying to the late liturgy and grumbled at his orderly, who was helping him to dress in the next room. He came into the bedroom once, softly jingling his spurs, and took something, then once more, already in his epaulettes and medals, limping slightly from rheumatism, and for some reason it seemed to Sofya Ivanovna that he walked and looked like a predator.
She heard Yagich make a telephone call.
“Please connect me with the Vassilyevsky Barracks!” he said, and a minute later: “Vassilyevsky Barracks? Please call Doctor Salimovich to the phone…” And after another minute: “Who is that on the phone? You, Volodya? Very glad. My dear boy, ask your father to come to the phone now. My spouse has gone quite to pieces after last evening. Not home, you say? Hm…Thank you. Excellent…much obliged…Merci.”
Yagich came into the bedroom for a third time, bent down to his wife, made a cross over her, let her kiss his hand (women who loved him kissed his hand, and he was used to it), and said he would be back for dinner. And he left.
Sometime after eleven o’clock the maid announced that Vladimir Mikhailych had come. Sofya Lvovna, reeling from fatigue and the headache, quickly put on her astonishing new mauve housecoat trimmed with fur and hurriedly did up her hair somehow. She felt an inexpressible tenderness in her soul, and trembled from joy and the fear that he might leave. She wanted at least to have a look at him.
Little Volodya had come to visit, properly dressed in a tailcoat and white tie. When Sofya Lvovna came in, he kissed her hand and said he sincerely regretted that she was not well. Then, when they sat down, he praised her housecoat.
“Yesterday’s meeting with Olya upset me,” she said. “At first I was terrified, but now I envy her. She’s an indestructible rock, she can’t be moved from her place; but can it be, Volodya, that she had no other way out? Can it be that to bury yourself alive is to resolve the question of life? It’s death, not life.”
At the mention of Olya, tenderness appeared on little Volodya’s face.
“Look, Volodya, you’re an intelligent person,” said Sofya Lvovna. “Teach me to act just as she has. Of course, I’m an unbeliever, and I wouldn’t go into a convent, but I could do something tantamount. My life isn’t easy,” she went on after a brief pause. “Do teach me…Say something persuasive to me. Say at least one word.”
“One word? All right: tararaboomdeay.”
“Why do you despise me, Volodya?” she asked quickly. “You speak to me in some sort of peculiar—forgive me—foppish language, such as one doesn’t use with friends and respectable women. You’re a success as a scholar, you’re fond of learning, why don’t you ever talk to me about your learning? Why? Am I not worthy?”