Part 61

“Have you any children?” Mariana asked to change the subject.

“Yes, I have a boy. He goes to school now. I had a girl too, but she’s gone, the little bird! An accident happened to her. She fell under a wheel. If only it had killed her at once! But no, she suffered a long while. Since then I’ve become more tender-hearted. Before I was as wild and hard as a tree!”

“Why, did you not love your Pavel?”

“But that’s not the same. Only a girl’s feelings. And you—do you love him?”

“Of course I do.”

“Very much?”

“Ever so much.”

“Really?...” Tatiana looked from one to the other, but said nothing more.

“I’ll tell you what I would like. Could you get me some coarse, strong wool? I want to knit some stockings...plain ones.”

Tatiana promised to have everything done, and clearing the table, went out of the room with her firm, quiet step.

“Well, what shall we do now?” Mariana asked, turning to Nejdanov, and without, waiting for a reply, continued, “Since our real work does not begin until tomorrow, let us devote this evening to literature. Would you like to? We can read your poems. I will be a severe critic, I promise you.”

It took Nejdanov a long time before he consented, but he gave in at last and began reading aloud out of his copybook. Mariana sat close to him and gazed into his face as he read. She had been right; she turned out to be a very severe critic. Very few of the verses pleased her. She preferred the purely lyrical, short ones, to the didactic, as she expressed it. Nejdanov did not read well. He had not the courage to attempt any style, and at the same time wanted to avoid a dry tone. It turned out neither the one thing nor the other. Mariana interrupted him suddenly by asking if he knew Dobrolubov’s beautiful poem, which begins, “To die for me no terror holds.” She read it to him—also not very well—in a somewhat childish manner.

For much I fear that o’er my corse The scalding tears of friends shall flow, And that, too late, they should with zeal Fresh flowers upon my body throw.

That fate sardonic should recall The ones I loved to my cold side, And make me lying in the ground, The object of love once denied.

That all my aching heart’s desires, So vainly sought for from my birth, Should crowd unbidden, smiling kind Above my body’s mound of earth.]

Nejdanov thought that it was too sad and too bitter. He could not have written a poem like that, he added, as he had no fears of any one weeping over his grave... there would be no tears.

“There will be if I outlive you,” Mariana observed slowly, and lifting her eyes to the ceiling she asked, in a whisper, as if speaking to herself:

“How did he do the portrait of me? From memory?”

Nejdanov turned to her quickly.

“Yes, from memory.”

Mariana was surprised at his reply. It seemed to her that she merely thought the question. “It is really wonderful...” she continued in the same tone of voice. “Why, he can’t draw at all. What was I talking about?” she added aloud. “Oh yes, it was about Dobrolubov’s poems. One ought to write poems like Pushkin’s, or even like Dobrolubov’s. It is not poetry exactly, but something nearly as good.”

“And poems like mine one should not write at all. Isn’t that so?” Nejdanov asked.

“Poems like yours please your friends, not because they are good, but because you are a good man and they are like you.”

Nejdanov smiled.

“You have completely buried them and me with them!” Mariana slapped his hand and called him naughty. Soon after she announced that she was tired and wanted to go to bed.

“By the way,” she added, shaking back her short thick curls, “do you know that I have a hundred and thirty roubles? And how much have you?”

“Ninety-eight.”

“Oh, then we are rich... for simplified folk. Well, good night, until tomorrow.”