Family Happiness by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (ereader with android txt) 📕

We were in mourning for my mother, who had died in the autumn, and I spent

all that winter alone in the country with Katya and Sonya.

Katya was an old friend of the family, our governess who had brought us all

up, and I had known and loved her since my earliest recollections. Sonya was

my younger sister. It was a dark and sad winter which we spent in our old

house of Pokrovskoye. The weather was cold and so windy that the snowdrifts

came higher than the windows; the panes were almost always dimmed by frost,

and we seldom walked or drove anywhere throughout the winter. Our visitors

were few, and those who came brought no addition of cheerfulness or

happiness to the household. They all wore sad faces and spoke low, as if

they were afraid of waking someone; they never laughed, but sighed and often

shed tears as they looked at me and especially at little Sonya in her black

frock. The feeling of death clung to the house; the air was still filled

with the grief and horror of death. My mother’s room was kept locked; and

whenever I passed it on my way to bed, I felt a strange uncomfortable

impulse to look into that cold empty room.

I was then seventeen; and in the very year of her death my mother was

intending to move to Petersburg, in order to take me into society. The loss

of my mother was a great grief to me; but I must confess to another feeling

behind that grief — a feeling that though I was young and pretty (so

everybody told me), I was wasting a second winter in the solitude of the

country. Before the winter ended, this sense of dejection, solitude, and

simple boredom increased to such an extent that I refused to leave my room

or open the piano or take up a book. When Katya urged me to find some

occupation, I said that I did not feel able for it; but in my heart I said,

“What is the good of it? What is the good of doing anything, when the best

part of my life is being wasted like this?” and to this question, tears were

my only answer.

I was told that I was growing thin and losing my looks; but even this failed

to interest me. What did it matter? For whom? I felt that my whole life was

bound to go on in the same solitude and helpless dreariness, from which I

had myself no strength and even no wish to escape. Towards the end of winter

Katya became anxious about me and determined to make an effort to take me

abroad. But money was needed for this, and we hardly knew how our affairs

stood after my mother’s death. Our guardian, who was to come and clear up

our position, was expected every day.

In March he arrived.

“Well, thank God!” Katya said to me one day, when I was walking up and down

the room like a shadow, without occupation, without a thought, and without a

wish. “Sergey Mikhaylych has arrived; he has sent to inquire about us and

means to come here for dinner. You must rouse yourself, dear Mashechka,” she

added, “or what will he think of you? He was so fond of you all.”

Sergey Mikhaylych was our near neighbor, and, though a much younger man, had

been a friend of my father’s. His coming was likely to change our plans and

to make it possible to leave the country; and also I had grown up in the

habit of love and regard for him; and when Katya begged me to rouse myself,

she guessed rightly that it would give me especial pain to show to

disadvantage before him, more than before any other of our friends. Like

everyone in the house, from Katya and his god-daughter Sonya down to the

helper in the stables, I loved him from old habit; and also he had a special

significance for me, owing to a remark which my mother had once made in my

presence. “I should like you to marry a man like him,” she said. At the time

this seemed to me strange and even unpleasant. My ideal husband was quite

different: he was to be thin, pale, and sad; and Sergey Mikhaylych was

middle-aged, tall, robust, and always, as it seemed to me, in good spirits.

But still my mother’s words stuck in my head; and even six years before this

time, when I was eleven, and he still said “thou” to me, and played with me,

and called me by the pet-name of “violet” — even then I sometimes asked

myself in a fright, “What shall I do, if he suddenly wants to marry me?”

Before our dinner, to which Katya made an addition of sweets and a dish of

spinach, Sergey Mikhaylych arrived. From the window I watched him drive up

to the house in a small sleigh; but as soon as it turned the corner, I

hastened to the drawing room, meaning to pretend that his visit was a

complete surprise. But when I heard his tramp and loud voice and Katya’s

footsteps in the hall, I lost patience and went to meet him myself. He was

holding Katya’s hand, talking loud, and smiling. When he saw me, he stopped

and looked at me for a time without bowing. I was uncomfortable and felt

myself blushing.

“Can this be really you?” he said in his plain decisive way, walking towards

me with his arms apart. “Is so great a change possible? How grown-up you

are! I used to call you “violet”, but now you are a rose in full bloom!’

He took my hand in his own large hand and pressed it so hard that it almost

hurt. Expecting him to kiss my hand, I bent towards him, but he only pressed

it again and looked straight into my eyes with the old firmness and

cheerfulness in his face.

It was six years since I had seen him last. He was much changed — older and

darker in complexion; and he now wore whiskers which did not become him at

all; but much remained the same — his simple manner, the large features of

his honest open face, his bright intelligent eyes, his friendly, almost

boyish, smile.

Five minutes later he had ceased to be a visitor and had become the friend

of us all, even of the servants, whose visible eagerness to wait on him

proved their pleasure at his arrival. He behaved quite unlike the neighbors

who had visited us after my mother’s death. they had thought it necessary to

be silent when they sat with us, and to shed tears. He, on the contrary, was

cheerful and talkative, and said not a word about my mother, so that this

indifference seemed strange to me at first and even improper on the part of

so close a friend. But I understood later that what seemed indifference was

sincerity, and I felt grateful for it. In the evening Katya poured out tea,

sitting in her old place in the drawing room, where she used to sit in my

mother’s lifetime; our old butler Grigori had hunted out one of my father’s

pipes and brought it to him; and he began to walk up and down the room as he

used to do in past days.

“How many terrible changes there are in this house, when one thinks of it

all!” he said, stopping in his walk.

“Yes,” said Katya with a sigh; and then she put the lid on the samovar and

looked at him, quite ready to burst out crying.

“I suppose you remember your father?” he said, turning to me.

“Not clearly,” I answered.

“How happy you would have been together now!” he added in a low voice,

looking thoughtfully at my face above the eyes. “I was very fond of him,” he

added in a still lower tone, and it seemed to me that his eyes were shining

more than usual.

“And now God has taken her too!” said Katya; and at once she laid her napkin

on the teapot, took out her handkerchief, and began to cry.

“Yes, the changes in this house are terrible,” he repeated, turning away.

“Sonya, show me your toys,” he added after a little and went off to the

parlor. When he had gone, I looked at Katya with eyes full of tears.

“What a splendid friend he is!” she said. And, though he was no relation, I

did really feel a kind of warmth and comfort in the sympathy of this good

man.

I could hear him moving about in the parlor with Sonya, and the sound of her

high childish voice. I sent tea to him there; and I heard him sit down at

the piano and strike the keys with Sonya’s little hands.

Then his voice came — “Marya Aleksandrovna, come here and play something.”

I liked his easy behavior to me and his friendly tone of command; I got up

and went to him.

“Play this,” he said, opening a book of Beethoven’s music at the adagio of

the “Moonlight Sonata.” “Let me hear how you play,” he added, and went off

to a corner of the room, carrying his cup with him.

I somehow felt that with him it was impossible to refuse or to say

beforehand that I played badly: I sat down obediently at the piano and began

to play as well as I could; yet I was afraid of criticism, because I knew

that he understood and enjoyed music. The adagio suited the remembrance of

past days evoked by our conversation at tea, and I believe that I played it

fairly well. But he would not let me play the scherzo. “No,” he said, coming

up to me; “you don’t play that right; don’t go on; but the first movement

was not bad; you seem to be musical.” This moderate praise pleased me so

much that I even reddened. I felt it pleasant and strange that a friend of

my father’s, and his contemporary, should no longer treat me like a child

but speak to me seriously. Katya now went upstairs to put Sonya to bed, and

we were left alone in the parlor.

He talked to me about my father, and about the beginning of their friendship

and the happy days they had spent together, while I was still busy with

lesson-books and toys; and his talk put my father before me in quite a new

light, as a man of simple and delightful character. He asked me too about my

tastes, what I read and what I intended to do, and gave me advice. The man

of mirth and jest who used to tease me and make me toys had disappeared;

here was a serious, simple, and affectionate friend, for whom I could not

help feeling respect and sympathy. It was easy and pleasant to talk to him;

and yet I felt an involuntary strain also. I was anxious about each word I

spoke: I wished so much to earn for my own sake the