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 grownup 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 earrings 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 earrings 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.