Oh, Dasha, how I cried.
He went away from me to die. How could I have kept him, made him come back, saved him?
What could I have done?
Just hold him fast to my heart... that was all.... But he hardly took any notice of me towards the end.
The revolution—he could see and think of nothing else.
Oh, I don't understand, I don't understand!
Is it worth while for all of us to go on living?
Everything is destroyed ... like storm-tossed birds we wander all over Russia. What for?
If all the blood which has been shed, all our sufferings, our trials, could give us back our home, our nice rooms, our card games with friends.... Shall we ever be happy again?
The past has gone beyond repair, gone for ever, Dasha.... Life is over for us, let others take our places.
Stronger, better people...."
Katya laid down her pen and dabbed at her eyes with her crumpled-up handkerchief.
Then she looked up at the rain streaming down the four windowpanes.
An acacia bent and tossed as if the savage wind was tousling its hair.
Katya proceeded with her letter:
"Vadim went to the front in the early spring.
My whole life was just waiting for him.
How sad, how utterly, utterly useless.... I remember sitting at the window one evening..'. .
The acacia was coming out, the fat buds were bursting open.
A flock of sparrows was making a great fuss in the yard. I felt such resentment, such loneliness.... As if I had no place in this world. The war passed, and the revolution will pass.
Russia will never be the same again.
We fight, we perish, we suffer.
But the tree blossoms just as it did last spring, and many springs before that.
And the tree and the sparrows, the whole of nature, seem to have retreated to some remote distance, where they live a life which is strange to me....
"Dasha, what are all our sufferings for?
It can't be they are all in vain. We women, you and I, we know our own little world. But all that goes on outside it—the whole of Russia—is simply a blazing furnace.
It must be that some new happiness will arise from the flames.... If people didn't believe that, they would never go in for all this hatred and destruction of one another.... I have lost all.... I have nothing to live for.... But I go on living, because I'm ashamed—not afraid, ashamed—to put my head under a train, or hang up a rope from a beam....
"I'm leaving Rostov tomorrow, so that there shall be nothing to remind me.... I shall go to Ekaterinoslav. I have friends there....
I am advised to go into a confectioner's.
Perhaps you'll come south, too, Dasha. They say things are very bad in Petersburg now....
"That's where a woman is so different from a man. A woman would never leave one she loved, not if it was the end of the world.... But Vadim left me.... He loved me as long as he felt sure of himself.... You remember how the sun shone on our joy that June in Petersburg,... All my life I shall never forget that pale northern sunshine. I haven't got a single photograph of Vadim, not the tiniest souvenir.... It's as if it had all been a dream. I can't believe he's dead, Dasha, I can't. I think I shall go mad. How sad, how futile my life has been...."
Katya could not go on. Her handkerchief was soaked through.... But she had to tell her sister all the ordinary everyday things people expect to be told in letters ... she committed these things to paper to the accompaniment of the sound of the falling rain, but neither her mind nor her heart was in the work. She wrote of the cost of food, of the soaring prices....
"No stuff, no thread.... A needle costs fifteen hundred rubles, or two live sucking pigs.... The girl next door, she's only seventeen years old, came back one night naked and bruised—her clothes were taken off in the street.
They go mostly for shoes...." She wrote about the Germans, how they had put military bands in the town park and had the streets swept, but sent all the grain and butter and eggs to Germany.... The common people and the workers hated them, but said nothing, since they had nowhere to look to for help.
It was Colonel Tetkin who told her all these things. '
"He's very nice, but of course an extra mouth is a burden.... His wife doesn't even take the trouble to conceal this."
Katya then added:
"I was twenty-seven the day before yesterday, but you should just see me. Oh well, never mind that.... It doesn't matter any more. There's no one to care...."
And again she went to work with her handkerchief.
Katya gave this letter to Tetkin.
He promised to send it at the first opportunity to Petersburg.
But it lay in his pocket a long time after Katya's departure.
Communications with the north were very hard to arrange.
The post was not working.
Letters were delivered by special messengers—daredevils who took large sums for the service.
Before leaving, Katya sold the few things she had brought with her from Samara, leaving herself only one treasure—an emerald ring which had been a birthday present, long long ago, before the war, one spring morning in Petersburg.
It all seemed so remote that Katya no longer felt any ties with the misty town in which her youth had flown by....
Dasha, Nikolai Ivanovich and Katya were walking along Nevsky Prospect.... They chose a ring set with an emerald.
She had placed the green flame on her finger, and now it was all that was left her of that life....
Several trains left the Rostov station in rapid succession.