Too Much Happiness

But when he did tell her at last, he told her also that Clara and Elisa had asked immediately what was to be done.

This seemed to be the way of women, he had said, to assume that something should be done.

He had replied, quite severely, “Nothing.”

In the morning Sophia took a clean though crumpled frock out of her bag-she had never learned how to pack tidily-fixed her curly hair as well as she could to hide some little patches of gray, and came downstairs to the sounds of a household already astir. Her place was the only one still set in the dining room. Elisa brought in the coffee and the first German breakfast that Sophia had ever eaten in this house-cold sliced meat and cheese and thickly buttered bread. She said that Clara was upstairs preparing their brother for his meeting with Sophia.

“At first we had the barber come in,” she said. “But then Clara learned to do it quite well. She turned out to be the one who has the skills of a nurse, it is fortunate one of us has them.”

Even before she said this Sophia had sensed that they were short of money. The damask and net curtains had a dingy look, the silver knife and fork she used had not recently been polished. Through the open door to the sitting room a rough-looking young girl, their present servant, was visible cleaning out the grate and raising clouds of dust. Elisa looked her way, as if to ask her to shut the door, then got up and did it herself. She came back to the table with a flushed, downcast face, and Sophia asked hastily, if rather impolitely, what was the illness of Herr Weierstrass?

“It is a weakness of his heart for one thing, and the pneumonia he had in the autumn that he ca

Clara appeared in the doorway.

“He is waiting for you now.”

Sophia climbed the stairs thinking not of the professor but of these two women who had made him the center of their lives. Knitting mufflers, mending the linen, making the puddings and preserves that could never be trusted to a servant. Honoring the Roman Catholic Church as their brother did-a cold undiverting religion in Sophia’s opinion-and all without a moment of mutiny as far as you could see, or any flicker of dissatisfaction.

I would go mad, she thought.

Even to be a professor, she thought, I would go mad. Students have mediocre minds, generally speaking. Only the most obvious, regular patterns can be impressed on them.

She would not have dared admit this to herself before she had Maksim.

She entered the bedroom smiling at her luck, her coming freedom, her soon-to-be husband.

“Ah, here you are at last,” said Weierstrass, speaking somewhat weakly and laboriously. “The naughty child, we thought she had deserted us. Are you on your way to Paris again, off to amuse yourself?”

“I am on my way back from Paris,” said Sophia. “I am going back to Stockholm. Paris was not at all amusing, it was dreary as can be.” She gave him her hands to kiss, one after the other.

“Is your Aniuta ill, then?”

“She is dead, mein liebe professor.”

“She died in prison?”

“No, no. That was long ago. She was not in prison that time. Her husband was. She died of pneumonia, but she had been suffering in many ways for a long time.”

“Oh, pneumonia, I have had it too. Still, that was sad for you.”

“My heart will never heal. But I have something good to tell you, something happy. I am to be married in the spring.”

“Are you divorcing the geologist? I do not wonder, you should have done that long ago. Still, a divorce is always unpleasant.”

“He is dead too. And he was a paleontologist. It is a new study, very interesting. They learn things from fossils.”

“Yes. I remember now. I have heard of the study. He died young then. I did not wish him to stand in your way, but truly I did not wish him dead. Was he ill long?”

“You might say that he was. You surely remember how I left him and you recommended me to Mittag-Leffler?”

“In Stockholm. Yes? You left him. Well. It had to be done.”

“Yes. But it is over now and I am going to marry a man of the same name but not closely related and a different sort of man entirely.”

“A Russian, then? Does he read fossils also?”

“Not at all. He is a professor of law. He is very energetic and very good-humored except when he is very gloomy. I will bring him to meet you and you shall see.”

“We will be pleased to entertain him,” said Weierstrass sadly. “It will put an end to your work.”

“Not at all, not at all. He does not wish it. But I will not teach anymore, I will be free. And I will live in a delightful climate in the south of France and I shall be healthy there all the time and do all the more work.”

“We shall see.”

“Mein Liebe,” she said. “I order you, order you to be happy for me.”

“I must seem very old,” he said. “And I have led a sedate life. I have not as many sides to my nature as you have. It was such a surprise to me that you would write novels.”

“You did not like the idea.”

“You are wrong. I did like your recollections. Very pleasant to read.”

“That book is not really a novel. You would not like the one I have written now. Sometimes I don’t even like it myself. It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love. Never mind, you will not have to read it. The Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.”

“I am not generally fond of novels.”

“They are for women?”

“Truly I sometimes forget that you are a woman. I think of you as-as a-”

“As a what?”

“As a gift to me and to me alone.”

Sophia bent and kissed his white forehead. She held back her tears till she had said good-bye to his sisters and left the house.

I will never see him again, she thought.

She thought of his face as white as the fresh starched pillows that Clara must have placed behind his head just that morning. Perhaps she had already taken them away, letting him slump down into the softer shabbier ones beneath. Perhaps he had fallen asleep at once, tired out from their exchange. He would have thought that they were meeting for the last time and he would have known that the thought was in her mind as well, but he would not know-this was her shame, her secret-how lightened, how free, she felt now, in spite of her tears, freer with every step away from that house.

Was his life, she thought, so much more satisfactory to contemplate than his sisters’?

His name would last awhile, in textbooks. And among mathematicians. Not so long as it might have done if he had been more zealous about establishing his reputation, keeping himself to the fore in his select and striving circle. He cared more for the work than for his name, when so many of his colleagues cared equally for both.

She should not have mentioned her writing. Frivolity to him. She had written the recollections of her life at Palibino in a glow of love for everything lost, things once despaired of as well as things once treasured. She had written it far from home when that home and her sister were gone. And Nihilist Girl came out of pain for her country, a burst of patriotism and perhaps a feeling that she had not been paying enough attention, with her mathematics and the tumults of her life.

Pain for her country, yes. But in some sense she had written that story in tribute to Aniuta. It was the story of a young woman who gives up the prospect of any normal life in order to marry a political prisoner exiled to Siberia. In this way she ensured that his life, his punishment, should be somewhat alleviated-southern instead of northern Siberia-as was the rule for men accompanied by their wives. The story would be praised by those banished Russians who might manage to read it in manuscript. A book had only to be refused publication in Russia to engender such praises among political exiles, as Sophia well knew. The Raevsky Sisters-the recollections-pleased her more, though the censor had passed it, and some critics dismissed it as nostalgia.