Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

nastier we might be to each other. ‘It’s all very well for you to grimace,’ I thought, ‘but you have harassed me all night with your scenes, and I have a meeting on.’ ‘It’s all very well for you,’ she not only thought but said, ‘but I have been awake all night with the baby.’ Those new theories of hypnotism, psychic diseases, and hysterics are not a simple folly, but a dangerous and repulsive one. Charcot would certainly have said that my wife was hysterical, and that I was abnormal, and he would no doubt have tried to cure me. But there was nothing to cure.

“Thus we lived in a perpetual fog, not seeing the condition we were in. And if what did happen had not happened, I should have gone on living so to old age and should have thought, when dying, that I had led a good life. I should not have realized the abyss of misery and horrible falsehood in which I wallowed.

“We were like two convicts hating each other and chained together, poisoning one another’s lives and trying not to see it. I did not then know that ninety-nine percent of married people live in a similar hell to the one I was in and that it cannot be otherwise. I did not then know this either about others or about myself.

“It is strange what coincidences there are in regular, or even in irregular, lives! Just when the parents find life together unendurable, it becomes necessary to move to town for the children’s education.”

He stopped, and once or twice gave vent to his strange sounds, which were now quite like suppressed sobs. We were approaching a station.

“What is the time?” he asked.

I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock.

“You are not tired?” he asked.

“No, but you are?”

“I am suffocating. Excuse me, I will walk up and down and drink some water.”

He went unsteadily through the carriage. I remained alone thinking over what he had said, and I was so engrossed in thought that I did not notice when he re-entered by the door at the other end of the carriage.

XVIII

“Yes, I keep diverging,” he began. “I have thought much over it. I now see many things differently and I want to express it.

“Well, so we lived in town. In town a man can live for a hundred years without noticing that he has long been dead and has rotted away. He has no time to take account of himself, he is always occupied. Business affairs, social intercourse, health, art, the children’s health and their education. Now one has to receive so-and-so and so-and-so, go to see so-and-so and so-and-so; now one has to go and look at this, and hear this man or that woman. In town, you know, there are at any given moment one or two, or even three celebrities whom one must on no account miss seeing. Then one has to undergo a treatment oneself or get someone else attended to, then there are teachers, tutors, and governesses, but one’s own life is quite empty. Well, so we lived and felt less the painfulness of living together. Besides at first we had splendid occupations, arranging things in a new place, in new quarters; and we were also occupied in going from the town to the country and back to town again.

“We lived so through one winter, and the next there occurred, unnoticed by anyone, an apparently unimportant thing, but the cause of all that happened later.

“She was not well and the doctors told her not to have children, and taught her how to avoid it. To me it was disgusting. I struggled against it, but she with frivolous obstinacy insisted on having her own way and I submitted. The last excuse for our swinish life⁠—children⁠—was then taken away, and life became viler than ever.

“To a peasant, a labouring man, children are necessary; though it is hard for him to feed them, still he needs them, and therefore his marital relations have a justification. But to us who have children, more children are unnecessary; they are an additional care and expense, a further division of property, and a burden. So our swinish life has no justification. We either artificially deprive ourselves of children or regard them as a misfortune, the consequences of carelessness, and that is still worse.

“We have no justification. But we have fallen morally so low that we do not even feel the need of any justification.

“The majority of the present educated world devote themselves to this kind of debauchery without the least qualm of conscience.

“There is indeed nothing that can feel qualms, for conscience in our society is nonexistent, unless one can call public opinion and the criminal law a ‘conscience.’ In this case neither the one nor the other is infringed: there is no reason to be ashamed of public opinion for everybody acts in the same way⁠—Mary Pávlovna, Iván Zakhárych, and the rest. Why breed paupers or deprive oneself of the possibility of social life? There is no need to fear or be ashamed in face of the criminal law either. Those shameless hussies, or soldiers’ wives, throw their babies into ponds or wells, and they of course must be put into prison, but we do it all at the proper time and in a clean way.

“We lived like that for another two years. The means employed by those scoundrel-doctors evidently began to bear fruit; she became physically stouter and handsomer, like the late beauty of summer’s end. She felt this and paid attention to her appearance. She developed a provocative kind of beauty which made people restless. She was in the full vigour of a well fed and excited woman of thirty who is not bearing children. Her appearance disturbed people. When she passed men she attracted their notice. She was like a fresh, well fed harnessed horse, whose bridle has been removed. There was no bridle, as is the case with ninety-nine