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

and then began to beat like a hammer. My chief feeling, a usual whenever I was enraged, was one of self pity. ‘In the presence of the children! of their nurse!’ thought I. Probably I looked awful, for Lisa gazed at me with strange eyes. ‘What am I to do?’ I asked myself. ‘Go in? I can’t: heaven only knows what I should do. But neither can I go away.’ The nurse looked at me as if she understood my position. ‘But it is impossible not to go in,’ I said to myself, and I quickly opened the door. He was sitting at the piano playing those arpeggios with his large white upturned fingers. She was standing in the curve of the piano, bending over some open music. She was the first to see or hear, and glanced at me. Whether she was frightened and pretended not to be, or whether she was really not frightened, anyway she did not start or move but only blushed, and that not at once.

“ ‘How glad I am that you have come: we have not decided what to play on Sunday,’ she said in a tone she would not have used to me had we been alone. This and her using the word ‘we’ of herself and him, filled me with indignation. I greeted him silently.

“He pressed my hand, and at once, with a smile which I thought distinctly ironic, began to explain that he had brought some music to practise for Sunday, but that they disagreed about what to play: a classical but more difficult piece, namely Beethoven’s sonata for the violin, or a few little pieces. It was all so simple and natural that there was nothing one could cavil at, yet I felt certain that it was all untrue and that they had agreed how to deceive me.

“One of the most distressing conditions of life for a jealous man (and everyone is jealous in our world) are certain society conventions which allow a man and a woman the greatest and most dangerous proximity. You would become a laughingstock to others if you tried to prevent such nearness at balls, or the nearness of doctors to their women patients, or of people occupied with art, sculpture, and especially music. A couple are occupied with the noblest of arts, music; this demands a certain nearness, and there is nothing reprehensible in that and only a stupid jealous husband can see anything undesirable in it. Yet everybody knows that it is by means of those very pursuits, especially of music, that the greater part of the adulteries in our society occur. I evidently confused them by the confusion I betrayed: for a long time I could not speak. I was like a bottle held upside down from which the water does not flow because it is too full. I wanted to abuse him and to turn him out, but again felt that I must treat him courteously and amiably. And I did so. I acted as though I approved of it all, and again because of the strange feeling which made me behave to him the more amiably the more his presence distressed me, I told him that I trusted his taste and advised her to do the same. He stayed as long as was necessary to efface the unpleasant impression caused by my sudden entrance⁠—looking frightened and remaining silent⁠—and then left, pretending that it was now decided what to play next day. I was however fully convinced that compared to what interested them the question of what to play was quite indifferent.

“I saw him out to the anteroom with special politeness. (How could one do less than accompany a man who had come to disturb the peace and destroy the happiness of a whole family?) And I pressed his soft white hand with particular warmth.”

XXII

“I did not speak to her all that day⁠—I could not. Nearness to her aroused in me such hatred of her that I was afraid of myself. At dinner in the presence of the children she asked me when I was going away. I had to go next week to the District Meetings of the Zemstvo. I told her the date. She asked whether I did not want anything for the journey. I did not answer but sat silent at table and then went in silence to my study. Latterly she used never to come to my room especially not at that time of day. I lay in my study filled with anger. Suddenly I heard her familiar step, and the terrible, monstrous idea entered my head that she, like Uriah’s wife, wished to conceal the sin she had already committed and that was why she was coming to me at such an unusual time. ‘Can she be coming to me?’ thought I, listening to her approaching footsteps. ‘If she is coming here, then I am right,’ and an expressible hatred of her took possession of me. Nearer and nearer came the steps. Is it possible that she won’t pass on to the dancing room? No, the door creaks and in the doorway appears her tall handsome figure, on her face and in her eyes a timid ingratiating look which she tries to hide, but which I see and the meaning of which I know. I almost choked, so long did I hold my breath, and still looking at her I grasped my cigarette case and began to smoke.

“ ‘Now how can you? One comes to sit with you for a bit, and you begin smoking’⁠—and she sat down close to me on the sofa, leaning against me. I moved away so as not to touch her.

“ ‘I see you are dissatisfied at my wanting to play on Sunday,’ she said.

“ ‘I am not at all dissatisfied,’ I said.

“ ‘As if I don’t see!’

“ ‘Well, I congratulate you on seeing. But I only see that you behave like a coquette.⁠ ⁠… You always find pleasure in all kinds of vileness, but to