V
My wife had already collected eight thousand; with my five it would be
thirteen thousand. For a start that was very good. The business which
had so worried and interested me was at last in my hands; I was doing
what the others would not and could not do; I was doing my duty,
organizing the relief fund in a practical and business-like way.
Everything seemed to be going in accordance with my desires and
intentions; but why did my feeling of uneasiness persist? I spent four
hours over my wife’s papers, making out their meaning and correcting her
mistakes, but instead of feeling soothed, I felt as though some one were
standing behind me and rubbing my back with a rough hand. What was it
I wanted? The organization of the relief fund had come into trustworthy
hands, the hungry would be fed--what more was wanted?
The four hours of this light work for some reason exhausted me, so that
I could not sit bending over the table nor write. From below I heard
from time to time a smothered moan; it was my wife sobbing. Alexey,
invariably meek, sleepy, and sanctimonious, kept coming up to the table
to see to the candles, and looked at me somewhat strangely.
“Yes, I must go away,” I decided at last, feeling utterly exhausted.
“As far as possible from these agreeable impressions! I will set off
tomorrow.”
I gathered together the papers and exercise books, and went down to my
wife. As, feeling quite worn out and shattered, I held the papers and
the exercise books to my breast with both hands, and passing through
my bedroom saw my trunks, the sound of weeping reached me through the
floor.
“Are you a kammer-junker?” a voice whispered in my ear. “That’s a very
pleasant thing. But yet you are a reptile.”
“It’s all nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” I muttered as I went
downstairs. “Nonsense... and it’s nonsense, too, that I am actuated
by vanity or a love of display.... What rubbish! Am I going to get a
decoration for working for the peasants or be made the director of a
department? Nonsense, nonsense! And who is there to show off to here in
the country?”
I was tired, frightfully tired, and something kept whispering in my
ear: “Very pleasant. But, still, you are a reptile.” For some reason I
remembered a line out of an old poem I knew as a child: “How pleasant it
is to be good!”
My wife was lying on the couch in the same attitude, on her face and
with her hands clutching her head. She was crying. A maid was standing
beside her with a perplexed and frightened face. I sent the maid away,
laid the papers on the table, thought a moment and said:
“Here are all your papers, Natalie. It’s all in order, it’s all capital,
and I am very much pleased. I am going away tomorrow.”
She went on crying. I went into the drawing-room and sat there in the
dark. My wife’s sobs, her sighs, accused me of something, and to justify
myself I remembered the whole of our quarrel, starting from my unhappy
idea of inviting my wife to our consultation and ending with the
exercise books and these tears. It was an ordinary attack of our
conjugal hatred, senseless and unseemly, such as had been frequent
during our married life, but what had the starving peasants to do with
it? How could it have happened that they had become a bone of
contention between us? It was just as though pursuing one another we had
accidentally run up to the altar and had carried on a quarrel there.
“Natalie,” I said softly from the drawing-room, “hush, hush!”
To cut short her weeping and make an end of this agonizing state of
affairs, I ought to have gone up to my wife and comforted her, caressed
her, or apologized; but how could I do it so that she would believe me?
How could I persuade the wild duck, living in captivity and hating me,
that it was dear to me, and that I felt for its sufferings? I had never
known my wife, so I had never known how to talk to her or what to
talk about. Her appearance I knew very well and appreciated it as it
deserved, but her spiritual, moral world, her mind, her outlook on life,
her frequent changes of mood, her eyes full of hatred, her disdain,
the scope and variety of her reading which sometimes struck me, or,
for instance, the nun-like expression I had seen on her face the day
before--all that was unknown and incomprehensible to me. When in my
collisions with her I tried to define what sort of a person she was,
my psychology went no farther than deciding that she was giddy,
impractical, ill-tempered, guided by feminine logic; and it seemed to
me that that was quite sufficient. But now that she was crying I had a
passionate desire to know more.
The weeping ceased. I went up to my wife. She sat up on the couch, and,
with her head propped in both hands, looked fixedly and dreamily at the
fire.
“I am going away tomorrow morning,” I said.
She said nothing. I walked across the room, sighed, and said:
“Natalie, when you begged me to go away, you said: ‘I will forgive you
everything, everything’.... So you think I have wronged you. I beg you
calmly and in brief terms to formulate the wrong I’ve done you.”
“I am worn out. Afterwards, some time...” said my wife.
“How am I to blame?” I went on. “What have I done? Tell me: you are
young and beautiful, you want to live, and I am nearly twice your age
and hated by you, but is that my fault? I didn’t marry you by force. But
if you want to live in freedom, go; I’ll give you your liberty. You can
go and love whom you please.... I will give you a divorce.”
“That’s not what I want,” she said. “You know I used to love you and
always thought of myself as older than you. That’s all nonsense....
You are not to blame for being older or for my being younger, or that I
might be able to love some one else if I were free; but because you are
a difficult person, an egoist, and hate every one.”
“Perhaps so. I don’t know,” I said.
“Please go away. You want to go on at me till the morning, but I warn
you I am quite worn out and cannot answer you. You promised me to go to
town. I am very grateful; I ask nothing more.”
My wife wanted me to go away, but it was not easy for me to do that. I
was dispirited and I dreaded the big, cheerless, chill rooms that I was
so weary of. Sometimes when I had an ache or a pain as a child, I used
to huddle up to my mother or my nurse, and when I hid my face in the
warm folds of their dress, it seemed to me as though I were hiding from
the pain. And in the same way it seemed to me now that I could only hide
from my uneasiness in this little room beside my wife. I sat down
and screened away the light from my eyes with my hand.... There was a
stillness.
“How are you to blame?” my wife said after a long silence, looking at me
with red eyes that gleamed with tears. “You are very well educated and
very well bred, very honest, just, and high-principled, but in you
the effect of all that is that wherever you go you bring suffocation,
oppression, something insulting and humiliating to the utmost degree.
You have a straightforward way of looking at things, and so you hate
the whole world. You hate those who have faith, because faith is an
expression of ignorance and lack of culture, and at the same time you
hate those who have no faith for having no faith and no ideals; you hate
old people for being conservative and behind the times, and young people
for free-thinking. The interests of the peasantry and of Russia are dear
to you, and so you hate the peasants because you suspect every one of
them of being a thief and a robber. You hate every one. You are just,
and always take your stand on your legal rights, and so you are always
at law with the peasants and your neighbours. You have had twenty
bushels of rye stolen, and your love of order has made you complain of
the peasants to the Governor and all the local authorities, and to send
a complaint of the local authorities to Petersburg. Legal justice!” said
my wife, and she laughed. “On the ground of your legal rights and in
the interests of morality, you refuse to give me a passport. Law and
morality is such that a self-respecting healthy young woman has to spend
her life in idleness, in depression, and in continual apprehension, and
to receive in return board and lodging from a man she does not love. You
have a thorough knowledge of the law, you are very honest and just, you
respect marriage and family life, and the effect of all that is that all
your life you have not done one kind action, that every one hates you,
that you are on bad terms with every one, and the seven years that you
have been married you’ve only lived seven months with your wife. You’ve
had no wife and I’ve had no husband. To live with a man like you is
impossible; there is no way of doing it. In the early years I was
frightened with you, and now I am ashamed.... That’s how my best years
have been wasted. When I fought with you I ruined my temper, grew
shrewish, coarse, timid, mistrustful.... Oh, but what’s the use of
talking! As though you wanted to understand! Go upstairs, and God be
with you!”
My wife lay down on the couch and sank into thought.
“And how splendid, how enviable life might have been!” she said softly,
looking reflectively into the fire. “What a life it might have been!
There’s no bringing it back now.”
Any one who has lived in the country in winter and knows those long
dreary, still evenings when even the dogs are too bored to bark and even
the clocks seem weary of ticking, and any one who on such evenings has
been troubled by awakening conscience and has moved restlessly about,
trying now to smother his conscience, now to interpret it, will
understand the distraction and the pleasure my wife’s voice gave me as
it sounded in the snug little room, telling me I was a bad man. I did
not understand what was wanted of me by my conscience, and my wife,
translating it in her feminine way, made clear to me in the meaning of
my agitation. As often before in the moments of intense uneasiness, I
guessed that the whole secret lay, not in the starving peasants, but in
my not being the sort of a man I ought to be.
My wife got up with an effort and came up to me.
“Pavel Andreitch,” she said, smiling mournfully, “forgive me, I don’t
believe you: you are not going away, but I will ask you one more favour.
Call this”--she pointed to her papers--“self-deception, feminine logic,
a mistake, as you like; but do not hinder me. It’s all that is left me
in life.” She turned away and paused. “Before this I had nothing. I have
wasted my youth in fighting with you. Now I have caught at this and am
living; I am happy.... It seems to me that I have found in this a means
of justifying my existence.”
“Natalie, you are a good woman, a woman of ideas,” I said, looking at my
wife enthusiastically, “and everything you say and do is intelligent and
fine.”