“It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,” he said, trying to
give himself courage. He squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took two
whiffs at it, flung it into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps
walked through the drawing-room, and opened the other door into his
wife’s bedroom.
Chapter 4
Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once
luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her
neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked
prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all
sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from
which she was taking something. Hearing her husband’s steps, she stopped,
looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give her features a
severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and
afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting to do what she had
attempted to do ten times already in these last three days—to sort out the
children’s things and her own, so as to take them to her mother’s—and
again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each time
before, she kept saying to herself, “that things cannot go on like this, that
she must take some step” to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him
some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her. She still
continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious
that this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of
the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she
realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look
after her five children properly, they would be still worse off where she was
going with them all. As it was, even in the course of these three days, the
youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome soup, and the others
had almost gone without their dinner the day before. She was conscious that
it was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself, she went on all the
same sorting out her things and pretending she was going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau
as though looking for something, and only looked round at him when he
had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe
and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.
“Dolly!” he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent his head towards
his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all that he was
radiant with freshness and health. In a rapid glance she scanned his figure
that beamed with health and freshness. “Yes, he is happy and content!” she
thought; “while I…. And that disgusting good nature, which everyone likes
him for and praises—I hate that good nature of his,” she thought. Her
mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her
pale, nervous face.
“What do you want?” she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
“Dolly!” he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. “Anna is coming today.”
“Well, what is that to me? I can’t see her!” she cried.
“But you must, really, Dolly….”
“Go away, go away, go away!” she shrieked, not looking at him, as
though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought of his wife, he
could hope that she would come round, as Matvey expressed it, and could
quietly go on reading his paper and drinking his coffee; but when he saw
her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate
and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath and a lump in his throat,
and his eyes began to shine with tears.
“My God! what have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake!… You know….” He
could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.
She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
“Dolly, what can I say?… One thing: forgive…. Remember, cannot nine
years of my life atone for an instant….”
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as it
were beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe differently.
“—instant of passion?” he said, and would have gone on, but at that
word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and again the
muscles of her right cheek worked.
“Go away, go out of the room!” she shrieked still more shrilly, “and don’t
talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness.”
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to
support herself. His face relaxed, his lips swelled, his eyes were swimming
with tears.
“Dolly!” he said, sobbing now; “for mercy’s sake, think of the children;
they are not to blame! I am to blame, and punish me, make me expiate my
fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to blame, no
words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!”
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was
unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak, but
could not. He waited.
“You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember
them, and know that this means their ruin,” she said—obviously one of the
phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of the last
few days.
She had called him “Stiva,” and he glanced at her with gratitude, and
moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.
“I think of the children, and for that reason I would do anything in the
world to save them, but I don’t myself know how to save them. By taking
them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious father—yes,
a vicious father…. Tell me, after what … has happened, can we live
together? Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?” she repeated, raising
her voice, “after my husband, the father of my children, enters into a love
affair with his own children’s governess?”
“But what could I do? what could I do?” he kept saying in a pitiful voice,
not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and lower.
“You are loathsome to me, repulsive!” she shrieked, getting more and
more heated. “Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you
have neither heart nor honorable feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting,
a stranger—yes, a complete stranger!” With pain and wrath she uttered the
word so terrible to herself—stranger.
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed
him. He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her. She saw in
him sympathy for her, but not love. “No, she hates me. She will not forgive
me,” he thought.
“It is awful! awful!” he said.
At that moment in the next room a child began to cry; probably it had
fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face suddenly softened.
She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though
she did not know where she was, and what she was doing, and getting up
rapidly, she moved towards the door.
“Well, she loves my child,” he thought, noticing the change of her face at
the child’s cry, “my child: how can she hate me?”
“Dolly, one word more,” he said, following her.
“If you come near me, I will call in the servants, the children! They may
all know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and you may live
here with your mistress!”
And she went out, slamming the door.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, wiped his face, and with a subdued tread
walked out of the room. “Matvey says she will come round; but how? I
don’t see the least chance of it. Ah, oh, how horrible it is! And how vulgarly
she shouted,” he said to himself, remembering her shriek and the words
—“scoundrel” and “mistress.” “And very likely the maids were listening!
Horribly vulgar! horrible!” Stepan Arkadyevitch stood a few seconds alone,
wiped his face, squared his chest, and walked out of the room.
It was Friday, and in the dining-room the German watchmaker was
winding up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this
punctual, bald watchmaker, “that the German was wound up for a whole
lifetime himself, to wind up watches,” and he smiled. Stepan Arkadyevitch
was fond of a joke: “And maybe she will come round! That’s a good
expression, ‘come round,’” he thought. “I must repeat that.”
“Matvey!” he shouted. “Arrange everything with Darya in the sitting
room for Anna Arkadyevna,” he said to Matvey when he came in.
“Yes, sir.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out onto the steps.
“You won’t dine at home?” said Matvey, seeing him off.
“That’s as it happens. But here’s for the housekeeping,” he said, taking
ten roubles from his pocketbook. “That’ll be enough.”
“Enough or not enough, we must make it do,” said Matvey, slamming the
carriage door and stepping back onto the steps.
