Chapter IV
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 every one 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 things would look up, 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 “thou,”1 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 things
will look up; 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 things
will look up! That’s a good expression, ‘look up,’ ” 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.
Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the
child, and knowing from the sound of the carriage that he had gone
off, went back again to her bedroom. It was her solitary refuge
from the household cares which crowded upon her directly she went
out from it. Even now, in the short time she had been in the
nursery, the English governess and Matrona Philimonovna had
succeeded in putting several questions to her, which did not admit
of delay, and which only she could answer: “What were the children
to put on for their walk? Should they have any milk? Should not a
new cook be sent for?”
“Ah, let me alone, let me alone!” she said, and
going back to her bedroom she sat down in the same place as she had
sat when talking to her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands
with the rings that slipped down on her bony fingers, and fell to
going over in her memory all the conversation. “He has gone! But
has he broken it off with her?” she thought. “Can it be he sees
her? Why didn’t I ask him! No, no, reconciliation is impossible.
Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers—strangers
forever!” She repeated again with special significance the word so
dreadful to her. “And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him! ...
How I loved him! And now don’t I love him? Don’t I love him more
than before? The most horrible thing is,” she began, but did not
finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head in at
the door.
“Let us send for my brother,” she said; “he can get
a dinner anyway, or we shall have the children getting nothing to
eat till six again, like yesterday.”
“Very well, I will come directly and see about it.
But did you send for some new milk?”
And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of
the day, and drowned her grief in them for a time.