The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Kreutzer Sonata/Chapter 17
XVII.
Well, this is the way we lived. Our relations grew ever more hostile. Finally we reached such a stage that it was not the dissensions that caused the hostility, but the hostility which provoked the dissensions. No matter what she said, I disagreed with her from the start, and the same was the case with her.
"In the fourth year both sides came to the natural conclusion that we could not understand each other or agree. We did not even try to hear each other's opinions. In regard to the simplest things, especially in regard to the children, we invariably stuck to our ideas. As I think of them now, the opinions which I defended were not of such prime importance to me as not to admit of deviations; but she held the contrary view, and yielding would have meant yielding to her. That I could not do. Neither could she. She, no doubt, considered herself absolutely right in regard to me, while I was, to my thinking, a saint in her presence. When we were left alone, we were doomed to silence or to kinds of conversation which, I am sure, animals even could carry on: 'What time is it? It is time to go to bed. What shall we have for dinner? Where shall I go? What do the papers say? Send for the doctor. Másha has a sore throat.' It was enough for us to deviate a hair's breadth from this circle of conversations, which was contracted to impossible limits, in order to give irritation a chance to flame up.
"There were conflicts and expressions of hatred for the coffee, the table-cloth, the vehicle, the progress of the game of cards,—for things that could be of no importance to either of us. In me, at least, a terrible hatred for her was frequently fermenting. I frequently looked at her, while she poured out the tea, swung her foot, or carried the spoon to her mouth and noisily sipped a liquid, and I hated her for it as for the meanest act. I did not notice then that the periods of irritation arose quite regularly and evenly in me, corresponding to the periods of what we called love. A period of love, then a period of irritation; an energetic period of love, a long period of irritation; a more feeble manifestation of love, a short period of irritation. We did not understand then that love and anger were the same animal sensations, only from opposite ends.
"It would have been terrible to live thus if we had understood our situation; but we did not understand, nor see it. A man's salvation, and punishment at the same time, when he lives irregularly, lies in the fact that he can befog himself, in order not to see the wretchedness of his situation. This we did. She tried to forget herself in tense, always hurried occupations with household affairs, with her own and her children's toilets, and with her children's studies and health. I had my own affairs: drinking, service, the chase, cards. We were both all the time occupied. Both of us felt that the more we were occupied, the more infuriated we could be at each other. 'It is easy enough for you to make grimaces,' thought I, 'but you have worn me out with your all-night scenes, and here I have to attend a meeting.' 'You are all right,' she not only thought, but even said, 'but I have sat up all night with the baby.' All these new theories of hypnotism, mental diseases, and hysterics,—all that is not a simple, but a dangerous and abominable insipidity. Charcot would, no doubt, have said about my wife that she was hysterical, and of me he would have said that I was abnormal, and would have, no doubt, begun to cure me. But there was nothing there to cure.
"Thus we lived in an eternal fog, without seeing the situation we were in. If that which had happened had not taken place and if I had lived in the same manner until old age, I should, at my death, have thought that I had lived a good life,—not an especially good, but not necessarily a bad, life,—such as all live; I should not have come to comprehend that abyss of wretchedness and that contemptible lie in which I wallowed.
"We should have been two mutually hating prisoners, fettered with one chain, poisoning each other's life, and endeavouring not to see this. I did not know then that ninety-nine out of a hundred married couples live in the same hell, and that it cannot be otherwise. At that time I knew neither of others, nor of myself.
"It is remarkable what coincidences there are in well-regulated and even in badly regulated lives! Just when the life of the parents becomes unbearable to both of them, it becomes necessary to subject the children to the conditions of the city for the sake of their education. And thus rises the necessity of settling in the city."
He grew silent and once or twice uttered his strange sounds, which now perfectly resembled repressed sobs. We were getting near to a station.
"What time is it?" he asked.
I looked at my watch: it was two o'clock.
"Are you not tired?" he asked.
"No. But you are!"
"I have a choking feeling. Excuse me, I will walk a little and take a drink of water."
He went, staggering, through the car. I remained sitting alone, running through everything he had told me, and I was so lost in thought that I did not notice how he had come in by the other door.