The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Kreutzer Sonata/Chapter 24
XXIV.
"Two days later I left for the meeting in the county, bidding my wife farewell in the best and quietest of moods.
"In the county there was always a great deal to do, and there was a special life, a special world by itself. There, in the office, I passed ten hours a day for two days in succession. On the second day they brought me a letter from my wife. I read it at once.
"She wrote about the children, about uncle, about the nurse, about purchases, and, among other things, she mentioned, as a most natural occurrence, that Trukhachévski had called bringing the promised music, and that he had promised to play again with her, but that she had refused.
"I did not remember his having promised to bring any music: it seemed to me that he had then bidden her farewell for good, and so this startled me. I was, however, so busy that I had no time to think about it, and only in the evening, when I returned to my room, did I re-read the letter.
"Not only had Trukhachévski been at my house during my absence, but the whole tenor of the letter seemed to be strained. The furious beast of jealousy roared in its kennel and wanted to leap out, but I was afraid of that beast and I quickly locked it up. 'What an abominable feeling this jealousy is!' said I to myself. 'What can there be more natural than what she writes?'
"So I lay down in my bed and began to think of the affairs which I had to attend to on the following day. During these meetings I could not easily fall asleep, in a strange bed, but this time I fell asleep at once. And, as sometimes happens, you know, you feel a kind of electric shock and you wake up. So I awoke. I awoke with the thought of her, of my carnal love for her, and of Trukhachévski, and that everything was at an end between him and her. Terror and rage compressed my heart. But I began to reason with myself. 'What nonsense,' said I to myself, 'there is no cause for it,—there is nothing and has been nothing. And how can I so lower her and myself, by supposing such horrors? He—something in the nature of a hired fiddler, known as a worthless man, and a worthy woman, a respected mother of a family, my wife! What absurdity!' was what presented itself to me on one side. 'Why can't it be?' was what presented itself on the other. 'Why could there not be that simplest and most intelligible thing in the name of which I married her, the same thing in the name of which I lived with her, which alone I needed in her, and which, therefore, others could need, and that musician, too? He is unmarried, healthy (I remembered how he crunched the gristle in the cutlet and with what eager red lips he clasped the wine-glass), well-fed, smooth, and not only unprincipled, but obviously following the rule to make use of every pleasure which presents itself. And between them there is the bond of music, of the most refined sensual lust. What can keep him back? She? Who is she? She is the same mystery she has always been. I do not know her. I know her only as an animal. And nothing can nor must keep back an animal.'
"Only then for the first time did I recall their faces on that evening, when, after the Kreutzer Sonata, they played some impassioned piece,—I do not remember by whom,—impassioned to the point of obscenity. 'How could I have left?' I said to myself, recalling their faces. 'Was it not clear that everything had taken place between them on that evening? And was it not evident that even on that evening there was no barrier between them, and that both of them, but especially she, experienced a certain measure of shame after what had happened to them? I remember how she smiled feebly, pitiably, and blissfully, wiping off the perspiration from her heated face, as I went up to the piano. They even then avoided looking at each other, and only at supper, as he poured out a glass of water for her, did they glance at each other and smile an imperceptible smile.'
"I now in terror recalled that glance of theirs with the barely perceptible smile, which I had accidentally noticed. 'Yes, all is ended,' one voice said to me, and immediately the other voice said something quite different: 'You are working under a delusion,—this cannot be.' It made me shudder to lie in the dark. I struck a match, and I felt terribly in that small room with the yellow wall-paper. I lighted a cigarette, and, as is always the case when I move in one and the same circle of insoluble contradictions, I smoked; I smoked one cigarette after another, in order to be befogged and not to notice the contradictions.
"I did not fall asleep all night long, and having decided at five o'clock that I could not remain any longer in this state of tension and that I must go home, I arose, woke the janitor, who was attending to me, and sent him for the horses. I sent a letter to the meeting saying that I was called back to Moscow on urgent business, and asking a member to take my chair. At eight o'clock I sat down in the tarantás and started."