第 2 页

Having finished the paper, a second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled joyously; not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind - the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.

But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him, and he grew thoughtful.

Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevich recognized the voices of Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tania, his eldest girl) were heard outside the door. They were carrying something, and dropped it.

`I told you not to sit passengers on the roof,' said the little girl in English; `there, pick them up!'

`Everything's in confusion,' thought Stepan Arkadyevich; `there are the children running about by themselves.' And going to the door, he called them. They left off the box that represented a train, and came in to their father.

The little girl, her father's favorite, ran up boldly, embraced him and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the well-known smell of scent that came from his whiskers. At last the little girl kissed his face, which was flushed from his stooping posture and beaming with tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her father held her back.

`How is mamma?' he asked, passing his hand over his daughter's smooth, soft little neck. `Good morning,' he said, smiling to the boy, who had come up to greet him.

He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and always tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not smile responsively to his father's chilly smile.

`Mamma? She is up,' answered the girl.

Stepan Arkadyevich sighed.

`That means she hasn't slept again all night,' he thought.

`Well, is she cheerful?'

The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her father and mother, and that her mother could not be cheerful, and that her father must be aware of this, and that he was pretending when he asked about it so lightly. And she blushed for her father. He at once perceived it, and blushed too.

`I don't know,' she said. `She did not say we must do our lessons, but she said we were to go for a walk with Miss Hoole to grandmamma's.'

`Well, go, Tania, my darling. Oh, wait a minute, though,' he said, still holding her and stroking her soft little hand.

He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yesterday, a little box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her favorites, a chocolate and a bonbon.

`For Grisha?' said the little girl, pointing to the chocolate.

`Yes, yes.' And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed the nape of her neck, and let her go.

`The carriage is ready,' said Matvei; `but there's someone to see you with a petition.'

`Been here long?' asked Stepan Arkadyevich.

`Half an hour or so.'

`How many times have I told you to tell me at once?'

`One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least,' said Matvei, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it was impossible to be angry.

`Well, show the person up at once,' said Oblonsky, frowning with vexation.

The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin, came with a request impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevich, as he generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to apply, and even wrote for her, easily and clearly, in his large, sprawling calligraphic and legible hand, a little note to a personage who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain's widow, Stepan Arkadyevich took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared that he had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget - his wife.

`Ah, yes!' He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a melancholy expression. `To go, or not to go?' he said to himself; and an inner voice told him he must not go, that nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and lying were opposed to his nature.

`It must be some day, though: it can't go on like this,' he said, trying to give himself courage. He set straight his chest, took out a cigarette, lighted it, took two whiffs at it, flung it into a mother-of-pearl ash tray, 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 hair (once luxuriant and beautiful) 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 toward the door, and trying in vain 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 undertake something, 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 of 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 all of them. 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, expressed bewilderment and suffering.

`Dolly!' he said in a subdued and timid voice. He had hunched up his shoulders 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, beaming with freshness and health. `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 trembled 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, without looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.

Stepan Arkadyevich could be calm when he thought of his wife, he could hope that everything would come round, as Matvei expressed it, and had been able to 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, his breath was cut short and a lump came to this 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 me... Remember, cannot nine years of our life atone for an instant...'

She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as if 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 passions and your vilenesses.'

She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips became puffy; tears welled up in his eyes.

`Dolly!' he said, sobbing now. `For mercy's sake, think of the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame - punish me then, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do! 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 made several attempts to speak, but could not. He waited.

`You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember, and know that they go to ruin now,' she said - obviously one of the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of the last three 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 remember the children, and for that reason I would do anything in the world to save them; but I don't myself know the means. 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? Do tell me - 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's to be done? What's to be done?' 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 a heart nor a sense of honor! 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 that it was his pity for her that exasperated her. She saw in him compassion 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 pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though she did not know where she was nor what she was doing, and, getting up rapidly, she moved toward 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 then?'

`Dolly, one word more,' he said, following her.

`If you follow me, I will call in the servants, and the children! Let them 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 Arkadyevich sighed, mopped his face, and with a subdued tread walked out of the room. `Matvei says everything will come round; but how? I don't see the least chance of it. Ah, ah, how horrible it is! And how vulgarly she shouted,' he said to himself, remembering her shrieks and the words - `scoundrel' and `mistress.' `And very likely the maids were listening! Horribly vulgar, horribly.' Stepan Arkadyevich stood a few seconds alone, wiped his eyes, thrust out his chest and walked out of the room.

It was Friday, and in the dining room the watchmaker, a German, was winding up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevich 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 Arkadyevich was fond of a nice joke. `And maybe it will come round!' That's a good expression, ``come round,'' he thought. `I must tell that.'

`Matvei!' he shouted. `Arrange everything with Marya in the sitting room for Anna Arkadyevna,' he said to Matvei when he came in.

`Yes, sir.'

Stepan Arkadyevich put on his fur coat and went out on the front steps.

`You won't dine at home?' said Matvei, seeing him off.

`It all depends. But here's for the housekeeping,' he said, taking ten roubles from his pocketbook. `Will it be enough?'

`Enough or not enough, we must make it do,' said Matvei, slamming the carriage door and going back to the steps.

Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back to her bedroom. It was her only 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 Matriona 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 she had occupied when talking to her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands, her rings slipping down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over her recollections of the entire interview. `He has gone! But what has he finally arrived at 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 Matriona Philimonovna put her head in at the door.