Family Happiness by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (books to read this summer .TXT) đź“–
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distance, as if fearing a sentimental scene. “Is it possible that he still
thinks himself in the right?” I wondered; and, though I was quite ready to
explain and to beg that we might not go to the party, the words died on my
lips.
“I must write to my mother that we have put off our departure,” he said;
“otherwise she will be uneasy.”
“When do you think of going?” I asked.
“On Tuesday, after the reception,” he replied.
“I hope it is not on my account,” I said, looking into his eyes; but those
eyes merely looked — they said nothing, and a veil seemed to cover them from
me. His face seemed to me to have grown suddenly old and disagreeable.
We went to the reception, and good friendly relations between us seemed to
have been restored, but these relations were quite different from what they
had been.
At the party I was sitting with other ladies when the Prince came up to me,
so that I had to stand up in order to speak to him. As I rose, my eyes
involuntarily sought my husband. He was looking at me from the other end of
the room, and now turned away. I was seized by a sudden sense of shame and
pain; in my confusion I blushed all over my face and neck under the
Prince’s eye. But I was forced to stand and listen, while he spoke, eyeing
me from his superior height. Our conversation was soon over: there was no
room for him beside me, and he, no doubt, felt that I was uncomfortable with
him. We talked of the last ball, of where I should spend the summer, and so
on. As he left me, he expressed a wish to make the acquaintance of my
husband, and I saw them meet and begin a conversation at the far end of the
room. The Prince evidently said something about me; for he smiled in the
middle of their talk and looked in my direction.
My husband suddenly flushed up. He made a low bow and turned away from the
prince without being dismissed. I blushed too: I was ashamed of the
impression which I and, still more, my husband must have made on the Prince.
Everyone, I thought, must have noticed my awkward shyness when I was
presented, and my husband’s eccentric behavior. “Heaven knows how they will
interpret such conduct? Perhaps they know already about my scene with my
husband!”
Princess D. drove me home, and on the way I spoke to her about my husband.
My patience was at an end, and I told her the whole story of what had taken
place between us owing to this unlucky party. To calm me, she said that such
differences were very common and quite unimportant, and that our quarrel
would leave no trace behind. She explained to me her view of my husband’s
character — that he had become very stiff and unsociable. I agreed, and
believed that I had learned to judge him myself more calmly and more truly.
but when I was alone with my husband later, the thought that I had sat in
judgment upon him weighed like a crime upon my conscience; and I felt that
the gulf which divided us had grown still greater.
From that day there was a complete change in our life and our relations to
each other. We were no longer as happy when we were alone together as
before. To certain subjects we gave a wide berth, and conversation flowed
more easily in the presence of a third person. When the talk turned on life
in the country, or on a ball, we were uneasy and shrank from looking at one
another. Both of us knew where the gulf between us lay, and seemed afraid to
approach it. I was convinced that he was proud and irascible, and that I
must be careful not to touch him on his weak point. He was equally sure that
I disliked the country and was dying for social distraction, and that he
must put up with this unfortunate taste of mine. We both avoided frank
conversation on these topics, and each misjudged the other. We had long
ceased to think each other the most perfect people in the world; each now
judged the other in secret, and measured the offender by the standard of
other people. I fell ill before we left Petersburg, and we went from there
to a house near town, from which my husband went on alone, to join his
mother at Nikolskoye. By that time I was well enough to have gone with him,
but he urged me to stay on the pretext of my health. I knew, however, that
he was really afraid we should be uncomfortable together in the country; so
I did not insist much, and he went off alone. I felt it dull and solitary in
his absence; but when he came back, I saw that he did not add to my life
what he had added formerly. In the old days every thought and experience
weighed on me like a crime till I had imparted it to him; every action and
word of his seemed to me a model of perfection; we often laughed for joy at
the mere sight of each other. But these relations had changed, so
imperceptibly that we had not even noticed their disappearance. Separate
interests and cares, which we no longer tried to share, made their
appearance, and even the fact of our estrangement ceased to trouble us. The
idea became familiar, and, before a year had passed, each could look at the
other without confusion. His fits of boyish merriment with me had quite
vanished; his mood of calm indulgence to all that passed, which used to
provoke me, had disappeared; there was an end of those penetrating looks
which used to confuse and delight me, an end of the ecstasies and prayers
which we once shared in common. We did not even meet often: he was
continually absent, with no fears or regrets for leaving me alone; and I was
constantly in society, where I did not need him.
There were no further scenes or quarrels between us. I tried to satisfy him,
he carried out all my wishes, and we seemed to love each other.
When we were by ourselves, which we seldom were, I felt neither joy nor
excitement nor embarrassment in his company: it seemed like being alone. I
realized that he was my husband and no mere stranger, a good man, and as
familiar to me as my own self. I was convinced that I knew just what he
would say and do, and how he would look; and if anything he did surprised
me, I concluded that he had made a mistake. I expected nothing from him. In
a word, he was my husband — and that was all. It seemed to me that things
must be so, as a matter of course, and that no other relations between us
had ever existed. When he left home, especially at first, I was lonely and
frightened and felt keenly my need of support; when he came back, I ran to
his arms with joy, though tow hours later my joy was quite forgotten, and I
found nothing to say to him. Only at moments which sometimes occurred
between us of quiet undemonstrative affection, I felt something wrong and
some pain at my heart, and I seemed to read the same story in his eyes. I
was conscious of a limit to tenderness, which he seemingly would not, and I
could not, overstep. This saddened me sometimes; but I had no leisure to
reflect on anything, and my regret for a change which I vaguely realized I
tried to drown in the distractions which were always within my reach.
Fashionable life, which had dazzled me at first by its glitter and flattery
of my self-love, now took entire command of my nature, became a habit, laid
its fetters upon me, and monopolized my capacity for feeling. I could not
bear solitude, and was afraid to reflect on my position. My whole day, from
late in the morning till late at night, was taken up by the claims of
society; even if I stayed at home, my time was not my own. this no longer
seemed to me either gay or dull, but it seemed that so, and not otherwise,
it always had to be.
So three years passed, during which our relations to one another remained
unchanged and seemed to have taken a fixed shape which could not become
either better or worse. Though two events of importance in our family life
took place during that time, neither of them changed my own life. These were
the birth of my first child and the death of Tatyana Semyonovna. At first
the feeling of motherhood did take hold of me with such power, and produce
in me such a passion of unanticipated joy, that I believed this would prove
the beginning of a new life for me. But, in the course of two months, when I
began to go out again, my feeling grew weaker and weaker, till it passed
into mere habit and the lifeless performance of a duty. My husband, on the
contrary, from the birth of our first boy, became his old self again —
gentle, composed, and home-loving, and transferred to the child his old
tenderness and gaiety. Many a night when I went, dressed for a ball, to the
nursery, to sign the child with the cross before he slept, I found my
husband there and felt his eyes fixed on me with something of reproof in
their serious gaze. Then I was ashamed and even shocked by my own
callousness, and asked myself if I was worse than other women. “But it
can’t be helped,” I said to myself; “I love my child, but to sit beside him
all day long would bore me; and nothing will make me pretend what I do not
really feel.”
His mother’s death was a great sorrow to my husband; he said that he found
it painful to go on living at Nikolskoye. For myself, although I mourned for
her and sympathized with my husband’s sorrow, Yet I found life in that house
easier and pleasanter after her death. Most of those three years we spent in
town: I went only once to Nikolskoye for two months; and the third year we
went abroad and spent the summer at Baden.
I was then twenty-one; our financial position was, I believed, satisfactory;
my domestic life gave me all that I asked of it; everyone I knew, it seemed
to me, loved me; my health was good; I was the best-dressed woman in Baden;
I knew that I was good looking; the weather was fine; I enjoyed the
atmosphere of beauty and refinement; and, in short, I was in excellent
spirits. They had once been even higher at Nikolskoye, when my happiness was
in myself and came from the feeling that I deserved to be happy, and from
the anticipation of still greater happiness to come. That was a different
state of things; but I did very well this summer also. I had no special
wishes or hopes of fears; it seemed to me that my life was full and my
conscience easy. Among all the visitors at Baden that season there was no
one man whom I preferred to the rest, or even to our old ambassador, Prince
K., who was assiduous in his attentions to me. One was young, and another
old; one was English and fair, another French and wore a beard — to me they
were all alike, but all indispensable. Indistinguishable as they
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