444 445
every manifestation of life in himself, and so neither stirred nor looked
at her. This was what had caused that strange expression of deathlike
rigidity in his face which had so impressed Anna.
When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the
carriage, and making an effort to master himself, took leave of her with
his usual urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound him to nothing;
he said that tomorrow he would let her know his decision.
His wife’s words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a cruel
pang to the heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch. That pang was intensi-
fied by the strange feeling of physical pity for her set up by her tears.
But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexey Alexandrovitch, to
his surprise and delight, felt complete relief both from this pity and
from the doubts and agonies of jealousy.
He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out
after suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense
of something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw,
the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at once
that what has so long poisoned his existence and enchained his atten-
tion, exists no longer, and that he can live and think again, and take
interest in other things besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey
Alexandrovitch was experiencing. The agony had been strange and
terrible, but now it was over; he felt that he could live again and think
of something other than his wife.
“No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it
and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her,” he
said to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen
it: he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen
anything wrong before—now these incidents proved clearly that she
had always been a corrupt woman. “I made a mistake in linking my life
to hers; but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be
unhappy. It’s not I that am to blame,” he told himself, “but she. But I
have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me...”
Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom his senti-
ments were as much changed as towards her, ceased to interest him.
The only thing that interested him now was the question of in what
way he could best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and
thus with most justice, extricate himself from the mud with which she
had spattered him in her fall, and then proceed along his path of active,
honorable, and useful existence.
“I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman
has committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of the
difficult position in which she has placed me. And I shall find it,” he
said to himself, frowning more and more. “I’m not the first nor the last.”
And to say nothing of historical instances dating from the “Fair Helen”
of Menelaus, recently revived in the memory of all, a whole list of
contemporary examples of husbands with unfaithful wives in the high-
est society rose before Alexey Alexandrovitch’s imagination. “Daryalov,
Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram.... Yes, even Dram,
such an honest, capable fellow...Semyonov, Tchagin, Sigonin,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch remembered. “Admitting that a certain quite irratio-
nal ridicule falls to the lot of these men, yet I never saw anything but a
misfortune in it, and always felt sympathy for it,” Alexey Alexandrovitch
said to himself, though indeed this was not the fact, and he had never
felt sympathy for misfortunes of that kind, but the more frequently he
had heard of instances of unfaithful wives betraying their husbands,
the more highly he had thought of himself. “It is a misfortune which
may befall anyone. And this misfortune has befallen me. The only
thing to be done is to make the best of the position.”