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The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment...then the
nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains....”
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the
pain from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child.
“Then the children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then
bringing them up; evil propensities” (she thought of little Masha’s
crime among the raspberries), “education, Latin—it’s all so incompre-
hensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these
children.” And there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory,
that always tore her mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby,
who had died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the
little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the
sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the open,
wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was
being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.
“And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m
wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or
nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and worry-
ing others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are growing up
unhappy, badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if it weren’t for
spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we should be
managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much tact that
we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on. They’ll have children, they won’t be
able to keep us; it’s a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly
anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can’t even bring the
children up by myself, and may find it hard with the help of other
people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we suppose the great-
est good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow.
At the very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can hope
for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil!... One’s whole
life ruined!” Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had
said, and again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help
admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.
“Is it far now, Mihail?” Darya Alexandrovna asked the counting
house clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were frightening her.
“From this village, they say, it’s five miles.” The carriage drove
along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd
of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders,
gaily and noisily chattering. They stood still on the bridge, staring
inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna
looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of their enjoy-
ment of life. “They’re all living, they’re all enjoying life,” Darya
Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant women
and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft
springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it were from prison, from
the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about me
now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my sister
Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all, but not
I.
“And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have,
anyway, a husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do
love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She
wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have
done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening
to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought
then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I
might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as
it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she thought about her