He did not sleep the entire night, and his wrath, increasing in a sort of enormous progression, by morning had reached the ultimate limits. He dressed hurriedly and, as if carrying a full cup of wrath and fearing to spill it, fearing to lose along with it the energy needed for a talk with his wife, went into her room as soon as he knew that she was up.
Anna, who thought she knew her husband so well, was struck by his look when he came in. His brow was scowling, and his grim eyes stared straight ahead, avoiding hers; his lips were tightly and contemptuously compressed. In his stride, in his movements, in the sound of his voice there were such resolution and firmness as his wife had never seen in him before. He came into the room without greeting her, made straight for her writing desk and, taking the keys, opened the drawer.
‘What do you want?!’ she cried.
‘Your lover’s letters,’ he said.
‘They’re not here,’ she said, closing the drawer; but by that movement he understood that he had guessed right and, rudely pushing her hand away, he quickly snatched the portfolio in which he knew she kept her most important papers. She tried to tear it from him, but he pushed her away.3
‘Sit down! I must talk with you,’ he said, putting the portfolio under his arm and pressing it so tightly with his elbow that his shoulder rose up.
Surprised and intimidated, she gazed at him silently.
‘I told you that I would not allow you to receive your lover at home.’
‘I had to see him, in order to ...’
She stopped, unable to invent anything.
‘I will not go into the details of why a woman needs to see her lover.’
‘I wanted, I only ...’ she said, flushing. His rudeness annoyed her and gave her courage. ‘Can’t you feel how easy it is for you to insult me?’ she said.
‘One can insult an honest man or an honest woman, but to tell a thief that he is a thief is merely
‘This cruelty is a new feature - I did not know it was in you.’
‘You call it cruelty when a husband offers his wife freedom, giving her the honourable shelter of his name, only on condition that propriety is observed. Is that cruelty?’
‘It’s worse than cruelty, it’s baseness, if you really want to know!’ Anna cried out in a burst of anger and got up, intending to leave.
‘No!’ he shouted in his squeaky voice, which now rose a pitch higher than usual, and, seizing her arm so strongly with his big fingers that the bracelet he pressed left red marks on it, he forced her to sit down. ‘Baseness? Since you want to use that word, it is baseness to abandon a husband and son for a lover and go on eating the husband’s bread!’
She bowed her head. Not only did she not say what she had said the day before to her lover - that
‘You cannot describe my position as any worse than I myself understand it to be. But why are you saying all this?’
‘Why am I saying this? Why?’ he went on just as wrathfully. ‘So that you know that since you have not carried out my wish with regard to observing propriety, I shall take measures to bring this situation to an end.’
‘It will end soon anyway,’ she said, and again, at the thought of her near and now desired death, tears came to her eyes.
‘It will end sooner than you’ve thought up with your lover! You must satisfy your animal passions ...’
‘Alexei Alexandrovich! I will not say that it is not magnanimous, but it is not even respectable to hit someone who is down.’
‘Yes, you’re only mindful of yourself, but the suffering of the man who was your husband does not interest you. You are indifferent to the destruction of his whole life, to the suffering he has exple ... expre ... experimenced.’
Alexei Alexandrovich was speaking so quickly that he became confused and could not get the word out. He finally came out with ‘experimenced’. She nearly laughed and at the same time felt ashamed that anything could make her laugh at such a moment. And for the first time, momentarily, she felt for him, put herself in his place and pitied him. But what could she say or do? She bowed her head and was silent. He, too, was silent for a while and then began to speak in a cold and less squeaky voice, emphasizing the arbitrarily chosen words, which had no particular importance.
‘I’ve come to tell you ...’ he said.
She looked at him. ‘No, I imagined it,’ she thought, remembering the look on his face when he stumbled over the word ‘experimenced’, ‘no, how can a man with those dull eyes, with that smug calm, feel anything?’
‘There’s nothing I can change,’ she whispered.
‘I’ve come to tell you that I am leaving for Moscow tomorrow and will not return to this house again, and you will be informed of my decision through my lawyer, to whom I shall entrust the matter of the divorce. My son will move to my sister’s,’ Alexei Alexandrovich said, trying hard to recall what he had wanted to say about the son.
