‘And generally,’ thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back at the whole of her life in those fifteen years of marriage, ‘pregnancy, nausea, dullness of mind, indifference to everything, and, above all, ugliness. Kitty, young and pretty Kitty, even she has lost her good looks, but when I’m pregnant I get ugly, I know it. Labour, suffering, ugly suffering, that last moment... then nursing, the sleepless nights, the terrible pains...’
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from cracked nipples that she had endured with almost every child. ‘Then the children’s illnesses, this eternal fear; then their upbringing, vile inclinations’ (she remembered little Masha’s crime in the raspberries), ‘education, Latin - all of it so incomprehensible and difficult. And on top of it all, the death of these same children.’ And again there came to her imagination the cruel memory, eternally gnawing at her mother’s heart, of the death of her last infant boy, who had died of croup, his funeral, the universal indifference before that small, pink coffin, and her own heart-rending, lonely pain before the pale little forehead with curls at the temples, before the opened, surprised little mouth she had glimpsed in the coffin just as it was covered by the pink lid with the lace cross.
‘And all that for what? What will come of it all? That I, having not a moment’s peace, now pregnant, now nursing, eternally angry, grumpy, tormented myself and tormenting others, repulsive to my husband, will live my life out and bring up unfortunate, poorly educated and destitute children. Even now, if we weren’t with the Levins, I don’t know how we’d live. Of course, Kostya and Kitty are so delicate that we don’t notice it; but it can’t go on. They’ll start having children and won’t be able to help us; they’re in tight straits even now. Is papa, who has kept almost nothing for himself, to help us? And so I can’t set my children up myself, but only with the help of others, in humiliation. Well, and if we take the most fortunate outcome: the children won’t die any more, and I’ll bring them up somehow. At best they simply won’t turn out to be scoundrels. That’s all I can wish for. And for that so much torment, so much work ... A whole life ruined!’ Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and again the recollection was vile to her; but she could not help admitting that there was a dose of crude truth in those words.
‘Is it far now, Mikhaila?’ Darya Alexandrovna asked the clerk, to get her mind off these thoughts that frightened her.
‘Five miles from this village, they say.’
The carriage drove down the village street on to a bridge. Along the bridge, with cheerful, ringing talk, went a crowd of merry peasant women with plaited sheaf-binders on their shoulders. The women stopped on the bridge, gazing curiously at the carriage. The faces turned to her all seemed healthy and cheerful to Darya Alexandrovna, taunting her with the joy of life.
‘And they all fall upon Anna. What for? Am I any better? I at least have a husband I love. Not as I’d have wanted to love, but I do love him, and Anna did not love hers. How is she to blame, then? She wants to live. God has put that into our souls. I might very well have done the same. Even now I don’t know if I did the right thing to listen to her that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought to have left my husband then and started life over from the beginning. I might have loved and been loved in a real way. And is it better now? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,’ she thought about her husband, ‘and so I put up with him. Is that better? I could still have been liked then, I still had some of my beauty,’ Darya Alexandrovna went on thinking and wanted to look in the mirror. She had a travelling mirror in her bag and would have liked to take it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the rocking clerk, she felt she would be embarrassed if one of them turned round, and so she did not take the mirror out.
