‘In the fourth year we both, it seemed, came to the conclusion that we could not understand one another or agree with one another. We no longer tried to bring any dispute to a conclusion. We invariably kept to our own opinions even about the most trivial questions,54 but especially about the children. As I now recall them the views I maintained were not at all so dear to me that I could not have given them up; but she was of the opposite opinion and to yield meant yielding to her, and that I could not do. It was the same with her. She probably considered herself quite in the right towards me, and as for me I always thought myself a saint towards her. When we were alone together we were doomed almost to silence, or to conversations such as I am convinced animals can carry on with one another: “What is the time? Time to go to bed. What is to-day’s dinner? Where shall we go? What is there in the papers? Send for the doctor; Másha has a sore throat.” We only needed to go a hairbreadth beyond this impossibly limited circle of conversation for irritation to flare up.55 We had collisions and acrimonious words about the coffee, a table-cloth, a trap, a lead at bridge,12 all of them things that could not be of any importance to either of us. In me at any rate there often raged a terrible hatred of her. Sometimes I watched her pouring out tea, swinging her leg, lifting a spoon to her mouth, smacking her lips and drawing in some liquid, and I hated her for these things as though they were the worst possible actions. I did not then notice that the periods of anger corresponded quite regularly and exactly to the periods of what we called love. A period of love – then a period of animosity; an energetic period of love, then a long period of animosity; a weaker manifestation of love, and a shorter period of animosity. We did not then understand that this love and animosity were one and the same animal feeling only at opposite poles. To live like that would have been awful had we understood our position; but we neither understood nor saw it. Both salvation and punishment for man lie in the fact that if he lives wrongly he can befog himself so as not to see the misery of his position. And this we did. She tried to forget herself in intense and always hurried occupation with household affairs, busying herself with the arrangements of the house, her own and the children’s clothes, their lessons, and their health;56 while I had my own occupations: wine, my office duties, shooting, and cards. We were both continually occupied, and we both felt that the busier we were the nastier we might be to each other. “It’s all very well for you to grimace,” I thought, “but you have harassed me all night with your scenes, and I have a meeting on.” “It’s all very well for you,” she not only thought but said, “but I have been awake all night with the baby.” Those new theories of hypnotism, psychic diseases, and hysterics are not a simple folly, but a dangerous and repulsive one. Charcot would certainly have said that my wife was hysterical, and that I was abnormal, and he would no doubt have tried to cure me. But there was nothing to cure.57
‘Thus we lived in a perpetual fog, not seeing the condition we were in. And if what did happen had not happened, I should have gone on living so to old age and should have thought, when dying, that I had led a good life. I should not have realized the abyss of misery and the horrible falsehood in which I wallowed.
‘We were like two convicts hating each other and chained together, poisoning one another’s lives and trying not to see it. I did not then know that ninety-nine per cent. of married people live in a similar hell to the one I was in and that it cannot be otherwise. I did not then know this either about others or about myself.
‘It is strange what coincidences there are in regular, or even in irregular, lives! Just when the parents find life together unendurable, it becomes necessary to move to town for the children’s education.’
He stopped, and once or twice gave vent to his strange sounds, which were now quite like suppressed sobs. We were approaching a station.
‘What is the time?’ he asked.
I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock.
‘You are not tired?’ he asked.
‘No, but you are?’
‘I am suffocating. Excuse me, I will walk up and down and drink some water.’
He went unsteadily through the carriage. I remained alone thinking over what he had said, and I was so engrossed in thought that I did not notice when he re-entered by the door at the other end of the carriage.
XVIII
‘YES, I keep diverging,’ he began. ‘I have thought much over it. I now see many things differently and I want to express it.
