Family Happiness by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (ereader with android txt) 📕

From that day there was a complete change in our life and our relations to

each other. We were no longer as happy when we were alone together as

before. To certain subjects we gave a wide berth, and conversation flowed

more easily in the presence of a third person. When the talk turned on life

in the country, or on a ball, we were uneasy and shrank from looking at one

another. Both of us knew where the gulf between us lay, and seemed afraid to

approach it. I was convinced that he was proud and irascible, and that I

must be careful not to touch him on his weak point. He was equally sure that

I disliked the country and was dying for social distraction, and that he

must put up with this unfortunate taste of mine. We both avoided frank

conversation on these topics, and each misjudged the other. We had long

ceased to think each other the most perfect people in the world; each now

judged the other in secret, and measured the offender by the standard of

other people. I fell ill before we left Petersburg, and we went from there

to a house near town, from which my husband went on alone, to join his

mother at Nikolskoye. By that time I was well enough to have gone with him,

but he urged me to stay on the pretext of my health. I knew, however, that

he was really afraid we should be uncomfortable together in the country; so

I did not insist much, and he went off alone. I felt it dull and solitary in

his absence; but when he came back, I saw that he did not add to my life

what he had added formerly. In the old days every thought and experience

weighed on me like a crime till I had imparted it to him; every action and

word of his seemed to me a model of perfection; we often laughed for joy at

the mere sight of each other. But these relations had changed, so

imperceptibly that we had not even noticed their disappearance. Separate

interests and cares, which we no longer tried to share, made their

appearance, and even the fact of our estrangement ceased to trouble us. The

idea became familiar, and, before a year had passed, each could look at the

other without confusion. His fits of boyish merriment with me had quite

vanished; his mood of calm indulgence to all that passed, which used to

provoke me, had disappeared; there was an end of those penetrating looks

which used to confuse and delight me, an end of the ecstasies and prayers

which we once shared in common. We did not even meet often: he was

continually absent, with no fears or regrets for leaving me alone; and I was

constantly in society, where I did not need him.

There were no further scenes or quarrels between us. I tried to satisfy him,

he carried out all my wishes, and we seemed to love each other.

When we were by ourselves, which we seldom were, I felt neither joy nor

excitement nor embarrassment in his company: it seemed like being alone. I

realized that he was my husband and no mere stranger, a good man, and as

familiar to me as my own self. I was convinced that I knew just what he

would say and do, and how he would look; and if anything he did surprised

me, I concluded that he had made a mistake. I expected nothing from him. In

a word, he was my husband — and that was all. It seemed to me that things

must be so, as a matter of course, and that no other relations between us

had ever existed. When he left home, especially at first, I was lonely and

frightened and felt keenly my need of support; when he came back, I ran to

his arms with joy, though tow hours later my joy was quite forgotten, and I

found nothing to say to him. Only at moments which sometimes occurred

between us of quiet undemonstrative affection, I felt something wrong and

some pain at my heart, and I seemed to read the same story in his eyes. I

was conscious of a limit to tenderness, which he seemingly would not, and I

could not, overstep. This saddened me sometimes; but I had no leisure to

reflect on anything, and my regret for a change which I vaguely realized I

tried to drown in the distractions which were always within my reach.

Fashionable life, which had dazzled me at first by its glitter and flattery

of my self-love, now took entire command of my nature, became a habit, laid

its fetters upon me, and monopolized my capacity for feeling. I could not

bear solitude, and was afraid to reflect on my position. My whole day, from

late in the morning till late at night, was taken up by the claims of

society; even if I stayed at home, my time was not my own. this no longer

seemed to me either gay or dull, but it seemed that so, and not otherwise,

it always had to be.

So three years passed, during which our relations to one another remained

unchanged and seemed to have taken a fixed shape which could not become

either better or worse. Though two events of importance in our family life

took place during that time, neither of them changed my own life. These were

the birth of my first child and the death of Tatyana Semyonovna. At first

the feeling of motherhood did take hold of me with such power, and produce

in me such a passion of unanticipated joy, that I believed this would prove

the beginning of a new life for me. But, in the course of two months, when I

began to go out again, my feeling grew weaker and weaker, till it passed

into mere habit and the lifeless performance of a duty. My husband, on the

contrary, from the birth of our first boy, became his old self again —

gentle, composed, and home-loving, and transferred to the child his old

tenderness and gaiety. Many a night when I went, dressed for a ball, to the

nursery, to sign the child with the cross before he slept, I found my

husband there and felt his eyes fixed on me with something of reproof in

their serious gaze. Then I was ashamed and even shocked by my own

callousness, and asked myself if I was worse than other women. “But it

can’t be helped,” I said to myself; “I love my child, but to sit beside him

all day long would bore me; and nothing will make me pretend what I do not

really feel.”

His mother’s death was a great sorrow to my husband; he said that he found

it painful to go on living at Nikolskoye. For myself, although I mourned for

her and sympathized with my husband’s sorrow, Yet I found life in that house

easier and pleasanter after her death. Most of those three years we spent in

town: I went only once to Nikolskoye for two months; and the third year we

went abroad and spent the summer at Baden.

I was then twenty-one; our financial position was, I believed, satisfactory;

my domestic life gave me all that I asked of it; everyone I knew, it seemed

to me, loved me; my health was good; I was the best-dressed woman in Baden;

I knew that I was good looking; the weather was fine; I enjoyed the

atmosphere of beauty and refinement; and, in short, I was in excellent

spirits. They had once been even higher at Nikolskoye, when my happiness was

in myself and came from the feeling that I deserved to be happy, and from

the anticipation of still greater happiness to come. That was a different

state of things; but I did very well this summer also. I had no special

wishes or hopes of fears; it seemed to me that my life was full and my

conscience easy. Among all the visitors at Baden that season there was no

one man whom I preferred to the rest, or even to our old ambassador, Prince

K., who was assiduous in his attentions to me. One was young, and another

old; one was English and fair, another French and wore a beard — to me they

were all alike, but all indispensable. Indistinguishable as they