Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [349]
On Levin’s advice, Darya Alexandrovna started out before dawn. The road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses ran at a merry pace, and on the box beside the coachman sat the clerk, whom Levin sent along instead of a footman for safety’s sake. Darya Alexandrovna dozed off and woke up only as they were approaching an inn where the horses were to be changed.
After having tea with the same rich muzhik-proprietor with whom Levin had stayed on his way to Sviyazhsky‘s, and talking with the women about children and with the old man about Count Vronsky, whom he praised very much, Darya Alexandrovna set off again at ten o’clock. At home, busy with the children, she never had time to think. But now, during this four-hour drive, all the previously repressed thoughts suddenly came crowding into her head, and she thought about the whole of her life as never before, and from all different sides. She herself found her thoughts strange. First she thought of her children, about whom she still worried, though the princess, and above all Kitty (she relied more on her), had promised to look after them. ‘What if Masha starts her pranks again, and what if Grisha gets kicked by a horse, and what if Lily’s stomach gets still more upset?’ But then the questions of the present were supplanted by questions of the near future. She began thinking that they ought to rent a new apartment in Moscow for the next winter, the furniture in the drawing room should be changed and a fur coat should be made for the oldest daughter. Then came thoughts of the more distant future: how she was going to send the children into the world. ‘Never mind about the girls - but the boys?
‘Very well, I can busy myself with Grisha now, but that’s because I’m now free myself, I’m not pregnant. Naturally, there’s no counting on Stiva. With the help of good people, I will send them out; but if there’s another child...’ And it occurred to her how incorrect the saying was about a curse being laid upon woman, that in pain she would bring forth children.6 ‘Never mind giving birth, but being pregnant - that’s the pain,’ she thought, picturing her last pregnancy and the death of that last child. And she remembered her conversation with the young peasant woman at the inn. To the question whether she had children, the beautiful young woman had cheerfully replied:
‘I had one girl, but God freed me, I buried her during Lent.’
‘And aren’t you very sorry about her?’ Darya Alexandrovna had asked.
‘Why be sorry? The old man has lots of grandchildren. Nothing but trouble. No work, no nothing. Just bondage.’
This answer had seemed repulsive to Darya Alexandrovna, despite the young woman’s good-natured prettiness, but now she inadvertently recalled those words. Cynical as they were, there was some truth in them.
‘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