Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/339

 emitting his peculiar sound. "In that case there is no reason for sleeping together (pardon my coarseness). As it is, people sleep together on account of oneness of ideals," he said, bursting into a nervous laugh.

"But pardon me," said the lawyer, "facts contradict your statement. We do see that marital relations exist, that all humankind, or the majority of it, live a conjugal life, and many persevere honestly in a protracted conjugal life."

The gray-haired gentleman laughed out once more.

"At first you say that marriage is based on love, and when I express a doubt in the existence of a love other than the sensual, you prove to me the existence of love in the fact that marriages exist. Yes, but marriages are mere deception in our days!"

"You will pardon me," said the lawyer, "all I said was that marriages have always existed."

"They have. But what makes them exist? They have existed with those people who in marriage see something mysterious,—a mystery which puts them under obligations in the sight of God,—there they have existed. With us, people marry, seeing in marriage nothing but cohabitation, and from this results either deception or violence. If it is a deception, it is easily borne. Husband and wife deceive others by making them believe that they are monogamous, whereas they are polygamous and polyandrous. This is bad, but it will pass; but when, as so very frequently happens, husband and wife have assumed the external obligation to live together all their lives, and they begin to hate each other from the second month on, and wish to separate, and still continue to live together, then there results that terrible hell which leads people to take to drink, to shoot, kill, and poison themselves and each other." He spoke ever more rapidly, without giving anybody a chance to interpose a word, and getting more and more excited. It was an awkward situation.