Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/370



passengers entered and seated themselves on a distant bench. He kept silent while they were seating themselves, but as soon as they quieted down he proceeded, apparently not losing the thread of his thoughts for a minute even.

"The vilest thing about it is," he began, "that in theory love is something ideal, elevated, whereas in practice it is abominable, swinish, a thing of which it is abominable and a shame to think and speak. Nature has purposely made it abominable and shameful. And if it is an abomination and a shame, it ought to be understood as such, whereas people, on the contrary, pretend that this abomination and shame is beautiful and elevated. What were the first signs of my love? They were these: I abandoned myself to animal excesses, not only feeling no shame, but somehow priding myself on the possibility of these physical excesses, paying not the least attention to her spiritual, nay, not even to her physical, life. I was bewildered to discover whence our animosity to each other came, but it was quite simple: this animosity was nothing but a protest of human nature against the animal which oppressed it.

"I marvelled at our mutual enmity. How could it have been otherwise? This hatred was nothing but the hatred which is common to participators in a crime, both for the incitement to the crime, and for the part taken in it. What else was it but a crime, when she, poor woman, became pregnant in the first month, and our swinish union still continued? You think that I am deviating