Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/383

 and continues to live as of old. But for our unfortunate women this is not the case, and it was not for my wife. Let alone the diseases, how to cure them, she heard on all sides and read endlessly varied and eternally changed rules about how to rear and educate the children: to feed them with this and that, and in such a way,—no, not with this and that, and in such a way, but like this; to dress, give them drink, bathe, put them to bed, give them outings, air,—in regard to all these things we, but more especially she, learned new rules every week. It looked as though it was but yesterday that women had begun to bear children. And if a child was not fed so or so, not properly bathed and not in time, and it grew ill,—then the conclusion was that we were at fault, that we had not done right by it.

"There was enough trouble as long as they kept well; but let them get ill, and then, of course, it was a real hell. It is supposed that a disease can be cured and that there is a science about it, and people, the doctors, who know how to cure. Not all, but the very best know how. So the child is ill, and you must strike him, that best doctor, who can save, and the child will be saved; or if you do not get him, or you do not live in the place where that doctor lives, the child will perish. This is not her exclusive belief, but the belief of all the women of her circle, and she hears it on all sides: Ekaterina Seménovna has lost two, because she did not call Iván Zakhárych in time. Iván Zakhárych has saved Márya Ivánovna's elder daughter; at the Petróvs', they, by the doctor's advice, scattered to various hotels, and they survived;—they did not scatter, and the children died; such and such a one had a weak child, and they went to the south, by the doctor's advice, and saved the child. How can she help worrying and suffering all her life when the lives of her children, to whom she is animally attached, depend upon her finding out in time what Iván Zakhárych may say