Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/384

 about it? But what Iván Zakhárych will say, nobody knows, least of all he himself, because he knows full well that he knows nothing and is unable to be of any use, and continues making haphazard guesses, in order that people should not lose faith in his knowledge. If she were all animal, she would not worry so much; if she were all man, she would have faith in God, and she would say and think as believers say: 'God hath given, God hath taken, you cannot go away from God.'

"The whole life with the children had been for my wife, consequently also for me, not a pleasure, but a torment. How could this have been avoided? She was in eternal worry. We would calm down from some scene of jealousy or simply from a quarrel, and we would try to live in peace, to read and think, or we would take up some work, when the sudden news would be brought to us that Vásya was vomiting, or Másha was having a bleeding spell, or Andryúsha had an eruption,—well, there was an end to peace. Now the question was: 'Where must one gallop? for what doctors? how shall the children be isolated?' And there would begin clysters, temperatures, mixtures, and doctors. No sooner would one thing be finished, than another began. There was no regular, settled domestic life. There was only, as I have told you, an eternal anxiety on account of imaginary or real dangers. It is so now in the majority of families. In my family this was very pronounced. My wife was fond of her children and credulous.

"Thus the presence of children did not improve our life; it only poisoned it. Besides, the children were a new cause for dissensions. The children themselves were the means and objects of dissensions from the moment they existed, and the older they grew, the more frequently was this so. The children were not only the objects of our dissensions, but also the weapons of our battles,—we used our children, as it were, to fight each other with.