Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/387

 either of us. In me, at least, a terrible hatred for her was frequently fermenting. I frequently looked at her, while she poured out the tea, swung her foot, or carried the spoon to her mouth and noisily sipped a liquid, and I hated her for it as for the meanest act. I did not notice then that the periods of irritation arose quite regularly and evenly in me, corresponding to the periods of what we called love. A period of love, then a period of irritation; an energetic period of love, a long period of irritation; a more feeble manifestation of love, a short period of irritation. We did not understand then that love and anger were the same animal sensations, only from opposite ends.

"It would have been terrible to live thus if we had understood our situation; but we did not understand, nor see it. A man's salvation, and punishment at the same time, when he lives irregularly, lies in the fact that he can befog himself, in order not to see the wretchedness of his situation. This we did. She tried to forget herself in tense, always hurried occupations with household affairs, with her own and her children's toilets, and with her children's studies and health. I had my own affairs: drinking, service, the chase, cards. We were both all the time occupied. Both of us felt that the more we were occupied, the more infuriated we could be at each other. 'It is easy enough for you to make grimaces,' thought I, 'but you have worn me out with your all-night scenes, and here I have to attend a meeting.' 'You are all right,' she not only thought, but even said, 'but I have sat up all night with the baby.' All these new theories of hypnotism, mental diseases, and hysterics,—all that is not a simple, but a dangerous and abominable insipidity. Charcot would, no doubt, have said about my wife that she was hysterical, and of me he would have said that I was abnormal, and would have, no doubt, begun to cure me. But there was nothing there to cure.