The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Kreutzer Sonata/Chapter 5
V.
"Yes, that is so. Then it went farther, and farther, and there were all kinds of deviations. O God! I am horrified when I think of all my villainies. This is the way I think of myself, whom my companions ridiculed for my so-called innocence. But when you hear of the golden youths, of the officers, of the Parisians! And all these gentlemen, and I, whenever we, thirty-year-old debauchees, who have upon our souls hundreds of the most varied and terrible crimes in regard to women, when we, thirty-year-old debauchees, cleanly washed, shaven, perfumed, in clean linen, in evening dress or uniform, enter a drawing-room or appear at a ball,—we are emblems of purity, charming!
"Consider what it ought to be and what it is! It ought to be that if, in society, such a gentleman comes up to my sister or daughter, I, knowing his life, ought to walk over to him, to call him aside, and quietly to say to him: 'Dear sir, I know the kind of a life you lead and with whom you pass your nights. This is not the place for you. Here are pure, innocent girls. Go away!' Thus it ought to be; whereas, in reality, when such a gentleman makes his appearance and dances with my sister or daughter, and embraces her, we rejoice, if he happens to be rich and has influential connections. Maybe he will honour my daughter after Rigolboge! Even if traces of the disease are left,—that does not matter much,—nowadays they cure well. Really, I know several girls of high life who have with delight been married off by their parents to men suffering from a well-known disease. Oh, oh, what abomination! The time will come when such abomination and lie shall be laid bare!"
He several times emitted his strange sounds, and took to drinking tea. The tea was dreadfully strong,—there was no water with which to weaken it. I felt that the two glasses which I had drunk had made me very nervous. The tea seemed to have affected him, too, for he became ever more agitated. His voice became more and more sonorous and expressive. He continually changed his position; he now took off his cap, and now put it on again, and his face assumed strange forms in the semidarkness in which we were sitting.
"Well, thus I lived to my thirtieth year, not giving up for a minute my intention of marrying and preparing for a most elevated and pure family life. For this purpose I looked around for a girl who would best answer to these requirements," he continued. "I besmirched myself in the mire of debauchery, and, at the same time, scrutinized girls to see who from her purity would be most worthy of me.
"I threw out many of them simply because they were not sufficiently pure for my purpose; finally I found one whom I considered worthy of me. She was one of two daughters of a former rich Pénza landed proprietor, who had lost his fortune.
"One evening, after we had had an outing in a boat, and in the night, when we returned home in the moonlight, and I was sitting near her and admiring her stately figure, which was well set off by a jersey, and her locks, I suddenly decided that it was she. It appeared to me on that evening that she understood everything, everything which I felt and thought, and that I felt and thought nothing but the most elevated things, whereas in reality it was only that her jersey and her locks were very becoming to her, and that after a day passed near her I longed for a greater approximation to her.
"It is wonderful how complete the illusion is that beauty is identical with goodness. A beautiful woman says insipid things, but you hear only cleverness. She speaks and does unseemly things, and you see only charm. And when she says no insipidities and does nothing unseemly, you at once come to the conclusion that she is wonderfully clever and moral!
"I returned home in transport and decided that she was the acme of moral perfection, and that therefore she was worthy of being my wife, and so I proposed to her the very next day.
"What a chaos that is! Out of a thousand men who are marrying, not only in our circle, but, unfortunately, also among the masses, there is hardly one who has not been married, like Don Juan, ten, or a hundred, or even a thousand times before his wedding.
"It is true, I now hear of young men—and I have observed it to be so—who feel and know that it is not a joke, but a great deed.
"God help them! But in my days there was not one such in ten thousand. All know this, and yet they pretend not to know it. In all the novels we have detailed descriptions of the heroes, and of ponds and bushes, near which they walk; but, in describing their great love for some maiden, there is nothing said about what had taken place before with the interesting hero,—not a word of his frequenting certain houses, of chambermaids, cooks, and other people's wives. And if there are such indecent novels, they are never put into the hands of those who, above all others, ought to know it, into girls' hands.
"At first we pretend before these girls that the debauchery which fills one-half of our cities, and even of the villages, does not exist at all.
"Then we all get so used to this pretence that, like the English, we begin sincerely to believe that we are all moral people and live in a moral world. These maidens—poor maidens—believe this quite in earnest. Even thus my wife believed it. I remember how once, while engaged to her, I showed her my diary, from which she could tell, even though only in a slight degree, what my past had been, but more especially what my last liaison had been. This she might have learned from others, and I, for some reason, felt the necessity of informing her of it. I remember her terror, despair, and confusion, when she learned this and comprehended it. I saw that she wanted to give me up. Why did she not?"
He emitted his sound, gulped down another swallow of tea, and kept silent.