The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Schroeder came the next day. She was very surprised and kept looking first at Schroeder and then at me.

  “But I’m well,” she said, with a vague smile.

  Schroeder did not examine her much (these medical men are haughtily careless at times), and only told me in the other room that it was a leftover from her illness and that come spring it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go somewhere to the sea, or if that was impossible, simply to take a country house. In short, he said nothing except that there was weakness or some such thing. When Schroeder left, she suddenly said to me again, looking at me terribly seriously:

  “I’m quite, quite well.”

  But having said this, she straightaway blushed all at once, apparently with shame. Apparently, it was shame. Oh, now I understand: she was ashamed that I was still her husband, looking after her, still as if I were a real husband. But I didn’t understand it then and ascribed her color to humility (the veil!).

  And then, a month after that, between four and five o’clock, in April, on a bright sunny day, I was sitting in my shop making calculations. Suddenly I heard her, in our room, at her table, at her work, softly, softly… singing. This novelty produced a tremendous impression on me, and to this day I haven’t understood it. Up to then I’d hardly ever heard her sing, except in the very first days, when I brought her into my house and we could still frolic, shooting at a target with the revolver. Then her voice was still rather strong, ringing, though unsteady, but terribly pleasant and healthy. Now, however, her little song was so feeble—oh, not that it was plaintive (it was some romance), but in her voice there was something as if cracked, broken, as if her little voice couldn’t manage it, as if the song itself were sick. She was singing in a half voice, and suddenly, after rising, the voice broke off—such a poor little voice, and it broke off so pitifully; she coughed and again softly, softly, barely, barely began to sing…

  My alarm will be laughed at, but no one will ever understand why I was so alarmed! No, I wasn’t sorry for her yet, it was something quite different as yet. To begin with, at least in the first minutes, there suddenly came perplexity and terrible astonishment, terrible and strange, painful and almost vengeful. “She’s singing, and with me here! Has she forgotten about me, or what?”

  All shaken, I sat where I was, then suddenly got up, took my hat, and walked out, as if uncomprehending. At least I don’t know why or where. Lukerya started helping me with my coat.

  “She sings?” I said to Lukerya involuntarily. She didn’t understand and stared at me, continuing not to understand; however, it was actually impossible to understand me.

  “Is it the first time she’s singing?”

  “No, she sometimes sings when you’re out,” Lukerya replied.

  I remember everything. I went down the stairs, walked out, and let my feet take me wherever they wanted to go. I walked as far as the corner and began staring somewhere. People were passing by, pushing me, I didn’t feel it. I hailed a cab and told the driver to go to the Police Bridge, I don’t know why. But then I suddenly dropped him and gave him twenty kopecks:

  “It’s for having bothered you,” I said, laughing to him senselessly, but in my heart some sort of rapture suddenly began.

  I turned toward home, quickening my pace. The cracked, poor, broken little note suddenly began to ring again in my soul. I was breathless. The veil was falling, falling from my eyes! If she’d begun singing with me there, it meant she’d forgotten about me—that’s what was clear and terrible. This my heart felt. Yet rapture shone in my soul and overcame fear.

  Oh, the irony of fate! There was and could have been nothing else in my soul all winter except this very rapture, but where had I myself been all winter? Had I been there with my soul? I ran up the stairs in great haste, I don’t know whether I walked in timidly. I remember only that the whole floor was as if undulating and I was as if floating on a river. I walked into the room, she was sitting in the same place, sewing, her head bent, but no longer singing. She gave me a passing, uncurious glance—not a glance, but merely the gesture, ordinary and indifferent, when someone comes into a room.

  I went straight over to her and sat down on a chair right beside her, like a crazy man. She gave me a quick look, as if frightened: I took her hand, and I don’t remember what I said to her, that is, wanted to say, because I couldn’t even speak properly. My voice faltered and wouldn’t obey me. And I didn’t know what to say, only I was suffocating.

  “Let’s talk… you know… say something!” I suddenly babbled some stupid thing—oh, as if intelligence was the point! She gave another start and drew back in great fright, looking me in the face, but suddenly—stern astonishment showed in her eyes. Yes, astonishment, and it was stern. She was looking at me with big eyes. This sternness, this stern astonishment, all at once demolished me: “So you also want love? Love?”—this astonishment as if suddenly asked, though she was silent. But I could read everything, everything. Everything in me shook, and I simply collapsed at her feet. Yes, I fell at her feet. She quickly jumped up, but with extraordinary strength I held her back by both hands.

  And I fully understood my despair, oh, I understood it! But, would you believe, rapture was seething in my heart so irrepressibly that I thought I would die. I was kissing her feet in ecstasy and happiness. Yes, in happiness, boundless and endless, and that while understanding all my hopeless despair! I was weeping, I was saying something, yet I couldn’t speak. Fright and astonishment were suddenly replaced in her by some worried thought, an extraordinary question, and she looked at me strangely, wildly even, she wanted to understand something very quickly, and she smiled. She was terribly ashamed that I was kissing her feet, and she kept pulling them away, but I at once kissed the place on the floor where her foot had been. She saw that and suddenly started laughing from shame (you know how one can laugh from shame). Hysterics were coming, I could see that, her hands twitched—I wasn’t thinking about that and kept mumbling to her that I loved her, that I wouldn’t get up, “let me kiss your dress… let me worship you like this all my life…” I don’t know, I don’t remember—and suddenly she began sobbing and shaking; a terrible fit of hysterics came. I had frightened her.

  I carried her over to the bed. When the fit passed, she sat up on the bed, seized my hands with a terribly crushed look, and begged me to calm down: “Enough, don’t torment yourself, calm down!”—and again she started weeping. All that evening I never left her side. I kept telling her I’d take her to Boulogne10 to swim in the sea, now, at once, in two weeks, that she had such a cracked little voice, I’d heard it that day; that I’d close the shop, sell it to Dobronravov, that everything would begin anew, and, above all, to Boulogne, to Boulogne! She listened and kept being afraid. Kept being more and more afraid. But for me the main thing was not that, but that the desire kept growing greater and more irrepressible in me to lie at her feet again, and again to kiss, to kiss the ground on which her feet stood, and to worship her and—“nothing more, I’ll ask nothing more of you,” I kept repeating every moment, “don’t answer me anything, don’t notice me at all, just let me look at you from the corner, turn me into a thing of yours, into a little dog…” She was weeping.

  “And I thought you’d just let me stay like that,” suddenly escaped her involuntarily, so involuntarily that she perhaps didn’t notice at all how she had said it, and yet—oh, this was her most important, her most fatal phrase, the clearest for me that evening, and it was as if my heart was slashed by this phrase as by a knife! It explained everything to me, everything, but as long as she was near, before my eyes, I hoped irresistibly and was terribly happy. Oh, I made her terribly weary that evening, and I understood that, but I was constantly thinking I was going to remake it all right then! Finally, toward nighttime, she became totally strengthless, I convinced her to go to sleep, and she fell asleep at once, soundly. I expected delirium, there was delirium, but very little. During the night I got up almost every minute and went quietly in my slippers to look at her. I
wrung my hands over her, looking at this sick being on this poor little cot, the iron bed I had bought for her then for three roubles. I knelt down, but didn’t dare to kiss the sleeper’s feet (without her will!). I’d start praying to God, but would jump up again. Lukerya watched me closely and kept coming in from the kitchen. I went to her and told her to go to bed and that the next day “something quite different” would begin.

  And I believed it blindly, insanely, terribly. Oh, rapture, rapture flooded me! I was only waiting for the next day. Above all, I did not believe in any calamity, despite the symptoms. Sense had not fully returned, despite the fallen veil, and it took a long, long time to return—oh, till today, till this very day!! And how, how could it return then: why, she was still alive then, she was right there before me, and I before her: “She’ll wake up tomorrow, and I’ll tell her all this, and she’ll see it all.” That was my reasoning then, simple and clear—hence the rapture! Above all, there was this trip to Boulogne. I kept thinking for some reason that Boulogne was—everything, that Boulogne contained something definitive. “To Boulogne, to Boulogne!…” I waited insanely for morning.

  III

  I UNDERSTAND ALL TOO WELL

  And this was only a few days ago, five days, only five days, last Tuesday! No, no, if she’d only waited a little longer, only a little bit longer, I—I would have dispelled the darkness! And, anyway, didn’t she calm down? The very next day she listened to me with a smile now, despite her bewilderment… Above all, throughout this time, all five days, there was bewilderment or shame in her. She was also afraid, very afraid. I won’t argue, I’m not going to contradict like some insane person: there was fear, but how could she not be afraid? We’d been strangers to each other for so long, had grown so unused to each other, and suddenly all this… But I didn’t consider her fear, the new thing was shining!… True, unquestionably true, I had made a mistake. And maybe even many mistakes. And when we woke up the next day, still that morning (it was Wednesday), I right away suddenly made a mistake: I suddenly made her my friend. I hurried too much, too much, but a confession was needed, was necessary—yes, and much more than a confession! I didn’t conceal from her even what I’d been concealing from myself all my life. I said straight out that all I’d done that whole winter was feel certain of her love. I explained to her that the pawnshop was nothing but the degradation of my will and intelligence, a personal idea of self-castigation and self-exaltation. I explained to her that I had actually turned coward in the buffet that time, owing to my character, to insecurity: I was struck by the surroundings, by the buffet; struck by how I was going to come out in this, and wouldn’t it come out stupid? I turned coward not at the duel, but that it would come out stupid… And afterward I didn’t want to admit it and tormented everyone, and tormented her for it, and that was why I had married her, so as to torment her for it. Generally, I spoke for the most part as if in a fever. She herself took me by the hands and begged me to stop: “You’re exaggerating… you’re tormenting yourself”—and again the tears would start, again all but fits! She kept begging me not to say any of it, not to remember.

  I paid little or no regard to her begging: spring, Boulogne! The sun was there, our new sun was there, that was all I kept saying! I locked the shop, handed the business over to Dobronravov. I suddenly suggested to her that we give everything away to the poor, except for the capital of three thousand inherited from my godmother, which we’d spend on going to Boulogne, then come back and start a new life of labor. So it was decided, because she didn’t say anything… she only smiled. And, it seems, she smiled more out of delicacy, so as not to upset me. I did see that I was burdening her, don’t think I was so stupid or such an egoist that I didn’t see it. I saw everything, everything to the last little feature, I saw and knew it better than anyone else; all my despair stood in full view!

  I told her all about me and about her. And about Lukerya. I told her I had wept… Oh, yes, I also changed the subject, I also tried by all means not to remind her of certain things. And she even became animated a couple of times, I remember, I remember! Why do you say that I looked and saw nothing? And if only this hadn’t happened, everything would have been resurrected. She even told me just two days ago, when the conversation turned to reading and what she’d read that winter—she even told me, laughing as she recalled it, about the scene between Gil Blas and the archbishop of Granada.11 And what childlike laughter, so dear, just as before, when she was my fiancée (one instant! one instant!); how glad I was! I was terribly struck, however, about this archbishop: so she had after all found peace of mind and happiness enough to laugh over the masterpiece as she sat there this winter. So she had already begun to be fully at peace, to believe fully that I would just let her stay like that. “I thought you’d just let me stay like that”—that’s what she had said then on Tuesday! Oh, a ten-year-old girl’s thought! And she believed, she did believe that everything would in fact stay like that: she at her table, I at mine, and both of us like that till we’re sixty years old. And suddenly—here I come, a husband, and a husband in need of love! Oh, incomprehension, oh, my blindness!

  It was also a mistake that I looked at her with rapture; I should have restrained myself, because rapture is frightening. But, after all, I did restrain myself, I didn’t kiss her feet anymore. I never once showed that… well, that I was a husband—oh, it never even entered my mind, I only worshipped! But it was impossible to be quite silent, it was impossible not to speak at all! I suddenly said to her that I delighted in her conversation and that I considered her incomparably, incomparably better educated and developed than myself. She turned bright red and said abashedly that I was exaggerating. Here, like a fool, unable to help myself, I told her how enraptured I had been when, standing behind the door, I had listened to her combat, the combat of innocence with that creature, and how I had delighted in her intelligence, her sparkling wit, together with such childlike simple-heartedness. She shuddered all over, as it were, tried to murmur again that I was exaggerating, but suddenly her whole face darkened, she covered it with her hands and began to sob… Here I, too, couldn’t stand it: I fell down before her again, again started kissing her feet, and again it ended with a fit, the same as on Tuesday. That was last evening, but in the morning …

  In the morning?! Madman, that morning was today, just now, only just now!

  Listen and try to fathom: when we came together over the samovar just now (this after yesterday’s fit), I was even struck by her calm, that’s how it was! And I’d spent the whole night shaking with fear over yesterday. But suddenly she comes up to me, stands in front of me, and, clasping her hands (just now, just now!), began saying to me that she was a criminal, that she knew it, that her crime had tormented her all winter, torments her still… that she values my magnanimity only too highly… “I’ll be your faithful wife, I’ll respect you…” Here I jumped up like a crazy man and embraced her! I was kissing her, kissing her face, her lips, like a husband, for the first time after a long separation. And why did I ever leave just now, for only two hours… our passports… Oh, God! Five minutes, if only I’d come back five minutes earlier?… And here this crowd in our gateway, those looks at me… oh, Lord!

  Lukerya says (oh, now I’ll never let Lukerya go, she knows everything, she was here all winter, she’ll tell me everything), she says that when I left the house, and only something like twenty minutes before I came back—she suddenly went into our room to ask the lady something or other, I don’t remember, and saw that her icon (that same icon of the Mother of God) had been taken down and was standing in front of her on the table, as if the lady had just been praying before it. “What’s the matter, ma’am?” “Nothing, Lukerya, go now… Wait, Lukerya,” she went up to her and kissed her. “Are you happy, ma’am?” “Yes, Lukerya.” “You should have come to the master long ago, ma’am, to ask forgiveness… Thank God you’ve made things up.” “All right, Lukerya,” she says, “you may go, Lukerya,” and she smiled, and so strangely. So st
rangely that Lukerya suddenly went back ten minutes later to look at her: “She was standing by the wall, right by the window, her hand leaning on the wall and her head pressed to it, she was standing like that, thinking. And she was so deep in thought that she didn’t hear how I stood and looked at her from the other room. I saw that she was as if smiling—standing, thinking, and smiling. I looked at her, turned quietly, walked out, also thinking to myself, only suddenly I heard the window being opened. I went at once to tell her, ‘It’s chilly, ma’am, you might catch cold,’ and suddenly I see her standing on the windowsill, already standing up straight in the open window, her back to me, holding the icon in her hands. My heart just sank, I shouted: ‘My lady, my lady!’ She heard me, made as if to turn toward me, then didn’t, but took a step, pressed the icon to her breast, and threw herself out the window!”

  I only remember that when I came in the gate, she was still warm. Above all, they were all staring at me. First they shouted, but then they suddenly fell silent and everyone makes way for me and… and she’s lying there with the icon. I remember, as if through darkness, that I went up silently and looked for a long time, and everyone surrounded me, saying something to me. Lukerya was there, but I didn’t see her. She says she spoke to me. I remember only that tradesman: he kept shouting to me that “a handful of blood came out of her mouth, a handful, a handful!” and showing me the blood right there on the stone. It seems I touched the blood with my finger, got it on my finger, looked at it (I remember that), while he kept telling me: “A handful, a handful!”