第41章

Suppose, now, that you are living in the country with a wife who loves you in this self-sacrificing manner.You may be healthy and contented, and have occupations which interest you, while, on the other hand, your wife may be too weak to superintend the household work (which, in consequence, will be left to the servants), or to look after the children (who, in consequence, will be left to the nurses), or to put her heart into any work whatsoever: and all because she loves nobody and nothing but yourself.She may be patently ill, yet she will say not a word to you about it, for fear of distressing you.She may be patently ennuyee, yet for your sake she will be prepared to be so for the rest of her life.She may be patently depressed because you stick so persistently to your occupations (whether sport, books, farming, state service, or anything else) and see clearly that they are doing you harm; yet, for all that, she will keep silence, and suffer it to be so.Yet, should you but fall sick--

and, despite her own ailments and your prayers that she will not distress herself in vain, your loving wife will remain sitting inseparably by your bedside.Every moment you will feel her sympathetic gaze resting upon you and, as it were, saying:

"There! I told you so, but it is all one to me, and I shall not leave you." In the morning you maybe a little better, and move into another room.The room, however, will be insufficiently warmed or set in order; the soup which alone you feel you could eat will not have been cooked; nor will any medicine have been sent for.Yet, though worn out with night watching, your loving wife will continue to regard you with an expression of sympathy, to walk about on tiptoe, and to whisper unaccustomed and obscure orders to the servants.You may wish to be read to--and your loving wife will tell you with a sigh that she feels sure you will be unable to hear her reading, and only grow angry at her awkwardness in doing it; wherefore you had better not be read to at all.You may wish to walk about the room--and she will tell you that it would be far better for you not to do so.You may wish to talk with some friends who have called--and she will tell you that talking is not good for you.At nightfall the fever may come upon you again, and you may wish to be left alone whereupon your loving wife, though wasted, pale, and full of yawns, will go on sitting in a chair opposite you, as dusk falls, until her very slightest movement, her very slightest sound, rouses you to feelings of anger and impatience.You may have a servant who has lived with you for twenty years, and to whom you are attached, and who would tend you well and to your satisfaction during the night, for the reason that he has been asleep all day and is, moreover, paid a salary for his services; yet your wife will not suffer him to wait upon you.No; everything she must do herself with her weak, unaccustomed fingers (of which you follow the movements with suppressed irritation as those pale members do their best to uncork a medicine bottle, to snuff a candle, to pour out physic, or to touch you in a squeamish sort of way).If you are an impatient, hasty sort of man, and beg of her to leave the room, you will hear by the vexed, distressed sounds which come from her that she is humbly sobbing and weeping behind the door, and whispering foolishness of some kind to the servant.

Finally if you do not die, your loving wife--who has not slept during the whole three weeks of your illness (a fact of which she will constantly remind you)--will fall ill in her turn, waste away, suffer much, and become even more incapable of any useful pursuit than she was before; while by the time that you have regained your normal state of health she will express to you her self-sacrificing affection only by shedding around you a kind of benignant dullness which involuntarily communicates itself both to yourself and to every one else in your vicinity.

The third kind of love--practical love--consists of a yearning to satisfy every need, every desire, every caprice, nay, every vice, of the being beloved.People who love thus always love their life long, since, the more they love, the more they get to know the object beloved, and the easier they find the task of loving it--

that is to say, of satisfying its desires.Their love seldom finds expression in words, but if it does so, it expresses itself neither with assurance nor beauty, but rather in a shamefaced, awkward manner, since people of this kind invariably have misgivings that they are loving unworthily.People of this kind love even the faults of their adored one, for the reason that those faults afford them the power of constantly satisfying new desires.They look for their affection to be returned, and even deceive themselves into believing that it is returned, and are happy accordingly: yet in the reverse case they will still continue to desire happiness for their beloved one, and try by every means in their power--whether moral or material, great or small--to provide it.

Such practical love it was--love for her nephew, for her niece, for her sister, for Lubov Sergievna, and even for myself, because I loved Dimitri--that shone in the eyes, as well as in the every word and movement, of Sophia Ivanovna.

Only long afterwards did I learn to value her at her true worth.

Yet even now the question occurred to me: "What has made Dimitri--

who throughout has tried to understand love differently to other young fellows, and has always had before his eyes the gentle, loving Sophia Ivanovna--suddenly fall so deeply in love with the incomprehensible Lubov Sergievna, and declare that in his aunt he can only find good QUALITIES? Verily it is a true saying that 'a prophet hath no honour in his own country.' One of two things:

either every man has in him more of bad than of good, or every man is more receptive to bad than to good.Lubov Sergievna he has not known for long, whereas his aunt's love he has known since the day of his birth."