Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 16
“It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only because I am free
myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course, there’s no counting on. And with
the help of good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there’s another baby
coming?...” And the thought struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid
on woman was that in sorrow she should bring forth children.
“The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the child–that’s what’s
so intolerable,” she thought, picturing to herself her last pregnancy, and the death
of the last baby. And she recalled the conversation she had just had with the young
woman at the inn. On being asked whether she had any children, the handsome
young woman had answered cheerfully:
“I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.”
“Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya Alexandrovna.
“Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only a trouble.
No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.”
This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the goodnatured
and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could not help recalling
these words. In those cynical words there was indeed a grain of truth.
“Yes, altogether,” thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her whole existence
during those fifteen years of her married life, “pregnancy, sickness, mental
incapacity, indifference to everything, and most of all–hideousness. Kitty, young
and pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I’m with child become
hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment...then
the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains....”
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from sore
breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. “Then the children’s illnesses,
that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up; evil propensities” (she
thought of little Masha’s crime among the raspberries), “education, Latin–it’s all so
incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children.”
And there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her
mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral,
the callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her
lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the
open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being
covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.
“And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m wasting my life,
never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or nursing a child, forever irritable,
peevish, wretched myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while
the children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if
it weren’t for spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we should be
managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much tact that we don’t feel
it; but it can’t go on. They’ll have children, they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a drag
on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us?
So that I can’t even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the
help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we suppose the greatest
good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow. At the very
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