The Devil by Leo Tolstoy Read Free Book Online Page A

stitches.”
    Yevgeny was standing at the time by the bed and Liza was looking at him, and one of her moist hands outside the coverlet caught his hand and pressed it. “Bear with her for my sake. You know she cannot prevent our loving one another,” was what her look said.
    “I won’t do so again. It’s nothing,” he whispered, and he kissed her damp, long hand and then her affectionate eyes, which closed while he kissed them.
    “Can it be the same thing over again?” he asked. “How are you feeling?”
    “I am afraid to say for fear of being mistaken, but I feel that he is alive and will live,” said she, glancing at her stomach.
    “Ah, it is dreadful, dreadful to think of.”
    Notwithstanding Liza’s insistence that he should go away, Yevgeny spent the night with her, hardly closing an eye and ready to attend on her.
    But she passed the night well, and had they not sent for the doctor she would perhaps have got up.
    By dinner-time the doctor arrived and of course said that though if the symptoms recurred there might be cause for apprehension, yet actually there were no positive symptoms, but as there were also no contraryindications one might suppose on the one hand that—and on the other hand that … And therefore she must lie still, and that “though I do not like prescribing, yet all the same she should take this mixture and should lie quiet.” Besides this, the doctor gave Varvara Alexeevna a lecture on woman’s anatomy, during which Varvara Alexeevna nodded her head significantly. Having received his fee, as usual into the backmost part of his palm, the doctor drove away and the patient was left to lie in bed for a week.

XV
    Yevgeny spent most of his time by his wife’s bedside, talking to her, reading to her, and what was hardest of all, enduring without murmur Varvara Alexeevna’s attacks, and even contriving to turn these into jokes.
    But he could not stay at home all the time. In the first place his wife sent him away, saying that he would fall ill if he always remained with her; and secondly the farming was progressing in a way that demanded his presence at every step. He could not stay at home, but had to be in the fields, in the wood, in the garden, at the threshing-floor; and everywhere he was pursued not merely by the thought but by the vivid image of Stepanida, and he only occasionally forgot her. But that would not have mattered, he could perhaps have mastered his feeling; what was worst of all was that, whereas he had previously lived for months without seeing her, he now continually came across her. She evidently understood that he wished to renew relations with her and tried to come in his way. Nothing was said either by him or by her, and therefore neither he nor she went directly to a rendezvous, but only sought opportunities of meeting.
    The most possible place for them to meet was in the forest, where peasant-women went with sacks to collect grass for their cows. Yevgeny knew this and therefore went there every day. Every day he told himself that he would not go, and every day it ended by his making his way to the forest and, on hearing the sound of voices,standing behind the bushes with sinking heart looking to see if she was there.
    Why he wanted to know whether it was she who was there, he did not know. If it had been she and she had been alone, he would not have gone to her—so he believed—he would have run away; but he wanted to see her.
    Once he met her. As he was entering the forest she came out of it with two other women, carrying a heavy sack full of grass on her back. A little earlier he would perhaps have met her in the forest. Now, with the other women there, she could not go back to him. But though he realized this impossibility, he stood for a long time behind a hazel bush, at the risk of attracting the other women’s attention. Of course she did not return, but he stayed there a long time and, great heavens, how delightful his imagination made her appear to