"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 good-natured 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.