Alerted by the coachman, Sasha came speeding over from Telyatinki. Chertkov came too, defying orders. But he did not dare to let the countess see him, and installed himself in Dr. Makovitsky's room downstairs. His secretary, Belinsky, reported to him every fifteen minutes. No doubt Chertkov had worked out a plan of action in case the master died: produce the will, thrust the widow aside, get his hands on the last manuscripts.
In spite of her anguish, Sonya, too, was thinking how to protect her rights. Taking advantage of the confusion around her, she seized a little portfolio of papers, and it required the intervention of Tanya, who had seen her in the act, to make her put it back. Sasha was more skillful, and managed, without her mother's notice, to steal a little notebook she found inside her father's blouse. The patient had five convulsions, each lasting for three minutes. At eleven o'clock that night he resumed consciousness, asked what had happened and dropped off to sleep.
The following clay he was out of clanger, but very weak, and was forced to stay in bed. Her husband's survival could only be the result of divine grace, Sonya thought, requiring a compensatory act of contrition on her part. Just as Sasha was about to return to Telyatinki, a servant came to tell her that the countess was waiting for her on the front steps. She found her mother standing, coatless and red-eyed, her head shaking from side to side.
"Forgive me!" said Sonya. "I give you my word of honor I shall never offend you again."
She also promised her daughter that she would cease tormenting Lyovochka and entreated her to come back, with Varvara Feokritova, and live at home. She looked so pitiful that even Sasha—tough, suspicious Sasha—burst into tears. The two women exchanged moist kisses and sighs of endearment. A great hope dawned over Yasnaya Polyana. Sasha returned to the fold with Varvara Feokritova, and Sonya, pushing her spirit of sacrifice to sublime heights, invited Chertkov to call on October 7, as though nothing had happened.
She had presumed upon her powers. When she heard the springs of the disciple's carriage in the drive, her heart began to pound so wildly that she nearly fainted. Snatching her binoculars, she watched out of the window, to make sure that her husband did not show too much joy at his approach. He came out onto the steps. She had made him promise not to embrace the villain. Did the two men know they were l>eing watched? They shook hands. Hiding, Sonya spied on them all day. That evening she wrote, "Impossible! That creature is the devil in person! I shall never be able to bear him!"
In view of Sonya's agitation after Chertkov's departure Tolstoy wrote to his disciplc's wife that it would be better, in the interests of all, not to repeat the experiment. He was particularly unwilling to provoke Sonya just then, having noticed a few days before that one of the notebooks of his Diary for Myself Alone had disappeared. Had he mislaid it or had someone taken it without his knowledge? He suspected his wife; and he was not mistaken. She had found it in the boot in which he always hid it, and had made off with it while he was asleep. Naturally, she said nothing to him about her find. But her pemsal of his notes confirmed the existence of a plot against her concocted by her husband and Chertkov. Now she was sure a will had been made, excluding her from the inheritance, and she had special reason to find this intolerable at that particular moment: a publishing company, Prozveshenye, had just offered her the fabulous sum of one million rubles for exclusive rights to publish the works of Leo Tolstoy after his death. A million rubles!! Enough to provide for her sons and daughters and twenty-five grandchildren for life! Well; that will, whatever it contained, had to be destroyed. She explained this to her husband on October 12, but he would not listen. Then she wrote a letter, which she left on his desk on October 14:
"Every day you inquire after my health with a compassionate air and
t Or $2,831,600.
ask how I have slept; and every day you are merely driving so many fresh nails into my heart, shortening my life and subjecting me to unendurable torture, and I can do nothing to lessen my own pain. Fate has decided that I should learn of this new blow, this evil deed you have perpetrated by depriving your numerous offspring of your copyrights—although your partner in crimc has not done as much to his own family. . . . 'l"he government that both of you have slandered and maligned in your pamphlets will now lawfully take the bread out of the mouths of your heirs, and give it to Siting ancl other rich publishers and businessmen, while Tolstoy's grandchildren will starve as the result of his malevolence and vanity. And it is the government, again—in the form of the State Bank—that receives Tolstoy's diaries for safekeeping, so that his wife may not have them. ... I am aghast (supposing that I should survive you) to think what evil may grow up out of your grave, and in the memories of your children and grandchildren."
When, trembling with apprehension, she went to her husband's study to hear his reaction to this, he coldly remarked, "Can't you leave me in peace?" She tried kind words and tears. He was immovable. How was he to confess that he had dispossessed her of her rights not only to the works written after 1881, but to War and Peace and Anna Karenina and The Cossacks as well? "When she rhapsodizes to me about her love ancl kneels down before me ancl kisses my hands, it is very hard for me," he wrote. After she left, he felt his pulse (an automatic reflex among the Tolstoy's) and noted: "Ninety." Then he corrected his article On Socialism and went for a ride. Every time he went into the forest alone, Sonya was sure he was going to meet Chertkov. On October 16, she set out on foot across the fields toward Telyatinki, lay down in a ditch a little way from the entrance to the estate and trained her binoculars on the house. She was watching for the tryst. But Lyovochka did not come. At nightfall, chilled to the bone, she made her way back to Yasnaya Polyana and sat down on a bench beneath a pine, where she was found by a servant with a lantern. When she told Lyovochka what she had done and begged him to swear he would never see the "disgusting" Chertkov again, lie growled: "I do not want to obey your whims and fancies. I want freedom; at eighty-two years of age I refuse to be treated like a little boy, tied to my wife's apron strings! I retract all my promises."
Shortly afterward a Tolstoyan peasant named Novikov came to see him, and, feeling in a mood for confidences, he told this "Dark One" how difficult his wife was making life for him. "Among us," said
t A well-known publisher of the time.
Novikov, "we settle quarrels with our womenfolk more simply, and you never see any fits of hysteria. I am not a partisan of the stick and have never had recourse to it myself, but even so, one can't do everything a woman wants!" Tolstoy gave a hearty laugh and told the anecdote to Dr. Makovitsky and Sasha; and, with just a touch of malice, Sasha in turn told him how Ivan, the coachman at Yasnaya Polyana, criticized the master for overindulgence and told everyone that, "In our village, when a woman starts acting up, her man gives her a good hiding with the reins and she turns soft as a glove!"
After Novikov left, Tolstoy could not stop thinking about the simple, rough life the peasant had described to him. Oh, to go out there, plunge into the world of the common people, earn his living sewing boots, and live on kasha ... To prove that he had not used up all his strength, he took up gymnastics again. One day, hanging from a clothes cupboard, he pulled it over onto his back, was bent double and nearly collapsed beneath the weight. "Wearing myself out needlessly! Eighty-two-year-old fool!" he wrote after this incident. However, he was convinced that the time had come for him to begin his new way of life: if a man can hold up a clothes cupboard single- handed, no obstacle can stand in his way. On October 24 he found a letter in his mail from a St. Petersburg student named Alexander Barkhudarov, reproaching him for the inconsistencies between his theory and his practice, on the basis of quotations from Merezhkovsky's book, The Life and Works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, published the previous year. There was a second letter, merely abusive, from a German woman in Breslau. How strange that these two criticisms should reach him just when he was wondering whether he ought not to break away and seek rebirth. He wrote to Novikov forthwith: