Arkadyevitch thought about himself. And he began keeping his eyes and
ears open, and towards the end of the winter he had discovered a very
good berth and had formed a plan of attack upon it, at first from
Moscow through aunts, uncles, and friends, and then, when the matter
was well advanced, in the spring, he went himself to Petersburg. It was
one of those snug, lucrative berths of which there are so many more
nowadays than there used to be, with incomes ranging from one thousand
to fifty thousand roubles. It was the post of secretary of the
committee of the amalgamated agency of the southern railways, and of
certain banking companies. This position, like all such appointments,
called for such immense energy and such varied qualifications, that it
was difficult for them to be found united in any one man. And since a
man combining all the qualifications was not to be found, it was at
least better that the post be filled by an honest than by a dishonest
man. And Stepan Arkadyevitch was not merely an honest
man—unemphatically—in the common acceptation of the words, he was an
honest man—emphatically—in that special sense which the word has in
Moscow, when they talk of an “honest” politician, an “honest” writer,
an “honest” newspaper, an “honest” institution, an “honest” tendency,
meaning not simply that the man or the institution is not dishonest,
but that they are capable on occasion of taking a line of their own in
opposition to the authorities.
Stepan Arkadyevitch moved in those circles in Moscow in which that
expression had come into use, was regarded there as an honest man, and
so had more right to this appointment than others.
The appointment yielded an income of from seven to ten thousand a year,
and Oblonsky could fill it without giving up his government position.
It was in the hands of two ministers, one lady, and two Jews, and all
these people, though the way had been paved already with them, Stepan
Arkadyevitch had to see in Petersburg. Besides this business, Stepan
Arkadyevitch had promised his sister Anna to obtain from Karenin a
definite answer on the question of divorce. And begging fifty roubles
from Dolly, he set off for Petersburg.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sat in Karenin’s study listening to his report on
the causes of the unsatisfactory position of Russian finance, and only
waiting for the moment when he would finish to speak about his own
business or about Anna.
“Yes, that’s very true,” he said, when Alexey Alexandrovitch took off
the pince-nez, without which he could not read now, and looked
inquiringly at his former brother-in-law, “that’s very true in
particular cases, but still the principle of our day is freedom.”
“Yes, but I lay down another principle, embracing the principle of
freedom,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, with emphasis on the word
“embracing,” and he put on his pince-nez again, so as to read the
passage in which this statement was made. And turning over the
beautifully written, wide-margined manuscript, Alexey Alexandrovitch
read aloud over again the conclusive passage.
“I don’t advocate protection for the sake of private interests, but for
the public weal, and for the lower and upper classes equally,” he said,
looking over his pince-nez at Oblonsky. “But _they_ cannot grasp that,
_they_ are taken up now with personal interests, and carried away by
phrases.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch knew that when Karenin began to talk of what _they_
were doing and thinking, the persons who would not accept his report
and were the cause of everything wrong in Russia, that it was coming
near the end. And so now he eagerly abandoned the principle of
free-trade, and fully agreed. Alexey Alexandrovitch paused,
thoughtfully turning over the pages of his manuscript.
“Oh, by the way,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “I wanted to ask you, some
time when you see Pomorsky, to drop him a hint that I should be very
glad to get that new appointment of secretary of the committee of the
amalgamated agency of the southern railways and banking companies.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch was familiar by now with the title of the post he
coveted, and he brought it out rapidly without mistake.
Alexey Alexandrovitch questioned him as to the duties of this new
committee, and pondered. He was considering whether the new committee
would not be acting in some way contrary to the views he had been
advocating. But as the influence of the new committee was of a very
complex nature, and his views were of very wide application, he could
not decide this straight off, and taking off his pince-nez, he said:
“Of course, I can mention it to him; but what is your reason precisely
for wishing to obtain the appointment?”
“It’s a good salary, rising to nine thousand, and my means....”
“Nine thousand!” repeated Alexey Alexandrovitch, and he frowned. The
high figure of the salary made him reflect that on that side Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s proposed position ran counter to the main tendency of
his own projects of reform, which always leaned towards economy.
“I consider, and I have embodied my views in a note on the subject,
that in our day these immense salaries are evidence of the unsound
economic _assiette_ of our finances.”
“But what’s to be done?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Suppose a bank
director gets ten thousand—well, he’s worth it; or an engineer gets
twenty thousand—after all, it’s a growing thing, you know!”
“I assume that a salary is the price paid for a commodity, and it ought
to conform with the law of supply and demand. If the salary is fixed
without any regard for that law, as, for instance, when I see two
engineers leaving college together, both equally well trained and
efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other is satisfied
with two; or when I see lawyers and hussars, having no special
qualifications, appointed directors of banking companies with immense
salaries, I conclude that the salary is not fixed in accordance with
the law of supply and demand, but simply through personal interest. And
this is an abuse of great gravity in itself, and one that reacts
injuriously on the government service. I consider....”
Stepan Arkadyevitch made haste to interrupt his brother-in-law.
“Yes; but you must agree that it’s a new institution of undoubted
utility that’s being started. After all, you know, it’s a growing
thing! What they lay particular stress on is the thing being carried on
honestly,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with emphasis.
But the Moscow significance of the word “honest” was lost on Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
“Honesty is only a negative qualification,” he said.
“Well, you’ll do me a great service, anyway,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
“by putting in a word to Pomorsky—just in the way of conversation....”
“But I fancy it’s more in Volgarinov’s hands,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
“Volgarinov has fully assented, as far as he’s concerned,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, turning red. Stepan Arkadyevitch reddened at the mention
of that name, because he had been that morning at the Jew Volgarinov’s,
and the visit had left an unpleasant recollection.
Stepan Arkadyevitch believed most positively that the committee in
which he was trying to get an appointment was a new, genuine, and
honest public body, but that morning when Volgarinov had—intentionally,
beyond a doubt—kept him two hours waiting with other petitioners in his
waiting room, he had suddenly felt uneasy.
Whether he was uncomfortable that he, a descendant of Rurik, Prince
Oblonsky, had been kept for two hours waiting to see a Jew, or that for
the first time in his life he was not following the example of his
ancestors in serving the government, but was turning off into a new
career, anyway he was very uncomfortable. During those two hours in
Volgarinov’s waiting room Stepan Arkadyevitch, stepping jauntily about
the room, pulling his whiskers, entering into conversation with the
other petitioners, and inventing an epigram on his position,
assiduously concealed from others, and even from himself, the feeling
he was experiencing.
But all the time he was uncomfortable and angry, he could not have said
why—whether because he could not get his epigram just right, or from
some other reason. When at last Volgarinov had received him with
exaggerated politeness and unmistakable triumph at his humiliation, and
had all but refused the favor asked of him, Stepan Arkadyevitch had
made haste to forget it all as soon as possible. And now, at the mere
recollection, he blushed.
Chapter 18
“Now there is something I want to talk about, and you know what it is.
About Anna,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said, pausing for a brief space, and
shaking off the unpleasant impression.
As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna’s name, the face of Alexey
Alexandrovitch was completely transformed; all the life was gone out of
it, and it looked weary and dead.
“What is it exactly that you want from me?” he said, moving in his
chair and snapping his pince-nez.
“A definite settlement, Alexey Alexandrovitch, some settlement of the
position. I’m appealing to you” (“not as an injured husband,” Stepan
Arkadyevitch was going to say, but afraid of wrecking his negotiation
by this, he changed the words) “not as a statesman” (which did not
sound _à propos_), “but simply as a man, and a good-hearted man and a
Christian. You must have pity on her,” he said.
“That is, in what way precisely?” Karenin said softly.
“Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!—I have been spending
all the winter with her—you would have pity on her. Her position is
awful, simply awful!”
“I had imagined,” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch in a higher, almost
shrill voice, “that Anna Arkadyevna had everything she had desired for
herself.”
“Oh, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for heaven’s sake, don’t let us indulge in
recriminations! What is past is past, and you know what she wants and
is waiting for—divorce.”
“But I believe Anna Arkadyevna refuses a divorce, if I make it a
condition to leave me my son. I replied in that sense, and supposed
that the matter was ended. I consider it at an end,” shrieked Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
“But, for heaven’s sake, don’t get hot!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
touching his brother-in-law’s knee. “The matter is not ended. If you
will allow me to recapitulate, it was like this: when you parted, you
were as magnanimous as could possibly be; you were ready to give her
everything—freedom, divorce even. She appreciated that. No, don’t think
that. She did appreciate it—to such a degree that at the first moment,
feeling how she had wronged you, she did not consider and could not
consider everything. She gave up everything. But experience, time, have
shown that her position is unbearable, impossible.”
“The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for me,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch put in, lifting his eyebrows.
“Allow me to disbelieve that,” Stepan Arkadyevitch replied gently. “Her
position is intolerable for her, and of no benefit to anyone whatever.
She has deserved it, you will say. She knows that and asks you for
nothing; she says plainly that she dare not ask you. But I, all of us,
her relatives, all who love her, beg you, entreat you. Why should she
suffer? Who is any the better for it?”
“Excuse me, you seem to put me in the position of the guilty party,”
observed Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Oh, no, oh, no, not at all! please understand me,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, touching his hand again, as though feeling sure this
physical contact would soften his brother-in-law. “All I say is this:
her position is intolerable, and it might be alleviated by you, and you
will lose nothing by it. I will arrange it all for you, so that you’ll
not notice it. You did promise it, you know.”
“The promise was given before. And I had supposed that the question of
my son had settled the matter. Besides, I had hoped that Anna
Arkadyevna had enough generosity....” Alexey Alexandrovitch articulated
with difficulty, his lips twitching and his face white.
“She leaves it all to your generosity. She begs, she implores one thing
of you—to extricate her from the impossible position in which she is
placed. She does not ask for her son now. Alexey Alexandrovitch, you
are a good man. Put yourself in her position for a minute. The question
of divorce for her in her position is a question of life and death. If
you had not promised it once, she would have reconciled herself to her
position, she would have gone on living in the country. But you
promised it, and she wrote to you, and moved to Moscow. And here she’s
been for six months in Moscow, where every chance meeting cuts her to
the heart, every day expecting an answer. Why, it’s like keeping a
condemned criminal for six months with the rope round his neck,
promising him perhaps death, perhaps mercy. Have pity on her, and I
will undertake to arrange everything. _Vos scrupules_....”
“I am not talking about that, about that....” Alexey Alexandrovitch
interrupted with disgust. “But, perhaps, I promised what I had no right
to promise.”
“So you go back from your promise?”
“I have never refused to do all that is possible, but I want time to
consider how much of what I promised is possible.”
“No, Alexey Alexandrovitch!” cried Oblonsky, jumping up, “I won’t
believe that! She’s unhappy as only an unhappy woman can be, and you
cannot refuse in such....”
“As much of what I promised as is possible. _Vous professez d’être
libre penseur._ But I as a believer cannot, in a matter of such
gravity, act in opposition to the Christian law.”
“But in Christian societies and among us, as far as I’m aware, divorce
is allowed,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Divorce is sanctioned even by
our church. And we see....”
“It is allowed, but not in the sense....”
“Alexey Alexandrovitch, you are not like yourself,” said Oblonsky,
after a brief pause. “Wasn’t it you (and didn’t we all appreciate it in
you?) who forgave everything, and moved simply by Christian feeling was
ready to make any sacrifice? You said yourself: if a man take thy coat,
give him thy cloak also, and now....”
“I beg,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch shrilly, getting suddenly onto his
feet, his face white and his jaws twitching, “I beg you to drop this
... to drop ... this subject!”
“Oh, no! Oh, forgive me, forgive me if I have wounded you,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, holding out his hand with a smile of embarrassment; “but
like a messenger I have simply performed the commission given me.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch gave him his hand, pondered a little, and said:
“I must think it over and seek for guidance. The day after tomorrow I
will give you a final answer,” he said, after considering a moment.
Chapter 19
Stepan Arkadyevitch was about to go away when Korney came in to
announce:
“Sergey Alexyevitch!”
“Who’s Sergey Alexyevitch?” Stepan Arkadyevitch was beginning, but he
remembered immediately.
“Ah, Seryozha!” he said aloud. “Sergey Alexyevitch! I thought it was
the director of a department. Anna asked me to see him too,” he
thought.
And he recalled the timid, piteous expression with which Anna had said
to him at parting: “Anyway, you will see him. Find out exactly where he
is, who is looking after him. And Stiva ... if it were possible! Could
it be possible?” Stepan Arkadyevitch knew what was meant by that “if it
were possible,”—if it were possible to arrange the divorce so as to let
her have her son.... Stepan Arkadyevitch saw now that it was no good to
dream of that, but still he was glad to see his nephew.
Alexey Alexandrovitch reminded his brother-in-law that they never spoke
to the boy of his mother, and he begged him not to mention a single
word about her.
“He was very ill after that interview with his mother, which we had not
foreseen,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch. “Indeed, we feared for his life.
But with rational treatment, and sea-bathing in the summer, he regained
his strength, and now, by the doctor’s advice, I have let him go to
school. And certainly the companionship of school has had a good effect
on him, and he is perfectly well, and making good progress.”
“What a fine fellow he’s grown! He’s not Seryozha now, but quite
full-fledged Sergey Alexyevitch!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling, as
he looked at the handsome, broad-shouldered lad in blue coat and long
trousers, who walked in alertly and confidently. The boy looked healthy
and good-humored. He bowed to his uncle as to a stranger, but
recognizing him, he blushed and turned hurriedly away from him, as
though offended and irritated at something. The boy went up to his
father and handed him a note of the marks he had gained in school.
“Well, that’s very fair,” said his father, “you can go.”
“He’s thinner and taller, and has grown out of being a child into a
boy; I like that,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Do you remember me?”
The boy looked back quickly at his uncle.
“Yes, _mon oncle_,” he answered, glancing at his father, and again he
looked downcast.
His uncle called him to him, and took his hand.
“Well, and how are you getting on?” he said, wanting to talk to him,
and not knowing what to say.
The boy, blushing and making no answer, cautiously drew his hand away.
As soon as Stepan Arkadyevitch let go his hand, he glanced doubtfully
at his father, and like a bird set free, he darted out of the room.
A year had passed since the last time Seryozha had seen his mother.
Since then he had heard nothing more of her. And in the course of that
year he had gone to school, and made friends among his schoolfellows.
The dreams and memories of his mother, which had made him ill after
seeing her, did not occupy his thoughts now. When they came back to
him, he studiously drove them away, regarding them as shameful and
girlish, below the dignity of a boy and a schoolboy. He knew that his
father and mother were separated by some quarrel, he knew that he had
to remain with his father, and he tried to get used to that idea.
He disliked seeing his uncle, so like his mother, for it called up
those memories of which he was ashamed. He disliked it all the more as
from some words he had caught as he waited at the study door, and still
more from the faces of his father and uncle, he guessed that they must
have been talking of his mother. And to avoid condemning the father
with whom he lived and on whom he was dependent, and, above all, to
avoid giving way to sentimentality, which he considered so degrading,
Seryozha tried not to look at his uncle who had come to disturb his
peace of mind, and not to think of what he recalled to him.
But when Stepan Arkadyevitch, going out after him, saw him on the
stairs, and calling to him, asked him how he spent his playtime at
school, Seryozha talked more freely to him away from his father’s
presence.
“We have a railway now,” he said in answer to his uncle’s question.
“It’s like this, do you see: two sit on a bench—they’re the passengers;
and one stands up straight on the bench. And all are harnessed to it by
their arms or by their belts, and they run through all the rooms—the
doors are left open beforehand. Well, and it’s pretty hard work being
the conductor!”
“That’s the one that stands?” Stepan Arkadyevitch inquired, smiling.
“Yes, you want pluck for it, and cleverness too, especially when they
stop all of a sudden, or someone falls down.”
“Yes, that must be a serious matter,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
watching with mournful interest the eager eyes, like his mother’s; not
childish now—no longer fully innocent. And though he had promised
Alexey Alexandrovitch not to speak of Anna, he could not restrain
himself.
“Do you remember your mother?” he asked suddenly.
“No, I don’t,” Seryozha said quickly. He blushed crimson, and his face
clouded over. And his uncle could get nothing more out of him. His
tutor found his pupil on the staircase half an hour later, and for a
long while he could not make out whether he was ill-tempered or crying.
“What is it? I expect you hurt yourself when you fell down?” said the
tutor. “I told you it was a dangerous game. And we shall have to speak
to the director.”
“If I had hurt myself, nobody should have found it out, that’s
certain.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“Leave me alone! If I remember, or if I don’t remember?... what
business is it of his? Why should I remember? Leave me in peace!” he
said, addressing not his tutor, but the whole world.
Chapter 20
Stepan Arkadyevitch, as usual, did not waste his time in Petersburg. In
Petersburg, besides business, his sister’s divorce, and his coveted
appointment, he wanted, as he always did, to freshen himself up, as he
said, after the mustiness of Moscow.
In spite of its _cafés chantants_ and its omnibuses, Moscow was yet a
stagnant bog. Stepan Arkadyevitch always felt it. After living for some
time in Moscow, especially in close relations with his family, he was
conscious of a depression of spirits. After being a long time in Moscow
without a change, he reached a point when he positively began to be
worrying himself over his wife’s ill-humor and reproaches, over his
children’s health and education, and the petty details of his official
work; even the fact of being in debt worried him. But he had only to go
and stay a little while in Petersburg, in the circle there in which he
moved, where people lived—really lived—instead of vegetating as in
Moscow, and all such ideas vanished and melted away at once, like wax
before the fire. His wife?... Only that day he had been talking to
Prince Tchetchensky. Prince Tchetchensky had a wife and family,
grown-up pages in the corps, ... and he had another illegitimate family
of children also. Though the first family was very nice too, Prince
Tchetchensky felt happier in his second family; and he used to take his
eldest son with him to his second family, and told Stepan Arkadyevitch
that he thought it good for his son, enlarging his ideas. What would
have been said to that in Moscow?
His children? In Petersburg children did not prevent their parents from
enjoying life. The children were brought up in schools, and there was
no trace of the wild idea that prevailed in Moscow, in Lvov’s
household, for instance, that all the luxuries of life were for the
children, while the parents have nothing but work and anxiety. Here
people understood that a man is in duty bound to live for himself, as
every man of culture should live.
His official duties? Official work here was not the stiff, hopeless
drudgery that it was in Moscow. Here there was some interest in
official life. A chance meeting, a service rendered, a happy phrase, a
knack of facetious mimicry, and a man’s career might be made in a
trice. So it had been with Bryantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyevitch had met
the previous day, and who was one of the highest functionaries in
government now. There was some interest in official work like that.
The Petersburg attitude on pecuniary matters had an especially soothing
effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch. Bartnyansky, who must spend at least
fifty thousand to judge by the style he lived in, had made an
interesting comment the day before on that subject.
As they were talking before dinner, Stepan Arkadyevitch said to
Bartnyansky:
“You’re friendly, I fancy, with Mordvinsky; you might do me a favor:
say a word to him, please, for me. There’s an appointment I should like
to get—secretary of the agency....”
“Oh, I shan’t remember all that, if you tell it to me.... But what
possesses you to have to do with railways and Jews?... Take it as you
will, it’s a low business.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch did not say to Bartnyansky that it was a “growing
thing”—Bartnyansky would not have understood that.
“I want the money, I’ve nothing to live on.”
“You’re living, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but in debt.”
“Are you, though? Heavily?” said Bartnyansky sympathetically.
“Very heavily: twenty thousand.”
Bartnyansky broke into good-humored laughter.
“Oh, lucky fellow!” said he. “My debts mount up to a million and a
half, and I’ve nothing, and still I can live, as you see!”
And Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the correctness of this view not in words
only but in actual fact. Zhivahov owed three hundred thousand, and
hadn’t a farthing to bless himself with, and he lived, and in style
too! Count Krivtsov was considered a hopeless case by everyone, and yet
he kept two mistresses. Petrovsky had run through five millions, and
still lived in just the same style, and was even a manager in the
financial department with a salary of twenty thousand. But besides
this, Petersburg had physically an agreeable effect on Stepan
Arkadyevitch. It made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes found a gray
hair in his head, dropped asleep after dinner, stretched, walked slowly
upstairs, breathing heavily, was bored by the society of young women,
and did not dance at balls. In Petersburg he always felt ten years
younger.
His experience in Petersburg was exactly what had been described to him
on the previous day by Prince Pyotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty, who had
just come back from abroad:
“We don’t know the way to live here,” said Pyotr Oblonsky. “I spent the
summer in Baden, and you wouldn’t believe it, I felt quite a young man.
At a glimpse of a pretty woman, my thoughts.... One dines and drinks a
glass of wine, and feels strong and ready for anything. I came home to
Russia—had to see my wife, and, what’s more, go to my country place;
and there, you’d hardly believe it, in a fortnight I’d got into a
dressing gown and given up dressing for dinner. Needn’t say I had no
thoughts left for pretty women. I became quite an old gentleman. There
was nothing left for me but to think of my eternal salvation. I went
off to Paris—I was as right as could be at once.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt exactly the difference that Pyotr Oblonsky
described. In Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be
there for long together, he might in good earnest have come to
considering his salvation; in Petersburg he felt himself a man of the
world again.
Between Princess Betsy Tverskaya and Stepan Arkadyevitch there had long
existed rather curious relations. Stepan Arkadyevitch always flirted
with her in jest, and used to say to her, also in jest, the most
unseemly things, knowing that nothing delighted her so much. The day
after his conversation with Karenin, Stepan Arkadyevitch went to see
her, and felt so youthful that in this jesting flirtation and nonsense
he recklessly went so far that he did not know how to extricate
himself, as unluckily he was so far from being attracted by her that he
thought her positively disagreeable. What made it hard to change the
conversation was the fact that he was very attractive to her. So that
he was considerably relieved at the arrival of Princess Myakaya, which
cut short their _tête-à-tête_.
“Ah, so you’re here!” said she when she saw him. “Well, and what news
of your poor sister? You needn’t look at me like that,” she added.
“Ever since they’ve all turned against her, all those who’re a thousand
times worse than she, I’ve thought she did a very fine thing. I can’t
forgive Vronsky for not letting me know when she was in Petersburg. I’d
have gone to see her and gone about with her everywhere. Please give
her my love. Come, tell me about her.”
“Yes, her position is very difficult; she....” began Stepan
Arkadyevitch, in the simplicity of his heart accepting as sterling coin
Princess Myakaya’s words “tell me about her.” Princess Myakaya
interrupted him immediately, as she always did, and began talking
herself.
“She’s done what they all do, except me—only they hide it. But she
wouldn’t be deceitful, and she did a fine thing. And she did better
still in throwing up that crazy brother-in-law of yours. You must
excuse me. Everybody used to say he was so clever, so very clever; I
was the only one that said he was a fool. Now that he’s so thick with
Lidia Ivanovna and Landau, they all say he’s crazy, and I should prefer
not to agree with everybody, but this time I can’t help it.”
“Oh, do please explain,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch; “what does it mean?
Yesterday I was seeing him on my sister’s behalf, and I asked him to
give me a final answer. He gave me no answer, and said he would think
it over. But this morning, instead of an answer, I received an
invitation from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for this evening.”
“Ah, so that’s it, that’s it!” said Princess Myakaya gleefully,
“they’re going to ask Landau what he’s to say.”
“Ask Landau? What for? Who or what’s Landau?”
“What! you don’t know Jules Landau, _le fameux Jules Landau, le
clairvoyant_? He’s crazy too, but on him your sister’s fate depends.
See what comes of living in the provinces—you know nothing about
anything. Landau, do you see, was a _commis_ in a shop in Paris, and he
went to a doctor’s; and in the doctor’s waiting room he fell asleep,
and in his sleep he began giving advice to all the patients. And
wonderful advice it was! Then the wife of Yury Meledinsky—you know, the
invalid?—heard of this Landau, and had him to see her husband. And he
cured her husband, though I can’t say that I see he did him much good,
for he’s just as feeble a creature as ever he was, but they believed in
him, and took him along with them and brought him to Russia. Here
there’s been a general rush to him, and he’s begun doctoring everyone.
He cured Countess Bezzubova, and she took such a fancy to him that she
adopted him.”
“Adopted him?”
“Yes, as her son. He’s not Landau any more now, but Count Bezzubov.
That’s neither here nor there, though; but Lidia—I’m very fond of her,
but she has a screw loose somewhere—has lost her heart to this Landau
now, and nothing is settled now in her house or Alexey Alexandrovitch’s
without him, and so your sister’s fate is now in the hands of Landau,
_alias_ Count Bezzubov.”
Chapter 21
After a capital dinner and a great deal of cognac drunk at
Bartnyansky’s, Stepan Arkadyevitch, only a little later than the
appointed time, went in to Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.
“Who else is with the countess?—a Frenchman?” Stepan Arkadyevitch asked
the hall-porter, as he glanced at the familiar overcoat of Alexey
Alexandrovitch and a queer, rather artless-looking overcoat with
clasps.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin and Count Bezzubov,” the porter answered
severely.
“Princess Myakaya guessed right,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he
went upstairs. “Curious! It would be quite as well, though, to get on
friendly terms with her. She has immense influence. If she would say a
word to Pomorsky, the thing would be a certainty.”
It was still quite light out-of-doors, but in Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s
little drawing-room the blinds were drawn and the lamps lighted. At a
round table under a lamp sat the countess and Alexey Alexandrovitch,
talking softly. A short, thinnish man, very pale and handsome, with
feminine hips and knock-kneed legs, with fine brilliant eyes and long
hair lying on the collar of his coat, was standing at the end of the
room gazing at the portraits on the wall. After greeting the lady of
the house and Alexey Alexandrovitch, Stepan Arkadyevitch could not
resist glancing once more at the unknown man.
“Monsieur Landau!” the countess addressed him with a softness and
caution that impressed Oblonsky. And she introduced them.
Landau looked round hurriedly, came up, and smiling, laid his moist,
lifeless hand in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s outstretched hand and
immediately walked away and fell to gazing at the portraits again. The
countess and Alexey Alexandrovitch looked at each other significantly.
“I am very glad to see you, particularly today,” said Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, pointing Stepan Arkadyevitch to a seat beside Karenin.
“I introduced you to him as Landau,” she said in a soft voice, glancing
at the Frenchman and again immediately after at Alexey Alexandrovitch,
“but he is really Count Bezzubov, as you’re probably aware. Only he
does not like the title.”
“Yes, I heard so,” answered Stepan Arkadyevitch; “they say he
completely cured Countess Bezzubova.”
“She was here today, poor thing!” the countess said, turning to Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “This separation is awful for her. It’s such a blow to
her!”
“And he positively is going?” queried Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Yes, he’s going to Paris. He heard a voice yesterday,” said Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, looking at Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Ah, a voice!” repeated Oblonsky, feeling that he must be as
circumspect as he possibly could in this society, where something
peculiar was going on, or was to go on, to which he had not the key.
A moment’s silence followed, after which Countess Lidia Ivanovna, as
though approaching the main topic of conversation, said with a fine
smile to Oblonsky:
“I’ve known you for a long while, and am very glad to make a closer
acquaintance with you. _Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis._ But to be
a true friend, one must enter into the spiritual state of one’s friend,
and I fear that you are not doing so in the case of Alexey
Alexandrovitch. You understand what I mean?” she said, lifting her fine
pensive eyes.
“In part, countess, I understand the position of Alexey
Alexandrovitch....” said Oblonsky. Having no clear idea what they were
talking about, he wanted to confine himself to generalities.
“The change is not in his external position,” Countess Lidia Ivanovna
said sternly, following with eyes of love the figure of Alexey
Alexandrovitch as he got up and crossed over to Landau; “his heart is
changed, a new heart has been vouchsafed him, and I fear you don’t
fully apprehend the change that has taken place in him.”
“Oh, well, in general outlines I can conceive the change. We have
always been friendly, and now....” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, responding
with a sympathetic glance to the expression of the countess, and
mentally balancing the question with which of the two ministers she was
most intimate, so as to know about which to ask her to speak for him.
“The change that has taken place in him cannot lessen his love for his
neighbors; on the contrary, that change can only intensify love in his
heart. But I am afraid you do not understand me. Won’t you have some
tea?” she said, with her eyes indicating the footman, who was handing
round tea on a tray.
“Not quite, countess. Of course, his misfortune....”
“Yes, a misfortune which has proved the highest happiness, when his
heart was made new, was filled full of it,” she said, gazing with eyes
full of love at Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“I do believe I might ask her to speak to both of them,” thought Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
“Oh, of course, countess,” he said; “but I imagine such changes are a
matter so private that no one, even the most intimate friend, would
care to speak of them.”
“On the contrary! We ought to speak freely and help one another.”
“Yes, undoubtedly so, but there is such a difference of convictions,
and besides....” said Oblonsky with a soft smile.
“There can be no difference where it is a question of holy truth.”
“Oh, no, of course; but....” and Stepan Arkadyevitch paused in
confusion. He understood at last that they were talking of religion.
“I fancy he will fall asleep immediately,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch
in a whisper full of meaning, going up to Lidia Ivanovna.
Stepan Arkadyevitch looked round. Landau was sitting at the window,
leaning on his elbow and the back of his chair, his head drooping.
Noticing that all eyes were turned on him he raised his head and smiled
a smile of childlike artlessness.
“Don’t take any notice,” said Lidia Ivanovna, and she lightly moved a
chair up for Alexey Alexandrovitch. “I have observed....” she was
beginning, when a footman came into the room with a letter. Lidia
Ivanovna rapidly ran her eyes over the note, and excusing herself,
wrote an answer with extraordinary rapidity, handed it to the man, and
came back to the table. “I have observed,” she went on, “that Moscow
people, especially the men, are more indifferent to religion than
anyone.”
“Oh, no, countess, I thought Moscow people had the reputation of being
the firmest in the faith,” answered Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“But as far as I can make out, you are unfortunately one of the
indifferent ones,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, turning to him with a
weary smile.
“How anyone can be indifferent!” said Lidia Ivanovna.
“I am not so much indifferent on that subject as I am waiting in
suspense,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with his most deprecating smile.
“I hardly think that the time for such questions has come yet for me.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna looked at each other.
“We can never tell whether the time has come for us or not,” said
Alexey Alexandrovitch severely. “We ought not to think whether we are
ready or not ready. God’s grace is not guided by human considerations:
sometimes it comes not to those that strive for it, and comes to those
that are unprepared, like Saul.”
“No, I believe it won’t be just yet,” said Lidia Ivanovna, who had been
meanwhile watching the movements of the Frenchman. Landau got up and
came to them.
“Do you allow me to listen?” he asked.
“Oh, yes; I did not want to disturb you,” said Lidia Ivanovna, gazing
tenderly at him; “sit here with us.”
“One has only not to close one’s eyes to shut out the light,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch went on.
“Ah, if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in
our hearts!” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile.
“But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to rise to that height,”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this
religious height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to
acknowledge his free-thinking views before a person who, by a single
word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment.
“That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?” said Lidia Ivanovna. “But
that is a false idea. There is no sin for believers, their sin has been
atoned for. _Pardon,_” she added, looking at the footman, who came in
again with another letter. She read it and gave a verbal answer:
“Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess’s, say.” “For the believer sin is not,”
she went on.
“Yes, but faith without works is dead,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
recalling the phrase from the catechism, and only by his smile clinging
to his independence.
“There you have it—from the epistle of St. James,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a certain
reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a subject they had
discussed more than once before. “What harm has been done by the false
interpretation of that passage! Nothing holds men back from belief like
that misinterpretation. ‘I have not works, so I cannot believe,’ though
all the while that is not said. But the very opposite is said.”
“Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting,” said Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, “those are the crude ideas of our
monks.... Yet that is nowhere said. It is far simpler and easier,” she
added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which
at court she encouraged youthful maids of honor, disconcerted by the
new surroundings of the court.
“We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,”
Alexey Alexandrovitch chimed in, with a glance of approval at her
words.
_“Vous comprenez l’anglais?”_ asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving a
reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through a shelf
of books.
“I want to read him ‘Safe and Happy,’ or ‘Under the Wing,’” she said,
looking inquiringly at Karenin. And finding the book, and sitting down
again in her place, she opened it. “It’s very short. In it is described
the way by which faith can be reached, and the happiness, above all
earthly bliss, with which it fills the soul. The believer cannot be
unhappy because he is not alone. But you will see.” She was just
settling herself to read when the footman came in again. “Madame
Borozdina? Tell her, tomorrow at two o’clock. Yes,” she said, putting
her finger in the place in the book, and gazing before her with her
fine pensive eyes, “that is how true faith acts. You know Marie Sanina?
You know about her trouble? She lost her only child. She was in
despair. And what happened? She found this comforter, and she thanks
God now for the death of her child. Such is the happiness faith
brings!”
“Oh, yes, that is most....” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, glad they were
going to read, and let him have a chance to collect his faculties. “No,
I see I’d better not ask her about anything today,” he thought. “If
only I can get out of this without putting my foot in it!”
“It will be dull for you,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, addressing
Landau; “you don’t know English, but it’s short.”
“Oh, I shall understand,” said Landau, with the same smile, and he
closed his eyes. Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna exchanged
meaningful glances, and the reading began.
Chapter 22
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt completely nonplussed by the strange talk
which he was hearing for the first time. The complexity of Petersburg,
as a rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out of his
Moscow stagnation. But he liked these complications, and understood
them only in the circles he knew and was at home in. In these
unfamiliar surroundings he was puzzled and disconcerted, and could not
get his bearings. As he listened to Countess Lidia Ivanovna, aware of
the beautiful, artless—or perhaps artful, he could not decide
which—eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevitch began to be
conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.
The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his head. “Marie Sanina
is glad her child’s dead.... How good a smoke would be now!... To be
saved, one need only believe, and the monks don’t know how the thing’s
to be done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does know.... And why is my
head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or all this being so queer? Anyway, I
fancy I’ve done nothing unsuitable so far. But anyway, it won’t do to
ask her now. They say they make one say one’s prayers. I only hope they
won’t make me! That’ll be too imbecile. And what stuff it is she’s
reading! but she has a good accent. Landau—Bezzubov—what’s he Bezzubov
for?” All at once Stepan Arkadyevitch became aware that his lower jaw
was uncontrollably forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to cover the
yawn, and shook himself together. But soon after he became aware that
he was dropping asleep and on the very point of snoring. He recovered
himself at the very moment when the voice of Countess Lidia Ivanovna
was saying “he’s asleep.” Stepan Arkadyevitch started with dismay,
feeling guilty and caught. But he was reassured at once by seeing that
the words “he’s asleep” referred not to him, but to Landau. The
Frenchman was asleep as well as Stepan Arkadyevitch. But Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s being asleep would have offended them, as he thought
(though even this, he thought, might not be so, as everything seemed so
queer), while Landau’s being asleep delighted them extremely,
especially Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
_“Mon ami,”_ said Lidia Ivanovna, carefully holding the folds of her
silk gown so as not to rustle, and in her excitement calling Karenin
not Alexey Alexandrovitch, but _“mon ami,” “donnez-lui la main. Vous
voyez?_ Sh!” she hissed at the footman as he came in again. “Not at
home.”
The Frenchman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with his head on
the back of his chair, and his moist hand, as it lay on his knee, made
faint movements, as though trying to catch something. Alexey
Alexandrovitch got up, tried to move carefully, but stumbled against
the table, went up and laid his hand in the Frenchman’s hand. Stepan
Arkadyevitch got up too, and opening his eyes wide, trying to wake
himself up if he were asleep, he looked first at one and then at the
other. It was all real. Stepan Arkadyevitch felt that his head was
getting worse and worse.
“_Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande,
qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte!_” articulated the Frenchman, without
opening his eyes.
“_Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez.... Revenez vers dix heures, encore
mieux demain._”
“_Qu’elle sorte!_” repeated the Frenchman impatiently.
“_C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?_” And receiving an answer in the
affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor he had meant to
ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister’s affairs, caring for
nothing, but filled with the sole desire to get away as soon as
possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into the street as though from
a plague-stricken house. For a long while he chatted and joked with his
cab-driver, trying to recover his spirits.
At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and afterwards
at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan Arkadyevitch felt a
little refreshed in the atmosphere he was used to. But still he felt
quite unlike himself all that evening.
On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s, where he was staying, Stepan
Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was
very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged him
to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its
contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of the servants,
carrying something heavy.
Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr
Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told
them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevitch, and
clinging to him, walked with him into his room and there began telling
him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep doing so.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened rarely with
him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he could
recall to his mind, everything was disgusting; but most disgusting of
all, as if it were something shameful, was the memory of the evening he
had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.
Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer,
refusing to grant Anna’s divorce, and he understood that this decision
was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or pretended
trance.
Chapter 23
In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must
necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife,
or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and
neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be
undertaken.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband
and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete
division nor agreement between them.
Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the heat and
dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of summer, and
all the trees in the boulevards had long since been in full leaf, and
the leaves were covered with dust. But they did not go back to
Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to do long before; they went on
staying in Moscow, though they both loathed it, because of late there
had been no agreement between them.
The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and all
efforts to come to an understanding intensified it, instead of removing
it. It was an inner irritation, grounded in her mind on the conviction
that his love had grown less; in his, on regret that he had put himself
for her sake in a difficult position, which she, instead of lightening,
made still more difficult. Neither of them gave full utterance to their
sense of grievance, but they considered each other in the wrong, and
tried on every pretext to prove this to one another.
In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with
all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing—love for
women, and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on
her alone. That love was less; consequently, as she reasoned, he must
have transferred part of his love to other women or to another
woman—and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any particular woman
but of the decrease of his love. Not having got an object for her
jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she
transferred her jealousy from one object to another. At one time she
was jealous of those low women with whom he might so easily renew his
old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might
meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might want to
marry, for whose sake he would break with her. And this last form of
jealousy tortured her most of all, especially as he had unwarily told
her, in a moment of frankness, that his mother knew him so little that
she had had the audacity to try and persuade him to marry the young
Princess Sorokina.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found
grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was
difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of
suspense she had passed in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of
Alexey Alexandrovitch, her solitude—she put it all down to him. If he
had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her position,
and would have rescued her from it. For her being in Moscow and not in
the country, he was to blame too. He could not live buried in the
country as she would have liked to do. He must have society, and he had
put her in this awful position, the bitterness of which he would not
see. And again, it was his fault that she was forever separated from
her son.
Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not
soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of
self-confidence, which had not been of old, and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a
bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where
the noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every
detail of their yesterday’s quarrel. Going back from the
well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to what had been the
ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a long while she
could hardly believe that their dissension had arisen from a
conversation so inoffensive, of so little moment to either. But so it
actually had been. It all arose from his laughing at the girls’ high
schools, declaring they were useless, while she defended them. He had
spoken slightingly of women’s education in general, and had said that
Hannah, Anna’s English protégée, had not the slightest need to know
anything of physics.
This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to her
occupations. And she bethought her of a phrase to pay him back for the
pain he had given her. “I don’t expect you to understand me, my
feelings, as anyone who loved me might, but simple delicacy I did
expect,” she said.
And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said something
unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but at that point, with an
unmistakable desire to wound her too, he had said:
“I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that’s true,
because I see it’s unnatural.”
The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up for
herself so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the
injustice with which he had accused her of affectation, of
artificiality, aroused her.
“I am very sorry that nothing but what’s coarse and material is
comprehensible and natural to you,” she said and walked out of the
room.
When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not referred to
the quarrel, but both felt that the quarrel had been smoothed over, but
was not at an end.
Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and
wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it
all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw
the blame on herself and to justify him.
“I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make
it up with him, and we’ll go away to the country; there I shall be more
at peace.”
“Unnatural!” She suddenly recalled the word that had stung her most of
all, not so much the word itself as the intent to wound her with which
it was said. “I know what he meant; he meant—unnatural, not loving my
own daughter, to love another person’s child. What does he know of love
for children, of my love for Seryozha, whom I’ve sacrificed for him?
But that wish to wound me! No, he loves another woman, it must be so.”
And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had
gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and
had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was horrified at
herself. “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?”
she said to herself, and began again from the beginning. “He’s
truthful, he’s honest, he loves me. I love him, and in a few days the
divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace of mind and trust,
and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will
tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go away
tomorrow.”
And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability,
she rang, and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their
things for the country.
At ten o’clock Vronsky came in.
Chapter 24
“Well, was it nice?” she asked, coming out to meet him with a penitent
and meek expression.
“Just as usual,” he answered, seeing at a glance that she was in one of
her good moods. He was used by now to these transitions, and he was
particularly glad to see it today, as he was in a specially good humor
himself.
“What do I see? Come, that’s good!” he said, pointing to the boxes in
the passage.
“Yes, we must go. I went out for a drive, and it was so fine I longed
to be in the country. There’s nothing to keep you, is there?”
“It’s the one thing I desire. I’ll be back directly, and we’ll talk it
over; I only want to change my coat. Order some tea.”
And he went into his room.
There was something mortifying in the way he had said “Come, that’s
good,” as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty, and
still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and his
self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of strife
rising up in her again, but making an effort she conquered it, and met
Vronsky as good-humoredly as before.
When he came in she told him, partly repeating phrases she had prepared
beforehand, how she had spent the day, and her plans for going away.
“You know it came to me almost like an inspiration,” she said. “Why
wait here for the divorce? Won’t it be just the same in the country? I
can’t wait any longer! I don’t want to go on hoping, I don’t want to
hear anything about the divorce. I have made up my mind it shall not
have any more influence on my life. Do you agree?”
“Oh, yes!” he said, glancing uneasily at her excited face.
“What did you do? Who was there?” she said, after a pause.
Vronsky mentioned the names of the guests. “The dinner was first rate,
and the boat race, and it was all pleasant enough, but in Moscow they
can never do anything without something _ridicule_. A lady of a sort
appeared on the scene, teacher of swimming to the Queen of Sweden, and
gave us an exhibition of her skill.”
“How? did she swim?” asked Anna, frowning.
“In an absurd red _costume de natation;_ she was old and hideous too.
So when shall we go?”
“What an absurd fancy! Why, did she swim in some special way, then?”
said Anna, not answering.
“There was absolutely nothing in it. That’s just what I say, it was
awfully stupid. Well, then, when do you think of going?”
Anna shook her head as though trying to drive away some unpleasant
idea.
“When? Why, the sooner the better! By tomorrow we shan’t be ready. The
day after tomorrow.”
“Yes ... oh, no, wait a minute! The day after tomorrow’s Sunday, I have
to be at maman’s,” said Vronsky, embarrassed, because as soon as he
uttered his mother’s name he was aware of her intent, suspicious eyes.
His embarrassment confirmed her suspicion. She flushed hotly and drew
away from him. It was now not the Queen of Sweden’s swimming-mistress
who filled Anna’s imagination, but the young Princess Sorokina. She was
staying in a village near Moscow with Countess Vronskaya.
“Can’t you go tomorrow?” she said.
“Well, no! The deeds and the money for the business I’m going there for
I can’t get by tomorrow,” he answered.
“If so, we won’t go at all.”
“But why so?”
“I shall not go later. Monday or never!”
“What for?” said Vronsky, as though in amazement. “Why, there’s no
meaning in it!”
“There’s no meaning in it to you, because you care nothing for me. You
don’t care to understand my life. The one thing that I cared for here
was Hannah. You say it’s affectation. Why, you said yesterday that I
don’t love my daughter, that I love this English girl, that it’s
unnatural. I should like to know what life there is for me that could
be natural!”
For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was
horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution. But even
though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself,
could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could not
give way to him.
“I never said that; I said I did not sympathize with this sudden
passion.”
“How is it, though you boast of your straightforwardness, you don’t
tell the truth?”
“I never boast, and I never tell lies,” he said slowly, restraining his
rising anger. “It’s a great pity if you can’t respect....”
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
And if you don’t love me any more, it would be better and more honest
to say so.”
“No, this is becoming unbearable!” cried Vronsky, getting up from his
chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said, speaking deliberately:
“What do you try my patience for?” looking as though he might have said
much more, but was restraining himself. “It has limits.”
“What do you mean by that?” she cried, looking with terror at the
undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel,
menacing eyes.
“I mean to say....” he was beginning, but he checked himself. “I must
ask what it is you want of me?”
“What can I want? All I can want is that you should not desert me, as
you think of doing,” she said, understanding all he had not uttered.
“But that I don’t want; that’s secondary. I want love, and there is
none. So then all is over.”
She turned towards the door.
“Stop! sto-op!” said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines of his
brows, though he held her by the hand. “What is it all about? I said
that we must put off going for three days, and on that you told me I
was lying, that I was not an honorable man.”
“Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having
sacrificed everything for me,” she said, recalling the words of a still
earlier quarrel, “that he’s worse than a dishonorable man—he’s a
heartless man.”
“Oh, there are limits to endurance!” he cried, and hastily let go her
hand.
“He hates me, that’s clear,” she thought, and in silence, without
looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room. “He
loves another woman, that’s even clearer,” she said to herself as she
went into her own room. “I want love, and there is none. So, then, all
is over.” She repeated the words she had said, “and it must be ended.”
“But how?” she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before
the looking-glass.
Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought
her up, to Dolly, or simply alone abroad, and of what _he_ was doing
now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether
reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends at
Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexey Alexandrovitch would
look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after this
rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them
with all her heart. At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea
that alone interested her, but she could not get clear sight of it.
Thinking once more of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she recalled the time of
her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her
at that time. “Why didn’t I die?” and the words and the feeling of that
time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul.
Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all. “Yes, to die!... And the
shame and disgrace of Alexey Alexandrovitch and of Seryozha, and my
awful shame, it will all be saved by death. To die! and he will feel
remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.”
With the trace of a smile of commiseration for herself she sat down in
the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on her left hand,
vividly picturing from different sides his feelings after her death.
Approaching footsteps—his steps—distracted her attention. As though
absorbed in the arrangement of her rings, she did not even turn to him.
He went up to her, and taking her by the hand, said softly:
“Anna, we’ll go the day after tomorrow, if you like. I agree to
everything.”
She did not speak.
“What is it?” he urged.
“You know,” she said, and at the same instant, unable to restrain
herself any longer, she burst into sobs.
“Cast me off!” she articulated between her sobs. “I’ll go away tomorrow
... I’ll do more. What am I? An immoral woman! A stone round your neck.
I don’t want to make you wretched, I don’t want to! I’ll set you free.
You don’t love me; you love someone else!”
Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that there was no trace
of foundation for her jealousy; that he had never ceased, and never
would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever.
“Anna, why distress yourself and me so?” he said to her, kissing her
hands. There was tenderness now in his face, and she fancied she caught
the sound of tears in his voice, and she felt them wet on her hand. And
instantly Anna’s despairing jealousy changed to a despairing passion of
tenderness. She put her arms round him, and covered with kisses his
head, his neck, his hands.
Chapter 25
Feeling that the reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to work
in the morning preparing for their departure. Though it was not settled
whether they should go on Monday or Tuesday, as they had each given way
to the other, Anna packed busily, feeling absolutely indifferent
whether they went a day earlier or later. She was standing in her room
over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in to see her
earlier than usual, dressed to go out.
“I’m going off at once to see maman; she can send me the money by
Yegorov. And I shall be ready to go tomorrow,” he said.
Though she was in such a good mood, the thought of his visit to his
mother’s gave her a pang.
“No, I shan’t be ready by then myself,” she said; and at once
reflected, “so then it was possible to arrange to do as I wished.” “No,
do as you meant to do. Go into the dining-room, I’m coming directly.
It’s only to turn out those things that aren’t wanted,” she said,
putting something more on the heap of frippery that lay in Annushka’s
arms.
Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came into the dining-room.
“You wouldn’t believe how distasteful these rooms have become to me,”
she said, sitting down beside him to her coffee. “There’s nothing more
awful than these _chambres garnies_. There’s no individuality in them,
no soul. These clocks, and curtains, and, worst of all, the
wallpapers—they’re a nightmare. I think of Vozdvizhenskoe as the
promised land. You’re not sending the horses off yet?”
“No, they will come after us. Where are you going to?”
“I wanted to go to Wilson’s to take some dresses to her. So it’s really
to be tomorrow?” she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her face
changed.
Vronsky’s valet came in to ask him to sign a receipt for a telegram
from Petersburg. There was nothing out of the way in Vronsky’s getting
a telegram, but he said, as though anxious to conceal something from
her, that the receipt was in his study, and he turned hurriedly to her.
“By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all.”
“From whom is the telegram?” she asked, not hearing him.
“From Stiva,” he answered reluctantly.
“Why didn’t you show it to me? What secret can there be between Stiva
and me?”
Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the telegram.
“I didn’t want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for
telegraphing: why telegraph when nothing is settled?”
“About the divorce?”
“Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He has
promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read it.”
With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what Vronsky had
told her. At the end was added: “Little hope; but I will do everything
possible and impossible.”
“I said yesterday that it’s absolutely nothing to me when I get, or
whether I never get, a divorce,” she said, flushing crimson. “There was
not the slightest necessity to hide it from me.” “So he may hide and
does hide his correspondence with women from me,” she thought.
“Yashvin meant to come this morning with Voytov,” said Vronsky; “I
believe he’s won from Pyevtsov all and more than he can pay, about
sixty thousand.”
“No,” she said, irritated by his so obviously showing by this change of
subject that he was irritated, “why did you suppose that this news
would affect me so, that you must even try to hide it? I said I don’t
want to consider it, and I should have liked you to care as little
about it as I do.”
“I care about it because I like definiteness,” he said.
“Definiteness is not in the form but the love,” she said, more and more
irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in which
he spoke. “What do you want it for?”
“My God! love again,” he thought, frowning.
“Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children’s in the
future.”
“There won’t be children in the future.”
“That’s a great pity,” he said.
“You want it for the children’s sake, but you don’t think of me?” she
said, quite forgetting or not having heard that he had said, “_For your
sake_ and the children’s.”
The question of the possibility of having children had long been a
subject of dispute and irritation to her. His desire to have children
she interpreted as a proof he did not prize her beauty.
“Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake,” he repeated,
frowning as though in pain, “because I am certain that the greater part
of your irritability comes from the indefiniteness of the position.”
“Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred for
me is apparent,” she thought, not hearing his words, but watching with
terror the cold, cruel judge who looked mocking her out of his eyes.
“The cause is not that,” she said, “and, indeed, I don’t see how the
cause of my irritability, as you call it, can be that I am completely
in your power. What indefiniteness is there in the position? on the
contrary....”
“I am very sorry that you don’t care to understand,” he interrupted,
obstinately anxious to give utterance to his thought. “The
indefiniteness consists in your imagining that I am free.”
“On that score you can set your mind quite at rest,” she said, and
turning away from him, she began drinking her coffee.
She lifted her cup, with her little finger held apart, and put it to
her lips. After drinking a few sips she glanced at him, and by his
expression, she saw clearly that he was repelled by her hand, and her
gesture, and the sound made by her lips.
“I don’t care in the least what your mother thinks, and what match she
wants to make for you,” she said, putting the cup down with a shaking
hand.
“But we are not talking about that.”
“Yes, that’s just what we are talking about. And let me tell you that a
heartless woman, whether she’s old or not old, your mother or anyone
else, is of no consequence to me, and I would not consent to know her.”
“Anna, I beg you not to speak disrespectfully of my mother.”
“A woman whose heart does not tell her where her son’s happiness and
honor lie has no heart.”
“I repeat my request that you will not speak disrespectfully of my
mother, whom I respect,” he said, raising his voice and looking sternly
at her.
She did not answer. Looking intently at him, at his face, his hands,
she recalled all the details of their reconciliation the previous day,
and his passionate caresses. “There, just such caresses he has
lavished, and will lavish, and longs to lavish on other women!” she
thought.
“You don’t love your mother. That’s all talk, and talk, and talk!” she
said, looking at him with hatred in her eyes.
“Even if so, you must....”
“Must decide, and I have decided,” she said, and she would have gone
away, but at that moment Yashvin walked into the room. Anna greeted him
and remained.
Why, when there was a tempest in her soul, and she felt she was
standing at a turning point in her life, which might have fearful
consequences—why, at that minute, she had to keep up appearances before
an outsider, who sooner or later must know it all—she did not know. But
at once quelling the storm within her, she sat down and began talking
to their guest.
“Well, how are you getting on? Has your debt been paid you?” she asked
Yashvin.
“Oh, pretty fair; I fancy I shan’t get it all, but I shall get a good
half. And when are you off?” said Yashvin, looking at Vronsky, and
unmistakably guessing at a quarrel.
“The day after tomorrow, I think,” said Vronsky.
“You’ve been meaning to go so long, though.”
“But now it’s quite decided,” said Anna, looking Vronsky straight in
the face with a look which told him not to dream of the possibility of
reconciliation.
“Don’t you feel sorry for that unlucky Pyevtsov?” she went on, talking
to Yashvin.
“I’ve never asked myself the question, Anna Arkadyevna, whether I’m
sorry for him or not. You see, all my fortune’s here”—he touched his
breast pocket—“and just now I’m a wealthy man. But today I’m going to
the club, and I may come out a beggar. You see, whoever sits down to
play with me—he wants to leave me without a shirt to my back, and so do
I him. And so we fight it out, and that’s the pleasure of it.”
“Well, but suppose you were married,” said Anna, “how would it be for
your wife?”
Yashvin laughed.
“That’s why I’m not married, and never mean to be.”
“And Helsingfors?” said Vronsky, entering into the conversation and
glancing at Anna’s smiling face. Meeting his eyes, Anna’s face
instantly took a coldly severe expression as though she were saying to
him: “It’s not forgotten. It’s all the same.”
“Were you really in love?” she said to Yashvin.
“Oh heavens! ever so many times! But you see, some men can play but
only so that they can always lay down their cards when the hour of a
_rendezvous_ comes, while I can take up love, but only so as not to be
late for my cards in the evening. That’s how I manage things.”
“No, I didn’t mean that, but the real thing.” She would have said
_Helsingfors_, but would not repeat the word used by Vronsky.
Voytov, who was buying the horse, came in. Anna got up and went out of
the room.
Before leaving the house, Vronsky went into her room. She would have
pretended to be looking for something on the table, but ashamed of
making a pretense, she looked straight in his face with cold eyes.
“What do you want?” she asked in French.
“To get the guarantee for Gambetta, I’ve sold him,” he said, in a tone
which said more clearly than words, “I’ve no time for discussing
things, and it would lead to nothing.”
“I’m not to blame in any way,” he thought. “If she will punish herself,
_tant pis pour elle._ But as he was going he fancied that she said
something, and his heart suddenly ached with pity for her.
“Eh, Anna?” he queried.
“I said nothing,” she answered just as coldly and calmly.
“Oh, nothing, _tant pis_ then,” he thought, feeling cold again, and he
turned and went out. As he was going out he caught a glimpse in the
looking-glass of her face, white, with quivering lips. He even wanted
to stop and to say some comforting word to her, but his legs carried
him out of the room before he could think what to say. The whole of
that day he spent away from home, and when he came in late in the
evening the maid told him that Anna Arkadyevna had a headache and
begged him not to go in to her.
Chapter 26
Never before had a day been passed in quarrel. Today was the first
time. And this was not a quarrel. It was the open acknowledgment of
complete coldness. Was it possible to glance at her as he had glanced
when he came into the room for the guarantee?—to look at her, see her
heart was breaking with despair, and go out without a word with that
face of callous composure? He was not merely cold to her, he hated her
because he loved another woman—that was clear.
And remembering all the cruel words he had said, Anna supplied, too,
the words that he had unmistakably wished to say and could have said to
her, and she grew more and more exasperated.
“I won’t prevent you,” he might say. “You can go where you like. You
were unwilling to be divorced from your husband, no doubt so that you
might go back to him. Go back to him. If you want money, I’ll give it
to you. How many roubles do you want?”
All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in
her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he
had actually said them.
“But didn’t he only yesterday swear he loved me, he, a truthful and
sincere man? Haven’t I despaired for nothing many times already?” she
said to herself afterwards.
All that day, except for the visit to Wilson’s, which occupied two
hours, Anna spent in doubts whether everything were over or whether
there were still hope of reconciliation, whether she should go away at
once or see him once more. She was expecting him the whole day, and in
the evening, as she went to her own room, leaving a message for him
that her head ached, she said to herself, “If he comes in spite of what
the maid says, it means that he loves me still. If not, it means that
all is over, and then I will decide what I’m to do!...”
In the evening she heard the rumbling of his carriage stop at the
entrance, his ring, his steps and his conversation with the servant; he
believed what was told him, did not care to find out more, and went to
his own room. So then everything was over.
And death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of
bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of
gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession
of her heart was waging with him.
Now nothing mattered: going or not going to Vozdvizhenskoe, getting or
not getting a divorce from her husband—all that did not matter. The one
thing that mattered was punishing him. When she poured herself out her
usual dose of opium, and thought that she had only to drink off the
whole bottle to die, it seemed to her so simple and easy, that she
began musing with enjoyment on how he would suffer, and repent and love
her memory when it would be too late. She lay in bed with open eyes, by
the light of a single burned-down candle, gazing at the carved cornice
of the ceiling and at the shadow of the screen that covered part of it,
while she vividly pictured to herself how he would feel when she would
be no more, when she would be only a memory to him. “How could I say
such cruel things to her?” he would say. “How could I go out of the
room without saying anything to her? But now she is no more. She has
gone away from us forever. She is....” Suddenly the shadow of the
screen wavered, pounced on the whole cornice, the whole ceiling; other
shadows from the other side swooped to meet it, for an instant the
shadows flitted back, but then with fresh swiftness they darted
forward, wavered, commingled, and all was darkness. “Death!” she
thought. And such horror came upon her that for a long while she could
not realize where she was, and for a long while her trembling hands
could not find the matches and light another candle, instead of the one
that had burned down and gone out. “No, anything—only to live! Why, I
love him! Why, he loves me! This has been before and will pass,” she
said, feeling that tears of joy at the return to life were trickling
down her cheeks. And to escape from her panic she went hurriedly to his
room.
He was asleep there, and sleeping soundly. She went up to him, and
holding the light above his face, she gazed a long while at him. Now
when he was asleep, she loved him so that at the sight of him she could
not keep back tears of tenderness. But she knew that if he waked up he
would look at her with cold eyes, convinced that he was right, and that
before telling him of her love, she would have to prove to him that he
had been wrong in his treatment of her. Without waking him, she went
back, and after a second dose of opium she fell towards morning into a
heavy, incomplete sleep, during which she never quite lost
consciousness.
In the morning she was waked by a horrible nightmare, which had
recurred several times in her dreams, even before her connection with
Vronsky. A little old man with unkempt beard was doing something bent
down over some iron, muttering meaningless French words, and she, as
she always did in this nightmare (it was what made the horror of it),
felt that this peasant was taking no notice of her, but was doing
something horrible with the iron—over her. And she waked up in a cold
sweat.
When she got up, the previous day came back to her as though veiled in
mist.
“There was a quarrel. Just what has happened several times. I said I
had a headache, and he did not come in to see me. Tomorrow we’re going
away; I must see him and get ready for the journey,” she said to
herself. And learning that he was in his study, she went down to him.
As she passed through the drawing-room she heard a carriage stop at the
entrance, and looking out of the window she saw the carriage, from
which a young girl in a lilac hat was leaning out giving some direction
to the footman ringing the bell. After a parley in the hall, someone
came upstairs, and Vronsky’s steps could be heard passing the
drawing-room. He went rapidly downstairs. Anna went again to the
window. She saw him come out onto the steps without his hat and go up
to the carriage. The young girl in the lilac hat handed him a parcel.
Vronsky, smiling, said something to her. The carriage drove away, he
ran rapidly upstairs again.
The mists that had shrouded everything in her soul parted suddenly. The
feelings of yesterday pierced the sick heart with a fresh pang. She
could not understand now how she could have lowered herself by spending
a whole day with him in his house. She went into his room to announce
her determination.
“That was Madame Sorokina and her daughter. They came and brought me
the money and the deeds from maman. I couldn’t get them yesterday. How
is your head, better?” he said quietly, not wishing to see and to
understand the gloomy and solemn expression of her face.
She looked silently, intently at him, standing in the middle of the
room. He glanced at her, frowned for a moment, and went on reading a
letter. She turned, and went deliberately out of the room. He still
might have turned her back, but she had reached the door, he was still
silent, and the only sound audible was the rustling of the note paper
as he turned it.
“Oh, by the way,” he said at the very moment she was in the doorway,
“we’re going tomorrow for certain, aren’t we?”
“You, but not I,” she said, turning round to him.
“Anna, we can’t go on like this....”
“You, but not I,” she repeated.
“This is getting unbearable!”
“You ... you will be sorry for this,” she said, and went out.
Frightened by the desperate expression with which these words were
uttered, he jumped up and would have run after her, but on second
thoughts he sat down and scowled, setting his teeth. This vulgar—as he
thought it—threat of something vague exasperated him. “I’ve tried
everything,” he thought; “the only thing left is not to pay attention,”
and he began to get ready to drive into town, and again to his mother’s
to get her signature to the deeds.
She heard the sound of his steps about the study and the dining-room.
At the drawing-room he stood still. But he did not turn in to see her,
he merely gave an order that the horse should be given to Voytov if he
came while he was away. Then she heard the carriage brought round, the
door opened, and he came out again. But he went back into the porch
again, and someone was running upstairs. It was the valet running up
for his gloves that had been forgotten. She went to the window and saw
him take the gloves without looking, and touching the coachman on the
back he said something to him. Then without looking up at the window he
settled himself in his usual attitude in the carriage, with his legs
crossed, and drawing on his gloves he vanished round the corner.
Chapter 27
“He has gone! It is over!” Anna said to herself, standing at the
window; and in answer to this statement the impression of the darkness
when the candle had flickered out, and of her fearful dream mingling
into one, filled her heart with cold terror.
“No, that cannot be!” she cried, and crossing the room she rang the
bell. She was so afraid now of being alone, that without waiting for
the servant to come in, she went out to meet him.
“Inquire where the count has gone,” she said. The servant answered that
the count had gone to the stable.
“His honor left word that if you cared to drive out, the carriage would
be back immediately.”
“Very good. Wait a minute. I’ll write a note at once. Send Mihail with
the note to the stables. Make haste.”
She sat down and wrote:
“I was wrong. Come back home; I must explain. For God’s sake come! I’m
afraid.”
She sealed it up and gave it to the servant.
She was afraid of being left alone now; she followed the servant out of
the room, and went to the nursery.
“Why, this isn’t it, this isn’t he! Where are his blue eyes, his sweet,
shy smile?” was her first thought when she saw her chubby, rosy little
girl with her black, curly hair instead of Seryozha, whom in the tangle
of her ideas she had expected to see in the nursery. The little girl
sitting at the table was obstinately and violently battering on it with
a cork, and staring aimlessly at her mother with her pitch-black eyes.
Answering the English nurse that she was quite well, and that she was
going to the country tomorrow, Anna sat down by the little girl and
began spinning the cork to show her. But the child’s loud, ringing
laugh, and the motion of her eyebrows, recalled Vronsky so vividly that
she got up hurriedly, restraining her sobs, and went away. “Can it be
all over? No, it cannot be!” she thought. “He will come back. But how
can he explain that smile, that excitement after he had been talking to
her? But even if he doesn’t explain, I will believe. If I don’t
believe, there’s only one thing left for me, and I can’t.”
She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes had passed. “By now he has
received the note and is coming back. Not long, ten minutes more....
But what if he doesn’t come? No, that cannot be. He mustn’t see me with
tear-stained eyes. I’ll go and wash. Yes, yes; did I do my hair or
not?” she asked herself. And she could not remember. She felt her head
with her hand. “Yes, my hair has been done, but when I did it I can’t
in the least remember.” She could not believe the evidence of her hand,
and went up to the pier-glass to see whether she really had done her
hair. She certainly had, but she could not think when she had done it.
“Who’s that?” she thought, looking in the looking-glass at the swollen
face with strangely glittering eyes, that looked in a scared way at
her. “Why, it’s I!” she suddenly understood, and looking round, she
seemed all at once to feel his kisses on her, and twitched her
shoulders, shuddering. Then she lifted her hand to her lips and kissed
it.
“What is it? Why, I’m going out of my mind!” and she went into her
bedroom, where Annushka was tidying the room.
“Annushka,” she said, coming to a standstill before her, and she stared
at the maid, not knowing what to say to her.
“You meant to go and see Darya Alexandrovna,” said the girl, as though
she understood.
“Darya Alexandrovna? Yes, I’ll go.”
“Fifteen minutes there, fifteen minutes back. He’s coming, he’ll be
here soon.” She took out her watch and looked at it. “But how could he
go away, leaving me in such a state? How can he live, without making it
up with me?” She went to the window and began looking into the street.
Judging by the time, he might be back now. But her calculations might
be wrong, and she began once more to recall when he had started and to
count the minutes.
At the moment when she had moved away to the big clock to compare it
with her watch, someone drove up. Glancing out of the window, she saw
his carriage. But no one came upstairs, and voices could be heard
below. It was the messenger who had come back in the carriage. She went
down to him.
“We didn’t catch the count. The count had driven off on the lower city
road.”
“What do you say? What!...” she said to the rosy, good-humored Mihail,
as he handed her back her note.
“Why, then, he has never received it!” she thought.
“Go with this note to Countess Vronskaya’s place, you know? and bring
an answer back immediately,” she said to the messenger.
“And I, what am I going to do?” she thought. “Yes, I’m going to
Dolly’s, that’s true or else I shall go out of my mind. Yes, and I can
telegraph, too.” And she wrote a telegram. “I absolutely must talk to
you; come at once.” After sending off the telegram, she went to dress.
When she was dressed and in her hat, she glanced again into the eyes of
the plump, comfortable-looking Annushka. There was unmistakable
sympathy in those good-natured little gray eyes.
“Annushka, dear, what am I to do?” said Anna, sobbing and sinking
helplessly into a chair.
“Why fret yourself so, Anna Arkadyevna? Why, there’s nothing out of the
way. You drive out a little, and it’ll cheer you up,” said the maid.
“Yes, I’m going,” said Anna, rousing herself and getting up. “And if
there’s a telegram while I’m away, send it on to Darya Alexandrovna’s
... but no, I shall be back myself.”
“Yes, I mustn’t think, I must do something, drive somewhere, and most
of all, get out of this house,” she said, feeling with terror the
strange turmoil going on in her own heart, and she made haste to go out
and get into the carriage.
“Where to?” asked Pyotr before getting onto the box.
“To Znamenka, the Oblonskys’.”
Chapter 28
It was bright and sunny. A fine rain had been falling all the morning,
and now it had not long cleared up. The iron roofs, the flags of the
roads, the flints of the pavements, the wheels and leather, the brass
and the tinplate of the carriages—all glistened brightly in the May
sunshine. It was three o’clock, and the very liveliest time in the
streets.
As she sat in a corner of the comfortable carriage, that hardly swayed
on its supple springs, while the grays trotted swiftly, in the midst of
the unceasing rattle of wheels and the changing impressions in the pure
air, Anna ran over the events of the last days, and she saw her
position quite differently from how it had seemed at home. Now the
thought of death seemed no longer so terrible and so clear to her, and
death itself no longer seemed so inevitable. Now she blamed herself for
the humiliation to which she had lowered herself. “I entreat him to
forgive me. I have given in to him. I have owned myself in fault. What
for? Can’t I live without him?” And leaving unanswered the question how
she was going to live without him, she fell to reading the signs on the
shops. “Office and warehouse. Dental surgeon. Yes, I’ll tell Dolly all
about it. She doesn’t like Vronsky. I shall be sick and ashamed, but
I’ll tell her. She loves me, and I’ll follow her advice. I won’t give
in to him; I won’t let him train me as he pleases. Filippov, bun shop.
They say they send their dough to Petersburg. The Moscow water is so
good for it. Ah, the springs at Mitishtchen, and the pancakes!”
And she remembered how, long, long ago, when she was a girl of
seventeen, she had gone with her aunt to Troitsa. “Riding, too. Was
that really me, with red hands? How much that seemed to me then
splendid and out of reach has become worthless, while what I had then
has gone out of my reach forever! Could I ever have believed then that
I could come to such humiliation? How conceited and self-satisfied he
will be when he gets my note! But I will show him.... How horrid that
paint smells! Why is it they’re always painting and building? _Modes et
robes_, she read. A man bowed to her. It was Annushka’s husband. “Our
parasites”; she remembered how Vronsky had said that. “Our? Why our?
What’s so awful is that one can’t tear up the past by its roots. One
can’t tear it out, but one can hide one’s memory of it. And I’ll hide
it.” And then she thought of her past with Alexey Alexandrovitch, of
how she had blotted the memory of it out of her life. “Dolly will think
I’m leaving my second husband, and so I certainly must be in the wrong.
As if I cared to be right! I can’t help it!” she said, and she wanted
to cry. But at once she fell to wondering what those two girls could be
smiling about. “Love, most likely. They don’t know how dreary it is,
how low.... The boulevard and the children. Three boys running, playing
at horses. Seryozha! And I’m losing everything and not getting him
back. Yes, I’m losing everything, if he doesn’t return. Perhaps he was
late for the train and has come back by now. Longing for humiliation
again!” she said to herself. “No, I’ll go to Dolly, and say straight
out to her, I’m unhappy, I deserve this, I’m to blame, but still I’m
unhappy, help me. These horses, this carriage—how loathsome I am to
myself in this carriage—all his; but I won’t see them again.”
Thinking over the words in which she would tell Dolly, and mentally
working her heart up to great bitterness, Anna went upstairs.
“Is there anyone with her?” she asked in the hall.
“Katerina Alexandrovna Levin,” answered the footman.
“Kitty! Kitty, whom Vronsky was in love with!” thought Anna, “the girl
he thinks of with love. He’s sorry he didn’t marry her. But me he
thinks of with hatred, and is sorry he had anything to do with me.”
The sisters were having a consultation about nursing when Anna called.
Dolly went down alone to see the visitor who had interrupted their
conversation.
“Well, so you’ve not gone away yet? I meant to have come to you,” she
said; “I had a letter from Stiva today.”
“We had a telegram too,” answered Anna, looking round for Kitty.
“He writes that he can’t make out quite what Alexey Alexandrovitch
wants, but he won’t go away without a decisive answer.”
“I thought you had someone with you. Can I see the letter?”
“Yes; Kitty,” said Dolly, embarrassed. “She stayed in the nursery. She
has been very ill.”
“So I heard. May I see the letter?”
“I’ll get it directly. But he doesn’t refuse; on the contrary, Stiva
has hopes,” said Dolly, stopping in the doorway.
“I haven’t, and indeed I don’t wish it,” said Anna.
“What’s this? Does Kitty consider it degrading to meet me?” thought
Anna when she was alone. “Perhaps she’s right, too. But it’s not for
her, the girl who was in love with Vronsky, it’s not for her to show me
that, even if it is true. I know that in my position I can’t be
received by any decent woman. I knew that from the first moment I
sacrificed everything to him. And this is my reward! Oh, how I hate
him! And what did I come here for? I’m worse here, more miserable.” She
heard from the next room the sisters’ voices in consultation. “And what
am I going to say to Dolly now? Amuse Kitty by the sight of my
wretchedness, submit to her patronizing? No; and besides, Dolly
wouldn’t understand. And it would be no good my telling her. It would
only be interesting to see Kitty, to show her how I despise everyone
and everything, how nothing matters to me now.”
Dolly came in with the letter. Anna read it and handed it back in
silence.
“I knew all that,” she said, “and it doesn’t interest me in the least.”
“Oh, why so? On the contrary, I have hopes,” said Dolly, looking
inquisitively at Anna. She had never seen her in such a strangely
irritable condition. “When are you going away?” she asked.
Anna, half-closing her eyes, looked straight before her and did not
answer.
“Why does Kitty shrink from me?” she said, looking at the door and
flushing red.
“Oh, what nonsense! She’s nursing, and things aren’t going right with
her, and I’ve been advising her.... She’s delighted. She’ll be here in
a minute,” said Dolly awkwardly, not clever at lying. “Yes, here she
is.”
Hearing that Anna had called, Kitty had wanted not to appear, but Dolly
persuaded her. Rallying her forces, Kitty went in, walked up to her,
blushing, and shook hands.
“I am so glad to see you,” she said with a trembling voice.
Kitty had been thrown into confusion by the inward conflict between her
antagonism to this bad woman and her desire to be nice to her. But as
soon as she saw Anna’s lovely and attractive face, all feeling of
antagonism disappeared.
“I should not have been surprised if you had not cared to meet me. I’m
used to everything. You have been ill? Yes, you are changed,” said
Anna.
Kitty felt that Anna was looking at her with hostile eyes. She ascribed
this hostility to the awkward position in which Anna, who had once
patronized her, must feel with her now, and she felt sorry for her.
They talked of Kitty’s illness, of the baby, of Stiva, but it was
obvious that nothing interested Anna.
“I came to say good-bye to you,” she said, getting up.
“Oh, when are you going?”
But again not answering, Anna turned to Kitty.
“Yes, I am very glad to have seen you,” she said with a smile. “I have
heard so much of you from everyone, even from your husband. He came to
see me, and I liked him exceedingly,” she said, unmistakably with
malicious intent. “Where is he?”
“He has gone back to the country,” said Kitty, blushing.
“Remember me to him, be sure you do.”
“I’ll be sure to!” Kitty said naïvely, looking compassionately into her
eyes.
“So good-bye, Dolly.” And kissing Dolly and shaking hands with Kitty,
Anna went out hurriedly.
“She’s just the same and just as charming! She’s very lovely!” said
Kitty, when she was alone with her sister. “But there’s something
piteous about her. Awfully piteous!”
“Yes, there’s something unusual about her today,” said Dolly. “When I
went with her into the hall, I fancied she was almost crying.”
Chapter 29
Anna got into the carriage again in an even worse frame of mind than
when she set out from home. To her previous tortures was added now that
sense of mortification and of being an outcast which she had felt so
distinctly on meeting Kitty.
“Where to? Home?” asked Pyotr.
“Yes, home,” she said, not even thinking now where she was going.
“How they looked at me as something dreadful, incomprehensible, and
curious! What can he be telling the other with such warmth?” she
thought, staring at two men who walked by. “Can one ever tell anyone
what one is feeling? I meant to tell Dolly, and it’s a good thing I
didn’t tell her. How pleased she would have been at my misery! She
would have concealed it, but her chief feeling would have been delight
at my being punished for the happiness she envied me for. Kitty, she
would have been even more pleased. How I can see through her! She knows
I was more than usually sweet to her husband. And she’s jealous and
hates me. And she despises me. In her eyes I’m an immoral woman. If I
were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in love with
me ... if I’d cared to. And, indeed, I did care to. There’s someone
who’s pleased with himself,” she thought, as she saw a fat, rubicund
gentleman coming towards her. He took her for an acquaintance, and
lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head, and then perceived
his mistake. “He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as well as
anyone in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites,
as the French say. They want that dirty ice cream, that they do know
for certain,” she thought, looking at two boys stopping an ice cream
seller, who took a barrel off his head and began wiping his perspiring
face with a towel. “We all want what is sweet and nice. If not
sweetmeats, then a dirty ice. And Kitty’s the same—if not Vronsky, then
Levin. And she envies me, and hates me. And we all hate each other. I
Kitty, Kitty me. Yes, that’s the truth. ‘_Tiutkin, coiffeur._’ _Je me
fais coiffer par Tiutkin...._ I’ll tell him that when he comes,” she
thought and smiled. But the same instant she remembered that she had no
one now to tell anything amusing to. “And there’s nothing amusing,
nothing mirthful, really. It’s all hateful. They’re singing for
vespers, and how carefully that merchant crosses himself! as if he were
afraid of missing something. Why these churches and this singing and
this humbug? Simply to conceal that we all hate each other like these
cab drivers who are abusing each other so angrily. Yashvin says, ‘He
wants to strip me of my shirt, and I him of his.’ Yes, that’s the
truth!”
She was plunged in these thoughts, which so engrossed her that she left
off thinking of her own position, when the carriage drew up at the
steps of her house. It was only when she saw the porter running out to
meet her that she remembered she had sent the note and the telegram.
“Is there an answer?” she inquired.
“I’ll see this minute,” answered the porter, and glancing into his
room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram.
“I can’t come before ten o’clock.—Vronsky,” she read.
“And hasn’t the messenger come back?”
“No,” answered the porter.
“Then, since it’s so, I know what I must do,” she said, and feeling a
vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she ran
upstairs. “I’ll go to him myself. Before going away forever, I’ll tell
him all. Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!” she thought.
Seeing his hat on the rack, she shuddered with aversion. She did not
consider that his telegram was an answer to her telegram and that he
had not yet received her note. She pictured him to herself as talking
calmly to his mother and Princess Sorokina and rejoicing at her
sufferings. “Yes, I must go quickly,” she said, not knowing yet where
she was going. She longed to get away as quickly as possible from the
feelings she had gone through in that awful house. The servants, the
walls, the things in that house—all aroused repulsion and hatred in her
and lay like a weight upon her.
“Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if he’s not there, then go
there and catch him.” Anna looked at the railway timetable in the
newspapers. An evening train went at two minutes past eight. “Yes, I
shall be in time.” She gave orders for the other horses to be put in
the carriage, and packed in a traveling-bag the things needed for a few
days. She knew she would never come back here again.
Among the plans that came into her head she vaguely determined that
after what would happen at the station or at the countess’s house, she
would go as far as the first town on the Nizhni road and stop there.
Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and
cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She
ordered the carriage and went out. The house threw a shadow now right
across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in the
sunshine. Annushka, who came down with her things, and Pyotr, who put
the things in the carriage, and the coachman, evidently out of humor,
were all hateful to her, and irritated her by their words and actions.
“I don’t want you, Pyotr.”
“But how about the ticket?”
“Well, as you like, it doesn’t matter,” she said crossly.
Pyotr jumped on the box, and putting his arms akimbo, told the coachman
to drive to the booking-office.
Chapter 30
“Here it is again! Again I understand it all!” Anna said to herself, as
soon as the carriage had started and swaying lightly, rumbled over the
tiny cobbles of the paved road, and again one impression followed
rapidly upon another.
“Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly?” she tried to
recall it. “‘_Tiutkin, coiffeur?_’—no, not that. Yes, of what Yashvin
says, the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds
men together. No, it’s a useless journey you’re making,” she said,
mentally addressing a party in a coach and four, evidently going for an
excursion into the country. “And the dog you’re taking with you will be
no help to you. You can’t get away from yourselves.” Turning her eyes
in the direction Pyotr had turned to look, she saw a factory-hand
almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman.
“Come, he’s found a quicker way,” she thought. “Count Vronsky and I did
not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.”
And now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she
was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had
hitherto avoided thinking about. “What was it he sought in me? Not love
so much as the satisfaction of vanity.” She remembered his words, the
expression of his face, that recalled an abject setter-dog, in the
early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this.
“Yes, there was the triumph of success in him. Of course there was love
too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me.
Now that’s over. There’s nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of,
but to be ashamed of. He has taken from me all he could, and now I am
no use to him. He is weary of me and is trying not to be dishonorable
in his behavior to me. He let that out yesterday—he wants divorce and
marriage so as to burn his ships. He loves me, but how? The zest is
gone, as the English say. That fellow wants everyone to admire him and
is very much pleased with himself,” she thought, looking at a red-faced
clerk, riding on a riding-school horse. “Yes, there’s not the same
flavor about me for him now. If I go away from him, at the bottom of
his heart he will be glad.”
This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing
light, which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human
relations.
“My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is
waning and waning, and that’s why we’re drifting apart.” She went on
musing. “And there’s no help for it. He is everything for me, and I
want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants
more and more to get away from me. We walked to meet each other up to
the time of our love, and then we have been irresistibly drifting in
different directions. And there’s no altering that. He tells me I’m
insanely jealous, and I have told myself that I am insanely jealous;
but it’s not true. I’m not jealous, but I’m unsatisfied. But....” she
opened her lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the
excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. “If I
could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but
his caresses; but I can’t and I don’t care to be anything else. And by
that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it
cannot be different. Don’t I know that he wouldn’t deceive me, that he
has no schemes about Princess Sorokina, that he’s not in love with
Kitty, that he won’t desert me! I know all that, but it makes it no
better for me. If without loving me, from _duty_ he’ll be good and kind
to me, without what I want, that’s a thousand times worse than
unkindness! That’s—hell! And that’s just how it is. For a long while
now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins. I don’t know
these streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses....
And in the houses always people and people.... How many of them, no
end, and all hating each other! Come, let me try and think what I want,
to make me happy. Well? Suppose I am divorced, and Alexey
Alexandrovitch lets me have Seryozha, and I marry Vronsky.” Thinking of
Alexey Alexandrovitch, she at once pictured him with extraordinary
vividness as though he were alive before her, with his mild, lifeless,
dull eyes, the blue veins in his white hands, his intonations and the
cracking of his fingers, and remembering the feeling which had existed
between them, and which was also called love, she shuddered with
loathing. “Well, I’m divorced, and become Vronsky’s wife. Well, will
Kitty cease looking at me as she looked at me today? No. And will
Seryozha leave off asking and wondering about my two husbands? And is
there any new feeling I can awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there
possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery? No, no!” she
answered now without the slightest hesitation. “Impossible! We are
drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness, and he mine, and
there’s no altering him or me. Every attempt has been made, the screw
has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I’m
sorry for her. Aren’t we all flung into the world only to hate each
other, and so to torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys
coming—laughing Seryozha?” she thought. “I thought, too, that I loved
him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived
without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the
exchange till that love was satisfied.” And with loathing she thought
of what she meant by that love. And the clearness with which she saw
life now, her own and all men’s, was a pleasure to her. “It’s so with
me and Pyotr, and the coachman, Fyodor, and that merchant, and all the
people living along the Volga, where those placards invite one to go,
and everywhere and always,” she thought when she had driven under the
low-pitched roof of the Nizhigorod station, and the porters ran to meet
her.
“A ticket to Obiralovka?” said Pyotr.
She had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a
great effort she understood the question.
“Yes,” she said, handing him her purse, and taking a little red bag in
her hand, she got out of the carriage.
Making her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting-room, she
gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the plans
between which she was hesitating. And again at the old sore places,
hope and then despair poisoned the wounds of her tortured, fearfully
throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa waiting for the
train, she gazed with aversion at the people coming and going (they
were all hateful to her), and thought how she would arrive at the
station, would write him a note, and what she would write to him, and
how he was at this moment complaining to his mother of his position,
not understanding her sufferings, and how she would go into the room,
and what she would say to him. Then she thought that life might still
be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully
her heart was beating.
Chapter 31
A bell rang, some young men, ugly and impudent, and at the same time
careful of the impression they were making, hurried by. Pyotr, too,
crossed the room in his livery and top-boots, with his dull, animal
face, and came up to her to take her to the train. Some noisy men were
quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one whispered something
about her to another—something vile, no doubt. She stepped up on the
high step, and sat down in a carriage by herself on a dirty seat that
had been white. Her bag lay beside her, shaken up and down by the
springiness of the seat. With a foolish smile Pyotr raised his hat,
with its colored band, at the window, in token of farewell; an impudent
conductor slammed the door and the latch. A grotesque-looking lady
wearing a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman, and was appalled
at her hideousness), and a little girl laughing affectedly ran down the
platform.
“Katerina Andreevna, she’s got them all, _ma tante!_” cried the girl.
“Even the child’s hideous and affected,” thought Anna. To avoid seeing
anyone, she got up quickly and seated herself at the opposite window of
the empty carriage. A misshapen-looking peasant covered with dirt, in a
cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all round, passed by that
window, stooping down to the carriage wheels. “There’s something
familiar about that hideous peasant,” thought Anna. And remembering her
dream, she moved away to the opposite door, shaking with terror. The
conductor opened the door and let in a man and his wife.
“Do you wish to get out?”
Anna made no answer. The conductor and her two fellow-passengers did
not notice under her veil her panic-stricken face. She went back to her
corner and sat down. The couple seated themselves on the opposite side,
and intently but surreptitiously scrutinized her clothes. Both husband
and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked, would she allow
him to smoke, obviously not with a view to smoking but to getting into
conversation with her. Receiving her assent, he said to his wife in
French something about caring less to smoke than to talk. They made
inane and affected remarks to one another, entirely for her benefit.
Anna saw clearly that they were sick of each other, and hated each
other. And no one could have helped hating such miserable
monstrosities.
A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise,
shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was nothing
for anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her agonizingly,
and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to hear it. At last
the third bell rang, there was a whistle and a hiss of steam, and a
clank of chains, and the man in her carriage crossed himself. “It would
be interesting to ask him what meaning he attaches to that,” thought
Anna, looking angrily at him. She looked past the lady out of the
window at the people who seemed whirling by as they ran beside the
train or stood on the platform. The train, jerking at regular intervals
at the junctions of the rails, rolled by the platform, past a stone
wall, a signal-box, past other trains; the wheels, moving more smoothly
and evenly, resounded with a slight clang on the rails. The window was
lighted up by the bright evening sun, and a slight breeze fluttered the
curtain. Anna forgot her fellow passengers, and to the light swaying of
the train she fell to thinking again, as she breathed the fresh air.
“Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn’t conceive a position in which
life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable,
and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other.
And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”
“That’s what reason is given man for, to escape from what worries him,”
said the lady in French, lisping affectedly, and obviously pleased with
her phrase.
The words seemed an answer to Anna’s thoughts.
“To escape from what worries him,” repeated Anna. And glancing at the
red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she saw that the sickly wife
considered herself misunderstood, and the husband deceived her and
encouraged her in that idea of herself. Anna seemed to see all their
history and all the crannies of their souls, as it were turning a light
upon them. But there was nothing interesting in them, and she pursued
her thought.
“Yes, I’m very much worried, and that’s what reason was given me for,
to escape; so then one must escape: why not put out the light when
there’s nothing more to look at, when it’s sickening to look at it all?
But how? Why did the conductor run along the footboard, why are they
shrieking, those young men in that train? why are they talking, why are
they laughing? It’s all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all
cruelty!...”
When the train came into the station, Anna got out into the crowd of
passengers, and moving apart from them as if they were lepers, she
stood on the platform, trying to think what she had come here for, and
what she meant to do. Everything that had seemed to her possible before
was now so difficult to consider, especially in this noisy crowd of
hideous people who would not leave her alone. One moment porters ran up
to her proffering their services, then young men, clacking their heels
on the planks of the platform and talking loudly, stared at her; people
meeting her dodged past on the wrong side. Remembering that she had
meant to go on further if there were no answer, she stopped a porter
and asked if her coachman were not here with a note from Count Vronsky.
“Count Vronsky? They sent up here from the Vronskys just this minute,
to meet Princess Sorokina and her daughter. And what is the coachman
like?”
Just as she was talking to the porter, the coachman Mihail, red and
cheerful in his smart blue coat and chain, evidently proud of having so
successfully performed his commission, came up to her and gave her a
letter. She broke it open, and her heart ached before she had read it.
“I am very sorry your note did not reach me. I will be home at ten,”
Vronsky had written carelessly....
“Yes, that’s what I expected!” she said to herself with an evil smile.
“Very good, you can go home then,” she said softly, addressing Mihail.
She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart’s beating hindered
her breathing. “No, I won’t let you make me miserable,” she thought
menacingly, addressing not him, not herself, but the power that made
her suffer, and she walked along the platform.
Two maid-servants walking along the platform turned their heads,
staring at her and making some remarks about her dress. “Real,” they
said of the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in
peace. Again they passed by, peering into her face, and with a laugh
shouting something in an unnatural voice. The station-master coming up
asked her whether she was going by train. A boy selling kvas never took
his eyes off her. “My God! where am I to go?” she thought, going
farther and farther along the platform. At the end she stopped. Some
ladies and children, who had come to meet a gentleman in spectacles,
paused in their loud laughter and talking, and stared at her as she
reached them. She quickened her pace and walked away from them to the
edge of the platform. A luggage train was coming in. The platform began
to sway, and she fancied she was in the train again.
And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she
had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a rapid,
light step she went down the steps that led from the tank to the rails
and stopped quite near the approaching train.