“I hope you haven’t been awfully bored?” was Owen’s first remark after
we sat down.
“No; I think it’s a lovely party.”
There was a silence.
“What _is_ the matter, Peter?” Owen asked again.
“Nothing, Owen, except natural excitement. Don’t be suspicious.”
Owen looked unconvinced, but he decided to change the subject. “Do you
know the part of the book that I really like best? It is where Levine
mows the meadows with the peasants.”
I knew we were back again at “Anna Karénine,” but I couldn’t bring my
mind to bear upon it.
“That is the real kind of life,” Owen pursued, “where all is simple,
and natural; where there are no balls and clubs and lies and all the
rest. I hate towns. I shall always live somewhere in the country.”
“It doesn’t suit everybody,” I brilliantly observed.
“It doesn’t suit people like Anna and Wronsky.”
“You’re always down on poor Anna.”
“She’s not poor. She had every chance to be happy. Why couldn’t she
have been content to be friends with Wronsky? All the rest was pure
selfishness.”
“You don’t understand,” I replied.
Owen hated to be told this. “Understand what?” he demanded, impatiently.
“The kind of love Anna and Wronsky had for each other.”
“Why, then, as soon as she goes to live with Wronsky, does she begin to
talk so much of her love for her son? I don’t like her. It seems to me
that she deliberately spoiled the lives of her husband and her son for
her own gratification.”
“She didn’t spoil her son’s life. He was only a little boy.”
“But she forsook him.”
“You don’t understand,” I was obliged to repeat. “You never _will_
understand.”
“Do you want to stick up for that sort of thing?”
“I’m not sticking up for it; but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing
a person can accept or refuse just as if it were an invitation to a
party. If you knew anything about it you wouldn’t say they might have
been content to be friends.”
“And do you like the way she makes fun of her husband to her lover?”
“What has that to do with it?”
“Even when she is making her confession to her husband she thinks only
of herself. She tells him that she hates him. It does not occur to her
that he can have any feelings, because his manner is stiff and he has a
habit of cracking his finger-joints.”
“It didn’t much matter how she made her confession.”
“It did. She needn’t have been brutal.”
“Oh, she wasn’t brutal.”
“And all the lies?”
“But you never seem to think of her situation!”
“I do. She deliberately brought about her own situation, after having
been warned by her husband. You admire her simply because she loves
Wronsky; but there is nothing very wonderful about that kind of love.”
“I never said I admired her; I said I understood her. If she sacrificed
her husband, she sacrificed herself too.”
“Yes――and her lover, and her friend Kitty, and her son, and everything.
Levine’s brother, who drinks himself to death, also sacrifices himself.
And Yavshine, who gambles away all his fortune.”
“You don’t see any difference?”
“I don’t see anything fine in the kind of love Anna felt. And when she
says she won’t have any more children, it seems to me that it becomes
simply disgusting. Have you thought what it means?”
“Oh, I know what it means,” I answered sulkily. Owen had managed to
completely alter my mood, and I no longer felt pleased with myself or
pleased with him. I was irritated because he seemed, now as always, to
try to judge what was a matter of emotion by reasoning about it.
“If you had ever loved anybody,” I said, “it would make you look at
such things differently.”
“Perhaps I mightn’t see them any clearer for that.”
“Perhaps not. But to judge human beings you require first of all to
understand something about human nature.”
“Understand! You’re always harping on that! It’s a very cheap way of
arguing. Why should I think _you_ understand?”
“Because I have felt what we are talking about, and you haven’t.” I
suddenly grew violently excited. “You don’t know what it is to care
for a person so that nothing else in the world matters, so that it is
like a kind of sickness, preventing you even from sleeping. You know
nothing, have felt nothing, and yet you bring out your miserable little
catechism arguments and pretend to pronounce judgment. I’d rather have
a man who had committed all the crimes on the earth than one of those
cold, fishy, reasonable creatures you admire, who never did anything
wrong, and never made anybody happy.”
Owen looked at me in amazement, which is indeed hardly surprising.
But suddenly my excitement passed, and I felt only a passion of
home-sickness and regret. It swept over me like a heavy, resistless
rush of water. All that was here around me grew black as night. I
longed to get away from everything that could even remind me of my
life of the past few months. I seemed to have a sudden bright light in
which I saw myself clearly. In these few months I had deteriorated, the
quality even of my love for Katherine had deteriorated; it had become
less of the spirit, more of an obsession. And now, as I stood there
before Owen, I seemed to hear the soft breaking of waves, infinitely
peaceful, and I had a vision of my own bedroom, where I went to sleep,
and wakened up, with the low sound of the sea in my ears. I said
good-night hurriedly to the astonished Owen. I told him I was sorry for
speaking as I had done, but that I would explain it all to him another
time; only now I must go. I ran downstairs to the cloak-room, and a few
minutes later left the house, without having said good-night to Mrs.
Gill.
* * * * *
When I reached home I let myself in quietly with a latch-key, but as I
was undressing George wakened up and began to ask me about the party. I
did not feel in the least like going to sleep, and after I had got into
bed we lay talking. Presently George got up and lit the gas, which I
had turned out. I saw him go to the hiding-place he had shown me on the
night of my arrival, and again take from it that mysterious bundle of
photographs. He came over and sat down on the side of my bed.
“I don’t want to see them,” I said, pushing him away; but he may have
detected a note of weakness in my voice, for he only laughed.
“Don’t be a fool,” he answered brutally. “I’m not going to do you any
harm.”
He drew them from the envelope and showed them to me, one by one, while
the gas flamed and flared above our heads.