Anna Karenina

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Title: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Release Date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1399]
[Most recently updated: September 20, 2022]
Language: English
Produced by: David Brannan, Andrew Sly and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNA KARENINA ***
[Illustration]
ANNA KARENINA
by Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Constance Garnett
Contents
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had
discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French
girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced
to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with
him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only
the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family
and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the
house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that
the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in
common with one another than they, the members of the family and
household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the
husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all
over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper,
and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for
her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time;
the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch
Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at
his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his
wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned
over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he
would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow
on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped
up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.
“Yes, yes, how was it now?” he thought, going over his dream. “Now, how
was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not
Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in
America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the
tables sang, _Il mio tesoro_—not _Il mio tesoro_ though, but something
better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and
they were women, too,” he remembered.
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a
smile. “Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that
was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even
expressing it in one’s thoughts awake.” And noticing a gleam of light
peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his
feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his
slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on
gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine
years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place
where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he
suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in
his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his
brows.
“Ah, ah, ah! Oo!...” he muttered, recalling everything that had
happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was
present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and
worst of all, his own fault.
“Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And the most
awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—all my fault, though I’m
not to blame. That’s the point of the whole situation,” he reflected.
“Oh, oh, oh!” he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the
acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.
Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming, happy and
good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his
wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise
had not found her in the study either, and saw her at last in her
bedroom with the unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.
She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details,
and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting perfectly still
with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of
horror, despair, and indignation.
“What’s this? this?” she asked, pointing to the letter.
And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case,
was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he
had met his wife’s words.
There happened to him at that instant what does happen to people when
they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful. He did not
succeed in adapting his face to the position in which he was placed
towards his wife by the discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt,
denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining
indifferent even—anything would have been better than what he did
do—his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology)—utterly involuntarily
assumed its habitual, good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.
This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself. Catching sight of that
smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical pain, broke out with her
characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed out of the
room. Since then she had refused to see her husband.
“It’s that idiotic smile that’s to blame for it all,” thought Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
“But what’s to be done? What’s to be done?” he said to himself in
despair, and found no answer.
Chapter 2
Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself.
He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he
repented of his conduct. He could not at this date repent of the fact
that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love
with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and
only a year younger than himself. All he repented of was that he had
not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife. But he felt all the
difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children,
and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better
from his wife if he had anticipated that the knowledge of them would
have had such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out the
subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have
suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the
fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer young
or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good
mother, ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It
had turned out quite the other way.
“Oh, it’s awful! oh dear, oh dear! awful!” Stepan Arkadyevitch kept
repeating to himself, and he could think of nothing to be done. “And
how well things were going up till now! how well we got on! She was
contented and happy in her children; I never interfered with her in
anything; I let her manage the children and the house just as she
liked. It’s true it’s bad _her_ having been a governess in our house.
That’s bad! There’s something common, vulgar, in flirting with one’s
governess. But what a governess!” (He vividly recalled the roguish
black eyes of Mlle. Roland and her smile.) “But after all, while she
was in the house, I kept myself in hand. And the worst of it all is
that she’s already ... it seems as if ill-luck would have it so! Oh,
oh! But what, what is to be done?”
There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to
all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one
must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself. To forget
himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could
not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must
forget himself in the dream of daily life.
“Then we shall see,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to himself, and getting
up he put on a gray dressing-gown lined with blue silk, tied the
tassels in a knot, and, drawing a deep breath of air into his broad,
bare chest, he walked to the window with his usual confident step,
turning out his feet that carried his full frame so easily. He pulled
up the blind and rang the bell loudly. It was at once answered by the
appearance of an old friend, his valet, Matvey, carrying his clothes,
his boots, and a telegram. Matvey was followed by the barber with all
the necessaries for shaving.
“Are there any papers from the office?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch,
taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking-glass.
“On the table,” replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring sympathy at his
master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile, “They’ve
sent from the carriage-jobbers.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced at Matvey in the
looking-glass. In the glance, in which their eyes met in the
looking-glass, it was clear that they understood one another. Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: “Why do you tell me that? don’t you know?”
Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg, and
gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint smile, at his master.
“I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you or
themselves for nothing,” he said. He had obviously prepared the
sentence beforehand.
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw Matvey wanted to make a joke and attract
attention to himself. Tearing open the telegram, he read it through,
guessing at the words, misspelt as they always are in telegrams, and
his face brightened.
“Matvey, my sister Anna Arkadyevna will be here tomorrow,” he said,
checking for a minute the sleek, plump hand of the barber, cutting a
pink path through his long, curly whiskers.
“Thank God!” said Matvey, showing by this response that he, like his
master, realized the significance of this arrival—that is, that Anna
Arkadyevna, the sister he was so fond of, might bring about a
reconciliation between husband and wife.
“Alone, or with her husband?” inquired Matvey.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could not answer, as the barber was at work on his
upper lip, and he raised one finger. Matvey nodded at the
looking-glass.
“Alone. Is the room to be got ready upstairs?”
“Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders.”
“Darya Alexandrovna?” Matvey repeated, as though in doubt.
“Yes, inform her. Here, take the telegram; give it to her, and then do
what she tells you.”
“You want to try it on,” Matvey understood, but he only said, “Yes,
sir.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch was already washed and combed and ready to be
dressed, when Matvey, stepping deliberately in his creaky boots, came
back into the room with the telegram in his hand. The barber had gone.
“Darya Alexandrovna told me to inform you that she is going away. Let
him do—that is you—as he likes,” he said, laughing only with his eyes,
and putting his hands in his pockets, he watched his master with his
head on one side. Stepan Arkadyevitch was silent a minute. Then a
good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his handsome
face.
“Eh, Matvey?” he said, shaking his head.
“It’s all right, sir; she will come round,” said Matvey.
“Come round?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you think so? Who’s there?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, hearing the
rustle of a woman’s dress at the door.
“It’s I,” said a firm, pleasant, woman’s voice, and the stern,
pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in at
the doorway.
“Well, what is it, Matrona?” queried Stepan Arkadyevitch, going up to
her at the door.
Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the wrong as regards his
wife, and was conscious of this himself, almost everyone in the house
(even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna’s chief ally) was on his side.
“Well, what now?” he asked disconsolately.
“Go to her, sir; own your fault again. Maybe God will aid you. She is
suffering so, it’s sad to see her; and besides, everything in the house
is topsy-turvy. You must have pity, sir, on the children. Beg her
forgiveness, sir. There’s no help for it! One must take the
consequences....”
“But she won’t see me.”
“You do your part. God is merciful; pray to God, sir, pray to God.”
“Come, that’ll do, you can go,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, blushing
suddenly. “Well now, do dress me.” He turned to Matvey and threw off
his dressing-gown decisively.
Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse’s collar, and,
blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure
over the well-groomed body of his master.
Chapter 3
When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on
himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his
cigarettes, pocketbook, matches, and watch with its double chain and
seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean,
fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness,
he walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where
coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and
papers from the office.
He read the letters. One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who was
buying a forest on his wife’s property. To sell this forest was
absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his
wife, the subject could not be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of
all was that his pecuniary interests should in this way enter into the
question of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that he
might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a reconciliation
with his wife on account of the sale of the forest—that idea hurt him.
When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevitch moved the
office-papers close to him, rapidly looked through two pieces of
business, made a few notes with a big pencil, and pushing away the
papers, turned to his coffee. As he sipped his coffee, he opened a
still damp morning paper, and began reading it.
Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme
one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of
the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for
him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held
by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the
majority changed them—or, more strictly speaking, he did not change
them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.
Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views;
these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just
as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took
those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain
society—owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion,
for some degree of mental activity—to have views was just as
indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his
preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many
of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more
rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of
life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and
certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of
money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out
of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly
afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into
lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal
party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is
only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and
Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without
his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the
object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world
when life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all this,
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man
by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop
at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family—the monkey. And so
Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked
his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it
diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which it was
maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry
that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative
elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the
revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, “in our opinion the danger
lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of
traditionalism clogging progress,” etc., etc. He read another article,
too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped
some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic
quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it
came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him,
as it always did, a certain satisfaction. But today that satisfaction
was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna’s advice and the unsatisfactory
state of the household. He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to
have left for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and
of the sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a
situation; but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a
quiet, ironical gratification. Having finished the paper, a second cup
of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs of the
roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled
joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his
mind—the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.
But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him, and he grew
thoughtful.
Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevitch recognized the voices of
Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tanya, his eldest girl) were heard
outside the door. They were carrying something, and dropped it.
“I told you not to sit passengers on the roof,” said the little girl in
English; “there, pick them up!”
“Everything’s in confusion,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch; “there are
the children running about by themselves.” And going to the door, he
called them. They threw down the box, that represented a train, and
came in to their father.
The little girl, her father’s favorite, ran up boldly, embraced him,
and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the smell
of scent that came from his whiskers. At last the little girl kissed
his face, which was flushed from his stooping posture and beaming with
tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her
father held her back.
“How is mamma?” he asked, passing his hand over his daughter’s smooth,
soft little neck. “Good morning,” he said, smiling to the boy, who had
come up to greet him. He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and
always tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond with
a smile to his father’s chilly smile.
“Mamma? She is up,” answered the girl.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed. “That means that she’s not slept again all
night,” he thought.
“Well, is she cheerful?”
The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her father and
mother, and that her mother could not be cheerful, and that her father
must be aware of this, and that he was pretending when he asked about
it so lightly. And she blushed for her father. He at once perceived it,
and blushed too.
“I don’t know,” she said. “She did not say we must do our lessons, but
she said we were to go for a walk with Miss Hoole to grandmamma’s.”
“Well, go, Tanya, my darling. Oh, wait a minute, though,” he said,
still holding her and stroking her soft little hand.
He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yesterday, a little
box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her favorites, a chocolate
and a fondant.
“For Grisha?” said the little girl, pointing to the chocolate.
“Yes, yes.” And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed her on
the roots of her hair and neck, and let her go.
“The carriage is ready,” said Matvey; “but there’s someone to see you
with a petition.”
“Been here long?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Half an hour.”
“How many times have I told you to tell me at once?”
“One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least,” said Matvey,
in the affectionately gruff tone with which it was impossible to be
angry.
“Well, show the person up at once,” said Oblonsky, frowning with
vexation.
The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin, came with a
request impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he
generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively
without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and to
whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and
legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage who
might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain’s widow,
Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he
had forgotten anything. It appeared that he had forgotten nothing
except what he wanted to forget—his wife.
“Ah, yes!” He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a harassed
expression. “To go, or not to go!” he said to himself; and an inner
voice told him he must not go, that nothing could come of it but
falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was impossible,
because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to
inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to love.
Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and
lying were opposed to his nature.
“It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,” he said,
trying to give himself courage. He squared his chest, took out a
cigarette, took two whiffs at it, flung it into a mother-of-pearl
ashtray, and with rapid steps walked through the drawing-room, and
opened the other door into his wife’s bedroom.
Chapter 4
Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once
luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of
her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which
looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a
litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an
open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband’s
steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to
give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she
was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just
attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in
these last three days—to sort out the children’s things and her own, so
as to take them to her mother’s—and again she could not bring herself
to do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to
herself, “that things cannot go on like this, that she must take some
step” to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part
at least of the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to
tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that this
was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of the
habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she
realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to
look after her five children properly, they would be still worse off
where she was going with them all. As it was, even in the course of
these three days, the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome
soup, and the others had almost gone without their dinner the day
before. She was conscious that it was impossible to go away; but,
cheating herself, she went on all the same sorting out her things and
pretending she was going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau
as though looking for something, and only looked round at him when he
had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she tried to give a
severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.
“Dolly!” he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent his head towards
his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all that he
was radiant with freshness and health. In a rapid glance she scanned
his figure that beamed with health and freshness. “Yes, he is happy and
content!” she thought; “while I.... And that disgusting good nature,
which everyone likes him for and praises—I hate that good nature of
his,” she thought. Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek
contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
“What do you want?” she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
“Dolly!” he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. “Anna is coming
today.”
“Well, what is that to me? I can’t see her!” she cried.
“But you must, really, Dolly....”
“Go away, go away, go away!” she shrieked, not looking at him, as
though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought of his wife, he could
hope that she would _come round_, as Matvey expressed it, and could
quietly go on reading his paper and drinking his coffee; but when he
saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice,
submissive to fate and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath
and a lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.
“My God! what have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake!... You know....” He
could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.
She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
“Dolly, what can I say?... One thing: forgive.... Remember, cannot nine
years of my life atone for an instant....”
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as it
were beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe
differently.
“—instant of passion?” he said, and would have gone on, but at that
word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and
again the muscles of her right cheek worked.
“Go away, go out of the room!” she shrieked still more shrilly, “and
don’t talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness.”
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to
support herself. His face relaxed, his lips swelled, his eyes were
swimming with tears.
“Dolly!” he said, sobbing now; “for mercy’s sake, think of the
children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and punish me, make me
expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to
blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive
me!”
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was
unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak,
but could not. He waited.
“You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember
them, and know that this means their ruin,” she said—obviously one of
the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of
the last few days.
She had called him “Stiva,” and he glanced at her with gratitude, and
moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.
“I think of the children, and for that reason I would do anything in
the world to save them, but I don’t myself know how to save them. By
taking them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious
father—yes, a vicious father.... Tell me, after what ... has happened,
can we live together? Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?”
she repeated, raising her voice, “after my husband, the father of my
children, enters into a love affair with his own children’s governess?”
“But what could I do? what could I do?” he kept saying in a pitiful
voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and
lower.
“You are loathsome to me, repulsive!” she shrieked, getting more and
more heated. “Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you
have neither heart nor honorable feeling! You are hateful to me,
disgusting, a stranger—yes, a complete stranger!” With pain and wrath
she uttered the word so terrible to herself—_stranger_.
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed
him. He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her. She
saw in him sympathy for her, but not love. “No, she hates me. She will
not forgive me,” he thought.
“It is awful! awful!” he said.
At that moment in the next room a child began to cry; probably it had
fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face suddenly
softened.
She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though
she did not know where she was, and what she was doing, and getting up
rapidly, she moved towards the door.
“Well, she loves my child,” he thought, noticing the change of her face
at the child’s cry, “my child: how can she hate me?”
“Dolly, one word more,” he said, following her.
“If you come near me, I will call in the servants, the children! They
may all know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and you may
live here with your mistress!”
And she went out, slamming the door.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, wiped his face, and with a subdued tread
walked out of the room. “Matvey says she will come round; but how? I
don’t see the least chance of it. Ah, oh, how horrible it is! And how
vulgarly she shouted,” he said to himself, remembering her shriek and
the words—“scoundrel” and “mistress.” “And very likely the maids were
listening! Horribly vulgar! horrible!” Stepan Arkadyevitch stood a few
seconds alone, wiped his face, squared his chest, and walked out of the
room.
It was Friday, and in the dining-room the German watchmaker was winding
up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this
punctual, bald watchmaker, “that the German was wound up for a whole
lifetime himself, to wind up watches,” and he smiled. Stepan
Arkadyevitch was fond of a joke: “And maybe she will come round! That’s
a good expression, ‘_come round,_’” he thought. “I must repeat that.”
“Matvey!” he shouted. “Arrange everything with Darya in the sitting
room for Anna Arkadyevna,” he said to Matvey when he came in.
“Yes, sir.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out onto the steps.
“You won’t dine at home?” said Matvey, seeing him off.
“That’s as it happens. But here’s for the housekeeping,” he said,
taking ten roubles from his pocketbook. “That’ll be enough.”
“Enough or not enough, we must make it do,” said Matvey, slamming the
carriage door and stepping back onto the steps.
Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing
from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back again to
her bedroom. It was her solitary refuge from the household cares which
crowded upon her directly she went out from it. Even now, in the short
time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and Matrona
Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to her, which
did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer: “What were the
children to put on for their walk? Should they have any milk? Should
not a new cook be sent for?”
“Ah, let me alone, let me alone!” she said, and going back to her
bedroom she sat down in the same place as she had sat when talking to
her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands with the rings that
slipped down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over in her memory
all the conversation. “He has gone! But has he broken it off with her?”
she thought. “Can it be he sees her? Why didn’t I ask him! No, no,
reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we
are strangers—strangers forever!” She repeated again with special
significance the word so dreadful to her. “And how I loved him! my God,
how I loved him!... How I loved him! And now don’t I love him? Don’t I
love him more than before? The most horrible thing is,” she began, but
did not finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head
in at the door.
“Let us send for my brother,” she said; “he can get a dinner anyway, or
we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like
yesterday.”
“Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But did you send for
some new milk?”
And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned
her grief in them for a time.
Chapter 5
Stepan Arkadyevitch had learned easily at school, thanks to his
excellent abilities, but he had been idle and mischievous, and
therefore was one of the lowest in his class. But in spite of his
habitually dissipated mode of life, his inferior grade in the service,
and his comparative youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative
position of president of one of the government boards at Moscow. This
post he had received through his sister Anna’s husband, Alexey
Alexandrovitch Karenin, who held one of the most important positions in
the ministry to whose department the Moscow office belonged. But if
Karenin had not got his brother-in-law this berth, then through a
hundred other personages—brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and
aunts—Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post, or some other
similar one, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely
needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife’s considerable
property, were in an embarrassed condition.
Half Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations of Stepan
Arkadyevitch. He was born in the midst of those who had been and are
the powerful ones of this world. One-third of the men in the
government, the older men, had been friends of his father’s, and had
known him in petticoats; another third were his intimate chums, and the
remainder were friendly acquaintances. Consequently the distributors of
earthly blessings in the shape of places, rents, shares, and such, were
all his friends, and could not overlook one of their own set; and
Oblonsky had no need to make any special exertion to get a lucrative
post. He had only not to refuse things, not to show jealousy, not to be
quarrelsome or take offense, all of which from his characteristic good
nature he never did. It would have struck him as absurd if he had been
told that he would not get a position with the salary he required,
especially as he expected nothing out of the way; he only wanted what
the men of his own age and standing did get, and he was no worse
qualified for performing duties of the kind than any other man.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was not merely liked by all who knew him for his
good humor, but for his bright disposition, and his unquestionable
honesty. In him, in his handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes,
black hair and eyebrows, and the white and red of his face, there was
something which produced a physical effect of kindliness and good humor
on the people who met him. “Aha! Stiva! Oblonsky! Here he is!” was
almost always said with a smile of delight on meeting him. Even though
it happened at times that after a conversation with him it seemed that
nothing particularly delightful had happened, the next day, and the
next, everyone was just as delighted at meeting him again.
After filling for three years the post of president of one of the
government boards at Moscow, Stepan Arkadyevitch had won the respect,
as well as the liking, of his fellow-officials, subordinates, and
superiors, and all who had had business with him. The principal
qualities in Stepan Arkadyevitch which had gained him this universal
respect in the service consisted, in the first place, of his extreme
indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own
shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism—not the liberalism he
read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in
virtue of which he treated all men perfectly equally and exactly the
same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly—the most
important point—his complete indifference to the business in which he
was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and
never made mistakes.
On reaching the offices of the board, Stepan Arkadyevitch, escorted by
a deferential porter with a portfolio, went into his little private
room, put on his uniform, and went into the boardroom. The clerks and
copyists all rose, greeting him with good-humored deference. Stepan
Arkadyevitch moved quickly, as ever, to his place, shook hands with his
colleagues, and sat down. He made a joke or two, and talked just as
much as was consistent with due decorum, and began work. No one knew
better than Stepan Arkadyevitch how to hit on the exact line between
freedom, simplicity, and official stiffness necessary for the agreeable
conduct of business. A secretary, with the good-humored deference
common to everyone in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s office, came up with
papers, and began to speak in the familiar and easy tone which had been
introduced by Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“We have succeeded in getting the information from the government
department of Penza. Here, would you care?...”
“You’ve got them at last?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laying his finger
on the paper. “Now, gentlemen....”
And the sitting of the board began.
“If they knew,” he thought, bending his head with a significant air as
he listened to the report, “what a guilty little boy their president
was half an hour ago.” And his eyes were laughing during the reading of
the report. Till two o’clock the sitting would go on without a break,
and at two o’clock there would be an interval and luncheon.
It was not yet two, when the large glass doors of the boardroom
suddenly opened and someone came in.
All the officials sitting on the further side under the portrait of the
Tsar and the eagle, delighted at any distraction, looked round at the
door; but the doorkeeper standing at the door at once drove out the
intruder, and closed the glass door after him.
When the case had been read through, Stepan Arkadyevitch got up and
stretched, and by way of tribute to the liberalism of the times took
out a cigarette in the boardroom and went into his private room. Two of
the members of the board, the old veteran in the service, Nikitin, and
the _Kammerjunker_ Grinevitch, went in with him.
“We shall have time to finish after lunch,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“To be sure we shall!” said Nikitin.
“A pretty sharp fellow this Fomin must be,” said Grinevitch of one of
the persons taking part in the case they were examining.
Stepan Arkadyevitch frowned at Grinevitch’s words, giving him thereby
to understand that it was improper to pass judgment prematurely, and
made him no reply.
“Who was that came in?” he asked the doorkeeper.
“Someone, your excellency, crept in without permission directly my back
was turned. He was asking for you. I told him: when the members come
out, then....”
“Where is he?”
“Maybe he’s gone into the passage, but here he comes anyway. That is
he,” said the doorkeeper, pointing to a strongly built,
broad-shouldered man with a curly beard, who, without taking off his
sheepskin cap, was running lightly and rapidly up the worn steps of the
stone staircase. One of the members going down—a lean official with a
portfolio—stood out of his way and looked disapprovingly at the legs of
the stranger, then glanced inquiringly at Oblonsky.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was standing at the top of the stairs. His
good-naturedly beaming face above the embroidered collar of his uniform
beamed more than ever when he recognized the man coming up.
“Why, it’s actually you, Levin, at last!” he said with a friendly
mocking smile, scanning Levin as he approached. “How is it you have
deigned to look me up in this den?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and not
content with shaking hands, he kissed his friend. “Have you been here
long?”
“I have just come, and very much wanted to see you,” said Levin,
looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around.
“Well, let’s go into my room,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who knew his
friend’s sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew
him along, as though guiding him through dangers.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was on familiar terms with almost all his
acquaintances, and called almost all of them by their Christian names:
old men of sixty, boys of twenty, actors, ministers, merchants, and
adjutant-generals, so that many of his intimate chums were to be found
at the extreme ends of the social ladder, and would have been very much
surprised to learn that they had, through the medium of Oblonsky,
something in common. He was the familiar friend of everyone with whom
he took a glass of champagne, and he took a glass of champagne with
everyone, and when in consequence he met any of his disreputable chums,
as he used in joke to call many of his friends, in the presence of his
subordinates, he well knew how, with his characteristic tact, to
diminish the disagreeable impression made on them. Levin was not a
disreputable chum, but Oblonsky, with his ready tact, felt that Levin
fancied he might not care to show his intimacy with him before his
subordinates, and so he made haste to take him off into his room.
Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not
rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of
his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the
difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one
another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this,
each of them—as is often the way with men who have selected careers of
different kinds—though in discussion he would even justify the other’s
career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the
life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his
friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight
mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up
to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what
precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he
took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited
and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his own want of
ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected view of
things. Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same
way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his friend,
and his official duties, which he laughed at, and regarded as trifling.
But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as
everyone did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin
laughed without complacency and sometimes angrily.
“We have long been expecting you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, going into
his room and letting Levin’s hand go as though to show that here all
danger was over. “I am very, very glad to see you,” he went on. “Well,
how are you? Eh? When did you come?”
Levin was silent, looking at the unknown faces of Oblonsky’s two
companions, and especially at the hand of the elegant Grinevitch, which
had such long white fingers, such long yellow filbert-shaped nails, and
such huge shining studs on the shirt-cuff, that apparently they
absorbed all his attention, and allowed him no freedom of thought.
Oblonsky noticed this at once, and smiled.
“Ah, to be sure, let me introduce you,” he said. “My colleagues: Philip
Ivanitch Nikitin, Mihail Stanislavitch Grinevitch”—and turning to
Levin—“a district councilor, a modern district councilman, a gymnast
who lifts thirteen stone with one hand, a cattle-breeder and sportsman,
and my friend, Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, the brother of Sergey
Ivanovitch Koznishev.”
“Delighted,” said the veteran.
“I have the honor of knowing your brother, Sergey Ivanovitch,” said
Grinevitch, holding out his slender hand with its long nails.
Levin frowned, shook hands coldly, and at once turned to Oblonsky.
Though he had a great respect for his half-brother, an author well
known to all Russia, he could not endure it when people treated him not
as Konstantin Levin, but as the brother of the celebrated Koznishev.
“No, I am no longer a district councilor. I have quarreled with them
all, and don’t go to the meetings any more,” he said, turning to
Oblonsky.
“You’ve been quick about it!” said Oblonsky with a smile. “But how?
why?”
“It’s a long story. I will tell you some time,” said Levin, but he
began telling him at once. “Well, to put it shortly, I was convinced
that nothing was really done by the district councils, or ever could
be,” he began, as though someone had just insulted him. “On one side
it’s a plaything; they play at being a parliament, and I’m neither
young enough nor old enough to find amusement in playthings; and on the
other side” (he stammered) “it’s a means for the coterie of the
district to make money. Formerly they had wardships, courts of justice,
now they have the district council—not in the form of bribes, but in
the form of unearned salary,” he said, as hotly as though someone of
those present had opposed his opinion.
“Aha! You’re in a new phase again, I see—a conservative,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch. “However, we can go into that later.”
“Yes, later. But I wanted to see you,” said Levin, looking with hatred
at Grinevitch’s hand.
Stepan Arkadyevitch gave a scarcely perceptible smile.
“How was it you used to say you would never wear European dress again?”
he said, scanning his new suit, obviously cut by a French tailor. “Ah!
I see: a new phase.”
Levin suddenly blushed, not as grown men blush, slightly, without being
themselves aware of it, but as boys blush, feeling that they are
ridiculous through their shyness, and consequently ashamed of it and
blushing still more, almost to the point of tears. And it was so
strange to see this sensible, manly face in such a childish plight,
that Oblonsky left off looking at him.
“Oh, where shall we meet? You know I want very much to talk to you,”
said Levin.
Oblonsky seemed to ponder.
“I’ll tell you what: let’s go to Gurin’s to lunch, and there we can
talk. I am free till three.”
“No,” answered Levin, after an instant’s thought, “I have got to go on
somewhere else.”
“All right, then, let’s dine together.”
“Dine together? But I have nothing very particular, only a few words to
say, and a question I want to ask you, and we can have a talk
afterwards.”
“Well, say the few words, then, at once, and we’ll gossip after
dinner.”
“Well, it’s this,” said Levin; “but it’s of no importance, though.”
His face all at once took an expression of anger from the effort he was
making to surmount his shyness.
“What are the Shtcherbatskys doing? Everything as it used to be?” he
said.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had long known that Levin was in love with his
sister-in-law, Kitty, gave a hardly perceptible smile, and his eyes
sparkled merrily.
“You said a few words, but I can’t answer in a few words, because....
Excuse me a minute....”
A secretary came in, with respectful familiarity and the modest
consciousness, characteristic of every secretary, of superiority to his
chief in the knowledge of their business; he went up to Oblonsky with
some papers, and began, under pretense of asking a question, to explain
some objection. Stepan Arkadyevitch, without hearing him out, laid his
hand genially on the secretary’s sleeve.
“No, you do as I told you,” he said, softening his words with a smile,
and with a brief explanation of his view of the matter he turned away
from the papers, and said: “So do it that way, if you please, Zahar
Nikititch.”
The secretary retired in confusion. During the consultation with the
secretary Levin had completely recovered from his embarrassment. He was
standing with his elbows on the back of a chair, and on his face was a
look of ironical attention.
“I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it,” he said.
“What don’t you understand?” said Oblonsky, smiling as brightly as
ever, and picking up a cigarette. He expected some queer outburst from
Levin.
“I don’t understand what you are doing,” said Levin, shrugging his
shoulders. “How can you do it seriously?”
“Why not?”
“Why, because there’s nothing in it.”
“You think so, but we’re overwhelmed with work.”
“On paper. But, there, you’ve a gift for it,” added Levin.
“That’s to say, you think there’s a lack of something in me?”
“Perhaps so,” said Levin. “But all the same I admire your grandeur, and
am proud that I’ve a friend in such a great person. You’ve not answered
my question, though,” he went on, with a desperate effort looking
Oblonsky straight in the face.
“Oh, that’s all very well. You wait a bit, and you’ll come to this
yourself. It’s very nice for you to have over six thousand acres in the
Karazinsky district, and such muscles, and the freshness of a girl of
twelve; still you’ll be one of us one day. Yes, as to your question,
there is no change, but it’s a pity you’ve been away so long.”
“Oh, why so?” Levin queried, panic-stricken.
“Oh, nothing,” responded Oblonsky. “We’ll talk it over. But what’s
brought you up to town?”
“Oh, we’ll talk about that, too, later on,” said Levin, reddening again
up to his ears.
“All right. I see,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I should ask you to come
to us, you know, but my wife’s not quite the thing. But I tell you
what; if you want to see them, they’re sure now to be at the Zoological
Gardens from four to five. Kitty skates. You drive along there, and
I’ll come and fetch you, and we’ll go and dine somewhere together.”
“Capital. So good-bye till then.”
“Now mind, you’ll forget, I know you, or rush off home to the country!”
Stepan Arkadyevitch called out laughing.
“No, truly!”
And Levin went out of the room, only when he was in the doorway
remembering that he had forgotten to take leave of Oblonsky’s
colleagues.
“That gentleman must be a man of great energy,” said Grinevitch, when
Levin had gone away.
“Yes, my dear boy,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, nodding his head, “he’s a
lucky fellow! Over six thousand acres in the Karazinsky district;
everything before him; and what youth and vigor! Not like some of us.”
“You have a great deal to complain of, haven’t you, Stepan
Arkadyevitch?”
“Ah, yes, I’m in a poor way, a bad way,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with
a heavy sigh.
Chapter 6
When Oblonsky asked Levin what had brought him to town, Levin blushed,
and was furious with himself for blushing, because he could not answer,
“I have come to make your sister-in-law an offer,” though that was
precisely what he had come for.
The families of the Levins and the Shtcherbatskys were old, noble
Moscow families, and had always been on intimate and friendly terms.
This intimacy had grown still closer during Levin’s student days. He
had both prepared for the university with the young Prince
Shtcherbatsky, the brother of Kitty and Dolly, and had entered at the
same time with him. In those days Levin used often to be in the
Shtcherbatskys’ house, and he was in love with the Shtcherbatsky
household. Strange as it may appear, it was with the household, the
family, that Konstantin Levin was in love, especially with the feminine
half of the household. Levin did not remember his own mother, and his
only sister was older than he was, so that it was in the
Shtcherbatskys’ house that he saw for the first time that inner life of
an old, noble, cultivated, and honorable family of which he had been
deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the members of that
family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as it were,
wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he not only
perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that
shrouded them he assumed the existence of the loftiest sentiments and
every possible perfection. Why it was the three young ladies had one
day to speak French, and the next English; why it was that at certain
hours they played by turns on the piano, the sounds of which were
audible in their brother’s room above, where the students used to work;
why they were visited by those professors of French literature, of
music, of drawing, of dancing; why at certain hours all the three young
ladies, with Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the coach to the Tversky
boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long one, Natalia
in a half-long one, and Kitty in one so short that her shapely legs in
tightly-drawn red stockings were visible to all beholders; why it was
they had to walk about the Tversky boulevard escorted by a footman with
a gold cockade in his hat—all this and much more that was done in their
mysterious world he did not understand, but he was sure that everything
that was done there was very good, and he was in love precisely with
the mystery of the proceedings.
In his student days he had all but been in love with the eldest, Dolly,
but she was soon married to Oblonsky. Then he began being in love with
the second. He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love with one of
the sisters, only he could not quite make out which. But Natalia, too,
had hardly made her appearance in the world when she married the
diplomat Lvov. Kitty was still a child when Levin left the university.
Young Shtcherbatsky went into the navy, was drowned in the Baltic, and
Levin’s relations with the Shtcherbatskys, in spite of his friendship
with Oblonsky, became less intimate. But when early in the winter of
this year Levin came to Moscow, after a year in the country, and saw
the Shtcherbatskys, he realized which of the three sisters he was
indeed destined to love.
One would have thought that nothing could be simpler than for him, a
man of good family, rather rich than poor, and thirty-two years old, to
make the young Princess Shtcherbatskaya an offer of marriage; in all
likelihood he would at once have been looked upon as a good match. But
Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in
every respect that she was a creature far above everything earthly; and
that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be
conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy
of her.
After spending two months in Moscow in a state of enchantment, seeing
Kitty almost every day in society, into which he went so as to meet
her, he abruptly decided that it could not be, and went back to the
country.
Levin’s conviction that it could not be was founded on the idea that in
the eyes of her family he was a disadvantageous and worthless match for
the charming Kitty, and that Kitty herself could not love him. In her
family’s eyes he had no ordinary, definite career and position in
society, while his contemporaries by this time, when he was thirty-two,
were already, one a colonel, and another a professor, another director
of a bank and railways, or president of a board like Oblonsky. But he
(he knew very well how he must appear to others) was a country
gentleman, occupied in breeding cattle, shooting game, and building
barns; in other words, a fellow of no ability, who had not turned out
well, and who was doing just what, according to the ideas of the world,
is done by people fit for nothing else.
The mysterious, enchanting Kitty herself could not love such an ugly
person as he conceived himself to be, and, above all, such an ordinary,
in no way striking person. Moreover, his attitude to Kitty in the
past—the attitude of a grown-up person to a child, arising from his
friendship with her brother—seemed to him yet another obstacle to love.
An ugly, good-natured man, as he considered himself, might, he
supposed, be liked as a friend; but to be loved with such a love as
that with which he loved Kitty, one would need to be a handsome and,
still more, a distinguished man.
He had heard that women often did care for ugly and ordinary men, but
he did not believe it, for he judged by himself, and he could not
himself have loved any but beautiful, mysterious, and exceptional
women.
But after spending two months alone in the country, he was convinced
that this was not one of those passions of which he had had experience
in his early youth; that this feeling gave him not an instant’s rest;
that he could not live without deciding the question, would she or
would she not be his wife, and that his despair had arisen only from
his own imaginings, that he had no sort of proof that he would be
rejected. And he had now come to Moscow with a firm determination to
make an offer, and get married if he were accepted. Or ... he could not
conceive what would become of him if he were rejected.
Chapter 7
On arriving in Moscow by a morning train, Levin had put up at the house
of his elder half-brother, Koznishev. After changing his clothes he
went down to his brother’s study, intending to talk to him at once
about the object of his visit, and to ask his advice; but his brother
was not alone. With him there was a well-known professor of philosophy,
who had come from Harkov expressly to clear up a difference that had
arisen between them on a very important philosophical question. The
professor was carrying on a hot crusade against materialists. Sergey
Koznishev had been following this crusade with interest, and after
reading the professor’s last article, he had written him a letter
stating his objections. He accused the professor of making too great
concessions to the materialists. And the professor had promptly
appeared to argue the matter out. The point in discussion was the
question then in vogue: Is there a line to be drawn between
psychological and physiological phenomena in man? and if so, where?
Sergey Ivanovitch met his brother with the smile of chilly friendliness
he always had for everyone, and introducing him to the professor, went
on with the conversation.
A little man in spectacles, with a narrow forehead, tore himself from
the discussion for an instant to greet Levin, and then went on talking
without paying any further attention to him. Levin sat down to wait
till the professor should go, but he soon began to get interested in
the subject under discussion.
Levin had come across the magazine articles about which they were
disputing, and had read them, interested in them as a development of
the first principles of science, familiar to him as a natural science
student at the university. But he had never connected these scientific
deductions as to the origin of man as an animal, as to reflex action,
biology, and sociology, with those questions as to the meaning of life
and death to himself, which had of late been more and more often in his
mind.
As he listened to his brother’s argument with the professor, he noticed
that they connected these scientific questions with those spiritual
problems, that at times they almost touched on the latter; but every
time they were close upon what seemed to him the chief point, they
promptly beat a hasty retreat, and plunged again into a sea of subtle
distinctions, reservations, quotations, allusions, and appeals to
authorities, and it was with difficulty that he understood what they
were talking about.
“I cannot admit it,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, with his habitual
clearness, precision of expression, and elegance of phrase. “I cannot
in any case agree with Keiss that my whole conception of the external
world has been derived from perceptions. The most fundamental idea, the
idea of existence, has not been received by me through sensation;
indeed, there is no special sense-organ for the transmission of such an
idea.”
“Yes, but they—Wurt, and Knaust, and Pripasov—would answer that your
consciousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your
sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your
sensations. Wurt, indeed, says plainly that, assuming there are no
sensations, it follows that there is no idea of existence.”
“I maintain the contrary,” began Sergey Ivanovitch.
But here it seemed to Levin that just as they were close upon the real
point of the matter, they were again retreating, and he made up his
mind to put a question to the professor.
“According to that, if my senses are annihilated, if my body is dead, I
can have no existence of any sort?” he queried.
The professor, in annoyance, and, as it were, mental suffering at the
interruption, looked round at the strange inquirer, more like a
bargeman than a philosopher, and turned his eyes upon Sergey
Ivanovitch, as though to ask: What’s one to say to him? But Sergey
Ivanovitch, who had been talking with far less heat and one-sidedness
than the professor, and who had sufficient breadth of mind to answer
the professor, and at the same time to comprehend the simple and
natural point of view from which the question was put, smiled and said:
“That question we have no right to answer as yet.”
“We have not the requisite data,” chimed in the professor, and he went
back to his argument. “No,” he said; “I would point out the fact that
if, as Pripasov directly asserts, perception is based on sensation,
then we are bound to distinguish sharply between these two
conceptions.”
Levin listened no more, and simply waited for the professor to go.
Chapter 8
When the professor had gone, Sergey Ivanovitch turned to his brother.
“Delighted that you’ve come. For some time, is it? How’s your farming
getting on?”
Levin knew that his elder brother took little interest in farming, and
only put the question in deference to him, and so he only told him
about the sale of his wheat and money matters.
Levin had meant to tell his brother of his determination to get
married, and to ask his advice; he had indeed firmly resolved to do so.
But after seeing his brother, listening to his conversation with the
professor, hearing afterwards the unconsciously patronizing tone in
which his brother questioned him about agricultural matters (their
mother’s property had not been divided, and Levin took charge of both
their shares), Levin felt that he could not for some reason begin to
talk to him of his intention of marrying. He felt that his brother
would not look at it as he would have wished him to.
“Well, how is your district council doing?” asked Sergey Ivanovitch,
who was greatly interested in these local boards and attached great
importance to them.
“I really don’t know.”
“What! Why, surely you’re a member of the board?”
“No, I’m not a member now; I’ve resigned,” answered Levin, “and I no
longer attend the meetings.”
“What a pity!” commented Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning.
Levin in self-defense began to describe what took place in the meetings
in his district.
“That’s how it always is!” Sergey Ivanovitch interrupted him. “We
Russians are always like that. Perhaps it’s our strong point, really,
the faculty of seeing our own shortcomings; but we overdo it, we
comfort ourselves with irony which we always have on the tip of our
tongues. All I say is, give such rights as our local self-government to
any other European people—why, the Germans or the English would have
worked their way to freedom from them, while we simply turn them into
ridicule.”
“But how can it be helped?” said Levin penitently. “It was my last
effort. And I did try with all my soul. I can’t. I’m no good at it.”
“It’s not that you’re no good at it,” said Sergey Ivanovitch; “it is
that you don’t look at it as you should.”
“Perhaps not,” Levin answered dejectedly.
“Oh! do you know brother Nikolay’s turned up again?”
This brother Nikolay was the elder brother of Konstantin Levin, and
half-brother of Sergey Ivanovitch; a man utterly ruined, who had
dissipated the greater part of his fortune, was living in the strangest
and lowest company, and had quarreled with his brothers.
“What did you say?” Levin cried with horror. “How do you know?”
“Prokofy saw him in the street.”
“Here in Moscow? Where is he? Do you know?” Levin got up from his
chair, as though on the point of starting off at once.
“I am sorry I told you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, shaking his head at
his younger brother’s excitement. “I sent to find out where he is
living, and sent him his IOU to Trubin, which I paid. This is the
answer he sent me.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch took a note from under a paper-weight and handed
it to his brother.
Levin read in the queer, familiar handwriting: “I humbly beg you to
leave me in peace. That’s the only favor I ask of my gracious
brothers.—Nikolay Levin.”
Levin read it, and without raising his head stood with the note in his
hands opposite Sergey Ivanovitch.
There was a struggle in his heart between the desire to forget his
unhappy brother for the time, and the consciousness that it would be
base to do so.
“He obviously wants to offend me,” pursued Sergey Ivanovitch; “but he
cannot offend me, and I should have wished with all my heart to assist
him, but I know it’s impossible to do that.”
“Yes, yes,” repeated Levin. “I understand and appreciate your attitude
to him; but I shall go and see him.”
“If you want to, do; but I shouldn’t advise it,” said Sergey
Ivanovitch. “As regards myself, I have no fear of your doing so; he
will not make you quarrel with me; but for your own sake, I should say
you would do better not to go. You can’t do him any good; still, do as
you please.”
“Very likely I can’t do any good, but I feel—especially at such a
moment—but that’s another thing—I feel I could not be at peace.”
“Well, that I don’t understand,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “One thing I
do understand,” he added; “it’s a lesson in humility. I have come to
look very differently and more charitably on what is called infamous
since brother Nikolay has become what he is ... you know what he
did....”
“Oh, it’s awful, awful!” repeated Levin.
After obtaining his brother’s address from Sergey Ivanovitch’s footman,
Levin was on the point of setting off at once to see him, but on second
thought he decided to put off his visit till the evening. The first
thing to do to set his heart at rest was to accomplish what he had come
to Moscow for. From his brother’s Levin went to Oblonsky’s office, and
on getting news of the Shtcherbatskys from him, he drove to the place
where he had been told he might find Kitty.
Chapter 9
At four o’clock, conscious of his throbbing heart, Levin stepped out of
a hired sledge at the Zoological Gardens, and turned along the path to
the frozen mounds and the skating ground, knowing that he would
certainly find her there, as he had seen the Shtcherbatskys’ carriage
at the entrance.
It was a bright, frosty day. Rows of carriages, sledges, drivers, and
policemen were standing in the approach. Crowds of well-dressed people,
with hats bright in the sun, swarmed about the entrance and along the
well-swept little paths between the little houses adorned with carving
in the Russian style. The old curly birches of the gardens, all their
twigs laden with snow, looked as though freshly decked in sacred
vestments.
He walked along the path towards the skating-ground, and kept saying to
himself—“You mustn’t be excited, you must be calm. What’s the matter
with you? What do you want? Be quiet, stupid,” he conjured his heart.
And the more he tried to compose himself, the more breathless he found
himself. An acquaintance met him and called him by his name, but Levin
did not even recognize him. He went towards the mounds, whence came the
clank of the chains of sledges as they slipped down or were dragged up,
the rumble of the sliding sledges, and the sounds of merry voices. He
walked on a few steps, and the skating-ground lay open before his eyes,
and at once, amidst all the skaters, he knew her.
He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his
heart. She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the
ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or
her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a
rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the
smile that shed light on all round her. “Is it possible I can go over
there on the ice, go up to her?” he thought. The place where she stood
seemed to him a holy shrine, unapproachable, and there was one moment
when he was almost retreating, so overwhelmed was he with terror. He
had to make an effort to master himself, and to remind himself that
people of all sorts were moving about her, and that he too might come
there to skate. He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at
her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without
looking.
On that day of the week and at that time of day people of one set, all
acquainted with one another, used to meet on the ice. There were crack
skaters there, showing off their skill, and learners clinging to chairs
with timid, awkward movements, boys, and elderly people skating with
hygienic motives. They seemed to Levin an elect band of blissful beings
because they were here, near her. All the skaters, it seemed, with
perfect self-possession, skated towards her, skated by her, even spoke
to her, and were happy, quite apart from her, enjoying the capital ice
and the fine weather.
Nikolay Shtcherbatsky, Kitty’s cousin, in a short jacket and tight
trousers, was sitting on a garden seat with his skates on. Seeing
Levin, he shouted to him:
“Ah, the first skater in Russia! Been here long? First-rate ice—do put
your skates on.”
“I haven’t got my skates,” Levin answered, marveling at this boldness
and ease in her presence, and not for one second losing sight of her,
though he did not look at her. He felt as though the sun were coming
near him. She was in a corner, and turning out her slender feet in
their high boots with obvious timidity, she skated towards him. A boy
in Russian dress, desperately waving his arms and bowed down to the
ground, overtook her. She skated a little uncertainly; taking her hands
out of the little muff that hung on a cord, she held them ready for
emergency, and looking towards Levin, whom she had recognized, she
smiled at him, and at her own fears. When she had got round the turn,
she gave herself a push off with one foot, and skated straight up to
Shtcherbatsky. Clutching at his arm, she nodded smiling to Levin. She
was more splendid than he had imagined her.
When he thought of her, he could call up a vivid picture of her to
himself, especially the charm of that little fair head, so freely set
on the shapely girlish shoulders, and so full of childish brightness
and good humor. The childishness of her expression, together with the
delicate beauty of her figure, made up her special charm, and that he
fully realized. But what always struck him in her as something unlooked
for, was the expression of her eyes, soft, serene, and truthful, and
above all, her smile, which always transported Levin to an enchanted
world, where he felt himself softened and tender, as he remembered
himself in some days of his early childhood.
“Have you been here long?” she said, giving him her hand. “Thank you,”
she added, as he picked up the handkerchief that had fallen out of her
muff.
“I? I’ve not long ... yesterday ... I mean today ... I arrived,”
answered Levin, in his emotion not at once understanding her question.
“I was meaning to come and see you,” he said; and then, recollecting
with what intention he was trying to see her, he was promptly overcome
with confusion and blushed.
“I didn’t know you could skate, and skate so well.”
She looked at him earnestly, as though wishing to make out the cause of
his confusion.
“Your praise is worth having. The tradition is kept up here that you
are the best of skaters,” she said, with her little black-gloved hand
brushing a grain of hoarfrost off her muff.
“Yes, I used once to skate with passion; I wanted to reach perfection.”
“You do everything with passion, I think,” she said smiling. “I should
so like to see how you skate. Put on skates, and let us skate
together.”
“Skate together! Can that be possible?” thought Levin, gazing at her.
“I’ll put them on directly,” he said.
And he went off to get skates.
“It’s a long while since we’ve seen you here, sir,” said the attendant,
supporting his foot, and screwing on the heel of the skate. “Except
you, there’s none of the gentlemen first-rate skaters. Will that be all
right?” said he, tightening the strap.
“Oh, yes, yes; make haste, please,” answered Levin, with difficulty
restraining the smile of rapture which would overspread his face.
“Yes,” he thought, “this now is life, this is happiness! _Together,_
she said; _let us skate together!_ Speak to her now? But that’s just
why I’m afraid to speak—because I’m happy now, happy in hope,
anyway.... And then?... But I must! I must! I must! Away with
weakness!”
Levin rose to his feet, took off his overcoat, and scurrying over the
rough ice round the hut, came out on the smooth ice and skated without
effort, as it were, by simple exercise of will, increasing and
slackening speed and turning his course. He approached with timidity,
but again her smile reassured him.
She gave him her hand, and they set off side by side, going faster and
faster, and the more rapidly they moved the more tightly she grasped
his hand.
“With you I should soon learn; I somehow feel confidence in you,” she
said to him.
“And I have confidence in myself when you are leaning on me,” he said,
but was at once panic-stricken at what he had said, and blushed. And
indeed, no sooner had he uttered these words, when all at once, like
the sun going behind a cloud, her face lost all its friendliness, and
Levin detected the familiar change in her expression that denoted the
working of thought; a crease showed on her smooth brow.
“Is there anything troubling you?—though I’ve no right to ask such a
question,” he added hurriedly.
“Oh, why so?... No, I have nothing to trouble me,” she responded
coldly; and she added immediately: “You haven’t seen Mlle. Linon, have
you?”
“Not yet.”
“Go and speak to her, she likes you so much.”
“What’s wrong? I have offended her. Lord help me!” thought Levin, and
he flew towards the old Frenchwoman with the gray ringlets, who was
sitting on a bench. Smiling and showing her false teeth, she greeted
him as an old friend.
“Yes, you see we’re growing up,” she said to him, glancing towards
Kitty, “and growing old. _Tiny bear_ has grown big now!” pursued the
Frenchwoman, laughing, and she reminded him of his joke about the three
young ladies whom he had compared to the three bears in the English
nursery tale. “Do you remember that’s what you used to call them?”
He remembered absolutely nothing, but she had been laughing at the joke
for ten years now, and was fond of it.
“Now, go and skate, go and skate. Our Kitty has learned to skate
nicely, hasn’t she?”
When Levin darted up to Kitty her face was no longer stern; her eyes
looked at him with the same sincerity and friendliness, but Levin
fancied that in her friendliness there was a certain note of deliberate
composure. And he felt depressed. After talking a little of her old
governess and her peculiarities, she questioned him about his life.
“Surely you must be dull in the country in the winter, aren’t you?” she
said.
“No, I’m not dull, I am very busy,” he said, feeling that she was
holding him in check by her composed tone, which he would not have the
force to break through, just as it had been at the beginning of the
winter.
“Are you going to stay in town long?” Kitty questioned him.
“I don’t know,” he answered, not thinking of what he was saying. The
thought that if he were held in check by her tone of quiet friendliness
he would end by going back again without deciding anything came into
his mind, and he resolved to make a struggle against it.
“How is it you don’t know?”
“I don’t know. It depends upon you,” he said, and was immediately
horror-stricken at his own words.
Whether it was that she had heard his words, or that she did not want
to hear them, she made a sort of stumble, twice struck out, and
hurriedly skated away from him. She skated up to Mlle. Linon, said
something to her, and went towards the pavilion where the ladies took
off their skates.
“My God! what have I done! Merciful God! help me, guide me,” said
Levin, praying inwardly, and at the same time, feeling a need of
violent exercise, he skated about describing inner and outer circles.
At that moment one of the young men, the best of the skaters of the
day, came out of the coffee-house in his skates, with a cigarette in
his mouth. Taking a run, he dashed down the steps in his skates,
crashing and bounding up and down. He flew down, and without even
changing the position of his hands, skated away over the ice.
“Ah, that’s a new trick!” said Levin, and he promptly ran up to the top
to do this new trick.
“Don’t break your neck! it needs practice!” Nikolay Shtcherbatsky
shouted after him.
Levin went to the steps, took a run from above as best he could, and
dashed down, preserving his balance in this unwonted movement with his
hands. On the last step he stumbled, but barely touching the ice with
his hand, with a violent effort recovered himself, and skated off,
laughing.
“How splendid, how nice he is!” Kitty was thinking at that time, as she
came out of the pavilion with Mlle. Linon, and looked towards him with
a smile of quiet affection, as though he were a favorite brother. “And
can it be my fault, can I have done anything wrong? They talk of
flirtation. I know it’s not he that I love; but still I am happy with
him, and he’s so jolly. Only, why did he say that?...” she mused.
Catching sight of Kitty going away, and her mother meeting her at the
steps, Levin, flushed from his rapid exercise, stood still and pondered
a minute. He took off his skates, and overtook the mother and daughter
at the entrance of the gardens.
“Delighted to see you,” said Princess Shtcherbatskaya. “On Thursdays we
are home, as always.”
“Today, then?”
“We shall be pleased to see you,” the princess said stiffly.
This stiffness hurt Kitty, and she could not resist the desire to
smooth over her mother’s coldness. She turned her head, and with a
smile said:
“Good-bye till this evening.”
At that moment Stepan Arkadyevitch, his hat cocked on one side, with
beaming face and eyes, strode into the garden like a conquering hero.
But as he approached his mother-in-law, he responded in a mournful and
crestfallen tone to her inquiries about Dolly’s health. After a little
subdued and dejected conversation with his mother-in-law, he threw out
his chest again, and put his arm in Levin’s.
“Well, shall we set off?” he asked. “I’ve been thinking about you all
this time, and I’m very, very glad you’ve come,” he said, looking him
in the face with a significant air.
“Yes, come along,” answered Levin in ecstasy, hearing unceasingly the
sound of that voice saying, “Good-bye till this evening,” and seeing
the smile with which it was said.
“To the England or the Hermitage?”
“I don’t mind which.”
“All right, then, the England,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, selecting
that restaurant because he owed more there than at the Hermitage, and
consequently considered it mean to avoid it. “Have you got a sledge?
That’s first-rate, for I sent my carriage home.”
The friends hardly spoke all the way. Levin was wondering what that
change in Kitty’s expression had meant, and alternately assuring
himself that there was hope, and falling into despair, seeing clearly
that his hopes were insane, and yet all the while he felt himself quite
another man, utterly unlike what he had been before her smile and those
words, “Good-bye till this evening.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch was absorbed during the drive in composing the menu
of the dinner.
“You like turbot, don’t you?” he said to Levin as they were arriving.
“Eh?” responded Levin. “Turbot? Yes, I’m _awfully_ fond of turbot.”
Chapter 10
When Levin went into the restaurant with Oblonsky, he could not help
noticing a certain peculiarity of expression, as it were, a restrained
radiance, about the face and whole figure of Stepan Arkadyevitch.
Oblonsky took off his overcoat, and with his hat over one ear walked
into the dining-room, giving directions to the Tatar waiters, who were
clustered about him in evening coats, bearing napkins. Bowing to right
and left to the people he met, and here as everywhere joyously greeting
acquaintances, he went up to the sideboard for a preliminary appetizer
of fish and vodka, and said to the painted Frenchwoman decked in
ribbons, lace, and ringlets, behind the counter, something so amusing
that even that Frenchwoman was moved to genuine laughter. Levin for his
part refrained from taking any vodka simply because he felt such a
loathing of that Frenchwoman, all made up, it seemed, of false hair,
_poudre de riz,_ and _vinaigre de toilette_. He made haste to move away
from her, as from a dirty place. His whole soul was filled with
memories of Kitty, and there was a smile of triumph and happiness
shining in his eyes.
“This way, your excellency, please. Your excellency won’t be disturbed
here,” said a particularly pertinacious, white-headed old Tatar with
immense hips and coat-tails gaping widely behind. “Walk in, your
excellency,” he said to Levin; by way of showing his respect to Stepan
Arkadyevitch, being attentive to his guest as well.
Instantly flinging a fresh cloth over the round table under the bronze
chandelier, though it already had a table cloth on it, he pushed up
velvet chairs, and came to a standstill before Stepan Arkadyevitch with
a napkin and a bill of fare in his hands, awaiting his commands.
“If you prefer it, your excellency, a private room will be free
directly; Prince Golistin with a lady. Fresh oysters have come in.”
“Ah! oysters.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch became thoughtful.
“How if we were to change our program, Levin?” he said, keeping his
finger on the bill of fare. And his face expressed serious hesitation.
“Are the oysters good? Mind now.”
“They’re Flensburg, your excellency. We’ve no Ostend.”
“Flensburg will do, but are they fresh?”
“Only arrived yesterday.”
“Well, then, how if we were to begin with oysters, and so change the
whole program? Eh?”
“It’s all the same to me. I should like cabbage soup and porridge
better than anything; but of course there’s nothing like that here.”
“_Porridge à la Russe,_ your honor would like?” said the Tatar, bending
down to Levin, like a nurse speaking to a child.
“No, joking apart, whatever you choose is sure to be good. I’ve been
skating, and I’m hungry. And don’t imagine,” he added, detecting a look
of dissatisfaction on Oblonsky’s face, “that I shan’t appreciate your
choice. I am fond of good things.”
“I should hope so! After all, it’s one of the pleasures of life,” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Well, then, my friend, you give us two—or better
say three—dozen oysters, clear soup with vegetables....”
“_Printanière,_” prompted the Tatar. But Stepan Arkadyevitch apparently
did not care to allow him the satisfaction of giving the French names
of the dishes.
“With vegetables in it, you know. Then turbot with thick sauce, then
... roast beef; and mind it’s good. Yes, and capons, perhaps, and then
sweets.”
The Tatar, recollecting that it was Stepan Arkadyevitch’s way not to
call the dishes by the names in the French bill of fare, did not repeat
them after him, but could not resist rehearsing the whole menu to
himself according to the bill:—“_Soupe printanière, turbot, sauce
Beaumarchais, poulard à l’estragon, macédoine de fruits_ ... etc.,” and
then instantly, as though worked by springs, laying down one bound bill
of fare, he took up another, the list of wines, and submitted it to
Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“What shall we drink?”
“What you like, only not too much. Champagne,” said Levin.
“What! to start with? You’re right though, I dare say. Do you like the
white seal?”
“_Cachet blanc,_” prompted the Tatar.
“Very well, then, give us that brand with the oysters, and then we’ll
see.”
“Yes, sir. And what table wine?”
“You can give us Nuits. Oh, no, better the classic Chablis.”
“Yes, sir. And _your_ cheese, your excellency?”
“Oh, yes, Parmesan. Or would you like another?”
“No, it’s all the same to me,” said Levin, unable to suppress a smile.
And the Tatar ran off with flying coat-tails, and in five minutes
darted in with a dish of opened oysters on mother-of-pearl shells, and
a bottle between his fingers.
Stepan Arkadyevitch crushed the starchy napkin, tucked it into his
waistcoat, and settling his arms comfortably, started on the oysters.
“Not bad,” he said, stripping the oysters from the pearly shell with a
silver fork, and swallowing them one after another. “Not bad,” he
repeated, turning his dewy, brilliant eyes from Levin to the Tatar.
Levin ate the oysters indeed, though white bread and cheese would have
pleased him better. But he was admiring Oblonsky. Even the Tatar,
uncorking the bottle and pouring the sparkling wine into the delicate
glasses, glanced at Stepan Arkadyevitch, and settled his white cravat
with a perceptible smile of satisfaction.
“You don’t care much for oysters, do you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
emptying his wine-glass, “or you’re worried about something. Eh?”
He wanted Levin to be in good spirits. But it was not that Levin was
not in good spirits; he was ill at ease. With what he had in his soul,
he felt sore and uncomfortable in the restaurant, in the midst of
private rooms where men were dining with ladies, in all this fuss and
bustle; the surroundings of bronzes, looking-glasses, gas, and
waiters—all of it was offensive to him. He was afraid of sullying what
his soul was brimful of.
“I? Yes, I am; but besides, all this bothers me,” he said. “You can’t
conceive how queer it all seems to a country person like me, as queer
as that gentleman’s nails I saw at your place....”
“Yes, I saw how much interested you were in poor Grinevitch’s nails,”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing.
“It’s too much for me,” responded Levin. “Do try, now, and put yourself
in my place, take the point of view of a country person. We in the
country try to bring our hands into such a state as will be most
convenient for working with. So we cut our nails; sometimes we turn up
our sleeves. And here people purposely let their nails grow as long as
they will, and link on small saucers by way of studs, so that they can
do nothing with their hands.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled gaily.
“Oh, yes, that’s just a sign that he has no need to do coarse work. His
work is with the mind....”
“Maybe. But still it’s queer to me, just as at this moment it seems
queer to me that we country folks try to get our meals over as soon as
we can, so as to be ready for our work, while here are we trying to
drag out our meal as long as possible, and with that object eating
oysters....”
“Why, of course,” objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. “But that’s just the
aim of civilization—to make everything a source of enjoyment.”
“Well, if that’s its aim, I’d rather be a savage.”
“And so you are a savage. All you Levins are savages.”
Levin sighed. He remembered his brother Nikolay, and felt ashamed and
sore, and he scowled; but Oblonsky began speaking of a subject which at
once drew his attention.
“Oh, I say, are you going tonight to our people, the Shtcherbatskys’, I
mean?” he said, his eyes sparkling significantly as he pushed away the
empty rough shells, and drew the cheese towards him.
“Yes, I shall certainly go,” replied Levin; “though I fancied the
princess was not very warm in her invitation.”
“What nonsense! That’s her manner.... Come, boy, the soup!... That’s
her manner—_grande dame,_” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I’m coming, too,
but I have to go to the Countess Bonina’s rehearsal. Come, isn’t it
true that you’re a savage? How do you explain the sudden way in which
you vanished from Moscow? The Shtcherbatskys were continually asking me
about you, as though I ought to know. The only thing I know is that you
always do what no one else does.”
“Yes,” said Levin, slowly and with emotion, “you’re right. I am a
savage. Only, my savageness is not in having gone away, but in coming
now. Now I have come....”
“Oh, what a lucky fellow you are!” broke in Stepan Arkadyevitch,
looking into Levin’s eyes.
“Why?”
“‘I know a gallant steed by tokens sure,
And by his eyes I know a youth in love,’”
declaimed Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Everything is before you.”
“Why, is it over for you already?”
“No; not over exactly, but the future is yours, and the present is
mine, and the present—well, it’s not all that it might be.”
“How so?”
“Oh, things go wrong. But I don’t want to talk of myself, and besides I
can’t explain it all,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Well, why have you
come to Moscow, then?... Hi! take away!” he called to the Tatar.
“You guess?” responded Levin, his eyes like deep wells of light fixed
on Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“I guess, but I can’t be the first to talk about it. You can see by
that whether I guess right or wrong,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, gazing
at Levin with a subtle smile.
“Well, and what have you to say to me?” said Levin in a quivering
voice, feeling that all the muscles of his face were quivering too.
“How do you look at the question?”
Stepan Arkadyevitch slowly emptied his glass of Chablis, never taking
his eyes off Levin.
“I?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “there’s nothing I desire so much as
that—nothing! It would be the best thing that could be.”
“But you’re not making a mistake? You know what we’re speaking of?”
said Levin, piercing him with his eyes. “You think it’s possible?”
“I think it’s possible. Why not possible?”
“No! do you really think it’s possible? No, tell me all you think! Oh,
but if ... if refusal’s in store for me!... Indeed I feel sure....”
“Why should you think that?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling at his
excitement.
“It seems so to me sometimes. That will be awful for me, and for her
too.”
“Oh, well, anyway there’s nothing awful in it for a girl. Every girl’s
proud of an offer.”
“Yes, every girl, but not she.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled. He so well knew that feeling of Levin’s,
that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes:
one class—all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with
all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other
class—she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all
humanity.
“Stay, take some sauce,” he said, holding back Levin’s hand as it
pushed away the sauce.
Levin obediently helped himself to sauce, but would not let Stepan
Arkadyevitch go on with his dinner.
“No, stop a minute, stop a minute,” he said. “You must understand that
it’s a question of life and death for me. I have never spoken to anyone
of this. And there’s no one I could speak of it to, except you. You
know we’re utterly unlike each other, different tastes and views and
everything; but I know you’re fond of me and understand me, and that’s
why I like you awfully. But for God’s sake, be quite straightforward
with me.”
“I tell you what I think,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling. “But I’ll
say more: my wife is a wonderful woman....” Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed,
remembering his position with his wife, and, after a moment’s silence,
resumed—“She has a gift of foreseeing things. She sees right through
people; but that’s not all; she knows what will come to pass,
especially in the way of marriages. She foretold, for instance, that
Princess Shahovskaya would marry Brenteln. No one would believe it, but
it came to pass. And she’s on your side.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s not only that she likes you—she says that Kitty is certain to be
your wife.”
At these words Levin’s face suddenly lighted up with a smile, a smile
not far from tears of emotion.
“She says that!” cried Levin. “I always said she was exquisite, your
wife. There, that’s enough, enough said about it,” he said, getting up
from his seat.
“All right, but do sit down.”
But Levin could not sit down. He walked with his firm tread twice up
and down the little cage of a room, blinked his eyelids that his tears
might not fall, and only then sat down to the table.
“You must understand,” said he, “it’s not love. I’ve been in love, but
it’s not that. It’s not my feeling, but a sort of force outside me has
taken possession of me. I went away, you see, because I made up my mind
that it could never be, you understand, as a happiness that does not
come on earth; but I’ve struggled with myself, I see there’s no living
without it. And it must be settled.”
“What did you go away for?”
“Ah, stop a minute! Ah, the thoughts that come crowding on one! The
questions one must ask oneself! Listen. You can’t imagine what you’ve
done for me by what you said. I’m so happy that I’ve become positively
hateful; I’ve forgotten everything. I heard today that my brother
Nikolay ... you know, he’s here ... I had even forgotten him. It seems
to me that he’s happy too. It’s a sort of madness. But one thing’s
awful.... Here, you’ve been married, you know the feeling ... it’s
awful that we—old—with a past ... not of love, but of sins ... are
brought all at once so near to a creature pure and innocent; it’s
loathsome, and that’s why one can’t help feeling oneself unworthy.”
“Oh, well, you’ve not many sins on your conscience.”
“Alas! all the same,” said Levin, “when with loathing I go over my
life, I shudder and curse and bitterly regret it.... Yes.”
“What would you have? The world’s made so,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“The one comfort is like that prayer, which I always liked: ‘Forgive me
not according to my unworthiness, but according to Thy
loving-kindness.’ That’s the only way she can forgive me.”
Chapter 11
Levin emptied his glass, and they were silent for a while.
“There’s one other thing I ought to tell you. Do you know Vronsky?”
Stepan Arkadyevitch asked Levin.
“No, I don’t. Why do you ask?”
“Give us another bottle,” Stepan Arkadyevitch directed the Tatar, who
was filling up their glasses and fidgeting round them just when he was
not wanted.
“Why you ought to know Vronsky is that he’s one of your rivals.”
“Who’s Vronsky?” said Levin, and his face was suddenly transformed from
the look of childlike ecstasy which Oblonsky had just been admiring to
an angry and unpleasant expression.
“Vronsky is one of the sons of Count Kirill Ivanovitch Vronsky, and one
of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of Petersburg. I made his
acquaintance in Tver when I was there on official business, and he came
there for the levy of recruits. Fearfully rich, handsome, great
connections, an aide-de-camp, and with all that a very nice,
good-natured fellow. But he’s more than simply a good-natured fellow,
as I’ve found out here—he’s a cultivated man, too, and very
intelligent; he’s a man who’ll make his mark.”
Levin scowled and was dumb.
“Well, he turned up here soon after you’d gone, and as I can see, he’s
over head and ears in love with Kitty, and you know that her
mother....”
“Excuse me, but I know nothing,” said Levin, frowning gloomily. And
immediately he recollected his brother Nikolay and how hateful he was
to have been able to forget him.
“You wait a bit, wait a bit,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling and
touching his hand. “I’ve told you what I know, and I repeat that in
this delicate and tender matter, as far as one can conjecture, I
believe the chances are in your favor.”
Levin dropped back in his chair; his face was pale.
“But I would advise you to settle the thing as soon as may be,” pursued
Oblonsky, filling up his glass.
“No, thanks, I can’t drink any more,” said Levin, pushing away his
glass. “I shall be drunk.... Come, tell me how are you getting on?” he
went on, obviously anxious to change the conversation.
“One word more: in any case I advise you to settle the question soon.
Tonight I don’t advise you to speak,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Go
round tomorrow morning, make an offer in due form, and God bless
you....”
“Oh, do you still think of coming to me for some shooting? Come next
spring, do,” said Levin.
Now his whole soul was full of remorse that he had begun this
conversation with Stepan Arkadyevitch. A feeling such as his was
profaned by talk of the rivalry of some Petersburg officer, of the
suppositions and the counsels of Stepan Arkadyevitch.
Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled. He knew what was passing in Levin’s soul.
“I’ll come some day,” he said. “But women, my boy, they’re the pivot
everything turns upon. Things are in a bad way with me, very bad. And
it’s all through women. Tell me frankly now,” he pursued, picking up a
cigar and keeping one hand on his glass; “give me your advice.”
“Why, what is it?”
“I’ll tell you. Suppose you’re married, you love your wife, but you’re
fascinated by another woman....”
“Excuse me, but I’m absolutely unable to comprehend how ... just as I
can’t comprehend how I could now, after my dinner, go straight to a
baker’s shop and steal a roll.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes sparkled more than usual.
“Why not? A roll will sometimes smell so good one can’t resist it.”
“Himmlisch ist’s, wenn ich bezwungen
Meine irdische Begier;
Aber doch wenn’s nich gelungen
Hatt’ ich auch recht hübsch Plaisir!”
As he said this, Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled subtly. Levin, too, could
not help smiling.
“Yes, but joking apart,” resumed Stepan Arkadyevitch, “you must
understand that the woman is a sweet, gentle loving creature, poor and
lonely, and has sacrificed everything. Now, when the thing’s done,
don’t you see, can one possibly cast her off? Even supposing one parts
from her, so as not to break up one’s family life, still, can one help
feeling for her, setting her on her feet, softening her lot?”
“Well, you must excuse me there. You know to me all women are divided
into two classes ... at least no ... truer to say: there are women and
there are ... I’ve never seen exquisite fallen beings, and I never
shall see them, but such creatures as that painted Frenchwoman at the
counter with the ringlets are vermin to my mind, and all fallen women
are the same.”
“But the Magdalen?”
“Ah, drop that! Christ would never have said those words if He had
known how they would be abused. Of all the Gospel those words are the
only ones remembered. However, I’m not saying so much what I think, as
what I feel. I have a loathing for fallen women. You’re afraid of
spiders, and I of these vermin. Most likely you’ve not made a study of
spiders and don’t know their character; and so it is with me.”
“It’s very well for you to talk like that; it’s very much like that
gentleman in Dickens who used to fling all difficult questions over his
right shoulder. But to deny the facts is no answer. What’s to be
done—you tell me that, what’s to be done? Your wife gets older, while
you’re full of life. Before you’ve time to look round, you feel that
you can’t love your wife with love, however much you may esteem her.
And then all at once love turns up, and you’re done for, done for,”
Stepan Arkadyevitch said with weary despair.
Levin half smiled.
“Yes, you’re done for,” resumed Oblonsky. “But what’s to be done?”
“Don’t steal rolls.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed outright.
“Oh, moralist! But you must understand, there are two women; one
insists only on her rights, and those rights are your love, which you
can’t give her; and the other sacrifices everything for you and asks
for nothing. What are you to do? How are you to act? There’s a fearful
tragedy in it.”
“If you care for my profession of faith as regards that, I’ll tell you
that I don’t believe there was any tragedy about it. And this is why.
To my mind, love ... both the sorts of love, which you remember Plato
defines in his Banquet, served as the test of men. Some men only
understand one sort, and some only the other. And those who only know
the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love
there can be no sort of tragedy. ‘I’m much obliged for the
gratification, my humble respects’—that’s all the tragedy. And in
platonic love there can be no tragedy, because in that love all is
clear and pure, because....”
At that instant Levin recollected his own sins and the inner conflict
he had lived through. And he added unexpectedly:
“But perhaps you are right. Very likely ... I don’t know, I don’t
know.”
“It’s this, don’t you see,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “you’re very much
all of a piece. That’s your strong point and your failing. You have a
character that’s all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be
of a piece too—but that’s not how it is. You despise public official
work because you want the reality to be invariably corresponding all
the while with the aim—and that’s not how it is. You want a man’s work,
too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to
be undivided—and that’s not how it is. All the variety, all the charm,
all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
Levin sighed and made no reply. He was thinking of his own affairs, and
did not hear Oblonsky.
And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends, though
they had been dining and drinking together, which should have drawn
them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs, and they
had nothing to do with one another. Oblonsky had more than once
experienced this extreme sense of aloofness, instead of intimacy,
coming on after dinner, and he knew what to do in such cases.
“Bill!” he called, and he went into the next room where he promptly
came across an aide-de-camp of his acquaintance and dropped into
conversation with him about an actress and her protector. And at once
in the conversation with the aide-de-camp Oblonsky had a sense of
relaxation and relief after the conversation with Levin, which always
put him to too great a mental and spiritual strain.
When the Tatar appeared with a bill for twenty-six roubles and odd
kopecks, besides a tip for himself, Levin, who would another time have
been horrified, like anyone from the country, at his share of fourteen
roubles, did not notice it, paid, and set off homewards to dress and go
to the Shtcherbatskys’ there to decide his fate.
Chapter 12
The young Princess Kitty Shtcherbatskaya was eighteen. It was the first
winter that she had been out in the world. Her success in society had
been greater than that of either of her elder sisters, and greater even
than her mother had anticipated. To say nothing of the young men who
danced at the Moscow balls being almost all in love with Kitty, two
serious suitors had already this first winter made their appearance:
Levin, and immediately after his departure, Count Vronsky.
Levin’s appearance at the beginning of the winter, his frequent visits,
and evident love for Kitty, had led to the first serious conversations
between Kitty’s parents as to her future, and to disputes between them.
The prince was on Levin’s side; he said he wished for nothing better
for Kitty. The princess for her part, going round the question in the
manner peculiar to women, maintained that Kitty was too young, that
Levin had done nothing to prove that he had serious intentions, that
Kitty felt no great attraction to him, and other side issues; but she
did not state the principal point, which was that she looked for a
better match for her daughter, and that Levin was not to her liking,
and she did not understand him. When Levin had abruptly departed, the
princess was delighted, and said to her husband triumphantly: “You see
I was right.” When Vronsky appeared on the scene, she was still more
delighted, confirmed in her opinion that Kitty was to make not simply a
good, but a brilliant match.
In the mother’s eyes there could be no comparison between Vronsky and
Levin. She disliked in Levin his strange and uncompromising opinions
and his shyness in society, founded, as she supposed, on his pride and
his queer sort of life, as she considered it, absorbed in cattle and
peasants. She did not very much like it that he, who was in love with
her daughter, had kept coming to the house for six weeks, as though he
were waiting for something, inspecting, as though he were afraid he
might be doing them too great an honor by making an offer, and did not
realize that a man, who continually visits at a house where there is a
young unmarried girl, is bound to make his intentions clear. And
suddenly, without doing so, he disappeared. “It’s as well he’s not
attractive enough for Kitty to have fallen in love with him,” thought
the mother.
Vronsky satisfied all the mother’s desires. Very wealthy, clever, of
aristocratic family, on the highroad to a brilliant career in the army
and at court, and a fascinating man. Nothing better could be wished
for.
Vronsky openly flirted with Kitty at balls, danced with her, and came
continually to the house, consequently there could be no doubt of the
seriousness of his intentions. But, in spite of that, the mother had
spent the whole of that winter in a state of terrible anxiety and
agitation.
Princess Shtcherbatskaya had herself been married thirty years ago, her
aunt arranging the match. Her husband, about whom everything was well
known beforehand, had come, looked at his future bride, and been looked
at. The matchmaking aunt had ascertained and communicated their mutual
impression. That impression had been favorable. Afterwards, on a day
fixed beforehand, the expected offer was made to her parents, and
accepted. All had passed very simply and easily. So it seemed, at
least, to the princess. But over her own daughters she had felt how far
from simple and easy is the business, apparently so commonplace, of
marrying off one’s daughters. The panics that had been lived through,
the thoughts that had been brooded over, the money that had been
wasted, and the disputes with her husband over marrying the two elder
girls, Darya and Natalia! Now, since the youngest had come out, she was
going through the same terrors, the same doubts, and still more violent
quarrels with her husband than she had over the elder girls. The old
prince, like all fathers indeed, was exceedingly punctilious on the
score of the honor and reputation of his daughters. He was irrationally
jealous over his daughters, especially over Kitty, who was his
favorite. At every turn he had scenes with the princess for
compromising her daughter. The princess had grown accustomed to this
already with her other daughters, but now she felt that there was more
ground for the prince’s touchiness. She saw that of late years much was
changed in the manners of society, that a mother’s duties had become
still more difficult. She saw that girls of Kitty’s age formed some
sort of clubs, went to some sort of lectures, mixed freely in men’s
society; drove about the streets alone, many of them did not curtsey,
and, what was the most important thing, all the girls were firmly
convinced that to choose their husbands was their own affair, and not
their parents’. “Marriages aren’t made nowadays as they used to be,”
was thought and said by all these young girls, and even by their
elders. But how marriages were made now, the princess could not learn
from anyone. The French fashion—of the parents arranging their
children’s future—was not accepted; it was condemned. The English
fashion of the complete independence of girls was also not accepted,
and not possible in Russian society. The Russian fashion of matchmaking
by the offices of intermediate persons was for some reason considered
unseemly; it was ridiculed by everyone, and by the princess herself.
But how girls were to be married, and how parents were to marry them,
no one knew. Everyone with whom the princess had chanced to discuss the
matter said the same thing: “Mercy on us, it’s high time in our day to
cast off all that old-fashioned business. It’s the young people have to
marry; and not their parents; and so we ought to leave the young people
to arrange it as they choose.” It was very easy for anyone to say that
who had no daughters, but the princess realized that in the process of
getting to know each other, her daughter might fall in love, and fall
in love with someone who did not care to marry her or who was quite
unfit to be her husband. And, however much it was instilled into the
princess that in our times young people ought to arrange their lives
for themselves, she was unable to believe it, just as she would have
been unable to believe that, at any time whatever, the most suitable
playthings for children five years old ought to be loaded pistols. And
so the princess was more uneasy over Kitty than she had been over her
elder sisters.
Now she was afraid that Vronsky might confine himself to simply
flirting with her daughter. She saw that her daughter was in love with
him, but tried to comfort herself with the thought that he was an
honorable man, and would not do this. But at the same time she knew how
easy it is, with the freedom of manners of today, to turn a girl’s
head, and how lightly men generally regard such a crime. The week
before, Kitty had told her mother of a conversation she had with
Vronsky during a mazurka. This conversation had partly reassured the
princess; but perfectly at ease she could not be. Vronsky had told
Kitty that both he and his brother were so used to obeying their mother
that they never made up their minds to any important undertaking
without consulting her. “And just now, I am impatiently awaiting my
mother’s arrival from Petersburg, as peculiarly fortunate,” he told
her.
Kitty had repeated this without attaching any significance to the
words. But her mother saw them in a different light. She knew that the
old lady was expected from day to day, that she would be pleased at her
son’s choice, and she felt it strange that he should not make his offer
through fear of vexing his mother. However, she was so anxious for the
marriage itself, and still more for relief from her fears, that she
believed it was so. Bitter as it was for the princess to see the
unhappiness of her eldest daughter, Dolly, on the point of leaving her
husband, her anxiety over the decision of her youngest daughter’s fate
engrossed all her feelings. Today, with Levin’s reappearance, a fresh
source of anxiety arose. She was afraid that her daughter, who had at
one time, as she fancied, a feeling for Levin, might, from extreme
sense of honor, refuse Vronsky, and that Levin’s arrival might
generally complicate and delay the affair so near being concluded.
“Why, has he been here long?” the princess asked about Levin, as they
returned home.
“He came today, mamma.”
“There’s one thing I want to say....” began the princess, and from her
serious and alert face, Kitty guessed what it would be.
“Mamma,” she said, flushing hotly and turning quickly to her, “please,
please don’t say anything about that. I know, I know all about it.”
She wished for what her mother wished for, but the motives of her
mother’s wishes wounded her.
“I only want to say that to raise hopes....”
“Mamma, darling, for goodness’ sake, don’t talk about it. It’s so
horrible to talk about it.”
“I won’t,” said her mother, seeing the tears in her daughter’s eyes;
“but one thing, my love; you promised me you would have no secrets from
me. You won’t?”
“Never, mamma, none,” answered Kitty, flushing a little, and looking
her mother straight in the face, “but there’s no use in my telling you
anything, and I ... I ... if I wanted to, I don’t know what to say or
how.... I don’t know....”
“No, she could not tell an untruth with those eyes,” thought the
mother, smiling at her agitation and happiness. The princess smiled
that what was taking place just now in her soul seemed to the poor
child so immense and so important.
Chapter 13
After dinner, and till the beginning of the evening, Kitty was feeling
a sensation akin to the sensation of a young man before a battle. Her
heart throbbed violently, and her thoughts would not rest on anything.
She felt that this evening, when they would both meet for the first
time, would be a turning point in her life. And she was continually
picturing them to herself, at one moment each separately, and then both
together. When she mused on the past, she dwelt with pleasure, with
tenderness, on the memories of her relations with Levin. The memories
of childhood and of Levin’s friendship with her dead brother gave a
special poetic charm to her relations with him. His love for her, of
which she felt certain, was flattering and delightful to her; and it
was pleasant for her to think of Levin. In her memories of Vronsky
there always entered a certain element of awkwardness, though he was in
the highest degree well-bred and at ease, as though there were some
false note—not in Vronsky, he was very simple and nice, but in herself,
while with Levin she felt perfectly simple and clear. But, on the other
hand, directly she thought of the future with Vronsky, there arose
before her a perspective of brilliant happiness; with Levin the future
seemed misty.
When she went upstairs to dress, and looked into the looking-glass, she
noticed with joy that it was one of her good days, and that she was in
complete possession of all her forces,—she needed this so for what lay
before her: she was conscious of external composure and free grace in
her movements.
At half-past seven she had only just gone down into the drawing-room,
when the footman announced, “Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin.” The
princess was still in her room, and the prince had not come in. “So it
is to be,” thought Kitty, and all the blood seemed to rush to her
heart. She was horrified at her paleness, as she glanced into the
looking-glass. At that moment she knew beyond doubt that he had come
early on purpose to find her alone and to make her an offer. And only
then for the first time the whole thing presented itself in a new,
different aspect; only then she realized that the question did not
affect her only—with whom she would be happy, and whom she loved—but
that she would have that moment to wound a man whom she liked. And to
wound him cruelly. What for? Because he, dear fellow, loved her, was in
love with her. But there was no help for it, so it must be, so it would
have to be.
“My God! shall I myself really have to say it to him?” she thought.
“Can I tell him I don’t love him? That will be a lie. What am I to say
to him? That I love someone else? No, that’s impossible. I’m going
away, I’m going away.”
She had reached the door, when she heard his step. “No! it’s not
honest. What have I to be afraid of? I have done nothing wrong. What is
to be, will be! I’ll tell the truth. And with him one can’t be ill at
ease. Here he is,” she said to herself, seeing his powerful, shy
figure, with his shining eyes fixed on her. She looked straight into
his face, as though imploring him to spare her, and gave her hand.
“It’s not time yet; I think I’m too early,” he said glancing round the
empty drawing-room. When he saw that his expectations were realized,
that there was nothing to prevent him from speaking, his face became
gloomy.
“Oh, no,” said Kitty, and sat down at the table.
“But this was just what I wanted, to find you alone,” he began, not
sitting down, and not looking at her, so as not to lose courage.
“Mamma will be down directly. She was very much tired....
Yesterday....”
She talked on, not knowing what her lips were uttering, and not taking
her supplicating and caressing eyes off him.
He glanced at her; she blushed, and ceased speaking.
“I told you I did not know whether I should be here long ... that it
depended on you....”
She dropped her head lower and lower, not knowing herself what answer
she should make to what was coming.
“That it depended on you,” he repeated. “I meant to say ... I meant to
say ... I came for this ... to be my wife!” he brought out, not knowing
what he was saying; but feeling that the most terrible thing was said,
he stopped short and looked at her....
She was breathing heavily, not looking at him. She was feeling ecstasy.
Her soul was flooded with happiness. She had never anticipated that the
utterance of love would produce such a powerful effect on her. But it
lasted only an instant. She remembered Vronsky. She lifted her clear,
truthful eyes, and seeing his desperate face, she answered hastily:
“That cannot be ... forgive me.”
A moment ago, and how close she had been to him, of what importance in
his life! And how aloof and remote from him she had become now!
“It was bound to be so,” he said, not looking at her.
He bowed, and was meaning to retreat.
Chapter 14
But at that very moment the princess came in. There was a look of
horror on her face when she saw them alone, and their disturbed faces.
Levin bowed to her, and said nothing. Kitty did not speak nor lift her
eyes. “Thank God, she has refused him,” thought the mother, and her
face lighted up with the habitual smile with which she greeted her
guests on Thursdays. She sat down and began questioning Levin about his
life in the country. He sat down again, waiting for other visitors to
arrive, in order to retreat unnoticed.
Five minutes later there came in a friend of Kitty’s, married the
preceding winter, Countess Nordston.
She was a thin, sallow, sickly, and nervous woman, with brilliant black
eyes. She was fond of Kitty, and her affection for her showed itself,
as the affection of married women for girls always does, in the desire
to make a match for Kitty after her own ideal of married happiness; she
wanted her to marry Vronsky. Levin she had often met at the
Shtcherbatskys’ early in the winter, and she had always disliked him.
Her invariable and favorite pursuit, when they met, consisted in making
fun of him.
“I do like it when he looks down at me from the height of his grandeur,
or breaks off his learned conversation with me because I’m a fool, or
is condescending to me. I like that so; to see him condescending! I am
so glad he can’t bear me,” she used to say of him.
She was right, for Levin actually could not bear her, and despised her
for what she was proud of and regarded as a fine characteristic—her
nervousness, her delicate contempt and indifference for everything
coarse and earthly.
The Countess Nordston and Levin got into that relation with one another
not seldom seen in society, when two persons, who remain externally on
friendly terms, despise each other to such a degree that they cannot
even take each other seriously, and cannot even be offended by each
other.
The Countess Nordston pounced upon Levin at once.
“Ah, Konstantin Dmitrievitch! So you’ve come back to our corrupt
Babylon,” she said, giving him her tiny, yellow hand, and recalling
what he had chanced to say early in the winter, that Moscow was a
Babylon. “Come, is Babylon reformed, or have you degenerated?” she
added, glancing with a simper at Kitty.
“It’s very flattering for me, countess, that you remember my words so
well,” responded Levin, who had succeeded in recovering his composure,
and at once from habit dropped into his tone of joking hostility to the
Countess Nordston. “They must certainly make a great impression on
you.”
“Oh, I should think so! I always note them all down. Well, Kitty, have
you been skating again?...”
And she began talking to Kitty. Awkward as it was for Levin to withdraw
now, it would still have been easier for him to perpetrate this
awkwardness than to remain all the evening and see Kitty, who glanced
at him now and then and avoided his eyes. He was on the point of
getting up, when the princess, noticing that he was silent, addressed
him.
“Shall you be long in Moscow? You’re busy with the district council,
though, aren’t you, and can’t be away for long?”
“No, princess, I’m no longer a member of the council,” he said. “I have
come up for a few days.”
“There’s something the matter with him,” thought Countess Nordston,
glancing at his stern, serious face. “He isn’t in his old argumentative
mood. But I’ll draw him out. I do love making a fool of him before
Kitty, and I’ll do it.”
“Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” she said to him, “do explain to me, please,
what’s the meaning of it. You know all about such things. At home in
our village of Kaluga all the peasants and all the women have drunk up
all they possessed, and now they can’t pay us any rent. What’s the
meaning of that? You always praise the peasants so.”
At that instant another lady came into the room, and Levin got up.
“Excuse me, countess, but I really know nothing about it, and can’t
tell you anything,” he said, and looked round at the officer who came
in behind the lady.
“That must be Vronsky,” thought Levin, and, to be sure of it, glanced
at Kitty. She had already had time to look at Vronsky, and looked round
at Levin. And simply from the look in her eyes, that grew unconsciously
brighter, Levin knew that she loved that man, knew it as surely as if
she had told him so in words. But what sort of a man was he? Now,
whether for good or for ill, Levin could not choose but remain; he must
find out what the man was like whom she loved.
There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what,
are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and
to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who
desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he
has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what
is good. Levin belonged to the second class. But he had no difficulty
in finding what was good and attractive in Vronsky. It was apparent at
the first glance. Vronsky was a squarely built, dark man, not very
tall, with a good-humored, handsome, and exceedingly calm and resolute
face. Everything about his face and figure, from his short-cropped
black hair and freshly shaven chin down to his loosely fitting,
brand-new uniform, was simple and at the same time elegant. Making way
for the lady who had come in, Vronsky went up to the princess and then
to Kitty.
As he approached her, his beautiful eyes shone with a specially tender
light, and with a faint, happy, and modestly triumphant smile (so it
seemed to Levin), bowing carefully and respectfully over her, he held
out his small broad hand to her.
Greeting and saying a few words to everyone, he sat down without once
glancing at Levin, who had never taken his eyes off him.
“Let me introduce you,” said the princess, indicating Levin.
“Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, Count Alexey Kirillovitch Vronsky.”
Vronsky got up and, looking cordially at Levin, shook hands with him.
“I believe I was to have dined with you this winter,” he said, smiling
his simple and open smile; “but you had unexpectedly left for the
country.”
“Konstantin Dmitrievitch despises and hates town and us townspeople,”
said Countess Nordston.
“My words must make a deep impression on you, since you remember them
so well,” said Levin, and, suddenly conscious that he had said just the
same thing before, he reddened.
Vronsky looked at Levin and Countess Nordston, and smiled.
“Are you always in the country?” he inquired. “I should think it must
be dull in the winter.”
“It’s not dull if one has work to do; besides, one’s not dull by
oneself,” Levin replied abruptly.
“I am fond of the country,” said Vronsky, noticing, and affecting not
to notice, Levin’s tone.
“But I hope, count, you would not consent to live in the country
always,” said Countess Nordston.
“I don’t know; I have never tried for long. I experienced a queer
feeling once,” he went on. “I never longed so for the country, Russian
country, with bast shoes and peasants, as when I was spending a winter
with my mother in Nice. Nice itself is dull enough, you know. And
indeed, Naples and Sorrento are only pleasant for a short time. And
it’s just there that Russia comes back to me most vividly, and
especially the country. It’s as though....”
He talked on, addressing both Kitty and Levin, turning his serene,
friendly eyes from one to the other, and saying obviously just what
came into his head.
Noticing that Countess Nordston wanted to say something, he stopped
short without finishing what he had begun, and listened attentively to
her.
The conversation did not flag for an instant, so that the princess, who
always kept in reserve, in case a subject should be lacking, two heavy
guns—the relative advantages of classical and of modern education, and
universal military service—had not to move out either of them, while
Countess Nordston had not a chance of chaffing Levin.
Levin wanted to, and could not, take part in the general conversation;
saying to himself every instant, “Now go,” he still did not go, as
though waiting for something.
The conversation fell upon table-turning and spirits, and Countess
Nordston, who believed in spiritualism, began to describe the marvels
she had seen.
“Ah, countess, you really must take me, for pity’s sake do take me to
see them! I have never seen anything extraordinary, though I am always
on the lookout for it everywhere,” said Vronsky, smiling.
“Very well, next Saturday,” answered Countess Nordston. “But you,
Konstantin Dmitrievitch, do you believe in it?” she asked Levin.
“Why do you ask me? You know what I shall say.”
“But I want to hear your opinion.”
“My opinion,” answered Levin, “is only that this table-turning simply
proves that educated society—so called—is no higher than the peasants.
They believe in the evil eye, and in witchcraft and omens, while
we....”
“Oh, then you don’t believe in it?”
“I can’t believe in it, countess.”
“But if I’ve seen it myself?”
“The peasant women too tell us they have seen goblins.”
“Then you think I tell a lie?”
And she laughed a mirthless laugh.
“Oh, no, Masha, Konstantin Dmitrievitch said he could not believe in
it,” said Kitty, blushing for Levin, and Levin saw this, and, still
more exasperated, would have answered, but Vronsky with his bright
frank smile rushed to the support of the conversation, which was
threatening to become disagreeable.
“You do not admit the conceivability at all?” he queried. “But why not?
We admit the existence of electricity, of which we know nothing. Why
should there not be some new force, still unknown to us, which....”
“When electricity was discovered,” Levin interrupted hurriedly, “it was
only the phenomenon that was discovered, and it was unknown from what
it proceeded and what were its effects, and ages passed before its
applications were conceived. But the spiritualists have begun with
tables writing for them, and spirits appearing to them, and have only
later started saying that it is an unknown force.”
Vronsky listened attentively to Levin, as he always did listen,
obviously interested in his words.
“Yes, but the spiritualists say we don’t know at present what this
force is, but there is a force, and these are the conditions in which
it acts. Let the scientific men find out what the force consists in.
No, I don’t see why there should not be a new force, if it....”
“Why, because with electricity,” Levin interrupted again, “every time
you rub tar against wool, a recognized phenomenon is manifested, but in
this case it does not happen every time, and so it follows it is not a
natural phenomenon.”
Feeling probably that the conversation was taking a tone too serious
for a drawing-room, Vronsky made no rejoinder, but by way of trying to
change the conversation, he smiled brightly, and turned to the ladies.
“Do let us try at once, countess,” he said; but Levin would finish
saying what he thought.
“I think,” he went on, “that this attempt of the spiritualists to
explain their marvels as some sort of new natural force is most futile.
They boldly talk of spiritual force, and then try to subject it to
material experiment.”
Everyone was waiting for him to finish, and he felt it.
“And I think you would be a first-rate medium,” said Countess Nordston;
“there’s something enthusiastic in you.”
Levin opened his mouth, was about to say something, reddened, and said
nothing.
“Do let us try table-turning at once, please,” said Vronsky. “Princess,
will you allow it?”
And Vronsky stood up, looking for a little table.
Kitty got up to fetch a table, and as she passed, her eyes met Levin’s.
She felt for him with her whole heart, the more because she was pitying
him for suffering of which she was herself the cause. “If you can
forgive me, forgive me,” said her eyes, “I am so happy.”
“I hate them all, and you, and myself,” his eyes responded, and he took
up his hat. But he was not destined to escape. Just as they were
arranging themselves round the table, and Levin was on the point of
retiring, the old prince came in, and after greeting the ladies,
addressed Levin.
“Ah!” he began joyously. “Been here long, my boy? I didn’t even know
you were in town. Very glad to see you.” The old prince embraced Levin,
and talking to him did not observe Vronsky, who had risen, and was
serenely waiting till the prince should turn to him.
Kitty felt how distasteful her father’s warmth was to Levin after what
had happened. She saw, too, how coldly her father responded at last to
Vronsky’s bow, and how Vronsky looked with amiable perplexity at her
father, as though trying and failing to understand how and why anyone
could be hostilely disposed towards him, and she flushed.
“Prince, let us have Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said Countess Nordston;
“we want to try an experiment.”
“What experiment? Table-turning? Well, you must excuse me, ladies and
gentlemen, but to my mind it is better fun to play the ring game,” said
the old prince, looking at Vronsky, and guessing that it had been his
suggestion. “There’s some sense in that, anyway.”
Vronsky looked wonderingly at the prince with his resolute eyes, and,
with a faint smile, began immediately talking to Countess Nordston of
the great ball that was to come off next week.
“I hope you will be there?” he said to Kitty. As soon as the old prince
turned away from him, Levin went out unnoticed, and the last impression
he carried away with him of that evening was the smiling, happy face of
Kitty answering Vronsky’s inquiry about the ball.
Chapter 15
At the end of the evening Kitty told her mother of her conversation
with Levin, and in spite of all the pity she felt for Levin, she was
glad at the thought that she had received an _offer_. She had no doubt
that she had acted rightly. But after she had gone to bed, for a long
while she could not sleep. One impression pursued her relentlessly. It
was Levin’s face, with his scowling brows, and his kind eyes looking
out in dark dejection below them, as he stood listening to her father,
and glancing at her and at Vronsky. And she felt so sorry for him that
tears came into her eyes. But immediately she thought of the man for
whom she had given him up. She vividly recalled his manly, resolute
face, his noble self-possession, and the good nature conspicuous in
everything towards everyone. She remembered the love for her of the man
she loved, and once more all was gladness in her soul, and she lay on
the pillow, smiling with happiness. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry; but what
could I do? It’s not my fault,” she said to herself; but an inner voice
told her something else. Whether she felt remorse at having won Levin’s
love, or at having refused him, she did not know. But her happiness was
poisoned by doubts. “Lord, have pity on us; Lord, have pity on us;
Lord, have pity on us!” she repeated to herself, till she fell asleep.
Meanwhile there took place below, in the prince’s little library, one
of the scenes so often repeated between the parents on account of their
favorite daughter.
“What? I’ll tell you what!” shouted the prince, waving his arms, and at
once wrapping his squirrel-lined dressing-gown round him again. “That
you’ve no pride, no dignity; that you’re disgracing, ruining your
daughter by this vulgar, stupid matchmaking!”
“But, really, for mercy’s sake, prince, what have I done?” said the
princess, almost crying.
She, pleased and happy after her conversation with her daughter, had
gone to the prince to say good-night as usual, and though she had no
intention of telling him of Levin’s offer and Kitty’s refusal, still
she hinted to her husband that she fancied things were practically
settled with Vronsky, and that he would declare himself so soon as his
mother arrived. And thereupon, at those words, the prince had all at
once flown into a passion, and began to use unseemly language.
“What have you done? I’ll tell you what. First of all, you’re trying to
catch an eligible gentleman, and all Moscow will be talking of it, and
with good reason. If you have evening parties, invite everyone, don’t
pick out the possible suitors. Invite all the young bucks. Engage a
piano player, and let them dance, and not as you do things nowadays,
hunting up good matches. It makes me sick, sick to see it, and you’ve
gone on till you’ve turned the poor wench’s head. Levin’s a thousand
times the better man. As for this little Petersburg swell, they’re
turned out by machinery, all on one pattern, and all precious rubbish.
But if he were a prince of the blood, my daughter need not run after
anyone.”
“But what have I done?”
“Why, you’ve....” The prince was crying wrathfully.
“I know if one were to listen to you,” interrupted the princess, “we
should never marry our daughter. If it’s to be so, we’d better go into
the country.”
“Well, and we had better.”
“But do wait a minute. Do I try and catch them? I don’t try to catch
them in the least. A young man, and a very nice one, has fallen in love
with her, and she, I fancy....”
“Oh, yes, you fancy! And how if she really is in love, and he’s no more
thinking of marriage than I am!... Oh, that I should live to see it!
Ah! spiritualism! Ah! Nice! Ah! the ball!” And the prince, imagining
that he was mimicking his wife, made a mincing curtsey at each word.
“And this is how we’re preparing wretchedness for Kitty; and she’s
really got the notion into her head....”
“But what makes you suppose so?”
“I don’t suppose; I know. We have eyes for such things, though
women-folk haven’t. I see a man who has serious intentions, that’s
Levin: and I see a peacock, like this feather-head, who’s only amusing
himself.”
“Oh, well, when once you get an idea into your head!...”
“Well, you’ll remember my words, but too late, just as with Dolly.”
“Well, well, we won’t talk of it,” the princess stopped him,
recollecting her unlucky Dolly.
“By all means, and good-night!”
And signing each other with the cross, the husband and wife parted with
a kiss, feeling that they each remained of their own opinion.
The princess had at first been quite certain that that evening had
settled Kitty’s future, and that there could be no doubt of Vronsky’s
intentions, but her husband’s words had disturbed her. And returning to
her own room, in terror before the unknown future, she, too, like
Kitty, repeated several times in her heart, “Lord, have pity; Lord,
have pity; Lord, have pity.”
Chapter 16
Vronsky had never had a real home life. His mother had been in her
youth a brilliant society woman, who had had during her married life,
and still more afterwards, many love affairs notorious in the whole
fashionable world. His father he scarcely remembered, and he had been
educated in the Corps of Pages.
Leaving the school very young as a brilliant officer, he had at once
got into the circle of wealthy Petersburg army men. Although he did go
more or less into Petersburg society, his love affairs had always
hitherto been outside it.
In Moscow he had for the first time felt, after his luxurious and
coarse life at Petersburg, all the charm of intimacy with a sweet and
innocent girl of his own rank, who cared for him. It never even entered
his head that there could be any harm in his relations with Kitty. At
balls he danced principally with her. He was a constant visitor at
their house. He talked to her as people commonly do talk in society—all
sorts of nonsense, but nonsense to which he could not help attaching a
special meaning in her case. Although he said nothing to her that he
could not have said before everybody, he felt that she was becoming
more and more dependent upon him, and the more he felt this, the better
he liked it, and the tenderer was his feeling for her. He did not know
that his mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a definite
character, that it is courting young girls with no intention of
marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions common
among brilliant young men such as he was. It seemed to him that he was
the first who had discovered this pleasure, and he was enjoying his
discovery.
If he could have heard what her parents were saying that evening, if he
could have put himself at the point of view of the family and have
heard that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he would
have been greatly astonished, and would not have believed it. He could
not believe that what gave such great and delicate pleasure to him, and
above all to her, could be wrong. Still less could he have believed
that he ought to marry.
Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. He not
only disliked family life, but a family, and especially a husband was,
in accordance with the views general in the bachelor world in which he
lived, conceived as something alien, repellant, and, above all,
ridiculous.
But though Vronsky had not the least suspicion what the parents were
saying, he felt on coming away from the Shtcherbatskys’ that the secret
spiritual bond which existed between him and Kitty had grown so much
stronger that evening that some step must be taken. But what step could
and ought to be taken he could not imagine.
“What is so exquisite,” he thought, as he returned from the
Shtcherbatskys’, carrying away with him, as he always did, a delicious
feeling of purity and freshness, arising partly from the fact that he
had not been smoking for a whole evening, and with it a new feeling of
tenderness at her love for him—“what is so exquisite is that not a word
has been said by me or by her, but we understand each other so well in
this unseen language of looks and tones, that this evening more clearly
than ever she told me she loves me. And how secretly, simply, and most
of all, how trustfully! I feel myself better, purer. I feel that I have
a heart, and that there is a great deal of good in me. Those sweet,
loving eyes! When she said: ‘Indeed I do....’
“Well, what then? Oh, nothing. It’s good for me, and good for her.” And
he began wondering where to finish the evening.
He passed in review of the places he might go to. “Club? a game of
bezique, champagne with Ignatov? No, I’m not going. _Château des
Fleurs_; there I shall find Oblonsky, songs, the cancan. No, I’m sick
of it. That’s why I like the Shtcherbatskys’, that I’m growing better.
I’ll go home.” He went straight to his room at Dussots’ Hotel, ordered
supper, and then undressed, and as soon as his head touched the pillow,
fell into a sound sleep.
Chapter 17
Next day at eleven o’clock in the morning Vronsky drove to the station
of the Petersburg railway to meet his mother, and the first person he
came across on the great flight of steps was Oblonsky, who was
expecting his sister by the same train.
“Ah! your excellency!” cried Oblonsky, “whom are you meeting?”
“My mother,” Vronsky responded, smiling, as everyone did who met
Oblonsky. He shook hands with him, and together they ascended the
steps. “She is to be here from Petersburg today.”
“I was looking out for you till two o’clock last night. Where did you
go after the Shtcherbatskys’?”
“Home,” answered Vronsky. “I must own I felt so well content yesterday
after the Shtcherbatskys’ that I didn’t care to go anywhere.”
“I know a gallant steed by tokens sure,
And by his eyes I know a youth in love,”
declaimed Stepan Arkadyevitch, just as he had done before to Levin.
Vronsky smiled with a look that seemed to say that he did not deny it,
but he promptly changed the subject.
“And whom are you meeting?” he asked.
“I? I’ve come to meet a pretty woman,” said Oblonsky.
“You don’t say so!”
“_Honi soit qui mal y pense!_ My sister Anna.”
“Ah! that’s Madame Karenina,” said Vronsky.
“You know her, no doubt?”
“I think I do. Or perhaps not ... I really am not sure,” Vronsky
answered heedlessly, with a vague recollection of something stiff and
tedious evoked by the name Karenina.
“But Alexey Alexandrovitch, my celebrated brother-in-law, you surely
must know. All the world knows him.”
“I know him by reputation and by sight. I know that he’s clever,
learned, religious somewhat.... But you know that’s not ... _not in my
line,_” said Vronsky in English.
“Yes, he’s a very remarkable man; rather a conservative, but a splendid
man,” observed Stepan Arkadyevitch, “a splendid man.”
“Oh, well, so much the better for him,” said Vronsky smiling. “Oh,
you’ve come,” he said, addressing a tall old footman of his mother’s,
standing at the door; “come here.”
Besides the charm Oblonsky had in general for everyone, Vronsky had
felt of late specially drawn to him by the fact that in his imagination
he was associated with Kitty.
“Well, what do you say? Shall we give a supper on Sunday for the
_diva?_” he said to him with a smile, taking his arm.
“Of course. I’m collecting subscriptions. Oh, did you make the
acquaintance of my friend Levin?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Yes; but he left rather early.”
“He’s a capital fellow,” pursued Oblonsky. “Isn’t he?”
“I don’t know why it is,” responded Vronsky, “in all Moscow
people—present company of course excepted,” he put in jestingly,
“there’s something uncompromising. They are all on the defensive, lose
their tempers, as though they all want to make one feel something....”
“Yes, that’s true, it is so,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing
good-humoredly.
“Will the train soon be in?” Vronsky asked a railway official.
“The train’s signaled,” answered the man.
The approach of the train was more and more evident by the preparatory
bustle in the station, the rush of porters, the movement of policemen
and attendants, and people meeting the train. Through the frosty vapor
could be seen workmen in short sheepskins and soft felt boots crossing
the rails of the curving line. The hiss of the boiler could be heard on
the distant rails, and the rumble of something heavy.
“No,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who felt a great inclination to tell
Vronsky of Levin’s intentions in regard to Kitty. “No, you’ve not got a
true impression of Levin. He’s a very nervous man, and is sometimes out
of humor, it’s true, but then he is often very nice. He’s such a true,
honest nature, and a heart of gold. But yesterday there were special
reasons,” pursued Stepan Arkadyevitch, with a meaning smile, totally
oblivious of the genuine sympathy he had felt the day before for his
friend, and feeling the same sympathy now, only for Vronsky. “Yes,
there were reasons why he could not help being either particularly
happy or particularly unhappy.”
Vronsky stood still and asked directly: “How so? Do you mean he made
your _belle-sœur_ an offer yesterday?”
“Maybe,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I fancied something of the sort
yesterday. Yes, if he went away early, and was out of humor too, it
must mean it.... He’s been so long in love, and I’m very sorry for
him.”
“So that’s it! I should imagine, though, she might reckon on a better
match,” said Vronsky, drawing himself up and walking about again,
“though I don’t know him, of course,” he added. “Yes, that is a hateful
position! That’s why most fellows prefer to have to do with Klaras. If
you don’t succeed with them it only proves that you’ve not enough cash,
but in this case one’s dignity’s at stake. But here’s the train.”
The engine had already whistled in the distance. A few instants later
the platform was quivering, and with puffs of steam hanging low in the
air from the frost, the engine rolled up, with the lever of the middle
wheel rhythmically moving up and down, and the stooping figure of the
engine-driver covered with frost. Behind the tender, setting the
platform more and more slowly swaying, came the luggage van with a dog
whining in it. At last the passenger carriages rolled in, oscillating
before coming to a standstill.
A smart guard jumped out, giving a whistle, and after him one by one
the impatient passengers began to get down: an officer of the guards,
holding himself erect, and looking severely about him; a nimble little
merchant with a satchel, smiling gaily; a peasant with a sack over his
shoulder.
Vronsky, standing beside Oblonsky, watched the carriages and the
passengers, totally oblivious of his mother. What he had just heard
about Kitty excited and delighted him. Unconsciously he arched his
chest, and his eyes flashed. He felt himself a conqueror.
“Countess Vronskaya is in that compartment,” said the smart guard,
going up to Vronsky.
The guard’s words roused him, and forced him to think of his mother and
his approaching meeting with her. He did not in his heart respect his
mother, and without acknowledging it to himself, he did not love her,
though in accordance with the ideas of the set in which he lived, and
with his own education, he could not have conceived of any behavior to
his mother not in the highest degree respectful and obedient, and the
more externally obedient and respectful his behavior, the less in his
heart he respected and loved her.
Chapter 18
Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage, and at the door of the
compartment he stopped short to make room for a lady who was getting
out.
With the insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady’s
appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society. He
begged pardon, and was getting into the carriage, but felt he must
glance at her once more; not that she was very beautiful, not on
account of the elegance and modest grace which were apparent in her
whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as
she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and
soft. As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her shining gray
eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly
attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him, and then
promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as though seeking someone.
In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness
which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and
the faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature
were so brimming over with something that against her will it showed
itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately
she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in
the faintly perceptible smile.
Vronsky stepped into the carriage. His mother, a dried-up old lady with
black eyes and ringlets, screwed up her eyes, scanning her son, and
smiled slightly with her thin lips. Getting up from the seat and
handing her maid a bag, she gave her little wrinkled hand to her son to
kiss, and lifting his head from her hand, kissed him on the cheek.
“You got my telegram? Quite well? Thank God.”
“You had a good journey?” said her son, sitting down beside her, and
involuntarily listening to a woman’s voice outside the door. He knew it
was the voice of the lady he had met at the door.
“All the same I don’t agree with you,” said the lady’s voice.
“It’s the Petersburg view, madame.”
“Not Petersburg, but simply feminine,” she responded.
“Well, well, allow me to kiss your hand.”
“Good-bye, Ivan Petrovitch. And could you see if my brother is here,
and send him to me?” said the lady in the doorway, and stepped back
again into the compartment.
“Well, have you found your brother?” said Countess Vronskaya,
addressing the lady.
Vronsky understood now that this was Madame Karenina.
“Your brother is here,” he said, standing up. “Excuse me, I did not
know you, and, indeed, our acquaintance was so slight,” said Vronsky,
bowing, “that no doubt you do not remember me.”
“Oh, no,” said she, “I should have known you because your mother and I
have been talking, I think, of nothing but you all the way.” As she
spoke she let the eagerness that would insist on coming out show itself
in her smile. “And still no sign of my brother.”
“Do call him, Alexey,” said the old countess. Vronsky stepped out onto
the platform and shouted:
“Oblonsky! Here!”
Madame Karenina, however, did not wait for her brother, but catching
sight of him she stepped out with her light, resolute step. And as soon
as her brother had reached her, with a gesture that struck Vronsky by
its decision and its grace, she flung her left arm around his neck,
drew him rapidly to her, and kissed him warmly. Vronsky gazed, never
taking his eyes from her, and smiled, he could not have said why. But
recollecting that his mother was waiting for him, he went back again
into the carriage.
“She’s very sweet, isn’t she?” said the countess of Madame Karenina.
“Her husband put her with me, and I was delighted to have her. We’ve
been talking all the way. And so you, I hear ... _vous filez le parfait
amour. Tant mieux, mon cher, tant mieux._”
“I don’t know what you are referring to, maman,” he answered coldly.
“Come, maman, let us go.”
Madame Karenina entered the carriage again to say good-bye to the
countess.
“Well, countess, you have met your son, and I my brother,” she said.
“And all my gossip is exhausted. I should have nothing more to tell
you.”
“Oh, no,” said the countess, taking her hand. “I could go all around
the world with you and never be dull. You are one of those delightful
women in whose company it’s sweet to be silent as well as to talk. Now
please don’t fret over your son; you can’t expect never to be parted.”
Madame Karenina stood quite still, holding herself very erect, and her
eyes were smiling.
“Anna Arkadyevna,” the countess said in explanation to her son, “has a
little son eight years old, I believe, and she has never been parted
from him before, and she keeps fretting over leaving him.”
“Yes, the countess and I have been talking all the time, I of my son
and she of hers,” said Madame Karenina, and again a smile lighted up
her face, a caressing smile intended for him.
“I am afraid that you must have been dreadfully bored,” he said,
promptly catching the ball of coquetry she had flung him. But
apparently she did not care to pursue the conversation in that strain,
and she turned to the old countess.
“Thank you so much. The time has passed so quickly. Good-bye,
countess.”
“Good-bye, my love,” answered the countess. “Let me have a kiss of your
pretty face. I speak plainly, at my age, and I tell you simply that
I’ve lost my heart to you.”
Stereotyped as the phrase was, Madame Karenina obviously believed it
and was delighted by it. She flushed, bent down slightly, and put her
cheek to the countess’s lips, drew herself up again, and with the same
smile fluttering between her lips and her eyes, she gave her hand to
Vronsky. He pressed the little hand she gave him, and was delighted, as
though at something special, by the energetic squeeze with which she
freely and vigorously shook his hand. She went out with the rapid step
which bore her rather fully-developed figure with such strange
lightness.
“Very charming,” said the countess.
That was just what her son was thinking. His eyes followed her till her
graceful figure was out of sight, and then the smile remained on his
face. He saw out of the window how she went up to her brother, put her
arm in his, and began telling him something eagerly, obviously
something that had nothing to do with him, Vronsky, and at that he felt
annoyed.
“Well, maman, are you perfectly well?” he repeated, turning to his
mother.
“Everything has been delightful. Alexander has been very good, and
Marie has grown very pretty. She’s very interesting.”
And she began telling him again of what interested her most—the
christening of her grandson, for which she had been staying in
Petersburg, and the special favor shown her elder son by the Tsar.
“Here’s Lavrenty,” said Vronsky, looking out of the window; “now we can
go, if you like.”
The old butler, who had traveled with the countess, came to the
carriage to announce that everything was ready, and the countess got up
to go.
“Come; there’s not such a crowd now,” said Vronsky.
The maid took a handbag and the lap dog, the butler and a porter the
other baggage. Vronsky gave his mother his arm; but just as they were
getting out of the carriage several men ran suddenly by with
panic-stricken faces. The station-master, too, ran by in his
extraordinary colored cap. Obviously something unusual had happened.
The crowd who had left the train were running back again.
“What?... What?... Where?... Flung himself!... Crushed!...” was heard
among the crowd. Stepan Arkadyevitch, with his sister on his arm,
turned back. They too looked scared, and stopped at the carriage door
to avoid the crowd.
The ladies got in, while Vronsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch followed the
crowd to find out details of the disaster.
A guard, either drunk or too much muffled up in the bitter frost, had
not heard the train moving back, and had been crushed.
Before Vronsky and Oblonsky came back the ladies heard the facts from
the butler.
Oblonsky and Vronsky had both seen the mutilated corpse. Oblonsky was
evidently upset. He frowned and seemed ready to cry.
“Ah, how awful! Ah, Anna, if you had seen it! Ah, how awful!” he said.
Vronsky did not speak; his handsome face was serious, but perfectly
composed.
“Oh, if you had seen it, countess,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “And his
wife was there.... It was awful to see her!... She flung herself on the
body. They say he was the only support of an immense family. How
awful!”
“Couldn’t one do anything for her?” said Madame Karenina in an agitated
whisper.
Vronsky glanced at her, and immediately got out of the carriage.
“I’ll be back directly, maman,” he remarked, turning round in the
doorway.
When he came back a few minutes later, Stepan Arkadyevitch was already
in conversation with the countess about the new singer, while the
countess was impatiently looking towards the door, waiting for her son.
“Now let us be off,” said Vronsky, coming in. They went out together.
Vronsky was in front with his mother. Behind walked Madame Karenina
with her brother. Just as they were going out of the station the
station-master overtook Vronsky.
“You gave my assistant two hundred roubles. Would you kindly explain
for whose benefit you intend them?”
“For the widow,” said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders. “I should have
thought there was no need to ask.”
“You gave that?” cried Oblonsky, behind, and, pressing his sister’s
hand, he added: “Very nice, very nice! Isn’t he a splendid fellow?
Good-bye, countess.”
And he and his sister stood still, looking for her maid.
When they went out the Vronsky’s carriage had already driven away.
People coming in were still talking of what happened.
“What a horrible death!” said a gentleman, passing by. “They say he was
cut in two pieces.”
“On the contrary, I think it’s the easiest—instantaneous,” observed
another.
“How is it they don’t take proper precautions?” said a third.
Madame Karenina seated herself in the carriage, and Stepan Arkadyevitch
saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and she was with
difficulty restraining her tears.
“What is it, Anna?” he asked, when they had driven a few hundred yards.
“It’s an omen of evil,” she said.
“What nonsense!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “You’ve come, that’s the
chief thing. You can’t conceive how I’m resting my hopes on you.”
“Have you known Vronsky long?” she asked.
“Yes. You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.”
“Yes?” said Anna softly. “Come now, let us talk of you,” she added,
tossing her head, as though she would physically shake off something
superfluous oppressing her. “Let us talk of your affairs. I got your
letter, and here I am.”
“Yes, all my hopes are in you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Well, tell me all about it.”
And Stepan Arkadyevitch began to tell his story.
On reaching home Oblonsky helped his sister out, sighed, pressed her
hand, and set off to his office.
Chapter 19
When Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in the little
drawing-room with a white-headed fat little boy, already like his
father, giving him a lesson in French reading. As the boy read, he kept
twisting and trying to tear off a button that was nearly off his
jacket. His mother had several times taken his hand from it, but the
fat little hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled the
button off and put it in her pocket.
“Keep your hands still, Grisha,” she said, and she took up her work, a
coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at
depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her
fingers and counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day
before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister
came or not, she had made everything ready for her arrival, and was
expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.
Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she
did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one of the
most important personages in Petersburg, and was a Petersburg _grande
dame_. And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her
threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that her
sister-in-law was coming. “And, after all, Anna is in no wise to
blame,” thought Dolly. “I know nothing of her except the very best, and
I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her towards
myself.” It was true that as far as she could recall her impressions at
Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself;
there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family
life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it
into her head to console me!” thought Dolly. “All consolation and
counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a
thousand times, and it’s all no use.”
All these days Dolly had been alone with her children. She did not want
to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not
talk of outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would
tell Anna everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of
speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her
humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases
of good advice and comfort. She had been on the lookout for her,
glancing at her watch every minute, and, as so often happens, let slip
just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the
bell.
Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door, she looked
round, and her care-worn face unconsciously expressed not gladness, but
wonder. She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.
“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her.
“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!”
“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the
expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew. “Most likely
she knows,” she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well,
come along, I’ll take you to your room,” she went on, trying to defer
as long as possible the moment of confidences.
“Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he’s grown!” said Anna; and kissing him,
never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood still and flushed a little.
“No, please, let us stay here.”
She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in a lock of her
black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook
her hair down.
“You are radiant with health and happiness!” said Dolly, almost with
envy.
“I?... Yes,” said Anna. “Merciful heavens, Tanya! You’re the same age
as my Seryozha,” she added, addressing the little girl as she ran in.
She took her in her arms and kissed her. “Delightful child, delightful!
Show me them all.”
She mentioned them, not only remembering the names, but the years,
months, characters, illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not
but appreciate that.
“Very well, we will go to them,” she said. “It’s a pity Vassya’s
asleep.”
After seeing the children, they sat down, alone now, in the
drawing-room, to coffee. Anna took the tray, and then pushed it away
from her.
“Dolly,” she said, “he has told me.”
Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for phrases of
conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.
“Dolly, dear,” she said, “I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to
try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, I’m simply sorry,
sorry from my heart for you!”
Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered.
She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her vigorous
little hand. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not lose its
frigid expression. She said:
“To comfort me’s impossible. Everything’s lost after what has happened,
everything’s over!”
And directly she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted
the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it and said:
“But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is it best to
act in this awful position—that’s what you must think of.”
“All’s over, and there’s nothing more,” said Dolly. “And the worst of
all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the children, I
am tied. And I can’t live with him! it’s a torture to me to see him.”
“Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from you:
tell me about it.”
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s face.
“Very well,” she said all at once. “But I will tell you it from the
beginning. You know how I was married. With the education mamma gave us
I was more than innocent, I was stupid. I knew nothing. I know they say
men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva”—she corrected
herself—“Stepan Arkadyevitch told me nothing. You’ll hardly believe it,
but till now I imagined that I was the only woman he had known. So I
lived eight years. You must understand that I was so far from
suspecting infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then—try to
imagine it—with such ideas, to find out suddenly all the horror, all
the loathsomeness.... You must try and understand me. To be fully
convinced of one’s happiness, and all at once....” continued Dolly,
holding back her sobs, “to get a letter ... his letter to his mistress,
my governess. No, it’s too awful!” She hastily pulled out her
handkerchief and hid her face in it. “I can understand being carried
away by feeling,” she went on after a brief silence, “but deliberately,
slyly deceiving me ... and with whom?... To go on being my husband
together with her ... it’s awful! You can’t understand....”
“Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do understand,”
said Anna, pressing her hand.
“And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?”
Dolly resumed. “Not the slightest! He’s happy and contented.”
“Oh, no!” Anna interposed quickly. “He’s to be pitied, he’s weighed
down by remorse....”
“Is he capable of remorse?” Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her
sister-in-law’s face.
“Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for
him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s
so humiliated. What touched me most....” (and here Anna guessed what
would touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed
for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you
beyond everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would
have answered—“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she
cannot forgive me,’ he keeps saying.”
Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to
her words.
“Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for the guilty
than the innocent,” she said, “if he feels that all the misery comes
from his fault. But how am I to forgive him, how am I to be his wife
again after her? For me to live with him now would be torture, just
because I love my past love for him....”
And sobs cut short her words. But as though of set design, each time
she was softened she began to speak again of what exasperated her.
“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,” she went on. “Do you know, Anna,
my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his
children. I have worked for him, and all I had has gone in his service,
and now of course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him. No
doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they were silent. Do
you understand?”
Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
“And after that he will tell me.... What! can I believe him? Never! No,
everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, the reward of
my work, and my sufferings.... Would you believe it, I was teaching
Grisha just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture. What
have I to strive and toil for? Why are the children here? What’s so
awful is that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and
tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could
kill him.”
“Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself. You are so
distressed, so overwrought, that you look at many things mistakenly.”
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.
“What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over
everything, and I see nothing.”
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each
word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.
“One thing I would say,” began Anna. “I am his sister, I know his
character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything” (she
waved her hand before her forehead), “that faculty for being completely
carried away, but for completely repenting too. He cannot believe it,
he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.”
“No; he understands, he understood!” Dolly broke in. “But I ... you are
forgetting me ... does it make it easier for me?”
“Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not realize all the
awfulness of your position. I saw nothing but him, and that the family
was broken up. I felt sorry for him, but after talking to you, I see
it, as a woman, quite differently. I see your agony, and I can’t tell
you how sorry I am for you! But, Dolly, darling, I fully realize your
sufferings, only there is one thing I don’t know; I don’t know ... I
don’t know how much love there is still in your heart for him. That you
know—whether there is enough for you to be able to forgive him. If
there is, forgive him!”
“No,” Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her hand
once more.
“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how men like
Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her. That never
happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred
to them. Somehow or other these women are still looked on with contempt
by them, and do not touch on their feeling for their family. They draw
a sort of line that can’t be crossed between them and their families. I
don’t understand it, but it is so.”
“Yes, but he has kissed her....”
“Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I
remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all
the poetry and loftiness of his feeling for you, and I know that the
longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You
know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word:
‘Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always been a divinity for him,
and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the
heart....”
“But if it is repeated?”
“It cannot be, as I understand it....”
“Yes, but could you forgive it?”
“I don’t know, I can’t judge.... Yes, I can,” said Anna, thinking a
moment; and grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her
inner balance, she added: “Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could
forgive it. I could not be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and
forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all....”
“Oh, of course,” Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she
had more than once thought, “else it would not be forgiveness. If one
forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take
you to your room,” she said, getting up, and on the way she embraced
Anna. “My dear, how glad I am you came. It has made things better, ever
so much better.”
Chapter 20
The whole of that day Anna spent at home, that’s to say at the
Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some of her acquaintances had
already heard of her arrival, and came to call the same day. Anna spent
the whole morning with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief
note to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at home.
“Come, God is merciful,” she wrote.
Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was general, and his wife,
speaking to him, addressed him as “Stiva,” as she had not done before.
In the relations of the husband and wife the same estrangement still
remained, but there was no talk now of separation, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch saw the possibility of explanation and reconciliation.
Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but
only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some
trepidation, at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg
lady, whom everyone spoke so highly of. But she made a favorable
impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once. Anna was
unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her youth: before Kitty knew
where she was she found herself not merely under Anna’s sway, but in
love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married
women. Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor the mother of a boy of
eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements, the freshness and
the unflagging eagerness which persisted in her face, and broke out in
her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed for a girl of
twenty, had it not been for a serious and at times mournful look in her
eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty felt that Anna was
perfectly simple and was concealing nothing, but that she had another
higher world of interests inaccessible to her, complex and poetic.
After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room, Anna rose quickly
and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar.
“Stiva,” she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and glancing
towards the door, “go, and God help you.”
He threw down the cigar, understanding her, and departed through the
doorway.
When Stepan Arkadyevitch had disappeared, she went back to the sofa
where she had been sitting, surrounded by the children. Either because
the children saw that their mother was fond of this aunt, or that they
felt a special charm in her themselves, the two elder ones, and the
younger following their lead, as children so often do, had clung about
their new aunt since before dinner, and would not leave her side. And
it had become a sort of game among them to sit as close as possible to
their aunt, to touch her, hold her little hand, kiss it, play with her
ring, or even touch the flounce of her skirt.
“Come, come, as we were sitting before,” said Anna Arkadyevna, sitting
down in her place.
And again Grisha poked his little face under her arm, and nestled with
his head on her gown, beaming with pride and happiness.
“And when is your next ball?” she asked Kitty.
“Next week, and a splendid ball. One of those balls where one always
enjoys oneself.”
“Why, are there balls where one always enjoys oneself?” Anna said, with
tender irony.
“It’s strange, but there are. At the Bobrishtchevs’ one always enjoys
oneself, and at the Nikitins’ too, while at the Mezhkovs’ it’s always
dull. Haven’t you noticed it?”
“No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one enjoys oneself,”
said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which
was not open to her. “For me there are some less dull and tiresome.”
“How can _you_ be dull at a ball?”
“Why should not _I_ be dull at a ball?” inquired Anna.
Kitty perceived that Anna knew what answer would follow.
“Because you always look nicer than anyone.”
Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little, and said:
“In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were, what
difference would it make to me?”
“Are you coming to this ball?” asked Kitty.
“I imagine it won’t be possible to avoid going. Here, take it,” she
said to Tanya, who was pulling the loosely-fitting ring off her white,
slender-tipped finger.
“I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you at a ball.”
“Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it’s
a pleasure to you ... Grisha, don’t pull my hair. It’s untidy enough
without that,” she said, putting up a straying lock, which Grisha had
been playing with.
“I imagine you at the ball in lilac.”
“And why in lilac precisely?” asked Anna, smiling. “Now, children, run
along, run along. Do you hear? Miss Hoole is calling you to tea,” she
said, tearing the children from her, and sending them off to the
dining-room.
“I know why you press me to come to the ball. You expect a great deal
of this ball, and you want everyone to be there to take part in it.”
“How do you know? Yes.”
“Oh! what a happy time you are at,” pursued Anna. “I remember, and I
know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains in Switzerland. That
mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is
just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a
path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming
to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is.... Who has not
been through it?”
Kitty smiled without speaking. “But how did she go through it? How I
should like to know all her love story!” thought Kitty, recalling the
unromantic appearance of Alexey Alexandrovitch, her husband.
“I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you. I liked him
so much,” Anna continued. “I met Vronsky at the railway station.”
“Oh, was he there?” asked Kitty, blushing. “What was it Stiva told
you?”
“Stiva gossiped about it all. And I should be so glad ... I traveled
yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,” she went on; “and his mother talked
without a pause of him, he’s her favorite. I know mothers are partial,
but....”
“What did his mother tell you?”
“Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favorite; still one can see
how chivalrous he is.... Well, for instance, she told me that he had
wanted to give up all his property to his brother, that he had done
something extraordinary when he was quite a child, saved a woman out of
the water. He’s a hero, in fact,” said Anna, smiling and recollecting
the two hundred roubles he had given at the station.
But she did not tell Kitty about the two hundred roubles. For some
reason it was disagreeable to her to think of it. She felt that there
was something that had to do with her in it, and something that ought
not to have been.
“She pressed me very much to go and see her,” Anna went on; “and I
shall be glad to go to see her tomorrow. Stiva is staying a long while
in Dolly’s room, thank God,” Anna added, changing the subject, and
getting up, Kitty fancied, displeased with something.
“No, I’m first! No, I!” screamed the children, who had finished tea,
running up to their Aunt Anna.
“All together,” said Anna, and she ran laughing to meet them, and
embraced and swung round all the throng of swarming children, shrieking
with delight.
Chapter 21
Dolly came out of her room to the tea of the grown-up people. Stepan
Arkadyevitch did not come out. He must have left his wife’s room by the
other door.
“I am afraid you’ll be cold upstairs,” observed Dolly, addressing Anna;
“I want to move you downstairs, and we shall be nearer.”
“Oh, please, don’t trouble about me,” answered Anna, looking intently
into Dolly’s face, trying to make out whether there had been a
reconciliation or not.
“It will be lighter for you here,” answered her sister-in-law.
“I assure you that I sleep everywhere, and always like a marmot.”
“What’s the question?” inquired Stepan Arkadyevitch, coming out of his
room and addressing his wife.
From his tone both Kitty and Anna knew that a reconciliation had taken
place.
“I want to move Anna downstairs, but we must hang up blinds. No one
knows how to do it; I must see to it myself,” answered Dolly addressing
him.
“God knows whether they are fully reconciled,” thought Anna, hearing
her tone, cold and composed.
“Oh, nonsense, Dolly, always making difficulties,” answered her
husband. “Come, I’ll do it all, if you like....”
“Yes, they must be reconciled,” thought Anna.
“I know how you do everything,” answered Dolly. “You tell Matvey to do
what can’t be done, and go away yourself, leaving him to make a muddle
of everything,” and her habitual, mocking smile curved the corners of
Dolly’s lips as she spoke.
“Full, full reconciliation, full,” thought Anna; “thank God!” and
rejoicing that she was the cause of it, she went up to Dolly and kissed
her.
“Not at all. Why do you always look down on me and Matvey?” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, smiling hardly perceptibly, and addressing his wife.
The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone to
her husband, while Stepan Arkadyevitch was happy and cheerful, but not
so as to seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his
offense.
At half-past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and pleasant family
conversation over the tea-table at the Oblonskys’ was broken up by an
apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some reason
struck everyone as strange. Talking about common acquaintances in
Petersburg, Anna got up quickly.
“She is in my album,” she said; “and, by the way, I’ll show you my
Seryozha,” she added, with a mother’s smile of pride.
Towards ten o’clock, when she usually said good-night to her son, and
often before going to a ball put him to bed herself, she felt depressed
at being so far from him; and whatever she was talking about, she kept
coming back in thought to her curly-headed Seryozha. She longed to look
at his photograph and talk of him. Seizing the first pretext, she got
up, and with her light, resolute step went for her album. The stairs up
to her room came out on the landing of the great warm main staircase.
Just as she was leaving the drawing-room, a ring was heard in the hall.
“Who can that be?” said Dolly.
“It’s early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it’s late,”
observed Kitty.
“Sure to be someone with papers for me,” put in Stepan Arkadyevitch.
When Anna was passing the top of the staircase, a servant was running
up to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself was standing
under a lamp. Anna glancing down at once recognized Vronsky, and a
strange feeling of pleasure and at the same time of dread of something
stirred in her heart. He was standing still, not taking off his coat,
pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant when she was just
facing the stairs, he raised his eyes, caught sight of her, and into
the expression of his face there passed a shade of embarrassment and
dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing
behind her Stepan Arkadyevitch’s loud voice calling him to come up, and
the quiet, soft, and composed voice of Vronsky refusing.
When Anna returned with the album, he was already gone, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch was telling them that he had called to inquire about the
dinner they were giving next day to a celebrity who had just arrived.
“And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he is!”
added Stepan Arkadyevitch.
Kitty blushed. She thought that she was the only person who knew why he
had come, and why he would not come up. “He has been at home,” she
thought, “and didn’t find me, and thought I should be here, but he did
not come up because he thought it late, and Anna’s here.”
All of them looked at each other, saying nothing, and began to look at
Anna’s album.
There was nothing either exceptional or strange in a man’s calling at
half-past nine on a friend to inquire details of a proposed dinner
party and not coming in, but it seemed strange to all of them. Above
all, it seemed strange and not right to Anna.
Chapter 22
The ball was only just beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the
great staircase, flooded with light, and lined with flowers and footmen
in powder and red coats. From the rooms came a constant, steady hum, as
from a hive, and the rustle of movement; and while on the landing
between trees they gave last touches to their hair and dresses before
the mirror, they heard from the ballroom the careful, distinct notes of
the fiddles of the orchestra beginning the first waltz. A little old
man in civilian dress, arranging his gray curls before another mirror,
and diffusing an odor of scent, stumbled against them on the stairs,
and stood aside, evidently admiring Kitty, whom he did not know. A
beardless youth, one of those society youths whom the old Prince
Shtcherbatsky called “young bucks,” in an exceedingly open waistcoat,
straightening his white tie as he went, bowed to them, and after
running by, came back to ask Kitty for a quadrille. As the first
quadrille had already been given to Vronsky, she had to promise this
youth the second. An officer, buttoning his glove, stood aside in the
doorway, and stroking his mustache, admired rosy Kitty.
Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the ball
had cost Kitty great trouble and consideration, at this moment she
walked into the ballroom in her elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip
as easily and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the
minute details of her attire, had not cost her or her family a moment’s
attention, as though she had been born in that tulle and lace, with her
hair done up high on her head, and a rose and two leaves on the top of
it.
When, just before entering the ballroom, the princess, her mother,
tried to turn right side out of the ribbon of her sash, Kitty had drawn
back a little. She felt that everything must be right of itself, and
graceful, and nothing could need setting straight.
It was one of Kitty’s best days. Her dress was not uncomfortable
anywhere; her lace berthe did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were not
crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, hollowed-out heels
did not pinch, but gladdened her feet; and the thick rolls of fair
chignon kept up on her head as if they were her own hair. All the three
buttons buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her
hand without concealing its lines. The black velvet of her locket
nestled with special softness round her neck. That velvet was
delicious; at home, looking at her neck in the looking-glass, Kitty had
felt that that velvet was speaking. About all the rest there might be a
doubt, but the velvet was delicious. Kitty smiled here too, at the
ball, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare shoulders and arms
gave Kitty a sense of chill marble, a feeling she particularly liked.
Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not keep from smiling from
the consciousness of her own attractiveness. She had scarcely entered
the ballroom and reached the throng of ladies, all tulle, ribbons,
lace, and flowers, waiting to be asked to dance—Kitty was never one of
that throng—when she was asked for a waltz, and asked by the best
partner, the first star in the hierarchy of the ballroom, a renowned
director of dances, a married man, handsome and well-built, Yegorushka
Korsunsky. He had only just left the Countess Bonina, with whom he had
danced the first half of the waltz, and, scanning his kingdom—that is
to say, a few couples who had started dancing—he caught sight of Kitty,
entering, and flew up to her with that peculiar, easy amble which is
confined to directors of balls. Without even asking her if she cared to
dance, he put out his arm to encircle her slender waist. She looked
round for someone to give her fan to, and their hostess, smiling to
her, took it.
“How nice you’ve come in good time,” he said to her, embracing her
waist; “such a bad habit to be late.” Bending her left hand, she laid
it on his shoulder, and her little feet in their pink slippers began
swiftly, lightly, and rhythmically moving over the slippery floor in
time to the music.
“It’s a rest to waltz with you,” he said to her, as they fell into the
first slow steps of the waltz. “It’s exquisite—such lightness,
precision.” He said to her the same thing he said to almost all his
partners whom he knew well.
She smiled at his praise, and continued to look about the room over his
shoulder. She was not like a girl at her first ball, for whom all faces
in the ballroom melt into one vision of fairyland. And she was not a
girl who had gone the stale round of balls till every face in the
ballroom was familiar and tiresome. But she was in the middle stage
between these two; she was excited, and at the same time she had
sufficient self-possession to be able to observe. In the left corner of
the ballroom she saw the cream of society gathered together.
There—incredibly naked—was the beauty Lidi, Korsunsky’s wife; there was
the lady of the house; there shone the bald head of Krivin, always to
be found where the best people were. In that direction gazed the young
men, not venturing to approach. There, too, she descried Stiva, and
there she saw the exquisite figure and head of Anna in a black velvet
gown. And _he_ was there. Kitty had not seen him since the evening she
refused Levin. With her long-sighted eyes, she knew him at once, and
was even aware that he was looking at her.
“Another turn, eh? You’re not tired?” said Korsunsky, a little out of
breath.
“No, thank you!”
“Where shall I take you?”
“Madame Karenina’s here, I think ... take me to her.”
“Wherever you command.”
And Korsunsky began waltzing with measured steps straight towards the
group in the left corner, continually saying, “Pardon, mesdames,
pardon, pardon, mesdames”; and steering his course through the sea of
lace, tulle, and ribbon, and not disarranging a feather, he turned his
partner sharply round, so that her slim ankles, in light transparent
stockings, were exposed to view, and her train floated out in fan shape
and covered Krivin’s knees. Korsunsky bowed, set straight his open
shirt front, and gave her his arm to conduct her to Anna Arkadyevna.
Kitty, flushed, took her train from Krivin’s knees, and, a little
giddy, looked round, seeking Anna. Anna was not in lilac, as Kitty had
so urgently wished, but in a black, low-cut, velvet gown, showing her
full throat and shoulders, that looked as though carved in old ivory,
and her rounded arms, with tiny, slender wrists. The whole gown was
trimmed with Venetian guipure. On her head, among her black hair—her
own, with no false additions—was a little wreath of pansies, and a
bouquet of the same in the black ribbon of her sash among white lace.
Her coiffure was not striking. All that was noticeable was the little
wilful tendrils of her curly hair that would always break free about
her neck and temples. Round her well-cut, strong neck was a thread of
pearls.
Kitty had been seeing Anna every day; she adored her, and had pictured
her invariably in lilac. But now seeing her in black, she felt that she
had not fully seen her charm. She saw her now as someone quite new and
surprising to her. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in
lilac, and that her charm was just that she always stood out against
her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her
black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was
only the frame, and all that was seen was she—simple, natural, elegant,
and at the same time gay and eager.
She was standing holding herself, as always, very erect, and when Kitty
drew near the group she was speaking to the master of the house, her
head slightly turned towards him.
“No, I don’t throw stones,” she was saying, in answer to something,
“though I can’t understand it,” she went on, shrugging her shoulders,
and she turned at once with a soft smile of protection towards Kitty.
With a flying, feminine glance she scanned her attire, and made a
movement of her head, hardly perceptible, but understood by Kitty,
signifying approval of her dress and her looks. “You came into the room
dancing,” she added.
“This is one of my most faithful supporters,” said Korsunsky, bowing to
Anna Arkadyevna, whom he had not yet seen. “The princess helps to make
balls happy and successful. Anna Arkadyevna, a waltz?” he said, bending
down to her.
“Why, have you met?” inquired their host.
“Is there anyone we have not met? My wife and I are like white
wolves—everyone knows us,” answered Korsunsky. “A waltz, Anna
Arkadyevna?”
“I don’t dance when it’s possible not to dance,” she said.
“But tonight it’s impossible,” answered Korsunsky.
At that instant Vronsky came up.
“Well, since it’s impossible tonight, let us start,” she said, not
noticing Vronsky’s bow, and she hastily put her hand on Korsunsky’s
shoulder.
“What is she vexed with him about?” thought Kitty, discerning that Anna
had intentionally not responded to Vronsky’s bow. Vronsky went up to
Kitty reminding her of the first quadrille, and expressing his regret
that he had not seen her all this time. Kitty gazed in admiration at
Anna waltzing, and listened to him. She expected him to ask her for a
waltz, but he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him. He flushed
slightly, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had only just put
his arm round her waist and taken the first step when the music
suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her
own, and long afterwards—for several years after—that look, full of
love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony
of shame.
“_Pardon! pardon!_ Waltz! waltz!” shouted Korsunsky from the other side
of the room, and seizing the first young lady he came across he began
dancing himself.
Chapter 23
Vronsky and Kitty waltzed several times round the room. After the first
waltz Kitty went to her mother, and she had hardly time to say a few
words to Countess Nordston when Vronsky came up again for the first
quadrille. During the quadrille nothing of any significance was said:
there was disjointed talk between them of the Korsunskys, husband and
wife, whom he described very amusingly, as delightful children at
forty, and of the future town theater; and only once the conversation
touched her to the quick, when he asked her about Levin, whether he was
here, and added that he liked him so much. But Kitty did not expect
much from the quadrille. She looked forward with a thrill at her heart
to the mazurka. She fancied that in the mazurka everything must be
decided. The fact that he did not during the quadrille ask her for the
mazurka did not trouble her. She felt sure she would dance the mazurka
with him as she had done at former balls, and refused five young men,
saying she was engaged for the mazurka. The whole ball up to the last
quadrille was for Kitty an enchanted vision of delightful colors,
sounds, and motions. She only sat down when she felt too tired and
begged for a rest. But as she was dancing the last quadrille with one
of the tiresome young men whom she could not refuse, she chanced to be
_vis-à-vis_ with Vronsky and Anna. She had not been near Anna again
since the beginning of the evening, and now again she saw her suddenly
quite new and surprising. She saw in her the signs of that excitement
of success she knew so well in herself; she saw that she was
intoxicated with the delighted admiration she was exciting. She knew
that feeling and knew its signs, and saw them in Anna; saw the
quivering, flashing light in her eyes, and the smile of happiness and
excitement unconsciously playing on her lips, and the deliberate grace,
precision, and lightness of her movements.
“Who?” she asked herself. “All or one?” And not assisting the harassed
young man she was dancing with in the conversation, the thread of which
he had lost and could not pick up again, she obeyed with external
liveliness the peremptory shouts of Korsunsky starting them all into
the _grand rond_, and then into the _chaîne_, and at the same time she
kept watch with a growing pang at her heart. “No, it’s not the
admiration of the crowd has intoxicated her, but the adoration of one.
And that one? can it be he?” Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous
light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red
lips. She seemed to make an effort to control herself, to try not to
show these signs of delight, but they came out on her face of
themselves. “But what of him?” Kitty looked at him and was filled with
terror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s
face she saw in him. What had become of his always self-possessed
resolute manner, and the carelessly serene expression of his face? Now
every time he turned to her, he bent his head, as though he would have
fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was nothing but humble
submission and dread. “I would not offend you,” his eyes seemed every
time to be saying, “but I want to save myself, and I don’t know how.”
On his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before.
They were speaking of common acquaintances, keeping up the most trivial
conversation, but to Kitty it seemed that every word they said was
determining their fate and hers. And strange it was that they were
actually talking of how absurd Ivan Ivanovitch was with his French, and
how the Eletsky girl might have made a better match, yet these words
had all the while consequence for them, and they were feeling just as
Kitty did. The whole ball, the whole world, everything seemed lost in
fog in Kitty’s soul. Nothing but the stern discipline of her
bringing-up supported her and forced her to do what was expected of
her, that is, to dance, to answer questions, to talk, even to smile.
But before the mazurka, when they were beginning to rearrange the
chairs and a few couples moved out of the smaller rooms into the big
room, a moment of despair and horror came for Kitty. She had refused
five partners, and now she was not dancing the mazurka. She had not
even a hope of being asked for it, because she was so successful in
society that the idea would never occur to anyone that she had remained
disengaged till now. She would have to tell her mother she felt ill and
go home, but she had not the strength to do this. She felt crushed. She
went to the furthest end of the little drawing-room and sank into a low
chair. Her light, transparent skirts rose like a cloud about her
slender waist; one bare, thin, soft, girlish arm, hanging listlessly,
was lost in the folds of her pink tunic; in the other she held her fan,
and with rapid, short strokes fanned her burning face. But while she
looked like a butterfly, clinging to a blade of grass, and just about
to open its rainbow wings for fresh flight, her heart ached with a
horrible despair.
“But perhaps I am wrong, perhaps it was not so?” And again she recalled
all she had seen.
“Kitty, what is it?” said Countess Nordston, stepping noiselessly over
the carpet towards her. “I don’t understand it.”
Kitty’s lower lip began to quiver; she got up quickly.
“Kitty, you’re not dancing the mazurka?”
“No, no,” said Kitty in a voice shaking with tears.
“He asked her for the mazurka before me,” said Countess Nordston,
knowing Kitty would understand who were “he” and “her.” “She said:
‘Why, aren’t you going to dance it with Princess Shtcherbatskaya?’”
“Oh, I don’t care!” answered Kitty.
No one but she herself understood her position; no one knew that she
had just refused the man whom perhaps she loved, and refused him
because she had put her faith in another.
Countess Nordston found Korsunsky, with whom she was to dance the
mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty.
Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she had not to
talk, because Korsunsky was all the time running about directing the
figure. Vronsky and Anna sat almost opposite her. She saw them with her
long-sighted eyes, and saw them, too, close by, when they met in the
figures, and the more she saw of them the more convinced was she that
her unhappiness was complete. She saw that they felt themselves alone
in that crowded room. And on Vronsky’s face, always so firm and
independent, she saw that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and
humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when
it has done wrong.
Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful,
and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to
Anna’s face. She was fascinating in her simple black dress, fascinating
were her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her firm neck
with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose
hair, fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and
hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was
something terrible and cruel in her fascination.
Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute was her
suffering. Kitty felt overwhelmed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky
saw her, coming across her in the mazurka, he did not at once recognize
her, she was so changed.
“Delightful ball!” he said to her, for the sake of saying something.
“Yes,” she answered.
In the middle of the mazurka, repeating a complicated figure, newly
invented by Korsunsky, Anna came forward into the center of the circle,
chose two gentlemen, and summoned a lady and Kitty. Kitty gazed at her
in dismay as she went up. Anna looked at her with drooping eyelids, and
smiled, pressing her hand. But, noticing that Kitty only responded to
her smile by a look of despair and amazement, she turned away from her,
and began gaily talking to the other lady.
“Yes, there is something uncanny, devilish and fascinating in her,”
Kitty said to herself.
Anna did not mean to stay to supper, but the master of the house began
to press her to do so.
“Nonsense, Anna Arkadyevna,” said Korsunsky, drawing her bare arm under
the sleeve of his dress coat, “I’ve such an idea for a _cotillion! Un
bijou!_”
And he moved gradually on, trying to draw her along with him. Their
host smiled approvingly.
“No, I am not going to stay,” answered Anna, smiling, but in spite of
her smile, both Korsunsky and the master of the house saw from her
resolute tone that she would not stay.
“No; why, as it is, I have danced more at your ball in Moscow than I
have all the winter in Petersburg,” said Anna, looking round at
Vronsky, who stood near her. “I must rest a little before my journey.”
“Are you certainly going tomorrow then?” asked Vronsky.
“Yes, I suppose so,” answered Anna, as it were wondering at the
boldness of his question; but the irrepressible, quivering brilliance
of her eyes and her smile set him on fire as she said it.
Anna Arkadyevna did not stay to supper, but went home.
Chapter 24
“Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive,” thought Levin, as
he came away from the Shtcherbatskys’, and walked in the direction of
his brother’s lodgings. “And I don’t get on with other people. Pride,
they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have
put myself in such a position.” And he pictured to himself Vronsky,
happy, good-natured, clever, and self-possessed, certainly never placed
in the awful position in which he had been that evening. “Yes, she was
bound to choose him. So it had to be, and I cannot complain of anyone
or anything. I am myself to blame. What right had I to imagine she
would care to join her life to mine? Who am I and what am I? A nobody,
not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.” And he recalled his
brother Nikolay, and dwelt with pleasure on the thought of him. “Isn’t
he right that everything in the world is base and loathsome? And are we
fair in our judgment of brother Nikolay? Of course, from the point of
view of Prokofy, seeing him in a torn cloak and tipsy, he’s a
despicable person. But I know him differently. I know his soul, and
know that we are like him. And I, instead of going to seek him out,
went out to dinner, and came here.” Levin walked up to a lamppost, read
his brother’s address, which was in his pocketbook, and called a
sledge. All the long way to his brother’s, Levin vividly recalled all
the facts familiar to him of his brother Nikolay’s life. He remembered
how his brother, while at the university, and for a year afterwards,
had, in spite of the jeers of his companions, lived like a monk,
strictly observing all religious rites, services, and fasts, and
avoiding every sort of pleasure, especially women. And afterwards, how
he had all at once broken out: he had associated with the most horrible
people, and rushed into the most senseless debauchery. He remembered
later the scandal over a boy, whom he had taken from the country to
bring up, and, in a fit of rage, had so violently beaten that
proceedings were brought against him for unlawfully wounding. Then he
recalled the scandal with a sharper, to whom he had lost money, and
given a promissory note, and against whom he had himself lodged a
complaint, asserting that he had cheated him. (This was the money
Sergey Ivanovitch had paid.) Then he remembered how he had spent a
night in the lockup for disorderly conduct in the street. He remembered
the shameful proceedings he had tried to get up against his brother
Sergey Ivanovitch, accusing him of not having paid him his share of his
mother’s fortune, and the last scandal, when he had gone to a western
province in an official capacity, and there had got into trouble for
assaulting a village elder.... It was all horribly disgusting, yet to
Levin it appeared not at all in the same disgusting light as it
inevitably would to those who did not know Nikolay, did not know all
his story, did not know his heart.
Levin remembered that when Nikolay had been in the devout stage, the
period of fasts and monks and church services, when he was seeking in
religion a support and a curb for his passionate temperament, everyone,
far from encouraging him, had jeered at him, and he, too, with the
others. They had teased him, called him Noah, and monk; and, when he
had broken out, no one had helped him, but everyone had turned away
from him with horror and disgust.
Levin felt that, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his brother
Nikolay, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was no more in
the wrong than the people who despised him. He was not to blame for
having been born with his unbridled temperament and his somehow limited
intelligence. But he had always wanted to be good. “I will tell him
everything, without reserve, and I will make him speak without reserve,
too, and I’ll show him that I love him, and so understand him,” Levin
resolved to himself, as, towards eleven o’clock, he reached the hotel
of which he had the address.
“At the top, 12 and 13,” the porter answered Levin’s inquiry.
“At home?”
“Sure to be at home.”
The door of No. 12 was half open, and there came out into the streak of
light thick fumes of cheap, poor tobacco, and the sound of a voice,
unknown to Levin; but he knew at once that his brother was there; he
heard his cough.
As he went in the door, the unknown voice was saying:
“It all depends with how much judgment and knowledge the thing’s done.”
Konstantin Levin looked in at the door, and saw that the speaker was a
young man with an immense shock of hair, wearing a Russian jerkin, and
that a pockmarked woman in a woolen gown, without collar or cuffs, was
sitting on the sofa. His brother was not to be seen. Konstantin felt a
sharp pang at his heart at the thought of the strange company in which
his brother spent his life. No one had heard him, and Konstantin,
taking off his galoshes, listened to what the gentleman in the jerkin
was saying. He was speaking of some enterprise.
“Well, the devil flay them, the privileged classes,” his brother’s
voice responded, with a cough. “Masha! get us some supper and some wine
if there’s any left; or else go and get some.”
The woman rose, came out from behind the screen, and saw Konstantin.
“There’s some gentleman, Nikolay Dmitrievitch,” she said.
“Whom do you want?” said the voice of Nikolay Levin, angrily.
“It’s I,” answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the light.
“Who’s _I_?” Nikolay’s voice said again, still more angrily. He could
be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something, and Levin
saw, facing him in the doorway, the big, scared eyes, and the huge,
thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet astonishing
in its weirdness and sickliness.
He was even thinner than three years before, when Konstantin Levin had
seen him last. He was wearing a short coat, and his hands and big bones
seemed huger than ever. His hair had grown thinner, the same straight
mustaches hid his lips, the same eyes gazed strangely and naïvely at
his visitor.
“Ah, Kostya!” he exclaimed suddenly, recognizing his brother, and his
eyes lit up with joy. But the same second he looked round at the young
man, and gave the nervous jerk of his head and neck that Konstantin
knew so well, as if his neckband hurt him; and a quite different
expression, wild, suffering, and cruel, rested on his emaciated face.
“I wrote to you and Sergey Ivanovitch both that I don’t know you and
don’t want to know you. What is it you want?”
He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him. The
worst and most tiresome part of his character, what made all relations
with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin Levin when he
thought of him, and now, when he saw his face, and especially that
nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it all.
“I didn’t want to see you for anything,” he answered timidly. “I’ve
simply come to see you.”
His brother’s timidity obviously softened Nikolay. His lips twitched.
“Oh, so that’s it?” he said. “Well, come in; sit down. Like some
supper? Masha, bring supper for three. No, stop a minute. Do you know
who this is?” he said, addressing his brother, and indicating the
gentleman in the jerkin: “This is Mr. Kritsky, my friend from Kiev, a
very remarkable man. He’s persecuted by the police, of course, because
he’s not a scoundrel.”
And he looked round in the way he always did at everyone in the room.
Seeing that the woman standing in the doorway was moving to go, he
shouted to her, “Wait a minute, I said.” And with the inability to
express himself, the incoherence that Konstantin knew so well, he
began, with another look round at everyone, to tell his brother
Kritsky’s story: how he had been expelled from the university for
starting a benefit society for the poor students and Sunday schools;
and how he had afterwards been a teacher in a peasant school, and how
he had been driven out of that too, and had afterwards been condemned
for something.
“You’re of the Kiev university?” said Konstantin Levin to Kritsky, to
break the awkward silence that followed.
“Yes, I was of Kiev,” Kritsky replied angrily, his face darkening.
“And this woman,” Nikolay Levin interrupted him, pointing to her, “is
the partner of my life, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of a bad
house,” and he jerked his neck saying this; “but I love her and respect
her, and anyone who wants to know me,” he added, raising his voice and
knitting his brows, “I beg to love her and respect her. She’s just the
same as my wife, just the same. So now you know whom you’ve to do with.
And if you think you’re lowering yourself, well, here’s the floor,
there’s the door.”
And again his eyes traveled inquiringly over all of them.
“Why I should be lowering myself, I don’t understand.”
“Then, Masha, tell them to bring supper; three portions, spirits and
wine.... No, wait a minute.... No, it doesn’t matter.... Go along.”
Chapter 25
“So you see,” pursued Nikolay Levin, painfully wrinkling his forehead
and twitching.
It was obviously difficult for him to think of what to say and do.
“Here, do you see?”... He pointed to some sort of iron bars, fastened
together with strings, lying in a corner of the room. “Do you see that?
That’s the beginning of a new thing we’re going into. It’s a productive
association....”
Konstantin scarcely heard him. He looked into his sickly, consumptive
face, and he was more and more sorry for him, and he could not force
himself to listen to what his brother was telling him about the
association. He saw that this association was a mere anchor to save him
from self-contempt. Nikolay Levin went on talking:
“You know that capital oppresses the laborer. The laborers with us, the
peasants, bear all the burden of labor, and are so placed that however
much they work they can’t escape from their position of beasts of
burden. All the profits of labor, on which they might improve their
position, and gain leisure for themselves, and after that education,
all the surplus values are taken from them by the capitalists. And
society’s so constituted that the harder they work, the greater the
profit of the merchants and landowners, while they stay beasts of
burden to the end. And that state of things must be changed,” he
finished up, and he looked questioningly at his brother.
“Yes, of course,” said Konstantin, looking at the patch of red that had
come out on his brother’s projecting cheekbones.
“And so we’re founding a locksmiths’ association, where all the
production and profit and the chief instruments of production will be
in common.”
“Where is the association to be?” asked Konstantin Levin.
“In the village of Vozdrem, Kazan government.”
“But why in a village? In the villages, I think, there is plenty of
work as it is. Why a locksmiths’ association in a village?”
“Why? Because the peasants are just as much slaves as they ever were,
and that’s why you and Sergey Ivanovitch don’t like people to try and
get them out of their slavery,” said Nikolay Levin, exasperated by the
objection.
Konstantin Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless and
dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolay still more.
“I know your and Sergey Ivanovitch’s aristocratic views. I know that he
applies all the power of his intellect to justify existing evils.”
“No; and what do you talk of Sergey Ivanovitch for?” said Levin,
smiling.
“Sergey Ivanovitch? I’ll tell you what for!” Nikolay Levin shrieked
suddenly at the name of Sergey Ivanovitch. “I’ll tell you what for....
But what’s the use of talking? There’s only one thing.... What did you
come to me for? You look down on this, and you’re welcome to,—and go
away, in God’s name go away!” he shrieked, getting up from his chair.
“And go away, and go away!”
“I don’t look down on it at all,” said Konstantin Levin timidly. “I
don’t even dispute it.”
At that instant Marya Nikolaevna came back. Nikolay Levin looked round
angrily at her. She went quickly to him, and whispered something.
“I’m not well; I’ve grown irritable,” said Nikolay Levin, getting
calmer and breathing painfully; “and then you talk to me of Sergey
Ivanovitch and his article. It’s such rubbish, such lying, such
self-deception. What can a man write of justice who knows nothing of
it? Have you read his article?” he asked Kritsky, sitting down again at
the table, and moving back off half of it the scattered cigarettes, so
as to clear a space.
“I’ve not read it,” Kritsky responded gloomily, obviously not desiring
to enter into the conversation.
“Why not?” said Nikolay Levin, now turning with exasperation upon
Kritsky.
“Because I didn’t see the use of wasting my time over it.”
“Oh, but excuse me, how did you know it would be wasting your time?
That article’s too deep for many people—that’s to say it’s over their
heads. But with me, it’s another thing; I see through his ideas, and I
know where its weakness lies.”
Everyone was mute. Kritsky got up deliberately and reached his cap.
“Won’t you have supper? All right, good-bye! Come round tomorrow with
the locksmith.”
Kritsky had hardly gone out when Nikolay Levin smiled and winked.
“He’s no good either,” he said. “I see, of course....”
But at that instant Kritsky, at the door, called him....
“What do you want now?” he said, and went out to him in the passage.
Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.
“Have you been long with my brother?” he said to her.
“Yes, more than a year. Nikolay Dmitrievitch’s health has become very
poor. Nikolay Dmitrievitch drinks a great deal,” she said.
“That is ... how does he drink?”
“Drinks vodka, and it’s bad for him.”
“And a great deal?” whispered Levin.
“Yes,” she said, looking timidly towards the doorway, where Nikolay
Levin had reappeared.
“What were you talking about?” he said, knitting his brows, and turning
his scared eyes from one to the other. “What was it?”
“Oh, nothing,” Konstantin answered in confusion.
“Oh, if you don’t want to say, don’t. Only it’s no good your talking to
her. She’s a wench, and you’re a gentleman,” he said with a jerk of the
neck. “You understand everything, I see, and have taken stock of
everything, and look with commiseration on my shortcomings,” he began
again, raising his voice.
“Nikolay Dmitrievitch, Nikolay Dmitrievitch,” whispered Marya
Nikolaevna, again going up to him.
“Oh, very well, very well!... But where’s the supper? Ah, here it is,”
he said, seeing a waiter with a tray. “Here, set it here,” he added
angrily, and promptly seizing the vodka, he poured out a glassful and
drank it greedily. “Like a drink?” he turned to his brother, and at
once became better humored.
“Well, enough of Sergey Ivanovitch. I’m glad to see you, anyway. After
all’s said and done, we’re not strangers. Come, have a drink. Tell me
what you’re doing,” he went on, greedily munching a piece of bread, and
pouring out another glassful. “How are you living?”
“I live alone in the country, as I used to. I’m busy looking after the
land,” answered Konstantin, watching with horror the greediness with
which his brother ate and drank, and trying to conceal that he noticed
it.
“Why don’t you get married?”
“It hasn’t happened so,” Konstantin answered, reddening a little.
“Why not? For me now ... everything’s at an end! I’ve made a mess of my
life. But this I’ve said, and I say still, that if my share had been
given me when I needed it, my whole life would have been different.”
Konstantin made haste to change the conversation.
“Do you know your little Vanya’s with me, a clerk in the countinghouse
at Pokrovskoe.”
Nikolay jerked his neck, and sank into thought.
“Yes, tell me what’s going on at Pokrovskoe. Is the house standing
still, and the birch trees, and our schoolroom? And Philip the
gardener, is he living? How I remember the arbor and the seat! Now mind
and don’t alter anything in the house, but make haste and get married,
and make everything as it used to be again. Then I’ll come and see you,
if your wife is nice.”
“But come to me now,” said Levin. “How nicely we would arrange it!”
“I’d come and see you if I were sure I should not find Sergey
Ivanovitch.”
“You wouldn’t find him there. I live quite independently of him.”
“Yes, but say what you like, you will have to choose between me and
him,” he said, looking timidly into his brother’s face.
This timidity touched Konstantin.
“If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I tell you
that in your quarrel with Sergey Ivanovitch I take neither side. You’re
both wrong. You’re more wrong externally, and he inwardly.”
“Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!” Nikolay shouted joyfully.
“But I personally value friendly relations with you more because....”
“Why, why?”
Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolay was
unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolay knew that this was just what
he meant to say, and scowling he took up the vodka again.
“Enough, Nikolay Dmitrievitch!” said Marya Nikolaevna, stretching out
her plump, bare arm towards the decanter.
“Let it be! Don’t insist! I’ll beat you!” he shouted.
Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humored smile, which was at
once reflected on Nikolay’s face, and she took the bottle.
“And do you suppose she understands nothing?” said Nikolay. “She
understands it all better than any of us. Isn’t it true there’s
something good and sweet in her?”
“Were you never before in Moscow?” Konstantin said to her, for the sake
of saying something.
“Only you mustn’t be polite and stiff with her. It frightens her. No
one ever spoke to her so but the justices of the peace who tried her
for trying to get out of a house of ill-fame. Mercy on us, the
senselessness in the world!” he cried suddenly. “These new
institutions, these justices of the peace, rural councils, what
hideousness it all is!”
And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions.
Konstantin Levin heard him, and the disbelief in the sense of all
public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed, was
distasteful to him now from his brother’s lips.
“In another world we shall understand it all,” he said lightly.
“In another world! Ah, I don’t like that other world! I don’t like it,”
he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother’s eyes. “Here one
would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one’s own
and other people’s, would be a good thing, and yet I’m afraid of death,
awfully afraid of death.” He shuddered. “But do drink something. Would
you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let’s go to the
Gypsies! Do you know I have got so fond of the Gypsies and Russian
songs.”
His speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one subject
to another. Konstantin with the help of Masha persuaded him not to go
out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.
Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to persuade
Nikolay Levin to go and stay with his brother.
Chapter 26
In the morning Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and towards evening he
reached home. On the journey in the train he talked to his neighbors
about politics and the new railways, and, just as in Moscow, he was
overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with
himself, shame of something or other. But when he got out at his own
station, when he saw his one-eyed coachman, Ignat, with the collar of
his coat turned up; when, in the dim light reflected by the station
fires, he saw his own sledge, his own horses with their tails tied up,
in their harness trimmed with rings and tassels; when the coachman
Ignat, as he put in his luggage, told him the village news, that the
contractor had arrived, and that Pava had calved,—he felt that little
by little the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and
self-dissatisfaction were passing away. He felt this at the mere sight
of Ignat and the horses; but when he had put on the sheepskin brought
for him, had sat down wrapped up in the sledge, and had driven off
pondering on the work that lay before him in the village, and staring
at the side-horse, that had been his saddle-horse, past his prime now,
but a spirited beast from the Don, he began to see what had happened to
him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be
anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before. In the
first place he resolved that from that day he would give up hoping for
any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage must have given him, and
consequently he would not so disdain what he really had. Secondly, he
would never again let himself give way to low passion, the memory of
which had so tortured him when he had been making up his mind to make
an offer. Then remembering his brother Nikolay, he resolved to himself
that he would never allow himself to forget him, that he would follow
him up, and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help when
things should go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then,
too, his brother’s talk of communism, which he had treated so lightly
at the time, now made him think. He considered a revolution in economic
conditions nonsense. But he always felt the injustice of his own
abundance in comparison with the poverty of the peasants, and now he
determined that so as to feel quite in the right, though he had worked
hard and lived by no means luxuriously before, he would now work still
harder, and would allow himself even less luxury. And all this seemed
to him so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the whole drive in
the pleasantest daydreams. With a resolute feeling of hope in a new,
better life, he reached home before nine o’clock at night.
The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a
light in the bedroom windows of his old nurse, Agafea Mihalovna, who
performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She was not yet
asleep. Kouzma, waked up by her, came sidling sleepily out onto the
steps. A setter bitch, Laska, ran out too, almost upsetting Kouzma, and
whining, turned round about Levin’s knees, jumping up and longing, but
not daring, to put her forepaws on his chest.
“You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna.
“I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at
home, one is better,” he answered, and went into his study.
The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar
details came out: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass,
the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his
father’s sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken
ashtray, a manuscript book with his handwriting. As he saw all this,
there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of
arranging the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All
these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: “No,
you’re not going to get away from us, and you’re not going to be
different, but you’re going to be the same as you’ve always been; with
doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to
amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you
won’t get, and which isn’t possible for you.”
This the things said to him, but another voice in his heart was telling
him that he must not fall under the sway of the past, and that one can
do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice, he went into the
corner where stood his two heavy dumbbells, and began brandishing them
like a gymnast, trying to restore his confident temper. There was a
creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumbbells.
The bailiff came in, and said everything, thank God, was doing well;
but informed him that the buckwheat in the new drying machine had been
a little scorched. This piece of news irritated Levin. The new drying
machine had been constructed and partly invented by Levin. The bailiff
had always been against the drying machine, and now it was with
suppressed triumph that he announced that the buckwheat had been
scorched. Levin was firmly convinced that if the buckwheat had been
scorched, it was only because the precautions had not been taken, for
which he had hundreds of times given orders. He was annoyed, and
reprimanded the bailiff. But there had been an important and joyful
event: Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at a show, had
calved.
“Kouzma, give me my sheepskin. And you tell them to take a lantern.
I’ll come and look at her,” he said to the bailiff.
The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just behind the house.
Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by the lilac tree, he went
into the cowhouse. There was the warm, steamy smell of dung when the
frozen door was opened, and the cows, astonished at the unfamiliar
light of the lantern, stirred on the fresh straw. He caught a glimpse
of the broad, smooth, black and piebald back of Hollandka. Berkoot, the
bull, was lying down with his ring in his lip, and seemed about to get
up, but thought better of it, and only gave two snorts as they passed
by him. Pava, a perfect beauty, huge as a hippopotamus, with her back
turned to them, prevented their seeing the calf, as she sniffed her all
over.
Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and
spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs. Pava, uneasy, began lowing,
but when Levin put the calf close to her she was soothed, and, sighing
heavily, began licking her with her rough tongue. The calf, fumbling,
poked her nose under her mother’s udder, and stiffened her tail out
straight.
“Here, bring the light, Fyodor, this way,” said Levin, examining the
calf. “Like the mother! though the color takes after the father; but
that’s nothing. Very good. Long and broad in the haunch. Vassily
Fedorovitch, isn’t she splendid?” he said to the bailiff, quite
forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his delight in
the calf.
“How could she fail to be? Oh, Semyon the contractor came the day after
you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the
bailiff. “I did inform you about the machine.”
This question was enough to take Levin back to all the details of his
work on the estate, which was on a large scale, and complicated. He
went straight from the cowhouse to the counting house, and after a
little conversation with the bailiff and Semyon the contractor, he went
back to the house and straight upstairs to the drawing-room.
Chapter 27
The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone,
had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this was stupid, he
knew that it was positively not right, and contrary to his present new
plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world in
which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived just the
life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had
dreamed of beginning with his wife, his family.
Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was for him
a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his imagination
a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his mother
had been.
He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage
that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only
secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of
marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority
of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous
facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on
which its whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that.
When he had gone into the little drawing-room, where he always had tea,
and had settled himself in his armchair with a book, and Agafea
Mihalovna had brought him tea, and with her usual, “Well, I’ll stay a
while, sir,” had taken a chair in the window, he felt that, however
strange it might be, he had not parted from his daydreams, and that he
could not live without them. Whether with her, or with another, still
it would be. He was reading a book, and thinking of what he was
reading, and stopping to listen to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away
without flagging, and yet with all that, all sorts of pictures of
family life and work in the future rose disconnectedly before his
imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something had been
put in its place, settled down, and laid to rest.
He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten his duty
to God, and with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, had been
drinking without stopping, and had beaten his wife till he’d half
killed her. He listened, and read his book, and recalled the whole
train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall’s _Treatise on
Heat_. He recalled his own criticisms of Tyndall of his complacent
satisfaction in the cleverness of his experiments, and for his lack of
philosophic insight. And suddenly there floated into his mind the
joyful thought: “In two years’ time I shall have two Dutch cows; Pava
herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen young daughters of Berkoot
and the three others—how lovely!”
He took up his book again. “Very good, electricity and heat are the
same thing; but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the
other in the equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then
what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt
instinctively.... It’s particulary nice if Pava’s daughter should be a
red-spotted cow, and all the herd will take after her, and the other
three, too! Splendid! To go out with my wife and visitors to meet the
herd.... My wife says, ‘Kostya and I looked after that calf like a
child.’ ‘How can it interest you so much?’ says a visitor. ‘Everything
that interests him, interests me.’ But who will she be?” And he
remembered what had happened at Moscow.... “Well, there’s nothing to be
done.... It’s not my fault. But now everything shall go on in a new
way. It’s nonsense to pretend that life won’t let one, that the past
won’t let one. One must struggle to live better, much better.”... He
raised his head, and fell to dreaming. Old Laska, who had not yet fully
digested her delight at his return, and had run out into the yard to
bark, came back wagging her tail, and crept up to him, bringing in the
scent of fresh air, put her head under his hand, and whined
plaintively, asking to be stroked.
“There, who’d have thought it?” said Agafea Mihalovna. “The dog now ...
why, she understands that her master’s come home, and that he’s
low-spirited.”
“Why low-spirited?”
“Do you suppose I don’t see it, sir? It’s high time I should know the
gentry. Why, I’ve grown up from a little thing with them. It’s nothing,
sir, so long as there’s health and a clear conscience.”
Levin looked intently at her, surprised at how well she knew his
thought.
“Shall I fetch you another cup?” said she, and taking his cup she went
out.
Laska kept poking her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she
promptly curled up at his feet, laying her head on a hindpaw. And in
token of all now being well and satisfactory, she opened her mouth a
little, smacked her lips, and settling her sticky lips more comfortably
about her old teeth, she sank into blissful repose. Levin watched all
her movements attentively.
“That’s what I’ll do,” he said to himself; “that’s what I’ll do!
Nothing’s amiss.... All’s well.”
Chapter 28
After the ball, early next morning, Anna Arkadyevna sent her husband a
telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.
“No, I must go, I must go”; she explained to her sister-in-law the
change in her plans in a tone that suggested that she had to remember
so many things that there was no enumerating them: “no, it had really
better be today!”
Stepan Arkadyevitch was not dining at home, but he promised to come and
see his sister off at seven o’clock.
Kitty, too, did not come, sending a note that she had a headache. Dolly
and Anna dined alone with the children and the English governess.
Whether it was that the children were fickle, or that they had acute
senses, and felt that Anna was quite different that day from what she
had been when they had taken such a fancy to her, that she was not now
interested in them,—but they had abruptly dropped their play with their
aunt, and their love for her, and were quite indifferent that she was
going away. Anna was absorbed the whole morning in preparations for her
departure. She wrote notes to her Moscow acquaintances, put down her
accounts, and packed. Altogether Dolly fancied she was not in a placid
state of mind, but in that worried mood, which Dolly knew well with
herself, and which does not come without cause, and for the most part
covers dissatisfaction with self. After dinner, Anna went up to her
room to dress, and Dolly followed her.
“How queer you are today!” Dolly said to her.
“I? Do you think so? I’m not queer, but I’m nasty. I am like that
sometimes. I keep feeling as if I could cry. It’s very stupid, but
it’ll pass off,” said Anna quickly, and she bent her flushed face over
a tiny bag in which she was packing a nightcap and some cambric
handkerchiefs. Her eyes were particularly bright, and were continually
swimming with tears. “In the same way I didn’t want to leave
Petersburg, and now I don’t want to go away from here.”
“You came here and did a good deed,” said Dolly, looking intently at
her.
Anna looked at her with eyes wet with tears.
“Don’t say that, Dolly. I’ve done nothing, and could do nothing. I
often wonder why people are all in league to spoil me. What have I
done, and what could I do? In your heart there was found love enough to
forgive....”
“If it had not been for you, God knows what would have happened! How
happy you are, Anna!” said Dolly. “Everything is clear and good in your
heart.”
“Every heart has its own _skeletons_, as the English say.”
“You have no sort of _skeleton_, have you? Everything is so clear in
you.”
“I have!” said Anna suddenly, and, unexpectedly after her tears, a sly,
ironical smile curved her lips.
“Come, he’s amusing, anyway, your _skeleton_, and not depressing,” said
Dolly, smiling.
“No, he’s depressing. Do you know why I’m going today instead of
tomorrow? It’s a confession that weighs on me; I want to make it to
you,” said Anna, letting herself drop definitely into an armchair, and
looking straight into Dolly’s face.
And to her surprise Dolly saw that Anna was blushing up to her ears, up
to the curly black ringlets on her neck.
“Yes,” Anna went on. “Do you know why Kitty didn’t come to dinner?
She’s jealous of me. I have spoiled ... I’ve been the cause of that
ball being a torture to her instead of a pleasure. But truly, truly,
it’s not my fault, or only my fault a little bit,” she said, daintily
drawling the words “a little bit.”
“Oh, how like Stiva you said that!” said Dolly, laughing.
Anna was hurt.
“Oh no, oh no! I’m not Stiva,” she said, knitting her brows. “That’s
why I’m telling you, just because I could never let myself doubt myself
for an instant,” said Anna.
But at the very moment she was uttering the words, she felt that they
were not true. She was not merely doubting herself, she felt emotion at
the thought of Vronsky, and was going away sooner than she had meant,
simply to avoid meeting him.
“Yes, Stiva told me you danced the mazurka with him, and that he....”
“You can’t imagine how absurdly it all came about. I only meant to be
matchmaking, and all at once it turned out quite differently. Possibly
against my own will....”
She crimsoned and stopped.
“Oh, they feel it directly?” said Dolly.
“But I should be in despair if there were anything serious in it on his
side,” Anna interrupted her. “And I am certain it will all be
forgotten, and Kitty will leave off hating me.”
“All the same, Anna, to tell you the truth, I’m not very anxious for
this marriage for Kitty. And it’s better it should come to nothing, if
he, Vronsky, is capable of falling in love with you in a single day.”
“Oh, heavens, that would be too silly!” said Anna, and again a deep
flush of pleasure came out on her face, when she heard the idea, that
absorbed her, put into words. “And so here I am going away, having made
an enemy of Kitty, whom I liked so much! Ah, how sweet she is! But
you’ll make it right, Dolly? Eh?”
Dolly could scarcely suppress a smile. She loved Anna, but she enjoyed
seeing that she too had her weaknesses.
“An enemy? That can’t be.”
“I did so want you all to care for me, as I do for you, and now I care
for you more than ever,” said Anna, with tears in her eyes. “Ah, how
silly I am today!”
She passed her handkerchief over her face and began dressing.
At the very moment of starting Stepan Arkadyevitch arrived, late, rosy
and good-humored, smelling of wine and cigars.
Anna’s emotionalism infected Dolly, and when she embraced her
sister-in-law for the last time, she whispered: “Remember, Anna, what
you’ve done for me—I shall never forget. And remember that I love you,
and shall always love you as my dearest friend!”
“I don’t know why,” said Anna, kissing her and hiding her tears.
“You understood me, and you understand. Good-bye, my darling!”
Chapter 29
“Come, it’s all over, and thank God!” was the first thought that came
to Anna Arkadyevna, when she had said good-bye for the last time to her
brother, who had stood blocking up the entrance to the carriage till
the third bell rang. She sat down on her lounge beside Annushka, and
looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping-carriage. “Thank God!
tomorrow I shall see Seryozha and Alexey Alexandrovitch, and my life
will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual.”
Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day,
Anna took pleasure in arranging herself for the journey with great
care. With her little deft hands she opened and shut her little red
bag, took out a cushion, laid it on her knees, and carefully wrapping
up her feet, settled herself comfortably. An invalid lady had already
lain down to sleep. Two other ladies began talking to Anna, and a stout
elderly lady tucked up her feet, and made observations about the
heating of the train. Anna answered a few words, but not foreseeing any
entertainment from the conversation, she asked Annushka to get a lamp,
hooked it onto the arm of her seat, and took from her bag a paper-knife
and an English novel. At first her reading made no progress. The fuss
and bustle were disturbing; then when the train had started, she could
not help listening to the noises; then the snow beating on the left
window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled guard
passing by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations about
the terrible snowstorm raging outside, distracted her attention.
Farther on, it was continually the same again and again: the same
shaking and rattling, the same snow on the window, the same rapid
transitions from steaming heat to cold, and back again to heat, the
same passing glimpses of the same figures in the twilight, and the same
voices, and Anna began to read and to understand what she read.
Annushka was already dozing, the red bag on her lap, clutched by her
broad hands, in gloves, of which one was torn. Anna Arkadyevna read and
understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow
the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to
live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a
sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a
sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she
longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had
ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had
surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the
same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the
smooth paper-knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.
The hero of the novel was already almost reaching his English
happiness, a baronetcy and an estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to
go with him to the estate, when she suddenly felt that _he_ ought to
feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what had
he to be ashamed of? “What have I to be ashamed of?” she asked herself
in injured surprise. She laid down the book and sank against the back
of the chair, tightly gripping the paper-cutter in both hands. There
was nothing. She went over all her Moscow recollections. All were good,
pleasant. She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and his face of
slavish adoration, remembered all her conduct with him: there was
nothing shameful. And for all that, at the same point in her memories,
the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some inner voice, just
at the point when she thought of Vronsky, were saying to her, “Warm,
very warm, hot.” “Well, what is it?” she said to herself resolutely,
shifting her seat in the lounge. “What does it mean? Am I afraid to
look it straight in the face? Why, what is it? Can it be that between
me and this officer boy there exist, or can exist, any other relations
than such as are common with every acquaintance?” She laughed
contemptuously and took up her book again; but now she was definitely
unable to follow what she read. She passed the paper-knife over the
window pane, then laid its smooth, cool surface to her cheek, and
almost laughed aloud at the feeling of delight that all at once without
cause came over her. She felt as though her nerves were strings being
strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her
eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously,
something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds
seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed
vividness. Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she
was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or
were standing still altogether; whether it were Annushka at her side or
a stranger. “What’s that on the arm of the chair, a fur cloak or some
beast? And what am I myself? Myself or some other woman?” She was
afraid of giving way to this delirium. But something drew her towards
it, and she could yield to it or resist it at will. She got up to rouse
herself, and slipped off her plaid and the cape of her warm dress. For
a moment she regained her self-possession, and realized that the thin
peasant who had come in wearing a long overcoat, with buttons missing
from it, was the stoveheater, that he was looking at the thermometer,
that it was the wind and snow bursting in after him at the door; but
then everything grew blurred again.... That peasant with the long waist
seemed to be gnawing something on the wall, the old lady began
stretching her legs the whole length of the carriage, and filling it
with a black cloud; then there was a fearful shrieking and banging, as
though someone were being torn to pieces; then there was a blinding
dazzle of red fire before her eyes and a wall seemed to rise up and
hide everything. Anna felt as though she were sinking down. But it was
not terrible, but delightful. The voice of a man muffled up and covered
with snow shouted something in her ear. She got up and pulled herself
together; she realized that they had reached a station and that this
was the guard. She asked Annushka to hand her the cape she had taken
off and her shawl, put them on and moved towards the door.
“Do you wish to get out?” asked Annushka.
“Yes, I want a little air. It’s very hot in here.” And she opened the
door. The driving snow and the wind rushed to meet her and struggled
with her over the door. But she enjoyed the struggle.
She opened the door and went out. The wind seemed as though lying in
wait for her; with gleeful whistle it tried to snatch her up and bear
her off, but she clung to the cold door post, and holding her skirt got
down onto the platform and under the shelter of the carriages. The wind
had been powerful on the steps, but on the platform, under the lee of
the carriages, there was a lull. With enjoyment she drew deep breaths
of the frozen, snowy air, and standing near the carriage looked about
the platform and the lighted station.
Chapter 30
The raging tempest rushed whistling between the wheels of the
carriages, about the scaffolding, and round the corner of the station.
The carriages, posts, people, everything that was to be seen was
covered with snow on one side, and was getting more and more thickly
covered. For a moment there would come a lull in the storm, but then it
would swoop down again with such onslaughts that it seemed impossible
to stand against it. Meanwhile men ran to and fro, talking merrily
together, their steps crackling on the platform as they continually
opened and closed the big doors. The bent shadow of a man glided by at
her feet, and she heard sounds of a hammer upon iron. “Hand over that
telegram!” came an angry voice out of the stormy darkness on the other
side. “This way! No. 28!” several different voices shouted again, and
muffled figures ran by covered with snow. Two gentlemen with lighted
cigarettes passed by her. She drew one more deep breath of the fresh
air, and had just put her hand out of her muff to take hold of the door
post and get back into the carriage, when another man in a military
overcoat, quite close beside her, stepped between her and the
flickering light of the lamp post. She looked round, and the same
instant recognized Vronsky’s face. Putting his hand to the peak of his
cap, he bowed to her and asked, Was there anything she wanted? Could he
be of any service to her? She gazed rather a long while at him without
answering, and, in spite of the shadow in which he was standing, she
saw, or fancied she saw, both the expression of his face and his eyes.
It was again that expression of reverential ecstasy which had so worked
upon her the day before. More than once she had told herself during the
past few days, and again only a few moments before, that Vronsky was
for her only one of the hundreds of young men, forever exactly the
same, that are met everywhere, that she would never allow herself to
bestow a thought upon him. But now at the first instant of meeting him,
she was seized by a feeling of joyful pride. She had no need to ask why
he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was
here to be where she was.
“I didn’t know you were going. What are you coming for?” she said,
letting fall the hand with which she had grasped the door post. And
irrepressible delight and eagerness shone in her face.
“What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes.
“You know that I have come to be where you are,” he said; “I can’t help
it.”
At that moment the wind, as it were, surmounting all obstacles, sent
the snow flying from the carriage roofs, and clanked some sheet of iron
it had torn off, while the hoarse whistle of the engine roared in
front, plaintively and gloomily. All the awfulness of the storm seemed
to her more splendid now. He had said what her soul longed to hear,
though she feared it with her reason. She made no answer, and in her
face he saw conflict.
“Forgive me, if you dislike what I said,” he said humbly.
He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so stubbornly,
that for a long while she could make no answer.
“It’s wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you’re a good man, to
forget what you’ve said, as I forget it,” she said at last.
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever
forget....”
“Enough, enough!” she cried trying assiduously to give a stern
expression to her face, into which he was gazing greedily. And
clutching at the cold door post, she clambered up the steps and got
rapidly into the corridor of the carriage. But in the little corridor
she paused, going over in her imagination what had happened. Though she
could not recall her own words or his, she realized instinctively that
the momentary conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she
was panic-stricken and blissful at it. After standing still a few
seconds, she went into the carriage and sat down in her place. The
overstrained condition which had tormented her before did not only come
back, but was intensified, and reached such a pitch that she was afraid
every minute that something would snap within her from the excessive
tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and
in the visions that filled her imagination, there was nothing
disagreeable or gloomy: on the contrary there was something blissful,
glowing, and exhilarating. Towards morning Anna sank into a doze,
sitting in her place, and when she waked it was daylight and the train
was near Petersburg. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son,
and the details of that day and the following came upon her.
At Petersburg, as soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first
person that attracted her attention was her husband. “Oh, mercy! why do
his ears look like that?” she thought, looking at his frigid and
imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment
as propping up the brim of his round hat. Catching sight of her, he
came to meet her, his lips falling into their habitual sarcastic smile,
and his big, tired eyes looking straight at her. An unpleasant
sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary
glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was
especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that
she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar
feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in
her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of
the feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.
“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year
after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his
deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always
took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest
what he said.
“Is Seryozha quite well?” she asked.
“And is this all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor? He’s quite
well....”
Chapter 31
Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his
armchair, looking straight before him or scanning the people who got in
and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed
people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he
seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at
people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law
court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man
asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even
pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a
person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he did at the lamp, and the
young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his
self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him
as a person.
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he
believed that he had made an impression on Anna—he did not yet believe
that,—but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness
and pride.
What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think. He
felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on
one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he
was happy at it. He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he
had come where she was, that all the happiness of his life, the only
meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her. And when he
got out of the carriage at Bologova to get some seltzer water, and
caught sight of Anna, involuntarily his first word had told her just
what he thought. And he was glad he had told her it, that she knew it
now and was thinking of it. He did not sleep all night. When he was
back in the carriage, he kept unceasingly going over every position in
which he had seen her, every word she had uttered, and before his
fancy, making his heart faint with emotion, floated pictures of a
possible future.
When he got out of the train at Petersburg, he felt after his sleepless
night as keen and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused near his
compartment, waiting for her to get out. “Once more,” he said to
himself, smiling unconsciously, “once more I shall see her walk, her
face; she will say something, turn her head, glance, smile, maybe.” But
before he caught sight of her, he saw her husband, whom the
station-master was deferentially escorting through the crowd. “Ah, yes!
The husband.” Only now for the first time did Vronsky realize clearly
the fact that there was a person attached to her, a husband. He knew
that she had a husband, but had hardly believed in his existence, and
only now fully believed in him, with his head and shoulders, and his
legs clad in black trousers; especially when he saw this husband calmly
take her arm with a sense of property.
Seeing Alexey Alexandrovitch with his Petersburg face and severely
self-confident figure, in his round hat, with his rather prominent
spine, he believed in him, and was aware of a disagreeable sensation,
such as a man might feel tortured by thirst, who, on reaching a spring,
should find a dog, a sheep, or a pig, who has drunk of it and muddied
the water. Alexey Alexandrovitch’s manner of walking, with a swing of
the hips and flat feet, particularly annoyed Vronsky. He could
recognize in no one but himself an indubitable right to love her. But
she was still the same, and the sight of her affected him the same way,
physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling his soul with
rapture. He told his German valet, who ran up to him from the second
class, to take his things and go on, and he himself went up to her. He
saw the first meeting between the husband and wife, and noted with a
lover’s insight the signs of slight reserve with which she spoke to her
husband. “No, she does not love him and cannot love him,” he decided to
himself.
At the moment when he was approaching Anna Arkadyevna he noticed too
with joy that she was conscious of his being near, and looked round,
and seeing him, turned again to her husband.
“Have you passed a good night?” he asked, bowing to her and her husband
together, and leaving it up to Alexey Alexandrovitch to accept the bow
on his own account, and to recognize it or not, as he might see fit.
“Thank you, very good,” she answered.
Her face looked weary, and there was not that play of eagerness in it,
peeping out in her smile and her eyes; but for a single instant, as she
glanced at him, there was a flash of something in her eyes, and
although the flash died away at once, he was happy for that moment. She
glanced at her husband to find out whether he knew Vronsky. Alexey
Alexandrovitch looked at Vronsky with displeasure, vaguely recalling
who this was. Vronsky’s composure and self-confidence here struck, like
a scythe against a stone, upon the cold self-confidence of Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
“Count Vronsky,” said Anna.
“Ah! We are acquainted, I believe,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch
indifferently, giving his hand.
“You set off with the mother and you return with the son,” he said,
articulating each syllable, as though each were a separate favor he was
bestowing.
“You’re back from leave, I suppose?” he said, and without waiting for a
reply, he turned to his wife in his jesting tone: “Well, were a great
many tears shed at Moscow at parting?”
By addressing his wife like this he gave Vronsky to understand that he
wished to be left alone, and, turning slightly towards him, he touched
his hat; but Vronsky turned to Anna Arkadyevna.
“I hope I may have the honor of calling on you,” he said.
Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced with his weary eyes at Vronsky.
“Delighted,” he said coldly. “On Mondays we’re at home. Most
fortunate,” he said to his wife, dismissing Vronsky altogether, “that I
should just have half an hour to meet you, so that I can prove my
devotion,” he went on in the same jesting tone.
“You lay too much stress on your devotion for me to value it much,” she
responded in the same jesting tone, involuntarily listening to the
sound of Vronsky’s steps behind them. “But what has it to do with me?”
she said to herself, and she began asking her husband how Seryozha had
got on without her.
“Oh, capitally! Mariette says he has been very good, And ... I must
disappoint you ... but he has not missed you as your husband has. But
once more _merci,_ my dear, for giving me a day. Our dear _Samovar_
will be delighted.” (He used to call the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, well
known in society, a samovar, because she was always bubbling over with
excitement.) “She has been continually asking after you. And, do you
know, if I may venture to advise you, you should go and see her today.
You know how she takes everything to heart. Just now, with all her own
cares, she’s anxious about the Oblonskys being brought together.”
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a friend of her husband’s, and the
center of that one of the coteries of the Petersburg world with which
Anna was, through her husband, in the closest relations.
“But you know I wrote to her?”
“Still she’ll want to hear details. Go and see her, if you’re not too
tired, my dear. Well, Kondraty will take you in the carriage, while I
go to my committee. I shall not be alone at dinner again,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch went on, no longer in a sarcastic tone. “You wouldn’t
believe how I’ve missed....” And with a long pressure of her hand and a
meaning smile, he put her in her carriage.
Chapter 32
The first person to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the
stairs to her, in spite of the governess’s call, and with desperate joy
shrieked: “Mother! mother!” Running up to her, he hung on her neck.
“I told you it was mother!” he shouted to the governess. “I knew!”
And her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to
disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She
had to let herself drop down to the reality to enjoy him as he really
was. But even as he was, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue
eyes, and his plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up
stockings. Anna experienced almost physical pleasure in the sensation
of his nearness, and his caresses, and moral soothing, when she met his
simple, confiding, and loving glance, and heard his naïve questions.
Anna took out the presents Dolly’s children had sent him, and told her
son what sort of little girl was Tanya at Moscow, and how Tanya could
read, and even taught the other children.
“Why, am I not so nice as she?” asked Seryozha.
“To me you’re nicer than anyone in the world.”
“I know that,” said Seryozha, smiling.
Anna had not had time to drink her coffee when the Countess Lidia
Ivanovna was announced. The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a tall, stout
woman, with an unhealthily sallow face and splendid, pensive black
eyes. Anna liked her, but today she seemed to be seeing her for the
first time with all her defects.
“Well, my dear, so you took the olive branch?” inquired Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, as soon as she came into the room.
“Yes, it’s all over, but it was all much less serious than we had
supposed,” answered Anna. “My _belle-sœur_ is in general too hasty.”
But Countess Lidia Ivanovna, though she was interested in everything
that did not concern her, had a habit of never listening to what
interested her; she interrupted Anna:
“Yes, there’s plenty of sorrow and evil in the world. I am so worried
today.”
“Oh, why?” asked Anna, trying to suppress a smile.
“I’m beginning to be weary of fruitlessly championing the truth, and
sometimes I’m quite unhinged by it. The Society of the Little Sisters”
(this was a religiously-patriotic, philanthropic institution) “was
going splendidly, but with these gentlemen it’s impossible to do
anything,” added Countess Lidia Ivanovna in a tone of ironical
submission to destiny. “They pounce on the idea, and distort it, and
then work it out so pettily and unworthily. Two or three people, your
husband among them, understand all the importance of the thing, but the
others simply drag it down. Yesterday Pravdin wrote to me....”
Pravdin was a well-known Panslavist abroad, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna
described the purport of his letter.
Then the countess told her of more disagreements and intrigues against
the work of the unification of the churches, and departed in haste, as
she had that day to be at the meeting of some society and also at the
Slavonic committee.
“It was all the same before, of course; but why was it I didn’t notice
it before?” Anna asked herself. “Or has she been very much irritated
today? It’s really ludicrous; her object is doing good; she a
Christian, yet she’s always angry; and she always has enemies, and
always enemies in the name of Christianity and doing good.”
After Countess Lidia Ivanovna another friend came, the wife of a chief
secretary, who told her all the news of the town. At three o’clock she
too went away, promising to come to dinner. Alexey Alexandrovitch was
at the ministry. Anna, left alone, spent the time till dinner in
assisting at her son’s dinner (he dined apart from his parents) and in
putting her things in order, and in reading and answering the notes and
letters which had accumulated on her table.
The feeling of causeless shame, which she had felt on the journey, and
her excitement, too, had completely vanished. In the habitual
conditions of her life she felt again resolute and irreproachable.
She recalled with wonder her state of mind on the previous day. “What
was it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which it was easy to put
a stop to, and I answered as I ought to have done. To speak of it to my
husband would be unnecessary and out of the question. To speak of it
would be to attach importance to what has no importance.” She
remembered how she had told her husband of what was almost a
declaration made her at Petersburg by a young man, one of her husband’s
subordinates, and how Alexey Alexandrovitch had answered that every
woman living in the world was exposed to such incidents, but that he
had the fullest confidence in her tact, and could never lower her and
himself by jealousy. “So then there’s no reason to speak of it? And
indeed, thank God, there’s nothing to speak of,” she told herself.
Chapter 33
Alexey Alexandrovitch came back from the meeting of the ministers at
four o’clock, but as often happened, he had not time to come in to her.
He went into his study to see the people waiting for him with
petitions, and to sign some papers brought him by his chief secretary.
At dinner time (there were always a few people dining with the
Karenins) there arrived an old lady, a cousin of Alexey Alexandrovitch,
the chief secretary of the department and his wife, and a young man who
had been recommended to Alexey Alexandrovitch for the service. Anna
went into the drawing-room to receive these guests. Precisely at five
o’clock, before the bronze Peter the First clock had struck the fifth
stroke, Alexey Alexandrovitch came in, wearing a white tie and evening
coat with two stars, as he had to go out directly after dinner. Every
minute of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s life was portioned out and occupied.
And to make time to get through all that lay before him every day, he
adhered to the strictest punctuality. “Unhasting and unresting,” was
his motto. He came into the dining hall, greeted everyone, and
hurriedly sat down, smiling to his wife.
“Yes, my solitude is over. You wouldn’t believe how uncomfortable” (he
laid stress on the word _uncomfortable_) “it is to dine alone.”
At dinner he talked a little to his wife about Moscow matters, and,
with a sarcastic smile, asked her after Stepan Arkadyevitch; but the
conversation was for the most part general, dealing with Petersburg
official and public news. After dinner he spent half an hour with his
guests, and again, with a smile, pressed his wife’s hand, withdrew, and
drove off to the council. Anna did not go out that evening either to
the Princess Betsy Tverskaya, who, hearing of her return, had invited
her, nor to the theater, where she had a box for that evening. She did
not go out principally because the dress she had reckoned upon was not
ready. Altogether, Anna, on turning, after the departure of her guests,
to the consideration of her attire, was very much annoyed. She was
generally a mistress of the art of dressing well without great expense,
and before leaving Moscow she had given her dressmaker three dresses to
transform. The dresses had to be altered so that they could not be
recognized, and they ought to have been ready three days before. It
appeared that two dresses had not been done at all, while the other one
had not been altered as Anna had intended. The dressmaker came to
explain, declaring that it would be better as she had done it, and Anna
was so furious that she felt ashamed when she thought of it afterwards.
To regain her serenity completely she went into the nursery, and spent
the whole evening with her son, put him to bed herself, signed him with
the cross, and tucked him up. She was glad she had not gone out
anywhere, and had spent the evening so well. She felt so light-hearted
and serene, she saw so clearly that all that had seemed to her so
important on her railway journey was only one of the common trivial
incidents of fashionable life, and that she had no reason to feel
ashamed before anyone else or before herself. Anna sat down at the
hearth with an English novel and waited for her husband. Exactly at
half-past nine she heard his ring, and he came into the room.
“Here you are at last!” she observed, holding out her hand to him.
He kissed her hand and sat down beside her.
“Altogether then, I see your visit was a success,” he said to her.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and she began telling him about everything from
the beginning: her journey with Countess Vronskaya, her arrival, the
accident at the station. Then she described the pity she had felt,
first for her brother, and afterwards for Dolly.
“I imagine one cannot exonerate such a man from blame, though he is
your brother,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch severely.
Anna smiled. She knew that he said that simply to show that family
considerations could not prevent him from expressing his genuine
opinion. She knew that characteristic in her husband, and liked it.
“I am glad it has all ended so satisfactorily, and that you are back
again,” he went on. “Come, what do they say about the new act I have
got passed in the council?”
Anna had heard nothing of this act, and she felt conscience-stricken at
having been able so readily to forget what was to him of such
importance.
“Here, on the other hand, it has made a great sensation,” he said, with
a complacent smile.
She saw that Alexey Alexandrovitch wanted to tell her something
pleasant to him about it, and she brought him by questions to telling
it. With the same complacent smile he told her of the ovations he had
received in consequence of the act he had passed.
“I was very, very glad. It shows that at last a reasonable and steady
view of the matter is becoming prevalent among us.”
Having drunk his second cup of tea with cream, and bread, Alexey
Alexandrovitch got up, and was going towards his study.
“And you’ve not been anywhere this evening? You’ve been dull, I
expect?” he said.
“Oh, no!” she answered, getting up after him and accompanying him
across the room to his study. “What are you reading now?” she asked.
“Just now I’m reading Duc de Lille, _Poésie des Enfers,_” he answered.
“A very remarkable book.”
Anna smiled, as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love, and,
putting her hand under his, she escorted him to the door of the study.
She knew his habit, that had grown into a necessity, of reading in the
evening. She knew, too, that in spite of his official duties, which
swallowed up almost the whole of his time, he considered it his duty to
keep up with everything of note that appeared in the intellectual
world. She knew, too, that he was really interested in books dealing
with politics, philosophy, and theology, that art was utterly foreign
to his nature; but, in spite of this, or rather, in consequence of it,
Alexey Alexandrovitch never passed over anything in the world of art,
but made it his duty to read everything. She knew that in politics, in
philosophy, in theology, Alexey Alexandrovitch often had doubts, and
made investigations; but on questions of art and poetry, and, above
all, of music, of which he was totally devoid of understanding, he had
the most distinct and decided opinions. He was fond of talking about
Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, of the significance of new schools of
poetry and music, all of which were classified by him with very
conspicuous consistency.
“Well, God be with you,” she said at the door of the study, where a
shaded candle and a decanter of water were already put by his armchair.
“And I’ll write to Moscow.”
He pressed her hand, and again kissed it.
“All the same he’s a good man; truthful, good-hearted, and remarkable
in his own line,” Anna said to herself going back to her room, as
though she were defending him to someone who had attacked him and said
that one could not love him. “But why is it his ears stick out so
strangely? Or has he had his hair cut?”
Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her
writing-table, finishing a letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of
measured steps in slippers, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, freshly washed
and combed, with a book under his arm, came in to her.
“It’s time, it’s time,” said he, with a meaning smile, and he went into
their bedroom.
“And what right had he to look at him like that?” thought Anna,
recalling Vronsky’s glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch.
Undressing, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of the
eagerness which, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her
eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in
her, hidden somewhere far away.
Chapter 34
When Vronsky went to Moscow from Petersburg, he had left his large set
of rooms in Morskaia to his friend and favorite comrade Petritsky.
Petritsky was a young lieutenant, not particularly well-connected, and
not merely not wealthy, but always hopelessly in debt. Towards evening
he was always drunk, and he had often been locked up after all sorts of
ludicrous and disgraceful scandals, but he was a favorite both of his
comrades and his superior officers. On arriving at twelve o’clock from
the station at his flat, Vronsky saw, at the outer door, a hired
carriage familiar to him. While still outside his own door, as he rang,
he heard masculine laughter, the lisp of a feminine voice, and
Petritsky’s voice. “If that’s one of the villains, don’t let him in!”
Vronsky told the servant not to announce him, and slipped quietly into
the first room. Baroness Shilton, a friend of Petritsky’s, with a rosy
little face and flaxen hair, resplendent in a lilac satin gown, and
filling the whole room, like a canary, with her Parisian chatter, sat
at the round table making coffee. Petritsky, in his overcoat, and the
cavalry captain Kamerovsky, in full uniform, probably just come from
duty, were sitting each side of her.
“Bravo! Vronsky!” shouted Petritsky, jumping up, scraping his chair.
“Our host himself! Baroness, some coffee for him out of the new coffee
pot. Why, we didn’t expect you! Hope you’re satisfied with the ornament
of your study,” he said, indicating the baroness. “You know each other,
of course?”
“I should think so,” said Vronsky, with a bright smile, pressing the
baroness’s little hand. “What next! I’m an old friend.”
“You’re home after a journey,” said the baroness, “so I’m flying. Oh,
I’ll be off this minute, if I’m in the way.”
“You’re home, wherever you are, baroness,” said Vronsky. “How do you
do, Kamerovsky?” he added, coldly shaking hands with Kamerovsky.
“There, you never know how to say such pretty things,” said the
baroness, turning to Petritsky.
“No; what’s that for? After dinner I say things quite as good.”
“After dinner there’s no credit in them? Well, then, I’ll make you some
coffee, so go and wash and get ready,” said the baroness, sitting down
again, and anxiously turning the screw in the new coffee pot. “Pierre,
give me the coffee,” she said, addressing Petritsky, whom she called
Pierre as a contraction of his surname, making no secret of her
relations with him. “I’ll put it in.”
“You’ll spoil it!”
“No, I won’t spoil it! Well, and your wife?” said the baroness
suddenly, interrupting Vronsky’s conversation with his comrade. “We’ve
been marrying you here. Have you brought your wife?”
“No, baroness. I was born a Bohemian, and a Bohemian I shall die.”
“So much the better, so much the better. Shake hands on it.”
And the baroness, detaining Vronsky, began telling him, with many
jokes, about her last new plans of life, asking his advice.
“He persists in refusing to give me a divorce! Well, what am I to do?”
(_He_ was her husband.) “Now I want to begin a suit against him. What
do you advise? Kamerovsky, look after the coffee; it’s boiling over.
You see, I’m engrossed with business! I want a lawsuit, because I must
have my property. Do you understand the folly of it, that on the
pretext of my being unfaithful to him,” she said contemptuously, “he
wants to get the benefit of my fortune.”
Vronsky heard with pleasure this light-hearted prattle of a pretty
woman, agreed with her, gave her half-joking counsel, and altogether
dropped at once into the tone habitual to him in talking to such women.
In his Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly opposed
classes. One, the lower class, vulgar, stupid, and, above all,
ridiculous people, who believe that one husband ought to live with the
one wife whom he has lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent,
a woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one
ought to bring up one’s children, earn one’s bread, and pay one’s
debts; and various similar absurdities. This was the class of
old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class of
people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the
great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon
oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything
else.
For the first moment only, Vronsky was startled after the impression of
a quite different world that he had brought with him from Moscow. But
immediately as though slipping his feet into old slippers, he dropped
back into the light-hearted, pleasant world he had always lived in.
The coffee was never really made, but spluttered over everyone, and
boiled away, doing just what was required of it—that is, providing much
cause for much noise and laughter, and spoiling a costly rug and the
baroness’s gown.
“Well now, good-bye, or you’ll never get washed, and I shall have on my
conscience the worst sin a gentleman can commit. So you would advise a
knife to his throat?”
“To be sure, and manage that your hand may not be far from his lips.
He’ll kiss your hand, and all will end satisfactorily,” answered
Vronsky.
“So at the Français!” and, with a rustle of her skirts, she vanished.
Kamerovsky got up too, and Vronsky, not waiting for him to go, shook
hands and went off to his dressing-room.
While he was washing, Petritsky described to him in brief outlines his
position, as far as it had changed since Vronsky had left Petersburg.
No money at all. His father said he wouldn’t give him any and pay his
debts. His tailor was trying to get him locked up, and another fellow,
too, was threatening to get him locked up. The colonel of the regiment
had announced that if these scandals did not cease he would have to
leave. As for the baroness, he was sick to death of her, especially
since she’d taken to offering continually to lend him money. But he had
found a girl—he’d show her to Vronsky—a marvel, exquisite, in the
strict Oriental style, “genre of the slave Rebecca, don’t you know.”
He’d had a row, too, with Berkoshov, and was going to send seconds to
him, but of course it would come to nothing. Altogether everything was
supremely amusing and jolly. And, not letting his comrade enter into
further details of his position, Petritsky proceeded to tell him all
the interesting news. As he listened to Petritsky’s familiar stories in
the familiar setting of the rooms he had spent the last three years in,
Vronsky felt a delightful sense of coming back to the careless
Petersburg life that he was used to.
“Impossible!” he cried, letting down the pedal of the washing basin in
which he had been sousing his healthy red neck. “Impossible!” he cried,
at the news that Laura had flung over Fertinghof and had made up to
Mileev. “And is he as stupid and pleased as ever? Well, and how’s
Buzulukov?”
“Oh, there is a tale about Buzulukov—simply lovely!” cried Petritsky.
“You know his weakness for balls, and he never misses a single court
ball. He went to a big ball in a new helmet. Have you seen the new
helmets? Very nice, lighter. Well, so he’s standing.... No, I say, do
listen.”
“I am listening,” answered Vronsky, rubbing himself with a rough towel.
“Up comes the Grand Duchess with some ambassador or other, and, as
ill-luck would have it, she begins talking to him about the new
helmets. The Grand Duchess positively wanted to show the new helmet to
the ambassador. They see our friend standing there.” (Petritsky
mimicked how he was standing with the helmet.) “The Grand Duchess asked
him to give her the helmet; he doesn’t give it to her. What do you
think of that? Well, everyone’s winking at him, nodding, frowning—give
it to her, do! He doesn’t give it to her. He’s mute as a fish. Only
picture it!... Well, the ... what’s his name, whatever he was ... tries
to take the helmet from him ... he won’t give it up!... He pulls it
from him, and hands it to the Grand Duchess. ‘Here, your Highness,’
says he, ‘is the new helmet.’ She turned the helmet the other side up,
And—just picture it!—plop went a pear and sweetmeats out of it, two
pounds of sweetmeats!... He’d been storing them up, the darling!”
Vronsky burst into roars of laughter. And long afterwards, when he was
talking of other things, he broke out into his healthy laugh, showing
his strong, close rows of teeth, when he thought of the helmet.
Having heard all the news, Vronsky, with the assistance of his valet,
got into his uniform, and went off to report himself. He intended, when
he had done that, to drive to his brother’s and to Betsy’s and to pay
several visits with a view to beginning to go into that society where
he might meet Madame Karenina. As he always did in Petersburg, he left
home not meaning to return till late at night.
PART TWO
Chapter 1
At the end of the winter, in the Shtcherbatskys’ house, a consultation
was being held, which was to pronounce on the state of Kitty’s health
and the measures to be taken to restore her failing strength. She had
been ill, and as spring came on she grew worse. The family doctor gave
her cod liver oil, then iron, then nitrate of silver, but as the first
and the second and the third were alike in doing no good, and as his
advice when spring came was to go abroad, a celebrated physician was
called in. The celebrated physician, a very handsome man, still
youngish, asked to examine the patient. He maintained, with peculiar
satisfaction, it seemed, that maiden modesty is a mere relic of
barbarism, and that nothing could be more natural than for a man still
youngish to handle a young girl naked. He thought it natural because he
did it every day, and felt and thought, as it seemed to him, no harm as
he did it and consequently he considered modesty in the girl not merely
as a relic of barbarism, but also as an insult to himself.
There was nothing for it but to submit, since, although all the doctors
had studied in the same school, had read the same books, and learned
the same science, and though some people said this celebrated doctor
was a bad doctor, in the princess’s household and circle it was for
some reason accepted that this celebrated doctor alone had some special
knowledge, and that he alone could save Kitty. After a careful
examination and sounding of the bewildered patient, dazed with shame,
the celebrated doctor, having scrupulously washed his hands, was
standing in the drawing-room talking to the prince. The prince frowned
and coughed, listening to the doctor. As a man who had seen something
of life, and neither a fool nor an invalid, he had no faith in
medicine, and in his heart was furious at the whole farce, specially as
he was perhaps the only one who fully comprehended the cause of Kitty’s
illness. “Conceited blockhead!” he thought, as he listened to the
celebrated doctor’s chatter about his daughter’s symptoms. The doctor
was meantime with difficulty restraining the expression of his contempt
for this old gentleman, and with difficulty condescending to the level
of his intelligence. He perceived that it was no good talking to the
old man, and that the principal person in the house was the mother.
Before her he decided to scatter his pearls. At that instant the
princess came into the drawing-room with the family doctor. The prince
withdrew, trying not to show how ridiculous he thought the whole
performance. The princess was distracted, and did not know what to do.
She felt she had sinned against Kitty.
“Well, doctor, decide our fate,” said the princess. “Tell me
everything.”
“Is there hope?” she meant to say, but her lips quivered, and she could
not utter the question. “Well, doctor?”
“Immediately, princess. I will talk it over with my colleague, and then
I will have the honor of laying my opinion before you.”
“So we had better leave you?”
“As you please.”
The princess went out with a sigh.
When the doctors were left alone, the family doctor began timidly
explaining his opinion, that there was a commencement of tuberculous
trouble, but ... and so on. The celebrated doctor listened to him, and
in the middle of his sentence looked at his big gold watch.
“Yes,” said he. “But....”
The family doctor respectfully ceased in the middle of his
observations.
“The commencement of the tuberculous process we are not, as you are
aware, able to define; till there are cavities, there is nothing
definite. But we may suspect it. And there are indications;
malnutrition, nervous excitability, and so on. The question stands
thus: in presence of indications of tuberculous process, what is to be
done to maintain nutrition?”
“But, you know, there are always moral, spiritual causes at the back in
these cases,” the family doctor permitted himself to interpolate with a
subtle smile.
“Yes, that’s an understood thing,” responded the celebrated physician,
again glancing at his watch. “Beg pardon, is the Yausky bridge done
yet, or shall I have to drive around?” he asked. “Ah! it is. Oh, well,
then I can do it in twenty minutes. So we were saying the problem may
be put thus: to maintain nutrition and to give tone to the nerves. The
one is in close connection with the other, one must attack both sides
at once.”
“And how about a tour abroad?” asked the family doctor.
“I’ve no liking for foreign tours. And take note: if there is an early
stage of tuberculous process, of which we cannot be certain, a foreign
tour will be of no use. What is wanted is means of improving nutrition,
and not for lowering it.” And the celebrated doctor expounded his plan
of treatment with Soden waters, a remedy obviously prescribed primarily
on the ground that they could do no harm.
The family doctor listened attentively and respectfully.
“But in favor of foreign travel I would urge the change of habits, the
removal from conditions calling up reminiscences. And then the mother
wishes it,” he added.
“Ah! Well, in that case, to be sure, let them go. Only, those German
quacks are mischievous.... They ought to be persuaded.... Well, let
them go then.”
He glanced once more at his watch.
“Oh! time’s up already,” And he went to the door. The celebrated doctor
announced to the princess (a feeling of what was due from him dictated
his doing so) that he ought to see the patient once more.
“What! another examination!” cried the mother, with horror.
“Oh, no, only a few details, princess.”
“Come this way.”
And the mother, accompanied by the doctor, went into the drawing-room
to Kitty. Wasted and flushed, with a peculiar glitter in her eyes, left
there by the agony of shame she had been put through, Kitty stood in
the middle of the room. When the doctor came in she flushed crimson,
and her eyes filled with tears. All her illness and treatment struck
her as a thing so stupid, ludicrous even! Doctoring her seemed to her
as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart
was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders? But
she could not grieve her mother, especially as her mother considered
herself to blame.
“May I trouble you to sit down, princess?” the celebrated doctor said
to her.
He sat down with a smile, facing her, felt her pulse, and again began
asking her tiresome questions. She answered him, and all at once got
up, furious.
“Excuse me, doctor, but there is really no object in this. This is the
third time you’ve asked me the same thing.”
The celebrated doctor did not take offense.
“Nervous irritability,” he said to the princess, when Kitty had left
the room. “However, I had finished....”
And the doctor began scientifically explaining to the princess, as an
exceptionally intelligent woman, the condition of the young princess,
and concluded by insisting on the drinking of the waters, which were
certainly harmless. At the question: Should they go abroad? the doctor
plunged into deep meditation, as though resolving a weighty problem.
Finally his decision was pronounced: they were to go abroad, but to put
no faith in foreign quacks, and to apply to him in any need.
It seemed as though some piece of good fortune had come to pass after
the doctor had gone. The mother was much more cheerful when she went
back to her daughter, and Kitty pretended to be more cheerful. She had
often, almost always, to be pretending now.
“Really, I’m quite well, mamma. But if you want to go abroad, let’s
go!” she said, and trying to appear interested in the proposed tour,
she began talking of the preparations for the journey.
Chapter 2
Soon after the doctor, Dolly had arrived. She knew that there was to be
a consultation that day, and though she was only just up after her
confinement (she had another baby, a little girl, born at the end of
the winter), though she had trouble and anxiety enough of her own, she
had left her tiny baby and a sick child, to come and hear Kitty’s fate,
which was to be decided that day.
“Well, well?” she said, coming into the drawing-room, without taking
off her hat. “You’re all in good spirits. Good news, then?”
They tried to tell her what the doctor had said, but it appeared that
though the doctor had talked distinctly enough and at great length, it
was utterly impossible to report what he had said. The only point of
interest was that it was settled they should go abroad.
Dolly could not help sighing. Her dearest friend, her sister, was going
away. And her life was not a cheerful one. Her relations with Stepan
Arkadyevitch after their reconciliation had become humiliating. The
union Anna had cemented turned out to be of no solid character, and
family harmony was breaking down again at the same point. There had
been nothing definite, but Stepan Arkadyevitch was hardly ever at home;
money, too, was hardly ever forthcoming, and Dolly was continually
tortured by suspicions of infidelity, which she tried to dismiss,
dreading the agonies of jealousy she had been through already. The
first onslaught of jealousy, once lived through, could never come back
again, and even the discovery of infidelities could never now affect
her as it had the first time. Such a discovery now would only mean
breaking up family habits, and she let herself be deceived, despising
him and still more herself, for the weakness. Besides this, the care of
her large family was a constant worry to her: first, the nursing of her
young baby did not go well, then the nurse had gone away, now one of
the children had fallen ill.
“Well, how are all of you?” asked her mother.
“Ah, mamma, we have plenty of troubles of our own. Lili is ill, and I’m
afraid it’s scarlatina. I have come here now to hear about Kitty, and
then I shall shut myself up entirely, if—God forbid—it should be
scarlatina.”
The old prince too had come in from his study after the doctor’s
departure, and after presenting his cheek to Dolly, and saying a few
words to her, he turned to his wife:
“How have you settled it? you’re going? Well, and what do you mean to
do with me?”
“I suppose you had better stay here, Alexander,” said his wife.
“That’s as you like.”
“Mamma, why shouldn’t father come with us?” said Kitty. “It would be
nicer for him and for us too.”
The old prince got up and stroked Kitty’s hair. She lifted her head and
looked at him with a forced smile. It always seemed to her that he
understood her better than anyone in the family, though he did not say
much about her. Being the youngest, she was her father’s favorite, and
she fancied that his love gave him insight. When now her glance met his
blue kindly eyes looking intently at her, it seemed to her that he saw
right through her, and understood all that was not good that was
passing within her. Reddening, she stretched out towards him expecting
a kiss, but he only patted her hair and said:
“These stupid chignons! There’s no getting at the real daughter. One
simply strokes the bristles of dead women. Well, Dolinka,” he turned to
his elder daughter, “what’s your young buck about, hey?”
“Nothing, father,” answered Dolly, understanding that her husband was
meant. “He’s always out; I scarcely ever see him,” she could not resist
adding with a sarcastic smile.
“Why, hasn’t he gone into the country yet—to see about selling that
forest?”
“No, he’s still getting ready for the journey.”
“Oh, that’s it!” said the prince. “And so am I to be getting ready for
a journey too? At your service,” he said to his wife, sitting down.
“And I tell you what, Katia,” he went on to his younger daughter, “you
must wake up one fine day and say to yourself: Why, I’m quite well, and
merry, and going out again with father for an early morning walk in the
frost. Hey?”
What her father said seemed simple enough, yet at these words Kitty
became confused and overcome like a detected criminal. “Yes, he sees it
all, he understands it all, and in these words he’s telling me that
though I’m ashamed, I must get over my shame.” She could not pluck up
spirit to make any answer. She tried to begin, and all at once burst
into tears, and rushed out of the room.
“See what comes of your jokes!” the princess pounced down on her
husband. “You’re always....” she began a string of reproaches.
The prince listened to the princess’s scolding rather a long while
without speaking, but his face was more and more frowning.
“She’s so much to be pitied, poor child, so much to be pitied, and you
don’t feel how it hurts her to hear the slightest reference to the
cause of it. Ah! to be so mistaken in people!” said the princess, and
by the change in her tone both Dolly and the prince knew she was
speaking of Vronsky. “I don’t know why there aren’t laws against such
base, dishonorable people.”
“Ah, I can’t bear to hear you!” said the prince gloomily, getting up
from his low chair, and seeming anxious to get away, yet stopping in
the doorway. “There are laws, madam, and since you’ve challenged me to
it, I’ll tell you who’s to blame for it all: you and you, you and
nobody else. Laws against such young gallants there have always been,
and there still are! Yes, if there has been nothing that ought not to
have been, old as I am, I’d have called him out to the barrier, the
young dandy. Yes, and now you physic her and call in these quacks.”
The prince apparently had plenty more to say, but as soon as the
princess heard his tone she subsided at once, and became penitent, as
she always did on serious occasions.
“Alexander, Alexander,” she whispered, moving to him and beginning to
weep.
As soon as she began to cry the prince too calmed down. He went up to
her.
“There, that’s enough, that’s enough! You’re wretched too, I know. It
can’t be helped. There’s no great harm done. God is merciful ...
thanks....” he said, not knowing what he was saying, as he responded to
the tearful kiss of the princess that he felt on his hand. And the
prince went out of the room.
Before this, as soon as Kitty went out of the room in tears, Dolly,
with her motherly, family instincts, had promptly perceived that here a
woman’s work lay before her, and she prepared to do it. She took off
her hat, and, morally speaking, tucked up her sleeves and prepared for
action. While her mother was attacking her father, she tried to
restrain her mother, so far as filial reverence would allow. During the
prince’s outburst she was silent; she felt ashamed for her mother, and
tender towards her father for so quickly being kind again. But when her
father left them she made ready for what was the chief thing needful—to
go to Kitty and console her.
“I’d been meaning to tell you something for a long while, mamma: did
you know that Levin meant to make Kitty an offer when he was here the
last time? He told Stiva so.”
“Well, what then? I don’t understand....”
“So did Kitty perhaps refuse him?... She didn’t tell you so?”
“No, she has said nothing to me either of one or the other; she’s too
proud. But I know it’s all on account of the other.”
“Yes, but suppose she has refused Levin, and she wouldn’t have refused
him if it hadn’t been for the other, I know. And then, he has deceived
her so horribly.”
It was too terrible for the princess to think how she had sinned
against her daughter, and she broke out angrily.
“Oh, I really don’t understand! Nowadays they will all go their own
way, and mothers haven’t a word to say in anything, and then....”
“Mamma, I’ll go up to her.”
“Well, do. Did I tell you not to?” said her mother.
Chapter 3
When she went into Kitty’s little room, a pretty, pink little room,
full of knick-knacks in _vieux saxe,_ as fresh, and pink, and white,
and gay as Kitty herself had been two months ago, Dolly remembered how
they had decorated the room the year before together, with what love
and gaiety. Her heart turned cold when she saw Kitty sitting on a low
chair near the door, her eyes fixed immovably on a corner of the rug.
Kitty glanced at her sister, and the cold, rather ill-tempered
expression of her face did not change.
“I’m just going now, and I shall have to keep in and you won’t be able
to come to see me,” said Dolly, sitting down beside her. “I want to
talk to you.”
“What about?” Kitty asked swiftly, lifting her head in dismay.
“What should it be, but your trouble?”
“I have no trouble.”
“Nonsense, Kitty. Do you suppose I could help knowing? I know all about
it. And believe me, it’s of so little consequence.... We’ve all been
through it.”
Kitty did not speak, and her face had a stern expression.
“He’s not worth your grieving over him,” pursued Darya Alexandrovna,
coming straight to the point.
“No, because he has treated me with contempt,” said Kitty, in a
breaking voice. “Don’t talk of it! Please, don’t talk of it!”
“But who can have told you so? No one has said that. I’m certain he was
in love with you, and would still be in love with you, if it
hadn’t....”
“Oh, the most awful thing of all for me is this sympathizing!” shrieked
Kitty, suddenly flying into a passion. She turned round on her chair,
flushed crimson, and rapidly moving her fingers, pinched the clasp of
her belt first with one hand and then with the other. Dolly knew this
trick her sister had of clenching her hands when she was much excited;
she knew, too, that in moments of excitement Kitty was capable of
forgetting herself and saying a great deal too much, and Dolly would
have soothed her, but it was too late.
“What, what is it you want to make me feel, eh?” said Kitty quickly.
“That I’ve been in love with a man who didn’t care a straw for me, and
that I’m dying of love for him? And this is said to me by my own
sister, who imagines that ... that ... that she’s sympathizing with
me!... I don’t want these condolences and humbug!”
“Kitty, you’re unjust.”
“Why are you tormenting me?”
“But I ... quite the contrary ... I see you’re unhappy....”
But Kitty in her fury did not hear her.
“I’ve nothing to grieve over and be comforted about. I am too proud
ever to allow myself to care for a man who does not love me.”
“Yes, I don’t say so either.... Only one thing. Tell me the truth,”
said Darya Alexandrovna, taking her by the hand: “tell me, did Levin
speak to you?...”
The mention of Levin’s name seemed to deprive Kitty of the last vestige
of self-control. She leaped up from her chair, and flinging her clasp
on the ground, she gesticulated rapidly with her hands and said:
“Why bring Levin in too? I can’t understand what you want to torment me
for. I’ve told you, and I say it again, that I have some pride, and
never, _never_ would I do as you’re doing—go back to a man who’s
deceived you, who has cared for another woman. I can’t understand it!
You may, but I can’t!”
And saying these words she glanced at her sister, and seeing that Dolly
sat silent, her head mournfully bowed, Kitty, instead of running out of
the room as she had meant to do, sat down near the door, and hid her
face in her handkerchief.
The silence lasted for two minutes: Dolly was thinking of herself. That
humiliation of which she was always conscious came back to her with a
peculiar bitterness when her sister reminded her of it. She had not
looked for such cruelty in her sister, and she was angry with her. But
suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and with it the sound of
heart-rending, smothered sobbing, and felt arms about her neck. Kitty
was on her knees before her.
“Dolinka, I am so, so wretched!” she whispered penitently. And the
sweet face covered with tears hid itself in Darya Alexandrovna’s skirt.
As though tears were the indispensable oil, without which the machinery
of mutual confidence could not run smoothly between the two sisters,
the sisters after their tears talked, not of what was uppermost in
their minds, but, though they talked of outside matters, they
understood each other. Kitty knew that the words she had uttered in
anger about her husband’s infidelity and her humiliating position had
cut her poor sister to the heart, but that she had forgiven her. Dolly
for her part knew all she had wanted to find out. She felt certain that
her surmises were correct; that Kitty’s misery, her inconsolable
misery, was due precisely to the fact that Levin had made her an offer
and she had refused him, and Vronsky had deceived her, and that she was
fully prepared to love Levin and to detest Vronsky. Kitty said not a
word of that; she talked of nothing but her spiritual condition.
“I have nothing to make me miserable,” she said, getting calmer; “but
can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome,
coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can’t imagine what
loathsome thoughts I have about everything.”
“Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?” asked Dolly, smiling.
“The most utterly loathsome and coarse: I can’t tell you. It’s not
unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that
was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most
loathsome. Come, how am I to tell you?” she went on, seeing the puzzled
look in her sister’s eyes. “Father began saying something to me just
now.... It seems to me he thinks all I want is to be married. Mother
takes me to a ball: it seems to me she only takes me to get me married
off as soon as may be, and be rid of me. I know it’s not the truth, but
I can’t drive away such thoughts. Eligible suitors, as they call them—I
can’t bear to see them. It seems to me they’re taking stock of me and
summing me up. In old days to go anywhere in a ball dress was a simple
joy to me, I admired myself; now I feel ashamed and awkward. And then!
The doctor.... Then....” Kitty hesitated; she wanted to say further
that ever since this change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyevitch
had become insufferably repulsive to her, and that she could not see
him without the grossest and most hideous conceptions rising before her
imagination.
“Oh, well, everything presents itself to me, in the coarsest, most
loathsome light,” she went on. “That’s my illness. Perhaps it will pass
off.”
“But you mustn’t think about it.”
“I can’t help it. I’m never happy except with the children at your
house.”
“What a pity you can’t be with me!”
“Oh, yes, I’m coming. I’ve had scarlatina, and I’ll persuade mamma to
let me.”
Kitty insisted on having her way, and went to stay at her sister’s and
nursed the children all through the scarlatina, for scarlatina it
turned out to be. The two sisters brought all the six children
successfully through it, but Kitty was no better in health, and in Lent
the Shtcherbatskys went abroad.
Chapter 4
The highest Petersburg society is essentially one: in it everyone knows
everyone else, everyone even visits everyone else. But this great set
has its subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close
ties in three different circles of this highest society. One circle was
her husband’s government official set, consisting of his colleagues and
subordinates, brought together in the most various and capricious
manner, and belonging to different social strata. Anna found it
difficult now to recall the feeling of almost awe-stricken reverence
which she had at first entertained for these persons. Now she knew all
of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their
habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them. She
knew their relations with one another and with the head authorities,
knew who was for whom, and how each one maintained his position, and
where they agreed and disagreed. But the circle of political, masculine
interests had never interested her, in spite of countess Lidia
Ivanovna’s influence, and she avoided it.
Another little set with which Anna was in close relations was the one
by means of which Alexey Alexandrovitch had made his career. The center
of this circle was the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. It was a set made up of
elderly, ugly, benevolent, and godly women, and clever, learned, and
ambitious men. One of the clever people belonging to the set had called
it “the conscience of Petersburg society.” Alexey Alexandrovitch had
the highest esteem for this circle, and Anna with her special gift for
getting on with everyone, had in the early days of her life in
Petersburg made friends in this circle also. Now, since her return from
Moscow, she had come to feel this set insufferable. It seemed to her
that both she and all of them were insincere, and she felt so bored and
ill at ease in that world that she went to see the Countess Lidia
Ivanovna as little as possible.
The third circle with which Anna had ties was preeminently the
fashionable world—the world of balls, of dinners, of sumptuous dresses,
the world that hung on to the court with one hand, so as to avoid
sinking to the level of the demi-monde. For the demi-monde the members
of that fashionable world believed that they despised, though their
tastes were not merely similar, but in fact identical. Her connection
with this circle was kept up through Princess Betsy Tverskaya, her
cousin’s wife, who had an income of a hundred and twenty thousand
roubles, and who had taken a great fancy to Anna ever since she first
came out, showed her much attention, and drew her into her set, making
fun of Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s coterie.
“When I’m old and ugly I’ll be the same,” Betsy used to say; “but for a
pretty young woman like you it’s early days for that house of charity.”
Anna had at first avoided as far as she could Princess Tverskaya’s
world, because it necessitated an expenditure beyond her means, and
besides in her heart she preferred the first circle. But since her
visit to Moscow she had done quite the contrary. She avoided her
serious-minded friends, and went out into the fashionable world. There
she met Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at those meetings.
She met Vronsky specially often at Betsy’s for Betsy was a Vronsky by
birth and his cousin. Vronsky was everywhere where he had any chance of
meeting Anna, and speaking to her, when he could, of his love. She gave
him no encouragement, but every time she met him there surged up in her
heart that same feeling of quickened life that had come upon her that
day in the railway carriage when she saw him for the first time. She
was conscious herself that her delight sparkled in her eyes and curved
her lips into a smile, and she could not quench the expression of this
delight.
At first Anna sincerely believed that she was displeased with him for
daring to pursue her. Soon after her return from Moscow, on arriving at
a _soirée_ where she had expected to meet him, and not finding him
there, she realized distinctly from the rush of disappointment that she
had been deceiving herself, and that this pursuit was not merely not
distasteful to her, but that it made the whole interest of her life.
The celebrated singer was singing for the second time, and all the
fashionable world was in the theater. Vronsky, seeing his cousin from
his stall in the front row, did not wait till the _entr’acte_, but went
to her box.
“Why didn’t you come to dinner?” she said to him. “I marvel at the
second sight of lovers,” she added with a smile, so that no one but he
could hear; “_she wasn’t there_. But come after the opera.”
Vronsky looked inquiringly at her. She nodded. He thanked her by a
smile, and sat down beside her.
“But how I remember your jeers!” continued Princess Betsy, who took a
peculiar pleasure in following up this passion to a successful issue.
“What’s become of all that? You’re caught, my dear boy.”
“That’s my one desire, to be caught,” answered Vronsky, with his
serene, good-humored smile. “If I complain of anything it’s only that
I’m not caught enough, to tell the truth. I begin to lose hope.”
“Why, whatever hope can you have?” said Betsy, offended on behalf of
her friend. “_Entendons nous...._” But in her eyes there were gleams of
light that betrayed that she understood perfectly and precisely as he
did what hope he might have.
“None whatever,” said Vronsky, laughing and showing his even rows of
teeth. “Excuse me,” he added, taking an opera-glass out of her hand,
and proceeding to scrutinize, over her bare shoulder, the row of boxes
facing them. “I’m afraid I’m becoming ridiculous.”
He was very well aware that he ran no risk of being ridiculous in the
eyes of Betsy or any other fashionable people. He was very well aware
that in their eyes the position of an unsuccessful lover of a girl, or
of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous. But the position of a
man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking
his life on drawing her into adultery, has something fine and grand
about it, and can never be ridiculous; and so it was with a proud and
gay smile under his mustaches that he lowered the opera-glass and
looked at his cousin.
“But why was it you didn’t come to dinner?” she said, admiring him.
“I must tell you about that. I was busily employed, and doing what, do
you suppose? I’ll give you a hundred guesses, a thousand ... you’d
never guess. I’ve been reconciling a husband with a man who’d insulted
his wife. Yes, really!”
“Well, did you succeed?”
“Almost.”
“You really must tell me about it,” she said, getting up. “Come to me
in the next _entr’acte._”
“I can’t; I’m going to the French theater.”
“From Nilsson?” Betsy queried in horror, though she could not herself
have distinguished Nilsson’s voice from any chorus girl’s.
“Can’t help it. I’ve an appointment there, all to do with my mission of
peace.”
“‘Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’” said
Betsy, vaguely recollecting she had heard some similar saying from
someone. “Very well, then, sit down, and tell me what it’s all about.”
And she sat down again.
Chapter 5
“This is rather indiscreet, but it’s so good it’s an awful temptation
to tell the story,” said Vronsky, looking at her with his laughing
eyes. “I’m not going to mention any names.”
“But I shall guess, so much the better.”
“Well, listen: two festive young men were driving—”
“Officers of your regiment, of course?”
“I didn’t say they were officers,—two young men who had been lunching.”
“In other words, drinking.”
“Possibly. They were driving on their way to dinner with a friend in
the most festive state of mind. And they beheld a pretty woman in a
hired sledge; she overtakes them, looks round at them, and, so they
fancy anyway, nods to them and laughs. They, of course, follow her.
They gallop at full speed. To their amazement, the fair one alights at
the entrance of the very house to which they were going. The fair one
darts upstairs to the top story. They get a glimpse of red lips under a
short veil, and exquisite little feet.”
“You describe it with such feeling that I fancy you must be one of the
two.”
“And after what you said, just now! Well, the young men go in to their
comrade’s; he was giving a farewell dinner. There they certainly did
drink a little too much, as one always does at farewell dinners. And at
dinner they inquire who lives at the top in that house. No one knows;
only their host’s valet, in answer to their inquiry whether any ‘young
ladies’ are living on the top floor, answered that there were a great
many of them about there. After dinner the two young men go into their
host’s study, and write a letter to the unknown fair one. They compose
an ardent epistle, a declaration in fact, and they carry the letter
upstairs themselves, so as to elucidate whatever might appear not
perfectly intelligible in the letter.”
“Why are you telling me these horrible stories? Well?”
“They ring. A maid-servant opens the door, they hand her the letter,
and assure the maid that they’re both so in love that they’ll die on
the spot at the door. The maid, stupefied, carries in their messages.
All at once a gentleman appears with whiskers like sausages, as red as
a lobster, announces that there is no one living in the flat except his
wife, and sends them both about their business.”
“How do you know he had whiskers like sausages, as you say?”
“Ah, you shall hear. I’ve just been to make peace between them.”
“Well, and what then?”
“That’s the most interesting part of the story. It appears that it’s a
happy couple, a government clerk and his lady. The government clerk
lodges a complaint, and I became a mediator, and such a mediator!... I
assure you Talleyrand couldn’t hold a candle to me.”
“Why, where was the difficulty?”
“Ah, you shall hear.... We apologize in due form: we are in despair, we
entreat forgiveness for the unfortunate misunderstanding. The
government clerk with the sausages begins to melt, but he, too, desires
to express his sentiments, and as soon as ever he begins to express
them, he begins to get hot and say nasty things, and again I’m obliged
to trot out all my diplomatic talents. I allowed that their conduct was
bad, but I urged him to take into consideration their heedlessness,
their youth; then, too, the young men had only just been lunching
together. ‘You understand. They regret it deeply, and beg you to
overlook their misbehavior.’ The government clerk was softened once
more. ‘I consent, count, and am ready to overlook it; but you perceive
that my wife—my wife’s a respectable woman—has been exposed to the
persecution, and insults, and effrontery of young upstarts,
scoundrels....’ And you must understand, the young upstarts are present
all the while, and I have to keep the peace between them. Again I call
out all my diplomacy, and again as soon as the thing was about at an
end, our friend the government clerk gets hot and red, and his sausages
stand on end with wrath, and once more I launch out into diplomatic
wiles.”
“Ah, he must tell you this story!” said Betsy, laughing, to a lady who
came into her box. “He has been making me laugh so.”
“Well, _bonne chance_!” she added, giving Vronsky one finger of the
hand in which she held her fan, and with a shrug of her shoulders she
twitched down the bodice of her gown that had worked up, so as to be
duly naked as she moved forward towards the footlights into the light
of the gas, and the sight of all eyes.
Vronsky drove to the French theater, where he really had to see the
colonel of his regiment, who never missed a single performance there.
He wanted to see him, to report on the result of his mediation, which
had occupied and amused him for the last three days. Petritsky, whom he
liked, was implicated in the affair, and the other culprit was a
capital fellow and first-rate comrade, who had lately joined the
regiment, the young Prince Kedrov. And what was most important, the
interests of the regiment were involved in it too.
Both the young men were in Vronsky’s company. The colonel of the
regiment was waited upon by the government clerk, Venden, with a
complaint against his officers, who had insulted his wife. His young
wife, so Venden told the story—he had been married half a year—was at
church with her mother, and suddenly overcome by indisposition, arising
from her interesting condition, she could not remain standing, she
drove home in the first sledge, a smart-looking one, she came across.
On the spot the officers set off in pursuit of her; she was alarmed,
and feeling still more unwell, ran up the staircase home. Venden
himself, on returning from his office, heard a ring at their bell and
voices, went out, and seeing the intoxicated officers with a letter, he
had turned them out. He asked for exemplary punishment.
“Yes, it’s all very well,” said the colonel to Vronsky, whom he had
invited to come and see him. “Petritsky’s becoming impossible. Not a
week goes by without some scandal. This government clerk won’t let it
drop, he’ll go on with the thing.”
Vronsky saw all the thanklessness of the business, and that there could
be no question of a duel in it, that everything must be done to soften
the government clerk, and hush the matter up. The colonel had called in
Vronsky just because he knew him to be an honorable and intelligent
man, and, more than all, a man who cared for the honor of the regiment.
They talked it over, and decided that Petritsky and Kedrov must go with
Vronsky to Venden’s to apologize. The colonel and Vronsky were both
fully aware that Vronsky’s name and rank would be sure to contribute
greatly to the softening of the injured husband’s feelings.
And these two influences were not in fact without effect; though the
result remained, as Vronsky had described, uncertain.
On reaching the French theater, Vronsky retired to the foyer with the
colonel, and reported to him his success, or non-success. The colonel,
thinking it all over, made up his mind not to pursue the matter
further, but then for his own satisfaction proceeded to cross-examine
Vronsky about his interview; and it was a long while before he could
restrain his laughter, as Vronsky described how the government clerk,
after subsiding for a while, would suddenly flare up again, as he
recalled the details, and how Vronsky, at the last half word of
conciliation, skillfully manœuvered a retreat, shoving Petritsky out
before him.
“It’s a disgraceful story, but killing. Kedrov really can’t fight the
gentleman! Was he so awfully hot?” he commented, laughing. “But what do
you say to Claire today? She’s marvelous,” he went on, speaking of a
new French actress. “However often you see her, every day she’s
different. It’s only the French who can do that.”
Chapter 6
Princess Betsy drove home from the theater, without waiting for the end
of the last act. She had only just time to go into her dressing-room,
sprinkle her long, pale face with powder, rub it, set her dress to
rights, and order tea in the big drawing-room, when one after another
carriages drove up to her huge house in Bolshaia Morskaia. Her guests
stepped out at the wide entrance, and the stout porter, who used to
read the newspapers in the mornings behind the glass door, to the
edification of the passers-by, noiselessly opened the immense door,
letting the visitors pass by him into the house.
Almost at the same instant the hostess, with freshly arranged coiffure
and freshened face, walked in at one door and her guests at the other
door of the drawing-room, a large room with dark walls, downy rugs, and
a brightly lighted table, gleaming with the light of candles, white
cloth, silver samovar, and transparent china tea-things.
The hostess sat down at the table and took off her gloves. Chairs were
set with the aid of footmen, moving almost imperceptibly about the
room; the party settled itself, divided into two groups: one round the
samovar near the hostess, the other at the opposite end of the
drawing-room, round the handsome wife of an ambassador, in black
velvet, with sharply defined black eyebrows. In both groups
conversation wavered, as it always does, for the first few minutes,
broken up by meetings, greetings, offers of tea, and as it were,
feeling about for something to rest upon.
“She’s exceptionally good as an actress; one can see she’s studied
Kaulbach,” said a diplomatic attaché in the group round the
ambassador’s wife. “Did you notice how she fell down?...”
“Oh, please, don’t let us talk about Nilsson! No one can possibly say
anything new about her,” said a fat, red-faced, flaxen-headed lady,
without eyebrows and chignon, wearing an old silk dress. This was
Princess Myakaya, noted for her simplicity and the roughness of her
manners, and nicknamed _enfant terrible_. Princess Myakaya, sitting in
the middle between the two groups, and listening to both, took part in
the conversation first of one and then of the other. “Three people have
used that very phrase about Kaulbach to me today already, just as
though they had made a compact about it. And I can’t see why they liked
that remark so.”
The conversation was cut short by this observation, and a new subject
had to be thought of again.
“Do tell me something amusing but not spiteful,” said the ambassador’s
wife, a great proficient in the art of that elegant conversation called
by the English _small talk_. She addressed the attaché, who was at a
loss now what to begin upon.
“They say that that’s a difficult task, that nothing’s amusing that
isn’t spiteful,” he began with a smile. “But I’ll try. Get me a
subject. It all lies in the subject. If a subject’s given me, it’s easy
to spin something round it. I often think that the celebrated talkers
of the last century would have found it difficult to talk cleverly now.
Everything clever is so stale....”
“That has been said long ago,” the ambassador’s wife interrupted him,
laughing.
The conversation began amiably, but just because it was too amiable, it
came to a stop again. They had to have recourse to the sure,
never-failing topic—gossip.
“Don’t you think there’s something Louis Quinze about Tushkevitch?” he
said, glancing towards a handsome, fair-haired young man, standing at
the table.
“Oh, yes! He’s in the same style as the drawing-room and that’s why it
is he’s so often here.”
This conversation was maintained, since it rested on allusions to what
could not be talked of in that room—that is to say, of the relations of
Tushkevitch with their hostess.
Round the samovar and the hostess the conversation had been meanwhile
vacillating in just the same way between three inevitable topics: the
latest piece of public news, the theater, and scandal. It, too, came
finally to rest on the last topic, that is, ill-natured gossip.
“Have you heard the Maltishtcheva woman—the mother, not the
daughter—has ordered a costume in _diable rose_ color?”
“Nonsense! No, that’s too lovely!”
“I wonder that with her sense—for she’s not a fool, you know—that she
doesn’t see how funny she is.”
Everyone had something to say in censure or ridicule of the luckless
Madame Maltishtcheva, and the conversation crackled merrily, like a
burning faggot-stack.
The husband of Princess Betsy, a good-natured fat man, an ardent
collector of engravings, hearing that his wife had visitors, came into
the drawing-room before going to his club. Stepping noiselessly over
the thick rugs, he went up to Princess Myakaya.
“How did you like Nilsson?” he asked.
“Oh, how can you steal upon anyone like that! How you startled me!” she
responded. “Please don’t talk to me about the opera; you know nothing
about music. I’d better meet you on your own ground, and talk about
your majolica and engravings. Come now, what treasure have you been
buying lately at the old curiosity shops?”
“Would you like me to show you? But you don’t understand such things.”
“Oh, do show me! I’ve been learning about them at those—what’s their
names?... the bankers ... they’ve some splendid engravings. They showed
them to us.”
“Why, have you been at the Schützburgs?” asked the hostess from the
samovar.
“Yes, _ma chère_. They asked my husband and me to dinner, and told us
the sauce at that dinner cost a hundred pounds,” Princess Myakaya said,
speaking loudly, and conscious everyone was listening; “and very nasty
sauce it was, some green mess. We had to ask them, and I made them
sauce for eighteen pence, and everybody was very much pleased with it.
I can’t run to hundred-pound sauces.”
“She’s unique!” said the lady of the house.
“Marvelous!” said someone.
The sensation produced by Princess Myakaya’s speeches was always
unique, and the secret of the sensation she produced lay in the fact
that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she said simple
things with some sense in them. In the society in which she lived such
plain statements produced the effect of the wittiest epigram. Princess
Myakaya could never see why it had that effect, but she knew it had,
and took advantage of it.
As everyone had been listening while Princess Myakaya spoke, and so the
conversation around the ambassador’s wife had dropped, Princess Betsy
tried to bring the whole party together, and turned to the ambassador’s
wife.
“Will you really not have tea? You should come over here by us.”
“No, we’re very happy here,” the ambassador’s wife responded with a
smile, and she went on with the conversation that had been begun.
It was a very agreeable conversation. They were criticizing the
Karenins, husband and wife.
“Anna is quite changed since her stay in Moscow. There’s something
strange about her,” said her friend.
“The great change is that she brought back with her the shadow of
Alexey Vronsky,” said the ambassador’s wife.
“Well, what of it? There’s a fable of Grimm’s about a man without a
shadow, a man who’s lost his shadow. And that’s his punishment for
something. I never could understand how it was a punishment. But a
woman must dislike being without a shadow.”
“Yes, but women with a shadow usually come to a bad end,” said Anna’s
friend.
“Bad luck to your tongue!” said Princess Myakaya suddenly. “Madame
Karenina’s a splendid woman. I don’t like her husband, but I like her
very much.”
“Why don’t you like her husband? He’s such a remarkable man,” said the
ambassador’s wife. “My husband says there are few statesmen like him in
Europe.”
“And my husband tells me just the same, but I don’t believe it,” said
Princess Myakaya. “If our husbands didn’t talk to us, we should see the
facts as they are. Alexey Alexandrovitch, to my thinking, is simply a
fool. I say it in a whisper ... but doesn’t it really make everything
clear? Before, when I was told to consider him clever, I kept looking
for his ability, and thought myself a fool for not seeing it; but
directly I said, _he’s a fool,_ though only in a whisper, everything’s
explained, isn’t it?”
“How spiteful you are today!”
“Not a bit. I’d no other way out of it. One of the two had to be a
fool. And, well, you know one can’t say that of oneself.”
“‘No one is satisfied with his fortune, and everyone is satisfied with
his wit.’” The attaché repeated the French saying.
“That’s just it, just it,” Princess Myakaya turned to him. “But the
point is that I won’t abandon Anna to your mercies. She’s so nice, so
charming. How can she help it if they’re all in love with her, and
follow her about like shadows?”
“Oh, I had no idea of blaming her for it,” Anna’s friend said in
self-defense.
“If no one follows us about like a shadow, that’s no proof that we’ve
any right to blame her.”
And having duly disposed of Anna’s friend, the Princess Myakaya got up,
and together with the ambassador’s wife, joined the group at the table,
where the conversation was dealing with the king of Prussia.
“What wicked gossip were you talking over there?” asked Betsy.
“About the Karenins. The princess gave us a sketch of Alexey
Alexandrovitch,” said the ambassador’s wife with a smile, as she sat
down at the table.
“Pity we didn’t hear it!” said Princess Betsy, glancing towards the
door. “Ah, here you are at last!” she said, turning with a smile to
Vronsky, as he came in.
Vronsky was not merely acquainted with all the persons whom he was
meeting here; he saw them all every day; and so he came in with the
quiet manner with which one enters a room full of people from whom one
has only just parted.
“Where do I come from?” he said, in answer to a question from the
ambassador’s wife. “Well, there’s no help for it, I must confess. From
the _opera bouffe_. I do believe I’ve seen it a hundred times, and
always with fresh enjoyment. It’s exquisite! I know it’s disgraceful,
but I go to sleep at the opera, and I sit out the _opera bouffe_ to the
last minute, and enjoy it. This evening....”
He mentioned a French actress, and was going to tell something about
her; but the ambassador’s wife, with playful horror, cut him short.
“Please don’t tell us about that horror.”
“All right, I won’t especially as everyone knows those horrors.”
“And we should all go to see them if it were accepted as the correct
thing, like the opera,” chimed in Princess Myakaya.
Chapter 7
Steps were heard at the door, and Princess Betsy, knowing it was Madame
Karenina, glanced at Vronsky. He was looking towards the door, and his
face wore a strange new expression. Joyfully, intently, and at the same
time timidly, he gazed at the approaching figure, and slowly he rose to
his feet. Anna walked into the drawing-room. Holding herself extremely
erect, as always, looking straight before her, and moving with her
swift, resolute, and light step, that distinguished her from all other
society women, she crossed the short space to her hostess, shook hands
with her, smiled, and with the same smile looked around at Vronsky.
Vronsky bowed low and pushed a chair up for her.
She acknowledged this only by a slight nod, flushed a little, and
frowned. But immediately, while rapidly greeting her acquaintances, and
shaking the hands proffered to her, she addressed Princess Betsy:
“I have been at Countess Lidia’s, and meant to have come here earlier,
but I stayed on. Sir John was there. He’s very interesting.”
“Oh, that’s this missionary?”
“Yes; he told us about the life in India, most interesting things.”
The conversation, interrupted by her coming in, flickered up again like
the light of a lamp being blown out.
“Sir John! Yes, Sir John; I’ve seen him. He speaks well. The Vlassieva
girl’s quite in love with him.”
“And is it true the younger Vlassieva girl’s to marry Topov?”
“Yes, they say it’s quite a settled thing.”
“I wonder at the parents! They say it’s a marriage for love.”
“For love? What antediluvian notions you have! Can one talk of love in
these days?” said the ambassador’s wife.
“What’s to be done? It’s a foolish old fashion that’s kept up still,”
said Vronsky.
“So much the worse for those who keep up the fashion. The only happy
marriages I know are marriages of prudence.”
“Yes, but then how often the happiness of these prudent marriages flies
away like dust just because that passion turns up that they have
refused to recognize,” said Vronsky.
“But by marriages of prudence we mean those in which both parties have
sown their wild oats already. That’s like scarlatina—one has to go
through it and get it over.”
“Then they ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.”
“I was in love in my young days with a deacon,” said the Princess
Myakaya. “I don’t know that it did me any good.”
“No; I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes
and then correct them,” said Princess Betsy.
“Even after marriage?” said the ambassador’s wife playfully.
“‘It’s never too late to mend.’” The attaché repeated the English
proverb.
“Just so,” Betsy agreed; “one must make mistakes and correct them. What
do you think about it?” she turned to Anna, who, with a faintly
perceptible resolute smile on her lips, was listening in silence to the
conversation.
“I think,” said Anna, playing with the glove she had taken off, “I
think ... of so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so
many kinds of love.”
Vronsky was gazing at Anna, and with a fainting heart waiting for what
she would say. He sighed as after a danger escaped when she uttered
these words.
Anna suddenly turned to him.
“Oh, I have had a letter from Moscow. They write me that Kitty
Shtcherbatskaya’s very ill.”
“Really?” said Vronsky, knitting his brows.
Anna looked sternly at him.
“That doesn’t interest you?”
“On the contrary, it does, very much. What was it exactly they told
you, if I may know?” he questioned.
Anna got up and went to Betsy.
“Give me a cup of tea,” she said, standing at her table.
While Betsy was pouring out the tea, Vronsky went up to Anna.
“What is it they write to you?” he repeated.
“I often think men have no understanding of what’s not honorable though
they’re always talking of it,” said Anna, without answering him. “I’ve
wanted to tell you so a long while,” she added, and moving a few steps
away, she sat down at a table in a corner covered with albums.
“I don’t quite understand the meaning of your words,” he said, handing
her the cup.
She glanced towards the sofa beside her, and he instantly sat down.
“Yes, I have been wanting to tell you,” she said, not looking at him.
“You behaved wrongly, very wrongly.”
“Do you suppose I don’t know that I’ve acted wrongly? But who was the
cause of my doing so?”
“What do you say that to me for?” she said, glancing severely at him.
“You know what for,” he answered boldly and joyfully, meeting her
glance and not dropping his eyes.
Not he, but she, was confused.
“That only shows you have no heart,” she said. But her eyes said that
she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him.
“What you spoke of just now was a mistake, and not love.”
“Remember that I have forbidden you to utter that word, that hateful
word,” said Anna, with a shudder. But at once she felt that by that
very word “forbidden” she had shown that she acknowledged certain
rights over him, and by that very fact was encouraging him to speak of
love. “I have long meant to tell you this,” she went on, looking
resolutely into his eyes, and hot all over from the burning flush on
her cheeks. “I’ve come on purpose this evening, knowing I should meet
you. I have come to tell you that this must end. I have never blushed
before anyone, and you force me to feel to blame for something.”
He looked at her and was struck by a new spiritual beauty in her face.
“What do you wish of me?” he said simply and seriously.
“I want you to go to Moscow and ask for Kitty’s forgiveness,” she said.
“You don’t wish that?” he said.
He saw she was saying what she forced herself to say, not what she
wanted to say.
“If you love me, as you say,” she whispered, “do so that I may be at
peace.”
His face grew radiant.
“Don’t you know that you’re all my life to me? But I know no peace, and
I can’t give it to you; all myself—and love ... yes. I can’t think of
you and myself apart. You and I are one to me. And I see no chance
before us of peace for me or for you. I see a chance of despair, of
wretchedness ... or I see a chance of bliss, what bliss!... Can it be
there’s no chance of it?” he murmured with his lips; but she heard.
She strained every effort of her mind to say what ought to be said. But
instead of that she let her eyes rest on him, full of love, and made no
answer.
“It’s come!” he thought in ecstasy. “When I was beginning to despair,
and it seemed there would be no end—it’s come! She loves me! She owns
it!”
“Then do this for me: never say such things to me, and let us be
friends,” she said in words; but her eyes spoke quite differently.
“Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be
the happiest or the wretchedest of people—that’s in your hands.”
She would have said something, but he interrupted her.
“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do.
But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear.
You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”
“I don’t want to drive you away.”
“Only don’t change anything, leave everything as it is,” he said in a
shaky voice. “Here’s your husband.”
At that instant Alexey Alexandrovitch did in fact walk into the room
with his calm, awkward gait.
Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, he went up to the lady of the house,
and sitting down for a cup of tea, began talking in his deliberate,
always audible voice, in his habitual tone of banter, ridiculing
someone.
“Your Rambouillet is in full conclave,” he said, looking round at all
the party; “the graces and the muses.”
But Princess Betsy could not endure that tone of his—“sneering,” as she
called it, using the English word, and like a skillful hostess she at
once brought him into a serious conversation on the subject of
universal conscription. Alexey Alexandrovitch was immediately
interested in the subject, and began seriously defending the new
imperial decree against Princess Betsy, who had attacked it.
Vronsky and Anna still sat at the little table.
“This is getting indecorous,” whispered one lady, with an expressive
glance at Madame Karenina, Vronsky, and her husband.
“What did I tell you?” said Anna’s friend.
But not only those ladies, almost everyone in the room, even the
Princess Myakaya and Betsy herself, looked several times in the
direction of the two who had withdrawn from the general circle, as
though that were a disturbing fact. Alexey Alexandrovitch was the only
person who did not once look in that direction, and was not diverted
from the interesting discussion he had entered upon.
Noticing the disagreeable impression that was being made on everyone,
Princess Betsy slipped someone else into her place to listen to Alexey
Alexandrovitch, and went up to Anna.
“I’m always amazed at the clearness and precision of your husband’s
language,” she said. “The most transcendental ideas seem to be within
my grasp when he’s speaking.”
“Oh, yes!” said Anna, radiant with a smile of happiness, and not
understanding a word of what Betsy had said. She crossed over to the
big table and took part in the general conversation.
Alexey Alexandrovitch, after staying half an hour, went up to his wife
and suggested that they should go home together. But she answered, not
looking at him, that she was staying to supper. Alexey Alexandrovitch
made his bows and withdrew.
The fat old Tatar, Madame Karenina’s coachman, was with difficulty
holding one of her pair of grays, chilled with the cold and rearing at
the entrance. A footman stood opening the carriage door. The
hall-porter stood holding open the great door of the house. Anna
Arkadyevna, with her quick little hand, was unfastening the lace of her
sleeve, caught in the hook of her fur cloak, and with bent head
listening to the words Vronsky murmured as he escorted her down.
“You’ve said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing,” he was saying;
“but you know that friendship’s not what I want: that there’s only one
happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so ... yes,
love!...”
“Love,” she repeated slowly, in an inner voice, and suddenly, at the
very instant she unhooked the lace, she added, “Why I don’t like the
word is that it means too much to me, far more than you can
understand,” and she glanced into his face. “_Au revoir!_”
She gave him her hand, and with her rapid, springy step she passed by
the porter and vanished into the carriage.
Her glance, the touch of her hand, set him aflame. He kissed the palm
of his hand where she had touched it, and went home, happy in the sense
that he had got nearer to the attainment of his aims that evening than
during the last two months.
Chapter 8
Alexey Alexandrovitch had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact
that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a table apart, in eager
conversation with him about something. But he noticed that to the rest
of the party this appeared something striking and improper, and for
that reason it seemed to him too to be improper. He made up his mind
that he must speak of it to his wife.
On reaching home Alexey Alexandrovitch went to his study, as he usually
did, seated himself in his low chair, opened a book on the Papacy at
the place where he had laid the paper-knife in it, and read till one
o’clock, just as he usually did. But from time to time he rubbed his
high forehead and shook his head, as though to drive away something. At
his usual time he got up and made his toilet for the night. Anna
Arkadyevna had not yet come in. With a book under his arm he went
upstairs. But this evening, instead of his usual thoughts and
meditations upon official details, his thoughts were absorbed by his
wife and something disagreeable connected with her. Contrary to his
usual habit, he did not get into bed, but fell to walking up and down
the rooms with his hands clasped behind his back. He could not go to
bed, feeling that it was absolutely needful for him first to think
thoroughly over the position that had just arisen.
When Alexey Alexandrovitch had made up his mind that he must talk to
his wife about it, it had seemed a very easy and simple matter. But
now, when he began to think over the question that had just presented
itself, it seemed to him very complicated and difficult.
Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his
notions was an insult to one’s wife, and one ought to have confidence
in one’s wife. Why one ought to have confidence—that is to say,
complete conviction that his young wife would always love him—he did
not ask himself. But he had no experience of lack of confidence,
because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to
have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful
feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he
felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and
irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch
was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife’s
loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very
irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his
life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres,
having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had
stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he
experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing
a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is
broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself,
the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had
lived. For the first time the question presented itself to him of the
possibility of his wife’s loving someone else, and he was horrified at
it.
He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread over
the resounding parquet of the dining-room, where one lamp was burning,
over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, in which the light was
reflected on the big new portrait of himself hanging over the sofa, and
across her boudoir, where two candles burned, lighting up the portraits
of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knick-knacks of her
writing-table, that he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to
the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk,
especially at the parquet of the lighted dining-room, he halted and
said to himself, “Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to; I must
express my view of it and my decision.” And he turned back again. “But
express what—what decision?” he said to himself in the drawing-room,
and he found no reply. “But after all,” he asked himself before turning
into the boudoir, “what has occurred? Nothing. She was talking a long
while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can talk to
whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and
her,” he told himself as he went into her boudoir; but this dictum,
which had always had such weight with him before, had now no weight and
no meaning at all. And from the bedroom door he turned back again; but
as he entered the dark drawing-room some inner voice told him that it
was not so, and that if others noticed it that showed that there was
something. And he said to himself again in the dining-room, “Yes, I
must decide and put a stop to it, and express my view of it....” And
again at the turn in the drawing-room he asked himself, “Decide how?”
And again he asked himself, “What had occurred?” and answered,
“Nothing,” and recollected that jealousy was a feeling insulting to his
wife; but again in the drawing-room he was convinced that something had
happened. His thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle,
without coming upon anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead,
and sat down in her boudoir.
There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case lying at
the top and an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly changed. He
began to think of her, of what she was thinking and feeling. For the
first time he pictured vividly to himself her personal life, her ideas,
her desires, and the idea that she could and should have a separate
life of her own seemed to him so alarming that he made haste to dispel
it. It was the chasm which he was afraid to peep into. To put himself
in thought and feeling in another person’s place was a spiritual
exercise not natural to Alexey Alexandrovitch. He looked on this
spiritual exercise as a harmful and dangerous abuse of the fancy.
“And the worst of it all,” thought he, “is that just now, at the very
moment when my great work is approaching completion” (he was thinking
of the project he was bringing forward at the time), “when I stand in
need of all my mental peace and all my energies, just now this stupid
worry should fall foul of me. But what’s to be done? I’m not one of
those men who submit to uneasiness and worry without having the force
of character to face them.
“I must think it over, come to a decision, and put it out of my mind,”
he said aloud.
“The question of her feelings, of what has passed and may be passing in
her soul, that’s not my affair; that’s the affair of her conscience,
and falls under the head of religion,” he said to himself, feeling
consolation in the sense that he had found to which division of
regulating principles this new circumstance could be properly referred.
“And so,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, “questions as to her
feelings, and so on, are questions for her conscience, with which I can
have nothing to do. My duty is clearly defined. As the head of the
family, I am a person bound in duty to guide her, and consequently, in
part the person responsible; I am bound to point out the danger I
perceive, to warn her, even to use my authority. I ought to speak
plainly to her.” And everything that he would say tonight to his wife
took clear shape in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s head. Thinking over what he
would say, he somewhat regretted that he should have to use his time
and mental powers for domestic consumption, with so little to show for
it, but, in spite of that, the form and contents of the speech before
him shaped itself as clearly and distinctly in his head as a
ministerial report.
“I must say and express fully the following points: first, exposition
of the value to be attached to public opinion and to decorum; secondly,
exposition of religious significance of marriage; thirdly, if need be,
reference to the calamity possibly ensuing to our son; fourthly,
reference to the unhappiness likely to result to herself.” And,
interlacing his fingers, Alexey Alexandrovitch stretched them, and the
joints of the fingers cracked. This trick, a bad habit, the cracking of
his fingers, always soothed him, and gave precision to his thoughts, so
needful to him at this juncture.
There was the sound of a carriage driving up to the front door. Alexey
Alexandrovitch halted in the middle of the room.
A woman’s step was heard mounting the stairs. Alexey Alexandrovitch,
ready for his speech, stood compressing his crossed fingers, waiting to
see if the crack would not come again. One joint cracked.
Already, from the sound of light steps on the stairs, he was aware that
she was close, and though he was satisfied with his speech, he felt
frightened of the explanation confronting him....
Chapter 9
Anna came in with hanging head, playing with the tassels of her hood.
Her face was brilliant and glowing; but this glow was not one of
brightness; it suggested the fearful glow of a conflagration in the
midst of a dark night. On seeing her husband, Anna raised her head and
smiled, as though she had just waked up.
“You’re not in bed? What a wonder!” she said, letting fall her hood,
and without stopping, she went on into the dressing-room. “It’s late,
Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she said, when she had gone through the
doorway.
“Anna, it’s necessary for me to have a talk with you.”
“With me?” she said, wonderingly. She came out from behind the door of
the dressing-room, and looked at him. “Why, what is it? What about?”
she asked, sitting down. “Well, let’s talk, if it’s so necessary. But
it would be better to get to sleep.”
Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her
own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how
likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an
impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had
come to her aid and was supporting her.
“Anna, I must warn you,” he began.
“Warn me?” she said. “Of what?”
She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not know
her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything unnatural,
either in the sound or the sense of her words. But to him, knowing her,
knowing that whenever he went to bed five minutes later than usual, she
noticed it, and asked him the reason; to him, knowing that every joy,
every pleasure and pain that she felt she communicated to him at once;
to him, now to see that she did not care to notice his state of mind,
that she did not care to say a word about herself, meant a great deal.
He saw that the inmost recesses of her soul, that had always hitherto
lain open before him, were closed against him. More than that, he saw
from her tone that she was not even perturbed at that, but as it were
said straight out to him: “Yes, it’s shut up, and so it must be, and
will be in future.” Now he experienced a feeling such as a man might
have, returning home and finding his own house locked up. “But perhaps
the key may yet be found,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“I want to warn you,” he said in a low voice, “that through
thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be talked
about in society. Your too animated conversation this evening with
Count Vronsky” (he enunciated the name firmly and with deliberate
emphasis) “attracted attention.”
He talked and looked at her laughing eyes, which frightened him now
with their impenetrable look, and, as he talked, he felt all the
uselessness and idleness of his words.
“You’re always like that,” she answered, as though completely
misapprehending him, and of all he had said only taking in the last
phrase. “One time you don’t like my being dull, and another time you
don’t like my being lively. I wasn’t dull. Does that offend you?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch shivered, and bent his hands to make the joints
crack.
“Oh, please, don’t do that, I do so dislike it,” she said.
“Anna, is this you?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, quietly making an
effort over himself, and restraining the motion of his fingers.
“But what is it all about?” she said, with such genuine and droll
wonder. “What do you want of me?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch paused, and rubbed his forehead and his eyes. He
saw that instead of doing as he had intended—that is to say, warning
his wife against a mistake in the eyes of the world—he had
unconsciously become agitated over what was the affair of her
conscience, and was struggling against the barrier he fancied between
them.
“This is what I meant to say to you,” he went on coldly and composedly,
“and I beg you to listen to it. I consider jealousy, as you know, a
humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be
influenced by it; but there are certain rules of decorum which cannot
be disregarded with impunity. This evening it was not I observed it,
but judging by the impression made on the company, everyone observed
that your conduct and deportment were not altogether what could be
desired.”
“I positively don’t understand,” said Anna, shrugging her shoulders—“He
doesn’t care,” she thought. “But other people noticed it, and that’s
what upsets him.”—“You’re not well, Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she added,
and she got up, and would have gone towards the door; but he moved
forward as though he would stop her.
His face was ugly and forbidding, as Anna had never seen him. She
stopped, and bending her head back and on one side, began with her
rapid hand taking out her hairpins.
“Well, I’m listening to what’s to come,” she said, calmly and
ironically; “and indeed I listen with interest, for I should like to
understand what’s the matter.”
She spoke, and marveled at the confident, calm, and natural tone in
which she was speaking, and the choice of the words she used.
“To enter into all the details of your feelings I have no right, and
besides, I regard that as useless and even harmful,” began Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “Ferreting in one’s soul, one often ferrets out
something that might have lain there unnoticed. Your feelings are an
affair of your own conscience; but I am in duty bound to you, to
myself, and to God, to point out to you your duties. Our life has been
joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a
crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement.”
“I don’t understand a word. And, oh dear! how sleepy I am, unluckily,”
she said, rapidly passing her hand through her hair, feeling for the
remaining hairpins.
“Anna, for God’s sake don’t speak like that!” he said gently. “Perhaps
I am mistaken, but believe me, what I say, I say as much for myself as
for you. I am your husband, and I love you.”
For an instant her face fell, and the mocking gleam in her eyes died
away; but the word _love_ threw her into revolt again. She thought:
“Love? Can he love? If he hadn’t heard there was such a thing as love,
he would never have used the word. He doesn’t even know what love is.”
“Alexey Alexandrovitch, really I don’t understand,” she said. “Define
what it is you find....”
“Pardon, let me say all I have to say. I love you. But I am not
speaking of myself; the most important persons in this matter are our
son and yourself. It may very well be, I repeat, that my words seem to
you utterly unnecessary and out of place; it may be that they are
called forth by my mistaken impression. In that case, I beg you to
forgive me. But if you are conscious yourself of even the smallest
foundation for them, then I beg you to think a little, and if your
heart prompts you, to speak out to me....”
Alexey Alexandrovitch was unconsciously saying something utterly unlike
what he had prepared.
“I have nothing to say. And besides,” she said hurriedly, with
difficulty repressing a smile, “it’s really time to be in bed.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed, and, without saying more, went into the
bedroom.
When she came into the bedroom, he was already in bed. His lips were
sternly compressed, and his eyes looked away from her. Anna got into
her bed, and lay expecting every minute that he would begin to speak to
her again. She both feared his speaking and wished for it. But he was
silent. She waited for a long while without moving, and had forgotten
about him. She thought of that other; she pictured him, and felt how
her heart was flooded with emotion and guilty delight at the thought of
him. Suddenly she heard an even, tranquil snore. For the first instant
Alexey Alexandrovitch seemed, as it were, appalled at his own snoring,
and ceased; but after an interval of two breathings the snore sounded
again, with a new tranquil rhythm.
“It’s late, it’s late,” she whispered with a smile. A long while she
lay, not moving, with open eyes, whose brilliance she almost fancied
she could herself see in the darkness.
Chapter 10
From that time a new life began for Alexey Alexandrovitch and for his
wife. Nothing special happened. Anna went out into society, as she had
always done, was particularly often at Princess Betsy’s, and met
Vronsky everywhere. Alexey Alexandrovitch saw this, but could do
nothing. All his efforts to draw her into open discussion she
confronted with a barrier which he could not penetrate, made up of a
sort of amused perplexity. Outwardly everything was the same, but their
inner relations were completely changed. Alexey Alexandrovitch, a man
of great power in the world of politics, felt himself helpless in this.
Like an ox with head bent, submissively he awaited the blow which he
felt was lifted over him. Every time he began to think about it, he
felt that he must try once more, that by kindness, tenderness, and
persuasion there was still hope of saving her, of bringing her back to
herself, and every day he made ready to talk to her. But every time he
began talking to her, he felt that the spirit of evil and deceit, which
had taken possession of her, had possession of him too, and he talked
to her in a tone quite unlike that in which he had meant to talk.
Involuntarily he talked to her in his habitual tone of jeering at
anyone who should say what he was saying. And in that tone it was
impossible to say what needed to be said to her.
Chapter 11
That which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing
desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna
had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more
entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood
before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm,
not knowing how or why.
“Anna! Anna!” he said with a choking voice, “Anna, for pity’s sake!...”
But the louder he spoke, the lower she dropped her once proud and gay,
now shame-stricken head, and she bowed down and sank from the sofa
where she was sitting, down on the floor, at his feet; she would have
fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.
“My God! Forgive me!” she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to her
bosom.
She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left her but to
humiliate herself and beg forgiveness; and as now there was no one in
her life but him, to him she addressed her prayer for forgiveness.
Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she
could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees
the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was
their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful
and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful
price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and
infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body
of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what
he has gained by his murder.
And with fury, as it were with passion, the murderer falls on the body,
and drags it and hacks at it; so he covered her face and shoulders with
kisses. She held his hand, and did not stir. “Yes, these kisses—that is
what has been bought by this shame. Yes, and one hand, which will
always be mine—the hand of my accomplice.” She lifted up that hand and
kissed it. He sank on his knees and tried to see her face; but she hid
it, and said nothing. At last, as though making an effort over herself,
she got up and pushed him away. Her face was still as beautiful, but it
was only the more pitiful for that.
“All is over,” she said; “I have nothing but you. Remember that.”
“I can never forget what is my whole life. For one instant of this
happiness....”
“Happiness!” she said with horror and loathing and her horror
unconsciously infected him. “For pity’s sake, not a word, not a word
more.”
She rose quickly and moved away from him.
“Not a word more,” she repeated, and with a look of chill despair,
incomprehensible to him, she parted from him. She felt that at that
moment she could not put into words the sense of shame, of rapture, and
of horror at this stepping into a new life, and she did not want to
speak of it, to vulgarize this feeling by inappropriate words. But
later too, and the next day and the third day, she still found no words
in which she could express the complexity of her feelings; indeed, she
could not even find thoughts in which she could clearly think out all
that was in her soul.
She said to herself: “No, just now I can’t think of it, later on, when
I am calmer.” But this calm for thought never came; every time the
thought rose of what she had done and what would happen to her, and
what she ought to do, a horror came over her and she drove those
thoughts away.
“Later, later,” she said—“when I am calmer.”
But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position
presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. One dream haunted
her almost every night. She dreamed that both were her husbands at
once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexey Alexandrovitch
was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, “How happy we are now!” And
Alexey Vronsky was there too, and he too was her husband. And she was
marveling that it had once seemed impossible to her, was explaining to
them, laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both
of them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her like a
nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.
Chapter 12
In the early days after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin
shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he
said to himself: “This was just how I used to shudder and blush,
thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not
get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I had
mismanaged that affair of my sister’s that was entrusted to me. And
yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could
distress me so much. It will be the same thing too with this trouble.
Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.”
But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about it;
and it was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those first
days. He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of family
life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and
was further than ever from marriage. He was painfully conscious
himself, as were all about him, that at his years it is not well for
man to be alone. He remembered how before starting for Moscow he had
once said to his cowman Nikolay, a simple-hearted peasant, whom he
liked talking to: “Well, Nikolay! I mean to get married,” and how
Nikolay had promptly answered, as of a matter on which there could be
no possible doubt: “And high time too, Konstantin Dmitrievitch.” But
marriage had now become further off than ever. The place was taken, and
whenever he tried to imagine any of the girls he knew in that place, he
felt that it was utterly impossible. Moreover, the recollection of the
rejection and the part he had played in the affair tortured him with
shame. However often he told himself that he was in no wise to blame in
it, that recollection, like other humiliating reminiscences of a
similar kind, made him twinge and blush. There had been in his past, as
in every man’s, actions, recognized by him as bad, for which his
conscience ought to have tormented him; but the memory of these evil
actions was far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but
humiliating reminiscences. These wounds never healed. And with these
memories was now ranged his rejection and the pitiful position in which
he must have appeared to others that evening. But time and work did
their part. Bitter memories were more and more covered up by the
incidents—paltry in his eyes, but really important—of his country life.
Every week he thought less often of Kitty. He was impatiently looking
forward to the news that she was married, or just going to be married,
hoping that such news would, like having a tooth out, completely cure
him.
Meanwhile spring came on, beautiful and kindly, without the delays and
treacheries of spring,—one of those rare springs in which plants,
beasts, and man rejoice alike. This lovely spring roused Levin still
more, and strengthened him in his resolution of renouncing all his past
and building up his lonely life firmly and independently. Though many
of the plans with which he had returned to the country had not been
carried out, still his most important resolution—that of purity—had
been kept by him. He was free from that shame, which had usually
harassed him after a fall; and he could look everyone straight in the
face. In February he had received a letter from Marya Nikolaevna
telling him that his brother Nikolay’s health was getting worse, but
that he would not take advice, and in consequence of this letter Levin
went to Moscow to his brother’s and succeeded in persuading him to see
a doctor and to go to a watering-place abroad. He succeeded so well in
persuading his brother, and in lending him money for the journey
without irritating him, that he was satisfied with himself in that
matter. In addition to his farming, which called for special attention
in spring, and in addition to reading, Levin had begun that winter a
work on agriculture, the plan of which turned on taking into account
the character of the laborer on the land as one of the unalterable data
of the question, like the climate and the soil, and consequently
deducing all the principles of scientific culture, not simply from the
data of soil and climate, but from the data of soil, climate, and a
certain unalterable character of the laborer. Thus, in spite of his
solitude, or in consequence of his solitude, his life was exceedingly
full. Only rarely he suffered from an unsatisfied desire to communicate
his stray ideas to someone besides Agafea Mihalovna. With her indeed he
not infrequently fell into discussion upon physics, the theory of
agriculture, and especially philosophy; philosophy was Agafea
Mihalovna’s favorite subject.
Spring was slow in unfolding. For the last few weeks it had been
steadily fine frosty weather. In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but
at night there were even seven degrees of frost. There was such a
frozen surface on the snow that they drove the wagons anywhere off the
roads. Easter came in the snow. Then all of a sudden, on Easter Monday,
a warm wind sprang up, storm clouds swooped down, and for three days
and three nights the warm, driving rain fell in streams. On Thursday
the wind dropped, and a thick gray fog brooded over the land as though
hiding the mysteries of the transformations that were being wrought in
nature. Behind the fog there was the flowing of water, the cracking and
floating of ice, the swift rush of turbid, foaming torrents; and on the
following Monday, in the evening, the fog parted, the storm clouds
split up into little curling crests of cloud, the sky cleared, and the
real spring had come. In the morning the sun rose brilliant and quickly
wore away the thin layer of ice that covered the water, and all the
warm air was quivering with the steam that rose up from the quickened
earth. The old grass looked greener, and the young grass thrust up its
tiny blades; the buds of the guelder-rose and of the currant and the
sticky birch-buds were swollen with sap, and an exploring bee was
humming about the golden blossoms that studded the willow. Larks
trilled unseen above the velvety green fields and the ice-covered
stubble-land; peewits wailed over the low lands and marshes flooded by
the pools; cranes and wild geese flew high across the sky uttering
their spring calls. The cattle, bald in patches where the new hair had
not grown yet, lowed in the pastures; the bowlegged lambs frisked round
their bleating mothers. Nimble children ran about the drying paths,
covered with the prints of bare feet. There was a merry chatter of
peasant women over their linen at the pond, and the ring of axes in the
yard, where the peasants were repairing ploughs and harrows. The real
spring had come.
Chapter 13
Levin put on his big boots, and, for the first time, a cloth jacket,
instead of his fur cloak, and went out to look after his farm, stepping
over streams of water that flashed in the sunshine and dazzled his
eyes, and treading one minute on ice and the next into sticky mud.
Spring is the time of plans and projects. And, as he came out into the
farmyard, Levin, like a tree in spring that knows not what form will be
taken by the young shoots and twigs imprisoned in its swelling buds,
hardly knew what undertakings he was going to begin upon now in the
farm work that was so dear to him. But he felt that he was full of the
most splendid plans and projects. First of all he went to the cattle.
The cows had been let out into their paddock, and their smooth sides
were already shining with their new, sleek, spring coats; they basked
in the sunshine and lowed to go to the meadow. Levin gazed admiringly
at the cows he knew so intimately to the minutest detail of their
condition, and gave orders for them to be driven out into the meadow,
and the calves to be let into the paddock. The herdsman ran gaily to
get ready for the meadow. The cowherd girls, picking up their
petticoats, ran splashing through the mud with bare legs, still white,
not yet brown from the sun, waving brush wood in their hands, chasing
the calves that frolicked in the mirth of spring.
After admiring the young ones of that year, who were particularly
fine—the early calves were the size of a peasant’s cow, and Pava’s
daughter, at three months old, was as big as a yearling—Levin gave
orders for a trough to be brought out and for them to be fed in the
paddock. But it appeared that as the paddock had not been used during
the winter, the hurdles made in the autumn for it were broken. He sent
for the carpenter, who, according to his orders, ought to have been at
work at the thrashing machine. But it appeared that the carpenter was
repairing the harrows, which ought to have been repaired before Lent.
This was very annoying to Levin. It was annoying to come upon that
everlasting slovenliness in the farm work against which he had been
striving with all his might for so many years. The hurdles, as he
ascertained, being not wanted in winter, had been carried to the
cart-horses’ stable; and there broken, as they were of light
construction, only meant for feeding calves. Moreover, it was apparent
also that the harrows and all the agricultural implements, which he had
directed to be looked over and repaired in the winter, for which very
purpose he had hired three carpenters, had not been put into repair,
and the harrows were being repaired when they ought to have been
harrowing the field. Levin sent for his bailiff, but immediately went
off himself to look for him. The bailiff, beaming all over, like
everyone that day, in a sheepskin bordered with astrachan, came out of
the barn, twisting a bit of straw in his hands.
“Why isn’t the carpenter at the thrashing machine?”
“Oh, I meant to tell you yesterday, the harrows want repairing. Here
it’s time they got to work in the fields.”
“But what were they doing in the winter, then?”
“But what did you want the carpenter for?”
“Where are the hurdles for the calves’ paddock?”
“I ordered them to be got ready. What would you have with those
peasants!” said the bailiff, with a wave of his hand.
“It’s not those peasants but this bailiff!” said Levin, getting angry.
“Why, what do I keep you for?” he cried. But, bethinking himself that
this would not help matters, he stopped short in the middle of a
sentence, and merely sighed. “Well, what do you say? Can sowing begin?”
he asked, after a pause.
“Behind Turkin tomorrow or the next day they might begin.”
“And the clover?”
“I’ve sent Vassily and Mishka; they’re sowing. Only I don’t know if
they’ll manage to get through; it’s so slushy.”
“How many acres?”
“About fifteen.”
“Why not sow all?” cried Levin.
That they were only sowing the clover on fifteen acres, not on all the
forty-five, was still more annoying to him. Clover, as he knew, both
from books and from his own experience, never did well except when it
was sown as early as possible, almost in the snow. And yet Levin could
never get this done.
“There’s no one to send. What would you have with such a set of
peasants? Three haven’t turned up. And there’s Semyon....”
“Well, you should have taken some men from the thatching.”
“And so I have, as it is.”
“Where are the peasants, then?”
“Five are making compôte” (which meant compost), “four are shifting the
oats for fear of a touch of mildew, Konstantin Dmitrievitch.”
Levin knew very well that “a touch of mildew” meant that his English
seed oats were already ruined. Again they had not done as he had
ordered.
“Why, but I told you during Lent to put in pipes,” he cried.
“Don’t put yourself out; we shall get it all done in time.”
Levin waved his hand angrily, went into the granary to glance at the
oats, and then to the stable. The oats were not yet spoiled. But the
peasants were carrying the oats in spades when they might simply let
them slide down into the lower granary; and arranging for this to be
done, and taking two workmen from there for sowing clover, Levin got
over his vexation with the bailiff. Indeed, it was such a lovely day
that one could not be angry.
“Ignat!” he called to the coachman, who, with his sleeves tucked up,
was washing the carriage wheels, “saddle me....”
“Which, sir?”
“Well, let it be Kolpik.”
“Yes, sir.”
While they were saddling his horse, Levin again called up the bailiff,
who was hanging about in sight, to make it up with him, and began
talking to him about the spring operations before them, and his plans
for the farm.
The wagons were to begin carting manure earlier, so as to get all done
before the early mowing. And the ploughing of the further land to go on
without a break so as to let it ripen lying fallow. And the mowing to
be all done by hired labor, not on half-profits. The bailiff listened
attentively, and obviously made an effort to approve of his employer’s
projects. But still he had that look Levin knew so well that always
irritated him, a look of hopelessness and despondency. That look said:
“That’s all very well, but as God wills.”
Nothing mortified Levin so much as that tone. But it was the tone
common to all the bailiffs he had ever had. They had all taken up that
attitude to his plans, and so now he was not angered by it, but
mortified, and felt all the more roused to struggle against this, as it
seemed, elemental force continually ranged against him, for which he
could find no other expression than “as God wills.”
“If we can manage it, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the bailiff.
“Why ever shouldn’t you manage it?”
“We positively must have another fifteen laborers. And they don’t turn
up. There were some here today asking seventy roubles for the summer.”
Levin was silent. Again he was brought face to face with that opposing
force. He knew that however much they tried, they could not hire more
than forty—thirty-seven perhaps or thirty-eight—laborers for a
reasonable sum. Some forty had been taken on, and there were no more.
But still he could not help struggling against it.
“Send to Sury, to Tchefirovka; if they don’t come we must look for
them.”
“Oh, I’ll send, to be sure,” said Vassily Fedorovitch despondently.
“But there are the horses, too, they’re not good for much.”
“We’ll get some more. I know, of course,” Levin added laughing, “you
always want to do with as little and as poor quality as possible; but
this year I’m not going to let you have things your own way. I’ll see
to everything myself.”
“Why, I don’t think you take much rest as it is. It cheers us up to
work under the master’s eye....”
“So they’re sowing clover behind the Birch Dale? I’ll go and have a
look at them,” he said, getting on to the little bay cob, Kolpik, who
was led up by the coachman.
“You can’t get across the streams, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” the
coachman shouted.
“All right, I’ll go by the forest.”
And Levin rode through the slush of the farmyard to the gate and out
into the open country, his good little horse, after his long
inactivity, stepping out gallantly, snorting over the pools, and
asking, as it were, for guidance. If Levin had felt happy before in the
cattle pens and farmyard, he felt happier yet in the open country.
Swaying rhythmically with the ambling paces of his good little cob,
drinking in the warm yet fresh scent of the snow and the air, as he
rode through his forest over the crumbling, wasted snow, still left in
parts, and covered with dissolving tracks, he rejoiced over every tree,
with the moss reviving on its bark and the buds swelling on its shoots.
When he came out of the forest, in the immense plain before him, his
grass fields stretched in an unbroken carpet of green, without one bare
place or swamp, only spotted here and there in the hollows with patches
of melting snow. He was not put out of temper even by the sight of the
peasants’ horses and colts trampling down his young grass (he told a
peasant he met to drive them out), nor by the sarcastic and stupid
reply of the peasant Ipat, whom he met on the way, and asked, “Well,
Ipat, shall we soon be sowing?” “We must get the ploughing done first,
Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” answered Ipat. The further he rode, the
happier he became, and plans for the land rose to his mind each better
than the last; to plant all his fields with hedges along the southern
borders, so that the snow should not lie under them; to divide them up
into six fields of arable and three of pasture and hay; to build a
cattle yard at the further end of the estate, and to dig a pond and to
construct movable pens for the cattle as a means of manuring the land.
And then eight hundred acres of wheat, three hundred of potatoes, and
four hundred of clover, and not one acre exhausted.
Absorbed in such dreams, carefully keeping his horse by the hedges, so
as not to trample his young crops, he rode up to the laborers who had
been sent to sow clover. A cart with the seed in it was standing, not
at the edge, but in the middle of the crop, and the winter corn had
been torn up by the wheels and trampled by the horse. Both the laborers
were sitting in the hedge, probably smoking a pipe together. The earth
in the cart, with which the seed was mixed, was not crushed to powder,
but crusted together or adhering in clods. Seeing the master, the
laborer, Vassily, went towards the cart, while Mishka set to work
sowing. This was not as it should be, but with the laborers Levin
seldom lost his temper. When Vassily came up, Levin told him to lead
the horse to the hedge.
“It’s all right, sir, it’ll spring up again,” responded Vassily.
“Please don’t argue,” said Levin, “but do as you’re told.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Vassily, and he took the horse’s head. “What a
sowing, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” he said, hesitating; “first rate.
Only it’s a work to get about! You drag a ton of earth on your shoes.”
“Why is it you have earth that’s not sifted?” said Levin.
“Well, we crumble it up,” answered Vassily, taking up some seed and
rolling the earth in his palms.
Vassily was not to blame for their having filled up his cart with
unsifted earth, but still it was annoying.
Levin had more than once already tried a way he knew for stifling his
anger, and turning all that seemed dark right again, and he tried that
way now. He watched how Mishka strode along, swinging the huge clods of
earth that clung to each foot; and getting off his horse, he took the
sieve from Vassily and started sowing himself.
“Where did you stop?”
Vassily pointed to the mark with his foot, and Levin went forward as
best he could, scattering the seed on the land. Walking was as
difficult as on a bog, and by the time Levin had ended the row he was
in a great heat, and he stopped and gave up the sieve to Vassily.
“Well, master, when summer’s here, mind you don’t scold me for these
rows,” said Vassily.
“Eh?” said Levin cheerily, already feeling the effect of his method.
“Why, you’ll see in the summer time. It’ll look different. Look you
where I sowed last spring. How I did work at it! I do my best,
Konstantin Dmitrievitch, d’ye see, as I would for my own father. I
don’t like bad work myself, nor would I let another man do it. What’s
good for the master’s good for us too. To look out yonder now,” said
Vassily, pointing, “it does one’s heart good.”
“It’s a lovely spring, Vassily.”
“Why, it’s a spring such as the old men don’t remember the like of. I
was up home; an old man up there has sown wheat too, about an acre of
it. He was saying you wouldn’t know it from rye.”
“Have you been sowing wheat long?”
“Why, sir, it was you taught us the year before last. You gave me two
measures. We sold about eight bushels and sowed a rood.”
“Well, mind you crumble up the clods,” said Levin, going towards his
horse, “and keep an eye on Mishka. And if there’s a good crop you shall
have half a rouble for every acre.”
“Humbly thankful. We are very well content, sir, as it is.”
Levin got on his horse and rode towards the field where was last year’s
clover, and the one which was ploughed ready for the spring corn.
The crop of clover coming up in the stubble was magnificent. It had
survived everything, and stood up vividly green through the broken
stalks of last year’s wheat. The horse sank in up to the pasterns, and
he drew each hoof with a sucking sound out of the half-thawed ground.
Over the ploughland riding was utterly impossible; the horse could only
keep a foothold where there was ice, and in the thawing furrows he sank
deep in at each step. The ploughland was in splendid condition; in a
couple of days it would be fit for harrowing and sowing. Everything was
capital, everything was cheering. Levin rode back across the streams,
hoping the water would have gone down. And he did in fact get across,
and startled two ducks. “There must be snipe too,” he thought, and just
as he reached the turning homewards he met the forest keeper, who
confirmed his theory about the snipe.
Levin went home at a trot, so as to have time to eat his dinner and get
his gun ready for the evening.
Chapter 14
As he rode up to the house in the happiest frame of mind, Levin heard
the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the house.
“Yes, that’s someone from the railway station,” he thought, “just the
time to be here from the Moscow train ... Who could it be? What if it’s
brother Nikolay? He did say: ‘Maybe I’ll go to the waters, or maybe
I’ll come down to you.’” He felt dismayed and vexed for the first
minute, that his brother Nikolay’s presence should come to disturb his
happy mood of spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once
he opened, as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened
feeling of joy and expectation, now he hoped with all his heart that it
was his brother. He pricked up his horse, and riding out from behind
the acacias he saw a hired three-horse sledge from the railway station,
and a gentleman in a fur coat. It was not his brother. “Oh, if it were
only some nice person one could talk to a little!” he thought.
“Ah,” cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. “Here’s a
delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!” he shouted,
recognizing Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“I shall find out for certain whether she’s married, or when she’s
going to be married,” he thought. And on that delicious spring day he
felt that the thought of her did not hurt him at all.
“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting out
of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his
cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits.
“I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and
kissing him, “to have some stand-shooting second, and to sell the
forest at Ergushovo third.”
“Delightful! What a spring we’re having! How ever did you get along in
a sledge?”
“In a cart it would have been worse still, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,”
answered the driver, who knew him.
“Well, I’m very, very glad to see you,” said Levin, with a genuine
smile of childlike delight.
Levin led his friend to the room set apart for visitors, where Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s things were carried also—a bag, a gun in a case, a
satchel for cigars. Leaving him there to wash and change his clothes,
Levin went off to the counting house to speak about the ploughing and
clover. Agafea Mihalovna, always very anxious for the credit of the
house, met him in the hall with inquiries about dinner.
“Do just as you like, only let it be as soon as possible,” he said, and
went to the bailiff.
When he came back, Stepan Arkadyevitch, washed and combed, came out of
his room with a beaming smile, and they went upstairs together.
“Well, I am glad I managed to get away to you! Now I shall understand
what the mysterious business is that you are always absorbed in here.
No, really, I envy you. What a house, how nice it all is! So bright, so
cheerful!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting that it was not always
spring and fine weather like that day. “And your nurse is simply
charming! A pretty maid in an apron might be even more agreeable,
perhaps; but for your severe monastic style it does very well.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch told him many interesting pieces of news;
especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother, Sergey
Ivanovitch, was intending to pay him a visit in the summer.
Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say in reference to Kitty and the
Shtcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was
grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As
always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and
feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not
communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan
Arkadyevitch his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans
for the land, and his thoughts and criticisms on the books he had been
reading, and the idea of his own book, the basis of which really was,
though he was unaware of it himself, a criticism of all the old books
on agriculture. Stepan Arkadyevitch, always charming, understanding
everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on
this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were,
and a new tone of respect that flattered him.
The efforts of Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner should be
particularly good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking the
preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread and butter, salt goose
and salted mushrooms, and in Levin’s finally ordering the soup to be
served without the accompaniment of little pies, with which the cook
had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But though Stepan
Arkadyevitch was accustomed to very different dinners, he thought
everything excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter,
and above all the salt goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup,
and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean wine—everything
was superb and delicious.
“Splendid, splendid!” he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast. “I
feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after the
noise and jolting of a steamer. And so you maintain that the laborer
himself is an element to be studied and to regulate the choice of
methods in agriculture. Of course, I’m an ignorant outsider; but I
should fancy theory and its application will have its influence on the
laborer too.”
“Yes, but wait a bit. I’m not talking of political economy, I’m talking
of the science of agriculture. It ought to be like the natural
sciences, and to observe given phenomena and the laborer in his
economic, ethnographical....”
At that instant Agafea Mihalovna came in with jam.
“Oh, Agafea Mihalovna,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, kissing the tips of
his plump fingers, “what salt goose, what herb brandy!... What do you
think, isn’t it time to start, Kostya?” he added.
Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare
tree-tops of the forest.
“Yes, it’s time,” he said. “Kouzma, get ready the trap,” and he ran
downstairs.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, going down, carefully took the canvas cover off
his varnished gun case with his own hands, and opening it, began to get
ready his expensive new-fashioned gun. Kouzma, who already scented a
big tip, never left Stepan Arkadyevitch’s side, and put on him both his
stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevitch readily left him.
“Kostya, give orders that if the merchant Ryabinin comes ... I told him
to come today, he’s to be brought in and to wait for me....”
“Why, do you mean to say you’re selling the forest to Ryabinin?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“To be sure I do. I have had to do business with him, ‘positively and
conclusively.’”
Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed. “Positively and conclusively” were the
merchant’s favorite words.
“Yes, it’s wonderfully funny the way he talks. She knows where her
master’s going!” he added, patting Laska, who hung about Levin, whining
and licking his hands, his boots, and his gun.
The trap was already at the steps when they went out.
“I told them to bring the trap round; or would you rather walk?”
“No, we’d better drive,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting into the
trap. He sat down, tucked the tiger-skin rug round him, and lighted a
cigar. “How is it you don’t smoke? A cigar is a sort of thing, not
exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure. Come,
this is life! How splendid it is! This is how I should like to live!”
“Why, who prevents you?” said Levin, smiling.
“No, you’re a lucky man! You’ve got everything you like. You like
horses—and you have them; dogs—you have them; shooting—you have it;
farming—you have it.”
“Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don’t fret for what I
haven’t,” said Levin, thinking of Kitty.
Stepan Arkadyevitch comprehended, looked at him, but said nothing.
Levin was grateful to Oblonsky for noticing, with his never-failing
tact, that he dreaded conversation about the Shtcherbatskys, and so
saying nothing about them. But now Levin was longing to find out what
was tormenting him so, yet he had not the courage to begin.
“Come, tell me how things are going with you,” said Levin, bethinking
himself that it was not nice of him to think only of himself.
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes sparkled merrily.
“You don’t admit, I know, that one can be fond of new rolls when one
has had one’s rations of bread—to your mind it’s a crime; but I don’t
count life as life without love,” he said, taking Levin’s question his
own way. “What am I to do? I’m made that way. And really, one does so
little harm to anyone, and gives oneself so much pleasure....”
“What! is there something new, then?” queried Levin.
“Yes, my boy, there is! There, do you see, you know the type of
Ossian’s women.... Women, such as one sees in dreams.... Well, these
women are sometimes to be met in reality ... and these women are
terrible. Woman, don’t you know, is such a subject that however much
you study it, it’s always perfectly new.”
“Well, then, it would be better not to study it.”
“No. Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for
truth, not in the finding it.”
Levin listened in silence, and in spite of all the efforts he made, he
could not in the least enter into the feelings of his friend and
understand his sentiments and the charm of studying such women.
Chapter 15
The place fixed on for the stand-shooting was not far above a stream in
a little aspen copse. On reaching the copse, Levin got out of the trap
and led Oblonsky to a corner of a mossy, swampy glade, already quite
free from snow. He went back himself to a double birch tree on the
other side, and leaning his gun on the fork of a dead lower branch, he
took off his full overcoat, fastened his belt again, and worked his
arms to see if they were free.
Gray old Laska, who had followed them, sat down warily opposite him and
pricked up her ears. The sun was setting behind a thick forest, and in
the glow of sunset the birch trees, dotted about in the aspen copse,
stood out clearly with their hanging twigs, and their buds swollen
almost to bursting.
From the thickest parts of the copse, where the snow still remained,
came the faint sound of narrow winding threads of water running away.
Tiny birds twittered, and now and then fluttered from tree to tree.
In the pauses of complete stillness there came the rustle of last
year’s leaves, stirred by the thawing of the earth and the growth of
the grass.
“Imagine! One can hear and see the grass growing!” Levin said to
himself, noticing a wet, slate-colored aspen leaf moving beside a blade
of young grass. He stood, listened, and gazed sometimes down at the wet
mossy ground, sometimes at Laska listening all alert, sometimes at the
sea of bare tree tops that stretched on the slope below him, sometimes
at the darkening sky, covered with white streaks of cloud.
A hawk flew high over a forest far away with slow sweep of its wings;
another flew with exactly the same motion in the same direction and
vanished. The birds twittered more and more loudly and busily in the
thicket. An owl hooted not far off, and Laska, starting, stepped
cautiously a few steps forward, and putting her head on one side, began
to listen intently. Beyond the stream was heard the cuckoo. Twice she
uttered her usual cuckoo call, and then gave a hoarse, hurried call and
broke down.
“Imagine! the cuckoo already!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, coming out
from behind a bush.
“Yes, I hear it,” answered Levin, reluctantly breaking the stillness
with his voice, which sounded disagreeable to himself. “Now it’s
coming!”
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s figure again went behind the bush, and Levin saw
nothing but the bright flash of a match, followed by the red glow and
blue smoke of a cigarette.
“Tchk! tchk!” came the snapping sound of Stepan Arkadyevitch cocking
his gun.
“What’s that cry?” asked Oblonsky, drawing Levin’s attention to a
prolonged cry, as though a colt were whinnying in a high voice, in
play.
“Oh, don’t you know it? That’s the hare. But enough talking! Listen,
it’s flying!” almost shrieked Levin, cocking his gun.
They heard a shrill whistle in the distance, and in the exact time, so
well known to the sportsman, two seconds later—another, a third, and
after the third whistle the hoarse, guttural cry could be heard.
Levin looked about him to right and to left, and there, just facing him
against the dusky blue sky above the confused mass of tender shoots of
the aspens, he saw the flying bird. It was flying straight towards him;
the guttural cry, like the even tearing of some strong stuff, sounded
close to his ear; the long beak and neck of the bird could be seen, and
at the very instant when Levin was taking aim, behind the bush where
Oblonsky stood, there was a flash of red lightning: the bird dropped
like an arrow, and darted upwards again. Again came the red flash and
the sound of a blow, and fluttering its wings as though trying to keep
up in the air, the bird halted, stopped still an instant, and fell with
a heavy splash on the slushy ground.
“Can I have missed it?” shouted Stepan Arkadyevitch, who could not see
for the smoke.
“Here it is!” said Levin, pointing to Laska, who with one ear raised,
wagging the end of her shaggy tail, came slowly back as though she
would prolong the pleasure, and as it were smiling, brought the dead
bird to her master. “Well, I’m glad you were successful,” said Levin,
who, at the same time, had a sense of envy that he had not succeeded in
shooting the snipe.
“It was a bad shot from the right barrel,” responded Stepan
Arkadyevitch, loading his gun. “Sh... it’s flying!”
The shrill whistles rapidly following one another were heard again. Two
snipe, playing and chasing one another, and only whistling, not crying,
flew straight at the very heads of the sportsmen. There was the report
of four shots, and like swallows the snipe turned swift somersaults in
the air and vanished from sight.
The stand-shooting was capital. Stepan Arkadyevitch shot two more birds
and Levin two, of which one was not found. It began to get dark. Venus,
bright and silvery, shone with her soft light low down in the west
behind the birch trees, and high up in the east twinkled the red lights
of Arcturus. Over his head Levin made out the stars of the Great Bear
and lost them again. The snipe had ceased flying; but Levin resolved to
stay a little longer, till Venus, which he saw below a branch of birch,
should be above it, and the stars of the Great Bear should be perfectly
plain. Venus had risen above the branch, and the ear of the Great Bear
with its shaft was now all plainly visible against the dark blue sky,
yet still he waited.
“Isn’t it time to go home?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
It was quite still now in the copse, and not a bird was stirring.
“Let’s stay a little while,” answered Levin.
“As you like.”
They were standing now about fifteen paces from one another.
“Stiva!” said Levin unexpectedly; “how is it you don’t tell me whether
your sister-in-law’s married yet, or when she’s going to be?”
Levin felt so resolute and serene that no answer, he fancied, could
affect him. But he had never dreamed of what Stepan Arkadyevitch
replied.
“She’s never thought of being married, and isn’t thinking of it; but
she’s very ill, and the doctors have sent her abroad. They’re
positively afraid she may not live.”
“What!” cried Levin. “Very ill? What is wrong with her? How has
she...?”
While they were saying this, Laska, with ears pricked up, was looking
upwards at the sky, and reproachfully at them.
“They have chosen a time to talk,” she was thinking. “It’s on the
wing.... Here it is, yes, it is. They’ll miss it,” thought Laska.
But at that very instant both suddenly heard a shrill whistle which, as
it were, smote on their ears, and both suddenly seized their guns and
two flashes gleamed, and two bangs sounded at the very same instant.
The snipe flying high above instantly folded its wings and fell into a
thicket, bending down the delicate shoots.
“Splendid! Together!” cried Levin, and he ran with Laska into the
thicket to look for the snipe.
“Oh, yes, what was it that was unpleasant?” he wondered. “Yes, Kitty’s
ill.... Well, it can’t be helped; I’m very sorry,” he thought.
“She’s found it! Isn’t she a clever thing?” he said, taking the warm
bird from Laska’s mouth and packing it into the almost full game bag.
“I’ve got it, Stiva!” he shouted.
Chapter 16
On the way home Levin asked all details of Kitty’s illness and the
Shtcherbatskys’ plans, and though he would have been ashamed to admit
it, he was pleased at what he heard. He was pleased that there was
still hope, and still more pleased that she should be suffering who had
made him suffer so much. But when Stepan Arkadyevitch began to speak of
the causes of Kitty’s illness, and mentioned Vronsky’s name, Levin cut
him short.
“I have no right whatever to know family matters, and, to tell the
truth, no interest in them either.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled hardly perceptibly, catching the
instantaneous change he knew so well in Levin’s face, which had become
as gloomy as it had been bright a minute before.
“Have you quite settled about the forest with Ryabinin?” asked Levin.
“Yes, it’s settled. The price is magnificent; thirty-eight thousand.
Eight straight away, and the rest in six years. I’ve been bothering
about it for ever so long. No one would give more.”
“Then you’ve as good as given away your forest for nothing,” said Levin
gloomily.
“How do you mean for nothing?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a
good-humored smile, knowing that nothing would be right in Levin’s eyes
now.
“Because the forest is worth at least a hundred and fifty roubles the
acre,” answered Levin.
“Oh, these farmers!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch playfully. “Your tone of
contempt for us poor townsfolk!... But when it comes to business, we do
it better than anyone. I assure you I have reckoned it all out,” he
said, “and the forest is fetching a very good price—so much so that I’m
afraid of this fellow’s crying off, in fact. You know it’s not
‘timber,’” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, hoping by this distinction to
convince Levin completely of the unfairness of his doubts. “And it
won’t run to more than twenty-five yards of fagots per acre, and he’s
giving me at the rate of seventy roubles the acre.”
Levin smiled contemptuously. “I know,” he thought, “that fashion not
only in him, but in all city people, who, after being twice in ten
years in the country, pick up two or three phrases and use them in
season and out of season, firmly persuaded that they know all about it.
‘_Timber, run to so many yards the acre._’ He says those words without
understanding them himself.”
“I wouldn’t attempt to teach you what you write about in your office,”
said he, “and if need arose, I should come to you to ask about it. But
you’re so positive you know all the lore of the forest. It’s difficult.
Have you counted the trees?”
“How count the trees?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing, still trying
to draw his friend out of his ill-temper. “Count the sands of the sea,
number the stars. Some higher power might do it.”
“Oh, well, the higher power of Ryabinin can. Not a single merchant ever
buys a forest without counting the trees, unless they get it given them
for nothing, as you’re doing now. I know your forest. I go there every
year shooting, and your forest’s worth a hundred and fifty roubles an
acre paid down, while he’s giving you sixty by installments. So that in
fact you’re making him a present of thirty thousand.”
“Come, don’t let your imagination run away with you,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch piteously. “Why was it none would give it, then?”
“Why, because he has an understanding with the merchants; he’s bought
them off. I’ve had to do with all of them; I know them. They’re not
merchants, you know: they’re speculators. He wouldn’t look at a bargain
that gave him ten, fifteen per cent. profit, but holds back to buy a
rouble’s worth for twenty kopecks.”
“Well, enough of it! You’re out of temper.”
“Not the least,” said Levin gloomily, as they drove up to the house.
At the steps there stood a trap tightly covered with iron and leather,
with a sleek horse tightly harnessed with broad collar-straps. In the
trap sat the chubby, tightly belted clerk who served Ryabinin as
coachman. Ryabinin himself was already in the house, and met the
friends in the hall. Ryabinin was a tall, thinnish, middle-aged man,
with mustache and a projecting clean-shaven chin, and prominent
muddy-looking eyes. He was dressed in a long-skirted blue coat, with
buttons below the waist at the back, and wore high boots wrinkled over
the ankles and straight over the calf, with big galoshes drawn over
them. He rubbed his face with his handkerchief, and wrapping round him
his coat, which sat extremely well as it was, he greeted them with a
smile, holding out his hand to Stepan Arkadyevitch, as though he wanted
to catch something.
“So here you are,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, giving him his hand.
“That’s capital.”
“I did not venture to disregard your excellency’s commands, though the
road was extremely bad. I positively walked the whole way, but I am
here at my time. Konstantin Dmitrievitch, my respects”; he turned to
Levin, trying to seize his hand too. But Levin, scowling, made as
though he did not notice his hand, and took out the snipe. “Your honors
have been diverting yourselves with the chase? What kind of bird may it
be, pray?” added Ryabinin, looking contemptuously at the snipe: “a
great delicacy, I suppose.” And he shook his head disapprovingly, as
though he had grave doubts whether this game were worth the candle.
“Would you like to go into my study?” Levin said in French to Stepan
Arkadyevitch, scowling morosely. “Go into my study; you can talk
there.”
“Quite so, where you please,” said Ryabinin with contemptuous dignity,
as though wishing to make it felt that others might be in difficulties
as to how to behave, but that he could never be in any difficulty about
anything.
On entering the study Ryabinin looked about, as his habit was, as
though seeking the holy picture, but when he had found it, he did not
cross himself. He scanned the bookcases and bookshelves, and with the
same dubious air with which he had regarded the snipe, he smiled
contemptuously and shook his head disapprovingly, as though by no means
willing to allow that this game were worth the candle.
“Well, have you brought the money?” asked Oblonsky. “Sit down.”
“Oh, don’t trouble about the money. I’ve come to see you to talk it
over.”
“What is there to talk over? But do sit down.”
“I don’t mind if I do,” said Ryabinin, sitting down and leaning his
elbows on the back of his chair in a position of the intensest
discomfort to himself. “You must knock it down a bit, prince. It would
be too bad. The money is ready conclusively to the last farthing. As to
paying the money down, there’ll be no hitch there.”
Levin, who had meanwhile been putting his gun away in the cupboard, was
just going out of the door, but catching the merchant’s words, he
stopped.
“Why, you’ve got the forest for nothing as it is,” he said. “He came to
me too late, or I’d have fixed the price for him.”
Ryabinin got up, and in silence, with a smile, he looked Levin down and
up.
“Very close about money is Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” he said with a
smile, turning to Stepan Arkadyevitch; “there’s positively no dealing
with him. I was bargaining for some wheat of him, and a pretty price I
offered too.”
“Why should I give you my goods for nothing? I didn’t pick it up on the
ground, nor steal it either.”
“Mercy on us! nowadays there’s no chance at all of stealing. With the
open courts and everything done in style, nowadays there’s no question
of stealing. We are just talking things over like gentlemen. His
excellency’s asking too much for the forest. I can’t make both ends
meet over it. I must ask for a little concession.”
“But is the thing settled between you or not? If it’s settled, it’s
useless haggling; but if it’s not,” said Levin, “I’ll buy the forest.”
The smile vanished at once from Ryabinin’s face. A hawklike, greedy,
cruel expression was left upon it. With rapid, bony fingers he
unbuttoned his coat, revealing a shirt, bronze waistcoat buttons, and a
watch chain, and quickly pulled out a fat old pocketbook.
“Here you are, the forest is mine,” he said, crossing himself quickly,
and holding out his hand. “Take the money; it’s my forest. That’s
Ryabinin’s way of doing business; he doesn’t haggle over every
half-penny,” he added, scowling and waving the pocketbook.
“I wouldn’t be in a hurry if I were you,” said Levin.
“Come, really,” said Oblonsky in surprise. “I’ve given my word, you
know.”
Levin went out of the room, slamming the door. Ryabinin looked towards
the door and shook his head with a smile.
“It’s all youthfulness—positively nothing but boyishness. Why, I’m
buying it, upon my honor, simply, believe me, for the glory of it, that
Ryabinin, and no one else, should have bought the copse of Oblonsky.
And as to the profits, why, I must make what God gives. In God’s name.
If you would kindly sign the title-deed....”
Within an hour the merchant, stroking his big overcoat neatly down, and
hooking up his jacket, with the agreement in his pocket, seated himself
in his tightly covered trap, and drove homewards.
“Ugh, these gentlefolks!” he said to the clerk. “They—they’re a nice
lot!”
“That’s so,” responded the clerk, handing him the reins and buttoning
the leather apron. “But I can congratulate you on the purchase, Mihail
Ignatitch?”
“Well, well....”
Chapter 17
Stepan Arkadyevitch went upstairs with his pocket bulging with notes,
which the merchant had paid him for three months in advance. The
business of the forest was over, the money in his pocket; their
shooting had been excellent, and Stepan Arkadyevitch was in the
happiest frame of mind, and so he felt specially anxious to dissipate
the ill-humor that had come upon Levin. He wanted to finish the day at
supper as pleasantly as it had been begun.
Levin certainly was out of humor, and in spite of all his desire to be
affectionate and cordial to his charming visitor, he could not control
his mood. The intoxication of the news that Kitty was not married had
gradually begun to work upon him.
Kitty was not married, but ill, and ill from love for a man who had
slighted her. This slight, as it were, rebounded upon him. Vronsky had
slighted her, and she had slighted him, Levin. Consequently Vronsky had
the right to despise Levin, and therefore he was his enemy. But all
this Levin did not think out. He vaguely felt that there was something
in it insulting to him, and he was not angry now at what had disturbed
him, but he fell foul of everything that presented itself. The stupid
sale of the forest, the fraud practiced upon Oblonsky and concluded in
his house, exasperated him.
“Well, finished?” he said, meeting Stepan Arkadyevitch upstairs. “Would
you like supper?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say no to it. What an appetite I get in the country!
Wonderful! Why didn’t you offer Ryabinin something?”
“Oh, damn him!”
“Still, how you do treat him!” said Oblonsky. “You didn’t even shake
hands with him. Why not shake hands with him?”
“Because I don’t shake hands with a waiter, and a waiter’s a hundred
times better than he is.”
“What a reactionist you are, really! What about the amalgamation of
classes?” said Oblonsky.
“Anyone who likes amalgamating is welcome to it, but it sickens me.”
“You’re a regular reactionist, I see.”
“Really, I have never considered what I am. I am Konstantin Levin, and
nothing else.”
“And Konstantin Levin very much out of temper,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, smiling.
“Yes, I am out of temper, and do you know why? Because—excuse me—of
your stupid sale....”
Stepan Arkadyevitch frowned good-humoredly, like one who feels himself
teased and attacked for no fault of his own.
“Come, enough about it!” he said. “When did anybody ever sell anything
without being told immediately after the sale, ‘It was worth much
more’? But when one wants to sell, no one will give anything.... No, I
see you’ve a grudge against that unlucky Ryabinin.”
“Maybe I have. And do you know why? You’ll say again that I’m a
reactionist, or some other terrible word; but all the same it does
annoy and anger me to see on all sides the impoverishing of the
nobility to which I belong, and, in spite of the amalgamation of
classes, I’m glad to belong. And their impoverishment is not due to
extravagance—that would be nothing; living in good style—that’s the
proper thing for noblemen; it’s only the nobles who know how to do it.
Now the peasants about us buy land, and I don’t mind that. The
gentleman does nothing, while the peasant works and supplants the idle
man. That’s as it ought to be. And I’m very glad for the peasant. But I
do mind seeing the process of impoverishment from a sort of—I don’t
know what to call it—innocence. Here a Polish speculator bought for
half its value a magnificent estate from a young lady who lives in
Nice. And there a merchant will get three acres of land, worth ten
roubles, as security for the loan of one rouble. Here, for no kind of
reason, you’ve made that rascal a present of thirty thousand roubles.”
“Well, what should I have done? Counted every tree?”
“Of course, they must be counted. You didn’t count them, but Ryabinin
did. Ryabinin’s children will have means of livelihood and education,
while yours maybe will not!”
“Well, you must excuse me, but there’s something mean in this counting.
We have our business and they have theirs, and they must make their
profit. Anyway, the thing’s done, and there’s an end of it. And here
come some poached eggs, my favorite dish. And Agafea Mihalovna will
give us that marvelous herb-brandy....”
Stepan Arkadyevitch sat down at the table and began joking with Agafea
Mihalovna, assuring her that it was long since he had tasted such a
dinner and such a supper.
“Well, you do praise it, anyway,” said Agafea Mihalovna, “but
Konstantin Dmitrievitch, give him what you will—a crust of bread—he’ll
eat it and walk away.”
Though Levin tried to control himself, he was gloomy and silent. He
wanted to put one question to Stepan Arkadyevitch, but he could not
bring himself to the point, and could not find the words or the moment
in which to put it. Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone down to his room,
undressed, again washed, and attired in a nightshirt with goffered
frills, he had got into bed, but Levin still lingered in his room,
talking of various trifling matters, and not daring to ask what he
wanted to know.
“How wonderfully they make this soap,” he said gazing at a piece of
soap he was handling, which Agafea Mihalovna had put ready for the
visitor but Oblonsky had not used. “Only look; why, it’s a work of
art.”
“Yes, everything’s brought to such a pitch of perfection nowadays,”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with a moist and blissful yawn. “The theater,
for instance, and the entertainments ... a—a—a!” he yawned. “The
electric light everywhere ... a—a—a!”
“Yes, the electric light,” said Levin. “Yes. Oh, and where’s Vronsky
now?” he asked suddenly, laying down the soap.
“Vronsky?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, checking his yawn; “he’s in
Petersburg. He left soon after you did, and he’s not once been in
Moscow since. And do you know, Kostya, I’ll tell you the truth,” he
went on, leaning his elbow on the table, and propping on his hand his
handsome ruddy face, in which his moist, good-natured, sleepy eyes
shone like stars. “It’s your own fault. You took fright at the sight of
your rival. But, as I told you at the time, I couldn’t say which had
the better chance. Why didn’t you fight it out? I told you at the time
that....” He yawned inwardly, without opening his mouth.
“Does he know, or doesn’t he, that I did make an offer?” Levin
wondered, gazing at him. “Yes, there’s something humbugging, diplomatic
in his face,” and feeling he was blushing, he looked Stepan
Arkadyevitch straight in the face without speaking.
“If there was anything on her side at the time, it was nothing but a
superficial attraction,” pursued Oblonsky. “His being such a perfect
aristocrat, don’t you know, and his future position in society, had an
influence not with her, but with her mother.”
Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart,
as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was
at home, and the walls of home are a support.
“Stay, stay,” he began, interrupting Oblonsky. “You talk of his being
an aristocrat. But allow me to ask what it consists in, that
aristocracy of Vronsky or of anybody else, beside which I can be looked
down upon? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don’t. A man whose
father crawled up from nothing at all by intrigue, and whose mother—God
knows whom she wasn’t mixed up with.... No, excuse me, but I consider
myself aristocratic, and people like me, who can point back in the past
to three or four honorable generations of their family, of the highest
degree of breeding (talent and intellect, of course that’s another
matter), and have never curried favor with anyone, never depended on
anyone for anything, like my father and my grandfather. And I know many
such. You think it mean of me to count the trees in my forest, while
you make Ryabinin a present of thirty thousand; but you get rents from
your lands and I don’t know what, while I don’t and so I prize what’s
come to me from my ancestors or been won by hard work.... We are
aristocrats, and not those who can only exist by favor of the powerful
of this world, and who can be bought for twopence halfpenny.”
“Well, but whom are you attacking? I agree with you,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, sincerely and genially; though he was aware that in the
class of those who could be bought for twopence halfpenny Levin was
reckoning him too. Levin’s warmth gave him genuine pleasure. “Whom are
you attacking? Though a good deal is not true that you say about
Vronsky, but I won’t talk about that. I tell you straight out, if I
were you, I should go back with me to Moscow, and....”
“No; I don’t know whether you know it or not, but I don’t care. And I
tell you—I did make an offer and was rejected, and Katerina
Alexandrovna is nothing now to me but a painful and humiliating
reminiscence.”
“What ever for? What nonsense!”
“But we won’t talk about it. Please forgive me, if I’ve been nasty,”
said Levin. Now that he had opened his heart, he became as he had been
in the morning. “You’re not angry with me, Stiva? Please don’t be
angry,” he said, and smiling, he took his hand.
“Of course not; not a bit, and no reason to be. I’m glad we’ve spoken
openly. And do you know, stand-shooting in the morning is unusually
good—why not go? I couldn’t sleep the night anyway, but I might go
straight from shooting to the station.”
“Capital.”
Chapter 18
Although all Vronsky’s inner life was absorbed in his passion, his
external life unalterably and inevitably followed along the old
accustomed lines of his social and regimental ties and interests. The
interests of his regiment took an important place in Vronsky’s life,
both because he was fond of the regiment, and because the regiment was
fond of him. They were not only fond of Vronsky in his regiment, they
respected him too, and were proud of him; proud that this man, with his
immense wealth, his brilliant education and abilities, and the path
open before him to every kind of success, distinction, and ambition,
had disregarded all that, and of all the interests of life had the
interests of his regiment and his comrades nearest to his heart.
Vronsky was aware of his comrades’ view of him, and in addition to his
liking for the life, he felt bound to keep up that reputation.
It need not be said that he did not speak of his love to any of his
comrades, nor did he betray his secret even in the wildest drinking
bouts (though indeed he was never so drunk as to lose all control of
himself). And he shut up any of his thoughtless comrades who attempted
to allude to his connection. But in spite of that, his love was known
to all the town; everyone guessed with more or less confidence at his
relations with Madame Karenina. The majority of the younger men envied
him for just what was the most irksome factor in his love—the exalted
position of Karenin, and the consequent publicity of their connection
in society.
The greater number of the young women, who envied Anna and had long
been weary of hearing her called _virtuous_, rejoiced at the
fulfillment of their predictions, and were only waiting for a decisive
turn in public opinion to fall upon her with all the weight of their
scorn. They were already making ready their handfuls of mud to fling at
her when the right moment arrived. The greater number of the
middle-aged people and certain great personages were displeased at the
prospect of the impending scandal in society.
Vronsky’s mother, on hearing of his connection, was at first pleased at
it, because nothing to her mind gave such a finishing touch to a
brilliant young man as a _liaison_ in the highest society; she was
pleased, too, that Madame Karenina, who had so taken her fancy, and had
talked so much of her son, was, after all, just like all other pretty
and well-bred women,—at least according to the Countess Vronskaya’s
ideas. But she had heard of late that her son had refused a position
offered him of great importance to his career, simply in order to
remain in the regiment, where he could be constantly seeing Madame
Karenina. She learned that great personages were displeased with him on
this account, and she changed her opinion. She was vexed, too, that
from all she could learn of this connection it was not that brilliant,
graceful, worldly _liaison_ which she would have welcomed, but a sort
of Wertherish, desperate passion, so she was told, which might well
lead him into imprudence. She had not seen him since his abrupt
departure from Moscow, and she sent her elder son to bid him come to
see her.
This elder son, too, was displeased with his younger brother. He did
not distinguish what sort of love his might be, big or little,
passionate or passionless, lasting or passing (he kept a ballet girl
himself, though he was the father of a family, so he was lenient in
these matters), but he knew that this love affair was viewed with
displeasure by those whom it was necessary to please, and therefore he
did not approve of his brother’s conduct.
Besides the service and society, Vronsky had another great
interest—horses; he was passionately fond of horses.
That year races and a steeplechase had been arranged for the officers.
Vronsky had put his name down, bought a thoroughbred English mare, and
in spite of his love affair, he was looking forward to the races with
intense, though reserved, excitement....
These two passions did not interfere with one another. On the contrary,
he needed occupation and distraction quite apart from his love, so as
to recruit and rest himself from the violent emotions that agitated
him.
Chapter 19
On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky had come earlier than
usual to eat beefsteak in the common messroom of the regiment. He had
no need to be strict with himself, as he had very quickly been brought
down to the required light weight; but still he had to avoid gaining
flesh, and so he eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes. He sat with his
coat unbuttoned over a white waistcoat, resting both elbows on the
table, and while waiting for the steak he had ordered he looked at a
French novel that lay open on his plate. He was only looking at the
book to avoid conversation with the officers coming in and out; he was
thinking.
He was thinking of Anna’s promise to see him that day after the races.
But he had not seen her for three days, and as her husband had just
returned from abroad, he did not know whether she would be able to meet
him today or not, and he did not know how to find out. He had had his
last interview with her at his cousin Betsy’s summer villa. He visited
the Karenins’ summer villa as rarely as possible. Now he wanted to go
there, and he pondered the question how to do it.
“Of course I shall say Betsy has sent me to ask whether she’s coming to
the races. Of course, I’ll go,” he decided, lifting his head from the
book. And as he vividly pictured the happiness of seeing her, his face
lighted up.
“Send to my house, and tell them to have out the carriage and three
horses as quick as they can,” he said to the servant, who handed him
the steak on a hot silver dish, and moving the dish up he began eating.
From the billiard room next door came the sound of balls knocking, of
talk and laughter. Two officers appeared at the entrance-door: one, a
young fellow, with a feeble, delicate face, who had lately joined the
regiment from the Corps of Pages; the other, a plump, elderly officer,
with a bracelet on his wrist, and little eyes, lost in fat.
Vronsky glanced at them, frowned, and looking down at his book as
though he had not noticed them, he proceeded to eat and read at the
same time.
“What? Fortifying yourself for your work?” said the plump officer,
sitting down beside him.
“As you see,” responded Vronsky, knitting his brows, wiping his mouth,
and not looking at the officer.
“So you’re not afraid of getting fat?” said the latter, turning a chair
round for the young officer.
“What?” said Vronsky angrily, making a wry face of disgust, and showing
his even teeth.
“You’re not afraid of getting fat?”
“Waiter, sherry!” said Vronsky, without replying, and moving the book
to the other side of him, he went on reading.
The plump officer took up the list of wines and turned to the young
officer.
“You choose what we’re to drink,” he said, handing him the card, and
looking at him.
“Rhine wine, please,” said the young officer, stealing a timid glance
at Vronsky, and trying to pull his scarcely visible mustache. Seeing
that Vronsky did not turn round, the young officer got up.
“Let’s go into the billiard room,” he said.
The plump officer rose submissively, and they moved towards the door.
At that moment there walked into the room the tall and well-built
Captain Yashvin. Nodding with an air of lofty contempt to the two
officers, he went up to Vronsky.
“Ah! here he is!” he cried, bringing his big hand down heavily on his
epaulet. Vronsky looked round angrily, but his face lighted up
immediately with his characteristic expression of genial and manly
serenity.
“That’s it, Alexey,” said the captain, in his loud baritone. “You must
just eat a mouthful, now, and drink only one tiny glass.”
“Oh, I’m not hungry.”
“There go the inseparables,” Yashvin dropped, glancing sarcastically at
the two officers who were at that instant leaving the room. And he bent
his long legs, swathed in tight riding breeches, and sat down in the
chair, too low for him, so that his knees were cramped up in a sharp
angle.
“Why didn’t you turn up at the Red Theater yesterday? Numerova wasn’t
at all bad. Where were you?”
“I was late at the Tverskoys’,” said Vronsky.
“Ah!” responded Yashvin.
Yashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without moral
principles, but of immoral principles, Yashvin was Vronsky’s greatest
friend in the regiment. Vronsky liked him both for his exceptional
physical strength, which he showed for the most part by being able to
drink like a fish, and do without sleep without being in the slightest
degree affected by it; and for his great strength of character, which
he showed in his relations with his comrades and superior officers,
commanding both fear and respect, and also at cards, when he would play
for tens of thousands and however much he might have drunk, always with
such skill and decision that he was reckoned the best player in the
English Club. Vronsky respected and liked Yashvin particularly because
he felt Yashvin liked him, not for his name and his money, but for
himself. And of all men he was the only one with whom Vronsky would
have liked to speak of his love. He felt that Yashvin, in spite of his
apparent contempt for every sort of feeling, was the only man who
could, so he fancied, comprehend the intense passion which now filled
his whole life. Moreover, he felt certain that Yashvin, as it was, took
no delight in gossip and scandal, and interpreted his feeling rightly,
that is to say, knew and believed that this passion was not a jest, not
a pastime, but something more serious and important.
Vronsky had never spoken to him of his passion, but he was aware that
he knew all about it, and that he put the right interpretation on it,
and he was glad to see that in his eyes.
“Ah! yes,” he said, to the announcement that Vronsky had been at the
Tverskoys’; and his black eyes shining, he plucked at his left
mustache, and began twisting it into his mouth, a bad habit he had.
“Well, and what did you do yesterday? Win anything?” asked Vronsky.
“Eight thousand. But three don’t count; he won’t pay up.”
“Oh, then you can afford to lose over me,” said Vronsky, laughing.
(Yashvin had bet heavily on Vronsky in the races.)
“No chance of my losing. Mahotin’s the only one that’s risky.”
And the conversation passed to forecasts of the coming race, the only
thing Vronsky could think of just now.
“Come along, I’ve finished,” said Vronsky, and getting up he went to
the door. Yashvin got up too, stretching his long legs and his long
back.
“It’s too early for me to dine, but I must have a drink. I’ll come
along directly. Hi, wine!” he shouted, in his rich voice, that always
rang out so loudly at drill, and set the windows shaking now.
“No, all right,” he shouted again immediately after. “You’re going
home, so I’ll go with you.”
And he walked out with Vronsky.
Chapter 20
Vronsky was staying in a roomy, clean, Finnish hut, divided into two by
a partition. Petritsky lived with him in camp too. Petritsky was asleep
when Vronsky and Yashvin came into the hut.
“Get up, don’t go on sleeping,” said Yashvin, going behind the
partition and giving Petritsky, who was lying with ruffled hair and
with his nose in the pillow, a prod on the shoulder.
Petritsky jumped up suddenly onto his knees and looked round.
“Your brother’s been here,” he said to Vronsky. “He waked me up, damn
him, and said he’d look in again.” And pulling up the rug he flung
himself back on the pillow. “Oh, do shut up, Yashvin!” he said, getting
furious with Yashvin, who was pulling the rug off him. “Shut up!” He
turned over and opened his eyes. “You’d better tell me what to drink;
such a nasty taste in my mouth, that....”
“Brandy’s better than anything,” boomed Yashvin. “Tereshtchenko! brandy
for your master and cucumbers,” he shouted, obviously taking pleasure
in the sound of his own voice.
“Brandy, do you think? Eh?” queried Petritsky, blinking and rubbing his
eyes. “And you’ll drink something? All right then, we’ll have a drink
together! Vronsky, have a drink?” said Petritsky, getting up and
wrapping the tiger-skin rug round him. He went to the door of the
partition wall, raised his hands, and hummed in French, “There was a
king in Thule.” “Vronsky, will you have a drink?”
“Go along,” said Vronsky, putting on the coat his valet handed to him.
“Where are you off to?” asked Yashvin. “Oh, here are your three
horses,” he added, seeing the carriage drive up.
“To the stables, and I’ve got to see Bryansky, too, about the horses,”
said Vronsky.
Vronsky had as a fact promised to call at Bryansky’s, some eight miles
from Peterhof, and to bring him some money owing for some horses; and
he hoped to have time to get that in too. But his comrades were at once
aware that he was not only going there.
Petritsky, still humming, winked and made a pout with his lips, as
though he would say: “Oh, yes, we know your Bryansky.”
“Mind you’re not late!” was Yashvin’s only comment; and to change the
conversation: “How’s my roan? is he doing all right?” he inquired,
looking out of the window at the middle one of the three horses, which
he had sold Vronsky.
“Stop!” cried Petritsky to Vronsky as he was just going out. “Your
brother left a letter and a note for you. Wait a bit; where are they?”
Vronsky stopped.
“Well, where are they?”
“Where are they? That’s just the question!” said Petritsky solemnly,
moving his forefinger upwards from his nose.
“Come, tell me; this is silly!” said Vronsky smiling.
“I have not lighted the fire. Here somewhere about.”
“Come, enough fooling! Where is the letter?”
“No, I’ve forgotten really. Or was it a dream? Wait a bit, wait a bit!
But what’s the use of getting in a rage. If you’d drunk four bottles
yesterday as I did you’d forget where you were lying. Wait a bit, I’ll
remember!”
Petritsky went behind the partition and lay down on his bed.
“Wait a bit! This was how I was lying, and this was how he was
standing. Yes—yes—yes.... Here it is!”—and Petritsky pulled a letter
out from under the mattress, where he had hidden it.
Vronsky took the letter and his brother’s note. It was the letter he
was expecting—from his mother, reproaching him for not having been to
see her—and the note was from his brother to say that he must have a
little talk with him. Vronsky knew that it was all about the same
thing. “What business is it of theirs!” thought Vronsky, and crumpling
up the letters he thrust them between the buttons of his coat so as to
read them carefully on the road. In the porch of the hut he was met by
two officers; one of his regiment and one of another.
Vronsky’s quarters were always a meeting place for all the officers.
“Where are you off to?”
“I must go to Peterhof.”
“Has the mare come from Tsarskoe?”
“Yes, but I’ve not seen her yet.”
“They say Mahotin’s Gladiator’s lame.”
“Nonsense! But however are you going to race in this mud?” said the
other.
“Here are my saviors!” cried Petritsky, seeing them come in. Before him
stood the orderly with a tray of brandy and salted cucumbers. “Here’s
Yashvin ordering me to drink a pick-me-up.”
“Well, you did give it to us yesterday,” said one of those who had come
in; “you didn’t let us get a wink of sleep all night.”
“Oh, didn’t we make a pretty finish!” said Petritsky. “Volkov climbed
onto the roof and began telling us how sad he was. I said: ‘Let’s have
music, the funeral march!’ He fairly dropped asleep on the roof over
the funeral march.”
“Drink it up; you positively must drink the brandy, and then seltzer
water and a lot of lemon,” said Yashvin, standing over Petritsky like a
mother making a child take medicine, “and then a little champagne—just
a small bottle.”
“Come, there’s some sense in that. Stop a bit, Vronsky. We’ll all have
a drink.”
“No; good-bye all of you. I’m not going to drink today.”
“Why, are you gaining weight? All right, then we must have it alone.
Give us the seltzer water and lemon.”
“Vronsky!” shouted someone when he was already outside.
“Well?”
“You’d better get your hair cut, it’ll weigh you down, especially at
the top.”
Vronsky was in fact beginning, prematurely, to get a little bald. He
laughed gaily, showing his even teeth, and pulling his cap over the
thin place, went out and got into his carriage.
“To the stables!” he said, and was just pulling out the letters to read
them through, but he thought better of it, and put off reading them so
as not to distract his attention before looking at the mare. “Later!”
Chapter 21
The temporary stable, a wooden shed, had been put up close to the race
course, and there his mare was to have been taken the previous day. He
had not yet seen her there.
During the last few days he had not ridden her out for exercise
himself, but had put her in the charge of the trainer, and so now he
positively did not know in what condition his mare had arrived
yesterday and was today. He had scarcely got out of his carriage when
his groom, the so-called “stable boy,” recognizing the carriage some
way off, called the trainer. A dry-looking Englishman, in high boots
and a short jacket, clean-shaven, except for a tuft below his chin,
came to meet him, walking with the uncouth gait of jockey, turning his
elbows out and swaying from side to side.
“Well, how’s Frou-Frou?” Vronsky asked in English.
“All right, sir,” the Englishman’s voice responded somewhere in the
inside of his throat. “Better not go in,” he added, touching his hat.
“I’ve put a muzzle on her, and the mare’s fidgety. Better not go in,
it’ll excite the mare.”
“No, I’m going in. I want to look at her.”
“Come along, then,” said the Englishman, frowning, and speaking with
his mouth shut, and, with swinging elbows, he went on in front with his
disjointed gait.
They went into the little yard in front of the shed. A stable boy,
spruce and smart in his holiday attire, met them with a broom in his
hand, and followed them. In the shed there were five horses in their
separate stalls, and Vronsky knew that his chief rival, Gladiator, a
very tall chestnut horse, had been brought there, and must be standing
among them. Even more than his mare, Vronsky longed to see Gladiator,
whom he had never seen. But he knew that by the etiquette of the race
course it was not merely impossible for him to see the horse, but
improper even to ask questions about him. Just as he was passing along
the passage, the boy opened the door into the second horse-box on the
left, and Vronsky caught a glimpse of a big chestnut horse with white
legs. He knew that this was Gladiator, but, with the feeling of a man
turning away from the sight of another man’s open letter, he turned
round and went into Frou-Frou’s stall.
“The horse is here belonging to Mak... Mak... I never can say the
name,” said the Englishman, over his shoulder, pointing his big finger
and dirty nail towards Gladiator’s stall.
“Mahotin? Yes, he’s my most serious rival,” said Vronsky.
“If you were riding him,” said the Englishman, “I’d bet on you.”
“Frou-Frou’s more nervous; he’s stronger,” said Vronsky, smiling at the
compliment to his riding.
“In a steeplechase it all depends on riding and on pluck,” said the
Englishman.
Of pluck—that is, energy and courage—Vronsky did not merely feel that
he had enough; what was of far more importance, he was firmly convinced
that no one in the world could have more of this “pluck” than he had.
“Don’t you think I want more thinning down?”
“Oh, no,” answered the Englishman. “Please, don’t speak loud. The
mare’s fidgety,” he added, nodding towards the horse-box, before which
they were standing, and from which came the sound of restless stamping
in the straw.
He opened the door, and Vronsky went into the horse-box, dimly lighted
by one little window. In the horse-box stood a dark bay mare, with a
muzzle on, picking at the fresh straw with her hoofs. Looking round him
in the twilight of the horse-box, Vronsky unconsciously took in once
more in a comprehensive glance all the points of his favorite mare.
Frou-Frou was a beast of medium size, not altogether free from
reproach, from a breeder’s point of view. She was small-boned all over;
though her chest was extremely prominent in front, it was narrow. Her
hind-quarters were a little drooping, and in her fore-legs, and still
more in her hind-legs, there was a noticeable curvature. The muscles of
both hind- and fore-legs were not very thick; but across her shoulders
the mare was exceptionally broad, a peculiarity specially striking now
that she was lean from training. The bones of her legs below the knees
looked no thicker than a finger from in front, but were extraordinarily
thick seen from the side. She looked altogether, except across the
shoulders, as it were, pinched in at the sides and pressed out in
depth. But she had in the highest degree the quality that makes all
defects forgotten: that quality was _blood_, the blood _that tells_, as
the English expression has it. The muscles stood up sharply under the
network of sinews, covered with the delicate, mobile skin, soft as
satin, and they were hard as bone. Her clean-cut head, with prominent,
bright, spirited eyes, broadened out at the open nostrils, that showed
the red blood in the cartilage within. About all her figure, and
especially her head, there was a certain expression of energy, and, at
the same time, of softness. She was one of those creatures which seem
only not to speak because the mechanism of their mouth does not allow
them to.
To Vronsky, at any rate, it seemed that she understood all he felt at
that moment, looking at her.
Directly Vronsky went towards her, she drew in a deep breath, and,
turning back her prominent eye till the white looked bloodshot, she
started at the approaching figures from the opposite side, shaking her
muzzle, and shifting lightly from one leg to the other.
“There, you see how fidgety she is,” said the Englishman.
“There, darling! There!” said Vronsky, going up to the mare and
speaking soothingly to her.
But the nearer he came, the more excited she grew. Only when he stood
by her head, she was suddenly quieter, while the muscles quivered under
her soft, delicate coat. Vronsky patted her strong neck, straightened
over her sharp withers a stray lock of her mane that had fallen on the
other side, and moved his face near her dilated nostrils, transparent
as a bat’s wing. She drew a loud breath and snorted out through her
tense nostrils, started, pricked up her sharp ear, and put out her
strong, black lip towards Vronsky, as though she would nip hold of his
sleeve. But remembering the muzzle, she shook it and again began
restlessly stamping one after the other her shapely legs.
“Quiet, darling, quiet!” he said, patting her again over her
hind-quarters; and with a glad sense that his mare was in the best
possible condition, he went out of the horse-box.
The mare’s excitement had infected Vronsky. He felt that his heart was
throbbing, and that he, too, like the mare, longed to move, to bite; it
was both dreadful and delicious.
“Well, I rely on you, then,” he said to the Englishman; “half-past six
on the ground.”
“All right,” said the Englishman. “Oh, where are you going, my lord?”
he asked suddenly, using the title “my lord,” which he had scarcely
ever used before.
Vronsky in amazement raised his head, and stared, as he knew how to
stare, not into the Englishman’s eyes, but at his forehead, astounded
at the impertinence of his question. But realizing that in asking this
the Englishman had been looking at him not as an employer, but as a
jockey, he answered:
“I’ve got to go to Bryansky’s; I shall be home within an hour.”
“How often I’m asked that question today!” he said to himself, and he
blushed, a thing which rarely happened to him. The Englishman looked
gravely at him; and, as though he, too, knew where Vronsky was going,
he added:
“The great thing’s to keep quiet before a race,” said he; “don’t get
out of temper or upset about anything.”
“All right,” answered Vronsky, smiling; and jumping into his carriage,
he told the man to drive to Peterhof.
Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had been
threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour of rain.
“What a pity!” thought Vronsky, putting up the roof of the carriage.
“It was muddy before, now it will be a perfect swamp.” As he sat in
solitude in the closed carriage, he took out his mother’s letter and
his brother’s note, and read them through.
Yes, it was the same thing over and over again. Everyone, his mother,
his brother, everyone thought fit to interfere in the affairs of his
heart. This interference aroused in him a feeling of angry hatred—a
feeling he had rarely known before. “What business is it of theirs? Why
does everybody feel called upon to concern himself about me? And why do
they worry me so? Just because they see that this is something they
can’t understand. If it were a common, vulgar, worldly intrigue, they
would have left me alone. They feel that this is something different,
that this is not a mere pastime, that this woman is dearer to me than
life. And this is incomprehensible, and that’s why it annoys them.
Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do
not complain of it,” he said, in the word _we_ linking himself with
Anna. “No, they must needs teach us how to live. They haven’t an idea
of what happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us
there is neither happiness nor unhappiness—no life at all,” he thought.
He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he
felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right. He felt that
the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary impulse, which
would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving no other traces in
the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant memories. He felt all the
torture of his own and her position, all the difficulty there was for
them, conspicuous as they were in the eye of all the world, in
concealing their love, in lying and deceiving; and in lying, deceiving,
feigning, and continually thinking of others, when the passion that
united them was so intense that they were both oblivious of everything
else but their love.
He vividly recalled all the constantly recurring instances of
inevitable necessity for lying and deceit, which were so against his
natural bent. He recalled particularly vividly the shame he had more
than once detected in her at this necessity for lying and deceit. And
he experienced the strange feeling that had sometimes come upon him
since his secret love for Anna. This was a feeling of loathing for
something—whether for Alexey Alexandrovitch, or for himself, or for the
whole world, he could not have said. But he always drove away this
strange feeling. Now, too, he shook it off and continued the thread of
his thoughts.
“Yes, she was unhappy before, but proud and at peace; and now she
cannot be at peace and feel secure in her dignity, though she does not
show it. Yes, we must put an end to it,” he decided.
And for the first time the idea clearly presented itself that it was
essential to put an end to this false position, and the sooner the
better. “Throw up everything, she and I, and hide ourselves somewhere
alone with our love,” he said to himself.
Chapter 22
The rain did not last long, and by the time Vronsky arrived, his
shaft-horse trotting at full speed and dragging the trace-horses
galloping through the mud, with their reins hanging loose, the sun had
peeped out again, the roofs of the summer villas and the old limetrees
in the gardens on both sides of the principal streets sparkled with wet
brilliance, and from the twigs came a pleasant drip and from the roofs
rushing streams of water. He thought no more of the shower spoiling the
race course, but was rejoicing now that—thanks to the rain—he would be
sure to find her at home and alone, as he knew that Alexey
Alexandrovitch, who had lately returned from a foreign watering place,
had not moved from Petersburg.
Hoping to find her alone, Vronsky alighted, as he always did, to avoid
attracting attention, before crossing the bridge, and walked to the
house. He did not go up the steps to the street door, but went into the
court.
“Has your master come?” he asked a gardener.
“No, sir. The mistress is at home. But will you please go to the front
door; there are servants there,” the gardener answered. “They’ll open
the door.”
“No, I’ll go in from the garden.”
And feeling satisfied that she was alone, and wanting to take her by
surprise, since he had not promised to be there today, and she would
certainly not expect him to come before the races, he walked, holding
his sword and stepping cautiously over the sandy path, bordered with
flowers, to the terrace that looked out upon the garden. Vronsky forgot
now all that he had thought on the way of the hardships and
difficulties of their position. He thought of nothing but that he would
see her directly, not in imagination, but living, all of her, as she
was in reality. He was just going in, stepping on his whole foot so as
not to creak, up the worn steps of the terrace, when he suddenly
remembered what he always forgot, and what caused the most torturing
side of his relations with her, her son with his questioning—hostile,
as he fancied—eyes.
This boy was more often than anyone else a check upon their freedom.
When he was present, both Vronsky and Anna did not merely avoid
speaking of anything that they could not have repeated before everyone;
they did not even allow themselves to refer by hints to anything the
boy did not understand. They had made no agreement about this, it had
settled itself. They would have felt it wounding themselves to deceive
the child. In his presence they talked like acquaintances. But in spite
of this caution, Vronsky often saw the child’s intent, bewildered
glance fixed upon him, and a strange shyness, uncertainty, at one time
friendliness, at another, coldness and reserve, in the boy’s manner to
him; as though the child felt that between this man and his mother
there existed some important bond, the significance of which he could
not understand.
As a fact, the boy did feel that he could not understand this relation,
and he tried painfully, and was not able to make clear to himself what
feeling he ought to have for this man. With a child’s keen instinct for
every manifestation of feeling, he saw distinctly that his father, his
governess, his nurse,—all did not merely dislike Vronsky, but looked on
him with horror and aversion, though they never said anything about
him, while his mother looked on him as her greatest friend.
“What does it mean? Who is he? How ought I to love him? If I don’t
know, it’s my fault; either I’m stupid or a naughty boy,” thought the
child. And this was what caused his dubious, inquiring, sometimes
hostile, expression, and the shyness and uncertainty which Vronsky
found so irksome. This child’s presence always and infallibly called up
in Vronsky that strange feeling of inexplicable loathing which he had
experienced of late. This child’s presence called up both in Vronsky
and in Anna a feeling akin to the feeling of a sailor who sees by the
compass that the direction in which he is swiftly moving is far from
the right one, but that to arrest his motion is not in his power, that
every instant is carrying him further and further away, and that to
admit to himself his deviation from the right direction is the same as
admitting his certain ruin.
This child, with his innocent outlook upon life, was the compass that
showed them the point to which they had departed from what they knew,
but did not want to know.
This time Seryozha was not at home, and she was completely alone. She
was sitting on the terrace waiting for the return of her son, who had
gone out for his walk and been caught in the rain. She had sent a
manservant and a maid out to look for him. Dressed in a white gown,
deeply embroidered, she was sitting in a corner of the terrace behind
some flowers, and did not hear him. Bending her curly black head, she
pressed her forehead against a cool watering pot that stood on the
parapet, and both her lovely hands, with the rings he knew so well,
clasped the pot. The beauty of her whole figure, her head, her neck,
her hands, struck Vronsky every time as something new and unexpected.
He stood still, gazing at her in ecstasy. But, directly he would have
made a step to come nearer to her, she was aware of his presence,
pushed away the watering pot, and turned her flushed face towards him.
“What’s the matter? You are ill?” he said to her in French, going up to
her. He would have run to her, but remembering that there might be
spectators, he looked round towards the balcony door, and reddened a
little, as he always reddened, feeling that he had to be afraid and be
on his guard.
“No, I’m quite well,” she said, getting up and pressing his
outstretched hand tightly. “I did not expect ... thee.”
“Mercy! what cold hands!” he said.
“You startled me,” she said. “I’m alone, and expecting Seryozha; he’s
out for a walk; they’ll come in from this side.”
But, in spite of her efforts to be calm, her lips were quivering.
“Forgive me for coming, but I couldn’t pass the day without seeing
you,” he went on, speaking French, as he always did to avoid using the
stiff Russian plural form, so impossibly frigid between them, and the
dangerously intimate singular.
“Forgive you? I’m so glad!”
“But you’re ill or worried,” he went on, not letting go her hands and
bending over her. “What were you thinking of?”
“Always the same thing,” she said, with a smile.
She spoke the truth. If ever at any moment she had been asked what she
was thinking of, she could have answered truly: of the same thing, of
her happiness and her unhappiness. She was thinking, just when he came
upon her, of this: why was it, she wondered, that to others, to Betsy
(she knew of her secret connection with Tushkevitch) it was all easy,
while to her it was such torture? Today this thought gained special
poignancy from certain other considerations. She asked him about the
races. He answered her questions, and, seeing that she was agitated,
trying to calm her, he began telling her in the simplest tone the
details of his preparations for the races.
“Tell him or not tell him?” she thought, looking into his quiet,
affectionate eyes. “He is so happy, so absorbed in his races that he
won’t understand as he ought, he won’t understand all the gravity of
this fact to us.”
“But you haven’t told me what you were thinking of when I came in,” he
said, interrupting his narrative; “please tell me!”
She did not answer, and, bending her head a little, she looked
inquiringly at him from under her brows, her eyes shining under their
long lashes. Her hand shook as it played with a leaf she had picked. He
saw it, and his face expressed that utter subjection, that slavish
devotion, which had done so much to win her.
“I see something has happened. Do you suppose I can be at peace,
knowing you have a trouble I am not sharing? Tell me, for God’s sake,”
he repeated imploringly.
“Yes, I shan’t be able to forgive him if he does not realize all the
gravity of it. Better not tell; why put him to the proof?” she thought,
still staring at him in the same way, and feeling the hand that held
the leaf was trembling more and more.
“For God’s sake!” he repeated, taking her hand.
“Shall I tell you?”
“Yes, yes, yes....”
“I’m with child,” she said, softly and deliberately. The leaf in her
hand shook more violently, but she did not take her eyes off him,
watching how he would take it. He turned white, would have said
something, but stopped; he dropped her hand, and his head sank on his
breast. “Yes, he realizes all the gravity of it,” she thought, and
gratefully she pressed his hand.
But she was mistaken in thinking he realized the gravity of the fact as
she, a woman, realized it. On hearing it, he felt come upon him with
tenfold intensity that strange feeling of loathing of someone. But at
the same time, he felt that the turning-point he had been longing for
had come now; that it was impossible to go on concealing things from
her husband, and it was inevitable in one way or another that they
should soon put an end to their unnatural position. But, besides that,
her emotion physically affected him in the same way. He looked at her
with a look of submissive tenderness, kissed her hand, got up, and, in
silence, paced up and down the terrace.
“Yes,” he said, going up to her resolutely. “Neither you nor I have
looked on our relations as a passing amusement, and now our fate is
sealed. It is absolutely necessary to put an end”—he looked round as he
spoke—“to the deception in which we are living.”
“Put an end? How put an end, Alexey?” she said softly.
She was calmer now, and her face lighted up with a tender smile.
“Leave your husband and make our life one.”
“It is one as it is,” she answered, scarcely audibly.
“Yes, but altogether; altogether.”
“But how, Alexey, tell me how?” she said in melancholy mockery at the
hopelessness of her own position. “Is there any way out of such a
position? Am I not the wife of my husband?”
“There is a way out of every position. We must take our line,” he said.
“Anything’s better than the position in which you’re living. Of course,
I see how you torture yourself over everything—the world and your son
and your husband.”
“Oh, not over my husband,” she said, with a quiet smile. “I don’t know
him, I don’t think of him. He doesn’t exist.”
“You’re not speaking sincerely. I know you. You worry about him too.”
“Oh, he doesn’t even know,” she said, and suddenly a hot flush came
over her face; her cheeks, her brow, her neck crimsoned, and tears of
shame came into her eyes. “But we won’t talk of him.”
Chapter 23
Vronsky had several times already, though not so resolutely as now,
tried to bring her to consider their position, and every time he had
been confronted by the same superficiality and triviality with which
she met his appeal now. It was as though there were something in this
which she could not or would not face, as though directly she began to
speak of this, she, the real Anna, retreated somehow into herself, and
another strange and unaccountable woman came out, whom he did not love,
and whom he feared, and who was in opposition to him. But today he was
resolved to have it out.
“Whether he knows or not,” said Vronsky, in his usual quiet and
resolute tone, “that’s nothing to do with us. We cannot ... you cannot
stay like this, especially now.”
“What’s to be done, according to you?” she asked with the same
frivolous irony. She who had so feared he would take her condition too
lightly was now vexed with him for deducing from it the necessity of
taking some step.
“Tell him everything, and leave him.”
“Very well, let us suppose I do that,” she said. “Do you know what the
result of that would be? I can tell you it all beforehand,” and a
wicked light gleamed in her eyes, that had been so soft a minute
before. “‘Eh, you love another man, and have entered into criminal
intrigues with him?’” (Mimicking her husband, she threw an emphasis on
the word “criminal,” as Alexey Alexandrovitch did.) “‘I warned you of
the results in the religious, the civil, and the domestic relation. You
have not listened to me. Now I cannot let you disgrace my name,—’” “and
my son,” she had meant to say, but about her son she could not
jest,—“‘disgrace my name, and’—and more in the same style,” she added.
“In general terms, he’ll say in his official manner, and with all
distinctness and precision, that he cannot let me go, but will take all
measures in his power to prevent scandal. And he will calmly and
punctually act in accordance with his words. That’s what will happen.
He’s not a man, but a machine, and a spiteful machine when he’s angry,”
she added, recalling Alexey Alexandrovitch as she spoke, with all the
peculiarities of his figure and manner of speaking, and reckoning
against him every defect she could find in him, softening nothing for
the great wrong she herself was doing him.
“But, Anna,” said Vronsky, in a soft and persuasive voice, trying to
soothe her, “we absolutely must, anyway, tell him, and then be guided
by the line he takes.”
“What, run away?”
“And why not run away? I don’t see how we can keep on like this. And
not for my sake—I see that you suffer.”
“Yes, run away, and become your mistress,” she said angrily.
“Anna,” he said, with reproachful tenderness.
“Yes,” she went on, “become your mistress, and complete the ruin
of....”
Again she would have said “my son,” but she could not utter that word.
Vronsky could not understand how she, with her strong and truthful
nature, could endure this state of deceit, and not long to get out of
it. But he did not suspect that the chief cause of it was the
word—_son_, which she could not bring herself to pronounce. When she
thought of her son, and his future attitude to his mother, who had
abandoned his father, she felt such terror at what she had done, that
she could not face it; but, like a woman, could only try to comfort
herself with lying assurances that everything would remain as it always
had been, and that it was possible to forget the fearful question of
how it would be with her son.
“I beg you, I entreat you,” she said suddenly, taking his hand, and
speaking in quite a different tone, sincere and tender, “never speak to
me of that!”
“But, Anna....”
“Never. Leave it to me. I know all the baseness, all the horror of my
position; but it’s not so easy to arrange as you think. And leave it to
me, and do what I say. Never speak to me of it. Do you promise me?...
No, no, promise!...”
“I promise everything, but I can’t be at peace, especially after what
you have told me. I can’t be at peace, when you can’t be at peace....”
“I?” she repeated. “Yes, I am worried sometimes; but that will pass, if
you will never talk about this. When you talk about it—it’s only then
it worries me.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“I know,” she interrupted him, “how hard it is for your truthful nature
to lie, and I grieve for you. I often think that you have ruined your
whole life for me.”
“I was just thinking the very same thing,” he said; “how could you
sacrifice everything for my sake? I can’t forgive myself that you’re
unhappy!”
“I unhappy?” she said, coming closer to him, and looking at him with an
ecstatic smile of love. “I am like a hungry man who has been given
food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he is not
unhappy. I unhappy? No, this is my unhappiness....”
She could hear the sound of her son’s voice coming towards them, and
glancing swiftly round the terrace, she got up impulsively. Her eyes
glowed with the fire he knew so well; with a rapid movement she raised
her lovely hands, covered with rings, took his head, looked a long look
into his face, and, putting up her face with smiling, parted lips,
swiftly kissed his mouth and both eyes, and pushed him away. She would
have gone, but he held her back.
“When?” he murmured in a whisper, gazing in ecstasy at her.
“Tonight, at one o’clock,” she whispered, and, with a heavy sigh, she
walked with her light, swift step to meet her son.
Seryozha had been caught by the rain in the big garden, and he and his
nurse had taken shelter in an arbor.
“Well, _au revoir_,” she said to Vronsky. “I must soon be getting ready
for the races. Betsy promised to fetch me.”
Vronsky, looking at his watch, went away hurriedly.
Chapter 24
When Vronsky looked at his watch on the Karenins’ balcony, he was so
greatly agitated and lost in his thoughts that he saw the figures on
the watch’s face, but could not take in what time it was. He came out
on to the highroad and walked, picking his way carefully through the
mud, to his carriage. He was so completely absorbed in his feeling for
Anna, that he did not even think what o’clock it was, and whether he
had time to go to Bryansky’s. He had left him, as often happens, only
the external faculty of memory, that points out each step one has to
take, one after the other. He went up to his coachman, who was dozing
on the box in the shadow, already lengthening, of a thick limetree; he
admired the shifting clouds of midges circling over the hot horses,
and, waking the coachman, he jumped into the carriage, and told him to
drive to Bryansky’s. It was only after driving nearly five miles that
he had sufficiently recovered himself to look at his watch, and realize
that it was half-past five, and he was late.
There were several races fixed for that day: the Mounted Guards’ race,
then the officers’ mile-and-a-half race, then the three-mile race, and
then the race for which he was entered. He could still be in time for
his race, but if he went to Bryansky’s he could only just be in time,
and he would arrive when the whole of the court would be in their
places. That would be a pity. But he had promised Bryansky to come, and
so he decided to drive on, telling the coachman not to spare the
horses.
He reached Bryansky’s, spent five minutes there, and galloped back.
This rapid drive calmed him. All that was painful in his relations with
Anna, all the feeling of indefiniteness left by their conversation, had
slipped out of his mind. He was thinking now with pleasure and
excitement of the race, of his being anyhow, in time, and now and then
the thought of the blissful interview awaiting him that night flashed
across his imagination like a flaming light.
The excitement of the approaching race gained upon him as he drove
further and further into the atmosphere of the races, overtaking
carriages driving up from the summer villas or out of Petersburg.
At his quarters no one was left at home; all were at the races, and his
valet was looking out for him at the gate. While he was changing his
clothes, his valet told him that the second race had begun already,
that a lot of gentlemen had been to ask for him, and a boy had twice
run up from the stables. Dressing without hurry (he never hurried
himself, and never lost his self-possession), Vronsky drove to the
sheds. From the sheds he could see a perfect sea of carriages, and
people on foot, soldiers surrounding the race course, and pavilions
swarming with people. The second race was apparently going on, for just
as he went into the sheds he heard a bell ringing. Going towards the
stable, he met the white-legged chestnut, Mahotin’s Gladiator, being
led to the race-course in a blue forage horsecloth, with what looked
like huge ears edged with blue.
“Where’s Cord?” he asked the stable-boy.
“In the stable, putting on the saddle.”
In the open horse-box stood Frou-Frou, saddled ready. They were just
going to lead her out.
“I’m not too late?”
“All right! All right!” said the Englishman; “don’t upset yourself!”
Vronsky once more took in in one glance the exquisite lines of his
favorite mare; who was quivering all over, and with an effort he tore
himself from the sight of her, and went out of the stable. He went
towards the pavilions at the most favorable moment for escaping
attention. The mile-and-a-half race was just finishing, and all eyes
were fixed on the horse-guard in front and the light hussar behind,
urging their horses on with a last effort close to the winning post.
From the center and outside of the ring all were crowding to the
winning post, and a group of soldiers and officers of the horse-guards
were shouting loudly their delight at the expected triumph of their
officer and comrade. Vronsky moved into the middle of the crowd
unnoticed, almost at the very moment when the bell rang at the finish
of the race, and the tall, mudspattered horse-guard who came in first,
bending over the saddle, let go the reins of his panting gray horse
that looked dark with sweat.
The horse, stiffening out its legs, with an effort stopped its rapid
course, and the officer of the horse-guards looked round him like a man
waking up from a heavy sleep, and just managed to smile. A crowd of
friends and outsiders pressed round him.
Vronsky intentionally avoided that select crowd of the upper world,
which was moving and talking with discreet freedom before the
pavilions. He knew that Madame Karenina was there, and Betsy, and his
brother’s wife, and he purposely did not go near them for fear of
something distracting his attention. But he was continually met and
stopped by acquaintances, who told him about the previous races, and
kept asking him why he was so late.
At the time when the racers had to go to the pavilion to receive the
prizes, and all attention was directed to that point, Vronsky’s elder
brother, Alexander, a colonel with heavy fringed epaulets, came up to
him. He was not tall, though as broadly built as Alexey, and handsomer
and rosier than he; he had a red nose, and an open, drunken-looking
face.
“Did you get my note?” he said. “There’s never any finding you.”
Alexander Vronsky, in spite of the dissolute life, and in especial the
drunken habits, for which he was notorious, was quite one of the court
circle.
Now, as he talked to his brother of a matter bound to be exceedingly
disagreeable to him, knowing that the eyes of many people might be
fixed upon him, he kept a smiling countenance, as though he were
jesting with his brother about something of little moment.
“I got it, and I really can’t make out what _you_ are worrying yourself
about,” said Alexey.
“I’m worrying myself because the remark has just been made to me that
you weren’t here, and that you were seen in Peterhof on Monday.”
“There are matters which only concern those directly interested in
them, and the matter you are so worried about is....”
“Yes, but if so, you may as well cut the service....”
“I beg you not to meddle, and that’s all I have to say.”
Alexey Vronsky’s frowning face turned white, and his prominent lower
jaw quivered, which happened rarely with him. Being a man of very warm
heart, he was seldom angry; but when he was angry, and when his chin
quivered, then, as Alexander Vronsky knew, he was dangerous. Alexander
Vronsky smiled gaily.
“I only wanted to give you Mother’s letter. Answer it, and don’t worry
about anything just before the race. _Bonne chance,_” he added, smiling
and he moved away from him. But after him another friendly greeting
brought Vronsky to a standstill.
“So you won’t recognize your friends! How are you, _mon cher?_” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch, as conspicuously brilliant in the midst of all the
Petersburg brilliance as he was in Moscow, his face rosy, and his
whiskers sleek and glossy. “I came up yesterday, and I’m delighted that
I shall see your triumph. When shall we meet?”
“Come tomorrow to the messroom,” said Vronsky, and squeezing him by the
sleeve of his coat, with apologies, he moved away to the center of the
race course, where the horses were being led for the great
steeplechase.
The horses who had run in the last race were being led home, steaming
and exhausted, by the stable-boys, and one after another the fresh
horses for the coming race made their appearance, for the most part
English racers, wearing horsecloths, and looking with their drawn-up
bellies like strange, huge birds. On the right was led in Frou-Frou,
lean and beautiful, lifting up her elastic, rather long pasterns, as
though moved by springs. Not far from her they were taking the rug off
the lop-eared Gladiator. The strong, exquisite, perfectly correct lines
of the stallion, with his superb hind-quarters and excessively short
pasterns almost over his hoofs, attracted Vronsky’s attention in spite
of himself. He would have gone up to his mare, but he was again
detained by an acquaintance.
“Oh, there’s Karenin!” said the acquaintance with whom he was chatting.
“He’s looking for his wife, and she’s in the middle of the pavilion.
Didn’t you see her?”
“No,” answered Vronsky, and without even glancing round towards the
pavilion where his friend was pointing out Madame Karenina, he went up
to his mare.
Vronsky had not had time to look at the saddle, about which he had to
give some direction, when the competitors were summoned to the pavilion
to receive their numbers and places in the row at starting. Seventeen
officers, looking serious and severe, many with pale faces, met
together in the pavilion and drew the numbers. Vronsky drew the number
seven. The cry was heard: “Mount!”
Feeling that with the others riding in the race, he was the center upon
which all eyes were fastened, Vronsky walked up to his mare in that
state of nervous tension in which he usually became deliberate and
composed in his movements. Cord, in honor of the races, had put on his
best clothes, a black coat buttoned up, a stiffly starched collar,
which propped up his cheeks, a round black hat, and top boots. He was
calm and dignified as ever, and was with his own hands holding
Frou-Frou by both reins, standing straight in front of her. Frou-Frou
was still trembling as though in a fever. Her eye, full of fire,
glanced sideways at Vronsky. Vronsky slipped his finger under the
saddle-girth. The mare glanced aslant at him, drew up her lip, and
twitched her ear. The Englishman puckered up his lips, intending to
indicate a smile that anyone should verify his saddling.
“Get up; you won’t feel so excited.”
Vronsky looked round for the last time at his rivals. He knew that he
would not see them during the race. Two were already riding forward to
the point from which they were to start. Galtsin, a friend of Vronsky’s
and one of his more formidable rivals, was moving round a bay horse
that would not let him mount. A little light hussar in tight riding
breeches rode off at a gallop, crouched up like a cat on the saddle, in
imitation of English jockeys. Prince Kuzovlev sat with a white face on
his thoroughbred mare from the Grabovsky stud, while an English groom
led her by the bridle. Vronsky and all his comrades knew Kuzovlev and
his peculiarity of “weak nerves” and terrible vanity. They knew that he
was afraid of everything, afraid of riding a spirited horse. But now,
just because it was terrible, because people broke their necks, and
there was a doctor standing at each obstacle, and an ambulance with a
cross on it, and a sister of mercy, he had made up his mind to take
part in the race. Their eyes met, and Vronsky gave him a friendly and
encouraging nod. Only one he did not see, his chief rival, Mahotin on
Gladiator.
“Don’t be in a hurry,” said Cord to Vronsky, “and remember one thing:
don’t hold her in at the fences, and don’t urge her on; let her go as
she likes.”
“All right, all right,” said Vronsky, taking the reins.
“If you can, lead the race; but don’t lose heart till the last minute,
even if you’re behind.”
Before the mare had time to move, Vronsky stepped with an agile,
vigorous movement into the steel-toothed stirrup, and lightly and
firmly seated himself on the creaking leather of the saddle. Getting
his right foot in the stirrup, he smoothed the double reins, as he
always did, between his fingers, and Cord let go.
As though she did not know which foot to put first, Frou-Frou started,
dragging at the reins with her long neck, and as though she were on
springs, shaking her rider from side to side. Cord quickened his step,
following him. The excited mare, trying to shake off her rider first on
one side and then the other, pulled at the reins, and Vronsky tried in
vain with voice and hand to soothe her.
They were just reaching the dammed-up stream on their way to the
starting point. Several of the riders were in front and several behind,
when suddenly Vronsky heard the sound of a horse galloping in the mud
behind him, and he was overtaken by Mahotin on his white-legged,
lop-eared Gladiator. Mahotin smiled, showing his long teeth, but
Vronsky looked angrily at him. He did not like him, and regarded him
now as his most formidable rival. He was angry with him for galloping
past and exciting his mare. Frou-Frou started into a gallop, her left
foot forward, made two bounds, and fretting at the tightened reins,
passed into a jolting trot, bumping her rider up and down. Cord, too,
scowled, and followed Vronsky almost at a trot.
Chapter 25
There were seventeen officers in all riding in this race. The race
course was a large three-mile ring of the form of an ellipse in front
of the pavilion. On this course nine obstacles had been arranged: the
stream, a big and solid barrier five feet high, just before the
pavilion, a dry ditch, a ditch full of water, a precipitous slope, an
Irish barricade (one of the most difficult obstacles, consisting of a
mound fenced with brushwood, beyond which was a ditch out of sight for
the horses, so that the horse had to clear both obstacles or might be
killed); then two more ditches filled with water, and one dry one; and
the end of the race was just facing the pavilion. But the race began
not in the ring, but two hundred yards away from it, and in that part
of the course was the first obstacle, a dammed-up stream, seven feet in
breadth, which the racers could leap or wade through as they preferred.
Three times they were ranged ready to start, but each time some horse
thrust itself out of line, and they had to begin again. The umpire who
was starting them, Colonel Sestrin, was beginning to lose his temper,
when at last for the fourth time he shouted “Away!” and the racers
started.
Every eye, every opera-glass, was turned on the brightly colored group
of riders at the moment they were in line to start.
“They’re off! They’re starting!” was heard on all sides after the hush
of expectation.
And little groups and solitary figures among the public began running
from place to place to get a better view. In the very first minute the
close group of horsemen drew out, and it could be seen that they were
approaching the stream in twos and threes and one behind another. To
the spectators it seemed as though they had all started simultaneously,
but to the racers there were seconds of difference that had great value
to them.
Frou-Frou, excited and over-nervous, had lost the first moment, and
several horses had started before her, but before reaching the stream,
Vronsky, who was holding in the mare with all his force as she tugged
at the bridle, easily overtook three, and there were left in front of
him Mahotin’s chestnut Gladiator, whose hind-quarters were moving
lightly and rhythmically up and down exactly in front of Vronsky, and
in front of all, the dainty mare Diana bearing Kuzovlev more dead than
alive.
For the first instant Vronsky was not master either of himself or his
mare. Up to the first obstacle, the stream, he could not guide the
motions of his mare.
Gladiator and Diana came up to it together and almost at the same
instant; simultaneously they rose above the stream and flew across to
the other side; Frou-Frou darted after them, as if flying; but at the
very moment when Vronsky felt himself in the air, he suddenly saw
almost under his mare’s hoofs Kuzovlev, who was floundering with Diana
on the further side of the stream. (Kuzovlev had let go the reins as he
took the leap, and the mare had sent him flying over her head.) Those
details Vronsky learned later; at the moment all he saw was that just
under him, where Frou-Frou must alight, Diana’s legs or head might be
in the way. But Frou-Frou drew up her legs and back in the very act of
leaping, like a falling cat, and, clearing the other mare, alighted
beyond her.
“O the darling!” thought Vronsky.
After crossing the stream Vronsky had complete control of his mare, and
began holding her in, intending to cross the great barrier behind
Mahotin, and to try to overtake him in the clear ground of about five
hundred yards that followed it.
The great barrier stood just in front of the imperial pavilion. The
Tsar and the whole court and crowds of people were all gazing at
them—at him, and Mahotin a length ahead of him, as they drew near the
“devil,” as the solid barrier was called. Vronsky was aware of those
eyes fastened upon him from all sides, but he saw nothing except the
ears and neck of his own mare, the ground racing to meet him, and the
back and white legs of Gladiator beating time swiftly before him, and
keeping always the same distance ahead. Gladiator rose, with no sound
of knocking against anything. With a wave of his short tail he
disappeared from Vronsky’s sight.
“Bravo!” cried a voice.
At the same instant, under Vronsky’s eyes, right before him flashed the
palings of the barrier. Without the slightest change in her action his
mare flew over it; the palings vanished, and he heard only a crash
behind him. The mare, excited by Gladiator’s keeping ahead, had risen
too soon before the barrier, and grazed it with her hind hoofs. But her
pace never changed, and Vronsky, feeling a spatter of mud in his face,
realized that he was once more the same distance from Gladiator. Once
more he perceived in front of him the same back and short tail, and
again the same swiftly moving white legs that got no further away.
At the very moment when Vronsky thought that now was the time to
overtake Mahotin, Frou-Frou herself, understanding his thoughts,
without any incitement on his part, gained ground considerably, and
began getting alongside of Mahotin on the most favorable side, close to
the inner cord. Mahotin would not let her pass that side. Vronsky had
hardly formed the thought that he could perhaps pass on the outer side,
when Frou-Frou shifted her pace and began overtaking him on the other
side. Frou-Frou’s shoulder, beginning by now to be dark with sweat, was
even with Gladiator’s back. For a few lengths they moved evenly. But
before the obstacle they were approaching, Vronsky began working at the
reins, anxious to avoid having to take the outer circle, and swiftly
passed Mahotin just upon the declivity. He caught a glimpse of his
mud-stained face as he flashed by. He even fancied that he smiled.
Vronsky passed Mahotin, but he was immediately aware of him close upon
him, and he never ceased hearing the even-thudding hoofs and the rapid
and still quite fresh breathing of Gladiator.
The next two obstacles, the water course and the barrier, were easily
crossed, but Vronsky began to hear the snorting and thud of Gladiator
closer upon him. He urged on his mare, and to his delight felt that she
easily quickened her pace, and the thud of Gladiator’s hoofs was again
heard at the same distance away.
Vronsky was at the head of the race, just as he wanted to be and as
Cord had advised, and now he felt sure of being the winner. His
excitement, his delight, and his tenderness for Frou-Frou grew keener
and keener. He longed to look round again, but he did not dare do this,
and tried to be cool and not to urge on his mare so to keep the same
reserve of force in her as he felt that Gladiator still kept. There
remained only one obstacle, the most difficult; if he could cross it
ahead of the others he would come in first. He was flying towards the
Irish barricade, Frou-Frou and he both together saw the barricade in
the distance, and both the man and the mare had a moment’s hesitation.
He saw the uncertainty in the mare’s ears and lifted the whip, but at
the same time felt that his fears were groundless; the mare knew what
was wanted. She quickened her pace and rose smoothly, just as he had
fancied she would, and as she left the ground gave herself up to the
force of her rush, which carried her far beyond the ditch; and with the
same rhythm, without effort, with the same leg forward, Frou-Frou fell
back into her pace again.
“Bravo, Vronsky!” he heard shouts from a knot of men—he knew they were
his friends in the regiment—who were standing at the obstacle. He could
not fail to recognize Yashvin’s voice though he did not see him.
“O my sweet!” he said inwardly to Frou-Frou, as he listened for what
was happening behind. “He’s cleared it!” he thought, catching the thud
of Gladiator’s hoofs behind him. There remained only the last ditch,
filled with water and five feet wide. Vronsky did not even look at it,
but anxious to get in a long way first began sawing away at the reins,
lifting the mare’s head and letting it go in time with her paces. He
felt that the mare was at her very last reserve of strength; not her
neck and shoulders merely were wet, but the sweat was standing in drops
on her mane, her head, her sharp ears, and her breath came in short,
sharp gasps. But he knew that she had strength left more than enough
for the remaining five hundred yards. It was only from feeling himself
nearer the ground and from the peculiar smoothness of his motion that
Vronsky knew how greatly the mare had quickened her pace. She flew over
the ditch as though not noticing it. She flew over it like a bird; but
at the same instant Vronsky, to his horror, felt that he had failed to
keep up with the mare’s pace, that he had, he did not know how, made a
fearful, unpardonable mistake, in recovering his seat in the saddle.
All at once his position had shifted and he knew that something awful
had happened. He could not yet make out what had happened, when the
white legs of a chestnut horse flashed by close to him, and Mahotin
passed at a swift gallop. Vronsky was touching the ground with one
foot, and his mare was sinking on that foot. He just had time to free
his leg when she fell on one side, gasping painfully, and, making vain
efforts to rise with her delicate, soaking neck, she fluttered on the
ground at his feet like a shot bird. The clumsy movement made by
Vronsky had broken her back. But that he only knew much later. At that
moment he knew only that Mahotin had flown swiftly by, while he stood
staggering alone on the muddy, motionless ground, and Frou-Frou lay
gasping before him, bending her head back and gazing at him with her
exquisite eyes. Still unable to realize what had happened, Vronsky
tugged at his mare’s reins. Again she struggled all over like a fish,
and her shoulders setting the saddle heaving, she rose on her front
legs but unable to lift her back, she quivered all over and again fell
on her side. With a face hideous with passion, his lower jaw trembling,
and his cheeks white, Vronsky kicked her with his heel in the stomach
and again fell to tugging at the rein. She did not stir, but thrusting
her nose into the ground, she simply gazed at her master with her
speaking eyes.
“A—a—a!” groaned Vronsky, clutching at his head. “Ah! what have I
done!” he cried. “The race lost! And my fault! shameful, unpardonable!
And the poor darling, ruined mare! Ah! what have I done!”
A crowd of men, a doctor and his assistant, the officers of his
regiment, ran up to him. To his misery he felt that he was whole and
unhurt. The mare had broken her back, and it was decided to shoot her.
Vronsky could not answer questions, could not speak to anyone. He
turned, and without picking up his cap that had fallen off, walked away
from the race course, not knowing where he was going. He felt utterly
wretched. For the first time in his life he knew the bitterest sort of
misfortune, misfortune beyond remedy, and caused by his own fault.
Yashvin overtook him with his cap, and led him home, and half an hour
later Vronsky had regained his self-possession. But the memory of that
race remained for long in his heart, the cruelest and bitterest memory
of his life.
Chapter 26
The external relations of Alexey Alexandrovitch and his wife had
remained unchanged. The sole difference lay in the fact that he was
more busily occupied than ever. As in former years, at the beginning of
the spring he had gone to a foreign watering-place for the sake of his
health, deranged by the winter’s work that every year grew heavier. And
just as always he returned in July and at once fell to work as usual
with increased energy. As usual, too, his wife had moved for the summer
to a villa out of town, while he remained in Petersburg. From the date
of their conversation after the party at Princess Tverskaya’s he had
never spoken again to Anna of his suspicions and his jealousies, and
that habitual tone of his bantering mimicry was the most convenient
tone possible for his present attitude to his wife. He was a little
colder to his wife. He simply seemed to be slightly displeased with her
for that first midnight conversation, which she had repelled. In his
attitude to her there was a shade of vexation, but nothing more. “You
would not be open with me,” he seemed to say, mentally addressing her;
“so much the worse for you. Now you may beg as you please, but I won’t
be open with you. So much the worse for you!” he said mentally, like a
man who, after vainly attempting to extinguish a fire, should fly in a
rage with his vain efforts and say, “Oh, very well then! you shall burn
for this!” This man, so subtle and astute in official life, did not
realize all the senselessness of such an attitude to his wife. He did
not realize it, because it was too terrible to him to realize his
actual position, and he shut down and locked and sealed up in his heart
that secret place where lay hid his feelings towards his family, that
is, his wife and son. He who had been such a careful father, had from
the end of that winter become peculiarly frigid to his son, and adopted
to him just the same bantering tone he used with his wife. “Aha, young
man!” was the greeting with which he met him.
Alexey Alexandrovitch asserted and believed that he had never in any
previous year had so much official business as that year. But he was
not aware that he sought work for himself that year, that this was one
of the means for keeping shut that secret place where lay hid his
feelings towards his wife and son and his thoughts about them, which
became more terrible the longer they lay there. If anyone had had the
right to ask Alexey Alexandrovitch what he thought of his wife’s
behavior, the mild and peaceable Alexey Alexandrovitch would have made
no answer, but he would have been greatly angered with any man who
should question him on that subject. For this reason there positively
came into Alexey Alexandrovitch’s face a look of haughtiness and
severity whenever anyone inquired after his wife’s health. Alexey
Alexandrovitch did not want to think at all about his wife’s behavior,
and he actually succeeded in not thinking about it at all.
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s permanent summer villa was in Peterhof, and the
Countess Lidia Ivanovna used as a rule to spend the summer there, close
to Anna, and constantly seeing her. That year Countess Lidia Ivanovna
declined to settle in Peterhof, was not once at Anna Arkadyevna’s, and
in conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch hinted at the unsuitability
of Anna’s close intimacy with Betsy and Vronsky. Alexey Alexandrovitch
sternly cut her short, roundly declaring his wife to be above
suspicion, and from that time began to avoid Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
He did not want to see, and did not see, that many people in society
cast dubious glances on his wife; he did not want to understand, and
did not understand, why his wife had so particularly insisted on
staying at Tsarskoe, where Betsy was staying, and not far from the camp
of Vronsky’s regiment. He did not allow himself to think about it, and
he did not think about it; but all the same though he never admitted it
to himself, and had no proofs, not even suspicious evidence, in the
bottom of his heart he knew beyond all doubt that he was a deceived
husband, and he was profoundly miserable about it.
How often during those eight years of happy life with his wife Alexey
Alexandrovitch had looked at other men’s faithless wives and other
deceived husbands and asked himself: “How can people descend to that?
how is it they don’t put an end to such a hideous position?” But now,
when the misfortune had come upon himself, he was so far from thinking
of putting an end to the position that he would not recognize it at
all, would not recognize it just because it was too awful, too
unnatural.
Since his return from abroad Alexey Alexandrovitch had twice been at
their country villa. Once he dined there, another time he spent the
evening there with a party of friends, but he had not once stayed the
night there, as it had been his habit to do in previous years.
The day of the races had been a very busy day for Alexey
Alexandrovitch; but when mentally sketching out the day in the morning,
he made up his mind to go to their country house to see his wife
immediately after dinner, and from there to the races, which all the
Court were to witness, and at which he was bound to be present. He was
going to see his wife, because he had determined to see her once a week
to keep up appearances. And besides, on that day, as it was the
fifteenth, he had to give his wife some money for her expenses,
according to their usual arrangement.
With his habitual control over his thoughts, though he thought all this
about his wife, he did not let his thoughts stray further in regard to
her.
That morning was a very full one for Alexey Alexandrovitch. The evening
before, Countess Lidia Ivanovna had sent him a pamphlet by a celebrated
traveler in China, who was staying in Petersburg, and with it she
enclosed a note begging him to see the traveler himself, as he was an
extremely interesting person from various points of view, and likely to
be useful. Alexey Alexandrovitch had not had time to read the pamphlet
through in the evening, and finished it in the morning. Then people
began arriving with petitions, and there came the reports, interviews,
appointments, dismissals, apportionment of rewards, pensions, grants,
notes, the workaday round, as Alexey Alexandrovitch called it, that
always took up so much time. Then there was private business of his
own, a visit from the doctor and the steward who managed his property.
The steward did not take up much time. He simply gave Alexey
Alexandrovitch the money he needed together with a brief statement of
the position of his affairs, which was not altogether satisfactory, as
it had happened that during that year, owing to increased expenses,
more had been paid out than usual, and there was a deficit. But the
doctor, a celebrated Petersburg doctor, who was an intimate
acquaintance of Alexey Alexandrovitch, took up a great deal of time.
Alexey Alexandrovitch had not expected him that day, and was surprised
at his visit, and still more so when the doctor questioned him very
carefully about his health, listened to his breathing, and tapped at
his liver. Alexey Alexandrovitch did not know that his friend Lidia
Ivanovna, noticing that he was not as well as usual that year, had
begged the doctor to go and examine him. “Do this for my sake,” the
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had said to him.
“I will do it for the sake of Russia, countess,” replied the doctor.
“A priceless man!” said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
The doctor was extremely dissatisfied with Alexey Alexandrovitch. He
found the liver considerably enlarged, and the digestive powers
weakened, while the course of mineral waters had been quite without
effect. He prescribed more physical exercise as far as possible, and as
far as possible less mental strain, and above all no worry—in other
words, just what was as much out of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s power as
abstaining from breathing. Then he withdrew, leaving in Alexey
Alexandrovitch an unpleasant sense that something was wrong with him,
and that there was no chance of curing it.
As he was coming away, the doctor chanced to meet on the staircase an
acquaintance of his, Sludin, who was secretary of Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s department. They had been comrades at the university,
and though they rarely met, they thought highly of each other and were
excellent friends, and so there was no one to whom the doctor would
have given his opinion of a patient so freely as to Sludin.
“How glad I am you’ve been seeing him!” said Sludin. “He’s not well,
and I fancy.... Well, what do you think of him?”
“I’ll tell you,” said the doctor, beckoning over Sludin’s head to his
coachman to bring the carriage round. “It’s just this,” said the
doctor, taking a finger of his kid glove in his white hands and pulling
it, “if you don’t strain the strings, and then try to break them,
you’ll find it a difficult job; but strain a string to its very utmost,
and the mere weight of one finger on the strained string will snap it.
And with his close assiduity, his conscientious devotion to his work,
he’s strained to the utmost; and there’s some outside burden weighing
on him, and not a light one,” concluded the doctor, raising his
eyebrows significantly. “Will you be at the races?” he added, as he
sank into his seat in the carriage.
“Yes, yes, to be sure; it does waste a lot of time,” the doctor
responded vaguely to some reply of Sludin’s he had not caught.
Directly after the doctor, who had taken up so much time, came the
celebrated traveler, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, by means of the
pamphlet he had only just finished reading and his previous
acquaintance with the subject, impressed the traveler by the depth of
his knowledge of the subject and the breadth and enlightenment of his
view of it.
At the same time as the traveler there was announced a provincial
marshal of nobility on a visit to Petersburg, with whom Alexey
Alexandrovitch had to have some conversation. After his departure, he
had to finish the daily routine of business with his secretary, and
then he still had to drive round to call on a certain great personage
on a matter of grave and serious import. Alexey Alexandrovitch only
just managed to be back by five o’clock, his dinner-hour, and after
dining with his secretary, he invited him to drive with him to his
country villa and to the races.
Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, Alexey Alexandrovitch
always tried nowadays to secure the presence of a third person in his
interviews with his wife.
Chapter 27
Anna was upstairs, standing before the looking-glass, and, with
Annushka’s assistance, pinning the last ribbon on her gown when she
heard carriage wheels crunching the gravel at the entrance.
“It’s too early for Betsy,” she thought, and glancing out of the window
she caught sight of the carriage and the black hat of Alexey
Alexandrovitch, and the ears that she knew so well sticking up each
side of it. “How unlucky! Can he be going to stay the night?” she
wondered, and the thought of all that might come of such a chance
struck her as so awful and terrible that, without dwelling on it for a
moment, she went down to meet him with a bright and radiant face; and
conscious of the presence of that spirit of falsehood and deceit in
herself that she had come to know of late, she abandoned herself to
that spirit and began talking, hardly knowing what she was saying.
“Ah, how nice of you!” she said, giving her husband her hand, and
greeting Sludin, who was like one of the family, with a smile. “You’re
staying the night, I hope?” was the first word the spirit of falsehood
prompted her to utter; “and now we’ll go together. Only it’s a pity
I’ve promised Betsy. She’s coming for me.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch knit his brows at Betsy’s name.
“Oh, I’m not going to separate the inseparables,” he said in his usual
bantering tone. “I’m going with Mihail Vassilievitch. I’m ordered
exercise by the doctors too. I’ll walk, and fancy myself at the springs
again.”
“There’s no hurry,” said Anna. “Would you like tea?”
She rang.
“Bring in tea, and tell Seryozha that Alexey Alexandrovitch is here.
Well, tell me, how have you been? Mihail Vassilievitch, you’ve not been
to see me before. Look how lovely it is out on the terrace,” she said,
turning first to one and then to the other.
She spoke very simply and naturally, but too much and too fast. She was
the more aware of this from noticing in the inquisitive look Mihail
Vassilievitch turned on her that he was, as it were, keeping watch on
her.
Mihail Vassilievitch promptly went out on the terrace.
She sat down beside her husband.
“You don’t look quite well,” she said.
“Yes,” he said; “the doctor’s been with me today and wasted an hour of
my time. I feel that someone of our friends must have sent him: my
health’s so precious, it seems.”
“No; what did he say?”
She questioned him about his health and what he had been doing, and
tried to persuade him to take a rest and come out to her.
All this she said brightly, rapidly, and with a peculiar brilliance in
her eyes. But Alexey Alexandrovitch did not now attach any special
significance to this tone of hers. He heard only her words and gave
them only the direct sense they bore. And he answered simply, though
jestingly. There was nothing remarkable in all this conversation, but
never after could Anna recall this brief scene without an agonizing
pang of shame.
Seryozha came in preceded by his governess. If Alexey Alexandrovitch
had allowed himself to observe he would have noticed the timid and
bewildered eyes with which Seryozha glanced first at his father and
then at his mother. But he would not see anything, and he did not see
it.
“Ah, the young man! He’s grown. Really, he’s getting quite a man. How
are you, young man?”
And he gave his hand to the scared child. Seryozha had been shy of his
father before, and now, ever since Alexey Alexandrovitch had taken to
calling him young man, and since that insoluble question had occurred
to him whether Vronsky were a friend or a foe, he avoided his father.
He looked round towards his mother as though seeking shelter. It was
only with his mother that he was at ease. Meanwhile, Alexey
Alexandrovitch was holding his son by the shoulder while he was
speaking to the governess, and Seryozha was so miserably uncomfortable
that Anna saw he was on the point of tears.
Anna, who had flushed a little the instant her son came in, noticing
that Seryozha was uncomfortable, got up hurriedly, took Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s hand from her son’s shoulder, and kissing the boy, led
him out onto the terrace, and quickly came back.
“It’s time to start, though,” said she, glancing at her watch. “How is
it Betsy doesn’t come?...”
“Yes,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, and getting up, he folded his hands
and cracked his fingers. “I’ve come to bring you some money, too, for
nightingales, we know, can’t live on fairy tales,” he said. “You want
it, I expect?”
“No, I don’t ... yes, I do,” she said, not looking at him, and
crimsoning to the roots of her hair. “But you’ll come back here after
the races, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes!” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch. “And here’s the glory of
Peterhof, Princess Tverskaya,” he added, looking out of the window at
the elegant English carriage with the tiny seats placed extremely high.
“What elegance! Charming! Well, let us be starting too, then.”
Princess Tverskaya did not get out of her carriage, but her groom, in
high boots, a cape, and black hat, darted out at the entrance.
“I’m going; good-bye!” said Anna, and kissing her son, she went up to
Alexey Alexandrovitch and held out her hand to him. “It was ever so
nice of you to come.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch kissed her hand.
“Well, _au revoir_, then! You’ll come back for some tea; that’s
delightful!” she said, and went out, gay and radiant. But as soon as
she no longer saw him, she was aware of the spot on her hand that his
lips had touched, and she shuddered with repulsion.
Chapter 28
When Alexey Alexandrovitch reached the race-course, Anna was already
sitting in the pavilion beside Betsy, in that pavilion where all the
highest society had gathered. She caught sight of her husband in the
distance. Two men, her husband and her lover, were the two centers of
her existence, and unaided by her external senses she was aware of
their nearness. She was aware of her husband approaching a long way
off, and she could not help following him in the surging crowd in the
midst of which he was moving. She watched his progress towards the
pavilion, saw him now responding condescendingly to an ingratiating
bow, now exchanging friendly, nonchalant greetings with his equals, now
assiduously trying to catch the eye of some great one of this world,
and taking off his big round hat that squeezed the tips of his ears.
All these ways of his she knew, and all were hateful to her. “Nothing
but ambition, nothing but the desire to get on, that’s all there is in
his soul,” she thought; “as for these lofty ideals, love of culture,
religion, they are only so many tools for getting on.”
From his glances towards the ladies’ pavilion (he was staring straight
at her, but did not distinguish his wife in the sea of muslin, ribbons,
feathers, parasols and flowers) she saw that he was looking for her,
but she purposely avoided noticing him.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch!” Princess Betsy called to him; “I’m sure you
don’t see your wife: here she is.”
He smiled his chilly smile.
“There’s so much splendor here that one’s eyes are dazzled,” he said,
and he went into the pavilion. He smiled to his wife as a man should
smile on meeting his wife after only just parting from her, and greeted
the princess and other acquaintances, giving to each what was due—that
is to say, jesting with the ladies and dealing out friendly greetings
among the men. Below, near the pavilion, was standing an
adjutant-general of whom Alexey Alexandrovitch had a high opinion,
noted for his intelligence and culture. Alexey Alexandrovitch entered
into conversation with him.
There was an interval between the races, and so nothing hindered
conversation. The adjutant-general expressed his disapproval of races.
Alexey Alexandrovitch replied defending them. Anna heard his high,
measured tones, not losing one word, and every word struck her as
false, and stabbed her ears with pain.
When the three-mile steeplechase was beginning, she bent forward and
gazed with fixed eyes at Vronsky as he went up to his horse and
mounted, and at the same time she heard that loathsome, never-ceasing
voice of her husband. She was in an agony of terror for Vronsky, but a
still greater agony was the never-ceasing, as it seemed to her, stream
of her husband’s shrill voice with its familiar intonations.
“I’m a wicked woman, a lost woman,” she thought; “but I don’t like
lying, I can’t endure falsehood, while as for _him_ (her husband) it’s
the breath of his life—falsehood. He knows all about it, he sees it
all; what does he care if he can talk so calmly? If he were to kill me,
if he were to kill Vronsky, I might respect him. No, all he wants is
falsehood and propriety,” Anna said to herself, not considering exactly
what it was she wanted of her husband, and how she would have liked to
see him behave. She did not understand either that Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s peculiar loquacity that day, so exasperating to her,
was merely the expression of his inward distress and uneasiness. As a
child that has been hurt skips about, putting all his muscles into
movement to drown the pain, in the same way Alexey Alexandrovitch
needed mental exercise to drown the thoughts of his wife that in her
presence and in Vronsky’s, and with the continual iteration of his
name, would force themselves on his attention. And it was as natural
for him to talk well and cleverly, as it is natural for a child to skip
about. He was saying:
“Danger in the races of officers, of cavalry men, is an essential
element in the race. If England can point to the most brilliant feats
of cavalry in military history, it is simply owing to the fact that she
has historically developed this force both in beasts and in men. Sport
has, in my opinion, a great value, and as is always the case, we see
nothing but what is most superficial.”
“It’s not superficial,” said Princess Tverskaya. “One of the officers,
they say, has broken two ribs.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled his smile, which uncovered his teeth, but
revealed nothing more.
“We’ll admit, princess, that that’s not superficial,” he said, “but
internal. But that’s not the point,” and he turned again to the general
with whom he was talking seriously; “we mustn’t forget that those who
are taking part in the race are military men, who have chosen that
career, and one must allow that every calling has its disagreeable
side. It forms an integral part of the duties of an officer. Low
sports, such as prize-fighting or Spanish bull-fights, are a sign of
barbarity. But specialized trials of skill are a sign of development.”
“No, I shan’t come another time; it’s too upsetting,” said Princess
Betsy. “Isn’t it, Anna?”
“It is upsetting, but one can’t tear oneself away,” said another lady.
“If I’d been a Roman woman I should never have missed a single circus.”
Anna said nothing, and keeping her opera-glass up, gazed always at the
same spot.
At that moment a tall general walked through the pavilion. Breaking off
what he was saying, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up hurriedly, though with
dignity, and bowed low to the general.
“You’re not racing?” the officer asked, chaffing him.
“My race is a harder one,” Alexey Alexandrovitch responded
deferentially.
And though the answer meant nothing, the general looked as though he
had heard a witty remark from a witty man, and fully relished _la
pointe de la sauce_.
“There are two aspects,” Alexey Alexandrovitch resumed: “those who take
part and those who look on; and love for such spectacles is an
unmistakable proof of a low degree of development in the spectator, I
admit, but....”
“Princess, bets!” sounded Stepan Arkadyevitch’s voice from below,
addressing Betsy. “Who’s your favorite?”
“Anna and I are for Kuzovlev,” replied Betsy.
“I’m for Vronsky. A pair of gloves?”
“Done!”
“But it is a pretty sight, isn’t it?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch paused while there was talking about him, but he
began again directly.
“I admit that manly sports do not....” he was continuing.
But at that moment the racers started, and all conversation ceased.
Alexey Alexandrovitch too was silent, and everyone stood up and turned
towards the stream. Alexey Alexandrovitch took no interest in the race,
and so he did not watch the racers, but fell listlessly to scanning the
spectators with his weary eyes. His eyes rested upon Anna.
Her face was white and set. She was obviously seeing nothing and no one
but one man. Her hand had convulsively clutched her fan, and she held
her breath. He looked at her and hastily turned away, scrutinizing
other faces.
“But here’s this lady too, and others very much moved as well; it’s
very natural,” Alexey Alexandrovitch told himself. He tried not to look
at her, but unconsciously his eyes were drawn to her. He examined that
face again, trying not to read what was so plainly written on it, and
against his own will, with horror read on it what he did not want to
know.
The first fall—Kuzovlev’s, at the stream—agitated everyone, but Alexey
Alexandrovitch saw distinctly on Anna’s pale, triumphant face that the
man she was watching had not fallen. When, after Mahotin and Vronsky
had cleared the worst barrier, the next officer had been thrown
straight on his head at it and fatally injured, and a shudder of horror
passed over the whole public, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that Anna did
not even notice it, and had some difficulty in realizing what they were
talking of about her. But more and more often, and with greater
persistence, he watched her. Anna, wholly engrossed as she was with the
race, became aware of her husband’s cold eyes fixed upon her from one
side.
She glanced round for an instant, looked inquiringly at him, and with a
slight frown turned away again.
“Ah, I don’t care!” she seemed to say to him, and she did not once
glance at him again.
The race was an unlucky one, and of the seventeen officers who rode in
it more than half were thrown and hurt. Towards the end of the race
everyone was in a state of agitation, which was intensified by the fact
that the Tsar was displeased.
Chapter 29
Everyone was loudly expressing disapprobation, everyone was repeating a
phrase someone had uttered—“The lions and gladiators will be the next
thing,” and everyone was feeling horrified; so that when Vronsky fell
to the ground, and Anna moaned aloud, there was nothing very out of the
way in it. But afterwards a change came over Anna’s face which really
was beyond decorum. She utterly lost her head. She began fluttering
like a caged bird, at one moment would have got up and moved away, at
the next turned to Betsy.
“Let us go, let us go!” she said.
But Betsy did not hear her. She was bending down, talking to a general
who had come up to her.
Alexey Alexandrovitch went up to Anna and courteously offered her his
arm.
“Let us go, if you like,” he said in French, but Anna was listening to
the general and did not notice her husband.
“He’s broken his leg too, so they say,” the general was saying. “This
is beyond everything.”
Without answering her husband, Anna lifted her opera-glass and gazed
towards the place where Vronsky had fallen; but it was so far off, and
there was such a crowd of people about it, that she could make out
nothing. She laid down the opera-glass, and would have moved away, but
at that moment an officer galloped up and made some announcement to the
Tsar. Anna craned forward, listening.
“Stiva! Stiva!” she cried to her brother.
But her brother did not hear her. Again she would have moved away.
“Once more I offer you my arm if you want to be going,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch, reaching towards her hand.
She drew back from him with aversion, and without looking in his face
answered:
“No, no, let me be, I’ll stay.”
She saw now that from the place of Vronsky’s accident an officer was
running across the course towards the pavilion. Betsy waved her
handkerchief to him. The officer brought the news that the rider was
not killed, but the horse had broken its back.
On hearing this Anna sat down hurriedly, and hid her face in her fan.
Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that she was weeping, and could not control
her tears, nor even the sobs that were shaking her bosom. Alexey
Alexandrovitch stood so as to screen her, giving her time to recover
herself.
“For the third time I offer you my arm,” he said to her after a little
time, turning to her. Anna gazed at him and did not know what to say.
Princess Betsy came to her rescue.
“No, Alexey Alexandrovitch; I brought Anna and I promised to take her
home,” put in Betsy.
“Excuse me, princess,” he said, smiling courteously but looking her
very firmly in the face, “but I see that Anna’s not very well, and I
wish her to come home with me.”
Anna looked about her in a frightened way, got up submissively, and
laid her hand on her husband’s arm.
“I’ll send to him and find out, and let you know,” Betsy whispered to
her.
As they left the pavilion, Alexey Alexandrovitch, as always, talked to
those he met, and Anna had, as always, to talk and answer; but she was
utterly beside herself, and moved hanging on her husband’s arm as
though in a dream.
“Is he killed or not? Is it true? Will he come or not? Shall I see him
today?” she was thinking.
She took her seat in her husband’s carriage in silence, and in silence
drove out of the crowd of carriages. In spite of all he had seen,
Alexey Alexandrovitch still did not allow himself to consider his
wife’s real condition. He merely saw the outward symptoms. He saw that
she was behaving unbecomingly, and considered it his duty to tell her
so. But it was very difficult for him not to say more, to tell her
nothing but that. He opened his mouth to tell her she had behaved
unbecomingly, but he could not help saying something utterly different.
“What an inclination we all have, though, for these cruel spectacles,”
he said. “I observe....”
“Eh? I don’t understand,” said Anna contemptuously.
He was offended, and at once began to say what he had meant to say.
“I am obliged to tell you,” he began.
“So now we are to have it out,” she thought, and she felt frightened.
“I am obliged to tell you that your behavior has been unbecoming
today,” he said to her in French.
“In what way has my behavior been unbecoming?” she said aloud, turning
her head swiftly and looking him straight in the face, not with the
bright expression that seemed covering something, but with a look of
determination, under which she concealed with difficulty the dismay she
was feeling.
“Mind,” he said, pointing to the open window opposite the coachman.
He got up and pulled up the window.
“What did you consider unbecoming?” she repeated.
“The despair you were unable to conceal at the accident to one of the
riders.”
He waited for her to answer, but she was silent, looking straight
before her.
“I have already begged you so to conduct yourself in society that even
malicious tongues can find nothing to say against you. There was a time
when I spoke of your inward attitude, but I am not speaking of that
now. Now I speak only of your external attitude. You have behaved
improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again.”
She did not hear half of what he was saying; she felt panic-stricken
before him, and was thinking whether it was true that Vronsky was not
killed. Was it of him they were speaking when they said the rider was
unhurt, but the horse had broken its back? She merely smiled with a
pretense of irony when he finished, and made no reply, because she had
not heard what he said. Alexey Alexandrovitch had begun to speak
boldly, but as he realized plainly what he was speaking of, the dismay
she was feeling infected him too. He saw the smile, and a strange
misapprehension came over him.
“She is smiling at my suspicions. Yes, she will tell me directly what
she told me before; that there is no foundation for my suspicions, that
it’s absurd.”
At that moment, when the revelation of everything was hanging over him,
there was nothing he expected so much as that she would answer
mockingly as before that his suspicions were absurd and utterly
groundless. So terrible to him was what he knew that now he was ready
to believe anything. But the expression of her face, scared and gloomy,
did not now promise even deception.
“Possibly I was mistaken,” said he. “If so, I beg your pardon.”
“No, you were not mistaken,” she said deliberately, looking desperately
into his cold face. “You were not mistaken. I was, and I could not help
being in despair. I hear you, but I am thinking of him. I love him, I
am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate
you.... You can do what you like to me.”
And dropping back into the corner of the carriage, she broke into sobs,
hiding her face in her hands. Alexey Alexandrovitch did not stir, and
kept looking straight before him. But his whole face suddenly bore the
solemn rigidity of the dead, and his expression did not change during
the whole time of the drive home. On reaching the house he turned his
head to her, still with the same expression.
“Very well! But I expect a strict observance of the external forms of
propriety till such time”—his voice shook—“as I may take measures to
secure my honor and communicate them to you.”
He got out first and helped her to get out. Before the servants he
pressed her hand, took his seat in the carriage, and drove back to
Petersburg. Immediately afterwards a footman came from Princess Betsy
and brought Anna a note.
“I sent to Alexey to find out how he is, and he writes me he is quite
well and unhurt, but in despair.”
“So _he_ will be here,” she thought. “What a good thing I told him
all!”
She glanced at her watch. She had still three hours to wait, and the
memories of their last meeting set her blood in flame.
“My God, how light it is! It’s dreadful, but I do love to see his face,
and I do love this fantastic light.... My husband! Oh! yes.... Well,
thank God! everything’s over with him.”
Chapter 30
In the little German watering-place to which the Shtcherbatskys had
betaken themselves, as in all places indeed where people are gathered
together, the usual process, as it were, of the crystallization of
society went on, assigning to each member of that society a definite
and unalterable place. Just as the particle of water in frost,
definitely and unalterably, takes the special form of the crystal of
snow, so each new person that arrived at the springs was at once placed
in his special place.
_Fürst_ Shtcherbatsky, _sammt Gemahlin und Tochter_, by the apartments
they took, and from their name and from the friends they made, were
immediately crystallized into a definite place marked out for them.
There was visiting the watering-place that year a real German Fürstin,
in consequence of which the crystallizing process went on more
vigorously than ever. Princess Shtcherbatskaya wished, above
everything, to present her daughter to this German princess, and the
day after their arrival she duly performed this rite. Kitty made a low
and graceful curtsey in the _very simple_, that is to say, very elegant
frock that had been ordered her from Paris. The German princess said,
“I hope the roses will soon come back to this pretty little face,” and
for the Shtcherbatskys certain definite lines of existence were at once
laid down from which there was no departing. The Shtcherbatskys made
the acquaintance too of the family of an English Lady Somebody, and of
a German countess and her son, wounded in the last war, and of a
learned Swede, and of M. Canut and his sister. But yet inevitably the
Shtcherbatskys were thrown most into the society of a Moscow lady,
Marya Yevgenyevna Rtishtcheva and her daughter, whom Kitty disliked,
because she had fallen ill, like herself, over a love affair, and a
Moscow colonel, whom Kitty had known from childhood, and always seen in
uniform and epaulets, and who now, with his little eyes and his open
neck and flowered cravat, was uncommonly ridiculous and tedious,
because there was no getting rid of him. When all this was so firmly
established, Kitty began to be very much bored, especially as the
prince went away to Carlsbad and she was left alone with her mother.
She took no interest in the people she knew, feeling that nothing fresh
would come of them. Her chief mental interest in the watering-place
consisted in watching and making theories about the people she did not
know. It was characteristic of Kitty that she always imagined
everything in people in the most favorable light possible, especially
so in those she did not know. And now as she made surmises as to who
people were, what were their relations to one another, and what they
were like, Kitty endowed them with the most marvelous and noble
characters, and found confirmation of her idea in her observations.
Of these people the one that attracted her most was a Russian girl who
had come to the watering-place with an invalid Russian lady, Madame
Stahl, as everyone called her. Madame Stahl belonged to the highest
society, but she was so ill that she could not walk, and only on
exceptionally fine days made her appearance at the springs in an
invalid carriage. But it was not so much from ill-health as from
pride—so Princess Shtcherbatskaya interpreted it—that Madame Stahl had
not made the acquaintance of anyone among the Russians there. The
Russian girl looked after Madame Stahl, and besides that, she was, as
Kitty observed, on friendly terms with all the invalids who were
seriously ill, and there were many of them at the springs, and looked
after them in the most natural way. This Russian girl was not, as Kitty
gathered, related to Madame Stahl, nor was she a paid attendant. Madame
Stahl called her Varenka, and other people called her “Mademoiselle
Varenka.” Apart from the interest Kitty took in this girl’s relations
with Madame Stahl and with other unknown persons, Kitty, as often
happened, felt an inexplicable attraction to Mademoiselle Varenka, and
was aware when their eyes met that she too liked her.
Of Mademoiselle Varenka one would not say that she had passed her first
youth, but she was, as it were, a creature without youth; she might
have been taken for nineteen or for thirty. If her features were
criticized separately, she was handsome rather than plain, in spite of
the sickly hue of her face. She would have been a good figure, too, if
it had not been for her extreme thinness and the size of her head,
which was too large for her medium height. But she was not likely to be
attractive to men. She was like a fine flower, already past its bloom
and without fragrance, though the petals were still unwithered.
Moreover, she would have been unattractive to men also from the lack of
just what Kitty had too much of—of the suppressed fire of vitality, and
the consciousness of her own attractiveness.
She always seemed absorbed in work about which there could be no doubt,
and so it seemed she could not take interest in anything outside it. It
was just this contrast with her own position that was for Kitty the
great attraction of Mademoiselle Varenka. Kitty felt that in her, in
her manner of life, she would find an example of what she was now so
painfully seeking: interest in life, a dignity in life—apart from the
worldly relations of girls with men, which so revolted Kitty, and
appeared to her now as a shameful hawking about of goods in search of a
purchaser. The more attentively Kitty watched her unknown friend, the
more convinced she was this girl was the perfect creature she fancied
her, and the more eagerly she wished to make her acquaintance.
The two girls used to meet several times a day, and every time they
met, Kitty’s eyes said: “Who are you? What are you? Are you really the
exquisite creature I imagine you to be? But for goodness’ sake don’t
suppose,” her eyes added, “that I would force my acquaintance on you, I
simply admire you and like you.” “I like you too, and you’re very, very
sweet. And I should like you better still, if I had time,” answered the
eyes of the unknown girl. Kitty saw indeed, that she was always busy.
Either she was taking the children of a Russian family home from the
springs, or fetching a shawl for a sick lady, and wrapping her up in
it, or trying to interest an irritable invalid, or selecting and buying
cakes for tea for someone.
Soon after the arrival of the Shtcherbatskys there appeared in the
morning crowd at the springs two persons who attracted universal and
unfavorable attention. These were a tall man with a stooping figure,
and huge hands, in an old coat too short for him, with black, simple,
and yet terrible eyes, and a pockmarked, kind-looking woman, very badly
and tastelessly dressed. Recognizing these persons as Russians, Kitty
had already in her imagination begun constructing a delightful and
touching romance about them. But the princess, having ascertained from
the visitors’ list that this was Nikolay Levin and Marya Nikolaevna,
explained to Kitty what a bad man this Levin was, and all her fancies
about these two people vanished. Not so much from what her mother told
her, as from the fact that it was Konstantin’s brother, this pair
suddenly seemed to Kitty intensely unpleasant. This Levin, with his
continual twitching of his head, aroused in her now an irrepressible
feeling of disgust.
It seemed to her that his big, terrible eyes, which persistently
pursued her, expressed a feeling of hatred and contempt, and she tried
to avoid meeting him.
Chapter 31
It was a wet day; it had been raining all the morning, and the
invalids, with their parasols, had flocked into the arcades.
Kitty was walking there with her mother and the Moscow colonel, smart
and jaunty in his European coat, bought ready-made at Frankfort. They
were walking on one side of the arcade, trying to avoid Levin, who was
walking on the other side. Varenka, in her dark dress, in a black hat
with a turn-down brim, was walking up and down the whole length of the
arcade with a blind Frenchwoman, and, every time she met Kitty, they
exchanged friendly glances.
“Mamma, couldn’t I speak to her?” said Kitty, watching her unknown
friend, and noticing that she was going up to the spring, and that they
might come there together.
“Oh, if you want to so much, I’ll find out about her first and make her
acquaintance myself,” answered her mother. “What do you see in her out
of the way? A companion, she must be. If you like, I’ll make
acquaintance with Madame Stahl; I used to know her _belle-sœur_,” added
the princess, lifting her head haughtily.
Kitty knew that the princess was offended that Madame Stahl had seemed
to avoid making her acquaintance. Kitty did not insist.
“How wonderfully sweet she is!” she said, gazing at Varenka just as she
handed a glass to the Frenchwoman. “Look how natural and sweet it all
is.”
“It’s so funny to see your _engouements_,” said the princess. “No, we’d
better go back,” she added, noticing Levin coming towards them with his
companion and a German doctor, to whom he was talking very noisily and
angrily.
They turned to go back, when suddenly they heard, not noisy talk, but
shouting. Levin, stopping short, was shouting at the doctor, and the
doctor, too, was excited. A crowd gathered about them. The princess and
Kitty beat a hasty retreat, while the colonel joined the crowd to find
out what was the matter.
A few minutes later the colonel overtook them.
“What was it?” inquired the princess.
“Scandalous and disgraceful!” answered the colonel. “The one thing to
be dreaded is meeting Russians abroad. That tall gentleman was abusing
the doctor, flinging all sorts of insults at him because he wasn’t
treating him quite as he liked, and he began waving his stick at him.
It’s simply a scandal!”
“Oh, how unpleasant!” said the princess. “Well, and how did it end?”
“Luckily at that point that ... the one in the mushroom hat ...
intervened. A Russian lady, I think she is,” said the colonel.
“Mademoiselle Varenka?” asked Kitty.
“Yes, yes. She came to the rescue before anyone; she took the man by
the arm and led him away.”
“There, mamma,” said Kitty; “you wonder that I’m enthusiastic about
her.”
The next day, as she watched her unknown friend, Kitty noticed that
Mademoiselle Varenka was already on the same terms with Levin and his
companion as with her other _protégés_. She went up to them, entered
into conversation with them, and served as interpreter for the woman,
who could not speak any foreign language.
Kitty began to entreat her mother still more urgently to let her make
friends with Varenka. And, disagreeable as it was to the princess to
seem to take the first step in wishing to make the acquaintance of
Madame Stahl, who thought fit to give herself airs, she made inquiries
about Varenka, and, having ascertained particulars about her tending to
prove that there could be no harm though little good in the
acquaintance, she herself approached Varenka and made acquaintance with
her.
Choosing a time when her daughter had gone to the spring, while Varenka
had stopped outside the baker’s, the princess went up to her.
“Allow me to make your acquaintance,” she said, with her dignified
smile. “My daughter has lost her heart to you,” she said. “Possibly you
do not know me. I am....”
“That feeling is more than reciprocal, princess,” Varenka answered
hurriedly.
“What a good deed you did yesterday to our poor compatriot!” said the
princess.
Varenka flushed a little. “I don’t remember. I don’t think I did
anything,” she said.
“Why, you saved that Levin from disagreeable consequences.”
“Yes, _sa compagne_ called me, and I tried to pacify him, he’s very
ill, and was dissatisfied with the doctor. I’m used to looking after
such invalids.”
“Yes, I’ve heard you live at Mentone with your aunt—I think—Madame
Stahl: I used to know her _belle-sœur_.”
“No, she’s not my aunt. I call her mamma, but I am not related to her;
I was brought up by her,” answered Varenka, flushing a little again.
This was so simply said, and so sweet was the truthful and candid
expression of her face, that the princess saw why Kitty had taken such
a fancy to Varenka.
“Well, and what’s this Levin going to do?” asked the princess.
“He’s going away,” answered Varenka.
At that instant Kitty came up from the spring beaming with delight that
her mother had become acquainted with her unknown friend.
“Well, see, Kitty, your intense desire to make friends with
Mademoiselle....”
“Varenka,” Varenka put in smiling, “that’s what everyone calls me.”
Kitty blushed with pleasure, and slowly, without speaking, pressed her
new friend’s hand, which did not respond to her pressure, but lay
motionless in her hand. The hand did not respond to her pressure, but
the face of Mademoiselle Varenka glowed with a soft, glad, though
rather mournful smile, that showed large but handsome teeth.
“I have long wished for this too,” she said.
“But you are so busy.”
“Oh, no, I’m not at all busy,” answered Varenka, but at that moment she
had to leave her new friends because two little Russian girls, children
of an invalid, ran up to her.
“Varenka, mamma’s calling!” they cried.
And Varenka went after them.
Chapter 32
The particulars which the princess had learned in regard to Varenka’s
past and her relations with Madame Stahl were as follows:
Madame Stahl, of whom some people said that she had worried her husband
out of his life, while others said it was he who had made her wretched
by his immoral behavior, had always been a woman of weak health and
enthusiastic temperament. When, after her separation from her husband,
she gave birth to her only child, the child had died almost
immediately, and the family of Madame Stahl, knowing her sensibility,
and fearing the news would kill her, had substituted another child, a
baby born the same night and in the same house in Petersburg, the
daughter of the chief cook of the Imperial Household. This was Varenka.
Madame Stahl learned later on that Varenka was not her own child, but
she went on bringing her up, especially as very soon afterwards Varenka
had not a relation of her own living. Madame Stahl had now been living
more than ten years continuously abroad, in the south, never leaving
her couch. And some people said that Madame Stahl had made her social
position as a philanthropic, highly religious woman; other people said
she really was at heart the highly ethical being, living for nothing
but the good of her fellow creatures, which she represented herself to
be. No one knew what her faith was—Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox.
But one fact was indubitable—she was in amicable relations with the
highest dignitaries of all the churches and sects.
Varenka lived with her all the while abroad, and everyone who knew
Madame Stahl knew and liked Mademoiselle Varenka, as everyone called
her.
Having learned all these facts, the princess found nothing to object to
in her daughter’s intimacy with Varenka, more especially as Varenka’s
breeding and education were of the best—she spoke French and English
extremely well—and what was of the most weight, brought a message from
Madame Stahl expressing her regret that she was prevented by her ill
health from making the acquaintance of the princess.
After getting to know Varenka, Kitty became more and more fascinated by
her friend, and every day she discovered new virtues in her.
The princess, hearing that Varenka had a good voice, asked her to come
and sing to them in the evening.
“Kitty plays, and we have a piano; not a good one, it’s true, but you
will give us so much pleasure,” said the princess with her affected
smile, which Kitty disliked particularly just then, because she noticed
that Varenka had no inclination to sing. Varenka came, however, in the
evening and brought a roll of music with her. The princess had invited
Marya Yevgenyevna and her daughter and the colonel.
Varenka seemed quite unaffected by there being persons present she did
not know, and she went directly to the piano. She could not accompany
herself, but she could sing music at sight very well. Kitty, who played
well, accompanied her.
“You have an extraordinary talent,” the princess said to her after
Varenka had sung the first song extremely well.
Marya Yevgenyevna and her daughter expressed their thanks and
admiration.
“Look,” said the colonel, looking out of the window, “what an audience
has collected to listen to you.” There actually was quite a
considerable crowd under the windows.
“I am very glad it gives you pleasure,” Varenka answered simply.
Kitty looked with pride at her friend. She was enchanted by her talent,
and her voice, and her face, but most of all by her manner, by the way
Varenka obviously thought nothing of her singing and was quite unmoved
by their praises. She seemed only to be asking: “Am I to sing again, or
is that enough?”
“If it had been I,” thought Kitty, “how proud I should have been! How
delighted I should have been to see that crowd under the windows! But
she’s utterly unmoved by it. Her only motive is to avoid refusing and
to please mamma. What is there in her? What is it gives her the power
to look down on everything, to be calm independently of everything? How
I should like to know it and to learn it of her!” thought Kitty, gazing
into her serene face. The princess asked Varenka to sing again, and
Varenka sang another song, also smoothly, distinctly, and well,
standing erect at the piano and beating time on it with her thin,
dark-skinned hand.
The next song in the book was an Italian one. Kitty played the opening
bars, and looked round at Varenka.
“Let’s skip that,” said Varenka, flushing a little. Kitty let her eyes
rest on Varenka’s face, with a look of dismay and inquiry.
“Very well, the next one,” she said hurriedly, turning over the pages,
and at once feeling that there was something connected with the song.
“No,” answered Varenka with a smile, laying her hand on the music, “no,
let’s have that one.” And she sang it just as quietly, as coolly, and
as well as the others.
When she had finished, they all thanked her again, and went off to tea.
Kitty and Varenka went out into the little garden that adjoined the
house.
“Am I right, that you have some reminiscences connected with that
song?” said Kitty. “Don’t tell me,” she added hastily, “only say if I’m
right.”
“No, why not? I’ll tell you simply,” said Varenka, and, without waiting
for a reply, she went on: “Yes, it brings up memories, once painful
ones. I cared for someone once, and I used to sing him that song.”
Kitty with big, wide-open eyes gazed silently, sympathetically at
Varenka.
“I cared for him, and he cared for me; but his mother did not wish it,
and he married another girl. He’s living now not far from us, and I see
him sometimes. You didn’t think I had a love story too,” she said, and
there was a faint gleam in her handsome face of that fire which Kitty
felt must once have glowed all over her.
“I didn’t think so? Why, if I were a man, I could never care for anyone
else after knowing you. Only I can’t understand how he could, to please
his mother, forget you and make you unhappy; he had no heart.”
“Oh, no, he’s a very good man, and I’m not unhappy; quite the contrary,
I’m very happy. Well, so we shan’t be singing any more now,” she added,
turning towards the house.
“How good you are! how good you are!” cried Kitty, and stopping her,
she kissed her. “If I could only be even a little like you!”
“Why should you be like anyone? You’re nice as you are,” said Varenka,
smiling her gentle, weary smile.
“No, I’m not nice at all. Come, tell me.... Stop a minute, let’s sit
down,” said Kitty, making her sit down again beside her. “Tell me,
isn’t it humiliating to think that a man has disdained your love, that
he hasn’t cared for it?...”
“But he didn’t disdain it; I believe he cared for me, but he was a
dutiful son....”
“Yes, but if it hadn’t been on account of his mother, if it had been
his own doing?...” said Kitty, feeling she was giving away her secret,
and that her face, burning with the flush of shame, had betrayed her
already.
“In that case he would have done wrong, and I should not have regretted
him,” answered Varenka, evidently realizing that they were now talking
not of her, but of Kitty.
“But the humiliation,” said Kitty, “the humiliation one can never
forget, can never forget,” she said, remembering her look at the last
ball during the pause in the music.
“Where is the humiliation? Why, you did nothing wrong?”
“Worse than wrong—shameful.”
Varenka shook her head and laid her hand on Kitty’s hand.
“Why, what is there shameful?” she said. “You didn’t tell a man, who
didn’t care for you, that you loved him, did you?”
“Of course not; I never said a word, but he knew it. No, no, there are
looks, there are ways; I can’t forget it, if I live a hundred years.”
“Why so? I don’t understand. The whole point is whether you love him
now or not,” said Varenka, who called everything by its name.
“I hate him; I can’t forgive myself.”
“Why, what for?”
“The shame, the humiliation!”
“Oh! if everyone were as sensitive as you are!” said Varenka. “There
isn’t a girl who hasn’t been through the same. And it’s all so
unimportant.”
“Why, what is important?” said Kitty, looking into her face with
inquisitive wonder.
“Oh, there’s so much that’s important,” said Varenka, smiling.
“Why, what?”
“Oh, so much that’s more important,” answered Varenka, not knowing what
to say. But at that instant they heard the princess’s voice from the
window. “Kitty, it’s cold! Either get a shawl, or come indoors.”
“It really is time to go in!” said Varenka, getting up. “I have to go
on to Madame Berthe’s; she asked me to.”
Kitty held her by the hand, and with passionate curiosity and entreaty
her eyes asked her: “What is it, what is this of such importance that
gives you such tranquillity? You know, tell me!” But Varenka did not
even know what Kitty’s eyes were asking her. She merely thought that
she had to go to see Madame Berthe too that evening, and to make haste
home in time for _maman’s_ tea at twelve o’clock. She went indoors,
collected her music, and saying good-bye to everyone, was about to go.
“Allow me to see you home,” said the colonel.
“Yes, how can you go alone at night like this?” chimed in the princess.
“Anyway, I’ll send Parasha.”
Kitty saw that Varenka could hardly restrain a smile at the idea that
she needed an escort.
“No, I always go about alone and nothing ever happens to me,” she said,
taking her hat. And kissing Kitty once more, without saying what was
important, she stepped out courageously with the music under her arm
and vanished into the twilight of the summer night, bearing away with
her her secret of what was important and what gave her the calm and
dignity so much to be envied.
Chapter 33
Kitty made the acquaintance of Madame Stahl too, and this acquaintance,
together with her friendship with Varenka, did not merely exercise a
great influence on her, it also comforted her in her mental distress.
She found this comfort through a completely new world being opened to
her by means of this acquaintance, a world having nothing in common
with her past, an exalted, noble world, from the height of which she
could contemplate her past calmly. It was revealed to her that besides
the instinctive life to which Kitty had given herself up hitherto there
was a spiritual life. This life was disclosed in religion, but a
religion having nothing in common with that one which Kitty had known
from childhood, and which found expression in litanies and all-night
services at the Widow’s Home, where one might meet one’s friends, and
in learning by heart Slavonic texts with the priest. This was a lofty,
mysterious religion connected with a whole series of noble thoughts and
feelings, which one could do more than merely believe because one was
told to, which one could love.
Kitty found all this out not from words. Madame Stahl talked to Kitty
as to a charming child that one looks on with pleasure as on the memory
of one’s youth, and only once she said in passing that in all human
sorrows nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight
of Christ’s compassion for us no sorrow is trifling—and immediately
talked of other things. But in every gesture of Madame Stahl, in every
word, in every heavenly—as Kitty called it—look, and above all in the
whole story of her life, which she heard from Varenka, Kitty recognized
that something “that was important,” of which, till then, she had known
nothing.
Yet, elevated as Madame Stahl’s character was, touching as was her
story, and exalted and moving as was her speech, Kitty could not help
detecting in her some traits which perplexed her. She noticed that when
questioning her about her family, Madame Stahl had smiled
contemptuously, which was not in accord with Christian meekness. She
noticed, too, that when she had found a Catholic priest with her,
Madame Stahl had studiously kept her face in the shadow of the
lamp-shade and had smiled in a peculiar way. Trivial as these two
observations were, they perplexed her, and she had her doubts as to
Madame Stahl. But on the other hand Varenka, alone in the world,
without friends or relations, with a melancholy disappointment in the
past, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, was just that perfection of
which Kitty dared hardly dream. In Varenka she realized that one has
but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and
noble. And that was what Kitty longed to be. Seeing now clearly what
was _the most important_, Kitty was not satisfied with being
enthusiastic over it; she at once gave herself up with her whole soul
to the new life that was opening to her. From Varenka’s accounts of the
doings of Madame Stahl and other people whom she mentioned, Kitty had
already constructed the plan of her own future life. She would, like
Madame Stahl’s niece, Aline, of whom Varenka had talked to her a great
deal, seek out those who were in trouble, wherever she might be living,
help them as far as she could, give them the Gospel, read the Gospel to
the sick, to criminals, to the dying. The idea of reading the Gospel to
criminals, as Aline did, particularly fascinated Kitty. But all these
were secret dreams, of which Kitty did not talk either to her mother or
to Varenka.
While awaiting the time for carrying out her plans on a large scale,
however, Kitty, even then at the springs, where there were so many
people ill and unhappy, readily found a chance for practicing her new
principles in imitation of Varenka.
At first the princess noticed nothing but that Kitty was much under the
influence of her _engouement_, as she called it, for Madame Stahl, and
still more for Varenka. She saw that Kitty did not merely imitate
Varenka in her conduct, but unconsciously imitated her in her manner of
walking, of talking, of blinking her eyes. But later on the princess
noticed that, apart from this adoration, some kind of serious spiritual
change was taking place in her daughter.
The princess saw that in the evenings Kitty read a French testament
that Madame Stahl had given her—a thing she had never done before; that
she avoided society acquaintances and associated with the sick people
who were under Varenka’s protection, and especially one poor family,
that of a sick painter, Petrov. Kitty was unmistakably proud of playing
the part of a sister of mercy in that family. All this was well enough,
and the princess had nothing to say against it, especially as Petrov’s
wife was a perfectly nice sort of woman, and that the German princess,
noticing Kitty’s devotion, praised her, calling her an angel of
consolation. All this would have been very well, if there had been no
exaggeration. But the princess saw that her daughter was rushing into
extremes, and so indeed she told her.
“_Il ne faut jamais rien outrer_,” she said to her.
Her daughter made her no reply, only in her heart she thought that one
could not talk about exaggeration where Christianity was concerned.
What exaggeration could there be in the practice of a doctrine wherein
one was bidden to turn the other cheek when one was smitten, and give
one’s cloak if one’s coat were taken? But the princess disliked this
exaggeration, and disliked even more the fact that she felt her
daughter did not care to show her all her heart. Kitty did in fact
conceal her new views and feelings from her mother. She concealed them
not because she did not respect or did not love her mother, but simply
because she was her mother. She would have revealed them to anyone
sooner than to her mother.
“How is it Anna Pavlovna’s not been to see us for so long?” the
princess said one day of Madame Petrova. “I’ve asked her, but she seems
put out about something.”
“No, I’ve not noticed it, maman,” said Kitty, flushing hotly.
“Is it long since you went to see them?”
“We’re meaning to make an expedition to the mountains tomorrow,”
answered Kitty.
“Well, you can go,” answered the princess, gazing at her daughter’s
embarrassed face and trying to guess the cause of her embarrassment.
That day Varenka came to dinner and told them that Anna Pavlovna had
changed her mind and given up the expedition for the morrow. And the
princess noticed again that Kitty reddened.
“Kitty, haven’t you had some misunderstanding with the Petrovs?” said
the princess, when they were left alone. “Why has she given up sending
the children and coming to see us?”
Kitty answered that nothing had happened between them, and that she
could not tell why Anna Pavlovna seemed displeased with her. Kitty
answered perfectly truly. She did not know the reason Anna Pavlovna had
changed to her, but she guessed it. She guessed at something which she
could not tell her mother, which she did not put into words to herself.
It was one of those things which one knows but which one can never
speak of even to oneself, so terrible and shameful would it be to be
mistaken.
Again and again she went over in her memory all her relations with the
family. She remembered the simple delight expressed on the round,
good-humored face of Anna Pavlovna at their meetings; she remembered
their secret confabulations about the invalid, their plots to draw him
away from the work which was forbidden him, and to get him
out-of-doors; the devotion of the youngest boy, who used to call her
“my Kitty,” and would not go to bed without her. How nice it all was!
Then she recalled the thin, terribly thin figure of Petrov, with his
long neck, in his brown coat, his scant, curly hair, his questioning
blue eyes that were so terrible to Kitty at first, and his painful
attempts to seem hearty and lively in her presence. She recalled the
efforts she had made at first to overcome the repugnance she felt for
him, as for all consumptive people, and the pains it had cost her to
think of things to say to him. She recalled the timid, softened look
with which he gazed at her, and the strange feeling of compassion and
awkwardness, and later of a sense of her own goodness, which she had
felt at it. How nice it all was! But all that was at first. Now, a few
days ago, everything was suddenly spoiled. Anna Pavlovna had met Kitty
with affected cordiality, and had kept continual watch on her and on
her husband.
Could that touching pleasure he showed when she came near be the cause
of Anna Pavlovna’s coolness?
“Yes,” she mused, “there was something unnatural about Anna Pavlovna,
and utterly unlike her good nature, when she said angrily the day
before yesterday: ‘There, he will keep waiting for you; he wouldn’t
drink his coffee without you, though he’s grown so dreadfully weak.’”
“Yes, perhaps, too, she didn’t like it when I gave him the rug. It was
all so simple, but he took it so awkwardly, and was so long thanking
me, that I felt awkward too. And then that portrait of me he did so
well. And most of all that look of confusion and tenderness! Yes, yes,
that’s it!” Kitty repeated to herself with horror. “No, it can’t be, it
oughtn’t to be! He’s so much to be pitied!” she said to herself
directly after.
This doubt poisoned the charm of her new life.
Chapter 34
Before the end of the course of drinking the waters, Prince
Shtcherbatsky, who had gone on from Carlsbad to Baden and Kissingen to
Russian friends—to get a breath of Russian air, as he said—came back to
his wife and daughter.
The views of the prince and of the princess on life abroad were
completely opposed. The princess thought everything delightful, and in
spite of her established position in Russian society, she tried abroad
to be like a European fashionable lady, which she was not—for the
simple reason that she was a typical Russian gentlewoman; and so she
was affected, which did not altogether suit her. The prince, on the
contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of European
life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show himself
abroad less European than he was in reality.
The prince returned thinner, with the skin hanging in loose bags on his
cheeks, but in the most cheerful frame of mind. His good humor was even
greater when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The news of Kitty’s
friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the reports the princess
gave him of some kind of change she had noticed in Kitty, troubled the
prince and aroused his habitual feeling of jealousy of everything that
drew his daughter away from him, and a dread that his daughter might
have got out of the reach of his influence into regions inaccessible to
him. But these unpleasant matters were all drowned in the sea of
kindliness and good humor which was always within him, and more so than
ever since his course of Carlsbad waters.
The day after his arrival the prince, in his long overcoat, with his
Russian wrinkles and baggy cheeks propped up by a starched collar, set
off with his daughter to the spring in the greatest good humor.
It was a lovely morning: the bright, cheerful houses with their little
gardens, the sight of the red-faced, red-armed, beer-drinking German
waitresses, working away merrily, did the heart good. But the nearer
they got to the springs the oftener they met sick people; and their
appearance seemed more pitiable than ever among the everyday conditions
of prosperous German life. Kitty was no longer struck by this contrast.
The bright sun, the brilliant green of the foliage, the strains of the
music were for her the natural setting of all these familiar faces,
with their changes to greater emaciation or to convalescence, for which
she watched. But to the prince the brightness and gaiety of the June
morning, and the sound of the orchestra playing a gay waltz then in
fashion, and above all, the appearance of the healthy attendants,
seemed something unseemly and monstrous, in conjunction with these
slowly moving, dying figures gathered together from all parts of
Europe. In spite of his feeling of pride and, as it were, of the return
of youth, with his favorite daughter on his arm, he felt awkward, and
almost ashamed of his vigorous step and his sturdy, stout limbs. He
felt almost like a man not dressed in a crowd.
“Present me to your new friends,” he said to his daughter, squeezing
her hand with his elbow. “I like even your horrid Soden for making you
so well again. Only it’s melancholy, very melancholy here. Who’s that?”
Kitty mentioned the names of all the people they met, with some of whom
she was acquainted and some not. At the entrance of the garden they met
the blind lady, Madame Berthe, with her guide, and the prince was
delighted to see the old Frenchwoman’s face light up when she heard
Kitty’s voice. She at once began talking to him with French exaggerated
politeness, applauding him for having such a delightful daughter,
extolling Kitty to the skies before her face, and calling her a
treasure, a pearl, and a consoling angel.
“Well, she’s the second angel, then,” said the prince, smiling. “she
calls Mademoiselle Varenka angel number one.”
“Oh! Mademoiselle Varenka, she’s a real angel, allez,” Madame Berthe
assented.
In the arcade they met Varenka herself. She was walking rapidly towards
them carrying an elegant red bag.
“Here is papa come,” Kitty said to her.
Varenka made—simply and naturally as she did everything—a movement
between a bow and a curtsey, and immediately began talking to the
prince, without shyness, naturally, as she talked to everyone.
“Of course I know you; I know you very well,” the prince said to her
with a smile, in which Kitty detected with joy that her father liked
her friend. “Where are you off to in such haste?”
“Maman’s here,” she said, turning to Kitty. “She has not slept all
night, and the doctor advised her to go out. I’m taking her her work.”
“So that’s angel number one?” said the prince when Varenka had gone on.
Kitty saw that her father had meant to make fun of Varenka, but that he
could not do it because he liked her.
“Come, so we shall see all your friends,” he went on, “even Madame
Stahl, if she deigns to recognize me.”
“Why, did you know her, papa?” Kitty asked apprehensively, catching the
gleam of irony that kindled in the prince’s eyes at the mention of
Madame Stahl.
“I used to know her husband, and her too a little, before she’d joined
the Pietists.”
“What is a Pietist, papa?” asked Kitty, dismayed to find that what she
prized so highly in Madame Stahl had a name.
“I don’t quite know myself. I only know that she thanks God for
everything, for every misfortune, and thanks God too that her husband
died. And that’s rather droll, as they didn’t get on together.”
“Who’s that? What a piteous face!” he asked, noticing a sick man of
medium height sitting on a bench, wearing a brown overcoat and white
trousers that fell in strange folds about his long, fleshless legs.
This man lifted his straw hat, showed his scanty curly hair and high
forehead, painfully reddened by the pressure of the hat.
“That’s Petrov, an artist,” answered Kitty, blushing. “And that’s his
wife,” she added, indicating Anna Pavlovna, who, as though on purpose,
at the very instant they approached walked away after a child that had
run off along a path.
“Poor fellow! and what a nice face he has!” said the prince. “Why don’t
you go up to him? He wanted to speak to you.”
“Well, let us go, then,” said Kitty, turning round resolutely. “How are
you feeling today?” she asked Petrov.
Petrov got up, leaning on his stick, and looked shyly at the prince.
“This is my daughter,” said the prince. “Let me introduce myself.”
The painter bowed and smiled, showing his strangely dazzling white
teeth.
“We expected you yesterday, princess,” he said to Kitty. He staggered
as he said this, and then repeated the motion, trying to make it seem
as if it had been intentional.
“I meant to come, but Varenka said that Anna Pavlovna sent word you
were not going.”
“Not going!” said Petrov, blushing, and immediately beginning to cough,
and his eyes sought his wife. “Anita! Anita!” he said loudly, and the
swollen veins stood out like cords on his thin white neck.
Anna Pavlovna came up.
“So you sent word to the princess that we weren’t going!” he whispered
to her angrily, losing his voice.
“Good morning, princess,” said Anna Pavlovna, with an assumed smile
utterly unlike her former manner. “Very glad to make your
acquaintance,” she said to the prince. “You’ve long been expected,
prince.”
“What did you send word to the princess that we weren’t going for?” the
artist whispered hoarsely once more, still more angrily, obviously
exasperated that his voice failed him so that he could not give his
words the expression he would have liked to.
“Oh, mercy on us! I thought we weren’t going,” his wife answered
crossly.
“What, when....” He coughed and waved his hand. The prince took off his
hat and moved away with his daughter.
“Ah! ah!” he sighed deeply. “Oh, poor things!”
“Yes, papa,” answered Kitty. “And you must know they’ve three children,
no servant, and scarcely any means. He gets something from the
Academy,” she went on briskly, trying to drown the distress that the
queer change in Anna Pavlovna’s manner to her had aroused in her.
“Oh, here’s Madame Stahl,” said Kitty, indicating an invalid carriage,
where, propped on pillows, something in gray and blue was lying under a
sunshade. This was Madame Stahl. Behind her stood the gloomy,
healthy-looking German workman who pushed the carriage. Close by was
standing a flaxen-headed Swedish count, whom Kitty knew by name.
Several invalids were lingering near the low carriage, staring at the
lady as though she were some curiosity.
The prince went up to her, and Kitty detected that disconcerting gleam
of irony in his eyes. He went up to Madame Stahl, and addressed her
with extreme courtesy and affability in that excellent French that so
few speak nowadays.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but I must recall myself to thank you
for your kindness to my daughter,” he said, taking off his hat and not
putting it on again.
“Prince Alexander Shtcherbatsky,” said Madame Stahl, lifting upon him
her heavenly eyes, in which Kitty discerned a look of annoyance.
“Delighted! I have taken a great fancy to your daughter.”
“You are still in weak health?”
“Yes; I’m used to it,” said Madame Stahl, and she introduced the prince
to the Swedish count.
“You are scarcely changed at all,” the prince said to her. “It’s ten or
eleven years since I had the honor of seeing you.”
“Yes; God sends the cross and sends the strength to bear it. Often one
wonders what is the goal of this life?... The other side!” she said
angrily to Varenka, who had rearranged the rug over her feet not to her
satisfaction.
“To do good, probably,” said the prince with a twinkle in his eye.
“That is not for us to judge,” said Madame Stahl, perceiving the shade
of expression on the prince’s face. “So you will send me that book,
dear count? I’m very grateful to you,” she said to the young Swede.
“Ah!” cried the prince, catching sight of the Moscow colonel standing
near, and with a bow to Madame Stahl he walked away with his daughter
and the Moscow colonel, who joined them.
“That’s our aristocracy, prince!” the Moscow colonel said with ironical
intention. He cherished a grudge against Madame Stahl for not making
his acquaintance.
“She’s just the same,” replied the prince.
“Did you know her before her illness, prince—that’s to say before she
took to her bed?”
“Yes. She took to her bed before my eyes,” said the prince.
“They say it’s ten years since she has stood on her feet.”
“She doesn’t stand up because her legs are too short. She’s a very bad
figure.”
“Papa, it’s not possible!” cried Kitty.
“That’s what wicked tongues say, my darling. And your Varenka catches
it too,” he added. “Oh, these invalid ladies!”
“Oh, no, papa!” Kitty objected warmly. “Varenka worships her. And then
she does so much good! Ask anyone! Everyone knows her and Aline Stahl.”
“Perhaps so,” said the prince, squeezing her hand with his elbow; “but
it’s better when one does good so that you may ask everyone and no one
knows.”
Kitty did not answer, not because she had nothing to say, but because
she did not care to reveal her secret thoughts even to her father. But,
strange to say, although she had so made up her mind not to be
influenced by her father’s views, not to let him into her inmost
sanctuary, she felt that the heavenly image of Madame Stahl, which she
had carried for a whole month in her heart, had vanished, never to
return, just as the fantastic figure made up of some clothes thrown
down at random vanishes when one sees that it is only some garment
lying there. All that was left was a woman with short legs, who lay
down because she had a bad figure, and worried patient Varenka for not
arranging her rug to her liking. And by no effort of the imagination
could Kitty bring back the former Madame Stahl.
Chapter 35
The prince communicated his good humor to his own family and his
friends, and even to the German landlord in whose rooms the
Shtcherbatskys were staying.
On coming back with Kitty from the springs, the prince, who had asked
the colonel, and Marya Yevgenyevna, and Varenka all to come and have
coffee with them, gave orders for a table and chairs to be taken into
the garden under the chestnut tree, and lunch to be laid there. The
landlord and the servants, too, grew brisker under the influence of his
good spirits. They knew his open-handedness; and half an hour later the
invalid doctor from Hamburg, who lived on the top floor, looked
enviously out of the window at the merry party of healthy Russians
assembled under the chestnut tree. In the trembling circles of shadow
cast by the leaves, at a table, covered with a white cloth, and set
with coffeepot, bread-and-butter, cheese, and cold game, sat the
princess in a high cap with lilac ribbons, distributing cups and
bread-and-butter. At the other end sat the prince, eating heartily, and
talking loudly and merrily. The prince had spread out near him his
purchases, carved boxes, and knick-knacks, paper-knives of all sorts,
of which he bought a heap at every watering-place, and bestowed them
upon everyone, including Lieschen, the servant girl, and the landlord,
with whom he jested in his comically bad German, assuring him that it
was not the water had cured Kitty, but his splendid cookery, especially
his plum soup. The princess laughed at her husband for his Russian
ways, but she was more lively and good-humored than she had been all
the while she had been at the waters. The colonel smiled, as he always
did, at the prince’s jokes, but as far as regards Europe, of which he
believed himself to be making a careful study, he took the princess’s
side. The simple-hearted Marya Yevgenyevna simply roared with laughter
at everything absurd the prince said, and his jokes made Varenka
helpless with feeble but infectious laughter, which was something Kitty
had never seen before.
Kitty was glad of all this, but she could not be light-hearted. She
could not solve the problem her father had unconsciously set her by his
good-humored view of her friends, and of the life that had so attracted
her. To this doubt there was joined the change in her relations with
the Petrovs, which had been so conspicuously and unpleasantly marked
that morning. Everyone was good-humored, but Kitty could not feel
good-humored, and this increased her distress. She felt a feeling such
as she had known in childhood, when she had been shut in her room as a
punishment, and had heard her sisters’ merry laughter outside.
“Well, but what did you buy this mass of things for?” said the
princess, smiling, and handing her husband a cup of coffee.
“One goes for a walk, one looks in a shop, and they ask you to buy.
‘_Erlaucht, Durchlaucht?_’ Directly they say ‘_Durchlaucht_,’ I can’t
hold out. I lose ten thalers.”
“It’s simply from boredom,” said the princess.
“Of course it is. Such boredom, my dear, that one doesn’t know what to
do with oneself.”
“How can you be bored, prince? There’s so much that’s interesting now
in Germany,” said Marya Yevgenyevna.
“But I know everything that’s interesting: the plum soup I know, and
the pea sausages I know. I know everything.”
“No, you may say what you like, prince, there’s the interest of their
institutions,” said the colonel.
“But what is there interesting about it? They’re all as pleased as
brass halfpence. They’ve conquered everybody, and why am I to be
pleased at that? I haven’t conquered anyone; and I’m obliged to take
off my own boots, yes, and put them away too; in the morning, get up
and dress at once, and go to the dining-room to drink bad tea! How
different it is at home! You get up in no haste, you get cross, grumble
a little, and come round again. You’ve time to think things over, and
no hurry.”
“But time’s money, you forget that,” said the colonel.
“Time, indeed, that depends! Why, there’s time one would give a month
of for sixpence, and time you wouldn’t give half an hour of for any
money. Isn’t that so, Katinka? What is it? why are you so depressed?”
“I’m not depressed.”
“Where are you off to? Stay a little longer,” he said to Varenka.
“I must be going home,” said Varenka, getting up, and again she went
off into a giggle. When she had recovered, she said good-bye, and went
into the house to get her hat.
Kitty followed her. Even Varenka struck her as different. She was not
worse, but different from what she had fancied her before.
“Oh, dear! it’s a long while since I’ve laughed so much!” said Varenka,
gathering up her parasol and her bag. “How nice he is, your father!”
Kitty did not speak.
“When shall I see you again?” asked Varenka.
“Mamma meant to go and see the Petrovs. Won’t you be there?” said
Kitty, to try Varenka.
“Yes,” answered Varenka. “They’re getting ready to go away, so I
promised to help them pack.”
“Well, I’ll come too, then.”
“No, why should you?”
“Why not? why not? why not?” said Kitty, opening her eyes wide, and
clutching at Varenka’s parasol, so as not to let her go. “No, wait a
minute; why not?”
“Oh, nothing; your father has come, and besides, they will feel awkward
at your helping.”
“No, tell me why you don’t want me to be often at the Petrovs’. You
don’t want me to—why not?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Varenka quietly.
“No, please tell me!”
“Tell you everything?” asked Varenka.
“Everything, everything!” Kitty assented.
“Well, there’s really nothing of any consequence; only that Mihail
Alexeyevitch” (that was the artist’s name) “had meant to leave earlier,
and now he doesn’t want to go away,” said Varenka, smiling.
“Well, well!” Kitty urged impatiently, looking darkly at Varenka.
“Well, and for some reason Anna Pavlovna told him that he didn’t want
to go because you are here. Of course, that was nonsense; but there was
a dispute over it—over you. You know how irritable these sick people
are.”
Kitty, scowling more than ever, kept silent, and Varenka went on
speaking alone, trying to soften or soothe her, and seeing a storm
coming—she did not know whether of tears or of words.
“So you’d better not go.... You understand; you won’t be offended?...”
“And it serves me right! And it serves me right!” Kitty cried quickly,
snatching the parasol out of Varenka’s hand, and looking past her
friend’s face.
Varenka felt inclined to smile, looking at her childish fury, but she
was afraid of wounding her.
“How does it serve you right? I don’t understand,” she said.
“It serves me right, because it was all sham; because it was all done
on purpose, and not from the heart. What business had I to interfere
with outsiders? And so it’s come about that I’m a cause of quarrel, and
that I’ve done what nobody asked me to do. Because it was all a sham! a
sham! a sham!...”
“A sham! with what object?” said Varenka gently.
“Oh, it’s so idiotic! so hateful! There was no need whatever for me....
Nothing but sham!” she said, opening and shutting the parasol.
“But with what object?”
“To seem better to people, to myself, to God; to deceive everyone. No!
now I won’t descend to that. I’ll be bad; but anyway not a liar, a
cheat.”
“But who is a cheat?” said Varenka reproachfully. “You speak as if....”
But Kitty was in one of her gusts of fury, and she would not let her
finish.
“I don’t talk about you, not about you at all. You’re perfection. Yes,
yes, I know you’re all perfection; but what am I to do if I’m bad? This
would never have been if I weren’t bad. So let me be what I am. I won’t
be a sham. What have I to do with Anna Pavlovna? Let them go their way,
and me go mine. I can’t be different.... And yet it’s not that, it’s
not that.”
“What is not that?” asked Varenka in bewilderment.
“Everything. I can’t act except from the heart, and you act from
principle. I liked you simply, but you most likely only wanted to save
me, to improve me.”
“You are unjust,” said Varenka.
“But I’m not speaking of other people, I’m speaking of myself.”
“Kitty,” they heard her mother’s voice, “come here, show papa your
necklace.”
Kitty, with a haughty air, without making peace with her friend, took
the necklace in a little box from the table and went to her mother.
“What’s the matter? Why are you so red?” her mother and father said to
her with one voice.
“Nothing,” she answered. “I’ll be back directly,” and she ran back.
“She’s still here,” she thought. “What am I to say to her? Oh, dear!
what have I done, what have I said? Why was I rude to her? What am I to
do? What am I to say to her?” thought Kitty, and she stopped in the
doorway.
Varenka in her hat and with the parasol in her hands was sitting at the
table examining the spring which Kitty had broken. She lifted her head.
“Varenka, forgive me, do forgive me,” whispered Kitty, going up to her.
“I don’t remember what I said. I....”
“I really didn’t mean to hurt you,” said Varenka, smiling.
Peace was made. But with her father’s coming all the world in which she
had been living was transformed for Kitty. She did not give up
everything she had learned, but she became aware that she had deceived
herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to be. Her eyes were,
it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of maintaining herself
without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle to which she had
wished to mount. Moreover, she became aware of all the dreariness of
the world of sorrow, of sick and dying people, in which she had been
living. The efforts she had made to like it seemed to her intolerable,
and she felt a longing to get back quickly into the fresh air, to
Russia, to Ergushovo, where, as she knew from letters, her sister Dolly
had already gone with her children.
But her affection for Varenka did not wane. As she said good-bye, Kitty
begged her to come to them in Russia.
“I’ll come when you get married,” said Varenka.
“I shall never marry.”
“Well, then, I shall never come.”
“Well, then, I shall be married simply for that. Mind now, remember
your promise,” said Kitty.
The doctor’s prediction was fulfilled. Kitty returned home to Russia
cured. She was not so gay and thoughtless as before, but she was
serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her.
PART THREE
Chapter 1
Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev wanted a rest from mental work, and instead
of going abroad as he usually did, he came towards the end of May to
stay in the country with his brother. In his judgment the best sort of
life was a country life. He had come now to enjoy such a life at his
brother’s. Konstantin Levin was very glad to have him, especially as he
did not expect his brother Nikolay that summer. But in spite of his
affection and respect for Sergey Ivanovitch, Konstantin Levin was
uncomfortable with his brother in the country. It made him
uncomfortable, and it positively annoyed him to see his brother’s
attitude to the country. To Konstantin Levin the country was the
background of life, that is of pleasures, endeavors, labor. To Sergey
Ivanovitch the country meant on one hand rest from work, on the other a
valuable antidote to the corrupt influences of town, which he took with
satisfaction and a sense of its utility. To Konstantin Levin the
country was good first because it afforded a field for labor, of the
usefulness of which there could be no doubt. To Sergey Ivanovitch the
country was particularly good, because there it was possible and
fitting to do nothing. Moreover, Sergey Ivanovitch’s attitude to the
peasants rather piqued Konstantin. Sergey Ivanovitch used to say that
he knew and liked the peasantry, and he often talked to the peasants,
which he knew how to do without affectation or condescension, and from
every such conversation he would deduce general conclusions in favor of
the peasantry and in confirmation of his knowing them. Konstantin Levin
did not like such an attitude to the peasants. To Konstantin the
peasant was simply the chief partner in their common labor, and in
spite of all the respect and the love, almost like that of kinship, he
had for the peasant—sucked in probably, as he said himself, with the
milk of his peasant nurse—still as a fellow-worker with him, while
sometimes enthusiastic over the vigor, gentleness, and justice of these
men, he was very often, when their common labors called for other
qualities, exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness, lack of
method, drunkenness, and lying. If he had been asked whether he liked
or didn’t like the peasants, Konstantin Levin would have been
absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not like the
peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general. Of course,
being a good-hearted man, he liked men rather than he disliked them,
and so too with the peasants. But like or dislike “the people” as
something apart he could not, not only because he lived with “the
people,” and all his interests were bound up with theirs, but also
because he regarded himself as a part of “the people,” did not see any
special qualities or failings distinguishing himself and “the people,”
and could not contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he had
lived so long in the closest relations with the peasants, as farmer and
arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser (the peasants trusted him,
and for thirty miles round they would come to ask his advice), he had
no definite views of “the people,” and would have been as much at a
loss to answer the question whether he knew “the people” as the
question whether he liked them. For him to say he knew the peasantry
would have been the same as to say he knew men. He was continually
watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and among them
peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people, and he was
continually observing new points in them, altering his former views of
them and forming new ones. With Sergey Ivanovitch it was quite the
contrary. Just as he liked and praised a country life in comparison
with the life he did not like, so too he liked the peasantry in
contradistinction to the class of men he did not like, and so too he
knew the peasantry as something distinct from and opposed to men
generally. In his methodical brain there were distinctly formulated
certain aspects of peasant life, deduced partly from that life itself,
but chiefly from contrast with other modes of life. He never changed
his opinion of the peasantry and his sympathetic attitude towards them.
In the discussions that arose between the brothers on their views of
the peasantry, Sergey Ivanovitch always got the better of his brother,
precisely because Sergey Ivanovitch had definite ideas about the
peasant—his character, his qualities, and his tastes. Konstantin Levin
had no definite and unalterable idea on the subject, and so in their
arguments Konstantin was readily convicted of contradicting himself.
In Sergey Ivanovitch’s eyes his younger brother was a capital fellow,
_with his heart in the right place_ (as he expressed it in French), but
with a mind which, though fairly quick, was too much influenced by the
impressions of the moment, and consequently filled with contradictions.
With all the condescension of an elder brother he sometimes explained
to him the true import of things, but he derived little satisfaction
from arguing with him because he got the better of him too easily.
Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of immense intellect and
culture, as generous in the highest sense of the word, and possessed of
a special faculty for working for the public good. But in the depths of
his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his
brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this
faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself
utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of
something—not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a
lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which
drives a man to choose someone out of the innumerable paths of life,
and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more
he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for
the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for
the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it
was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently
took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by
observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public
welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to
heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a
new machine.
Besides this, Konstantin Levin was not at his ease with his brother,
because in summer in the country Levin was continually busy with work
on the land, and the long summer day was not long enough for him to get
through all he had to do, while Sergey Ivanovitch was taking a holiday.
But though he was taking a holiday now, that is to say, he was doing no
writing, he was so used to intellectual activity that he liked to put
into concise and eloquent shape the ideas that occurred to him, and
liked to have someone to listen to him. His most usual and natural
listener was his brother. And so in spite of the friendliness and
directness of their relations, Konstantin felt an awkwardness in
leaving him alone. Sergey Ivanovitch liked to stretch himself on the
grass in the sun, and to lie so, basking and chatting lazily.
“You wouldn’t believe,” he would say to his brother, “what a pleasure
this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea in one’s brain, as empty as a
drum!”
But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and listening to him,
especially when he knew that while he was away they would be carting
dung onto the fields not ploughed ready for it, and heaping it all up
anyhow; and would not screw the shares in the ploughs, but would let
them come off and then say that the new ploughs were a silly invention,
and there was nothing like the old Andreevna plough, and so on.
“Come, you’ve done enough trudging about in the heat,” Sergey
Ivanovitch would say to him.
“No, I must just run round to the counting-house for a minute,” Levin
would answer, and he would run off to the fields.
Chapter 2
Early in June it happened that Agafea Mihalovna, the old nurse and
housekeeper, in carrying to the cellar a jar of mushrooms she had just
pickled, slipped, fell, and sprained her wrist. The district doctor, a
talkative young medical student, who had just finished his studies,
came to see her. He examined the wrist, said it was not broken, was
delighted at a chance of talking to the celebrated Sergey Ivanovitch
Koznishev, and to show his advanced views of things told him all the
scandal of the district, complaining of the poor state into which the
district council had fallen. Sergey Ivanovitch listened attentively,
asked him questions, and, roused by a new listener, he talked fluently,
uttered a few keen and weighty observations, respectfully appreciated
by the young doctor, and was soon in that eager frame of mind his
brother knew so well, which always, with him, followed a brilliant and
eager conversation. After the departure of the doctor, he wanted to go
with a fishing rod to the river. Sergey Ivanovitch was fond of angling,
and was, it seemed, proud of being able to care for such a stupid
occupation.
Konstantin Levin, whose presence was needed in the plough land and
meadows, had come to take his brother in the trap.
It was that time of the year, the turning-point of summer, when the
crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of
the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the rye is
all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves
in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats, with tufts of
yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop irregularly over
the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is already out and
hiding the ground; when the fallow lands, trodden hard as stone by the
cattle, are half ploughed over, with paths left untouched by the
plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto the fields there comes
at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet, and on the
low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass waiting
for the mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among it.
It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the
fields before the beginning of the labors of harvest—every year
recurring, every year straining every nerve of the peasants. The crop
was a splendid one, and bright, hot summer days had set in with short,
dewy nights.
The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows.
Sergey Ivanovitch was all the while admiring the beauty of the woods,
which were a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his brother now an
old lime tree on the point of flowering, dark on the shady side, and
brightly spotted with yellow stipules, now the young shoots of this
year’s saplings brilliant with emerald. Konstantin Levin did not like
talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away
the beauty of what he saw. He assented to what his brother said, but he
could not help beginning to think of other things. When they came out
of the woods, all his attention was engrossed by the view of the fallow
land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in parts trampled and
checkered with furrows, in parts dotted with ridges of dung, and in
parts even ploughed. A string of carts was moving across it. Levin
counted the carts, and was pleased that all that were wanted had been
brought, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts passed to the
mowing. He always felt something special moving him to the quick at the
hay-making. On reaching the meadow Levin stopped the horse.
The morning dew was still lying on the thick undergrowth of the grass,
and that he might not get his feet wet, Sergey Ivanovitch asked his
brother to drive him in the trap up to the willow tree from which the
carp was caught. Sorry as Konstantin Levin was to crush down his mowing
grass, he drove him into the meadow. The high grass softly turned about
the wheels and the horse’s legs, leaving its seeds clinging to the wet
axles and spokes of the wheels. His brother seated himself under a
bush, arranging his tackle, while Levin led the horse away, fastened
him up, and walked into the vast gray-green sea of grass unstirred by
the wind. The silky grass with its ripe seeds came almost to his waist
in the dampest spots.
Crossing the meadow, Konstantin Levin came out onto the road, and met
an old man with a swollen eye, carrying a skep on his shoulder.
“What? taken a stray swarm, Fomitch?” he asked.
“No, indeed, Konstantin Dmitrich! All we can do to keep our own! This
is the second swarm that has flown away.... Luckily the lads caught
them. They were ploughing your field. They unyoked the horses and
galloped after them.”
“Well, what do you say, Fomitch—start mowing or wait a bit?”
“Eh, well. Our way’s to wait till St. Peter’s Day. But you always mow
sooner. Well, to be sure, please God, the hay’s good. There’ll be
plenty for the beasts.”
“What do you think about the weather?”
“That’s in God’s hands. Maybe it will be fine.”
Levin went up to his brother.
Sergey Ivanovitch had caught nothing, but he was not bored, and seemed
in the most cheerful frame of mind. Levin saw that, stimulated by his
conversation with the doctor, he wanted to talk. Levin, on the other
hand, would have liked to get home as soon as possible to give orders
about getting together the mowers for next day, and to set at rest his
doubts about the mowing, which greatly absorbed him.
“Well, let’s be going,” he said.
“Why be in such a hurry? Let’s stay a little. But how wet you are! Even
though one catches nothing, it’s nice. That’s the best thing about
every part of sport, that one has to do with nature. How exquisite this
steely water is!” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “These riverside banks always
remind me of the riddle—do you know it? ‘The grass says to the water:
we quiver and we quiver.’”
“I don’t know the riddle,” answered Levin wearily.
Chapter 3
“Do you know, I’ve been thinking about you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“It’s beyond everything what’s being done in the district, according to
what this doctor tells me. He’s a very intelligent fellow. And as I’ve
told you before, I tell you again: it’s not right for you not to go to
the meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business. If
decent people won’t go into it, of course it’s bound to go all wrong.
We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no
schools, nor district nurses, nor midwives, nor drugstores—nothing.”
“Well, I did try, you know,” Levin said slowly and unwillingly. “I
can’t! and so there’s no help for it.”
“But why can’t you? I must own I can’t make it out. Indifference,
incapacity—I won’t admit; surely it’s not simply laziness?”
“None of those things. I’ve tried, and I see I can do nothing,” said
Levin.
He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying. Looking towards the
plough land across the river, he made out something black, but he could
not distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on horseback.
“Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt and didn’t succeed,
as you think, and you give in. How can you have so little
self-respect?”
“Self-respect!” said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother’s words;
“I don’t understand. If they’d told me at college that other people
understood the integral calculus, and I didn’t, then pride would have
come in. But in this case one wants first to be convinced that one has
certain qualifications for this sort of business, and especially that
all this business is of great importance.”
“What! do you mean to say it’s not of importance?” said Sergey
Ivanovitch, stung to the quick too at his brother’s considering
anything of no importance that interested him, and still more at his
obviously paying little attention to what he was saying.
“I don’t think it important; it does not take hold of me, I can’t help
it,” answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff, and
that the bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the ploughed
land. They were turning the plough over. “Can they have finished
ploughing?” he wondered.
“Come, really though,” said the elder brother, with a frown on his
handsome, clever face, “there’s a limit to everything. It’s very well
to be original and genuine, and to dislike everything conventional—I
know all about that; but really, what you’re saying either has no
meaning, or it has a very wrong meaning. How can you think it a matter
of no importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert....”
“I never did assert it,” thought Konstantin Levin.
“...dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the children,
and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of
every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping
them, and don’t help them because to your mind it’s of no importance.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so
undeveloped that you can’t see all that you can do, or you won’t
sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.
Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to
submit, or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And this
mortified him and hurt his feelings.
“It’s both,” he said resolutely: “I don’t see that it was possible....”
“What! was it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to
provide medical aid?”
“Impossible, as it seems to me.... For the three thousand square miles
of our district, what with our thaws, and the storms, and the work in
the fields, I don’t see how it is possible to provide medical aid all
over. And besides, I don’t believe in medicine.”
“Oh, well, that’s unfair ... I can quote to you thousands of
instances.... But the schools, anyway.”
“Why have schools?”
“What do you mean? Can there be two opinions of the advantage of
education? If it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for
everyone.”
Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and so he
got hot, and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause of his
indifference to public business.
“Perhaps it may all be very good; but why should I worry myself about
establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and schools
to which I shall never send my children, to which even the peasants
don’t want to send their children, and to which I’ve no very firm faith
that they ought to send them?” said he.
Sergey Ivanovitch was for a minute surprised at this unexpected view of
the subject; but he promptly made a new plan of attack. He was silent
for a little, drew out a hook, threw it in again, and turned to his
brother smiling.
“Come, now.... In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We
ourselves sent for the district doctor for Agafea Mihalovna.”
“Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again.”
“That remains to be proved.... Next, the peasant who can read and write
is as a workman of more use and value to you.”
“No, you can ask anyone you like,” Konstantin Levin answered with
decision, “the man that can read and write is much inferior as a
workman. And mending the highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as
they put up bridges they’re stolen.”
“Still, that’s not the point,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning. He
disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually
skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected
points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply. “Do you admit
that education is a benefit for the people?”
“Yes, I admit it,” said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious
immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he
admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless
rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that
this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and he awaited the
proofs.
The argument turned out to be far simpler than he had expected.
“If you admit that it is a benefit,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “then, as
an honest man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathizing with
the movement, and so wishing to work for it.”
“But I still do not admit this movement to be just,” said Konstantin
Levin, reddening a little.
“What! But you said just now....”
“That’s to say, I don’t admit it’s being either good or possible.”
“That you can’t tell without making the trial.”
“Well, supposing that’s so,” said Levin, though he did not suppose so
at all, “supposing that is so, still I don’t see, all the same, what
I’m to worry myself about it for.”
“How so?”
“No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical
point of view,” said Levin.
“I can’t see where philosophy comes in,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, in a
tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother’s right to
talk about philosophy. And that irritated Levin.
“I’ll tell you, then,” he said with heat, “I imagine the mainspring of
all our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the local
institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that could conduce to my
prosperity, and the roads are not better and could not be better; my
horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and dispensaries are
no use to me. An arbitrator of disputes is no use to me. I never appeal
to him, and never shall appeal to him. The schools are no good to me,
but positively harmful, as I told you. For me the district institutions
simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three
acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts
of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self-interest offers me no
inducement.”
“Excuse me,” Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile, “self-interest
did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did
work for it.”
“No!” Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; “the
emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There self-interest
did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that crushed us, all
decent people among us. But to be a town councilor and discuss how many
dustmen are needed, and how chimneys shall be constructed in the town
in which I don’t live—to serve on a jury and try a peasant who’s stolen
a flitch of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts
of jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the
president cross-examining my old half-witted Alioshka, ‘Do you admit,
prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal of the bacon?’ ‘Eh?’”
Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the
president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was
all to the point.
But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, what do you mean to say, then?”
“I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me ... my interest,
I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when they made
raids on us students, and the police read our letters, I was ready to
defend those rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to education and
freedom. I can understand compulsory military service, which affects my
children, my brothers, and myself, I am ready to deliberate on what
concerns me; but deliberating on how to spend forty thousand roubles of
district council money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka—I don’t
understand, and I can’t do it.”
Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had burst
open. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.
“But tomorrow it’ll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited your
tastes better to be tried in the old criminal tribunal?”
“I’m not going to be tried. I shan’t murder anybody, and I’ve no need
of it. Well, I tell you what,” he went on, flying off again to a
subject quite beside the point, “our district self-government and all
the rest of it—it’s just like the birch branches we stick in the ground
on Trinity Day, for instance, to look like a copse which has grown up
of itself in Europe, and I can’t gush over these birch branches and
believe in them.”
Sergey Ivanovitch merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to express
his wonder how the birch branches had come into their argument at that
point, though he did really understand at once what his brother meant.
“Excuse me, but you know one really can’t argue in that way,” he
observed.
But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of
which he was conscious, of lack of zeal for the public welfare, and he
went on.
“I imagine,” he said, “that no sort of activity is likely to be lasting
if it is not founded on self-interest, that’s a universal principle, a
philosophical principle,” he said, repeating the word “philosophical”
with determination, as though wishing to show that he had as much right
as anyone else to talk of philosophy.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled. “He too has a philosophy of his own at the
service of his natural tendencies,” he thought.
“Come, you’d better let philosophy alone,” he said. “The chief problem
of the philosophy of all ages consists just in finding the
indispensable connection which exists between individual and social
interests. But that’s not to the point; what is to the point is a
correction I must make in your comparison. The birches are not simply
stuck in, but some are sown and some are planted, and one must deal
carefully with them. It’s only those peoples that have an intuitive
sense of what’s of importance and significance in their institutions,
and know how to value them, that have a future before them—it’s only
those peoples that one can truly call historical.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch carried the subject into the regions of
philosophical history where Konstantin Levin could not follow him, and
showed him all the incorrectness of his view.
“As for your dislike of it, excuse my saying so, that’s simply our
Russian sloth and old serf-owner’s ways, and I’m convinced that in you
it’s a temporary error and will pass.”
Konstantin was silent. He felt himself vanquished on all sides, but he
felt at the same time that what he wanted to say was unintelligible to
his brother. Only he could not make up his mind whether it was
unintelligible because he was not capable of expressing his meaning
clearly, or because his brother would not or could not understand him.
But he did not pursue the speculation, and without replying, he fell to
musing on a quite different and personal matter.
Sergey Ivanovitch wound up the last line, untied the horse, and they
drove off.
Chapter 4
The personal matter that absorbed Levin during his conversation with
his brother was this. Once in a previous year he had gone to look at
the mowing, and being made very angry by the bailiff he had recourse to
his favorite means for regaining his temper,—he took a scythe from a
peasant and began mowing.
He liked the work so much that he had several times tried his hand at
mowing since. He had cut the whole of the meadow in front of his house,
and this year ever since the early spring he had cherished a plan for
mowing for whole days together with the peasants. Ever since his
brother’s arrival, he had been in doubt whether to mow or not. He was
loath to leave his brother alone all day long, and he was afraid his
brother would laugh at him about it. But as he drove into the meadow,
and recalled the sensations of mowing, he came near deciding that he
would go mowing. After the irritating discussion with his brother, he
pondered over this intention again.
“I must have physical exercise, or my temper’ll certainly be ruined,”
he thought, and he determined he would go mowing, however awkward he
might feel about it with his brother or the peasants.
Towards evening Konstantin Levin went to his counting house, gave
directions as to the work to be done, and sent about the village to
summon the mowers for the morrow, to cut the hay in Kalinov meadow, the
largest and best of his grass lands.
“And send my scythe, please, to Tit, for him to set it, and bring it
round tomorrow. I shall maybe do some mowing myself too,” he said,
trying not to be embarrassed.
The bailiff smiled and said: “Yes, sir.”
At tea the same evening Levin said to his brother:
“I fancy the fine weather will last. Tomorrow I shall start mowing.”
“I’m so fond of that form of field labor,” said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“I’m awfully fond of it. I sometimes mow myself with the peasants, and
tomorrow I want to try mowing the whole day.”
Sergey Ivanovitch lifted his head, and looked with interest at his
brother.
“How do you mean? Just like one of the peasants, all day long?”
“Yes, it’s very pleasant,” said Levin.
“It’s splendid as exercise, only you’ll hardly be able to stand it,”
said Sergey Ivanovitch, without a shade of irony.
“I’ve tried it. It’s hard work at first, but you get into it. I dare
say I shall manage to keep it up....”
“Really! what an idea! But tell me, how do the peasants look at it? I
suppose they laugh in their sleeves at their master’s being such a
queer fish?”
“No, I don’t think so; but it’s so delightful, and at the same time
such hard work, that one has no time to think about it.”
“But how will you do about dining with them? To send you a bottle of
Lafitte and roast turkey out there would be a little awkward.”
“No, I’ll simply come home at the time of their noonday rest.”
Next morning Konstantin Levin got up earlier than usual, but he was
detained giving directions on the farm, and when he reached the mowing
grass the mowers were already at their second row.
From the uplands he could get a view of the shaded cut part of the
meadow below, with its grayish ridges of cut grass, and the black heaps
of coats, taken off by the mowers at the place from which they had
started cutting.
Gradually, as he rode towards the meadow, the peasants came into sight,
some in coats, some in their shirts mowing, one behind another in a
long string, swinging their scythes differently. He counted forty-two
of them.
They were mowing slowly over the uneven, low-lying parts of the meadow,
where there had been an old dam. Levin recognized some of his own men.
Here was old Yermil in a very long white smock, bending forward to
swing a scythe; there was a young fellow, Vaska, who had been a
coachman of Levin’s, taking every row with a wide sweep. Here, too, was
Tit, Levin’s preceptor in the art of mowing, a thin little peasant. He
was in front of all, and cut his wide row without bending, as though
playing with the scythe.
Levin got off his mare, and fastening her up by the roadside went to
meet Tit, who took a second scythe out of a bush and gave it to him.
“It’s ready, sir; it’s like a razor, cuts of itself,” said Tit, taking
off his cap with a smile and giving him the scythe.
Levin took the scythe, and began trying it. As they finished their
rows, the mowers, hot and good-humored, came out into the road one
after another, and, laughing a little, greeted the master. They all
stared at him, but no one made any remark, till a tall old man, with a
wrinkled, beardless face, wearing a short sheepskin jacket, came out
into the road and accosted him.
“Look’ee now, master, once take hold of the rope there’s no letting it
go!” he said, and Levin heard smothered laughter among the mowers.
“I’ll try not to let it go,” he said, taking his stand behind Tit, and
waiting for the time to begin.
“Mind’ee,” repeated the old man.
Tit made room, and Levin started behind him. The grass was short close
to the road, and Levin, who had not done any mowing for a long while,
and was disconcerted by the eyes fastened upon him, cut badly for the
first moments, though he swung his scythe vigorously. Behind him he
heard voices:
“It’s not set right; handle’s too high; see how he has to stoop to it,”
said one.
“Press more on the heel,” said another.
“Never mind, he’ll get on all right,” the old man resumed.
“He’s made a start.... You swing it too wide, you’ll tire yourself
out.... The master, sure, does his best for himself! But see the grass
missed out! For such work us fellows would catch it!”
The grass became softer, and Levin, listening without answering,
followed Tit, trying to do the best he could. They moved a hundred
paces. Tit kept moving on, without stopping, not showing the slightest
weariness, but Levin was already beginning to be afraid he would not be
able to keep it up: he was so tired.
He felt as he swung his scythe that he was at the very end of his
strength, and was making up his mind to ask Tit to stop. But at that
very moment Tit stopped of his own accord, and stooping down picked up
some grass, rubbed his scythe, and began whetting it. Levin
straightened himself, and drawing a deep breath looked round. Behind
him came a peasant, and he too was evidently tired, for he stopped at
once without waiting to mow up to Levin, and began whetting his scythe.
Tit sharpened his scythe and Levin’s, and they went on. The next time
it was just the same. Tit moved on with sweep after sweep of his
scythe, not stopping nor showing signs of weariness. Levin followed
him, trying not to get left behind, and he found it harder and harder:
the moment came when he felt he had no strength left, but at that very
moment Tit stopped and whetted the scythes.
So they mowed the first row. And this long row seemed particularly hard
work to Levin; but when the end was reached and Tit, shouldering his
scythe, began with deliberate stride returning on the tracks left by
his heels in the cut grass, and Levin walked back in the same way over
the space he had cut, in spite of the sweat that ran in streams over
his face and fell in drops down his nose, and drenched his back as
though he had been soaked in water, he felt very happy. What delighted
him particularly was that now he knew he would be able to hold out.
His pleasure was only disturbed by his row not being well cut. “I will
swing less with my arm and more with my whole body,” he thought,
comparing Tit’s row, which looked as if it had been cut with a line,
with his own unevenly and irregularly lying grass.
The first row, as Levin noticed, Tit had mowed specially quickly,
probably wishing to put his master to the test, and the row happened to
be a long one. The next rows were easier, but still Levin had to strain
every nerve not to drop behind the peasants.
He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, but not to be left behind
the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible. He heard nothing
but the swish of scythes, and saw before him Tit’s upright figure
mowing away, the crescent-shaped curve of the cut grass, the grass and
flower heads slowly and rhythmically falling before the blade of his
scythe, and ahead of him the end of the row, where would come the rest.
Suddenly, in the midst of his toil, without understanding what it was
or whence it came, he felt a pleasant sensation of chill on his hot,
moist shoulders. He glanced at the sky in the interval for whetting the
scythes. A heavy, lowering storm cloud had blown up, and big raindrops
were falling. Some of the peasants went to their coats and put them on;
others—just like Levin himself—merely shrugged their shoulders,
enjoying the pleasant coolness of it.
Another row, and yet another row, followed—long rows and short rows,
with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and
could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to
come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst
of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was
doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row
was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s. But so soon as he
recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do better, he was at
once conscious of all the difficulty of his task, and the row was badly
mown.
On finishing yet another row he would have gone back to the top of the
meadow again to begin the next, but Tit stopped, and going up to the
old man said something in a low voice to him. They both looked at the
sun. “What are they talking about, and why doesn’t he go back?” thought
Levin, not guessing that the peasants had been mowing no less than four
hours without stopping, and it was time for their lunch.
“Lunch, sir,” said the old man.
“Is it really time? That’s right; lunch, then.”
Levin gave his scythe to Tit, and together with the peasants, who were
crossing the long stretch of mown grass, slightly sprinkled with rain,
to get their bread from the heap of coats, he went towards his house.
Only then he suddenly awoke to the fact that he had been wrong about
the weather and the rain was drenching his hay.
“The hay will be spoiled,” he said.
“Not a bit of it, sir; mow in the rain, and you’ll rake in fine
weather!” said the old man.
Levin untied his horse and rode home to his coffee. Sergey Ivanovitch
was only just getting up. When he had drunk his coffee, Levin rode back
again to the mowing before Sergey Ivanovitch had had time to dress and
come down to the dining-room.
Chapter 5
After lunch Levin was not in the same place in the string of mowers as
before, but stood between the old man who had accosted him jocosely,
and now invited him to be his neighbor, and a young peasant, who had
only been married in the autumn, and who was mowing this summer for the
first time.
The old man, holding himself erect, moved in front, with his feet
turned out, taking long, regular strides, and with a precise and
regular action which seemed to cost him no more effort than swinging
one’s arms in walking, as though it were in play, he laid down the
high, even row of grass. It was as though it were not he but the sharp
scythe of itself swishing through the juicy grass.
Behind Levin came the lad Mishka. His pretty, boyish face, with a twist
of fresh grass bound round his hair, was all working with effort; but
whenever anyone looked at him he smiled. He would clearly have died
sooner than own it was hard work for him.
Levin kept between them. In the very heat of the day the mowing did not
seem such hard work to him. The perspiration with which he was drenched
cooled him, while the sun, that burned his back, his head, and his
arms, bare to the elbow, gave a vigor and dogged energy to his labor;
and more and more often now came those moments of unconsciousness, when
it was possible not to think what one was doing. The scythe cut of
itself. These were happy moments. Still more delightful were the
moments when they reached the stream where the rows ended, and the old
man rubbed his scythe with the wet, thick grass, rinsed its blade in
the fresh water of the stream, ladled out a little in a tin dipper, and
offered Levin a drink.
“What do you say to my home-brew, eh? Good, eh?” said he, winking.
And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor so good as this warm water
with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin
dipper. And immediately after this came the delicious, slow saunter,
with his hand on the scythe, during which he could wipe away the
streaming sweat, take deep breaths of air, and look about at the long
string of mowers and at what was happening around in the forest and the
country.
The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of
unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe,
but the scythe mowing of itself, a body full of life and consciousness
of its own, and as though by magic, without thinking of it, the work
turned out regular and well-finished of itself. These were the most
blissful moments.
It was only hard work when he had to break off the motion, which had
become unconscious, and to think; when he had to mow round a hillock or
a tuft of sorrel. The old man did this easily. When a hillock came he
changed his action, and at one time with the heel, and at another with
the tip of his scythe, clipped the hillock round both sides with short
strokes. And while he did this he kept looking about and watching what
came into his view: at one moment he picked a wild berry and ate it or
offered it to Levin, then he flung away a twig with the blade of the
scythe, then he looked at a quail’s nest, from which the bird flew just
under the scythe, or caught a snake that crossed his path, and lifting
it on the scythe as though on a fork showed it to Levin and threw it
away.
For both Levin and the young peasant behind him, such changes of
position were difficult. Both of them, repeating over and over again
the same strained movement, were in a perfect frenzy of toil, and were
incapable of shifting their position and at the same time watching what
was before them.
Levin did not notice how time was passing. If he had been asked how
long he had been working he would have said half an hour—and it was
getting on for dinner time. As they were walking back over the cut
grass, the old man called Levin’s attention to the little girls and
boys who were coming from different directions, hardly visible through
the long grass, and along the road towards the mowers, carrying sacks
of bread dragging at their little hands and pitchers of the sour
rye-beer, with cloths wrapped round them.
“Look’ee, the little emmets crawling!” he said, pointing to them, and
he shaded his eyes with his hand to look at the sun. They mowed two
more rows; the old man stopped.
“Come, master, dinner time!” he said briskly. And on reaching the
stream the mowers moved off across the lines of cut grass towards their
pile of coats, where the children who had brought their dinners were
sitting waiting for them. The peasants gathered into groups—those
further away under a cart, those nearer under a willow bush.
Levin sat down by them; he felt disinclined to go away.
All constraint with the master had disappeared long ago. The peasants
got ready for dinner. Some washed, the young lads bathed in the stream,
others made a place comfortable for a rest, untied their sacks of
bread, and uncovered the pitchers of rye-beer. The old man crumbled up
some bread in a cup, stirred it with the handle of a spoon, poured
water on it from the dipper, broke up some more bread, and having
seasoned it with salt, he turned to the east to say his prayer.
“Come, master, taste my sop,” said he, kneeling down before the cup.
The sop was so good that Levin gave up the idea of going home. He dined
with the old man, and talked to him about his family affairs, taking
the keenest interest in them, and told him about his own affairs and
all the circumstances that could be of interest to the old man. He felt
much nearer to him than to his brother, and could not help smiling at
the affection he felt for this man. When the old man got up again, said
his prayer, and lay down under a bush, putting some grass under his
head for a pillow, Levin did the same, and in spite of the clinging
flies that were so persistent in the sunshine, and the midges that
tickled his hot face and body, he fell asleep at once and only waked
when the sun had passed to the other side of the bush and reached him.
The old man had been awake a long while, and was sitting up whetting
the scythes of the younger lads.
Levin looked about him and hardly recognized the place, everything was
so changed. The immense stretch of meadow had been mown and was
sparkling with a peculiar fresh brilliance, with its lines of already
sweet-smelling grass in the slanting rays of the evening sun. And the
bushes about the river had been cut down, and the river itself, not
visible before, now gleaming like steel in its bends, and the moving,
ascending, peasants, and the sharp wall of grass of the unmown part of
the meadow, and the hawks hovering over the stripped meadow—all was
perfectly new. Raising himself, Levin began considering how much had
been cut and how much more could still be done that day.
The work done was exceptionally much for forty-two men. They had cut
the whole of the big meadow, which had, in the years of serf labor,
taken thirty scythes two days to mow. Only the corners remained to do,
where the rows were short. But Levin felt a longing to get as much
mowing done that day as possible, and was vexed with the sun sinking so
quickly in the sky. He felt no weariness; all he wanted was to get his
work done more and more quickly and as much done as possible.
“Could you cut Mashkin Upland too?—what do you think?” he said to the
old man.
“As God wills, the sun’s not high. A little vodka for the lads?”
At the afternoon rest, when they were sitting down again, and those who
smoked had lighted their pipes, the old man told the men that “Mashkin
Upland’s to be cut—there’ll be some vodka.”
“Why not cut it? Come on, Tit! We’ll look sharp! We can eat at night.
Come on!” cried voices, and eating up their bread, the mowers went back
to work.
“Come, lads, keep it up!” said Tit, and ran on ahead almost at a trot.
“Get along, get along!” said the old man, hurrying after him and easily
overtaking him, “I’ll mow you down, look out!”
And young and old mowed away, as though they were racing with one
another. But however fast they worked, they did not spoil the grass,
and the rows were laid just as neatly and exactly. The little piece
left uncut in the corner was mown in five minutes. The last of the
mowers were just ending their rows while the foremost snatched up their
coats onto their shoulders, and crossed the road towards Mashkin
Upland.
The sun was already sinking into the trees when they went with their
jingling dippers into the wooded ravine of Mashkin Upland. The grass
was up to their waists in the middle of the hollow, soft, tender, and
feathery, spotted here and there among the trees with wild
heart’s-ease.
After a brief consultation—whether to take the rows lengthwise or
diagonally—Prohor Yermilin, also a renowned mower, a huge, black-haired
peasant, went on ahead. He went up to the top, turned back again and
started mowing, and they all proceeded to form in line behind him,
going downhill through the hollow and uphill right up to the edge of
the forest. The sun sank behind the forest. The dew was falling by now;
the mowers were in the sun only on the hillside, but below, where a
mist was rising, and on the opposite side, they mowed into the fresh,
dewy shade. The work went rapidly. The grass cut with a juicy sound,
and was at once laid in high, fragrant rows. The mowers from all sides,
brought closer together in the short row, kept urging one another on to
the sound of jingling dippers and clanging scythes, and the hiss of the
whetstones sharpening them, and good-humored shouts.
Levin still kept between the young peasant and the old man. The old
man, who had put on his short sheepskin jacket, was just as
good-humored, jocose, and free in his movements. Among the trees they
were continually cutting with their scythes the so-called “birch
mushrooms,” swollen fat in the succulent grass. But the old man bent
down every time he came across a mushroom, picked it up and put it in
his bosom. “Another present for my old woman,” he said as he did so.
Easy as it was to mow the wet, soft grass, it was hard work going up
and down the steep sides of the ravine. But this did not trouble the
old man. Swinging his scythe just as ever, and moving his feet in their
big, plaited shoes with firm, little steps, he climbed slowly up the
steep place, and though his breeches hanging out below his smock, and
his whole frame trembled with effort, he did not miss one blade of
grass or one mushroom on his way, and kept making jokes with the
peasants and Levin. Levin walked after him and often thought he must
fall, as he climbed with a scythe up a steep cliff where it would have
been hard work to clamber without anything. But he climbed up and did
what he had to do. He felt as though some external force were moving
him.
Chapter 6
Mashkin Upland was mown, the last row finished, the peasants had put on
their coats and were gaily trudging home. Levin got on his horse and,
parting regretfully from the peasants, rode homewards. On the hillside
he looked back; he could not see them in the mist that had risen from
the valley; he could only hear rough, good-humored voices, laughter,
and the sound of clanking scythes.
Sergey Ivanovitch had long ago finished dinner, and was drinking iced
lemon and water in his own room, looking through the reviews and papers
which he had only just received by post, when Levin rushed into the
room, talking merrily, with his wet and matted hair sticking to his
forehead, and his back and chest grimed and moist.
“We mowed the whole meadow! Oh, it is nice, delicious! And how have you
been getting on?” said Levin, completely forgetting the disagreeable
conversation of the previous day.
“Mercy! what do you look like!” said Sergey Ivanovitch, for the first
moment looking round with some dissatisfaction. “And the door, do shut
the door!” he cried. “You must have let in a dozen at least.”
Sergey Ivanovitch could not endure flies, and in his own room he never
opened the window except at night, and carefully kept the door shut.
“Not one, on my honor. But if I have, I’ll catch them. You wouldn’t
believe what a pleasure it is! How have you spent the day?”
“Very well. But have you really been mowing the whole day? I expect
you’re as hungry as a wolf. Kouzma has got everything ready for you.”
“No, I don’t feel hungry even. I had something to eat there. But I’ll
go and wash.”
“Yes, go along, go along, and I’ll come to you directly,” said Sergey
Ivanovitch, shaking his head as he looked at his brother. “Go along,
make haste,” he added smiling, and gathering up his books, he prepared
to go too. He, too, felt suddenly good-humored and disinclined to leave
his brother’s side. “But what did you do while it was raining?”
“Rain? Why, there was scarcely a drop. I’ll come directly. So you had a
nice day too? That’s first-rate.” And Levin went off to change his
clothes.
Five minutes later the brothers met in the dining-room. Although it
seemed to Levin that he was not hungry, and he sat down to dinner
simply so as not to hurt Kouzma’s feelings, yet when he began to eat
the dinner struck him as extraordinarily good. Sergey Ivanovitch
watched him with a smile.
“Oh, by the way, there’s a letter for you,” said he. “Kouzma, bring it
down, please. And mind you shut the doors.”
The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud. Oblonsky wrote to
him from Petersburg: “I have had a letter from Dolly; she’s at
Ergushovo, and everything seems going wrong there. Do ride over and see
her, please; help her with advice; you know all about it. She will be
so glad to see you. She’s quite alone, poor thing. My mother-in-law and
all of them are still abroad.”
“That’s capital! I will certainly ride over to her,” said Levin. “Or
we’ll go together. She’s such a splendid woman, isn’t she?”
“They’re not far from here, then?”
“Twenty-five miles. Or perhaps it is thirty. But a capital road.
Capital, we’ll drive over.”
“I shall be delighted,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, still smiling. The
sight of his younger brother’s appearance had immediately put him in a
good humor.
“Well, you have an appetite!” he said, looking at his dark-red,
sunburnt face and neck bent over the plate.
“Splendid! You can’t imagine what an effectual remedy it is for every
sort of foolishness. I want to enrich medicine with a new word:
_Arbeitskur_.”
“Well, but you don’t need it, I should fancy.”
“No, but for all sorts of nervous invalids.”
“Yes, it ought to be tried. I had meant to come to the mowing to look
at you, but it was so unbearably hot that I got no further than the
forest. I sat there a little, and went on by the forest to the village,
met your old nurse, and sounded her as to the peasants’ view of you. As
far as I can make out, they don’t approve of this. She said: ‘It’s not
a gentleman’s work.’ Altogether, I fancy that in the people’s ideas
there are very clear and definite notions of certain, as they call it,
‘gentlemanly’ lines of action. And they don’t sanction the gentry’s
moving outside bounds clearly laid down in their ideas.”
“Maybe so; but anyway it’s a pleasure such as I have never known in my
life. And there’s no harm in it, you know. Is there?” answered Levin.
“I can’t help it if they don’t like it. Though I do believe it’s all
right. Eh?”
“Altogether,” pursued Sergey Ivanovitch, “you’re satisfied with your
day?”
“Quite satisfied. We cut the whole meadow. And such a splendid old man
I made friends with there! You can’t fancy how delightful he was!”
“Well, so you’re content with your day. And so am I. First, I solved
two chess problems, and one a very pretty one—a pawn opening. I’ll show
it you. And then—I thought over our conversation yesterday.”
“Eh! our conversation yesterday?” said Levin, blissfully dropping his
eyelids and drawing deep breaths after finishing his dinner, and
absolutely incapable of recalling what their conversation yesterday was
about.
“I think you are partly right. Our difference of opinion amounts to
this, that you make the mainspring self-interest, while I suppose that
interest in the common weal is bound to exist in every man of a certain
degree of advancement. Possibly you are right too, that action founded
on material interest would be more desirable. You are altogether, as
the French say, too _primesautière_ a nature; you must have intense,
energetic action, or nothing.”
Levin listened to his brother and did not understand a single word, and
did not want to understand. He was only afraid his brother might ask
him some question which would make it evident he had not heard.
“So that’s what I think it is, my dear boy,” said Sergey Ivanovitch,
touching him on the shoulder.
“Yes, of course. But, do you know? I won’t stand up for my view,”
answered Levin, with a guilty, childlike smile. “Whatever was it I was
disputing about?” he wondered. “Of course, I’m right, and he’s right,
and it’s all first-rate. Only I must go round to the counting house and
see to things.” He got up, stretching and smiling. Sergey Ivanovitch
smiled too.
“If you want to go out, let’s go together,” he said, disinclined to be
parted from his brother, who seemed positively breathing out freshness
and energy. “Come, we’ll go to the counting house, if you have to go
there.”
“Oh, heavens!” shouted Levin, so loudly that Sergey Ivanovitch was
quite frightened.
“What, what is the matter?”
“How’s Agafea Mihalovna’s hand?” said Levin, slapping himself on the
head. “I’d positively forgotten her even.”
“It’s much better.”
“Well, anyway I’ll run down to her. Before you’ve time to get your hat
on, I’ll be back.”
And he ran downstairs, clattering with his heels like a spring-rattle.
Chapter 7
Stephan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most natural
and essential official duty—so familiar to everyone in the government
service, though incomprehensible to outsiders—that duty, but for which
one could hardly be in government service, of reminding the ministry of
his existence—and having, for the due performance of this rite, taken
all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably spending his
days at the races and in the summer villas. Meanwhile Dolly and the
children had moved into the country, to cut down expenses as much as
possible. She had gone to Ergushovo, the estate that had been her
dowry, and the one where in spring the forest had been sold. It was
nearly forty miles from Levin’s Pokrovskoe. The big, old house at
Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and the old prince had had the
lodge done up and built on to. Twenty years before, when Dolly was a
child, the lodge had been roomy and comfortable, though, like all
lodges, it stood sideways to the entrance avenue, and faced the south.
But by now this lodge was old and dilapidated. When Stepan Arkadyevitch
had gone down in the spring to sell the forest, Dolly had begged him to
look over the house and order what repairs might be needed. Stepan
Arkadyevitch, like all unfaithful husbands indeed, was very solicitous
for his wife’s comfort, and he had himself looked over the house, and
given instructions about everything that he considered necessary. What
he considered necessary was to cover all the furniture with cretonne,
to put up curtains, to weed the garden, to make a little bridge on the
pond, and to plant flowers. But he forgot many other essential matters,
the want of which greatly distressed Darya Alexandrovna later on.
In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s efforts to be an attentive father and
husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and
children. He had bachelor tastes, and it was in accordance with them
that he shaped his life. On his return to Moscow he informed his wife
with pride that everything was ready, that the house would be a little
paradise, and that he advised her most certainly to go. His wife’s
staying away in the country was very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevitch
from every point of view: it did the children good, it decreased
expenses, and it left him more at liberty. Darya Alexandrovna regarded
staying in the country for the summer as essential for the children,
especially for the little girl, who had not succeeded in regaining her
strength after the scarlatina, and also as a means of escaping the
petty humiliations, the little bills owing to the wood-merchant, the
fishmonger, the shoemaker, which made her miserable. Besides this, she
was pleased to go away to the country because she was dreaming of
getting her sister Kitty to stay with her there. Kitty was to be back
from abroad in the middle of the summer, and bathing had been
prescribed for her. Kitty wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to
spend the summer with Dolly at Ergushovo, full of childish associations
for both of them.
The first days of her existence in the country were very hard for
Dolly. She used to stay in the country as a child, and the impression
she had retained of it was that the country was a refuge from all the
unpleasantness of the town, that life there, though not luxurious—Dolly
could easily make up her mind to that—was cheap and comfortable; that
there was plenty of everything, everything was cheap, everything could
be got, and children were happy. But now coming to the country as the
head of a family, she perceived that it was all utterly unlike what she
had fancied.
The day after their arrival there was a heavy fall of rain, and in the
night the water came through in the corridor and in the nursery, so
that the beds had to be carried into the drawing-room. There was no
kitchen maid to be found; of the nine cows, it appeared from the words
of the cowherd-woman that some were about to calve, others had just
calved, others were old, and others again hard-uddered; there was not
butter nor milk enough even for the children. There were no eggs. They
could get no fowls; old, purplish, stringy cocks were all they had for
roasting and boiling. Impossible to get women to scrub the floors—all
were potato-hoeing. Driving was out of the question, because one of the
horses was restive, and bolted in the shafts. There was no place where
they could bathe; the whole of the river-bank was trampled by the
cattle and open to the road; even walks were impossible, for the cattle
strayed into the garden through a gap in the hedge, and there was one
terrible bull, who bellowed, and therefore might be expected to gore
somebody. There were no proper cupboards for their clothes; what
cupboards there were either would not close at all, or burst open
whenever anyone passed by them. There were no pots and pans; there was
no copper in the washhouse, nor even an ironing-board in the maids’
room.
Finding instead of peace and rest all these, from her point of view,
fearful calamities, Darya Alexandrovna was at first in despair. She
exerted herself to the utmost, felt the hopelessness of the position,
and was every instant suppressing the tears that started into her eyes.
The bailiff, a retired quartermaster, whom Stepan Arkadyevitch had
taken a fancy to and had appointed bailiff on account of his handsome
and respectful appearance as a hall-porter, showed no sympathy for
Darya Alexandrovna’s woes. He said respectfully, “nothing can be done,
the peasants are such a wretched lot,” and did nothing to help her.
The position seemed hopeless. But in the Oblonskys’ household, as in
all families indeed, there was one inconspicuous but most valuable and
useful person, Marya Philimonovna. She soothed her mistress, assured
her that everything would _come round_ (it was her expression, and
Matvey had borrowed it from her), and without fuss or hurry proceeded
to set to work herself. She had immediately made friends with the
bailiff’s wife, and on the very first day she drank tea with her and
the bailiff under the acacias, and reviewed all the circumstances of
the position. Very soon Marya Philimonovna had established her club, so
to say, under the acacias, and there it was, in this club, consisting
of the bailiff’s wife, the village elder, and the counting-house clerk,
that the difficulties of existence were gradually smoothed away, and in
a week’s time everything actually had come round. The roof was mended,
a kitchen maid was found—a crony of the village elder’s—hens were
bought, the cows began giving milk, the garden hedge was stopped up
with stakes, the carpenter made a mangle, hooks were put in the
cupboards, and they ceased to burst open spontaneously, and an
ironing-board covered with army cloth was placed across from the arm of
a chair to the chest of drawers, and there was a smell of flatirons in
the maids’ room.
“Just see, now, and you were quite in despair,” said Marya
Philimonovna, pointing to the ironing-board. They even rigged up a
bathing-shed of straw hurdles. Lily began to bathe, and Darya
Alexandrovna began to realize, if only in part, her expectations, if
not of a peaceful, at least of a comfortable, life in the country.
Peaceful with six children Darya Alexandrovna could not be. One would
fall ill, another might easily become so, a third would be without
something necessary, a fourth would show symptoms of a bad disposition,
and so on. Rare indeed were the brief periods of peace. But these cares
and anxieties were for Darya Alexandrovna the sole happiness possible.
Had it not been for them, she would have been left alone to brood over
her husband who did not love her. And besides, hard though it was for
the mother to bear the dread of illness, the illnesses themselves, and
the grief of seeing signs of evil propensities in her children—the
children themselves were even now repaying her in small joys for her
sufferings. Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like
gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain,
nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing
but the joy, nothing but gold.
Now in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more
frequently aware of those joys. Often, looking at them, she would make
every possible effort to persuade herself that she was mistaken, that
she as a mother was partial to her children. All the same, she could
not help saying to herself that she had charming children, all six of
them in different ways, but a set of children such as is not often to
be met with, and she was happy in them, and proud of them.
Chapter 8
Towards the end of May, when everything had been more or less
satisfactorily arranged, she received her husband’s answer to her
complaints of the disorganized state of things in the country. He wrote
begging her forgiveness for not having thought of everything before,
and promised to come down at the first chance. This chance did not
present itself, and till the beginning of June Darya Alexandrovna
stayed alone in the country.
On the Sunday in St. Peter’s week Darya Alexandrovna drove to mass for
all her children to take the sacrament. Darya Alexandrovna in her
intimate, philosophical talks with her sister, her mother, and her
friends very often astonished them by the freedom of her views in
regard to religion. She had a strange religion of transmigration of
souls all her own, in which she had firm faith, troubling herself
little about the dogmas of the Church. But in her family she was strict
in carrying out all that was required by the Church—and not merely in
order to set an example, but with all her heart in it. The fact that
the children had not been at the sacrament for nearly a year worried
her extremely, and with the full approval and sympathy of Marya
Philimonovna she decided that this should take place now in the summer.
For several days before, Darya Alexandrovna was busily deliberating on
how to dress all the children. Frocks were made or altered and washed,
seams and flounces were let out, buttons were sewn on, and ribbons got
ready. One dress, Tanya’s, which the English governess had undertaken,
cost Darya Alexandrovna much loss of temper. The English governess in
altering it had made the seams in the wrong place, had taken up the
sleeves too much, and altogether spoilt the dress. It was so narrow on
Tanya’s shoulders that it was quite painful to look at her. But Marya
Philimonovna had the happy thought of putting in gussets, and adding a
little shoulder-cape. The dress was set right, but there was nearly a
quarrel with the English governess. On the morning, however, all was
happily arranged, and towards ten o’clock—the time at which they had
asked the priest to wait for them for the mass—the children in their
new dresses, with beaming faces, stood on the step before the carriage
waiting for their mother.
To the carriage, instead of the restive Raven, they had harnessed,
thanks to the representations of Marya Philimonovna, the bailiff’s
horse, Brownie, and Darya Alexandrovna, delayed by anxiety over her own
attire, came out and got in, dressed in a white muslin gown.
Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair, and dressed with care and
excitement. In the old days she had dressed for her own sake to look
pretty and be admired. Later on, as she got older, dress became more
and more distasteful to her. She saw that she was losing her good
looks. But now she began to feel pleasure and interest in dress again.
Now she did not dress for her own sake, not for the sake of her own
beauty, but simply that as the mother of those exquisite creatures she
might not spoil the general effect. And looking at herself for the last
time in the looking-glass she was satisfied with herself. She looked
nice. Not nice as she would have wished to look nice in old days at a
ball, but nice for the object which she now had in view.
In the church there was no one but the peasants, the servants and their
women-folk. But Darya Alexandrovna saw, or fancied she saw, the
sensation produced by her children and her. The children were not only
beautiful to look at in their smart little dresses, but they were
charming in the way they behaved. Aliosha, it is true, did not stand
quite correctly; he kept turning round, trying to look at his little
jacket from behind; but all the same he was wonderfully sweet. Tanya
behaved like a grown-up person, and looked after the little ones. And
the smallest, Lily, was bewitching in her naïve astonishment at
everything, and it was difficult not to smile when, after taking the
sacrament, she said in English, “Please, some more.”
On the way home the children felt that something solemn had happened,
and were very sedate.
Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch Grisha began
whistling, and, what was worse, was disobedient to the English
governess, and was forbidden to have any tart. Darya Alexandrovna would
not have let things go so far on such a day had she been present; but
she had to support the English governess’s authority, and she upheld
her decision that Grisha should have no tart. This rather spoiled the
general good humor. Grisha cried, declaring that Nikolinka had whistled
too, and he was not punished, and that he wasn’t crying for the tart—he
didn’t care—but at being unjustly treated. This was really too tragic,
and Darya Alexandrovna made up her mind to persuade the English
governess to forgive Grisha, and she went to speak to her. But on the
way, as she passed the drawing-room, she beheld a scene, filling her
heart with such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes, and she
forgave the delinquent herself.
The culprit was sitting at the window in the corner of the
drawing-room; beside him was standing Tanya with a plate. On the
pretext of wanting to give some dinner to her dolls, she had asked the
governess’s permission to take her share of tart to the nursery, and
had taken it instead to her brother. While still weeping over the
injustice of his punishment, he was eating the tart, and kept saying
through his sobs, “Eat yourself; let’s eat it together ... together.”
Tanya had at first been under the influence of her pity for Grisha,
then of a sense of her noble action, and tears were standing in her
eyes too; but she did not refuse, and ate her share.
On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed, but, looking into
her face, they saw they were not doing wrong. They burst out laughing,
and, with their mouths full of tart, they began wiping their smiling
lips with their hands, and smearing their radiant faces all over with
tears and jam.
“Mercy! Your new white frock! Tanya! Grisha!” said their mother, trying
to save the frock, but with tears in her eyes, smiling a blissful,
rapturous smile.
The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given for the little
girls to have their blouses put on, and the boys their old jackets, and
the wagonette to be harnessed; with Brownie, to the bailiff’s
annoyance, again in the shafts, to drive out for mushroom picking and
bathing. A roar of delighted shrieks arose in the nursery, and never
ceased till they had set off for the bathing-place.
They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even Lily found a birch
mushroom. It had always happened before that Miss Hoole found them and
pointed them out to her; but this time she found a big one quite of
herself, and there was a general scream of delight, “Lily has found a
mushroom!”
Then they reached the river, put the horses under the birch trees, and
went to the bathing-place. The coachman, Terenty, fastened the horses,
who kept whisking away the flies, to a tree, and, treading down the
grass, lay down in the shade of a birch and smoked his shag, while the
never-ceasing shrieks of delight of the children floated across to him
from the bathing-place.
Though it was hard work to look after all the children and restrain
their wild pranks, though it was difficult too to keep in one’s head
and not mix up all the stockings, little breeches, and shoes for the
different legs, and to undo and to do up again all the tapes and
buttons, Darya Alexandrovna, who had always liked bathing herself, and
believed it to be very good for the children, enjoyed nothing so much
as bathing with all the children. To go over all those fat little legs,
pulling on their stockings, to take in her arms and dip those little
naked bodies, and to hear their screams of delight and alarm, to see
the breathless faces with wide-open, scared, and happy eyes of all her
splashing cherubs, was a great pleasure to her.
When half the children had been dressed, some peasant women in holiday
dress, out picking herbs, came up to the bathing-shed and stopped
shyly. Marya Philimonovna called one of them and handed her a sheet and
a shirt that had dropped into the water for her to dry them, and Darya
Alexandrovna began to talk to the women. At first they laughed behind
their hands and did not understand her questions, but soon they grew
bolder and began to talk, winning Darya Alexandrovna’s heart at once by
the genuine admiration of the children that they showed.
“My, what a beauty! as white as sugar,” said one, admiring Tanitchka,
and shaking her head; “but thin....”
“Yes, she has been ill.”
“And so they’ve been bathing you too,” said another to the baby.
“No; he’s only three months old,” answered Darya Alexandrovna with
pride.
“You don’t say so!”
“And have you any children?”
“I’ve had four; I’ve two living—a boy and a girl. I weaned her last
carnival.”
“How old is she?”
“Why, two years old.”
“Why did you nurse her so long?”
“It’s our custom; for three fasts....”
And the conversation became most interesting to Darya Alexandrovna.
What sort of time did she have? What was the matter with the boy? Where
was her husband? Did it often happen?
Darya Alexandrovna felt disinclined to leave the peasant women, so
interesting to her was their conversation, so completely identical were
all their interests. What pleased her most of all was that she saw
clearly what all the women admired more than anything was her having so
many children, and such fine ones. The peasant women even made Darya
Alexandrovna laugh, and offended the English governess, because she was
the cause of the laughter she did not understand. One of the younger
women kept staring at the Englishwoman, who was dressing after all the
rest, and when she put on her third petticoat she could not refrain
from the remark, “My, she keeps putting on and putting on, and she’ll
never have done!” she said, and they all went off into roars.
Chapter 9
On the drive home, as Darya Alexandrovna, with all her children round
her, their heads still wet from their bath, and a kerchief tied over
her own head, was getting near the house, the coachman said, “There’s
some gentleman coming: the master of Pokrovskoe, I do believe.”
Darya Alexandrovna peeped out in front, and was delighted when she
recognized in the gray hat and gray coat the familiar figure of Levin
walking to meet them. She was glad to see him at any time, but at this
moment she was specially glad he should see her in all her glory. No
one was better able to appreciate her grandeur than Levin.
Seeing her, he found himself face to face with one of the pictures of
his daydream of family life.
“You’re like a hen with your chickens, Darya Alexandrovna.”
“Ah, how glad I am to see you!” she said, holding out her hand to him.
“Glad to see me, but you didn’t let me know. My brother’s staying with
me. I got a note from Stiva that you were here.”
“From Stiva?” Darya Alexandrovna asked with surprise.
“Yes; he writes that you are here, and that he thinks you might allow
me to be of use to you,” said Levin, and as he said it he became
suddenly embarrassed, and, stopping abruptly, he walked on in silence
by the wagonette, snapping off the buds of the lime trees and nibbling
them. He was embarrassed through a sense that Darya Alexandrovna would
be annoyed by receiving from an outsider help that should by rights
have come from her own husband. Darya Alexandrovna certainly did not
like this little way of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s of foisting his domestic
duties on others. And she was at once aware that Levin was aware of
this. It was just for this fineness of perception, for this delicacy,
that Darya Alexandrovna liked Levin.
“I know, of course,” said Levin, “that that simply means that you would
like to see me, and I’m exceedingly glad. Though I can fancy that, used
to town housekeeping as you are, you must feel in the wilds here, and
if there’s anything wanted, I’m altogether at your disposal.”
“Oh, no!” said Dolly. “At first things were rather uncomfortable, but
now we’ve settled everything capitally—thanks to my old nurse,” she
said, indicating Marya Philimonovna, who, seeing that they were
speaking of her, smiled brightly and cordially to Levin. She knew him,
and knew that he would be a good match for her young lady, and was very
keen to see the matter settled.
“Won’t you get in, sir, we’ll make room this side!” she said to him.
“No, I’ll walk. Children, who’d like to race the horses with me?” The
children knew Levin very little, and could not remember when they had
seen him, but they experienced in regard to him none of that strange
feeling of shyness and hostility which children so often experience
towards hypocritical, grown-up people, and for which they are so often
and miserably punished. Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the
cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of
children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it
may be disguised. Whatever faults Levin had, there was not a trace of
hypocrisy in him, and so the children showed him the same friendliness
that they saw in their mother’s face. On his invitation, the two elder
ones at once jumped out to him and ran with him as simply as they would
have done with their nurse or Miss Hoole or their mother. Lily, too,
began begging to go to him, and her mother handed her to him; he sat
her on his shoulder and ran along with her.
“Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, Darya Alexandrovna!” he said,
smiling good-humoredly to the mother; “there’s no chance of my hurting
or dropping her.”
And, looking at his strong, agile, assiduously careful and needlessly
wary movements, the mother felt her mind at rest, and smiled gaily and
approvingly as she watched him.
Here, in the country, with children, and with Darya Alexandrovna, with
whom he was in sympathy, Levin was in a mood not infrequent with him,
of childlike light-heartedness that she particularly liked in him. As
he ran with the children, he taught them gymnastic feats, set Miss
Hoole laughing with his queer English accent, and talked to Darya
Alexandrovna of his pursuits in the country.
After dinner, Darya Alexandrovna, sitting alone with him on the
balcony, began to speak of Kitty.
“You know, Kitty’s coming here, and is going to spend the summer with
me.”
“Really,” he said, flushing, and at once, to change the conversation,
he said: “Then I’ll send you two cows, shall I? If you insist on a bill
you shall pay me five roubles a month; but it’s really too bad of you.”
“No, thank you. We can manage very well now.”
“Oh, well, then, I’ll have a look at your cows, and if you’ll allow me,
I’ll give directions about their food. Everything depends on their
food.”
And Levin, to turn the conversation, explained to Darya Alexandrovna
the theory of cow-keeping, based on the principle that the cow is
simply a machine for the transformation of food into milk, and so on.
He talked of this, and passionately longed to hear more of Kitty, and,
at the same time, was afraid of hearing it. He dreaded the breaking up
of the inward peace he had gained with such effort.
“Yes, but still all this has to be looked after, and who is there to
look after it?” Darya Alexandrovna responded, without interest.
She had by now got her household matters so satisfactorily arranged,
thanks to Marya Philimonovna, that she was disinclined to make any
change in them; besides, she had no faith in Levin’s knowledge of
farming. General principles, as to the cow being a machine for the
production of milk, she looked on with suspicion. It seemed to her that
such principles could only be a hindrance in farm management. It all
seemed to her a far simpler matter: all that was needed, as Marya
Philimonovna had explained, was to give Brindle and Whitebreast more
food and drink, and not to let the cook carry all the kitchen slops to
the laundry maid’s cow. That was clear. But general propositions as to
feeding on meal and on grass were doubtful and obscure. And, what was
most important, she wanted to talk about Kitty.
Chapter 10
“Kitty writes to me that there’s nothing she longs for so much as quiet
and solitude,” Dolly said after the silence that had followed.
“And how is she—better?” Levin asked in agitation.
“Thank God, she’s quite well again. I never believed her lungs were
affected.”
“Oh, I’m very glad!” said Levin, and Dolly fancied she saw something
touching, helpless, in his face as he said this and looked silently
into her face.
“Let me ask you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said Darya Alexandrovna,
smiling her kindly and rather mocking smile, “why is it you are angry
with Kitty?”
“I? I’m not angry with her,” said Levin.
“Yes, you are angry. Why was it you did not come to see us nor them
when you were in Moscow?”
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, blushing up to the roots of his hair, “I
wonder really that with your kind heart you don’t feel this. How it is
you feel no pity for me, if nothing else, when you know....”
“What do I know?”
“You know I made an offer and that I was refused,” said Levin, and all
the tenderness he had been feeling for Kitty a minute before was
replaced by a feeling of anger for the slight he had suffered.
“What makes you suppose I know?”
“Because everybody knows it....”
“That’s just where you are mistaken; I did not know it, though I had
guessed it was so.”
“Well, now you know it.”
“All I knew was that something had happened that made her dreadfully
miserable, and that she begged me never to speak of it. And if she
would not tell me, she would certainly not speak of it to anyone else.
But what did pass between you? Tell me.”
“I have told you.”
“When was it?”
“When I was at their house the last time.”
“Do you know that,” said Darya Alexandrovna, “I am awfully, awfully
sorry for her. You suffer only from pride....”
“Perhaps so,” said Levin, “but....”
She interrupted him.
“But she, poor girl ... I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. Now I see
it all.”
“Well, Darya Alexandrovna, you must excuse me,” he said, getting up.
“Good-bye, Darya Alexandrovna, till we meet again.”
“No, wait a minute,” she said, clutching him by the sleeve. “Wait a
minute, sit down.”
“Please, please, don’t let us talk of this,” he said, sitting down, and
at the same time feeling rise up and stir within his heart a hope he
had believed to be buried.
“If I did not like you,” she said, and tears came into her eyes; “if I
did not know you, as I do know you....”
The feeling that had seemed dead revived more and more, rose up and
took possession of Levin’s heart.
“Yes, I understand it all now,” said Darya Alexandrovna. “You can’t
understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own choice, it’s
always clear whom you love. But a girl’s in a position of suspense,
with all a woman’s or maiden’s modesty, a girl who sees you men from
afar, who takes everything on trust,—a girl may have, and often has,
such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say.”
“Yes, if the heart does not speak....”
“No, the heart does speak; but just consider: you men have views about
a girl, you come to the house, you make friends, you criticize, you
wait to see if you have found what you love, and then, when you are
sure you love her, you make an offer....”
“Well, that’s not quite it.”
“Anyway you make an offer, when your love is ripe or when the balance
has completely turned between the two you are choosing from. But a girl
is not asked. She is expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot
choose, she can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
“Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky,” thought Levin, and the dead
thing that had come to life within him died again, and only weighed on
his heart and set it aching.
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, “that’s how one chooses a new dress or
some purchase or other, not love. The choice has been made, and so much
the better.... And there can be no repeating it.”
“Ah, pride, pride!” said Darya Alexandrovna, as though despising him
for the baseness of this feeling in comparison with that other feeling
which only women know. “At the time when you made Kitty an offer she
was just in a position in which she could not answer. She was in doubt.
Doubt between you and Vronsky. Him she was seeing every day, and you
she had not seen for a long while. Supposing she had been older ... I,
for instance, in her place could have felt no doubt. I always disliked
him, and so it has turned out.”
Levin recalled Kitty’s answer. She had said: “_No, that cannot be_....”
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said dryly, “I appreciate your confidence in
me; I believe you are making a mistake. But whether I am right or
wrong, that pride you so despise makes any thought of Katerina
Alexandrovna out of the question for me,—you understand, utterly out of
the question.”
“I will only say one thing more: you know that I am speaking of my
sister, whom I love as I love my own children. I don’t say she cared
for you, all I meant to say is that her refusal at that moment proves
nothing.”
“I don’t know!” said Levin, jumping up. “If you only knew how you are
hurting me. It’s just as if a child of yours were dead, and they were
to say to you: He would have been like this and like that, and he might
have lived, and how happy you would have been in him. But he’s dead,
dead, dead!...”
“How absurd you are!” said Darya Alexandrovna, looking with mournful
tenderness at Levin’s excitement. “Yes, I see it all more and more
clearly,” she went on musingly. “So you won’t come to see us, then,
when Kitty’s here?”
“No, I shan’t come. Of course I won’t avoid meeting Katerina
Alexandrovna, but as far as I can, I will try to save her the annoyance
of my presence.”
“You are very, very absurd,” repeated Darya Alexandrovna, looking with
tenderness into his face. “Very well then, let it be as though we had
not spoken of this. What have you come for, Tanya?” she said in French
to the little girl who had come in.
“Where’s my spade, mamma?”
“I speak French, and you must too.”
The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the
French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French
where to look for the spade. And this made a disagreeable impression on
Levin.
Everything in Darya Alexandrovna’s house and children struck him now as
by no means so charming as a little while before. “And what does she
talk French with the children for?” he thought; “how unnatural and
false it is! And the children feel it so: Learning French and
unlearning sincerity,” he thought to himself, unaware that Darya
Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times already, and yet,
even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed it necessary to
teach her children French in that way.
“But why are you going? Do stay a little.”
Levin stayed to tea; but his good-humor had vanished, and he felt ill
at ease.
After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put in,
and, when he came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly disturbed,
with a troubled face, and tears in her eyes. While Levin had been
outside, an incident had occurred which had utterly shattered all the
happiness she had been feeling that day, and her pride in her children.
Grisha and Tanya had been fighting over a ball. Darya Alexandrovna,
hearing a scream in the nursery, ran in and saw a terrible sight. Tanya
was pulling Grisha’s hair, while he, with a face hideous with rage, was
beating her with his fists wherever he could get at her. Something
snapped in Darya Alexandrovna’s heart when she saw this. It was as if
darkness had swooped down upon her life; she felt that these children
of hers, that she was so proud of, were not merely most ordinary, but
positively bad, ill-bred children, with coarse, brutal
propensities—wicked children.
She could not talk or think of anything else, and she could not speak
to Levin of her misery.
Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her, saying that it
showed nothing bad, that all children fight; but, even as he said it,
he was thinking in his heart: “No, I won’t be artificial and talk
French with my children; but my children won’t be like that. All one
has to do is not spoil children, not to distort their nature, and
they’ll be delightful. No, my children won’t be like that.”
He said good-bye and drove away, and she did not try to keep him.
Chapter 11
In the middle of July the elder of the village on Levin’s sister’s
estate, about fifteen miles from Pokrovskoe, came to Levin to report on
how things were going there and on the hay. The chief source of income
on his sister’s estate was from the riverside meadows. In former years
the hay had been bought by the peasants for twenty roubles the three
acres. When Levin took over the management of the estate, he thought on
examining the grasslands that they were worth more, and he fixed the
price at twenty-five roubles the three acres. The peasants would not
give that price, and, as Levin suspected, kept off other purchasers.
Then Levin had driven over himself, and arranged to have the grass cut,
partly by hired labor, partly at a payment of a certain proportion of
the crop. His own peasants put every hindrance they could in the way of
this new arrangement, but it was carried out, and the first year the
meadows had yielded a profit almost double. The previous year—which was
the third year—the peasants had maintained the same opposition to the
arrangement, and the hay had been cut on the same system. This year the
peasants were doing all the mowing for a third of the hay crop, and the
village elder had come now to announce that the hay had been cut, and
that, fearing rain, they had invited the counting-house clerk over, had
divided the crop in his presence, and had raked together eleven stacks
as the owner’s share. From the vague answers to his question how much
hay had been cut on the principal meadow, from the hurry of the village
elder who had made the division, not asking leave, from the whole tone
of the peasant, Levin perceived that there was something wrong in the
division of the hay, and made up his mind to drive over himself to look
into the matter.
Arriving for dinner at the village, and leaving his horse at the
cottage of an old friend of his, the husband of his brother’s
wet-nurse, Levin went to see the old man in his bee-house, wanting to
find out from him the truth about the hay. Parmenitch, a talkative,
comely old man, gave Levin a very warm welcome, showed him all he was
doing, told him everything about his bees and the swarms of that year;
but gave vague and unwilling answers to Levin’s inquiries about the
mowing. This confirmed Levin still more in his suspicions. He went to
the hay fields and examined the stacks. The haystacks could not
possibly contain fifty wagon-loads each, and to convict the peasants
Levin ordered the wagons that had carried the hay to be brought up
directly, to lift one stack, and carry it into the barn. There turned
out to be only thirty-two loads in the stack. In spite of the village
elder’s assertions about the compressibility of hay, and its having
settled down in the stacks, and his swearing that everything had been
done in the fear of God, Levin stuck to his point that the hay had been
divided without his orders, and that, therefore, he would not accept
that hay as fifty loads to a stack. After a prolonged dispute the
matter was decided by the peasants taking these eleven stacks,
reckoning them as fifty loads each. The arguments and the division of
the haycocks lasted the whole afternoon. When the last of the hay had
been divided, Levin, intrusting the superintendence of the rest to the
counting-house clerk, sat down on a haycock marked off by a stake of
willow, and looked admiringly at the meadow swarming with peasants.
In front of him, in the bend of the river beyond the marsh, moved a
bright-colored line of peasant women, and the scattered hay was being
rapidly formed into gray winding rows over the pale green stubble.
After the women came the men with pitchforks, and from the gray rows
there were growing up broad, high, soft haycocks. To the left, carts
were rumbling over the meadow that had been already cleared, and one
after another the haycocks vanished, flung up in huge forkfuls, and in
their place there were rising heavy cartloads of fragrant hay hanging
over the horses’ hind-quarters.
“What weather for haying! What hay it’ll be!” said an old man,
squatting down beside Levin. “It’s tea, not hay! It’s like scattering
grain to the ducks, the way they pick it up!” he added, pointing to the
growing haycocks. “Since dinner time they’ve carried a good half of
it.”
“The last load, eh?” he shouted to a young peasant, who drove by,
standing in the front of an empty cart, shaking the cord reins.
“The last, dad!” the lad shouted back, pulling in the horse, and,
smiling, he looked round at a bright, rosy-checked peasant girl who sat
in the cart smiling too, and drove on.
“Who’s that? Your son?” asked Levin.
“My baby,” said the old man with a tender smile.
“What a fine fellow!”
“The lad’s all right.”
“Married already?”
“Yes, it’s two years last St. Philip’s day.”
“Any children?”
“Children indeed! Why, for over a year he was innocent as a babe
himself, and bashful too,” answered the old man. “Well, the hay! It’s
as fragrant as tea!” he repeated, wishing to change the subject.
Levin looked more attentively at Ivan Parmenov and his wife. They were
loading a haycock onto the cart not far from him. Ivan Parmenov was
standing on the cart, taking, laying in place, and stamping down the
huge bundles of hay, which his pretty young wife deftly handed up to
him, at first in armfuls, and then on the pitchfork. The young wife
worked easily, merrily, and dexterously. The close-packed hay did not
once break away off her fork. First she gathered it together, stuck the
fork into it, then with a rapid, supple movement leaned the whole
weight of her body on it, and at once with a bend of her back under the
red belt she drew herself up, and arching her full bosom under the
white smock, with a smart turn swung the fork in her arms, and flung
the bundle of hay high onto the cart. Ivan, obviously doing his best to
save her every minute of unnecessary labor, made haste, opening his
arms to clutch the bundle and lay it in the cart. As she raked together
what was left of the hay, the young wife shook off the bits of hay that
had fallen on her neck, and straightening the red kerchief that had
dropped forward over her white brow, not browned like her face by the
sun, she crept under the cart to tie up the load. Ivan directed her how
to fasten the cord to the cross-piece, and at something she said he
laughed aloud. In the expressions of both faces was to be seen
vigorous, young, freshly awakened love.
Chapter 12
The load was tied on. Ivan jumped down and took the quiet, sleek horse
by the bridle. The young wife flung the rake up on the load, and with a
bold step, swinging her arms, she went to join the women, who were
forming a ring for the haymakers’ dance. Ivan drove off to the road and
fell into line with the other loaded carts. The peasant women, with
their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers, and chattering
with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the hay cart. One wild
untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang it alone through a
verse, and then the same verse was taken up and repeated by half a
hundred strong healthy voices, of all sorts, coarse and fine, singing
in unison.
The women, all singing, began to come close to Levin, and he felt as
though a storm were swooping down upon him with a thunder of merriment.
The storm swooped down, enveloped him and the haycock on which he was
lying, and the other haycocks, and the wagon-loads, and the whole
meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to the
measures of this wild merry song with its shouts and whistles and
clapping. Levin felt envious of this health and mirthfulness; he longed
to take part in the expression of this joy of life. But he could do
nothing, and had to lie and look on and listen. When the peasants, with
their singing, had vanished out of sight and hearing, a weary feeling
of despondency at his own isolation, his physical inactivity, his
alienation from this world, came over Levin.
Some of the very peasants who had been most active in wrangling with
him over the hay, some whom he had treated with contumely, and who had
tried to cheat him, those very peasants had greeted him good-humoredly,
and evidently had not, were incapable of having any feeling of rancor
against him, any regret, any recollection even of having tried to
deceive him. All that was drowned in a sea of merry common labor. God
gave the day, God gave the strength. And the day and the strength were
consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own reward. For whom the
labor? What would be its fruits? These were idle considerations—beside
the point.
Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense of envy of the
men who led this life; but today for the first time, especially under
the influence of what he had seen in the attitude of Ivan Parmenov to
his young wife, the idea presented itself definitely to his mind that
it was in his power to exchange the dreary, artificial, idle, and
individualistic life he was leading for this laborious, pure, and
socially delightful life.
The old man who had been sitting beside him had long ago gone home; the
people had all separated. Those who lived near had gone home, while
those who came from far were gathered into a group for supper, and to
spend the night in the meadow. Levin, unobserved by the peasants, still
lay on the haycock, and still looked on and listened and mused. The
peasants who remained for the night in the meadow scarcely slept all
the short summer night. At first there was the sound of merry talk and
laughing all together over the supper, then singing again and laughter.
All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness of
heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard
but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and
the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the
morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and looking at
the stars, he saw that the night was over.
“Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?” he said to
himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he
had passed through in that brief night. All the thoughts and feelings
he had passed through fell into three separate trains of thought. One
was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education.
This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and simple.
Another series of thoughts and mental images related to the life he
longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life
he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content,
the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably
conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the question how to
effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing
took clear shape for him. “Have a wife? Have work and the necessity of
work? Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a member of a peasant
community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I to set about it?” he asked
himself again, and could not find an answer. “I haven’t slept all
night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said to himself.
“I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my
fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,”
he told himself. “It’s all ever so much simpler and better....”
“How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were,
mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his
head in the middle of the sky. “How exquisite it all is in this
exquisite night! And when was there time for that cloud-shell to form?
Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—only two
white streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”
He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad towards the
village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen. The
gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn, the full triumph
of light over darkness.
Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground.
“What’s that? Someone coming,” he thought, catching the tinkle of
bells, and lifting his head. Forty paces from him a carriage with four
horses harnessed abreast was driving towards him along the grassy road
on which he was walking. The shaft-horses were tilted against the
shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held
the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of
the road.
This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be, he
gazed absently at the coach.
In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the window,
evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both hands the
ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light and thought, full of
a subtle, complex inner life, that was remote from Levin, she was
gazing beyond him at the glow of the sunrise.
At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful
eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up with
wondering delight.
He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the
world. There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate
for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was
Kitty. He understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the railway
station. And everything that had been stirring Levin during that
sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at once.
He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There
only, in the carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the
road, and was rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the
solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly
upon him of late.
She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs was no
longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking of dogs
showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left was
the empty fields all round, the village in front, and he himself
isolated and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted
highroad.
He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he had
been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and feelings of
that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell.
There, in the remote heights above, a mysterious change had been
accomplished. There was no trace of shell, and there was stretched over
fully half the sky an even cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets. The
sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same softness, but with the
same remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.
“No,” he said to himself, “however good that life of simplicity and
toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love _her_.”
Chapter 13
None but those who were most intimate with Alexey Alexandrovitch knew
that, while on the surface the coldest and most reasonable of men, he
had one weakness quite opposed to the general trend of his character.
Alexey Alexandrovitch could not hear or see a child or woman crying
without being moved. The sight of tears threw him into a state of
nervous agitation, and he utterly lost all power of reflection. The
chief secretary of his department and his private secretary were aware
of this, and used to warn women who came with petitions on no account
to give way to tears, if they did not want to ruin their chances. “He
will get angry, and will not listen to you,” they used to say. And as a
fact, in such cases the emotional disturbance set up in Alexey
Alexandrovitch by the sight of tears found expression in hasty anger.
“I can do nothing. Kindly leave the room!” he would commonly cry in
such cases.
When returning from the races Anna had informed him of her relations
with Vronsky, and immediately afterwards had burst into tears, hiding
her face in her hands, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for all the fury aroused
in him against her, was aware at the same time of a rush of that
emotional disturbance always produced in him by tears. Conscious of it,
and conscious that any expression of his feelings at that minute would
be out of keeping with the position, he tried to suppress every
manifestation of life in himself, and so neither stirred nor looked at
her. This was what had caused that strange expression of deathlike
rigidity in his face which had so impressed Anna.
When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the carriage,
and making an effort to master himself, took leave of her with his
usual urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound him to nothing; he
said that tomorrow he would let her know his decision.
His wife’s words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a cruel
pang to the heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch. That pang was intensified
by the strange feeling of physical pity for her set up by her tears.
But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his
surprise and delight, felt complete relief both from this pity and from
the doubts and agonies of jealousy.
He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after
suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense of
something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw,
the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at
once that what has so long poisoned his existence and enchained his
attention, exists no longer, and that he can live and think again, and
take interest in other things besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey
Alexandrovitch was experiencing. The agony had been strange and
terrible, but now it was over; he felt that he could live again and
think of something other than his wife.
“No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it and
always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her,” he said
to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen it:
he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen
anything wrong before—now these incidents proved clearly that she had
always been a corrupt woman. “I made a mistake in linking my life to
hers; but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be
unhappy. It’s not I that am to blame,” he told himself, “but she. But I
have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me....”
Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom his sentiments
were as much changed as towards her, ceased to interest him. The only
thing that interested him now was the question of in what way he could
best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and thus with most
justice, extricate himself from the mud with which she had spattered
him in her fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable,
and useful existence.
“I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman has
committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of the
difficult position in which she has placed me. And I shall find it,” he
said to himself, frowning more and more. “I’m not the first nor the
last.” And to say nothing of historical instances dating from the “Fair
Helen” of Menelaus, recently revived in the memory of all, a whole list
of contemporary examples of husbands with unfaithful wives in the
highest society rose before Alexey Alexandrovitch’s imagination.
“Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram.... Yes,
even Dram, such an honest, capable fellow ... Semyonov, Tchagin,
Sigonin,” Alexey Alexandrovitch remembered. “Admitting that a certain
quite irrational _ridicule_ falls to the lot of these men, yet I never
saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt sympathy for it,”
Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, though indeed this was not the
fact, and he had never felt sympathy for misfortunes of that kind, but
the more frequently he had heard of instances of unfaithful wives
betraying their husbands, the more highly he had thought of himself.
“It is a misfortune which may befall anyone. And this misfortune has
befallen me. The only thing to be done is to make the best of the
position.”
And he began passing in review the methods of proceeding of men who had
been in the same position that he was in.
“Daryalov fought a duel....”
The duel had particularly fascinated the thoughts of Alexey
Alexandrovitch in his youth, just because he was physically a coward,
and was himself well aware of the fact. Alexey Alexandrovitch could not
without horror contemplate the idea of a pistol aimed at himself, and
had never made use of any weapon in his life. This horror had in his
youth set him pondering on dueling, and picturing himself in a position
in which he would have to expose his life to danger. Having attained
success and an established position in the world, he had long ago
forgotten this feeling; but the habitual bent of feeling reasserted
itself, and dread of his own cowardice proved even now so strong that
Alexey Alexandrovitch spent a long while thinking over the question of
dueling in all its aspects, and hugging the idea of a duel, though he
was fully aware beforehand that he would never under any circumstances
fight one.
“There’s no doubt our society is still so barbarous (it’s not the same
in England) that very many”—and among these were those whose opinion
Alexey Alexandrovitch particularly valued—“look favorably on the duel;
but what result is attained by it? Suppose I call him out,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch went on to himself, and vividly picturing the night he
would spend after the challenge, and the pistol aimed at him, he
shuddered, and knew that he never would do it—“suppose I call him out.
Suppose I am taught,” he went on musing, “to shoot; I press the
trigger,” he said to himself, closing his eyes, “and it turns out I
have killed him,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, and he shook
his head as though to dispel such silly ideas. “What sense is there in
murdering a man in order to define one’s relation to a guilty wife and
son? I should still just as much have to decide what I ought to do with
her. But what is more probable and what would doubtless occur—I should
be killed or wounded. I, the innocent person, should be the
victim—killed or wounded. It’s even more senseless. But apart from
that, a challenge to fight would be an act hardly honest on my side.
Don’t I know perfectly well that my friends would never allow me to
fight a duel—would never allow the life of a statesman, needed by
Russia, to be exposed to danger? Knowing perfectly well beforehand that
the matter would never come to real danger, it would amount to my
simply trying to gain a certain sham reputation by such a challenge.
That would be dishonest, that would be false, that would be deceiving
myself and others. A duel is quite irrational, and no one expects it of
me. My aim is simply to safeguard my reputation, which is essential for
the uninterrupted pursuit of my public duties.” Official duties, which
had always been of great consequence in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s eyes,
seemed of special importance to his mind at this moment. Considering
and rejecting the duel, Alexey Alexandrovitch turned to divorce—another
solution selected by several of the husbands he remembered. Passing in
mental review all the instances he knew of divorces (there were plenty
of them in the very highest society with which he was very familiar),
Alexey Alexandrovitch could not find a single example in which the
object of divorce was that which he had in view. In all these instances
the husband had practically ceded or sold his unfaithful wife, and the
very party which, being in fault, had not the right to contract a fresh
marriage, had formed counterfeit, pseudo-matrimonial ties with a
self-styled husband. In his own case, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that a
legal divorce, that is to say, one in which only the guilty wife would
be repudiated, was impossible of attainment. He saw that the complex
conditions of the life they led made the coarse proofs of his wife’s
guilt, required by the law, out of the question; he saw that a certain
refinement in that life would not admit of such proofs being brought
forward, even if he had them, and that to bring forward such proofs
would damage him in the public estimation more than it would her.
An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a public scandal, which
would be a perfect godsend to his enemies for calumny and attacks on
his high position in society. His chief object, to define the position
with the least amount of disturbance possible, would not be attained by
divorce either. Moreover, in the event of divorce, or even of an
attempt to obtain a divorce, it was obvious that the wife broke off all
relations with the husband and threw in her lot with the lover. And in
spite of the complete, as he supposed, contempt and indifference he now
felt for his wife, at the bottom of his heart Alexey Alexandrovitch
still had one feeling left in regard to her—a disinclination to see her
free to throw in her lot with Vronsky, so that her crime would be to
her advantage. The mere notion of this so exasperated Alexey
Alexandrovitch, that directly it rose to his mind he groaned with
inward agony, and got up and changed his place in the carriage, and for
a long while after, he sat with scowling brows, wrapping his numbed and
bony legs in the fleecy rug.
“Apart from formal divorce, One might still do like Karibanov,
Paskudin, and that good fellow Dram—that is, separate from one’s wife,”
he went on thinking, when he had regained his composure. But this step
too presented the same drawback of public scandal as a divorce, and
what was more, a separation, quite as much as a regular divorce, flung
his wife into the arms of Vronsky. “No, it’s out of the question, out
of the question!” he said again, twisting his rug about him again. “I
cannot be unhappy, but neither she nor he ought to be happy.”
The feeling of jealousy, which had tortured him during the period of
uncertainty, had passed away at the instant when the tooth had been
with agony extracted by his wife’s words. But that feeling had been
replaced by another, the desire, not merely that she should not be
triumphant, but that she should get due punishment for her crime. He
did not acknowledge this feeling, but at the bottom of his heart he
longed for her to suffer for having destroyed his peace of mind—his
honor. And going once again over the conditions inseparable from a
duel, a divorce, a separation, and once again rejecting them, Alexey
Alexandrovitch felt convinced that there was only one solution,—to keep
her with him, concealing what had happened from the world, and using
every measure in his power to break off the intrigue, and still
more—though this he did not admit to himself—to punish her. “I must
inform her of my conclusion, that thinking over the terrible position
in which she has placed her family, all other solutions will be worse
for both sides than an external _status quo_, and that such I agree to
retain, on the strict condition of obedience on her part to my wishes,
that is to say, cessation of all intercourse with her lover.” When this
decision had been finally adopted, another weighty consideration
occurred to Alexey Alexandrovitch in support of it. “By such a course
only shall I be acting in accordance with the dictates of religion,” he
told himself. “In adopting this course, I am not casting off a guilty
wife, but giving her a chance of amendment; and, indeed, difficult as
the task will be to me, I shall devote part of my energies to her
reformation and salvation.”
Though Alexey Alexandrovitch was perfectly aware that he could not
exert any moral influence over his wife, that such an attempt at
reformation could lead to nothing but falsity; though in passing
through these difficult moments he had not once thought of seeking
guidance in religion, yet now, when his conclusion corresponded, as it
seemed to him, with the requirements of religion, this religious
sanction to his decision gave him complete satisfaction, and to some
extent restored his peace of mind. He was pleased to think that, even
in such an important crisis in life, no one would be able to say that
he had not acted in accordance with the principles of that religion
whose banner he had always held aloft amid the general coolness and
indifference. As he pondered over subsequent developments, Alexey
Alexandrovitch did not see, indeed, why his relations with his wife
should not remain practically the same as before. No doubt, she could
never regain his esteem, but there was not, and there could not be, any
sort of reason that his existence should be troubled, and that he
should suffer because she was a bad and faithless wife. “Yes, time will
pass; time, which arranges all things, and the old relations will be
reestablished,” Alexey Alexandrovitch told himself; “so far
reestablished, that is, that I shall not be sensible of a break in the
continuity of my life. She is bound to be unhappy, but I am not to
blame, and so I cannot be unhappy.”
Chapter 14
As he neared Petersburg, Alexey Alexandrovitch not only adhered
entirely to his decision, but was even composing in his head the letter
he would write to his wife. Going into the porter’s room, Alexey
Alexandrovitch glanced at the letters and papers brought from his
office, and directed that they should be brought to him in his study.
“The horses can be taken out and I will see no one,” he said in answer
to the porter, with a certain pleasure, indicative of his agreeable
frame of mind, emphasizing the words, “see no one.”
In his study Alexey Alexandrovitch walked up and down twice, and
stopped at an immense writing-table, on which six candles had already
been lighted by the valet who had preceded him. He cracked his knuckles
and sat down, sorting out his writing appurtenances. Putting his elbows
on the table, he bent his head on one side, thought a minute, and began
to write, without pausing for a second. He wrote without using any form
of address to her, and wrote in French, making use of the plural
“_vous_,” which has not the same note of coldness as the corresponding
Russian form.
“At our last conversation, I notified you of my intention to
communicate to you my decision in regard to the subject of that
conversation. Having carefully considered everything, I am writing now
with the object of fulfilling that promise. My decision is as follows.
Whatever your conduct may have been, I do not consider myself justified
in breaking the ties in which we are bound by a Higher Power. The
family cannot be broken up by a whim, a caprice, or even by the sin of
one of the partners in the marriage, and our life must go on as it has
done in the past. This is essential for me, for you, and for our son. I
am fully persuaded that you have repented and do repent of what has
called forth the present letter, and that you will cooperate with me in
eradicating the cause of our estrangement, and forgetting the past. In
the contrary event, you can conjecture what awaits you and your son.
All this I hope to discuss more in detail in a personal interview. As
the season is drawing to a close, I would beg you to return to
Petersburg as quickly as possible, not later than Tuesday. All
necessary preparations shall be made for your arrival here. I beg you
to note that I attach particular significance to compliance with this
request.
A. Karenin
“_P.S._—I enclose the money which may be needed for your expenses.”
He read the letter through and felt pleased with it, and especially
that he had remembered to enclose money: there was not a harsh word,
not a reproach in it, nor was there undue indulgence. Most of all, it
was a golden bridge for return. Folding the letter and smoothing it
with a massive ivory knife, and putting it in an envelope with the
money, he rang the bell with the gratification it always afforded him
to use the well arranged appointments of his writing-table.
“Give this to the courier to be delivered to Anna Arkadyevna tomorrow
at the summer villa,” he said, getting up.
“Certainly, your excellency; tea to be served in the study?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch ordered tea to be brought to the study, and
playing with the massive paper-knife, he moved to his easy chair, near
which there had been placed ready for him a lamp and the French work on
Egyptian hieroglyphics that he had begun. Over the easy chair there
hung in a gold frame an oval portrait of Anna, a fine painting by a
celebrated artist. Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced at it. The
unfathomable eyes gazed ironically and insolently at him. Insufferably
insolent and challenging was the effect in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s eyes
of the black lace about the head, admirably touched in by the painter,
the black hair and handsome white hand with one finger lifted, covered
with rings. After looking at the portrait for a minute, Alexey
Alexandrovitch shuddered so that his lips quivered and he uttered the
sound “brrr,” and turned away. He made haste to sit down in his easy
chair and opened the book. He tried to read, but he could not revive
the very vivid interest he had felt before in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
He looked at the book and thought of something else. He thought not of
his wife, but of a complication that had arisen in his official life,
which at the time constituted the chief interest of it. He felt that he
had penetrated more deeply than ever before into this intricate affair,
and that he had originated a leading idea—he could say it without
self-flattery—calculated to clear up the whole business, to strengthen
him in his official career, to discomfit his enemies, and thereby to be
of the greatest benefit to the government. Directly the servant had set
the tea and left the room, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up and went to the
writing-table. Moving into the middle of the table a portfolio of
papers, with a scarcely perceptible smile of self-satisfaction, he took
a pencil from a rack and plunged into the perusal of a complex report
relating to the present complication. The complication was of this
nature: Alexey Alexandrovitch’s characteristic quality as a politician,
that special individual qualification that every rising functionary
possesses, the qualification that with his unflagging ambition, his
reserve, his honesty, and with his self-confidence had made his career,
was his contempt for red tape, his cutting down of correspondence, his
direct contact, wherever possible, with the living fact, and his
economy. It happened that the famous Commission of the 2nd of June had
set on foot an inquiry into the irrigation of lands in the Zaraisky
province, which fell under Alexey Alexandrovitch’s department, and was
a glaring example of fruitless expenditure and paper reforms. Alexey
Alexandrovitch was aware of the truth of this. The irrigation of these
lands in the Zaraisky province had been initiated by the predecessor of
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s predecessor. And vast sums of money had
actually been spent and were still being spent on this business, and
utterly unproductively, and the whole business could obviously lead to
nothing whatever. Alexey Alexandrovitch had perceived this at once on
entering office, and would have liked to lay hands on the Board of
Irrigation. But at first, when he did not yet feel secure in his
position, he knew it would affect too many interests, and would be
injudicious. Later on he had been engrossed in other questions, and had
simply forgotten the Board of Irrigation. It went of itself, like all
such boards, by the mere force of inertia. (Many people gained their
livelihood by the Board of Irrigation, especially one highly
conscientious and musical family: all the daughters played on stringed
instruments, and Alexey Alexandrovitch knew the family and had stood
godfather to one of the elder daughters.) The raising of this question
by a hostile department was in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s opinion a
dishonorable proceeding, seeing that in every department there were
things similar and worse, which no one inquired into, for well-known
reasons of official etiquette. However, now that the glove had been
thrown down to him, he had boldly picked it up and demanded the
appointment of a special commission to investigate and verify the
working of the Board of Irrigation of the lands in the Zaraisky
province. But in compensation he gave no quarter to the enemy either.
He demanded the appointment of another special commission to inquire
into the question of the Native Tribes Organization Committee. The
question of the Native Tribes had been brought up incidentally in the
Commission of the 2nd of June, and had been pressed forward actively by
Alexey Alexandrovitch as one admitting of no delay on account of the
deplorable condition of the native tribes. In the commission this
question had been a ground of contention between several departments.
The department hostile to Alexey Alexandrovitch proved that the
condition of the native tribes was exceedingly flourishing, that the
proposed reconstruction might be the ruin of their prosperity, and that
if there were anything wrong, it arose mainly from the failure on the
part of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s department to carry out the measures
prescribed by law. Now Alexey Alexandrovitch intended to demand: First,
that a new commission should be formed which should be empowered to
investigate the condition of the native tribes on the spot; secondly,
if it should appear that the condition of the native tribes actually
was such as it appeared to be from the official documents in the hands
of the committee, that another new scientific commission should be
appointed to investigate the deplorable condition of the native tribes
from the—(1) political, (2) administrative, (3) economic, (4)
ethnographical, (5) material, and (6) religious points of view;
thirdly, that evidence should be required from the rival department of
the measures that had been taken during the last ten years by that
department for averting the disastrous conditions in which the native
tribes were now placed; and fourthly and finally, that that department
explain why it had, as appeared from the evidence before the committee,
from No. 17,015 and 18,038, from December 5, 1863, and June 7, 1864,
acted in direct contravention of the intent of the law T... Act 18, and
the note to Act 36. A flash of eagerness suffused the face of Alexey
Alexandrovitch as he rapidly wrote out a synopsis of these ideas for
his own benefit. Having filled a sheet of paper, he got up, rang, and
sent a note to the chief secretary of his department to look up certain
necessary facts for him. Getting up and walking about the room, he
glanced again at the portrait, frowned, and smiled contemptuously.
After reading a little more of the book on Egyptian hieroglyphics, and
renewing his interest in it, Alexey Alexandrovitch went to bed at
eleven o’clock, and recollecting as he lay in bed the incident with his
wife, he saw it now in by no means such a gloomy light.
Chapter 15
Though Anna had obstinately and with exasperation contradicted Vronsky
when he told her their position was impossible, at the bottom of her
heart she regarded her own position as false and dishonorable, and she
longed with her whole soul to change it. On the way home from the races
she had told her husband the truth in a moment of excitement, and in
spite of the agony she had suffered in doing so, she was glad of it.
After her husband had left her, she told herself that she was glad,
that now everything was made clear, and at least there would be no more
lying and deception. It seemed to her beyond doubt that her position
was now made clear forever. It might be bad, this new position, but it
would be clear; there would be no indefiniteness or falsehood about it.
The pain she had caused herself and her husband in uttering those words
would be rewarded now by everything being made clear, she thought. That
evening she saw Vronsky, but she did not tell him of what had passed
between her and her husband, though, to make the position definite, it
was necessary to tell him.
When she woke up next morning the first thing that rose to her mind was
what she had said to her husband, and those words seemed to her so
awful that she could not conceive now how she could have brought
herself to utter those strange, coarse words, and could not imagine
what would come of it. But the words were spoken, and Alexey
Alexandrovitch had gone away without saying anything. “I saw Vronsky
and did not tell him. At the very instant he was going away I would
have turned him back and told him, but I changed my mind, because it
was strange that I had not told him the first minute. Why was it I
wanted to tell him and did not tell him?” And in answer to this
question a burning blush of shame spread over her face. She knew what
had kept her from it, she knew that she had been ashamed. Her position,
which had seemed to her simplified the night before, suddenly struck
her now as not only not simple, but as absolutely hopeless. She felt
terrified at the disgrace, of which she had not ever thought before.
Directly she thought of what her husband would do, the most terrible
ideas came to her mind. She had a vision of being turned out of the
house, of her shame being proclaimed to all the world. She asked
herself where she should go when she was turned out of the house, and
she could not find an answer.
When she thought of Vronsky, it seemed to her that he did not love her,
that he was already beginning to be tired of her, that she could not
offer herself to him, and she felt bitter against him for it. It seemed
to her that the words that she had spoken to her husband, and had
continually repeated in her imagination, she had said to everyone, and
everyone had heard them. She could not bring herself to look those of
her own household in the face. She could not bring herself to call her
maid, and still less go downstairs and see her son and his governess.
The maid, who had been listening at her door for a long while, came
into her room of her own accord. Anna glanced inquiringly into her
face, and blushed with a scared look. The maid begged her pardon for
coming in, saying that she had fancied the bell rang. She brought her
clothes and a note. The note was from Betsy. Betsy reminded her that
Liza Merkalova and Baroness Shtoltz were coming to play croquet with
her that morning with their adorers, Kaluzhsky and old Stremov. “Come,
if only as a study in morals. I shall expect you,” she finished.
Anna read the note and heaved a deep sigh.
“Nothing, I need nothing,” she said to Annushka, who was rearranging
the bottles and brushes on the dressing table. “You can go. I’ll dress
at once and come down. I need nothing.”
Annushka went out, but Anna did not begin dressing, and sat in the same
position, her head and hands hanging listlessly, and every now and then
she shivered all over, seemed as though she would make some gesture,
utter some word, and sank back into lifelessness again. She repeated
continually, “My God! my God!” But neither “God” nor “my” had any
meaning to her. The idea of seeking help in her difficulty in religion
was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexey Alexandrovitch
himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in which she
had been brought up. She knew that the support of religion was possible
only upon condition of renouncing what made up for her the whole
meaning of life. She was not simply miserable, she began to feel alarm
at the new spiritual condition, never experienced before, in which she
found herself. She felt as though everything were beginning to be
double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear double to
over-tired eyes. She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and
what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or
what was going to happen, and exactly what she longed for, she could
not have said.
“Ah, what am I doing!” she said to herself, feeling a sudden thrill of
pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself, she saw that
she was holding her hair in both hands, each side of her temples, and
pulling it. She jumped up, and began walking about.
“The coffee is ready, and mademoiselle and Seryozha are waiting,” said
Annushka, coming back again and finding Anna in the same position.
“Seryozha? What about Seryozha?” Anna asked, with sudden eagerness,
recollecting her son’s existence for the first time that morning.
“He’s been naughty, I think,” answered Annushka with a smile.
“In what way?”
“Some peaches were lying on the table in the corner room. I think he
slipped in and ate one of them on the sly.”
The recollection of her son suddenly roused Anna from the helpless
condition in which she found herself. She recalled the partly sincere,
though greatly exaggerated, rôle of the mother living for her child,
which she had taken up of late years, and she felt with joy that in the
plight in which she found herself she had a support, quite apart from
her relation to her husband or to Vronsky. This support was her son. In
whatever position she might be placed, she could not lose her son. Her
husband might put her to shame and turn her out, Vronsky might grow
cold to her and go on living his own life apart (she thought of him
again with bitterness and reproach); she could not leave her son. She
had an aim in life. And she must act; act to secure this relation to
her son, so that he might not be taken from her. Quickly indeed, as
quickly as possible, she must take action before he was taken from her.
She must take her son and go away. Here was the one thing she had to do
now. She needed consolation. She must be calm, and get out of this
insufferable position. The thought of immediate action binding her to
her son, of going away somewhere with him, gave her this consolation.
She dressed quickly, went downstairs, and with resolute steps walked
into the drawing-room, where she found, as usual, waiting for her, the
coffee, Seryozha, and his governess. Seryozha, all in white, with his
back and head bent, was standing at a table under a looking-glass, and
with an expression of intense concentration which she knew well, and in
which he resembled his father, he was doing something to the flowers he
carried.
The governess had a particularly severe expression. Seryozha screamed
shrilly, as he often did, “Ah, mamma!” and stopped, hesitating whether
to go to greet his mother and put down the flowers, or to finish making
the wreath and go with the flowers.
The governess, after saying good-morning, began a long and detailed
account of Seryozha’s naughtiness, but Anna did not hear her; she was
considering whether she would take her with her or not. “No, I won’t
take her,” she decided. “I’ll go alone with my child.”
“Yes, it’s very wrong,” said Anna, and taking her son by the shoulder
she looked at him, not severely, but with a timid glance that
bewildered and delighted the boy, and she kissed him. “Leave him to
me,” she said to the astonished governess, and not letting go of her
son, she sat down at the table, where coffee was set ready for her.
“Mamma! I ... I ... didn’t....” he said, trying to make out from her
expression what was in store for him in regard to the peaches.
“Seryozha,” she said, as soon as the governess had left the room, “that
was wrong, but you’ll never do it again, will you?... You love me?”
She felt that the tears were coming into her eyes. “Can I help loving
him?” she said to herself, looking deeply into his scared and at the
same time delighted eyes. “And can he ever join his father in punishing
me? Is it possible he will not feel for me?” Tears were already flowing
down her face, and to hide them she got up abruptly and almost ran out
on to the terrace.
After the thunder showers of the last few days, cold, bright weather
had set in. The air was cold in the bright sun that filtered through
the freshly washed leaves.
She shivered, both from the cold and from the inward horror which had
clutched her with fresh force in the open air.
“Run along, run along to Mariette,” she said to Seryozha, who had
followed her out, and she began walking up and down on the straw
matting of the terrace. “Can it be that they won’t forgive me, won’t
understand how it all couldn’t be helped?” she said to herself.
Standing still, and looking at the tops of the aspen trees waving in
the wind, with their freshly washed, brightly shining leaves in the
cold sunshine, she knew that they would not forgive her, that everyone
and everything would be merciless to her now as was that sky, that
green. And again she felt that everything was split in two in her soul.
“I mustn’t, mustn’t think,” she said to herself. “I must get ready. To
go where? When? Whom to take with me? Yes, to Moscow by the evening
train. Annushka and Seryozha, and only the most necessary things. But
first I must write to them both.” She went quickly indoors into her
boudoir, sat down at the table, and wrote to her husband:—“After what
has happened, I cannot remain any longer in your house. I am going
away, and taking my son with me. I don’t know the law, and so I don’t
know with which of the parents the son should remain; but I take him
with me because I cannot live without him. Be generous, leave him to
me.”
Up to this point she wrote rapidly and naturally, but the appeal to his
generosity, a quality she did not recognize in him, and the necessity
of winding up the letter with something touching, pulled her up. “Of my
fault and my remorse I cannot speak, because....”
She stopped again, finding no connection in her ideas. “No,” she said
to herself, “there’s no need of anything,” and tearing up the letter,
she wrote it again, leaving out the allusion to generosity, and sealed
it up.
Another letter had to be written to Vronsky. “I have told my husband,”
she wrote, and she sat a long while unable to write more. It was so
coarse, so unfeminine. “And what more am I to write to him?” she said
to herself. Again a flush of shame spread over her face; she recalled
his composure, and a feeling of anger against him impelled her to tear
the sheet with the phrase she had written into tiny bits. “No need of
anything,” she said to herself, and closing her blotting-case she went
upstairs, told the governess and the servants that she was going that
day to Moscow, and at once set to work to pack up her things.
Chapter 16
All the rooms of the summer villa were full of porters, gardeners, and
footmen going to and fro carrying out things. Cupboards and chests were
open; twice they had sent to the shop for cord; pieces of newspaper
were tossing about on the floor. Two trunks, some bags and strapped-up
rugs, had been carried down into the hall. The carriage and two hired
cabs were waiting at the steps. Anna, forgetting her inward agitation
in the work of packing, was standing at a table in her boudoir, packing
her traveling bag, when Annushka called her attention to the rattle of
some carriage driving up. Anna looked out of the window and saw Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s courier on the steps, ringing at the front door bell.
“Run and find out what it is,” she said, and with a calm sense of being
prepared for anything, she sat down in a low chair, folding her hands
on her knees. A footman brought in a thick packet directed in Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s hand.
“The courier has orders to wait for an answer,” he said.
“Very well,” she said, and as soon as he had left the room she tore
open the letter with trembling fingers. A roll of unfolded notes done
up in a wrapper fell out of it. She disengaged the letter and began
reading it at the end. “Preparations shall be made for your arrival
here ... I attach particular significance to compliance....” she read.
She ran on, then back, read it all through, and once more read the
letter all through again from the beginning. When she had finished, she
felt that she was cold all over, and that a fearful calamity, such as
she had not expected, had burst upon her.
In the morning she had regretted that she had spoken to her husband,
and wished for nothing so much as that those words could be unspoken.
And here this letter regarded them as unspoken, and gave her what she
had wanted. But now this letter seemed to her more awful than anything
she had been able to conceive.
“He’s right!” she said; “of course, he’s always right; he’s a
Christian, he’s generous! Yes, vile, base creature! And no one
understands it except me, and no one ever will; and I can’t explain it.
They say he’s so religious, so high-principled, so upright, so clever;
but they don’t see what I’ve seen. They don’t know how he has crushed
my life for eight years, crushed everything that was living in me—he
has not once even thought that I’m a live woman who must have love.
They don’t know how at every step he’s humiliated me, and been just as
pleased with himself. Haven’t I striven, striven with all my strength,
to find something to give meaning to my life? Haven’t I struggled to
love him, to love my son when I could not love my husband? But the time
came when I knew that I couldn’t cheat myself any longer, that I was
alive, that I was not to blame, that God has made me so that I must
love and live. And now what does he do? If he’d killed me, if he’d
killed him, I could have borne anything, I could have forgiven
anything; but, no, he.... How was it I didn’t guess what he would do?
He’s doing just what’s characteristic of his mean character. He’ll keep
himself in the right, while me, in my ruin, he’ll drive still lower to
worse ruin yet....”
She recalled the words from the letter. “You can conjecture what awaits
you and your son....” “That’s a threat to take away my child, and most
likely by their stupid law he can. But I know very well why he says it.
He doesn’t believe even in my love for my child, or he despises it
(just as he always used to ridicule it). He despises that feeling in
me, but he knows that I won’t abandon my child, that I can’t abandon my
child, that there could be no life for me without my child, even with
him whom I love; but that if I abandoned my child and ran away from
him, I should be acting like the most infamous, basest of women. He
knows that, and knows that I am incapable of doing that.”
She recalled another sentence in the letter. “Our life must go on as it
has done in the past....” “That life was miserable enough in the old
days; it has been awful of late. What will it be now? And he knows all
that; he knows that I can’t repent that I breathe, that I love; he
knows that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he wants to
go on torturing me. I know him; I know that he’s at home and is happy
in deceit, like a fish swimming in the water. No, I won’t give him that
happiness. I’ll break through the spiderweb of lies in which he wants
to catch me, come what may. Anything’s better than lying and deceit.”
“But how? My God! my God! Was ever a woman so miserable as I am?...”
“No; I will break through it, I will break through it!” she cried,
jumping up and keeping back her tears. And she went to the
writing-table to write him another letter. But at the bottom of her
heart she felt that she was not strong enough to break through
anything, that she was not strong enough to get out of her old
position, however false and dishonorable it might be.
She sat down at the writing-table, but instead of writing she clasped
her hands on the table, and, laying her head on them, burst into tears,
with sobs and heaving breast like a child crying. She was weeping that
her dream of her position being made clear and definite had been
annihilated forever. She knew beforehand that everything would go on in
the old way, and far worse, indeed, than in the old way. She felt that
the position in the world that she enjoyed, and that had seemed to her
of so little consequence in the morning, that this position was
precious to her, that she would not have the strength to exchange it
for the shameful position of a woman who has abandoned husband and
child to join her lover; that however much she might struggle, she
could not be stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in
love, but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the menace of
detection hanging over her at every instant; deceiving her husband for
the sake of a shameful connection with a man living apart and away from
her, whose life she could never share. She knew that this was how it
would be, and at the same time it was so awful that she could not even
conceive what it would end in. And she cried without restraint, as
children cry when they are punished.
The sound of the footman’s steps forced her to rouse herself, and,
hiding her face from him, she pretended to be writing.
“The courier asks if there’s an answer,” the footman announced.
“An answer? Yes,” said Anna. “Let him wait. I’ll ring.”
“What can I write?” she thought. “What can I decide upon alone? What do
I know? What do I want? What is there I care for?” Again she felt that
her soul was beginning to be split in two. She was terrified again at
this feeling, and clutched at the first pretext for doing something
which might divert her thoughts from herself. “I ought to see Alexey”
(so she called Vronsky in her thoughts); “no one but he can tell me
what I ought to do. I’ll go to Betsy’s, perhaps I shall see him there,”
she said to herself, completely forgetting that when she had told him
the day before that she was not going to Princess Tverskaya’s, he had
said that in that case he should not go either. She went up to the
table, wrote to her husband, “I have received your letter.—A.”; and,
ringing the bell, gave it to the footman.
“We are not going,” she said to Annushka, as she came in.
“Not going at all?”
“No; don’t unpack till tomorrow, and let the carriage wait. I’m going
to the princess’s.”
“Which dress am I to get ready?”
Chapter 17
The croquet party to which the Princess Tverskaya had invited Anna was
to consist of two ladies and their adorers. These two ladies were the
chief representatives of a select new Petersburg circle, nicknamed, in
imitation of some imitation, _les sept merveilles du monde_. These
ladies belonged to a circle which, though of the highest society, was
utterly hostile to that in which Anna moved. Moreover, Stremov, one of
the most influential people in Petersburg, and the elderly admirer of
Liza Merkalova, was Alexey Alexandrovitch’s enemy in the political
world. From all these considerations Anna had not meant to go, and the
hints in Princess Tverskaya’s note referred to her refusal. But now
Anna was eager to go, in the hope of seeing Vronsky.
Anna arrived at Princess Tverskaya’s earlier than the other guests.
At the same moment as she entered, Vronsky’s footman, with
side-whiskers combed out like a _Kammerjunker_, went in too. He stopped
at the door, and, taking off his cap, let her pass. Anna recognized
him, and only then recalled that Vronsky had told her the day before
that he would not come. Most likely he was sending a note to say so.
As she took off her outer garment in the hall, she heard the footman,
pronouncing his “_r’s_” even like a _Kammerjunker_, say, “From the
count for the princess,” and hand the note.
She longed to question him as to where his master was. She longed to
turn back and send him a letter to come and see her, or to go herself
to see him. But neither the first nor the second nor the third course
was possible. Already she heard bells ringing to announce her arrival
ahead of her, and Princess Tverskaya’s footman was standing at the open
door waiting for her to go forward into the inner rooms.
“The princess is in the garden; they will inform her immediately. Would
you be pleased to walk into the garden?” announced another footman in
another room.
The position of uncertainty, of indecision, was still the same as at
home—worse, in fact, since it was impossible to take any step,
impossible to see Vronsky, and she had to remain here among outsiders,
in company so uncongenial to her present mood. But she was wearing a
dress that she knew suited her. She was not alone; all around was that
luxurious setting of idleness that she was used to, and she felt less
wretched than at home. She was not forced to think what she was to do.
Everything would be done of itself. On meeting Betsy coming towards her
in a white gown that struck her by its elegance, Anna smiled at her
just as she always did. Princess Tverskaya was walking with Tushkevitch
and a young lady, a relation, who, to the great joy of her parents in
the provinces, was spending the summer with the fashionable princess.
There was probably something unusual about Anna, for Betsy noticed it
at once.
“I slept badly,” answered Anna, looking intently at the footman who
came to meet them, and, as she supposed, brought Vronsky’s note.
“How glad I am you’ve come!” said Betsy. “I’m tired, and was just
longing to have some tea before they come. You might go”—she turned to
Tushkevitch—“with Masha, and try the croquet ground over there where
they’ve been cutting it. We shall have time to talk a little over tea;
we’ll have a cozy chat, eh?” she said in English to Anna, with a smile,
pressing the hand with which she held a parasol.
“Yes, especially as I can’t stay very long with you. I’m forced to go
on to old Madame Vrede. I’ve been promising to go for a century,” said
Anna, to whom lying, alien as it was to her nature, had become not
merely simple and natural in society, but a positive source of
satisfaction. Why she said this, which she had not thought of a second
before, she could not have explained. She had said it simply from the
reflection that as Vronsky would not be here, she had better secure her
own freedom, and try to see him somehow. But why she had spoken of old
Madame Vrede, whom she had to go and see, as she had to see many other
people, she could not have explained; and yet, as it afterwards turned
out, had she contrived the most cunning devices to meet Vronsky, she
could have thought of nothing better.
“No. I’m not going to let you go for anything,” answered Betsy, looking
intently into Anna’s face. “Really, if I were not fond of you, I should
feel offended. One would think you were afraid my society would
compromise you. Tea in the little dining-room, please,” she said, half
closing her eyes, as she always did when addressing the footman.
Taking the note from him, she read it.
“Alexey’s playing us false,” she said in French; “he writes that he
can’t come,” she added in a tone as simple and natural as though it
could never enter her head that Vronsky could mean anything more to
Anna than a game of croquet. Anna knew that Betsy knew everything, but,
hearing how she spoke of Vronsky before her, she almost felt persuaded
for a minute that she knew nothing.
“Ah!” said Anna indifferently, as though not greatly interested in the
matter, and she went on smiling: “How can you or your friends
compromise anyone?”
This playing with words, this hiding of a secret, had a great
fascination for Anna, as, indeed, it has for all women. And it was not
the necessity of concealment, not the aim with which the concealment
was contrived, but the process of concealment itself which attracted
her.
“I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope,” she said. “Stremov and Liza
Merkalova, why, they’re the cream of the cream of society. Besides,
they’re received everywhere, and _I_”—she laid special stress on the
I—“have never been strict and intolerant. It’s simply that I haven’t
the time.”
“No; you don’t care, perhaps, to meet Stremov? Let him and Alexey
Alexandrovitch tilt at each other in the committee—that’s no affair of
ours. But in the world, he’s the most amiable man I know, and a devoted
croquet player. You shall see. And, in spite of his absurd position as
Liza’s lovesick swain at his age, you ought to see how he carries off
the absurd position. He’s very nice. Sappho Shtoltz you don’t know? Oh,
that’s a new type, quite new.”
Betsy said all this, and, at the same time, from her good-humored,
shrewd glance, Anna felt that she partly guessed her plight, and was
hatching something for her benefit. They were in the little boudoir.
“I must write to Alexey though,” and Betsy sat down to the table,
scribbled a few lines, and put the note in an envelope.
“I’m telling him to come to dinner. I’ve one lady extra to dinner with
me, and no man to take her in. Look what I’ve said, will that persuade
him? Excuse me, I must leave you for a minute. Would you seal it up,
please, and send it off?” she said from the door; “I have to give some
directions.”
Without a moment’s thought, Anna sat down to the table with Betsy’s
letter, and, without reading it, wrote below: “It’s essential for me to
see you. Come to the Vrede garden. I shall be there at six o’clock.”
She sealed it up, and, Betsy coming back, in her presence handed the
note to be taken.
At tea, which was brought them on a little tea-table in the cool little
drawing-room, the cozy chat promised by Princess Tverskaya before the
arrival of her visitors really did come off between the two women. They
criticized the people they were expecting, and the conversation fell
upon Liza Merkalova.
“She’s very sweet, and I always liked her,” said Anna.
“You ought to like her. She raves about you. Yesterday she came up to
me after the races and was in despair at not finding you. She says
you’re a real heroine of romance, and that if she were a man she would
do all sorts of mad things for your sake. Stremov says she does that as
it is.”
“But do tell me, please, I never could make it out,” said Anna, after
being silent for some time, speaking in a tone that showed she was not
asking an idle question, but that what she was asking was of more
importance to her than it should have been; “do tell me, please, what
are her relations with Prince Kaluzhsky, Mishka, as he’s called? I’ve
met them so little. What does it mean?”
Betsy smiled with her eyes, and looked intently at Anna.
“It’s a new manner,” she said. “They’ve all adopted that manner.
They’ve flung their caps over the windmills. But there are ways and
ways of flinging them.”
“Yes, but what are her relations precisely with Kaluzhsky?”
Betsy broke into unexpectedly mirthful and irrepressible laughter, a
thing which rarely happened with her.
“You’re encroaching on Princess Myakaya’s special domain now. That’s
the question of an _enfant terrible_,” and Betsy obviously tried to
restrain herself, but could not, and went off into peals of that
infectious laughter that people laugh who do not laugh often. “You’d
better ask them,” she brought out, between tears of laughter.
“No; you laugh,” said Anna, laughing too in spite of herself, “but I
never could understand it. I can’t understand the husband’s rôle in
it.”
“The husband? Liza Merkalova’s husband carries her shawl, and is always
ready to be of use. But anything more than that in reality, no one
cares to inquire. You know in decent society one doesn’t talk or think
even of certain details of the toilet. That’s how it is with this.”
“Will you be at Madame Rolandak’s fête?” asked Anna, to change the
conversation.
“I don’t think so,” answered Betsy, and, without looking at her friend,
she began filling the little transparent cups with fragrant tea.
Putting a cup before Anna, she took out a cigarette, and, fitting it
into a silver holder, she lighted it.
“It’s like this, you see: I’m in a fortunate position,” she began,
quite serious now, as she took up her cup. “I understand you, and I
understand Liza. Liza now is one of those naïve natures that, like
children, don’t know what’s good and what’s bad. Anyway, she didn’t
comprehend it when she was very young. And now she’s aware that the
lack of comprehension suits her. Now, perhaps, she doesn’t know on
purpose,” said Betsy, with a subtle smile. “But, anyway, it suits her.
The very same thing, don’t you see, may be looked at tragically, and
turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even
humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too
tragically.”
“How I should like to know other people just as I know myself!” said
Anna, seriously and dreamily. “Am I worse than other people, or better?
I think I’m worse.”
“_Enfant terrible, enfant terrible!_” repeated Betsy. “But here they
are.”
Chapter 18
They heard the sound of steps and a man’s voice, then a woman’s voice
and laughter, and immediately thereafter there walked in the expected
guests: Sappho Shtoltz, and a young man beaming with excess of health,
the so-called Vaska. It was evident that ample supplies of beefsteak,
truffles, and Burgundy never failed to reach him at the fitting hour.
Vaska bowed to the two ladies, and glanced at them, but only for one
second. He walked after Sappho into the drawing-room, and followed her
about as though he were chained to her, keeping his sparkling eyes
fixed on her as though he wanted to eat her. Sappho Shtoltz was a
blonde beauty with black eyes. She walked with smart little steps in
high-heeled shoes, and shook hands with the ladies vigorously like a
man.
Anna had never met this new star of fashion, and was struck by her
beauty, the exaggerated extreme to which her dress was carried, and the
boldness of her manners. On her head there was such a superstructure of
soft, golden hair—her own and false mixed—that her head was equal in
size to the elegantly rounded bust, of which so much was exposed in
front. The impulsive abruptness of her movements was such that at every
step the lines of her knees and the upper part of her legs were
distinctly marked under her dress, and the question involuntarily rose
to the mind where in the undulating, piled-up mountain of material at
the back the real body of the woman, so small and slender, so naked in
front, and so hidden behind and below, really came to an end.
Betsy made haste to introduce her to Anna.
“Only fancy, we all but ran over two soldiers,” she began telling them
at once, using her eyes, smiling and twitching away her tail, which she
flung back at one stroke all on one side. “I drove here with Vaska....
Ah, to be sure, you don’t know each other.” And mentioning his surname
she introduced the young man, and reddening a little, broke into a
ringing laugh at her mistake—that is, at her having called him Vaska to
a stranger. Vaska bowed once more to Anna, but he said nothing to her.
He addressed Sappho: “You’ve lost your bet. We got here first. Pay up,”
said he, smiling.
Sappho laughed still more festively.
“Not just now,” said she.
“Oh, all right, I’ll have it later.”
“Very well, very well. Oh, yes.” She turned suddenly to Princess Betsy:
“I am a nice person ... I positively forgot it ... I’ve brought you a
visitor. And here he comes.” The unexpected young visitor, whom Sappho
had invited, and whom she had forgotten, was, however, a personage of
such consequence that, in spite of his youth, both the ladies rose on
his entrance.
He was a new admirer of Sappho’s. He now dogged her footsteps, like
Vaska.
Soon after Prince Kaluzhsky arrived, and Liza Merkalova with Stremov.
Liza Merkalova was a thin brunette, with an Oriental, languid type of
face, and—as everyone used to say—exquisite enigmatic eyes. The tone of
her dark dress (Anna immediately observed and appreciated the fact) was
in perfect harmony with her style of beauty. Liza was as soft and
enervated as Sappho was smart and abrupt.
But to Anna’s taste Liza was far more attractive. Betsy had said to
Anna that she had adopted the pose of an innocent child, but when Anna
saw her, she felt that this was not the truth. She really was both
innocent and corrupt, but a sweet and passive woman. It is true that
her tone was the same as Sappho’s; that like Sappho, she had two men,
one young and one old, tacked onto her, and devouring her with their
eyes. But there was something in her higher than what surrounded her.
There was in her the glow of the real diamond among glass imitations.
This glow shone out in her exquisite, truly enigmatic eyes. The weary,
and at the same time passionate, glance of those eyes, encircled by
dark rings, impressed one by its perfect sincerity. Everyone looking
into those eyes fancied he knew her wholly, and knowing her, could not
but love her. At the sight of Anna, her whole face lighted up at once
with a smile of delight.
“Ah, how glad I am to see you!” she said, going up to her. “Yesterday
at the races all I wanted was to get to you, but you’d gone away. I did
so want to see you, yesterday especially. Wasn’t it awful?” she said,
looking at Anna with eyes that seemed to lay bare all her soul.
“Yes; I had no idea it would be so thrilling,” said Anna, blushing.
The company got up at this moment to go into the garden.
“I’m not going,” said Liza, smiling and settling herself close to Anna.
“You won’t go either, will you? Who wants to play croquet?”
“Oh, I like it,” said Anna.
“There, how do you manage never to be bored by things? It’s delightful
to look at you. You’re alive, but I’m bored.”
“How can you be bored? Why, you live in the liveliest set in
Petersburg,” said Anna.
“Possibly the people who are not of our set are even more bored; but
we—I certainly—are not happy, but awfully, awfully bored.”
Sappho smoking a cigarette went off into the garden with the two young
men. Betsy and Stremov remained at the tea-table.
“What, bored!” said Betsy. “Sappho says they did enjoy themselves
tremendously at your house last night.”
“Ah, how dreary it all was!” said Liza Merkalova. “We all drove back to
my place after the races. And always the same people, always the same.
Always the same thing. We lounged about on sofas all the evening. What
is there to enjoy in that? No; do tell me how you manage never to be
bored?” she said, addressing Anna again. “One has but to look at you
and one sees, here’s a woman who may be happy or unhappy, but isn’t
bored. Tell me how you do it?”
“I do nothing,” answered Anna, blushing at these searching questions.
“That’s the best way,” Stremov put in. Stremov was a man of fifty,
partly gray, but still vigorous-looking, very ugly, but with a
characteristic and intelligent face. Liza Merkalova was his wife’s
niece, and he spent all his leisure hours with her. On meeting Anna
Karenina, as he was Alexey Alexandrovitch’s enemy in the government, he
tried, like a shrewd man and a man of the world, to be particularly
cordial with her, the wife of his enemy.
“‘Nothing,’” he put in with a subtle smile, “that’s the very best way.
I told you long ago,” he said, turning to Liza Merkalova, “that if you
don’t want to be bored, you mustn’t think you’re going to be bored.
It’s just as you mustn’t be afraid of not being able to fall asleep, if
you’re afraid of sleeplessness. That’s just what Anna Arkadyevna has
just said.”
“I should be very glad if I had said it, for it’s not only clever but
true,” said Anna, smiling.
“No, do tell me why it is one can’t go to sleep, and one can’t help
being bored?”
“To sleep well one ought to work, and to enjoy oneself one ought to
work too.”
“What am I to work for when my work is no use to anybody? And I can’t
and won’t knowingly make a pretense about it.”
“You’re incorrigible,” said Stremov, not looking at her, and he spoke
again to Anna. As he rarely met Anna, he could say nothing but
commonplaces to her, but he said those commonplaces as to when she was
returning to Petersburg, and how fond Countess Lidia Ivanovna was of
her, with an expression which suggested that he longed with his whole
soul to please her and show his regard for her and even more than that.
Tushkevitch came in, announcing that the party were awaiting the other
players to begin croquet.
“No, don’t go away, please don’t,” pleaded Liza Merkalova, hearing that
Anna was going. Stremov joined in her entreaties.
“It’s too violent a transition,” he said, “to go from such company to
old Madame Vrede. And besides, you will only give her a chance for
talking scandal, while here you arouse none but such different feelings
of the highest and most opposite kind,” he said to her.
Anna pondered for an instant in uncertainty. This shrewd man’s
flattering words, the naïve, childlike affection shown her by Liza
Merkalova, and all the social atmosphere she was used to,—it was all so
easy, and what was in store for her was so difficult, that she was for
a minute in uncertainty whether to remain, whether to put off a little
longer the painful moment of explanation. But remembering what was in
store for her alone at home, if she did not come to some decision,
remembering that gesture—terrible even in memory—when she had clutched
her hair in both hands—she said good-bye and went away.
Chapter 19
In spite of Vronsky’s apparently frivolous life in society, he was a
man who hated irregularity. In early youth in the Corps of Pages, he
had experienced the humiliation of a refusal, when he had tried, being
in difficulties, to borrow money, and since then he had never once put
himself in the same position again.
In order to keep his affairs in some sort of order, he used about five
times a year (more or less frequently, according to circumstances) to
shut himself up alone and put all his affairs into definite shape. This
he used to call his day of reckoning or _faire la lessive_.
On waking up the day after the races, Vronsky put on a white linen
coat, and without shaving or taking his bath, he distributed about the
table moneys, bills, and letters, and set to work. Petritsky, who knew
he was ill-tempered on such occasions, on waking up and seeing his
comrade at the writing-table, quietly dressed and went out without
getting in his way.
Every man who knows to the minutest details all the complexity of the
conditions surrounding him, cannot help imagining that the complexity
of these conditions, and the difficulty of making them clear, is
something exceptional and personal, peculiar to himself, and never
supposes that others are surrounded by just as complicated an array of
personal affairs as he is. So indeed it seemed to Vronsky. And not
without inward pride, and not without reason, he thought that any other
man would long ago have been in difficulties, would have been forced to
some dishonorable course, if he had found himself in such a difficult
position. But Vronsky felt that now especially it was essential for him
to clear up and define his position if he were to avoid getting into
difficulties.
What Vronsky attacked first as being the easiest was his pecuniary
position. Writing out on note paper in his minute hand all that he
owed, he added up the amount and found that his debts amounted to
seventeen thousand and some odd hundreds, which he left out for the
sake of clearness. Reckoning up his money and his bank book, he found
that he had left one thousand eight hundred roubles, and nothing coming
in before the New Year. Reckoning over again his list of debts, Vronsky
copied it, dividing it into three classes. In the first class he put
the debts which he would have to pay at once, or for which he must in
any case have the money ready so that on demand for payment there could
not be a moment’s delay in paying. Such debts amounted to about four
thousand: one thousand five hundred for a horse, and two thousand five
hundred as surety for a young comrade, Venovsky, who had lost that sum
to a cardsharper in Vronsky’s presence. Vronsky had wanted to pay the
money at the time (he had that amount then), but Venovsky and Yashvin
had insisted that they would pay and not Vronsky, who had not played.
That was so far well, but Vronsky knew that in this dirty business,
though his only share in it was undertaking by word of mouth to be
surety for Venovsky, it was absolutely necessary for him to have the
two thousand five hundred roubles so as to be able to fling it at the
swindler, and have no more words with him. And so for this first and
most important division he must have four thousand roubles. The second
class—eight thousand roubles—consisted of less important debts. These
were principally accounts owing in connection with his race horses, to
the purveyor of oats and hay, the English saddler, and so on. He would
have to pay some two thousand roubles on these debts too, in order to
be quite free from anxiety. The last class of debts—to shops, to
hotels, to his tailor—were such as need not be considered. So that he
needed at least six thousand roubles for current expenses, and he only
had one thousand eight hundred. For a man with one hundred thousand
roubles of revenue, which was what everyone fixed as Vronsky’s income,
such debts, one would suppose, could hardly be embarrassing; but the
fact was that he was far from having one hundred thousand. His father’s
immense property, which alone yielded a yearly income of two hundred
thousand, was left undivided between the brothers. At the time when the
elder brother, with a mass of debts, married Princess Varya Tchirkova,
the daughter of a Decembrist without any fortune whatever, Alexey had
given up to his elder brother almost the whole income from his father’s
estate, reserving for himself only twenty-five thousand a year from it.
Alexey had said at the time to his brother that that sum would be
sufficient for him until he married, which he probably never would do.
And his brother, who was in command of one of the most expensive
regiments, and was only just married, could not decline the gift. His
mother, who had her own separate property, had allowed Alexey every
year twenty thousand in addition to the twenty-five thousand he had
reserved, and Alexey had spent it all. Of late his mother, incensed
with him on account of his love affair and his leaving Moscow, had
given up sending him the money. And in consequence of this, Vronsky,
who had been in the habit of living on the scale of forty-five thousand
a year, having only received twenty thousand that year, found himself
now in difficulties. To get out of these difficulties, he could not
apply to his mother for money. Her last letter, which he had received
the day before, had particularly exasperated him by the hints in it
that she was quite ready to help him to succeed in the world and in the
army, but not to lead a life which was a scandal to all good society.
His mother’s attempt to buy him stung him to the quick and made him
feel colder than ever to her. But he could not draw back from the
generous word when it was once uttered, even though he felt now,
vaguely foreseeing certain eventualities in his intrigue with Madame
Karenina, that this generous word had been spoken thoughtlessly, and
that even though he were not married he might need all the hundred
thousand of income. But it was impossible to draw back. He had only to
recall his brother’s wife, to remember how that sweet, delightful Varya
sought, at every convenient opportunity, to remind him that she
remembered his generosity and appreciated it, to grasp the
impossibility of taking back his gift. It was as impossible as beating
a woman, stealing, or lying. One thing only could and ought to be done,
and Vronsky determined upon it without an instant’s hesitation: to
borrow money from a money-lender, ten thousand roubles, a proceeding
which presented no difficulty, to cut down his expenses generally, and
to sell his race horses. Resolving on this, he promptly wrote a note to
Rolandak, who had more than once sent to him with offers to buy horses
from him. Then he sent for the Englishman and the money-lender, and
divided what money he had according to the accounts he intended to pay.
Having finished this business, he wrote a cold and cutting answer to
his mother. Then he took out of his notebook three notes of Anna’s,
read them again, burned them, and remembering their conversation on the
previous day, he sank into meditation.
Chapter 20
Vronsky’s life was particularly happy in that he had a code of
principles, which defined with unfailing certitude what he ought and
what he ought not to do. This code of principles covered only a very
small circle of contingencies, but then the principles were never
doubtful, and Vronsky, as he never went outside that circle, had never
had a moment’s hesitation about doing what he ought to do. These
principles laid down as invariable rules: that one must pay a
cardsharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie
to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat anyone, but
one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may
give one and so on. These principles were possibly not reasonable and
not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he
adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could
hold his head up. Only quite lately in regard to his relations with
Anna, Vronsky had begun to feel that his code of principles did not
fully cover all possible contingencies, and to foresee in the future
difficulties and perplexities for which he could find no guiding clue.
His present relation to Anna and to her husband was to his mind clear
and simple. It was clearly and precisely defined in the code of
principles by which he was guided.
She was an honorable woman who had bestowed her love upon him, and he
loved her, and therefore she was in his eyes a woman who had a right to
the same, or even more, respect than a lawful wife. He would have had
his hand chopped off before he would have allowed himself by a word, by
a hint, to humiliate her, or even to fall short of the fullest respect
a woman could look for.
His attitude to society, too, was clear. Everyone might know, might
suspect it, but no one might dare to speak of it. If any did so, he was
ready to force all who might speak to be silent and to respect the
non-existent honor of the woman he loved.
His attitude to the husband was the clearest of all. From the moment
that Anna loved Vronsky, he had regarded his own right over her as the
one thing unassailable. Her husband was simply a superfluous and
tiresome person. No doubt he was in a pitiable position, but how could
that be helped? The one thing the husband had a right to was to demand
satisfaction with a weapon in his hand, and Vronsky was prepared for
this at any minute.
But of late new inner relations had arisen between him and her, which
frightened Vronsky by their indefiniteness. Only the day before she had
told him that she was with child. And he felt that this fact and what
she expected of him called for something not fully defined in that code
of principles by which he had hitherto steered his course in life. And
he had been indeed caught unawares, and at the first moment when she
spoke to him of her position, his heart had prompted him to beg her to
leave her husband. He had said that, but now thinking things over he
saw clearly that it would be better to manage to avoid that; and at the
same time, as he told himself so, he was afraid whether it was not
wrong.
“If I told her to leave her husband, that must mean uniting her life
with mine; am I prepared for that? How can I take her away now, when I
have no money? Supposing I could arrange.... But how can I take her
away while I’m in the service? If I say that—I ought to be prepared to
do it, that is, I ought to have the money and to retire from the army.”
And he grew thoughtful. The question whether to retire from the service
or not brought him to the other and perhaps the chief though hidden
interest of his life, of which none knew but he.
Ambition was the old dream of his youth and childhood, a dream which he
did not confess even to himself, though it was so strong that now this
passion was even doing battle with his love. His first steps in the
world and in the service had been successful, but two years before he
had made a great mistake. Anxious to show his independence and to
advance, he had refused a post that had been offered him, hoping that
this refusal would heighten his value; but it turned out that he had
been too bold, and he was passed over. And having, whether he liked or
not, taken up for himself the position of an independent man, he
carried it off with great tact and good sense, behaving as though he
bore no grudge against anyone, did not regard himself as injured in any
way, and cared for nothing but to be left alone since he was enjoying
himself. In reality he had ceased to enjoy himself as long ago as the
year before, when he went away to Moscow. He felt that this independent
attitude of a man who might have done anything, but cared to do
nothing, was already beginning to pall, that many people were beginning
to fancy that he was not really capable of anything but being a
straightforward, good-natured fellow. His connection with Madame
Karenina, by creating so much sensation and attracting general
attention, had given him a fresh distinction which soothed his gnawing
worm of ambition for a while, but a week before that worm had been
roused up again with fresh force. The friend of his childhood, a man of
the same set, of the same coterie, his comrade in the Corps of Pages,
Serpuhovskoy, who had left school with him and had been his rival in
class, in gymnastics, in their scrapes and their dreams of glory, had
come back a few days before from Central Asia, where he had gained two
steps up in rank, and an order rarely bestowed upon generals so young.
As soon as he arrived in Petersburg, people began to talk about him as
a newly risen star of the first magnitude. A schoolfellow of Vronsky’s
and of the same age, he was a general and was expecting a command,
which might have influence on the course of political events; while
Vronsky, independent and brilliant and beloved by a charming woman
though he was, was simply a cavalry captain who was readily allowed to
be as independent as ever he liked. “Of course I don’t envy
Serpuhovskoy and never could envy him; but his advancement shows me
that one has only to watch one’s opportunity, and the career of a man
like me may be very rapidly made. Three years ago he was in just the
same position as I am. If I retire, I burn my ships. If I remain in the
army, I lose nothing. She said herself she did not wish to change her
position. And with her love I cannot feel envious of Serpuhovskoy.” And
slowly twirling his mustaches, he got up from the table and walked
about the room. His eyes shone particularly brightly, and he felt in
that confident, calm, and happy frame of mind which always came after
he had thoroughly faced his position. Everything was straight and
clear, just as after former days of reckoning. He shaved, took a cold
bath, dressed and went out.
Chapter 21
“We’ve come to fetch you. Your _lessive_ lasted a good time today,”
said Petritsky. “Well, is it over?”
“It is over,” answered Vronsky, smiling with his eyes only, and
twirling the tips of his mustaches as circumspectly as though after the
perfect order into which his affairs had been brought any over-bold or
rapid movement might disturb it.
“You’re always just as if you’d come out of a bath after it,” said
Petritsky. “I’ve come from Gritsky’s” (that was what they called the
colonel); “they’re expecting you.”
Vronsky, without answering, looked at his comrade, thinking of
something else.
“Yes; is that music at his place?” he said, listening to the familiar
sounds of polkas and waltzes floating across to him. “What’s the fête?”
“Serpuhovskoy’s come.”
“Aha!” said Vronsky, “why, I didn’t know.”
The smile in his eyes gleamed more brightly than ever.
Having once made up his mind that he was happy in his love, that he
sacrificed his ambition to it—having anyway taken up this position,
Vronsky was incapable of feeling either envious of Serpuhovskoy or hurt
with him for not coming first to him when he came to the regiment.
Serpuhovskoy was a good friend, and he was delighted he had come.
“Ah, I’m very glad!”
The colonel, Demin, had taken a large country house. The whole party
were in the wide lower balcony. In the courtyard the first objects that
met Vronsky’s eyes were a band of singers in white linen coats,
standing near a barrel of vodka, and the robust, good-humored figure of
the colonel surrounded by officers. He had gone out as far as the first
step of the balcony and was loudly shouting across the band that played
Offenbach’s quadrille, waving his arms and giving some orders to a few
soldiers standing on one side. A group of soldiers, a quartermaster,
and several subalterns came up to the balcony with Vronsky. The colonel
returned to the table, went out again onto the steps with a tumbler in
his hand, and proposed the toast, “To the health of our former comrade,
the gallant general, Prince Serpuhovskoy. Hurrah!”
The colonel was followed by Serpuhovskoy, who came out onto the steps
smiling, with a glass in his hand.
“You always get younger, Bondarenko,” he said to the rosy-checked,
smart-looking quartermaster standing just before him, still youngish
looking though doing his second term of service.
It was three years since Vronsky had seen Serpuhovskoy. He looked more
robust, had let his whiskers grow, but was still the same graceful
creature, whose face and figure were even more striking from their
softness and nobility than their beauty. The only change Vronsky
detected in him was that subdued, continual radiance of beaming content
which settles on the faces of men who are successful and are sure of
the recognition of their success by everyone. Vronsky knew that radiant
air, and immediately observed it in Serpuhovskoy.
As Serpuhovskoy came down the steps he saw Vronsky. A smile of pleasure
lighted up his face. He tossed his head upwards and waved the glass in
his hand, greeting Vronsky, and showing him by the gesture that he
could not come to him before the quartermaster, who stood craning
forward his lips ready to be kissed.
“Here he is!” shouted the colonel. “Yashvin told me you were in one of
your gloomy tempers.”
Serpuhovskoy kissed the moist, fresh lips of the gallant-looking
quartermaster, and wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, went up to
Vronsky.
“How glad I am!” he said, squeezing his hand and drawing him on one
side.
“You look after him,” the colonel shouted to Yashvin, pointing to
Vronsky; and he went down below to the soldiers.
“Why weren’t you at the races yesterday? I expected to see you there,”
said Vronsky, scrutinizing Serpuhovskoy.
“I did go, but late. I beg your pardon,” he added, and he turned to the
adjutant: “Please have this divided from me, each man as much as it
runs to.” And he hurriedly took notes for three hundred roubles from
his pocketbook, blushing a little.
“Vronsky! Have anything to eat or drink?” asked Yashvin. “Hi, something
for the count to eat! Ah, here it is: have a glass!”
The fête at the colonel’s lasted a long while. There was a great deal
of drinking. They tossed Serpuhovskoy in the air and caught him again
several times. Then they did the same to the colonel. Then, to the
accompaniment of the band, the colonel himself danced with Petritsky.
Then the colonel, who began to show signs of feebleness, sat down on a
bench in the courtyard and began demonstrating to Yashvin the
superiority of Russia over Prussia, especially in cavalry attack, and
there was a lull in the revelry for a moment. Serpuhovskoy went into
the house to the bathroom to wash his hands and found Vronsky there;
Vronsky was drenching his head with water. He had taken off his coat
and put his sunburnt, hairy neck under the tap, and was rubbing it and
his head with his hands. When he had finished, Vronsky sat down by
Serpuhovskoy. They both sat down in the bathroom on a lounge, and a
conversation began which was very interesting to both of them.
“I’ve always been hearing about you through my wife,” said
Serpuhovskoy. “I’m glad you’ve been seeing her pretty often.”
“She’s friendly with Varya, and they’re the only women in Petersburg I
care about seeing,” answered Vronsky, smiling. He smiled because he
foresaw the topic the conversation would turn on, and he was glad of
it.
“The only ones?” Serpuhovskoy queried, smiling.
“Yes; and I heard news of you, but not only through your wife,” said
Vronsky, checking his hint by a stern expression of face. “I was
greatly delighted to hear of your success, but not a bit surprised. I
expected even more.”
Serpuhovskoy smiled. Such an opinion of him was obviously agreeable to
him, and he did not think it necessary to conceal it.
“Well, I on the contrary expected less—I’ll own frankly. But I’m glad,
very glad. I’m ambitious; that’s my weakness, and I confess to it.”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t confess to it if you hadn’t been successful,”
said Vronsky.
“I don’t suppose so,” said Serpuhovskoy, smiling again. “I won’t say
life wouldn’t be worth living without it, but it would be dull. Of
course I may be mistaken, but I fancy I have a certain capacity for the
line I’ve chosen, and that power of any sort in my hands, if it is to
be, will be better than in the hands of a good many people I know,”
said Serpuhovskoy, with beaming consciousness of success; “and so the
nearer I get to it, the better pleased I am.”
“Perhaps that is true for you, but not for everyone. I used to think so
too, but here I live and think life worth living not only for that.”
“There it’s out! here it comes!” said Serpuhovskoy, laughing. “Ever
since I heard about you, about your refusal, I began.... Of course, I
approved of what you did. But there are ways of doing everything. And I
think your action was good in itself, but you didn’t do it quite in the
way you ought to have done.”
“What’s done can’t be undone, and you know I never go back on what I’ve
done. And besides, I’m very well off.”
“Very well off—for the time. But you’re not satisfied with that. I
wouldn’t say this to your brother. He’s a nice child, like our host
here. There he goes!” he added, listening to the roar of “hurrah!”—“and
he’s happy, but that does not satisfy you.”
“I didn’t say it did satisfy me.”
“Yes, but that’s not the only thing. Such men as you are wanted.”
“By whom?”
“By whom? By society, by Russia. Russia needs men; she needs a party,
or else everything goes and will go to the dogs.”
“How do you mean? Bertenev’s party against the Russian communists?”
“No,” said Serpuhovskoy, frowning with vexation at being suspected of
such an absurdity. “_Tout ça est une blague_. That’s always been and
always will be. There are no communists. But intriguing people have to
invent a noxious, dangerous party. It’s an old trick. No, what’s wanted
is a powerful party of independent men like you and me.”
“But why so?” Vronsky mentioned a few men who were in power. “Why
aren’t they independent men?”
“Simply because they have not, or have not had from birth, an
independent fortune; they’ve not had a name, they’ve not been close to
the sun and center as we have. They can be bought either by money or by
favor. And they have to find a support for themselves in inventing a
policy. And they bring forward some notion, some policy that they don’t
believe in, that does harm; and the whole policy is really only a means
to a government house and so much income. _Cela n’est pas plus fin que
ça_, when you get a peep at their cards. I may be inferior to them,
stupider perhaps, though I don’t see why I should be inferior to them.
But you and I have one important advantage over them for certain, in
being more difficult to buy. And such men are more needed than ever.”
Vronsky listened attentively, but he was not so much interested by the
meaning of the words as by the attitude of Serpuhovskoy who was already
contemplating a struggle with the existing powers, and already had his
likes and dislikes in that higher world, while his own interest in the
governing world did not go beyond the interests of his regiment.
Vronsky felt, too, how powerful Serpuhovskoy might become through his
unmistakable faculty for thinking things out and for taking things in,
through his intelligence and gift of words, so rarely met with in the
world in which he moved. And, ashamed as he was of the feeling, he felt
envious.
“Still I haven’t the one thing of most importance for that,” he
answered; “I haven’t the desire for power. I had it once, but it’s
gone.”
“Excuse me, that’s not true,” said Serpuhovskoy, smiling.
“Yes, it is true, it is true ... now!” Vronsky added, to be truthful.
“Yes, it’s true now, that’s another thing; but that _now_ won’t last
forever.”
“Perhaps,” answered Vronsky.
“You say _perhaps_,” Serpuhovskoy went on, as though guessing his
thoughts, “but I say _for certain_. And that’s what I wanted to see you
for. Your action was just what it should have been. I see that, but you
ought not to keep it up. I only ask you to give me _carte blanche_. I’m
not going to offer you my protection ... though, indeed, why shouldn’t
I protect you?—you’ve protected me often enough! I should hope our
friendship rises above all that sort of thing. Yes,” he said, smiling
to him as tenderly as a woman, “give me _carte blanche_, retire from
the regiment, and I’ll draw you upwards imperceptibly.”
“But you must understand that I want nothing,” said Vronsky, “except
that all should be as it is.”
Serpuhovskoy got up and stood facing him.
“You say that all should be as it is. I understand what that means. But
listen: we’re the same age, you’ve known a greater number of women
perhaps than I have.” Serpohovskoy’s smile and gestures told Vronsky
that he mustn’t be afraid, that he would be tender and careful in
touching the sore place. “But I’m married, and believe me, in getting
to know thoroughly one’s wife, if one loves her, as someone has said,
one gets to know all women better than if one knew thousands of them.”
“We’re coming directly!” Vronsky shouted to an officer, who looked into
the room and called them to the colonel.
Vronsky was longing now to hear to the end and know what Serpuhovskey
would say to him.
“And here’s my opinion for you. Women are the chief stumbling block in
a man’s career. It’s hard to love a woman and do anything. There’s only
one way of having love conveniently without its being a
hindrance—that’s marriage. How, how am I to tell you what I mean?” said
Serpuhovskoy, who liked similes. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Yes,
just as you can only carry a _fardeau_ and do something with your
hands, when the _fardeau_ is tied on your back, and that’s marriage.
And that’s what I felt when I was married. My hands were suddenly set
free. But to drag that _fardeau_ about with you without marriage, your
hands will always be so full that you can do nothing. Look at Mazankov,
at Krupov. They’ve ruined their careers for the sake of women.”
“What women!” said Vronsky, recalling the Frenchwoman and the actress
with whom the two men he had mentioned were connected.
“The firmer the woman’s footing in society, the worse it is. That’s
much the same as—not merely carrying the _fardeau_ in your arms—but
tearing it away from someone else.”
“You have never loved,” Vronsky said softly, looking straight before
him and thinking of Anna.
“Perhaps. But you remember what I’ve said to you. And another thing,
women are all more materialistic than men. We make something immense
out of love, but they are always _terre-à-terre_.”
“Directly, directly!” he cried to a footman who came in. But the
footman had not come to call them again, as he supposed. The footman
brought Vronsky a note.
“A man brought it from Princess Tverskaya.”
Vronsky opened the letter, and flushed crimson.
“My head’s begun to ache; I’m going home,” he said to Serpuhovskoy.
“Oh, good-bye then. You give me _carte blanche!_”
“We’ll talk about it later on; I’ll look you up in Petersburg.”
Chapter 22
It was six o’clock already, and so, in order to be there quickly, and
at the same time not to drive with his own horses, known to everyone,
Vronsky got into Yashvin’s hired fly, and told the driver to drive as
quickly as possible. It was a roomy, old-fashioned fly, with seats for
four. He sat in one corner, stretched his legs out on the front seat,
and sank into meditation.
A vague sense of the order into which his affairs had been brought, a
vague recollection of the friendliness and flattery of Serpuhovskoy,
who had considered him a man that was needed, and most of all, the
anticipation of the interview before him—all blended into a general,
joyous sense of life. This feeling was so strong that he could not help
smiling. He dropped his legs, crossed one leg over the other knee, and
taking it in his hand, felt the springy muscle of the calf, where it
had been grazed the day before by his fall, and leaning back he drew
several deep breaths.
“I’m happy, very happy!” he said to himself. He had often before had
this sense of physical joy in his own body, but he had never felt so
fond of himself, of his own body, as at that moment. He enjoyed the
slight ache in his strong leg, he enjoyed the muscular sensation of
movement in his chest as he breathed. The bright, cold August day,
which had made Anna feel so hopeless, seemed to him keenly stimulating,
and refreshed his face and neck that still tingled from the cold water.
The scent of brilliantine on his whiskers struck him as particularly
pleasant in the fresh air. Everything he saw from the carriage window,
everything in that cold pure air, in the pale light of the sunset, was
as fresh, and gay, and strong as he was himself: the roofs of the
houses shining in the rays of the setting sun, the sharp outlines of
fences and angles of buildings, the figures of passers-by, the
carriages that met him now and then, the motionless green of the trees
and grass, the fields with evenly drawn furrows of potatoes, and the
slanting shadows that fell from the houses, and trees, and bushes, and
even from the rows of potatoes—everything was bright like a pretty
landscape just finished and freshly varnished.
“Get on, get on!” he said to the driver, putting his head out of the
window, and pulling a three-rouble note out of his pocket he handed it
to the man as he looked round. The driver’s hand fumbled with something
at the lamp, the whip cracked, and the carriage rolled rapidly along
the smooth highroad.
“I want nothing, nothing but this happiness,” he thought, staring at
the bone button of the bell in the space between the windows, and
picturing to himself Anna just as he had seen her last time. “And as I
go on, I love her more and more. Here’s the garden of the Vrede Villa.
Whereabouts will she be? Where? How? Why did she fix on this place to
meet me, and why does she write in Betsy’s letter?” he thought,
wondering now for the first time at it. But there was now no time for
wonder. He called to the driver to stop before reaching the avenue, and
opening the door, jumped out of the carriage as it was moving, and went
into the avenue that led up to the house. There was no one in the
avenue; but looking round to the right he caught sight of her. Her face
was hidden by a veil, but he drank in with glad eyes the special
movement in walking, peculiar to her alone, the slope of the shoulders,
and the setting of the head, and at once a sort of electric shock ran
all over him. With fresh force, he felt conscious of himself from the
springy motions of his legs to the movements of his lungs as he
breathed, and something set his lips twitching.
Joining him, she pressed his hand tightly.
“You’re not angry that I sent for you? I absolutely had to see you,”
she said; and the serious and set line of her lips, which he saw under
the veil, transformed his mood at once.
“I angry! But how have you come, where from?”
“Never mind,” she said, laying her hand on his, “come along, I must
talk to you.”
He saw that something had happened, and that the interview would not be
a joyous one. In her presence he had no will of his own: without
knowing the grounds of her distress, he already felt the same distress
unconsciously passing over him.
“What is it? what?” he asked her, squeezing her hand with his elbow,
and trying to read her thoughts in her face.
She walked on a few steps in silence, gathering up her courage; then
suddenly she stopped.
“I did not tell you yesterday,” she began, breathing quickly and
painfully, “that coming home with Alexey Alexandrovitch I told him
everything ... told him I could not be his wife, that ... and told him
everything.”
He heard her, unconsciously bending his whole figure down to her as
though hoping in this way to soften the hardness of her position for
her. But directly she had said this he suddenly drew himself up, and a
proud and hard expression came over his face.
“Yes, yes, that’s better, a thousand times better! I know how painful
it was,” he said. But she was not listening to his words, she was
reading his thoughts from the expression of his face. She could not
guess that that expression arose from the first idea that presented
itself to Vronsky—that a duel was now inevitable. The idea of a duel
had never crossed her mind, and so she put a different interpretation
on this passing expression of hardness.
When she got her husband’s letter, she knew then at the bottom of her
heart that everything would go on in the old way, that she would not
have the strength of will to forego her position, to abandon her son,
and to join her lover. The morning spent at Princess Tverskaya’s had
confirmed her still more in this. But this interview was still of the
utmost gravity for her. She hoped that this interview would transform
her position, and save her. If on hearing this news he were to say to
her resolutely, passionately, without an instant’s wavering: “Throw up
everything and come with me!” she would give up her son and go away
with him. But this news had not produced what she had expected in him;
he simply seemed as though he were resenting some affront.
“It was not in the least painful to me. It happened of itself,” she
said irritably; “and see....” she pulled her husband’s letter out of
her glove.
“I understand, I understand,” he interrupted her, taking the letter,
but not reading it, and trying to soothe her. “The one thing I longed
for, the one thing I prayed for, was to cut short this position, so as
to devote my life to your happiness.”
“Why do you tell me that?” she said. “Do you suppose I can doubt it? If
I doubted....”
“Who’s that coming?” said Vronsky suddenly, pointing to two ladies
walking towards them. “Perhaps they know us!” and he hurriedly turned
off, drawing her after him into a side path.
“Oh, I don’t care!” she said. Her lips were quivering. And he fancied
that her eyes looked with strange fury at him from under the veil. “I
tell you that’s not the point—I can’t doubt that; but see what he
writes to me. Read it.” She stood still again.
Again, just as at the first moment of hearing of her rupture with her
husband, Vronsky, on reading the letter, was unconsciously carried away
by the natural sensation aroused in him by his own relation to the
betrayed husband. Now while he held his letter in his hands, he could
not help picturing the challenge, which he would most likely find at
home today or tomorrow, and the duel itself, in which, with the same
cold and haughty expression that his face was assuming at this moment
he would await the injured husband’s shot, after having himself fired
into the air. And at that instant there flashed across his mind the
thought of what Serpuhovskoy had just said to him, and what he had
himself been thinking in the morning—that it was better not to bind
himself—and he knew that this thought he could not tell her.
Having read the letter, he raised his eyes to her, and there was no
determination in them. She saw at once that he had been thinking about
it before by himself. She knew that whatever he might say to her, he
would not say all he thought. And she knew that her last hope had
failed her. This was not what she had been reckoning on.
“You see the sort of man he is,” she said, with a shaking voice;
“he....”
“Forgive me, but I rejoice at it,” Vronsky interrupted. “For God’s
sake, let me finish!” he added, his eyes imploring her to give him time
to explain his words. “I rejoice, because things cannot, cannot
possibly remain as he supposes.”
“Why can’t they?” Anna said, restraining her tears, and obviously
attaching no sort of consequence to what he said. She felt that her
fate was sealed.
Vronsky meant that after the duel—inevitable, he thought—things could
not go on as before, but he said something different.
“It can’t go on. I hope that now you will leave him. I hope”—he was
confused, and reddened—“that you will let me arrange and plan our life.
Tomorrow....” he was beginning.
She did not let him go on.
“But my child!” she shrieked. “You see what he writes! I should have to
leave him, and I can’t and won’t do that.”
“But, for God’s sake, which is better?—leave your child, or keep up
this degrading position?”
“To whom is it degrading?”
“To all, and most of all to you.”
“You say degrading ... don’t say that. Those words have no meaning for
me,” she said in a shaking voice. She did not want him now to say what
was untrue. She had nothing left her but his love, and she wanted to
love him. “Don’t you understand that from the day I loved you
everything has changed for me? For me there is one thing, and one thing
only—your love. If that’s mine, I feel so exalted, so strong, that
nothing can be humiliating to me. I am proud of my position, because
... proud of being ... proud....” She could not say what she was proud
of. Tears of shame and despair choked her utterance. She stood still
and sobbed.
He felt, too, something swelling in his throat and twitching in his
nose, and for the first time in his life he felt on the point of
weeping. He could not have said exactly what it was touched him so. He
felt sorry for her, and he felt he could not help her, and with that he
knew that he was to blame for her wretchedness, and that he had done
something wrong.
“Is not a divorce possible?” he said feebly. She shook her head, not
answering. “Couldn’t you take your son, and still leave him?”
“Yes; but it all depends on him. Now I must go to him,” she said
shortly. Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way had
not deceived her.
“On Tuesday I shall be in Petersburg, and everything can be settled.”
“Yes,” she said. “But don’t let us talk any more of it.”
Anna’s carriage, which she had sent away, and ordered to come back to
the little gate of the Vrede garden, drove up. Anna said good-bye to
Vronsky, and drove home.
Chapter 23
On Monday there was the usual sitting of the Commission of the 2nd of
June. Alexey Alexandrovitch walked into the hall where the sitting was
held, greeted the members and the president, as usual, and sat down in
his place, putting his hand on the papers laid ready before him. Among
these papers lay the necessary evidence and a rough outline of the
speech he intended to make. But he did not really need these documents.
He remembered every point, and did not think it necessary to go over in
his memory what he would say. He knew that when the time came, and when
he saw his enemy facing him, and studiously endeavoring to assume an
expression of indifference, his speech would flow of itself better than
he could prepare it now. He felt that the import of his speech was of
such magnitude that every word of it would have weight. Meantime, as he
listened to the usual report, he had the most innocent and inoffensive
air. No one, looking at his white hands, with their swollen veins and
long fingers, so softly stroking the edges of the white paper that lay
before him, and at the air of weariness with which his head drooped on
one side, would have suspected that in a few minutes a torrent of words
would flow from his lips that would arouse a fearful storm, set the
members shouting and attacking one another, and force the president to
call for order. When the report was over, Alexey Alexandrovitch
announced in his subdued, delicate voice that he had several points to
bring before the meeting in regard to the Commission for the
Reorganization of the Native Tribes. All attention was turned upon him.
Alexey Alexandrovitch cleared his throat, and not looking at his
opponent, but selecting, as he always did while he was delivering his
speeches, the first person sitting opposite him, an inoffensive little
old man, who never had an opinion of any sort in the Commission, began
to expound his views. When he reached the point about the fundamental
and radical law, his opponent jumped up and began to protest. Stremov,
who was also a member of the Commission, and also stung to the quick,
began defending himself, and altogether a stormy sitting followed; but
Alexey Alexandrovitch triumphed, and his motion was carried, three new
commissions were appointed, and the next day in a certain Petersburg
circle nothing else was talked of but this sitting. Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s success had been even greater than he had anticipated.
Next morning, Tuesday, Alexey Alexandrovitch, on waking up, recollected
with pleasure his triumph of the previous day, and he could not help
smiling, though he tried to appear indifferent, when the chief
secretary of his department, anxious to flatter him, informed him of
the rumors that had reached him concerning what had happened in the
Commission.
Absorbed in business with the chief secretary, Alexey Alexandrovitch
had completely forgotten that it was Tuesday, the day fixed by him for
the return of Anna Arkadyevna, and he was surprised and received a
shock of annoyance when a servant came in to inform him of her arrival.
Anna had arrived in Petersburg early in the morning; the carriage had
been sent to meet her in accordance with her telegram, and so Alexey
Alexandrovitch might have known of her arrival. But when she arrived,
he did not meet her. She was told that he had not yet gone out, but was
busy with his secretary. She sent word to her husband that she had
come, went to her own room, and occupied herself in sorting out her
things, expecting he would come to her. But an hour passed; he did not
come. She went into the dining-room on the pretext of giving some
directions, and spoke loudly on purpose, expecting him to come out
there; but he did not come, though she heard him go to the door of his
study as he parted from the chief secretary. She knew that he usually
went out quickly to his office, and she wanted to see him before that,
so that their attitude to one another might be defined.
She walked across the drawing-room and went resolutely to him. When she
went into his study he was in official uniform, obviously ready to go
out, sitting at a little table on which he rested his elbows, looking
dejectedly before him. She saw him before he saw her, and she saw that
he was thinking of her.
On seeing her, he would have risen, but changed his mind, then his face
flushed hotly—a thing Anna had never seen before, and he got up quickly
and went to meet her, looking not at her eyes, but above them at her
forehead and hair. He went up to her, took her by the hand, and asked
her to sit down.
“I am very glad you have come,” he said, sitting down beside her, and
obviously wishing to say something, he stuttered. Several times he
tried to begin to speak, but stopped. In spite of the fact that,
preparing herself for meeting him, she had schooled herself to despise
and reproach him, she did not know what to say to him, and she felt
sorry for him. And so the silence lasted for some time. “Is Seryozha
quite well?” he said, and not waiting for an answer, he added: “I
shan’t be dining at home today, and I have got to go out directly.”
“I had thought of going to Moscow,” she said.
“No, you did quite, quite right to come,” he said, and was silent
again.
Seeing that he was powerless to begin the conversation, she began
herself.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she said, looking at him and not dropping her
eyes under his persistent gaze at her hair, “I’m a guilty woman, I’m a
bad woman, but I am the same as I was, as I told you then, and I have
come to tell you that I can change nothing.”
“I have asked you no question about that,” he said, all at once,
resolutely and with hatred looking her straight in the face; “that was
as I had supposed.” Under the influence of anger he apparently regained
complete possession of all his faculties. “But as I told you then, and
have written to you,” he said in a thin, shrill voice, “I repeat now,
that I am not bound to know this. I ignore it. Not all wives are so
kind as you, to be in such a hurry to communicate such agreeable news
to their husbands.” He laid special emphasis on the word “agreeable.”
“I shall ignore it so long as the world knows nothing of it, so long as
my name is not disgraced. And so I simply inform you that our relations
must be just as they have always been, and that only in the event of
your compromising me I shall be obliged to take steps to secure my
honor.”
“But our relations cannot be the same as always,” Anna began in a timid
voice, looking at him with dismay.
When she saw once more those composed gestures, heard that shrill,
childish, and sarcastic voice, her aversion for him extinguished her
pity for him, and she felt only afraid, but at all costs she wanted to
make clear her position.
“I cannot be your wife while I....” she began.
He laughed a cold and malignant laugh.
“The manner of life you have chosen is reflected, I suppose, in your
ideas. I have too much respect or contempt, or both ... I respect your
past and despise your present ... that I was far from the
interpretation you put on my words.”
Anna sighed and bowed her head.
“Though indeed I fail to comprehend how, with the independence you
show,” he went on, getting hot, “—announcing your infidelity to your
husband and seeing nothing reprehensible in it, apparently—you can see
anything reprehensible in performing a wife’s duties in relation to
your husband.”
“Alexey Alexandrovitch! What is it you want of me?”
“I want you not to meet that man here, and to conduct yourself so that
neither the world nor the servants can reproach you ... not to see him.
That’s not much, I think. And in return you will enjoy all the
privileges of a faithful wife without fulfilling her duties. That’s all
I have to say to you. Now it’s time for me to go. I’m not dining at
home.” He got up and moved towards the door.
Anna got up too. Bowing in silence, he let her pass before him.
Chapter 24
The night spent by Levin on the haycock did not pass without result for
him. The way in which he had been managing his land revolted him and
had lost all attraction for him. In spite of the magnificent harvest,
never had there been, or, at least, never it seemed to him, had there
been so many hindrances and so many quarrels between him and the
peasants as that year, and the origin of these failures and this
hostility was now perfectly comprehensible to him. The delight he had
experienced in the work itself, and the consequent greater intimacy
with the peasants, the envy he felt of them, of their life, the desire
to adopt that life, which had been to him that night not a dream but an
intention, the execution of which he had thought out in detail—all this
had so transformed his view of the farming of the land as he had
managed it, that he could not take his former interest in it, and could
not help seeing that unpleasant relation between him and the workpeople
which was the foundation of it all. The herd of improved cows such as
Pava, the whole land ploughed over and enriched, the nine level fields
surrounded with hedges, the two hundred and forty acres heavily
manured, the seed sown in drills, and all the rest of it—it was all
splendid if only the work had been done for themselves, or for
themselves and comrades—people in sympathy with them. But he saw
clearly now (his work on a book of agriculture, in which the chief
element in husbandry was to have been the laborer, greatly assisted him
in this) that the sort of farming he was carrying on was nothing but a
cruel and stubborn struggle between him and the laborers, in which
there was on one side—his side—a continual intense effort to change
everything to a pattern he considered better; on the other side, the
natural order of things. And in this struggle he saw that with immense
expenditure of force on his side, and with no effort or even intention
on the other side, all that was attained was that the work did not go
to the liking of either side, and that splendid tools, splendid cattle
and land were spoiled with no good to anyone. Worst of all, the energy
expended on this work was not simply wasted. He could not help feeling
now, since the meaning of this system had become clear to him, that the
aim of his energy was a most unworthy one. In reality, what was the
struggle about? He was struggling for every farthing of his share (and
he could not help it, for he had only to relax his efforts, and he
would not have had the money to pay his laborers’ wages), while they
were only struggling to be able to do their work easily and agreeably,
that is to say, as they were used to doing it. It was for his interests
that every laborer should work as hard as possible, and that while
doing so he should keep his wits about him, so as to try not to break
the winnowing machines, the horse rakes, the thrashing machines, that
he should attend to what he was doing. What the laborer wanted was to
work as pleasantly as possible, with rests, and above all, carelessly
and heedlessly, without thinking. That summer Levin saw this at every
step. He sent the men to mow some clover for hay, picking out the worst
patches where the clover was overgrown with grass and weeds and of no
use for seed; again and again they mowed the best acres of clover,
justifying themselves by the pretense that the bailiff had told them
to, and trying to pacify him with the assurance that it would be
splendid hay; but he knew that it was owing to those acres being so
much easier to mow. He sent out a hay machine for pitching the hay—it
was broken at the first row because it was dull work for a peasant to
sit on the seat in front with the great wings waving above him. And he
was told, “Don’t trouble, your honor, sure, the womenfolks will pitch
it quick enough.” The ploughs were practically useless, because it
never occurred to the laborer to raise the share when he turned the
plough, and forcing it round, he strained the horses and tore up the
ground, and Levin was begged not to mind about it. The horses were
allowed to stray into the wheat because not a single laborer would
consent to be night-watchman, and in spite of orders to the contrary,
the laborers insisted on taking turns for night duty, and Ivan, after
working all day long, fell asleep, and was very penitent for his fault,
saying, “Do what you will to me, your honor.”
They killed three of the best calves by letting them into the clover
aftermath without care as to their drinking, and nothing would make the
men believe that they had been blown out by the clover, but they told
him, by way of consolation, that one of his neighbors had lost a
hundred and twelve head of cattle in three days. All this happened, not
because anyone felt ill-will to Levin or his farm; on the contrary, he
knew that they liked him, thought him a simple gentleman (their highest
praise); but it happened simply because all they wanted was to work
merrily and carelessly, and his interests were not only remote and
incomprehensible to them, but fatally opposed to their most just
claims. Long before, Levin had felt dissatisfaction with his own
position in regard to the land. He saw where his boat leaked, but he
did not look for the leak, perhaps purposely deceiving himself.
(Nothing would be left him if he lost faith in it.) But now he could
deceive himself no longer. The farming of the land, as he was managing
it, had become not merely unattractive but revolting to him, and he
could take no further interest in it.
To this now was joined the presence, only twenty-five miles off, of
Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, whom he longed to see and could not see. Darya
Alexandrovna Oblonskaya had invited him, when he was over there, to
come; to come with the object of renewing his offer to her sister, who
would, so she gave him to understand, accept him now. Levin himself had
felt on seeing Kitty Shtcherbatskaya that he had never ceased to love
her; but he could not go over to the Oblonskys’, knowing she was there.
The fact that he had made her an offer, and she had refused him, had
placed an insuperable barrier between her and him. “I can’t ask her to
be my wife merely because she can’t be the wife of the man she wanted
to marry,” he said to himself. The thought of this made him cold and
hostile to her. “I should not be able to speak to her without a feeling
of reproach; I could not look at her without resentment; and she will
only hate me all the more, as she’s bound to. And besides, how can I
now, after what Darya Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I help
showing that I know what she told me? And me to go magnanimously to
forgive her, and have pity on her! Me go through a performance before
her of forgiving, and deigning to bestow my love on her!... What
induced Darya Alexandrovna to tell me that? By chance I might have seen
her, then everything would have happened of itself; but, as it is, it’s
out of the question, out of the question!”
Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a side-saddle for
Kitty’s use. “I’m told you have a side-saddle,” she wrote to him; “I
hope you will bring it over yourself.”
This was more than he could stand. How could a woman of any
intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister in such a humiliating
position! He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up, and sent the saddle
without any reply. To write that he would go was impossible, because he
could not go; to write that he could not come because something
prevented him, or that he would be away, that was still worse. He sent
the saddle without an answer, and with a sense of having done something
shameful; he handed over all the now revolting business of the estate
to the bailiff, and set off next day to a remote district to see his
friend Sviazhsky, who had splendid marshes for grouse in his
neighborhood, and had lately written to ask him to keep a long-standing
promise to stay with him. The grouse-marsh, in the Surovsky district,
had long tempted Levin, but he had continually put off this visit on
account of his work on the estate. Now he was glad to get away from the
neighborhood of the Shtcherbatskys, and still more from his farm work,
especially on a shooting expedition, which always in trouble served as
the best consolation.
Chapter 25
In the Surovsky district there was no railway nor service of post
horses, and Levin drove there with his own horses in his big,
old-fashioned carriage.
He stopped halfway at a well-to-do peasant’s to feed his horses. A
bald, well-preserved old man, with a broad, red beard, gray on his
cheeks, opened the gate, squeezing against the gatepost to let the
three horses pass. Directing the coachman to a place under the shed in
the big, clean, tidy yard, with charred, old-fashioned ploughs in it,
the old man asked Levin to come into the parlor. A cleanly dressed
young woman, with clogs on her bare feet, was scrubbing the floor in
the new outer room. She was frightened of the dog, that ran in after
Levin, and uttered a shriek, but began laughing at her own fright at
once when she was told the dog would not hurt her. Pointing Levin with
her bare arm to the door into the parlor, she bent down again, hiding
her handsome face, and went on scrubbing.
“Would you like the samovar?” she asked.
“Yes, please.”
The parlor was a big room, with a Dutch stove, and a screen dividing it
into two. Under the holy pictures stood a table painted in patterns, a
bench, and two chairs. Near the entrance was a dresser full of
crockery. The shutters were closed, there were few flies, and it was so
clean that Levin was anxious that Laska, who had been running along the
road and bathing in puddles, should not muddy the floor, and ordered
her to a place in the corner by the door. After looking round the
parlor, Levin went out in the back yard. The good-looking young woman
in clogs, swinging the empty pails on the yoke, ran on before him to
the well for water.
“Look sharp, my girl!” the old man shouted after her, good-humoredly,
and he went up to Levin. “Well, sir, are you going to Nikolay
Ivanovitch Sviazhsky? His honor comes to us too,” he began, chatting,
leaning his elbows on the railing of the steps. In the middle of the
old man’s account of his acquaintance with Sviazhsky, the gates creaked
again, and laborers came into the yard from the fields, with wooden
ploughs and harrows. The horses harnessed to the ploughs and harrows
were sleek and fat. The laborers were obviously of the household: two
were young men in cotton shirts and caps, the two others were hired
laborers in homespun shirts, one an old man, the other a young fellow.
Moving off from the steps, the old man went up to the horses and began
unharnessing them.
“What have they been ploughing?” asked Levin.
“Ploughing up the potatoes. We rent a bit of land too. Fedot, don’t let
out the gelding, but take it to the trough, and we’ll put the other in
harness.”
“Oh, father, the ploughshares I ordered, has he brought them along?”
asked the big, healthy-looking fellow, obviously the old man’s son.
“There ... in the outer room,” answered the old man, bundling together
the harness he had taken off, and flinging it on the ground. “You can
put them on, while they have dinner.”
The good-looking young woman came into the outer room with the full
pails dragging at her shoulders. More women came on the scene from
somewhere, young and handsome, middle-aged, old and ugly, with children
and without children.
The samovar was beginning to sing; the laborers and the family, having
disposed of the horses, came in to dinner. Levin, getting his
provisions out of his carriage, invited the old man to take tea with
him.
“Well, I have had some today already,” said the old man, obviously
accepting the invitation with pleasure. “But just a glass for company.”
Over their tea Levin heard all about the old man’s farming. Ten years
before, the old man had rented three hundred acres from the lady who
owned them, and a year ago he had bought them and rented another three
hundred from a neighboring landowner. A small part of the land—the
worst part—he let out for rent, while a hundred acres of arable land he
cultivated himself with his family and two hired laborers. The old man
complained that things were doing badly. But Levin saw that he simply
did so from a feeling of propriety, and that his farm was in a
flourishing condition. If it had been unsuccessful he would not have
bought land at thirty-five roubles the acre, he would not have married
his three sons and a nephew, he would not have rebuilt twice after
fires, and each time on a larger scale. In spite of the old man’s
complaints, it was evident that he was proud, and justly proud, of his
prosperity, proud of his sons, his nephew, his sons’ wives, his horses
and his cows, and especially of the fact that he was keeping all this
farming going. From his conversation with the old man, Levin thought he
was not averse to new methods either. He had planted a great many
potatoes, and his potatoes, as Levin had seen driving past, were
already past flowering and beginning to die down, while Levin’s were
only just coming into flower. He earthed up his potatoes with a modern
plough borrowed from a neighboring landowner. He sowed wheat. The
trifling fact that, thinning out his rye, the old man used the rye he
thinned out for his horses, specially struck Levin. How many times had
Levin seen this splendid fodder wasted, and tried to get it saved; but
always it had turned out to be impossible. The peasant got this done,
and he could not say enough in praise of it as food for the beasts.
“What have the wenches to do? They carry it out in bundles to the
roadside, and the cart brings it away.”
“Well, we landowners can’t manage well with our laborers,” said Levin,
handing him a glass of tea.
“Thank you,” said the old man, and he took the glass, but refused
sugar, pointing to a lump he had left. “They’re simple destruction,”
said he. “Look at Sviazhsky’s, for instance. We know what the land’s
like—first-rate, yet there’s not much of a crop to boast of. It’s not
looked after enough—that’s all it is!”
“But you work your land with hired laborers?”
“We’re all peasants together. We go into everything ourselves. If a
man’s no use, he can go, and we can manage by ourselves.”
“Father, Finogen wants some tar,” said the young woman in the clogs,
coming in.
“Yes, yes, that’s how it is, sir!” said the old man, getting up, and
crossing himself deliberately, he thanked Levin and went out.
When Levin went into the kitchen to call his coachman he saw the whole
family at dinner. The women were standing up waiting on them. The
young, sturdy-looking son was telling something funny with his mouth
full of pudding, and they were all laughing, the woman in the clogs,
who was pouring cabbage soup into a bowl, laughing most merrily of all.
Very probably the good-looking face of the young woman in the clogs had
a good deal to do with the impression of well-being this peasant
household made upon Levin, but the impression was so strong that Levin
could never get rid of it. And all the way from the old peasant’s to
Sviazhsky’s he kept recalling this peasant farm as though there were
something in this impression that demanded his special attention.
Chapter 26
Sviazhsky was the marshal of his district. He was five years older than
Levin, and had long been married. His sister-in-law, a young girl Levin
liked very much, lived in his house; and Levin knew that Sviazhsky and
his wife would have greatly liked to marry the girl to him. He knew
this with certainty, as so-called eligible young men always know it,
though he could never have brought himself to speak of it to anyone;
and he knew too that, although he wanted to get married, and although
by every token this very attractive girl would make an excellent wife,
he could no more have married her, even if he had not been in love with
Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, than he could have flown up to the sky. And this
knowledge poisoned the pleasure he had hoped to find in the visit to
Sviazhsky.
On getting Sviazhsky’s letter with the invitation for shooting, Levin
had immediately thought of this; but in spite of it he had made up his
mind that Sviazhsky’s having such views for him was simply his own
groundless supposition, and so he would go, all the same. Besides, at
the bottom of his heart he had a desire to try himself, put himself to
the test in regard to this girl. The Sviazhskys’ home-life was
exceedingly pleasant, and Sviazhsky himself, the best type of man
taking part in local affairs that Levin knew, was very interesting to
him.
Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to Levin,
whose convictions, very logical though never original, go one way by
themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and firm in its
direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always in direct
contradiction to their convictions. Sviazhsky was an extremely advanced
man. He despised the nobility, and believed the mass of the nobility to
be secretly in favor of serfdom, and only concealing their views from
cowardice. He regarded Russia as a ruined country, rather after the
style of Turkey, and the government of Russia as so bad that he never
permitted himself to criticize its doings seriously, and yet he was a
functionary of that government and a model marshal of nobility, and
when he drove about he always wore the cockade of office and the cap
with the red band. He considered human life only tolerable abroad, and
went abroad to stay at every opportunity, and at the same time he
carried on a complex and improved system of agriculture in Russia, and
with extreme interest followed everything and knew everything that was
being done in Russia. He considered the Russian peasant as occupying a
stage of development intermediate between the ape and the man, and at
the same time in the local assemblies no one was readier to shake hands
with the peasants and listen to their opinion. He believed neither in
God nor the devil, but was much concerned about the question of the
improvement of the clergy and the maintenance of their revenues, and
took special trouble to keep up the church in his village.
On the woman question he was on the side of the extreme advocates of
complete liberty for women, and especially their right to labor. But he
lived with his wife on such terms that their affectionate childless
home life was the admiration of everyone, and arranged his wife’s life
so that she did nothing and could do nothing but share her husband’s
efforts that her time should pass as happily and as agreeably as
possible.
If it had not been a characteristic of Levin’s to put the most
favorable interpretation on people, Sviazhsky’s character would have
presented no doubt or difficulty to him: he would have said to himself,
“a fool or a knave,” and everything would have seemed clear. But he
could not say “a fool,” because Sviazhsky was unmistakably clever, and
moreover, a highly cultivated man, who was exceptionally modest over
his culture. There was not a subject he knew nothing of. But he did not
display his knowledge except when he was compelled to do so. Still less
could Levin say that he was a knave, as Sviazhsky was unmistakably an
honest, good-hearted, sensible man, who worked good-humoredly, keenly,
and perseveringly at his work; he was held in high honor by everyone
about him, and certainly he had never consciously done, and was indeed
incapable of doing, anything base.
Levin tried to understand him, and could not understand him, and looked
at him and his life as at a living enigma.
Levin and he were very friendly, and so Levin used to venture to sound
Sviazhsky, to try to get at the very foundation of his view of life;
but it was always in vain. Every time Levin tried to penetrate beyond
the outer chambers of Sviazhsky’s mind, which were hospitably open to
all, he noticed that Sviazhsky was slightly disconcerted; faint signs
of alarm were visible in his eyes, as though he were afraid Levin would
understand him, and he would give him a kindly, good-humored repulse.
Just now, since his disenchantment with farming, Levin was particularly
glad to stay with Sviazhsky. Apart from the fact that the sight of this
happy and affectionate couple, so pleased with themselves and everyone
else, and their well-ordered home had always a cheering effect on
Levin, he felt a longing, now that he was so dissatisfied with his own
life, to get at that secret in Sviazhsky that gave him such clearness,
definiteness, and good courage in life. Moreover, Levin knew that at
Sviazhsky’s he should meet the landowners of the neighborhood, and it
was particularly interesting for him just now to hear and take part in
those rural conversations concerning crops, laborers’ wages, and so on,
which, he was aware, are conventionally regarded as something very low,
but which seemed to him just now to constitute the one subject of
importance. “It was not, perhaps, of importance in the days of serfdom,
and it may not be of importance in England. In both cases the
conditions of agriculture are firmly established; but among us now,
when everything has been turned upside down and is only just taking
shape, the question what form these conditions will take is the one
question of importance in Russia,” thought Levin.
The shooting turned out to be worse than Levin had expected. The marsh
was dry and there were no grouse at all. He walked about the whole day
and only brought back three birds, but to make up for that—he brought
back, as he always did from shooting, an excellent appetite, excellent
spirits, and that keen, intellectual mood which with him always
accompanied violent physical exertion. And while out shooting, when he
seemed to be thinking of nothing at all, suddenly the old man and his
family kept coming back to his mind, and the impression of them seemed
to claim not merely his attention, but the solution of some question
connected with them.
In the evening at tea, two landowners who had come about some business
connected with a wardship were of the party, and the interesting
conversation Levin had been looking forward to sprang up.
Levin was sitting beside his hostess at the tea table, and was obliged
to keep up a conversation with her and her sister, who was sitting
opposite him. Madame Sviazhskaya was a round-faced, fair-haired, rather
short woman, all smiles and dimples. Levin tried through her to get a
solution of the weighty enigma her husband presented to his mind; but
he had not complete freedom of ideas, because he was in an agony of
embarrassment. This agony of embarrassment was due to the fact that the
sister-in-law was sitting opposite to him, in a dress, specially put
on, as he fancied, for his benefit, cut particularly open, in the shape
of a trapeze, on her white bosom. This quadrangular opening, in spite
of the bosom’s being very white, or just because it was very white,
deprived Levin of the full use of his faculties. He imagined, probably
mistakenly, that this low-necked bodice had been made on his account,
and felt that he had no right to look at it, and tried not to look at
it; but he felt that he was to blame for the very fact of the
low-necked bodice having been made. It seemed to Levin that he had
deceived someone, that he ought to explain something, but that to
explain it was impossible, and for that reason he was continually
blushing, was ill at ease and awkward. His awkwardness infected the
pretty sister-in-law too. But their hostess appeared not to observe
this, and kept purposely drawing her into the conversation.
“You say,” she said, pursuing the subject that had been started, “that
my husband cannot be interested in what’s Russian. It’s quite the
contrary; he is always in cheerful spirits abroad, but not as he is
here. Here, he feels in his proper place. He has so much to do, and he
has the faculty of interesting himself in everything. Oh, you’ve not
been to see our school, have you?”
“I’ve seen it.... The little house covered with ivy, isn’t it?”
“Yes; that’s Nastia’s work,” she said, indicating her sister.
“You teach in it yourself?” asked Levin, trying to look above the open
neck, but feeling that wherever he looked in that direction he should
see it.
“Yes; I used to teach in it myself, and do teach still, but we have a
first-rate schoolmistress now. And we’ve started gymnastic exercises.”
“No, thank you, I won’t have any more tea,” said Levin, and conscious
of doing a rude thing, but incapable of continuing the conversation, he
got up, blushing. “I hear a very interesting conversation,” he added,
and walked to the other end of the table, where Sviazhsky was sitting
with the two gentlemen of the neighborhood. Sviazhsky was sitting
sideways, with one elbow on the table, and a cup in one hand, while
with the other hand he gathered up his beard, held it to his nose and
let it drop again, as though he were smelling it. His brilliant black
eyes were looking straight at the excited country gentleman with gray
whiskers, and apparently he derived amusement from his remarks. The
gentleman was complaining of the peasants. It was evident to Levin that
Sviazhsky knew an answer to this gentleman’s complaints, which would at
once demolish his whole contention, but that in his position he could
not give utterance to this answer, and listened, not without pleasure,
to the landowner’s comic speeches.
The gentleman with the gray whiskers was obviously an inveterate
adherent of serfdom and a devoted agriculturist, who had lived all his
life in the country. Levin saw proofs of this in his dress, in the
old-fashioned threadbare coat, obviously not his everyday attire, in
his shrewd, deep-set eyes, in his idiomatic, fluent Russian, in the
imperious tone that had become habitual from long use, and in the
resolute gestures of his large, red, sunburnt hands, with an old
betrothal ring on the little finger.
Chapter 27
“If I’d only the heart to throw up what’s been set going ... such a lot
of trouble wasted ... I’d turn my back on the whole business, sell up,
go off like Nikolay Ivanovitch ... to hear _La Belle Hélène_,” said the
landowner, a pleasant smile lighting up his shrewd old face.
“But you see you don’t throw it up,” said Nikolay Ivanovitch Sviazhsky;
“so there must be something gained.”
“The only gain is that I live in my own house, neither bought nor
hired. Besides, one keeps hoping the people will learn sense. Though,
instead of that, you’d never believe it—the drunkenness, the
immorality! They keep chopping and changing their bits of land. Not a
sight of a horse or a cow. The peasant’s dying of hunger, but just go
and take him on as a laborer, he’ll do his best to do you a mischief,
and then bring you up before the justice of the peace.”
“But then you make complaints to the justice too,” said Sviazhsky.
“I lodge complaints? Not for anything in the world! Such a talking, and
such a to-do, that one would have cause to regret it. At the works, for
instance, they pocketed the advance-money and made off. What did the
justice do? Why, acquitted them. Nothing keeps them in order but their
own communal court and their village elder. He’ll flog them in the good
old style! But for that there’d be nothing for it but to give it all up
and run away.”
Obviously the landowner was chaffing Sviazhsky, who, far from resenting
it, was apparently amused by it.
“But you see we manage our land without such extreme measures,” said
he, smiling: “Levin and I and this gentleman.”
He indicated the other landowner.
“Yes, the thing’s done at Mihail Petrovitch’s, but ask him how it’s
done. Do you call that a rational system?” said the landowner,
obviously rather proud of the word “rational.”
“My system’s very simple,” said Mihail Petrovitch, “thank God. All my
management rests on getting the money ready for the autumn taxes, and
the peasants come to me, ‘Father, master, help us!’ Well, the peasants
are all one’s neighbors; one feels for them. So one advances them a
third, but one says: ‘Remember, lads, I have helped you, and you must
help me when I need it—whether it’s the sowing of the oats, or the
haycutting, or the harvest’; and well, one agrees, so much for each
taxpayer—though there are dishonest ones among them too, it’s true.”
Levin, who had long been familiar with these patriarchal methods,
exchanged glances with Sviazhsky and interrupted Mihail Petrovitch,
turning again to the gentleman with the gray whiskers.
“Then what do you think?” he asked; “what system is one to adopt
nowadays?”
“Why, manage like Mihail Petrovitch, or let the land for half the crop
or for rent to the peasants; that one can do—only that’s just how the
general prosperity of the country is being ruined. Where the land with
serf-labor and good management gave a yield of nine to one, on the
half-crop system it yields three to one. Russia has been ruined by the
emancipation!”
Sviazhsky looked with smiling eyes at Levin, and even made a faint
gesture of irony to him; but Levin did not think the landowner’s words
absurd, he understood them better than he did Sviazhsky. A great deal
more of what the gentleman with the gray whiskers said to show in what
way Russia was ruined by the emancipation struck him indeed as very
true, new to him, and quite incontestable. The landowner unmistakably
spoke his own individual thought—a thing that very rarely happens—and a
thought to which he had been brought not by a desire of finding some
exercise for an idle brain, but a thought which had grown up out of the
conditions of his life, which he had brooded over in the solitude of
his village, and had considered in every aspect.
“The point is, don’t you see, that progress of every sort is only made
by the use of authority,” he said, evidently wishing to show he was not
without culture. “Take the reforms of Peter, of Catherine, of
Alexander. Take European history. And progress in agriculture more than
anything else—the potato, for instance, that was introduced among us by
force. The wooden plough too wasn’t always used. It was introduced
maybe in the days before the Empire, but it was probably brought in by
force. Now, in our own day, we landowners in the serf times used
various improvements in our husbandry: drying machines and thrashing
machines, and carting manure and all the modern implements—all that we
brought into use by our authority, and the peasants opposed it at
first, and ended by imitating us. Now, by the abolition of serfdom we
have been deprived of our authority; and so our husbandry, where it had
been raised to a high level, is bound to sink to the most savage
primitive condition. That’s how I see it.”
“But why so? If it’s rational, you’ll be able to keep up the same
system with hired labor,” said Sviazhsky.
“We’ve no power over them. With whom am I going to work the system,
allow me to ask?”
“There it is—the labor force—the chief element in agriculture,” thought
Levin.
“With laborers.”
“The laborers won’t work well, and won’t work with good implements. Our
laborer can do nothing but get drunk like a pig, and when he’s drunk he
ruins everything you give him. He makes the horses ill with too much
water, cuts good harness, barters the tires of the wheels for drink,
drops bits of iron into the thrashing machine, so as to break it. He
loathes the sight of anything that’s not after his fashion. And that’s
how it is the whole level of husbandry has fallen. Lands gone out of
cultivation, overgrown with weeds, or divided among the peasants, and
where millions of bushels were raised you get a hundred thousand; the
wealth of the country has decreased. If the same thing had been done,
but with care that....”
And he proceeded to unfold his own scheme of emancipation by means of
which these drawbacks might have been avoided.
This did not interest Levin, but when he had finished, Levin went back
to his first position, and, addressing Sviazhsky, and trying to draw
him into expressing his serious opinion:—
“That the standard of culture is falling, and that with our present
relations to the peasants there is no possibility of farming on a
rational system to yield a profit—that’s perfectly true,” said he.
“I don’t believe it,” Sviazhsky replied quite seriously; “all I see is
that we don’t know how to cultivate the land, and that our system of
agriculture in the serf days was by no means too high, but too low. We
have no machines, no good stock, no efficient supervision; we don’t
even know how to keep accounts. Ask any landowner; he won’t be able to
tell you what crop’s profitable, and what’s not.”
“Italian bookkeeping,” said the gentleman of the gray whiskers
ironically. “You may keep your books as you like, but if they spoil
everything for you, there won’t be any profit.”
“Why do they spoil things? A poor thrashing machine, or your Russian
presser, they will break, but my steam press they don’t break. A
wretched Russian nag they’ll ruin, but keep good dray-horses—they won’t
ruin them. And so it is all round. We must raise our farming to a
higher level.”
“Oh, if one only had the means to do it, Nikolay Ivanovitch! It’s all
very well for you; but for me, with a son to keep at the university,
lads to be educated at the high school—how am I going to buy these
dray-horses?”
“Well, that’s what the land banks are for.”
“To get what’s left me sold by auction? No, thank you.”
“I don’t agree that it’s necessary or possible to raise the level of
agriculture still higher,” said Levin. “I devote myself to it, and I
have means, but I can do nothing. As to the banks, I don’t know to whom
they’re any good. For my part, anyway, whatever I’ve spent money on in
the way of husbandry, it has been a loss: stock—a loss, machinery—a
loss.”
“That’s true enough,” the gentleman with the gray whiskers chimed in,
positively laughing with satisfaction.
“And I’m not the only one,” pursued Levin. “I mix with all the
neighboring landowners, who are cultivating their land on a rational
system; they all, with rare exceptions, are doing so at a loss. Come,
tell us how does your land do—does it pay?” said Levin, and at once in
Sviazhsky’s eyes he detected that fleeting expression of alarm which he
had noticed whenever he had tried to penetrate beyond the outer
chambers of Sviazhsky’s mind.
Moreover, this question on Levin’s part was not quite in good faith.
Madame Sviazhskaya had just told him at tea that they had that summer
invited a German expert in bookkeeping from Moscow, who for a
consideration of five hundred roubles had investigated the management
of their property, and found that it was costing them a loss of three
thousand odd roubles. She did not remember the precise sum, but it
appeared that the German had worked it out to the fraction of a
farthing.
The gray-whiskered landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of
Sviazhsky’s famling, obviously aware how much gain his neighbor and
marshal was likely to be making.
“Possibly it does not pay,” answered Sviazhsky. “That merely proves
either that I’m a bad manager, or that I’ve sunk my capital for the
increase of my rents.”
“Oh, rent!” Levin cried with horror. “Rent there may be in Europe,
where land has been improved by the labor put into it, but with us all
the land is deteriorating from the labor put into it—in other words
they’re working it out; so there’s no question of rent.”
“How no rent? It’s a law.”
“Then we’re outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but simply
muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent?...”
“Will you have some junket? Masha, pass us some junket or raspberries.”
He turned to his wife. “Extraordinarily late the raspberries are
lasting this year.”
And in the happiest frame of mind Sviazhsky got up and walked off,
apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very point
when to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning.
Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with the
gray-whiskered landowner, trying to prove to him that all the
difficulty arises from the fact that we don’t find out the
peculiarities and habits of our laborer; but the landowner, like all
men who think independently and in isolation, was slow in taking in any
other person’s idea, and particularly partial to his own. He stuck to
it that the Russian peasant is a swine and likes swinishness, and that
to get him out of his swinishness one must have authority, and there is
none; one must have the stick, and we have become so liberal that we
have all of a sudden replaced the stick that served us for a thousand
years by lawyers and model prisons, where the worthless, stinking
peasant is fed on good soup and has a fixed allowance of cubic feet of
air.
“What makes you think,” said Levin, trying to get back to the question,
“that it’s impossible to find some relation to the laborer in which the
labor would become productive?”
“That never could be so with the Russian peasantry; we’ve no power over
them,” answered the landowner.
“How can new conditions be found?” said Sviazhsky. Having eaten some
junket and lighted a cigarette, he came back to the discussion. “All
possible relations to the labor force have been defined and studied,”
he said. “The relic of barbarism, the primitive commune with each
guarantee for all, will disappear of itself; serfdom has been
abolished—there remains nothing but free labor, and its forms are fixed
and ready made, and must be adopted. Permanent hands, day-laborers,
rammers—you can’t get out of those forms.”
“But Europe is dissatisfied with these forms.”
“Dissatisfied, and seeking new ones. And will find them, in all
probability.”
“That’s just what I was meaning,” answered Levin. “Why shouldn’t we
seek them for ourselves?”
“Because it would be just like inventing afresh the means for
constructing railways. They are ready, invented.”
“But if they don’t do for us, if they’re stupid?” said Levin.
And again he detected the expression of alarm in the eyes of Sviazhsky.
“Oh, yes; we’ll bury the world under our caps! We’ve found the secret
Europe was seeking for! I’ve heard all that; but, excuse me, do you
know all that’s been done in Europe on the question of the organization
of labor?”
“No, very little.”
“That question is now absorbing the best minds in Europe. The
Schulze-Delitsch movement.... And then all this enormous literature of
the labor question, the most liberal Lassalle movement ... the
Mulhausen experiment? That’s a fact by now, as you’re probably aware.”
“I have some idea of it, but very vague.”
“No, you only say that; no doubt you know all about it as well as I do.
I’m not a professor of sociology, of course, but it interested me, and
really, if it interests you, you ought to study it.”
“But what conclusion have they come to?”
“Excuse me....”
The two neighbors had risen, and Sviazhsky, once more checking Levin in
his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond the outer
chambers of his mind, went to see his guests out.
Chapter 28
Levin was insufferably bored that evening with the ladies; he was
stirred as he had never been before by the idea that the
dissatisfaction he was feeling with his system of managing his land was
not an exceptional case, but the general condition of things in Russia;
that the organization of some relation of the laborers to the soil in
which they would work, as with the peasant he had met half-way to the
Sviazhskys’, was not a dream, but a problem which must be solved. And
it seemed to him that the problem could be solved, and that he ought to
try and solve it.
After saying good-night to the ladies, and promising to stay the whole
of the next day, so as to make an expedition on horseback with them to
see an interesting ruin in the crown forest, Levin went, before going
to bed, into his host’s study to get the books on the labor question
that Sviazhsky had offered him. Sviazhsky’s study was a huge room,
surrounded by bookcases and with two tables in it—one a massive
writing-table, standing in the middle of the room, and the other a
round table, covered with recent numbers of reviews and journals in
different languages, ranged like the rays of a star round the lamp. On
the writing-table was a stand of drawers marked with gold lettering,
and full of papers of various sorts.
Sviazhsky took out the books, and sat down in a rocking-chair.
“What are you looking at there?” he said to Levin, who was standing at
the round table looking through the reviews.
“Oh, yes, there’s a very interesting article here,” said Sviazhsky of
the review Levin was holding in his hand. “It appears,” he went on,
with eager interest, “that Friedrich was not, after all, the person
chiefly responsible for the partition of Poland. It is proved....”
And with his characteristic clearness, he summed up those new, very
important, and interesting revelations. Although Levin was engrossed at
the moment by his ideas about the problem of the land, he wondered, as
he heard Sviazhsky: “What is there inside of him? And why, why is he
interested in the partition of Poland?” When Sviazhsky had finished,
Levin could not help asking: “Well, and what then?” But there was
nothing to follow. It was simply interesting that it had been proved to
be so and so. But Sviazhsky did not explain, and saw no need to explain
why it was interesting to him.
“Yes, but I was very much interested by your irritable neighbor,” said
Levin, sighing. “He’s a clever fellow, and said a lot that was true.”
“Oh, get along with you! An inveterate supporter of serfdom at heart,
like all of them!” said Sviazhsky.
“Whose marshal you are.”
“Yes, only I marshal them in the other direction,” said Sviazhsky,
laughing.
“I’ll tell you what interests me very much,” said Levin. “He’s right
that our system, that’s to say of rational farming, doesn’t answer,
that the only thing that answers is the money-lender system, like that
meek-looking gentleman’s, or else the very simplest.... Whose fault is
it?”
“Our own, of course. Besides, it’s not true that it doesn’t answer. It
answers with Vassiltchikov.”
“A factory....”
“But I really don’t know what it is you are surprised at. The people
are at such a low stage of rational and moral development, that it’s
obvious they’re bound to oppose everything that’s strange to them. In
Europe, a rational system answers because the people are educated; it
follows that we must educate the people—that’s all.”
“But how are we to educate the people?”
“To educate the people three things are needed: schools, and schools,
and schools.”
“But you said yourself the people are at such a low stage of material
development: what help are schools for that?”
“Do you know, you remind me of the story of the advice given to the
sick man—You should try purgative medicine. Taken: worse. Try leeches.
Tried them: worse. Well, then, there’s nothing left but to pray to God.
Tried it: worse. That’s just how it is with us. I say political
economy; you say—worse. I say socialism: worse. Education: worse.”
“But how do schools help matters?”
“They give the peasant fresh wants.”
“Well, that’s a thing I’ve never understood,” Levin replied with heat.
“In what way are schools going to help the people to improve their
material position? You say schools, education, will give them fresh
wants. So much the worse, since they won’t be capable of satisfying
them. And in what way a knowledge of addition and subtraction and the
catechism is going to improve their material condition, I never could
make out. The day before yesterday, I met a peasant woman in the
evening with a little baby, and asked her where she was going. She said
she was going to the wise woman; her boy had screaming fits, so she was
taking him to be doctored. I asked, ‘Why, how does the wise woman cure
screaming fits?’ ‘She puts the child on the hen-roost and repeats some
charm....’”
“Well, you’re saying it yourself! What’s wanted to prevent her taking
her child to the hen-roost to cure it of screaming fits is just....”
Sviazhsky said, smiling good-humoredly.
“Oh, no!” said Levin with annoyance; “that method of doctoring I merely
meant as a simile for doctoring the people with schools. The people are
poor and ignorant—that we see as surely as the peasant woman sees the
baby is ill because it screams. But in what way this trouble of poverty
and ignorance is to be cured by schools is as incomprehensible as how
the hen-roost affects the screaming. What has to be cured is what makes
him poor.”
“Well, in that, at least, you’re in agreement with Spencer, whom you
dislike so much. He says, too, that education may be the consequence of
greater prosperity and comfort, of more frequent washing, as he says,
but not of being able to read and write....”
“Well, then, I’m very glad—or the contrary, very sorry, that I’m in
agreement with Spencer; only I’ve known it a long while. Schools can do
no good; what will do good is an economic organization in which the
people will become richer, will have more leisure—and then there will
be schools.”
“Still, all over Europe now schools are obligatory.”
“And how far do you agree with Spencer yourself about it?” asked Levin.
But there was a gleam of alarm in Sviazhsky’s eyes, and he said
smiling:
“No; that screaming story is positively capital! Did you really hear it
yourself?”
Levin saw that he was not to discover the connection between this man’s
life and his thoughts. Obviously he did not care in the least what his
reasoning led him to; all he wanted was the process of reasoning. And
he did not like it when the process of reasoning brought him into a
blind alley. That was the only thing he disliked, and avoided by
changing the conversation to something agreeable and amusing.
All the impressions of the day, beginning with the impression made by
the old peasant, which served, as it were, as the fundamental basis of
all the conceptions and ideas of the day, threw Levin into violent
excitement. This dear good Sviazhsky, keeping a stock of ideas simply
for social purposes, and obviously having some other principles hidden
from Levin, while with the crowd, whose name is legion, he guided
public opinion by ideas he did not share; that irascible country
gentleman, perfectly correct in the conclusions that he had been
worried into by life, but wrong in his exasperation against a whole
class, and that the best class in Russia; his own dissatisfaction with
the work he had been doing, and the vague hope of finding a remedy for
all this—all was blended in a sense of inward turmoil, and anticipation
of some solution near at hand.
Left alone in the room assigned him, lying on a spring mattress that
yielded unexpectedly at every movement of his arm or his leg, Levin did
not fall asleep for a long while. Not one conversation with Sviazhsky,
though he had said a great deal that was clever, had interested Levin;
but the conclusions of the irascible landowner required consideration.
Levin could not help recalling every word he had said, and in
imagination amending his own replies.
“Yes, I ought to have said to him: You say that our husbandry does not
answer because the peasant hates improvements, and that they must be
forced on him by authority. If no system of husbandry answered at all
without these improvements, you would be quite right. But the only
system that does answer is where laborer is working in accordance with
his habits, just as on the old peasant’s land half-way here. Your and
our general dissatisfaction with the system shows that either we are to
blame or the laborers. We have gone our way—the European way—a long
while, without asking ourselves about the qualities of our labor force.
Let us try to look upon the labor force not as an abstract force, but
as the _Russian peasant_ with his instincts, and we shall arrange our
system of culture in accordance with that. Imagine, I ought to have
said to him, that you have the same system as the old peasant has, that
you have found means of making your laborers take an interest in the
success of the work, and have found the happy mean in the way of
improvements which they will admit, and you will, without exhausting
the soil, get twice or three times the yield you got before. Divide it
in halves, give half as the share of labor, the surplus left you will
be greater, and the share of labor will be greater too. And to do this
one must lower the standard of husbandry and interest the laborers in
its success. How to do this?—that’s a matter of detail; but undoubtedly
it can be done.”
This idea threw Levin into a great excitement. He did not sleep half
the night, thinking over in detail the putting of his idea into
practice. He had not intended to go away next day, but he now
determined to go home early in the morning. Besides, the sister-in-law
with her low-necked bodice aroused in him a feeling akin to shame and
remorse for some utterly base action. Most important of all—he must get
back without delay: he would have to make haste to put his new project
to the peasants before the sowing of the winter wheat, so that the
sowing might be undertaken on a new basis. He had made up his mind to
revolutionize his whole system.
Chapter 29
The carrying out of Levin’s plan presented many difficulties; but he
struggled on, doing his utmost, and attained a result which, though not
what he desired, was enough to enable him, without self-deception, to
believe that the attempt was worth the trouble. One of the chief
difficulties was that the process of cultivating the land was in full
swing, that it was impossible to stop everything and begin it all again
from the beginning, and the machine had to be mended while in motion.
When on the evening that he arrived home he informed the bailiff of his
plans, the latter with visible pleasure agreed with what he said so
long as he was pointing out that all that had been done up to that time
was stupid and useless. The bailiff said that he had said so a long
while ago, but no heed had been paid him. But as for the proposal made
by Levin—to take a part as shareholder with his laborers in each
agricultural undertaking—at this the bailiff simply expressed a
profound despondency, and offered no definite opinion, but began
immediately talking of the urgent necessity of carrying the remaining
sheaves of rye the next day, and of sending the men out for the second
ploughing, so that Levin felt that this was not the time for discussing
it.
On beginning to talk to the peasants about it, and making a proposition
to cede them the land on new terms, he came into collision with the
same great difficulty that they were so much absorbed by the current
work of the day, that they had not time to consider the advantages and
disadvantages of the proposed scheme.
The simple-hearted Ivan, the cowherd, seemed completely to grasp
Levin’s proposal—that he should with his family take a share of the
profits of the cattle-yard—and he was in complete sympathy with the
plan. But when Levin hinted at the future advantages, Ivan’s face
expressed alarm and regret that he could not hear all he had to say,
and he made haste to find himself some task that would admit of no
delay: he either snatched up the fork to pitch the hay out of the pens,
or ran to get water or to clear out the dung.
Another difficulty lay in the invincible disbelief of the peasant that
a landowner’s object could be anything else than a desire to squeeze
all he could out of them. They were firmly convinced that his real aim
(whatever he might say to them) would always be in what he did not say
to them. And they themselves, in giving their opinion, said a great
deal but never said what was their real object. Moreover (Levin felt
that the irascible landowner had been right) the peasants made their
first and unalterable condition of any agreement whatever that they
should not be forced to any new methods of tillage of any kind, nor to
use new implements. They agreed that the modern plough ploughed better,
that the scarifier did the work more quickly, but they found thousands
of reasons that made it out of the question for them to use either of
them; and though he had accepted the conviction that he would have to
lower the standard of cultivation, he felt sorry to give up improved
methods, the advantages of which were so obvious. But in spite of all
these difficulties he got his way, and by autumn the system was
working, or at least so it seemed to him.
At first Levin had thought of giving up the whole farming of the land
just as it was to the peasants, the laborers, and the bailiff on new
conditions of partnership; but he was very soon convinced that this was
impossible, and determined to divide it up. The cattle-yard, the
garden, hay fields, and arable land, divided into several parts, had to
be made into separate lots. The simple-hearted cowherd, Ivan, who,
Levin fancied, understood the matter better than any of them,
collecting together a gang of workers to help him, principally of his
own family, became a partner in the cattle-yard. A distant part of the
estate, a tract of waste land that had lain fallow for eight years, was
with the help of the clever carpenter, Fyodor Ryezunov, taken by six
families of peasants on new conditions of partnership, and the peasant
Shuraev took the management of all the vegetable gardens on the same
terms. The remainder of the land was still worked on the old system,
but these three associated partnerships were the first step to a new
organization of the whole, and they completely took up Levin’s time.
It is true that in the cattle-yard things went no better than before,
and Ivan strenuously opposed warm housing for the cows and butter made
of fresh cream, affirming that cows require less food if kept cold, and
that butter is more profitable made from sour cream, and he asked for
wages just as under the old system, and took not the slightest interest
in the fact that the money he received was not wages but an advance out
of his future share in the profits.
It is true that Fyodor Ryezunov’s company did not plough over the
ground twice before sowing, as had been agreed, justifying themselves
on the plea that the time was too short. It is true that the peasants
of the same company, though they had agreed to work the land on new
conditions, always spoke of the land, not as held in partnership, but
as rented for half the crop, and more than once the peasants and
Ryezunov himself said to Levin, “If you would take a rent for the land,
it would save you trouble, and we should be more free.” Moreover the
same peasants kept putting off, on various excuses, the building of a
cattleyard and barn on the land as agreed upon, and delayed doing it
till the winter.
It is true that Shuraev would have liked to let out the kitchen gardens
he had undertaken in small lots to the peasants. He evidently quite
misunderstood, and apparently intentionally misunderstood, the
conditions upon which the land had been given to him.
Often, too, talking to the peasants and explaining to them all the
advantages of the plan, Levin felt that the peasants heard nothing but
the sound of his voice, and were firmly resolved, whatever he might
say, not to let themselves be taken in. He felt this especially when he
talked to the cleverest of the peasants, Ryezunov, and detected the
gleam in Ryezunov’s eyes which showed so plainly both ironical
amusement at Levin, and the firm conviction that, if anyone were to be
taken in, it would not be he, Ryezunov. But in spite of all this Levin
thought the system worked, and that by keeping accounts strictly and
insisting on his own way, he would prove to them in the future the
advantages of the arrangement, and then the system would go of itself.
These matters, together with the management of the land still left on
his hands, and the indoor work over his book, so engrossed Levin the
whole summer that he scarcely ever went out shooting. At the end of
August he heard that the Oblonskys had gone away to Moscow, from their
servant who brought back the side-saddle. He felt that in not answering
Darya Alexandrovna’s letter he had by his rudeness, of which he could
not think without a flush of shame, burned his ships, and that he would
never go and see them again. He had been just as rude with the
Sviazhskys, leaving them without saying good-bye. But he would never go
to see them again either. He did not care about that now. The business
of reorganizing the farming of his land absorbed him as completely as
though there would never be anything else in his life. He read the
books lent him by Sviazhsky, and copying out what he had not got, he
read both the economic and socialistic books on the subject, but, as he
had anticipated, found nothing bearing on the scheme he had undertaken.
In the books on political economy—in Mill, for instance, whom he
studied first with great ardor, hoping every minute to find an answer
to the questions that were engrossing him—he found laws deduced from
the condition of land culture in Europe; but he did not see why these
laws, which did not apply in Russia, must be general. He saw just the
same thing in the socialistic books: either they were the beautiful but
impracticable fantasies which had fascinated him when he was a student,
or they were attempts at improving, rectifying the economic position in
which Europe was placed, with which the system of land tenure in Russia
had nothing in common. Political economy told him that the laws by
which the wealth of Europe had been developed, and was developing, were
universal and unvarying. Socialism told him that development along
these lines leads to ruin. And neither of them gave an answer, or even
a hint, in reply to the question what he, Levin, and all the Russian
peasants and landowners, were to do with their millions of hands and
millions of acres, to make them as productive as possible for the
common weal.
Having once taken the subject up, he read conscientiously everything
bearing on it, and intended in the autumn to go abroad to study land
systems on the spot, in order that he might not on this question be
confronted with what so often met him on various subjects. Often, just
as he was beginning to understand the idea in the mind of anyone he was
talking to, and was beginning to explain his own, he would suddenly be
told: “But Kauffmann, but Jones, but Dubois, but Michelli? You haven’t
read them: they’ve thrashed that question out thoroughly.”
He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to tell
him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia has splendid land,
splendid laborers, and that in certain cases, as at the peasant’s on
the way to Sviazhsky’s, the produce raised by the laborers and the land
is great—in the majority of cases when capital is applied in the
European way the produce is small, and that this simply arises from the
fact that the laborers want to work and work well only in their own
peculiar way, and that this antagonism is not incidental but
invariable, and has its roots in the national spirit. He thought that
the Russian people whose task it was to colonize and cultivate vast
tracts of unoccupied land, consciously adhered, till all their land was
occupied, to the methods suitable to their purpose, and that their
methods were by no means so bad as was generally supposed. And he
wanted to prove this theoretically in his book and practically on his
land.
Chapter 30
At the end of September the timber had been carted for building the
cattleyard on the land that had been allotted to the association of
peasants, and the butter from the cows was sold and the profits
divided. In practice the system worked capitally, or, at least, so it
seemed to Levin. In order to work out the whole subject theoretically
and to complete his book, which, in Levin’s daydreams, was not merely
to effect a revolution in political economy, but to annihilate that
science entirely and to lay the foundation of a new science of the
relation of the people to the soil, all that was left to do was to make
a tour abroad, and to study on the spot all that had been done in the
same direction, and to collect conclusive evidence that all that had
been done there was not what was wanted. Levin was only waiting for the
delivery of his wheat to receive the money for it and go abroad. But
the rains began, preventing the harvesting of the corn and potatoes
left in the fields, and putting a stop to all work, even to the
delivery of the wheat.
The mud was impassable along the roads; two mills were carried away,
and the weather got worse and worse.
On the 30th of September the sun came out in the morning, and hoping
for fine weather, Levin began making final preparations for his
journey. He gave orders for the wheat to be delivered, sent the bailiff
to the merchant to get the money owing him, and went out himself to
give some final directions on the estate before setting off.
Having finished all his business, soaked through with the streams of
water which kept running down the leather behind his neck and his
gaiters, but in the keenest and most confident temper, Levin returned
homewards in the evening. The weather had become worse than ever
towards evening; the hail lashed the drenched mare so cruelly that she
went along sideways, shaking her head and ears; but Levin was all right
under his hood, and he looked cheerfully about him at the muddy streams
running under the wheels, at the drops hanging on every bare twig, at
the whiteness of the patch of unmelted hailstones on the planks of the
bridge, at the thick layer of still juicy, fleshy leaves that lay
heaped up about the stripped elm-tree. In spite of the gloominess of
nature around him, he felt peculiarly eager. The talks he had been
having with the peasants in the further village had shown that they
were beginning to get used to their new position. The old servant to
whose hut he had gone to get dry evidently approved of Levin’s plan,
and of his own accord proposed to enter the partnership by the purchase
of cattle.
“I have only to go stubbornly on towards my aim, and I shall attain my
end,” thought Levin; “and it’s something to work and take trouble for.
This is not a matter of myself individually; the question of the public
welfare comes into it. The whole system of culture, the chief element
in the condition of the people, must be completely transformed. Instead
of poverty, general prosperity and content; instead of hostility,
harmony and unity of interests. In short, a bloodless revolution, but a
revolution of the greatest magnitude, beginning in the little circle of
our district, then the province, then Russia, the whole world. Because
a just idea cannot but be fruitful. Yes, it’s an aim worth working for.
And its being me, Kostya Levin, who went to a ball in a black tie, and
was refused by the Shtcherbatskaya girl, and who was intrinsically such
a pitiful, worthless creature—that proves nothing; I feel sure Franklin
felt just as worthless, and he too had no faith in himself, thinking of
himself as a whole. That means nothing. And he too, most likely, had an
Agafea Mihalovna to whom he confided his secrets.”
Musing on such thoughts Levin reached home in the darkness.
The bailiff, who had been to the merchant, had come back and brought
part of the money for the wheat. An agreement had been made with the
old servant, and on the road the bailiff had learned that everywhere
the corn was still standing in the fields, so that his one hundred and
sixty shocks that had not been carried were nothing in comparison with
the losses of others.
After dinner Levin was sitting, as he usually did, in an easy chair
with a book, and as he read he went on thinking of the journey before
him in connection with his book. Today all the significance of his book
rose before him with special distinctness, and whole periods ranged
themselves in his mind in illustration of his theories. “I must write
that down,” he thought. “That ought to form a brief introduction, which
I thought unnecessary before.” He got up to go to his writing-table,
and Laska, lying at his feet, got up too, stretching and looking at him
as though to inquire where to go. But he had not time to write it down,
for the head peasants had come round, and Levin went out into the hall
to them.
After his levee, that is to say, giving directions about the labors of
the next day, and seeing all the peasants who had business with him,
Levin went back to his study and sat down to work.
Laska lay under the table; Agafea Mihalovna settled herself in her
place with her stocking.
After writing for a little while, Levin suddenly thought with
exceptional vividness of Kitty, her refusal, and their last meeting. He
got up and began walking about the room.
“What’s the use of being dreary?” said Agafea Mihalovna. “Come, why do
you stay on at home? You ought to go to some warm springs, especially
now you’re ready for the journey.”
“Well, I am going away the day after tomorrow, Agafea Mihalovna; I must
finish my work.”
“There, there, your work, you say! As if you hadn’t done enough for the
peasants! Why, as ’tis, they’re saying, ‘Your master will be getting
some honor from the Tsar for it.’ Indeed and it is a strange thing; why
need you worry about the peasants?”
“I’m not worrying about them; I’m doing it for my own good.”
Agafea Mihalovna knew every detail of Levin’s plans for his land. Levin
often put his views before her in all their complexity, and not
uncommonly he argued with her and did not agree with her comments. But
on this occasion she entirely misinterpreted what he had said.
“Of one’s soul’s salvation we all know and must think before all else,”
she said with a sigh. “Parfen Denisitch now, for all he was no scholar,
he died a death that God grant everyone of us the like,” she said,
referring to a servant who had died recently. “Took the sacrament and
all.”
“That’s not what I mean,” said he. “I mean that I’m acting for my own
advantage. It’s all the better for me if the peasants do their work
better.”
“Well, whatever you do, if he’s a lazy good-for-nought, everything’ll
be at sixes and sevens. If he has a conscience, he’ll work, and if not,
there’s no doing anything.”
“Oh, come, you say yourself Ivan has begun looking after the cattle
better.”
“All I say is,” answered Agafea Mihalovna, evidently not speaking at
random, but in strict sequence of idea, “that you ought to get married,
that’s what I say.”
Agafea Mihalovna’s allusion to the very subject he had only just been
thinking about, hurt and stung him. Levin scowled, and without
answering her, he sat down again to his work, repeating to himself all
that he had been thinking of the real significance of that work. Only
at intervals he listened in the stillness to the click of Agafea
Mihalovna’s needles, and recollecting what he did not want to remember,
he frowned again.
At nine o’clock they heard the bell and the faint vibration of a
carriage over the mud.
“Well, here’s visitors come to us, and you won’t be dull,” said Agafea
Mihalovna, getting up and going to the door. But Levin overtook her.
His work was not going well now, and he was glad of a visitor, whoever
it might be.
Chapter 31
Running halfway down the staircase, Levin caught a sound he knew, a
familiar cough in the hall. But he heard it indistinctly through the
sound of his own footsteps, and hoped he was mistaken. Then he caught
sight of a long, bony, familiar figure, and now it seemed there was no
possibility of mistake; and yet he still went on hoping that this tall
man taking off his fur cloak and coughing was not his brother Nikolay.
Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torture. Just
now, when Levin, under the influence of the thoughts that had come to
him, and Agafea Mihalovna’s hint, was in a troubled and uncertain
humor, the meeting with his brother that he had to face seemed
particularly difficult. Instead of a lively, healthy visitor, some
outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain humor, he
had to see his brother, who knew him through and through, who would
call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force him to show
himself fully. And that he was not disposed to do.
Angry with himself for so base a feeling, Levin ran into the hall; as
soon as he had seen his brother close, this feeling of selfish
disappointment vanished instantly and was replaced by pity. Terrible as
his brother Nikolay had been before in his emaciation and sickliness,
now he looked still more emaciated, still more wasted. He was a
skeleton covered with skin.
He stood in the hall, jerking his long thin neck, and pulling the scarf
off it, and smiled a strange and pitiful smile. When he saw that smile,
submissive and humble, Levin felt something clutching at his throat.
“You see, I’ve come to you,” said Nikolay in a thick voice, never for
one second taking his eyes off his brother’s face. “I’ve been meaning
to a long while, but I’ve been unwell all the time. Now I’m ever so
much better,” he said, rubbing his beard with his big thin hands.
“Yes, yes!” answered Levin. And he felt still more frightened when,
kissing him, he felt with his lips the dryness of his brother’s skin
and saw close to him his big eyes, full of a strange light.
A few weeks before, Konstantin Levin had written to his brother that
through the sale of the small part of the property, that had remained
undivided, there was a sum of about two thousand roubles to come to him
as his share.
Nikolay said that he had come now to take this money and, what was more
important, to stay a while in the old nest, to get in touch with the
earth, so as to renew his strength like the heroes of old for the work
that lay before him. In spite of his exaggerated stoop, and the
emaciation that was so striking from his height, his movements were as
rapid and abrupt as ever. Levin led him into his study.
His brother dressed with particular care—a thing he never used to
do—combed his scanty, lank hair, and, smiling, went upstairs.
He was in the most affectionate and good-humored mood, just as Levin
often remembered him in childhood. He even referred to Sergey
Ivanovitch without rancor. When he saw Agafea Mihalovna, he made jokes
with her and asked after the old servants. The news of the death of
Parfen Denisitch made a painful impression on him. A look of fear
crossed his face, but he regained his serenity immediately.
“Of course he was quite old,” he said, and changed the subject. “Well,
I’ll spend a month or two with you, and then I’m off to Moscow. Do you
know, Myakov has promised me a place there, and I’m going into the
service. Now I’m going to arrange my life quite differently,” he went
on. “You know I got rid of that woman.”
“Marya Nikolaevna? Why, what for?”
“Oh, she was a horrid woman! She caused me all sorts of worries.” But
he did not say what the annoyances were. He could not say that he had
cast off Marya Nikolaevna because the tea was weak, and, above all,
because she would look after him, as though he were an invalid.
“Besides, I want to turn over a new leaf completely now. I’ve done
silly things, of course, like everyone else, but money’s the last
consideration; I don’t regret it. So long as there’s health, and my
health, thank God, is quite restored.”
Levin listened and racked his brains, but could think of nothing to
say. Nikolay probably felt the same; he began questioning his brother
about his affairs; and Levin was glad to talk about himself, because
then he could speak without hypocrisy. He told his brother of his plans
and his doings.
His brother listened, but evidently he was not interested by it.
These two men were so akin, so near each other, that the slightest
gesture, the tone of voice, told both more than could be said in words.
Both of them now had only one thought—the illness of Nikolay and the
nearness of his death—which stifled all else. But neither of them dared
to speak of it, and so whatever they said—not uttering the one thought
that filled their minds—was all falsehood. Never had Levin been so glad
when the evening was over and it was time to go to bed. Never with any
outside person, never on any official visit had he been so unnatural
and false as he was that evening. And the consciousness of this
unnaturalness, and the remorse he felt at it, made him even more
unnatural. He wanted to weep over his dying, dearly loved brother, and
he had to listen and keep on talking of how he meant to live.
As the house was damp, and only one bedroom had been kept heated, Levin
put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom behind a screen.
His brother got into bed, and whether he slept or did not sleep, tossed
about like a sick man, coughed, and when he could not get his throat
clear, mumbled something. Sometimes when his breathing was painful, he
said, “Oh, my God!” Sometimes when he was choking he muttered angrily,
“Ah, the devil!” Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him.
His thoughts were of the most various, but the end of all his thoughts
was the same—death. Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first
time presented itself to him with irresistible force. And death, which
was here in this loved brother, groaning half asleep and from habit
calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as
it had hitherto seemed to him. It was in himself too, he felt that. If
not today, tomorrow, if not tomorrow, in thirty years, wasn’t it all
the same! And what was this inevitable death—he did not know, had never
thought about it, and what was more, had not the power, had not the
courage to think about it.
“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I
had forgotten—death.”
He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and
holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the
more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was
indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten
one little fact—that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was
even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it
was awful, but it was so.
“But I am alive still. Now what’s to be done? what’s to be done?” he
said in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously and went to the
looking-glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were
gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were
beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength
in them. But Nikolay, who lay there breathing with what was left of
lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how
they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited
till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling pillows at each
other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fyodor
Bogdanitch could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life
and happiness. “And now that bent, hollow chest ... and I, not knowing
what will become of me, or wherefore....”
“K...ha! K...ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting, why don’t you go
to sleep?” his brother’s voice called to him.
“Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sleepy.”
“I have had a good sleep, I’m not in a sweat now. Just see, feel my
shirt; it’s not wet, is it?”
Levin felt, withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle, but for
a long while he could not sleep. The question how to live had hardly
begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble question
presented itself—death.
“Why, he’s dying—yes, he’ll die in the spring, and how help him? What
can I say to him? What do I know about it? I’d even forgotten that it
was at all.”
Chapter 32
Levin had long before made the observation that when one is
uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable and
meek, one is apt very soon after to find things intolerable from their
touchiness and irritability. He felt that this was how it would be with
his brother. And his brother Nikolay’s gentleness did in fact not last
out for long. The very next morning he began to be irritable, and
seemed doing his best to find fault with his brother, attacking him on
his tenderest points.
Levin felt himself to blame, and could not set things right. He felt
that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had spoken, as it is
called, from the heart—that is to say, had said only just what they
were thinking and feeling—they would simply have looked into each
other’s faces, and Konstantin could only have said, “You’re dying,
you’re dying!” and Nikolay could only have answered, “I know I’m dying,
but I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid!” And they could have said
nothing more, if they had said only what was in their hearts. But life
like that was impossible, and so Konstantin tried to do what he had
been trying to do all his life, and never could learn to do, though, as
far as he could observe, many people knew so well how to do it, and
without it there was no living at all. He tried to say what he was not
thinking, but he felt continually that it had a ring of falsehood, that
his brother detected him in it, and was exasperated at it.
The third day Nikolay induced his brother to explain his plan to him
again, and began not merely attacking it, but intentionally confounding
it with communism.
“You’ve simply borrowed an idea that’s not your own, but you’ve
distorted it, and are trying to apply it where it’s not applicable.”
“But I tell you it’s nothing to do with it. They deny the justice of
property, of capital, of inheritance, while I do not deny this chief
stimulus.” (Levin felt disgusted himself at using such expressions, but
ever since he had been engrossed by his work, he had unconsciously come
more and more frequently to use words not Russian.) “All I want is to
regulate labor.”
“Which means, you’ve borrowed an idea, stripped it of all that gave it
its force, and want to make believe that it’s something new,” said
Nikolay, angrily tugging at his necktie.
“But my idea has nothing in common....”
“That, anyway,” said Nikolay Levin, with an ironical smile, his eyes
flashing malignantly, “has the charm of—what’s one to call
it?—geometrical symmetry, of clearness, of definiteness. It may be a
Utopia. But if once one allows the possibility of making of all the
past a _tabula rasa_—no property, no family—then labor would organize
itself. But you gain nothing....”
“Why do you mix things up? I’ve never been a communist.”
“But I have, and I consider it’s premature, but rational, and it has a
future, just like Christianity in its first ages.”
“All that I maintain is that the labor force ought to be investigated
from the point of view of natural science; that is to say, it ought to
be studied, its qualities ascertained....”
“But that’s utter waste of time. That force finds a certain form of
activity of itself, according to the stage of its development. There
have been slaves first everywhere, then metayers; and we have the
half-crop system, rent, and day laborers. What are you trying to find?”
Levin suddenly lost his temper at these words, because at the bottom of
his heart he was afraid that it was true—true that he was trying to
hold the balance even between communism and the familiar forms, and
that this was hardly possible.
“I am trying to find means of working productively for myself and for
the laborers. I want to organize....” he answered hotly.
“You don’t want to organize anything; it’s simply just as you’ve been
all your life, that you want to be original to pose as not exploiting
the peasants simply, but with some idea in view.”
“Oh, all right, that’s what you think—and let me alone!” answered
Levin, feeling the muscles of his left cheek twitching uncontrollably.
“You’ve never had, and never have, convictions; all you want is to
please your vanity.”
“Oh, very well; then let me alone!”
“And I will let you alone! and it’s high time I did, and go to the
devil with you! and I’m very sorry I ever came!”
In spite of all Levin’s efforts to soothe his brother afterwards,
Nikolay would listen to nothing he said, declaring that it was better
to part, and Konstantin saw that it simply was that life was unbearable
to him.
Nikolay was just getting ready to go, when Konstantin went in to him
again and begged him, rather unnaturally, to forgive him if he had hurt
his feelings in any way.
“Ah, generosity!” said Nikolay, and he smiled. “If you want to be
right, I can give you that satisfaction. You’re in the right; but I’m
going all the same.”
It was only just at parting that Nikolay kissed him, and said, looking
with sudden strangeness and seriousness at his brother:
“Anyway, don’t remember evil against me, Kostya!” and his voice
quivered. These were the only words that had been spoken sincerely
between them. Levin knew that those words meant, “You see, and you
know, that I’m in a bad way, and maybe we shall not see each other
again.” Levin knew this, and the tears gushed from his eyes. He kissed
his brother once more, but he could not speak, and knew not what to
say.
Three days after his brother’s departure, Levin too set off for his
foreign tour. Happening to meet Shtcherbatsky, Kitty’s cousin, in the
railway train, Levin greatly astonished him by his depression.
“What’s the matter with you?” Shtcherbatsky asked him.
“Oh, nothing; there’s not much happiness in life.”
“Not much? You come with me to Paris instead of to Mulhausen. You shall
see how to be happy.”
“No, I’ve done with it all. It’s time I was dead.”
“Well, that’s a good one!” said Shtcherbatsky, laughing; “why, I’m only
just getting ready to begin.”
“Yes, I thought the same not long ago, but now I know I shall soon be
dead.”
Levin said what he had genuinely been thinking of late. He saw nothing
but death or the advance towards death in everything. But his cherished
scheme only engrossed him the more. Life had to be got through somehow
till death did come. Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but
just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the
darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his
strength.
PART FOUR
Chapter 1
The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met
every day, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexey
Alexandrovitch made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that the
servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at
home. Vronsky was never at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s house, but Anna saw
him away from home, and her husband was aware of it.
The position was one of misery for all three; and not one of them would
have been equal to enduring this position for a single day, if it had
not been for the expectation that it would change, that it was merely a
temporary painful ordeal which would pass over. Alexey Alexandrovitch
hoped that this passion would pass, as everything does pass, that
everyone would forget about it, and his name would remain unsullied.
Anna, on whom the position depended, and for whom it was more miserable
than for anyone, endured it because she not merely hoped, but firmly
believed, that it would all very soon be settled and come right. She
had not the least idea what would settle the position, but she firmly
believed that something would very soon turn up now. Vronsky, against
his own will or wishes, followed her lead, hoped too that something,
apart from his own action, would be sure to solve all difficulties.
In the middle of the winter Vronsky spent a very tiresome week. A
foreign prince, who had come on a visit to Petersburg, was put under
his charge, and he had to show him the sights worth seeing. Vronsky was
of distinguished appearance; he possessed, moreover, the art of
behaving with respectful dignity, and was used to having to do with
such grand personages—that was how he came to be put in charge of the
prince. But he felt his duties very irksome. The prince was anxious to
miss nothing of which he would be asked at home, had he seen that in
Russia? And on his own account he was anxious to enjoy to the utmost
all Russian forms of amusement. Vronsky was obliged to be his guide in
satisfying both these inclinations. The mornings they spent driving to
look at places of interest; the evenings they passed enjoying the
national entertainments. The prince rejoiced in health exceptional even
among princes. By gymnastics and careful attention to his health he had
brought himself to such a point that in spite of his excess in pleasure
he looked as fresh as a big glossy green Dutch cucumber. The prince had
traveled a great deal, and considered one of the chief advantages of
modern facilities of communication was the accessibility of the
pleasures of all nations.
He had been in Spain, and there had indulged in serenades and had made
friends with a Spanish girl who played the mandolin. In Switzerland he
had killed chamois. In England he had galloped in a red coat over
hedges and killed two hundred pheasants for a bet. In Turkey he had got
into a harem; in India he had hunted on an elephant, and now in Russia
he wished to taste all the specially Russian forms of pleasure.
Vronsky, who was, as it were, chief master of the ceremonies to him,
was at great pains to arrange all the Russian amusements suggested by
various persons to the prince. They had race horses, and Russian
pancakes and bear hunts and three-horse sledges, and gypsies and
drinking feasts, with the Russian accompaniment of broken crockery. And
the prince with surprising ease fell in with the Russian spirit,
smashed trays full of crockery, sat with a gypsy girl on his knee, and
seemed to be asking—what more, and does the whole Russian spirit
consist in just this?
In reality, of all the Russian entertainments the prince liked best
French actresses and ballet dancers and white-seal champagne. Vronsky
was used to princes, but, either because he had himself changed of
late, or that he was in too close proximity to the prince, that week
seemed fearfully wearisome to him. The whole of that week he
experienced a sensation such as a man might have set in charge of a
dangerous madman, afraid of the madman, and at the same time, from
being with him, fearing for his own reason. Vronsky was continually
conscious of the necessity of never for a second relaxing the tone of
stern official respectfulness, that he might not himself be insulted.
The prince’s manner of treating the very people who, to Vronsky’s
surprise, were ready to descend to any depths to provide him with
Russian amusements, was contemptuous. His criticisms of Russian women,
whom he wished to study, more than once made Vronsky crimson with
indignation. The chief reason why the prince was so particularly
disagreeable to Vronsky was that he could not help seeing himself in
him. And what he saw in this mirror did not gratify his self-esteem. He
was a very stupid and very self-satisfied and very healthy and very
well-washed man, and nothing else. He was a gentleman—that was true,
and Vronsky could not deny it. He was equable and not cringing with his
superiors, was free and ingratiating in his behavior with his equals,
and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors. Vronsky was
himself the same, and regarded it as a great merit to be so. But for
this prince he was an inferior, and his contemptuous and indulgent
attitude to him revolted him.
“Brainless beef! can I be like that?” he thought.
Be that as it might, when, on the seventh day, he parted from the
prince, who was starting for Moscow, and received his thanks, he was
happy to be rid of his uncomfortable position and the unpleasant
reflection of himself. He said good-bye to him at the station on their
return from a bear hunt, at which they had had a display of Russian
prowess kept up all night.
Chapter 2
When he got home, Vronsky found there a note from Anna. She wrote, “I
am ill and unhappy. I cannot come out, but I cannot go on longer
without seeing you. Come in this evening. Alexey Alexandrovitch goes to
the council at seven and will be there till ten.” Thinking for an
instant of the strangeness of her bidding him come straight to her, in
spite of her husband’s insisting on her not receiving him, he decided
to go.
Vronsky had that winter got his promotion, was now a colonel, had left
the regimental quarters, and was living alone. After having some lunch,
he lay down on the sofa immediately, and in five minutes memories of
the hideous scenes he had witnessed during the last few days were
confused together and joined on to a mental image of Anna and of the
peasant who had played an important part in the bear hunt, and Vronsky
fell asleep. He waked up in the dark, trembling with horror, and made
haste to light a candle. “What was it? What? What was the dreadful
thing I dreamed? Yes, yes; I think a little dirty man with a disheveled
beard was stooping down doing something, and all of a sudden he began
saying some strange words in French. Yes, there was nothing else in the
dream,” he said to himself. “But why was it so awful?” He vividly
recalled the peasant again and those incomprehensible French words the
peasant had uttered, and a chill of horror ran down his spine.
“What nonsense!” thought Vronsky, and glanced at his watch.
It was half-past eight already. He rang up his servant, dressed in
haste, and went out onto the steps, completely forgetting the dream and
only worried at being late. As he drove up to the Karenins’ entrance he
looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine. A high, narrow
carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the entrance. He
recognized Anna’s carriage. “She is coming to me,” thought Vronsky,
“and better she should. I don’t like going into that house. But no
matter; I can’t hide myself,” he thought, and with that manner peculiar
to him from childhood, as of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of,
Vronsky got out of his sledge and went to the door. The door opened,
and the hall-porter with a rug on his arm called the carriage. Vronsky,
though he did not usually notice details, noticed at this moment the
amazed expression with which the porter glanced at him. In the very
doorway Vronsky almost ran up against Alexey Alexandrovitch. The gas
jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face under the black
hat and on the white cravat, brilliant against the beaver of the coat.
Karenin’s fixed, dull eyes were fastened upon Vronsky’s face. Vronsky
bowed, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to
his hat and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the
carriage, pick up the rug and the opera-glass at the window and
disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and his
eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.
“What a position!” he thought. “If he would fight, would stand up for
his honor, I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness or
baseness.... He puts me in the position of playing false, which I never
meant and never mean to do.”
Vronsky’s ideas had changed since the day of his conversation with Anna
in the Vrede garden. Unconsciously yielding to the weakness of Anna—who
had surrendered herself up to him utterly, and simply looked to him to
decide her fate, ready to submit to anything—he had long ceased to
think that their tie might end as he had thought then. His ambitious
plans had retreated into the background again, and feeling that he had
got out of that circle of activity in which everything was definite, he
had given himself entirely to his passion, and that passion was binding
him more and more closely to her.
He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her retreating
footsteps. He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him,
and was now going back to the drawing-room.
“No,” she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the
tears came into her eyes. “No; if things are to go on like this, the
end will come much, much too soon.”
“What is it, dear one?”
“What? I’ve been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours ... No, I
won’t ... I can’t quarrel with you. Of course you couldn’t come. No, I
won’t.” She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long
while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time
searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she
had not seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture
of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in
reality) fit with him as he really was.
Chapter 3
“You met him?” she asked, when they had sat down at the table in the
lamplight. “You’re punished, you see, for being late.”
“Yes; but how was it? Wasn’t he to be at the council?”
“He had been and come back, and was going out somewhere again. But
that’s no matter. Don’t talk about it. Where have you been? With the
prince still?”
She knew every detail of his existence. He was going to say that he had
been up all night and had dropped asleep, but looking at her thrilled
and rapturous face, he was ashamed. And he said he had had to go to
report on the prince’s departure.
“But it’s over now? He is gone?”
“Thank God it’s over! You wouldn’t believe how insufferable it’s been
for me.”
“Why so? Isn’t it the life all of you, all young men, always lead?” she
said, knitting her brows; and taking up the crochet work that was lying
on the table, she began drawing the hook out of it, without looking at
Vronsky.
“I gave that life up long ago,” said he, wondering at the change in her
face, and trying to divine its meaning. “And I confess,” he said, with
a smile, showing his thick, white teeth, “this week I’ve been, as it
were, looking at myself in a glass, seeing that life, and I didn’t like
it.”
She held the work in her hands, but did not crochet, and looked at him
with strange, shining, and hostile eyes.
“This morning Liza came to see me—they’re not afraid to call on me, in
spite of the Countess Lidia Ivanovna,” she put in—“and she told me
about your Athenian evening. How loathsome!”
“I was just going to say....”
She interrupted him. “It was that Thérèse you used to know?”
“I was just saying....”
“How disgusting you are, you men! How is it you can’t understand that a
woman can never forget that,” she said, getting more and more angry,
and so letting him see the cause of her irritation, “especially a woman
who cannot know your life? What do I know? What have I ever known?” she
said, “what you tell me. And how do I know whether you tell me the
truth?...”
“Anna, you hurt me. Don’t you trust me? Haven’t I told you that I
haven’t a thought I wouldn’t lay bare to you?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, evidently trying to suppress her jealous
thoughts. “But if only you knew how wretched I am! I believe you, I
believe you.... What were you saying?”
But he could not at once recall what he had been going to say. These
fits of jealousy, which of late had been more and more frequent with
her, horrified him, and however much he tried to disguise the fact,
made him feel cold to her, although he knew the cause of her jealousy
was her love for him. How often he had told himself that her love was
happiness; and now she loved him as a woman can love when love has
outweighed for her all the good things of life—and he was much further
from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he had
thought himself unhappy, but happiness was before him; now he felt that
the best happiness was already left behind. She was utterly unlike what
she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had
changed for the worse. She had broadened out all over, and in her face
at the time when she was speaking of the actress there was an evil
expression of hatred that distorted it. He looked at her as a man looks
at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it
the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he
felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly
wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now, when as at
that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what
bound him to her could not be broken.
“Well, well, what was it you were going to say about the prince? I have
driven away the fiend,” she added. The fiend was the name they had
given her jealousy. “What did you begin to tell me about the prince?
Why did you find it so tiresome?”
“Oh, it was intolerable!” he said, trying to pick up the thread of his
interrupted thought. “He does not improve on closer acquaintance. If
you want him defined, here he is: a prime, well-fed beast such as takes
medals at the cattle shows, and nothing more,” he said, with a tone of
vexation that interested her.
“No; how so?” she replied. “He’s seen a great deal, anyway; he’s
cultured?”
“It’s an utterly different culture—their culture. He’s cultivated, one
sees, simply to be able to despise culture, as they despise everything
but animal pleasures.”
“But don’t you all care for these animal pleasures?” she said, and
again he noticed a dark look in her eyes that avoided him.
“How is it you’re defending him?” he said, smiling.
“I’m not defending him, it’s nothing to me; but I imagine, if you had
not cared for those pleasures yourself, you might have got out of them.
But if it affords you satisfaction to gaze at Thérèse in the attire of
Eve....”
“Again, the devil again,” Vronsky said, taking the hand she had laid on
the table and kissing it.
“Yes; but I can’t help it. You don’t know what I have suffered waiting
for you. I believe I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous: I believe you when
you’re here; but when you’re away somewhere leading your life, so
incomprehensible to me....”
She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the crochet
work, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop
after loop of the wool that was dazzling white in the lamplight, while
the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in the embroidered cuff.
“How was it, then? Where did you meet Alexey Alexandrovitch?” Her voice
sounded in an unnatural and jarring tone.
“We ran up against each other in the doorway.”
“And he bowed to you like this?”
She drew a long face, and half-closing her eyes, quickly transformed
her expression, folded her hands, and Vronsky suddenly saw in her
beautiful face the very expression with which Alexey Alexandrovitch had
bowed to him. He smiled, while she laughed gaily, with that sweet, deep
laugh, which was one of her greatest charms.
“I don’t understand him in the least,” said Vronsky. “If after your
avowal to him at your country house he had broken with you, if he had
called me out—but this I can’t understand. How can he put up with such
a position? He feels it, that’s evident.”
“He?” she said sneeringly. “He’s perfectly satisfied.”
“What are we all miserable for, when everything might be so happy?”
“Only not he. Don’t I know him, the falsity in which he’s utterly
steeped?... Could one, with any feeling, live as he is living with me?
He understands nothing, and feels nothing. Could a man of any feeling
live in the same house with his unfaithful wife? Could he talk to her,
call her ‘my dear’?”
And again she could not help mimicking him: “‘Anna, _ma chère_; Anna,
dear!’”
“He’s not a man, not a human being—he’s a doll! No one knows him; but I
know him. Oh, if I’d been in his place, I’d long ago have killed, have
torn to pieces a wife like me. I wouldn’t have said, ‘Anna, _ma
chère_’! He’s not a man, he’s an official machine. He doesn’t
understand that I’m your wife, that he’s outside, that he’s
superfluous.... Don’t let’s talk of him!...”
“You’re unfair, very unfair, dearest,” said Vronsky, trying to soothe
her. “But never mind, don’t let’s talk of him. Tell me what you’ve been
doing? What is the matter? What has been wrong with you, and what did
the doctor say?”
She looked at him with mocking amusement. Evidently she had hit on
other absurd and grotesque aspects in her husband and was awaiting the
moment to give expression to them.
But he went on:
“I imagine that it’s not illness, but your condition. When will it be?”
The ironical light died away in her eyes, but a different smile, a
consciousness of something, he did not know what, and of quiet
melancholy, came over her face.
“Soon, soon. You say that our position is miserable, that we must put
an end to it. If you knew how terrible it is to me, what I would give
to be able to love you freely and boldly! I should not torture myself
and torture you with my jealousy.... And it will come soon, but not as
we expect.”
And at the thought of how it would come, she seemed so pitiable to
herself that tears came into her eyes, and she could not go on. She
laid her hand on his sleeve, dazzling and white with its rings in the
lamplight.
“It won’t come as we suppose. I didn’t mean to say this to you, but
you’ve made me. Soon, soon, all will be over, and we shall all, all be
at peace, and suffer no more.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, understanding her.
“You asked when? Soon. And I shan’t live through it. Don’t interrupt
me!” and she made haste to speak. “I know it; I know for certain. I
shall die; and I’m very glad I shall die, and release myself and you.”
Tears dropped from her eyes; he bent down over her hand and began
kissing it, trying to hide his emotion, which, he knew, had no sort of
grounds, though he could not control it.
“Yes, it’s better so,” she said, tightly gripping his hand. “That’s the
only way, the only way left us.”
He had recovered himself, and lifted his head.
“How absurd! What absurd nonsense you are talking!”
“No, it’s the truth.”
“What, what’s the truth?”
“That I shall die. I have had a dream.”
“A dream?” repeated Vronsky, and instantly he recalled the peasant of
his dream.
“Yes, a dream,” she said. “It’s a long while since I dreamed it. I
dreamed that I ran into my bedroom, that I had to get something there,
to find out something; you know how it is in dreams,” she said, her
eyes wide with horror; “and in the bedroom, in the corner, stood
something.”
“Oh, what nonsense! How can you believe....”
But she would not let him interrupt her. What she was saying was too
important to her.
“And the something turned round, and I saw it was a peasant with a
disheveled beard, little, and dreadful looking. I wanted to run away,
but he bent down over a sack, and was fumbling there with his
hands....”
She showed how he had moved his hands. There was terror in her face.
And Vronsky, remembering his dream, felt the same terror filling his
soul.
“He was fumbling and kept talking quickly, quickly in French, you know:
_Il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le pétrir_.... And in my horror
I tried to wake up, and woke up ... but woke up in the dream. And I
began asking myself what it meant. And Korney said to me: ‘In
childbirth you’ll die, ma’am, you’ll die....’ And I woke up.”
“What nonsense, what nonsense!” said Vronsky; but he felt himself that
there was no conviction in his voice.
“But don’t let’s talk of it. Ring the bell, I’ll have tea. And stay a
little now; it’s not long I shall....”
But all at once she stopped. The expression of her face instantaneously
changed. Horror and excitement were suddenly replaced by a look of
soft, solemn, blissful attention. He could not comprehend the meaning
of the change. She was listening to the stirring of the new life within
her.
Chapter 4
Alexey Alexandrovitch, after meeting Vronsky on his own steps, drove,
as he had intended, to the Italian opera. He sat through two acts
there, and saw everyone he had wanted to see. On returning home, he
carefully scrutinized the hat stand, and noticing that there was not a
military overcoat there, he went, as usual, to his own room. But,
contrary to his usual habit, he did not go to bed, he walked up and
down his study till three o’clock in the morning. The feeling of
furious anger with his wife, who would not observe the proprieties and
keep to the one stipulation he had laid on her, not to receive her
lover in her own home, gave him no peace. She had not complied with his
request, and he was bound to punish her and carry out his threat—obtain
a divorce and take away his son. He knew all the difficulties connected
with this course, but he had said he would do it, and now he must carry
out his threat. Countess Lidia Ivanovna had hinted that this was the
best way out of his position, and of late the obtaining of divorces had
been brought to such perfection that Alexey Alexandrovitch saw a
possibility of overcoming the formal difficulties. Misfortunes never
come singly, and the affairs of the reorganization of the native
tribes, and of the irrigation of the lands of the Zaraisky province,
had brought such official worries upon Alexey Alexandrovitch that he
had been of late in a continual condition of extreme irritability.
He did not sleep the whole night, and his fury, growing in a sort of
vast, arithmetical progression, reached its highest limits in the
morning. He dressed in haste, and as though carrying his cup full of
wrath, and fearing to spill any over, fearing to lose with his wrath
the energy necessary for the interview with his wife, he went into her
room directly he heard she was up.
Anna, who had thought she knew her husband so well, was amazed at his
appearance when he went in to her. His brow was lowering, and his eyes
stared darkly before him, avoiding her eyes; his mouth was tightly and
contemptuously shut. In his walk, in his gestures, in the sound of his
voice there was a determination and firmness such as his wife had never
seen in him. He went into her room, and without greeting her, walked
straight up to her writing-table, and taking her keys, opened a drawer.
“What do you want?” she cried.
“Your lover’s letters,” he said.
“They’re not here,” she said, shutting the drawer; but from that action
he saw he had guessed right, and roughly pushing away her hand, he
quickly snatched a portfolio in which he knew she used to put her most
important papers. She tried to pull the portfolio away, but he pushed
her back.
“Sit down! I have to speak to you,” he said, putting the portfolio
under his arm, and squeezing it so tightly with his elbow that his
shoulder stood up. Amazed and intimidated, she gazed at him in silence.
“I told you that I would not allow you to receive your lover in this
house.”
“I had to see him to....”
She stopped, not finding a reason.
“I do not enter into the details of why a woman wants to see her
lover.”
“I meant, I only....” she said, flushing hotly. This coarseness of his
angered her, and gave her courage. “Surely you must feel how easy it is
for you to insult me?” she said.
“An honest man and an honest woman may be insulted, but to tell a thief
he’s a thief is simply _la constatation d’un fait_.”
“This cruelty is something new I did not know in you.”
“You call it cruelty for a husband to give his wife liberty, giving her
the honorable protection of his name, simply on the condition of
observing the proprieties: is that cruelty?”
“It’s worse than cruel—it’s base, if you want to know!” Anna cried, in
a rush of hatred, and getting up, she was going away.
“No!” he shrieked, in his shrill voice, which pitched a note higher
than usual even, and his big hands clutching her by the arm so
violently that red marks were left from the bracelet he was squeezing,
he forcibly sat her down in her place.
“Base! If you care to use that word, what is base is to forsake husband
and child for a lover, while you eat your husband’s bread!”
She bowed her head. She did not say what she had said the evening
before to her lover, that _he_ was her husband, and her husband was
superfluous; she did not even think that. She felt all the justice of
his words, and only said softly:
“You cannot describe my position as worse than I feel it to be myself;
but what are you saying all this for?”
“What am I saying it for? what for?” he went on, as angrily. “That you
may know that since you have not carried out my wishes in regard to
observing outward decorum, I will take measures to put an end to this
state of things.”
“Soon, very soon, it will end, anyway,” she said; and again, at the
thought of death near at hand and now desired, tears came into her
eyes.
“It will end sooner than you and your lover have planned! If you must
have the satisfaction of animal passion....”
“Alexey Alexandrovitch! I won’t say it’s not generous, but it’s not
like a gentleman to strike anyone who’s down.”
“Yes, you only think of yourself! But the sufferings of a man who was
your husband have no interest for you. You don’t care that his whole
life is ruined, that he is thuff ... thuff....”
Alexey Alexandrovitch was speaking so quickly that he stammered, and
was utterly unable to articulate the word “suffering.” In the end he
pronounced it “thuffering.” She wanted to laugh, and was immediately
ashamed that anything could amuse her at such a moment. And for the
first time, for an instant, she felt for him, put herself in his place,
and was sorry for him. But what could she say or do? Her head sank, and
she sat silent. He too was silent for some time, and then began
speaking in a frigid, less shrill voice, emphasizing random words that
had no special significance.
“I came to tell you....” he said.
She glanced at him. “No, it was my fancy,” she thought, recalling the
expression of his face when he stumbled over the word “suffering.” “No;
can a man with those dull eyes, with that self-satisfied complacency,
feel anything?”
“I cannot change anything,” she whispered.
“I have come to tell you that I am going tomorrow to Moscow, and shall
not return again to this house, and you will receive notice of what I
decide through the lawyer into whose hands I shall intrust the task of
getting a divorce. My son is going to my sister’s,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch, with an effort recalling what he had meant to say about
his son.
“You take Seryozha to hurt me,” she said, looking at him from under her
brows. “You do not love him.... Leave me Seryozha!”
“Yes, I have lost even my affection for my son, because he is
associated with the repulsion I feel for you. But still I shall take
him. Good-bye!”
And he was going away, but now she detained him.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch, leave me Seryozha!” she whispered once more. “I
have nothing else to say. Leave Seryozha till my ... I shall soon be
confined; leave him!”
Alexey Alexandrovitch flew into a rage, and, snatching his hand from
her, he went out of the room without a word.
Chapter 5
The waiting-room of the celebrated Petersburg lawyer was full when
Alexey Alexandrovitch entered it. Three ladies—an old lady, a young
lady, and a merchant’s wife—and three gentlemen—one a German banker
with a ring on his finger, the second a merchant with a beard, and the
third a wrathful-looking government clerk in official uniform, with a
cross on his neck—had obviously been waiting a long while already. Two
clerks were writing at tables with scratching pens. The appurtenances
of the writing-tables, about which Alexey Alexandrovitch was himself
very fastidious, were exceptionally good. He could not help observing
this. One of the clerks, without getting up, turned wrathfully to
Alexey Alexandrovitch, half closing his eyes. “What are you wanting?”
He replied that he had to see the lawyer on some business.
“He is engaged,” the clerk responded severely, and he pointed with his
pen at the persons waiting, and went on writing.
“Can’t he spare time to see me?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“He has no time free; he is always busy. Kindly wait your turn.”
“Then I must trouble you to give him my card,” Alexey Alexandrovitch
said with dignity, seeing the impossibility of preserving his
incognito.
The clerk took the card and, obviously not approving of what he read on
it, went to the door.
Alexey Alexandrovitch was in principle in favor of the publicity of
legal proceedings, though for some higher official considerations he
disliked the application of the principle in Russia, and disapproved of
it, as far as he could disapprove of anything instituted by authority
of the Emperor. His whole life had been spent in administrative work,
and consequently, when he did not approve of anything, his disapproval
was softened by the recognition of the inevitability of mistakes and
the possibility of reform in every department. In the new public law
courts he disliked the restrictions laid on the lawyers conducting
cases. But till then he had had nothing to do with the law courts, and
so had disapproved of their publicity simply in theory; now his
disapprobation was strengthened by the unpleasant impression made on
him in the lawyer’s waiting room.
“Coming immediately,” said the clerk; and two minutes later there did
actually appear in the doorway the large figure of an old solicitor who
had been consulting with the lawyer himself.
The lawyer was a little, squat, bald man, with a dark, reddish beard,
light-colored long eyebrows, and an overhanging brow. He was attired as
though for a wedding, from his cravat to his double watch-chain and
varnished boots. His face was clever and manly, but his dress was
dandified and in bad taste.
“Pray walk in,” said the lawyer, addressing Alexey Alexandrovitch; and,
gloomily ushering Karenin in before him, he closed the door.
“Won’t you sit down?” He indicated an armchair at a writing-table
covered with papers. He sat down himself, and, rubbing his little hands
with short fingers covered with white hairs, he bent his head on one
side. But as soon as he was settled in this position a moth flew over
the table. The lawyer, with a swiftness that could never have been
expected of him, opened his hands, caught the moth, and resumed his
former attitude.
“Before beginning to speak of my business,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch,
following the lawyer’s movements with wondering eyes, “I ought to
observe that the business about which I have to speak to you is to be
strictly private.”
The lawyer’s overhanging reddish mustaches were parted in a scarcely
perceptible smile.
“I should not be a lawyer if I could not keep the secrets confided to
me. But if you would like proof....”
Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced at his face, and saw that the shrewd,
gray eyes were laughing, and seemed to know all about it already.
“You know my name?” Alexey Alexandrovitch resumed.
“I know you and the good”—again he caught a moth—“work you are doing,
like every Russian,” said the lawyer, bowing.
Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed, plucking up his courage. But having once
made up his mind he went on in his shrill voice, without timidity—or
hesitation, accentuating here and there a word.
“I have the misfortune,” Alexey Alexandrovitch began, “to have been
deceived in my married life, and I desire to break off all relations
with my wife by legal means—that is, to be divorced, but to do this so
that my son may not remain with his mother.”
The lawyer’s gray eyes tried not to laugh, but they were dancing with
irrepressible glee, and Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that it was not
simply the delight of a man who has just got a profitable job: there
was triumph and joy, there was a gleam like the malignant gleam he saw
in his wife’s eyes.
“You desire my assistance in securing a divorce?”
“Yes, precisely so; but I ought to warn you that I may be wasting your
time and attention. I have come simply to consult you as a preliminary
step. I want a divorce, but the form in which it is possible is of
great consequence to me. It is very possible that if that form does not
correspond with my requirements I may give up a legal divorce.”
“Oh, that’s always the case,” said the lawyer, “and that’s always for
you to decide.”
He let his eyes rest on Alexey Alexandrovitch’s feet, feeling that he
might offend his client by the sight of his irrepressible amusement. He
looked at a moth that flew before his nose, and moved his hands, but
did not catch it from regard for Alexey Alexandrovitch’s position.
“Though in their general features our laws on this subject are known to
me,” pursued Alexey Alexandrovitch, “I should be glad to have an idea
of the forms in which such things are done in practice.”
“You would be glad,” the lawyer, without lifting his eyes, responded,
adopting, with a certain satisfaction, the tone of his client’s
remarks, “for me to lay before you all the methods by which you could
secure what you desire?”
And on receiving an assuring nod from Alexey Alexandrovitch, he went
on, stealing a glance now and then at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s face,
which was growing red in patches.
“Divorce by our laws,” he said, with a slight shade of disapprobation
of our laws, “is possible, as you are aware, in the following cases....
Wait a little!” he called to a clerk who put his head in at the door,
but he got up all the same, said a few words to him, and sat down
again. “... In the following cases: physical defect in the married
parties, desertion without communication for five years,” he said,
crooking a short finger covered with hair, “adultery” (this word he
pronounced with obvious satisfaction), “subdivided as follows” (he
continued to crook his fat fingers, though the three cases and their
subdivisions could obviously not be classified together): “physical
defect of the husband or of the wife, adultery of the husband or of the
wife.” As by now all his fingers were used up, he uncrooked all his
fingers and went on: “This is the theoretical view; but I imagine you
have done me the honor to apply to me in order to learn its application
in practice. And therefore, guided by precedents, I must inform you
that in practice cases of divorce may all be reduced to the
following—there’s no physical defect, I may assume, nor desertion?...”
Alexey Alexandrovitch bowed his head in assent.
“—May be reduced to the following: adultery of one of the married
parties, and the detection in the fact of the guilty party by mutual
agreement, and failing such agreement, accidental detection. It must be
admitted that the latter case is rarely met with in practice,” said the
lawyer, and stealing a glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch he paused, as a
man selling pistols, after enlarging on the advantages of each weapon,
might await his customer’s choice. But Alexey Alexandrovitch said
nothing, and therefore the lawyer went on: “The most usual and simple,
the sensible course, I consider, is adultery by mutual consent. I
should not permit myself to express it so, speaking with a man of no
education,” he said, “but I imagine that to you this is
comprehensible.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch was, however, so perturbed that he did not
immediately comprehend all the good sense of adultery by mutual
consent, and his eyes expressed this uncertainty; but the lawyer
promptly came to his assistance.
“People cannot go on living together—here you have a fact. And if both
are agreed about it, the details and formalities become a matter of no
importance. And at the same time this is the simplest and most certain
method.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch fully understood now. But he had religious
scruples, which hindered the execution of such a plan.
“That is out of the question in the present case,” he said. “Only one
alternative is possible: undesigned detection, supported by letters
which I have.”
At the mention of letters the lawyer pursed up his lips, and gave
utterance to a thin little compassionate and contemptuous sound.
“Kindly consider,” he began, “cases of that kind are, as you are aware,
under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; the reverend fathers are fond of
going into the minutest details in cases of that kind,” he said with a
smile, which betrayed his sympathy with the reverend fathers’ taste.
“Letters may, of course, be a partial confirmation; but detection in
the fact there must be of the most direct kind, that is, by
eyewitnesses. In fact, if you do me the honor to intrust your
confidence to me, you will do well to leave me the choice of the
measures to be employed. If one wants the result, one must admit the
means.”
“If it is so....” Alexey Alexandrovitch began, suddenly turning white;
but at that moment the lawyer rose and again went to the door to speak
to the intruding clerk.
“Tell her we don’t haggle over fees!” he said, and returned to Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
On his way back he caught unobserved another moth. “Nice state my rep
curtains will be in by the summer!” he thought, frowning.
“And so you were saying?...” he said.
“I will communicate my decision to you by letter,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch, getting up, and he clutched at the table. After
standing a moment in silence, he said: “From your words I may
consequently conclude that a divorce may be obtained? I would ask you
to let me know what are your terms.”
“It may be obtained if you give me complete liberty of action,” said
the lawyer, not answering his question. “When can I reckon on receiving
information from you?” he asked, moving towards the door, his eyes and
his varnished boots shining.
“In a week’s time. Your answer as to whether you will undertake to
conduct the case, and on what terms, you will be so good as to
communicate to me.”
“Very good.”
The lawyer bowed respectfully, let his client out of the door, and,
left alone, gave himself up to his sense of amusement. He felt so
mirthful that, contrary to his rules, he made a reduction in his terms
to the haggling lady, and gave up catching moths, finally deciding that
next winter he must have the furniture covered with velvet, like
Sigonin’s.
Chapter 6
Alexey Alexandrovitch had gained a brilliant victory at the sitting of
the Commission of the 17th of August, but in the sequel this victory
cut the ground from under his feet. The new commission for the inquiry
into the condition of the native tribes in all its branches had been
formed and despatched to its destination with an unusual speed and
energy inspired by Alexey Alexandrovitch. Within three months a report
was presented. The condition of the native tribes was investigated in
its political, administrative, economic, ethnographic, material, and
religious aspects. To all these questions there were answers admirably
stated, and answers admitting no shade of doubt, since they were not a
product of human thought, always liable to error, but were all the
product of official activity. The answers were all based on official
data furnished by governors and heads of churches, and founded on the
reports of district magistrates and ecclesiastical superintendents,
founded in their turn on the reports of parochial overseers and parish
priests; and so all of these answers were unhesitating and certain. All
such questions as, for instance, of the cause of failure of crops, of
the adherence of certain tribes to their ancient beliefs,
etc.—questions which, but for the convenient intervention of the
official machine, are not, and cannot be solved for ages—received full,
unhesitating solution. And this solution was in favor of Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s contention. But Stremov, who had felt stung to the
quick at the last sitting, had, on the reception of the commission’s
report, resorted to tactics which Alexey Alexandrovitch had not
anticipated. Stremov, carrying with him several members, went over to
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s side, and not contenting himself with warmly
defending the measure proposed by Karenin, proposed other more extreme
measures in the same direction. These measures, still further
exaggerated in opposition to what was Alexey Alexandrovitch’s
fundamental idea, were passed by the commission, and then the aim of
Stremov’s tactics became apparent. Carried to an extreme, the measures
seemed at once to be so absurd that the highest authorities, and public
opinion, and intellectual ladies, and the newspapers, all at the same
time fell foul of them, expressing their indignation both with the
measures and their nominal father, Alexey Alexandrovitch. Stremov drew
back, affecting to have blindly followed Karenin, and to be astounded
and distressed at what had been done. This meant the defeat of Alexey
Alexandrovitch. But in spite of failing health, in spite of his
domestic griefs, he did not give in. There was a split in the
commission. Some members, with Stremov at their head, justified their
mistake on the ground that they had put faith in the commission of
revision, instituted by Alexey Alexandrovitch, and maintained that the
report of the commission was rubbish, and simply so much waste paper.
Alexey Alexandrovitch, with a following of those who saw the danger of
so revolutionary an attitude to official documents, persisted in
upholding the statements obtained by the revising commission. In
consequence of this, in the higher spheres, and even in society, all
was chaos, and although everyone was interested, no one could tell
whether the native tribes really were becoming impoverished and ruined,
or whether they were in a flourishing condition. The position of Alexey
Alexandrovitch, owing to this, and partly owing to the contempt
lavished on him for his wife’s infidelity, became very precarious. And
in this position he took an important resolution. To the astonishment
of the commission, he announced that he should ask permission to go
himself to investigate the question on the spot. And having obtained
permission, Alexey Alexandrovitch prepared to set off to these remote
provinces.
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s departure made a great sensation, the more so
as just before he started he officially returned the posting-fares
allowed him for twelve horses, to drive to his destination.
“I think it very noble,” Betsy said about this to the Princess Myakaya.
“Why take money for posting-horses when everyone knows that there are
railways everywhere now?”
But Princess Myakaya did not agree, and the Princess Tverskaya’s
opinion annoyed her indeed.
“It’s all very well for you to talk,” said she, “when you have I don’t
know how many millions; but I am very glad when my husband goes on a
revising tour in the summer. It’s very good for him and pleasant
traveling about, and it’s a settled arrangement for me to keep a
carriage and coachman on the money.”
On his way to the remote provinces Alexey Alexandrovitch stopped for
three days at Moscow.
The day after his arrival he was driving back from calling on the
governor-general. At the crossroads by Gazetoy Place, where there are
always crowds of carriages and sledges, Alexey Alexandrovitch suddenly
heard his name called out in such a loud and cheerful voice that he
could not help looking round. At the corner of the pavement, in a
short, stylish overcoat and a low-crowned fashionable hat, jauntily
askew, with a smile that showed a gleam of white teeth and red lips,
stood Stepan Arkadyevitch, radiant, young, and beaming. He called him
vigorously and urgently, and insisted on his stopping. He had one arm
on the window of a carriage that was stopping at the corner, and out of
the window were thrust the heads of a lady in a velvet hat, and two
children. Stepan Arkadyevitch was smiling and beckoning to his
brother-in-law. The lady smiled a kindly smile too, and she too waved
her hand to Alexey Alexandrovitch. It was Dolly with her children.
Alexey Alexandrovitch did not want to see anyone in Moscow, and least
of all his wife’s brother. He raised his hat and would have driven on,
but Stepan Arkadyevitch told his coachman to stop, and ran across the
snow to him.
“Well, what a shame not to have let us know! Been here long? I was at
Dussots’ yesterday and saw ‘Karenin’ on the visitors’ list, but it
never entered my head that it was you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
sticking his head in at the window of the carriage, “or I should have
looked you up. I am glad to see you!” he said, knocking one foot
against the other to shake the snow off. “What a shame of you not to
let us know!” he repeated.
“I had no time; I am very busy,” Alexey Alexandrovitch responded dryly.
“Come to my wife, she does so want to see you.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch unfolded the rug in which his frozen feet were
wrapped, and getting out of his carriage made his way over the snow to
Darya Alexandrovna.
“Why, Alexey Alexandrovitch, what are you cutting us like this for?”
said Dolly, smiling.
“I was very busy. Delighted to see you!” he said in a tone clearly
indicating that he was annoyed by it. “How are you?”
“Tell me, how is my darling Anna?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch mumbled something and would have gone on. But
Stepan Arkadyevitch stopped him.
“I tell you what we’ll do tomorrow. Dolly, ask him to dinner. We’ll ask
Koznishev and Pestsov, so as to entertain him with our Moscow
celebrities.”
“Yes, please, do come,” said Dolly; “we will expect you at five, or six
o’clock, if you like. How is my darling Anna? How long....”
“She is quite well,” Alexey Alexandrovitch mumbled, frowning.
“Delighted!” and he moved away towards his carriage.
“You will come?” Dolly called after him.
Alexey Alexandrovitch said something which Dolly could not catch in the
noise of the moving carriages.
“I shall come round tomorrow!” Stepan Arkadyevitch shouted to him.
Alexey Alexandrovitch got into his carriage, and buried himself in it
so as neither to see nor be seen.
“Queer fish!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch to his wife, and glancing at his
watch, he made a motion of his hand before his face, indicating a
caress to his wife and children, and walked jauntily along the
pavement.
“Stiva! Stiva!” Dolly called, reddening.
He turned round.
“I must get coats, you know, for Grisha and Tanya. Give me the money.”
“Never mind; you tell them I’ll pay the bill!” and he vanished, nodding
genially to an acquaintance who drove by.
Chapter 7
The next day was Sunday. Stepan Arkadyevitch went to the Grand Theater
to a rehearsal of the ballet, and gave Masha Tchibisova, a pretty
dancing-girl whom he had just taken under his protection, the coral
necklace he had promised her the evening before, and behind the scenes
in the dim daylight of the theater, managed to kiss her pretty little
face, radiant over her present. Besides the gift of the necklace he
wanted to arrange with her about meeting after the ballet. After
explaining that he could not come at the beginning of the ballet, he
promised he would come for the last act and take her to supper. From
the theater Stepan Arkadyevitch drove to Ohotny Row, selected himself
the fish and asparagus for dinner, and by twelve o’clock was at
Dussots’, where he had to see three people, luckily all staying at the
same hotel: Levin, who had recently come back from abroad and was
staying there; the new head of his department, who had just been
promoted to that position, and had come on a tour of revision to
Moscow; and his brother-in-law, Karenin, whom he must see, so as to be
sure of bringing him to dinner.
Stepan Arkadyevitch liked dining, but still better he liked to give a
dinner, small, but very choice, both as regards the food and drink and
as regards the selection of guests. He particularly liked the program
of that day’s dinner. There would be fresh perch, asparagus, and _la
pièce de resistance_—first-rate, but quite plain, roast beef, and wines
to suit: so much for the eating and drinking. Kitty and Levin would be
of the party, and that this might not be obtrusively evident, there
would be a girl cousin too, and young Shtcherbatsky, and _la pièce de
resistance_ among the guests—Sergey Koznishev and Alexey
Alexandrovitch. Sergey Ivanovitch was a Moscow man, and a philosopher;
Alexey Alexandrovitch a Petersburger, and a practical politician. He
was asking, too, the well-known eccentric enthusiast, Pestsov, a
liberal, a great talker, a musician, an historian, and the most
delightfully youthful person of fifty, who would be a sauce or garnish
for Koznishev and Karenin. He would provoke them and set them off.
The second installment for the forest had been received from the
merchant and was not yet exhausted; Dolly had been very amiable and
good-humored of late, and the idea of the dinner pleased Stepan
Arkadyevitch from every point of view. He was in the most light-hearted
mood. There were two circumstances a little unpleasant, but these two
circumstances were drowned in the sea of good-humored gaiety which
flooded the soul of Stepan Arkadyevitch. These two circumstances were:
first, that on meeting Alexey Alexandrovitch the day before in the
street he had noticed that he was cold and reserved with him, and
putting the expression of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s face and the fact
that he had not come to see them or let them know of his arrival with
the rumors he had heard about Anna and Vronsky, Stepan Arkadyevitch
guessed that something was wrong between the husband and wife.
That was one disagreeable thing. The other slightly disagreeable fact
was that the new head of his department, like all new heads, had the
reputation already of a terrible person, who got up at six o’clock in
the morning, worked like a horse, and insisted on his subordinates
working in the same way. Moreover, this new head had the further
reputation of being a bear in his manners, and was, according to all
reports, a man of a class in all respects the opposite of that to which
his predecessor had belonged, and to which Stepan Arkadyevitch had
hitherto belonged himself. On the previous day Stepan Arkadyevitch had
appeared at the office in a uniform, and the new chief had been very
affable and had talked to him as to an acquaintance. Consequently
Stepan Arkadyevitch deemed it his duty to call upon him in his
non-official dress. The thought that the new chief might not tender him
a warm reception was the other unpleasant thing. But Stepan
Arkadyevitch instinctively felt that everything would _come round_ all
right. “They’re all people, all men, like us poor sinners; why be nasty
and quarrelsome?” he thought as he went into the hotel.
“Good-day, Vassily,” he said, walking into the corridor with his hat
cocked on one side, and addressing a footman he knew; “why, you’ve let
your whiskers grow! Levin, number seven, eh? Take me up, please. And
find out whether Count Anitchkin” (this was the new head) “is
receiving.”
“Yes, sir,” Vassily responded, smiling. “You’ve not been to see us for
a long while.”
“I was here yesterday, but at the other entrance. Is this number
seven?”
Levin was standing with a peasant from Tver in the middle of the room,
measuring a fresh bearskin, when Stepan Arkadyevitch went in.
“What! you killed him?” cried Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Well done! A
she-bear? How are you, Arhip!”
He shook hands with the peasant and sat down on the edge of a chair,
without taking off his coat and hat.
“Come, take off your coat and stay a little,” said Levin, taking his
hat.
“No, I haven’t time; I’ve only looked in for a tiny second,” answered
Stepan Arkadyevitch. He threw open his coat, but afterwards did take it
off, and sat on for a whole hour, talking to Levin about hunting and
the most intimate subjects.
“Come, tell me, please, what you did abroad? Where have you been?” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch, when the peasant had gone.
“Oh, I stayed in Germany, in Prussia, in France, and in England—not in
the capitals, but in the manufacturing towns, and saw a great deal that
was new to me. And I’m glad I went.”
“Yes, I knew your idea of the solution of the labor question.”
“Not a bit: in Russia there can be no labor question. In Russia the
question is that of the relation of the working people to the land;
though the question exists there too—but there it’s a matter of
repairing what’s been ruined, while with us....”
Stepan Arkadyevitch listened attentively to Levin.
“Yes, yes!” he said, “it’s very possible you’re right. But I’m glad
you’re in good spirits, and are hunting bears, and working, and
interested. Shtcherbatsky told me another story—he met you—that you
were in such a depressed state, talking of nothing but death....”
“Well, what of it? I’ve not given up thinking of death,” said Levin.
“It’s true that it’s high time I was dead; and that all this is
nonsense. It’s the truth I’m telling you. I do value my idea and my
work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours
is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet.
And for us to suppose we can have something great—ideas, work—it’s all
dust and ashes.”
“But all that’s as old as the hills, my boy!”
“It is old; but do you know, when you grasp this fully, then somehow
everything becomes of no consequence. When you understand that you will
die tomorrow, if not today, and nothing will be left, then everything
is so unimportant! And I consider my idea very important, but it turns
out really to be as unimportant too, even if it were carried out, as
doing for that bear. So one goes on living, amusing oneself with
hunting, with work—anything so as not to think of death!”
Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled a subtle affectionate smile as he listened
to Levin.
“Well, of course! Here you’ve come round to my point. Do you remember
you attacked me for seeking enjoyment in life? Don’t be so severe, O
moralist!”
“No; all the same, what’s fine in life is....” Levin hesitated—“oh, I
don’t know. All I know is that we shall soon be dead.”
“Why so soon?”
“And do you know, there’s less charm in life, when one thinks of death,
but there’s more peace.”
“On the contrary, the finish is always the best. But I must be going,”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up for the tenth time.
“Oh, no, stay a bit!” said Levin, keeping him. “Now, when shall we see
each other again? I’m going tomorrow.”
“I’m a nice person! Why, that’s just what I came for! You simply must
come to dinner with us today. Your brother’s coming, and Karenin, my
brother-in-law.”
“You don’t mean to say he’s here?” said Levin, and he wanted to inquire
about Kitty. He had heard at the beginning of the winter that she was
at Petersburg with her sister, the wife of the diplomat, and he did not
know whether she had come back or not; but he changed his mind and did
not ask. “Whether she’s coming or not, I don’t care,” he said to
himself.
“So you’ll come?”
“Of course.”
“At five o’clock, then, and not evening dress.”
And Stepan Arkadyevitch got up and went down below to the new head of
his department. Instinct had not misled Stepan Arkadyevitch. The
terrible new head turned out to be an extremely amenable person, and
Stepan Arkadyevitch lunched with him and stayed on, so that it was four
o’clock before he got to Alexey Alexandrovitch.
Chapter 8
Alexey Alexandrovitch, on coming back from church service, had spent
the whole morning indoors. He had two pieces of business before him
that morning; first, to receive and send on a deputation from the
native tribes which was on its way to Petersburg, and now at Moscow;
secondly, to write the promised letter to the lawyer. The deputation,
though it had been summoned at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s instigation, was
not without its discomforting and even dangerous aspect, and he was
glad he had found it in Moscow. The members of this deputation had not
the slightest conception of their duty and the part they were to play.
They naïvely believed that it was their business to lay before the
commission their needs and the actual condition of things, and to ask
assistance of the government, and utterly failed to grasp that some of
their statements and requests supported the contention of the enemy’s
side, and so spoiled the whole business. Alexey Alexandrovitch was
busily engaged with them for a long while, drew up a program for them
from which they were not to depart, and on dismissing them wrote a
letter to Petersburg for the guidance of the deputation. He had his
chief support in this affair in the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. She was a
specialist in the matter of deputations, and no one knew better than
she how to manage them, and put them in the way they should go. Having
completed this task, Alexey Alexandrovitch wrote the letter to the
lawyer. Without the slightest hesitation he gave him permission to act
as he might judge best. In the letter he enclosed three of Vronsky’s
notes to Anna, which were in the portfolio he had taken away.
Since Alexey Alexandrovitch had left home with the intention of not
returning to his family again, and since he had been at the lawyer’s
and had spoken, though only to one man, of his intention, since
especially he had translated the matter from the world of real life to
the world of ink and paper, he had grown more and more used to his own
intention, and by now distinctly perceived the feasibility of its
execution.
He was sealing the envelope to the lawyer, when he heard the loud tones
of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s voice. Stepan Arkadyevitch was disputing with
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s servant, and insisting on being announced.
“No matter,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch, “so much the better. I will
inform him at once of my position in regard to his sister, and explain
why it is I can’t dine with him.”
“Come in!” he said aloud, collecting his papers, and putting them in
the blotting-paper.
“There, you see, you’re talking nonsense, and he’s at home!” responded
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s voice, addressing the servant, who had refused to
let him in, and taking off his coat as he went, Oblonsky walked into
the room. “Well, I’m awfully glad I’ve found you! So I hope....” Stepan
Arkadyevitch began cheerfully.
“I cannot come,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said coldly, standing and not
asking his visitor to sit down.
Alexey Alexandrovitch had thought to pass at once into those frigid
relations in which he ought to stand with the brother of a wife against
whom he was beginning a suit for divorce. But he had not taken into
account the ocean of kindliness brimming over in the heart of Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
Stepan Arkadyevitch opened wide his clear, shining eyes.
“Why can’t you? What do you mean?” he asked in perplexity, speaking in
French. “Oh, but it’s a promise. And we’re all counting on you.”
“I want to tell you that I can’t dine at your house, because the terms
of relationship which have existed between us must cease.”
“How? How do you mean? What for?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a
smile.
“Because I am beginning an action for divorce against your sister, my
wife. I ought to have....”
But, before Alexey Alexandrovitch had time to finish his sentence,
Stepan Arkadyevitch was behaving not at all as he had expected. He
groaned and sank into an armchair.
“No, Alexey Alexandrovitch! What are you saying?” cried Oblonsky, and
his suffering was apparent in his face.
“It is so.”
“Excuse me, I can’t, I can’t believe it!”
Alexey Alexandrovitch sat down, feeling that his words had not had the
effect he anticipated, and that it would be unavoidable for him to
explain his position, and that, whatever explanations he might make,
his relations with his brother-in-law would remain unchanged.
“Yes, I am brought to the painful necessity of seeking a divorce,” he
said.
“I will say one thing, Alexey Alexandrovitch. I know you for an
excellent, upright man; I know Anna—excuse me, I can’t change my
opinion of her—for a good, an excellent woman; and so, excuse me, I
cannot believe it. There is some misunderstanding,” said he.
“Oh, if it were merely a misunderstanding!...”
“Pardon, I understand,” interposed Stepan Arkadyevitch. “But of
course.... One thing: you must not act in haste. You must not, you must
not act in haste!”
“I am not acting in haste,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said coldly, “but one
cannot ask advice of anyone in such a matter. I have quite made up my
mind.”
“This is awful!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I would do one thing,
Alexey Alexandrovitch. I beseech you, do it!” he said. “No action has
yet been taken, if I understand rightly. Before you take advice, see my
wife, talk to her. She loves Anna like a sister, she loves you, and
she’s a wonderful woman. For God’s sake, talk to her! Do me that favor,
I beseech you!”
Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, and Stepan Arkadyevitch looked at him
sympathetically, without interrupting his silence.
“You will go to see her?”
“I don’t know. That was just why I have not been to see you. I imagine
our relations must change.”
“Why so? I don’t see that. Allow me to believe that apart from our
connection you have for me, at least in part, the same friendly feeling
I have always had for you ... and sincere esteem,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, pressing his hand. “Even if your worst suppositions were
correct, I don’t—and never would—take on myself to judge either side,
and I see no reason why our relations should be affected. But now, do
this, come and see my wife.”
“Well, we look at the matter differently,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch
coldly. “However, we won’t discuss it.”
“No; why shouldn’t you come today to dine, anyway? My wife’s expecting
you. Please, do come. And, above all, talk it over with her. She’s a
wonderful woman. For God’s sake, on my knees, I implore you!”
“If you so much wish it, I will come,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch,
sighing.
And, anxious to change the conversation, he inquired about what
interested them both—the new head of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s department,
a man not yet old, who had suddenly been promoted to so high a
position.
Alexey Alexandrovitch had previously felt no liking for Count
Anitchkin, and had always differed from him in his opinions. But now,
from a feeling readily comprehensible to officials—that hatred felt by
one who has suffered a defeat in the service for one who has received a
promotion, he could not endure him.
“Well, have you seen him?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch with a malignant
smile.
“Of course; he was at our sitting yesterday. He seems to know his work
capitally, and to be very energetic.”
“Yes, but what is his energy directed to?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Is he aiming at doing anything, or simply undoing what’s been done?
It’s the great misfortune of our government—this paper administration,
of which he’s a worthy representative.”
“Really, I don’t know what fault one could find with him. His policy I
don’t know, but one thing—he’s a very nice fellow,” answered Stepan
Arkadyevitch. “I’ve just been seeing him, and he’s really a capital
fellow. We lunched together, and I taught him how to make, you know
that drink, wine and oranges. It’s so cooling. And it’s a wonder he
didn’t know it. He liked it awfully. No, really he’s a capital fellow.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch glanced at his watch.
“Why, good heavens, it’s four already, and I’ve still to go to
Dolgovushin’s! So please come round to dinner. You can’t imagine how
you will grieve my wife and me.”
The way in which Alexey Alexandrovitch saw his brother-in-law out was
very different from the manner in which he had met him.
“I’ve promised, and I’ll come,” he answered wearily.
“Believe me, I appreciate it, and I hope you won’t regret it,” answered
Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling.
And, putting on his coat as he went, he patted the footman on the head,
chuckled, and went out.
“At five o’clock, and not evening dress, please,” he shouted once more,
turning at the door.
Chapter 9
It was past five, and several guests had already arrived, before the
host himself got home. He went in together with Sergey Ivanovitch
Koznishev and Pestsov, who had reached the street door at the same
moment. These were the two leading representatives of the Moscow
intellectuals, as Oblonsky had called them. Both were men respected for
their character and their intelligence. They respected each other, but
were in complete and hopeless disagreement upon almost every subject,
not because they belonged to opposite parties, but precisely because
they were of the same party (their enemies refused to see any
distinction between their views); but, in that party, each had his own
special shade of opinion. And since no difference is less easily
overcome than the difference of opinion about semi-abstract questions,
they never agreed in any opinion, and had long, indeed, been accustomed
to jeer without anger, each at the other’s incorrigible aberrations.
They were just going in at the door, talking of the weather, when
Stepan Arkadyevitch overtook them. In the drawing-room there were
already sitting Prince Alexander Dmitrievitch Shtcherbatsky, young
Shtcherbatsky, Turovtsin, Kitty, and Karenin.
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw immediately that things were not going well in
the drawing-room without him. Darya Alexandrovna, in her best gray silk
gown, obviously worried about the children, who were to have their
dinner by themselves in the nursery, and by her husband’s absence, was
not equal to the task of making the party mix without him. All were
sitting like so many priests’ wives on a visit (so the old prince
expressed it), obviously wondering why they were there, and pumping up
remarks simply to avoid being silent. Turovtsin—good, simple man—felt
unmistakably a fish out of water, and the smile with which his thick
lips greeted Stepan Arkadyevitch said, as plainly as words: “Well, old
boy, you have popped me down in a learned set! A drinking party now, or
the _Château des Fleurs_, would be more in my line!” The old prince sat
in silence, his bright little eyes watching Karenin from one side, and
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw that he had already formed a phrase to sum up
that politician of whom guests were invited to partake as though he
were a sturgeon. Kitty was looking at the door, calling up all her
energies to keep her from blushing at the entrance of Konstantin Levin.
Young Shtcherbatsky, who had not been introduced to Karenin, was trying
to look as though he were not in the least conscious of it. Karenin
himself had followed the Petersburg fashion for a dinner with ladies
and was wearing evening dress and a white tie. Stepan Arkadyevitch saw
by his face that he had come simply to keep his promise, and was
performing a disagreeable duty in being present at this gathering. He
was indeed the person chiefly responsible for the chill benumbing all
the guests before Stepan Arkadyevitch came in.
On entering the drawing-room Stepan Arkadyevitch apologized, explaining
that he had been detained by that prince, who was always the scapegoat
for all his absences and unpunctualities, and in one moment he had made
all the guests acquainted with each other, and, bringing together
Alexey Alexandrovitch and Sergey Koznishev, started them on a
discussion of the Russification of Poland, into which they immediately
plunged with Pestsov. Slapping Turovtsin on the shoulder, he whispered
something comic in his ear, and set him down by his wife and the old
prince. Then he told Kitty she was looking very pretty that evening,
and presented Shtcherbatsky to Karenin. In a moment he had so kneaded
together the social dough that the drawing-room became very lively, and
there was a merry buzz of voices. Konstantin Levin was the only person
who had not arrived. But this was so much the better, as going into the
dining-room, Stepan Arkadyevitch found to his horror that the port and
sherry had been procured from Depré, and not from Levy, and, directing
that the coachman should be sent off as speedily as possible to Levy’s,
he was going back to the drawing-room.
In the dining-room he was met by Konstantin Levin.
“I’m not late?”
“You can never help being late!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, taking his
arm.
“Have you a lot of people? Who’s here?” asked Levin, unable to help
blushing, as he knocked the snow off his cap with his glove.
“All our own set. Kitty’s here. Come along, I’ll introduce you to
Karenin.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch, for all his liberal views, was well aware that to
meet Karenin was sure to be felt a flattering distinction, and so
treated his best friends to this honor. But at that instant Konstantin
Levin was not in a condition to feel all the gratification of making
such an acquaintance. He had not seen Kitty since that memorable
evening when he met Vronsky, not counting, that is, the moment when he
had had a glimpse of her on the highroad. He had known at the bottom of
his heart that he would see her here today. But to keep his thoughts
free, he had tried to persuade himself that he did not know it. Now
when he heard that she was here, he was suddenly conscious of such
delight, and at the same time of such dread, that his breath failed him
and he could not utter what he wanted to say.
“What is she like, what is she like? Like what she used to be, or like
what she was in the carriage? What if Darya Alexandrovna told the
truth? Why shouldn’t it be the truth?” he thought.
“Oh, please, introduce me to Karenin,” he brought out with an effort,
and with a desperately determined step he walked into the drawing-room
and beheld her.
She was not the same as she used to be, nor was she as she had been in
the carriage; she was quite different.
She was scared, shy, shame-faced, and still more charming from it. She
saw him the very instant he walked into the room. She had been
expecting him. She was delighted, and so confused at her own delight
that there was a moment, the moment when he went up to her sister and
glanced again at her, when she, and he, and Dolly, who saw it all,
thought she would break down and would begin to cry. She crimsoned,
turned white, crimsoned again, and grew faint, waiting with quivering
lips for him to come to her. He went up to her, bowed, and held out his
hand without speaking. Except for the slight quiver of her lips and the
moisture in her eyes that made them brighter, her smile was almost calm
as she said:
“How long it is since we’ve seen each other!” and with desperate
determination she pressed his hand with her cold hand.
“You’ve not seen me, but I’ve seen you,” said Levin, with a radiant
smile of happiness. “I saw you when you were driving from the railway
station to Ergushovo.”
“When?” she asked, wondering.
“You were driving to Ergushovo,” said Levin, feeling as if he would sob
with the rapture that was flooding his heart. “And how dared I
associate a thought of anything not innocent with this touching
creature? And, yes, I do believe it’s true what Darya Alexandrovna told
me,” he thought.
Stepan Arkadyevitch took him by the arm and led him away to Karenin.
“Let me introduce you.” He mentioned their names.
“Very glad to meet you again,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch coldly,
shaking hands with Levin.
“You are acquainted?” Stepan Arkadyevitch asked in surprise.
“We spent three hours together in the train,” said Levin smiling, “but
got out, just as in a masquerade, quite mystified—at least I was.”
“Nonsense! Come along, please,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, pointing in
the direction of the dining-room.
The men went into the dining-room and went up to a table, laid with six
sorts of spirits and as many kinds of cheese, some with little silver
spades and some without, caviar, herrings, preserves of various kinds,
and plates with slices of French bread.
The men stood round the strong-smelling spirits and salt delicacies,
and the discussion of the Russification of Poland between Koznishev,
Karenin, and Pestsov died down in anticipation of dinner.
Sergey Ivanovitch was unequaled in his skill in winding up the most
heated and serious argument by some unexpected pinch of Attic salt that
changed the disposition of his opponent. He did this now.
Alexey Alexandrovitch had been maintaining that the Russification of
Poland could only be accomplished as a result of larger measures which
ought to be introduced by the Russian government.
Pestsov insisted that one country can only absorb another when it is
the more densely populated.
Koznishev admitted both points, but with limitations. As they were
going out of the drawing-room to conclude the argument, Koznishev said,
smiling:
“So, then, for the Russification of our foreign populations there is
but one method—to bring up as many children as one can. My brother and
I are terribly in fault, I see. You married men, especially you, Stepan
Arkadyevitch, are the real patriots: what number have you reached?” he
said, smiling genially at their host and holding out a tiny wine-glass
to him.
Everyone laughed, and Stepan Arkadyevitch with particular good humor.
“Oh, yes, that’s the best method!” he said, munching cheese and filling
the wine-glass with a special sort of spirit. The conversation dropped
at the jest.
“This cheese is not bad. Shall I give you some?” said the master of the
house. “Why, have you been going in for gymnastics again?” he asked
Levin, pinching his muscle with his left hand. Levin smiled, bent his
arm, and under Stepan Arkadyevitch’s fingers the muscles swelled up
like a sound cheese, hard as a knob of iron, through the fine cloth of
the coat.
“What biceps! A perfect Samson!”
“I imagine great strength is needed for hunting bears,” observed Alexey
Alexandrovitch, who had the mistiest notions about the chase. He cut
off and spread with cheese a wafer of bread fine as a spider-web.
Levin smiled.
“Not at all. Quite the contrary; a child can kill a bear,” he said,
with a slight bow moving aside for the ladies, who were approaching the
table.
“You have killed a bear, I’ve been told!” said Kitty, trying
assiduously to catch with her fork a perverse mushroom that would slip
away, and setting the lace quivering over her white arm. “Are there
bears on your place?” she added, turning her charming little head to
him and smiling.
There was apparently nothing extraordinary in what she said, but what
unutterable meaning there was for him in every sound, in every turn of
her lips, her eyes, her hand as she said it! There was entreaty for
forgiveness, and trust in him, and tenderness—soft, timid
tenderness—and promise and hope and love for him, which he could not
but believe in and which choked him with happiness.
“No, we’ve been hunting in the Tver province. It was coming back from
there that I met your _beau-frère_ in the train, or your _beau-frère’s_
brother-in-law,” he said with a smile. “It was an amusing meeting.”
And he began telling with droll good-humor how, after not sleeping all
night, he had, wearing an old fur-lined, full-skirted coat, got into
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s compartment.
“The conductor, forgetting the proverb, would have chucked me out on
account of my attire; but thereupon I began expressing my feelings in
elevated language, and ... you, too,” he said, addressing Karenin and
forgetting his name, “at first would have ejected me on the ground of
the old coat, but afterwards you took my part, for which I am extremely
grateful.”
“The rights of passengers generally to choose their seats are too
ill-defined,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, rubbing the tips of his
fingers on his handkerchief.
“I saw you were in uncertainty about me,” said Levin, smiling
good-naturedly, “but I made haste to plunge into intellectual
conversation to smooth over the defects of my attire.” Sergey
Ivanovitch, while he kept up a conversation with their hostess, had one
ear for his brother, and he glanced askance at him. “What is the matter
with him today? Why such a conquering hero?” he thought. He did not
know that Levin was feeling as though he had grown wings. Levin knew
she was listening to his words and that she was glad to listen to him.
And this was the only thing that interested him. Not in that room only,
but in the whole world, there existed for him only himself, with
enormously increased importance and dignity in his own eyes, and she.
He felt himself on a pinnacle that made him giddy, and far away down
below were all those nice excellent Karenins, Oblonskys, and all the
world.
Quite without attracting notice, without glancing at them, as though
there were no other places left, Stepan Arkadyevitch put Levin and
Kitty side by side.
“Oh, you may as well sit there,” he said to Levin.
The dinner was as choice as the china, in which Stepan Arkadyevitch was
a connoisseur. The _soupe Marie-Louise_ was a splendid success; the
tiny pies eaten with it melted in the mouth and were irreproachable.
The two footmen and Matvey, in white cravats, did their duty with the
dishes and wines unobtrusively, quietly, and swiftly. On the material
side the dinner was a success; it was no less so on the immaterial. The
conversation, at times general and at times between individuals, never
paused, and towards the end the company was so lively that the men rose
from the table, without stopping speaking, and even Alexey
Alexandrovitch thawed.
Chapter 10
Pestsov liked thrashing an argument out to the end, and was not
satisfied with Sergey Ivanovitch’s words, especially as he felt the
injustice of his view.
“I did not mean,” he said over the soup, addressing Alexey
Alexandrovitch, “mere density of population alone, but in conjunction
with fundamental ideas, and not by means of principles.”
“It seems to me,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said languidly, and with no
haste, “that that’s the same thing. In my opinion, influence over
another people is only possible to the people which has the higher
development, which....”
“But that’s just the question,” Pestsov broke in in his bass. He was
always in a hurry to speak, and seemed always to put his whole soul
into what he was saying. “In what are we to make higher development
consist? The English, the French, the Germans, which is at the highest
stage of development? Which of them will nationalize the other? We see
the Rhine provinces have been turned French, but the Germans are not at
a lower stage!” he shouted. “There is another law at work there.”
“I fancy that the greater influence is always on the side of true
civilization,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, slightly lifting his
eyebrows.
“But what are we to lay down as the outward signs of true
civilization?” said Pestsov.
“I imagine such signs are generally very well known,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
“But are they fully known?” Sergey Ivanovitch put in with a subtle
smile. “It is the accepted view now that real culture must be purely
classical; but we see most intense disputes on each side of the
question, and there is no denying that the opposite camp has strong
points in its favor.”
“You are for classics, Sergey Ivanovitch. Will you take red wine?” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“I am not expressing my own opinion of either form of culture,” Sergey
Ivanovitch said, holding out his glass with a smile of condescension,
as to a child. “I only say that both sides have strong arguments to
support them,” he went on, addressing Alexey Alexandrovitch. “My
sympathies are classical from education, but in this discussion I am
personally unable to arrive at a conclusion. I see no distinct grounds
for classical studies being given a preeminence over scientific
studies.”
“The natural sciences have just as great an educational value,” put in
Pestsov. “Take astronomy, take botany, or zoology with its system of
general principles.”
“I cannot quite agree with that,” responded Alexey Alexandrovitch “It
seems to me that one must admit that the very process of studying the
forms of language has a peculiarly favorable influence on intellectual
development. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the influence of the
classical authors is in the highest degree moral, while, unfortunately,
with the study of the natural sciences are associated the false and
noxious doctrines which are the curse of our day.”
Sergey Ivanovitch would have said something, but Pestsov interrupted
him in his rich bass. He began warmly contesting the justice of this
view. Sergey Ivanovitch waited serenely to speak, obviously with a
convincing reply ready.
“But,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, smiling subtly, and addressing Karenin,
“One must allow that to weigh all the advantages and disadvantages of
classical and scientific studies is a difficult task, and the question
which form of education was to be preferred would not have been so
quickly and conclusively decided if there had not been in favor of
classical education, as you expressed it just now, its moral—_disons le
mot_—anti-nihilist influence.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“If it had not been for the distinctive property of anti-nihilistic
influence on the side of classical studies, we should have considered
the subject more, have weighed the arguments on both sides,” said
Sergey Ivanovitch with a subtle smile, “we should have given elbow-room
to both tendencies. But now we know that these little pills of
classical learning possess the medicinal property of anti-nihilism, and
we boldly prescribe them to our patients.... But what if they had no
such medicinal property?” he wound up humorously.
At Sergey Ivanovitch’s little pills, everyone laughed; Turovtsin in
especial roared loudly and jovially, glad at last to have found
something to laugh at, all he ever looked for in listening to
conversation.
Stepan Arkadyevitch had not made a mistake in inviting Pestsov. With
Pestsov intellectual conversation never flagged for an instant.
Directly Sergey Ivanovitch had concluded the conversation with his
jest, Pestsov promptly started a new one.
“I can’t agree even,” said he, “that the government had that aim. The
government obviously is guided by abstract considerations, and remains
indifferent to the influence its measures may exercise. The education
of women, for instance, would naturally be regarded as likely to be
harmful, but the government opens schools and universities for women.”
And the conversation at once passed to the new subject of the education
of women.
Alexey Alexandrovitch expressed the idea that the education of women is
apt to be confounded with the emancipation of women, and that it is
only so that it can be considered dangerous.
“I consider, on the contrary, that the two questions are inseparably
connected together,” said Pestsov; “it is a vicious circle. Woman is
deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education
results from the absence of rights. We must not forget that the
subjection of women is so complete, and dates from such ages back that
we are often unwilling to recognize the gulf that separates them from
us,” said he.
“You said rights,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, waiting till Pestsov had
finished, “meaning the right of sitting on juries, of voting, of
presiding at official meetings, the right of entering the civil
service, of sitting in parliament....”
“Undoubtedly.”
“But if women, as a rare exception, can occupy such positions, it seems
to me you are wrong in using the expression ‘rights.’ It would be more
correct to say duties. Every man will agree that in doing the duty of a
juryman, a witness, a telegraph clerk, we feel we are performing
duties. And therefore it would be correct to say that women are seeking
duties, and quite legitimately. And one can but sympathize with this
desire to assist in the general labor of man.”
“Quite so,” Alexey Alexandrovitch assented. “The question, I imagine,
is simply whether they are fitted for such duties.”
“They will most likely be perfectly fitted,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
“when education has become general among them. We see this....”
“How about the proverb?” said the prince, who had a long while been
intent on the conversation, his little comical eyes twinkling. “I can
say it before my daughter: her hair is long, because her wit is....”
“Just what they thought of the negroes before their emancipation!” said
Pestsov angrily.
“What seems strange to me is that women should seek fresh duties,” said
Sergey Ivanovitch, “while we see, unhappily, that men usually try to
avoid them.”
“Duties are bound up with rights—power, money, honor; those are what
women are seeking,” said Pestsov.
“Just as though I should seek the right to be a wet-nurse and feel
injured because women are paid for the work, while no one will take
me,” said the old prince.
Turovtsin exploded in a loud roar of laughter and Sergey Ivanovitch
regretted that he had not made this comparison. Even Alexey
Alexandrovitch smiled.
“Yes, but a man can’t nurse a baby,” said Pestsov, “while a woman....”
“No, there was an Englishman who did suckle his baby on board ship,”
said the old prince, feeling this freedom in conversation permissible
before his own daughters.
“There are as many such Englishmen as there would be women officials,”
said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“Yes, but what is a girl to do who has no family?” put in Stepan
Arkadyevitch, thinking of Masha Tchibisova, whom he had had in his mind
all along, in sympathizing with Pestsov and supporting him.
“If the story of such a girl were thoroughly sifted, you would find she
had abandoned a family—her own or a sister’s, where she might have
found a woman’s duties,” Darya Alexandrovna broke in unexpectedly in a
tone of exasperation, probably suspecting what sort of girl Stepan
Arkadyevitch was thinking of.
“But we take our stand on principle as the ideal,” replied Pestsov in
his mellow bass. “Woman desires to have rights, to be independent,
educated. She is oppressed, humiliated by the consciousness of her
disabilities.”
“And I’m oppressed and humiliated that they won’t engage me at the
Foundling,” the old prince said again, to the huge delight of
Turovtsin, who in his mirth dropped his asparagus with the thick end in
the sauce.
Chapter 11
Everyone took part in the conversation except Kitty and Levin. At
first, when they were talking of the influence that one people has on
another, there rose to Levin’s mind what he had to say on the subject.
But these ideas, once of such importance in his eyes, seemed to come
into his brain as in a dream, and had now not the slightest interest
for him. It even struck him as strange that they should be so eager to
talk of what was of no use to anyone. Kitty, too, should, one would
have supposed, have been interested in what they were saying of the
rights and education of women. How often she had mused on the subject,
thinking of her friend abroad, Varenka, of her painful state of
dependence, how often she had wondered about herself what would become
of her if she did not marry, and how often she had argued with her
sister about it! But it did not interest her at all. She and Levin had
a conversation of their own, yet not a conversation, but some sort of
mysterious communication, which brought them every moment nearer, and
stirred in both a sense of glad terror before the unknown into which
they were entering.
At first Levin, in answer to Kitty’s question how he could have seen
her last year in the carriage, told her how he had been coming home
from the mowing along the highroad and had met her.
“It was very, very early in the morning. You were probably only just
awake. Your mother was asleep in the corner. It was an exquisite
morning. I was walking along wondering who it could be in a
four-in-hand? It was a splendid set of four horses with bells, and in a
second you flashed by, and I saw you at the window—you were sitting
like this, holding the strings of your cap in both hands, and thinking
awfully deeply about something,” he said, smiling. “How I should like
to know what you were thinking about then! Something important?”
“Wasn’t I dreadfully untidy?” she wondered, but seeing the smile of
ecstasy these reminiscences called up, she felt that the impression she
had made had been very good. She blushed and laughed with delight;
“Really I don’t remember.”
“How nicely Turovtsin laughs!” said Levin, admiring his moist eyes and
shaking chest.
“Have you known him long?” asked Kitty.
“Oh, everyone knows him!”
“And I see you think he’s a horrid man?”
“Not horrid, but nothing in him.”
“Oh, you’re wrong! And you must give up thinking so directly!” said
Kitty. “I used to have a very poor opinion of him too, but he, he’s an
awfully nice and wonderfully good-hearted man. He has a heart of gold.”
“How could you find out what sort of heart he has?”
“We are great friends. I know him very well. Last winter, soon after
... you came to see us,” she said, with a guilty and at the same time
confiding smile, “all Dolly’s children had scarlet fever, and he
happened to come and see her. And only fancy,” she said in a whisper,
“he felt so sorry for her that he stayed and began to help her look
after the children. Yes, and for three weeks he stopped with them, and
looked after the children like a nurse.”
“I am telling Konstantin Dmitrievitch about Turovtsin in the scarlet
fever,” she said, bending over to her sister.
“Yes, it was wonderful, noble!” said Dolly, glancing towards Turovtsin,
who had become aware they were talking of him, and smiling gently to
him. Levin glanced once more at Turovtsin, and wondered how it was he
had not realized all this man’s goodness before.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I’ll never think ill of people again!” he
said gaily, genuinely expressing what he felt at the moment.
Chapter 12
Connected with the conversation that had sprung up on the rights of
women there were certain questions as to the inequality of rights in
marriage improper to discuss before the ladies. Pestsov had several
times during dinner touched upon these questions, but Sergey Ivanovitch
and Stepan Arkadyevitch carefully drew him off them.
When they rose from the table and the ladies had gone out, Pestsov did
not follow them, but addressing Alexey Alexandrovitch, began to expound
the chief ground of inequality. The inequality in marriage, in his
opinion, lay in the fact that the infidelity of the wife and the
infidelity of the husband are punished unequally, both by the law and
by public opinion. Stepan Arkadyevitch went hurriedly up to Alexey
Alexandrovitch and offered him a cigar.
“No, I don’t smoke,” Alexey Alexandrovitch answered calmly, and as
though purposely wishing to show that he was not afraid of the subject,
he turned to Pestsov with a chilly smile.
“I imagine that such a view has a foundation in the very nature of
things,” he said, and would have gone on to the drawing-room. But at
this point Turovtsin broke suddenly and unexpectedly into the
conversation, addressing Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“You heard, perhaps, about Pryatchnikov?” said Turovtsin, warmed up by
the champagne he had drunk, and long waiting for an opportunity to
break the silence that had weighed on him. “Vasya Pryatchnikov,” he
said, with a good-natured smile on his damp, red lips, addressing
himself principally to the most important guest, Alexey Alexandrovitch,
“they told me today he fought a duel with Kvitsky at Tver, and has
killed him.”
Just as it always seems that one bruises oneself on a sore place, so
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt now that the conversation would by ill luck
fall every moment on Alexey Alexandrovitch’s sore spot. He would again
have got his brother-in-law away, but Alexey Alexandrovitch himself
inquired, with curiosity:
“What did Pryatchnikov fight about?”
“His wife. Acted like a man, he did! Called him out and shot him!”
“Ah!” said Alexey Alexandrovitch indifferently, and lifting his
eyebrows, he went into the drawing-room.
“How glad I am you have come,” Dolly said with a frightened smile,
meeting him in the outer drawing-room. “I must talk to you. Let’s sit
here.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch, with the same expression of indifference, given
him by his lifted eyebrows, sat down beside Darya Alexandrovna, and
smiled affectedly.
“It’s fortunate,” said he, “especially as I was meaning to ask you to
excuse me, and to be taking leave. I have to start tomorrow.”
Darya Alexandrovna was firmly convinced of Anna’s innocence, and she
felt herself growing pale and her lips quivering with anger at this
frigid, unfeeling man, who was so calmly intending to ruin her innocent
friend.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she said, with desperate resolution looking
him in the face, “I asked you about Anna, you made me no answer. How is
she?”
“She is, I believe, quite well, Darya Alexandrovna,” replied Alexey
Alexandrovitch, not looking at her.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch, forgive me, I have no right ... but I love Anna
as a sister, and esteem her; I beg, I beseech you to tell me what is
wrong between you? what fault do you find with her?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch frowned, and almost closing his eyes, dropped his
head.
“I presume that your husband has told you the grounds on which I
consider it necessary to change my attitude to Anna Arkadyevna?” he
said, not looking her in the face, but eyeing with displeasure
Shtcherbatsky, who was walking across the drawing-room.
“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, I can’t believe it!” Dolly
said, clasping her bony hands before her with a vigorous gesture. She
rose quickly, and laid her hand on Alexey Alexandrovitch’s sleeve. “We
shall be disturbed here. Come this way, please.”
Dolly’s agitation had an effect on Alexey Alexandrovitch. He got up and
submissively followed her to the schoolroom. They sat down to a table
covered with an oilcloth cut in slits by penknives.
“I don’t, I don’t believe it!” Dolly said, trying to catch his glance
that avoided her.
“One cannot disbelieve facts, Darya Alexandrovna,” said he, with an
emphasis on the word “facts.”
“But what has she done?” said Darya Alexandrovna. “What precisely has
she done?”
“She has forsaken her duty, and deceived her husband. That’s what she
has done,” said he.
“No, no, it can’t be! No, for God’s sake, you are mistaken,” said
Dolly, putting her hands to her temples and closing her eyes.
Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled coldly, with his lips alone, meaning to
signify to her and to himself the firmness of his conviction; but this
warm defense, though it could not shake him, reopened his wound. He
began to speak with greater heat.
“It is extremely difficult to be mistaken when a wife herself informs
her husband of the fact—informs him that eight years of her life, and a
son, all that’s a mistake, and that she wants to begin life again,” he
said angrily, with a snort.
“Anna and sin—I cannot connect them, I cannot believe it!”
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, now looking straight into Dolly’s
kindly, troubled face, and feeling that his tongue was being loosened
in spite of himself, “I would give a great deal for doubt to be still
possible. When I doubted, I was miserable, but it was better than now.
When I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope, and still I doubt
of everything. I am in such doubt of everything that I even hate my
son, and sometimes do not believe he is my son. I am very unhappy.”
He had no need to say that. Darya Alexandrovna had seen that as soon as
he glanced into her face; and she felt sorry for him, and her faith in
the innocence of her friend began to totter.
“Oh, this is awful, awful! But can it be true that you are resolved on
a divorce?”
“I am resolved on extreme measures. There is nothing else for me to
do.”
“Nothing else to do, nothing else to do....” she replied, with tears in
her eyes. “Oh no, don’t say nothing else to do!” she said.
“What is horrible in a trouble of this kind is that one cannot, as in
any other—in loss, in death—bear one’s trouble in peace, but that one
must act,” said he, as though guessing her thought. “One must get out
of the humiliating position in which one is placed; one can’t live _à
trois_.”
“I understand, I quite understand that,” said Dolly, and her head sank.
She was silent for a little, thinking of herself, of her own grief in
her family, and all at once, with an impulsive movement, she raised her
head and clasped her hands with an imploring gesture. “But wait a
little! You are a Christian. Think of her! What will become of her, if
you cast her off?”
“I have thought, Darya Alexandrovna, I have thought a great deal,” said
Alexey Alexandrovitch. His face turned red in patches, and his dim eyes
looked straight before him. Darya Alexandrovna at that moment pitied
him with all her heart. “That was what I did indeed when she herself
made known to me my humiliation; I left everything as of old. I gave
her a chance to reform, I tried to save her. And with what result? She
would not regard the slightest request—that she should observe
decorum,” he said, getting heated. “One may save anyone who does not
want to be ruined; but if the whole nature is so corrupt, so depraved,
that ruin itself seems to be her salvation, what’s to be done?”
“Anything, only not divorce!” answered Darya Alexandrovna
“But what is anything?”
“No, it is awful! She will be no one’s wife, she will be lost!”
“What can I do?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, raising his shoulders and
his eyebrows. The recollection of his wife’s last act had so incensed
him that he had become frigid, as at the beginning of the conversation.
“I am very grateful for your sympathy, but I must be going,” he said,
getting up.
“No, wait a minute. You must not ruin her. Wait a little; I will tell
you about myself. I was married, and my husband deceived me; in anger
and jealousy, I would have thrown up everything, I would myself.... But
I came to myself again; and who did it? Anna saved me. And here I am
living on. The children are growing up, my husband has come back to his
family, and feels his fault, is growing purer, better, and I live
on.... I have forgiven it, and you ought to forgive!”
Alexey Alexandrovitch heard her, but her words had no effect on him
now. All the hatred of that day when he had resolved on a divorce had
sprung up again in his soul. He shook himself, and said in a shrill,
loud voice:
“Forgive I cannot, and do not wish to, and I regard it as wrong. I have
done everything for this woman, and she has trodden it all in the mud
to which she is akin. I am not a spiteful man, I have never hated
anyone, but I hate her with my whole soul, and I cannot even forgive
her, because I hate her too much for all the wrong she has done me!” he
said, with tones of hatred in his voice.
“Love those that hate you....” Darya Alexandrovna whispered timorously.
Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled contemptuously. That he knew long ago, but
it could not be applied to his case.
“Love those that hate you, but to love those one hates is impossible.
Forgive me for having troubled you. Everyone has enough to bear in his
own grief!” And regaining his self-possession, Alexey Alexandrovitch
quietly took leave and went away.
Chapter 13
When they rose from table, Levin would have liked to follow Kitty into
the drawing-room; but he was afraid she might dislike this, as too
obviously paying her attention. He remained in the little ring of men,
taking part in the general conversation, and without looking at Kitty,
he was aware of her movements, her looks, and the place where she was
in the drawing-room.
He did at once, and without the smallest effort, keep the promise he
had made her—always to think well of all men, and to like everyone
always. The conversation fell on the village commune, in which Pestsov
saw a sort of special principle, called by him the “choral” principle.
Levin did not agree with Pestsov, nor with his brother, who had a
special attitude of his own, both admitting and not admitting the
significance of the Russian commune. But he talked to them, simply
trying to reconcile and soften their differences. He was not in the
least interested in what he said himself, and even less so in what they
said; all he wanted was that they and everyone should be happy and
contented. He knew now the one thing of importance; and that one thing
was at first there, in the drawing-room, and then began moving across
and came to a standstill at the door. Without turning round he felt the
eyes fixed on him, and the smile, and he could not help turning round.
She was standing in the doorway with Shtcherbatsky, looking at him.
“I thought you were going towards the piano,” said he, going up to her.
“That’s something I miss in the country—music.”
“No; we only came to fetch you and thank you,” she said, rewarding him
with a smile that was like a gift, “for coming. What do they want to
argue for? No one ever convinces anyone, you know.”
“Yes; that’s true,” said Levin; “it generally happens that one argues
warmly simply because one can’t make out what one’s opponent wants to
prove.”
Levin had often noticed in discussions between the most intelligent
people that after enormous efforts, and an enormous expenditure of
logical subtleties and words, the disputants finally arrived at being
aware that what they had so long been struggling to prove to one
another had long ago, from the beginning of the argument, been known to
both, but that they liked different things, and would not define what
they liked for fear of its being attacked. He had often had the
experience of suddenly in a discussion grasping what it was his
opponent liked and at once liking it too, and immediately he found
himself agreeing, and then all arguments fell away as useless.
Sometimes, too, he had experienced the opposite, expressing at last
what he liked himself, which he was devising arguments to defend, and,
chancing to express it well and genuinely, he had found his opponent at
once agreeing and ceasing to dispute his position. He tried to say
this.
She knitted her brow, trying to understand. But directly he began to
illustrate his meaning, she understood at once.
“I know: one must find out what he is arguing for, what is precious to
him, then one can....”
She had completely guessed and expressed his badly expressed idea.
Levin smiled joyfully; he was struck by this transition from the
confused, verbose discussion with Pestsov and his brother to this
laconic, clear, almost wordless communication of the most complex
ideas.
Shtcherbatsky moved away from them, and Kitty, going up to a
card-table, sat down, and, taking up the chalk, began drawing diverging
circles over the new green cloth.
They began again on the subject that had been started at dinner—the
liberty and occupations of women. Levin was of the opinion of Darya
Alexandrovna that a girl who did not marry should find a woman’s duties
in a family. He supported this view by the fact that no family can get
on without women to help; that in every family, poor or rich, there are
and must be nurses, either relations or hired.
“No,” said Kitty, blushing, but looking at him all the more boldly with
her truthful eyes; “a girl may be so circumstanced that she cannot live
in the family without humiliation, while she herself....”
At the hint he understood her.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes—you’re right; you’re right!”
And he saw all that Pestsov had been maintaining at dinner of the
liberty of woman, simply from getting a glimpse of the terror of an old
maid’s existence and its humiliation in Kitty’s heart; and loving her,
he felt that terror and humiliation, and at once gave up his arguments.
A silence followed. She was still drawing with the chalk on the table.
Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her
mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of
happiness.
“Ah! I’ve scribbled all over the table!” she said, and, laying down the
chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.
“What! shall I be left alone—without her?” he thought with horror, and
he took the chalk. “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting down to the table.
“I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.”
He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.
“Please, ask it.”
“Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, _w, y, t, m, i, c,
n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t_. These letters meant, “When you told me it
could never be, did that mean never, or then?” There seemed no
likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he
looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the
words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on
her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as
though asking him, “Is it what I think?”
“I understand,” she said, flushing a little.
“What is this word?” he said, pointing to the _n_ that stood for
_never_.
“It means _never_,” she said; “but that’s not true!”
He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and
stood up. She wrote, _t, i, c, n, a, d_.
Dolly was completely comforted in the depression caused by her
conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch when she caught sight of the
two figures: Kitty with the chalk in her hand, with a shy and happy
smile looking upwards at Levin, and his handsome figure bending over
the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on the table and the
next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant,
“Then I could not answer differently.”
He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
“Only then?”
“Yes,” her smile answered.
“And n... and now?” he asked.
“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so
much!” she wrote the initial letters, _i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h._ This
meant, “If you could forget and forgive what happened.”
He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it,
wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to
forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”
She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
“I understand,” she said in a whisper.
He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and without
asking him, “Is it this?” took the chalk and at once answered.
For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and
often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He could
not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming eyes, beaming
with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he wrote three
letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them over her
arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, “Yes.”
“You’re playing _secrétaire_?” said the old prince. “But we must really
be getting along if you want to be in time at the theater.”
Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.
In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said that
she loved him, and that she would tell her father and mother that he
would come tomorrow morning.
Chapter 14
When Kitty had gone and Levin was left alone, he felt such uneasiness
without her, and such an impatient longing to get as quickly, as
quickly as possible, to tomorrow morning, when he would see her again
and be plighted to her forever, that he felt afraid, as though of
death, of those fourteen hours that he had to get through without her.
It was essential for him to be with someone to talk to, so as not to be
left alone, to kill time. Stepan Arkadyevitch would have been the
companion most congenial to him, but he was going out, he said, to a
_soirée_, in reality to the ballet. Levin only had time to tell him he
was happy, and that he loved him, and would never, never forget what he
had done for him. The eyes and the smile of Stepan Arkadyevitch showed
Levin that he comprehended that feeling fittingly.
“Oh, so it’s not time to die yet?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, pressing
Levin’s hand with emotion.
“N-n-no!” said Levin.
Darya Alexandrovna too, as she said good-bye to him, gave him a sort of
congratulation, saying, “How glad I am you have met Kitty again! One
must value old friends.” Levin did not like these words of Darya
Alexandrovna’s. She could not understand how lofty and beyond her it
all was, and she ought not to have dared to allude to it. Levin said
good-bye to them, but, not to be left alone, he attached himself to his
brother.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to a meeting.”
“Well, I’ll come with you. May I?”
“What for? Yes, come along,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, smiling. “What is
the matter with you today?”
“With me? Happiness is the matter with me!” said Levin, letting down
the window of the carriage they were driving in. “You don’t mind?—it’s
so stifling. It’s happiness is the matter with me! Why is it you have
never married?”
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.
“I am very glad, she seems a nice gi....” Sergey Ivanovitch was
beginning.
“Don’t say it! don’t say it!” shouted Levin, clutching at the collar of
his fur coat with both hands, and muffling him up in it. “She’s a nice
girl” were such simple, humble words, so out of harmony with his
feeling.
Sergey Ivanovitch laughed outright a merry laugh, which was rare with
him. “Well, anyway, I may say that I’m very glad of it.”
“That you may do tomorrow, tomorrow and nothing more! Nothing, nothing,
silence,” said Levin, and muffling him once more in his fur coat, he
added: “I do like you so! Well, is it possible for me to be present at
the meeting?”
“Of course it is.”
“What is your discussion about today?” asked Levin, never ceasing
smiling.
They arrived at the meeting. Levin heard the secretary hesitatingly
read the minutes which he obviously did not himself understand; but
Levin saw from this secretary’s face what a good, nice, kind-hearted
person he was. This was evident from his confusion and embarrassment in
reading the minutes. Then the discussion began. They were disputing
about the misappropriation of certain sums and the laying of certain
pipes, and Sergey Ivanovitch was very cutting to two members, and said
something at great length with an air of triumph; and another member,
scribbling something on a bit of paper, began timidly at first, but
afterwards answered him very viciously and delightfully. And then
Sviazhsky (he was there too) said something too, very handsomely and
nobly. Levin listened to them, and saw clearly that these missing sums
and these pipes were not anything real, and that they were not at all
angry, but were all the nicest, kindest people, and everything was as
happy and charming as possible among them. They did no harm to anyone,
and were all enjoying it. What struck Levin was that he could see
through them all today, and from little, almost imperceptible signs
knew the soul of each, and saw distinctly that they were all good at
heart. And Levin himself in particular they were all extremely fond of
that day. That was evident from the way they spoke to him, from the
friendly, affectionate way even those he did not know looked at him.
“Well, did you like it?” Sergey Ivanovitch asked him.
“Very much. I never supposed it was so interesting! Capital! Splendid!”
Sviazhsky went up to Levin and invited him to come round to tea with
him. Levin was utterly at a loss to comprehend or recall what it was he
had disliked in Sviazhsky, what he had failed to find in him. He was a
clever and wonderfully good-hearted man.
“Most delighted,” he said, and asked after his wife and sister-in-law.
And from a queer association of ideas, because in his imagination the
idea of Sviazhsky’s sister-in-law was connected with marriage, it
occurred to him that there was no one to whom he could more suitably
speak of his happiness, and he was very glad to go and see them.
Sviazhsky questioned him about his improvements on his estate,
presupposing, as he always did, that there was no possibility of doing
anything not done already in Europe, and now this did not in the least
annoy Levin. On the contrary, he felt that Sviazhsky was right, that
the whole business was of little value, and he saw the wonderful
softness and consideration with which Sviazhsky avoided fully
expressing his correct view. The ladies of the Sviazhsky household were
particularly delightful. It seemed to Levin that they knew all about it
already and sympathized with him, saying nothing merely from delicacy.
He stayed with them one hour, two, three, talking of all sorts of
subjects but the one thing that filled his heart, and did not observe
that he was boring them dreadfully, and that it was long past their
bedtime.
Sviazhsky went with him into the hall, yawning and wondering at the
strange humor his friend was in. It was past one o’clock. Levin went
back to his hotel, and was dismayed at the thought that all alone now
with his impatience he had ten hours still left to get through. The
servant, whose turn it was to be up all night, lighted his candles, and
would have gone away, but Levin stopped him. This servant, Yegor, whom
Levin had noticed before, struck him as a very intelligent, excellent,
and, above all, good-hearted man.
“Well, Yegor, it’s hard work not sleeping, isn’t it?”
“One’s got to put up with it! It’s part of our work, you see. In a
gentleman’s house it’s easier; but then here one makes more.”
It appeared that Yegor had a family, three boys and a daughter, a
sempstress, whom he wanted to marry to a cashier in a saddler’s shop.
Levin, on hearing this, informed Yegor that, in his opinion, in
marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always
be happy, for happiness rests only on oneself.
Yegor listened attentively, and obviously quite took in Levin’s idea,
but by way of assent to it he enunciated, greatly to Levin’s surprise,
the observation that when he had lived with good masters he had always
been satisfied with his masters, and now was perfectly satisfied with
his employer, though he was a Frenchman.
“Wonderfully good-hearted fellow!” thought Levin.
“Well, but you yourself, Yegor, when you got married, did you love your
wife?”
“Ay! and why not?” responded Yegor.
And Levin saw that Yegor too was in an excited state and intending to
express all his most heartfelt emotions.
“My life, too, has been a wonderful one. From a child up....” he was
beginning with flashing eyes, apparently catching Levin’s enthusiasm,
just as people catch yawning.
But at that moment a ring was heard. Yegor departed, and Levin was left
alone. He had eaten scarcely anything at dinner, had refused tea and
supper at Sviazhsky’s, but he was incapable of thinking of supper. He
had not slept the previous night, but was incapable of thinking of
sleep either. His room was cold, but he was oppressed by heat. He
opened both the movable panes in his window and sat down to the table
opposite the open panes. Over the snow-covered roofs could be seen a
decorated cross with chains, and above it the rising triangle of
Charles’s Wain with the yellowish light of Capella. He gazed at the
cross, then at the stars, drank in the fresh freezing air that flowed
evenly into the room, and followed as though in a dream the images and
memories that rose in his imagination. At four o’clock he heard steps
in the passage and peeped out at the door. It was the gambler Myaskin,
whom he knew, coming from the club. He walked gloomily, frowning and
coughing. “Poor, unlucky fellow!” thought Levin, and tears came into
his eyes from love and pity for this man. He would have talked with
him, and tried to comfort him, but remembering that he had nothing but
his shirt on, he changed his mind and sat down again at the open pane
to bathe in the cold air and gaze at the exquisite lines of the cross,
silent, but full of meaning for him, and the mounting lurid yellow
star. At seven o’clock there was a noise of people polishing the
floors, and bells ringing in some servants’ department, and Levin felt
that he was beginning to get frozen. He closed the pane, washed,
dressed, and went out into the street.
Chapter 15
The streets were still empty. Levin went to the house of the
Shtcherbatskys. The visitors’ doors were closed and everything was
asleep. He walked back, went into his room again, and asked for coffee.
The day servant, not Yegor this time, brought it to him. Levin would
have entered into conversation with him, but a bell rang for the
servant, and he went out. Levin tried to drink coffee and put some roll
in his mouth, but his mouth was quite at a loss what to do with the
roll. Levin, rejecting the roll, put on his coat and went out again for
a walk. It was nine o’clock when he reached the Shtcherbatskys’ steps
the second time. In the house they were only just up, and the cook came
out to go marketing. He had to get through at least two hours more.
All that night and morning Levin lived perfectly unconsciously, and
felt perfectly lifted out of the conditions of material life. He had
eaten nothing for a whole day, he had not slept for two nights, had
spent several hours undressed in the frozen air, and felt not simply
fresher and stronger than ever, but felt utterly independent of his
body; he moved without muscular effort, and felt as if he could do
anything. He was convinced he could fly upwards or lift the corner of
the house, if need be. He spent the remainder of the time in the
street, incessantly looking at his watch and gazing about him.
And what he saw then, he never saw again after. The children especially
going to school, the bluish doves flying down from the roofs to the
pavement, and the little loaves covered with flour, thrust out by an
unseen hand, touched him. Those loaves, those doves, and those two boys
were not earthly creatures. It all happened at the same time: a boy ran
towards a dove and glanced smiling at Levin; the dove, with a whir of
her wings, darted away, flashing in the sun, amid grains of snow that
quivered in the air, while from a little window there came a smell of
fresh-baked bread, and the loaves were put out. All of this together
was so extraordinarily nice that Levin laughed and cried with delight.
Going a long way round by Gazetny Place and Kislovka, he went back
again to the hotel, and putting his watch before him, he sat down to
wait for twelve o’clock. In the next room they were talking about some
sort of machines, and swindling, and coughing their morning coughs.
They did not realize that the hand was near twelve. The hand reached
it. Levin went out onto the steps. The sledge-drivers clearly knew all
about it. They crowded round Levin with happy faces, quarreling among
themselves, and offering their services. Trying not to offend the other
sledge drivers, and promising to drive with them too, Levin took one
and told him to drive to the Shtcherbatskys’. The sledge-driver was
splendid in a white shirt-collar sticking out over his overcoat and
into his strong, full-blooded red neck. The sledge was high and
comfortable, and altogether such a one as Levin never drove in after,
and the horse was a good one, and tried to gallop but didn’t seem to
move. The driver knew the Shtcherbatskys’ house, and drew up at the
entrance with a curve of his arm and a “Wo!” especially indicative of
respect for his fare. The Shtcherbatskys’ hall-porter certainly knew
all about it. This was evident from the smile in his eyes and the way
he said:
“Well, it’s a long while since you’ve been to see us, Konstantin
Dmitrievitch!”
Not only he knew all about it, but he was unmistakably delighted and
making efforts to conceal his joy. Looking into his kindly old eyes,
Levin realized even something new in his happiness.
“Are they up?”
“Pray walk in! Leave it here,” said he, smiling, as Levin would have
come back to take his hat. That meant something.
“To whom shall I announce your honor?” asked the footman.
The footman, though a young man, and one of the new school of footmen,
a dandy, was a very kind-hearted, good fellow, and he too knew all
about it.
“The princess ... the prince ... the young princess....” said Levin.
The first person he saw was Mademoiselle Linon. She walked across the
room, and her ringlets and her face were beaming. He had only just
spoken to her, when suddenly he heard the rustle of a skirt at the
door, and Mademoiselle Linon vanished from Levin’s eyes, and a joyful
terror came over him at the nearness of his happiness. Mademoiselle
Linon was in great haste, and leaving him, went out at the other door.
Directly she had gone out, swift, swift light steps sounded on the
parquet, and his bliss, his life, himself—what was best in himself,
what he had so long sought and longed for—was quickly, so quickly
approaching him. She did not walk, but seemed, by some unseen force, to
float to him. He saw nothing but her clear, truthful eyes, frightened
by the same bliss of love that flooded his heart. Those eyes were
shining nearer and nearer, blinding him with their light of love. She
stopped still close to him, touching him. Her hands rose and dropped
onto his shoulders.
She had done all she could—she had run up to him and given herself up
entirely, shy and happy. He put his arms round her and pressed his lips
to her mouth that sought his kiss.
She too had not slept all night, and had been expecting him all the
morning.
Her mother and father had consented without demur, and were happy in
her happiness. She had been waiting for him. She wanted to be the first
to tell him her happiness and his. She had got ready to see him alone,
and had been delighted at the idea, and had been shy and ashamed, and
did not know herself what she was doing. She had heard his steps and
voice, and had waited at the door for Mademoiselle Linon to go.
Mademoiselle Linon had gone away. Without thinking, without asking
herself how and what, she had gone up to him, and did as she was doing.
“Let us go to mamma!” she said, taking him by the hand. For a long
while he could say nothing, not so much because he was afraid of
desecrating the loftiness of his emotion by a word, as that every time
he tried to say something, instead of words he felt that tears of
happiness were welling up. He took her hand and kissed it.
“Can it be true?” he said at last in a choked voice. “I can’t believe
you love me, dear!”
She smiled at that “dear,” and at the timidity with which he glanced at
her.
“Yes!” she said significantly, deliberately. “I am so happy!”
Not letting go his hands, she went into the drawing-room. The princess,
seeing them, breathed quickly, and immediately began to cry and then
immediately began to laugh, and with a vigorous step Levin had not
expected, ran up to him, and hugging his head, kissed him, wetting his
cheeks with her tears.
“So it is all settled! I am glad. Love her. I am glad.... Kitty!”
“You’ve not been long settling things,” said the old prince, trying to
seem unmoved; but Levin noticed that his eyes were wet when he turned
to him.
“I’ve long, always wished for this!” said the prince, taking Levin by
the arm and drawing him towards himself. “Even when this little
feather-head fancied....”
“Papa!” shrieked Kitty, and shut his mouth with her hands.
“Well, I won’t!” he said. “I’m very, very ... plea... Oh, what a fool I
am....”
He embraced Kitty, kissed her face, her hand, her face again, and made
the sign of the cross over her.
And there came over Levin a new feeling of love for this man, till then
so little known to him, when he saw how slowly and tenderly Kitty
kissed his muscular hand.
Chapter 16
The princess sat in her armchair, silent and smiling; the prince sat
down beside her. Kitty stood by her father’s chair, still holding his
hand. All were silent.
The princess was the first to put everything into words, and to
translate all thoughts and feelings into practical questions. And all
equally felt this strange and painful for the first minute.
“When is it to be? We must have the benediction and announcement. And
when’s the wedding to be? What do you think, Alexander?”
“Here he is,” said the old prince, pointing to Levin—“he’s the
principal person in the matter.”
“When?” said Levin blushing. “Tomorrow. If you ask me, I should say,
the benediction today and the wedding tomorrow.”
“Come, _mon cher_, that’s nonsense!”
“Well, in a week.”
“He’s quite mad.”
“No, why so?”
“Well, upon my word!” said the mother, smiling, delighted at this
haste. “How about the trousseau?”
“Will there really be a trousseau and all that?” Levin thought with
horror. “But can the trousseau and the benediction and all that—can it
spoil my happiness? Nothing can spoil it!” He glanced at Kitty, and
noticed that she was not in the least, not in the very least, disturbed
by the idea of the trousseau. “Then it must be all right,” he thought.
“Oh, I know nothing about it; I only said what I should like,” he said
apologetically.
“We’ll talk it over, then. The benediction and announcement can take
place now. That’s very well.”
The princess went up to her husband, kissed him, and would have gone
away, but he kept her, embraced her, and, tenderly as a young lover,
kissed her several times, smiling. The old people were obviously
muddled for a moment, and did not quite know whether it was they who
were in love again or their daughter. When the prince and the princess
had gone, Levin went up to his betrothed and took her hand. He was
self-possessed now and could speak, and he had a great deal he wanted
to tell her. But he said not at all what he had to say.
“How I knew it would be so! I never hoped for it; and yet in my heart I
was always sure,” he said. “I believe that it was ordained.”
“And I!” she said. “Even when....” She stopped and went on again,
looking at him resolutely with her truthful eyes, “Even when I thrust
from me my happiness. I always loved you alone, but I was carried away.
I ought to tell you.... Can you forgive that?”
“Perhaps it was for the best. You will have to forgive me so much. I
ought to tell you....”
This was one of the things he had meant to speak about. He had resolved
from the first to tell her two things—that he was not chaste as she
was, and that he was not a believer. It was agonizing, but he
considered he ought to tell her both these facts.
“No, not now, later!” he said.
“Very well, later, but you must certainly tell me. I’m not afraid of
anything. I want to know everything. Now it is settled.”
He added: “Settled that you’ll take me whatever I may be—you won’t give
me up? Yes?”
“Yes, yes.”
Their conversation was interrupted by Mademoiselle Linon, who with an
affected but tender smile came to congratulate her favorite pupil.
Before she had gone, the servants came in with their congratulations.
Then relations arrived, and there began that state of blissful
absurdity from which Levin did not emerge till the day after his
wedding. Levin was in a continual state of awkwardness and discomfort,
but the intensity of his happiness went on all the while increasing. He
felt continually that a great deal was being expected of him—what, he
did not know; and he did everything he was told, and it all gave him
happiness. He had thought his engagement would have nothing about it
like others, that the ordinary conditions of engaged couples would
spoil his special happiness; but it ended in his doing exactly as other
people did, and his happiness being only increased thereby and becoming
more and more special, more and more unlike anything that had ever
happened.
“Now we shall have sweetmeats to eat,” said Mademoiselle Linon—and
Levin drove off to buy sweetmeats.
“Well, I’m very glad,” said Sviazhsky. “I advise you to get the
bouquets from Fomin’s.”
“Oh, are they wanted?” And he drove to Fomin’s.
His brother offered to lend him money, as he would have so many
expenses, presents to give....
“Oh, are presents wanted?” And he galloped to Foulde’s.
And at the confectioner’s, and at Fomin’s, and at Foulde’s he saw that
he was expected; that they were pleased to see him, and prided
themselves on his happiness, just as everyone whom he had to do with
during those days. What was extraordinary was that everyone not only
liked him, but even people previously unsympathetic, cold, and callous,
were enthusiastic over him, gave way to him in everything, treated his
feeling with tenderness and delicacy, and shared his conviction that he
was the happiest man in the world because his betrothed was beyond
perfection. Kitty too felt the same thing. When Countess Nordston
ventured to hint that she had hoped for something better, Kitty was so
angry and proved so conclusively that nothing in the world could be
better than Levin, that Countess Nordston had to admit it, and in
Kitty’s presence never met Levin without a smile of ecstatic
admiration.
The confession he had promised was the one painful incident of this
time. He consulted the old prince, and with his sanction gave Kitty his
diary, in which there was written the confession that tortured him. He
had written this diary at the time with a view to his future wife. Two
things caused him anguish: his lack of purity and his lack of faith.
His confession of unbelief passed unnoticed. She was religious, had
never doubted the truths of religion, but his external unbelief did not
affect her in the least. Through love she knew all his soul, and in his
soul she saw what she wanted, and that such a state of soul should be
called unbelieving was to her a matter of no account. The other
confession set her weeping bitterly.
Levin, not without an inner struggle, handed her his diary. He knew
that between him and her there could not be, and should not be,
secrets, and so he had decided that so it must be. But he had not
realized what an effect it would have on her, he had not put himself in
her place. It was only when the same evening he came to their house
before the theater, went into her room and saw her tear-stained,
pitiful, sweet face, miserable with suffering he had caused and nothing
could undo, he felt the abyss that separated his shameful past from her
dovelike purity, and was appalled at what he had done.
“Take them, take these dreadful books!” she said, pushing away the
notebooks lying before her on the table. “Why did you give them me? No,
it was better anyway,” she added, touched by his despairing face. “But
it’s awful, awful!”
His head sank, and he was silent. He could say nothing.
“You can’t forgive me,” he whispered.
“Yes, I forgive you; but it’s terrible!”
But his happiness was so immense that this confession did not shatter
it, it only added another shade to it. She forgave him; but from that
time more than ever he considered himself unworthy of her, morally
bowed down lower than ever before her, and prized more highly than ever
his undeserved happiness.
Chapter 17
Unconsciously going over in his memory the conversations that had taken
place during and after dinner, Alexey Alexandrovitch returned to his
solitary room. Darya Alexandrovna’s words about forgiveness had aroused
in him nothing but annoyance. The applicability or non-applicability of
the Christian precept to his own case was too difficult a question to
be discussed lightly, and this question had long ago been answered by
Alexey Alexandrovitch in the negative. Of all that had been said, what
stuck most in his memory was the phrase of stupid, good-natured
Turovtsin—“_Acted like a man, he did! Called him out and shot him!_”
Everyone had apparently shared this feeling, though from politeness
they had not expressed it.
“But the matter is settled, it’s useless thinking about it,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch told himself. And thinking of nothing but the journey
before him, and the revision work he had to do, he went into his room
and asked the porter who escorted him where his man was. The porter
said that the man had only just gone out. Alexey Alexandrovitch ordered
tea to be sent him, sat down to the table, and taking the guidebook,
began considering the route of his journey.
“Two telegrams,” said his manservant, coming into the room. “I beg your
pardon, your excellency; I’d only just that minute gone out.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch took the telegrams and opened them. The first
telegram was the announcement of Stremov’s appointment to the very post
Karenin had coveted. Alexey Alexandrovitch flung the telegram down, and
flushing a little, got up and began to pace up and down the room.
“_Quos vult perdere dementat_,” he said, meaning by _quos_ the persons
responsible for this appointment. He was not so much annoyed that he
had not received the post, that he had been conspicuously passed over;
but it was incomprehensible, amazing to him that they did not see that
the wordy phrase-monger Stremov was the last man fit for it. How could
they fail to see how they were ruining themselves, lowering their
_prestige_ by this appointment?
“Something else in the same line,” he said to himself bitterly, opening
the second telegram. The telegram was from his wife. Her name, written
in blue pencil, “Anna,” was the first thing that caught his eye. “I am
dying; I beg, I implore you to come. I shall die easier with your
forgiveness,” he read. He smiled contemptuously, and flung down the
telegram. That this was a trick and a fraud, of that, he thought for
the first minute, there could be no doubt.
“There is no deceit she would stick at. She was near her confinement.
Perhaps it is the confinement. But what can be their aim? To legitimize
the child, to compromise me, and prevent a divorce,” he thought. “But
something was said in it: I am dying....” He read the telegram again,
and suddenly the plain meaning of what was said in it struck him.
“And if it is true?” he said to himself. “If it is true that in the
moment of agony and nearness to death she is genuinely penitent, and I,
taking it for a trick, refuse to go? That would not only be cruel, and
everyone would blame me, but it would be stupid on my part.”
“Piotr, call a coach; I am going to Petersburg,” he said to his
servant.
Alexey Alexandrovitch decided that he would go to Petersburg and see
his wife. If her illness was a trick, he would say nothing and go away
again. If she was really in danger, and wished to see him before her
death, he would forgive her if he found her alive, and pay her the last
duties if he came too late.
All the way he thought no more of what he ought to do.
With a sense of weariness and uncleanness from the night spent in the
train, in the early fog of Petersburg Alexey Alexandrovitch drove
through the deserted Nevsky and stared straight before him, not
thinking of what was awaiting him. He could not think about it, because
in picturing what would happen, he could not drive away the reflection
that her death would at once remove all the difficulty of his position.
Bakers, closed shops, night-cabmen, porters sweeping the pavements
flashed past his eyes, and he watched it all, trying to smother the
thought of what was awaiting him, and what he dared not hope for, and
yet was hoping for. He drove up to the steps. A sledge and a carriage
with the coachman asleep stood at the entrance. As he went into the
entry, Alexey Alexandrovitch, as it were, got out his resolution from
the remotest corner of his brain, and mastered it thoroughly. Its
meaning ran: “If it’s a trick, then calm contempt and departure. If
truth, do what is proper.”
The porter opened the door before Alexey Alexandrovitch rang. The
porter, Kapitonitch, looked queer in an old coat, without a tie, and in
slippers.
“How is your mistress?”
“A successful confinement yesterday.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch stopped short and turned white. He felt
distinctly now how intensely he had longed for her death.
“And how is she?”
Korney in his morning apron ran downstairs.
“Very ill,” he answered. “There was a consultation yesterday, and the
doctor’s here now.”
“Take my things,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, and feeling some relief
at the news that there was still hope of her death, he went into the
hall.
On the hatstand there was a military overcoat. Alexey Alexandrovitch
noticed it and asked:
“Who is here?”
“The doctor, the midwife, and Count Vronsky.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch went into the inner rooms.
In the drawing-room there was no one; at the sound of his steps there
came out of her boudoir the midwife in a cap with lilac ribbons.
She went up to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and with the familiarity given by
the approach of death took him by the arm and drew him towards the
bedroom.
“Thank God you’ve come! She keeps on about you and nothing but you,”
she said.
“Make haste with the ice!” the doctor’s peremptory voice said from the
bedroom.
Alexey Alexandrovitch went into her boudoir.
At the table, sitting sideways in a low chair, was Vronsky, his face
hidden in his hands, weeping. He jumped up at the doctor’s voice, took
his hands from his face, and saw Alexey Alexandrovitch. Seeing the
husband, he was so overwhelmed that he sat down again, drawing his head
down to his shoulders, as if he wanted to disappear; but he made an
effort over himself, got up and said:
“She is dying. The doctors say there is no hope. I am entirely in your
power, only let me be here ... though I am at your disposal. I....”
Alexey Alexandrovitch, seeing Vronsky’s tears, felt a rush of that
nervous emotion always produced in him by the sight of other people’s
suffering, and turning away his face, he moved hurriedly to the door,
without hearing the rest of his words. From the bedroom came the sound
of Anna’s voice saying something. Her voice was lively, eager, with
exceedingly distinct intonations. Alexey Alexandrovitch went into the
bedroom, and went up to the bed. She was lying turned with her face
towards him. Her cheeks were flushed crimson, her eyes glittered, her
little white hands thrust out from the sleeves of her dressing gown
were playing with the quilt, twisting it about. It seemed as though she
were not only well and blooming, but in the happiest frame of mind. She
was talking rapidly, musically, and with exceptionally correct
articulation and expressive intonation.
“For Alexey—I am speaking of Alexey Alexandrovitch (what a strange and
awful thing that both are Alexey, isn’t it?)—Alexey would not refuse
me. I should forget, he would forgive.... But why doesn’t he come? He’s
so good he doesn’t know himself how good he is. Ah, my God, what agony!
Give me some water, quick! Oh, that will be bad for her, my little
girl! Oh, very well then, give her to a nurse. Yes, I agree, it’s
better in fact. He’ll be coming; it will hurt him to see her. Give her
to the nurse.”
“Anna Arkadyevna, he has come. Here he is!” said the midwife, trying to
attract her attention to Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Oh, what nonsense!” Anna went on, not seeing her husband. “No, give
her to me; give me my little one! He has not come yet. You say he won’t
forgive me, because you don’t know him. No one knows him. I’m the only
one, and it was hard for me even. His eyes I ought to know—Seryozha has
just the same eyes—and I can’t bear to see them because of it. Has
Seryozha had his dinner? I know everyone will forget him. He would not
forget. Seryozha must be moved into the corner room, and Mariette must
be asked to sleep with him.”
All of a sudden she shrank back, was silent; and in terror, as though
expecting a blow, as though to defend herself, she raised her hands to
her face. She had seen her husband.
“No, no!” she began. “I am not afraid of him; I am afraid of death.
Alexey, come here. I am in a hurry, because I’ve no time, I’ve not long
left to live; the fever will begin directly and I shall understand
nothing more. Now I understand, I understand it all, I see it all!”
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s wrinkled face wore an expression of agony; he
took her by the hand and tried to say something, but he could not utter
it; his lower lip quivered, but he still went on struggling with his
emotion, and only now and then glanced at her. And each time he glanced
at her, he saw her eyes gazing at him with such passionate and
triumphant tenderness as he had never seen in them.
“Wait a minute, you don’t know ... stay a little, stay!...” She
stopped, as though collecting her ideas. “Yes,” she began; “yes, yes,
yes. This is what I wanted to say. Don’t be surprised at me. I’m still
the same.... But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her: she
loved that man, and I tried to hate you, and could not forget about her
that used to be. I’m not that woman. Now I’m my real self, all myself.
I’m dying now, I know I shall die, ask him. Even now I feel—see here,
the weights on my feet, on my hands, on my fingers. My fingers—see how
huge they are! But this will soon all be over.... Only one thing I
want: forgive me, forgive me quite. I’m terrible, but my nurse used to
tell me; the holy martyr—what was her name? She was worse. And I’ll go
to Rome; there’s a wilderness, and there I shall be no trouble to
anyone, only I’ll take Seryozha and the little one.... No, you can’t
forgive me! I know, it can’t be forgiven! No, no, go away, you’re too
good!” She held his hand in one burning hand, while she pushed him away
with the other.
The nervous agitation of Alexey Alexandrovitch kept increasing, and had
by now reached such a point that he ceased to struggle with it. He
suddenly felt that what he had regarded as nervous agitation was on the
contrary a blissful spiritual condition that gave him all at once a new
happiness he had never known. He did not think that the Christian law
that he had been all his life trying to follow, enjoined on him to
forgive and love his enemies; but a glad feeling of love and
forgiveness for his enemies filled his heart. He knelt down, and laying
his head in the curve of her arm, which burned him as with fire through
the sleeve, he sobbed like a little child. She put her arm around his
head, moved towards him, and with defiant pride lifted up her eyes.
“That is he. I knew him! Now, forgive me, everyone, forgive me!...
They’ve come again; why don’t they go away?... Oh, take these cloaks
off me!”
The doctor unloosed her hands, carefully laying her on the pillow, and
covered her up to the shoulders. She lay back submissively, and looked
before her with beaming eyes.
“Remember one thing, that I needed nothing but forgiveness, and I want
nothing more.... Why doesn’t _he_ come?” she said, turning to the door
towards Vronsky. “Do come, do come! Give him your hand.”
Vronsky came to the side of the bed, and seeing Anna, again hid his
face in his hands.
“Uncover your face—look at him! He’s a saint,” she said. “Oh! uncover
your face, do uncover it!” she said angrily. “Alexey Alexandrovitch, do
uncover his face! I want to see him.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch took Vronsky’s hands and drew them away from his
face, which was awful with the expression of agony and shame upon it.
“Give him your hand. Forgive him.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch gave him his hand, not attempting to restrain the
tears that streamed from his eyes.
“Thank God, thank God!” she said, “now everything is ready. Only to
stretch my legs a little. There, that’s capital. How badly these
flowers are done—not a bit like a violet,” she said, pointing to the
hangings. “My God, my God! when will it end? Give me some morphine.
Doctor, give me some morphine! Oh, my God, my God!”
And she tossed about on the bed.
The doctors said that it was puerperal fever, and that it was
ninety-nine chances in a hundred it would end in death. The whole day
long there was fever, delirium, and unconsciousness. At midnight the
patient lay without consciousness, and almost without pulse.
The end was expected every minute.
Vronsky had gone home, but in the morning he came to inquire, and
Alexey Alexandrovitch meeting him in the hall, said: “Better stay, she
might ask for you,” and himself led him to his wife’s boudoir. Towards
morning, there was a return again of excitement, rapid thought and
talk, and again it ended in unconsciousness. On the third day it was
the same thing, and the doctors said there was hope. That day Alexey
Alexandrovitch went into the boudoir where Vronsky was sitting, and
closing the door sat down opposite him.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch,” said Vronsky, feeling that a statement of the
position was coming, “I can’t speak, I can’t understand. Spare me!
However hard it is for you, believe me, it is more terrible for me.”
He would have risen; but Alexey Alexandrovitch took him by the hand and
said:
“I beg you to hear me out; it is necessary. I must explain my feelings,
the feelings that have guided me and will guide me, so that you may not
be in error regarding me. You know I had resolved on a divorce, and had
even begun to take proceedings. I won’t conceal from you that in
beginning this I was in uncertainty, I was in misery; I will confess
that I was pursued by a desire to revenge myself on you and on her.
When I got the telegram, I came here with the same feelings; I will say
more, I longed for her death. But....” He paused, pondering whether to
disclose or not to disclose his feeling to him. “But I saw her and
forgave her. And the happiness of forgiveness has revealed to me my
duty. I forgive completely. I would offer the other cheek, I would give
my cloak if my coat be taken. I pray to God only not to take from me
the bliss of forgiveness!”
Tears stood in his eyes, and the luminous, serene look in them
impressed Vronsky.
“This is my position: you can trample me in the mud, make me the
laughing-stock of the world, I will not abandon her, and I will never
utter a word of reproach to you,” Alexey Alexandrovitch went on. “My
duty is clearly marked for me; I ought to be with her, and I will be.
If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose it
would be better for you to go away.”
He got up, and sobs cut short his words. Vronsky too was getting up,
and in a stooping, not yet erect posture, looked up at him from under
his brows. He did not understand Alexey Alexandrovitch’s feeling, but
he felt that it was something higher and even unattainable for him with
his view of life.
Chapter 18
After the conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch, Vronsky went out
onto the steps of the Karenins’ house and stood still, with difficulty
remembering where he was, and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt
disgraced, humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of
washing away his humiliation. He felt thrust out of the beaten track
along which he had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the
habits and rules of his life that had seemed so firm, had turned out
suddenly false and inapplicable. The betrayed husband, who had figured
till that time as a pitiful creature, an incidental and somewhat
ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her
herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and on the pinnacle
that husband had shown himself, not malignant, not false, not
ludicrous, but kind and straightforward and large. Vronsky could not
but feel this, and the parts were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt his
elevation and his own abasement, his truth and his own falsehood. He
felt that the husband was magnanimous even in his sorrow, while he had
been base and petty in his deceit. But this sense of his own
humiliation before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a
small part of his misery. He felt unutterably wretched now, for his
passion for Anna, which had seemed to him of late to be growing cooler,
now that he knew he had lost her forever, was stronger than ever it had
been. He had seen all of her in her illness, had come to know her very
soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her till then. And
now when he had learned to know her, to love her as she should be
loved, he had been humiliated before her, and had lost her forever,
leaving with her nothing of himself but a shameful memory. Most
terrible of all had been his ludicrous, shameful position when Alexey
Alexandrovitch had pulled his hands away from his humiliated face. He
stood on the steps of the Karenins’ house like one distraught, and did
not know what to do.
“A sledge, sir?” asked the porter.
“Yes, a sledge.”
On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without
undressing, lay down flat on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying
his head on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories, and ideas of
the strangest description followed one another with extraordinary
rapidity and vividness. First it was the medicine he had poured out for
the patient and spilt over the spoon, then the midwife’s white hands,
then the queer posture of Alexey Alexandrovitch on the floor beside the
bed.
“To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the serene confidence of
a healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy, he will go to sleep at
once. And the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he
began to drop off into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of
unconsciousness had begun to meet over his head, when all at once—it
was as though a violent shock of electricity had passed over him. He
started so that he leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on
his arms got in a panic onto his knees. His eyes were wide open as
though he had never been asleep. The heaviness in his head and the
weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had suddenly
gone.
“You may trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexey Alexandrovitch’s words
and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna’s face with its burning
flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at him
but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish
and ludicrous figure when Alexey Alexandrovitch took his hands away
from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the
sofa in the same position and shut his eyes.
“To sleep! To forget!” he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut
he saw more distinctly than ever Anna’s face as it had been on the
memorable evening before the races.
“That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her
memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? how can
we be reconciled?” he said aloud, and unconsciously began to repeat
these words. This repetition checked the rising up of fresh images and
memories, which he felt were thronging in his brain. But repeating
words did not check his imagination for long. Again in extraordinarily
rapid succession his best moments rose before his mind, and then his
recent humiliation. “Take away his hands,” Anna’s voice says. He takes
away his hands and feels the shamestruck and idiotic expression of his
face.
He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the
smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of
thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He
listened, and heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: “I did
not appreciate it, did not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it,
did not make enough of it.”
“What’s this? Am I going out of my mind?” he said to himself. “Perhaps.
What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men shoot themselves?”
he answered himself, and opening his eyes, he saw with wonder an
embroidered cushion beside him, worked by Varya, his brother’s wife. He
touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to think of Varya, of when
he had seen her last. But to think of anything extraneous was an
agonizing effort. “No, I must sleep!” He moved the cushion up, and
pressed his head into it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes
shut. He jumped up and sat down. “That’s all over for me,” he said to
himself. “I must think what to do. What is left?” His mind rapidly ran
through his life apart from his love of Anna.
“Ambition? Serpuhovskoy? Society? The court?” He could not come to a
pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now there was no
reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat, undid his
belt, and uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more freely, walked up
and down the room. “This is how people go mad,” he repeated, “and how
they shoot themselves ... to escape humiliation,” he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched
teeth he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked round him,
turned it to a loaded barrel, and sank into thought. For two minutes,
his head bent forward with an expression of an intense effort of
thought, he stood with the revolver in his hand, motionless, thinking.
“Of course,” he said to himself, as though a logical, continuous, and
clear chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion.
In reality this “of course,” that seemed convincing to him, was simply
the result of exactly the same circle of memories and images through
which he had passed ten times already during the last hour—memories of
happiness lost forever. There was the same conception of the
senselessness of everything to come in life, the same consciousness of
humiliation. Even the sequence of these images and emotions was the
same.
“Of course,” he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed
again round the same spellbound circle of memories and images, and
pulling the revolver to the left side of his chest, and clutching it
vigorously with his whole hand, as it were, squeezing it in his fist,
he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the shot, but a
violent blow on his chest sent him reeling. He tried to clutch at the
edge of the table, dropped the revolver, staggered, and sat down on the
ground, looking about him in astonishment. He did not recognize his
room, looking up from the ground, at the bent legs of the table, at the
wastepaper basket, and the tiger-skin rug. The hurried, creaking steps
of his servant coming through the drawing-room brought him to his
senses. He made an effort at thought, and was aware that he was on the
floor; and seeing blood on the tiger-skin rug and on his arm, he knew
he had shot himself.
“Idiotic! Missed!” he said, fumbling after the revolver. The revolver
was close beside him—he sought further off. Still feeling for it, he
stretched out to the other side, and not being strong enough to keep
his balance, fell over, streaming with blood.
The elegant, whiskered manservant, who used to be continually
complaining to his acquaintances of the delicacy of his nerves, was so
panic-stricken on seeing his master lying on the floor, that he left
him losing blood while he ran for assistance. An hour later Varya, his
brother’s wife, had arrived, and with the assistance of three doctors,
whom she had sent for in all directions, and who all appeared at the
same moment, she got the wounded man to bed, and remained to nurse him.
Chapter 19
The mistake made by Alexey Alexandrovitch in that, when preparing for
seeing his wife, he had overlooked the possibility that her repentance
might be sincere, and he might forgive her, and she might not die—this
mistake was two months after his return from Moscow brought home to him
in all its significance. But the mistake made by him had arisen not
simply from his having overlooked that contingency, but also from the
fact that until that day of his interview with his dying wife, he had
not known his own heart. At his sick wife’s bedside he had for the
first time in his life given way to that feeling of sympathetic
suffering always roused in him by the sufferings of others, and
hitherto looked on by him with shame as a harmful weakness. And pity
for her, and remorse for having desired her death, and most of all, the
joy of forgiveness, made him at once conscious, not simply of the
relief of his own sufferings, but of a spiritual peace he had never
experienced before. He suddenly felt that the very thing that was the
source of his sufferings had become the source of his spiritual joy;
that what had seemed insoluble while he was judging, blaming, and
hating, had become clear and simple when he forgave and loved.
He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and her remorse.
He forgave Vronsky, and pitied him, especially after reports reached
him of his despairing action. He felt more for his son than before. And
he blamed himself now for having taken too little interest in him. But
for the little newborn baby he felt a quite peculiar sentiment, not of
pity, only, but of tenderness. At first, from a feeling of compassion
alone, he had been interested in the delicate little creature, who was
not his child, and who was cast on one side during her mother’s
illness, and would certainly have died if he had not troubled about
her, and he did not himself observe how fond he became of her. He would
go into the nursery several times a day, and sit there for a long
while, so that the nurses, who were at first afraid of him, got quite
used to his presence. Sometimes for half an hour at a stretch he would
sit silently gazing at the saffron-red, downy, wrinkled face of the
sleeping baby, watching the movements of the frowning brows, and the
fat little hands, with clenched fingers, that rubbed the little eyes
and nose. At such moments particularly, Alexey Alexandrovitch had a
sense of perfect peace and inward harmony, and saw nothing
extraordinary in his position, nothing that ought to be changed.
But as time went on, he saw more and more distinctly that however
natural the position now seemed to him, he would not long be allowed to
remain in it. He felt that besides the blessed spiritual force
controlling his soul, there was another, a brutal force, as powerful,
or more powerful, which controlled his life, and that this force would
not allow him that humble peace he longed for. He felt that everyone
was looking at him with inquiring wonder, that he was not understood,
and that something was expected of him. Above all, he felt the
instability and unnaturalness of his relations with his wife.
When the softening effect of the near approach of death had passed
away, Alexey Alexandrovitch began to notice that Anna was afraid of
him, ill at ease with him, and could not look him straight in the face.
She seemed to be wanting, and not daring, to tell him something; and as
though foreseeing their present relations could not continue, she
seemed to be expecting something from him.
Towards the end of February it happened that Anna’s baby daughter, who
had been named Anna too, fell ill. Alexey Alexandrovitch was in the
nursery in the morning, and leaving orders for the doctor to be sent
for, he went to his office. On finishing his work, he returned home at
four. Going into the hall he saw a handsome groom, in a braided livery
and a bear fur cape, holding a white fur cloak.
“Who is here?” asked Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Princess Elizaveta Federovna Tverskaya,” the groom answered, and it
seemed to Alexey Alexandrovitch that he grinned.
During all this difficult time Alexey Alexandrovitch had noticed that
his worldly acquaintances, especially women, took a peculiar interest
in him and his wife. All these acquaintances he observed with
difficulty concealing their mirth at something; the same mirth that he
had perceived in the lawyer’s eyes, and just now in the eyes of this
groom. Everyone seemed, somehow, hugely delighted, as though they had
just been at a wedding. When they met him, with ill-disguised enjoyment
they inquired after his wife’s health. The presence of Princess
Tverskaya was unpleasant to Alexey Alexandrovitch from the memories
associated with her, and also because he disliked her, and he went
straight to the nursery. In the day nursery Seryozha, leaning on the
table with his legs on a chair, was drawing and chatting away merrily.
The English governess, who had during Anna’s illness replaced the
French one, was sitting near the boy knitting a shawl. She hurriedly
got up, curtseyed, and pulled Seryozha.
Alexey Alexandrovitch stroked his son’s hair, answered the governess’s
inquiries about his wife, and asked what the doctor had said of the
baby.
“The doctor said it was nothing serious, and he ordered a bath, sir.”
“But she is still in pain,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, listening to
the baby’s screaming in the next room.
“I think it’s the wet-nurse, sir,” the Englishwoman said firmly.
“What makes you think so?” he asked, stopping short.
“It’s just as it was at Countess Paul’s, sir. They gave the baby
medicine, and it turned out that the baby was simply hungry: the nurse
had no milk, sir.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, and after standing still a few seconds
he went in at the other door. The baby was lying with its head thrown
back, stiffening itself in the nurse’s arms, and would not take the
plump breast offered it; and it never ceased screaming in spite of the
double hushing of the wet-nurse and the other nurse, who was bending
over her.
“Still no better?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“She’s very restless,” answered the nurse in a whisper.
“Miss Edwarde says that perhaps the wet-nurse has no milk,” he said.
“I think so too, Alexey Alexandrovitch.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
“Who’s one to say it to? Anna Arkadyevna still ill....” said the nurse
discontentedly.
The nurse was an old servant of the family. And in her simple words
there seemed to Alexey Alexandrovitch an allusion to his position.
The baby screamed louder than ever, struggling and sobbing. The nurse,
with a gesture of despair, went to it, took it from the wet-nurse’s
arms, and began walking up and down, rocking it.
“You must ask the doctor to examine the wet-nurse,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch. The smartly dressed and healthy-looking nurse,
frightened at the idea of losing her place, muttered something to
herself, and covering her bosom, smiled contemptuously at the idea of
doubts being cast on her abundance of milk. In that smile, too, Alexey
Alexandrovitch saw a sneer at his position.
“Luckless child!” said the nurse, hushing the baby, and still walking
up and down with it.
Alexey Alexandrovitch sat down, and with a despondent and suffering
face watched the nurse walking to and fro.
When the child at last was still, and had been put in a deep bed, and
the nurse, after smoothing the little pillow, had left her, Alexey
Alexandrovitch got up, and walking awkwardly on tiptoe, approached the
baby. For a minute he was still, and with the same despondent face
gazed at the baby; but all at once a smile, that moved his hair and the
skin of his forehead, came out on his face, and he went as softly out
of the room.
In the dining-room he rang the bell, and told the servant who came in
to send again for the doctor. He felt vexed with his wife for not being
anxious about this exquisite baby, and in this vexed humor he had no
wish to go to her; he had no wish, either, to see Princess Betsy. But
his wife might wonder why he did not go to her as usual; and so,
overcoming his disinclination, he went towards the bedroom. As he
walked over the soft rug towards the door, he could not help
overhearing a conversation he did not want to hear.
“If he hadn’t been going away, I could have understood your answer and
his too. But your husband ought to be above that,” Betsy was saying.
“It’s not for my husband; for myself I don’t wish it. Don’t say that!”
answered Anna’s excited voice.
“Yes, but you must care to say good-bye to a man who has shot himself
on your account....”
“That’s just why I don’t want to.”
With a dismayed and guilty expression, Alexey Alexandrovitch stopped
and would have gone back unobserved. But reflecting that this would be
undignified, he turned back again, and clearing his throat, he went up
to the bedroom. The voices were silent, and he went in.
Anna, in a gray dressing gown, with a crop of short clustering black
curls on her round head, was sitting on a settee. The eagerness died
out of her face, as it always did, at the sight of her husband; she
dropped her head and looked round uneasily at Betsy. Betsy, dressed in
the height of the latest fashion, in a hat that towered somewhere over
her head like a shade on a lamp, in a blue dress with violet crossway
stripes slanting one way on the bodice and the other way on the skirt,
was sitting beside Anna, her tall flat figure held erect. Bowing her
head, she greeted Alexey Alexandrovitch with an ironical smile.
“Ah!” she said, as though surprised. “I’m very glad you’re at home. You
never put in an appearance anywhere, and I haven’t seen you ever since
Anna has been ill. I have heard all about it—your anxiety. Yes, you’re
a wonderful husband!” she said, with a meaning and affable air, as
though she were bestowing an order of magnanimity on him for his
conduct to his wife.
Alexey Alexandrovitch bowed frigidly, and kissing his wife’s hand,
asked how she was.
“Better, I think,” she said, avoiding his eyes.
“But you’ve rather a feverish-looking color,” he said, laying stress on
the word “feverish.”
“We’ve been talking too much,” said Betsy. “I feel it’s selfishness on
my part, and I am going away.”
She got up, but Anna, suddenly flushing, quickly caught at her hand.
“No, wait a minute, please. I must tell you ... no, you.” she turned to
Alexey Alexandrovitch, and her neck and brow were suffused with
crimson. “I won’t and can’t keep anything secret from you,” she said.
Alexey Alexandrovitch cracked his fingers and bowed his head.
“Betsy’s been telling me that Count Vronsky wants to come here to say
good-bye before his departure for Tashkend.” She did not look at her
husband, and was evidently in haste to have everything out, however
hard it might be for her. “I told her I could not receive him.”
“You said, my dear, that it would depend on Alexey Alexandrovitch,”
Betsy corrected her.
“Oh, no, I can’t receive him; and what object would there....” She
stopped suddenly, and glanced inquiringly at her husband (he did not
look at her). “In short, I don’t wish it....”
Alexey Alexandrovitch advanced and would have taken her hand.
Her first impulse was to jerk back her hand from the damp hand with big
swollen veins that sought hers, but with an obvious effort to control
herself she pressed his hand.
“I am very grateful to you for your confidence, but....” he said,
feeling with confusion and annoyance that what he could decide easily
and clearly by himself, he could not discuss before Princess Tverskaya,
who to him stood for the incarnation of that brute force which would
inevitably control him in the life he led in the eyes of the world, and
hinder him from giving way to his feeling of love and forgiveness. He
stopped short, looking at Princess Tverskaya.
“Well, good-bye, my darling,” said Betsy, getting up. She kissed Anna,
and went out. Alexey Alexandrovitch escorted her out.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch! I know you are a truly magnanimous man,” said
Betsy, stopping in the little drawing-room, and with special warmth
shaking hands with him once more. “I am an outsider, but I so love her
and respect you that I venture to advise. Receive him. Alexey Vronsky
is the soul of honor, and he is going away to Tashkend.”
“Thank you, princess, for your sympathy and advice. But the question of
whether my wife can or cannot see anyone she must decide herself.”
He said this from habit, lifting his brows with dignity, and reflected
immediately that whatever his words might be, there could be no dignity
in his position. And he saw this by the suppressed, malicious, and
ironical smile with which Betsy glanced at him after this phrase.
Chapter 20
Alexey Alexandrovitch took leave of Betsy in the drawing-room, and went
to his wife. She was lying down, but hearing his steps she sat up
hastily in her former attitude, and looked in a scared way at him. He
saw she had been crying.
“I am very grateful for your confidence in me.” He repeated gently in
Russian the phrase he had said in Betsy’s presence in French, and sat
down beside her. When he spoke to her in Russian, using the Russian
“thou” of intimacy and affection, it was insufferably irritating to
Anna. “And I am very grateful for your decision. I, too, imagine that
since he is going away, there is no sort of necessity for Count Vronsky
to come here. However, if....”
“But I’ve said so already, so why repeat it?” Anna suddenly interrupted
him with an irritation she could not succeed in repressing. “No sort of
necessity,” she thought, “for a man to come and say good-bye to the
woman he loves, for whom he was ready to ruin himself, and has ruined
himself, and who cannot live without him. No sort of necessity!” she
compressed her lips, and dropped her burning eyes to his hands with
their swollen veins. They were rubbing each other.
“Let us never speak of it,” she added more calmly.
“I have left this question to you to decide, and I am very glad to
see....” Alexey Alexandrovitch was beginning.
“That my wish coincides with your own,” she finished quickly,
exasperated at his talking so slowly while she knew beforehand all he
would say.
“Yes,” he assented; “and Princess Tverskaya’s interference in the most
difficult private affairs is utterly uncalled for. She especially....”
“I don’t believe a word of what’s said about her,” said Anna quickly.
“I know she really cares for me.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed and said nothing. She played nervously
with the tassel of her dressing-gown, glancing at him with that
torturing sensation of physical repulsion for which she blamed herself,
though she could not control it. Her only desire now was to be rid of
his oppressive presence.
“I have just sent for the doctor,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“I am very well; what do I want the doctor for?”
“No, the little one cries, and they say the nurse hasn’t enough milk.”
“Why didn’t you let me nurse her, when I begged to? Anyway” (Alexey
Alexandrovitch knew what was meant by that “anyway”), “she’s a baby,
and they’re killing her.” She rang the bell and ordered the baby to be
brought her. “I begged to nurse her, I wasn’t allowed to, and now I’m
blamed for it.”
“I don’t blame....”
“Yes, you do blame me! My God! why didn’t I die!” And she broke into
sobs. “Forgive me, I’m nervous, I’m unjust,” she said, controlling
herself, “but do go away....”
“No, it can’t go on like this,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself
decidedly as he left his wife’s room.
Never had the impossibility of his position in the world’s eyes, and
his wife’s hatred of him, and altogether the might of that mysterious
brutal force that guided his life against his spiritual inclinations,
and exacted conformity with its decrees and change in his attitude to
his wife, been presented to him with such distinctness as that day. He
saw clearly that all the world and his wife expected of him something,
but what exactly, he could not make out. He felt that this was rousing
in his soul a feeling of anger destructive of his peace of mind and of
all the good of his achievement. He believed that for Anna herself it
would be better to break off all relations with Vronsky; but if they
all thought this out of the question, he was even ready to allow these
relations to be renewed, so long as the children were not disgraced,
and he was not deprived of them nor forced to change his position. Bad
as this might be, it was anyway better than a rupture, which would put
her in a hopeless and shameful position, and deprive him of everything
he cared for. But he felt helpless; he knew beforehand that everyone
was against him, and that he would not be allowed to do what seemed to
him now so natural and right, but would be forced to do what was wrong,
though it seemed the proper thing to them.
Chapter 21
Before Betsy had time to walk out of the drawing-room, she was met in
the doorway by Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had just come from Yeliseev’s,
where a consignment of fresh oysters had been received.
“Ah! princess! what a delightful meeting!” he began. “I’ve been to see
you.”
“A meeting for one minute, for I’m going,” said Betsy, smiling and
putting on her glove.
“Don’t put on your glove yet, princess; let me kiss your hand. There’s
nothing I’m so thankful to the revival of the old fashions for as the
kissing the hand.” He kissed Betsy’s hand. “When shall we see each
other?”
“You don’t deserve it,” answered Betsy, smiling.
“Oh, yes, I deserve a great deal, for I’ve become a most serious
person. I don’t only manage my own affairs, but other people’s too,” he
said, with a significant expression.
“Oh, I’m so glad!” answered Betsy, at once understanding that he was
speaking of Anna. And going back into the drawing-room, they stood in a
corner. “He’s killing her,” said Betsy in a whisper full of meaning.
“It’s impossible, impossible....”
“I’m so glad you think so,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, shaking his head
with a serious and sympathetically distressed expression, “that’s what
I’ve come to Petersburg for.”
“The whole town’s talking of it,” she said. “It’s an impossible
position. She pines and pines away. He doesn’t understand that she’s
one of those women who can’t trifle with their feelings. One of two
things: either let him take her away, act with energy, or give her a
divorce. This is stifling her.”
“Yes, yes ... just so....” Oblonsky said, sighing. “That’s what I’ve
come for. At least not solely for that ... I’ve been made a
_Kammerherr_; of course, one has to say thank you. But the chief thing
was having to settle this.”
“Well, God help you!” said Betsy.
After accompanying Betsy to the outside hall, once more kissing her
hand above the glove, at the point where the pulse beats, and murmuring
to her such unseemly nonsense that she did not know whether to laugh or
be angry, Stepan Arkadyevitch went to his sister. He found her in
tears.
Although he happened to be bubbling over with good spirits, Stepan
Arkadyevitch immediately and quite naturally fell into the sympathetic,
poetically emotional tone which harmonized with her mood. He asked her
how she was, and how she had spent the morning.
“Very, very miserably. Today and this morning and all past days and
days to come,” she said.
“I think you’re giving way to pessimism. You must rouse yourself, you
must look life in the face. I know it’s hard, but....”
“I have heard it said that women love men even for their vices,” Anna
began suddenly, “but I hate him for his virtues. I can’t live with him.
Do you understand? the sight of him has a physical effect on me, it
makes me beside myself. I can’t, I can’t live with him. What am I to
do? I have been unhappy, and used to think one couldn’t be more
unhappy, but the awful state of things I am going through now, I could
never have conceived. Would you believe it, that knowing he’s a good
man, a splendid man, that I’m not worth his little finger, still I hate
him. I hate him for his generosity. And there’s nothing left for me
but....”
She would have said death, but Stepan Arkadyevitch would not let her
finish.
“You are ill and overwrought,” he said; “believe me, you’re
exaggerating dreadfully. There’s nothing so terrible in it.”
And Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled. No one else in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s
place, having to do with such despair, would have ventured to smile
(the smile would have seemed brutal); but in his smile there was so
much of sweetness and almost feminine tenderness that his smile did not
wound, but softened and soothed. His gentle, soothing words and smiles
were as soothing and softening as almond oil. And Anna soon felt this.
“No, Stiva,” she said, “I’m lost, lost! worse than lost! I can’t say
yet that all is over; on the contrary, I feel that it’s not over. I’m
an overstrained string that must snap. But it’s not ended yet ... and
it will have a fearful end.”
“No matter, we must let the string be loosened, little by little.
There’s no position from which there is no way of escape.”
“I have thought, and thought. Only one....”
Again he knew from her terrified eyes that this one way of escape in
her thought was death, and he would not let her say it.
“Not at all,” he said. “Listen to me. You can’t see your own position
as I can. Let me tell you candidly my opinion.” Again he smiled
discreetly his almond-oil smile. “I’ll begin from the beginning. You
married a man twenty years older than yourself. You married him without
love and not knowing what love was. It was a mistake, let’s admit.”
“A fearful mistake!” said Anna.
“But I repeat, it’s an accomplished fact. Then you had, let us say, the
misfortune to love a man not your husband. That was a misfortune; but
that, too, is an accomplished fact. And your husband knew it and
forgave it.” He stopped at each sentence, waiting for her to object,
but she made no answer. “That’s so. Now the question is: can you go on
living with your husband? Do you wish it? Does he wish it?”
“I know nothing, nothing.”
“But you said yourself that you can’t endure him.”
“No, I didn’t say so. I deny it. I can’t tell, I don’t know anything
about it.”
“Yes, but let....”
“You can’t understand. I feel I’m lying head downwards in a sort of
pit, but I ought not to save myself. And I can’t....”
“Never mind, we’ll slip something under and pull you out. I understand
you: I understand that you can’t take it on yourself to express your
wishes, your feelings.”
“There’s nothing, nothing I wish ... except for it to be all over.”
“But he sees this and knows it. And do you suppose it weighs on him any
less than on you? You’re wretched, he’s wretched, and what good can
come of it? while divorce would solve the difficulty completely.” With
some effort Stepan Arkadyevitch brought out his central idea, and
looked significantly at her.
She said nothing, and shook her cropped head in dissent. But from the
look in her face, that suddenly brightened into its old beauty, he saw
that if she did not desire this, it was simply because it seemed to her
unattainable happiness.
“I’m awfully sorry for you! And how happy I should be if I could
arrange things!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling more boldly. “Don’t
speak, don’t say a word! God grant only that I may speak as I feel. I’m
going to him.”
Anna looked at him with dreamy, shining eyes, and said nothing.
Chapter 22
Stepan Arkadyevitch, with the same somewhat solemn expression with
which he used to take his presidential chair at his board, walked into
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s room. Alexey Alexandrovitch was walking about
his room with his hands behind his back, thinking of just what Stepan
Arkadyevitch had been discussing with his wife.
“I’m not interrupting you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, on the sight of
his brother-in-law becoming suddenly aware of a sense of embarrassment
unusual with him. To conceal this embarrassment he took out a cigarette
case he had just bought that opened in a new way, and sniffing the
leather, took a cigarette out of it.
“No. Do you want anything?” Alexey Alexandrovitch asked without
eagerness.
“Yes, I wished ... I wanted ... yes, I wanted to talk to you,” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch, with surprise aware of an unaccustomed timidity.
This feeling was so unexpected and so strange that he did not believe
it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he was meaning to
do was wrong.
Stepan Arkadyevitch made an effort and struggled with the timidity that
had come over him.
“I hope you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere affection
and respect for you,” he said, reddening.
Alexey Alexandrovitch stood still and said nothing, but his face struck
Stepan Arkadyevitch by its expression of an unresisting sacrifice.
“I intended ... I wanted to have a little talk with you about my sister
and your mutual position,” he said, still struggling with an
unaccustomed constraint.
Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled mournfully, looked at his brother-in-law,
and without answering went up to the table, took from it an unfinished
letter, and handed it to his brother-in-law.
“I think unceasingly of the same thing. And here is what I had begun
writing, thinking I could say it better by letter, and that my presence
irritates her,” he said, as he gave him the letter.
Stepan Arkadyevitch took the letter, looked with incredulous surprise
at the lusterless eyes fixed so immovably on him, and began to read.
“I see that my presence is irksome to you. Painful as it is to me to
believe it, I see that it is so, and cannot be otherwise. I don’t blame
you, and God is my witness that on seeing you at the time of your
illness I resolved with my whole heart to forget all that had passed
between us and to begin a new life. I do not regret, and shall never
regret, what I have done; but I have desired one thing—your good, the
good of your soul—and now I see I have not attained that. Tell me
yourself what will give you true happiness and peace to your soul. I
put myself entirely in your hands, and trust to your feeling of what’s
right.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch handed back the letter, and with the same surprise
continued looking at his brother-in-law, not knowing what to say. This
silence was so awkward for both of them that Stepan Arkadyevitch’s lips
began twitching nervously, while he still gazed without speaking at
Karenin’s face.
“That’s what I wanted to say to her,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch,
turning away.
“Yes, yes....” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, not able to answer for the
tears that were choking him.
“Yes, yes, I understand you,” he brought out at last.
“I want to know what she would like,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“I am afraid she does not understand her own position. She is not a
judge,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, recovering himself. “She is crushed,
simply crushed by your generosity. If she were to read this letter, she
would be incapable of saying anything, she would only hang her head
lower than ever.”
“Yes, but what’s to be done in that case? how explain, how find out her
wishes?”
“If you will allow me to give my opinion, I think that it lies with you
to point out directly the steps you consider necessary to end the
position.”
“So you consider it must be ended?” Alexey Alexandrovitch interrupted
him. “But how?” he added, with a gesture of his hands before his eyes
not usual with him. “I see no possible way out of it.”
“There is some way of getting out of every position,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, standing up and becoming more cheerful. “There was a time
when you thought of breaking off.... If you are convinced now that you
cannot make each other happy....”
“Happiness may be variously understood. But suppose that I agree to
everything, that I want nothing: what way is there of getting out of
our position?”
“If you care to know my opinion,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with the
same smile of softening, almond-oil tenderness with which he had been
talking to Anna. His kindly smile was so winning that Alexey
Alexandrovitch, feeling his own weakness and unconsciously swayed by
it, was ready to believe what Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying.
“She will never speak out about it. But one thing is possible, one
thing she might desire,” he went on, “that is the cessation of your
relations and all memories associated with them. To my thinking, in
your position what’s essential is the formation of a new attitude to
one another. And that can only rest on a basis of freedom on both
sides.”
“Divorce,” Alexey Alexandrovitch interrupted, in a tone of aversion.
“Yes, I imagine that divorce—yes, divorce,” Stepan Arkadyevitch
repeated, reddening. “That is from every point of view the most
rational course for married people who find themselves in the position
you are in. What can be done if married people find that life is
impossible for them together? That may always happen.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed heavily and closed his eyes.
“There’s only one point to be considered: is either of the parties
desirous of forming new ties? If not, it is very simple,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, feeling more and more free from constraint.
Alexey Alexandrovitch, scowling with emotion, muttered something to
himself, and made no answer. All that seemed so simple to Stepan
Arkadyevitch, Alexey Alexandrovitch had thought over thousands of
times. And, so far from being simple, it all seemed to him utterly
impossible. Divorce, the details of which he knew by this time, seemed
to him now out of the question, because the sense of his own dignity
and respect for religion forbade his taking upon himself a fictitious
charge of adultery, and still more suffering his wife, pardoned and
beloved by him, to be caught in the fact and put to public shame.
Divorce appeared to him impossible also on other still more weighty
grounds.
What would become of his son in case of a divorce? To leave him with
his mother was out of the question. The divorced mother would have her
own illegitimate family, in which his position as a stepson and his
education would not be good. Keep him with him? He knew that would be
an act of vengeance on his part, and that he did not want. But apart
from this, what more than all made divorce seem impossible to Alexey
Alexandrovitch was, that by consenting to a divorce he would be
completely ruining Anna. The saying of Darya Alexandrovna at Moscow,
that in deciding on a divorce he was thinking of himself, and not
considering that by this he would be ruining her irrevocably, had sunk
into his heart. And connecting this saying with his forgiveness of her,
with his devotion to the children, he understood it now in his own way.
To consent to a divorce, to give her her freedom, meant in his thoughts
to take from himself the last tie that bound him to life—the children
whom he loved; and to take from her the last prop that stayed her on
the path of right, to thrust her down to her ruin. If she were
divorced, he knew she would join her life to Vronsky’s, and their tie
would be an illegitimate and criminal one, since a wife, by the
interpretation of the ecclesiastical law, could not marry while her
husband was living. “She will join him, and in a year or two he will
throw her over, or she will form a new tie,” thought Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “And I, by agreeing to an unlawful divorce, shall be to
blame for her ruin.” He had thought it all over hundreds of times, and
was convinced that a divorce was not at all simple, as Stepan
Arkadyevitch had said, but was utterly impossible. He did not believe a
single word Stepan Arkadyevitch said to him; to every word he had a
thousand objections to make, but he listened to him, feeling that his
words were the expression of that mighty brutal force which controlled
his life and to which he would have to submit.
“The only question is on what terms you agree to give her a divorce.
She does not want anything, does not dare ask you for anything, she
leaves it all to your generosity.”
“My God, my God! what for?” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch, remembering
the details of divorce proceedings in which the husband took the blame
on himself, and with just the same gesture with which Vronsky had done
the same, he hid his face for shame in his hands.
“You are distressed, I understand that. But if you think it over....”
“Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also; and if any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also,”
thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Yes, yes!” he cried in a shrill voice. “I will take the disgrace on
myself, I will give up even my son, but ... but wouldn’t it be better
to let it alone? Still you may do as you like....”
And turning away so that his brother-in-law could not see him, he sat
down on a chair at the window. There was bitterness, there was shame in
his heart, but with bitterness and shame he felt joy and emotion at the
height of his own meekness.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was touched. He was silent for a space.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch, believe me, she appreciates your generosity,”
he said. “But it seems it was the will of God,” he added, and as he
said it felt how foolish a remark it was, and with difficulty repressed
a smile at his own foolishness.
Alexey Alexandrovitch would have made some reply, but tears stopped
him.
“This is an unhappy fatality, and one must accept it as such. I accept
the calamity as an accomplished fact, and am doing my best to help both
her and you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
When he went out of his brother-in-law’s room he was touched, but that
did not prevent him from being glad he had successfully brought the
matter to a conclusion, for he felt certain Alexey Alexandrovitch would
not go back on his words. To this satisfaction was added the fact that
an idea had just struck him for a riddle turning on his successful
achievement, that when the affair was over he would ask his wife and
most intimate friends. He put this riddle into two or three different
ways. “But I’ll work it out better than that,” he said to himself with
a smile.
Chapter 23
Vronsky’s wound had been a dangerous one, though it did not touch the
heart, and for several days he had lain between life and death. The
first time he was able to speak, Varya, his brother’s wife, was alone
in the room.
“Varya,” he said, looking sternly at her, “I shot myself by accident.
And please never speak of it, and tell everyone so. Or else it’s too
ridiculous.”
Without answering his words, Varya bent over him, and with a delighted
smile gazed into his face. His eyes were clear, not feverish; but their
expression was stern.
“Thank God!” she said. “You’re not in pain?”
“A little here.” He pointed to his breast.
“Then let me change your bandages.”
In silence, stiffening his broad jaws, he looked at her while she
bandaged him up. When she had finished he said:
“I’m not delirious. Please manage that there may be no talk of my
having shot myself on purpose.”
“No one does say so. Only I hope you won’t shoot yourself by accident
any more,” she said, with a questioning smile.
“Of course I won’t, but it would have been better....”
And he smiled gloomily.
In spite of these words and this smile, which so frightened Varya, when
the inflammation was over and he began to recover, he felt that he was
completely free from one part of his misery. By his action he had, as
it were, washed away the shame and humiliation he had felt before. He
could now think calmly of Alexey Alexandrovitch. He recognized all his
magnanimity, but he did not now feel himself humiliated by it. Besides,
he got back again into the beaten track of his life. He saw the
possibility of looking men in the face again without shame, and he
could live in accordance with his own habits. One thing he could not
pluck out of his heart, though he never ceased struggling with it, was
the regret, amounting to despair, that he had lost her forever. That
now, having expiated his sin against the husband, he was bound to
renounce her, and never in future to stand between her with her
repentance and her husband, he had firmly decided in his heart; but he
could not tear out of his heart his regret at the loss of her love, he
could not erase from his memory those moments of happiness that he had
so little prized at the time, and that haunted him in all their charm.
Serpuhovskoy had planned his appointment at Tashkend, and Vronsky
agreed to the proposition without the slightest hesitation. But the
nearer the time of departure came, the bitterer was the sacrifice he
was making to what he thought his duty.
His wound had healed, and he was driving about making preparations for
his departure for Tashkend.
“To see her once and then to bury myself, to die,” he thought, and as
he was paying farewell visits, he uttered this thought to Betsy.
Charged with this commission, Betsy had gone to Anna, and brought him
back a negative reply.
“So much the better,” thought Vronsky, when he received the news. “It
was a weakness, which would have shattered what strength I have left.”
Next day Betsy herself came to him in the morning, and announced that
she had heard through Oblonsky as a positive fact that Alexey
Alexandrovitch had agreed to a divorce, and that therefore Vronsky
could see Anna.
Without even troubling himself to see Betsy out of his flat, forgetting
all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her, where her
husband was, Vronsky drove straight to the Karenins’. He ran up the
stairs seeing no one and nothing, and with a rapid step, almost
breaking into a run, he went into her room. And without considering,
without noticing whether there was anyone in the room or not, he flung
his arms round her, and began to cover her face, her hands, her neck
with kisses.
Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she
would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his
passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself, but it
was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that for a
long while she could say nothing.
“Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours,” she said at last,
pressing his hands to her bosom.
“So it had to be,” he said. “So long as we live, it must be so. I know
it now.”
“That’s true,” she said, getting whiter and whiter, and embracing his
head. “Still there is something terrible in it after all that has
happened.”
“It will all pass, it will all pass; we shall be so happy. Our love, if
it could be stronger, will be strengthened by there being something
terrible in it,” he said, lifting his head and parting his strong teeth
in a smile.
And she could not but respond with a smile—not to his words, but to the
love in his eyes. She took his hand and stroked her chilled cheeks and
cropped head with it.
“I don’t know you with this short hair. You’ve grown so pretty. A boy.
But how pale you are!”
“Yes, I’m very weak,” she said, smiling. And her lips began trembling
again.
“We’ll go to Italy; you will get strong,” he said.
“Can it be possible we could be like husband and wife, alone, your
family with you?” she said, looking close into his eyes.
“It only seems strange to me that it can ever have been otherwise.”
“Stiva says that _he_ has agreed to everything, but I can’t accept
_his_ generosity,” she said, looking dreamily past Vronsky’s face. “I
don’t want a divorce; it’s all the same to me now. Only I don’t know
what he will decide about Seryozha.”
He could not conceive how at this moment of their meeting she could
remember and think of her son, of divorce. What did it all matter?
“Don’t speak of that, don’t think of it,” he said, turning her hand in
his, and trying to draw her attention to him; but still she did not
look at him.
“Oh, why didn’t I die! it would have been better,” she said, and silent
tears flowed down both her cheeks; but she tried to smile, so as not to
wound him.
To decline the flattering and dangerous appointment at Tashkend would
have been, Vronsky had till then considered, disgraceful and
impossible. But now, without an instant’s consideration, he declined
it, and observing dissatisfaction in the most exalted quarters at this
step, he immediately retired from the army.
A month later Alexey Alexandrovitch was left alone with his son in his
house at Petersburg, while Anna and Vronsky had gone abroad, not having
obtained a divorce, but having absolutely declined all idea of one.
PART FIVE
Chapter 1
Princess Shtcherbatskaya considered that it was out of the question for
the wedding to take place before Lent, just five weeks off, since not
half the trousseau could possibly be ready by that time. But she could
not but agree with Levin that to fix it for after Lent would be putting
it off too late, as an old aunt of Prince Shtcherbatsky’s was seriously
ill and might die, and then the mourning would delay the wedding still
longer. And therefore, deciding to divide the trousseau into two
parts—a larger and smaller trousseau—the princess consented to have the
wedding before Lent. She determined that she would get the smaller part
of the trousseau all ready now, and the larger part should be made
later, and she was much vexed with Levin because he was incapable of
giving her a serious answer to the question whether he agreed to this
arrangement or not. The arrangement was the more suitable as,
immediately after the wedding, the young people were to go to the
country, where the more important part of the trousseau would not be
wanted.
Levin still continued in the same delirious condition in which it
seemed to him that he and his happiness constituted the chief and sole
aim of all existence, and that he need not now think or care about
anything, that everything was being done and would be done for him by
others. He had not even plans and aims for the future, he left its
arrangement to others, knowing that everything would be delightful. His
brother Sergey Ivanovitch, Stepan Arkadyevitch, and the princess guided
him in doing what he had to do. All he did was to agree entirely with
everything suggested to him. His brother raised money for him, the
princess advised him to leave Moscow after the wedding. Stepan
Arkadyevitch advised him to go abroad. He agreed to everything. “Do
what you choose, if it amuses you. I’m happy, and my happiness can be
no greater and no less for anything you do,” he thought. When he told
Kitty of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s advice that they should go abroad, he
was much surprised that she did not agree to this, and had some
definite requirements of her own in regard to their future. She knew
Levin had work he loved in the country. She did not, as he saw,
understand this work, she did not even care to understand it. But that
did not prevent her from regarding it as a matter of great importance.
And then she knew their home would be in the country, and she wanted to
go, not abroad where she was not going to live, but to the place where
their home would be. This definitely expressed purpose astonished
Levin. But since he did not care either way, he immediately asked
Stepan Arkadyevitch, as though it were his duty, to go down to the
country and to arrange everything there to the best of his ability with
the taste of which he had so much.
“But I say,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to him one day after he had come
back from the country, where he had got everything ready for the young
people’s arrival, “have you a certificate of having been at
confession?”
“No. But what of it?”
“You can’t be married without it.”
“_Aïe, aïe, aïe!_” cried Levin. “Why, I believe it’s nine years since
I’ve taken the sacrament! I never thought of it.”
“You’re a pretty fellow!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch laughing, “and you
call me a Nihilist! But this won’t do, you know. You must take the
sacrament.”
“When? There are four days left now.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch arranged this also, and Levin had to go to
confession. To Levin, as to any unbeliever who respects the beliefs of
others, it was exceedingly disagreeable to be present at and take part
in church ceremonies. At this moment, in his present softened state of
feeling, sensitive to everything, this inevitable act of hypocrisy was
not merely painful to Levin, it seemed to him utterly impossible. Now,
in the heyday of his highest glory, his fullest flower, he would have
to be a liar or a scoffer. He felt incapable of being either. But
though he repeatedly plied Stepan Arkadyevitch with questions as to the
possibility of obtaining a certificate without actually communicating,
Stepan Arkadyevitch maintained that it was out of the question.
“Besides, what is it to you—two days? And he’s an awfully nice clever
old fellow. He’ll pull the tooth out for you so gently, you won’t
notice it.”
Standing at the first litany, Levin attempted to revive in himself his
youthful recollections of the intense religious emotion he had passed
through between the ages of sixteen and seventeen.
But he was at once convinced that it was utterly impossible to him. He
attempted to look at it all as an empty custom, having no sort of
meaning, like the custom of paying calls. But he felt that he could not
do that either. Levin found himself, like the majority of his
contemporaries, in the vaguest position in regard to religion. Believe
he could not, and at the same time he had no firm conviction that it
was all wrong. And consequently, not being able to believe in the
significance of what he was doing nor to regard it with indifference as
an empty formality, during the whole period of preparing for the
sacrament he was conscious of a feeling of discomfort and shame at
doing what he did not himself understand, and what, as an inner voice
told him, was therefore false and wrong.
During the service he would first listen to the prayers, trying to
attach some meaning to them not discordant with his own views; then
feeling that he could not understand and must condemn them, he tried
not to listen to them, but to attend to the thoughts, observations, and
memories which floated through his brain with extreme vividness during
this idle time of standing in church.
He had stood through the litany, the evening service and the midnight
service, and the next day he got up earlier than usual, and without
having tea went at eight o’clock in the morning to the church for the
morning service and the confession.
There was no one in the church but a beggar soldier, two old women, and
the church officials. A young deacon, whose long back showed in two
distinct halves through his thin undercassock, met him, and at once
going to a little table at the wall read the exhortation. During the
reading, especially at the frequent and rapid repetition of the same
words, “Lord, have mercy on us!” which resounded with an echo, Levin
felt that thought was shut and sealed up, and that it must not be
touched or stirred now or confusion would be the result; and so
standing behind the deacon he went on thinking of his own affairs,
neither listening nor examining what was said. “It’s wonderful what
expression there is in her hand,” he thought, remembering how they had
been sitting the day before at a corner table. They had nothing to talk
about, as was almost always the case at this time, and laying her hand
on the table she kept opening and shutting it, and laughed herself as
she watched her action. He remembered how he had kissed it and then had
examined the lines on the pink palm. “Have mercy on us again!” thought
Levin, crossing himself, bowing, and looking at the supple spring of
the deacon’s back bowing before him. “She took my hand then and
examined the lines. ‘You’ve got a splendid hand,’ she said.” And he
looked at his own hand and the short hand of the deacon. “Yes, now it
will soon be over,” he thought. “No, it seems to be beginning again,”
he thought, listening to the prayers. “No, it’s just ending: there he
is bowing down to the ground. That’s always at the end.”
The deacon’s hand in a plush cuff accepted a three-rouble note
unobtrusively, and the deacon said he would put it down in the
register, and his new boots creaking jauntily over the flagstones of
the empty church, he went to the altar. A moment later he peeped out
thence and beckoned to Levin. Thought, till then locked up, began to
stir in Levin’s head, but he made haste to drive it away. “It will come
right somehow,” he thought, and went towards the altar-rails. He went
up the steps, and turning to the right saw the priest. The priest, a
little old man with a scanty grizzled beard and weary, good-natured
eyes, was standing at the altar-rails, turning over the pages of a
missal. With a slight bow to Levin he began immediately reading prayers
in the official voice. When he had finished them he bowed down to the
ground and turned, facing Levin.
“Christ is present here unseen, receiving your confession,” he said,
pointing to the crucifix. “Do you believe in all the doctrines of the
Holy Apostolic Church?” the priest went on, turning his eyes away from
Levin’s face and folding his hands under his stole.
“I have doubted, I doubt everything,” said Levin in a voice that jarred
on himself, and he ceased speaking.
The priest waited a few seconds to see if he would not say more, and
closing his eyes he said quickly, with a broad, Vladimirsky accent:
“Doubt is natural to the weakness of mankind, but we must pray that God
in His mercy will strengthen us. What are your special sins?” he added,
without the slightest interval, as though anxious not to waste time.
“My chief sin is doubt. I have doubts of everything, and for the most
part I am in doubt.”
“Doubt is natural to the weakness of mankind,” the priest repeated the
same words. “What do you doubt about principally?”
“I doubt of everything. I sometimes even have doubts of the existence
of God,” Levin could not help saying, and he was horrified at the
impropriety of what he was saying. But Levin’s words did not, it
seemed, make much impression on the priest.
“What sort of doubt can there be of the existence of God?” he said
hurriedly, with a just perceptible smile.
Levin did not speak.
“What doubt can you have of the Creator when you behold His creation?”
the priest went on in the rapid customary jargon. “Who has decked the
heavenly firmament with its lights? Who has clothed the earth in its
beauty? How explain it without the Creator?” he said, looking
inquiringly at Levin.
Levin felt that it would be improper to enter upon a metaphysical
discussion with the priest, and so he said in reply merely what was a
direct answer to the question.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know! Then how can you doubt that God created all?” the
priest said, with good-humored perplexity.
“I don’t understand it at all,” said Levin, blushing, and feeling that
his words were stupid, and that they could not be anything but stupid
in such a position.
“Pray to God and beseech Him. Even the holy fathers had doubts, and
prayed to God to strengthen their faith. The devil has great power, and
we must resist him. Pray to God, beseech Him. Pray to God,” he repeated
hurriedly.
The priest paused for some time, as though meditating.
“You’re about, I hear, to marry the daughter of my parishioner and son
in the spirit, Prince Shtcherbatsky?” he resumed, with a smile. “An
excellent young lady.”
“Yes,” answered Levin, blushing for the priest. “What does he want to
ask me about this at confession for?” he thought.
And, as though answering his thought, the priest said to him:
“You are about to enter into holy matrimony, and God may bless you with
offspring. Well, what sort of bringing-up can you give your babes if
you do not overcome the temptation of the devil, enticing you to
infidelity?” he said, with gentle reproachfulness. “If you love your
child as a good father, you will not desire only wealth, luxury, honor
for your infant; you will be anxious for his salvation, his spiritual
enlightenment with the light of truth. Eh? What answer will you make
him when the innocent babe asks you: ‘Papa! who made all that enchants
me in this world—the earth, the waters, the sun, the flowers, the
grass?’ Can you say to him: ‘I don’t know’? You cannot but know, since
the Lord God in His infinite mercy has revealed it to us. Or your child
will ask you: ‘What awaits me in the life beyond the tomb?’ What will
you say to him when you know nothing? How will you answer him? Will you
leave him to the allurements of the world and the devil? That’s not
right,” he said, and he stopped, putting his head on one side and
looking at Levin with his kindly, gentle eyes.
Levin made no answer this time, not because he did not want to enter
upon a discussion with the priest, but because, so far, no one had ever
asked him such questions, and when his babes did ask him those
questions, it would be time enough to think about answering them.
“You are entering upon a time of life,” pursued the priest, “when you
must choose your path and keep to it. Pray to God that He may in His
mercy aid you and have mercy on you!” he concluded. “Our Lord and God,
Jesus Christ, in the abundance and riches of His loving-kindness,
forgives this child....” and, finishing the prayer of absolution, the
priest blessed him and dismissed him.
On getting home that day, Levin had a delightful sense of relief at the
awkward position being over and having been got through without his
having to tell a lie. Apart from this, there remained a vague memory
that what the kind, nice old fellow had said had not been at all so
stupid as he had fancied at first, and that there was something in it
that must be cleared up.
“Of course, not now,” thought Levin, “but some day later on.” Levin
felt more than ever now that there was something not clear and not
clean in his soul, and that, in regard to religion, he was in the same
position which he perceived so clearly and disliked in others, and for
which he blamed his friend Sviazhsky.
Levin spent that evening with his betrothed at Dolly’s, and was in very
high spirits. To explain to Stepan Arkadyevitch the state of excitement
in which he found himself, he said that he was happy like a dog being
trained to jump through a hoop, who, having at last caught the idea,
and done what was required of him, whines and wags its tail, and jumps
up to the table and the windows in its delight.
Chapter 2
On the day of the wedding, according to the Russian custom (the
princess and Darya Alexandrovna insisted on strictly keeping all the
customs), Levin did not see his betrothed, and dined at his hotel with
three bachelor friends, casually brought together at his rooms. These
were Sergey Ivanovitch, Katavasov, a university friend, now professor
of natural science, whom Levin had met in the street and insisted on
taking home with him, and Tchirikov, his best man, a Moscow
conciliation-board judge, Levin’s companion in his bear-hunts. The
dinner was a very merry one: Sergey Ivanovitch was in his happiest
mood, and was much amused by Katavasov’s originality. Katavasov,
feeling his originality was appreciated and understood, made the most
of it. Tchirikov always gave a lively and good-humored support to
conversation of any sort.
“See, now,” said Katavasov, drawling his words from a habit acquired in
the lecture-room, “what a capable fellow was our friend Konstantin
Dmitrievitch. I’m not speaking of present company, for he’s absent. At
the time he left the university he was fond of science, took an
interest in humanity; now one-half of his abilities is devoted to
deceiving himself, and the other to justifying the deceit.”
“A more determined enemy of matrimony than you I never saw,” said
Sergey Ivanovitch.
“Oh, no, I’m not an enemy of matrimony. I’m in favor of division of
labor. People who can do nothing else ought to rear people while the
rest work for their happiness and enlightenment. That’s how I look at
it. To muddle up two trades is the error of the amateur; I’m not one of
their number.”
“How happy I shall be when I hear that you’re in love!” said Levin.
“Please invite me to the wedding.”
“I’m in love now.”
“Yes, with a cuttlefish! You know,” Levin turned to his brother,
“Mihail Semyonovitch is writing a work on the digestive organs of
the....”
“Now, make a muddle of it! It doesn’t matter what about. And the fact
is, I certainly do love cuttlefish.”
“But that’s no hindrance to your loving your wife.”
“The cuttlefish is no hindrance. The wife is the hindrance.”
“Why so?”
“Oh, you’ll see! You care about farming, hunting,—well, you’d better
look out!”
“Arhip was here today; he said there were a lot of elks in Prudno, and
two bears,” said Tchirikov.
“Well, you must go and get them without me.”
“Ah, that’s the truth,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “And you may say
good-bye to bear-hunting for the future—your wife won’t allow it!”
Levin smiled. The picture of his wife not letting him go was so
pleasant that he was ready to renounce the delights of looking upon
bears forever.
“Still, it’s a pity they should get those two bears without you. Do you
remember last time at Hapilovo? That was a delightful hunt!” said
Tchirikov.
Levin had not the heart to disillusion him of the notion that there
could be something delightful apart from her, and so said nothing.
“There’s some sense in this custom of saying good-bye to bachelor
life,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “However happy you may be, you must
regret your freedom.”
“And confess there is a feeling that you want to jump out of the
window, like Gogol’s bridegroom?”
“Of course there is, but it isn’t confessed,” said Katavasov, and he
broke into loud laughter.
“Oh, well, the window’s open. Let’s start off this instant to Tver!
There’s a big she-bear; one can go right up to the lair. Seriously,
let’s go by the five o’clock! And here let them do what they like,”
said Tchirikov, smiling.
“Well, now, on my honor,” said Levin, smiling, “I can’t find in my
heart that feeling of regret for my freedom.”
“Yes, there’s such a chaos in your heart just now that you can’t find
anything there,” said Katavasov. “Wait a bit, when you set it to rights
a little, you’ll find it!”
“No; if so, I should have felt a little, apart from my feeling” (he
could not say love before them) “and happiness, a certain regret at
losing my freedom.... On the contrary, I am glad at the very loss of my
freedom.”
“Awful! It’s a hopeless case!” said Katavasov. “Well, let’s drink to
his recovery, or wish that a hundredth part of his dreams may be
realized—and that would be happiness such as never has been seen on
earth!”
Soon after dinner the guests went away to be in time to be dressed for
the wedding.
When he was left alone, and recalled the conversation of these bachelor
friends, Levin asked himself: had he in his heart that regret for his
freedom of which they had spoken? He smiled at the question. “Freedom!
What is freedom for? Happiness is only in loving and wishing her
wishes, thinking her thoughts, that is to say, not freedom at
all—that’s happiness!”
“But do I know her ideas, her wishes, her feelings?” some voice
suddenly whispered to him. The smile died away from his face, and he
grew thoughtful. And suddenly a strange feeling came upon him. There
came over him a dread and doubt—doubt of everything.
“What if she does not love me? What if she’s marrying me simply to be
married? What if she doesn’t see herself what she’s doing?” he asked
himself. “She may come to her senses, and only when she is being
married realize that she does not and cannot love me.” And strange,
most evil thoughts of her began to come to him. He was jealous of
Vronsky, as he had been a year ago, as though the evening he had seen
her with Vronsky had been yesterday. He suspected she had not told him
everything.
He jumped up quickly. “No, this can’t go on!” he said to himself in
despair. “I’ll go to her; I’ll ask her; I’ll say for the last time: we
are free, and hadn’t we better stay so? Anything’s better than endless
misery, disgrace, unfaithfulness!” With despair in his heart and bitter
anger against all men, against himself, against her, he went out of the
hotel and drove to her house.
He found her in one of the back rooms. She was sitting on a chest and
making some arrangements with her maid, sorting over heaps of dresses
of different colors, spread on the backs of chairs and on the floor.
“Ah!” she cried, seeing him, and beaming with delight. “Kostya!
Konstantin Dmitrievitch!” (These latter days she used these names
almost alternately.) “I didn’t expect you! I’m going through my
wardrobe to see what’s for whom....”
“Oh! that’s very nice!” he said gloomily, looking at the maid.
“You can go, Dunyasha, I’ll call you presently,” said Kitty. “Kostya,
what’s the matter?” she asked, definitely adopting this familiar name
as soon as the maid had gone out. She noticed his strange face,
agitated and gloomy, and a panic came over her.
“Kitty! I’m in torture. I can’t suffer alone,” he said with despair in
his voice, standing before her and looking imploringly into her eyes.
He saw already from her loving, truthful face, that nothing could come
of what he had meant to say, but yet he wanted her to reassure him
herself. “I’ve come to say that there’s still time. This can all be
stopped and set right.”
“What? I don’t understand. What is the matter?”
“What I have said a thousand times over, and can’t help thinking ...
that I’m not worthy of you. You couldn’t consent to marry me. Think a
little. You’ve made a mistake. Think it over thoroughly. You can’t love
me.... If ... better say so,” he said, not looking at her. “I shall be
wretched. Let people say what they like; anything’s better than
misery.... Far better now while there’s still time....”
“I don’t understand,” she answered, panic-stricken; “you mean you want
to give it up ... don’t want it?”
“Yes, if you don’t love me.”
“You’re out of your mind!” she cried, turning crimson with vexation.
But his face was so piteous, that she restrained her vexation, and
flinging some clothes off an armchair, she sat down beside him. “What
are you thinking? tell me all.”
“I am thinking you can’t love me. What can you love me for?”
“My God! what can I do?...” she said, and burst into tears.
“Oh! what have I done?” he cried, and kneeling before her, he fell to
kissing her hands.
When the princess came into the room five minutes later, she found them
completely reconciled. Kitty had not simply assured him that she loved
him, but had gone so far—in answer to his question, what she loved him
for—as to explain what for. She told him that she loved him because she
understood him completely, because she knew what he would like, and
because everything he liked was good. And this seemed to him perfectly
clear. When the princess came to them, they were sitting side by side
on the chest, sorting the dresses and disputing over Kitty’s wanting to
give Dunyasha the brown dress she had been wearing when Levin proposed
to her, while he insisted that that dress must never be given away, but
Dunyasha must have the blue one.
“How is it you don’t see? She’s a brunette, and it won’t suit her....
I’ve worked it all out.”
Hearing why he had come, the princess was half humorously, half
seriously angry with him, and sent him home to dress and not to hinder
Kitty’s hair-dressing, as Charles the hair-dresser was just coming.
“As it is, she’s been eating nothing lately and is losing her looks,
and then you must come and upset her with your nonsense,” she said to
him. “Get along with you, my dear!”
Levin, guilty and shamefaced, but pacified, went back to his hotel. His
brother, Darya Alexandrovna, and Stepan Arkadyevitch, all in full
dress, were waiting for him to bless him with the holy picture. There
was no time to lose. Darya Alexandrovna had to drive home again to
fetch her curled and pomaded son, who was to carry the holy pictures
after the bride. Then a carriage had to be sent for the best man, and
another that would take Sergey Ivanovitch away would have to be sent
back.... Altogether there were a great many most complicated matters to
be considered and arranged. One thing was unmistakable, that there must
be no delay, as it was already half-past six.
Nothing special happened at the ceremony of benediction with the holy
picture. Stepan Arkadyevitch stood in a comically solemn pose beside
his wife, took the holy picture, and telling Levin to bow down to the
ground, he blessed him with his kindly, ironical smile, and kissed him
three times; Darya Alexandrovna did the same, and immediately was in a
hurry to get off, and again plunged into the intricate question of the
destinations of the various carriages.
“Come, I’ll tell you how we’ll manage: you drive in our carriage to
fetch him, and Sergey Ivanovitch, if he’ll be so good, will drive there
and then send his carriage.”
“Of course; I shall be delighted.”
“We’ll come on directly with him. Are your things sent off?” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Yes,” answered Levin, and he told Kouzma to put out his clothes for
him to dress.
Chapter 3
A crowd of people, principally women, was thronging round the church
lighted up for the wedding. Those who had not succeeded in getting into
the main entrance were crowding about the windows, pushing, wrangling,
and peeping through the gratings.
More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up in ranks along the
street by the police. A police officer, regardless of the frost, stood
at the entrance, gorgeous in his uniform. More carriages were
continually driving up, and ladies wearing flowers and carrying their
trains, and men taking off their helmets or black hats kept walking
into the church. Inside the church both lusters were already lighted,
and all the candles before the holy pictures. The gilt on the red
ground of the holy picture-stand, and the gilt relief on the pictures,
and the silver of the lusters and candlesticks, and the stones of the
floor, and the rugs, and the banners above in the choir, and the steps
of the altar, and the old blackened books, and the cassocks and
surplices—all were flooded with light. On the right side of the warm
church, in the crowd of frock coats and white ties, uniforms and
broadcloth, velvet, satin, hair and flowers, bare shoulders and arms
and long gloves, there was discreet but lively conversation that echoed
strangely in the high cupola. Every time there was heard the creak of
the opened door the conversation in the crowd died away, and everybody
looked round expecting to see the bride and bridegroom come in. But the
door had opened more than ten times, and each time it was either a
belated guest or guests, who joined the circle of the invited on the
right, or a spectator, who had eluded or softened the police officer,
and went to join the crowd of outsiders on the left. Both the guests
and the outside public had by now passed through all the phases of
anticipation.
At first they imagined that the bride and bridegroom would arrive
immediately, and attached no importance at all to their being late.
Then they began to look more and more often towards the door, and to
talk of whether anything could have happened. Then the long delay began
to be positively discomforting, and relations and guests tried to look
as if they were not thinking of the bridegroom but were engrossed in
conversation.
The head deacon, as though to remind them of the value of his time,
coughed impatiently, making the window-panes quiver in their frames. In
the choir the bored choristers could be heard trying their voices and
blowing their noses. The priest was continually sending first the
beadle and then the deacon to find out whether the bridegroom had not
come, more and more often he went himself, in a lilac vestment and an
embroidered sash, to the side door, expecting to see the bridegroom. At
last one of the ladies, glancing at her watch, said, “It really is
strange, though!” and all the guests became uneasy and began loudly
expressing their wonder and dissatisfaction. One of the bridegroom’s
best men went to find out what had happened. Kitty meanwhile had long
ago been quite ready, and in her white dress and long veil and wreath
of orange blossoms she was standing in the drawing-room of the
Shtcherbatskys’ house with her sister, Madame Lvova, who was her
bridal-mother. She was looking out of the window, and had been for over
half an hour anxiously expecting to hear from the best man that her
bridegroom was at the church.
Levin meanwhile, in his trousers, but without his coat and waistcoat,
was walking to and fro in his room at the hotel, continually putting
his head out of the door and looking up and down the corridor. But in
the corridor there was no sign of the person he was looking for and he
came back in despair, and frantically waving his hands addressed Stepan
Arkadyevitch, who was smoking serenely.
“Was ever a man in such a fearful fool’s position?” he said.
“Yes, it is stupid,” Stepan Arkadyevitch assented, smiling soothingly.
“But don’t worry, it’ll be brought directly.”
“No, what is to be done!” said Levin, with smothered fury. “And these
fools of open waistcoats! Out of the question!” he said, looking at the
crumpled front of his shirt. “And what if the things have been taken on
to the railway station!” he roared in desperation.
“Then you must put on mine.”
“I ought to have done so long ago, if at all.”
“It’s not nice to look ridiculous.... Wait a bit! it will _come
round_.”
The point was that when Levin asked for his evening suit, Kouzma, his
old servant, had brought him the coat, waistcoat, and everything that
was wanted.
“But the shirt!” cried Levin.
“You’ve got a shirt on,” Kouzma answered, with a placid smile.
Kouzma had not thought of leaving out a clean shirt, and on receiving
instructions to pack up everything and send it round to the
Shtcherbatskys’ house, from which the young people were to set out the
same evening, he had done so, packing everything but the dress suit.
The shirt worn since the morning was crumpled and out of the question
with the fashionable open waistcoat. It was a long way to send to the
Shtcherbatskys’. They sent out to buy a shirt. The servant came back;
everything was shut up—it was Sunday. They sent to Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s and brought a shirt—it was impossibly wide and short.
They sent finally to the Shtcherbatskys’ to unpack the things. The
bridegroom was expected at the church while he was pacing up and down
his room like a wild beast in a cage, peeping out into the corridor,
and with horror and despair recalling what absurd things he had said to
Kitty and what she might be thinking now.
At last the guilty Kouzma flew panting into the room with the shirt.
“Only just in time. They were just lifting it into the van,” said
Kouzma.
Three minutes later Levin ran full speed into the corridor, not looking
at his watch for fear of aggravating his sufferings.
“You won’t help matters like this,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a
smile, hurrying with more deliberation after him. “It will come round,
it will come round ... I tell you.”
Chapter 4
“They’ve come!” “Here he is!” “Which one?” “Rather young, eh?” “Why, my
dear soul, she looks more dead than alive!” were the comments in the
crowd, when Levin, meeting his bride in the entrance, walked with her
into the church.
Stepan Arkadyevitch told his wife the cause of the delay, and the
guests were whispering it with smiles to one another. Levin saw nothing
and no one; he did not take his eyes off his bride.
Everyone said she had lost her looks dreadfully of late, and was not
nearly so pretty on her wedding day as usual; but Levin did not think
so. He looked at her hair done up high, with the long white veil and
white flowers and the high, stand-up, scalloped collar, that in such a
maidenly fashion hid her long neck at the sides and only showed it in
front, her strikingly slender figure, and it seemed to him that she
looked better than ever—not because these flowers, this veil, this gown
from Paris added anything to her beauty; but because, in spite of the
elaborate sumptuousness of her attire, the expression of her sweet
face, of her eyes, of her lips was still her own characteristic
expression of guileless truthfulness.
“I was beginning to think you meant to run away,” she said, and smiled
to him.
“It’s so stupid, what happened to me, I’m ashamed to speak of it!” he
said, reddening, and he was obliged to turn to Sergey Ivanovitch, who
came up to him.
“This is a pretty story of yours about the shirt!” said Sergey
Ivanovitch, shaking his head and smiling.
“Yes, yes!” answered Levin, without an idea of what they were talking
about.
“Now, Kostya, you have to decide,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with an air
of mock dismay, “a weighty question. You are at this moment just in the
humor to appreciate all its gravity. They ask me, are they to light the
candles that have been lighted before or candles that have never been
lighted? It’s a matter of ten roubles,” he added, relaxing his lips
into a smile. “I have decided, but I was afraid you might not agree.”
Levin saw it was a joke, but he could not smile.
“Well, how’s it to be then?—unlighted or lighted candles? that’s the
question.”
“Yes, yes, unlighted.”
“Oh, I’m very glad. The question’s decided!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
smiling. “How silly men are, though, in this position,” he said to
Tchirikov, when Levin, after looking absently at him, had moved back to
his bride.
“Kitty, mind you’re the first to step on the carpet,” said Countess
Nordston, coming up. “You’re a nice person!” she said to Levin.
“Aren’t you frightened, eh?” said Marya Dmitrievna, an old aunt.
“Are you cold? You’re pale. Stop a minute, stoop down,” said Kitty’s
sister, Madame Lvova, and with her plump, handsome arms she smilingly
set straight the flowers on her head.
Dolly came up, tried to say something, but could not speak, cried, and
then laughed unnaturally.
Kitty looked at all of them with the same absent eyes as Levin.
Meanwhile the officiating clergy had got into their vestments, and the
priest and deacon came out to the lectern, which stood in the forepart
of the church. The priest turned to Levin saying something. Levin did
not hear what the priest said.
“Take the bride’s hand and lead her up,” the best man said to Levin.
It was a long while before Levin could make out what was expected of
him. For a long time they tried to set him right and made him begin
again—because he kept taking Kitty by the wrong arm or with the wrong
arm—till he understood at last that what he had to do was, without
changing his position, to take her right hand in his right hand. When
at last he had taken the bride’s hand in the correct way, the priest
walked a few paces in front of them and stopped at the lectern. The
crowd of friends and relations moved after them, with a buzz of talk
and a rustle of skirts. Someone stooped down and pulled out the bride’s
train. The church became so still that the drops of wax could be heard
falling from the candles.
The little old priest in his ecclesiastical cap, with his long
silvery-gray locks of hair parted behind his ears, was fumbling with
something at the lectern, putting out his little old hands from under
the heavy silver vestment with the gold cross on the back of it.
Stepan Arkadyevitch approached him cautiously, whispered something, and
making a sign to Levin, walked back again.
The priest lighted two candles, wreathed with flowers, and holding them
sideways so that the wax dropped slowly from them he turned, facing the
bridal pair. The priest was the same old man that had confessed Levin.
He looked with weary and melancholy eyes at the bride and bridegroom,
sighed, and putting his right hand out from his vestment, blessed the
bridegroom with it, and also with a shade of solicitous tenderness laid
the crossed fingers on the bowed head of Kitty. Then he gave them the
candles, and taking the censer, moved slowly away from them.
“Can it be true?” thought Levin, and he looked round at his bride.
Looking down at her he saw her face in profile, and from the scarcely
perceptible quiver of her lips and eyelashes he knew she was aware of
his eyes upon her. She did not look round, but the high scalloped
collar, that reached her little pink ear, trembled faintly. He saw that
a sigh was held back in her throat, and the little hand in the long
glove shook as it held the candle.
All the fuss of the shirt, of being late, all the talk of friends and
relations, their annoyance, his ludicrous position—all suddenly passed
away and he was filled with joy and dread.
The handsome, stately head-deacon wearing a silver robe and his curly
locks standing out at each side of his head, stepped smartly forward,
and lifting his stole on two fingers, stood opposite the priest.
“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” the solemn syllables rang out slowly
one after another, setting the air quivering with waves of sound.
“Blessed is the name of our God, from the beginning, is now, and ever
shall be,” the little old priest answered in a submissive, piping
voice, still fingering something at the lectern. And the full chorus of
the unseen choir rose up, filling the whole church, from the windows to
the vaulted roof, with broad waves of melody. It grew stronger, rested
for an instant, and slowly died away.
They prayed, as they always do, for peace from on high and for
salvation, for the Holy Synod, and for the Tsar; they prayed, too, for
the servants of God, Konstantin and Ekaterina, now plighting their
troth.
“Vouchsafe to them love made perfect, peace and help, O Lord, we
beseech Thee,” the whole church seemed to breathe with the voice of the
head deacon.
Levin heard the words, and they impressed him. “How did they guess that
it is help, just help that one wants?” he thought, recalling all his
fears and doubts of late. “What do I know? what can I do in this
fearful business,” he thought, “without help? Yes, it is help I want
now.”
When the deacon had finished the prayer for the Imperial family, the
priest turned to the bridal pair with a book: “Eternal God, that
joinest together in love them that were separate,” he read in a gentle,
piping voice: “who hast ordained the union of holy wedlock that cannot
be set asunder, Thou who didst bless Isaac and Rebecca and their
descendants, according to Thy Holy Covenant; bless Thy servants,
Konstantin and Ekaterina, leading them in the path of all good works.
For gracious and merciful art Thou, our Lord, and glory be to Thee, the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, now and ever shall be.”
“Amen!” the unseen choir sent rolling again upon the air.
“‘Joinest together in love them that were separate.’ What deep meaning
in those words, and how they correspond with what one feels at this
moment,” thought Levin. “Is she feeling the same as I?”
And looking round, he met her eyes, and from their expression he
concluded that she was understanding it just as he was. But this was a
mistake; she almost completely missed the meaning of the words of the
service; she had not heard them, in fact. She could not listen to them
and take them in, so strong was the one feeling that filled her breast
and grew stronger and stronger. That feeling was joy at the completion
of the process that for the last month and a half had been going on in
her soul, and had during those six weeks been a joy and a torture to
her. On the day when in the drawing-room of the house in Arbaty Street
she had gone up to him in her brown dress, and given herself to him
without a word—on that day, at that hour, there took place in her heart
a complete severance from all her old life, and a quite different, new,
utterly strange life had begun for her, while the old life was actually
going on as before. Those six weeks had for her been a time of the
utmost bliss and the utmost misery. All her life, all her desires and
hopes were concentrated on this one man, still uncomprehended by her,
to whom she was bound by a feeling of alternate attraction and
repulsion, even less comprehended than the man himself, and all the
while she was going on living in the outward conditions of her old
life. Living the old life, she was horrified at herself, at her utter
insurmountable callousness to all her own past, to things, to habits,
to the people she had loved, who loved her—to her mother, who was
wounded by her indifference, to her kind, tender father, till then
dearer than all the world. At one moment she was horrified at this
indifference, at another she rejoiced at what had brought her to this
indifference. She could not frame a thought, not a wish apart from life
with this man; but this new life was not yet, and she could not even
picture it clearly to herself. There was only anticipation, the dread
and joy of the new and the unknown. And now behold—anticipation and
uncertainty and remorse at the abandonment of the old life—all was
ending, and the new was beginning. This new life could not but have
terrors for her inexperience; but, terrible or not, the change had been
wrought six weeks before in her soul, and this was merely the final
sanction of what had long been completed in her heart.
Turning again to the lectern, the priest with some difficulty took
Kitty’s little ring, and asking Levin for his hand, put it on the first
joint of his finger. “The servant of God, Konstantin, plights his troth
to the servant of God, Ekaterina.” And putting his big ring on Kitty’s
touchingly weak, pink little finger, the priest said the same thing.
And the bridal pair tried several times to understand what they had to
do, and each time made some mistake and were corrected by the priest in
a whisper. At last, having duly performed the ceremony, having signed
the rings with the cross, the priest handed Kitty the big ring, and
Levin the little one. Again they were puzzled, and passed the rings
from hand to hand, still without doing what was expected.
Dolly, Tchirikov, and Stepan Arkadyevitch stepped forward to set them
right. There was an interval of hesitation, whispering, and smiles; but
the expression of solemn emotion on the faces of the betrothed pair did
not change: on the contrary, in their perplexity over their hands they
looked more grave and deeply moved than before, and the smile with
which Stepan Arkadyevitch whispered to them that now they would each
put on their own ring died away on his lips. He had a feeling that any
smile would jar on them.
“Thou who didst from the beginning create male and female,” the priest
read after the exchange of rings, “from Thee woman was given to man to
be a helpmeet to him, and for the procreation of children. O Lord, our
God, who hast poured down the blessings of Thy Truth according to Thy
Holy Covenant upon Thy chosen servants, our fathers, from generation to
generation, bless Thy servants Konstantin and Ekaterina, and make their
troth fast in faith, and union of hearts, and truth, and love....”
Levin felt more and more that all his ideas of marriage, all his dreams
of how he would order his life, were mere childishness, and that it was
something he had not understood hitherto, and now understood less than
ever, though it was being performed upon him. The lump in his throat
rose higher and higher, tears that would not be checked came into his
eyes.
Chapter 5
In the church there was all Moscow, all the friends and relations; and
during the ceremony of plighting troth, in the brilliantly lighted
church, there was an incessant flow of discreetly subdued talk in the
circle of gaily dressed women and girls, and men in white ties,
frockcoats, and uniforms. The talk was principally kept up by the men,
while the women were absorbed in watching every detail of the ceremony,
which always means so much to them.
In the little group nearest to the bride were her two sisters: Dolly,
and the other one, the self-possessed beauty, Madame Lvova, who had
just arrived from abroad.
“Why is it Marie’s in lilac, as bad as black, at a wedding?” said
Madame Korsunskaya.
“With her complexion, it’s the one salvation,” responded Madame
Trubetskaya. “I wonder why they had the wedding in the evening? It’s
like shop-people....”
“So much prettier. I was married in the evening too....” answered
Madame Korsunskaya, and she sighed, remembering how charming she had
been that day, and how absurdly in love her husband was, and how
different it all was now.
“They say if anyone’s best man more than ten times, he’ll never be
married. I wanted to be for the tenth time, but the post was taken,”
said Count Siniavin to the pretty Princess Tcharskaya, who had designs
on him.
Princess Tcharskaya only answered with a smile. She looked at Kitty,
thinking how and when she would stand with Count Siniavin in Kitty’s
place, and how she would remind him then of his joke today.
Shtcherbatsky told the old maid of honor, Madame Nikolaeva, that he
meant to put the crown on Kitty’s chignon for luck.
“She ought not to have worn a chignon,” answered Madame Nikolaeva, who
had long ago made up her mind that if the elderly widower she was
angling for married her, the wedding should be of the simplest. “I
don’t like such grandeur.”
Sergey Ivanovitch was talking to Darya Dmitrievna, jestingly assuring
her that the custom of going away after the wedding was becoming common
because newly married people always felt a little ashamed of
themselves.
“Your brother may feel proud of himself. She’s a marvel of sweetness. I
believe you’re envious.”
“Oh, I’ve got over that, Darya Dmitrievna,” he answered, and a
melancholy and serious expression suddenly came over his face.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was telling his sister-in-law his joke about
divorce.
“The wreath wants setting straight,” she answered, not hearing him.
“What a pity she’s lost her looks so,” Countess Nordston said to Madame
Lvova. “Still he’s not worth her little finger, is he?”
“Oh, I like him so—not because he’s my future _beau-frère_,” answered
Madame Lvova. “And how well he’s behaving! It’s so difficult, too, to
look well in such a position, not to be ridiculous. And he’s not
ridiculous, and not affected; one can see he’s moved.”
“You expected it, I suppose?”
“Almost. She always cared for him.”
“Well, we shall see which of them will step on the rug first. I warned
Kitty.”
“It will make no difference,” said Madame Lvova; “we’re all obedient
wives; it’s in our family.”
“Oh, I stepped on the rug before Vassily on purpose. And you, Dolly?”
Dolly stood beside them; she heard them, but she did not answer. She
was deeply moved. The tears stood in her eyes, and she could not have
spoken without crying. She was rejoicing over Kitty and Levin; going
back in thought to her own wedding, she glanced at the radiant figure
of Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgot all the present, and remembered only her
own innocent love. She recalled not herself only, but all her
women-friends and acquaintances. She thought of them on the one day of
their triumph, when they had stood like Kitty under the wedding crown,
with love and hope and dread in their hearts, renouncing the past, and
stepping forward into the mysterious future. Among the brides that came
back to her memory, she thought too of her darling Anna, of whose
proposed divorce she had just been hearing. And she had stood just as
innocent in orange flowers and bridal veil. And now? “It’s terribly
strange,” she said to herself. It was not merely the sisters, the
women-friends and female relations of the bride who were following
every detail of the ceremony. Women who were quite strangers, mere
spectators, were watching it excitedly, holding their breath, in fear
of losing a single movement or expression of the bride and bridegroom,
and angrily not answering, often not hearing, the remarks of the
callous men, who kept making joking or irrelevant observations.
“Why has she been crying? Is she being married against her will?”
“Against her will to a fine fellow like that? A prince, isn’t he?”
“Is that her sister in the white satin? Just listen how the deacon
booms out, ‘And fearing her husband.’”
“Are the choristers from Tchudovo?”
“No, from the Synod.”
“I asked the footman. He says he’s going to take her home to his
country place at once. Awfully rich, they say. That’s why she’s being
married to him.”
“No, they’re a well-matched pair.”
“I say, Marya Vassilievna, you were making out those fly-away
crinolines were not being worn. Just look at her in the puce dress—an
ambassador’s wife they say she is—how her skirt bounces out from side
to side!”
“What a pretty dear the bride is—like a lamb decked with flowers! Well,
say what you will, we women feel for our sister.”
Such were the comments in the crowd of gazing women who had succeeded
in slipping in at the church doors.
Chapter 6
When the ceremony of plighting troth was over, the beadle spread before
the lectern in the middle of the church a piece of pink silken stuff,
the choir sang a complicated and elaborate psalm, in which the bass and
tenor sang responses to one another, and the priest turning round
pointed the bridal pair to the pink silk rug. Though both had often
heard a great deal about the saying that the one who steps first on the
rug will be the head of the house, neither Levin nor Kitty were capable
of recollecting it, as they took the few steps towards it. They did not
hear the loud remarks and disputes that followed, some maintaining he
had stepped on first, and others that both had stepped on together.
After the customary questions, whether they desired to enter upon
matrimony, and whether they were pledged to anyone else, and their
answers, which sounded strange to themselves, a new ceremony began.
Kitty listened to the words of the prayer, trying to make out their
meaning, but she could not. The feeling of triumph and radiant
happiness flooded her soul more and more as the ceremony went on, and
deprived her of all power of attention.
They prayed: “Endow them with continence and fruitfulness, and
vouchsafe that their hearts may rejoice looking upon their sons and
daughters.” They alluded to God’s creation of a wife from Adam’s rib
“and for this cause a man shall leave father and mother, and cleave
unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh,” and that “this is a
great mystery”; they prayed that God would make them fruitful and bless
them, like Isaac and Rebecca, Joseph, Moses and Zipporah, and that they
might look upon their children’s children. “That’s all splendid,”
thought Kitty, catching the words, “all that’s just as it should be,”
and a smile of happiness, unconsciously reflected in everyone who
looked at her, beamed on her radiant face.
“Put it on quite,” voices were heard urging when the priest had put on
the wedding crowns and Shtcherbatsky, his hand shaking in its
three-button glove, held the crown high above her head.
“Put it on!” she whispered, smiling.
Levin looked round at her, and was struck by the joyful radiance on her
face, and unconsciously her feeling infected him. He too, like her felt
glad and happy.
They enjoyed hearing the epistle read, and the roll of the head
deacon’s voice at the last verse, awaited with such impatience by the
outside public. They enjoyed drinking out of the shallow cup of warm
red wine and water, and they were still more pleased when the priest,
flinging back his stole and taking both their hands in his, led them
round the lectern to the accompaniment of bass voices chanting “Glory
to God.”
Shtcherbatsky and Tchirikov, supporting the crowns and stumbling over
the bride’s train, smiling too and seeming delighted at something, were
at one moment left behind, at the next treading on the bridal pair as
the priest came to a halt. The spark of joy kindled in Kitty seemed to
have infected everyone in the church. It seemed to Levin that the
priest and the deacon too wanted to smile just as he did.
Taking the crowns off their heads the priest read the last prayer and
congratulated the young people. Levin looked at Kitty, and he had never
before seen her look as she did. She was charming with the new radiance
of happiness in her face. Levin longed to say something to her, but he
did not know whether it was all over. The priest got him out of his
difficulty. He smiled his kindly smile and said gently, “Kiss your
wife, and you kiss your husband,” and took the candles out of their
hands.
Levin kissed her smiling lips with timid care, gave her his arm, and
with a new strange sense of closeness, walked out of the church. He did
not believe, he could not believe, that it was true. It was only when
their wondering and timid eyes met that he believed in it, because he
felt that they were one.
After supper, the same night, the young people left for the country.
Chapter 7
Vronsky and Anna had been traveling for three months together in
Europe. They had visited Venice, Rome, and Naples, and had just arrived
at a small Italian town where they meant to stay some time. A handsome
head waiter, with thick pomaded hair parted from the neck upwards, an
evening coat, a broad white cambric shirt front, and a bunch of
trinkets hanging above his rounded stomach, stood with his hands in the
full curve of his pockets, looking contemptuously from under his
eyelids while he gave some frigid reply to a gentleman who had stopped
him. Catching the sound of footsteps coming from the other side of the
entry towards the staircase, the head waiter turned round, and seeing
the Russian count, who had taken their best rooms, he took his hands
out of his pockets deferentially, and with a bow informed him that a
courier had been, and that the business about the palazzo had been
arranged. The steward was prepared to sign the agreement.
“Ah! I’m glad to hear it,” said Vronsky. “Is madame at home or not?”
“Madame has been out for a walk but has returned now,” answered the
waiter.
Vronsky took off his soft, wide-brimmed hat and passed his handkerchief
over his heated brow and hair, which had grown half over his ears, and
was brushed back covering the bald patch on his head. And glancing
casually at the gentleman, who still stood there gazing intently at
him, he would have gone on.
“This gentleman is a Russian, and was inquiring after you,” said the
head waiter.
With mingled feelings of annoyance at never being able to get away from
acquaintances anywhere, and longing to find some sort of diversion from
the monotony of his life, Vronsky looked once more at the gentleman,
who had retreated and stood still again, and at the same moment a light
came into the eyes of both.
“Golenishtchev!”
“Vronsky!”
It really was Golenishtchev, a comrade of Vronsky’s in the Corps of
Pages. In the corps Golenishtchev had belonged to the liberal party; he
left the corps without entering the army, and had never taken office
under the government. Vronsky and he had gone completely different ways
on leaving the corps, and had only met once since.
At that meeting Vronsky perceived that Golenishtchev had taken up a
sort of lofty, intellectually liberal line, and was consequently
disposed to look down upon Vronsky’s interests and calling in life.
Hence Vronsky had met him with the chilling and haughty manner he so
well knew how to assume, the meaning of which was: “You may like or
dislike my way of life, that’s a matter of the most perfect
indifference to me; you will have to treat me with respect if you want
to know me.” Golenishtchev had been contemptuously indifferent to the
tone taken by Vronsky. This second meeting might have been expected,
one would have supposed, to estrange them still more. But now they
beamed and exclaimed with delight on recognizing one another. Vronsky
would never have expected to be so pleased to see Golenishtchev, but
probably he was not himself aware how bored he was. He forgot the
disagreeable impression of their last meeting, and with a face of frank
delight held out his hand to his old comrade. The same expression of
delight replaced the look of uneasiness on Golenishtchev’s face.
“How glad I am to meet you!” said Vronsky, showing his strong white
teeth in a friendly smile.
“I heard the name Vronsky, but I didn’t know which one. I’m very, very
glad!”
“Let’s go in. Come, tell me what you’re doing.”
“I’ve been living here for two years. I’m working.”
“Ah!” said Vronsky, with sympathy; “let’s go in.” And with the habit
common with Russians, instead of saying in Russian what he wanted to
keep from the servants, he began to speak in French.
“Do you know Madame Karenina? We are traveling together. I am going to
see her now,” he said in French, carefully scrutinizing Golenishtchev’s
face.
“Ah! I did not know” (though he did know), Golenishtchev answered
carelessly. “Have you been here long?” he added.
“Four days,” Vronsky answered, once more scrutinizing his friend’s face
intently.
“Yes, he’s a decent fellow, and will look at the thing properly,”
Vronsky said to himself, catching the significance of Golenishtchev’s
face and the change of subject. “I can introduce him to Anna, he looks
at it properly.”
During those three months that Vronsky had spent abroad with Anna, he
had always on meeting new people asked himself how the new person would
look at his relations with Anna, and for the most part, in men, he had
met with the “proper” way of looking at it. But if he had been asked,
and those who looked at it “properly” had been asked, exactly how they
did look at it, both he and they would have been greatly puzzled to
answer.
In reality, those who in Vronsky’s opinion had the “proper” view had no
sort of view at all, but behaved in general as well-bred persons do
behave in regard to all the complex and insoluble problems with which
life is encompassed on all sides; they behaved with propriety, avoiding
allusions and unpleasant questions. They assumed an air of fully
comprehending the import and force of the situation, of accepting and
even approving of it, but of considering it superfluous and uncalled
for to put all this into words.
Vronsky at once divined that Golenishtchev was of this class, and
therefore was doubly pleased to see him. And in fact, Golenishtchev’s
manner to Madame Karenina, when he was taken to call on her, was all
that Vronsky could have desired. Obviously without the slightest effort
he steered clear of all subjects which might lead to embarrassment.
He had never met Anna before, and was struck by her beauty, and still
more by the frankness with which she accepted her position. She blushed
when Vronsky brought in Golenishtchev, and he was extremely charmed by
this childish blush overspreading her candid and handsome face. But
what he liked particularly was the way in which at once, as though on
purpose that there might be no misunderstanding with an outsider, she
called Vronsky simply Alexey, and said they were moving into a house
they had just taken, what was here called a palazzo. Golenishtchev
liked this direct and simple attitude to her own position. Looking at
Anna’s manner of simple-hearted, spirited gaiety, and knowing Alexey
Alexandrovitch and Vronsky, Golenishtchev fancied that he understood
her perfectly. He fancied that he understood what she was utterly
unable to understand: how it was that, having made her husband
wretched, having abandoned him and her son and lost her good name, she
yet felt full of spirits, gaiety, and happiness.
“It’s in the guide-book,” said Golenishtchev, referring to the palazzo
Vronsky had taken. “There’s a first-rate Tintoretto there. One of his
latest period.”
“I tell you what: it’s a lovely day, let’s go and have another look at
it,” said Vronsky, addressing Anna.
“I shall be very glad to; I’ll go and put on my hat. Would you say it’s
hot?” she said, stopping short in the doorway and looking inquiringly
at Vronsky. And again a vivid flush overspread her face.
Vronsky saw from her eyes that she did not know on what terms he cared
to be with Golenishtchev, and so was afraid of not behaving as he would
wish.
He looked a long, tender look at her.
“No, not very,” he said.
And it seemed to her that she understood everything, most of all, that
he was pleased with her; and smiling to him, she walked with her rapid
step out at the door.
The friends glanced at one another, and a look of hesitation came into
both faces, as though Golenishtchev, unmistakably admiring her, would
have liked to say something about her, and could not find the right
thing to say, while Vronsky desired and dreaded his doing so.
“Well then,” Vronsky began to start a conversation of some sort; “so
you’re settled here? You’re still at the same work, then?” he went on,
recalling that he had been told Golenishtchev was writing something.
“Yes, I’m writing the second part of the _Two Elements_,” said
Golenishtchev, coloring with pleasure at the question—“that is, to be
exact, I am not writing it yet; I am preparing, collecting materials.
It will be of far wider scope, and will touch on almost all questions.
We in Russia refuse to see that we are the heirs of Byzantium,” and he
launched into a long and heated explanation of his views.
Vronsky at the first moment felt embarrassed at not even knowing of the
first part of the _Two Elements_, of which the author spoke as
something well known. But as Golenishtchev began to lay down his
opinions and Vronsky was able to follow them even without knowing the
_Two Elements_, he listened to him with some interest, for
Golenishtchev spoke well. But Vronsky was startled and annoyed by the
nervous irascibility with which Golenishtchev talked of the subject
that engrossed him. As he went on talking, his eyes glittered more and
more angrily; he was more and more hurried in his replies to imaginary
opponents, and his face grew more and more excited and worried.
Remembering Golenishtchev, a thin, lively, good-natured and well-bred
boy, always at the head of the class, Vronsky could not make out the
reason of his irritability, and he did not like it. What he
particularly disliked was that Golenishtchev, a man belonging to a good
set, should put himself on a level with some scribbling fellows, with
whom he was irritated and angry. Was it worth it? Vronsky disliked it,
yet he felt that Golenishtchev was unhappy, and was sorry for him.
Unhappiness, almost mental derangement, was visible on his mobile,
rather handsome face, while without even noticing Anna’s coming in, he
went on hurriedly and hotly expressing his views.
When Anna came in in her hat and cape, and her lovely hand rapidly
swinging her parasol, and stood beside him, it was with a feeling of
relief that Vronsky broke away from the plaintive eyes of Golenishtchev
which fastened persistently upon him, and with a fresh rush of love
looked at his charming companion, full of life and happiness.
Golenishtchev recovered himself with an effort, and at first was
dejected and gloomy, but Anna, disposed to feel friendly with everyone
as she was at that time, soon revived his spirits by her direct and
lively manner. After trying various subjects of conversation, she got
him upon painting, of which he talked very well, and she listened to
him attentively. They walked to the house they had taken, and looked
over it.
“I am very glad of one thing,” said Anna to Golenishtchev when they
were on their way back, “Alexey will have a capital _atelier_. You must
certainly take that room,” she said to Vronsky in Russian, using the
affectionately familiar form as though she saw that Golenishtchev would
become intimate with them in their isolation, and that there was no
need of reserve before him.
“Do you paint?” said Golenishtchev, turning round quickly to Vronsky.
“Yes, I used to study long ago, and now I have begun to do a little,”
said Vronsky, reddening.
“He has great talent,” said Anna with a delighted smile. “I’m no judge,
of course. But good judges have said the same.”
Chapter 8
Anna, in that first period of her emancipation and rapid return to
health, felt herself unpardonably happy and full of the joy of life.
The thought of her husband’s unhappiness did not poison her happiness.
On one side that memory was too awful to be thought of. On the other
side her husband’s unhappiness had given her too much happiness to be
regretted. The memory of all that had happened after her illness: her
reconciliation with her husband, its breakdown, the news of Vronsky’s
wound, his visit, the preparations for divorce, the departure from her
husband’s house, the parting from her son—all that seemed to her like a
delirious dream, from which she had waked up alone with Vronsky abroad.
The thought of the harm caused to her husband aroused in her a feeling
like repulsion, and akin to what a drowning man might feel who has
shaken off another man clinging to him. That man did drown. It was an
evil action, of course, but it was the sole means of escape, and better
not to brood over these fearful facts.
One consolatory reflection upon her conduct had occurred to her at the
first moment of the final rupture, and when now she recalled all the
past, she remembered that one reflection. “I have inevitably made that
man wretched,” she thought; “but I don’t want to profit by his misery.
I too am suffering, and shall suffer; I am losing what I prized above
everything—I am losing my good name and my son. I have done wrong, and
so I don’t want happiness, I don’t want a divorce, and shall suffer
from my shame and the separation from my child.” But, however sincerely
Anna had meant to suffer, she was not suffering. Shame there was not.
With the tact of which both had such a large share, they had succeeded
in avoiding Russian ladies abroad, and so had never placed themselves
in a false position, and everywhere they had met people who pretended
that they perfectly understood their position, far better indeed than
they did themselves. Separation from the son she loved—even that did
not cause her anguish in these early days. The baby girl—_his_
child—was so sweet, and had so won Anna’s heart, since she was all that
was left her, that Anna rarely thought of her son.
The desire for life, waxing stronger with recovered health, was so
intense, and the conditions of life were so new and pleasant, that Anna
felt unpardonably happy. The more she got to know Vronsky, the more she
loved him. She loved him for himself, and for his love for her. Her
complete ownership of him was a continual joy to her. His presence was
always sweet to her. All the traits of his character, which she learned
to know better and better, were unutterably dear to her. His
appearance, changed by his civilian dress, was as fascinating to her as
though she were some young girl in love. In everything he said,
thought, and did, she saw something particularly noble and elevated.
Her adoration of him alarmed her indeed; she sought and could not find
in him anything not fine. She dared not show him her sense of her own
insignificance beside him. It seemed to her that, knowing this, he
might sooner cease to love her; and she dreaded nothing now so much as
losing his love, though she had no grounds for fearing it. But she
could not help being grateful to him for his attitude to her, and
showing that she appreciated it. He, who had in her opinion such a
marked aptitude for a political career, in which he would have been
certain to play a leading part—he had sacrificed his ambition for her
sake, and never betrayed the slightest regret. He was more lovingly
respectful to her than ever, and the constant care that she should not
feel the awkwardness of her position never deserted him for a single
instant. He, so manly a man, never opposed her, had indeed, with her,
no will of his own, and was anxious, it seemed, for nothing but to
anticipate her wishes. And she could not but appreciate this, even
though the very intensity of his solicitude for her, the atmosphere of
care with which he surrounded her, sometimes weighed upon her.
Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had
so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the
realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of
the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake
men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of
their desires. For a time after joining his life to hers, and putting
on civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of freedom in general of
which he had known nothing before, and of freedom in his love,—and he
was content, but not for long. He was soon aware that there was
springing up in his heart a desire for desires—_ennui_. Without
conscious intention he began to clutch at every passing caprice, taking
it for a desire and an object. Sixteen hours of the day must be
occupied in some way, since they were living abroad in complete
freedom, outside the conditions of social life which filled up time in
Petersburg. As for the amusements of bachelor existence, which had
provided Vronsky with entertainment on previous tours abroad, they
could not be thought of, since the sole attempt of the sort had led to
a sudden attack of depression in Anna, quite out of proportion with the
cause—a late supper with bachelor friends. Relations with the society
of the place—foreign and Russian—were equally out of the question owing
to the irregularity of their position. The inspection of objects of
interest, apart from the fact that everything had been seen already,
had not for Vronsky, a Russian and a sensible man, the immense
significance Englishmen are able to attach to that pursuit.
And just as the hungry stomach eagerly accepts every object it can get,
hoping to find nourishment in it, Vronsky quite unconsciously clutched
first at politics, then at new books, and then at pictures.
As he had from a child a taste for painting, and as, not knowing what
to spend his money on, he had begun collecting engravings, he came to a
stop at painting, began to take interest in it, and concentrated upon
it the unoccupied mass of desires which demanded satisfaction.
He had a ready appreciation of art, and probably, with a taste for
imitating art, he supposed himself to have the real thing essential for
an artist, and after hesitating for some time which style of painting
to select—religious, historical, realistic, or genre painting—he set to
work to paint. He appreciated all kinds, and could have felt inspired
by anyone of them; but he had no conception of the possibility of
knowing nothing at all of any school of painting, and of being inspired
directly by what is within the soul, without caring whether what is
painted will belong to any recognized school. Since he knew nothing of
this, and drew his inspiration, not directly from life, but indirectly
from life embodied in art, his inspiration came very quickly and
easily, and as quickly and easily came his success in painting
something very similar to the sort of painting he was trying to
imitate.
More than any other style he liked the French—graceful and
effective—and in that style he began to paint Anna’s portrait in
Italian costume, and the portrait seemed to him, and to everyone who
saw it, extremely successful.
Chapter 9
The old neglected palazzo, with its lofty carved ceilings and frescoes
on the walls, with its floors of mosaic, with its heavy yellow stuff
curtains on the windows, with its vases on pedestals, and its open
fireplaces, its carved doors and gloomy reception rooms, hung with
pictures—this palazzo did much, by its very appearance after they had
moved into it, to confirm in Vronsky the agreeable illusion that he was
not so much a Russian country gentleman, a retired army officer, as an
enlightened amateur and patron of the arts, himself a modest artist who
had renounced the world, his connections, and his ambition for the sake
of the woman he loved.
The pose chosen by Vronsky with their removal into the palazzo was
completely successful, and having, through Golenishtchev, made
acquaintance with a few interesting people, for a time he was
satisfied. He painted studies from nature under the guidance of an
Italian professor of painting, and studied mediæval Italian life.
Mediæval Italian life so fascinated Vronsky that he even wore a hat and
flung a cloak over his shoulder in the mediæval style, which, indeed,
was extremely becoming to him.
“Here we live, and know nothing of what’s going on,” Vronsky said to
Golenishtchev as he came to see him one morning. “Have you seen
Mihailov’s picture?” he said, handing him a Russian gazette he had
received that morning, and pointing to an article on a Russian artist,
living in the very same town, and just finishing a picture which had
long been talked about, and had been bought beforehand. The article
reproached the government and the academy for letting so remarkable an
artist be left without encouragement and support.
“I’ve seen it,” answered Golenishtchev. “Of course, he’s not without
talent, but it’s all in a wrong direction. It’s all the
Ivanov-Strauss-Renan attitude to Christ and to religious painting.”
“What is the subject of the picture?” asked Anna.
“Christ before Pilate. Christ is represented as a Jew with all the
realism of the new school.”
And the question of the subject of the picture having brought him to
one of his favorite theories, Golenishtchev launched forth into a
disquisition on it.
“I can’t understand how they can fall into such a gross mistake. Christ
always has His definite embodiment in the art of the great masters. And
therefore, if they want to depict, not God, but a revolutionist or a
sage, let them take from history a Socrates, a Franklin, a Charlotte
Corday, but not Christ. They take the very figure which cannot be taken
for their art, and then....”
“And is it true that this Mihailov is in such poverty?” asked Vronsky,
thinking that, as a Russian Mæcenas, it was his duty to assist the
artist regardless of whether the picture were good or bad.
“I should say not. He’s a remarkable portrait-painter. Have you ever
seen his portrait of Madame Vassiltchikova? But I believe he doesn’t
care about painting any more portraits, and so very likely he is in
want. I maintain that....”
“Couldn’t we ask him to paint a portrait of Anna Arkadyevna?” said
Vronsky.
“Why mine?” said Anna. “After yours I don’t want another portrait.
Better have one of Annie” (so she called her baby girl). “Here she is,”
she added, looking out of the window at the handsome Italian nurse, who
was carrying the child out into the garden, and immediately glancing
unnoticed at Vronsky. The handsome nurse, from whom Vronsky was
painting a head for his picture, was the one hidden grief in Anna’s
life. He painted with her as his model, admired her beauty and
mediævalism, and Anna dared not confess to herself that she was afraid
of becoming jealous of this nurse, and was for that reason particularly
gracious and condescending both to her and her little son. Vronsky,
too, glanced out of the window and into Anna’s eyes, and, turning at
once to Golenishtchev, he said:
“Do you know this Mihailov?”
“I have met him. But he’s a queer fish, and quite without breeding. You
know, one of those uncouth new people one’s so often coming across
nowadays, one of those free-thinkers you know, who are reared
_d’emblée_ in theories of atheism, scepticism, and materialism. In
former days,” said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to
observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, “in former days
the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of
religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle
came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born
free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of
morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up
directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.
Well, he’s of that class. He’s the son, it appears, of some Moscow
butler, and has never had any sort of bringing-up. When he got into the
academy and made his reputation he tried, as he’s no fool, to educate
himself. And he turned to what seemed to him the very source of
culture—the magazines. In old times, you see, a man who wanted to
educate himself—a Frenchman, for instance—would have set to work to
study all the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians
and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in
his way. But in our day he goes straight for the literature of
negation, very quickly assimilates all the extracts of the science of
negation, and he’s ready. And that’s not all—twenty years ago he would
have found in that literature traces of conflict with authorities, with
the creeds of the ages; he would have perceived from this conflict that
there was something else; but now he comes at once upon a literature in
which the old creeds do not even furnish matter for discussion, but it
is stated baldly that there is nothing else—evolution, natural
selection, struggle for existence—and that’s all. In my article
I’ve....”
“I tell you what,” said Anna, who had for a long while been exchanging
wary glances with Vronsky, and knew that he was not in the least
interested in the education of this artist, but was simply absorbed by
the idea of assisting him, and ordering a portrait of him; “I tell you
what,” she said, resolutely interrupting Golenishtchev, who was still
talking away, “let’s go and see him!”
Golenishtchev recovered his self-possession and readily agreed. But as
the artist lived in a remote suburb, it was decided to take the
carriage.
An hour later Anna, with Golenishtchev by her side and Vronsky on the
front seat of the carriage, facing them, drove up to a new ugly house
in the remote suburb. On learning from the porter’s wife, who came out
to them, that Mihailov saw visitors at his studio, but that at that
moment he was in his lodging only a couple of steps off, they sent her
to him with their cards, asking permission to see his picture.
Chapter 10
The artist Mihailov was, as always, at work when the cards of Count
Vronsky and Golenishtchev were brought to him. In the morning he had
been working in his studio at his big picture. On getting home he flew
into a rage with his wife for not having managed to put off the
landlady, who had been asking for money.
“I’ve said it to you twenty times, don’t enter into details. You’re
fool enough at all times, and when you start explaining things in
Italian you’re a fool three times as foolish,” he said after a long
dispute.
“Don’t let it run so long; it’s not my fault. If I had the money....”
“Leave me in peace, for God’s sake!” Mihailov shrieked, with tears in
his voice, and, stopping his ears, he went off into his working room,
the other side of a partition wall, and closed the door after him.
“Idiotic woman!” he said to himself, sat down to the table, and,
opening a portfolio, he set to work at once with peculiar fervor at a
sketch he had begun.
Never did he work with such fervor and success as when things went ill
with him, and especially when he quarreled with his wife. “Oh! damn
them all!” he thought as he went on working. He was making a sketch for
the figure of a man in a violent rage. A sketch had been made before,
but he was dissatisfied with it. “No, that one was better ... where is
it?” He went back to his wife, and scowling, and not looking at her,
asked his eldest little girl, where was that piece of paper he had
given them? The paper with the discarded sketch on it was found, but it
was dirty, and spotted with candle-grease. Still, he took the sketch,
laid it on his table, and, moving a little away, screwing up his eyes,
he fell to gazing at it. All at once he smiled and gesticulated
gleefully.
“That’s it! that’s it!” he said, and, at once picking up the pencil, he
began rapidly drawing. The spot of tallow had given the man a new pose.
He had sketched this new pose, when all at once he recalled the face of
a shopkeeper of whom he had bought cigars, a vigorous face with a
prominent chin, and he sketched this very face, this chin on to the
figure of the man. He laughed aloud with delight. The figure from a
lifeless imagined thing had become living, and such that it could never
be changed. That figure lived, and was clearly and unmistakably
defined. The sketch might be corrected in accordance with the
requirements of the figure, the legs, indeed, could and must be put
differently, and the position of the left hand must be quite altered;
the hair too might be thrown back. But in making these corrections he
was not altering the figure but simply getting rid of what concealed
the figure. He was, as it were, stripping off the wrappings which
hindered it from being distinctly seen. Each new feature only brought
out the whole figure in all its force and vigor, as it had suddenly
come to him from the spot of tallow. He was carefully finishing the
figure when the cards were brought him.
“Coming, coming!”
He went in to his wife.
“Come, Sasha, don’t be cross!” he said, smiling timidly and
affectionately at her. “You were to blame. I was to blame. I’ll make it
all right.” And having made peace with his wife he put on an
olive-green overcoat with a velvet collar and a hat, and went towards
his studio. The successful figure he had already forgotten. Now he was
delighted and excited at the visit of these people of consequence,
Russians, who had come in their carriage.
Of his picture, the one that stood now on his easel, he had at the
bottom of his heart one conviction—that no one had ever painted a
picture like it. He did not believe that his picture was better than
all the pictures of Raphael, but he knew that what he tried to convey
in that picture, no one ever had conveyed. This he knew positively, and
had known a long while, ever since he had begun to paint it. But other
people’s criticisms, whatever they might be, had yet immense
consequence in his eyes, and they agitated him to the depths of his
soul. Any remark, the most insignificant, that showed that the critic
saw even the tiniest part of what he saw in the picture, agitated him
to the depths of his soul. He always attributed to his critics a more
profound comprehension than he had himself, and always expected from
them something he did not himself see in the picture. And often in
their criticisms he fancied that he had found this.
He walked rapidly to the door of his studio, and in spite of his
excitement he was struck by the soft light on Anna’s figure as she
stood in the shade of the entrance listening to Golenishtchev, who was
eagerly telling her something, while she evidently wanted to look round
at the artist. He was himself unconscious how, as he approached them,
he seized on this impression and absorbed it, as he had the chin of the
shopkeeper who had sold him the cigars, and put it away somewhere to be
brought out when he wanted it. The visitors, not agreeably impressed
beforehand by Golenishtchev’s account of the artist, were still less so
by his personal appearance. Thick-set and of middle height, with nimble
movements, with his brown hat, olive-green coat and narrow
trousers—though wide trousers had been a long while in fashion,—most of
all, with the ordinariness of his broad face, and the combined
expression of timidity and anxiety to keep up his dignity, Mihailov
made an unpleasant impression.
“Please step in,” he said, trying to look indifferent, and going into
the passage he took a key out of his pocket and opened the door.
Chapter 11
On entering the studio, Mihailov once more scanned his visitors and
noted down in his imagination Vronsky’s expression too, and especially
his jaws. Although his artistic sense was unceasingly at work
collecting materials, although he felt a continually increasing
excitement as the moment of criticizing his work drew nearer, he
rapidly and subtly formed, from imperceptible signs, a mental image of
these three persons.
That fellow (Golenishtchev) was a Russian living here. Mihailov did not
remember his surname nor where he had met him, nor what he had said to
him. He only remembered his face as he remembered all the faces he had
ever seen; but he remembered, too, that it was one of the faces laid by
in his memory in the immense class of the falsely consequential and
poor in expression. The abundant hair and very open forehead gave an
appearance of consequence to the face, which had only one expression—a
petty, childish, peevish expression, concentrated just above the bridge
of the narrow nose. Vronsky and Madame Karenina must be, Mihailov
supposed, distinguished and wealthy Russians, knowing nothing about
art, like all those wealthy Russians, but posing as amateurs and
connoisseurs. “Most likely they’ve already looked at all the antiques,
and now they’re making the round of the studios of the new people, the
German humbug, and the cracked Pre-Raphaelite English fellow, and have
only come to me to make the point of view complete,” he thought. He was
well acquainted with the way dilettanti have (the cleverer they were
the worse he found them) of looking at the works of contemporary
artists with the sole object of being in a position to say that art is
a thing of the past, and that the more one sees of the new men the more
one sees how inimitable the works of the great old masters have
remained. He expected all this; he saw it all in their faces, he saw it
in the careless indifference with which they talked among themselves,
stared at the lay figures and busts, and walked about in leisurely
fashion, waiting for him to uncover his picture. But in spite of this,
while he was turning over his studies, pulling up the blinds and taking
off the sheet, he was in intense excitement, especially as, in spite of
his conviction that all distinguished and wealthy Russians were certain
to be beasts and fools, he liked Vronsky, and still more Anna.
“Here, if you please,” he said, moving on one side with his nimble gait
and pointing to his picture, “it’s the exhortation to Pilate. Matthew,
chapter xxvii,” he said, feeling his lips were beginning to tremble
with emotion. He moved away and stood behind them.
For the few seconds during which the visitors were gazing at the
picture in silence Mihailov too gazed at it with the indifferent eye of
an outsider. For those few seconds he was sure in anticipation that a
higher, juster criticism would be uttered by them, by those very
visitors whom he had been so despising a moment before. He forgot all
he had thought about his picture before during the three years he had
been painting it; he forgot all its qualities which had been absolutely
certain to him—he saw the picture with their indifferent, new, outside
eyes, and saw nothing good in it. He saw in the foreground Pilate’s
irritated face and the serene face of Christ, and in the background the
figures of Pilate’s retinue and the face of John watching what was
happening. Every face that, with such agony, such blunders and
corrections had grown up within him with its special character, every
face that had given him such torments and such raptures, and all these
faces so many times transposed for the sake of the harmony of the
whole, all the shades of color and tones that he had attained with such
labor—all of this together seemed to him now, looking at it with their
eyes, the merest vulgarity, something that had been done a thousand
times over. The face dearest to him, the face of Christ, the center of
the picture, which had given him such ecstasy as it unfolded itself to
him, was utterly lost to him when he glanced at the picture with their
eyes. He saw a well-painted (no, not even that—he distinctly saw now a
mass of defects) repetition of those endless Christs of Titian,
Raphael, Rubens, and the same soldiers and Pilate. It was all common,
poor, and stale, and positively badly painted—weak and unequal. They
would be justified in repeating hypocritically civil speeches in the
presence of the painter, and pitying him and laughing at him when they
were alone again.
The silence (though it lasted no more than a minute) became too
intolerable to him. To break it, and to show he was not agitated, he
made an effort and addressed Golenishtchev.
“I think I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you,” he said, looking
uneasily first at Anna, then at Vronsky, in fear of losing any shade of
their expression.
“To be sure! We met at Rossi’s, do you remember, at that _soirée_ when
that Italian lady recited—the new Rachel?” Golenishtchev answered
easily, removing his eyes without the slightest regret from the picture
and turning to the artist.
Noticing, however, that Mihailov was expecting a criticism of the
picture, he said:
“Your picture has got on a great deal since I saw it last time; and
what strikes me particularly now, as it did then, is the figure of
Pilate. One so knows the man: a good-natured, capital fellow, but an
official through and through, who does not know what it is he’s doing.
But I fancy....”
All Mihailov’s mobile face beamed at once; his eyes sparkled. He tried
to say something, but he could not speak for excitement, and pretended
to be coughing. Low as was his opinion of Golenishtchev’s capacity for
understanding art, trifling as was the true remark upon the fidelity of
the expression of Pilate as an official, and offensive as might have
seemed the utterance of so unimportant an observation while nothing was
said of more serious points, Mihailov was in an ecstasy of delight at
this observation. He had himself thought about Pilate’s figure just
what Golenishtchev said. The fact that this reflection was but one of
millions of reflections, which as Mihailov knew for certain would be
true, did not diminish for him the significance of Golenishtchev’s
remark. His heart warmed to Golenishtchev for this remark, and from a
state of depression he suddenly passed to ecstasy. At once the whole of
his picture lived before him in all the indescribable complexity of
everything living. Mihailov again tried to say that that was how he
understood Pilate, but his lips quivered intractably, and he could not
pronounce the words. Vronsky and Anna too said something in that
subdued voice in which, partly to avoid hurting the artist’s feelings
and partly to avoid saying out loud something silly—so easily said when
talking of art—people usually speak at exhibitions of pictures.
Mihailov fancied that the picture had made an impression on them too.
He went up to them.
“How marvelous Christ’s expression is!” said Anna. Of all she saw she
liked that expression most of all, and she felt that it was the center
of the picture, and so praise of it would be pleasant to the artist.
“One can see that He is pitying Pilate.”
This again was one of the million true reflections that could be found
in his picture and in the figure of Christ. She said that He was
pitying Pilate. In Christ’s expression there ought to be indeed an
expression of pity, since there is an expression of love, of heavenly
peace, of readiness for death, and a sense of the vanity of words. Of
course there is the expression of an official in Pilate and of pity in
Christ, seeing that one is the incarnation of the fleshly and the other
of the spiritual life. All this and much more flashed into Mihailov’s
thoughts.
“Yes, and how that figure is done—what atmosphere! One can walk round
it,” said Golenishtchev, unmistakably betraying by this remark that he
did not approve of the meaning and idea of the figure.
“Yes, there’s a wonderful mastery!” said Vronsky. “How those figures in
the background stand out! There you have technique,” he said,
addressing Golenishtchev, alluding to a conversation between them about
Vronsky’s despair of attaining this technique.
“Yes, yes, marvelous!” Golenishtchev and Anna assented. In spite of the
excited condition in which he was, the sentence about technique had
sent a pang to Mihailov’s heart, and looking angrily at Vronsky he
suddenly scowled. He had often heard this word technique, and was
utterly unable to understand what was understood by it. He knew that by
this term was understood a mechanical facility for painting or drawing,
entirely apart from its subject. He had noticed often that even in
actual praise technique was opposed to essential quality, as though one
could paint well something that was bad. He knew that a great deal of
attention and care was necessary in taking off the coverings, to avoid
injuring the creation itself, and to take off all the coverings; but
there was no art of painting—no technique of any sort—about it. If to a
little child or to his cook were revealed what he saw, it or she would
have been able to peel the wrappings off what was seen. And the most
experienced and adroit painter could not by mere mechanical facility
paint anything if the lines of the subject were not revealed to him
first. Besides, he saw that if it came to talking about technique, it
was impossible to praise him for it. In all he had painted and
repainted he saw faults that hurt his eyes, coming from want of care in
taking off the wrappings—faults he could not correct now without
spoiling the whole. And in almost all the figures and faces he saw,
too, remnants of the wrappings not perfectly removed that spoiled the
picture.
“One thing might be said, if you will allow me to make the remark....”
observed Golenishtchev.
“Oh, I shall be delighted, I beg you,” said Mihailov with a forced
smile.
“That is, that you make Him the man-god, and not the God-man. But I
know that was what you meant to do.”
“I cannot paint a Christ that is not in my heart,” said Mihailov
gloomily.
“Yes; but in that case, if you will allow me to say what I think....
Your picture is so fine that my observation cannot detract from it,
and, besides, it is only my personal opinion. With you it is different.
Your very motive is different. But let us take Ivanov. I imagine that
if Christ is brought down to the level of an historical character, it
would have been better for Ivanov to select some other historical
subject, fresh, untouched.”
“But if this is the greatest subject presented to art?”
“If one looked one would find others. But the point is that art cannot
suffer doubt and discussion. And before the picture of Ivanov the
question arises for the believer and the unbeliever alike, ‘Is it God,
or is it not God?’ and the unity of the impression is destroyed.”
“Why so? I think that for educated people,” said Mihailov, “the
question cannot exist.”
Golenishtchev did not agree with this, and confounded Mihailov by his
support of his first idea of the unity of the impression being
essential to art.
Mihailov was greatly perturbed, but he could say nothing in defense of
his own idea.
Chapter 12
Anna and Vronsky had long been exchanging glances, regretting their
friend’s flow of cleverness. At last Vronsky, without waiting for the
artist, walked away to another small picture.
“Oh, how exquisite! What a lovely thing! A gem! How exquisite!” they
cried with one voice.
“What is it they’re so pleased with?” thought Mihailov. He had
positively forgotten that picture he had painted three years ago. He
had forgotten all the agonies and the ecstasies he had lived through
with that picture when for several months it had been the one thought
haunting him day and night. He had forgotten, as he always forgot, the
pictures he had finished. He did not even like to look at it, and had
only brought it out because he was expecting an Englishman who wanted
to buy it.
“Oh, that’s only an old study,” he said.
“How fine!” said Golenishtchev, he too, with unmistakable sincerity,
falling under the spell of the picture.
Two boys were angling in the shade of a willow-tree. The elder had just
dropped in the hook, and was carefully pulling the float from behind a
bush, entirely absorbed in what he was doing. The other, a little
younger, was lying in the grass leaning on his elbows, with his
tangled, flaxen head in his hands, staring at the water with his dreamy
blue eyes. What was he thinking of?
The enthusiasm over this picture stirred some of the old feeling for it
in Mihailov, but he feared and disliked this waste of feeling for
things past, and so, even though this praise was grateful to him, he
tried to draw his visitors away to a third picture.
But Vronsky asked whether the picture was for sale. To Mihailov at that
moment, excited by visitors, it was extremely distasteful to speak of
money matters.
“It is put up there to be sold,” he answered, scowling gloomily.
When the visitors had gone, Mihailov sat down opposite the picture of
Pilate and Christ, and in his mind went over what had been said, and
what, though not said, had been implied by those visitors. And, strange
to say, what had had such weight with him, while they were there and
while he mentally put himself at their point of view, suddenly lost all
importance for him. He began to look at his picture with all his own
full artist vision, and was soon in that mood of conviction of the
perfectibility, and so of the significance, of his picture—a conviction
essential to the most intense fervor, excluding all other interests—in
which alone he could work.
Christ’s foreshortened leg was not right, though. He took his palette
and began to work. As he corrected the leg he looked continually at the
figure of John in the background, which his visitors had not even
noticed, but which he knew was beyond perfection. When he had finished
the leg he wanted to touch that figure, but he felt too much excited
for it. He was equally unable to work when he was cold and when he was
too much affected and saw everything too much. There was only one stage
in the transition from coldness to inspiration, at which work was
possible. Today he was too much agitated. He would have covered the
picture, but he stopped, holding the cloth in his hand, and, smiling
blissfully, gazed a long while at the figure of John. At last, as it
were regretfully tearing himself away, he dropped the cloth, and,
exhausted but happy, went home.
Vronsky, Anna, and Golenishtchev, on their way home, were particularly
lively and cheerful. They talked of Mihailov and his pictures. The word
_talent_, by which they meant an inborn, almost physical, aptitude
apart from brain and heart, and in which they tried to find an
expression for all the artist had gained from life, recurred
particularly often in their talk, as though it were necessary for them
to sum up what they had no conception of, though they wanted to talk of
it. They said that there was no denying his talent, but that his talent
could not develop for want of education—the common defect of our
Russian artists. But the picture of the boys had imprinted itself on
their memories, and they were continually coming back to it. “What an
exquisite thing! How he has succeeded in it, and how simply! He doesn’t
even comprehend how good it is. Yes, I mustn’t let it slip; I must buy
it,” said Vronsky.
Chapter 13
Mihailov sold Vronsky his picture, and agreed to paint a portrait of
Anna. On the day fixed he came and began the work.
From the fifth sitting the portrait impressed everyone, especially
Vronsky, not only by its resemblance, but by its characteristic beauty.
It was strange how Mihailov could have discovered just her
characteristic beauty. “One needs to know and love her as I have loved
her to discover the very sweetest expression of her soul,” Vronsky
thought, though it was only from this portrait that he had himself
learned this sweetest expression of her soul. But the expression was so
true that he, and others too, fancied they had long known it.
“I have been struggling on for ever so long without doing anything,” he
said of his own portrait of her, “and he just looked and painted it.
That’s where technique comes in.”
“That will come,” was the consoling reassurance given him by
Golenishtchev, in whose view Vronsky had both talent, and what was most
important, culture, giving him a wider outlook on art. Golenishtchev’s
faith in Vronsky’s talent was propped up by his own need of Vronsky’s
sympathy and approval for his own articles and ideas, and he felt that
the praise and support must be mutual.
In another man’s house, and especially in Vronsky’s palazzo, Mihailov
was quite a different man from what he was in his studio. He behaved
with hostile courtesy, as though he were afraid of coming closer to
people he did not respect. He called Vronsky “your excellency,” and
notwithstanding Anna’s and Vronsky’s invitations, he would never stay
to dinner, nor come except for the sittings. Anna was even more
friendly to him than to other people, and was very grateful for her
portrait. Vronsky was more than cordial with him, and was obviously
interested to know the artist’s opinion of his picture. Golenishtchev
never let slip an opportunity of instilling sound ideas about art into
Mihailov. But Mihailov remained equally chilly to all of them. Anna was
aware from his eyes that he liked looking at her, but he avoided
conversation with her. Vronsky’s talk about his painting he met with
stubborn silence, and he was as stubbornly silent when he was shown
Vronsky’s picture. He was unmistakably bored by Golenishtchev’s
conversation, and he did not attempt to oppose him.
Altogether Mihailov, with his reserved and disagreeable, as it were,
hostile attitude, was quite disliked by them as they got to know him
better; and they were glad when the sittings were over, and they were
left with a magnificent portrait in their possession, and he gave up
coming. Golenishtchev was the first to give expression to an idea that
had occurred to all of them, which was that Mihailov was simply jealous
of Vronsky.
“Not envious, let us say, since he has _talent_; but it annoys him that
a wealthy man of the highest society, and a count, too (you know they
all detest a title), can, without any particular trouble, do as well,
if not better, than he who has devoted all his life to it. And more
than all, it’s a question of culture, which he is without.”
Vronsky defended Mihailov, but at the bottom of his heart he believed
it, because in his view a man of a different, lower world would be sure
to be envious.
Anna’s portrait—the same subject painted from nature both by him and by
Mihailov—ought to have shown Vronsky the difference between him and
Mihailov; but he did not see it. Only after Mihailov’s portrait was
painted he left off painting his portrait of Anna, deciding that it was
now not needed. His picture of mediæval life he went on with. And he
himself, and Golenishtchev, and still more Anna, thought it very good,
because it was far more like the celebrated pictures they knew than
Mihailov’s picture.
Mihailov meanwhile, although Anna’s portrait greatly fascinated him,
was even more glad than they were when the sittings were over, and he
had no longer to listen to Golenishtchev’s disquisitions upon art, and
could forget about Vronsky’s painting. He knew that Vronsky could not
be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew that he and
all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was
distasteful to him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a
big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll
and sit before a man in love, and begin caressing his doll as the lover
caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just
such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of
Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both
pitiable and offensive.
Vronsky’s interest in painting and the Middle Ages did not last long.
He had enough taste for painting to be unable to finish his picture.
The picture came to a standstill. He was vaguely aware that its
defects, inconspicuous at first, would be glaring if he were to go on
with it. The same experience befell him as Golenishtchev, who felt that
he had nothing to say, and continually deceived himself with the theory
that his idea was not yet mature, that he was working it out and
collecting materials. This exasperated and tortured Golenishtchev, but
Vronsky was incapable of deceiving and torturing himself, and even more
incapable of exasperation. With his characteristic decision, without
explanation or apology, he simply ceased working at painting.
But without this occupation, the life of Vronsky and of Anna, who
wondered at his loss of interest in it, struck them as intolerably
tedious in an Italian town. The palazzo suddenly seemed so obtrusively
old and dirty, the spots on the curtains, the cracks in the floors, the
broken plaster on the cornices became so disagreeably obvious, and the
everlasting sameness of Golenishtchev, and the Italian professor and
the German traveler became so wearisome, that they had to make some
change. They resolved to go to Russia, to the country. In Petersburg
Vronsky intended to arrange a partition of the land with his brother,
while Anna meant to see her son. The summer they intended to spend on
Vronsky’s great family estate.
Chapter 14
Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in
the way he had expected to be. At every step he found his former dreams
disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy;
but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was
utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he
experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth,
happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that
little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating
smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where
one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must
row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was
only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very
delightful, was very difficult.
As a bachelor, when he had watched other people’s married life, seen
the petty cares, the squabbles, the jealousy, he had only smiled
contemptuously in his heart. In his future married life there could be,
he was convinced, nothing of that sort; even the external forms,
indeed, he fancied, must be utterly unlike the life of others in
everything. And all of a sudden, instead of his life with his wife
being made on an individual pattern, it was, on the contrary, entirely
made up of the pettiest details, which he had so despised before, but
which now, by no will of his own, had gained an extraordinary
importance that it was useless to contend against. And Levin saw that
the organization of all these details was by no means so easy as he had
fancied before. Although Levin believed himself to have the most exact
conceptions of domestic life, unconsciously, like all men, he pictured
domestic life as the happiest enjoyment of love, with nothing to hinder
and no petty cares to distract. He ought, as he conceived the position,
to do his work, and to find repose from it in the happiness of love.
She ought to be beloved, and nothing more. But, like all men, he forgot
that she too would want work. And he was surprised that she, his
poetic, exquisite Kitty, could, not merely in the first weeks, but even
in the first days of their married life, think, remember, and busy
herself about tablecloths, and furniture, about mattresses for
visitors, about a tray, about the cook, and the dinner, and so on.
While they were still engaged, he had been struck by the definiteness
with which she had declined the tour abroad and decided to go into the
country, as though she knew of something she wanted, and could still
think of something outside her love. This had jarred upon him then, and
now her trivial cares and anxieties jarred upon him several times. But
he saw that this was essential for her. And, loving her as he did,
though he did not understand the reason of them, and jeered at these
domestic pursuits, he could not help admiring them. He jeered at the
way in which she arranged the furniture they had brought from Moscow;
rearranged their room; hung up curtains; prepared rooms for visitors; a
room for Dolly; saw after an abode for her new maid; ordered dinner of
the old cook; came into collision with Agafea Mihalovna, taking from
her the charge of the stores. He saw how the old cook smiled, admiring
her, and listening to her inexperienced, impossible orders, how
mournfully and tenderly Agafea Mihalovna shook her head over the young
mistress’s new arrangements. He saw that Kitty was extraordinarily
sweet when, laughing and crying, she came to tell him that her maid,
Masha, was used to looking upon her as her young lady, and so no one
obeyed her. It seemed to him sweet, but strange, and he thought it
would have been better without this.
He did not know how great a sense of change she was experiencing; she,
who at home had sometimes wanted some favorite dish, or sweets, without
the possibility of getting either, now could order what she liked, buy
pounds of sweets, spend as much money as she liked, and order any
puddings she pleased.
She was dreaming with delight now of Dolly’s coming to them with her
children, especially because she would order for the children their
favorite puddings and Dolly would appreciate all her new housekeeping.
She did not know herself why and wherefore, but the arranging of her
house had an irresistible attraction for her. Instinctively feeling the
approach of spring, and knowing that there would be days of rough
weather too, she built her nest as best she could, and was in haste at
the same time to build it and to learn how to do it.
This care for domestic details in Kitty, so opposed to Levin’s ideal of
exalted happiness, was at first one of the disappointments; and this
sweet care of her household, the aim of which he did not understand,
but could not help loving, was one of the new happy surprises.
Another disappointment and happy surprise came in their quarrels. Levin
could never have conceived that between him and his wife any relations
could arise other than tender, respectful and loving, and all at once
in the very early days they quarreled, so that she said he did not care
for her, that he cared for no one but himself, burst into tears, and
wrung her arms.
This first quarrel arose from Levin’s having gone out to a new
farmhouse and having been away half an hour too long, because he had
tried to get home by a short cut and had lost his way. He drove home
thinking of nothing but her, of her love, of his own happiness, and the
nearer he drew to home, the warmer was his tenderness for her. He ran
into the room with the same feeling, with an even stronger feeling than
he had had when he reached the Shtcherbatskys’ house to make his offer.
And suddenly he was met by a lowering expression he had never seen in
her. He would have kissed her; she pushed him away.
“What is it?”
“You’ve been enjoying yourself,” she began, trying to be calm and
spiteful. But as soon as she opened her mouth, a stream of reproach, of
senseless jealousy, of all that had been torturing her during that half
hour which she had spent sitting motionless at the window, burst from
her. It was only then, for the first time, that he clearly understood
what he had not understood when he led her out of the church after the
wedding. He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he
did not know where he ended and she began. He felt this from the
agonizing sensation of division that he experienced at that instant. He
was offended for the first instant, but the very same second he felt
that he could not be offended by her, that she was himself. He felt for
the first moment as a man feels when, having suddenly received a
violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge
himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself
who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry
with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain.
Never afterwards did he feel it with such intensity, but this first
time he could not for a long while get over it. His natural feeling
urged him to defend himself, to prove to her she was wrong; but to
prove her wrong would mean irritating her still more and making the
rupture greater that was the cause of all his suffering. One habitual
feeling impelled him to get rid of the blame and to pass it on to her.
Another feeling, even stronger, impelled him as quickly as possible to
smooth over the rupture without letting it grow greater. To remain
under such undeserved reproach was wretched, but to make her suffer by
justifying himself was worse still. Like a man half-awake in an agony
of pain, he wanted to tear out, to fling away the aching place, and
coming to his senses, he felt that the aching place was himself. He
could do nothing but try to help the aching place to bear it, and this
he tried to do.
They made peace. She, recognizing that she was wrong, though she did
not say so, became tenderer to him, and they experienced new, redoubled
happiness in their love. But that did not prevent such quarrels from
happening again, and exceedingly often too, on the most unexpected and
trivial grounds. These quarrels frequently arose from the fact that
they did not yet know what was of importance to each other and that all
this early period they were both often in a bad temper. When one was in
a good temper, and the other in a bad temper, the peace was not broken;
but when both happened to be in an ill-humor, quarrels sprang up from
such incomprehensibly trifling causes, that they could never remember
afterwards what they had quarreled about. It is true that when they
were both in a good temper their enjoyment of life was redoubled. But
still this first period of their married life was a difficult time for
them.
During all this early time they had a peculiarly vivid sense of
tension, as it were, a tugging in opposite directions of the chain by
which they were bound. Altogether their honeymoon—that is to say, the
month after their wedding—from which from tradition Levin expected so
much, was not merely not a time of sweetness, but remained in the
memories of both as the bitterest and most humiliating period in their
lives. They both alike tried in later life to blot out from their
memories all the monstrous, shameful incidents of that morbid period,
when both were rarely in a normal frame of mind, both were rarely quite
themselves.
It was only in the third month of their married life, after their
return from Moscow, where they had been staying for a month, that their
life began to go more smoothly.
Chapter 15
They had just come back from Moscow, and were glad to be alone. He was
sitting at the writing-table in his study, writing. She, wearing the
dark lilac dress she had worn during the first days of their married
life, and put on again today, a dress particularly remembered and loved
by him, was sitting on the sofa, the same old-fashioned leather sofa
which had always stood in the study in Levin’s father’s and
grandfather’s days. She was sewing at _broderie anglaise_. He thought
and wrote, never losing the happy consciousness of her presence. His
work, both on the land and on the book, in which the principles of the
new land system were to be laid down, had not been abandoned; but just
as formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed to him petty and
trivial in comparison with the darkness that overspread all life, now
they seemed as unimportant and petty in comparison with the life that
lay before him suffused with the brilliant light of happiness. He went
on with his work, but he felt now that the center of gravity of his
attention had passed to something else, and that consequently he looked
at his work quite differently and more clearly. Formerly this work had
been for him an escape from life. Formerly he had felt that without
this work his life would be too gloomy. Now these pursuits were
necessary for him that life might not be too uniformly bright. Taking
up his manuscript, reading through what he had written, he found with
pleasure that the work was worth his working at. Many of his old ideas
seemed to him superfluous and extreme, but many blanks became distinct
to him when he reviewed the whole thing in his memory. He was writing
now a new chapter on the causes of the present disastrous condition of
agriculture in Russia. He maintained that the poverty of Russia arises
not merely from the anomalous distribution of landed property and
misdirected reforms, but that what had contributed of late years to
this result was the civilization from without abnormally grafted upon
Russia, especially facilities of communication, as railways, leading to
centralization in towns, the development of luxury, and the consequent
development of manufactures, credit and its accompaniment of
speculation—all to the detriment of agriculture. It seemed to him that
in a normal development of wealth in a state all these phenomena would
arise only when a considerable amount of labor had been put into
agriculture, when it had come under regular, or at least definite,
conditions; that the wealth of a country ought to increase
proportionally, and especially in such a way that other sources of
wealth should not outstrip agriculture; that in harmony with a certain
stage of agriculture there should be means of communication
corresponding to it, and that in our unsettled condition of the land,
railways, called into being by political and not by economic needs,
were premature, and instead of promoting agriculture, as was expected
of them, they were competing with agriculture and promoting the
development of manufactures and credit, and so arresting its progress;
and that just as the one-sided and premature development of one organ
in an animal would hinder its general development, so in the general
development of wealth in Russia, credit, facilities of communication,
manufacturing activity, indubitably necessary in Europe, where they had
arisen in their proper time, had with us only done harm, by throwing
into the background the chief question calling for settlement—the
question of the organization of agriculture.
While he was writing his ideas she was thinking how unnaturally cordial
her husband had been to young Prince Tcharsky, who had, with great want
of tact, flirted with her the day before they left Moscow. “He’s
jealous,” she thought. “Goodness! how sweet and silly he is! He’s
jealous of me! If he knew that I think no more of them than of Piotr
the cook,” she thought, looking at his head and red neck with a feeling
of possession strange to herself. “Though it’s a pity to take him from
his work (but he has plenty of time!), I must look at his face; will he
feel I’m looking at him? I wish he’d turn round ... I’ll _will_ him
to!” and she opened her eyes wide, as though to intensify the influence
of her gaze.
“Yes, they draw away all the sap and give a false appearance of
prosperity,” he muttered, stopping to write, and, feeling that she was
looking at him and smiling, he looked round.
“Well?” he queried, smiling, and getting up.
“He looked round,” she thought.
“It’s nothing; I wanted you to look round,” she said, watching him, and
trying to guess whether he was vexed at being interrupted or not.
“How happy we are alone together!—I am, that is,” he said, going up to
her with a radiant smile of happiness.
“I’m just as happy. I’ll never go anywhere, especially not to Moscow.”
“And what were you thinking about?”
“I? I was thinking.... No, no, go along, go on writing; don’t break
off,” she said, pursing up her lips, “and I must cut out these little
holes now, do you see?”
She took up her scissors and began cutting them out.
“No; tell me, what was it?” he said, sitting down beside her and
watching the tiny scissors moving round.
“Oh! what was I thinking about? I was thinking about Moscow, about the
back of your head.”
“Why should I, of all people, have such happiness! It’s unnatural, too
good,” he said, kissing her hand.
“I feel quite the opposite; the better things are, the more natural it
seems to me.”
“And you’ve got a little curl loose,” he said, carefully turning her
head round.
“A little curl, oh yes. No, no, we are busy at our work!”
Work did not progress further, and they darted apart from one another
like culprits when Kouzma came in to announce that tea was ready.
“Have they come from the town?” Levin asked Kouzma.
“They’ve just come; they’re unpacking the things.”
“Come quickly,” she said to him as she went out of the study, “or else
I shall read your letters without you.”
Left alone, after putting his manuscripts together in the new portfolio
bought by her, he washed his hands at the new washstand with the
elegant fittings, that had all made their appearance with her. Levin
smiled at his own thoughts, and shook his head disapprovingly at those
thoughts; a feeling akin to remorse fretted him. There was something
shameful, effeminate, Capuan, as he called it to himself, in his
present mode of life. “It’s not right to go on like this,” he thought.
“It’ll soon be three months, and I’m doing next to nothing. Today,
almost for the first time, I set to work seriously, and what happened?
I did nothing but begin and throw it aside. Even my ordinary pursuits I
have almost given up. On the land I scarcely walk or drive about at all
to look after things. Either I am loath to leave her, or I see she’s
dull alone. And I used to think that, before marriage, life was nothing
much, somehow didn’t count, but that after marriage, life began in
earnest. And here almost three months have passed, and I have spent my
time so idly and unprofitably. No, this won’t do; I must begin. Of
course, it’s not her fault. She’s not to blame in any way. I ought
myself to be firmer, to maintain my masculine independence of action;
or else I shall get into such ways, and she’ll get used to them too....
Of course she’s not to blame,” he told himself.
But it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame someone
else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground
of his dissatisfaction. And it vaguely came into Levin’s mind that she
herself was not to blame (she could not be to blame for anything), but
what was to blame was her education, too superficial and frivolous.
(“That fool Tcharsky: she wanted, I know, to stop him, but didn’t know
how to.”) “Yes, apart from her interest in the house (that she has),
apart from dress and _broderie anglaise_, she has no serious interests.
No interest in her work, in the estate, in the peasants, nor in music,
though she’s rather good at it, nor in reading. She does nothing, and
is perfectly satisfied.” Levin, in his heart, censured this, and did
not as yet understand that she was preparing for that period of
activity which was to come for her when she would at once be the wife
of her husband and mistress of the house, and would bear, and nurse,
and bring up children. He knew not that she was instinctively aware of
this, and preparing herself for this time of terrible toil, did not
reproach herself for the moments of carelessness and happiness in her
love that she enjoyed now while gaily building her nest for the future.
Chapter 16
When Levin went upstairs, his wife was sitting near the new silver
samovar behind the new tea service, and, having settled old Agafea
Mihalovna at a little table with a full cup of tea, was reading a
letter from Dolly, with whom they were in continual and frequent
correspondence.
“You see, your good lady’s settled me here, told me to sit a bit with
her,” said Agafea Mihalovna, smiling affectionately at Kitty.
In these words of Agafea Mihalovna, Levin read the final act of the
drama which had been enacted of late between her and Kitty. He saw
that, in spite of Agafea Mihalovna’s feelings being hurt by a new
mistress taking the reins of government out of her hands, Kitty had yet
conquered her and made her love her.
“Here, I opened your letter too,” said Kitty, handing him an illiterate
letter. “It’s from that woman, I think, your brother’s....” she said.
“I did not read it through. This is from my people and from Dolly.
Fancy! Dolly took Tanya and Grisha to a children’s ball at the
Sarmatskys’: Tanya was a French marquise.”
But Levin did not hear her. Flushing, he took the letter from Marya
Nikolaevna, his brother’s former mistress, and began to read it. This
was the second letter he had received from Marya Nikolaevna. In the
first letter, Marya Nikolaevna wrote that his brother had sent her away
for no fault of hers, and, with touching simplicity, added that though
she was in want again, she asked for nothing, and wished for nothing,
but was only tormented by the thought that Nikolay Dmitrievitch would
come to grief without her, owing to the weak state of his health, and
begged his brother to look after him. Now she wrote quite differently.
She had found Nikolay Dmitrievitch, had again made it up with him in
Moscow, and had moved with him to a provincial town, where he had
received a post in the government service. But that he had quarreled
with the head official, and was on his way back to Moscow, only he had
been taken so ill on the road that it was doubtful if he would ever
leave his bed again, she wrote. “It’s always of you he has talked, and,
besides, he has no more money left.”
“Read this; Dolly writes about you,” Kitty was beginning, with a smile;
but she stopped suddenly, noticing the changed expression on her
husband’s face.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“She writes to me that Nikolay, my brother, is at death’s door. I shall
go to him.”
Kitty’s face changed at once. Thoughts of Tanya as a marquise, of
Dolly, all had vanished.
“When are you going?” she said.
“Tomorrow.”
“And I will go with you, can I?” she said.
“Kitty! What are you thinking of?” he said reproachfully.
“How do you mean?” offended that he should seem to take her suggestion
unwillingly and with vexation. “Why shouldn’t I go? I shan’t be in your
way. I....”
“I’m going because my brother is dying,” said Levin. “Why should
you....”
“Why? For the same reason as you.”
“And, at a moment of such gravity for me, she only thinks of her being
dull by herself,” thought Levin. And this lack of candor in a matter of
such gravity infuriated him.
“It’s out of the question,” he said sternly.
Agafea Mihalovna, seeing that it was coming to a quarrel, gently put
down her cup and withdrew. Kitty did not even notice her. The tone in
which her husband had said the last words wounded her, especially
because he evidently did not believe what she had said.
“I tell you, that if you go, I shall come with you; I shall certainly
come,” she said hastily and wrathfully. “Why out of the question? Why
do you say it’s out of the question?”
“Because it’ll be going God knows where, by all sorts of roads and to
all sorts of hotels. You would be a hindrance to me,” said Levin,
trying to be cool.
“Not at all. I don’t want anything. Where you can go, I can....”
“Well, for one thing then, because this woman’s there whom you can’t
meet.”
“I don’t know and don’t care to know who’s there and what. I know that
my husband’s brother is dying and my husband is going to him, and I go
with my husband too....”
“Kitty! Don’t get angry. But just think a little: this is a matter of
such importance that I can’t bear to think that you should bring in a
feeling of weakness, of dislike to being left alone. Come, you’ll be
dull alone, so go and stay at Moscow a little.”
“There, you always ascribe base, vile motives to me,” she said with
tears of wounded pride and fury. “I didn’t mean, it wasn’t weakness, it
wasn’t ... I feel that it’s my duty to be with my husband when he’s in
trouble, but you try on purpose to hurt me, you try on purpose not to
understand....”
“No; this is awful! To be such a slave!” cried Levin, getting up, and
unable to restrain his anger any longer. But at the same second he felt
that he was beating himself.
“Then why did you marry? You could have been free. Why did you, if you
regret it?” she said, getting up and running away into the
drawing-room.
When he went to her, she was sobbing.
He began to speak, trying to find words not to dissuade but simply to
soothe her. But she did not heed him, and would not agree to anything.
He bent down to her and took her hand, which resisted him. He kissed
her hand, kissed her hair, kissed her hand again—still she was silent.
But when he took her face in both his hands and said “Kitty!” she
suddenly recovered herself, and began to cry, and they were reconciled.
It was decided that they should go together the next day. Levin told
his wife that he believed she wanted to go simply in order to be of
use, agreed that Marya Nikolaevna’s being with his brother did not make
her going improper, but he set off at the bottom of his heart
dissatisfied both with her and with himself. He was dissatisfied with
her for being unable to make up her mind to let him go when it was
necessary (and how strange it was for him to think that he, so lately
hardly daring to believe in such happiness as that she could love
him—now was unhappy because she loved him too much!), and he was
dissatisfied with himself for not showing more strength of will. Even
greater was the feeling of disagreement at the bottom of his heart as
to her not needing to consider the woman who was with his brother, and
he thought with horror of all the contingencies they might meet with.
The mere idea of his wife, his Kitty, being in the same room with a
common wench, set him shuddering with horror and loathing.
Chapter 17
The hotel of the provincial town where Nikolay Levin was lying ill was
one of those provincial hotels which are constructed on the newest
model of modern improvements, with the best intentions of cleanliness,
comfort, and even elegance, but owing to the public that patronizes
them, are with astounding rapidity transformed into filthy taverns with
a pretension of modern improvement that only makes them worse than the
old-fashioned, honestly filthy hotels. This hotel had already reached
that stage, and the soldier in a filthy uniform smoking in the entry,
supposed to stand for a hall-porter, and the cast-iron, slippery, dark,
and disagreeable staircase, and the free and easy waiter in a filthy
frock coat, and the common dining-room with a dusty bouquet of wax
flowers adorning the table, and filth, dust, and disorder everywhere,
and at the same time the sort of modern up-to-date self-complacent
railway uneasiness of this hotel, aroused a most painful feeling in
Levin after their fresh young life, especially because the impression
of falsity made by the hotel was so out of keeping with what awaited
them.
As is invariably the case, after they had been asked at what price they
wanted rooms, it appeared that there was not one decent room for them;
one decent room had been taken by the inspector of railroads, another
by a lawyer from Moscow, a third by Princess Astafieva from the
country. There remained only one filthy room, next to which they
promised that another should be empty by the evening. Feeling angry
with his wife because what he had expected had come to pass, which was
that at the moment of arrival, when his heart throbbed with emotion and
anxiety to know how his brother was getting on, he should have to be
seeing after her, instead of rushing straight to his brother, Levin
conducted her to the room assigned them.
“Go, do go!” she said, looking at him with timid and guilty eyes.
He went out of the door without a word, and at once stumbled over Marya
Nikolaevna, who had heard of his arrival and had not dared to go in to
see him. She was just the same as when he saw her in Moscow; the same
woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the same good-naturedly
stupid, pockmarked face, only a little plumper.
“Well, how is he? how is he?”
“Very bad. He can’t get up. He has kept expecting you. He.... Are you
... with your wife?”
Levin did not for the first moment understand what it was confused her,
but she immediately enlightened him.
“I’ll go away. I’ll go down to the kitchen,” she brought out. “Nikolay
Dmitrievitch will be delighted. He heard about it, and knows your lady,
and remembers her abroad.”
Levin realized that she meant his wife, and did not know what answer to
make.
“Come along, come along to him!” he said.
But as soon as he moved, the door of his room opened and Kitty peeped
out. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger with his wife, who had
put herself and him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna
crimsoned still more. She positively shrank together and flushed to the
point of tears, and clutching the ends of her apron in both hands,
twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what to say and what to
do.
For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the
eyes with which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so incomprehensible
to her; but it lasted only a single instant.
“Well! how is he?” she turned to her husband and then to her.
“But one can’t go on talking in the passage like this!” Levin said,
looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant
across the corridor, as though about his affairs.
“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who had
recovered herself, but noticing her husband’s face of dismay, “or go
on; go, and then come for me,” she said, and went back into the room.
Levin went to his brother’s room. He had not in the least expected what
he saw and felt in his brother’s room. He had expected to find him in
the same state of self-deception which he had heard was so frequent
with the consumptive, and which had struck him so much during his
brother’s visit in the autumn. He had expected to find the physical
signs of the approach of death more marked—greater weakness, greater
emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things. He had
expected himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother
he loved and the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only
in a greater degree. And he had prepared himself for this; but he found
something utterly different.
In a little dirty room with the painted panels of its walls filthy with
spittle, and conversation audible through the thin partition from the
next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on a
bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay covered with a quilt, a
body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as
a rake-handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long
bone of the arm smooth from the beginning to the middle. The head lay
sideways on the pillow. Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat
on the temples and tense, transparent-looking forehead.
“It cannot be that that fearful body was my brother Nikolay?” thought
Levin. But he went closer, saw the face, and doubt became impossible.
In spite of the terrible change in the face, Levin had only to glance
at those eager eyes raised at his approach, only to catch the faint
movement of the mouth under the sticky mustache, to realize the
terrible truth that this death-like body was his living brother.
The glittering eyes looked sternly and reproachfully at his brother as
he drew near. And immediately this glance established a living
relationship between living men. Levin immediately felt the reproach in
the eyes fixed on him, and felt remorse at his own happiness.
When Konstantin took him by the hand, Nikolay smiled. The smile was
faint, scarcely perceptible, and in spite of the smile the stern
expression of the eyes was unchanged.
“You did not expect to find me like this,” he articulated with effort.
“Yes ... no,” said Levin, hesitating over his words. “How was it you
didn’t let me know before, that is, at the time of my wedding? I made
inquiries in all directions.”
He had to talk so as not to be silent, and he did not know what to say,
especially as his brother made no reply, and simply stared without
dropping his eyes, and evidently penetrated to the inner meaning of
each word. Levin told his brother that his wife had come with him.
Nikolay expressed pleasure, but said he was afraid of frightening her
by his condition. A silence followed. Suddenly Nikolay stirred, and
began to say something. Levin expected something of peculiar gravity
and importance from the expression of his face, but Nikolay began
speaking of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting he
had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw that he still hoped.
Seizing the first moment of silence, Levin got up, anxious to escape,
if only for an instant, from his agonizing emotion, and said that he
would go and fetch his wife.
“Very well, and I’ll tell her to tidy up here. It’s dirty and stinking
here, I expect. Marya! clear up the room,” the sick man said with
effort. “Oh, and when you’ve cleared up, go away yourself,” he added,
looking inquiringly at his brother.
Levin made no answer. Going out into the corridor, he stopped short. He
had said he would fetch his wife, but now, taking stock of the emotion
he was feeling, he decided that he would try on the contrary to
persuade her not to go in to the sick man. “Why should she suffer as I
am suffering?” he thought.
“Well, how is he?” Kitty asked with a frightened face.
“Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful! What did you come for?” said Levin.
Kitty was silent for a few seconds, looking timidly and ruefully at her
husband; then she went up and took him by the elbow with both hands.
“Kostya! take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together.
You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You
must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more
painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!”
she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended
on it.
Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely
forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna by now, he went again in to his
brother with Kitty.
Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him
a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty went into the sick-room, and,
turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible
steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that
he had not to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh young
hand the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with
that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to
women.
“We have met, though we were not acquainted, at Soden,” she said. “You
never thought I was to be your sister?”
“You would not have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at
her entrance.
“Yes, I should. What a good thing you let us know! Not a day has passed
that Kostya has not mentioned you, and been anxious.”
But the sick man’s interest did not last long.
Before she had finished speaking, there had come back into his face the
stern, reproachful expression of the dying man’s envy of the living.
“I am afraid you are not quite comfortable here,” she said, turning
away from his fixed stare, and looking about the room. “We must ask
about another room,” she said to her husband, “so that we might be
nearer.”
Chapter 18
Levin could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be
natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick man, his
eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see
and did not distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelt
the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and
heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. It never
entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to
consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated
legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could
not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to
make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run
cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely
convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or
to relieve his suffering. But a sense of his regarding all aid as out
of the question was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this
made it still more painful for Levin. To be in the sick-room was agony
to him, not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various
pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again, because he was
unable to remain alone.
But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the
sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse
at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her
husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state,
and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it
was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible,
and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of
which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention.
She sent for the doctor, sent to the chemist’s, set the maid who had
come with her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub; she
herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something
under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the
sick-room, something else was carried out. She herself went several
times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got
out and brought in sheets, pillow cases, towels, and shirts.
The waiter, who was busy with a party of engineers dining in the dining
hall, came several times with an irate countenance in answer to her
summons, and could not avoid carrying out her orders, as she gave them
with such gracious insistence that there was no evading her. Levin did
not approve of all this; he did not believe it would be of any good to
the patient. Above all, he feared the patient would be angry at it. But
the sick man, though he seemed and was indifferent about it, was not
angry, but only abashed, and on the whole as it were interested in what
she was doing with him. Coming back from the doctor to whom Kitty had
sent him, Levin, on opening the door, came upon the sick man at the
instant when, by Kitty’s directions, they were changing his linen. The
long white ridge of his spine, with the huge, prominent shoulder blades
and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was bare, and Marya Nikolaevna and the
waiter were struggling with the sleeve of the night shirt, and could
not get the long, limp arm into it. Kitty, hurriedly closing the door
after Levin, was not looking that way; but the sick man groaned, and
she moved rapidly towards him.
“Make haste,” she said.
“Oh, don’t you come,” said the sick man angrily. “I’ll do it my
myself....”
“What say?” queried Marya Nikolaevna. But Kitty heard and saw he was
ashamed and uncomfortable at being naked before her.
“I’m not looking, I’m not looking!” she said, putting the arm in.
“Marya Nikolaevna, you come this side, you do it,” she added.
“Please go for me, there’s a little bottle in my small bag,” she said,
turning to her husband, “you know, in the side pocket; bring it,
please, and meanwhile they’ll finish clearing up here.”
Returning with the bottle, Levin found the sick man settled comfortably
and everything about him completely changed. The heavy smell was
replaced by the smell of aromatic vinegar, which Kitty with pouting
lips and puffed-out, rosy cheeks was squirting through a little pipe.
There was no dust visible anywhere, a rug was laid by the bedside. On
the table stood medicine bottles and decanters tidily arranged, and the
linen needed was folded up there, and Kitty’s _broderie anglaise_. On
the other table by the patient’s bed there were candles and drink and
powders. The sick man himself, washed and combed, lay in clean sheets
on high raised pillows, in a clean night-shirt with a white collar
about his astoundingly thin neck, and with a new expression of hope
looked fixedly at Kitty.
The doctor brought by Levin, and found by him at the club, was not the
one who had been attending Nikolay Levin, as the patient was
dissatisfied with him. The new doctor took up a stethoscope and sounded
the patient, shook his head, prescribed medicine, and with extreme
minuteness explained first how to take the medicine and then what diet
was to be kept to. He advised eggs, raw or hardly cooked, and seltzer
water, with warm milk at a certain temperature. When the doctor had
gone away the sick man said something to his brother, of which Levin
could distinguish only the last words: “Your Katya.” By the expression
with which he gazed at her, Levin saw that he was praising her. He
called indeed to Katya, as he called her.
“I’m much better already,” he said. “Why, with you I should have got
well long ago. How nice it is!” he took her hand and drew it towards
his lips, but as though afraid she would dislike it he changed his
mind, let it go, and only stroked it. Kitty took his hand in both hers
and pressed it.
“Now turn me over on the left side and go to bed,” he said.
No one could make out what he said but Kitty; she alone understood. She
understood because she was all the while mentally keeping watch on what
he needed.
“On the other side,” she said to her husband, “he always sleeps on that
side. Turn him over, it’s so disagreeable calling the servants. I’m not
strong enough. Can you?” she said to Marya Nikolaevna.
“I’m afraid not,” answered Marya Nikolaevna.
Terrible as it was to Levin to put his arms round that terrible body,
to take hold of that under the quilt, of which he preferred to know
nothing, under his wife’s influence he made his resolute face that she
knew so well, and putting his arms into the bed took hold of the body,
but in spite of his own strength he was struck by the strange heaviness
of those powerless limbs. While he was turning him over, conscious of
the huge emaciated arm about his neck, Kitty swiftly and noiselessly
turned the pillow, beat it up and settled in it the sick man’s head,
smoothing back his hair, which was sticking again to his moist brow.
The sick man kept his brother’s hand in his own. Levin felt that he
meant to do something with his hand and was pulling it somewhere. Levin
yielded with a sinking heart: yes, he drew it to his mouth and kissed
it. Levin, shaking with sobs and unable to articulate a word, went out
of the room.
Chapter 19
“Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast
revealed them unto babes.” So Levin thought about his wife as he talked
to her that evening.
Levin thought of the text, not because he considered himself “wise and
prudent.” He did not so consider himself, but he could not help knowing
that he had more intellect than his wife and Agafea Mihalovna, and he
could not help knowing that when he thought of death, he thought with
all the force of his intellect. He knew too that the brains of many
great men, whose thoughts he had read, had brooded over death and yet
knew not a hundredth part of what his wife and Agafea Mihalovna knew
about it. Different as those two women were, Agafea Mihalovna and
Katya, as his brother Nikolay had called her, and as Levin particularly
liked to call her now, they were quite alike in this. Both knew,
without a shade of doubt, what sort of thing life was and what was
death, and though neither of them could have answered, and would even
not have understood the questions that presented themselves to Levin,
both had no doubt of the significance of this event, and were precisely
alike in their way of looking at it, which they shared with millions of
people. The proof that they knew for a certainty the nature of death
lay in the fact that they knew without a second of hesitation how to
deal with the dying, and were not frightened of them. Levin and other
men like him, though they could have said a great deal about death,
obviously did not know this since they were afraid of death, and were
absolutely at a loss what to do when people were dying. If Levin had
been alone now with his brother Nikolay, he would have looked at him
with terror, and with still greater terror waited, and would not have
known what else to do.
More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to move.
To talk of outside things seemed to him shocking, impossible, to talk
of death and depressing subjects—also impossible. To be silent, also
impossible. “If I look at him he will think I am studying him, I am
afraid; if I don’t look at him, he’ll think I’m thinking of other
things. If I walk on tiptoe, he will be vexed; to tread firmly, I’m
ashamed.” Kitty evidently did not think of herself, and had no time to
think about herself: she was thinking about him because she knew
something, and all went well. She told him about herself even and about
her wedding, and smiled and sympathized with him and petted him, and
talked of cases of recovery and all went well; so then she must know.
The proof that her behavior and Agafea Mihalovna’s was not instinctive,
animal, irrational, was that apart from the physical treatment, the
relief of suffering, both Agafea Mihalovna and Kitty required for the
dying man something else more important than the physical treatment,
and something which had nothing in common with physical conditions.
Agafea Mihalovna, speaking of the man just dead, had said: “Well, thank
God, he took the sacrament and received absolution; God grant each one
of us such a death.” Katya in just the same way, besides all her care
about linen, bedsores, drink, found time the very first day to persuade
the sick man of the necessity of taking the sacrament and receiving
absolution.
On getting back from the sick-room to their own two rooms for the
night, Levin sat with hanging head not knowing what to do. Not to speak
of supper, of preparing for bed, of considering what they were going to
do, he could not even talk to his wife; he was ashamed to. Kitty, on
the contrary, was more active than usual. She was even livelier than
usual. She ordered supper to be brought, herself unpacked their things,
and herself helped to make the beds, and did not even forget to
sprinkle them with Persian powder. She showed that alertness, that
swiftness of reflection which comes out in men before a battle, in
conflict, in the dangerous and decisive moments of life—those moments
when a man shows once and for all his value, and that all his past has
not been wasted but has been a preparation for these moments.
Everything went rapidly in her hands, and before it was twelve o’clock
all their things were arranged cleanly and tidily in her rooms, in such
a way that the hotel rooms seemed like home: the beds were made,
brushes, combs, looking-glasses were put out, table napkins were
spread.
Levin felt that it was unpardonable to eat, to sleep, to talk even now,
and it seemed to him that every movement he made was unseemly. She
arranged the brushes, but she did it all so that there was nothing
shocking in it.
They could neither of them eat, however, and for a long while they
could not sleep, and did not even go to bed.
“I am very glad I persuaded him to receive extreme unction tomorrow,”
she said, sitting in her dressing jacket before her folding
looking-glass, combing her soft, fragrant hair with a fine comb. “I
have never seen it, but I know, mamma has told me, there are prayers
said for recovery.”
“Do you suppose he can possibly recover?” said Levin, watching a
slender tress at the back of her round little head that was continually
hidden when she passed the comb through the front.
“I asked the doctor; he said he couldn’t live more than three days. But
can they be sure? I’m very glad, anyway, that I persuaded him,” she
said, looking askance at her husband through her hair. “Anything is
possible,” she added with that peculiar, rather sly expression that was
always in her face when she spoke of religion.
Since their conversation about religion when they were engaged neither
of them had ever started a discussion of the subject, but she performed
all the ceremonies of going to church, saying her prayers, and so on,
always with the unvarying conviction that this ought to be so. In spite
of his assertion to the contrary, she was firmly persuaded that he was
as much a Christian as she, and indeed a far better one; and all that
he said about it was simply one of his absurd masculine freaks, just as
he would say about her _broderie anglaise_ that good people patch
holes, but that she cut them on purpose, and so on.
“Yes, you see this woman, Marya Nikolaevna, did not know how to manage
all this,” said Levin. “And ... I must own I’m very, very glad you
came. You are such purity that....” He took her hand and did not kiss
it (to kiss her hand in such closeness to death seemed to him
improper); he merely squeezed it with a penitent air, looking at her
brightening eyes.
“It would have been miserable for you to be alone,” she said, and
lifting her hands which hid her cheeks flushing with pleasure, twisted
her coil of hair on the nape of her neck and pinned it there. “No,” she
went on, “she did not know how.... Luckily, I learned a lot at Soden.”
“Surely there are not people there so ill?”
“Worse.”
“What’s so awful to me is that I can’t see him as he was when he was
young. You would not believe how charming he was as a youth, but I did
not understand him then.”
“I can quite, quite believe it. How I feel that we might have been
friends!” she said; and, distressed at what she had said, she looked
round at her husband, and tears came into her eyes.
“Yes, _might have been_,” he said mournfully. “He’s just one of those
people of whom they say they’re not for this world.”
“But we have many days before us; we must go to bed,” said Kitty,
glancing at her tiny watch.
Chapter 20
The next day the sick man received the sacrament and extreme unction.
During the ceremony Nikolay Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes,
fastened on the holy image that was set out on a card-table covered
with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and hope that
it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this passionate prayer
and hope would only make him feel more bitterly parting from the life
he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the workings of his intellect:
he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for him
without faith, but had grown up because step by step the contemporary
scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed out the
possibility of faith; and so he knew that his present return was not a
legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working of his
intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a
desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had strengthened
his hope by accounts of the marvelous recoveries she had heard of.
Levin knew all this; and it was agonizingly painful to him to behold
the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated wrist, lifted with
difficulty, making the sign of the cross on the tense brow, and the
prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which one could not feel
consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the
sacrament Levin did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times.
He said, addressing God, “If Thou dost exist, make this man to recover”
(of course this same thing has been repeated many times), “and Thou
wilt save him and me.”
After extreme unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He did
not cough once in the course of an hour, smiled, kissed Kitty’s hand,
thanking her with tears, and said he was comfortable, free from pain,
and that he felt strong and had an appetite. He even raised himself
when his soup was brought, and asked for a cutlet as well. Hopelessly
ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that he could not
recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of
excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken.
“Is he better?”
“Yes, much.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“There’s nothing wonderful in it.”
“Anyway, he’s better,” they said in a whisper, smiling to one another.
This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into a
quiet sleep, but he was waked up half an hour later by his cough. And
all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself. The
reality of his suffering crushed all hopes in Levin and Kitty and in
the sick man himself, leaving no doubt, no memory even of past hopes.
Without referring to what he had believed in half an hour before, as
though ashamed even to recall it, he asked for iodine to inhale in a
bottle covered with perforated paper. Levin gave him the bottle, and
the same look of passionate hope with which he had taken the sacrament
was now fastened on his brother, demanding from him the confirmation of
the doctor’s words that inhaling iodine worked wonders.
“Is Katya not here?” he gasped, looking round while Levin reluctantly
assented to the doctor’s words. “No; so I can say it.... It was for her
sake I went through that farce. She’s so sweet; but you and I can’t
deceive ourselves. This is what I believe in,” he said, and, squeezing
the bottle in his bony hand, he began breathing over it.
At eight o’clock in the evening Levin and his wife were drinking tea in
their room when Marya Nikolaevna ran in to them breathlessly. She was
pale, and her lips were quivering. “He is dying!” she whispered. “I’m
afraid will die this minute.”
Both of them ran to him. He was sitting raised up with one elbow on the
bed, his long back bent, and his head hanging low.
“How do you feel?” Levin asked in a whisper, after a silence.
“I feel I’m setting off,” Nikolay said with difficulty, but with
extreme distinctness, screwing the words out of himself. He did not
raise his head, but simply turned his eyes upwards, without their
reaching his brother’s face. “Katya, go away!” he added.
Levin jumped up, and with a peremptory whisper made her go out.
“I’m setting off,” he said again.
“Why do you think so?” said Levin, so as to say something.
“Because I’m setting off,” he repeated, as though he had a liking for
the phrase. “It’s the end.”
Marya Nikolaevna went up to him.
“You had better lie down; you’d be easier,” she said.
“I shall lie down soon enough,” he pronounced slowly, “when I’m dead,”
he said sarcastically, wrathfully. “Well, you can lay me down if you
like.”
Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed at
his face, holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes, but
the muscles twitched from time to time on his forehead, as with one
thinking deeply and intensely. Levin involuntarily thought with him of
what it was that was happening to him now, but in spite of all his
mental efforts to go along with him he saw by the expression of that
calm, stern face that for the dying man all was growing clearer and
clearer that was still as dark as ever for Levin.
“Yes, yes, so,” the dying man articulated slowly at intervals. “Wait a
little.” He was silent. “Right!” he pronounced all at once
reassuringly, as though all were solved for him. “O Lord!” he murmured,
and sighed deeply.
Marya Nikolaevna felt his feet. “They’re getting cold,” she whispered.
For a long while, a very long while it seemed to Levin, the sick man
lay motionless. But he was still alive, and from time to time he
sighed. Levin by now was exhausted from mental strain. He felt that,
with no mental effort, could he understand what it was that was
_right_. He could not even think of the problem of death itself, but
with no will of his own thoughts kept coming to him of what he had to
do next; closing the dead man’s eyes, dressing him, ordering the
coffin. And, strange to say, he felt utterly cold, and was not
conscious of sorrow nor of loss, less still of pity for his brother. If
he had any feeling for his brother at that moment, it was envy for the
knowledge the dying man had now that he could not have.
A long time more he sat over him so, continually expecting the end. But
the end did not come. The door opened and Kitty appeared. Levin got up
to stop her. But at the moment he was getting up, he caught the sound
of the dying man stirring.
“Don’t go away,” said Nikolay and held out his hand. Levin gave him
his, and angrily waved to his wife to go away.
With the dying man’s hand in his hand, he sat for half an hour, an
hour, another hour. He did not think of death at all now. He wondered
what Kitty was doing; who lived in the next room; whether the doctor
lived in a house of his own. He longed for food and for sleep. He
cautiously drew away his hand and felt the feet. The feet were cold,
but the sick man was still breathing. Levin tried again to move away on
tiptoe, but the sick man stirred again and said: “Don’t go.”
The dawn came; the sick man’s condition was unchanged. Levin stealthily
withdrew his hand, and without looking at the dying man, went off to
his own room and went to sleep. When he woke up, instead of news of his
brother’s death which he expected, he learned that the sick man had
returned to his earlier condition. He had begun sitting up again,
coughing, had begun eating again, talking again, and again had ceased
to talk of death, again had begun to express hope of his recovery, and
had become more irritable and more gloomy than ever. No one, neither
his brother nor Kitty, could soothe him. He was angry with everyone,
and said nasty things to everyone, reproached everyone for his
sufferings, and insisted that they should get him a celebrated doctor
from Moscow. To all inquiries made him as to how he felt, he made the
same answer with an expression of vindictive reproachfulness, “I’m
suffering horribly, intolerably!”
The sick man was suffering more and more, especially from bedsores,
which it was impossible now to remedy, and grew more and more angry
with everyone about him, blaming them for everything, and especially
for not having brought him a doctor from Moscow. Kitty tried in every
possible way to relieve him, to soothe him; but it was all in vain, and
Levin saw that she herself was exhausted both physically and morally,
though she would not admit it. The sense of death, which had been
evoked in all by his taking leave of life on the night when he had sent
for his brother, was broken up. Everyone knew that he must inevitably
die soon, that he was half dead already. Everyone wished for nothing
but that he should die as soon as possible, and everyone, concealing
this, gave him medicines, tried to find remedies and doctors, and
deceived him and themselves and each other. All this was falsehood,
disgusting, irreverent deceit. And owing to the bent of his character,
and because he loved the dying man more than anyone else did, Levin was
most painfully conscious of this deceit.
Levin, who had long been possessed by the idea of reconciling his
brothers, at least in face of death, had written to his brother, Sergey
Ivanovitch, and having received an answer from him, he read this letter
to the sick man. Sergey Ivanovitch wrote that he could not come
himself, and in touching terms he begged his brother’s forgiveness.
The sick man said nothing.
“What am I to write to him?” said Levin. “I hope you are not angry with
him?”
“No, not the least!” Nikolay answered, vexed at the question. “Tell him
to send me a doctor.”
Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was still in the same
condition. The sense of longing for his death was felt by everyone now
at the mere sight of him, by the waiters and the hotel-keeper and all
the people staying in the hotel, and the doctor and Marya Nikolaevna
and Levin and Kitty. The sick man alone did not express this feeling,
but on the contrary was furious at their not getting him doctors, and
went on taking medicine and talking of life. Only at rare moments, when
the opium gave him an instant’s relief from the never-ceasing pain, he
would sometimes, half asleep, utter what was ever more intense in his
heart than in all the others: “Oh, if it were only the end!” or: “When
will it be over?”
His sufferings, steadily growing more intense, did their work and
prepared him for death. There was no position in which he was not in
pain, there was not a minute in which he was unconscious of it, not a
limb, not a part of his body that did not ache and cause him agony.
Even the memories, the impressions, the thoughts of this body awakened
in him now the same aversion as the body itself. The sight of other
people, their remarks, his own reminiscences, everything was for him a
source of agony. Those about him felt this, and instinctively did not
allow themselves to move freely, to talk, to express their wishes
before him. All his life was merged in the one feeling of suffering and
desire to be rid of it.
There was evidently coming over him that revulsion that would make him
look upon death as the goal of his desires, as happiness. Hitherto each
individual desire, aroused by suffering or privation, such as hunger,
fatigue, thirst, had been satisfied by some bodily function giving
pleasure. But now no physical craving or suffering received relief, and
the effort to relieve them only caused fresh suffering. And so all
desires were merged in one—the desire to be rid of all his sufferings
and their source, the body. But he had no words to express this desire
of deliverance, and so he did not speak of it, and from habit asked for
the satisfaction of desires which could not now be satisfied. “Turn me
over on the other side,” he would say, and immediately after he would
ask to be turned back again as before. “Give me some broth. Take away
the broth. Talk of something: why are you silent?” And directly they
began to talk he would close his eyes, and would show weariness,
indifference, and loathing.
On the tenth day from their arrival at the town, Kitty was unwell. She
suffered from headache and sickness, and she could not get up all the
morning.
The doctor opined that the indisposition arose from fatigue and
excitement, and prescribed rest.
After dinner, however, Kitty got up and went as usual with her work to
the sick man. He looked at her sternly when she came in, and smiled
contemptuously when she said she had been unwell. That day he was
continually blowing his nose, and groaning piteously.
“How do you feel?” she asked him.
“Worse,” he articulated with difficulty. “In pain!”
“In pain, where?”
“Everywhere.”
“It will be over today, you will see,” said Marya Nikolaevna. Though it
was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had noticed
was very keen, must have heard. Levin said hush to her, and looked
round at the sick man. Nikolay had heard; but these words produced no
effect on him. His eyes had still the same intense, reproachful look.
“Why do you think so?” Levin asked her, when she had followed him into
the corridor.
“He has begun picking at himself,” said Marya Nikolaevna.
“How do you mean?”
“Like this,” she said, tugging at the folds of her woolen skirt. Levin
noticed, indeed, that all that day the patient pulled at himself, as it
were, trying to snatch something away.
Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction came true. Towards night the sick man was
not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the
same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his
brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked
just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to read the prayer for the
dying.
While the priest was reading it, the dying man did not show any sign of
life; his eyes were closed. Levin, Kitty, and Marya Nikolaevna stood at
the bedside. The priest had not quite finished reading the prayer when
the dying man stretched, sighed, and opened his eyes. The priest, on
finishing the prayer, put the cross to the cold forehead, then slowly
returned it to the stand, and after standing for two minutes more in
silence, he touched the huge, bloodless hand that was turning cold.
“He is gone,” said the priest, and would have moved away; but suddenly
there was a faint stir in the mustaches of the dead man that seemed
glued together, and quite distinctly in the hush they heard from the
bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds:
“Not quite ... soon.”
And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the
mustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying
out the corpse.
The sight of his brother, and the nearness of death, revived in Levin
that sense of horror in face of the insoluble enigma, together with the
nearness and inevitability of death, that had come upon him that autumn
evening when his brother had come to him. This feeling was now even
stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of
apprehending the meaning of death, and its inevitability rose up before
him more terrible than ever. But now, thanks to his wife’s presence,
that feeling did not reduce him to despair. In spite of death, he felt
the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair,
and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still
stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had
scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as
insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
The doctor confirmed his suppositions in regard to Kitty. Her
indisposition was a symptom that she was with child.
Chapter 21
From the moment when Alexey Alexandrovitch understood from his
interviews with Betsy and with Stepan Arkadyevitch that all that was
expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without burdening her
with his presence, and that his wife herself desired this, he felt so
distraught that he could come to no decision of himself; he did not
know himself what he wanted now, and putting himself in the hands of
those who were so pleased to interest themselves in his affairs, he met
everything with unqualified assent. It was only when Anna had left his
house, and the English governess sent to ask him whether she should
dine with him or separately, that for the first time he clearly
comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most difficult of
all in this position was the fact that he could not in any way connect
and reconcile his past with what was now. It was not the past when he
had lived happily with his wife that troubled him. The transition from
that past to a knowledge of his wife’s unfaithfulness he had lived
through miserably already; that state was painful, but he could
understand it. If his wife had then, on declaring to him her
unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he
would not have been in the hopeless position—incomprehensible to
himself—in which he felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his
immediate past, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife, and for the
other man’s child with what was now the case, that is with the fact
that, as it were, in return for all this he now found himself alone,
put to shame, a laughing-stock, needed by no one, and despised by
everyone.
For the first two days after his wife’s departure Alexey Alexandrovitch
received applicants for assistance and his chief secretary, drove to
the committee, and went down to dinner in the dining-room as usual.
Without giving himself a reason for what he was doing, he strained
every nerve of his being for those two days, simply to preserve an
appearance of composure, and even of indifference. Answering inquiries
about the disposition of Anna Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he had
exercised immense self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes what
had occurred was not unforeseen nor out of the ordinary course of
events, and he attained his aim: no one could have detected in him
signs of despair. But on the second day after her departure, when
Korney gave him a bill from a fashionable draper’s shop, which Anna had
forgotten to pay, and announced that the clerk from the shop was
waiting, Alexey Alexandrovitch told him to show the clerk up.
“Excuse me, your excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But if you
direct us to apply to her excellency, would you graciously oblige us
with her address?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, as it seemed to the clerk, and all at
once, turning round, he sat down at the table. Letting his head sink
into his hands, he sat for a long while in that position, several times
attempted to speak and stopped short. Korney, perceiving his master’s
emotion, asked the clerk to call another time. Left alone, Alexey
Alexandrovitch recognized that he had not the strength to keep up the
line of firmness and composure any longer. He gave orders for the
carriage that was awaiting him to be taken back, and for no one to be
admitted, and he did not go down to dinner.
He felt that he could not endure the weight of universal contempt and
exasperation, which he had distinctly seen in the face of the clerk and
of Korney, and of everyone, without exception, whom he had met during
those two days. He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the
hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in
that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being
shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very
fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to
him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog
yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against
people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to
do this for two days, but now he felt incapable of keeping up the
unequal struggle.
His despair was even intensified by the consciousness that he was
utterly alone in his sorrow. In all Petersburg there was not a human
being to whom he could express what he was feeling, who would feel for
him, not as a high official, not as a member of society, but simply as
a suffering man; indeed he had not such a one in the whole world.
Alexey Alexandrovitch grew up an orphan. There were two brothers. They
did not remember their father, and their mother died when Alexey
Alexandrovitch was ten years old. The property was a small one. Their
uncle, Karenin, a government official of high standing, at one time a
favorite of the late Tsar, had brought them up.
On completing his high school and university courses with medals,
Alexey Alexandrovitch had, with his uncle’s aid, immediately started in
a prominent position in the service, and from that time forward he had
devoted himself exclusively to political ambition. In the high school
and the university, and afterwards in the service, Alexey
Alexandrovitch had never formed a close friendship with anyone. His
brother had been the person nearest to his heart, but he had a post in
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was always abroad, where he had
died shortly after Alexey Alexandrovitch’s marriage.
While he was governor of a province, Anna’s aunt, a wealthy provincial
lady, had thrown him—middle-aged as he was, though young for a
governor—with her niece, and had succeeded in putting him in such a
position that he had either to declare himself or to leave the town.
Alexey Alexandrovitch was not long in hesitation. There were at the
time as many reasons for the step as against it, and there was no
overbalancing consideration to outweigh his invariable rule of
abstaining when in doubt. But Anna’s aunt had through a common
acquaintance insinuated that he had already compromised the girl, and
that he was in honor bound to make her an offer. He made the offer, and
concentrated on his betrothed and his wife all the feeling of which he
was capable.
The attachment he felt to Anna precluded in his heart every need of
intimate relations with others. And now among all his acquaintances he
had not one friend. He had plenty of so-called connections, but no
friendships. Alexey Alexandrovitch had plenty of people whom he could
invite to dinner, to whose sympathy he could appeal in any public
affair he was concerned about, whose interest he could reckon upon for
anyone he wished to help, with whom he could candidly discuss other
people’s business and affairs of state. But his relations with these
people were confined to one clearly defined channel, and had a certain
routine from which it was impossible to depart. There was one man, a
comrade of his at the university, with whom he had made friends later,
and with whom he could have spoken of a personal sorrow; but this
friend had a post in the Department of Education in a remote part of
Russia. Of the people in Petersburg the most intimate and most possible
were his chief secretary and his doctor.
Mihail Vassilievitch Sludin, the chief secretary, was a
straightforward, intelligent, good-hearted, and conscientious man, and
Alexey Alexandrovitch was aware of his personal goodwill. But their
five years of official work together seemed to have put a barrier
between them that cut off warmer relations.
After signing the papers brought him, Alexey Alexandrovitch had sat for
a long while in silence, glancing at Mihail Vassilievitch, and several
times he attempted to speak, but could not. He had already prepared the
phrase: “You have heard of my trouble?” But he ended by saying, as
usual: “So you’ll get this ready for me?” and with that dismissed him.
The other person was the doctor, who had also a kindly feeling for him;
but there had long existed a taciturn understanding between them that
both were weighed down by work, and always in a hurry.
Of his women friends, foremost amongst them Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
Alexey Alexandrovitch never thought. All women, simply as women, were
terrible and distasteful to him.
Chapter 22
Alexey Alexandrovitch had forgotten the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, but
she had not forgotten him. At the bitterest moment of his lonely
despair she came to him, and without waiting to be announced, walked
straight into his study. She found him as he was sitting with his head
in both hands.
“_J’ai forcé la consigne_,” she said, walking in with rapid steps and
breathing hard with excitement and rapid exercise. “I have heard all!
Alexey Alexandrovitch! Dear friend!” she went on, warmly squeezing his
hand in both of hers and gazing with her fine pensive eyes into his.
Alexey Alexandrovitch, frowning, got up, and disengaging his hand,
moved her a chair.
“Won’t you sit down, countess? I’m seeing no one because I’m unwell,
countess,” he said, and his lips twitched.
“Dear friend!” repeated Countess Lidia Ivanovna, never taking her eyes
off his, and suddenly her eyebrows rose at the inner corners,
describing a triangle on her forehead, her ugly yellow face became
still uglier, but Alexey Alexandrovitch felt that she was sorry for him
and was preparing to cry. And he too was softened; he snatched her
plump hand and proceeded to kiss it.
“Dear friend!” she said in a voice breaking with emotion. “You ought
not to give way to grief. Your sorrow is a great one, but you ought to
find consolation.”
“I am crushed, I am annihilated, I am no longer a man!” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch, letting go her hand, but still gazing into her brimming
eyes. “My position is so awful because I can find nowhere, I cannot
find within me strength to support me.”
“You will find support; seek it—not in me, though I beseech you to
believe in my friendship,” she said, with a sigh. “Our support is love,
that love that He has vouchsafed us. His burden is light,” she said,
with the look of ecstasy Alexey Alexandrovitch knew so well. “He will
be your support and your succor.”
Although there was in these words a flavor of that sentimental emotion
at her own lofty feelings, and that new mystical fervor which had
lately gained ground in Petersburg, and which seemed to Alexey
Alexandrovitch disproportionate, still it was pleasant to him to hear
this now.
“I am weak. I am crushed. I foresaw nothing, and now I understand
nothing.”
“Dear friend,” repeated Lidia Ivanovna.
“It’s not the loss of what I have not now, it’s not that!” pursued
Alexey Alexandrovitch. “I do not grieve for that. But I cannot help
feeling humiliated before other people for the position I am placed in.
It is wrong, but I can’t help it, I can’t help it.”
“Not you it was performed that noble act of forgiveness, at which I was
moved to ecstasy, and everyone else too, but He, working within your
heart,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, raising her eyes rapturously,
“and so you cannot be ashamed of your act.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch knitted his brows, and crooking his hands, he
cracked his fingers.
“One must know all the facts,” he said in his thin voice. “A man’s
strength has its limits, countess, and I have reached my limits. The
whole day I have had to be making arrangements, arrangements about
household matters arising” (he emphasized the word _arising_) “from my
new, solitary position. The servants, the governess, the accounts....
These pinpricks have stabbed me to the heart, and I have not the
strength to bear it. At dinner ... yesterday, I was almost getting up
from the dinner-table. I could not bear the way my son looked at me. He
did not ask me the meaning of it all, but he wanted to ask, and I could
not bear the look in his eyes. He was afraid to look at me, but that is
not all....” Alexey Alexandrovitch would have referred to the bill that
had been brought him, but his voice shook, and he stopped. That bill on
blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, he could not recall without a rush
of self-pity.
“I understand, dear friend,” said Lidia Ivanovna. “I understand it all.
Succor and comfort you will find not in me, though I have come only to
aid you if I can. If I could take from off you all these petty,
humiliating cares ... I understand that a woman’s word, a woman’s
superintendence is needed. You will intrust it to me?”
Silently and gratefully Alexey Alexandrovitch pressed her hand.
“Together we will take care of Seryozha. Practical affairs are not my
strong point. But I will set to work. I will be your housekeeper. Don’t
thank me. I do it not from myself....”
“I cannot help thanking you.”
“But, dear friend, do not give way to the feeling of which you
spoke—being ashamed of what is the Christian’s highest glory: _he who
humbles himself shall be exalted_. And you cannot thank me. You must
thank Him, and pray to Him for succor. In Him alone we find peace,
consolation, salvation, and love,” she said, and turning her eyes
heavenwards, she began praying, as Alexey Alexandrovitch gathered from
her silence.
Alexey Alexandrovitch listened to her now, and those expressions which
had seemed to him, if not distasteful, at least exaggerated, now seemed
to him natural and consolatory. Alexey Alexandrovitch had disliked this
new enthusiastic fervor. He was a believer, who was interested in
religion primarily in its political aspect, and the new doctrine which
ventured upon several new interpretations, just because it paved the
way to discussion and analysis, was in principle disagreeable to him.
He had hitherto taken up a cold and even antagonistic attitude to this
new doctrine, and with Countess Lidia Ivanovna, who had been carried
away by it, he had never argued, but by silence had assiduously parried
her attempts to provoke him into argument. Now for the first time he
heard her words with pleasure, and did not inwardly oppose them.
“I am very, very grateful to you, both for your deeds and for your
words,” he said, when she had finished praying.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna once more pressed both her friend’s hands.
“Now I will enter upon my duties,” she said with a smile after a pause,
as she wiped away the traces of tears. “I am going to Seryozha. Only in
the last extremity shall I apply to you.” And she got up and went out.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna went into Seryozha’s part of the house, and
dropping tears on the scared child’s cheeks, she told him that his
father was a saint and his mother was dead.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna kept her promise. She did actually take upon
herself the care of the organization and management of Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s household. But she had not overstated the case when
saying that practical affairs were not her strong point. All her
arrangements had to be modified because they could not be carried out,
and they were modified by Korney, Alexey Alexandrovitch’s valet, who,
though no one was aware of the fact, now managed Karenin’s household,
and quietly and discreetly reported to his master while he was dressing
all it was necessary for him to know. But Lidia Ivanovna’s help was
none the less real; she gave Alexey Alexandrovitch moral support in the
consciousness of her love and respect for him, and still more, as it
was soothing to her to believe, in that she almost turned him to
Christianity—that is, from an indifferent and apathetic believer she
turned him into an ardent and steadfast adherent of the new
interpretation of Christian doctrine, which had been gaining ground of
late in Petersburg. It was easy for Alexey Alexandrovitch to believe in
this teaching. Alexey Alexandrovitch, like Lidia Ivanovna indeed, and
others who shared their views, was completely devoid of vividness of
imagination, that spiritual faculty in virtue of which the conceptions
evoked by the imagination become so vivid that they must needs be in
harmony with other conceptions, and with actual fact. He saw nothing
impossible and inconceivable in the idea that death, though existing
for unbelievers, did not exist for him, and that, as he was possessed
of the most perfect faith, of the measure of which he was himself the
judge, therefore there was no sin in his soul, and he was experiencing
complete salvation here on earth.
It is true that the erroneousness and shallowness of this conception of
his faith was dimly perceptible to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and he knew
that when, without the slightest idea that his forgiveness was the
action of a higher power, he had surrendered directly to the feeling of
forgiveness, he had felt more happiness than now when he was thinking
every instant that Christ was in his heart, and that in signing
official papers he was doing His will. But for Alexey Alexandrovitch it
was a necessity to think in that way; it was such a necessity for him
in his humiliation to have some elevated standpoint, however imaginary,
from which, looked down upon by all, he could look down on others, that
he clung, as to his one salvation, to his delusion of salvation.
Chapter 23
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and sentimental girl,
been married to a wealthy man of high rank, an extremely good-natured,
jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her
husband abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations of affection
he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that people knowing the
count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the sentimental Lidia,
were at a loss to explain. Though they were divorced and lived apart,
yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her
with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her
husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love with
someone. She was in love with several people at once, both men and
women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had been
particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with all the new
princes and princesses who married into the imperial family; she had
been in love with a high dignitary of the Church, a vicar, and a parish
priest; she had been in love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, with
Komissarov, with a minister, a doctor, an English missionary and
Karenin. All these passions constantly waning or growing more ardent,
did not prevent her from keeping up the most extended and complicated
relations with the court and fashionable society. But from the time
that after Karenin’s trouble she took him under her special protection,
from the time that she set to work in Karenin’s household looking after
his welfare, she felt that all her other attachments were not the real
thing, and that she was now genuinely in love, and with no one but
Karenin. The feeling she now experienced for him seemed to her stronger
than any of her former feelings. Analyzing her feeling, and comparing
it with former passions, she distinctly perceived that she would not
have been in love with Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the
Tsar, that she would not have been in love with Ristitch-Kudzhitsky if
there had been no Slavonic question, but that she loved Karenin for
himself, for his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the sweet—to her—high
notes of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his weary eyes, his
character, and his soft white hands with their swollen veins. She was
not simply overjoyed at meeting him, but she sought in his face signs
of the impression she was making on him. She tried to please him, not
by her words only, but in her whole person. For his sake it was that
she now lavished more care on her dress than before. She caught herself
in reveries on what might have been, if she had not been married and he
had been free. She blushed with emotion when he came into the room, she
could not repress a smile of rapture when he said anything amiable to
her.
For several days now Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been in a state of
intense excitement. She had learned that Anna and Vronsky were in
Petersburg. Alexey Alexandrovitch must be saved from seeing her, he
must be saved even from the torturing knowledge that that awful woman
was in the same town with him, and that he might meet her any minute.
Lidia Ivanovna made inquiries through her friends as to what those
_infamous people_, as she called Anna and Vronsky, intended doing, and
she endeavored so to guide every movement of her friend during those
days that he could not come across them. The young adjutant, an
acquaintance of Vronsky, through whom she obtained her information, and
who hoped through Countess Lidia Ivanovna to obtain a concession, told
her that they had finished their business and were going away next day.
Lidia Ivanovna had already begun to calm down, when the next morning a
note was brought her, the handwriting of which she recognized with
horror. It was the handwriting of Anna Karenina. The envelope was of
paper as thick as bark; on the oblong yellow paper there was a huge
monogram, and the letter smelt of agreeable scent.
“Who brought it?”
“A commissionaire from the hotel.”
It was some time before Countess Lidia Ivanovna could sit down to read
the letter. Her excitement brought on an attack of asthma, to which she
was subject. When she had recovered her composure, she read the
following letter in French:
“Madame la Comtesse,
“The Christian feelings with which your heart is filled give me the, I
feel, unpardonable boldness to write to you. I am miserable at being
separated from my son. I entreat permission to see him once before my
departure. Forgive me for recalling myself to your memory. I apply to
you and not to Alexey Alexandrovitch, simply because I do not wish to
cause that generous man to suffer in remembering me. Knowing your
friendship for him, I know you will understand me. Could you send
Seryozha to me, or should I come to the house at some fixed hour, or
will you let me know when and where I could see him away from home? I
do not anticipate a refusal, knowing the magnanimity of him with whom
it rests. You cannot conceive the craving I have to see him, and so
cannot conceive the gratitude your help will arouse in me.
“Anna.”
Everything in this letter exasperated Countess Lidia Ivanovna: its
contents and the allusion to magnanimity, and especially its free and
easy—as she considered—tone.
“Say that there is no answer,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, and
immediately opening her blotting-book, she wrote to Alexey
Alexandrovitch that she hoped to see him at one o’clock at the levee.
“I must talk with you of a grave and painful subject. There we will
arrange where to meet. Best of all at my house, where I will order tea
_as you like it_. Urgent. He lays the cross, but He gives the strength
to bear it,” she added, so as to give him some slight preparation.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna usually wrote some two or three letters a day
to Alexey Alexandrovitch. She enjoyed that form of communication, which
gave opportunity for a refinement and air of mystery not afforded by
their personal interviews.
Chapter 24
The levee was drawing to a close. People met as they were going away,
and gossiped of the latest news, of the newly bestowed honors and the
changes in the positions of the higher functionaries.
“If only Countess Marya Borissovna were Minister of War, and Princess
Vatkovskaya were Commander-in-Chief,” said a gray-headed, little old
man in a gold-embroidered uniform, addressing a tall, handsome maid of
honor who had questioned him about the new appointments.
“And me among the adjutants,” said the maid of honor, smiling.
“You have an appointment already. You’re over the ecclesiastical
department. And your assistant’s Karenin.”
“Good-day, prince!” said the little old man to a man who came up to
him.
“What were you saying of Karenin?” said the prince.
“He and Putyatov have received the Alexander Nevsky.”
“I thought he had it already.”
“No. Just look at him,” said the little old man, pointing with his
embroidered hat to Karenin in a court uniform with the new red ribbon
across his shoulders, standing in the doorway of the hall with an
influential member of the Imperial Council. “Pleased and happy as a
brass farthing,” he added, stopping to shake hands with a handsome
gentleman of the bedchamber of colossal proportions.
“No; he’s looking older,” said the gentleman of the bedchamber.
“From overwork. He’s always drawing up projects nowadays. He won’t let
a poor devil go nowadays till he’s explained it all to him under
heads.”
“Looking older, did you say? _Il fait des passions_. I believe Countess
Lidia Ivanovna’s jealous now of his wife.”
“Oh, come now, please don’t say any harm of Countess Lidia Ivanovna.”
“Why, is there any harm in her being in love with Karenin?”
“But is it true Madame Karenina’s here?”
“Well, not here in the palace, but in Petersburg. I met her yesterday
with Alexey Vronsky, _bras dessous, bras dessous_, in the Morsky.”
“_C’est un homme qui n’a pas_,...” the gentleman of the bedchamber was
beginning, but he stopped to make room, bowing, for a member of the
Imperial family to pass.
Thus people talked incessantly of Alexey Alexandrovitch, finding fault
with him and laughing at him, while he, blocking up the way of the
member of the Imperial Council he had captured, was explaining to him
point by point his new financial project, never interrupting his
discourse for an instant for fear he should escape.
Almost at the same time that his wife left Alexey Alexandrovitch there
had come to him that bitterest moment in the life of an official—the
moment when his upward career comes to a full stop. This full stop had
arrived and everyone perceived it, but Alexey Alexandrovitch himself
was not yet aware that his career was over. Whether it was due to his
feud with Stremov, or his misfortune with his wife, or simply that
Alexey Alexandrovitch had reached his destined limits, it had become
evident to everyone in the course of that year that his career was at
an end. He still filled a position of consequence, he sat on many
commissions and committees, but he was a man whose day was over, and
from whom nothing was expected. Whatever he said, whatever he proposed,
was heard as though it were something long familiar, and the very thing
that was not needed. But Alexey Alexandrovitch was not aware of this,
and, on the contrary, being cut off from direct participation in
governmental activity, he saw more clearly than ever the errors and
defects in the action of others, and thought it his duty to point out
means for their correction. Shortly after his separation from his wife,
he began writing his first note on the new judicial procedure, the
first of the endless series of notes he was destined to write in the
future.
Alexey Alexandrovitch did not merely fail to observe his hopeless
position in the official world, he was not merely free from anxiety on
this head, he was positively more satisfied than ever with his own
activity.
“He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord,
how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the
things that are of the world, how he may please his wife,” says the
Apostle Paul, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, who was now guided in every
action by Scripture, often recalled this text. It seemed to him that
ever since he had been left without a wife, he had in these very
projects of reform been serving the Lord more zealously than before.
The unmistakable impatience of the member of the Council trying to get
away from him did not trouble Alexey Alexandrovitch; he gave up his
exposition only when the member of the Council, seizing his chance when
one of the Imperial family was passing, slipped away from him.
Left alone, Alexey Alexandrovitch looked down, collecting his thoughts,
then looked casually about him and walked towards the door, where he
hoped to meet Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
“And how strong they all are, how sound physically,” thought Alexey
Alexandrovitch, looking at the powerfully built gentleman of the
bedchamber with his well-combed, perfumed whiskers, and at the red neck
of the prince, pinched by his tight uniform. He had to pass them on his
way. “Truly is it said that all the world is evil,” he thought, with
another sidelong glance at the calves of the gentleman of the
bedchamber.
Moving forward deliberately, Alexey Alexandrovitch bowed with his
customary air of weariness and dignity to the gentleman who had been
talking about him, and looking towards the door, his eyes sought
Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
“Ah! Alexey Alexandrovitch!” said the little old man, with a malicious
light in his eyes, at the moment when Karenin was on a level with them,
and was nodding with a frigid gesture, “I haven’t congratulated you
yet,” said the old man, pointing to his newly received ribbon.
“Thank you,” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch. “What an _exquisite_ day
today,” he added, laying emphasis in his peculiar way on the word
_exquisite_.
That they laughed at him he was well aware, but he did not expect
anything but hostility from them; he was used to that by now.
Catching sight of the yellow shoulders of Lidia Ivanovna jutting out
above her corset, and her fine pensive eyes bidding him to her, Alexey
Alexandrovitch smiled, revealing untarnished white teeth, and went
towards her.
Lidia Ivanovna’s dress had cost her great pains, as indeed all her
dresses had done of late. Her aim in dress was now quite the reverse of
that she had pursued thirty years before. Then her desire had been to
adorn herself with something, and the more adorned the better. Now, on
the contrary, she was perforce decked out in a way so inconsistent with
her age and her figure, that her one anxiety was to contrive that the
contrast between these adornments and her own exterior should not be
too appalling. And as far as Alexey Alexandrovitch was concerned she
succeeded, and was in his eyes attractive. For him she was the one
island not only of goodwill to him, but of love in the midst of the sea
of hostility and jeering that surrounded him.
Passing through rows of ironical eyes, he was drawn as naturally to her
loving glance as a plant to the sun.
“I congratulate you,” she said to him, her eyes on his ribbon.
Suppressing a smile of pleasure, he shrugged his shoulders, closing his
eyes, as though to say that that could not be a source of joy to him.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna was very well aware that it was one of his
chief sources of satisfaction, though he never admitted it.
“How is our angel?” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, meaning Seryozha.
“I can’t say I was quite pleased with him,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch,
raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes. “And Sitnikov is not
satisfied with him.” (Sitnikov was the tutor to whom Seryozha’s secular
education had been intrusted.) “As I have mentioned to you, there’s a
sort of coldness in him towards the most important questions which
ought to touch the heart of every man and every child....” Alexey
Alexandrovitch began expounding his views on the sole question that
interested him besides the service—the education of his son.
When Alexey Alexandrovitch with Lidia Ivanovna’s help had been brought
back anew to life and activity, he felt it his duty to undertake the
education of the son left on his hands. Having never before taken any
interest in educational questions, Alexey Alexandrovitch devoted some
time to the theoretical study of the subject. After reading several
books on anthropology, education, and didactics, Alexey Alexandrovitch
drew up a plan of education, and engaging the best tutor in Petersburg
to superintend it, he set to work, and the subject continually absorbed
him.
“Yes, but the heart. I see in him his father’s heart, and with such a
heart a child cannot go far wrong,” said Lidia Ivanovna with
enthusiasm.
“Yes, perhaps.... As for me, I do my duty. It’s all I can do.”
“You’re coming to me,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, after a pause; “we
have to speak of a subject painful for you. I would give anything to
have spared you certain memories, but others are not of the same mind.
I have received a letter from _her_. _She_ is here in Petersburg.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch shuddered at the allusion to his wife, but
immediately his face assumed the deathlike rigidity which expressed
utter helplessness in the matter.
“I was expecting it,” he said.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna looked at him ecstatically, and tears of
rapture at the greatness of his soul came into her eyes.
Chapter 25
When Alexey Alexandrovitch came into the Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s snug
little boudoir, decorated with old china and hung with portraits, the
lady herself had not yet made her appearance.
She was changing her dress.
A cloth was laid on a round table, and on it stood a china tea service
and a silver spirit-lamp and tea kettle. Alexey Alexandrovitch looked
idly about at the endless familiar portraits which adorned the room,
and sitting down to the table, he opened a New Testament lying upon it.
The rustle of the countess’s silk skirt drew his attention off.
“Well now, we can sit quietly,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, slipping
hurriedly with an agitated smile between the table and the sofa, “and
talk over our tea.”
After some words of preparation, Countess Lidia Ivanovna, breathing
hard and flushing crimson, gave into Alexey Alexandrovitch’s hands the
letter she had received.
After reading the letter, he sat a long while in silence.
“I don’t think I have the right to refuse her,” he said, timidly
lifting his eyes.
“Dear friend, you never see evil in anyone!”
“On the contrary, I see that all is evil. But whether it is just....”
His face showed irresolution, and a seeking for counsel, support, and
guidance in a matter he did not understand.
“No,” Countess Lidia Ivanovna interrupted him; “there are limits to
everything. I can understand immorality,” she said, not quite
truthfully, since she never could understand that which leads women to
immorality; “but I don’t understand cruelty: to whom? to you! How can
she stay in the town where you are? No, the longer one lives the more
one learns. And I’m learning to understand your loftiness and her
baseness.”
“Who is to throw a stone?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, unmistakably
pleased with the part he had to play. “I have forgiven all, and so I
cannot deprive her of what is exacted by love in her—by her love for
her son....”
“But is that love, my friend? Is it sincere? Admitting that you have
forgiven—that you forgive—have we the right to work on the feelings of
that angel? He looks on her as dead. He prays for her, and beseeches
God to have mercy on her sins. And it is better so. But now what will
he think?”
“I had not thought of that,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, evidently
agreeing.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna hid her face in her hands and was silent. She
was praying.
“If you ask my advice,” she said, having finished her prayer and
uncovered her face, “I do not advise you to do this. Do you suppose I
don’t see how you are suffering, how this has torn open your wounds?
But supposing that, as always, you don’t think of yourself, what can it
lead to?—to fresh suffering for you, to torture for the child. If there
were a trace of humanity left in her, she ought not to wish for it
herself. No, I have no hesitation in saying I advise not, and if you
will intrust it to me, I will write to her.”
And Alexey Alexandrovitch consented, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna sent
the following letter in French:
“Dear Madame,
“To be reminded of you might have results for your son in leading to
questions on his part which could not be answered without implanting in
the child’s soul a spirit of censure towards what should be for him
sacred, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband’s refusal in
the spirit of Christian love. I pray to Almighty God to have mercy on
you.
“Countess Lidia.”
This letter attained the secret object which Countess Lidia Ivanovna
had concealed from herself. It wounded Anna to the quick.
For his part, Alexey Alexandrovitch, on returning home from Lidia
Ivanovna’s, could not all that day concentrate himself on his usual
pursuits, and find that spiritual peace of one saved and believing
which he had felt of late.
The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned against him, and
towards whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia Ivanovna had so
justly told him, ought not to have troubled him; but he was not easy;
he could not understand the book he was reading; he could not drive
away harassing recollections of his relations with her, of the mistake
which, as it now seemed, he had made in regard to her. The memory of
how he had received her confession of infidelity on their way home from
the races (especially that he had insisted only on the observance of
external decorum, and had not sent a challenge) tortured him like a
remorse. He was tortured too by the thought of the letter he had
written her; and most of all, his forgiveness, which nobody wanted, and
his care of the other man’s child made his heart burn with shame and
remorse.
And just the same feeling of shame and regret he felt now, as he
reviewed all his past with her, recalling the awkward words in which,
after long wavering, he had made her an offer.
“But how have I been to blame?” he said to himself. And this question
always excited another question in him—whether they felt differently,
did their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys and Oblonskys
... these gentlemen of the bedchamber, with their fine calves. And
there passed before his mind a whole series of these mettlesome,
vigorous, self-confident men, who always and everywhere drew his
inquisitive attention in spite of himself. He tried to dispel these
thoughts, he tried to persuade himself that he was not living for this
transient life, but for the life of eternity, and that there was peace
and love in his heart.
But the fact that he had in this transient, trivial life made, as it
seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes tortured him as though the
eternal salvation in which he believed had no existence. But this
temptation did not last long, and soon there was reestablished once
more in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s soul the peace and the elevation by
virtue of which he could forget what he did not want to remember.
Chapter 26
“Well, Kapitonitch?” said Seryozha, coming back rosy and good-humored
from his walk the day before his birthday, and giving his overcoat to
the tall old hall-porter, who smiled down at the little person from the
height of his long figure. “Well, has the bandaged clerk been here
today? Did papa see him?”
“He saw him. The minute the chief secretary came out, I announced him,”
said the hall-porter with a good-humored wink. “Here, I’ll take it
off.”
“Seryozha!” said the tutor, stopping in the doorway leading to the
inner rooms. “Take it off yourself.” But Seryozha, though he heard his
tutor’s feeble voice, did not pay attention to it. He stood keeping
hold of the hall-porter’s belt, and gazing into his face.
“Well, and did papa do what he wanted for him?”
The hall-porter nodded his head affirmatively. The clerk with his face
tied up, who had already been seven times to ask some favor of Alexey
Alexandrovitch, interested both Seryozha and the hall-porter. Seryozha
had come upon him in the hall, and had heard him plaintively beg the
hall-porter to announce him, saying that he and his children had death
staring them in the face.
Since then Seryozha, having met him a second time in the hall, took
great interest in him.
“Well, was he very glad?” he asked.
“Glad? I should think so! Almost dancing as he walked away.”
“And has anything been left?” asked Seryozha, after a pause.
“Come, sir,” said the hall-porter; then with a shake of his head he
whispered, “Something from the countess.”
Seryozha understood at once that what the hall-porter was speaking of
was a present from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for his birthday.
“What do you say? Where?”
“Korney took it to your papa. A fine plaything it must be too!”
“How big? Like this?”
“Rather small, but a fine thing.”
“A book.”
“No, a thing. Run along, run along, Vassily Lukitch is calling you,”
said the porter, hearing the tutor’s steps approaching, and carefully
taking away from his belt the little hand in the glove half pulled off,
he signed with his head towards the tutor.
“Vassily Lukitch, in a tiny minute!” answered Seryozha with that gay
and loving smile which always won over the conscientious Vassily
Lukitch.
Seryozha was too happy, everything was too delightful for him to be
able to help sharing with his friend the porter the family good fortune
of which he had heard during his walk in the public gardens from Lidia
Ivanovna’s niece. This piece of good news seemed to him particularly
important from its coming at the same time with the gladness of the
bandaged clerk and his own gladness at toys having come for him. It
seemed to Seryozha that this was a day on which everyone ought to be
glad and happy.
“You know papa’s received the Alexander Nevsky today?”
“To be sure I do! People have been already to congratulate him.”
“And is he glad?”
“Glad at the Tsar’s gracious favor! I should think so! It’s a proof
he’s deserved it,” said the porter severely and seriously.
Seryozha fell to dreaming, gazing up at the face of the porter, which
he had thoroughly studied in every detail, especially the chin that
hung down between the gray whiskers, never seen by anyone but Seryozha,
who saw him only from below.
“Well, and has your daughter been to see you lately?”
The porter’s daughter was a ballet dancer.
“When is she to come on week-days? They’ve their lessons to learn too.
And you’ve your lesson, sir; run along.”
On coming into the room, Seryozha, instead of sitting down to his
lessons, told his tutor of his supposition that what had been brought
him must be a machine. “What do you think?” he inquired.
But Vassily Lukitch was thinking of nothing but the necessity of
learning the grammar lesson for the teacher, who was coming at two.
“No, do just tell me, Vassily Lukitch,” he asked suddenly, when he was
seated at their work table with the book in his hands, “what is greater
than the Alexander Nevsky? You know papa’s received the Alexander
Nevsky?”
Vassily Lukitch replied that the Vladimir was greater than the
Alexander Nevsky.
“And higher still?”
“Well, highest of all is the Andrey Pervozvanny.”
“And higher than the Andrey?”
“I don’t know.”
“What, you don’t know?” and Seryozha, leaning on his elbows, sank into
deep meditation.
His meditations were of the most complex and diverse character. He
imagined his father’s having suddenly been presented with both the
Vladimir and the Andrey today, and in consequence being much better
tempered at his lesson, and dreamed how, when he was grown up, he would
himself receive all the orders, and what they might invent higher than
the Andrey. Directly any higher order were invented, he would win it.
They would make a higher one still, and he would immediately win that
too.
The time passed in such meditations, and when the teacher came, the
lesson about the adverbs of place and time and manner of action was not
ready, and the teacher was not only displeased, but hurt. This touched
Seryozha. He felt he was not to blame for not having learned the
lesson; however much he tried, he was utterly unable to do that. As
long as the teacher was explaining to him, he believed him and seemed
to comprehend, but as soon as he was left alone, he was positively
unable to recollect and to understand that the short and familiar word
“suddenly” is an adverb of manner of action. Still he was sorry that he
had disappointed the teacher.
He chose a moment when the teacher was looking in silence at the book.
“Mihail Ivanitch, when is your birthday?” he asked all, of a sudden.
“You’d much better be thinking about your work. Birthdays are of no
importance to a rational being. It’s a day like any other on which one
has to do one’s work.”
Seryozha looked intently at the teacher, at his scanty beard, at his
spectacles, which had slipped down below the ridge on his nose, and
fell into so deep a reverie that he heard nothing of what the teacher
was explaining to him. He knew that the teacher did not think what he
said; he felt it from the tone in which it was said. “But why have they
all agreed to speak just in the same manner always the dreariest and
most useless stuff? Why does he keep me off; why doesn’t he love me?”
he asked himself mournfully, and could not think of an answer.
Chapter 27
After the lesson with the grammar teacher came his father’s lesson.
While waiting for his father, Seryozha sat at the table playing with a
penknife, and fell to dreaming. Among Seryozha’s favorite occupations
was searching for his mother during his walks. He did not believe in
death generally, and in her death in particular, in spite of what Lidia
Ivanovna had told him and his father had confirmed, and it was just
because of that, and after he had been told she was dead, that he had
begun looking for her when out for a walk. Every woman of full,
graceful figure with dark hair was his mother. At the sight of such a
woman such a feeling of tenderness was stirred within him that his
breath failed him, and tears came into his eyes. And he was on the
tiptoe of expectation that she would come up to him, would lift her
veil. All her face would be visible, she would smile, she would hug
him, he would sniff her fragrance, feel the softness of her arms, and
cry with happiness, just as he had one evening lain on her lap while
she tickled him, and he laughed and bit her white, ring-covered
fingers. Later, when he accidentally learned from his old nurse that
his mother was not dead, and his father and Lidia Ivanovna had
explained to him that she was dead to him because she was wicked (which
he could not possibly believe, because he loved her), he went on
seeking her and expecting her in the same way. That day in the public
gardens there had been a lady in a lilac veil, whom he had watched with
a throbbing heart, believing it to be she as she came towards them
along the path. The lady had not come up to them, but had disappeared
somewhere. That day, more intensely than ever, Seryozha felt a rush of
love for her, and now, waiting for his father, he forgot everything,
and cut all round the edge of the table with his penknife, staring
straight before him with sparkling eyes and dreaming of her.
“Here is your papa!” said Vassily Lukitch, rousing him.
Seryozha jumped up and went up to his father, and kissing his hand,
looked at him intently, trying to discover signs of his joy at
receiving the Alexander Nevsky.
“Did you have a nice walk?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, sitting down in
his easy chair, pulling the volume of the Old Testament to him and
opening it. Although Alexey Alexandrovitch had more than once told
Seryozha that every Christian ought to know Scripture history
thoroughly, he often referred to the Bible himself during the lesson,
and Seryozha observed this.
“Yes, it was very nice indeed, papa,” said Seryozha, sitting sideways
on his chair and rocking it, which was forbidden. “I saw Nadinka”
(Nadinka was a niece of Lidia Ivanovna’s who was being brought up in
her house). “She told me you’d been given a new star. Are you glad,
papa?”
“First of all, don’t rock your chair, please,” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “And secondly, it’s not the reward that’s precious, but
the work itself. And I could have wished you understood that. If you
now are going to work, to study in order to win a reward, then the work
will seem hard to you; but when you work” (Alexey Alexandrovitch, as he
spoke, thought of how he had been sustained by a sense of duty through
the wearisome labor of the morning, consisting of signing one hundred
and eighty papers), “loving your work, you will find your reward in
it.”
Seryozha’s eyes, that had been shining with gaiety and tenderness, grew
dull and dropped before his father’s gaze. This was the same
long-familiar tone his father always took with him, and Seryozha had
learned by now to fall in with it. His father always talked to him—so
Seryozha felt—as though he were addressing some boy of his own
imagination, one of those boys that exist in books, utterly unlike
himself. And Seryozha always tried with his father to act being the
story-book boy.
“You understand that, I hope?” said his father.
“Yes, papa,” answered Seryozha, acting the part of the imaginary boy.
The lesson consisted of learning by heart several verses out of the
Gospel and the repetition of the beginning of the Old Testament. The
verses from the Gospel Seryozha knew fairly well, but at the moment
when he was saying them he became so absorbed in watching the sharply
protruding, bony knobbiness of his father’s forehead, that he lost the
thread, and he transposed the end of one verse and the beginning of
another. So it was evident to Alexey Alexandrovitch that he did not
understand what he was saying, and that irritated him.
He frowned, and began explaining what Seryozha had heard many times
before and never could remember, because he understood it too well,
just as that “suddenly” is an adverb of manner of action. Seryozha
looked with scared eyes at his father, and could think of nothing but
whether his father would make him repeat what he had said, as he
sometimes did. And this thought so alarmed Seryozha that he now
understood nothing. But his father did not make him repeat it, and
passed on to the lesson out of the Old Testament. Seryozha recounted
the events themselves well enough, but when he had to answer questions
as to what certain events prefigured, he knew nothing, though he had
already been punished over this lesson. The passage at which he was
utterly unable to say anything, and began fidgeting and cutting the
table and swinging his chair, was where he had to repeat the patriarchs
before the Flood. He did not know one of them, except Enoch, who had
been taken up alive to heaven. Last time he had remembered their names,
but now he had forgotten them utterly, chiefly because Enoch was the
personage he liked best in the whole of the Old Testament, and Enoch’s
translation to heaven was connected in his mind with a whole long train
of thought, in which he became absorbed now while he gazed with
fascinated eyes at his father’s watch-chain and a half-unbuttoned
button on his waistcoat.
In death, of which they talked to him so often, Seryozha disbelieved
entirely. He did not believe that those he loved could die, above all
that he himself would die. That was to him something utterly
inconceivable and impossible. But he had been told that all men die; he
had asked people, indeed, whom he trusted, and they too, had confirmed
it; his old nurse, too, said the same, though reluctantly. But Enoch
had not died, and so it followed that everyone did not die. “And why
cannot anyone else so serve God and be taken alive to heaven?” thought
Seryozha. Bad people, that is those Seryozha did not like, they might
die, but the good might all be like Enoch.
“Well, what are the names of the patriarchs?”
“Enoch, Enos—”
“But you have said that already. This is bad, Seryozha, very bad. If
you don’t try to learn what is more necessary than anything for a
Christian,” said his father, getting up, “whatever can interest you? I
am displeased with you, and Piotr Ignatitch” (this was the most
important of his teachers) “is displeased with you.... I shall have to
punish you.”
His father and his teacher were both displeased with Seryozha, and he
certainly did learn his lessons very badly. But still it could not be
said he was a stupid boy. On the contrary, he was far cleverer than the
boys his teacher held up as examples to Seryozha. In his father’s
opinion, he did not want to learn what he was taught. In reality he
could not learn that. He could not, because the claims of his own soul
were more binding on him than those claims his father and his teacher
made upon him. Those claims were in opposition, and he was in direct
conflict with his education. He was nine years old; he was a child; but
he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the
eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into
his soul. His teachers complained that he would not learn, while his
soul was brimming over with thirst for knowledge. And he learned from
Kapitonitch, from his nurse, from Nadinka, from Vassily Lukitch, but
not from his teachers. The spring his father and his teachers reckoned
upon to turn their mill-wheels had long dried up at the source, but its
waters did their work in another channel.
His father punished Seryozha by not letting him go to see Nadinka,
Lidia Ivanovna’s niece; but this punishment turned out happily for
Seryozha. Vassily Lukitch was in a good humor, and showed him how to
make windmills. The whole evening passed over this work and in dreaming
how to make a windmill on which he could turn himself—clutching at the
sails or tying himself on and whirling round. Of his mother Seryozha
did not think all the evening, but when he had gone to bed, he suddenly
remembered her, and prayed in his own words that his mother tomorrow
for his birthday might leave off hiding herself and come to him.
“Vassily Lukitch, do you know what I prayed for tonight extra besides
the regular things?”
“That you might learn your lessons better?”
“No.”
“Toys?”
“No. You’ll never guess. A splendid thing; but it’s a secret! When it
comes to pass I’ll tell you. Can’t you guess!”
“No, I can’t guess. You tell me,” said Vassily Lukitch with a smile,
which was rare with him. “Come, lie down, I’m putting out the candle.”
“Without the candle I can see better what I see and what I prayed for.
There! I was almost telling the secret!” said Seryozha, laughing gaily.
When the candle was taken away, Seryozha heard and felt his mother. She
stood over him, and with loving eyes caressed him. But then came
windmills, a knife, everything began to be mixed up, and he fell
asleep.
Chapter 28
On arriving in Petersburg, Vronsky and Anna stayed at one of the best
hotels; Vronsky apart in a lower story, Anna above with her child, its
nurse, and her maid, in a large suite of four rooms.
On the day of his arrival Vronsky went to his brother’s. There he found
his mother, who had come from Moscow on business. His mother and
sister-in-law greeted him as usual: they asked him about his stay
abroad, and talked of their common acquaintances, but did not let drop
a single word in allusion to his connection with Anna. His brother came
the next morning to see Vronsky, and of his own accord asked him about
her, and Alexey Vronsky told him directly that he looked upon his
connection with Madame Karenina as marriage; that he hoped to arrange a
divorce, and then to marry her, and until then he considered her as
much a wife as any other wife, and he begged him to tell their mother
and his wife so.
“If the world disapproves, I don’t care,” said Vronsky; “but if my
relations want to be on terms of relationship with me, they will have
to be on the same terms with my wife.”
The elder brother, who had always a respect for his younger brother’s
judgment, could not well tell whether he was right or not till the
world had decided the question; for his part he had nothing against it,
and with Alexey he went up to see Anna.
Before his brother, as before everyone, Vronsky addressed Anna with a
certain formality, treating her as he might a very intimate friend, but
it was understood that his brother knew their real relations, and they
talked about Anna’s going to Vronsky’s estate.
In spite of all his social experience Vronsky was, in consequence of
the new position in which he was placed, laboring under a strange
misapprehension. One would have thought he must have understood that
society was closed for him and Anna; but now some vague ideas had
sprung up in his brain that this was only the case in old-fashioned
days, and that now with the rapidity of modern progress (he had
unconsciously become by now a partisan of every sort of progress) the
views of society had changed, and that the question whether they would
be received in society was not a foregone conclusion. “Of course,” he
thought, “she would not be received at court, but intimate friends can
and must look at it in the proper light.” One may sit for several hours
at a stretch with one’s legs crossed in the same position, if one knows
that there’s nothing to prevent one’s changing one’s position; but if a
man knows that he must remain sitting so with crossed legs, then cramps
come on, the legs begin to twitch and to strain towards the spot to
which one would like to draw them. This was what Vronsky was
experiencing in regard to the world. Though at the bottom of his heart
he knew that the world was shut on them, he put it to the test whether
the world had not changed by now and would not receive them. But he
very quickly perceived that though the world was open for him
personally, it was closed for Anna. Just as in the game of cat and
mouse, the hands raised for him were dropped to bar the way for Anna.
One of the first ladies of Petersburg society whom Vronsky saw was his
cousin Betsy.
“At last!” she greeted him joyfully. “And Anna? How glad I am! Where
are you stopping? I can fancy after your delightful travels you must
find our poor Petersburg horrid. I can fancy your honeymoon in Rome.
How about the divorce? Is that all over?”
Vronsky noticed that Betsy’s enthusiasm waned when she learned that no
divorce had as yet taken place.
“People will throw stones at me, I know,” she said, “but I shall come
and see Anna; yes, I shall certainly come. You won’t be here long, I
suppose?”
And she did certainly come to see Anna the same day, but her tone was
not at all the same as in former days. She unmistakably prided herself
on her courage, and wished Anna to appreciate the fidelity of her
friendship. She only stayed ten minutes, talking of society gossip, and
on leaving she said:
“You’ve never told me when the divorce is to be? Supposing I’m ready to
fling my cap over the mill, other starchy people will give you the cold
shoulder until you’re married. And that’s so simple nowadays. _Ça se
fait_. So you’re going on Friday? Sorry we shan’t see each other
again.”
From Betsy’s tone Vronsky might have grasped what he had to expect from
the world; but he made another effort in his own family. His mother he
did not reckon upon. He knew that his mother, who had been so
enthusiastic over Anna at their first acquaintance, would have no mercy
on her now for having ruined her son’s career. But he had more hope of
Varya, his brother’s wife. He fancied she would not throw stones, and
would go simply and directly to see Anna, and would receive her in her
own house.
The day after his arrival Vronsky went to her, and finding her alone,
expressed his wishes directly.
“You know, Alexey,” she said after hearing him, “how fond I am of you,
and how ready I am to do anything for you; but I have not spoken,
because I knew I could be of no use to you and to Anna Arkadyevna,” she
said, articulating the name “Anna Arkadyevna” with particular care.
“Don’t suppose, please, that I judge her. Never; perhaps in her place I
should have done the same. I don’t and can’t enter into that,” she
said, glancing timidly at his gloomy face. “But one must call things by
their names. You want me to go and see her, to ask her here, and to
rehabilitate her in society; but do understand that _I cannot_ do so. I
have daughters growing up, and I must live in the world for my
husband’s sake. Well, I’m ready to come and see Anna Arkadyevna: she
will understand that I can’t ask her here, or I should have to do so in
such a way that she would not meet people who look at things
differently; that would offend her. I can’t raise her....”
“Oh, I don’t regard her as fallen more than hundreds of women you do
receive!” Vronsky interrupted her still more gloomily, and he got up in
silence, understanding that his sister-in-law’s decision was not to be
shaken.
“Alexey! don’t be angry with me. Please understand that I’m not to
blame,” began Varya, looking at him with a timid smile.
“I’m not angry with you,” he said still as gloomily; “but I’m sorry in
two ways. I’m sorry, too, that this means breaking up our friendship—if
not breaking up, at least weakening it. You will understand that for
me, too, it cannot be otherwise.”
And with that he left her.
Vronsky knew that further efforts were useless, and that he had to
spend these few days in Petersburg as though in a strange town,
avoiding every sort of relation with his own old circle in order not to
be exposed to the annoyances and humiliations which were so intolerable
to him. One of the most unpleasant features of his position in
Petersburg was that Alexey Alexandrovitch and his name seemed to meet
him everywhere. He could not begin to talk of anything without the
conversation turning on Alexey Alexandrovitch; he could not go anywhere
without risk of meeting him. So at least it seemed to Vronsky, just as
it seems to a man with a sore finger that he is continually, as though
on purpose, grazing his sore finger on everything.
Their stay in Petersburg was the more painful to Vronsky that he
perceived all the time a sort of new mood that he could not understand
in Anna. At one time she would seem in love with him, and then she
would become cold, irritable, and impenetrable. She was worrying over
something, and keeping something back from him, and did not seem to
notice the humiliations which poisoned his existence, and for her, with
her delicate intuition, must have been still more unbearable.
Chapter 29
One of Anna’s objects in coming back to Russia had been to see her son.
From the day she left Italy the thought of it had never ceased to
agitate her. And as she got nearer to Petersburg, the delight and
importance of this meeting grew ever greater in her imagination. She
did not even put to herself the question how to arrange it. It seemed
to her natural and simple to see her son when she should be in the same
town with him. But on her arrival in Petersburg she was suddenly made
distinctly aware of her present position in society, and she grasped
the fact that to arrange this meeting was no easy matter.
She had now been two days in Petersburg. The thought of her son never
left her for a single instant, but she had not yet seen him. To go
straight to the house, where she might meet Alexey Alexandrovitch, that
she felt she had no right to do. She might be refused admittance and
insulted. To write and so enter into relations with her husband—that it
made her miserable to think of doing; she could only be at peace when
she did not think of her husband. To get a glimpse of her son out
walking, finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for
her; she had so looked forward to this meeting, she had so much she
must say to him, she so longed to embrace him, to kiss him. Seryozha’s
old nurse might be a help to her and show her what to do. But the nurse
was not now living in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s house. In this
uncertainty, and in efforts to find the nurse, two days had slipped by.
Hearing of the close intimacy between Alexey Alexandrovitch and
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write to her
a letter, which cost her great pains, and in which she intentionally
said that permission to see her son must depend on her husband’s
generosity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her husband, he
would keep up his character of magnanimity, and would not refuse her
request.
The commissionaire who took the letter had brought her back the most
cruel and unexpected answer, that there was no answer. She had never
felt so humiliated as at the moment when, sending for the
commissionaire, she heard from him the exact account of how he had
waited, and how afterwards he had been told there was no answer. Anna
felt humiliated, insulted, but she saw that from her point of view
Countess Lidia Ivanovna was right. Her suffering was the more poignant
that she had to bear it in solitude. She could not and would not share
it with Vronsky. She knew that to him, although he was the primary
cause of her distress, the question of her seeing her son would seem a
matter of very little consequence. She knew that he would never be
capable of understanding all the depth of her suffering, that for his
cool tone at any allusion to it she would begin to hate him. And she
dreaded that more than anything in the world, and so she hid from him
everything that related to her son. Spending the whole day at home she
considered ways of seeing her son, and had reached a decision to write
to her husband. She was just composing this letter when she was handed
the letter from Lidia Ivanovna. The countess’s silence had subdued and
depressed her, but the letter, all that she read between the lines in
it, so exasperated her, this malice was so revolting beside her
passionate, legitimate tenderness for her son, that she turned against
other people and left off blaming herself.
“This coldness—this pretense of feeling!” she said to herself. “They
must needs insult me and torture the child, and I am to submit to it!
Not on any consideration! She is worse than I am. I don’t lie, anyway.”
And she decided on the spot that next day, Seryozha’s birthday, she
would go straight to her husband’s house, bribe or deceive the
servants, but at any cost see her son and overturn the hideous
deception with which they were encompassing the unhappy child.
She went to a toy shop, bought toys and thought over a plan of action.
She would go early in the morning at eight o’clock, when Alexey
Alexandrovitch would be certain not to be up. She would have money in
her hand to give the hall-porter and the footman, so that they should
let her in, and not raising her veil, she would say that she had come
from Seryozha’s godfather to congratulate him, and that she had been
charged to leave the toys at his bedside. She had prepared everything
but the words she should say to her son. Often as she had dreamed of
it, she could never think of anything.
The next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, Anna got out of a hired
sledge and rang at the front entrance of her former home.
“Run and see what’s wanted. Some lady,” said Kapitonitch, who, not yet
dressed, in his overcoat and galoshes, had peeped out of the window and
seen a lady in a veil standing close up to the door. His assistant, a
lad Anna did not know, had no sooner opened the door to her than she
came in, and pulling a three-rouble note out of her muff put it
hurriedly into his hand.
“Seryozha—Sergey Alexeitch,” she said, and was going on. Scrutinizing
the note, the porter’s assistant stopped her at the second glass door.
“Whom do you want?” he asked.
She did not hear his words and made no answer.
Noticing the embarrassment of the unknown lady, Kapitonitch went out to
her, opened the second door for her, and asked her what she was pleased
to want.
“From Prince Skorodumov for Sergey Alexeitch,” she said.
“His honor’s not up yet,” said the porter, looking at her attentively.
Anna had not anticipated that the absolutely unchanged hall of the
house where she had lived for nine years would so greatly affect her.
Memories sweet and painful rose one after another in her heart, and for
a moment she forgot what she was here for.
“Would you kindly wait?” said Kapitonitch, taking off her fur cloak.
As he took off the cloak, Kapitonitch glanced at her face, recognized
her, and made her a low bow in silence.
“Please walk in, your excellency,” he said to her.
She tried to say something, but her voice refused to utter any sound;
with a guilty and imploring glance at the old man she went with light,
swift steps up the stairs. Bent double, and his galoshes catching in
the steps, Kapitonitch ran after her, trying to overtake her.
“The tutor’s there; maybe he’s not dressed. I’ll let him know.”
Anna still mounted the familiar staircase, not understanding what the
old man was saying.
“This way, to the left, if you please. Excuse its not being tidy. His
honor’s in the old parlor now,” the hall-porter said, panting. “Excuse
me, wait a little, your excellency; I’ll just see,” he said, and
overtaking her, he opened the high door and disappeared behind it. Anna
stood still waiting. “He’s only just awake,” said the hall-porter,
coming out. And at the very instant the porter said this, Anna caught
the sound of a childish yawn. From the sound of this yawn alone she
knew her son and seemed to see him living before her eyes.
“Let me in; go away!” she said, and went in through the high doorway.
On the right of the door stood a bed, and sitting up in the bed was the
boy. His little body bent forward with his nightshirt unbuttoned, he
was stretching and still yawning. The instant his lips came together
they curved into a blissfully sleepy smile, and with that smile he
slowly and deliciously rolled back again.
“Seryozha!” she whispered, going noiselessly up to him.
When she was parted from him, and all this latter time when she had
been feeling a fresh rush of love for him, she had pictured him as he
was at four years old, when she had loved him most of all. Now he was
not even the same as when she had left him; he was still further from
the four-year-old baby, more grown and thinner. How thin his face was,
how short his hair was! What long hands! How he had changed since she
left him! But it was he with his head, his lips, his soft neck and
broad little shoulders.
“Seryozha!” she repeated just in the child’s ear.
He raised himself again on his elbow, turned his tangled head from side
to side as though looking for something, and opened his eyes. Slowly
and inquiringly he looked for several seconds at his mother standing
motionless before him, then all at once he smiled a blissful smile, and
shutting his eyes, rolled not backwards but towards her into her arms.
“Seryozha! my darling boy!” she said, breathing hard and putting her
arms round his plump little body. “Mother!” he said, wriggling about in
her arms so as to touch her hands with different parts of him.
Smiling sleepily still with closed eyes, he flung fat little arms round
her shoulders, rolled towards her, with the delicious sleepy warmth and
fragrance that is only found in children, and began rubbing his face
against her neck and shoulders.
“I know,” he said, opening his eyes; “it’s my birthday today. I knew
you’d come. I’ll get up directly.”
And saying that he dropped asleep.
Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in
her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs so long now,
that were thrust out below the quilt, those short-cropped curls on his
neck in which she had so often kissed him. She touched all this and
could say nothing; tears choked her.
“What are you crying for, mother?” he said, waking completely up.
“Mother, what are you crying for?” he cried in a tearful voice.
“I won’t cry ... I’m crying for joy. It’s so long since I’ve seen you.
I won’t, I won’t,” she said, gulping down her tears and turning away.
“Come, it’s time for you to dress now,” she added, after a pause, and,
never letting go his hands, she sat down by his bedside on the chair,
where his clothes were put ready for him.
“How do you dress without me? How....” she tried to begin talking
simply and cheerfully, but she could not, and again she turned away.
“I don’t have a cold bath, papa didn’t order it. And you’ve not seen
Vassily Lukitch? He’ll come in soon. Why, you’re sitting on my
clothes!”
And Seryozha went off into a peal of laughter. She looked at him and
smiled.
“Mother, darling, sweet one!” he shouted, flinging himself on her again
and hugging her. It was as though only now, on seeing her smile, he
fully grasped what had happened.
“I don’t want that on,” he said, taking off her hat. And as it were,
seeing her afresh without her hat, he fell to kissing her again.
“But what did you think about me? You didn’t think I was dead?”
“I never believed it.”
“You didn’t believe it, my sweet?”
“I knew, I knew!” he repeated his favorite phrase, and snatching the
hand that was stroking his hair, he pressed the open palm to his mouth
and kissed it.
Chapter 30
Meanwhile Vassily Lukitch had not at first understood who this lady
was, and had learned from their conversation that it was no other
person than the mother who had left her husband, and whom he had not
seen, as he had entered the house after her departure. He was in doubt
whether to go in or not, or whether to communicate with Alexey
Alexandrovitch. Reflecting finally that his duty was to get Seryozha up
at the hour fixed, and that it was therefore not his business to
consider who was there, the mother or anyone else, but simply to do his
duty, he finished dressing, went to the door and opened it.
But the embraces of the mother and child, the sound of their voices,
and what they were saying, made him change his mind.
He shook his head, and with a sigh he closed the door. “I’ll wait
another ten minutes,” he said to himself, clearing his throat and
wiping away tears.
Among the servants of the household there was intense excitement all
this time. All had heard that their mistress had come, and that
Kapitonitch had let her in, and that she was even now in the nursery,
and that their master always went in person to the nursery at nine
o’clock, and everyone fully comprehended that it was impossible for the
husband and wife to meet, and that they must prevent it. Korney, the
valet, going down to the hall-porter’s room, asked who had let her in,
and how it was he had done so, and ascertaining that Kapitonitch had
admitted her and shown her up, he gave the old man a talking-to. The
hall-porter was doggedly silent, but when Korney told him he ought to
be sent away, Kapitonitch darted up to him, and waving his hands in
Korney’s face, began:
“Oh yes, to be sure you’d not have let her in! After ten years’
service, and never a word but of kindness, and there you’d up and say,
‘Be off, go along, get away with you!’ Oh yes, you’re a shrewd one at
politics, I dare say! You don’t need to be taught how to swindle the
master, and to filch fur coats!”
“Soldier!” said Korney contemptuously, and he turned to the nurse who
was coming in. “Here, what do you think, Marya Efimovna: he let her in
without a word to anyone,” Korney said addressing her. “Alexey
Alexandrovitch will be down immediately—and go into the nursery!”
“A pretty business, a pretty business!” said the nurse. “You, Korney
Vassilievitch, you’d best keep him some way or other, the master, while
I’ll run and get her away somehow. A pretty business!”
When the nurse went into the nursery, Seryozha was telling his mother
how he and Nadinka had had a fall in sledging downhill, and had turned
over three times. She was listening to the sound of his voice, watching
his face and the play of expression on it, touching his hand, but she
did not follow what he was saying. She must go, she must leave
him,—this was the only thing she was thinking and feeling. She heard
the steps of Vassily Lukitch coming up to the door and coughing; she
heard, too, the steps of the nurse as she came near; but she sat like
one turned to stone, incapable of beginning to speak or to get up.
“Mistress, darling!” began the nurse, going up to Anna and kissing her
hands and shoulders. “God has brought joy indeed to our boy on his
birthday. You aren’t changed one bit.”
“Oh, nurse dear, I didn’t know you were in the house,” said Anna,
rousing herself for a moment.
“I’m not living here, I’m living with my daughter. I came for the
birthday, Anna Arkadyevna, darling!”
The nurse suddenly burst into tears, and began kissing her hand again.
Seryozha, with radiant eyes and smiles, holding his mother by one hand
and his nurse by the other, pattered on the rug with his fat little
bare feet. The tenderness shown by his beloved nurse to his mother
threw him into an ecstasy.
“Mother! She often comes to see me, and when she comes....” he was
beginning, but he stopped, noticing that the nurse was saying something
in a whisper to his mother, and that in his mother’s face there was a
look of dread and something like shame, which was so strangely
unbecoming to her.
She went up to him.
“My sweet!” she said.
She could not say _good-bye_, but the expression on her face said it,
and he understood. “Darling, darling Kootik!” she used the name by
which she had called him when he was little, “you won’t forget me?
You....” but she could not say more.
How often afterwards she thought of words she might have said. But now
she did not know how to say it, and could say nothing. But Seryozha
knew all she wanted to say to him. He understood that she was unhappy
and loved him. He understood even what the nurse had whispered. He had
caught the words “always at nine o’clock,” and he knew that this was
said of his father, and that his father and mother could not meet. That
he understood, but one thing he could not understand—why there should
be a look of dread and shame in her face?... She was not in fault, but
she was afraid of him and ashamed of something. He would have liked to
put a question that would have set at rest this doubt, but he did not
dare; he saw that she was miserable, and he felt for her. Silently he
pressed close to her and whispered, “Don’t go yet. He won’t come just
yet.”
The mother held him away from her to see what he was thinking, what to
say to him, and in his frightened face she read not only that he was
speaking of his father, but, as it were, asking her what he ought to
think about his father.
“Seryozha, my darling,” she said, “love him; he’s better and kinder
than I am, and I have done him wrong. When you grow up you will judge.”
“There’s no one better than you!...” he cried in despair through his
tears, and, clutching her by the shoulders, he began squeezing her with
all his force to him, his arms trembling with the strain.
“My sweet, my little one!” said Anna, and she cried as weakly and
childishly as he.
At that moment the door opened. Vassily Lukitch came in.
At the other door there was the sound of steps, and the nurse in a
scared whisper said, “He’s coming,” and gave Anna her hat.
Seryozha sank onto the bed and sobbed, hiding his face in his hands.
Anna removed his hands, once more kissed his wet face, and with rapid
steps went to the door. Alexey Alexandrovitch walked in, meeting her.
Seeing her, he stopped short and bowed his head.
Although she had just said he was better and kinder than she, in the
rapid glance she flung at him, taking in his whole figure in all its
details, feelings of repulsion and hatred for him and jealousy over her
son took possession of her. With a swift gesture she put down her veil,
and, quickening her pace, almost ran out of the room.
She had not time to undo, and so carried back with her, the parcel of
toys she had chosen the day before in a toy shop with such love and
sorrow.
Chapter 31
As intensely as Anna had longed to see her son, and long as she had
been thinking of it and preparing herself for it, she had not in the
least expected that seeing him would affect her so deeply. On getting
back to her lonely rooms in the hotel she could not for a long while
understand why she was there. “Yes, it’s all over, and I am again
alone,” she said to herself, and without taking off her hat she sat
down in a low chair by the hearth. Fixing her eyes on a bronze clock
standing on a table between the windows, she tried to think.
The French maid brought from abroad came in to suggest she should
dress. She gazed at her wonderingly and said, “Presently.” A footman
offered her coffee. “Later on,” she said.
The Italian nurse, after having taken the baby out in her best, came in
with her, and brought her to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on
seeing her mother, as she always did, held out her fat little hands,
and with a smile on her toothless mouth, began, like a fish with a
float, bobbing her fingers up and down the starched folds of her
embroidered skirt, making them rustle. It was impossible not to smile,
not to kiss the baby, impossible not to hold out a finger for her to
clutch, crowing and prancing all over; impossible not to offer her a
lip which she sucked into her little mouth by way of a kiss. And all
this Anna did, and took her in her arms and made her dance, and kissed
her fresh little cheek and bare little elbows; but at the sight of this
child it was plainer than ever to her that the feeling she had for her
could not be called love in comparison with what she felt for Seryozha.
Everything in this baby was charming, but for some reason all this did
not go deep to her heart. On her first child, though the child of an
unloved father, had been concentrated all the love that had never found
satisfaction. Her baby girl had been born in the most painful
circumstances and had not had a hundredth part of the care and thought
which had been concentrated on her first child. Besides, in the little
girl everything was still in the future, while Seryozha was by now
almost a personality, and a personality dearly loved. In him there was
a conflict of thought and feeling; he understood her, he loved her, he
judged her, she thought, recalling his words and his eyes. And she was
forever—not physically only but spiritually—divided from him, and it
was impossible to set this right.
She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the locket
in which there was Seryozha’s portrait when he was almost of the same
age as the girl. She got up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a
little table an album in which there were photographs of her son at
different ages. She wanted to compare them, and began taking them out
of the album. She took them all out except one, the latest and best
photograph. In it he was in a white smock, sitting astride a chair,
with frowning eyes and smiling lips. It was his best, most
characteristic expression. With her little supple hands, her white,
delicate fingers, that moved with a peculiar intensity today, she
pulled at a corner of the photograph, but the photograph had caught
somewhere, and she could not get it out. There was no paper-knife on
the table, and so, pulling out the photograph that was next to her
son’s (it was a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and
with long hair), she used it to push out her son’s photograph. “Oh,
here is he!” she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and she
suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present misery. She had
not once thought of him all the morning. But now, coming all at once
upon that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a
sudden rush of love for him.
“But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?” she
thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting she had
herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She sent to ask
him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited him,
rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him all, and
the expressions of love with which he would console her. The messenger
returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he
would come immediately, and that he asked whether she would let him
bring with him Prince Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg.
“He’s not coming alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me,”
she thought; “he’s not coming so that I could tell him everything, but
coming with Yashvin.” And all at once a strange idea came to her: what
if he had ceased to love her?
And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her that
she saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea. The fact
that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact that he had
insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms in Petersburg, and that
even now he was not coming to her alone, as though he were trying to
avoid meeting her face to face.
“But he ought to tell me so. I must know that it is so. If I knew it,
then I know what I should do,” she said to herself, utterly unable to
picture to herself the position she would be in if she were convinced
of his not caring for her. She thought he had ceased to love her, she
felt close upon despair, and consequently she felt exceptionally alert.
She rang for her maid and went to her dressing-room. As she dressed,
she took more care over her appearance than she had done all those
days, as though he might, if he had grown cold to her, fall in love
with her again because she had dressed and arranged her hair in the way
most becoming to her.
She heard the bell ring before she was ready. When she went into the
drawing-room it was not he, but Yashvin, who met her eyes. Vronsky was
looking through the photographs of her son, which she had forgotten on
the table, and he made no haste to look round at her.
“We have met already,” she said, putting her little hand into the huge
hand of Yashvin, whose bashfulness was so queerly out of keeping with
his immense frame and coarse face. “We met last year at the races. Give
them to me,” she said, with a rapid movement snatching from Vronsky the
photographs of her son, and glancing significantly at him with flashing
eyes. “Were the races good this year? Instead of them I saw the races
in the Corso in Rome. But you don’t care for life abroad,” she said
with a cordial smile. “I know you and all your tastes, though I have
seen so little of you.”
“I’m awfully sorry for that, for my tastes are mostly bad,” said
Yashvin, gnawing at his left mustache.
Having talked a little while, and noticing that Vronsky glanced at the
clock, Yashvin asked her whether she would be staying much longer in
Petersburg, and unbending his huge figure reached after his cap.
“Not long, I think,” she said hesitatingly, glancing at Vronsky.
“So then we shan’t meet again?”
“Come and dine with me,” said Anna resolutely, angry it seemed with
herself for her embarrassment, but flushing as she always did when she
defined her position before a fresh person. “The dinner here is not
good, but at least you will see him. There is no one of his old friends
in the regiment Alexey cares for as he does for you.”
“Delighted,” said Yashvin with a smile, from which Vronsky could see
that he liked Anna very much.
Yashvin said good-bye and went away; Vronsky stayed behind.
“Are you going too?” she said to him.
“I’m late already,” he answered. “Run along! I’ll catch you up in a
moment,” he called to Yashvin.
She took him by the hand, and without taking her eyes off him, gazed at
him while she ransacked her mind for the words to say that would keep
him.
“Wait a minute, there’s something I want to say to you,” and taking his
broad hand she pressed it on her neck. “Oh, was it right my asking him
to dinner?”
“You did quite right,” he said with a serene smile that showed his even
teeth, and he kissed her hand.
“Alexey, you have not changed to me?” she said, pressing his hand in
both of hers. “Alexey, I am miserable here. When are we going away?”
“Soon, soon. You wouldn’t believe how disagreeable our way of living
here is to me too,” he said, and he drew away his hand.
“Well, go, go!” she said in a tone of offense, and she walked quickly
away from him.
Chapter 32
When Vronsky returned home, Anna was not yet home. Soon after he had
left, some lady, so they told him, had come to see her, and she had
gone out with her. That she had gone out without leaving word where she
was going, that she had not yet come back, and that all the morning she
had been going about somewhere without a word to him—all this, together
with the strange look of excitement in her face in the morning, and the
recollection of the hostile tone with which she had before Yashvin
almost snatched her son’s photographs out of his hands, made him
serious. He decided he absolutely must speak openly with her. And he
waited for her in her drawing-room. But Anna did not return alone, but
brought with her her old unmarried aunt, Princess Oblonskaya. This was
the lady who had come in the morning, and with whom Anna had gone out
shopping. Anna appeared not to notice Vronsky’s worried and inquiring
expression, and began a lively account of her morning’s shopping. He
saw that there was something working within her; in her flashing eyes,
when they rested for a moment on him, there was an intense
concentration, and in her words and movements there was that nervous
rapidity and grace which, during the early period of their intimacy,
had so fascinated him, but which now so disturbed and alarmed him.
The dinner was laid for four. All were gathered together and about to
go into the little dining-room when Tushkevitch made his appearance
with a message from Princess Betsy. Princess Betsy begged her to excuse
her not having come to say good-bye; she had been indisposed, but
begged Anna to come to her between half-past six and nine o’clock.
Vronsky glanced at Anna at the precise limit of time, so suggestive of
steps having been taken that she should meet no one; but Anna appeared
not to notice it.
“Very sorry that I can’t come just between half-past six and nine,” she
said with a faint smile.
“The princess will be very sorry.”
“And so am I.”
“You’re going, no doubt, to hear Patti?” said Tushkevitch.
“Patti? You suggest the idea to me. I would go if it were possible to
get a box.”
“I can get one,” Tushkevitch offered his services.
“I should be very, very grateful to you,” said Anna. “But won’t you
dine with us?”
Vronsky gave a hardly perceptible shrug. He was at a complete loss to
understand what Anna was about. What had she brought the old Princess
Oblonskaya home for, what had she made Tushkevitch stay to dinner for,
and, most amazing of all, why was she sending him for a box? Could she
possibly think in her position of going to Patti’s benefit, where all
the circle of her acquaintances would be? He looked at her with serious
eyes, but she responded with that defiant, half-mirthful,
half-desperate look, the meaning of which he could not comprehend. At
dinner Anna was in aggressively high spirits—she almost flirted both
with Tushkevitch and with Yashvin. When they got up from dinner and
Tushkevitch had gone to get a box at the opera, Yashvin went to smoke,
and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms. After sitting there
for some time he ran upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a low-necked
gown of light silk and velvet that she had had made in Paris, and with
costly white lace on her head, framing her face, and particularly
becoming, showing up her dazzling beauty.
“Are you really going to the theater?” he said, trying not to look at
her.
“Why do you ask with such alarm?” she said, wounded again at his not
looking at her. “Why shouldn’t I go?”
She appeared not to understand the motive of his words.
“Oh, of course, there’s no reason whatever,” he said, frowning.
“That’s just what I say,” she said, willfully refusing to see the irony
of his tone, and quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove.
“Anna, for God’s sake! what is the matter with you?” he said, appealing
to her exactly as once her husband had done.
“I don’t understand what you are asking.”
“You know that it’s out of the question to go.”
“Why so? I’m not going alone. Princess Varvara has gone to dress, she
is going with me.”
He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair.
“But do you mean to say you don’t know?...” he began.
“But I don’t care to know!” she almost shrieked. “I don’t care to. Do I
regret what I have done? No, no, no! If it were all to do again from
the beginning, it would be the same. For us, for you and for me, there
is only one thing that matters, whether we love each other. Other
people we need not consider. Why are we living here apart and not
seeing each other? Why can’t I go? I love you, and I don’t care for
anything,” she said in Russian, glancing at him with a peculiar gleam
in her eyes that he could not understand. “If you have not changed to
me, why don’t you look at me?”
He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face and full dress,
always so becoming to her. But now her beauty and elegance were just
what irritated him.
“My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat you,” he
said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in his voice,
but with coldness in his eyes.
She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eyes, and
answered with irritation:
“And I beg you to explain why I should not go.”
“Because it might cause you....” he hesitated.
“I don’t understand. Yashvin _n’est pas compromettant_, and Princess
Varvara is no worse than others. Oh, here she is!”
Chapter 33
Vronsky for the first time experienced a feeling of anger against Anna,
almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own
position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her
plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly what he was
thinking, he would have said:
“In that dress, with a princess only too well known to everyone, to
show yourself at the theater is equivalent not merely to acknowledging
your position as a fallen woman, but is flinging down a challenge to
society, that is to say, cutting yourself off from it forever.”
He could not say that to her. “But how can she fail to see it, and what
is going on in her?” he said to himself. He felt at the same time that
his respect for her was diminished while his sense of her beauty was
intensified.
He went back scowling to his rooms, and sitting down beside Yashvin,
who, with his long legs stretched out on a chair, was drinking brandy
and seltzer water, he ordered a glass of the same for himself.
“You were talking of Lankovsky’s Powerful. That’s a fine horse, and I
would advise you to buy him,” said Yashvin, glancing at his comrade’s
gloomy face. “His hind-quarters aren’t quite first-rate, but the legs
and head—one couldn’t wish for anything better.”
“I think I will take him,” answered Vronsky.
Their conversation about horses interested him, but he did not for an
instant forget Anna, and could not help listening to the sound of steps
in the corridor and looking at the clock on the chimney piece.
“Anna Arkadyevna gave orders to announce that she has gone to the
theater.”
Yashvin, tipping another glass of brandy into the bubbling water, drank
it and got up, buttoning his coat.
“Well, let’s go,” he said, faintly smiling under his mustache, and
showing by this smile that he knew the cause of Vronsky’s gloominess,
and did not attach any significance to it.
“I’m not going,” Vronsky answered gloomily.
“Well, I must, I promised to. Good-bye, then. If you do, come to the
stalls; you can take Kruzin’s stall,” added Yashvin as he went out.
“No, I’m busy.”
“A wife is a care, but it’s worse when she’s not a wife,” thought
Yashvin, as he walked out of the hotel.
Vronsky, left alone, got up from his chair and began pacing up and down
the room.
“And what’s today? The fourth night.... Yegor and his wife are there,
and my mother, most likely. Of course all Petersburg’s there. Now she’s
gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the light. Tushkevitch,
Yashvin, Princess Varvara,” he pictured them to himself.... “What about
me? Either that I’m frightened or have given up to Tushkevitch the
right to protect her? From every point of view—stupid, stupid!... And
why is she putting me in such a position?” he said with a gesture of
despair.
With that gesture he knocked against the table, on which there was
standing the seltzer water and the decanter of brandy, and almost upset
it. He tried to catch it, let it slip, and angrily kicked the table
over and rang.
“If you care to be in my service,” he said to the valet who came in,
“you had better remember your duties. This shouldn’t be here. You ought
to have cleared away.”
The valet, conscious of his own innocence, would have defended himself,
but glancing at his master, he saw from his face that the only thing to
do was to be silent, and hurriedly threading his way in and out,
dropped down on the carpet and began gathering up the whole and broken
glasses and bottles.
“That’s not your duty; send the waiter to clear away, and get my dress
coat out.”
Vronsky went into the theater at half-past eight. The performance was
in full swing. The little old box-keeper, recognizing Vronsky as he
helped him off with his fur coat, called him “Your Excellency,” and
suggested he should not take a number but should simply call Fyodor. In
the brightly lighted corridor there was no one but the box-opener and
two attendants with fur cloaks on their arms listening at the doors.
Through the closed doors came the sounds of the discreet _staccato_
accompaniment of the orchestra, and a single female voice rendering
distinctly a musical phrase. The door opened to let the box-opener slip
through, and the phrase drawing to the end reached Vronsky’s hearing
clearly. But the doors were closed again at once, and Vronsky did not
hear the end of the phrase and the cadence of the accompaniment, though
he knew from the thunder of applause that it was over. When he entered
the hall, brilliantly lighted with chandeliers and gas jets, the noise
was still going on. On the stage the singer, bowing and smiling, with
bare shoulders flashing with diamonds, was, with the help of the tenor
who had given her his arm, gathering up the bouquets that were flying
awkwardly over the footlights. Then she went up to a gentleman with
glossy pomaded hair parted down the center, who was stretching across
the footlights holding out something to her, and all the public in the
stalls as well as in the boxes was in excitement, craning forward,
shouting and clapping. The conductor in his high chair assisted in
passing the offering, and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked
into the middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about
him. That day less than ever was his attention turned upon the
familiar, habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the
familiar, uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in the packed
theater.
There were, as always, the same ladies of some sort with officers of
some sort in the back of the boxes; the same gaily dressed women—God
knows who—and uniforms and black coats; the same dirty crowd in the
upper gallery; and among the crowd, in the boxes and in the front rows,
were some forty of the _real_ people. And to those oases Vronsky at
once directed his attention, and with them he entered at once into
relation.
The act was over when he went in, and so he did not go straight to his
brother’s box, but going up to the first row of stalls stopped at the
footlights with Serpuhovskoy, who, standing with one knee raised and
his heel on the footlights, caught sight of him in the distance and
beckoned to him, smiling.
Vronsky had not yet seen Anna. He purposely avoided looking in her
direction. But he knew by the direction of people’s eyes where she was.
He looked round discreetly, but he was not seeking her; expecting the
worst, his eyes sought for Alexey Alexandrovitch. To his relief Alexey
Alexandrovitch was not in the theater that evening.
“How little of the military man there is left in you!” Serpuhovskoy was
saying to him. “A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort, one
would say.”
“Yes, it was like going back home when I put on a black coat,” answered
Vronsky, smiling and slowly taking out his opera-glass.
“Well, I’ll own I envy you there. When I come back from abroad and put
on this,” he touched his epaulets, “I regret my freedom.”
Serpuhovskoy had long given up all hope of Vronsky’s career, but he
liked him as before, and was now particularly cordial to him.
“What a pity you were not in time for the first act!”
Vronsky, listening with one ear, moved his opera-glass from the stalls
and scanned the boxes. Near a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who
seemed to wave angrily in the moving opera-glass, Vronsky suddenly
caught sight of Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, and smiling
in the frame of lace. She was in the fifth box, twenty paces from him.
She was sitting in front, and slightly turning, was saying something to
Yashvin. The setting of her head on her handsome, broad shoulders, and
the restrained excitement and brilliance of her eyes and her whole face
reminded him of her just as he had seen her at the ball in Moscow. But
he felt utterly different towards her beauty now. In his feeling for
her now there was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it
attracted him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of
injury. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she
had seen him already.
When Vronsky turned the opera-glass again in that direction, he noticed
that Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept laughing
unnaturally and looking round at the next box. Anna, folding her fan
and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and
obviously did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box.
Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common when he was losing
at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left end of his mustache further and
further into his mouth, and cast sidelong glances at the next box.
In that box on the left were the Kartasovs. Vronsky knew them, and knew
that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartasova, a thin little
woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon Anna, she
was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for her. Her face
was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly. Kartasov, a fat,
bald man, was continually looking round at Anna, while he attempted to
soothe his wife. When the wife had gone out, the husband lingered a
long while, and tried to catch Anna’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to
her. But Anna, with unmistakable intention, avoided noticing him, and
talked to Yashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her. Kartasov
went out without making his salutation, and the box was left empty.
Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the
Kartasovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna had
happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all from
the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to carry
through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this attitude of
external composure she was completely successful. Anyone who did not
know her and her circle, who had not heard all the utterances of the
women expressive of commiseration, indignation, and amazement, that she
should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with
her lace and her beauty, would have admired the serenity and loveliness
of this woman without a suspicion that she was undergoing the
sensations of a man in the stocks.
Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what,
Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out
something, he went towards his brother’s box. Purposely choosing the
way round furthest from Anna’s box, he jostled as he came out against
the colonel of his old regiment talking to two acquaintances. Vronsky
heard the name of Madame Karenina, and noticed how the colonel hastened
to address Vronsky loudly by name, with a meaning glance at his
companions.
“Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can’t let you off
without a supper. You’re one of the old set,” said the colonel of his
regiment.
“I can’t stop, awfully sorry, another time,” said Vronsky, and he ran
upstairs towards his brother’s box.
The old countess, Vronsky’s mother, with her steel-gray curls, was in
his brother’s box. Varya with the young Princess Sorokina met him in
the corridor.
Leaving the Princess Sorokina with her mother, Varya held out her hand
to her brother-in-law, and began immediately to speak of what
interested him. She was more excited than he had ever seen her.
“I think it’s mean and hateful, and Madame Kartasova had no right to do
it. Madame Karenina....” she began.
“But what is it? I don’t know.”
“What? you’ve not heard?”
“You know I should be the last person to hear of it.”
“There isn’t a more spiteful creature than that Madame Kartasova!”
“But what did she do?”
“My husband told me.... She has insulted Madame Karenina. Her husband
began talking to her across the box, and Madame Kartasova made a scene.
She said something aloud, he says, something insulting, and went away.”
“Count, your maman is asking for you,” said the young Princess
Sorokina, peeping out of the door of the box.
“I’ve been expecting you all the while,” said his mother, smiling
sarcastically. “You were nowhere to be seen.”
Her son saw that she could not suppress a smile of delight.
“Good evening, maman. I have come to you,” he said coldly.
“Why aren’t you going to _faire la cour à Madame Karenina?_” she went
on, when Princess Sorokina had moved away. “_Elle fait sensation. On
oublie la Patti pour elle_.”
“Maman, I have asked you not to say anything to me of that,” he
answered, scowling.
“I’m only saying what everyone’s saying.”
Vronsky made no reply, and saying a few words to Princess Sorokina, he
went away. At the door he met his brother.
“Ah, Alexey!” said his brother. “How disgusting! Idiot of a woman,
nothing else.... I wanted to go straight to her. Let’s go together.”
Vronsky did not hear him. With rapid steps he went downstairs; he felt
that he must do something, but he did not know what. Anger with her for
having put herself and him in such a false position, together with pity
for her suffering, filled his heart. He went down, and made straight
for Anna’s box. At her box stood Stremov, talking to her.
“There are no more tenors. _Le moule en est brisé!_”
Vronsky bowed to her and stopped to greet Stremov.
“You came in late, I think, and have missed the best song,” Anna said
to Vronsky, glancing ironically, he thought, at him.
“I am a poor judge of music,” he said, looking sternly at her.
“Like Prince Yashvin,” she said smiling, “who considers that Patti
sings too loud.”
“Thank you,” she said, her little hand in its long glove taking the
playbill Vronsky picked up, and suddenly at that instant her lovely
face quivered. She got up and went into the interior of the box.
Noticing in the next act that her box was empty, Vronsky, rousing
indignant “hushes” in the silent audience, went out in the middle of a
solo and drove home.
Anna was already at home. When Vronsky went up to her, she was in the
same dress as she had worn at the theater. She was sitting in the first
armchair against the wall, looking straight before her. She looked at
him, and at once resumed her former position.
“Anna,” he said.
“You, you are to blame for everything!” she cried, with tears of
despair and hatred in her voice, getting up.
“I begged, I implored you not to go, I knew it would be unpleasant....”
“Unpleasant!” she cried—“hideous! As long as I live I shall never
forget it. She said it was a disgrace to sit beside me.”
“A silly woman’s chatter,” he said: “but why risk it, why provoke?...”
“I hate your calm. You ought not to have brought me to this. If you had
loved me....”
“Anna! How does the question of my love come in?”
“Oh, if you loved me, as I love, if you were tortured as I am!...” she
said, looking at him with an expression of terror.
He was sorry for her, and angry notwithstanding. He assured her of his
love because he saw that this was the only means of soothing her, and
he did not reproach her in words, but in his heart he reproached her.
And the asseverations of his love, which seemed to him so vulgar that
he was ashamed to utter them, she drank in eagerly, and gradually
became calmer. The next day, completely reconciled, they left for the
country.
PART SIX
Chapter 1
Darya Alexandrovna spent the summer with her children at Pokrovskoe, at
her sister Kitty Levin’s. The house on her own estate was quite in
ruins, and Levin and his wife had persuaded her to spend the summer
with them. Stepan Arkadyevitch greatly approved of the arrangement. He
said he was very sorry his official duties prevented him from spending
the summer in the country with his family, which would have been the
greatest happiness for him; and remaining in Moscow, he came down to
the country from time to time for a day or two. Besides the Oblonskys,
with all their children and their governess, the old princess too came
to stay that summer with the Levins, as she considered it her duty to
watch over her inexperienced daughter in her _interesting condition_.
Moreover, Varenka, Kitty’s friend abroad, kept her promise to come to
Kitty when she was married, and stayed with her friend. All of these
were friends or relations of Levin’s wife. And though he liked them
all, he rather regretted his own Levin world and ways, which was
smothered by this influx of the “Shtcherbatsky element,” as he called
it to himself. Of his own relations there stayed with him only Sergey
Ivanovitch, but he too was a man of the Koznishev and not the Levin
stamp, so that the Levin spirit was utterly obliterated.
In the Levins’ house, so long deserted, there were now so many people
that almost all the rooms were occupied, and almost every day it
happened that the old princess, sitting down to table, counted them all
over, and put the thirteenth grandson or granddaughter at a separate
table. And Kitty, with her careful housekeeping, had no little trouble
to get all the chickens, turkeys, and geese, of which so many were
needed to satisfy the summer appetites of the visitors and children.
The whole family were sitting at dinner. Dolly’s children, with their
governess and Varenka, were making plans for going to look for
mushrooms. Sergey Ivanovitch, who was looked up to by all the party for
his intellect and learning, with a respect that almost amounted to awe,
surprised everyone by joining in the conversation about mushrooms.
“Take me with you. I am very fond of picking mushrooms,” he said,
looking at Varenka; “I think it’s a very nice occupation.”
“Oh, we shall be delighted,” answered Varenka, coloring a little. Kitty
exchanged meaningful glances with Dolly. The proposal of the learned
and intellectual Sergey Ivanovitch to go looking for mushrooms with
Varenka confirmed certain theories of Kitty’s with which her mind had
been very busy of late. She made haste to address some remark to her
mother, so that her look should not be noticed. After dinner Sergey
Ivanovitch sat with his cup of coffee at the drawing-room window, and
while he took part in a conversation he had begun with his brother, he
watched the door through which the children would start on the
mushroom-picking expedition. Levin was sitting in the window near his
brother.
Kitty stood beside her husband, evidently awaiting the end of a
conversation that had no interest for her, in order to tell him
something.
“You have changed in many respects since your marriage, and for the
better,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, smiling to Kitty, and obviously little
interested in the conversation, “but you have remained true to your
passion for defending the most paradoxical theories.”
“Katya, it’s not good for you to stand,” her husband said to her,
putting a chair for her and looking significantly at her.
“Oh, and there’s no time either,” added Sergey Ivanovitch, seeing the
children running out.
At the head of them all Tanya galloped sideways, in her tightly-drawn
stockings, and waving a basket and Sergey Ivanovitch’s hat, she ran
straight up to him.
Boldly running up to Sergey Ivanovitch with shining eyes, so like her
father’s fine eyes, she handed him his hat and made as though she would
put it on for him, softening her freedom by a shy and friendly smile.
“Varenka’s waiting,” she said, carefully putting his hat on, seeing
from Sergey Ivanovitch’s smile that she might do so.
Varenka was standing at the door, dressed in a yellow print gown, with
a white kerchief on her head.
“I’m coming, I’m coming, Varvara Andreevna,” said Sergey Ivanovitch,
finishing his cup of coffee, and putting into their separate pockets
his handkerchief and cigar-case.
“And how sweet my Varenka is! eh?” said Kitty to her husband, as soon
as Sergey Ivanovitch rose. She spoke so that Sergey Ivanovitch could
hear, and it was clear that she meant him to do so. “And how
good-looking she is—such a refined beauty! Varenka!” Kitty shouted.
“Shall you be in the mill copse? We’ll come out to you.”
“You certainly forget your condition, Kitty,” said the old princess,
hurriedly coming out at the door. “You mustn’t shout like that.”
Varenka, hearing Kitty’s voice and her mother’s reprimand, went with
light, rapid steps up to Kitty. The rapidity of her movement, her
flushed and eager face, everything betrayed that something out of the
common was going on in her. Kitty knew what this was, and had been
watching her intently. She called Varenka at that moment merely in
order mentally to give her a blessing for the important event which, as
Kitty fancied, was bound to come to pass that day after dinner in the
wood.
“Varenka, I should be very happy if a certain something were to
happen,” she whispered as she kissed her.
“And are you coming with us?” Varenka said to Levin in confusion,
pretending not to have heard what had been said.
“I am coming, but only as far as the threshing-floor, and there I shall
stop.”
“Why, what do you want there?” said Kitty.
“I must go to have a look at the new wagons, and to check the invoice,”
said Levin; “and where will you be?”
“On the terrace.”
Chapter 2
On the terrace were assembled all the ladies of the party. They always
liked sitting there after dinner, and that day they had work to do
there too. Besides the sewing and knitting of baby clothes, with which
all of them were busy, that afternoon jam was being made on the terrace
by a method new to Agafea Mihalovna, without the addition of water.
Kitty had introduced this new method, which had been in use in her
home. Agafea Mihalovna, to whom the task of jam-making had always been
intrusted, considering that what had been done in the Levin household
could not be amiss, had nevertheless put water with the strawberries,
maintaining that the jam could not be made without it. She had been
caught in the act, and was now making jam before everyone, and it was
to be proved to her conclusively that jam could be very well made
without water.
Agafea Mihalovna, her face heated and angry, her hair untidy, and her
thin arms bare to the elbows, was turning the preserving-pan over the
charcoal stove, looking darkly at the raspberries and devoutly hoping
they would stick and not cook properly. The princess, conscious that
Agafea Mihalovna’s wrath must be chiefly directed against her, as the
person responsible for the raspberry jam-making, tried to appear to be
absorbed in other things and not interested in the jam, talked of other
matters, but cast stealthy glances in the direction of the stove.
“I always buy my maids’ dresses myself, of some cheap material,” the
princess said, continuing the previous conversation. “Isn’t it time to
skim it, my dear?” she added, addressing Agafea Mihalovna. “There’s not
the slightest need for you to do it, and it’s hot for you,” she said,
stopping Kitty.
“I’ll do it,” said Dolly, and getting up, she carefully passed the
spoon over the frothing sugar, and from time to time shook off the
clinging jam from the spoon by knocking it on a plate that was covered
with yellow-red scum and blood-colored syrup. “How they’ll enjoy this
at tea-time!” she thought of her children, remembering how she herself
as a child had wondered how it was the grown-up people did not eat what
was best of all—the scum of the jam.
“Stiva says it’s much better to give money.” Dolly took up meanwhile
the weighty subject under discussion, what presents should be made to
servants. “But....”
“Money’s out of the question!” the princess and Kitty exclaimed with
one voice. “They appreciate a present....”
“Well, last year, for instance, I bought our Matrona Semyenovna, not a
poplin, but something of that sort,” said the princess.
“I remember she was wearing it on your nameday.”
“A charming pattern—so simple and refined,—I should have liked it
myself, if she hadn’t had it. Something like Varenka’s. So pretty and
inexpensive.”
“Well, now I think it’s done,” said Dolly, dropping the syrup from the
spoon.
“When it sets as it drops, it’s ready. Cook it a little longer, Agafea
Mihalovna.”
“The flies!” said Agafea Mihalovna angrily. “It’ll be just the same,”
she added.
“Ah! how sweet it is! don’t frighten it!” Kitty said suddenly, looking
at a sparrow that had settled on the step and was pecking at the center
of a raspberry.
“Yes, but you keep a little further from the stove,” said her mother.
“_À propos de Varenka_,” said Kitty, speaking in French, as they had
been doing all the while, so that Agafea Mihalovna should not
understand them, “you know, mamma, I somehow expect things to be
settled today. You know what I mean. How splendid it would be!”
“But what a famous matchmaker she is!” said Dolly. “How carefully and
cleverly she throws them together!...”
“No; tell me, mamma, what do you think?”
“Why, what is one to think? He” (_he_ meant Sergey Ivanovitch) “might
at any time have been a match for anyone in Russia; now, of course,
he’s not quite a young man, still I know ever so many girls would be
glad to marry him even now.... She’s a very nice girl, but he
might....”
“Oh, no, mamma, do understand why, for him and for her too, nothing
better could be imagined. In the first place, she’s charming!” said
Kitty, crooking one of her fingers.
“He thinks her very attractive, that’s certain,” assented Dolly.
“Then he occupies such a position in society that he has no need to
look for either fortune or position in his wife. All he needs is a
good, sweet wife—a restful one.”
“Well, with her he would certainly be restful,” Dolly assented.
“Thirdly, that she should love him. And so it is ... that is, it would
be so splendid!... I look forward to seeing them coming out of the
forest—and everything settled. I shall see at once by their eyes. I
should be so delighted! What do you think, Dolly?”
“But don’t excite yourself. It’s not at all the thing for you to be
excited,” said her mother.
“Oh, I’m not excited, mamma. I fancy he will make her an offer today.”
“Ah, that’s so strange, how and when a man makes an offer!... There is
a sort of barrier, and all at once it’s broken down,” said Dolly,
smiling pensively and recalling her past with Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Mamma, how did papa make you an offer?” Kitty asked suddenly.
“There was nothing out of the way, it was very simple,” answered the
princess, but her face beamed all over at the recollection.
“Oh, but how was it? You loved him, anyway, before you were allowed to
speak?”
Kitty felt a peculiar pleasure in being able now to talk to her mother
on equal terms about those questions of such paramount interest in a
woman’s life.
“Of course I did; he had come to stay with us in the country.”
“But how was it settled between you, mamma?”
“You imagine, I dare say, that you invented something quite new? It’s
always just the same: it was settled by the eyes, by smiles....”
“How nicely you said that, mamma! It’s just by the eyes, by smiles that
it’s done,” Dolly assented.
“But what words did he say?”
“What did Kostya say to you?”
“He wrote it in chalk. It was wonderful.... How long ago it seems!” she
said.
And the three women all fell to musing on the same thing. Kitty was the
first to break the silence. She remembered all that last winter before
her marriage, and her passion for Vronsky.
“There’s one thing ... that old love affair of Varenka’s,” she said, a
natural chain of ideas bringing her to this point. “I should have liked
to say something to Sergey Ivanovitch, to prepare him. They’re all—all
men, I mean,” she added, “awfully jealous over our past.”
“Not all,” said Dolly. “You judge by your own husband. It makes him
miserable even now to remember Vronsky. Eh? that’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Kitty answered, a pensive smile in her eyes.
“But I really don’t know,” the mother put in in defense of her motherly
care of her daughter, “what there was in your past that could worry
him? That Vronsky paid you attentions—that happens to every girl.”
“Oh, yes, but we didn’t mean that,” Kitty said, flushing a little.
“No, let me speak,” her mother went on, “why, you yourself would not
let me have a talk to Vronsky. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, mamma!” said Kitty, with an expression of suffering.
“There’s no keeping you young people in check nowadays.... Your
friendship could not have gone beyond what was suitable. I should
myself have called upon him to explain himself. But, my darling, it’s
not right for you to be agitated. Please remember that, and calm
yourself.”
“I’m perfectly calm, maman.”
“How happy it was for Kitty that Anna came then,” said Dolly, “and how
unhappy for her. It turned out quite the opposite,” she said, struck by
her own ideas. “Then Anna was so happy, and Kitty thought herself
unhappy. Now it is just the opposite. I often think of her.”
“A nice person to think about! Horrid, repulsive woman—no heart,” said
her mother, who could not forget that Kitty had married not Vronsky,
but Levin.
“What do you want to talk of it for?” Kitty said with annoyance. “I
never think about it, and I don’t want to think of it.... And I don’t
want to think of it,” she said, catching the sound of her husband’s
well-known step on the steps of the terrace.
“What’s that you don’t want to think about?” inquired Levin, coming
onto the terrace.
But no one answered him, and he did not repeat the question.
“I’m sorry I’ve broken in on your feminine parliament,” he said,
looking round on everyone discontentedly, and perceiving that they had
been talking of something which they would not talk about before him.
For a second he felt that he was sharing the feeling of Agafea
Mihalovna, vexation at their making jam without water, and altogether
at the outside Shtcherbatsky element. He smiled, however, and went up
to Kitty.
“Well, how are you?” he asked her, looking at her with the expression
with which everyone looked at her now.
“Oh, very well,” said Kitty, smiling, “and how have things gone with
you?”
“The wagons held three times as much as the old carts did. Well, are we
going for the children? I’ve ordered the horses to be put in.”
“What! you want to take Kitty in the wagonette?” her mother said
reproachfully.
“Yes, at a walking pace, princess.”
Levin never called the princess “maman” as men often do call their
mothers-in-law, and the princess disliked his not doing so. But though
he liked and respected the princess, Levin could not call her so
without a sense of profaning his feeling for his dead mother.
“Come with us, maman,” said Kitty.
“I don’t like to see such imprudence.”
“Well, I’ll walk then, I’m so well.” Kitty got up and went to her
husband and took his hand.
“You may be well, but everything in moderation,” said the princess.
“Well, Agafea Mihalovna, is the jam done?” said Levin, smiling to
Agafea Mihalovna, and trying to cheer her up. “Is it all right in the
new way?”
“I suppose it’s all right. For our notions it’s boiled too long.”
“It’ll be all the better, Agafea Mihalovna, it won’t mildew, even
though our ice has begun to thaw already, so that we’ve no cool cellar
to store it,” said Kitty, at once divining her husband’s motive, and
addressing the old housekeeper with the same feeling; “but your
pickle’s so good, that mamma says she never tasted any like it,” she
added, smiling, and putting her kerchief straight.
Agafea Mihalovna looked angrily at Kitty.
“You needn’t try to console me, mistress. I need only to look at you
with him, and I feel happy,” she said, and something in the rough
familiarity of that _with him_ touched Kitty.
“Come along with us to look for mushrooms, you will show us the best
places.” Agafea Mihalovna smiled and shook her head, as though to say:
“I should like to be angry with you too, but I can’t.”
“Do it, please, by my receipt,” said the princess; “put some paper over
the jam, and moisten it with a little rum, and without even ice, it
will never go mildewy.”
Chapter 3
Kitty was particularly glad of a chance of being alone with her
husband, for she had noticed the shade of mortification that had passed
over his face—always so quick to reflect every feeling—at the moment
when he had come onto the terrace and asked what they were talking of,
and had got no answer.
When they had set off on foot ahead of the others, and had come out of
sight of the house onto the beaten dusty road, marked with rusty wheels
and sprinkled with grains of corn, she clung faster to his arm and
pressed it closer to her. He had quite forgotten the momentary
unpleasant impression, and alone with her he felt, now that the thought
of her approaching motherhood was never for a moment absent from his
mind, a new and delicious bliss, quite pure from all alloy of sense, in
the being near to the woman he loved. There was no need of speech, yet
he longed to hear the sound of her voice, which like her eyes had
changed since she had been with child. In her voice, as in her eyes,
there was that softness and gravity which is found in people
continually concentrated on some cherished pursuit.
“So you’re not tired? Lean more on me,” said he.
“No, I’m so glad of a chance of being alone with you, and I must own,
though I’m happy with them, I do regret our winter evenings alone.”
“That was good, but this is even better. Both are better,” he said,
squeezing her hand.
“Do you know what we were talking about when you came in?”
“About jam?”
“Oh, yes, about jam too; but afterwards, about how men make offers.”
“Ah!” said Levin, listening more to the sound of her voice than to the
words she was saying, and all the while paying attention to the road,
which passed now through the forest, and avoiding places where she
might make a false step.
“And about Sergey Ivanovitch and Varenka. You’ve noticed?... I’m very
anxious for it,” she went on. “What do you think about it?” And she
peeped into his face.
“I don’t know what to think,” Levin answered, smiling. “Sergey seems
very strange to me in that way. I told you, you know....”
“Yes, that he was in love with that girl who died....”
“That was when I was a child; I know about it from hearsay and
tradition. I remember him then. He was wonderfully sweet. But I’ve
watched him since with women; he is friendly, some of them he likes,
but one feels that to him they’re simply people, not women.”
“Yes, but now with Varenka ... I fancy there’s something....”
“Perhaps there is.... But one has to know him.... He’s a peculiar,
wonderful person. He lives a spiritual life only. He’s too pure, too
exalted a nature.”
“Why? Would this lower him, then?”
“No, but he’s so used to a spiritual life that he can’t reconcile
himself with actual fact, and Varenka is after all fact.”
Levin had grown used by now to uttering his thought boldly, without
taking the trouble of clothing it in exact language. He knew that his
wife, in such moments of loving tenderness as now, would understand
what he meant to say from a hint, and she did understand him.
“Yes, but there’s not so much of that actual fact about her as about
me. I can see that he would never have cared for me. She is altogether
spiritual.”
“Oh, no, he is so fond of you, and I am always so glad when my people
like you....”
“Yes, he’s very nice to me; but....”
“It’s not as it was with poor Nikolay ... you really cared for each
other,” Levin finished. “Why not speak of him?” he added. “I sometimes
blame myself for not; it ends in one’s forgetting. Ah, how terrible and
dear he was!... Yes, what were we talking about?” Levin said, after a
pause.
“You think he can’t fall in love,” said Kitty, translating into her own
language.
“It’s not so much that he can’t fall in love,” Levin said, smiling,
“but he has not the weakness necessary.... I’ve always envied him, and
even now, when I’m so happy, I still envy him.”
“You envy him for not being able to fall in love?”
“I envy him for being better than I,” said Levin. “He does not live for
himself. His whole life is subordinated to his duty. And that’s why he
can be calm and contented.”
“And you?” Kitty asked, with an ironical and loving smile.
She could never have explained the chain of thought that made her
smile; but the last link in it was that her husband, in exalting his
brother and abasing himself, was not quite sincere. Kitty knew that
this insincerity came from his love for his brother, from his sense of
shame at being too happy, and above all from his unflagging craving to
be better—she loved it in him, and so she smiled.
“And you? What are you dissatisfied with?” she asked, with the same
smile.
Her disbelief in his self-dissatisfaction delighted him, and
unconsciously he tried to draw her into giving utterance to the grounds
of her disbelief.
“I am happy, but dissatisfied with myself....” he said.
“Why, how can you be dissatisfied with yourself if you are happy?”
“Well, how shall I say?... In my heart I really care for nothing
whatever but that you should not stumble—see? Oh, but really you
mustn’t skip about like that!” he cried, breaking off to scold her for
too agile a movement in stepping over a branch that lay in the path.
“But when I think about myself, and compare myself with others,
especially with my brother, I feel I’m a poor creature.”
“But in what way?” Kitty pursued with the same smile. “Don’t you too
work for others? What about your co-operative settlement, and your work
on the estate, and your book?...”
“Oh, but I feel, and particularly just now—it’s your fault,” he said,
pressing her hand—“that all that doesn’t count. I do it in a way
halfheartedly. If I could care for all that as I care for you!...
Instead of that, I do it in these days like a task that is set me.”
“Well, what would you say about papa?” asked Kitty. “Is he a poor
creature then, as he does nothing for the public good?”
“He?—no! But then one must have the simplicity, the
straightforwardness, the goodness of your father: and I haven’t got
that. I do nothing, and I fret about it. It’s all your doing. Before
there was you—and _this_ too,” he added with a glance towards her waist
that she understood—“I put all my energies into work; now I can’t, and
I’m ashamed; I do it just as though it were a task set me, I’m
pretending....”
“Well, but would you like to change this minute with Sergey
Ivanovitch?” said Kitty. “Would you like to do this work for the
general good, and to love the task set you, as he does, and nothing
else?”
“Of course not,” said Levin. “But I’m so happy that I don’t understand
anything. So you think he’ll make her an offer today?” he added after a
brief silence.
“I think so, and I don’t think so. Only, I’m awfully anxious for it.
Here, wait a minute.” She stooped down and picked a wild camomile at
the edge of the path. “Come, count: he does propose, he doesn’t,” she
said, giving him the flower.
“He does, he doesn’t,” said Levin, tearing off the white petals.
“No, no!” Kitty, snatching at his hand, stopped him. She had been
watching his fingers with interest. “You picked off two.”
“Oh, but see, this little one shan’t count to make up,” said Levin,
tearing off a little half-grown petal. “Here’s the wagonette overtaking
us.”
“Aren’t you tired, Kitty?” called the princess.
“Not in the least.”
“If you are you can get in, as the horses are quiet and walking.”
But it was not worth while to get in, they were quite near the place,
and all walked on together.
Chapter 4
Varenka, with her white kerchief on her black hair, surrounded by the
children, gaily and good-humoredly looking after them, and at the same
time visibly excited at the possibility of receiving a declaration from
the man she cared for, was very attractive. Sergey Ivanovitch walked
beside her, and never left off admiring her. Looking at her, he
recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the
good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the
feeling he had for her was something special that he had felt long,
long ago, and only once, in his early youth. The feeling of happiness
in being near her continually grew, and at last reached such a point
that, as he put a huge, slender-stalked agaric fungus in her basket, he
looked straight into her face, and noticing the flush of glad and
alarmed excitement that overspread her face, he was confused himself,
and smiled to her in silence a smile that said too much.
“If so,” he said to himself, “I ought to think it over and make up my
mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a moment.”
“I’m going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my
efforts will make no show,” he said, and he left the edge of the forest
where they were walking on low silky grass between old birch trees
standing far apart, and went more into the heart of the wood, where
between the white birch trunks there were gray trunks of aspen and dark
bushes of hazel. Walking some forty paces away, Sergey Ivanovitch,
knowing he was out of sight, stood still behind a bushy spindle-tree in
full flower with its rosy red catkins. It was perfectly still all round
him. Only overhead in the birches under which he stood, the flies, like
a swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly, and from time to time the
children’s voices were floated across to him. All at once he heard, not
far from the edge of the wood, the sound of Varenka’s contralto voice,
calling Grisha, and a smile of delight passed over Sergey Ivanovitch’s
face. Conscious of this smile, he shook his head disapprovingly at his
own condition, and taking out a cigar, he began lighting it. For a long
while he could not get a match to light against the trunk of a birch
tree. The soft scales of the white bark rubbed off the phosphorus, and
the light went out. At last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant
cigar smoke, hovering uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched away
forwards and upwards over a bush under the overhanging branches of a
birch tree. Watching the streak of smoke, Sergey Ivanovitch walked
gently on, deliberating on his position.
“Why not?” he thought. “If it were only a passing fancy or a passion,
if it were only this attraction—this mutual attraction (I can call it a
_mutual_ attraction), but if I felt that it was in contradiction with
the whole bent of my life—if I felt that in giving way to this
attraction I should be false to my vocation and my duty ... but it’s
not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I lost Marie,
I said to myself that I would remain faithful to her memory. That’s the
only thing I can say against my feeling.... That’s a great thing,”
Sergey Ivanovitch said to himself, feeling at the same time that this
consideration had not the slightest importance for him personally, but
would only perhaps detract from his romantic character in the eyes of
others. “But apart from that, however much I searched, I should never
find anything to say against my feeling. If I were choosing by
considerations of suitability alone, I could not have found anything
better.”
However many women and girls he thought of whom he knew, he could not
think of a girl who united to such a degree all, positively all, the
qualities he would wish to see in his wife. She had all the charm and
freshness of youth, but she was not a child; and if she loved him, she
loved him consciously as a woman ought to love; that was one thing.
Another point: she was not only far from being worldly, but had an
unmistakable distaste for worldly society, and at the same time she
knew the world, and had all the ways of a woman of the best society,
which were absolutely essential to Sergey Ivanovitch’s conception of
the woman who was to share his life. Thirdly: she was religious, and
not like a child, unconsciously religious and good, as Kitty, for
example, was, but her life was founded on religious principles. Even in
trifling matters, Sergey Ivanovitch found in her all that he wanted in
his wife: she was poor and alone in the world, so she would not bring
with her a mass of relations and their influence into her husband’s
house, as he saw now in Kitty’s case. She would owe everything to her
husband, which was what he had always desired too for his future family
life. And this girl, who united all these qualities, loved him. He was
a modest man, but he could not help seeing it. And he loved her. There
was one consideration against it—his age. But he came of a long-lived
family, he had not a single gray hair, no one would have taken him for
forty, and he remembered Varenka’s saying that it was only in Russia
that men of fifty thought themselves old, and that in France a man of
fifty considers himself _dans la force de l’âge_, while a man of forty
is _un jeune homme_. But what did the mere reckoning of years matter
when he felt as young in heart as he had been twenty years ago? Was it
not youth to feel as he felt now, when coming from the other side to
the edge of the wood he saw in the glowing light of the slanting
sunbeams the gracious figure of Varenka in her yellow gown with her
basket, walking lightly by the trunk of an old birch tree, and when
this impression of the sight of Varenka blended so harmoniously with
the beauty of the view, of the yellow oatfield lying bathed in the
slanting sunshine, and beyond it the distant ancient forest flecked
with yellow and melting into the blue of the distance? His heart
throbbed joyously. A softened feeling came over him. He felt that he
had made up his mind. Varenka, who had just crouched down to pick a
mushroom, rose with a supple movement and looked round. Flinging away
the cigar, Sergey Ivanovitch advanced with resolute steps towards her.
Chapter 5
“Varvara Andreevna, when I was very young, I set before myself the
ideal of the woman I loved and should be happy to call my wife. I have
lived through a long life, and now for the first time I have met what I
sought—in you. I love you, and offer you my hand.”
Sergey Ivanovitch was saying this to himself while he was ten paces
from Varvara. Kneeling down, with her hands over the mushrooms to guard
them from Grisha, she was calling little Masha.
“Come here, little ones! There are so many!” she was saying in her
sweet, deep voice.
Seeing Sergey Ivanovitch approaching, she did not get up and did not
change her position, but everything told him that she felt his presence
and was glad of it.
“Well, did you find some?” she asked from under the white kerchief,
turning her handsome, gently smiling face to him.
“Not one,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “Did you?”
She did not answer, busy with the children who thronged about her.
“That one too, near the twig,” she pointed out to little Masha a little
fungus, split in half across its rosy cap by the dry grass from under
which it thrust itself. Varenka got up while Masha picked the fungus,
breaking it into two white halves. “This brings back my childhood,” she
added, moving apart from the children beside Sergey Ivanovitch.
They walked on for some steps in silence. Varenka saw that he wanted to
speak; she guessed of what, and felt faint with joy and panic. They had
walked so far away that no one could hear them now, but still he did
not begin to speak. It would have been better for Varenka to be silent.
After a silence it would have been easier for them to say what they
wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms. But against her own
will, as it were accidentally, Varenka said:
“So you found nothing? In the middle of the wood there are always
fewer, though.” Sergey Ivanovitch sighed and made no answer. He was
annoyed that she had spoken about the mushrooms. He wanted to bring her
back to the first words she had uttered about her childhood; but after
a pause of some length, as though against his own will, he made an
observation in response to her last words.
“I have heard that the white edible funguses are found principally at
the edge of the wood, though I can’t tell them apart.”
Some minutes more passed, they moved still further away from the
children, and were quite alone. Varenka’s heart throbbed so that she
heard it beating, and felt that she was turning red and pale and red
again.
To be the wife of a man like Koznishev, after her position with Madame
Stahl, was to her imagination the height of happiness. Besides, she was
almost certain that she was in love with him. And this moment it would
have to be decided. She felt frightened. She dreaded both his speaking
and his not speaking.
Now or never it must be said—that Sergey Ivanovitch felt too.
Everything in the expression, the flushed cheeks and the downcast eyes
of Varenka betrayed a painful suspense. Sergey Ivanovitch saw it and
felt sorry for her. He felt even that to say nothing now would be a
slight to her. Rapidly in his own mind he ran over all the arguments in
support of his decision. He even said over to himself the words in
which he meant to put his offer, but instead of those words, some
utterly unexpected reflection that occurred to him made him ask:
“What is the difference between the ‘birch’ mushroom and the ‘white’
mushroom?”
Varenka’s lips quivered with emotion as she answered:
“In the top part there is scarcely any difference, it’s in the stalk.”
And as soon as these words were uttered, both he and she felt that it
was over, that what was to have been said would not be said; and their
emotion, which had up to then been continually growing more intense,
began to subside.
“The birch mushroom’s stalk suggests a dark man’s chin after two days
without shaving,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, speaking quite calmly now.
“Yes, that’s true,” answered Varenka smiling, and unconsciously the
direction of their walk changed. They began to turn towards the
children. Varenka felt both sore and ashamed; at the same time she had
a sense of relief.
When he had got home again and went over the whole subject, Sergey
Ivanovitch thought his previous decision had been a mistaken one. He
could not be false to the memory of Marie.
“Gently, children, gently!” Levin shouted quite angrily to the
children, standing before his wife to protect her when the crowd of
children flew with shrieks of delight to meet them.
Behind the children Sergey Ivanovitch and Varenka walked out of the
wood. Kitty had no need to ask Varenka; she saw from the calm and
somewhat crestfallen faces of both that her plans had not come off.
“Well?” her husband questioned her as they were going home again.
“It doesn’t bite,” said Kitty, her smile and manner of speaking
recalling her father, a likeness Levin often noticed with pleasure.
“How doesn’t bite?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, taking her husband’s hand, lifting it to her
mouth, and just faintly brushing it with closed lips. “Like a kiss on a
priest’s hand.”
“Which didn’t it bite with?” he said, laughing.
“Both. But it should have been like this....”
“There are some peasants coming....”
“Oh, they didn’t see.”
Chapter 6
During the time of the children’s tea the grown-up people sat in the
balcony and talked as though nothing had happened, though they all,
especially Sergey Ivanovitch and Varenka, were very well aware that
there had happened an event which, though negative, was of very great
importance. They both had the same feeling, rather like that of a
schoolboy after an examination, which has left him in the same class or
shut him out of the school forever. Everyone present, feeling too that
something had happened, talked eagerly about extraneous subjects. Levin
and Kitty were particularly happy and conscious of their love that
evening. And their happiness in their love seemed to imply a
disagreeable slur on those who would have liked to feel the same and
could not—and they felt a prick of conscience.
“Mark my words, Alexander will not come,” said the old princess.
That evening they were expecting Stepan Arkadyevitch to come down by
train, and the old prince had written that possibly he might come too.
“And I know why,” the princess went on; “he says that young people
ought to be left alone for a while at first.”
“But papa has left us alone. We’ve never seen him,” said Kitty.
“Besides, we’re not young people!—we’re old, married people by now.”
“Only if he doesn’t come, I shall say good-bye to you children,” said
the princess, sighing mournfully.
“What nonsense, mamma!” both the daughters fell upon her at once.
“How do you suppose he is feeling? Why, now....”
And suddenly there was an unexpected quiver in the princess’s voice.
Her daughters were silent, and looked at one another. “Maman always
finds something to be miserable about,” they said in that glance. They
did not know that happy as the princess was in her daughter’s house,
and useful as she felt herself to be there, she had been extremely
miserable, both on her own account and her husband’s, ever since they
had married their last and favorite daughter, and the old home had been
left empty.
“What is it, Agafea Mihalovna?” Kitty asked suddenly of Agafea
Mihalovna, who was standing with a mysterious air, and a face full of
meaning.
“About supper.”
“Well, that’s right,” said Dolly; “you go and arrange about it, and
I’ll go and hear Grisha repeat his lesson, or else he will have nothing
done all day.”
“That’s my lesson! No, Dolly, I’m going,” said Levin, jumping up.
Grisha, who was by now at a high school, had to go over the lessons of
the term in the summer holidays. Darya Alexandrovna, who had been
studying Latin with her son in Moscow before, had made it a rule on
coming to the Levins’ to go over with him, at least once a day, the
most difficult lessons of Latin and arithmetic. Levin had offered to
take her place, but the mother, having once overheard Levin’s lesson,
and noticing that it was not given exactly as the teacher in Moscow had
given it, said resolutely, though with much embarrassment and anxiety
not to mortify Levin, that they must keep strictly to the book as the
teacher had done, and that she had better undertake it again herself.
Levin was amazed both at Stepan Arkadyevitch, who, by neglecting his
duty, threw upon the mother the supervision of studies of which she had
no comprehension, and at the teachers for teaching the children so
badly. But he promised his sister-in-law to give the lessons exactly as
she wished. And he went on teaching Grisha, not in his own way, but by
the book, and so took little interest in it, and often forgot the hour
of the lesson. So it had been today.
“No, I’m going, Dolly, you sit still,” he said. “We’ll do it all
properly, like the book. Only when Stiva comes, and we go out shooting,
then we shall have to miss it.”
And Levin went to Grisha.
Varenka was saying the same thing to Kitty. Even in the happy,
well-ordered household of the Levins Varenka had succeeded in making
herself useful.
“I’ll see to the supper, you sit still,” she said, and got up to go to
Agafea Mihalovna.
“Yes, yes, most likely they’ve not been able to get chickens. If so,
ours....”
“Agafea Mihalovna and I will see about it,” and Varenka vanished with
her.
“What a nice girl!” said the princess.
“Not nice, maman; she’s an exquisite girl; there’s no one else like
her.”
“So you are expecting Stepan Arkadyevitch today?” said Sergey
Ivanovitch, evidently not disposed to pursue the conversation about
Varenka. “It would be difficult to find two sons-in-law more unlike
than yours,” he said with a subtle smile. “One all movement, only
living in society, like a fish in water; the other our Kostya, lively,
alert, quick in everything, but as soon as he is in society, he either
sinks into apathy, or struggles helplessly like a fish on land.”
“Yes, he’s very heedless,” said the princess, addressing Sergey
Ivanovitch. “I’ve been meaning, indeed, to ask you to tell him that
it’s out of the question for her” (she indicated Kitty) “to stay here;
that she positively must come to Moscow. He talks of getting a doctor
down....”
“Maman, he’ll do everything; he has agreed to everything,” Kitty said,
angry with her mother for appealing to Sergey Ivanovitch to judge in
such a matter.
In the middle of their conversation they heard the snorting of horses
and the sound of wheels on the gravel. Dolly had not time to get up to
go and meet her husband, when from the window of the room below, where
Grisha was having his lesson, Levin leaped out and helped Grisha out
after him.
“It’s Stiva!” Levin shouted from under the balcony. “We’ve finished,
Dolly, don’t be afraid!” he added, and started running like a boy to
meet the carriage.
“_Is ea id, ejus, ejus, ejus!_” shouted Grisha, skipping along the
avenue.
“And someone else too! Papa, of course!” cried Levin, stopping at the
entrance of the avenue. “Kitty, don’t come down the steep staircase, go
round.”
But Levin had been mistaken in taking the person sitting in the
carriage for the old prince. As he got nearer to the carriage he saw
beside Stepan Arkadyevitch not the prince but a handsome, stout young
man in a Scotch cap, with long ends of ribbon behind. This was Vassenka
Veslovsky, a distant cousin of the Shtcherbatskys, a brilliant young
gentleman in Petersburg and Moscow society. “A capital fellow, and a
keen sportsman,” as Stepan Arkadyevitch said, introducing him.
Not a whit abashed by the disappointment caused by his having come in
place of the old prince, Veslovsky greeted Levin gaily, claiming
acquaintance with him in the past, and snatching up Grisha into the
carriage, lifted him over the pointer that Stepan Arkadyevitch had
brought with him.
Levin did not get into the carriage, but walked behind. He was rather
vexed at the non-arrival of the old prince, whom he liked more and more
the more he saw of him, and also at the arrival of this Vassenka
Veslovsky, a quite uncongenial and superfluous person. He seemed to him
still more uncongenial and superfluous when, on approaching the steps
where the whole party, children and grown-up, were gathered together in
much excitement, Levin saw Vassenka Veslovsky, with a particularly warm
and gallant air, kissing Kitty’s hand.
“Your wife and I are cousins and very old friends,” said Vassenka
Veslovsky, once more shaking Levin’s hand with great warmth.
“Well, are there plenty of birds?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to Levin,
hardly leaving time for everyone to utter their greetings. “We’ve come
with the most savage intentions. Why, maman, they’ve not been in Moscow
since! Look, Tanya, here’s something for you! Get it, please, it’s in
the carriage, behind!” he talked in all directions. “How pretty you’ve
grown, Dolly,” he said to his wife, once more kissing her hand, holding
it in one of his, and patting it with the other.
Levin, who a minute before had been in the happiest frame of mind, now
looked darkly at everyone, and everything displeased him.
“Who was it he kissed yesterday with those lips?” he thought, looking
at Stepan Arkadyevitch’s tender demonstrations to his wife. He looked
at Dolly, and he did not like her either.
“She doesn’t believe in his love. So what is she so pleased about?
Revolting!” thought Levin.
He looked at the princess, who had been so dear to him a minute before,
and he did not like the manner in which she welcomed this Vassenka,
with his ribbons, just as though she were in her own house.
Even Sergey Ivanovitch, who had come out too onto the steps, seemed to
him unpleasant with the show of cordiality with which he met Stepan
Arkadyevitch, though Levin knew that his brother neither liked nor
respected Oblonsky.
And Varenka, even she seemed hateful, with her air _sainte nitouche_
making the acquaintance of this gentleman, while all the while she was
thinking of nothing but getting married.
And more hateful than anyone was Kitty for falling in with the tone of
gaiety with which this gentleman regarded his visit in the country, as
though it were a holiday for himself and everyone else. And, above all,
unpleasant was that particular smile with which she responded to his
smile.
Noisily talking, they all went into the house; but as soon as they were
all seated, Levin turned and went out.
Kitty saw something was wrong with her husband. She tried to seize a
moment to speak to him alone, but he made haste to get away from her,
saying he was wanted at the counting-house. It was long since his own
work on the estate had seemed to him so important as at that moment.
“It’s all holiday for them,” he thought; “but these are no holiday
matters, they won’t wait, and there’s no living without them.”
Chapter 7
Levin came back to the house only when they sent to summon him to
supper. On the stairs were standing Kitty and Agafea Mihalovna,
consulting about wines for supper.
“But why are you making all this fuss? Have what we usually do.”
“No, Stiva doesn’t drink ... Kostya, stop, what’s the matter?” Kitty
began, hurrying after him, but he strode ruthlessly away to the
dining-room without waiting for her, and at once joined in the lively
general conversation which was being maintained there by Vassenka
Veslovsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Well, what do you say, are we going shooting tomorrow?” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
“Please, do let’s go,” said Veslovsky, moving to another chair, where
he sat down sideways, with one fat leg crossed under him.
“I shall be delighted, we will go. And have you had any shooting yet
this year?” said Levin to Veslovsky, looking intently at his leg, but
speaking with that forced amiability that Kitty knew so well in him,
and that was so out of keeping with him. “I can’t answer for our
finding grouse, but there are plenty of snipe. Only we ought to start
early. You’re not tired? Aren’t you tired, Stiva?”
“Me tired? I’ve never been tired yet. Suppose we stay up all night.
Let’s go for a walk!”
“Yes, really, let’s not go to bed at all! Capital!” Veslovsky chimed
in.
“Oh, we all know you can do without sleep, and keep other people up
too,” Dolly said to her husband, with that faint note of irony in her
voice which she almost always had now with her husband. “But to my
thinking, it’s time for bed now.... I’m going, I don’t want supper.”
“No, do stay a little, Dolly,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, going round to
her side behind the table where they were having supper. “I’ve so much
still to tell you.”
“Nothing really, I suppose.”
“Do you know Veslovsky has been at Anna’s, and he’s going to them
again? You know they’re hardly fifty miles from you, and I too must
certainly go over there. Veslovsky, come here!”
Vassenka crossed over to the ladies, and sat down beside Kitty.
“Ah, do tell me, please; you have stayed with her? How was she?” Darya
Alexandrovna appealed to him.
Levin was left at the other end of the table, and though never pausing
in his conversation with the princess and Varenka, he saw that there
was an eager and mysterious conversation going on between Stepan
Arkadyevitch, Dolly, Kitty, and Veslovsky. And that was not all. He saw
on his wife’s face an expression of real feeling as she gazed with
fixed eyes on the handsome face of Vassenka, who was telling them
something with great animation.
“It’s exceedingly nice at their place,” Veslovsky was telling them
about Vronsky and Anna. “I can’t, of course, take it upon myself to
judge, but in their house you feel the real feeling of home.”
“What do they intend doing?”
“I believe they think of going to Moscow.”
“How jolly it would be for us all to go over to them together! When are
you going there?” Stepan Arkadyevitch asked Vassenka.
“I’m spending July there.”
“Will you go?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to his wife.
“I’ve been wanting to a long while; I shall certainly go,” said Dolly.
“I am sorry for her, and I know her. She’s a splendid woman. I will go
alone, when you go back, and then I shall be in no one’s way. And it
will be better indeed without you.”
“To be sure,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “And you, Kitty?”
“I? Why should I go?” Kitty said, flushing all over, and she glanced
round at her husband.
“Do you know Anna Arkadyevna, then?” Veslovsky asked her. “She’s a very
fascinating woman.”
“Yes,” she answered Veslovsky, crimsoning still more. She got up and
walked across to her husband.
“Are you going shooting, then, tomorrow?” she said.
His jealousy had in these few moments, especially at the flush that had
overspread her cheeks while she was talking to Veslovsky, gone far
indeed. Now as he heard her words, he construed them in his own
fashion. Strange as it was to him afterwards to recall it, it seemed to
him at the moment clear that in asking whether he was going shooting,
all she cared to know was whether he would give that pleasure to
Vassenka Veslovsky, with whom, as he fancied, she was in love.
“Yes, I’m going,” he answered her in an unnatural voice, disagreeable
to himself.
“No, better spend the day here tomorrow, or Dolly won’t see anything of
her husband, and set off the day after,” said Kitty.
The motive of Kitty’s words was interpreted by Levin thus: “Don’t
separate me from _him_. I don’t care about _your_ going, but do let me
enjoy the society of this delightful young man.”
“Oh, if you wish, we’ll stay here tomorrow,” Levin answered, with
peculiar amiability.
Vassenka meanwhile, utterly unsuspecting the misery his presence had
occasioned, got up from the table after Kitty, and watching her with
smiling and admiring eyes, he followed her.
Levin saw that look. He turned white, and for a minute he could hardly
breathe. “How dare he look at my wife like that!” was the feeling that
boiled within him.
“Tomorrow, then? Do, please, let us go,” said Vassenka, sitting down on
a chair, and again crossing his leg as his habit was.
Levin’s jealousy went further still. Already he saw himself a deceived
husband, looked upon by his wife and her lover as simply necessary to
provide them with the conveniences and pleasures of life.... But in
spite of that he made polite and hospitable inquiries of Vassenka about
his shooting, his gun, and his boots, and agreed to go shooting next
day.
Happily for Levin, the old princess cut short his agonies by getting up
herself and advising Kitty to go to bed. But even at this point Levin
could not escape another agony. As he said good-night to his hostess,
Vassenka would again have kissed her hand, but Kitty, reddening, drew
back her hand and said with a naïve bluntness, for which the old
princess scolded her afterwards:
“We don’t like that fashion.”
In Levin’s eyes she was to blame for having allowed such relations to
arise, and still more to blame for showing so awkwardly that she did
not like them.
“Why, how can one want to go to bed!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who,
after drinking several glasses of wine at supper, was now in his most
charming and sentimental humor. “Look, Kitty,” he said, pointing to the
moon, which had just risen behind the lime trees—“how exquisite!
Veslovsky, this is the time for a serenade. You know, he has a splendid
voice; we practiced songs together along the road. He has brought some
lovely songs with him, two new ones. Varvara Andreevna and he must sing
some duets.”
When the party had broken up, Stepan Arkadyevitch walked a long while
about the avenue with Veslovsky; their voices could be heard singing
one of the new songs.
Levin hearing these voices sat scowling in an easy-chair in his wife’s
bedroom, and maintained an obstinate silence when she asked him what
was wrong. But when at last with a timid glance she hazarded the
question: “Was there perhaps something you disliked about
Veslovsky?”—it all burst out, and he told her all. He was humiliated
himself at what he was saying, and that exasperated him all the more.
He stood facing her with his eyes glittering menacingly under his
scowling brows, and he squeezed his strong arms across his chest, as
though he were straining every nerve to hold himself in. The expression
of his face would have been grim, and even cruel, if it had not at the
same time had a look of suffering which touched her. His jaws were
twitching, and his voice kept breaking.
“You must understand that I’m not jealous, that’s a nasty word. I can’t
be jealous, and believe that.... I can’t say what I feel, but this is
awful.... I’m not jealous, but I’m wounded, humiliated that anybody
dare think, that anybody dare look at you with eyes like that.”
“Eyes like what?” said Kitty, trying as conscientiously as possible to
recall every word and gesture of that evening and every shade implied
in them.
At the very bottom of her heart she did think there had been something
precisely at the moment when he had crossed over after her to the other
end of the table; but she dared not own it even to herself, and would
have been even more unable to bring herself to say so to him, and so
increase his suffering.
“And what can there possibly be attractive about me as I am now?...”
“Ah!” he cried, clutching at his head, “you shouldn’t say that!... If
you had been attractive then....”
“Oh, no, Kostya, oh, wait a minute, oh, do listen!” she said, looking
at him with an expression of pained commiseration. “Why, what can you
be thinking about! When for me there’s no one in the world, no one, no
one!... Would you like me never to see anyone?”
For the first minute she had been offended at his jealousy; she was
angry that the slightest amusement, even the most innocent, should be
forbidden her; but now she would readily have sacrificed, not merely
such trifles, but everything, for his peace of mind, to save him from
the agony he was suffering.
“You must understand the horror and comedy of my position,” he went on
in a desperate whisper; “that he’s in my house, that he’s done nothing
improper positively except his free and easy airs and the way he sits
on his legs. He thinks it’s the best possible form, and so I’m obliged
to be civil to him.”
“But, Kostya, you’re exaggerating,” said Kitty, at the bottom of her
heart rejoicing at the depth of his love for her, shown now in his
jealousy.
“The most awful part of it all is that you’re just as you always are,
and especially now when to me you’re something sacred, and we’re so
happy, so particularly happy—and all of a sudden a little wretch....
He’s not a little wretch; why should I abuse him? I have nothing to do
with him. But why should my, and your, happiness....”
“Do you know, I understand now what it’s all come from,” Kitty was
beginning.
“Well, what? what?”
“I saw how you looked while we were talking at supper.”
“Well, well!” Levin said in dismay.
She told him what they had been talking about. And as she told him, she
was breathless with emotion. Levin was silent for a space, then he
scanned her pale and distressed face, and suddenly he clutched at his
head.
“Katya, I’ve been worrying you! Darling, forgive me! It’s madness!
Katya, I’m a criminal. And how could you be so distressed at such
idiocy?”
“Oh, I was sorry for you.”
“For me? for me? How mad I am!... But why make you miserable? It’s
awful to think that any outsider can shatter our happiness.”
“It’s humiliating too, of course.”
“Oh, then I’ll keep him here all the summer, and will overwhelm him
with civility,” said Levin, kissing her hands. “You shall see.
Tomorrow.... Oh, yes, we are going tomorrow.”
Chapter 8
Next day, before the ladies were up, the wagonette and a trap for the
shooting party were at the door, and Laska, aware since early morning
that they were going shooting, after much whining and darting to and
fro, had sat herself down in the wagonette beside the coachman, and,
disapproving of the delay, was excitedly watching the door from which
the sportsmen still did not come out. The first to come out was
Vassenka Veslovsky, in new high boots that reached half-way up his
thick thighs, in a green blouse, with a new Russian leather
cartridge-belt, and in his Scotch cap with ribbons, with a brand-new
English gun without a sling. Laska flew up to him, welcomed him, and
jumping up, asked him in her own way whether the others were coming
soon, but getting no answer from him, she returned to her post of
observation and sank into repose again, her head on one side, and one
ear pricked up to listen. At last the door opened with a creak, and
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s spot-and-tan pointer Krak flew out, running round
and round and turning over in the air. Stepan Arkadyevitch himself
followed with a gun in his hand and a cigar in his mouth.
“Good dog, good dog, Krak!” he cried encouragingly to the dog, who put
his paws up on his chest, catching at his game bag. Stepan Arkadyevitch
was dressed in rough leggings and spats, in torn trousers and a short
coat. On his head there was a wreck of a hat of indefinite form, but
his gun of a new patent was a perfect gem, and his game bag and
cartridge belt, though worn, were of the very best quality.
Vassenka Veslovsky had had no notion before that it was truly _chic_
for a sportsman to be in tatters, but to have his shooting outfit of
the best quality. He saw it now as he looked at Stepan Arkadyevitch,
radiant in his rags, graceful, well-fed, and joyous, a typical Russian
nobleman. And he made up his mind that next time he went shooting he
would certainly adopt the same get-up.
“Well, and what about our host?” he asked.
“A young wife,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling.
“Yes, and such a charming one!”
“He came down dressed. No doubt he’s run up to her again.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch guessed right. Levin had run up again to his wife
to ask her once more if she forgave him for his idiocy yesterday, and,
moreover, to beg her for Christ’s sake to be more careful. The great
thing was for her to keep away from the children—they might any minute
push against her. Then he had once more to hear her declare that she
was not angry with him for going away for two days, and to beg her to
be sure to send him a note next morning by a servant on horseback, to
write him, if it were but two words only, to let him know that all was
well with her.
Kitty was distressed, as she always was, at parting for a couple of
days from her husband, but when she saw his eager figure, looking big
and strong in his shooting-boots and his white blouse, and a sort of
sportsman elation and excitement incomprehensible to her, she forgot
her own chagrin for the sake of his pleasure, and said good-bye to him
cheerfully.
“Pardon, gentlemen!” he said, running out onto the steps. “Have you put
the lunch in? Why is the chestnut on the right? Well, it doesn’t
matter. Laska, down; go and lie down!”
“Put it with the herd of oxen,” he said to the herdsman, who was
waiting for him at the steps with some question. “Excuse me, here comes
another villain.”
Levin jumped out of the wagonette, in which he had already taken his
seat, to meet the carpenter, who came towards the steps with a rule in
his hand.
“You didn’t come to the counting house yesterday, and now you’re
detaining me. Well, what is it?”
“Would your honor let me make another turning? It’s only three steps to
add. And we make it just fit at the same time. It will be much more
convenient.”
“You should have listened to me,” Levin answered with annoyance. “I
said: Put the lines and then fit in the steps. Now there’s no setting
it right. Do as I told you, and make a new staircase.”
The point was that in the lodge that was being built the carpenter had
spoiled the staircase, fitting it together without calculating the
space it was to fill, so that the steps were all sloping when it was
put in place. Now the carpenter wanted, keeping the same staircase, to
add three steps.
“It will be much better.”
“But where’s your staircase coming out with its three steps?”
“Why, upon my word, sir,” the carpenter said with a contemptuous smile.
“It comes out right at the very spot. It starts, so to speak,” he said,
with a persuasive gesture; “it comes down, and comes down, and comes
out.”
“But three steps will add to the length too ... where is it to come
out?”
“Why, to be sure, it’ll start from the bottom and go up and go up, and
come out so,” the carpenter said obstinately and convincingly.
“It’ll reach the ceiling and the wall.”
“Upon my word! Why, it’ll go up, and up, and come out like this.”
Levin took out a ramrod and began sketching him the staircase in the
dust.
“There, do you see?”
“As your honor likes,” said the carpenter, with a sudden gleam in his
eyes, obviously understanding the thing at last. “It seems it’ll be
best to make a new one.”
“Well, then, do it as you’re told,” Levin shouted, seating himself in
the wagonette. “Down! Hold the dogs, Philip!”
Levin felt now at leaving behind all his family and household cares
such an eager sense of joy in life and expectation that he was not
disposed to talk. Besides that, he had that feeling of concentrated
excitement that every sportsman experiences as he approaches the scene
of action. If he had anything on his mind at that moment, it was only
the doubt whether they would start anything in the Kolpensky marsh,
whether Laska would show to advantage in comparison with Krak, and
whether he would shoot well that day himself. Not to disgrace himself
before a new spectator—not to be outdone by Oblonsky—that too was a
thought that crossed his brain.
Oblonsky was feeling the same, and he too was not talkative. Vassenka
Veslovsky kept up alone a ceaseless flow of cheerful chatter. As he
listened to him now, Levin felt ashamed to think how unfair he had been
to him the day before. Vassenka was really a nice fellow, simple,
good-hearted, and very good-humored. If Levin had met him before he was
married, he would have made friends with him. Levin rather disliked his
holiday attitude to life and a sort of free and easy assumption of
elegance. It was as though he assumed a high degree of importance in
himself that could not be disputed, because he had long nails and a
stylish cap, and everything else to correspond; but this could be
forgiven for the sake of his good nature and good breeding. Levin liked
him for his good education, for speaking French and English with such
an excellent accent, and for being a man of his world.
Vassenka was extremely delighted with the left horse, a horse of the
Don Steppes. He kept praising him enthusiastically. “How fine it must
be galloping over the steppes on a steppe horse! Eh? isn’t it?” he
said. He had imagined riding on a steppe horse as something wild and
romantic, and it turned out nothing of the sort. But his simplicity,
particularly in conjunction with his good looks, his amiable smile, and
the grace of his movements, was very attractive. Either because his
nature was sympathetic to Levin, or because Levin was trying to atone
for his sins of the previous evening by seeing nothing but what was
good in him, anyway he liked his society.
After they had driven over two miles from home, Veslovsky all at once
felt for a cigar and his pocketbook, and did not know whether he had
lost them or left them on the table. In the pocketbook there were
thirty-seven pounds, and so the matter could not be left in
uncertainty.
“Do you know what, Levin, I’ll gallop home on that left trace-horse.
That will be splendid. Eh?” he said, preparing to get out.
“No, why should you?” answered Levin, calculating that Vassenka could
hardly weigh less than seventeen stone. “I’ll send the coachman.”
The coachman rode back on the trace-horse, and Levin himself drove the
remaining pair.
Chapter 9
“Well, now what’s our plan of campaign? Tell us all about it,” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Our plan is this. Now we’re driving to Gvozdyov. In Gvozdyov there’s a
grouse marsh on this side, and beyond Gvozdyov come some magnificent
snipe marshes where there are grouse too. It’s hot now, and we’ll get
there—it’s fifteen miles or so—towards evening and have some evening
shooting; we’ll spend the night there and go on tomorrow to the bigger
moors.”
“And is there nothing on the way?”
“Yes; but we’ll reserve ourselves; besides it’s hot. There are two nice
little places, but I doubt there being anything to shoot.”
Levin would himself have liked to go into these little places, but they
were near home; he could shoot them over any time, and they were only
little places—there would hardly be room for three to shoot. And so,
with some insincerity, he said that he doubted there being anything to
shoot. When they reached a little marsh Levin would have driven by, but
Stepan Arkadyevitch, with the experienced eye of a sportsman, at once
detected reeds visible from the road.
“Shan’t we try that?” he said, pointing to the little marsh.
“Levin, do, please! how delightful!” Vassenka Veslovsky began begging,
and Levin could but consent.
Before they had time to stop, the dogs had flown one before the other
into the marsh.
“Krak! Laska!...”
The dogs came back.
“There won’t be room for three. I’ll stay here,” said Levin, hoping
they would find nothing but peewits, who had been startled by the dogs,
and turning over in their flight, were plaintively wailing over the
marsh.
“No! Come along, Levin, let’s go together!” Veslovsky called.
“Really, there’s not room. Laska, back, Laska! You won’t want another
dog, will you?”
Levin remained with the wagonette, and looked enviously at the
sportsmen. They walked right across the marsh. Except little birds and
peewits, of which Vassenka killed one, there was nothing in the marsh.
“Come, you see now that it was not that I grudged the marsh,” said
Levin, “only it’s wasting time.”
“Oh, no, it was jolly all the same. Did you see us?” said Vassenka
Veslovsky, clambering awkwardly into the wagonette with his gun and his
peewit in his hands. “How splendidly I shot this bird! Didn’t I? Well,
shall we soon be getting to the real place?”
The horses started off suddenly, Levin knocked his head against the
stock of someone’s gun, and there was the report of a shot. The gun did
actually go off first, but that was how it seemed to Levin. It appeared
that Vassenka Veslovsky had pulled only one trigger, and had left the
other hammer still cocked. The charge flew into the ground without
doing harm to anyone. Stepan Arkadyevitch shook his head and laughed
reprovingly at Veslovsky. But Levin had not the heart to reprove him.
In the first place, any reproach would have seemed to be called forth
by the danger he had incurred and the bump that had come up on Levin’s
forehead. And besides, Veslovsky was at first so naïvely distressed,
and then laughed so good-humoredly and infectiously at their general
dismay, that one could not but laugh with him.
When they reached the second marsh, which was fairly large, and would
inevitably take some time to shoot over, Levin tried to persuade them
to pass it by. But Veslovsky again overpersuaded him. Again, as the
marsh was narrow, Levin, like a good host, remained with the carriage.
Krak made straight for some clumps of sedge. Vassenka Veslovsky was the
first to run after the dog. Before Stepan Arkadyevitch had time to come
up, a grouse flew out. Veslovsky missed it and it flew into an unmown
meadow. This grouse was left for Veslovsky to follow up. Krak found it
again and pointed, and Veslovsky shot it and went back to the carriage.
“Now you go and I’ll stay with the horses,” he said.
Levin had begun to feel the pangs of a sportsman’s envy. He handed the
reins to Veslovsky and walked into the marsh.
Laska, who had been plaintively whining and fretting against the
injustice of her treatment, flew straight ahead to a hopeful place that
Levin knew well, and that Krak had not yet come upon.
“Why don’t you stop her?” shouted Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“She won’t scare them,” answered Levin, sympathizing with his bitch’s
pleasure and hurrying after her.
As she came nearer and nearer to the familiar breeding places there was
more and more earnestness in Laska’s exploration. A little marsh bird
did not divert her attention for more than an instant. She made one
circuit round the clump of reeds, was beginning a second, and suddenly
quivered with excitement and became motionless.
“Come, come, Stiva!” shouted Levin, feeling his heart beginning to beat
more violently; and all of a sudden, as though some sort of shutter had
been drawn back from his straining ears, all sounds, confused but loud,
began to beat on his hearing, losing all sense of distance. He heard
the steps of Stepan Arkadyevitch, mistaking them for the tramp of the
horses in the distance; he heard the brittle sound of the twigs on
which he had trodden, taking this sound for the flying of a grouse. He
heard too, not far behind him, a splashing in the water, which he could
not explain to himself.
Picking his steps, he moved up to the dog.
“Fetch it!”
Not a grouse but a snipe flew up from beside the dog. Levin had lifted
his gun, but at the very instant when he was taking aim, the sound of
splashing grew louder, came closer, and was joined with the sound of
Veslovsky’s voice, shouting something with strange loudness. Levin saw
he had his gun pointed behind the snipe, but still he fired.
When he had made sure he had missed, Levin looked round and saw the
horses and the wagonette not on the road but in the marsh.
Veslovsky, eager to see the shooting, had driven into the marsh, and
got the horses stuck in the mud.
“Damn the fellow!” Levin said to himself, as he went back to the
carriage that had sunk in the mire. “What did you drive in for?” he
said to him dryly, and calling the coachman, he began pulling the
horses out.
Levin was vexed both at being hindered from shooting and at his horses
getting stuck in the mud, and still more at the fact that neither
Stepan Arkadyevitch nor Veslovsky helped him and the coachman to
unharness the horses and get them out, since neither of them had the
slightest notion of harnessing. Without vouchsafing a syllable in reply
to Vassenka’s protestations that it had been quite dry there, Levin
worked in silence with the coachman at extricating the horses. But
then, as he got warm at the work and saw how assiduously Veslovsky was
tugging at the wagonette by one of the mud-guards, so that he broke it
indeed, Levin blamed himself for having under the influence of
yesterday’s feelings been too cold to Veslovsky, and tried to be
particularly genial so as to smooth over his chilliness. When
everything had been put right, and the carriage had been brought back
to the road, Levin had the lunch served.
“_Bon appétit—bonne conscience! Ce poulet va tomber jusqu’au fond de
mes bottes_,” Vassenka, who had recovered his spirits, quoted the
French saying as he finished his second chicken. “Well, now our
troubles are over, now everything’s going to go well. Only, to atone
for my sins, I’m bound to sit on the box. That’s so? eh? No, no! I’ll
be your Automedon. You shall see how I’ll get you along,” he answered,
not letting go the rein, when Levin begged him to let the coachman
drive. “No, I must atone for my sins, and I’m very comfortable on the
box.” And he drove.
Levin was a little afraid he would exhaust the horses, especially the
chestnut, whom he did not know how to hold in; but unconsciously he
fell under the influence of his gaiety and listened to the songs he
sang all the way on the box, or the descriptions and representations he
gave of driving in the English fashion, four-in-hand; and it was in the
very best of spirits that after lunch they drove to the Gvozdyov marsh.
Chapter 10
Vassenka drove the horses so smartly that they reached the marsh too
early, while it was still hot.
As they drew near this more important marsh, the chief aim of their
expedition, Levin could not help considering how he could get rid of
Vassenka and be free in his movements. Stepan Arkadyevitch evidently
had the same desire, and on his face Levin saw the look of anxiety
always present in a true sportsman when beginning shooting, together
with a certain good-humored slyness peculiar to him.
“How shall we go? It’s a splendid marsh, I see, and there are hawks,”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, pointing to two great birds hovering over the
reeds. “Where there are hawks, there is sure to be game.”
“Now, gentlemen,” said Levin, pulling up his boots and examining the
lock of his gun with rather a gloomy expression, “do you see those
reeds?” He pointed to an oasis of blackish green in the huge half-mown
wet meadow that stretched along the right bank of the river. “The marsh
begins here, straight in front of us, do you see—where it is greener?
From here it runs to the right where the horses are; there are breeding
places there, and grouse, and all round those reeds as far as that
alder, and right up to the mill. Over there, do you see, where the
pools are? That’s the best place. There I once shot seventeen snipe.
We’ll separate with the dogs and go in different directions, and then
meet over there at the mill.”
“Well, which shall go to left and which to right?” asked Stepan
Arkadyevitch. “It’s wider to the right; you two go that way and I’ll
take the left,” he said with apparent carelessness.
“Capital! we’ll make the bigger bag! Yes, come along, come along!”
Vassenka exclaimed.
Levin could do nothing but agree, and they divided.
As soon as they entered the marsh, the two dogs began hunting about
together and made towards the green, slime-covered pool. Levin knew
Laska’s method, wary and indefinite; he knew the place too and expected
a whole covey of snipe.
“Veslovsky, beside me, walk beside me!” he said in a faint voice to his
companion splashing in the water behind him. Levin could not help
feeling an interest in the direction his gun was pointed, after that
casual shot near the Kolpensky marsh.
“Oh, I won’t get in your way, don’t trouble about me.”
But Levin could not help troubling, and recalled Kitty’s words at
parting: “Mind you don’t shoot one another.” The dogs came nearer and
nearer, passed each other, each pursuing its own scent. The expectation
of snipe was so intense that to Levin the squelching sound of his own
heel, as he drew it up out of the mire, seemed to be the call of a
snipe, and he clutched and pressed the lock of his gun.
“Bang! bang!” sounded almost in his ear. Vassenka had fired at a flock
of ducks which was hovering over the marsh and flying at that moment
towards the sportsmen, far out of range. Before Levin had time to look
round, there was the whir of one snipe, another, a third, and some
eight more rose one after another.
Stepan Arkadyevitch hit one at the very moment when it was beginning
its zigzag movements, and the snipe fell in a heap into the mud.
Oblonsky aimed deliberately at another, still flying low in the reeds,
and together with the report of the shot, that snipe too fell, and it
could be seen fluttering out where the sedge had been cut, its unhurt
wing showing white beneath.
Levin was not so lucky: he aimed at his first bird too low, and missed;
he aimed at it again, just as it was rising, but at that instant
another snipe flew up at his very feet, distracting him so that he
missed again.
While they were loading their guns, another snipe rose, and Veslovsky,
who had had time to load again, sent two charges of small-shot into the
water. Stepan Arkadyevitch picked up his snipe, and with sparkling eyes
looked at Levin.
“Well, now let us separate,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and limping on
his left foot, holding his gun in readiness and whistling to his dog,
he walked off in one direction. Levin and Veslovsky walked in the
other.
It always happened with Levin that when his first shots were a failure
he got hot and out of temper, and shot badly the whole day. So it was
that day. The snipe showed themselves in numbers. They kept flying up
from just under the dogs, from under the sportsmen’s legs, and Levin
might have retrieved his ill luck. But the more he shot, the more he
felt disgraced in the eyes of Veslovsky, who kept popping away merrily
and indiscriminately, killing nothing, and not in the slightest abashed
by his ill success. Levin, in feverish haste, could not restrain
himself, got more and more out of temper, and ended by shooting almost
without a hope of hitting. Laska, indeed, seemed to understand this.
She began looking more languidly, and gazed back at the sportsmen, as
it were, with perplexity or reproach in her eyes. Shots followed shots
in rapid succession. The smoke of the powder hung about the sportsmen,
while in the great roomy net of the game bag there were only three
light little snipe. And of these one had been killed by Veslovsky
alone, and one by both of them together. Meanwhile from the other side
of the marsh came the sound of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s shots, not
frequent, but, as Levin fancied, well-directed, for almost after each
they heard “Krak, Krak, _apporte_!”
This excited Levin still more. The snipe were floating continually in
the air over the reeds. Their whirring wings close to the earth, and
their harsh cries high in the air, could be heard on all sides; the
snipe that had risen first and flown up into the air, settled again
before the sportsmen. Instead of two hawks there were now dozens of
them hovering with shrill cries over the marsh.
After walking through the larger half of the marsh, Levin and Veslovsky
reached the place where the peasants’ mowing-grass was divided into
long strips reaching to the reeds, marked off in one place by the
trampled grass, in another by a path mown through it. Half of these
strips had already been mown.
Though there was not so much hope of finding birds in the uncut part as
the cut part, Levin had promised Stepan Arkadyevitch to meet him, and
so he walked on with his companion through the cut and uncut patches.
“Hi, sportsmen!” shouted one of a group of peasants, sitting on an
unharnessed cart; “come and have some lunch with us! Have a drop of
wine!”
Levin looked round.
“Come along, it’s all right!” shouted a good-humored-looking bearded
peasant with a red face, showing his white teeth in a grin, and holding
up a greenish bottle that flashed in the sunlight.
“_Qu’est-ce qu’ils disent_?” asked Veslovsky.
“They invite you to have some vodka. Most likely they’ve been dividing
the meadow into lots. I should have some,” said Levin, not without some
guile, hoping Veslovsky would be tempted by the vodka, and would go
away to them.
“Why do they offer it?”
“Oh, they’re merry-making. Really, you should join them. You would be
interested.”
“_Allons, c’est curieux_.”
“You go, you go, you’ll find the way to the mill!” cried Levin, and
looking round he perceived with satisfaction that Veslovsky, bent and
stumbling with weariness, holding his gun out at arm’s length, was
making his way out of the marsh towards the peasants.
“You come too!” the peasants shouted to Levin. “Never fear! You taste
our cake!”
Levin felt a strong inclination to drink a little vodka and to eat some
bread. He was exhausted, and felt it a great effort to drag his
staggering legs out of the mire, and for a minute he hesitated. But
Laska was setting. And immediately all his weariness vanished, and he
walked lightly through the swamp towards the dog. A snipe flew up at
his feet; he fired and killed it. Laska still pointed.—“Fetch it!”
Another bird flew up close to the dog. Levin fired. But it was an
unlucky day for him; he missed it, and when he went to look for the one
he had shot, he could not find that either. He wandered all about the
reeds, but Laska did not believe he had shot it, and when he sent her
to find it, she pretended to hunt for it, but did not really. And in
the absence of Vassenka, on whom Levin threw the blame of his failure,
things went no better. There were plenty of snipe still, but Levin made
one miss after another.
The slanting rays of the sun were still hot; his clothes, soaked
through with perspiration, stuck to his body; his left boot full of
water weighed heavily on his leg and squeaked at every step; the sweat
ran in drops down his powder-grimed face, his mouth was full of the
bitter taste, his nose of the smell of powder and stagnant water, his
ears were ringing with the incessant whir of the snipe; he could not
touch the stock of his gun, it was so hot; his heart beat with short,
rapid throbs; his hands shook with excitement, and his weary legs
stumbled and staggered over the hillocks and in the swamp, but still he
walked on and still he shot. At last, after a disgraceful miss, he
flung his gun and his hat on the ground.
“No, I must control myself,” he said to himself. Picking up his gun and
his hat, he called Laska, and went out of the swamp. When he got on to
dry ground he sat down, pulled off his boot and emptied it, then walked
to the marsh, drank some stagnant-tasting water, moistened his burning
hot gun, and washed his face and hands. Feeling refreshed, he went back
to the spot where a snipe had settled, firmly resolved to keep cool.
He tried to be calm, but it was the same again. His finger pressed the
cock before he had taken a good aim at the bird. It got worse and
worse.
He had only five birds in his game-bag when he walked out of the marsh
towards the alders where he was to rejoin Stepan Arkadyevitch.
Before he caught sight of Stepan Arkadyevitch he saw his dog. Krak
darted out from behind the twisted root of an alder, black all over
with the stinking mire of the marsh, and with the air of a conqueror
sniffed at Laska. Behind Krak there came into view in the shade of the
alder tree the shapely figure of Stepan Arkadyevitch. He came to meet
him, red and perspiring, with unbuttoned neckband, still limping in the
same way.
“Well? You have been popping away!” he said, smiling good-humoredly.
“How have you got on?” queried Levin. But there was no need to ask, for
he had already seen the full game bag.
“Oh, pretty fair.”
He had fourteen birds.
“A splendid marsh! I’ve no doubt Veslovsky got in your way. It’s
awkward too, shooting with one dog,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, to
soften his triumph.
Chapter 11
When Levin and Stepan Arkadyevitch reached the peasant’s hut where
Levin always used to stay, Veslovsky was already there. He was sitting
in the middle of the hut, clinging with both hands to the bench from
which he was being pulled by a soldier, the brother of the peasant’s
wife, who was helping him off with his miry boots. Veslovsky was
laughing his infectious, good-humored laugh.
“I’ve only just come. _Ils ont été charmants_. Just fancy, they gave me
drink, fed me! Such bread, it was exquisite! _Délicieux!_ And the
vodka, I never tasted any better. And they would not take a penny for
anything. And they kept saying: ‘Excuse our homely ways.’”
“What should they take anything for? They were entertaining you, to be
sure. Do you suppose they keep vodka for sale?” said the soldier,
succeeding at last in pulling the soaked boot off the blackened
stocking.
In spite of the dirtiness of the hut, which was all muddied by their
boots and the filthy dogs licking themselves clean, and the smell of
marsh mud and powder that filled the room, and the absence of knives
and forks, the party drank their tea and ate their supper with a relish
only known to sportsmen. Washed and clean, they went into a hay-barn
swept ready for them, where the coachman had been making up beds for
the gentlemen.
Though it was dusk, not one of them wanted to go to sleep.
After wavering among reminiscences and anecdotes of guns, of dogs, and
of former shooting parties, the conversation rested on a topic that
interested all of them. After Vassenka had several times over expressed
his appreciation of this delightful sleeping place among the fragrant
hay, this delightful broken cart (he supposed it to be broken because
the shafts had been taken out), of the good nature of the peasants that
had treated him to vodka, of the dogs who lay at the feet of their
respective masters, Oblonsky began telling them of a delightful
shooting party at Malthus’s, where he had stayed the previous summer.
Malthus was a well-known capitalist, who had made his money by
speculation in railway shares. Stepan Arkadyevitch described what
grouse moors this Malthus had bought in the Tver province, and how they
were preserved, and of the carriages and dogcarts in which the shooting
party had been driven, and the luncheon pavilion that had been rigged
up at the marsh.
“I don’t understand you,” said Levin, sitting up in the hay; “how is it
such people don’t disgust you? I can understand a lunch with Lafitte is
all very pleasant, but don’t you dislike just that very sumptuousness?
All these people, just like our spirit monopolists in old days, get
their money in a way that gains them the contempt of everyone. They
don’t care for their contempt, and then they use their dishonest gains
to buy off the contempt they have deserved.”
“Perfectly true!” chimed in Vassenka Veslovsky. “Perfectly! Oblonsky,
of course, goes out of _bonhomie_, but other people say: ‘Well,
Oblonsky stays with them.’...”
“Not a bit of it.” Levin could hear that Oblonsky was smiling as he
spoke. “I simply don’t consider him more dishonest than any other
wealthy merchant or nobleman. They’ve all made their money alike—by
their work and their intelligence.”
“Oh, by what work? Do you call it work to get hold of concessions and
speculate with them?”
“Of course it’s work. Work in this sense, that if it were not for him
and others like him, there would have been no railways.”
“But that’s not work, like the work of a peasant or a learned
profession.”
“Granted, but it’s work in the sense that his activity produces a
result—the railways. But of course you think the railways useless.”
“No, that’s another question; I am prepared to admit that they’re
useful. But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended
is dishonest.”
“But who is to define what is proportionate?”
“Making profit by dishonest means, by trickery,” said Levin, conscious
that he could not draw a distinct line between honesty and dishonesty.
“Such as banking, for instance,” he went on. “It’s an evil—the amassing
of huge fortunes without labor, just the same thing as with the spirit
monopolies, it’s only the form that’s changed. _Le roi est mort, vive
le roi_. No sooner were the spirit monopolies abolished than the
railways came up, and banking companies; that, too, is profit without
work.”
“Yes, that may all be very true and clever.... Lie down, Krak!” Stepan
Arkadyevitch called to his dog, who was scratching and turning over all
the hay. He was obviously convinced of the correctness of his position,
and so talked serenely and without haste. “But you have not drawn the
line between honest and dishonest work. That I receive a bigger salary
than my chief clerk, though he knows more about the work than I
do—that’s dishonest, I suppose?”
“I can’t say.”
“Well, but I can tell you: your receiving some five thousand, let’s
say, for your work on the land, while our host, the peasant here,
however hard he works, can never get more than fifty roubles, is just
as dishonest as my earning more than my chief clerk, and Malthus
getting more than a station-master. No, quite the contrary; I see that
society takes up a sort of antagonistic attitude to these people, which
is utterly baseless, and I fancy there’s envy at the bottom of it....”
“No, that’s unfair,” said Veslovsky; “how could envy come in? There is
something not nice about that sort of business.”
“You say,” Levin went on, “that it’s unjust for me to receive five
thousand, while the peasant has fifty; that’s true. It is unfair, and I
feel it, but....”
“It really is. Why is it we spend our time riding, drinking, shooting,
doing nothing, while they are forever at work?” said Vassenka
Veslovsky, obviously for the first time in his life reflecting on the
question, and consequently considering it with perfect sincerity.
“Yes, you feel it, but you don’t give him your property,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, intentionally, as it seemed, provoking Levin.
There had arisen of late something like a secret antagonism between the
two brothers-in-law; as though, since they had married sisters, a kind
of rivalry had sprung up between them as to which was ordering his life
best, and now this hostility showed itself in the conversation, as it
began to take a personal note.
“I don’t give it away, because no one demands that from me, and if I
wanted to, I could not give it away,” answered Levin, “and have no one
to give it to.”
“Give it to this peasant, he would not refuse it.”
“Yes, but how am I to give it up? Am I to go to him and make a deed of
conveyance?”
“I don’t know; but if you are convinced that you have no right....”
“I’m not at all convinced. On the contrary, I feel I have no right to
give it up, that I have duties both to the land and to my family.”
“No, excuse me, but if you consider this inequality is unjust, why is
it you don’t act accordingly?...”
“Well, I do act negatively on that idea, so far as not trying to
increase the difference of position existing between him and me.”
“No, excuse me, that’s a paradox.”
“Yes, there’s something of a sophistry about that,” Veslovsky agreed.
“Ah! our host; so you’re not asleep yet?” he said to the peasant who
came into the barn, opening the creaking door. “How is it you’re not
asleep?”
“No, how’s one to sleep! I thought our gentlemen would be asleep, but I
heard them chattering. I want to get a hook from here. She won’t bite?”
he added, stepping cautiously with his bare feet.
“And where are you going to sleep?”
“We are going out for the night with the beasts.”
“Ah, what a night!” said Veslovsky, looking out at the edge of the hut
and the unharnessed wagonette that could be seen in the faint light of
the evening glow in the great frame of the open doors. “But listen,
there are women’s voices singing, and, on my word, not badly too. Who’s
that singing, my friend?”
“That’s the maids from hard by here.”
“Let’s go, let’s have a walk! We shan’t go to sleep, you know.
Oblonsky, come along!”
“If one could only do both, lie here and go,” answered Oblonsky,
stretching. “It’s capital lying here.”
“Well, I shall go by myself,” said Veslovsky, getting up eagerly, and
putting on his shoes and stockings. “Good-bye, gentlemen. If it’s fun,
I’ll fetch you. You’ve treated me to some good sport, and I won’t
forget you.”
“He really is a capital fellow, isn’t he?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
when Veslovsky had gone out and the peasant had closed the door after
him.
“Yes, capital,” answered Levin, still thinking of the subject of their
conversation just before. It seemed to him that he had clearly
expressed his thoughts and feelings to the best of his capacity, and
yet both of them, straightforward men and not fools, had said with one
voice that he was comforting himself with sophistries. This
disconcerted him.
“It’s just this, my dear boy. One must do one of two things: either
admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for
one’s rights in it; or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust
privileges, as I do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.”
“No, if it were unjust, you could not enjoy these advantages and be
satisfied—at least I could not. The great thing for me is to feel that
I’m not to blame.”
“What do you say, why not go after all?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
evidently weary of the strain of thought. “We shan’t go to sleep, you
know. Come, let’s go!”
Levin did not answer. What they had said in the conversation, that he
acted justly only in a negative sense, absorbed his thoughts. “Can it
be that it’s only possible to be just negatively?” he was asking
himself.
“How strong the smell of the fresh hay is, though,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, getting up. “There’s not a chance of sleeping. Vassenka
has been getting up some fun there. Do you hear the laughing and his
voice? Hadn’t we better go? Come along!”
“No, I’m not coming,” answered Levin.
“Surely that’s not a matter of principle too,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, smiling, as he felt about in the dark for his cap.
“It’s not a matter of principle, but why should I go?”
“But do you know you are preparing trouble for yourself,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, finding his cap and getting up.
“How so?”
“Do you suppose I don’t see the line you’ve taken up with your wife? I
heard how it’s a question of the greatest consequence, whether or not
you’re to be away for a couple of days’ shooting. That’s all very well
as an idyllic episode, but for your whole life that won’t answer. A man
must be independent; he has his masculine interests. A man has to be
manly,” said Oblonsky, opening the door.
“In what way? To go running after servant girls?” said Levin.
“Why not, if it amuses him? _Ça ne tire pas à conséquence_. It won’t do
my wife any harm, and it’ll amuse me. The great thing is to respect the
sanctity of the home. There should be nothing in the home. But don’t
tie your own hands.”
“Perhaps so,” said Levin dryly, and he turned on his side. “Tomorrow,
early, I want to go shooting, and I won’t wake anyone, and shall set
off at daybreak.”
“_Messieurs, venez vite!_” they heard the voice of Veslovsky coming
back. “_Charmante!_ I’ve made such a discovery. _Charmante!_ a perfect
Gretchen, and I’ve already made friends with her. Really, exceedingly
pretty,” he declared in a tone of approval, as though she had been made
pretty entirely on his account, and he was expressing his satisfaction
with the entertainment that had been provided for him.
Levin pretended to be asleep, while Oblonsky, putting on his slippers,
and lighting a cigar, walked out of the barn, and soon their voices
were lost.
For a long while Levin could not get to sleep. He heard the horses
munching hay, then he heard the peasant and his elder boy getting ready
for the night, and going off for the night watch with the beasts, then
he heard the soldier arranging his bed on the other side of the barn,
with his nephew, the younger son of their peasant host. He heard the
boy in his shrill little voice telling his uncle what he thought about
the dogs, who seemed to him huge and terrible creatures, and asking
what the dogs were going to hunt next day, and the soldier in a husky,
sleepy voice, telling him the sportsmen were going in the morning to
the marsh, and would shoot with their guns; and then, to check the
boy’s questions, he said, “Go to sleep, Vaska; go to sleep, or you’ll
catch it,” and soon after he began snoring himself, and everything was
still. He could only hear the snort of the horses, and the guttural cry
of a snipe.
“Is it really only negative?” he repeated to himself. “Well, what of
it? It’s not my fault.” And he began thinking about the next day.
“Tomorrow I’ll go out early, and I’ll make a point of keeping cool.
There are lots of snipe; and there are grouse too. When I come back
there’ll be the note from Kitty. Yes, Stiva may be right, I’m not manly
with her, I’m tied to her apron-strings.... Well, it can’t be helped!
Negative again....”
Half asleep, he heard the laughter and mirthful talk of Veslovsky and
Stepan Arkadyevitch. For an instant he opened his eyes: the moon was
up, and in the open doorway, brightly lighted up by the moonlight, they
were standing talking. Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying something of the
freshness of one girl, comparing her to a freshly peeled nut, and
Veslovsky with his infectious laugh was repeating some words, probably
said to him by a peasant: “Ah, you do your best to get round her!”
Levin, half asleep, said:
“Gentlemen, tomorrow before daylight!” and fell asleep.
Chapter 12
Waking up at earliest dawn, Levin tried to wake his companions.
Vassenka, lying on his stomach, with one leg in a stocking thrust out,
was sleeping so soundly that he could elicit no response. Oblonsky,
half asleep, declined to get up so early. Even Laska, who was asleep,
curled up in the hay, got up unwillingly, and lazily stretched out and
straightened her hind legs one after the other. Getting on his boots
and stockings, taking his gun, and carefully opening the creaking door
of the barn, Levin went out into the road. The coachmen were sleeping
in their carriages, the horses were dozing. Only one was lazily eating
oats, dipping its nose into the manger. It was still gray out-of-doors.
“Why are you up so early, my dear?” the old woman, their hostess, said,
coming out of the hut and addressing him affectionately as an old
friend.
“Going shooting, granny. Do I go this way to the marsh?”
“Straight out at the back; by our threshing floor, my dear, and hemp
patches; there’s a little footpath.” Stepping carefully with her
sunburnt, bare feet, the old woman conducted Levin, and moved back the
fence for him by the threshing floor.
“Straight on and you’ll come to the marsh. Our lads drove the cattle
there yesterday evening.”
Laska ran eagerly forward along the little path. Levin followed her
with a light, rapid step, continually looking at the sky. He hoped the
sun would not be up before he reached the marsh. But the sun did not
delay. The moon, which had been bright when he went out, by now shone
only like a crescent of quicksilver. The pink flush of dawn, which one
could not help seeing before, now had to be sought to be discerned at
all. What were before undefined, vague blurs in the distant countryside
could now be distinctly seen. They were sheaves of rye. The dew, not
visible till the sun was up, wetted Levin’s legs and his blouse above
his belt in the high growing, fragrant hemp patch, from which the
pollen had already fallen out. In the transparent stillness of morning
the smallest sounds were audible. A bee flew by Levin’s ear with the
whizzing sound of a bullet. He looked carefully, and saw a second and a
third. They were all flying from the beehives behind the hedge, and
they disappeared over the hemp patch in the direction of the marsh. The
path led straight to the marsh. The marsh could be recognized by the
mist which rose from it, thicker in one place and thinner in another,
so that the reeds and willow bushes swayed like islands in this mist.
At the edge of the marsh and the road, peasant boys and men, who had
been herding for the night, were lying, and in the dawn all were asleep
under their coats. Not far from them were three hobbled horses. One of
them clanked a chain. Laska walked beside her master, pressing a little
forward and looking round. Passing the sleeping peasants and reaching
the first reeds, Levin examined his pistols and let his dog off. One of
the horses, a sleek, dark-brown three-year-old, seeing the dog, started
away, switched its tail and snorted. The other horses too were
frightened, and splashing through the water with their hobbled legs,
and drawing their hoofs out of the thick mud with a squelching sound,
they bounded out of the marsh. Laska stopped, looking ironically at the
horses and inquiringly at Levin. Levin patted Laska, and whistled as a
sign that she might begin.
Laska ran joyfully and anxiously through the slush that swayed under
her.
Running into the marsh among the familiar scents of roots, marsh
plants, and slime, and the extraneous smell of horse dung, Laska
detected at once a smell that pervaded the whole marsh, the scent of
that strong-smelling bird that always excited her more than any other.
Here and there among the moss and marsh plants this scent was very
strong, but it was impossible to determine in which direction it grew
stronger or fainter. To find the direction, she had to go farther away
from the wind. Not feeling the motion of her legs, Laska bounded with a
stiff gallop, so that at each bound she could stop short, to the right,
away from the wind that blew from the east before sunrise, and turned
facing the wind. Sniffing in the air with dilated nostrils, she felt at
once that not their tracks only but they themselves were here before
her, and not one, but many. Laska slackened her speed. They were here,
but where precisely she could not yet determine. To find the very spot,
she began to make a circle, when suddenly her master’s voice drew her
off. “Laska! here?” he asked, pointing her to a different direction.
She stopped, asking him if she had better not go on doing as she had
begun. But he repeated his command in an angry voice, pointing to a
spot covered with water, where there could not be anything. She obeyed
him, pretending she was looking, so as to please him, went round it,
and went back to her former position, and was at once aware of the
scent again. Now when he was not hindering her, she knew what to do,
and without looking at what was under her feet, and to her vexation
stumbling over a high stump into the water, but righting herself with
her strong, supple legs, she began making the circle which was to make
all clear to her. The scent of them reached her, stronger and stronger,
and more and more defined, and all at once it became perfectly clear to
her that one of them was here, behind this tuft of reeds, five paces in
front of her; she stopped, and her whole body was still and rigid. On
her short legs she could see nothing in front of her, but by the scent
she knew it was sitting not more than five paces off. She stood still,
feeling more and more conscious of it, and enjoying it in anticipation.
Her tail was stretched straight and tense, and only wagging at the
extreme end. Her mouth was slightly open, her ears raised. One ear had
been turned wrong side out as she ran up, and she breathed heavily but
warily, and still more warily looked round, but more with her eyes than
her head, to her master. He was coming along with the face she knew so
well, though the eyes were always terrible to her. He stumbled over the
stump as he came, and moved, as she thought, extraordinarily slowly.
She thought he came slowly, but he was running.
Noticing Laska’s special attitude as she crouched on the ground, as it
were, scratching big prints with her hind paws, and with her mouth
slightly open, Levin knew she was pointing at grouse, and with an
inward prayer for luck, especially with the first bird, he ran up to
her. Coming quite close up to her, he could from his height look beyond
her, and he saw with his eyes what she was seeing with her nose. In a
space between two little thickets, at a couple of yards’ distance, he
could see a grouse. Turning its head, it was listening. Then lightly
preening and folding its wings, it disappeared round a corner with a
clumsy wag of its tail.
“Fetch it, fetch it!” shouted Levin, giving Laska a shove from behind.
“But I can’t go,” thought Laska. “Where am I to go? From here I feel
them, but if I move forward I shall know nothing of where they are or
who they are.” But then he shoved her with his knee, and in an excited
whisper said, “Fetch it, Laska.”
“Well, if that’s what he wishes, I’ll do it, but I can’t answer for
myself now,” she thought, and darted forward as fast as her legs would
carry her between the thick bushes. She scented nothing now; she could
only see and hear, without understanding anything.
Ten paces from her former place a grouse rose with a guttural cry and
the peculiar round sound of its wings. And immediately after the shot
it splashed heavily with its white breast on the wet mire. Another bird
did not linger, but rose behind Levin without the dog. When Levin
turned towards it, it was already some way off. But his shot caught it.
Flying twenty paces further, the second grouse rose upwards, and
whirling round like a ball, dropped heavily on a dry place.
“Come, this is going to be some good!” thought Levin, packing the warm
and fat grouse into his game bag. “Eh, Laska, will it be good?”
When Levin, after loading his gun, moved on, the sun had fully risen,
though unseen behind the storm-clouds. The moon had lost all of its
luster, and was like a white cloud in the sky. Not a single star could
be seen. The sedge, silvery with dew before, now shone like gold. The
stagnant pools were all like amber. The blue of the grass had changed
to yellow-green. The marsh birds twittered and swarmed about the brook
and upon the bushes that glittered with dew and cast long shadows. A
hawk woke up and settled on a haycock, turning its head from side to
side and looking discontentedly at the marsh. Crows were flying about
the field, and a bare-legged boy was driving the horses to an old man,
who had got up from under his long coat and was combing his hair. The
smoke from the gun was white as milk over the green of the grass.
One of the boys ran up to Levin.
“Uncle, there were ducks here yesterday!” he shouted to him, and he
walked a little way off behind him.
And Levin was doubly pleased, in sight of the boy, who expressed his
approval, at killing three snipe, one after another, straight off.
Chapter 13
The sportsman’s saying, that if the first beast or the first bird is
not missed, the day will be lucky, turned out correct.
At ten o’clock Levin, weary, hungry, and happy after a tramp of twenty
miles, returned to his night’s lodging with nineteen head of fine game
and one duck, which he tied to his belt, as it would not go into the
game bag. His companions had long been awake, and had had time to get
hungry and have breakfast.
“Wait a bit, wait a bit, I know there are nineteen,” said Levin,
counting a second time over the grouse and snipe, that looked so much
less important now, bent and dry and bloodstained, with heads crooked
aside, than they did when they were flying.
The number was verified, and Stepan Arkadyevitch’s envy pleased Levin.
He was pleased too on returning to find the man sent by Kitty with a
note was already there.
“I am perfectly well and happy. If you were uneasy about me, you can
feel easier than ever. I’ve a new bodyguard, Marya Vlasyevna,”—this was
the midwife, a new and important personage in Levin’s domestic life.
“She has come to have a look at me. She found me perfectly well, and we
have kept her till you are back. All are happy and well, and please,
don’t be in a hurry to come back, but, if the sport is good, stay
another day.”
These two pleasures, his lucky shooting and the letter from his wife,
were so great that two slightly disagreeable incidents passed lightly
over Levin. One was that the chestnut trace horse, who had been
unmistakably overworked on the previous day, was off his feed and out
of sorts. The coachman said he was “Overdriven yesterday, Konstantin
Dmitrievitch. Yes, indeed! driven ten miles with no sense!”
The other unpleasant incident, which for the first minute destroyed his
good humor, though later he laughed at it a great deal, was to find
that of all the provisions Kitty had provided in such abundance that
one would have thought there was enough for a week, nothing was left.
On his way back, tired and hungry from shooting, Levin had so distinct
a vision of meat-pies that as he approached the hut he seemed to smell
and taste them, as Laska had smelt the game, and he immediately told
Philip to give him some. It appeared that there were no pies left, nor
even any chicken.
“Well, this fellow’s appetite!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing and
pointing at Vassenka Veslovsky. “I never suffer from loss of appetite,
but he’s really marvelous!...”
“Well, it can’t be helped,” said Levin, looking gloomily at Veslovsky.
“Well, Philip, give me some beef, then.”
“The beef’s been eaten, and the bones given to the dogs,” answered
Philip.
Levin was so hurt that he said, in a tone of vexation, “You might have
left me something!” and he felt ready to cry.
“Then put away the game,” he said in a shaking voice to Philip, trying
not to look at Vassenka, “and cover them with some nettles. And you
might at least ask for some milk for me.”
But when he had drunk some milk, he felt ashamed immediately at having
shown his annoyance to a stranger, and he began to laugh at his hungry
mortification.
In the evening they went shooting again, and Veslovsky had several
successful shots, and in the night they drove home.
Their homeward journey was as lively as their drive out had been.
Veslovsky sang songs and related with enjoyment his adventures with the
peasants, who had regaled him with vodka, and said to him, “Excuse our
homely ways,” and his night’s adventures with kiss-in-the-ring and the
servant-girl and the peasant, who had asked him was he married, and on
learning that he was not, said to him, “Well, mind you don’t run after
other men’s wives—you’d better get one of your own.” These words had
particularly amused Veslovsky.
“Altogether, I’ve enjoyed our outing awfully. And you, Levin?”
“I have, very much,” Levin said quite sincerely. It was particularly
delightful to him to have got rid of the hostility he had been feeling
towards Vassenka Veslovsky at home, and to feel instead the most
friendly disposition to him.
Chapter 14
Next day at ten o’clock Levin, who had already gone his rounds, knocked
at the room where Vassenka had been put for the night.
“_Entrez!_” Veslovsky called to him. “Excuse me, I’ve only just
finished my ablutions,” he said, smiling, standing before him in his
underclothes only.
“Don’t mind me, please.” Levin sat down in the window. “Have you slept
well?”
“Like the dead. What sort of day is it for shooting?”
“What will you take, tea or coffee?”
“Neither. I’ll wait till lunch. I’m really ashamed. I suppose the
ladies are down? A walk now would be capital. You show me your horses.”
After walking about the garden, visiting the stable, and even doing
some gymnastic exercises together on the parallel bars, Levin returned
to the house with his guest, and went with him into the drawing-room.
“We had splendid shooting, and so many delightful experiences!” said
Veslovsky, going up to Kitty, who was sitting at the samovar. “What a
pity ladies are cut off from these delights!”
“Well, I suppose he must say something to the lady of the house,” Levin
said to himself. Again he fancied something in the smile, in the
all-conquering air with which their guest addressed Kitty....
The princess, sitting on the other side of the table with Marya
Vlasyevna and Stepan Arkadyevitch, called Levin to her side, and began
to talk to him about moving to Moscow for Kitty’s confinement, and
getting ready rooms for them. Just as Levin had disliked all the
trivial preparations for his wedding, as derogatory to the grandeur of
the event, now he felt still more offensive the preparations for the
approaching birth, the date of which they reckoned, it seemed, on their
fingers. He tried to turn a deaf ear to these discussions of the best
patterns of long clothes for the coming baby; tried to turn away and
avoid seeing the mysterious, endless strips of knitting, the triangles
of linen, and so on, to which Dolly attached special importance. The
birth of a son (he was certain it would be a son) which was promised
him, but which he still could not believe in—so marvelous it
seemed—presented itself to his mind, on one hand, as a happiness so
immense, and therefore so incredible; on the other, as an event so
mysterious, that this assumption of a definite knowledge of what would
be, and consequent preparation for it, as for something ordinary that
did happen to people, jarred on him as confusing and humiliating.
But the princess did not understand his feelings, and put down his
reluctance to think and talk about it to carelessness and indifference,
and so she gave him no peace. She had commissioned Stepan Arkadyevitch
to look at a flat, and now she called Levin up.
“I know nothing about it, princess. Do as you think fit,” he said.
“You must decide when you will move.”
“I really don’t know. I know millions of children are born away from
Moscow, and doctors ... why....”
“But if so....”
“Oh, no, as Kitty wishes.”
“We can’t talk to Kitty about it! Do you want me to frighten her? Why,
this spring Natalia Golitzina died from having an ignorant doctor.”
“I will do just what you say,” he said gloomily.
The princess began talking to him, but he did not hear her. Though the
conversation with the princess had indeed jarred upon him, he was
gloomy, not on account of that conversation, but from what he saw at
the samovar.
“No, it’s impossible,” he thought, glancing now and then at Vassenka
bending over Kitty, telling her something with his charming smile, and
at her, flushed and disturbed.
There was something not nice in Vassenka’s attitude, in his eyes, in
his smile. Levin even saw something not nice in Kitty’s attitude and
look. And again the light died away in his eyes. Again, as before, all
of a sudden, without the slightest transition, he felt cast down from a
pinnacle of happiness, peace, and dignity, into an abyss of despair,
rage, and humiliation. Again everything and everyone had become hateful
to him.
“You do just as you think best, princess,” he said again, looking
round.
“Heavy is the cap of Monomach,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said playfully,
hinting, evidently, not simply at the princess’s conversation, but at
the cause of Levin’s agitation, which he had noticed.
“How late you are today, Dolly!”
Everyone got up to greet Darya Alexandrovna. Vassenka only rose for an
instant, and with the lack of courtesy to ladies characteristic of the
modern young man, he scarcely bowed, and resumed his conversation
again, laughing at something.
“I’ve been worried about Masha. She did not sleep well, and is
dreadfully tiresome today,” said Dolly.
The conversation Vassenka had started with Kitty was running on the
same lines as on the previous evening, discussing Anna, and whether
love is to be put higher than worldly considerations. Kitty disliked
the conversation, and she was disturbed both by the subject and the
tone in which it was conducted, and also by the knowledge of the effect
it would have on her husband. But she was too simple and innocent to
know how to cut short this conversation, or even to conceal the
superficial pleasure afforded her by the young man’s very obvious
admiration. She wanted to stop it, but she did not know what to do.
Whatever she did she knew would be observed by her husband, and the
worst interpretation put on it. And, in fact, when she asked Dolly what
was wrong with Masha, and Vassenka, waiting till this uninteresting
conversation was over, began to gaze indifferently at Dolly, the
question struck Levin as an unnatural and disgusting piece of
hypocrisy.
“What do you say, shall we go and look for mushrooms today?” said
Dolly.
“By all means, please, and I shall come too,” said Kitty, and she
blushed. She wanted from politeness to ask Vassenka whether he would
come, and she did not ask him. “Where are you going, Kostya?” she asked
her husband with a guilty face, as he passed by her with a resolute
step. This guilty air confirmed all his suspicions.
“The mechanician came when I was away; I haven’t seen him yet,” he
said, not looking at her.
He went downstairs, but before he had time to leave his study he heard
his wife’s familiar footsteps running with reckless speed to him.
“What do you want?” he said to her shortly. “We are busy.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said to the German mechanician; “I want a few
words with my husband.”
The German would have left the room, but Levin said to him:
“Don’t disturb yourself.”
“The train is at three?” queried the German. “I mustn’t be late.”
Levin did not answer him, but walked out himself with his wife.
“Well, what have you to say to me?” he said to her in French.
He did not look her in the face, and did not care to see that she in
her condition was trembling all over, and had a piteous, crushed look.
“I ... I want to say that we can’t go on like this; that this is
misery....” she said.
“The servants are here at the sideboard,” he said angrily; “don’t make
a scene.”
“Well, let’s go in here!”
They were standing in the passage. Kitty would have gone into the next
room, but there the English governess was giving Tanya a lesson.
“Well, come into the garden.”
In the garden they came upon a peasant weeding the path. And no longer
considering that the peasant could see her tear-stained and his
agitated face, that they looked like people fleeing from some disaster,
they went on with rapid steps, feeling that they must speak out and
clear up misunderstandings, must be alone together, and so get rid of
the misery they were both feeling.
“We can’t go on like this! It’s misery! I am wretched; you are
wretched. What for?” she said, when they had at last reached a solitary
garden seat at a turn in the lime tree avenue.
“But tell me one thing: was there in his tone anything unseemly, not
nice, humiliatingly horrible?” he said, standing before her again in
the same position with his clenched fists on his chest, as he had stood
before her that night.
“Yes,” she said in a shaking voice; “but, Kostya, surely you see I’m
not to blame? All the morning I’ve been trying to take a tone ... but
such people.... Why did he come? How happy we were!” she said,
breathless with the sobs that shook her.
Although nothing had been pursuing them, and there was nothing to run
away from, and they could not possibly have found anything very
delightful on that garden seat, the gardener saw with astonishment that
they passed him on their way home with comforted and radiant faces.
Chapter 15
After escorting his wife upstairs, Levin went to Dolly’s part of the
house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was in great distress too that
day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a little girl,
who stood in the corner roaring.
“And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all
alone, and not see one of your dolls, and I won’t make you a new
frock,” she said, not knowing how to punish her.
“Oh, she is a disgusting child!” she turned to Levin. “Where does she
get such wicked propensities?”
“Why, what has she done?” Levin said without much interest, for he had
wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at an
unlucky moment.
“Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there ... I can’t tell
you really what she did. It’s a thousand pities Miss Elliot’s not with
us. This one sees to nothing—she’s a machine.... _Figurez-vous que la
petite_?...”
And Darya Alexandrovna described Masha’s crime.
“That proves nothing; it’s not a question of evil propensities at all,
it’s simply mischief,” Levin assured her.
“But you are upset about something? What have you come for?” asked
Dolly. “What’s going on there?”
And in the tone of her question Levin heard that it would be easy for
him to say what he had meant to say.
“I’ve not been in there, I’ve been alone in the garden with Kitty.
We’ve had a quarrel for the second time since ... Stiva came.”
Dolly looked at him with her shrewd, comprehending eyes.
“Come, tell me, honor bright, has there been ... not in Kitty, but in
that gentleman’s behavior, a tone which might be unpleasant—not
unpleasant, but horrible, offensive to a husband?”
“You mean, how shall I say.... Stay, stay in the corner!” she said to
Masha, who, detecting a faint smile in her mother’s face, had been
turning round. “The opinion of the world would be that he is behaving
as young men do behave. _Il fait la cour à une jeune et jolie femme_,
and a husband who’s a man of the world should only be flattered by it.”
“Yes, yes,” said Levin gloomily; “but you noticed it?”
“Not only I, but Stiva noticed it. Just after breakfast he said to me
in so many words, _Je crois que Veslovsky fait un petit brin de cour à
Kitty_.”
“Well, that’s all right then; now I’m satisfied. I’ll send him away,”
said Levin.
“What do you mean! Are you crazy?” Dolly cried in horror; “nonsense,
Kostya, only think!” she said, laughing. “You can go now to Fanny,” she
said to Masha. “No, if you wish it, I’ll speak to Stiva. He’ll take him
away. He can say you’re expecting visitors. Altogether he doesn’t fit
into the house.”
“No, no, I’ll do it myself.”
“But you’ll quarrel with him?”
“Not a bit. I shall so enjoy it,” Levin said, his eyes flashing with
real enjoyment. “Come, forgive her, Dolly, she won’t do it again,” he
said of the little sinner, who had not gone to Fanny, but was standing
irresolutely before her mother, waiting and looking up from under her
brows to catch her mother’s eye.
The mother glanced at her. The child broke into sobs, hid her face on
her mother’s lap, and Dolly laid her thin, tender hand on her head.
“And what is there in common between us and him?” thought Levin, and he
went off to look for Veslovsky.
As he passed through the passage he gave orders for the carriage to be
got ready to drive to the station.
“The spring was broken yesterday,” said the footman.
“Well, the covered trap, then, and make haste. Where’s the visitor?”
“The gentleman’s gone to his room.”
Levin came upon Veslovsky at the moment when the latter, having
unpacked his things from his trunk, and laid out some new songs, was
putting on his gaiters to go out riding.
Whether there was something exceptional in Levin’s face, or that
Vassenka was himself conscious that _ce petit brin de cour_ he was
making was out of place in this family, but he was somewhat (as much as
a young man in society can be) disconcerted at Levin’s entrance.
“You ride in gaiters?”
“Yes, it’s much cleaner,” said Vassenka, putting his fat leg on a
chair, fastening the bottom hook, and smiling with simple-hearted good
humor.
He was undoubtedly a good-natured fellow, and Levin felt sorry for him
and ashamed of himself, as his host, when he saw the shy look on
Vassenka’s face.
On the table lay a piece of stick which they had broken together that
morning, trying their strength. Levin took the fragment in his hands
and began smashing it up, breaking bits off the stick, not knowing how
to begin.
“I wanted....” He paused, but suddenly, remembering Kitty and
everything that had happened, he said, looking him resolutely in the
face: “I have ordered the horses to be put-to for you.”
“How so?” Vassenka began in surprise. “To drive where?”
“For you to drive to the station,” Levin said gloomily.
“Are you going away, or has something happened?”
“It happens that I expect visitors,” said Levin, his strong fingers
more and more rapidly breaking off the ends of the split stick. “And
I’m not expecting visitors, and nothing has happened, but I beg you to
go away. You can explain my rudeness as you like.”
Vassenka drew himself up.
“I beg you to explain....” he said with dignity, understanding at last.
“I can’t explain,” Levin said softly and deliberately, trying to
control the trembling of his jaw; “and you’d better not ask.”
And as the split ends were all broken off, Levin clutched the thick
ends in his finger, broke the stick in two, and carefully caught the
end as it fell.
Probably the sight of those nervous fingers, of the muscles he had
proved that morning at gymnastics, of the glittering eyes, the soft
voice, and quivering jaws, convinced Vassenka better than any words. He
bowed, shrugging his shoulders, and smiling contemptuously.
“Can I not see Oblonsky?”
The shrug and the smile did not irritate Levin.
“What else was there for him to do?” he thought.
“I’ll send him to you at once.”
“What madness is this?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said when, after hearing
from his friend that he was being turned out of the house, he found
Levin in the garden, where he was walking about waiting for his guest’s
departure. “_Mais c’est ridicule!_ What fly has stung you? _Mais c’est
du dernier ridicule!_ What did you think, if a young man....”
But the place where Levin had been stung was evidently still sore, for
he turned pale again, when Stepan Arkadyevitch would have enlarged on
the reason, and he himself cut him short.
“Please don’t go into it! I can’t help it. I feel ashamed of how I’m
treating you and him. But it won’t be, I imagine, a great grief to him
to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife.”
“But it’s insulting to him! _Et puis c’est ridicule_.”
“And to me it’s both insulting and distressing! And I’m not at fault in
any way, and there’s no need for me to suffer.”
“Well, this I didn’t expect of you! _On peut être jaloux, mais à ce
point, c’est du dernier ridicule!_”
Levin turned quickly, and walked away from him into the depths of the
avenue, and he went on walking up and down alone. Soon he heard the
rumble of the trap, and saw from behind the trees how Vassenka, sitting
in the hay (unluckily there was no seat in the trap) in his Scotch cap,
was driven along the avenue, jolting up and down over the ruts.
“What’s this?” Levin thought, when a footman ran out of the house and
stopped the trap. It was the mechanician, whom Levin had totally
forgotten. The mechanician, bowing low, said something to Veslovsky,
then clambered into the trap, and they drove off together.
Stepan Arkadyevitch and the princess were much upset by Levin’s action.
And he himself felt not only in the highest degree _ridicule_, but also
utterly guilty and disgraced. But remembering what sufferings he and
his wife had been through, when he asked himself how he should act
another time, he answered that he should do just the same again.
In spite of all this, towards the end of that day, everyone except the
princess, who could not pardon Levin’s action, became extraordinarily
lively and good-humored, like children after a punishment or grown-up
people after a dreary, ceremonious reception, so that by the evening
Vassenka’s dismissal was spoken of, in the absence of the princess, as
though it were some remote event. And Dolly, who had inherited her
father’s gift of humorous storytelling, made Varenka helpless with
laughter as she related for the third and fourth time, always with
fresh humorous additions, how she had only just put on her new shoes
for the benefit of the visitor, and on going into the drawing-room,
heard suddenly the rumble of the trap. And who should be in the trap
but Vassenka himself, with his Scotch cap, and his songs and his
gaiters, and all, sitting in the hay.
“If only you’d ordered out the carriage! But no! and then I hear:
‘Stop!’ Oh, I thought they’ve relented. I look out, and behold a fat
German being sat down by him and driving away.... And my new shoes all
for nothing!...”
Chapter 16
Darya Alexandrovna carried out her intention and went to see Anna. She
was sorry to annoy her sister and to do anything Levin disliked. She
quite understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to have
anything to do with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see Anna, and
show her that her feelings could not be changed, in spite of the change
in her position. That she might be independent of the Levins in this
expedition, Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire horses for
the drive; but Levin learning of it went to her to protest.
“What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if I did
dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my horses,” he
said. “You never told me that you were going for certain. Hiring horses
in the village is disagreeable to me, and, what’s of more importance,
they’ll undertake the job and never get you there. I have horses. And
if you don’t want to wound me, you’ll take mine.”
Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and on the day fixed Levin had ready
for his sister-in-law a set of four horses and relays, getting them
together from the farm and saddle-horses—not at all a smart-looking
set, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the whole distance in a
single day. At that moment, when horses were wanted for the princess,
who was going, and for the midwife, it was a difficult matter for Levin
to make up the number, but the duties of hospitality would not let him
allow Darya Alexandrovna to hire horses when staying in his house.
Moreover, he was well aware that the twenty roubles that would be asked
for the journey were a serious matter for her; Darya Alexandrovna’s
pecuniary affairs, which were in a very unsatisfactory state, were
taken to heart by the Levins as if they were their own.
Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak. The
road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted along
merrily, and on the box, besides the coachman, sat the counting-house
clerk, whom Levin was sending instead of a groom for greater security.
Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only on reaching the inn where
the horses were to be changed.
After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant’s with whom Levin had
stayed on the way to Sviazhsky’s, and chatting with the women about
their children, and with the old man about Count Vronsky, whom the
latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna, at ten o’clock, went on
again. At home, looking after her children, she had no time to think.
So now, after this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had
suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over
all her life as she never had before, and from the most different
points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first
she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although the
princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to look
after them. “If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if Grisha
isn’t kicked by a horse, and Lily’s stomach isn’t upset again!” she
thought. But these questions of the present were succeeded by questions
of the immediate future. She began thinking how she had to get a new
flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew the drawing-room
furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the
more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her children
in the world. “The girls are all right,” she thought; “but the boys?”
“It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only
because I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course,
there’s no counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I can
bring them up; but if there’s another baby coming?...” And the thought
struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman was
that in sorrow she should bring forth children.
“The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the
child—that’s what’s so intolerable,” she thought, picturing to herself
her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled
the conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On
being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young woman had
answered cheerfully:
“I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.”
“Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya Alexandrovna.
“Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only
a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.”
This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the
good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could
not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed
a grain of truth.
“Yes, altogether,” thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her
whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life,
“pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything,
and most of all—hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even
Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I’m with child become hideous, I
know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment
... then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains....”
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from
sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. “Then the
children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them
up; evil propensities” (she thought of little Masha’s crime among the
raspberries), “education, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and
difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children.” And
there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always
tore her mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had
died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the
little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at
the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the
open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it
was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.
“And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m
wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or
nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and
worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are
growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if it
weren’t for spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we
should be managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much
tact that we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on. They’ll have children,
they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a drag on them as it is. How is
papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that I
can’t even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with
the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we
suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I
bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent
people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what
agonies, what toil!... One’s whole life ruined!” Again she recalled
what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at
the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain of
brutal truth in the words.
“Is it far now, Mihail?” Darya Alexandrovna asked the counting-house
clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were frightening her.
“From this village, they say, it’s five miles.” The carriage drove
along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd
of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders,
gaily and noisily chattering. They stood still on the bridge, staring
inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces turned to Darya
Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of
their enjoyment of life. “They’re all living, they’re all enjoying
life,” Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant
women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the
soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it were from
prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only
looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women
and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all,
but not I.
“And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a
husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him,
while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live.
God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the
same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to
her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then
to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have
loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I
don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she thought about her
husband, “and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that time I
could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,” Darya
Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at
herself in the looking-glass. She had a traveling looking-glass in her
handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the
coachman and the swaying counting-house clerk, she felt that she would
be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take
out the glass.
But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not
too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always
particularly attentive to her, of Stiva’s good-hearted friend,
Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the
scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else, a
quite young man, who—her husband had told her it as a joke—thought her
more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate and
impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. “Anna
did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She
is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as
I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to
every impression,” thought Darya Alexandrovna,—and a sly smile curved
her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya
Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love
affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man
who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to
her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at
this avowal made her smile.
In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to
Vozdvizhenskoe.
Chapter 17
The coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the right,
to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting on a cart. The
counting-house clerk was just going to jump down, but on second
thoughts he shouted peremptorily to the peasants instead, and beckoned
to them to come up. The wind, that seemed to blow as they drove,
dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming
horses that angrily shook them off. The metallic clank of a whetstone
against a scythe, that came to them from the cart, ceased. One of the
peasants got up and came towards the carriage.
“Well, you are slow!” the counting-house clerk shouted angrily to the
peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the ruts of the
rough dry road. “Come along, do!”
A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair, and his
bent back dark with perspiration, came towards the carriage, quickening
his steps, and took hold of the mud-guard with his sunburnt hand.
“Vozdvizhenskoe, the manor house? the count’s?” he repeated; “go on to
the end of this track. Then turn to the left. Straight along the avenue
and you’ll come right upon it. But whom do you want? The count
himself?”
“Well, are they at home, my good man?” Darya Alexandrovna said vaguely,
not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this peasant.
“At home for sure,” said the peasant, shifting from one bare foot to
the other, and leaving a distinct print of five toes and a heel in the
dust. “Sure to be at home,” he repeated, evidently eager to talk. “Only
yesterday visitors arrived. There’s a sight of visitors come. What do
you want?” He turned round and called to a lad, who was shouting
something to him from the cart. “Oh! They all rode by here not long
since, to look at a reaping machine. They’ll be home by now. And who
will you be belonging to?...”
“We’ve come a long way,” said the coachman, climbing onto the box. “So
it’s not far?”
“I tell you, it’s just here. As soon as you get out....” he said,
keeping hold all the while of the carriage.
A healthy-looking, broad-shouldered young fellow came up too.
“What, is it laborers they want for the harvest?” he asked.
“I don’t know, my boy.”
“So you keep to the left, and you’ll come right on it,” said the
peasant, unmistakably loth to let the travelers go, and eager to
converse.
The coachman started the horses, but they were only just turning off
when the peasant shouted: “Stop! Hi, friend! Stop!” called the two
voices. The coachman stopped.
“They’re coming! They’re yonder!” shouted the peasant. “See what a
turn-out!” he said, pointing to four persons on horseback, and two in a
_char-à-banc_, coming along the road.
They were Vronsky with a jockey, Veslovsky and Anna on horseback, and
Princess Varvara and Sviazhsky in the _char-à-banc_. They had gone out
to look at the working of a new reaping machine.
When the carriage stopped, the party on horseback were coming at a
walking pace. Anna was in front beside Veslovsky. Anna, quietly walking
her horse, a sturdy English cob with cropped mane and short tail, her
beautiful head with her black hair straying loose under her high hat,
her full shoulders, her slender waist in her black riding habit, and
all the ease and grace of her deportment, impressed Dolly.
For the first minute it seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to be on
horseback. The conception of riding on horseback for a lady was, in
Darya Alexandrovna’s mind, associated with ideas of youthful flirtation
and frivolity, which, in her opinion, was unbecoming in Anna’s
position. But when she had scrutinized her, seeing her closer, she was
at once reconciled to her riding. In spite of her elegance, everything
was so simple, quiet, and dignified in the attitude, the dress and the
movements of Anna, that nothing could have been more natural.
Beside Anna, on a hot-looking gray cavalry horse, was Vassenka
Veslovsky in his Scotch cap with floating ribbons, his stout legs
stretched out in front, obviously pleased with his own appearance.
Darya Alexandrovna could not suppress a good-humored smile as she
recognized him. Behind rode Vronsky on a dark bay mare, obviously
heated from galloping. He was holding her in, pulling at the reins.
After him rode a little man in the dress of a jockey. Sviazhsky and
Princess Varvara in a new _char-à-banc_ with a big, raven-black
trotting horse, overtook the party on horseback.
Anna’s face suddenly beamed with a joyful smile at the instant when, in
the little figure huddled in a corner of the old carriage, she
recognized Dolly. She uttered a cry, started in the saddle, and set her
horse into a gallop. On reaching the carriage she jumped off without
assistance, and holding up her riding habit, she ran up to greet Dolly.
“I thought it was you and dared not think it. How delightful! You can’t
fancy how glad I am!” she said, at one moment pressing her face against
Dolly and kissing her, and at the next holding her off and examining
her with a smile.
“Here’s a delightful surprise, Alexey!” she said, looking round at
Vronsky, who had dismounted, and was walking towards them.
Vronsky, taking off his tall gray hat, went up to Dolly.
“You wouldn’t believe how glad we are to see you,” he said, giving
peculiar significance to the words, and showing his strong white teeth
in a smile.
Vassenka Veslovsky, without getting off his horse, took off his cap and
greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over his head.
“That’s Princess Varvara,” Anna said in reply to a glance of inquiry
from Dolly as the _char-à-banc_ drove up.
“Ah!” said Darya Alexandrovna, and unconsciously her face betrayed her
dissatisfaction.
Princess Varvara was her husband’s aunt, and she had long known her,
and did not respect her. She knew that Princess Varvara had passed her
whole life toadying on her rich relations, but that she should now be
sponging on Vronsky, a man who was nothing to her, mortified Dolly on
account of her kinship with her husband. Anna noticed Dolly’s
expression, and was disconcerted by it. She blushed, dropped her riding
habit, and stumbled over it.
Darya Alexandrovna went up to the _char-à-banc_ and coldly greeted
Princess Varvara. Sviazhsky too she knew. He inquired how his queer
friend with the young wife was, and running his eyes over the
ill-matched horses and the carriage with its patched mud-guards,
proposed to the ladies that they should get into the _char-à-banc_.
“And I’ll get into this vehicle,” he said. “The horse is quiet, and the
princess drives capitally.”
“No, stay as you were,” said Anna, coming up, “and we’ll go in the
carriage,” and taking Dolly’s arm, she drew her away.
Darya Alexandrovna’s eyes were fairly dazzled by the elegant carriage
of a pattern she had never seen before, the splendid horses, and the
elegant and gorgeous people surrounding her. But what struck her most
of all was the change that had taken place in Anna, whom she knew so
well and loved. Any other woman, a less close observer, not knowing
Anna before, or not having thought as Darya Alexandrovna had been
thinking on the road, would not have noticed anything special in Anna.
But now Dolly was struck by that temporary beauty, which is only found
in women during the moments of love, and which she saw now in Anna’s
face. Everything in her face, the clearly marked dimples in her cheeks
and chin, the line of her lips, the smile which, as it were, fluttered
about her face, the brilliance of her eyes, the grace and rapidity of
her movements, the fulness of the notes of her voice, even the manner
in which, with a sort of angry friendliness, she answered Veslovsky
when he asked permission to get on her cob, so as to teach it to gallop
with the right leg foremost—it was all peculiarly fascinating, and it
seemed as if she were herself aware of it, and rejoicing in it.
When both the women were seated in the carriage, a sudden embarrassment
came over both of them. Anna was disconcerted by the intent look of
inquiry Dolly fixed upon her. Dolly was embarrassed because after
Sviazhsky’s phrase about “this vehicle,” she could not help feeling
ashamed of the dirty old carriage in which Anna was sitting with her.
The coachman Philip and the counting-house clerk were experiencing the
same sensation. The counting-house clerk, to conceal his confusion,
busied himself settling the ladies, but Philip the coachman became
sullen, and was bracing himself not to be overawed in future by this
external superiority. He smiled ironically, looking at the raven horse,
and was already deciding in his own mind that this smart trotter in the
_char-à-banc_ was only good for _promenage_, and wouldn’t do thirty
miles straight off in the heat.
The peasants had all got up from the cart and were inquisitively and
mirthfully staring at the meeting of the friends, making their comments
on it.
“They’re pleased, too; haven’t seen each other for a long while,” said
the curly-headed old man with the bast round his hair.
“I say, Uncle Gerasim, if we could take that raven horse now, to cart
the corn, that ’ud be quick work!”
“Look-ee! Is that a woman in breeches?” said one of them, pointing to
Vassenka Veslovsky sitting in a side saddle.
“Nay, a man! See how smartly he’s going it!”
“Eh, lads! seems we’re not going to sleep, then?”
“What chance of sleep today!” said the old man, with a sidelong look at
the sun. “Midday’s past, look-ee! Get your hooks, and come along!”
Chapter 18
Anna looked at Dolly’s thin, care-worn face, with its wrinkles filled
with dust from the road, and she was on the point of saying what she
was thinking, that is, that Dolly had got thinner. But, conscious that
she herself had grown handsomer, and that Dolly’s eyes were telling her
so, she sighed and began to speak about herself.
“You are looking at me,” she said, “and wondering how I can be happy in
my position? Well! it’s shameful to confess, but I ... I’m inexcusably
happy. Something magical has happened to me, like a dream, when you’re
frightened, panic-stricken, and all of a sudden you wake up and all the
horrors are no more. I have waked up. I have lived through the misery,
the dread, and now for a long while past, especially since we’ve been
here, I’ve been so happy!...” she said, with a timid smile of inquiry
looking at Dolly.
“How glad I am!” said Dolly smiling, involuntarily speaking more coldly
than she wanted to. “I’m very glad for you. Why haven’t you written to
me?”
“Why?... Because I hadn’t the courage.... You forget my position....”
“To me? Hadn’t the courage? If you knew how I ... I look at....”
Darya Alexandrovna wanted to express her thoughts of the morning, but
for some reason it seemed to her now out of place to do so.
“But of that we’ll talk later. What’s this, what are all these
buildings?” she asked, wanting to change the conversation and pointing
to the red and green roofs that came into view behind the green hedges
of acacia and lilac. “Quite a little town.”
But Anna did not answer.
“No, no! How do you look at my position, what do you think of it?” she
asked.
“I consider....” Darya Alexandrovna was beginning, but at that instant
Vassenka Veslovsky, having brought the cob to gallop with the right leg
foremost, galloped past them, bumping heavily up and down in his short
jacket on the chamois leather of the side saddle. “He’s doing it, Anna
Arkadyevna!” he shouted.
Anna did not even glance at him; but again it seemed to Darya
Alexandrovna out of place to enter upon such a long conversation in the
carriage, and so she cut short her thought.
“I don’t think anything,” she said, “but I always loved you, and if one
loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as
one would like them to be....”
Anna, taking her eyes off her friend’s face and dropping her eyelids
(this was a new habit Dolly had not seen in her before), pondered,
trying to penetrate the full significance of the words. And obviously
interpreting them as she would have wished, she glanced at Dolly.
“If you had any sins,” she said, “they would all be forgiven you for
your coming to see me and these words.”
And Dolly saw that tears stood in her eyes. She pressed Anna’s hand in
silence.
“Well, what are these buildings? How many there are of them!” After a
moment’s silence she repeated her question.
“These are the servants’ houses, barns, and stables,” answered Anna.
“And there the park begins. It had all gone to ruin, but Alexey had
everything renewed. He is very fond of this place, and, what I never
expected, he has become intensely interested in looking after it. But
his is such a rich nature! Whatever he takes up, he does splendidly. So
far from being bored by it, he works with passionate interest. He—with
his temperament as I know it—he has become careful and businesslike, a
first-rate manager, he positively reckons every penny in his management
of the land. But only in that. When it’s a question of tens of
thousands, he doesn’t think of money.” She spoke with that gleefully
sly smile with which women often talk of the secret characteristics
only known to them—of those they love. “Do you see that big building?
that’s the new hospital. I believe it will cost over a hundred
thousand; that’s his hobby just now. And do you know how it all came
about? The peasants asked him for some meadowland, I think it was, at a
cheaper rate, and he refused, and I accused him of being miserly. Of
course it was not really because of that, but everything together, he
began this hospital to prove, do you see, that he was not miserly about
money. _C’est une petitesse_, if you like, but I love him all the more
for it. And now you’ll see the house in a moment. It was his
grandfather’s house, and he has had nothing changed outside.”
“How beautiful!” said Dolly, looking with involuntary admiration at the
handsome house with columns, standing out among the different-colored
greens of the old trees in the garden.
“Isn’t it fine? And from the house, from the top, the view is
wonderful.”
They drove into a courtyard strewn with gravel and bright with flowers,
in which two laborers were at work putting an edging of stones round
the light mould of a flower bed, and drew up in a covered entry.
“Ah, they’re here already!” said Anna, looking at the saddle horses,
which were just being led away from the steps. “It is a nice horse,
isn’t it? It’s my cob; my favorite. Lead him here and bring me some
sugar. Where is the count?” she inquired of two smart footmen who
darted out. “Ah, there he is!” she said, seeing Vronsky coming to meet
her with Veslovsky.
“Where are you going to put the princess?” said Vronsky in French,
addressing Anna, and without waiting for a reply, he once more greeted
Darya Alexandrovna, and this time he kissed her hand. “I think the big
balcony room.”
“Oh, no, that’s too far off! Better in the corner room, we shall see
each other more. Come, let’s go up,” said Anna, as she gave her
favorite horse the sugar the footman had brought her.
“_Et vous oubliez votre devoir_,” she said to Veslovsky, who came out
too on the steps.
“_Pardon, j’en ai tout plein les poches_,” he answered, smiling,
putting his fingers in his waistcoat pocket.
“_Mais vous venez trop tard_,” she said, rubbing her handkerchief on
her hand, which the horse had made wet in taking the sugar.
Anna turned to Dolly. “You can stay some time? For one day only? That’s
impossible!”
“I promised to be back, and the children....” said Dolly, feeling
embarrassed both because she had to get her bag out of the carriage,
and because she knew her face must be covered with dust.
“No, Dolly, darling!... Well, we’ll see. Come along, come along!” and
Anna led Dolly to her room.
That room was not the smart guest chamber Vronsky had suggested, but
the one of which Anna had said that Dolly would excuse it. And this
room, for which excuse was needed, was more full of luxury than any in
which Dolly had ever stayed, a luxury that reminded her of the best
hotels abroad.
“Well, darling, how happy I am!” Anna said, sitting down in her riding
habit for a moment beside Dolly. “Tell me about all of you. Stiva I had
only a glimpse of, and he cannot tell one about the children. How is my
favorite, Tanya? Quite a big girl, I expect?”
“Yes, she’s very tall,” Darya Alexandrovna answered shortly, surprised
herself that she should respond so coolly about her children. “We are
having a delightful stay at the Levins’,” she added.
“Oh, if I had known,” said Anna, “that you do not despise me!... You
might have all come to us. Stiva’s an old friend and a great friend of
Alexey’s, you know,” she added, and suddenly she blushed.
“Yes, but we are all....” Dolly answered in confusion.
“But in my delight I’m talking nonsense. The one thing, darling, is
that I am so glad to have you!” said Anna, kissing her again. “You
haven’t told me yet how and what you think about me, and I keep wanting
to know. But I’m glad you will see me as I am. The chief thing I
shouldn’t like would be for people to imagine I want to prove anything.
I don’t want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one
harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven’t I? But it is a
big subject, and we’ll talk over everything properly later. Now I’ll go
and dress and send a maid to you.”
Chapter 19
Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna, with a good housewife’s eye, scanned
her room. All she had seen in entering the house and walking through
it, and all she saw now in her room, gave her an impression of wealth
and sumptuousness and of that modern European luxury of which she had
only read in English novels, but had never seen in Russia and in the
country. Everything was new from the new French hangings on the walls
to the carpet which covered the whole floor. The bed had a spring
mattress, and a special sort of bolster and silk pillowcases on the
little pillows. The marble washstand, the dressing table, the little
sofa, the tables, the bronze clock on the chimney piece, the window
curtains, and the _portières_ were all new and expensive.
The smart maid, who came in to offer her services, with her hair done
up high, and a gown more fashionable than Dolly’s, was as new and
expensive as the whole room. Darya Alexandrovna liked her neatness, her
deferential and obliging manners, but she felt ill at ease with her.
She felt ashamed of her seeing the patched dressing jacket that had
unluckily been packed by mistake for her. She was ashamed of the very
patches and darned places of which she had been so proud at home. At
home it had been so clear that for six dressing jackets there would be
needed twenty-four yards of nainsook at sixteen pence the yard, which
was a matter of thirty shillings besides the cutting-out and making,
and these thirty shillings had been saved. But before the maid she
felt, if not exactly ashamed, at least uncomfortable.
Darya Alexandrovna had a great sense of relief when Annushka, whom she
had known for years, walked in. The smart maid was sent for to go to
her mistress, and Annushka remained with Darya Alexandrovna.
Annushka was obviously much pleased at that lady’s arrival, and began
to chatter away without a pause. Dolly observed that she was longing to
express her opinion in regard to her mistress’s position, especially as
to the love and devotion of the count to Anna Arkadyevna, but Dolly
carefully interrupted her whenever she began to speak about this.
“I grew up with Anna Arkadyevna; my lady’s dearer to me than anything.
Well, it’s not for us to judge. And, to be sure, there seems so much
love....”
“Kindly pour out the water for me to wash now, please,” Darya
Alexandrovna cut her short.
“Certainly. We’ve two women kept specially for washing small things,
but most of the linen’s done by machinery. The count goes into
everything himself. Ah, what a husband!...”
Dolly was glad when Anna came in, and by her entrance put a stop to
Annushka’s gossip.
Anna had put on a very simple batiste gown. Dolly scrutinized that
simple gown attentively. She knew what it meant, and the price at which
such simplicity was obtained.
“An old friend,” said Anna of Annushka.
Anna was not embarrassed now. She was perfectly composed and at ease.
Dolly saw that she had now completely recovered from the impression her
arrival had made on her, and had assumed that superficial, careless
tone which, as it were, closed the door on that compartment in which
her deeper feelings and ideas were kept.
“Well, Anna, and how is your little girl?” asked Dolly.
“Annie?” (This was what she called her little daughter Anna.) “Very
well. She has got on wonderfully. Would you like to see her? Come, I’ll
show her to you. We had a terrible bother,” she began telling her,
“over nurses. We had an Italian wet-nurse. A good creature, but so
stupid! We wanted to get rid of her, but the baby is so used to her
that we’ve gone on keeping her still.”
“But how have you managed?...” Dolly was beginning a question as to
what name the little girl would have; but noticing a sudden frown on
Anna’s face, she changed the drift of her question.
“How did you manage? have you weaned her yet?”
But Anna had understood.
“You didn’t mean to ask that? You meant to ask about her surname. Yes?
That worries Alexey. She has no name—that is, she’s a Karenina,” said
Anna, dropping her eyelids till nothing could be seen but the eyelashes
meeting. “But we’ll talk about all that later,” her face suddenly
brightening. “Come, I’ll show you her. _Elle est très gentille_. She
crawls now.”
In the nursery the luxury which had impressed Dolly in the whole house
struck her still more. There were little go-carts ordered from England,
and appliances for learning to walk, and a sofa after the fashion of a
billiard table, purposely constructed for crawling, and swings and
baths, all of special pattern, and modern. They were all English,
solid, and of good make, and obviously very expensive. The room was
large, and very light and lofty.
When they went in, the baby, with nothing on but her little smock, was
sitting in a little elbow chair at the table, having her dinner of
broth, which she was spilling all over her little chest. The baby was
being fed, and the Russian nursery maid was evidently sharing her meal.
Neither the wet-nurse nor the head-nurse were there; they were in the
next room, from which came the sound of their conversation in the queer
French which was their only means of communication.
Hearing Anna’s voice, a smart, tall, English nurse with a disagreeable
face and a dissolute expression walked in at the door, hurriedly
shaking her fair curls, and immediately began to defend herself though
Anna had not found fault with her. At every word Anna said, the English
nurse said hurriedly several times, “Yes, my lady.”
The rosy baby with her black eyebrows and hair, her sturdy red little
body with tight goose-flesh skin, delighted Darya Alexandrovna in spite
of the cross expression with which she stared at the stranger. She
positively envied the baby’s healthy appearance. She was delighted,
too, at the baby’s crawling. Not one of her own children had crawled
like that. When the baby was put on the carpet and its little dress
tucked up behind, it was wonderfully charming. Looking round like some
little wild animal at the grown-up big people with her bright black
eyes, she smiled, unmistakably pleased at their admiring her, and
holding her legs sideways, she pressed vigorously on her arms, and
rapidly drew her whole back up after, and then made another step
forward with her little arms.
But the whole atmosphere of the nursery, and especially the English
nurse, Darya Alexandrovna did not like at all. It was only on the
supposition that no good nurse would have entered so irregular a
household as Anna’s that Darya Alexandrovna could explain to herself
how Anna with her insight into people could take such an
unprepossessing, disreputable-looking woman as nurse to her child.
Besides, from a few words that were dropped, Darya Alexandrovna saw at
once that Anna, the two nurses, and the child had no common existence,
and that the mother’s visit was something exceptional. Anna wanted to
get the baby her plaything, and could not find it.
Most amazing of all was the fact that on being asked how many teeth the
baby had, Anna answered wrong, and knew nothing about the two last
teeth.
“I sometimes feel sorry I’m so superfluous here,” said Anna, going out
of the nursery and holding up her skirt so as to escape the plaything
standing in the doorway. “It was very different with my first child.”
“I expected it to be the other way,” said Darya Alexandrovna shyly.
“Oh, no! By the way, do you know I saw Seryozha?” said Anna, screwing
up her eyes, as though looking at something far away. “But we’ll talk
about that later. You wouldn’t believe it, I’m like a hungry beggar
woman when a full dinner is set before her, and she does not know what
to begin on first. The dinner is you, and the talks I have before me
with you, which I could never have with anyone else; and I don’t know
which subject to begin upon first. _Mais je ne vous ferai grâce de
rien_. I must have everything out with you.”
“Oh, I ought to give you a sketch of the company you will meet with
us,” she went on. “I’ll begin with the ladies. Princess Varvara—you
know her, and I know your opinion and Stiva’s about her. Stiva says the
whole aim of her existence is to prove her superiority over Auntie
Katerina Pavlovna: that’s all true; but she’s a good-natured woman, and
I am so grateful to her. In Petersburg there was a moment when a
chaperon was absolutely essential for me. Then she turned up. But
really she is good-natured. She did a great deal to alleviate my
position. I see you don’t understand all the difficulty of my position
... there in Petersburg,” she added. “Here I’m perfectly at ease and
happy. Well, of that later on, though. Then Sviazhsky—he’s the marshal
of the district, and he’s a very good sort of a man, but he wants to
get something out of Alexey. You understand, with his property, now
that we are settled in the country, Alexey can exercise great
influence. Then there’s Tushkevitch—you have seen him, you know—Betsy’s
admirer. Now he’s been thrown over and he’s come to see us. As Alexey
says, he’s one of those people who are very pleasant if one accepts
them for what they try to appear to be, _et puis il est comme il faut_,
as Princess Varvara says. Then Veslovsky ... you know him. A very nice
boy,” she said, and a sly smile curved her lips. “What’s this wild
story about him and the Levins? Veslovsky told Alexey about it, and we
don’t believe it. _Il est très gentil et naïf_,” she said again with
the same smile. “Men need occupation, and Alexey needs a circle, so I
value all these people. We have to have the house lively and gay, so
that Alexey may not long for any novelty. Then you’ll see the steward—a
German, a very good fellow, and he understands his work. Alexey has a
very high opinion of him. Then the doctor, a young man, not quite a
Nihilist perhaps, but you know, eats with his knife ... but a very good
doctor. Then the architect.... _Une petite cour!_”
Chapter 20
“Here’s Dolly for you, princess, you were so anxious to see her,” said
Anna, coming out with Darya Alexandrovna onto the stone terrace where
Princess Varvara was sitting in the shade at an embroidery frame,
working at a cover for Count Alexey Kirillovitch’s easy chair. “She
says she doesn’t want anything before dinner, but please order some
lunch for her, and I’ll go and look for Alexey and bring them all in.”
Princess Varvara gave Dolly a cordial and rather patronizing reception,
and began at once explaining to her that she was living with Anna
because she had always cared more for her than her sister Katerina
Pavlovna, the aunt that had brought Anna up, and that now, when
everyone had abandoned Anna, she thought it her duty to help her in
this most difficult period of transition.
“Her husband will give her a divorce, and then I shall go back to my
solitude; but now I can be of use, and I am doing my duty, however
difficult it may be for me—not like some other people. And how sweet it
is of you, how right of you to have come! They live like the best of
married couples; it’s for God to judge them, not for us. And didn’t
Biryuzovsky and Madame Avenieva ... and Sam Nikandrov, and Vassiliev
and Madame Mamonova, and Liza Neptunova.... Did no one say anything
about them? And it has ended by their being received by everyone. And
then, _c’est un intérieur si joli, si comme il faut. Tout-à-fait à
l’anglaise. On se réunit le matin au breakfast, et puis on se sépare._
Everyone does as he pleases till dinner time. Dinner at seven o’clock.
Stiva did very rightly to send you. He needs their support. You know
that through his mother and brother he can do anything. And then they
do so much good. He didn’t tell you about his hospital? _Ce sera
admirable_—everything from Paris.”
Their conversation was interrupted by Anna, who had found the men of
the party in the billiard room, and returned with them to the terrace.
There was still a long time before the dinner-hour, it was exquisite
weather, and so several different methods of spending the next two
hours were proposed. There were very many methods of passing the time
at Vozdvizhenskoe, and these were all unlike those in use at
Pokrovskoe.
“_Une partie de lawn-tennis,_” Veslovsky proposed, with his handsome
smile. “We’ll be partners again, Anna Arkadyevna.”
“No, it’s too hot; better stroll about the garden and have a row in the
boat, show Darya Alexandrovna the river banks.” Vronsky proposed.
“I agree to anything,” said Sviazhsky.
“I imagine that what Dolly would like best would be a stroll—wouldn’t
you? And then the boat, perhaps,” said Anna.
So it was decided. Veslovsky and Tushkevitch went off to the bathing
place, promising to get the boat ready and to wait there for them.
They walked along the path in two couples, Anna with Sviazhsky, and
Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly was a little embarrassed and anxious in the
new surroundings in which she found herself. Abstractly, theoretically,
she did not merely justify, she positively approved of Anna’s conduct.
As is indeed not unfrequent with women of unimpeachable virtue, weary
of the monotony of respectable existence, at a distance she not only
excused illicit love, she positively envied it. Besides, she loved Anna
with all her heart. But seeing Anna in actual life among these
strangers, with this fashionable tone that was so new to Darya
Alexandrovna, she felt ill at ease. What she disliked particularly was
seeing Princess Varvara ready to overlook everything for the sake of
the comforts she enjoyed.
As a general principle, abstractly, Dolly approved of Anna’s action;
but to see the man for whose sake her action had been taken was
disagreeable to her. Moreover, she had never liked Vronsky. She thought
him very proud, and saw nothing in him of which he could be proud
except his wealth. But against her own will, here in his own house, he
overawed her more than ever, and she could not be at ease with him. She
felt with him the same feeling she had had with the maid about her
dressing jacket. Just as with the maid she had felt not exactly
ashamed, but embarrassed at her darns, so she felt with him not exactly
ashamed, but embarrassed at herself.
Dolly was ill at ease, and tried to find a subject of conversation.
Even though she supposed that, through his pride, praise of his house
and garden would be sure to be disagreeable to him, she did all the
same tell him how much she liked his house.
“Yes, it’s a very fine building, and in the good old-fashioned style,”
he said.
“I like so much the court in front of the steps. Was that always so?”
“Oh, no!” he said, and his face beamed with pleasure. “If you could
only have seen that court last spring!”
And he began, at first rather diffidently, but more and more carried
away by the subject as he went on, to draw her attention to the various
details of the decoration of his house and garden. It was evident that,
having devoted a great deal of trouble to improve and beautify his
home, Vronsky felt a need to show off the improvements to a new person,
and was genuinely delighted at Darya Alexandrovna’s praise.
“If you would care to look at the hospital, and are not tired, indeed,
it’s not far. Shall we go?” he said, glancing into her face to convince
himself that she was not bored. “Are you coming, Anna?” he turned to
her.
“We will come, won’t we?” she said, addressing Sviazhsky. “_Mais il ne
faut pas laisser le pauvre Veslovsky et Tushkevitch se morfondre là
dans le bateau._ We must send and tell them.”
“Yes, this is a monument he is setting up here,” said Anna, turning to
Dolly with that sly smile of comprehension with which she had
previously talked about the hospital.
“Oh, it’s a work of real importance!” said Sviazhsky. But to show he
was not trying to ingratiate himself with Vronsky, he promptly added
some slightly critical remarks.
“I wonder, though, count,” he said, “that while you do so much for the
health of the peasants, you take so little interest in the schools.”
“_C’est devenu tellement commun les écoles,_” said Vronsky. “You
understand it’s not on that account, but it just happens so, my
interest has been diverted elsewhere. This way then to the hospital,”
he said to Darya Alexandrovna, pointing to a turning out of the avenue.
The ladies put up their parasols and turned into the side path. After
going down several turnings, and going through a little gate, Darya
Alexandrovna saw standing on rising ground before her a large
pretentious-looking red building, almost finished. The iron roof, which
was not yet painted, shone with dazzling brightness in the sunshine.
Beside the finished building another had been begun, surrounded by
scaffolding. Workmen in aprons, standing on scaffolds, were laying
bricks, pouring mortar out of vats, and smoothing it with trowels.
“How quickly work gets done with you!” said Sviazhsky. “When I was here
last time the roof was not on.”
“By the autumn it will all be ready. Inside almost everything is done,”
said Anna.
“And what’s this new building?”
“That’s the house for the doctor and the dispensary,” answered Vronsky,
seeing the architect in a short jacket coming towards him; and excusing
himself to the ladies, he went to meet him.
Going round a hole where the workmen were slaking lime, he stood still
with the architect and began talking rather warmly.
“The front is still too low,” he said to Anna, who had asked what was
the matter.
“I said the foundation ought to be raised,” said Anna.
“Yes, of course it would have been much better, Anna Arkadyevna,” said
the architect, “but now it’s too late.”
“Yes, I take a great interest in it,” Anna answered Sviazhsky, who was
expressing his surprise at her knowledge of architecture. “This new
building ought to have been in harmony with the hospital. It was an
afterthought, and was begun without a plan.”
Vronsky, having finished his talk with the architect, joined the
ladies, and led them inside the hospital.
Although they were still at work on the cornices outside and were
painting on the ground floor, upstairs almost all the rooms were
finished. Going up the broad cast-iron staircase to the landing, they
walked into the first large room. The walls were stuccoed to look like
marble, the huge plate-glass windows were already in, only the parquet
floor was not yet finished, and the carpenters, who were planing a
block of it, left their work, taking off the bands that fastened their
hair, to greet the gentry.
“This is the reception room,” said Vronsky. “Here there will be a desk,
tables, and benches, and nothing more.”
“This way; let us go in here. Don’t go near the window,” said Anna,
trying the paint to see if it were dry. “Alexey, the paint’s dry
already,” she added.
From the reception room they went into the corridor. Here Vronsky
showed them the mechanism for ventilation on a novel system. Then he
showed them marble baths, and beds with extraordinary springs. Then he
showed them the wards one after another, the storeroom, the linen room,
then the heating stove of a new pattern, then the trolleys, which would
make no noise as they carried everything needed along the corridors,
and many other things. Sviazhsky, as a connoisseur in the latest
mechanical improvements, appreciated everything fully. Dolly simply
wondered at all she had not seen before, and, anxious to understand it
all, made minute inquiries about everything, which gave Vronsky great
satisfaction.
“Yes, I imagine that this will be the solitary example of a properly
fitted hospital in Russia,” said Sviazhsky.
“And won’t you have a lying-in ward?” asked Dolly. “That’s so much
needed in the country. I have often....”
In spite of his usual courtesy, Vronsky interrupted her.
“This is not a lying-in home, but a hospital for the sick, and is
intended for all diseases, except infectious complaints,” he said. “Ah!
look at this,” and he rolled up to Darya Alexandrovna an invalid chair
that had just been ordered for the convalescents. “Look.” He sat down
in the chair and began moving it. “The patient can’t walk—still too
weak, perhaps, or something wrong with his legs, but he must have air,
and he moves, rolls himself along....”
Darya Alexandrovna was interested by everything. She liked everything
very much, but most of all she liked Vronsky himself with his natural,
simple-hearted eagerness. “Yes, he’s a very nice, good man,” she
thought several times, not hearing what he said, but looking at him and
penetrating into his expression, while she mentally put herself in
Anna’s place. She liked him so much just now with his eager interest
that she saw how Anna could be in love with him.
Chapter 21
“No, I think the princess is tired, and horses don’t interest her,”
Vronsky said to Anna, who wanted to go on to the stables, where
Sviazhsky wished to see the new stallion. “You go on, while I escort
the princess home, and we’ll have a little talk,” he said, “if you
would like that?” he added, turning to her.
“I know nothing about horses, and I shall be delighted,” answered Darya
Alexandrovna, rather astonished.
She saw by Vronsky’s face that he wanted something from her. She was
not mistaken. As soon as they had passed through the little gate back
into the garden, he looked in the direction Anna had taken, and having
made sure that she could neither hear nor see them, he began:
“You guess that I have something I want to say to you,” he said,
looking at her with laughing eyes. “I am not wrong in believing you to
be a friend of Anna’s.” He took off his hat, and taking out his
handkerchief, wiped his head, which was growing bald.
Darya Alexandrovna made no answer, and merely stared at him with
dismay. When she was left alone with him, she suddenly felt afraid; his
laughing eyes and stern expression scared her.
The most diverse suppositions as to what he was about to speak of to
her flashed into her brain. “He is going to beg me to come to stay with
them with the children, and I shall have to refuse; or to create a set
that will receive Anna in Moscow.... Or isn’t it Vassenka Veslovsky and
his relations with Anna? Or perhaps about Kitty, that he feels he was
to blame?” All her conjectures were unpleasant, but she did not guess
what he really wanted to talk about to her.
“You have so much influence with Anna, she is so fond of you,” he said;
“do help me.”
Darya Alexandrovna looked with timid inquiry into his energetic face,
which under the lime-trees was continually being lighted up in patches
by the sunshine, and then passing into complete shadow again. She
waited for him to say more, but he walked in silence beside her,
scratching with his cane in the gravel.
“You have come to see us, you, the only woman of Anna’s former
friends—I don’t count Princess Varvara—but I know that you have done
this not because you regard our position as normal, but because,
understanding all the difficulty of the position, you still love her
and want to be a help to her. Have I understood you rightly?” he asked,
looking round at her.
“Oh, yes,” answered Darya Alexandrovna, putting down her sunshade,
“but....”
“No,” he broke in, and unconsciously, oblivious of the awkward position
into which he was putting his companion, he stopped abruptly, so that
she had to stop short too. “No one feels more deeply and intensely than
I do all the difficulty of Anna’s position; and that you may well
understand, if you do me the honor of supposing I have any heart. I am
to blame for that position, and that is why I feel it.”
“I understand,” said Darya Alexandrovna, involuntarily admiring the
sincerity and firmness with which he said this. “But just because you
feel yourself responsible, you exaggerate it, I am afraid,” she said.
“Her position in the world is difficult, I can well understand.”
“In the world it is hell!” he brought out quickly, frowning darkly.
“You can’t imagine moral sufferings greater than what she went through
in Petersburg in that fortnight ... and I beg you to believe it.”
“Yes, but here, so long as neither Anna ... nor you miss society....”
“Society!” he said contemptuously, “how could I miss society?”
“So far—and it may be so always—you are happy and at peace. I see in
Anna that she is happy, perfectly happy, she has had time to tell me so
much already,” said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling; and involuntarily, as
she said this, at the same moment a doubt entered her mind whether Anna
really were happy.
But Vronsky, it appeared, had no doubts on that score.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “I know that she has revived after all her
sufferings; she is happy. She is happy in the present. But I?... I am
afraid of what is before us ... I beg your pardon, you would like to
walk on?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Well, then, let us sit here.”
Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the avenue.
He stood up facing her.
“I see that she is happy,” he repeated, and the doubt whether she were
happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna’s mind. “But can it
last? Whether we have acted rightly or wrongly is another question, but
the die is cast,” he said, passing from Russian to French, “and we are
bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of love that we
hold most sacred. We have a child, we may have other children. But the
law and all the conditions of our position are such that thousands of
complications arise which she does not see and does not want to see.
And that one can well understand. But I can’t help seeing them. My
daughter is by law not my daughter, but Karenin’s. I cannot bear this
falsity!” he said, with a vigorous gesture of refusal, and he looked
with gloomy inquiry towards Darya Alexandrovna.
She made no answer, but simply gazed at him. He went on:
“One day a son may be born, my son, and he will be legally a Karenin;
he will not be the heir of my name nor of my property, and however
happy we may be in our home life and however many children we may have,
there will be no real tie between us. They will be Karenins. You can
understand the bitterness and horror of this position! I have tried to
speak of this to Anna. It irritates her. She does not understand, and
to her I cannot speak plainly of all this. Now look at another side. I
am happy, happy in her love, but I must have occupation. I have found
occupation, and am proud of what I am doing and consider it nobler than
the pursuits of my former companions at court and in the army. And most
certainly I would not change the work I am doing for theirs. I am
working here, settled in my own place, and I am happy and contented,
and we need nothing more to make us happy. I love my work here. _Ce
n’est pas un pis-aller,_ on the contrary....”
Darya Alexandrovna noticed that at this point in his explanation he
grew confused, and she did not quite understand this digression, but
she felt that having once begun to speak of matters near his heart, of
which he could not speak to Anna, he was now making a clean breast of
everything, and that the question of his pursuits in the country fell
into the same category of matters near his heart, as the question of
his relations with Anna.
“Well, I will go on,” he said, collecting himself. “The great thing is
that as I work I want to have a conviction that what I am doing will
not die with me, that I shall have heirs to come after me,—and this I
have not. Conceive the position of a man who knows that his children,
the children of the woman he loves, will not be his, but will belong to
someone who hates them and cares nothing about them! It is awful!”
He paused, evidently much moved.
“Yes, indeed, I see that. But what can Anna do?” queried Darya
Alexandrovna.
“Yes, that brings me to the object of my conversation,” he said,
calming himself with an effort. “Anna can, it depends on her.... Even
to petition the Tsar for legitimization, a divorce is essential. And
that depends on Anna. Her husband agreed to a divorce—at that time your
husband had arranged it completely. And now, I know, he would not
refuse it. It is only a matter of writing to him. He said plainly at
that time that if she expressed the desire, he would not refuse. Of
course,” he said gloomily, “it is one of those Pharisaical cruelties of
which only such heartless men are capable. He knows what agony any
recollection of him must give her, and knowing her, he must have a
letter from her. I can understand that it is agony to her. But the
matter is of such importance, that one must _passer par-dessus toutes
ces finesses de sentiment. Il y va du bonheur et de l’existence d’Anne
et de ses enfants._ I won’t speak of myself, though it’s hard for me,
very hard,” he said, with an expression as though he were threatening
someone for its being hard for him. “And so it is, princess, that I am
shamelessly clutching at you as an anchor of salvation. Help me to
persuade her to write to him and ask for a divorce.”
“Yes, of course,” Darya Alexandrovna said dreamily, as she vividly
recalled her last interview with Alexey Alexandrovitch. “Yes, of
course,” she repeated with decision, thinking of Anna.
“Use your influence with her, make her write. I don’t like—I’m almost
unable to speak about this to her.”
“Very well, I will talk to her. But how is it she does not think of it
herself?” said Darya Alexandrovna, and for some reason she suddenly at
that point recalled Anna’s strange new habit of half-closing her eyes.
And she remembered that Anna drooped her eyelids just when the deeper
questions of life were touched upon. “Just as though she half-shut her
eyes to her own life, so as not to see everything,” thought Dolly.
“Yes, indeed, for my own sake and for hers I will talk to her,” Dolly
said in reply to his look of gratitude.
They got up and walked to the house.
Chapter 22
When Anna found Dolly at home before her, she looked intently in her
eyes, as though questioning her about the talk she had had with
Vronsky, but she made no inquiry in words.
“I believe it’s dinner time,” she said. “We’ve not seen each other at
all yet. I am reckoning on the evening. Now I want to go and dress. I
expect you do too; we all got splashed at the buildings.”
Dolly went to her room and she felt amused. To change her dress was
impossible, for she had already put on her best dress. But in order to
signify in some way her preparation for dinner, she asked the maid to
brush her dress, changed her cuffs and tie, and put some lace on her
head.
“This is all I can do,” she said with a smile to Anna, who came in to
her in a third dress, again of extreme simplicity.
“Yes, we are too formal here,” she said, as it were apologizing for her
magnificence. “Alexey is delighted at your visit, as he rarely is at
anything. He has completely lost his heart to you,” she added. “You’re
not tired?”
There was no time for talking about anything before dinner. Going into
the drawing-room they found Princess Varvara already there, and the
gentlemen of the party in black frock-coats. The architect wore a
swallow-tail coat. Vronsky presented the doctor and the steward to his
guest. The architect he had already introduced to her at the hospital.
A stout butler, resplendent with a smoothly shaven round chin and a
starched white cravat, announced that dinner was ready, and the ladies
got up. Vronsky asked Sviazhsky to take in Anna Arkadyevna, and himself
offered his arm to Dolly. Veslovsky was before Tushkevitch in offering
his arm to Princess Varvara, so that Tushkevitch with the steward and
the doctor walked in alone.
The dinner, the dining-room, the service, the waiting at table, the
wine, and the food, were not simply in keeping with the general tone of
modern luxury throughout all the house, but seemed even more sumptuous
and modern. Darya Alexandrovna watched this luxury which was novel to
her, and as a good housekeeper used to managing a household—although
she never dreamed of adapting anything she saw to her own household, as
it was all in a style of luxury far above her own manner of living—she
could not help scrutinizing every detail, and wondering how and by whom
it was all done. Vassenka Veslovsky, her husband, and even Sviazhsky,
and many other people she knew, would never have considered this
question, and would have readily believed what every well-bred host
tries to make his guests feel, that is, that all that is well-ordered
in his house has cost him, the host, no trouble whatever, but comes of
itself. Darya Alexandrovna was well aware that even porridge for the
children’s breakfast does not come of itself, and that therefore, where
so complicated and magnificent a style of luxury was maintained,
someone must give earnest attention to its organization. And from the
glance with which Alexey Kirillovitch scanned the table, from the way
he nodded to the butler, and offered Darya Alexandrovna her choice
between cold soup and hot soup, she saw that it was all organized and
maintained by the care of the master of the house himself. It was
evident that it all rested no more upon Anna than upon Veslovsky. She,
Sviazhsky, the princess, and Veslovsky, were equally guests, with light
hearts enjoying what had been arranged for them.
Anna was the hostess only in conducting the conversation. The
conversation was a difficult one for the lady of the house at a small
table with persons present, like the steward and the architect,
belonging to a completely different world, struggling not to be
overawed by an elegance to which they were unaccustomed, and unable to
sustain a large share in the general conversation. But this difficult
conversation Anna directed with her usual tact and naturalness, and
indeed she did so with actual enjoyment, as Darya Alexandrovna
observed. The conversation began about the row Tushkevitch and
Veslovsky had taken alone together in the boat, and Tushkevitch began
describing the last boat races in Petersburg at the Yacht Club. But
Anna, seizing the first pause, at once turned to the architect to draw
him out of his silence.
“Nikolay Ivanitch was struck,” she said, meaning Sviazhsky, “at the
progress the new building had made since he was here last; but I am
there every day, and every day I wonder at the rate at which it grows.”
“It’s first-rate working with his excellency,” said the architect with
a smile (he was respectful and composed, though with a sense of his own
dignity). “It’s a very different matter to have to do with the district
authorities. Where one would have to write out sheaves of papers, here
I call upon the count, and in three words we settle the business.”
“The American way of doing business,” said Sviazhsky, with a smile.
“Yes, there they build in a rational fashion....”
The conversation passed to the misuse of political power in the United
States, but Anna quickly brought it round to another topic, so as to
draw the steward into talk.
“Have you ever seen a reaping machine?” she said, addressing Darya
Alexandrovna. “We had just ridden over to look at one when we met. It’s
the first time I ever saw one.”
“How do they work?” asked Dolly.
“Exactly like little scissors. A plank and a lot of little scissors.
Like this.”
Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful white hands covered with
rings, and began showing how the machine worked. It was clear that she
saw nothing would be understood from her explanation; but aware that
her talk was pleasant and her hands beautiful she went on explaining.
“More like little penknives,” Veslovsky said playfully, never taking
his eyes off her.
Anna gave a just perceptible smile, but made no answer. “Isn’t it true,
Karl Fedoritch, that it’s just like little scissors?” she said to the
steward.
“_Oh, ja,_” answered the German. _“Es ist ein ganz einfaches Ding,”_
and he began to explain the construction of the machine.
“It’s a pity it doesn’t bind too. I saw one at the Vienna exhibition,
which binds with a wire,” said Sviazhsky. “They would be more
profitable in use.”
_“Es kommt drauf an.... Der Preis vom Draht muss ausgerechnet werden.”_
And the German, roused from his taciturnity, turned to Vronsky. _“Das
lässt sich ausrechnen, Erlaucht.”_ The German was just feeling in the
pocket where were his pencil and the notebook he always wrote in, but
recollecting that he was at a dinner, and observing Vronsky’s chilly
glance, he checked himself. _“Zu compliziert, macht zu viel Klopot,”_
he concluded.
_“Wünscht man Dochots, so hat man auch Klopots,”_ said Vassenka
Veslovsky, mimicking the German. _“J’adore l’allemand,”_ he addressed
Anna again with the same smile.
_“Cessez,”_ she said with playful severity.
“We expected to find you in the fields, Vassily Semyonitch,” she said
to the doctor, a sickly-looking man; “have you been there?”
“I went there, but I had taken flight,” the doctor answered with gloomy
jocoseness.
“Then you’ve taken a good constitutional?”
“Splendid!”
“Well, and how was the old woman? I hope it’s not typhus?”
“Typhus it is not, but it’s taking a bad turn.”
“What a pity!” said Anna, and having thus paid the dues of civility to
her domestic circle, she turned to her own friends.
“It would be a hard task, though, to construct a machine from your
description, Anna Arkadyevna,” Sviazhsky said jestingly.
“Oh, no, why so?” said Anna with a smile that betrayed that she knew
there was something charming in her disquisitions upon the machine that
had been noticed by Sviazhsky. This new trait of girlish coquettishness
made an unpleasant impression on Dolly.
“But Anna Arkadyevna’s knowledge of architecture is marvelous,” said
Tushkevitch.
“To be sure, I heard Anna Arkadyevna talking yesterday about plinths
and damp-courses,” said Veslovsky. “Have I got it right?”
“There’s nothing marvelous about it, when one sees and hears so much of
it,” said Anna. “But, I dare say, you don’t even know what houses are
made of?”
Darya Alexandrovna saw that Anna disliked the tone of raillery that
existed between her and Veslovsky, but fell in with it against her
will.
Vronsky acted in this matter quite differently from Levin. He obviously
attached no significance to Veslovsky’s chattering; on the contrary, he
encouraged his jests.
“Come now, tell us, Veslovsky, how are the stones held together?”
“By cement, of course.”
“Bravo! And what is cement?”
“Oh, some sort of paste ... no, putty,” said Veslovsky, raising a
general laugh.
The company at dinner, with the exception of the doctor, the architect,
and the steward, who remained plunged in gloomy silence, kept up a
conversation that never paused, glancing off one subject, fastening on
another, and at times stinging one or the other to the quick. Once
Darya Alexandrovna felt wounded to the quick, and got so hot that she
positively flushed and wondered afterwards whether she had said
anything extreme or unpleasant. Sviazhsky began talking of Levin,
describing his strange view that machinery is simply pernicious in its
effects on Russian agriculture.
“I have not the pleasure of knowing this M. Levin,” Vronsky said,
smiling, “but most likely he has never seen the machines he condemns;
or if he has seen and tried any, it must have been after a queer
fashion, some Russian imitation, not a machine from abroad. What sort
of views can anyone have on such a subject?”
“Turkish views, in general,” Veslovsky said, turning to Anna with a
smile.
“I can’t defend his opinions,” Darya Alexandrovna said, firing up; “but
I can say that he’s a highly cultivated man, and if he were here he
would know very well how to answer you, though I am not capable of
doing so.”
“I like him extremely, and we are great friends,” Sviazhsky said,
smiling good-naturedly. “_Mais pardon, il est un petit peu toqué;_ he
maintains, for instance, that district councils and arbitration boards
are all of no use, and he is unwilling to take part in anything.”
“It’s our Russian apathy,” said Vronsky, pouring water from an iced
decanter into a delicate glass on a high stem; “we’ve no sense of the
duties our privileges impose upon us, and so we refuse to recognize
these duties.”
“I know no man more strict in the performance of his duties,” said
Darya Alexandrovna, irritated by Vronsky’s tone of superiority.
“For my part,” pursued Vronsky, who was evidently for some reason or
other keenly affected by this conversation, “such as I am, I am, on the
contrary, extremely grateful for the honor they have done me, thanks to
Nikolay Ivanitch” (he indicated Sviazhsky), “in electing me a justice
of the peace. I consider that for me the duty of being present at the
session, of judging some peasants’ quarrel about a horse, is as
important as anything I can do. And I shall regard it as an honor if
they elect me for the district council. It’s only in that way I can pay
for the advantages I enjoy as a landowner. Unluckily they don’t
understand the weight that the big landowners ought to have in the
state.”
It was strange to Darya Alexandrovna to hear how serenely confident he
was of being right at his own table. She thought how Levin, who
believed the opposite, was just as positive in his opinions at his own
table. But she loved Levin, and so she was on his side.
“So we can reckon upon you, count, for the coming elections?” said
Sviazhsky. “But you must come a little beforehand, so as to be on the
spot by the eighth. If you would do me the honor to stop with me.”
“I rather agree with your _beau-frère_,” said Anna, “though not quite
on the same ground as he,” she added with a smile. “I’m afraid that we
have too many of these public duties in these latter days. Just as in
old days there were so many government functionaries that one had to
call in a functionary for every single thing, so now everyone’s doing
some sort of public duty. Alexey has been here now six months, and he’s
a member, I do believe, of five or six different public bodies. _Du
train que cela va,_ the whole time will be wasted on it. And I’m afraid
that with such a multiplicity of these bodies, they’ll end in being a
mere form. How many are you a member of, Nikolay Ivanitch?” she turned
to Sviazhsky—“over twenty, I fancy.”
Anna spoke lightly, but irritation could be discerned in her tone.
Darya Alexandrovna, watching Anna and Vronsky attentively, detected it
instantly. She noticed, too, that as she spoke Vronsky’s face had
immediately taken a serious and obstinate expression. Noticing this,
and that Princess Varvara at once made haste to change the conversation
by talking of Petersburg acquaintances, and remembering what Vronsky
had without apparent connection said in the garden of his work in the
country, Dolly surmised that this question of public activity was
connected with some deep private disagreement between Anna and Vronsky.
The dinner, the wine, the decoration of the table were all very good;
but it was all like what Darya Alexandrovna had seen at formal dinners
and balls which of late years had become quite unfamiliar to her; it
all had the same impersonal and constrained character, and so on an
ordinary day and in a little circle of friends it made a disagreeable
impression on her.
After dinner they sat on the terrace, then they proceeded to play lawn
tennis. The players, divided into two parties, stood on opposite sides
of a tightly drawn net with gilt poles on the carefully leveled and
rolled croquet-ground. Darya Alexandrovna made an attempt to play, but
it was a long time before she could understand the game, and by the
time she did understand it, she was so tired that she sat down with
Princess Varvara and simply looked on at the players. Her partner,
Tushkevitch, gave up playing too, but the others kept the game up for a
long time. Sviazhsky and Vronsky both played very well and seriously.
They kept a sharp lookout on the balls served to them, and without
haste or getting in each other’s way, they ran adroitly up to them,
waited for the rebound, and neatly and accurately returned them over
the net. Veslovsky played worse than the others. He was too eager, but
he kept the players lively with his high spirits. His laughter and
outcries never paused. Like the other men of the party, with the
ladies’ permission, he took off his coat, and his solid, comely figure
in his white shirt-sleeves, with his red perspiring face and his
impulsive movements, made a picture that imprinted itself vividly on
the memory.
When Darya Alexandrovna lay in bed that night, as soon as she closed
her eyes, she saw Vassenka Veslovsky flying about the croquet ground.
During the game Darya Alexandrovna was not enjoying herself. She did
not like the light tone of raillery that was kept up all the time
between Vassenka Veslovsky and Anna, and the unnaturalness altogether
of grown-up people, all alone without children, playing at a child’s
game. But to avoid breaking up the party and to get through the time
somehow, after a rest she joined the game again, and pretended to be
enjoying it. All that day it seemed to her as though she were acting in
a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was
spoiling the whole performance. She had come with the intention of
staying two days, if all went well. But in the evening, during the
game, she made up her mind that she would go home next day. The
maternal cares and worries, which she had so hated on the way, now,
after a day spent without them, struck her in quite another light, and
tempted her back to them.
When, after evening tea and a row by night in the boat, Darya
Alexandrovna went alone to her room, took off her dress, and began
arranging her thin hair for the night, she had a great sense of relief.
It was positively disagreeable to her to think that Anna was coming to
see her immediately. She longed to be alone with her own thoughts.
Chapter 23
Dolly was wanting to go to bed when Anna came in to see her, attired
for the night. In the course of the day Anna had several times begun to
speak of matters near her heart, and every time after a few words she
had stopped: “Afterwards, by ourselves, we’ll talk about everything.
I’ve got so much I want to tell you,” she said.
Now they were by themselves, and Anna did not know what to talk about.
She sat in the window looking at Dolly, and going over in her own mind
all the stores of intimate talk which had seemed so inexhaustible
beforehand, and she found nothing. At that moment it seemed to her that
everything had been said already.
“Well, what of Kitty?” she said with a heavy sigh, looking penitently
at Dolly. “Tell me the truth, Dolly: isn’t she angry with me?”
“Angry? Oh, no!” said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling.
“But she hates me, despises me?”
“Oh, no! But you know that sort of thing isn’t forgiven.”
“Yes, yes,” said Anna, turning away and looking out of the open window.
“But I was not to blame. And who is to blame? What’s the meaning of
being to blame? Could it have been otherwise? What do you think? Could
it possibly have happened that you didn’t become the wife of Stiva?”
“Really, I don’t know. But this is what I want you to tell me....”
“Yes, yes, but we’ve not finished about Kitty. Is she happy? He’s a
very nice man, they say.”
“He’s much more than very nice. I don’t know a better man.”
“Ah, how glad I am! I’m so glad! Much more than very nice,” she
repeated.
Dolly smiled.
“But tell me about yourself. We’ve a great deal to talk about. And I’ve
had a talk with....” Dolly did not know what to call him. She felt it
awkward to call him either the count or Alexey Kirillovitch.
“With Alexey,” said Anna, “I know what you talked about. But I wanted
to ask you directly what you think of me, of my life?”
“How am I to say like that straight off? I really don’t know.”
“No, tell me all the same.... You see my life. But you mustn’t forget
that you’re seeing us in the summer, when you have come to us and we
are not alone.... But we came here early in the spring, lived quite
alone, and shall be alone again, and I desire nothing better. But
imagine me living alone without him, alone, and that will be ... I see
by everything that it will often be repeated, that he will be half the
time away from home,” she said, getting up and sitting down close by
Dolly.
“Of course,” she interrupted Dolly, who would have answered, “of course
I won’t try to keep him by force. I don’t keep him indeed. The races
are just coming, his horses are running, he will go. I’m very glad. But
think of me, fancy my position.... But what’s the use of talking about
it?” She smiled. “Well, what did he talk about with you?”
“He spoke of what I want to speak about of myself, and it’s easy for me
to be his advocate; of whether there is not a possibility ... whether
you could not....” (Darya Alexandrovna hesitated) “correct, improve
your position.... You know how I look at it.... But all the same, if
possible, you should get married....”
“Divorce, you mean?” said Anna. “Do you know, the only woman who came
to see me in Petersburg was Betsy Tverskaya? You know her, of course?
_Au fond, c’est la femme la plus depravée qui existe._ She had an
intrigue with Tushkevitch, deceiving her husband in the basest way. And
she told me that she did not care to know me so long as my position was
irregular. Don’t imagine I would compare ... I know you, darling. But I
could not help remembering.... Well, so what did he say to you?” she
repeated.
“He said that he was unhappy on your account and his own. Perhaps you
will say that it’s egoism, but what a legitimate and noble egoism. He
wants first of all to legitimize his daughter, and to be your husband,
to have a legal right to you.”
“What wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my position?”
she put in gloomily.
“The chief thing he desires ... he desires that you should not suffer.”
“That’s impossible. Well?”
“Well, and the most legitimate desire—he wishes that your children
should have a name.”
“What children?” Anna said, not looking at Dolly, and half closing her
eyes.
“Annie and those to come....”
“He need not trouble on that score; I shall have no more children.”
“How can you tell that you won’t?”
“I shall not, because I don’t wish it.” And, in spite of all her
emotion, Anna smiled, as she caught the naïve expression of curiosity,
wonder, and horror on Dolly’s face.
“The doctor told me after my illness....”
“Impossible!” said Dolly, opening her eyes wide.
For her this was one of those discoveries the consequences and
deductions from which are so immense that all that one feels for the
first instant is that it is impossible to take it all in, and that one
will have to reflect a great, great deal upon it.
This discovery, suddenly throwing light on all those families of one or
two children, which had hitherto been so incomprehensible to her,
aroused so many ideas, reflections, and contradictory emotions, that
she had nothing to say, and simply gazed with wide-open eyes of wonder
at Anna. This was the very thing she had been dreaming of, but now
learning that it was possible, she was horrified. She felt that it was
too simple a solution of too complicated a problem.
_“N’est-ce pas immoral?”_ was all she said, after a brief pause.
“Why so? Think, I have a choice between two alternatives: either to be
with child, that is an invalid, or to be the friend and companion of my
husband—practically my husband,” Anna said in a tone intentionally
superficial and frivolous.
“Yes, yes,” said Darya Alexandrovna, hearing the very arguments she had
used to herself, and not finding the same force in them as before.
“For you, for other people,” said Anna, as though divining her
thoughts, “there may be reason to hesitate; but for me.... You must
consider, I am not his wife; he loves me as long as he loves me. And
how am I to keep his love? Not like this!”
She moved her white hands in a curve before her waist with
extraordinary rapidity, as happens during moments of excitement; ideas
and memories rushed into Darya Alexandrovna’s head. “I,” she thought,
“did not keep my attraction for Stiva; he left me for others, and the
first woman for whom he betrayed me did not keep him by being always
pretty and lively. He deserted her and took another. And can Anna
attract and keep Count Vronsky in that way? If that is what he looks
for, he will find dresses and manners still more attractive and
charming. And however white and beautiful her bare arms are, however
beautiful her full figure and her eager face under her black curls, he
will find something better still, just as my disgusting, pitiful, and
charming husband does.”
Dolly made no answer, she merely sighed. Anna noticed this sigh,
indicating dissent, and she went on. In her armory she had other
arguments so strong that no answer could be made to them.
“Do you say that it’s not right? But you must consider,” she went on;
“you forget my position. How can I desire children? I’m not speaking of
the suffering, I’m not afraid of that. Think only, what are my children
to be? Ill-fated children, who will have to bear a stranger’s name. For
the very fact of their birth they will be forced to be ashamed of their
mother, their father, their birth.”
“But that is just why a divorce is necessary.” But Anna did not hear
her. She longed to give utterance to all the arguments with which she
had so many times convinced herself.
“What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing
unhappy beings into the world!” She looked at Dolly, but without
waiting for a reply she went on:
“I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children,” she said.
“If they are not, at any rate they are not unhappy; while if they are
unhappy, I alone should be to blame for it.”
These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her own
reflections; but she heard them without understanding them. “How can
one wrong creatures that don’t exist?” she thought. And all at once the
idea struck her: could it possibly, under any circumstances, have been
better for her favorite Grisha if he had never existed? And this seemed
to her so wild, so strange, that she shook her head to drive away this
tangle of whirling, mad ideas.
“No, I don’t know; it’s not right,” was all she said, with an
expression of disgust on her face.
“Yes, but you mustn’t forget that you and I.... And besides that,”
added Anna, in spite of the wealth of her arguments and the poverty of
Dolly’s objections, seeming still to admit that it was not right,
“don’t forget the chief point, that I am not now in the same position
as you. For you the question is: do you desire not to have any more
children; while for me it is: do I desire to have them? And that’s a
great difference. You must see that I can’t desire it in my position.”
Darya Alexandrovna made no reply. She suddenly felt that she had got
far away from Anna; that there lay between them a barrier of questions
on which they could never agree, and about which it was better not to
speak.
Chapter 24
“Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your position,
if possible,” said Dolly.
“Yes, if possible,” said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly
different tone, subdued and mournful.
“Surely you don’t mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your husband
had consented to it.”
“Dolly, I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Oh, we won’t then,” Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing the
expression of suffering on Anna’s face. “All I see is that you take too
gloomy a view of things.”
“I? Not at all! I’m always bright and happy. You see, _je fais des
passions._ Veslovsky....”
“Yes, to tell the truth, I don’t like Veslovsky’s tone,” said Darya
Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject.
“Oh, that’s nonsense! It amuses Alexey, and that’s all; but he’s a boy,
and quite under my control. You know, I turn him as I please. It’s just
as it might be with your Grisha.... Dolly!”—she suddenly changed the
subject—“you say I take too gloomy a view of things. You can’t
understand. It’s too awful! I try not to take any view of it at all.”
“But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can.”
“But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexey, and say I
don’t think about it. I don’t think about it!” she repeated, and a
flush rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and
sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the
room, stopping now and then. “I don’t think of it? Not a day, not an
hour passes that I don’t think of it, and blame myself for thinking of
it ... because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!” she
repeated. “When I think of it, I can’t sleep without morphine. But
never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me, divorce. In the first
place, he won’t give me a divorce. He’s under the influence of Countess
Lidia Ivanovna now.”
Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head,
following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.
“You ought to make the attempt,” she said softly.
“Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?” she said, evidently
giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and
learned by heart. “It means that I, hating him, but still recognizing
that I have wronged him—and I consider him magnanimous—that I humiliate
myself to write to him.... Well, suppose I make the effort; I do it.
Either I receive a humiliating refusal or consent.... Well, I have
received his consent, say....” Anna was at that moment at the furthest
end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the curtain
at the window. “I receive his consent, but my ... my son? They won’t
give him up to me. He will grow up despising me, with his father, whom
I’ve abandoned. Do you see, I love ... equally, I think, but both more
than myself—two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.”
She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with
her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white dressing gown
her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She bent her head,
and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at Dolly, a thin
little pitiful figure in her patched dressing jacket and nightcap,
shaking all over with emotion.
“It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the
other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want.
And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care
about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I
can’t, I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me
for anything. You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m
suffering.” She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look,
peeped into her face and took her hand.
“What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise
me. I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy,
I am,” she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears.
Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed. She
had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but
now she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home
and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm
quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own
seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any
account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that
she would certainly go back next day.
Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine-glass and dropped
into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient
was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a little while,
she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind.
When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He was
looking for traces of the conversation which he knew that, staying so
long in Dolly’s room, she must have had with her. But in her expression
of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he could find
nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh though he was
used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that it should
affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been talking of,
but he hoped that she would tell him something of her own accord. But
she only said:
“I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’ve known her a long while, you know. She’s very good-hearted, I
suppose, _mais excessivement terre-à-terre._ Still, I’m very glad to
see her.”
He took Anna’s hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.
Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him. Next morning, in spite of
the protests of her hosts, Darya Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward
journey. Levin’s coachman, in his by no means new coat and shabby hat,
with his ill-matched horses and his coach with the patched mud-guards,
drove with gloomy determination into the covered gravel approach.
Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the
gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her
hosts were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and that
it was better for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew that
now, from Dolly’s departure, no one again would stir up within her soul
the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to
stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of
her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in
the life she was leading.
As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a
delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men how
they had liked being at Vronsky’s, when suddenly the coachman, Philip,
expressed himself unasked:
“Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all they
gave us. Everything cleared up till there wasn’t a grain left by
cockcrow. What are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now down to
forty-five kopecks. At our place, no fear, all comers may have as much
as they can eat.”
“The master’s a screw,” put in the counting-house clerk.
“Well, did you like their horses?” asked Dolly.
“The horses!—there’s no two opinions about them. And the food was good.
But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna. I don’t
know what you thought,” he said, turning his handsome, good-natured
face to her.
“I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?”
“Eh, we must!”
On reaching home and finding everyone entirely satisfactory and
particularly charming, Darya Alexandrovna began with great liveliness
telling them how she had arrived, how warmly they had received her, of
the luxury and good taste in which the Vronskys lived, and of their
recreations, and she would not allow a word to be said against them.
“One has to know Anna and Vronsky—I have got to know him better now—to
see how nice they are, and how touching,” she said, speaking now with
perfect sincerity, and forgetting the vague feeling of dissatisfaction
and awkwardness she had experienced there.
Chapter 25
Vronsky and Anna spent the whole summer and part of the winter in the
country, living in just the same condition, and still taking no steps
to obtain a divorce. It was an understood thing between them that they
should not go away anywhere; but both felt, the longer they lived
alone, especially in the autumn, without guests in the house, that they
could not stand this existence, and that they would have to alter it.
Their life was apparently such that nothing better could be desired.
They had the fullest abundance of everything; they had a child, and
both had occupation. Anna devoted just as much care to her appearance
when they had no visitors, and she did a great deal of reading, both of
novels and of what serious literature was in fashion. She ordered all
the books that were praised in the foreign papers and reviews she
received, and read them with that concentrated attention which is only
given to what is read in seclusion. Moreover, every subject that was of
interest to Vronsky, she studied in books and special journals, so that
he often went straight to her with questions relating to agriculture or
architecture, sometimes even with questions relating to horse-breeding
or sport. He was amazed at her knowledge, her memory, and at first was
disposed to doubt it, to ask for confirmation of her facts; and she
would find what he asked for in some book, and show it to him.
The building of the hospital, too, interested her. She did not merely
assist, but planned and suggested a great deal herself. But her chief
thought was still of herself—how far she was dear to Vronsky, how far
she could make up to him for all he had given up. Vronsky appreciated
this desire not only to please, but to serve him, which had become the
sole aim of her existence, but at the same time he wearied of the
loving snares in which she tried to hold him fast. As time went on, and
he saw himself more and more often held fast in these snares, he had an
ever growing desire, not so much to escape from them, as to try whether
they hindered his freedom. Had it not been for this growing desire to
be free, not to have scenes every time he wanted to go to the town to a
meeting or a race, Vronsky would have been perfectly satisfied with his
life. The rôle he had taken up, the rôle of a wealthy landowner, one of
that class which ought to be the very heart of the Russian aristocracy,
was entirely to his taste; and now, after spending six months in that
character, he derived even greater satisfaction from it. And his
management of his estate, which occupied and absorbed him more and
more, was most successful. In spite of the immense sums cost him by the
hospital, by machinery, by cows ordered from Switzerland, and many
other things, he was convinced that he was not wasting, but increasing
his substance. In all matters affecting income, the sales of timber,
wheat, and wool, the letting of lands, Vronsky was hard as a rock, and
knew well how to keep up prices. In all operations on a large scale on
this and his other estates, he kept to the simplest methods involving
no risk, and in trifling details he was careful and exacting to an
extreme degree. In spite of all the cunning and ingenuity of the German
steward, who would try to tempt him into purchases by making his
original estimate always far larger than really required, and then
representing to Vronsky that he might get the thing cheaper, and so
make a profit, Vronsky did not give in. He listened to his steward,
cross-examined him, and only agreed to his suggestions when the
implement to be ordered or constructed was the very newest, not yet
known in Russia, and likely to excite wonder. Apart from such
exceptions, he resolved upon an increased outlay only where there was a
surplus, and in making such an outlay he went into the minutest
details, and insisted on getting the very best for his money; so that
by the method on which he managed his affairs, it was clear that he was
not wasting, but increasing his substance.
In October there were the provincial elections in the Kashinsky
province, where were the estates of Vronsky, Sviazhsky, Koznishev,
Oblonsky, and a small part of Levin’s land.
These elections were attracting public attention from several
circumstances connected with them, and also from the people taking part
in them. There had been a great deal of talk about them, and great
preparations were being made for them. Persons who never attended the
elections were coming from Moscow, from Petersburg, and from abroad to
attend these. Vronsky had long before promised Sviazhsky to go to them.
Before the elections Sviazhsky, who often visited Vozdvizhenskoe, drove
over to fetch Vronsky. On the day before there had been almost a
quarrel between Vronsky and Anna over this proposed expedition. It was
the very dullest autumn weather, which is so dreary in the country, and
so, preparing himself for a struggle, Vronsky, with a hard and cold
expression, informed Anna of his departure as he had never spoken to
her before. But, to his surprise, Anna accepted the information with
great composure, and merely asked when he would be back. He looked
intently at her, at a loss to explain this composure. She smiled at his
look. He knew that way she had of withdrawing into herself, and knew
that it only happened when she had determined upon something without
letting him know her plans. He was afraid of this; but he was so
anxious to avoid a scene that he kept up appearances, and half
sincerely believed in what he longed to believe in—her reasonableness.
“I hope you won’t be dull?”
“I hope not,” said Anna. “I got a box of books yesterday from
Gautier’s. No, I shan’t be dull.”
“She’s trying to take that tone, and so much the better,” he thought,
“or else it would be the same thing over and over again.”
And he set off for the elections without appealing to her for a candid
explanation. It was the first time since the beginning of their
intimacy that he had parted from her without a full explanation. From
one point of view this troubled him, but on the other side he felt that
it was better so. “At first there will be, as this time, something
undefined kept back, and then she will get used to it. In any case I
can give up anything for her, but not my masculine independence,” he
thought.
Chapter 26
In September Levin moved to Moscow for Kitty’s confinement. He had
spent a whole month in Moscow with nothing to do, when Sergey
Ivanovitch, who had property in the Kashinsky province, and took great
interest in the question of the approaching elections, made ready to
set off to the elections. He invited his brother, who had a vote in the
Seleznevsky district, to come with him. Levin had, moreover, to
transact in Kashin some extremely important business relating to the
wardship of land and to the receiving of certain redemption money for
his sister, who was abroad.
Levin still hesitated, but Kitty, who saw that he was bored in Moscow,
and urged him to go, on her own authority ordered him the proper
nobleman’s uniform, costing seven pounds. And that seven pounds paid
for the uniform was the chief cause that finally decided Levin to go.
He went to Kashin....
Levin had been six days in Kashin, visiting the assembly each day, and
busily engaged about his sister’s business, which still dragged on. The
district marshals of nobility were all occupied with the elections, and
it was impossible to get the simplest thing done that depended upon the
court of wardship. The other matter, the payment of the sums due, was
met too by difficulties. After long negotiations over the legal
details, the money was at last ready to be paid; but the notary, a most
obliging person, could not hand over the order, because it must have
the signature of the president, and the president, though he had not
given over his duties to a deputy, was at the elections. All these
worrying negotiations, this endless going from place to place, and
talking with pleasant and excellent people, who quite saw the
unpleasantness of the petitioner’s position, but were powerless to
assist him—all these efforts that yielded no result, led to a feeling
of misery in Levin akin to the mortifying helplessness one experiences
in dreams when one tries to use physical force. He felt this frequently
as he talked to his most good-natured solicitor. This solicitor did, it
seemed, everything possible, and strained every nerve to get him out of
his difficulties. “I tell you what you might try,” he said more than
once; “go to so-and-so and so-and-so,” and the solicitor drew up a
regular plan for getting round the fatal point that hindered
everything. But he would add immediately, “It’ll mean some delay,
anyway, but you might try it.” And Levin did try, and did go. Everyone
was kind and civil, but the point evaded seemed to crop up again in the
end, and again to bar the way. What was particularly trying, was that
Levin could not make out with whom he was struggling, to whose interest
it was that his business should not be done. That no one seemed to
know; the solicitor certainly did not know. If Levin could have
understood why, just as he saw why one can only approach the booking
office of a railway station in single file, it would not have been so
vexatious and tiresome to him. But with the hindrances that confronted
him in his business, no one could explain why they existed.
But Levin had changed a good deal since his marriage; he was patient,
and if he could not see why it was all arranged like this, he told
himself that he could not judge without knowing all about it, and that
most likely it must be so, and he tried not to fret.
In attending the elections, too, and taking part in them, he tried now
not to judge, not to fall foul of them, but to comprehend as fully as
he could the question which was so earnestly and ardently absorbing
honest and excellent men whom he respected. Since his marriage there
had been revealed to Levin so many new and serious aspects of life that
had previously, through his frivolous attitude to them, seemed of no
importance, that in the question of the elections too he assumed and
tried to find some serious significance.
Sergey Ivanovitch explained to him the meaning and object of the
proposed revolution at the elections. The marshal of the province in
whose hands the law had placed the control of so many important public
functions—the guardianship of wards (the very department which was
giving Levin so much trouble just now), the disposal of large sums
subscribed by the nobility of the province, the high schools, female,
male, and military, and popular instruction on the new model, and
finally, the district council—the marshal of the province, Snetkov, was
a nobleman of the old school,—dissipating an immense fortune, a
good-hearted man, honest after his own fashion, but utterly without any
comprehension of the needs of modern days. He always took, in every
question, the side of the nobility; he was positively antagonistic to
the spread of popular education, and he succeeded in giving a purely
party character to the district council which ought by rights to be of
such an immense importance. What was needed was to put in his place a
fresh, capable, perfectly modern man, of contemporary ideas, and to
frame their policy so as from the rights conferred upon the nobles, not
as the nobility, but as an element of the district council, to extract
all the powers of self-government that could possibly be derived from
them. In the wealthy Kashinsky province, which always took the lead of
other provinces in everything, there was now such a preponderance of
forces that this policy, once carried through properly there, might
serve as a model for other provinces for all Russia. And hence the
whole question was of the greatest importance. It was proposed to elect
as marshal in place of Snetkov either Sviazhsky, or, better still,
Nevyedovsky, a former university professor, a man of remarkable
intelligence and a great friend of Sergey Ivanovitch.
The meeting was opened by the governor, who made a speech to the
nobles, urging them to elect the public functionaries, not from regard
for persons, but for the service and welfare of their fatherland, and
hoping that the honorable nobility of the Kashinsky province would, as
at all former elections, hold their duty as sacred, and vindicate the
exalted confidence of the monarch.
When he had finished with his speech, the governor walked out of the
hall, and the noblemen noisily and eagerly—some even
enthusiastically—followed him and thronged round him while he put on
his fur coat and conversed amicably with the marshal of the province.
Levin, anxious to see into everything and not to miss anything, stood
there too in the crowd, and heard the governor say: “Please tell Marya
Ivanovna my wife is very sorry she couldn’t come to the Home.” And
thereupon the nobles in high good-humor sorted out their fur coats and
all drove off to the cathedral.
In the cathedral Levin, lifting his hand like the rest and repeating
the words of the archdeacon, swore with most terrible oaths to do all
the governor had hoped they would do. Church services always affected
Levin, and as he uttered the words “I kiss the cross,” and glanced
round at the crowd of young and old men repeating the same, he felt
touched.
On the second and third days there was business relating to the
finances of the nobility and the female high school, of no importance
whatever, as Sergey Ivanovitch explained, and Levin, busy seeing after
his own affairs, did not attend the meetings. On the fourth day the
auditing of the marshal’s accounts took place at the high table of the
marshal of the province. And then there occurred the first skirmish
between the new party and the old. The committee who had been deputed
to verify the accounts reported to the meeting that all was in order.
The marshal of the province got up, thanked the nobility for their
confidence, and shed tears. The nobles gave him a loud welcome, and
shook hands with him. But at that instant a nobleman of Sergey
Ivanovitch’s party said that he had heard that the committee had not
verified the accounts, considering such a verification an insult to the
marshal of the province. One of the members of the committee
incautiously admitted this. Then a small gentleman, very young-looking
but very malignant, began to say that it would probably be agreeable to
the marshal of the province to give an account of his expenditures of
the public moneys, and that the misplaced delicacy of the members of
the committee was depriving him of this moral satisfaction. Then the
members of the committee tried to withdraw their admission, and Sergey
Ivanovitch began to prove that they must logically admit either that
they had verified the accounts or that they had not, and he developed
this dilemma in detail. Sergey Ivanovitch was answered by the spokesman
of the opposite party. Then Sviazhsky spoke, and then the malignant
gentleman again. The discussion lasted a long time and ended in
nothing. Levin was surprised that they should dispute upon this subject
so long, especially as, when he asked Sergey Ivanovitch whether he
supposed that money had been misappropriated, Sergey Ivanovitch
answered:
“Oh, no! He’s an honest man. But those old-fashioned methods of
paternal family arrangements in the management of provincial affairs
must be broken down.”
On the fifth day came the elections of the district marshals. It was
rather a stormy day in several districts. In the Seleznevsky district
Sviazhsky was elected unanimously without a ballot, and he gave a
dinner that evening.
Chapter 27
The sixth day was fixed for the election of the marshal of the
province.
The rooms, large and small, were full of noblemen in all sorts of
uniforms. Many had come only for that day. Men who had not seen each
other for years, some from the Crimea, some from Petersburg, some from
abroad, met in the rooms of the Hall of Nobility. There was much
discussion around the governor’s table under the portrait of the Tsar.
The nobles, both in the larger and the smaller rooms, grouped
themselves in camps, and from their hostile and suspicious glances,
from the silence that fell upon them when outsiders approached a group,
and from the way that some, whispering together, retreated to the
farther corridor, it was evident that each side had secrets from the
other. In appearance the noblemen were sharply divided into two
classes: the old and the new. The old were for the most part either in
old uniforms of the nobility, buttoned up closely, with spurs and hats,
or in their own special naval, cavalry, infantry, or official uniforms.
The uniforms of the older men were embroidered in the old-fashioned way
with epaulets on their shoulders; they were unmistakably tight and
short in the waist, as though their wearers had grown out of them. The
younger men wore the uniform of the nobility with long waists and broad
shoulders, unbuttoned over white waistcoats, or uniforms with black
collars and with the embroidered badges of justices of the peace. To
the younger men belonged the court uniforms that here and there
brightened up the crowd.
But the division into young and old did not correspond with the
division of parties. Some of the young men, as Levin observed, belonged
to the old party; and some of the very oldest noblemen, on the
contrary, were whispering with Sviazhsky, and were evidently ardent
partisans of the new party.
Levin stood in the smaller room, where they were smoking and taking
light refreshments, close to his own friends, and listening to what
they were saying, he conscientiously exerted all his intelligence
trying to understand what was said. Sergey Ivanovitch was the center
round which the others grouped themselves. He was listening at that
moment to Sviazhsky and Hliustov, the marshal of another district, who
belonged to their party. Hliustov would not agree to go with his
district to ask Snetkov to stand, while Sviazhsky was persuading him to
do so, and Sergey Ivanovitch was approving of the plan. Levin could not
make out why the opposition was to ask the marshal to stand whom they
wanted to supersede.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had just been drinking and taking some lunch,
came up to them in his uniform of a gentleman of the bedchamber, wiping
his lips with a perfumed handkerchief of bordered batiste.
“We are placing our forces,” he said, pulling out his whiskers, “Sergey
Ivanovitch!”
And listening to the conversation, he supported Sviazhsky’s contention.
“One district’s enough, and Sviazhsky’s obviously of the opposition,”
he said, words evidently intelligible to all except Levin.
“Why, Kostya, you here too! I suppose you’re converted, eh?” he added,
turning to Levin and drawing his arm through his. Levin would have been
glad indeed to be converted, but could not make out what the point was,
and retreating a few steps from the speakers, he explained to Stepan
Arkadyevitch his inability to understand why the marshal of the
province should be asked to stand.
_“O sancta simplicitas!”_ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and briefly and
clearly he explained it to Levin. If, as at previous elections, all the
districts asked the marshal of the province to stand, then he would be
elected without a ballot. That must not be. Now eight districts had
agreed to call upon him: if two refused to do so, Snetkov might decline
to stand at all; and then the old party might choose another of their
party, which would throw them completely out in their reckoning. But if
only one district, Sviazhsky’s, did not call upon him to stand, Snetkov
would let himself be balloted for. They were even, some of them, going
to vote for him, and purposely to let him get a good many votes, so
that the enemy might be thrown off the scent, and when a candidate of
the other side was put up, they too might give him some votes. Levin
understood to some extent, but not fully, and would have put a few more
questions, when suddenly everyone began talking and making a noise and
they moved towards the big room.
“What is it? eh? whom?” “No guarantee? whose? what?” “They won’t pass
him?” “No guarantee?” “They won’t let Flerov in?” “Eh, because of the
charge against him?” “Why, at this rate, they won’t admit anyone. It’s
a swindle!” “The law!” Levin heard exclamations on all sides, and he
moved into the big room together with the others, all hurrying
somewhere and afraid of missing something. Squeezed by the crowding
noblemen, he drew near the high table where the marshal of the
province, Sviazhsky, and the other leaders were hotly disputing about
something.
Chapter 28
Levin was standing rather far off. A nobleman breathing heavily and
hoarsely at his side, and another whose thick boots were creaking,
prevented him from hearing distinctly. He could only hear the soft
voice of the marshal faintly, then the shrill voice of the malignant
gentleman, and then the voice of Sviazhsky. They were disputing, as far
as he could make out, as to the interpretation to be put on the act and
the exact meaning of the words: “liable to be called up for trial.”
The crowd parted to make way for Sergey Ivanovitch approaching the
table. Sergey Ivanovitch, waiting till the malignant gentleman had
finished speaking, said that he thought the best solution would be to
refer to the act itself, and asked the secretary to find the act. The
act said that in case of difference of opinion, there must be a ballot.
Sergey Ivanovitch read the act and began to explain its meaning, but at
that point a tall, stout, round-shouldered landowner, with dyed
whiskers, in a tight uniform that cut the back of his neck, interrupted
him. He went up to the table, and striking it with his finger ring, he
shouted loudly: “A ballot! Put it to the vote! No need for more
talking!” Then several voices began to talk all at once, and the tall
nobleman with the ring, getting more and more exasperated, shouted more
and more loudly. But it was impossible to make out what he said.
He was shouting for the very course Sergey Ivanovitch had proposed; but
it was evident that he hated him and all his party, and this feeling of
hatred spread through the whole party and roused in opposition to it
the same vindictiveness, though in a more seemly form, on the other
side. Shouts were raised, and for a moment all was confusion, so that
the marshal of the province had to call for order.
“A ballot! A ballot! Every nobleman sees it! We shed our blood for our
country!... The confidence of the monarch.... No checking the accounts
of the marshal; he’s not a cashier.... But that’s not the point....
Votes, please! Beastly!...” shouted furious and violent voices on all
sides. Looks and faces were even more violent and furious than their
words. They expressed the most implacable hatred. Levin did not in the
least understand what was the matter, and he marveled at the passion
with which it was disputed whether or not the decision about Flerov
should be put to the vote. He forgot, as Sergey Ivanovitch explained to
him afterwards, this syllogism: that it was necessary for the public
good to get rid of the marshal of the province; that to get rid of the
marshal it was necessary to have a majority of votes; that to get a
majority of votes it was necessary to secure Flerov’s right to vote;
that to secure the recognition of Flerov’s right to vote they must
decide on the interpretation to be put on the act.
“And one vote may decide the whole question, and one must be serious
and consecutive, if one wants to be of use in public life,” concluded
Sergey Ivanovitch. But Levin forgot all that, and it was painful to him
to see all these excellent persons, for whom he had a respect, in such
an unpleasant and vicious state of excitement. To escape from this
painful feeling he went away into the other room where there was nobody
except the waiters at the refreshment bar. Seeing the waiters busy over
washing up the crockery and setting in order their plates and
wine-glasses, seeing their calm and cheerful faces, Levin felt an
unexpected sense of relief as though he had come out of a stuffy room
into the fresh air. He began walking up and down, looking with pleasure
at the waiters. He particularly liked the way one gray-whiskered
waiter, who showed his scorn for the other younger ones and was jeered
at by them, was teaching them how to fold up napkins properly. Levin
was just about to enter into conversation with the old waiter, when the
secretary of the court of wardship, a little old man whose specialty it
was to know all the noblemen of the province by name and patronymic,
drew him away.
“Please come, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” he said, “your brother’s
looking for you. They are voting on the legal point.”
Levin walked into the room, received a white ball, and followed his
brother, Sergey Ivanovitch, to the table where Sviazhsky was standing
with a significant and ironical face, holding his beard in his fist and
sniffing at it. Sergey Ivanovitch put his hand into the box, put the
ball somewhere, and making room for Levin, stopped. Levin advanced, but
utterly forgetting what he was to do, and much embarrassed, he turned
to Sergey Ivanovitch with the question, “Where am I to put it?” He
asked this softly, at a moment when there was talking going on near, so
that he had hoped his question would not be overheard. But the persons
speaking paused, and his improper question was overheard. Sergey
Ivanovitch frowned.
“That is a matter for each man’s own decision,” he said severely.
Several people smiled. Levin crimsoned, hurriedly thrust his hand under
the cloth, and put the ball to the right as it was in his right hand.
Having put it in, he recollected that he ought to have thrust his left
hand too, and so he thrust it in though too late, and, still more
overcome with confusion, he beat a hasty retreat into the background.
“A hundred and twenty-six for admission! Ninety-eight against!” sang
out the voice of the secretary, who could not pronounce the letter _r_.
Then there was a laugh; a button and two nuts were found in the box.
The nobleman was allowed the right to vote, and the new party had
conquered.
But the old party did not consider themselves conquered. Levin heard
that they were asking Snetkov to stand, and he saw that a crowd of
noblemen was surrounding the marshal, who was saying something. Levin
went nearer. In reply Snetkov spoke of the trust the noblemen of the
province had placed in him, the affection they had shown him, which he
did not deserve, as his only merit had been his attachment to the
nobility, to whom he had devoted twelve years of service. Several times
he repeated the words: “I have served to the best of my powers with
truth and good faith, I value your goodness and thank you,” and
suddenly he stopped short from the tears that choked him, and went out
of the room. Whether these tears came from a sense of the injustice
being done him, from his love for the nobility, or from the strain of
the position he was placed in, feeling himself surrounded by enemies,
his emotion infected the assembly, the majority were touched, and Levin
felt a tenderness for Snetkov.
In the doorway the marshal of the province jostled against Levin.
“Beg pardon, excuse me, please,” he said as to a stranger, but
recognizing Levin, he smiled timidly. It seemed to Levin that he would
have liked to say something, but could not speak for emotion. His face
and his whole figure in his uniform with the crosses, and white
trousers striped with braid, as he moved hurriedly along, reminded
Levin of some hunted beast who sees that he is in evil case. This
expression in the marshal’s face was particularly touching to Levin,
because, only the day before, he had been at his house about his
trustee business and had seen him in all his grandeur, a kind-hearted,
fatherly man. The big house with the old family furniture; the rather
dirty, far from stylish, but respectful footmen, unmistakably old house
serfs who had stuck to their master; the stout, good-natured wife in a
cap with lace and a Turkish shawl, petting her pretty grandchild, her
daughter’s daughter; the young son, a sixth form high school boy,
coming home from school, and greeting his father, kissing his big hand;
the genuine, cordial words and gestures of the old man—all this had the
day before roused an instinctive feeling of respect and sympathy in
Levin. This old man was a touching and pathetic figure to Levin now,
and he longed to say something pleasant to him.
“So you’re sure to be our marshal again,” he said.
“It’s not likely,” said the marshal, looking round with a scared
expression. “I’m worn out, I’m old. If there are men younger and more
deserving than I, let them serve.”
And the marshal disappeared through a side door.
The most solemn moment was at hand. They were to proceed immediately to
the election. The leaders of both parties were reckoning white and
black on their fingers.
The discussion upon Flerov had given the new party not only Flerov’s
vote, but had also gained time for them, so that they could send to
fetch three noblemen who had been rendered unable to take part in the
elections by the wiles of the other party. Two noble gentlemen, who had
a weakness for strong drink, had been made drunk by the partisans of
Snetkov, and a third had been robbed of his uniform.
On learning this, the new party had made haste, during the dispute
about Flerov, to send some of their men in a sledge to clothe the
stripped gentleman, and to bring along one of the intoxicated to the
meeting.
“I’ve brought one, drenched him with water,” said the landowner, who
had gone on this errand, to Sviazhsky. “He’s all right? he’ll do.”
“Not too drunk, he won’t fall down?” said Sviazhsky, shaking his head.
“No, he’s first-rate. If only they don’t give him any more here....
I’ve told the waiter not to give him anything on any account.”
Chapter 29
The narrow room, in which they were smoking and taking refreshments,
was full of noblemen. The excitement grew more intense, and every face
betrayed some uneasiness. The excitement was specially keen for the
leaders of each party, who knew every detail, and had reckoned up every
vote. They were the generals organizing the approaching battle. The
rest, like the rank and file before an engagement, though they were
getting ready for the fight, sought for other distractions in the
interval. Some were lunching, standing at the bar, or sitting at the
table; others were walking up and down the long room, smoking
cigarettes, and talking with friends whom they had not seen for a long
while.
Levin did not care to eat, and he was not smoking; he did not want to
join his own friends, that is Sergey Ivanovitch, Stepan Arkadyevitch,
Sviazhsky and the rest, because Vronsky in his equerry’s uniform was
standing with them in eager conversation. Levin had seen him already at
the meeting on the previous day, and he had studiously avoided him, not
caring to greet him. He went to the window and sat down, scanning the
groups, and listening to what was being said around him. He felt
depressed, especially because everyone else was, as he saw, eager,
anxious, and interested, and he alone, with an old, toothless little
man with mumbling lips wearing a naval uniform, sitting beside him, had
no interest in it and nothing to do.
“He’s such a blackguard! I have told him so, but it makes no
difference. Only think of it! He couldn’t collect it in three years!”
he heard vigorously uttered by a round-shouldered, short, country
gentleman, who had pomaded hair hanging on his embroidered collar, and
new boots obviously put on for the occasion, with heels that tapped
energetically as he spoke. Casting a displeased glance at Levin, this
gentleman sharply turned his back.
“Yes, it’s a dirty business, there’s no denying,” a small gentleman
assented in a high voice.
Next, a whole crowd of country gentlemen, surrounding a stout general,
hurriedly came near Levin. These persons were unmistakably seeking a
place where they could talk without being overheard.
“How dare he say I had his breeches stolen! Pawned them for drink, I
expect. Damn the fellow, prince indeed! He’d better not say it, the
beast!”
“But excuse me! They take their stand on the act,” was being said in
another group; “the wife must be registered as noble.”
“Oh, damn your acts! I speak from my heart. We’re all gentlemen, aren’t
we? Above suspicion.”
“Shall we go on, your excellency, _fine champagne?_”
Another group was following a nobleman, who was shouting something in a
loud voice; it was one of the three intoxicated gentlemen.
“I always advised Marya Semyonovna to let for a fair rent, for she can
never save a profit,” he heard a pleasant voice say. The speaker was a
country gentleman with gray whiskers, wearing the regimental uniform of
an old general staff-officer. It was the very landowner Levin had met
at Sviazhsky’s. He knew him at once. The landowner too stared at Levin,
and they exchanged greetings.
“Very glad to see you! To be sure! I remember you very well. Last year
at our district marshal, Nikolay Ivanovitch’s.”
“Well, and how is your land doing?” asked Levin.
“Oh, still just the same, always at a loss,” the landowner answered
with a resigned smile, but with an expression of serenity and
conviction that so it must be. “And how do you come to be in our
province?” he asked. “Come to take part in our _coup d’état?_” he said,
confidently pronouncing the French words with a bad accent. “All
Russia’s here—gentlemen of the bedchamber, and everything short of the
ministry.” He pointed to the imposing figure of Stepan Arkadyevitch in
white trousers and his court uniform, walking by with a general.
“I ought to own that I don’t very well understand the drift of the
provincial elections,” said Levin.
The landowner looked at him.
“Why, what is there to understand? There’s no meaning in it at all.
It’s a decaying institution that goes on running only by the force of
inertia. Just look, the very uniforms tell you that it’s an assembly of
justices of the peace, permanent members of the court, and so on, but
not of noblemen.”
“Then why do you come?” asked Levin.
“From habit, nothing else. Then, too, one must keep up connections.
It’s a moral obligation of a sort. And then, to tell the truth, there’s
one’s own interests. My son-in-law wants to stand as a permanent
member; they’re not rich people, and he must be brought forward. These
gentlemen, now, what do they come for?” he said, pointing to the
malignant gentleman, who was talking at the high table.
“That’s the new generation of nobility.”
“New it may be, but nobility it isn’t. They’re proprietors of a sort,
but we’re the landowners. As noblemen, they’re cutting their own
throats.”
“But you say it’s an institution that’s served its time.”
“That it may be, but still it ought to be treated a little more
respectfully. Snetkov, now.... We may be of use, or we may not, but
we’re the growth of a thousand years. If we’re laying out a garden,
planning one before the house, you know, and there you’ve a tree that’s
stood for centuries in the very spot.... Old and gnarled it may be, and
yet you don’t cut down the old fellow to make room for the flowerbeds,
but lay out your beds so as to take advantage of the tree. You won’t
grow him again in a year,” he said cautiously, and he immediately
changed the conversation. “Well, and how is your land doing?”
“Oh, not very well. I make five per cent.”
“Yes, but you don’t reckon your own work. Aren’t you worth something
too? I’ll tell you my own case. Before I took to seeing after the land,
I had a salary of three hundred pounds from the service. Now I do more
work than I did in the service, and like you I get five per cent. on
the land, and thank God for that. But one’s work is thrown in for
nothing.”
“Then why do you do it, if it’s a clear loss?”
“Oh, well, one does it! What would you have? It’s habit, and one knows
it’s how it should be. And what’s more,” the landowner went on, leaning
his elbows on the window and chatting on, “my son, I must tell you, has
no taste for it. There’s no doubt he’ll be a scientific man. So
there’ll be no one to keep it up. And yet one does it. Here this year
I’ve planted an orchard.”
“Yes, yes,” said Levin, “that’s perfectly true. I always feel there’s
no real balance of gain in my work on the land, and yet one does it....
It’s a sort of duty one feels to the land.”
“But I tell you what,” the landowner pursued; “a neighbor of mine, a
merchant, was at my place. We walked about the fields and the garden.
‘No,’ said he, ‘Stepan Vassilievitch, everything’s well looked after,
but your garden’s neglected.’ But, as a fact, it’s well kept up. ‘To my
thinking, I’d cut down that lime-tree. Here you’ve thousands of limes,
and each would make two good bundles of bark. And nowadays that bark’s
worth something. I’d cut down the lot.’”
“And with what he made he’d increase his stock, or buy some land for a
trifle, and let it out in lots to the peasants,” Levin added, smiling.
He had evidently more than once come across those commercial
calculations. “And he’d make his fortune. But you and I must thank God
if we keep what we’ve got and leave it to our children.”
“You’re married, I’ve heard?” said the landowner.
“Yes,” Levin answered, with proud satisfaction. “Yes, it’s rather
strange,” he went on. “So we live without making anything, as though we
were ancient vestals set to keep in a fire.”
The landowner chuckled under his white mustaches.
“There are some among us, too, like our friend Nikolay Ivanovitch, or
Count Vronsky, that’s settled here lately, who try to carry on their
husbandry as though it were a factory; but so far it leads to nothing
but making away with capital on it.”
“But why is it we don’t do like the merchants? Why don’t we cut down
our parks for timber?” said Levin, returning to a thought that had
struck him.
“Why, as you said, to keep the fire in. Besides that’s not work for a
nobleman. And our work as noblemen isn’t done here at the elections,
but yonder, each in our corner. There’s a class instinct, too, of what
one ought and oughtn’t to do. There’s the peasants, too, I wonder at
them sometimes; any good peasant tries to take all the land he can.
However bad the land is, he’ll work it. Without a return too. At a
simple loss.”
“Just as we do,” said Levin. “Very, very glad to have met you,” he
added, seeing Sviazhsky approaching him.
“And here we’ve met for the first time since we met at your place,”
said the landowner to Sviazhsky, “and we’ve had a good talk too.”
“Well, have you been attacking the new order of things?” said Sviazhsky
with a smile.
“That we’re bound to do.”
“You’ve relieved your feelings?”
Chapter 30
Sviazhsky took Levin’s arm, and went with him to his own friends.
This time there was no avoiding Vronsky. He was standing with Stepan
Arkadyevitch and Sergey Ivanovitch, and looking straight at Levin as he
drew near.
“Delighted! I believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you ... at
Princess Shtcherbatskaya’s,” he said, giving Levin his hand.
“Yes, I quite remember our meeting,” said Levin, and blushing crimson,
he turned away immediately, and began talking to his brother.
With a slight smile Vronsky went on talking to Sviazhsky, obviously
without the slightest inclination to enter into conversation with
Levin. But Levin, as he talked to his brother, was continually looking
round at Vronsky, trying to think of something to say to him to gloss
over his rudeness.
“What are we waiting for now?” asked Levin, looking at Sviazhsky and
Vronsky.
“For Snetkov. He has to refuse or to consent to stand,” answered
Sviazhsky.
“Well, and what has he done, consented or not?”
“That’s the point, that he’s done neither,” said Vronsky.
“And if he refuses, who will stand then?” asked Levin, looking at
Vronsky.
“Whoever chooses to,” said Sviazhsky.
“Shall you?” asked Levin.
“Certainly not I,” said Sviazhsky, looking confused, and turning an
alarmed glance at the malignant gentleman, who was standing beside
Sergey Ivanovitch.
“Who then? Nevyedovsky?” said Levin, feeling he was putting his foot
into it.
But this was worse still. Nevyedovsky and Sviazhsky were the two
candidates.
“I certainly shall not, under any circumstances,” answered the
malignant gentleman.
This was Nevyedovsky himself. Sviazhsky introduced him to Levin.
“Well, you find it exciting too?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, winking at
Vronsky. “It’s something like a race. One might bet on it.”
“Yes, it is keenly exciting,” said Vronsky. “And once taking the thing
up, one’s eager to see it through. It’s a fight!” he said, scowling and
setting his powerful jaws.
“What a capable fellow Sviazhsky is! Sees it all so clearly.”
“Oh, yes!” Vronsky assented indifferently.
A silence followed, during which Vronsky—since he had to look at
something—looked at Levin, at his feet, at his uniform, then at his
face, and noticing his gloomy eyes fixed upon him, he said, in order to
say something:
“How is it that you, living constantly in the country, are not a
justice of the peace? You are not in the uniform of one.”
“It’s because I consider that the justice of the peace is a silly
institution,” Levin answered gloomily. He had been all the time looking
for an opportunity to enter into conversation with Vronsky, so as to
smooth over his rudeness at their first meeting.
“I don’t think so, quite the contrary,” Vronsky said, with quiet
surprise.
“It’s a plaything,” Levin cut him short. “We don’t want justices of the
peace. I’ve never had a single thing to do with them during eight
years. And what I have had was decided wrongly by them. The justice of
the peace is over thirty miles from me. For some matter of two roubles
I should have to send a lawyer, who costs me fifteen.”
And he related how a peasant had stolen some flour from the miller, and
when the miller told him of it, had lodged a complaint for slander. All
this was utterly uncalled for and stupid, and Levin felt it himself as
he said it.
“Oh, this is such an original fellow!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with
his most soothing, almond-oil smile. “But come along; I think they’re
voting....”
And they separated.
“I can’t understand,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, who had observed his
brother’s clumsiness, “I can’t understand how anyone can be so
absolutely devoid of political tact. That’s where we Russians are so
deficient. The marshal of the province is our opponent, and with him
you’re _ami cochon_, and you beg him to stand. Count Vronsky, now ...
I’m not making a friend of him; he’s asked me to dinner, and I’m not
going; but he’s one of our side—why make an enemy of him? Then you ask
Nevyedovsky if he’s going to stand. That’s not a thing to do.”
“Oh, I don’t understand it at all! And it’s all such nonsense,” Levin
answered gloomily.
“You say it’s all such nonsense, but as soon as you have anything to do
with it, you make a muddle.”
Levin did not answer, and they walked together into the big room.
The marshal of the province, though he was vaguely conscious in the air
of some trap being prepared for him, and though he had not been called
upon by all to stand, had still made up his mind to stand. All was
silence in the room. The secretary announced in a loud voice that the
captain of the guards, Mihail Stepanovitch Snetkov, would now be
balloted for as marshal of the province.
The district marshals walked carrying plates, on which were balls, from
their tables to the high table, and the election began.
“Put it in the right side,” whispered Stepan Arkadyevitch, as with his
brother Levin followed the marshal of his district to the table. But
Levin had forgotten by now the calculations that had been explained to
him, and was afraid Stepan Arkadyevitch might be mistaken in saying
“the right side.” Surely Snetkov was the enemy. As he went up, he held
the ball in his right hand, but thinking he was wrong, just at the box
he changed to the left hand, and undoubtedly put the ball to the left.
An adept in the business, standing at the box and seeing by the mere
action of the elbow where each put his ball, scowled with annoyance. It
was no good for him to use his insight.
Everything was still, and the counting of the balls was heard. Then a
single voice rose and proclaimed the numbers for and against. The
marshal had been voted for by a considerable majority. All was noise
and eager movement towards the doors. Snetkov came in, and the nobles
thronged round him, congratulating him.
“Well, now is it over?” Levin asked Sergey Ivanovitch.
“It’s only just beginning,” Sviazhsky said, replying for Sergey
Ivanovitch with a smile. “Some other candidate may receive more votes
than the marshal.”
Levin had quite forgotten about that. Now he could only remember that
there was some sort of trickery in it, but he was too bored to think
what it was exactly. He felt depressed, and longed to get out of the
crowd.
As no one was paying any attention to him, and no one apparently needed
him, he quietly slipped away into the little room where the
refreshments were, and again had a great sense of comfort when he saw
the waiters. The little old waiter pressed him to have something, and
Levin agreed. After eating a cutlet with beans and talking to the
waiters of their former masters, Levin, not wishing to go back to the
hall, where it was all so distasteful to him, proceeded to walk through
the galleries. The galleries were full of fashionably dressed ladies,
leaning over the balustrade and trying not to lose a single word of
what was being said below. With the ladies were sitting and standing
smart lawyers, high school teachers in spectacles, and officers.
Everywhere they were talking of the election, and of how worried the
marshal was, and how splendid the discussions had been. In one group
Levin heard his brother’s praises. One lady was telling a lawyer:
“How glad I am I heard Koznishev! It’s worth losing one’s dinner. He’s
exquisite! So clear and distinct all of it! There’s not one of you in
the law courts that speaks like that. The only one is Meidel, and he’s
not so eloquent by a long way.”
Finding a free place, Levin leaned over the balustrade and began
looking and listening.
All the noblemen were sitting railed off behind barriers according to
their districts. In the middle of the room stood a man in a uniform,
who shouted in a loud, high voice:
“As a candidate for the marshalship of the nobility of the province we
call upon staff-captain Yevgeney Ivanovitch Apuhtin!” A dead silence
followed, and then a weak old voice was heard: “Declined!”
“We call upon the privy councilor Pyotr Petrovitch Bol,” the voice
began again.
“Declined!” a high boyish voice replied.
Again it began, and again “Declined.” And so it went on for about an
hour. Levin, with his elbows on the balustrade, looked and listened. At
first he wondered and wanted to know what it meant; then feeling sure
that he could not make it out he began to be bored. Then recalling all
the excitement and vindictiveness he had seen on all the faces, he felt
sad; he made up his mind to go, and went downstairs. As he passed
through the entry to the galleries he met a dejected high school boy
walking up and down with tired-looking eyes. On the stairs he met a
couple—a lady running quickly on her high heels and the jaunty deputy
prosecutor.
“I told you you weren’t late,” the deputy prosecutor was saying at the
moment when Levin moved aside to let the lady pass.
Levin was on the stairs to the way out, and was just feeling in his
waistcoat pocket for the number of his overcoat, when the secretary
overtook him.
“This way, please, Konstantin Dmitrievitch; they are voting.”
The candidate who was being voted on was Nevyedovsky, who had so
stoutly denied all idea of standing. Levin went up to the door of the
room; it was locked. The secretary knocked, the door opened, and Levin
was met by two red-faced gentlemen, who darted out.
“I can’t stand any more of it,” said one red-faced gentleman.
After them the face of the marshal of the province was poked out. His
face was dreadful-looking from exhaustion and dismay.
“I told you not to let anyone out!” he cried to the doorkeeper.
“I let someone in, your excellency!”
“Mercy on us!” and with a heavy sigh the marshal of the province walked
with downcast head to the high table in the middle of the room, his
legs staggering in his white trousers.
Nevyedovsky had scored a higher majority, as they had planned, and he
was the new marshal of the province. Many people were amused, many were
pleased and happy, many were in ecstasies, many were disgusted and
unhappy. The former marshal of the province was in a state of despair,
which he could not conceal. When Nevyedovsky went out of the room, the
crowd thronged round him and followed him enthusiastically, just as
they had followed the governor who had opened the meetings, and just as
they had followed Snetkov when he was elected.
Chapter 31
The newly elected marshal and many of the successful party dined that
day with Vronsky.
Vronsky had come to the elections partly because he was bored in the
country and wanted to show Anna his right to independence, and also to
repay Sviazhsky by his support at the election for all the trouble he
had taken for Vronsky at the district council election, but chiefly in
order strictly to perform all those duties of a nobleman and landowner
which he had taken upon himself. But he had not in the least expected
that the election would so interest him, so keenly excite him, and that
he would be so good at this kind of thing. He was quite a new man in
the circle of the nobility of the province, but his success was
unmistakable, and he was not wrong in supposing that he had already
obtained a certain influence. This influence was due to his wealth and
reputation, the capital house in the town lent him by his old friend
Shirkov, who had a post in the department of finances and was director
of a flourishing bank in Kashin; the excellent cook Vronsky had brought
from the country, and his friendship with the governor, who was a
schoolfellow of Vronsky’s—a schoolfellow he had patronized and
protected indeed. But what contributed more than all to his success was
his direct, equable manner with everyone, which very quickly made the
majority of the noblemen reverse the current opinion of his supposed
haughtiness. He was himself conscious that, except that whimsical
gentleman married to Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, who had _à propos de
bottes_ poured out a stream of irrelevant absurdities with such
spiteful fury, every nobleman with whom he had made acquaintance had
become his adherent. He saw clearly, and other people recognized it,
too, that he had done a great deal to secure the success of
Nevyedovsky. And now at his own table, celebrating Nevyedovsky’s
election, he was experiencing an agreeable sense of triumph over the
success of his candidate. The election itself had so fascinated him
that, if he could succeed in getting married during the next three
years, he began to think of standing himself—much as after winning a
race ridden by a jockey, he had longed to ride a race himself.
Today he was celebrating the success of his jockey. Vronsky sat at the
head of the table, on his right hand sat the young governor, a general
of high rank. To all the rest he was the chief man in the province, who
had solemnly opened the elections with his speech, and aroused a
feeling of respect and even of awe in many people, as Vronsky saw; to
Vronsky he was little Katka Maslov—that had been his nickname in the
Pages’ Corps—whom he felt to be shy and tried to _mettre à son aise_.
On the left hand sat Nevyedovsky with his youthful, stubborn, and
malignant face. With him Vronsky was simple and deferential.
Sviazhsky took his failure very light-heartedly. It was indeed no
failure in his eyes, as he said himself, turning, glass in hand, to
Nevyedovsky; they could not have found a better representative of the
new movement, which the nobility ought to follow. And so every honest
person, as he said, was on the side of today’s success and was
rejoicing over it.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was glad, too, that he was having a good time, and
that everyone was pleased. The episode of the elections served as a
good occasion for a capital dinner. Sviazhsky comically imitated the
tearful discourse of the marshal, and observed, addressing Nevyedovsky,
that his excellency would have to select another more complicated
method of auditing the accounts than tears. Another nobleman jocosely
described how footmen in stockings had been ordered for the marshal’s
ball, and how now they would have to be sent back unless the new
marshal would give a ball with footmen in stockings.
Continually during dinner they said of Nevyedovsky: “our marshal,” and
“your excellency.”
This was said with the same pleasure with which a bride is called
“Madame” and her husband’s name. Nevyedovsky affected to be not merely
indifferent but scornful of this appellation, but it was obvious that
he was highly delighted, and had to keep a curb on himself not to
betray the triumph which was unsuitable to their new liberal tone.
After dinner several telegrams were sent to people interested in the
result of the election. And Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was in high good
humor, sent Darya Alexandrovna a telegram: “Nevyedovsky elected by
twenty votes. Congratulations. Tell people.” He dictated it aloud,
saying: “We must let them share our rejoicing.” Darya Alexandrovna,
getting the message, simply sighed over the rouble wasted on it, and
understood that it was an after-dinner affair. She knew Stiva had a
weakness after dining for _faire jouer le télégraphe._
Everything, together with the excellent dinner and the wine, not from
Russian merchants, but imported direct from abroad, was extremely
dignified, simple, and enjoyable. The party—some twenty—had been
selected by Sviazhsky from among the more active new liberals, all of
the same way of thinking, who were at the same time clever and well
bred. They drank, also half in jest, to the health of the new marshal
of the province, of the governor, of the bank director, and of “our
amiable host.”
Vronsky was satisfied. He had never expected to find so pleasant a tone
in the provinces.
Towards the end of dinner it was still more lively. The governor asked
Vronsky to come to a concert for the benefit of the Servians which his
wife, who was anxious to make his acquaintance, had been getting up.
“There’ll be a ball, and you’ll see the belle of the province. Worth
seeing, really.”
“Not in my line,” Vronsky answered. He liked that English phrase. But
he smiled, and promised to come.
Before they rose from the table, when all of them were smoking,
Vronsky’s valet went up to him with a letter on a tray.
“From Vozdvizhenskoe by special messenger,” he said with a significant
expression.
“Astonishing! how like he is to the deputy prosecutor Sventitsky,” said
one of the guests in French of the valet, while Vronsky, frowning, read
the letter.
The letter was from Anna. Before he read the letter, he knew its
contents. Expecting the elections to be over in five days, he had
promised to be back on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew that the
letter contained reproaches for not being back at the time fixed. The
letter he had sent the previous evening had probably not reached her
yet.
The letter was what he had expected, but the form of it was unexpected,
and particularly disagreeable to him. “Annie is very ill, the doctor
says it may be inflammation. I am losing my head all alone. Princess
Varvara is no help, but a hindrance. I expected you the day before
yesterday, and yesterday, and now I am sending to find out where you
are and what you are doing. I wanted to come myself, but thought better
of it, knowing you would dislike it. Send some answer, that I may know
what to do.”
The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter
ill, and this hostile tone.
The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy, burdensome
love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he
had to go, and by the first train that night he set off home.
Chapter 32
Before Vronsky’s departure for the elections, Anna had reflected that
the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left home,
might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to her, and
resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear the
parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which he had
looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded her,
and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed.
In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had expressed
his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same
point—the sense of her own humiliation. “He has the right to go away
when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave me. He
has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to do
it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a cold, severe
expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it
has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,” she
thought. “That glance shows the beginning of indifference.”
And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was
nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to
him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him. And
so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by morphine at
night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he
ceased to love her. It is true there was still one means; not to keep
him—for that she wanted nothing more than his love—but to be nearer to
him, to be in such a position that he would not leave her. That means
was divorce and marriage. And she began to long for that, and made up
her mind to agree to it the first time he or Stiva approached her on
the subject.
Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five
days that he was to be at the elections.
Walks, conversation with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital, and,
most of all, reading—reading of one book after another—filled up her
time. But on the sixth day, when the coachman came back without him,
she felt that now she was utterly incapable of stifling the thought of
him and of what he was doing there, just at that time her little girl
was taken ill. Anna began to look after her, but even that did not
distract her mind, especially as the illness was not serious. However
hard she tried, she could not love this little child, and to feign love
was beyond her powers. Towards the evening of that day, still alone,
Anna was in such a panic about him that she decided to start for the
town, but on second thoughts wrote him the contradictory letter that
Vronsky received, and without reading it through, sent it off by a
special messenger. The next morning she received his letter and
regretted her own. She dreaded a repetition of the severe look he had
flung at her at parting, especially when he knew that the baby was not
dangerously ill. But still she was glad she had written to him. At this
moment Anna was positively admitting to herself that she was a burden
to him, that he would relinquish his freedom regretfully to return to
her, and in spite of that she was glad he was coming. Let him weary of
her, but he would be here with her, so that she would see him, would
know of every action he took.
She was sitting in the drawing-room near a lamp, with a new volume of
Taine, and as she read, listening to the sound of the wind outside, and
every minute expecting the carriage to arrive. Several times she had
fancied she heard the sound of wheels, but she had been mistaken. At
last she heard not the sound of wheels, but the coachman’s shout and
the dull rumble in the covered entry. Even Princess Varvara, playing
patience, confirmed this, and Anna, flushing hotly, got up; but instead
of going down, as she had done twice before, she stood still. She
suddenly felt ashamed of her duplicity, but even more she dreaded how
he might meet her. All feeling of wounded pride had passed now; she was
only afraid of the expression of his displeasure. She remembered that
her child had been perfectly well again for the last two days. She felt
positively vexed with her for getting better from the very moment her
letter was sent off. Then she thought of him, that he was here, all of
him, with his hands, his eyes. She heard his voice. And forgetting
everything, she ran joyfully to meet him.
“Well, how is Annie?” he said timidly from below, looking up to Anna as
she ran down to him.
He was sitting on a chair, and a footman was pulling off his warm
over-boot.
“Oh, she is better.”
“And you?” he said, shaking himself.
She took his hand in both of hers, and drew it to her waist, never
taking her eyes off him.
“Well, I’m glad,” he said, coldly scanning her, her hair, her dress,
which he knew she had put on for him. All was charming, but how many
times it had charmed him! And the stern, stony expression that she so
dreaded settled upon his face.
“Well, I’m glad. And are you well?” he said, wiping his damp beard with
his handkerchief and kissing her hand.
“Never mind,” she thought, “only let him be here, and so long as he’s
here he cannot, he dare not, cease to love me.”
The evening was spent happily and gaily in the presence of Princess
Varvara, who complained to him that Anna had been taking morphine in
his absence.
“What am I to do? I couldn’t sleep.... My thoughts prevented me. When
he’s here I never take it—hardly ever.”
He told her about the election, and Anna knew how by adroit questions
to bring him to what gave him most pleasure—his own success. She told
him of everything that interested him at home; and all that she told
him was of the most cheerful description.
But late in the evening, when they were alone, Anna, seeing that she
had regained complete possession of him, wanted to erase the painful
impression of the glance he had given her for her letter. She said:
“Tell me frankly, you were vexed at getting my letter, and you didn’t
believe me?”
As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his feelings
were to her, he had not forgiven her for that.
“Yes,” he said, “the letter was so strange. First, Annie ill, and then
you thought of coming yourself.”
“It was all the truth.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it.”
“Yes, you do doubt it. You are vexed, I see.”
“Not for one moment. I’m only vexed, that’s true, that you seem somehow
unwilling to admit that there are duties....”
“The duty of going to a concert....”
“But we won’t talk about it,” he said.
“Why not talk about it?” she said.
“I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up. Now,
for instance, I shall have to go to Moscow to arrange about the
house.... Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable? Don’t you know that I
can’t live without you?”
“If so,” said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, “it means that you are
sick of this life.... Yes, you will come for a day and go away, as men
do....”
“Anna, that’s cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life.”
But she did not hear him.
“If you go to Moscow, I will go too. I will not stay here. Either we
must separate or else live together.”
“Why, you know, that’s my one desire. But for that....”
“We must get a divorce. I will write to him. I see I cannot go on like
this.... But I will come with you to Moscow.”
“You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so much
as never to be parted from you,” said Vronsky, smiling.
But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold
look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.
She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.
“If so, it’s a calamity!” that glance told her. It was a moment’s
impression, but she never forgot it.
Anna wrote to her husband asking him about a divorce, and towards the
end of November, taking leave of Princess Varvara, who wanted to go to
Petersburg, she went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an
answer from Alexey Alexandrovitch, and after that the divorce, they now
established themselves together like married people.
PART SEVEN
Chapter 1
The Levins had been three months in Moscow. The date had long passed on
which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned
in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she was still
about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than
two months ago. The doctor, the monthly nurse, and Dolly and her
mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching
event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy. Kitty was the
only person who felt perfectly calm and happy.
She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of love
for the future child, for her to some extent actually existing already,
and she brooded blissfully over this feeling. He was not by now
altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his own life
independently of her. Often this separate being gave her pain, but at
the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy.
All the people she loved were with her, and all were so good to her, so
attentively caring for her, so entirely pleasant was everything
presented to her, that if she had not known and felt that it must all
soon be over, she could not have wished for a better and pleasanter
life. The only thing that spoiled the charm of this manner of life was
that her husband was not here as she loved him to be, and as he was in
the country.
She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country.
In the town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as though he
were afraid someone would be rude to him, and still more to her. At
home in the country, knowing himself distinctly to be in his right
place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere. He was never
unoccupied. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, as though afraid
of missing something, and yet he had nothing to do. And she felt sorry
for him. To others, she knew, he did not appear an object of pity. On
the contrary, when Kitty looked at him in society, as one sometimes
looks at those one loves, trying to see him as if he were a stranger,
so as to catch the impression he must make on others, she saw with a
panic even of jealous fear that he was far indeed from being a pitiable
figure, that he was very attractive with his fine breeding, his rather
old-fashioned, reserved courtesy with women, his powerful figure, and
striking, as she thought, and expressive face. But she saw him not from
without, but from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that
was the only way she could define his condition to herself. Sometimes
she inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the town;
sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him to order his
life here so that he could be satisfied with it.
What had he to do, indeed? He did not care for cards; he did not go to
a club. Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky’s type—she
knew now what that meant ... it meant drinking and going somewhere
after drinking. She could not think without horror of where men went on
such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she knew he could only
find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in the society of young
women, and that she could not wish for. Should he stay at home with
her, her mother and her sisters? But much as she liked and enjoyed
their conversations forever on the same subjects—“Aline-Nadine,” as the
old prince called the sisters’ talks—she knew it must bore him. What
was there left for him to do? To go on writing at his book he had
indeed attempted, and at first he used to go to the library and make
extracts and look up references for his book. But, as he told her, the
more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything. And besides,
he complained that he had talked too much about his book here, and that
consequently all his ideas about it were muddled and had lost their
interest for him.
One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever happened
between them here in town. Whether it was that their conditions were
different, or that they had both become more careful and sensible in
that respect, they had no quarrels in Moscow from jealousy, which they
had so dreaded when they moved from the country.
One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of
view, did indeed happen—that was Kitty’s meeting with Vronsky.
The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty’s godmother, who had always
been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she
did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went with
her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky.
The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting was
that at the instant when she recognized in his civilian dress the
features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her, the blood
rushed to her heart, and a vivid blush—she felt it—overspread her face.
But this lasted only a few seconds. Before her father, who purposely
began talking in a loud voice to Vronsky, had finished, she was
perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to him, if necessary,
exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and more than that,
to do so in such a way that everything to the faintest intonation and
smile would have been approved by her husband, whose unseen presence
she seemed to feel about her at that instant.
She said a few words to him, even smiled serenely at his joke about the
elections, which he called “our parliament.” (She had to smile to show
she saw the joke.) But she turned away immediately to Princess Marya
Borissovna, and did not once glance at him till he got up to go; then
she looked at him, but evidently only because it would be uncivil not
to look at a man when he is saying good-bye.
She was grateful to her father for saying nothing to her about their
meeting Vronsky, but she saw by his special warmth to her after the
visit during their usual walk that he was pleased with her. She was
pleased with herself. She had not expected she would have had the
power, while keeping somewhere in the bottom of her heart all the
memories of her old feeling for Vronsky, not only to seem but to be
perfectly indifferent and composed with him.
Levin flushed a great deal more than she when she told him she had met
Vronsky at Princess Marya Borissovna’s. It was very hard for her to
tell him this, but still harder to go on speaking of the details of the
meeting, as he did not question her, but simply gazed at her with a
frown.
“I am very sorry you weren’t there,” she said. “Not that you weren’t in
the room ... I couldn’t have been so natural in your presence ... I am
blushing now much more, much, much more,” she said, blushing till the
tears came into her eyes. “But that you couldn’t see through a crack.”
The truthful eyes told Levin that she was satisfied with herself, and
in spite of her blushing he was quickly reassured and began questioning
her, which was all she wanted. When he had heard everything, even to
the detail that for the first second she could not help flushing, but
that afterwards she was just as direct and as much at her ease as with
any chance acquaintance, Levin was quite happy again and said he was
glad of it, and would not now behave as stupidly as he had done at the
election, but would try the first time he met Vronsky to be as friendly
as possible.
“It’s so wretched to feel that there’s a man almost an enemy whom it’s
painful to meet,” said Levin. “I’m very, very glad.”
Chapter 2
“Go, please, go then and call on the Bols,” Kitty said to her husband,
when he came in to see her at eleven o’clock before going out. “I know
you are dining at the club; papa put down your name. But what are you
going to do in the morning?”
“I am only going to Katavasov,” answered Levin.
“Why so early?”
“He promised to introduce me to Metrov. I wanted to talk to him about
my work. He’s a distinguished scientific man from Petersburg,” said
Levin.
“Yes; wasn’t it his article you were praising so? Well, and after
that?” said Kitty.
“I shall go to the court, perhaps, about my sister’s business.”
“And the concert?” she queried.
“I shan’t go there all alone.”
“No? do go; there are going to be some new things.... That interested
you so. I should certainly go.”
“Well, anyway, I shall come home before dinner,” he said, looking at
his watch.
“Put on your frock coat, so that you can go straight to call on
Countess Bola.”
“But is it absolutely necessary?”
“Oh, absolutely! He has been to see us. Come, what is it? You go in,
sit down, talk for five minutes of the weather, get up and go away.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it! I’ve got so out of the way of all this
that it makes me feel positively ashamed. It’s such a horrible thing to
do! A complete outsider walks in, sits down, stays on with nothing to
do, wastes their time and worries himself, and walks away!”
Kitty laughed.
“Why, I suppose you used to pay calls before you were married, didn’t
you?”
“Yes, I did, but I always felt ashamed, and now I’m so out of the way
of it that, by Jove! I’d sooner go two days running without my dinner
than pay this call! One’s so ashamed! I feel all the while that they’re
annoyed, that they’re saying, ‘What has he come for?’”
“No, they won’t. I’ll answer for that,” said Kitty, looking into his
face with a laugh. She took his hand. “Well, good-bye.... Do go,
please.”
He was just going out after kissing his wife’s hand, when she stopped
him.
“Kostya, do you know I’ve only fifty roubles left?”
“Oh, all right, I’ll go to the bank and get some. How much?” he said,
with the expression of dissatisfaction she knew so well.
“No, wait a minute.” She held his hand. “Let’s talk about it, it
worries me. I seem to spend nothing unnecessary, but money seems to fly
away simply. We don’t manage well, somehow.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” he said with a little cough, looking at her from
under his brows.
That cough she knew well. It was a sign of intense dissatisfaction, not
with her, but with himself. He certainly was displeased not at so much
money being spent, but at being reminded of what he, knowing something
was unsatisfactory, wanted to forget.
“I have told Sokolov to sell the wheat, and to borrow an advance on the
mill. We shall have money enough in any case.”
“Yes, but I’m afraid that altogether....”
“Oh, it’s all right, all right,” he repeated. “Well, good-bye,
darling.”
“No, I’m really sorry sometimes that I listened to mamma. How nice it
would have been in the country! As it is, I’m worrying you all, and
we’re wasting our money.”
“Not at all, not at all. Not once since I’ve been married have I said
that things could have been better than they are....”
“Truly?” she said, looking into his eyes.
He had said it without thinking, simply to console her. But when he
glanced at her and saw those sweet truthful eyes fastened questioningly
on him, he repeated it with his whole heart. “I was positively
forgetting her,” he thought. And he remembered what was before them, so
soon to come.
“Will it be soon? How do you feel?” he whispered, taking her two hands.
“I have so often thought so, that now I don’t think about it or know
anything about it.”
“And you’re not frightened?”
She smiled contemptuously.
“Not the least little bit,” she said.
“Well, if anything happens, I shall be at Katavasov’s.”
“No, nothing will happen, and don’t think about it. I’m going for a
walk on the boulevard with papa. We’re going to see Dolly. I shall
expect you before dinner. Oh, yes! Do you know that Dolly’s position is
becoming utterly impossible? She’s in debt all round; she hasn’t a
penny. We were talking yesterday with mamma and Arseny” (this was her
sister’s husband Lvov), “and we determined to send you with him to talk
to Stiva. It’s really unbearable. One can’t speak to papa about it....
But if you and he....”
“Why, what can we do?” said Levin.
“You’ll be at Arseny’s, anyway; talk to him, he will tell what we
decided.”
“Oh, I agree to everything Arseny thinks beforehand. I’ll go and see
him. By the way, if I do go to the concert, I’ll go with Natalia. Well,
good-bye.”
On the steps Levin was stopped by his old servant Kouzma, who had been
with him before his marriage, and now looked after their household in
town.
“Beauty” (that was the left shaft-horse brought up from the country)
“has been badly shod and is quite lame,” he said. “What does your honor
wish to be done?”
During the first part of their stay in Moscow, Levin had used his own
horses brought up from the country. He had tried to arrange this part
of their expenses in the best and cheapest way possible; but it
appeared that their own horses came dearer than hired horses, and they
still hired too.
“Send for the veterinary, there may be a bruise.”
“And for Katerina Alexandrovna?” asked Kouzma.
Levin was not by now struck as he had been at first by the fact that to
get from one end of Moscow to the other he had to have two powerful
horses put into a heavy carriage, to take the carriage three miles
through the snowy slush and to keep it standing there four hours,
paying five roubles every time.
Now it seemed quite natural.
“Hire a pair for our carriage from the jobmaster,” said he.
“Yes, sir.”
And so, simply and easily, thanks to the facilities of town life, Levin
settled a question which, in the country, would have called for so much
personal trouble and exertion, and going out onto the steps, he called
a sledge, sat down, and drove to Nikitsky. On the way he thought no
more of money, but mused on the introduction that awaited him to the
Petersburg savant, a writer on sociology, and what he would say to him
about his book.
Only during the first days of his stay in Moscow Levin had been struck
by the expenditure, strange to one living in the country, unproductive
but inevitable, that was expected of him on every side. But by now he
had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this matter which is
said to happen to drunkards—the first glass sticks in the throat, the
second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they’re like tiny
little birds. When Levin had changed his first hundred-rouble note to
pay for liveries for his footmen and hall-porter he could not help
reflecting that these liveries were of no use to anyone—but they were
indubitably necessary, to judge by the amazement of the princess and
Kitty when he suggested that they might do without liveries,—that these
liveries would cost the wages of two laborers for the summer, that is,
would pay for about three hundred working days from Easter to Ash
Wednesday, and each a day of hard work from early morning to late
evening—and that hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat. But the
next note, changed to pay for providing a dinner for their relations,
that cost twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the
reflection that twenty-eight roubles meant nine measures of oats, which
men would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and thrashed and
winnowed and sifted and sown,—this next one he parted with more easily.
And now the notes he changed no longer aroused such reflections, and
they flew off like little birds. Whether the labor devoted to obtaining
the money corresponded to the pleasure given by what was bought with
it, was a consideration he had long ago dismissed. His business
calculation that there was a certain price below which he could not
sell certain grain was forgotten too. The rye, for the price of which
he had so long held out, had been sold for fifty kopecks a measure
cheaper than it had been fetching a month ago. Even the consideration
that with such an expenditure he could not go on living for a year
without debt, that even had no force. Only one thing was essential: to
have money in the bank, without inquiring where it came from, so as to
know that one had the wherewithal to buy meat for tomorrow. And this
condition had hitherto been fulfilled; he had always had the money in
the bank. But now the money in the bank had gone, and he could not
quite tell where to get the next installment. And this it was which, at
the moment when Kitty had mentioned money, had disturbed him; but he
had no time to think about it. He drove off, thinking of Katavasov and
the meeting with Metrov that was before him.
Chapter 3
Levin had on this visit to town seen a great deal of his old friend at
the university, Professor Katavasov, whom he had not seen since his
marriage. He liked in Katavasov the clearness and simplicity of his
conception of life. Levin thought that the clearness of Katavasov’s
conception of life was due to the poverty of his nature; Katavasov
thought that the disconnectedness of Levin’s ideas was due to his lack
of intellectual discipline; but Levin enjoyed Katavasov’s clearness,
and Katavasov enjoyed the abundance of Levin’s untrained ideas, and
they liked to meet and to discuss.
Levin had read Katavasov some parts of his book, and he had liked them.
On the previous day Katavasov had met Levin at a public lecture and
told him that the celebrated Metrov, whose article Levin had so much
liked, was in Moscow, that he had been much interested by what
Katavasov had told him about Levin’s work, and that he was coming to
see him tomorrow at eleven, and would be very glad to make Levin’s
acquaintance.
“You’re positively a reformed character, I’m glad to see,” said
Katavasov, meeting Levin in the little drawing-room. “I heard the bell
and thought: Impossible that it can be he at the exact time!... Well,
what do you say to the Montenegrins now? They’re a race of warriors.”
“Why, what’s happened?” asked Levin.
Katavasov in a few words told him the last piece of news from the war,
and going into his study, introduced Levin to a short, thick-set man of
pleasant appearance. This was Metrov. The conversation touched for a
brief space on politics and on how recent events were looked at in the
higher spheres in Petersburg. Metrov repeated a saying that had reached
him through a most trustworthy source, reported as having been uttered
on this subject by the Tsar and one of the ministers. Katavasov had
heard also on excellent authority that the Tsar had said something
quite different. Levin tried to imagine circumstances in which both
sayings might have been uttered, and the conversation on that topic
dropped.
“Yes, here he’s written almost a book on the natural conditions of the
laborer in relation to the land,” said Katavasov; “I’m not a
specialist, but I, as a natural science man, was pleased at his not
taking mankind as something outside biological laws; but, on the
contrary, seeing his dependence on his surroundings, and in that
dependence seeking the laws of his development.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Metrov.
“What I began precisely was to write a book on agriculture; but
studying the chief instrument of agriculture, the laborer,” said Levin,
reddening, “I could not help coming to quite unexpected results.”
And Levin began carefully, as it were, feeling his ground, to expound
his views. He knew Metrov had written an article against the generally
accepted theory of political economy, but to what extent he could
reckon on his sympathy with his own new views he did not know and could
not guess from the clever and serene face of the learned man.
“But in what do you see the special characteristics of the Russian
laborer?” said Metrov; “in his biological characteristics, so to speak,
or in the condition in which he is placed?”
Levin saw that there was an idea underlying this question with which he
did not agree. But he went on explaining his own idea that the Russian
laborer has a quite special view of the land, different from that of
other people; and to support this proposition he made haste to add that
in his opinion this attitude of the Russian peasant was due to the
consciousness of his vocation to people vast unoccupied expanses in the
East.
“One may easily be led into error in basing any conclusion on the
general vocation of a people,” said Metrov, interrupting Levin. “The
condition of the laborer will always depend on his relation to the land
and to capital.”
And without letting Levin finish explaining his idea, Metrov began
expounding to him the special point of his own theory.
In what the point of his theory lay, Levin did not understand, because
he did not take the trouble to understand. He saw that Metrov, like
other people, in spite of his own article, in which he had attacked the
current theory of political economy, looked at the position of the
Russian peasant simply from the point of view of capital, wages, and
rent. He would indeed have been obliged to admit that in the
eastern—much the larger—part of Russia rent was as yet nil, that for
nine-tenths of the eighty millions of the Russian peasants wages took
the form simply of food provided for themselves, and that capital does
not so far exist except in the form of the most primitive tools. Yet it
was only from that point of view that he considered every laborer,
though in many points he differed from the economists and had his own
theory of the wage-fund, which he expounded to Levin.
Levin listened reluctantly, and at first made objections. He would have
liked to interrupt Metrov, to explain his own thought, which in his
opinion would have rendered further exposition of Metrov’s theories
superfluous. But later on, feeling convinced that they looked at the
matter so differently, that they could never understand one another, he
did not even oppose his statements, but simply listened. Although what
Metrov was saying was by now utterly devoid of interest for him, he yet
experienced a certain satisfaction in listening to him. It flattered
his vanity that such a learned man should explain his ideas to him so
eagerly, with such intensity and confidence in Levin’s understanding of
the subject, sometimes with a mere hint referring him to a whole aspect
of the subject. He put this down to his own credit, unaware that
Metrov, who had already discussed his theory over and over again with
all his intimate friends, talked of it with special eagerness to every
new person, and in general was eager to talk to anyone of any subject
that interested him, even if still obscure to himself.
“We are late though,” said Katavasov, looking at his watch directly
Metrov had finished his discourse.
“Yes, there’s a meeting of the Society of Amateurs today in
commemoration of the jubilee of Svintitch,” said Katavasov in answer to
Levin’s inquiry. “Pyotr Ivanovitch and I were going. I’ve promised to
deliver an address on his labors in zoology. Come along with us, it’s
very interesting.”
“Yes, and indeed it’s time to start,” said Metrov. “Come with us, and
from there, if you care to, come to my place. I should very much like
to hear your work.”
“Oh, no! It’s no good yet, it’s unfinished. But I shall be very glad to
go to the meeting.”
“I say, friends, have you heard? He has handed in the separate report,”
Katavasov called from the other room, where he was putting on his frock
coat.
And a conversation sprang up upon the university question, which was a
very important event that winter in Moscow. Three old professors in the
council had not accepted the opinion of the younger professors. The
young ones had registered a separate resolution. This, in the judgment
of some people, was monstrous, in the judgment of others it was the
simplest and most just thing to do, and the professors were split up
into two parties.
One party, to which Katavasov belonged, saw in the opposite party a
scoundrelly betrayal and treachery, while the opposite party saw in
them childishness and lack of respect for the authorities. Levin,
though he did not belong to the university, had several times already
during his stay in Moscow heard and talked about this matter, and had
his own opinion on the subject. He took part in the conversation that
was continued in the street, as they all three walked to the buildings
of the old university.
The meeting had already begun. Round the cloth-covered table, at which
Katavasov and Metrov seated themselves, there were some half-dozen
persons, and one of these was bending close over a manuscript, reading
something aloud. Levin sat down in one of the empty chairs that were
standing round the table, and in a whisper asked a student sitting near
what was being read. The student, eyeing Levin with displeasure, said:
“Biography.”
Though Levin was not interested in the biography, he could not help
listening, and learned some new and interesting facts about the life of
the distinguished man of science.
When the reader had finished, the chairman thanked him and read some
verses of the poet Ment sent him on the jubilee, and said a few words
by way of thanks to the poet. Then Katavasov in his loud, ringing voice
read his address on the scientific labors of the man whose jubilee was
being kept.
When Katavasov had finished, Levin looked at his watch, saw it was past
one, and thought that there would not be time before the concert to
read Metrov his book, and indeed, he did not now care to do so. During
the reading he had thought over their conversation. He saw distinctly
now that though Metrov’s ideas might perhaps have value, his own ideas
had a value too, and their ideas could only be made clear and lead to
something if each worked separately in his chosen path, and that
nothing would be gained by putting their ideas together. And having
made up his mind to refuse Metrov’s invitation, Levin went up to him at
the end of the meeting. Metrov introduced Levin to the chairman, with
whom he was talking of the political news. Metrov told the chairman
what he had already told Levin, and Levin made the same remarks on his
news that he had already made that morning, but for the sake of variety
he expressed also a new opinion which had only just struck him. After
that the conversation turned again on the university question. As Levin
had already heard it all, he made haste to tell Metrov that he was
sorry he could not take advantage of his invitation, took leave, and
drove to Lvov’s.
Chapter 4
Lvov, the husband of Natalia, Kitty’s sister, had spent all his life in
foreign capitals, where he had been educated, and had been in the
diplomatic service.
During the previous year he had left the diplomatic service, not owing
to any “unpleasantness” (he never had any “unpleasantness” with
anyone), and was transferred to the department of the court of the
palace in Moscow, in order to give his two boys the best education
possible.
In spite of the striking contrast in their habits and views and the
fact that Lvov was older than Levin, they had seen a great deal of one
another that winter, and had taken a great liking to each other.
Lvov was at home, and Levin went in to him unannounced.
Lvov, in a house coat with a belt and in chamois leather shoes, was
sitting in an armchair, and with a pince-nez with blue glasses he was
reading a book that stood on a reading desk, while in his beautiful
hand he held a half-burned cigarette daintily away from him.
His handsome, delicate, and still youthful-looking face, to which his
curly, glistening silvery hair gave a still more aristocratic air,
lighted up with a smile when he saw Levin.
“Capital! I was meaning to send to you. How’s Kitty? Sit here, it’s
more comfortable.” He got up and pushed up a rocking chair. “Have you
read the last circular in the _Journal de St. Pétersbourg?_ I think
it’s excellent,” he said, with a slight French accent.
Levin told him what he had heard from Katavasov was being said in
Petersburg, and after talking a little about politics, he told him of
his interview with Metrov, and the learned society’s meeting. To Lvov
it was very interesting.
“That’s what I envy you, that you are able to mix in these interesting
scientific circles,” he said. And as he talked, he passed as usual into
French, which was easier to him. “It’s true I haven’t the time for it.
My official work and the children leave me no time; and then I’m not
ashamed to own that my education has been too defective.”
“That I don’t believe,” said Levin with a smile, feeling, as he always
did, touched at Lvov’s low opinion of himself, which was not in the
least put on from a desire to seem or to be modest, but was absolutely
sincere.
“Oh, yes, indeed! I feel now how badly educated I am. To educate my
children I positively have to look up a great deal, and in fact simply
to study myself. For it’s not enough to have teachers, there must be
someone to look after them, just as on your land you want laborers and
an overseer. See what I’m reading”—he pointed to Buslaev’s _Grammar_ on
the desk—“it’s expected of Misha, and it’s so difficult.... Come,
explain to me.... Here he says....”
Levin tried to explain to him that it couldn’t be understood, but that
it had to be taught; but Lvov would not agree with him.
“Oh, you’re laughing at it!”
“On the contrary, you can’t imagine how, when I look at you, I’m always
learning the task that lies before me, that is the education of one’s
children.”
“Well, there’s nothing for you to learn,” said Lvov.
“All I know,” said Levin, “is that I have never seen better brought-up
children than yours, and I wouldn’t wish for children better than
yours.”
Lvov visibly tried to restrain the expression of his delight, but he
was positively radiant with smiles.
“If only they’re better than I! That’s all I desire. You don’t know yet
all the work,” he said, “with boys who’ve been left like mine to run
wild abroad.”
“You’ll catch all that up. They’re such clever children. The great
thing is the education of character. That’s what I learn when I look at
your children.”
“You talk of the education of character. You can’t imagine how
difficult that is! You have hardly succeeded in combating one tendency
when others crop up, and the struggle begins again. If one had not a
support in religion—you remember we talked about that—no father could
bring children up relying on his own strength alone without that help.”
This subject, which always interested Levin, was cut short by the
entrance of the beauty Natalia Alexandrovna, dressed to go out.
“I didn’t know you were here,” she said, unmistakably feeling no
regret, but a positive pleasure, in interrupting this conversation on a
topic she had heard so much of that she was by now weary of it. “Well,
how is Kitty? I am dining with you today. I tell you what, Arseny,” she
turned to her husband, “you take the carriage.”
And the husband and wife began to discuss their arrangements for the
day. As the husband had to drive to meet someone on official business,
while the wife had to go to the concert and some public meeting of a
committee on the Eastern Question, there was a great deal to consider
and settle. Levin had to take part in their plans as one of themselves.
It was settled that Levin should go with Natalia to the concert and the
meeting, and that from there they should send the carriage to the
office for Arseny, and he should call for her and take her to Kitty’s;
or that, if he had not finished his work, he should send the carriage
back and Levin would go with her.
“He’s spoiling me,” Lvov said to his wife; “he assures me that our
children are splendid, when I know how much that’s bad there is in
them.”
“Arseny goes to extremes, I always say,” said his wife. “If you look
for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it’s true, as papa
says,—that when we were brought up there was one extreme—we were kept
in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it’s
just the other way—the parents are in the wash house, while the
children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at
all, but to exist altogether for their children.”
“Well, what if they like it better?” Lvov said, with his beautiful
smile, touching her hand. “Anyone who didn’t know you would think you
were a stepmother, not a true mother.”
“No, extremes are not good in anything,” Natalia said serenely, putting
his paper-knife straight in its proper place on the table.
“Well, come here, you perfect children,” Lvov said to the two handsome
boys who came in, and after bowing to Levin, went up to their father,
obviously wishing to ask him about something.
Levin would have liked to talk to them, to hear what they would say to
their father, but Natalia began talking to him, and then Lvov’s
colleague in the service, Mahotin, walked in, wearing his court
uniform, to go with him to meet someone, and a conversation was kept up
without a break upon Herzegovina, Princess Korzinskaya, the town
council, and the sudden death of Madame Apraksina.
Levin even forgot the commission intrusted to him. He recollected it as
he was going into the hall.
“Oh, Kitty told me to talk to you about Oblonsky,” he said, as Lvov was
standing on the stairs, seeing his wife and Levin off.
“Yes, yes, maman wants us, _les beaux-frères,_ to attack him,” he said,
blushing. “But why should I?”
“Well, then, I will attack him,” said Madame Lvova, with a smile,
standing in her white sheepskin cape, waiting till they had finished
speaking. “Come, let us go.”
Chapter 5
At the concert in the afternoon two very interesting things were
performed. One was a fantasia, _King Lear;_ the other was a quartette
dedicated to the memory of Bach. Both were new and in the new style,
and Levin was eager to form an opinion of them. After escorting his
sister-in-law to her stall, he stood against a column and tried to
listen as attentively and conscientiously as possible. He tried not to
let his attention be distracted, and not to spoil his impression by
looking at the conductor in a white tie, waving his arms, which always
disturbed his enjoyment of music so much, or the ladies in bonnets,
with strings carefully tied over their ears, and all these people
either thinking of nothing at all or thinking of all sorts of things
except the music. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs or
talkative acquaintances, and stood looking at the floor straight before
him, listening.
But the more he listened to the fantasia of _King Lear_ the further he
felt from forming any definite opinion of it. There was, as it were, a
continual beginning, a preparation of the musical expression of some
feeling, but it fell to pieces again directly, breaking into new
musical motives, or simply nothing but the whims of the composer,
exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these fragmentary
musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable,
because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything.
Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one
another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman. And
those emotions, like a madman’s, sprang up quite unexpectedly.
During the whole of the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching
people dancing, and was in a state of complete bewilderment when the
fantasia was over, and felt a great weariness from the fruitless strain
on his attention. Loud applause resounded on all sides. Everyone got
up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to throw some light on his
own perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin began to walk
about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known
musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew.
“Marvelous!” Pestsov was saying in his mellow bass. “How are you,
Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to
say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia’s
approach, where woman, _das ewig Weibliche,_ enters into conflict with
fate. Isn’t it?”
“You mean ... what has Cordelia to do with it?” Levin asked timidly,
forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King Lear.
“Cordelia comes in ... see here!” said Pestsov, tapping his finger on
the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and passing it to
Levin.
Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made haste
to read in the Russian translation the lines from Shakespeare that were
printed on the back of the program.
“You can’t follow it without that,” said Pestsov, addressing Levin, as
the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and he had no one to
talk to.
In the _entr’acte_ Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the
merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that
the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take
music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it
tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an
instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble
certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the
pedestal. “These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they
were positively clinging on the ladder,” said Levin. The comparison
pleased him, but he could not remember whether he had not used the same
phrase before, and to Pestsov, too, and as he said it he felt confused.
Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest
manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art.
The second piece that was performed Levin could not hear. Pestsov, who
was standing beside him, was talking to him almost all the time,
condemning the music for its excessive affected assumption of
simplicity, and comparing it with the simplicity of the Pre-Raphaelites
in painting. As he went out Levin met many more acquaintances, with
whom he talked of politics, of music, and of common acquaintances.
Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had utterly forgotten to call
upon.
“Well, go at once then,” Madame Lvova said, when he told her; “perhaps
they’ll not be at home, and then you can come to the meeting to fetch
me. You’ll find me still there.”
Chapter 6
“Perhaps they’re not at home?” said Levin, as he went into the hall of
Countess Bola’s house.
“At home; please walk in,” said the porter, resolutely removing his
overcoat.
“How annoying!” thought Levin with a sigh, taking off one glove and
stroking his hat. “What did I come for? What have I to say to them?”
As he passed through the first drawing-room Levin met in the doorway
Countess Bola, giving some order to a servant with a care-worn and
severe face. On seeing Levin she smiled, and asked him to come into the
little drawing-room, where he heard voices. In this room there were
sitting in armchairs the two daughters of the countess, and a Moscow
colonel, whom Levin knew. Levin went up, greeted them, and sat down
beside the sofa with his hat on his knees.
“How is your wife? Have you been at the concert? We couldn’t go. Mamma
had to be at the funeral service.”
“Yes, I heard.... What a sudden death!” said Levin.
The countess came in, sat down on the sofa, and she too asked after his
wife and inquired about the concert.
Levin answered, and repeated an inquiry about Madame Apraksina’s sudden
death.
“But she was always in weak health.”
“Were you at the opera yesterday?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Lucca was very good.”
“Yes, very good,” he said, and as it was utterly of no consequence to
him what they thought of him, he began repeating what they had heard a
hundred times about the characteristics of the singer’s talent.
Countess Bola pretended to be listening. Then, when he had said enough
and paused, the colonel, who had been silent till then, began to talk.
The colonel too talked of the opera, and about culture. At last, after
speaking of the proposed _folle journée_ at Turin’s, the colonel
laughed, got up noisily, and went away. Levin too rose, but he saw by
the face of the countess that it was not yet time for him to go. He
must stay two minutes longer. He sat down.
But as he was thinking all the while how stupid it was, he could not
find a subject for conversation, and sat silent.
“You are not going to the public meeting? They say it will be very
interesting,” began the countess.
“No, I promised my _belle-sœur_ to fetch her from it,” said Levin.
A silence followed. The mother once more exchanged glances with a
daughter.
“Well, now I think the time has come,” thought Levin, and he got up.
The ladies shook hands with him, and begged him to say _mille choses_
to his wife for them.
The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat, “Where is your honor
staying?” and immediately wrote down his address in a big handsomely
bound book.
“Of course I don’t care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully stupid,”
thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection that everyone does
it. He drove to the public meeting, where he was to find his
sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.
At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many people,
and almost all the highest society. Levin was in time for the report
which, as everyone said, was very interesting. When the reading of the
report was over, people moved about, and Levin met Sviazhsky, who
invited him very pressingly to come that evening to a meeting of the
Society of Agriculture, where a celebrated lecture was to be delivered,
and Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had only just come from the races, and
many other acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered various
criticisms on the meeting, on the new fantasia, and on a public trial.
But, probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel, he made
a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he recalled
several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence upon a foreigner
who had been condemned in Russia, and of how unfair it would be to
punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated what he had heard the day
before in conversation from an acquaintance.
“I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp by
putting it into the water,” said Levin. Then he recollected that this
idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as his own,
came from a fable of Krilov’s, and that the acquaintance had picked it
up from a newspaper article.
After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good
spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.
Chapter 7
Levin reached the club just at the right time. Members and visitors
were driving up as he arrived. Levin had not been at the club for a
very long while—not since he lived in Moscow, when he was leaving the
university and going into society. He remembered the club, the external
details of its arrangement, but he had completely forgotten the
impression it had made on him in old days. But as soon as, driving into
the wide semicircular court and getting out of the sledge, he mounted
the steps, and the hall-porter, adorned with a crossway scarf,
noiselessly opened the door to him with a bow; as soon as he saw in the
porter’s room the cloaks and galoshes of members who thought it less
trouble to take them off downstairs; as soon as he heard the mysterious
ringing bell that preceded him as he ascended the easy, carpeted
staircase, and saw the statue on the landing, and the third porter at
the top doors, a familiar figure grown older, in the club livery,
opening the door without haste or delay, and scanning the visitors as
they passed in—Levin felt the old impression of the club come back in a
rush, an impression of repose, comfort, and propriety.
“Your hat, please,” the porter said to Levin, who forgot the club rule
to leave his hat in the porter’s room. “Long time since you’ve been.
The prince put your name down yesterday. Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch is
not here yet.”
The porter did not only know Levin, but also all his ties and
relationships, and so immediately mentioned his intimate friends.
Passing through the outer hall, divided up by screens, and the room
partitioned on the right, where a man sits at the fruit buffet, Levin
overtook an old man walking slowly in, and entered the dining-room full
of noise and people.
He walked along the tables, almost all full, and looked at the
visitors. He saw people of all sorts, old and young; some he knew a
little, some intimate friends. There was not a single cross or
worried-looking face. All seemed to have left their cares and anxieties
in the porter’s room with their hats, and were all deliberately getting
ready to enjoy the material blessings of life. Sviazhsky was here and
Shtcherbatsky, Nevyedovsky and the old prince, and Vronsky and Sergey
Ivanovitch.
“Ah! why are you late?” the prince said smiling, and giving him his
hand over his own shoulder. “How’s Kitty?” he added, smoothing out the
napkin he had tucked in at his waistcoat buttons.
“All right; they are dining at home, all the three of them.”
“Ah, ‘Aline-Nadine,’ to be sure! There’s no room with us. Go to that
table, and make haste and take a seat,” said the prince, and turning
away he carefully took a plate of eel soup.
“Levin, this way!” a good-natured voice shouted a little farther on. It
was Turovtsin. He was sitting with a young officer, and beside them
were two chairs turned upside down. Levin gladly went up to them. He
had always liked the good-hearted rake, Turovtsin—he was associated in
his mind with memories of his courtship—and at that moment, after the
strain of intellectual conversation, the sight of Turovtsin’s
good-natured face was particularly welcome.
“For you and Oblonsky. He’ll be here directly.”
The young man, holding himself very erect, with eyes forever twinkling
with enjoyment, was an officer from Petersburg, Gagin. Turovtsin
introduced them.
“Oblonsky’s always late.”
“Ah, here he is!”
“Have you only just come?” said Oblonsky, coming quickly towards them.
“Good day. Had some vodka? Well, come along then.”
Levin got up and went with him to the big table spread with spirits and
appetizers of the most various kinds. One would have thought that out
of two dozen delicacies one might find something to one’s taste, but
Stepan Arkadyevitch asked for something special, and one of the
liveried waiters standing by immediately brought what was required.
They drank a wine-glassful and returned to their table.
At once, while they were still at the soup, Gagin was served with
champagne, and told the waiter to fill four glasses. Levin did not
refuse the wine, and asked for a second bottle. He was very hungry, and
ate and drank with great enjoyment, and with still greater enjoyment
took part in the lively and simple conversation of his companions.
Gagin, dropping his voice, told the last good story from Petersburg,
and the story, though improper and stupid, was so ludicrous that Levin
broke into roars of laughter so loud that those near looked round.
“That’s in the same style as, ‘that’s a thing I can’t endure!’ You know
the story?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Ah, that’s exquisite! Another
bottle,” he said to the waiter, and he began to relate his good story.
“Pyotr Illyitch Vinovsky invites you to drink with him,” a little old
waiter interrupted Stepan Arkadyevitch, bringing two delicate glasses
of sparkling champagne, and addressing Stepan Arkadyevitch and Levin.
Stepan Arkadyevitch took the glass, and looking towards a bald man with
red mustaches at the other end of the table, he nodded to him, smiling.
“Who’s that?” asked Levin.
“You met him once at my place, don’t you remember? A good-natured
fellow.”
Levin did the same as Stepan Arkadyevitch and took the glass.
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s anecdote too was very amusing. Levin told his
story, and that too was successful. Then they talked of horses, of the
races, of what they had been doing that day, and of how smartly
Vronsky’s Atlas had won the first prize. Levin did not notice how the
time passed at dinner.
“Ah! and here they are!” Stepan Arkadyevitch said towards the end of
dinner, leaning over the back of his chair and holding out his hand to
Vronsky, who came up with a tall officer of the Guards. Vronsky’s face
too beamed with the look of good-humored enjoyment that was general in
the club. He propped his elbow playfully on Stepan Arkadyevitch’s
shoulder, whispering something to him, and he held out his hand to
Levin with the same good-humored smile.
“Very glad to meet you,” he said. “I looked out for you at the
election, but I was told you had gone away.”
“Yes, I left the same day. We’ve just been talking of your horse. I
congratulate you,” said Levin. “It was very rapidly run.”
“Yes; you’ve race horses too, haven’t you?”
“No, my father had; but I remember and know something about it.”
“Where have you dined?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“We were at the second table, behind the columns.”
“We’ve been celebrating his success,” said the tall colonel. “It’s his
second Imperial prize. I wish I might have the luck at cards he has
with horses. Well, why waste the precious time? I’m going to the
‘infernal regions,’” added the colonel, and he walked away.
“That’s Yashvin,” Vronsky said in answer to Turovtsin, and he sat down
in the vacated seat beside them. He drank the glass offered him, and
ordered a bottle of wine. Under the influence of the club atmosphere or
the wine he had drunk, Levin chatted away to Vronsky of the best breeds
of cattle, and was very glad not to feel the slightest hostility to
this man. He even told him, among other things, that he had heard from
his wife that she had met him at Princess Marya Borissovna’s.
“Ah, Princess Marya Borissovna, she’s exquisite!” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, and he told an anecdote about her which set them all
laughing. Vronsky particularly laughed with such simplehearted
amusement that Levin felt quite reconciled to him.
“Well, have we finished?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up with a
smile. “Let us go.”
Chapter 8
Getting up from the table, Levin walked with Gagin through the lofty
room to the billiard room, feeling his arms swing as he walked with a
peculiar lightness and ease. As he crossed the big room, he came upon
his father-in-law.
“Well, how do you like our Temple of Indolence?” said the prince,
taking his arm. “Come along, come along!”
“Yes, I wanted to walk about and look at everything. It’s interesting.”
“Yes, it’s interesting for you. But its interest for me is quite
different. You look at those little old men now,” he said, pointing to
a club member with bent back and projecting lip, shuffling towards them
in his soft boots, “and imagine that they were _shlupiks_ like that
from their birth up.”
“How _shlupiks_?”
“I see you don’t know that name. That’s our club designation. You know
the game of rolling eggs: when one’s rolled a long while it becomes a
_shlupik_. So it is with us; one goes on coming and coming to the club,
and ends by becoming a _shlupik_. Ah, you laugh! but we look out, for
fear of dropping into it ourselves. You know Prince Tchetchensky?”
inquired the prince; and Levin saw by his face that he was just going
to relate something funny.
“No, I don’t know him.”
“You don’t say so! Well, Prince Tchetchensky is a well-known figure. No
matter, though. He’s always playing billiards here. Only three years
ago he was not a _shlupik_ and kept up his spirits and even used to
call other people _shlupiks_. But one day he turns up, and our porter
... you know Vassily? Why, that fat one; he’s famous for his _bon
mots_. And so Prince Tchetchensky asks him, ‘Come, Vassily, who’s here?
Any _shlupiks_ here yet?’ And he says, ‘You’re the third.’ Yes, my dear
boy, that he did!”
Talking and greeting the friends they met, Levin and the prince walked
through all the rooms: the great room where tables had already been
set, and the usual partners were playing for small stakes; the divan
room, where they were playing chess, and Sergey Ivanovitch was sitting
talking to somebody; the billiard room, where, about a sofa in a
recess, there was a lively party drinking champagne—Gagin was one of
them. They peeped into the “infernal regions,” where a good many men
were crowding round one table, at which Yashvin was sitting. Trying not
to make a noise, they walked into the dark reading room, where under
the shaded lamps there sat a young man with a wrathful countenance,
turning over one journal after another, and a bald general buried in a
book. They went, too, into what the prince called the intellectual
room, where three gentlemen were engaged in a heated discussion of the
latest political news.
“Prince, please come, we’re ready,” said one of his card party, who had
come to look for him, and the prince went off. Levin sat down and
listened, but recalling all the conversation of the morning he felt all
of a sudden fearfully bored. He got up hurriedly, and went to look for
Oblonsky and Turovtsin, with whom it had been so pleasant.
Turovtsin was one of the circle drinking in the billiard room, and
Stepan Arkadyevitch was talking with Vronsky near the door at the
farther corner of the room.
“It’s not that she’s dull; but this undefined, this unsettled
position,” Levin caught, and he was hurrying away, but Stepan
Arkadyevitch called to him.
“Levin,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and Levin noticed that his eyes were
not full of tears exactly, but moist, which always happened when he had
been drinking, or when he was touched. Just now it was due to both
causes. “Levin, don’t go,” he said, and he warmly squeezed his arm
above the elbow, obviously not at all wishing to let him go.
“This is a true friend of mine—almost my greatest friend,” he said to
Vronsky. “You have become even closer and dearer to me. And I want you,
and I know you ought, to be friends, and great friends, because you’re
both splendid fellows.”
“Well, there’s nothing for us now but to kiss and be friends,” Vronsky
said, with good-natured playfulness, holding out his hand.
Levin quickly took the offered hand, and pressed it warmly.
“I’m very, very glad,” said Levin.
“Waiter, a bottle of champagne,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“And I’m very glad,” said Vronsky.
But in spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s desire, and their own desire,
they had nothing to talk about, and both felt it.
“Do you know, he has never met Anna?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to
Vronsky. “And I want above everything to take him to see her. Let us
go, Levin!”
“Really?” said Vronsky. “She will be very glad to see you. I should be
going home at once,” he added, “but I’m worried about Yashvin, and I
want to stay on till he finishes.”
“Why, is he losing?”
“He keeps losing, and I’m the only friend that can restrain him.”
“Well, what do you say to pyramids? Levin, will you play? Capital!”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Get the table ready,” he said to the marker.
“It has been ready a long while,” answered the marker, who had already
set the balls in a triangle, and was knocking the red one about for his
own diversion.
“Well, let us begin.”
After the game Vronsky and Levin sat down at Gagin’s table, and at
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s suggestion Levin took a hand in the game.
Vronsky sat down at the table, surrounded by friends, who were
incessantly coming up to him. Every now and then he went to the
“infernal” to keep an eye on Yashvin. Levin was enjoying a delightful
sense of repose after the mental fatigue of the morning. He was glad
that all hostility was at an end with Vronsky, and the sense of peace,
decorum, and comfort never left him.
When the game was over, Stepan Arkadyevitch took Levin’s arm.
“Well, let us go to Anna’s, then. At once? Eh? She is at home. I
promised her long ago to bring you. Where were you meaning to spend the
evening?”
“Oh, nowhere specially. I promised Sviazhsky to go to the Society of
Agriculture. By all means, let us go,” said Levin.
“Very good; come along. Find out if my carriage is here,” Stepan
Arkadyevitch said to the waiter.
Levin went up to the table, paid the forty roubles he had lost; paid
his bill, the amount of which was in some mysterious way ascertained by
the little old waiter who stood at the counter, and swinging his arms
he walked through all the rooms to the way out.
Chapter 9
“Oblonsky’s carriage!” the porter shouted in an angry bass. The
carriage drove up and both got in. It was only for the first few
moments, while the carriage was driving out of the clubhouse gates,
that Levin was still under the influence of the club atmosphere of
repose, comfort, and unimpeachable good form. But as soon as the
carriage drove out into the street, and he felt it jolting over the
uneven road, heard the angry shout of a sledge driver coming towards
them, saw in the uncertain light the red blind of a tavern and the
shops, this impression was dissipated, and he began to think over his
actions, and to wonder whether he was doing right in going to see Anna.
What would Kitty say? But Stepan Arkadyevitch gave him no time for
reflection, and, as though divining his doubts, he scattered them.
“How glad I am,” he said, “that you should know her! You know Dolly has
long wished for it. And Lvov’s been to see her, and often goes. Though
she is my sister,” Stepan Arkadyevitch pursued, “I don’t hesitate to
say that she’s a remarkable woman. But you will see. Her position is
very painful, especially now.”
“Why especially now?”
“We are carrying on negotiations with her husband about a divorce. And
he’s agreed; but there are difficulties in regard to the son, and the
business, which ought to have been arranged long ago, has been dragging
on for three months past. As soon as the divorce is over, she will
marry Vronsky. How stupid these old ceremonies are, that no one
believes in, and which only prevent people being comfortable!” Stepan
Arkadyevitch put in. “Well, then their position will be as regular as
mine, as yours.”
“What is the difficulty?” said Levin.
“Oh, it’s a long and tedious story! The whole business is in such an
anomalous position with us. But the point is she has been for three
months in Moscow, where everyone knows her, waiting for the divorce;
she goes out nowhere, sees no woman except Dolly, because, do you
understand, she doesn’t care to have people come as a favor. That fool
Princess Varvara, even she has left her, considering this a breach of
propriety. Well, you see, in such a position any other woman would not
have found resources in herself. But you’ll see how she has arranged
her life—how calm, how dignified she is. To the left, in the crescent
opposite the church!” shouted Stepan Arkadyevitch, leaning out of the
window. “Phew! how hot it is!” he said, in spite of twelve degrees of
frost, flinging his open overcoat still wider open.
“But she has a daughter: no doubt she’s busy looking after her?” said
Levin.
“I believe you picture every woman simply as a female, _une couveuse,_”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “If she’s occupied, it must be with her
children. No, she brings her up capitally, I believe, but one doesn’t
hear about her. She’s busy, in the first place, with what she writes. I
see you’re smiling ironically, but you’re wrong. She’s writing a
children’s book, and doesn’t talk about it to anyone, but she read it
to me and I gave the manuscript to Vorkuev ... you know the publisher
... and he’s an author himself too, I fancy. He understands those
things, and he says it’s a remarkable piece of work. But are you
fancying she’s an authoress?—not a bit of it. She’s a woman with a
heart, before everything, but you’ll see. Now she has a little English
girl with her, and a whole family she’s looking after.”
“Oh, something in a philanthropic way?”
“Why, you will look at everything in the worst light. It’s not from
philanthropy, it’s from the heart. They—that is, Vronsky—had a trainer,
an Englishman, first-rate in his own line, but a drunkard. He’s
completely given up to drink—delirium tremens—and the family were cast
on the world. She saw them, helped them, got more and more interested
in them, and now the whole family is on her hands. But not by way of
patronage, you know, helping with money; she’s herself preparing the
boys in Russian for the high school, and she’s taken the little girl to
live with her. But you’ll see her for yourself.”
The carriage drove into the courtyard, and Stepan Arkadyevitch rang
loudly at the entrance where sledges were standing.
And without asking the servant who opened the door whether the lady
were at home, Stepan Arkadyevitch walked into the hall. Levin followed
him, more and more doubtful whether he was doing right or wrong.
Looking at himself in the glass, Levin noticed that he was red in the
face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan
Arkadyevitch up the carpeted stairs. At the top Stepan Arkadyevitch
inquired of the footman, who bowed to him as to an intimate friend, who
was with Anna Arkadyevna, and received the answer that it was M.
Vorkuev.
“Where are they?”
“In the study.”
Passing through the dining-room, a room not very large, with dark,
paneled walls, Stepan Arkadyevitch and Levin walked over the soft
carpet to the half-dark study, lighted up by a single lamp with a big
dark shade. Another lamp with a reflector was hanging on the wall,
lighting up a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could
not help looking at. It was the portrait of Anna, painted in Italy by
Mihailov. While Stepan Arkadyevitch went behind the _treillage_, and
the man’s voice which had been speaking paused, Levin gazed at the
portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown
on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively forgot
where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could not take his
eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living,
charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders,
with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly
and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not
living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.
“I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably
addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the
portrait. Anna had come from behind the _treillage_ to meet him, and
Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the portrait,
in a dark blue shot gown, not in the same position nor with the same
expression, but with the same perfection of beauty which the artist had
caught in the portrait. She was less dazzling in reality, but, on the
other hand, there was something fresh and seductive in the living woman
which was not in the portrait.
Chapter 10
She had risen to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him;
and in the quiet ease with which she held out her little vigorous hand,
introduced him to Vorkuev and indicated a red-haired, pretty little
girl who was sitting at work, calling her her pupil, Levin recognized
and liked the manners of a woman of the great world, always
self-possessed and natural.
“I am delighted, delighted,” she repeated, and on her lips these simple
words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you
and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva
and for your wife’s sake.... I knew her for a very short time, but she
left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And
to think she will soon be a mother!”
She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to
her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good,
and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though
he had known her from childhood.
“Ivan Petrovitch and I settled in Alexey’s study,” she said in answer
to Stepan Arkadyevitch’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as
to be able to smoke”—and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether
he would smoke, she pulled closer a tortoise-shell cigar-case and took
a cigarette.
“How are you feeling today?” her brother asked her.
“Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual.”
“Yes, isn’t it extraordinarily fine?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
noticing that Levin was scrutinizing the picture.
“I have never seen a better portrait.”
“And extraordinarily like, isn’t it?” said Vorkuev.
Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar brilliance
lighted up Anna’s face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin flushed,
and to cover his confusion would have asked whether she had seen Darya
Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna spoke. “We were just
talking, Ivan Petrovitch and I, of Vashtchenkov’s last pictures. Have
you seen them?”
“Yes, I have seen them,” answered Levin.
“But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you ... you were saying?...”
Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately.
“She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high school
people on Grisha’s account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had been
unfair to him.”
“Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn’t care for them very much,”
Levin went back to the subject she had started.
Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike attitude to
the subject with which he had been talking all the morning. Every word
in his conversation with her had a special significance. And talking to
her was pleasant; still pleasanter it was to listen to her.
Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and
carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great weight
to the ideas of the person she was talking to.
The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new
illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the
artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness.
Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than
anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to
realism. In the fact of not lying they see poetry.
Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure as
this remark. Anna’s face lighted up at once, as at once she appreciated
the thought. She laughed.
“I laugh,” she said, “as one laughs when one sees a very true portrait.
What you said so perfectly hits off French art now, painting and
literature too, indeed—Zola, Daudet. But perhaps it is always so, that
men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and
then—all the _combinaisons_ made—they are tired of the fictitious
figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.”
“That’s perfectly true,” said Vorknev.
“So you’ve been at the club?” she said to her brother.
“Yes, yes, this is a woman!” Levin thought, forgetting himself and
staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment
was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was
talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the
change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment before in its
repose—suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But
this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though
recollecting something.
“Oh, well, but that’s of no interest to anyone,” she said, and she
turned to the English girl.
“Please order the tea in the drawing-room,” she said in English.
The girl got up and went out.
“Well, how did she get through her examination?” asked Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
“Splendidly! She’s a very gifted child and a sweet character.”
“It will end in your loving her more than your own.”
“There a man speaks. In love there’s no more nor less. I love my
daughter with one love, and her with another.”
“I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, “that if she were
to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English girl
to the public question of the education of Russian children, she would
be doing a great and useful work.”
“Yes, but I can’t help it; I couldn’t do it. Count Alexey Kirillovitch
urged me very much” (as she uttered the words _Count Alexey
Kirillovitch_ she glanced with appealing timidity at Levin, and he
unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring look); “he
urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several
times. The children were very nice, but I could not feel drawn to the
work. You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will,
there’s no forcing it. I took to this child—I could not myself say
why.”
And she glanced again at Levin. And her smile and her glance—all told
him that it was to him only she was addressing her words, valuing his
good opinion, and at the same time sure beforehand that they understood
each other.
“I quite understand that,” Levin answered. “It’s impossible to give
one’s heart to a school or such institutions in general, and I believe
that’s just why philanthropic institutions always give such poor
results.”
She was silent for a while, then she smiled.
“Yes, yes,” she agreed; “I never could. _Je n’ai pas le cœur assez_
large to love a whole asylum of horrid little girls. _Cela ne m’a
jamais réussi._ There are so many women who have made themselves _une
position sociale_ in that way. And now more than ever,” she said with a
mournful, confiding expression, ostensibly addressing her brother, but
unmistakably intending her words only for Levin, “now when I have such
need of some occupation, I cannot.” And suddenly frowning (Levin saw
that she was frowning at herself for talking about herself) she changed
the subject. “I know about you,” she said to Levin; “that you’re not a
public-spirited citizen, and I have defended you to the best of my
ability.”
“How have you defended me?”
“Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won’t you have some
tea?” She rose and took up a book bound in morocco.
“Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, indicating the book.
“It’s well worth taking up.”
“Oh, no, it’s all so sketchy.”
“I told him about it,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to his sister, nodding
at Levin.
“You shouldn’t have. My writing is something after the fashion of those
little baskets and carving which Liza Mertsalova used to sell me from
the prisons. She had the direction of the prison department in that
society,” she turned to Levin; “and they were miracles of patience, the
work of those poor wretches.”
And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so
extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had
no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. As she
said that she sighed, and her face suddenly taking a hard expression,
looked as it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she
was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was
utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating
happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin
looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her
brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors and he felt for her
a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.
She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing-room, while she
stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. “About her divorce,
about Vronsky, and what he’s doing at the club, about me?” wondered
Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the question of what she was
saying to Stepan Arkadyevitch, that he scarcely heard what Vorkuev was
telling him of the qualities of the story for children Anna Arkadyevna
had written.
At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter,
continued. There was not a single instant when a subject for
conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had
hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to hear
what the others were saying. And all that was said, not only by her,
but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevitch—all, so it seemed to Levin,
gained peculiar significance from her appreciation and her criticism.
While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time
admiring her—her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same
time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and
talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to
divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto,
now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and was
also sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand
her. At eleven o’clock, when Stepan Arkadyevitch got up to go (Vorkuev
had left earlier), it seemed to Levin that he had only just come.
Regretfully Levin too rose.
“Good-bye,” she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face with
a winning look. “I am very glad _que la glace est rompue._”
She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.
“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot
pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never
pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through,
and may God spare her that.”
“Certainly, yes, I will tell her....” Levin said, blushing.
Chapter 11
“What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!” he was thinking, as he
stepped out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Well, didn’t I tell you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, seeing that Levin
had been completely won over.
“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, “an extraordinary woman! It’s not her
cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I’m awfully
sorry for her!”
“Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be
hard on people in future,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, opening the
carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”
Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in
their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her
expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling
sympathy for her, Levin reached home.
At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well,
and that her sisters had not long been gone, and he handed him two
letters. Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not
overlook them later. One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote
that the corn could not be sold, that it was fetching only five and a
half roubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. The
other letter was from his sister. She scolded him for her business
being still unsettled.
“Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can’t get more,” Levin
decided the first question, which had always before seemed such a
weighty one, with extraordinary facility on the spot. “It’s
extraordinary how all one’s time is taken up here,” he thought,
considering the second letter. He felt himself to blame for not having
got done what his sister had asked him to do for her. “Today, again,
I’ve not been to the court, but today I’ve certainly not had time.” And
resolving that he would not fail to do it next day, he went up to his
wife. As he went in, Levin rapidly ran through mentally the day he had
spent. All the events of the day were conversations, conversations he
had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon subjects
which, if he had been alone at home, he would never have taken up, but
here they were very interesting. And all these conversations were right
enough, only in two places there was something not quite right. One was
what he had said about the carp, the other was something not “quite the
thing” in the tender sympathy he was feeling for Anna.
Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three
sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for
him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had
been left alone.
“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight
into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But
that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed
her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his
account of how he had spent the evening.
“Well, I’m very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural
with him. You understand, I shall try not to see him, but I’m glad that
this awkwardness is all over,” he said, and remembering that by way of
trying not to see him, he had immediately gone to call on Anna, he
blushed. “We talk about the peasants drinking; I don’t know which
drinks most, the peasantry or our own class; the peasants do on
holidays, but....”
But Kitty took not the slightest interest in discussing the drinking
habits of the peasants. She saw that he blushed, and she wanted to know
why.
“Well, and then where did you go?”
“Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.”
And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to
whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once for
all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.
Kitty’s eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna’s name, but
controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and
deceived him.
“Oh!” was all she said.
“I’m sure you won’t be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and Dolly
wished it,” Levin went on.
“Oh, no!” she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded him
no good.
“She is a very sweet, very, very unhappy, good woman,” he said, telling
her about Anna, her occupations, and what she had told him to say to
her.
“Yes, of course, she is very much to be pitied,” said Kitty, when he
had finished. “Whom was your letter from?”
He told her, and believing in her calm tone, he went to change his
coat.
Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went up to
her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.
“What? what is it?” he asked, knowing beforehand what.
“You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I saw
it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were drinking
at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went ... to her of all
people! No, we must go away.... I shall go away tomorrow.”
It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he
succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity, in
conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for him, that
he had succumbed to Anna’s artful influence, and that he would avoid
her. One thing he did with more sincerity confess to was that living so
long in Moscow, a life of nothing but conversation, eating and
drinking, he was degenerating. They talked till three o’clock in the
morning. Only at three o’clock were they sufficiently reconciled to be
able to go to sleep.
Chapter 12
After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began
walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole evening
done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had
fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her
aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and
conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the
striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky
and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had
made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room,
she ceased to think of him.
One thought, and one only, pursued her in different forms, and refused
to be shaken off. “If I have so much effect on others, on this man, who
loves his home and his wife, why is it _he_ is so cold to me?... not
cold exactly, he loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us
apart now. Why wasn’t he here all the evening? He told Stiva to say he
could not leave Yashvin, and must watch over his play. Is Yashvin a
child? But supposing it’s true. He never tells a lie. But there’s
something else in it if it’s true. He is glad of an opportunity of
showing me that he has other duties; I know that, I submit to that. But
why prove that to me? He wants to show me that his love for me is not
to interfere with his freedom. But I need no proofs, I need love. He
ought to understand all the bitterness of this life for me here in
Moscow. Is this life? I am not living, but waiting for an event, which
is continually put off and put off. No answer again! And Stiva says he
cannot go to Alexey Alexandrovitch. And I can’t write again. I can do
nothing, can begin nothing, can alter nothing; I hold myself in, I
wait, inventing amusements for myself—the English family, writing,
reading—but it’s all nothing but a sham, it’s all the same as morphine.
He ought to feel for me,” she said, feeling tears of self-pity coming
into her eyes.
She heard Vronsky’s abrupt ring and hurriedly dried her tears—not only
dried her tears, but sat down by a lamp and opened a book, affecting
composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had
not come home as he had promised—displeased only, and not on any
account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity.
She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want
strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put
herself into an attitude of antagonism.
“Well, you’ve not been dull?” he said, eagerly and good-humoredly,
going up to her. “What a terrible passion it is—gambling!”
“No, I’ve not been dull; I’ve learned long ago not to be dull. Stiva
has been here and Levin.”
“Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?” he
said, sitting down beside her.
“Very much. They have not long been gone. What was Yashvin doing?”
“He was winning—seventeen thousand. I got him away. He had really
started home, but he went back again, and now he’s losing.”
“Then what did you stay for?” she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes to
him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. “You told
Stiva you were staying on to get Yashvin away. And you have left him
there.”
The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on his
face too.
“In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message; and
secondly, I never tell lies. But what’s the chief point, I wanted to
stay, and I stayed,” he said, frowning. “Anna, what is it for, why will
you?” he said after a moment’s silence, bending over towards her, and
he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.
She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of
evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the
rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender.
“Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you
want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?” she said,
getting more and more excited. “Does anyone contest your rights? But
you want to be right, and you’re welcome to be right.”
His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more
obstinate expression.
“For you it’s a matter of obstinacy,” she said, watching him intently
and suddenly finding the right word for that expression that irritated
her, “simply obstinacy. For you it’s a question of whether you keep the
upper hand of me, while for me....” Again she felt sorry for herself,
and she almost burst into tears. “If you knew what it is for me! When I
feel as I do now that you are hostile, yes, hostile to me, if you knew
what this means for me! If you knew how I feel on the brink of calamity
at this instant, how afraid I am of myself!” And she turned away,
hiding her sobs.
“But what are you talking about?” he said, horrified at her expression
of despair, and again bending over her, he took her hand and kissed it.
“What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home? Don’t I avoid
the society of women?”
“Well, yes! If that were all!” she said.
“Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am ready
to do anything to make you happy,” he said, touched by her expression
of despair; “what wouldn’t I do to save you from distress of any sort,
as now, Anna!” he said.
“It’s nothing, nothing!” she said. “I don’t know myself whether it’s
the solitary life, my nerves.... Come, don’t let us talk of it. What
about the race? You haven’t told me!” she inquired, trying to conceal
her triumph at the victory, which had anyway been on her side.
He asked for supper, and began telling her about the races; but in his
tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that he did
not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of obstinacy with
which she had been struggling had asserted itself again in him. He was
colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his surrender.
And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I
feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that
this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second
time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there
had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could
not exorcise from his, and still less from her own heart.
Chapter 13
There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially
if he sees that all around him are living in the same way. Levin could
not have believed three months before that he could have gone quietly
to sleep in the condition in which he was that day, that leading an
aimless, irrational life, living too beyond his means, after drinking
to excess (he could not call what happened at the club anything else),
forming inappropriately friendly relations with a man with whom his
wife had once been in love, and a still more inappropriate call upon a
woman who could only be called a lost woman, after being fascinated by
that woman and causing his wife distress—he could still go quietly to
sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a sleepless night, and the
wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and untroubled.
At five o’clock the creak of a door opening waked him. He jumped up and
looked round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was a light
moving behind the screen, and he heard her steps.
“What is it?... what is it?” he said, half-asleep. “Kitty! What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle in her
hand. “I felt unwell,” she said, smiling a particularly sweet and
meaning smile.
“What? has it begun?” he said in terror. “We ought to send....” and
hurriedly he reached after his clothes.
“No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be
nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.”
And getting into bed, she blew out the candle, lay down and was still.
Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding
her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of peculiar
tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind the
screen, she said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he fell asleep at
once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and
understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart
while she lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest
event in a woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of
her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She seemed struggling
between regret at waking him, and the desire to talk to him.
“Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy.... We ought
to send for Lizaveta Petrovna.”
The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some
knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days.
“Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,”
she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom
and then to her lips.
He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her,
as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her.
He had to go, but he could not tear himself from her eyes. He thought
he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen
it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to himself, thinking
of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed
with soft curling hair under her night cap, was radiant with joy and
courage.
Though there was so little that was complex or artificial in Kitty’s
character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed now, when
suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel of her soul
shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul,
she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than ever. She
looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows twitched, she threw
up her head, and going quickly up to him, clutched his hand and pressed
close up to him, breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and
was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And for the first
minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her
eyes there was a tenderness that told him that she was far from
reproaching him, that she loved him for her sufferings. “If not I, who
is to blame for it?” he thought unconsciously, seeking someone
responsible for this suffering for him to punish; but there was no one
responsible. She was suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her
sufferings, and rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that
something sublime was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He
could not make it out. It was beyond his understanding.
“I have sent to mamma. You go quickly to fetch Lizaveta Petrovna ...
Kostya!... Nothing, it’s over.”
She moved away from him and rang the bell.
“Well, go now; Pasha’s coming. I am all right.”
And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting she
had brought in in the night and begun working at it again.
As Levin was going out of one door, he heard the maid-servant come in
at the other. He stood at the door and heard Kitty giving exact
directions to the maid, and beginning to help her move the bedstead.
He dressed, and while they were putting in his horses, as a hired
sledge was not to be seen yet, he ran again up to the bedroom, not on
tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Two maid-servants were
carefully moving something in the bedroom.
Kitty was walking about knitting rapidly and giving directions.
“I’m going for the doctor. They have sent for Lizaveta Petrovna, but
I’ll go on there too. Isn’t there anything wanted? Yes, shall I go to
Dolly’s?”
She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying.
“Yes, yes. Do go,” she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to
him.
He had just gone into the drawing-room, when suddenly a plaintive moan
sounded from the bedroom, smothered instantly. He stood still, and for
a long while he could not understand.
“Yes, that is she,” he said to himself, and clutching at his head he
ran downstairs.
“Lord have mercy on us! pardon us! aid us!” he repeated the words that
for some reason came suddenly to his lips. And he, an unbeliever,
repeated these words not with his lips only. At that instant he knew
that all his doubts, even the impossibility of believing with his
reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder
his turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like dust.
To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself,
his soul, and his love?
The horse was not yet ready, but feeling a peculiar concentration of
his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he started
off on foot without waiting for the horse, and told Kouzma to overtake
him.
At the corner he met a night cabman driving hurriedly. In the little
sledge, wrapped in a velvet cloak, sat Lizaveta Petrovna with a
kerchief round her head. “Thank God! thank God!” he said, overjoyed to
recognize her little fair face which wore a peculiarly serious, even
stern expression. Telling the driver not to stop, he ran along beside
her.
“For two hours, then? Not more?” she inquired. “You should let Pyotr
Dmitrievitch know, but don’t hurry him. And get some opium at the
chemist’s.”
“So you think that it may go on well? Lord have mercy on us and help
us!” Levin said, seeing his own horse driving out of the gate. Jumping
into the sledge beside Kouzma, he told him to drive to the doctor’s.
Chapter 14
The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that “he had been up
late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon.” The
footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and seemed very busy about
them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his
indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but
immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew or
was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more necessary
to act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through this wall of
indifference and attain his aim.
“Don’t be in a hurry or let anything slip,” Levin said to himself,
feeling a greater and greater flow of physical energy and attention to
all that lay before him to do.
Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin considered
various plans, and decided on the following one: that Kouzma should go
for another doctor, while he himself should go to the chemist’s for
opium, and if when he came back the doctor had not yet begun to get up,
he would either by tipping the footman, or by force, wake the doctor at
all hazards.
At the chemist’s the lank shopman sealed up a packet of powders for a
coachman who stood waiting, and refused him opium with the same
callousness with which the doctor’s footman had cleaned his lamp
chimneys. Trying not to get flurried or out of temper, Levin mentioned
the names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the opium was
needed for, tried to persuade him. The assistant inquired in German
whether he should give it, and receiving an affirmative reply from
behind the partition, he took out a bottle and a funnel, deliberately
poured the opium from a bigger bottle into a little one, stuck on a
label, sealed it up, in spite of Levin’s request that he would not do
so, and was about to wrap it up too. This was more than Levin could
stand; he took the bottle firmly out of his hands, and ran to the big
glass doors. The doctor was not even now getting up, and the footman,
busy now in putting down the rugs, refused to wake him. Levin
deliberately took out a ten rouble note, and, careful to speak slowly,
though losing no time over the business, he handed him the note, and
explained that Pyotr Dmitrievitch (what a great and important personage
he seemed to Levin now, this Pyotr Dmitrievitch, who had been of so
little consequence in his eyes before!) had promised to come at any
time; that he would certainly not be angry! and that he must therefore
wake him at once.
The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin into the waiting
room.
Levin could hear through the door the doctor coughing, moving about,
washing, and saying something. Three minutes passed; it seemed to Levin
that more than an hour had gone by. He could not wait any longer.
“Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” he said in an imploring voice
at the open door. “For God’s sake, forgive me! See me as you are. It’s
been going on more than two hours already.”
“In a minute; in a minute!” answered a voice, and to his amazement
Levin heard that the doctor was smiling as he spoke.
“For one instant.”
“In a minute.”
Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting on his boots, and
two minutes more while the doctor put on his coat and combed his hair.
“Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” Levin was beginning again in a plaintive voice,
just as the doctor came in dressed and ready. “These people have no
conscience,” thought Levin. “Combing his hair, while we’re dying!”
“Good morning!” the doctor said to him, shaking hands, and, as it were,
teasing him with his composure. “There’s no hurry. Well now?”
Trying to be as accurate as possible, Levin began to tell him every
unnecessary detail of his wife’s condition, interrupting his account
repeatedly with entreaties that the doctor would come with him at once.
“Oh, you needn’t be in any hurry. You don’t understand, you know. I’m
certain I’m not wanted, still I’ve promised, and if you like, I’ll
come. But there’s no hurry. Please sit down; won’t you have some
coffee?”
Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he was laughing at
him; but the doctor had no notion of making fun of him.
“I know, I know,” the doctor said, smiling; “I’m a married man myself;
and at these moments we husbands are very much to be pitied. I’ve a
patient whose husband always takes refuge in the stables on such
occasions.”
“But what do you think, Pyotr Dmitrievitch? Do you suppose it may go
all right?”
“Everything points to a favorable issue.”
“So you’ll come immediately?” said Levin, looking wrathfully at the
servant who was bringing in the coffee.
“In an hour’s time.”
“Oh, for mercy’s sake!”
“Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway.”
The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.
“The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read yesterday’s
telegrams?” said the doctor, munching some roll.
“No, I can’t stand it!” said Levin, jumping up. “So you’ll be with us
in a quarter of an hour.”
“In half an hour.”
“On your honor?”
When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the princess, and
they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in
her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him,
and burst into tears.
“Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?” she queried, clasping the hand of
the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anxious face.
“She’s going on well,” she said; “persuade her to lie down. She will be
easier so.”
From the moment when he had waked up and understood what was going on,
Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and
without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his
wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage.
Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it
would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these
ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to
keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to
him he could do this. But when he came back from the doctor’s and saw
her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently:
“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” He sighed, and flung his head
up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst
into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had
passed.
But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the
full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings,
and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it
because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling
that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his
heart would break with sympathy and pain.
But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more,
and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.
All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no
conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all
sense of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held
her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence
and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him
minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a
candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o’clock in the
afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o’clock in the morning,
he would not have been more surprised. Where he was all this time, he
knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face,
sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to
reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought,
with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her
tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat
cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring
face, and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning
face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not
know. The princess was with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the
study, where a table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not
there, but Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had been sent somewhere.
Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had done this
eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later on he
found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Then he had been
sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor had answered
and then had said something about the irregularities in the municipal
council. Then he had been sent to the bedroom to help the old princess
to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the
princess’s old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and
had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure
him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy picture
and set it at Kitty’s head, carefully tucking it in behind the pillow.
But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could not tell. He
did not understand why the old princess took his hand, and looking
compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly
persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the room, and even
the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at him and offered
him a drop of something.
All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened
nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed
of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief—this was joy. Yet that
grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of
life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through
which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the
contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to
inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while
reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” he repeated to himself
incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete
alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and
simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.
All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away
from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after
another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ashtray, with
Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner,
about politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin
suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he
had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow,
where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from
sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every
time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching
him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror that had
come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped
up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to
blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as he looked at
her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with
terror and prayed: “Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!” And as time
went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he
became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing
became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them.
He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.
Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but
seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying
you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell
to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.
Chapter 15
He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all
burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the
doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the doctor’s
stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his
cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into
oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard
the doctor’s chat and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly
shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but
holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The
doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly.
Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as
strange. “I suppose it must be so,” he thought, and still sat where he
was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom,
edged round Lizaveta Petrovna and the princess, and took up his
position at Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some
change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he
had no wish to see or comprehend. But he saw it by the face of Lizaveta
Petrovna. Lizaveta Petrovna’s face was stern and pale, and still as
resolute, though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were fixed
intently on Kitty. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair
clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her
lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her
moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.
“Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!” she said rapidly.
“Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You’re not afraid? Quick,
quick, Lizaveta Petrovna....”
She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her
face was drawn, she pushed him away.
“Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and
again he heard that unearthly scream.
Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,” Dolly called after him.
But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over. He
stood in the next room, his head leaning against the door post, and
heard shrieks, howls such as he had never heard before, and he knew
that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had long ago
ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child. He did not
even wish for her life now, all he longed for was the end of this awful
anguish.
“Doctor! What is it? What is it? By God!” he said, snatching at the
doctor’s hand as he came up.
“It’s the end,” said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so grave as
he said it that Levin took _the end_ as meaning her death.
Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw was the
face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was even more frowning and stern. Kitty’s
face he did not know. In the place where it had been was something that
was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that came from
it. He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed,
feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it
became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit
of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears, but
there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued
stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive,
tender, and blissful, uttered softly, “It’s over!”
He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt,
looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence
and tried to smile, and could not.
And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in which he
had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all
in an instant borne back to the old every-day world, glorified though
now, by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The
strained chords snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he had never
foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook, that for
long they prevented him from speaking.
Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s hand before his
lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers,
responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in
the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a flickering light in a lamp,
lay the life of a human creature, which had never existed before, and
which would now with the same right, with the same importance to
itself, live and create in its own image.
“Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!” Levin heard
Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking
hand.
“Mamma, is it true?” said Kitty’s voice.
The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make. And in the
midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply to the mother’s
question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room.
It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human
being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.
If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had died
with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was
standing before him, he would have been surprised at nothing. But now,
coming back to the world of reality, he had to make great mental
efforts to take in that she was alive and well, and that the creature
squalling so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her agony was
over. And he was unutterably happy. That he understood; he was
completely happy in it. But the baby? Whence, why, who was he?... He
could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him something extraneous,
superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself.
Chapter 16
At ten o’clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch were sitting at Levin’s. Having inquired after Kitty, they
had dropped into conversation upon other subjects. Levin heard them,
and unconsciously, as they talked, going over the past, over what had
been up to that morning, he thought of himself as he had been yesterday
till that point. It was as though a hundred years had passed since
then. He felt himself exalted to unattainable heights, from which he
studiously lowered himself so as not to wound the people he was talking
to. He talked, and was all the time thinking of his wife, of her
condition now, of his son, in whose existence he tried to school
himself into believing. The whole world of woman, which had taken for
him since his marriage a new value he had never suspected before, was
now so exalted that he could not take it in in his imagination. He
heard them talk of yesterday’s dinner at the club, and thought: “What
is happening with her now? Is she asleep? How is she? What is she
thinking of? Is he crying, my son Dmitri?” And in the middle of the
conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped up and went out of
the room.
“Send me word if I can see her,” said the prince.
“Very well, in a minute,” answered Levin, and without stopping, he went
to her room.
She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother, making
plans about the christening.
Carefully set to rights, with hair well-brushed, in a smart little cap
with some blue in it, her arms out on the quilt, she was lying on her
back. Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to her. Her face, bright
before, brightened still more as he drew near her. There was the same
change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the face of the
dead. But then it means farewell, here it meant welcome. Again a rush
of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of the child’s birth,
flooded his heart. She took his hand and asked him if he had slept. He
could not answer, and turned away, struggling with his weakness.
“I have had a nap, Kostya!” she said to him; “and I am so comfortable
now.”
She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.
“Give him to me,” she said, hearing the baby’s cry. “Give him to me,
Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at him.”
“To be sure, his papa shall look at him,” said Lizaveta Petrovna,
getting up and bringing something red, and queer, and wriggling. “Wait
a minute, we’ll make him tidy first,” and Lizaveta Petrovna laid the
red wobbling thing on the bed, began untrussing and trussing up the
baby, lifting it up and turning it over with one finger and powdering
it with something.
Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made strenuous efforts to
discover in his heart some traces of fatherly feeling for it. He felt
nothing towards it but disgust. But when it was undressed and he caught
a glimpse of wee, wee, little hands, little feet, saffron-colored, with
little toes, too, and positively with a little big toe different from
the rest, and when he saw Lizaveta Petrovna closing the wide-open
little hands, as though they were soft springs, and putting them into
linen garments, such pity for the little creature came upon him, and
such terror that she would hurt it, that he held her hand back.
Lizaveta Petrovna laughed.
“Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened!”
When the baby had been put to rights and transformed into a firm doll,
Lizaveta Petrovna dandled it as though proud of her handiwork, and
stood a little away so that Levin might see his son in all his glory.
Kitty looked sideways in the same direction, never taking her eyes off
the baby. “Give him to me! give him to me!” she said, and even made as
though she would sit up.
“What are you thinking of, Katerina Alexandrovna, you mustn’t move like
that! Wait a minute. I’ll give him to you. Here we’re showing papa what
a fine fellow we are!”
And Lizaveta Petrovna, with one hand supporting the wobbling head,
lifted up on the other arm the strange, limp, red creature, whose head
was lost in its swaddling clothes. But it had a nose, too, and slanting
eyes and smacking lips.
“A splendid baby!” said Lizaveta Petrovna.
Levin sighed with mortification. This splendid baby excited in him no
feeling but disgust and compassion. It was not at all the feeling he
had looked forward to.
He turned away while Lizaveta Petrovna put the baby to the unaccustomed
breast.
Suddenly laughter made him look round. The baby had taken the breast.
“Come, that’s enough, that’s enough!” said Lizaveta Petrovna, but Kitty
would not let the baby go. He fell asleep in her arms.
“Look, now,” said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see it. The
aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more and the baby
sneezed.
Smiling, hardly able to restrain his tears, Levin kissed his wife and
went out of the dark room. What he felt towards this little creature
was utterly unlike what he had expected. There was nothing cheerful and
joyous in the feeling; on the contrary, it was a new torture of
apprehension. It was the consciousness of a new sphere of liability to
pain. And this sense was so painful at first, the apprehension lest
this helpless creature should suffer was so intense, that it prevented
him from noticing the strange thrill of senseless joy and even pride
that he had felt when the baby sneezed.
Chapter 17
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s affairs were in a very bad way.
The money for two-thirds of the forest had all been spent already, and
he had borrowed from the merchant in advance at ten per cent discount,
almost all the remaining third. The merchant would not give more,
especially as Darya Alexandrovna, for the first time that winter
insisting on her right to her own property, had refused to sign the
receipt for the payment of the last third of the forest. All his salary
went on household expenses and in payment of petty debts that could not
be put off. There was positively no money.
This was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s opinion
things could not go on like this. The explanation of the position was,
in his view, to be found in the fact that his salary was too small. The
post he filled had been unmistakably very good five years ago, but it
was so no longer.
Petrov, the bank director, had twelve thousand; Sventitsky, a company
director, had seventeen thousand; Mitin, who had founded a bank,
received fifty thousand.
“Clearly I’ve been napping, and they’ve overlooked me,” Stepan
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.
She looked at the lower part of the carriages, at the screws and chains
and the tall cast-iron wheel of the first carriage slowly moving up,
and trying to measure the middle between the front and back wheels, and
the very minute when that middle point would be opposite her.
“There,” she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage,
at the sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers—“there, in the
very middle, and I will punish him and escape from everyone and from
myself.”
She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it
reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand
delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to
wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about
to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed
herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole
series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that
had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before
her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take
her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the
moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped
the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her
hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again
at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was
terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing?
What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge
and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord,
forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant
muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by
which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow,
and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her
all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was
quenched forever.
PART EIGHT
Chapter 1
Almost two months had passed. The hot summer was half over, but Sergey
Ivanovitch was only just preparing to leave Moscow.
Sergey Ivanovitch’s life had not been uneventful during this time. A
year ago he had finished his book, the fruit of six years’ labor,
“Sketch of a Survey of the Principles and Forms of Government in Europe
and Russia.” Several sections of this book and its introduction had
appeared in periodical publications, and other parts had been read by
Sergey Ivanovitch to persons of his circle, so that the leading ideas
of the work could not be completely novel to the public. But still
Sergey Ivanovitch had expected that on its appearance his book would be
sure to make a serious impression on society, and if it did not cause a
revolution in social science it would, at any rate, make a great stir
in the scientific world.
After the most conscientious revision the book had last year been
published, and had been distributed among the booksellers.
Though he asked no one about it, reluctantly and with feigned
indifference answered his friends’ inquiries as to how the book was
going, and did not even inquire of the booksellers how the book was
selling, Sergey Ivanovitch was all on the alert, with strained
attention, watching for the first impression his book would make in the
world and in literature.
But a week passed, a second, a third, and in society no impression
whatever could be detected. His friends who were specialists and
savants, occasionally—unmistakably from politeness—alluded to it. The
rest of his acquaintances, not interested in a book on a learned
subject, did not talk of it at all. And society generally—just now
especially absorbed in other things—was absolutely indifferent. In the
press, too, for a whole month there was not a word about his book.
Sergey Ivanovitch had calculated to a nicety the time necessary for
writing a review, but a month passed, and a second, and still there was
silence.
Only in the _Northern Beetle_, in a comic article on the singer
Drabanti, who had lost his voice, there was a contemptuous allusion to
Koznishev’s book, suggesting that the book had been long ago seen
through by everyone, and was a subject of general ridicule.
At last in the third month a critical article appeared in a serious
review. Sergey Ivanovitch knew the author of the article. He had met
him once at Golubtsov’s.
The author of the article was a young man, an invalid, very bold as a
writer, but extremely deficient in breeding and shy in personal
relations.
In spite of his absolute contempt for the author, it was with complete
respect that Sergey Ivanovitch set about reading the article. The
article was awful.
The critic had undoubtedly put an interpretation upon the book which
could not possibly be put on it. But he had selected quotations so
adroitly that for people who had not read the book (and obviously
scarcely anyone had read it) it seemed absolutely clear that the whole
book was nothing but a medley of high-flown phrases, not even—as
suggested by marks of interrogation—used appropriately, and that the
author of the book was a person absolutely without knowledge of the
subject. And all this was so wittily done that Sergey Ivanovitch would
not have disowned such wit himself. But that was just what was so
awful.
In spite of the scrupulous conscientiousness with which Sergey
Ivanovitch verified the correctness of the critic’s arguments, he did
not for a minute stop to ponder over the faults and mistakes which were
ridiculed; but unconsciously he began immediately trying to recall
every detail of his meeting and conversation with the author of the
article.
“Didn’t I offend him in some way?” Sergey Ivanovitch wondered.
And remembering that when they met he had corrected the young man about
something he had said that betrayed ignorance, Sergey Ivanovitch found
the clue to explain the article.
This article was followed by a deadly silence about the book both in
the press and in conversation, and Sergey Ivanovitch saw that his six
years’ task, toiled at with such love and labor, had gone, leaving no
trace.
Sergey Ivanovitch’s position was still more difficult from the fact
that, since he had finished his book, he had had no more literary work
to do, such as had hitherto occupied the greater part of his time.
Sergey Ivanovitch was clever, cultivated, healthy, and energetic, and
he did not know what use to make of his energy. Conversations in
drawing-rooms, in meetings, assemblies, and committees—everywhere where
talk was possible—took up part of his time. But being used for years to
town life, he did not waste all his energies in talk, as his less
experienced younger brother did, when he was in Moscow. He had a great
deal of leisure and intellectual energy still to dispose of.
Fortunately for him, at this period so difficult for him from the
failure of his book, the various public questions of the dissenting
sects, of the American alliance, of the Samara famine, of exhibitions,
and of spiritualism, were definitely replaced in public interest by the
Slavonic question, which had hitherto rather languidly interested
society, and Sergey Ivanovitch, who had been one of the first to raise
this subject, threw himself into it heart and soul.
In the circle to which Sergey Ivanovitch belonged, nothing was talked
of or written about just now but the Servian War. Everything that the
idle crowd usually does to kill time was done now for the benefit of
the Slavonic States. Balls, concerts, dinners, matchboxes, ladies’
dresses, beer, restaurants—everything testified to sympathy with the
Slavonic peoples.
From much of what was spoken and written on the subject, Sergey
Ivanovitch differed on various points. He saw that the Slavonic
question had become one of those fashionable distractions which succeed
one another in providing society with an object and an occupation. He
saw, too, that a great many people were taking up the subject from
motives of self-interest and self-advertisement. He recognized that the
newspapers published a great deal that was superfluous and exaggerated,
with the sole aim of attracting attention and outbidding one another.
He saw that in this general movement those who thrust themselves most
forward and shouted the loudest were men who had failed and were
smarting under a sense of injury—generals without armies, ministers not
in the ministry, journalists not on any paper, party leaders without
followers. He saw that there was a great deal in it that was frivolous
and absurd. But he saw and recognized an unmistakable growing
enthusiasm, uniting all classes, with which it was impossible not to
sympathize. The massacre of men who were fellow Christians, and of the
same Slavonic race, excited sympathy for the sufferers and indignation
against the oppressors. And the heroism of the Servians and
Montenegrins struggling for a great cause begot in the whole people a
longing to help their brothers not in word but in deed.
But in this there was another aspect that rejoiced Sergey Ivanovitch.
That was the manifestation of public opinion. The public had definitely
expressed its desire. The soul of the people had, as Sergey Ivanovitch
said, found expression. And the more he worked in this cause, the more
incontestable it seemed to him that it was a cause destined to assume
vast dimensions, to create an epoch.
He threw himself heart and soul into the service of this great cause,
and forgot to think about his book. His whole time now was engrossed by
it, so that he could scarcely manage to answer all the letters and
appeals addressed to him. He worked the whole spring and part of the
summer, and it was only in July that he prepared to go away to his
brother’s in the country.
He was going both to rest for a fortnight, and in the very heart of the
people, in the farthest wilds of the country, to enjoy the sight of
that uplifting of the spirit of the people, of which, like all
residents in the capital and big towns, he was fully persuaded.
Katavasov had long been meaning to carry out his promise to stay with
Levin, and so he was going with him.
Chapter 2
Sergey Ivanovitch and Katavasov had only just reached the station of
the Kursk line, which was particularly busy and full of people that
day, when, looking round for the groom who was following with their
things, they saw a party of volunteers driving up in four cabs. Ladies
met them with bouquets of flowers, and followed by the rushing crowd
they went into the station.
One of the ladies, who had met the volunteers, came out of the hall and
addressed Sergey Ivanovitch.
“You too come to see them off?” she asked in French.
“No, I’m going away myself, princess. To my brother’s for a holiday. Do
you always see them off?” said Sergey Ivanovitch with a hardly
perceptible smile.
“Oh, that would be impossible!” answered the princess. “Is it true that
eight hundred have been sent from us already? Malvinsky wouldn’t
believe me.”
“More than eight hundred. If you reckon those who have been sent not
directly from Moscow, over a thousand,” answered Sergey Ivanovitch.
“There! That’s just what I said!” exclaimed the lady. “And it’s true
too, I suppose, that more than a million has been subscribed?”
“Yes, princess.”
“What do you say to today’s telegram? Beaten the Turks again.”
“Yes, so I saw,” answered Sergey Ivanovitch. They were speaking of the
last telegram stating that the Turks had been for three days in
succession beaten at all points and put to flight, and that tomorrow a
decisive engagement was expected.
“Ah, by the way, a splendid young fellow has asked leave to go, and
they’ve made some difficulty, I don’t know why. I meant to ask you; I
know him; please write a note about his case. He’s being sent by
Countess Lidia Ivanovna.”
Sergey Ivanovitch asked for all the details the princess knew about the
young man, and going into the first-class waiting-room, wrote a note to
the person on whom the granting of leave of absence depended, and
handed it to the princess.
“You know Count Vronsky, the notorious one ... is going by this train?”
said the princess with a smile full of triumph and meaning, when he
found her again and gave her the letter.
“I had heard he was going, but I did not know when. By this train?”
“I’ve seen him. He’s here: there’s only his mother seeing him off. It’s
the best thing, anyway, that he could do.”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
While they were talking the crowd streamed by them into the
dining-room. They went forward too, and heard a gentleman with a glass
in his hand delivering a loud discourse to the volunteers. “In the
service of religion, humanity, and our brothers,” the gentleman said,
his voice growing louder and louder; “to this great cause mother Moscow
dedicates you with her blessing. _Jivio!_” he concluded, loudly and
tearfully.
Everyone shouted _Jivio!_ and a fresh crowd dashed into the hall,
almost carrying the princess off her legs.
“Ah, princess! that was something like!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
suddenly appearing in the middle of the crowd and beaming upon them
with a delighted smile. “Capitally, warmly said, wasn’t it? Bravo! And
Sergey Ivanovitch! Why, you ought to have said something—just a few
words, you know, to encourage them; you do that so well,” he added with
a soft, respectful, and discreet smile, moving Sergey Ivanovitch
forward a little by the arm.
“No, I’m just off.”
“Where to?”
“To the country, to my brother’s,” answered Sergey Ivanovitch.
“Then you’ll see my wife. I’ve written to her, but you’ll see her
first. Please tell her that they’ve seen me and that it’s ‘all right,’
as the English say. She’ll understand. Oh, and be so good as to tell
her I’m appointed secretary of the committee.... But she’ll understand!
You know, _les petites misères de la vie humaine,_” he said, as it were
apologizing to the princess. “And Princess Myakaya—not Liza, but
Bibish—is sending a thousand guns and twelve nurses. Did I tell you?”
“Yes, I heard so,” answered Koznishev indifferently.
“It’s a pity you’re going away,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Tomorrow
we’re giving a dinner to two who’re setting off—Dimer-Bartnyansky from
Petersburg and our Veslovsky, Grisha. They’re both going. Veslovsky’s
only lately married. There’s a fine fellow for you! Eh, princess?” he
turned to the lady.
The princess looked at Koznishev without replying. But the fact that
Sergey Ivanovitch and the princess seemed anxious to get rid of him did
not in the least disconcert Stepan Arkadyevitch. Smiling, he stared at
the feather in the princess’s hat, and then about him as though he were
going to pick something up. Seeing a lady approaching with a collecting
box, he beckoned her up and put in a five-rouble note.
“I can never see these collecting boxes unmoved while I’ve money in my
pocket,” he said. “And how about today’s telegram? Fine chaps those
Montenegrins!”
“You don’t say so!” he cried, when the princess told him that Vronsky
was going by this train. For an instant Stepan Arkadyevitch’s face
looked sad, but a minute later, when, stroking his mustaches and
swinging as he walked, he went into the hall where Vronsky was, he had
completely forgotten his own despairing sobs over his sister’s corpse,
and he saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend.
“With all his faults one can’t refuse to do him justice,” said the
princess to Sergey Ivanovitch as soon as Stepan Arkadyevitch had left
them. “What a typically Russian, Slav nature! Only, I’m afraid it won’t
be pleasant for Vronsky to see him. Say what you will, I’m touched by
that man’s fate. Do talk to him a little on the way,” said the
princess.
“Yes, perhaps, if it happens so.”
“I never liked him. But this atones for a great deal. He’s not merely
going himself, he’s taking a squadron at his own expense.”
“Yes, so I heard.”
A bell sounded. Everyone crowded to the doors. “Here he is!” said the
princess, indicating Vronsky, who with his mother on his arm walked by,
wearing a long overcoat and wide-brimmed black hat. Oblonsky was
walking beside him, talking eagerly of something.
Vronsky was frowning and looking straight before him, as though he did
not hear what Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying.
Probably on Oblonsky’s pointing them out, he looked round in the
direction where the princess and Sergey Ivanovitch were standing, and
without speaking lifted his hat. His face, aged and worn by suffering,
looked stony.
Going onto the platform, Vronsky left his mother and disappeared into a
compartment.
On the platform there rang out “God save the Tsar,” then shouts of
“hurrah!” and _“jivio!”_ One of the volunteers, a tall, very young man
with a hollow chest, was particularly conspicuous, bowing and waving
his felt hat and a nosegay over his head. Then two officers emerged,
bowing too, and a stout man with a big beard, wearing a greasy forage
cap.
Chapter 3
Saying good-bye to the princess, Sergey Ivanovitch was joined by
Katavasov; together they got into a carriage full to overflowing, and
the train started.
At Tsaritsino station the train was met by a chorus of young men
singing “Hail to Thee!” Again the volunteers bowed and poked their
heads out, but Sergey Ivanovitch paid no attention to them. He had had
so much to do with the volunteers that the type was familiar to him and
did not interest him. Katavasov, whose scientific work had prevented
his having a chance of observing them hitherto, was very much
interested in them and questioned Sergey Ivanovitch.
Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to go into the second-class and talk to
them himself. At the next station Katavasov acted on this suggestion.
At the first stop he moved into the second-class and made the
acquaintance of the volunteers. They were sitting in a corner of the
carriage, talking loudly and obviously aware that the attention of the
passengers and Katavasov as he got in was concentrated upon them. More
loudly than all talked the tall, hollow-chested young man. He was
unmistakably tipsy, and was relating some story that had occurred at
his school. Facing him sat a middle-aged officer in the Austrian
military jacket of the Guards uniform. He was listening with a smile to
the hollow-chested youth, and occasionally pulling him up. The third,
in an artillery uniform, was sitting on a box beside them. A fourth was
asleep.
Entering into conversation with the youth, Katavasov learned that he
was a wealthy Moscow merchant who had run through a large fortune
before he was two-and-twenty. Katavasov did not like him, because he
was unmanly and effeminate and sickly. He was obviously convinced,
especially now after drinking, that he was performing a heroic action,
and he bragged of it in the most unpleasant way.
The second, the retired officer, made an unpleasant impression too upon
Katavasov. He was, it seemed, a man who had tried everything. He had
been on a railway, had been a land-steward, and had started factories,
and he talked, quite without necessity, of all he had done, and used
learned expressions quite inappropriately.
The third, the artilleryman, on the contrary, struck Katavasov very
favorably. He was a quiet, modest fellow, unmistakably impressed by the
knowledge of the officer and the heroic self-sacrifice of the merchant
and saying nothing about himself. When Katavasov asked him what had
impelled him to go to Servia, he answered modestly:
“Oh, well, everyone’s going. The Servians want help, too. I’m sorry for
them.”
“Yes, you artillerymen especially are scarce there,” said Katavasov.
“Oh, I wasn’t long in the artillery, maybe they’ll put me into the
infantry or the cavalry.”
“Into the infantry when they need artillery more than anything?” said
Katavasov, fancying from the artilleryman’s apparent age that he must
have reached a fairly high grade.
“I wasn’t long in the artillery; I’m a cadet retired,” he said, and he
began to explain how he had failed in his examination.
All of this together made a disagreeable impression on Katavasov, and
when the volunteers got out at a station for a drink, Katavasov would
have liked to compare his unfavorable impression in conversation with
someone. There was an old man in the carriage, wearing a military
overcoat, who had been listening all the while to Katavasov’s
conversation with the volunteers. When they were left alone, Katavasov
addressed him.
“What different positions they come from, all those fellows who are
going off there,” Katavasov said vaguely, not wishing to express his
own opinion, and at the same time anxious to find out the old man’s
views.
The old man was an officer who had served on two campaigns. He knew
what makes a soldier, and judging by the appearance and the talk of
those persons, by the swagger with which they had recourse to the
bottle on the journey, he considered them poor soldiers. Moreover, he
lived in a district town, and he was longing to tell how one soldier
had volunteered from his town, a drunkard and a thief whom no one would
employ as a laborer. But knowing by experience that in the present
condition of the public temper it was dangerous to express an opinion
opposed to the general one, and especially to criticize the volunteers
unfavorably, he too watched Katavasov without committing himself.
“Well, men are wanted there,” he said, laughing with his eyes. And they
fell to talking of the last war news, and each concealed from the other
his perplexity as to the engagement expected next day, since the Turks
had been beaten, according to the latest news, at all points. And so
they parted, neither giving expression to his opinion.
Katavasov went back to his own carriage, and with reluctant hypocrisy
reported to Sergey Ivanovitch his observations of the volunteers, from
which it would appear that they were capital fellows.
At a big station at a town the volunteers were again greeted with
shouts and singing, again men and women with collecting boxes appeared,
and provincial ladies brought bouquets to the volunteers and followed
them into the refreshment room; but all this was on a much smaller and
feebler scale than in Moscow.
Chapter 4
While the train was stopping at the provincial town, Sergey Ivanovitch
did not go to the refreshment room, but walked up and down the
platform.
The first time he passed Vronsky’s compartment he noticed that the
curtain was drawn over the window; but as he passed it the second time
he saw the old countess at the window. She beckoned to Koznishev.
“I’m going, you see, taking him as far as Kursk,” she said.
“Yes, so I heard,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, standing at her window and
peeping in. “What a noble act on his part!” he added, noticing that
Vronsky was not in the compartment.
“Yes, after his misfortune, what was there for him to do?”
“What a terrible thing it was!” said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“Ah, what I have been through! But do get in.... Ah, what I have been
through!” she repeated, when Sergey Ivanovitch had got in and sat down
beside her. “You can’t conceive it! For six weeks he did not speak to
anyone, and would not touch food except when I implored him. And not
for one minute could we leave him alone. We took away everything he
could have used against himself. We lived on the ground floor, but
there was no reckoning on anything. You know, of course, that he had
shot himself once already on her account,” she said, and the old lady’s
eyelashes twitched at the recollection. “Yes, hers was the fitting end
for such a woman. Even the death she chose was low and vulgar.”
“It’s not for us to judge, countess,” said Sergey Ivanovitch; “but I
can understand that it has been very hard for you.”
“Ah, don’t speak of it! I was staying on my estate, and he was with me.
A note was brought him. He wrote an answer and sent it off. We hadn’t
an idea that she was close by at the station. In the evening I had only
just gone to my room, when my Mary told me a lady had thrown herself
under the train. Something seemed to strike me at once. I knew it was
she. The first thing I said was, he was not to be told. But they’d told
him already. His coachman was there and saw it all. When I ran into his
room, he was beside himself—it was fearful to see him. He didn’t say a
word, but galloped off there. I don’t know to this day what happened
there, but he was brought back at death’s door. I shouldn’t have known
him. _Prostration complète,_ the doctor said. And that was followed
almost by madness. Oh, why talk of it!” said the countess with a wave
of her hand. “It was an awful time! No, say what you will, she was a
bad woman. Why, what is the meaning of such desperate passions? It was
all to show herself something out of the way. Well, and that she did
do. She brought herself to ruin and two good men—her husband and my
unhappy son.”
“And what did her husband do?” asked Sergey Ivanovitch.
“He has taken her daughter. Alexey was ready to agree to anything at
first. Now it worries him terribly that he should have given his own
child away to another man. But he can’t take back his word. Karenin
came to the funeral. But we tried to prevent his meeting Alexey. For
him, for her husband, it was easier, anyway. She had set him free. But
my poor son was utterly given up to her. He had thrown up everything,
his career, me, and even then she had no mercy on him, but of set
purpose she made his ruin complete. No, say what you will, her very
death was the death of a vile woman, of no religious feeling. God
forgive me, but I can’t help hating the memory of her, when I look at
my son’s misery!”
“But how is he now?”
“It was a blessing from Providence for us—this Servian war. I’m old,
and I don’t understand the rights and wrongs of it, but it’s come as a
providential blessing to him. Of course for me, as his mother, it’s
terrible; and what’s worse, they say, _ce n’est pas très bien vu à
Pétersbourg_. But it can’t be helped! It was the one thing that could
rouse him. Yashvin—a friend of his—he had lost all he had at cards and
he was going to Servia. He came to see him and persuaded him to go. Now
it’s an interest for him. Do please talk to him a little. I want to
distract his mind. He’s so low-spirited. And as bad luck would have it,
he has toothache too. But he’ll be delighted to see you. Please do talk
to him; he’s walking up and down on that side.”
Sergey Ivanovitch said he would be very glad to, and crossed over to
the other side of the station.
Chapter 5
In the slanting evening shadows cast by the baggage piled up on the
platform, Vronsky in his long overcoat and slouch hat, with his hands
in his pockets, strode up and down, like a wild beast in a cage,
turning sharply after twenty paces. Sergey Ivanovitch fancied, as he
approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see.
This did not affect Sergey Ivanovitch in the slightest. He was above
all personal considerations with Vronsky.
At that moment Sergey Ivanovitch looked upon Vronsky as a man taking an
important part in a great cause, and Koznishev thought it his duty to
encourage him and express his approval. He went up to him.
Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognized him, and going
a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very warmly.
“Possibly you didn’t wish to see me,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “but
couldn’t I be of use to you?”
“There’s no one I should less dislike seeing than you,” said Vronsky.
“Excuse me; and there’s nothing in life for me to like.”
“I quite understand, and I merely meant to offer you my services,” said
Sergey Ivanovitch, scanning Vronsky’s face, full of unmistakable
suffering. “Wouldn’t it be of use to you to have a letter to
Ristitch—to Milan?”
“Oh, no!” Vronsky said, seeming to understand him with difficulty. “If
you don’t mind, let’s walk on. It’s so stuffy among the carriages. A
letter? No, thank you; to meet death one needs no letters of
introduction. Nor for the Turks....” he said, with a smile that was
merely of the lips. His eyes still kept their look of angry suffering.
“Yes; but you might find it easier to get into relations, which are
after all essential, with anyone prepared to see you. But that’s as you
like. I was very glad to hear of your intention. There have been so
many attacks made on the volunteers, and a man like you raises them in
public estimation.”
“My use as a man,” said Vronsky, “is that life’s worth nothing to me.
And that I’ve enough bodily energy to cut my way into their ranks, and
to trample on them or fall—I know that. I’m glad there’s something to
give my life for, for it’s not simply useless but loathsome to me.
Anyone’s welcome to it.” And his jaw twitched impatiently from the
incessant gnawing toothache, that prevented him from even speaking with
a natural expression.
“You will become another man, I predict,” said Sergey Ivanovitch,
feeling touched. “To deliver one’s brother-men from bondage is an aim
worth death and life. God grant you success outwardly—and inwardly
peace,” he added, and he held out his hand. Vronsky warmly pressed his
outstretched hand.
“Yes, as a weapon I may be of some use. But as a man, I’m a wreck,” he
jerked out.
He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong teeth, that
were like rows of ivory in his mouth. He was silent, and his eyes
rested on the wheels of the tender, slowly and smoothly rolling along
the rails.
And all at once a different pain, not an ache, but an inner trouble,
that set his whole being in anguish, made him for an instant forget his
toothache. As he glanced at the tender and the rails, under the
influence of the conversation with a friend he had not met since his
misfortune, he suddenly recalled _her_—that is, what was left of her
when he had run like one distraught into the cloak room of the railway
station—on the table, shamelessly sprawling out among strangers, the
bloodstained body so lately full of life; the head unhurt dropping back
with its weight of hair, and the curling tresses about the temples, and
the exquisite face, with red, half-opened mouth, the strange, fixed
expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the still open eyes, that
seemed to utter that fearful phrase—that he would be sorry for it—that
she had said when they were quarreling.
And he tried to think of her as she was when he met her the first time,
at a railway station too, mysterious, exquisite, loving, seeking and
giving happiness, and not cruelly revengeful as he remembered her on
that last moment. He tried to recall his best moments with her, but
those moments were poisoned forever. He could only think of her as
triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse never
to be effaced. He lost all consciousness of toothache, and his face
worked with sobs.
Passing twice up and down beside the baggage in silence and regaining
his self-possession, he addressed Sergey Ivanovitch calmly:
“You have had no telegrams since yesterday’s? Yes, driven back for a
third time, but a decisive engagement expected for tomorrow.”
And after talking a little more of King Milan’s proclamation, and the
immense effect it might have, they parted, going to their carriages on
hearing the second bell.
Chapter 6
Sergey Ivanovitch had not telegraphed to his brother to send to meet
him, as he did not know when he should be able to leave Moscow. Levin
was not at home when Katavasov and Sergey Ivanovitch in a fly hired at
the station drove up to the steps of the Pokrovskoe house, as black as
Moors from the dust of the road. Kitty, sitting on the balcony with her
father and sister, recognized her brother-in-law, and ran down to meet
him.
“What a shame not to have let us know,” she said, giving her hand to
Sergey Ivanovitch, and putting her forehead up for him to kiss.
“We drove here capitally, and have not put you out,” answered Sergey
Ivanovitch. “I’m so dirty. I’m afraid to touch you. I’ve been so busy,
I didn’t know when I should be able to tear myself away. And so you’re
still as ever enjoying your peaceful, quiet happiness,” he said,
smiling, “out of the reach of the current in your peaceful backwater.
Here’s our friend Fyodor Vassilievitch who has succeeded in getting
here at last.”
“But I’m not a negro, I shall look like a human being when I wash,”
said Katavasov in his jesting fashion, and he shook hands and smiled,
his teeth flashing white in his black face.
“Kostya will be delighted. He has gone to his settlement. It’s time he
should be home.”
“Busy as ever with his farming. It really is a peaceful backwater,”
said Katavasov; “while we in town think of nothing but the Servian war.
Well, how does our friend look at it? He’s sure not to think like other
people.”
“Oh, I don’t know, like everybody else,” Kitty answered, a little
embarrassed, looking round at Sergey Ivanovitch. “I’ll send to fetch
him. Papa’s staying with us. He’s only just come home from abroad.”
And making arrangements to send for Levin and for the guests to wash,
one in his room and the other in what had been Dolly’s, and giving
orders for their luncheon, Kitty ran out onto the balcony, enjoying the
freedom, and rapidity of movement, of which she had been deprived
during the months of her pregnancy.
“It’s Sergey Ivanovitch and Katavasov, a professor,” she said.
“Oh, that’s a bore in this heat,” said the prince.
“No, papa, he’s very nice, and Kostya’s very fond of him,” Kitty said,
with a deprecating smile, noticing the irony on her father’s face.
“Oh, I didn’t say anything.”
“You go to them, darling,” said Kitty to her sister, “and entertain
them. They saw Stiva at the station; he was quite well. And I must run
to Mitya. As ill-luck would have it, I haven’t fed him since tea. He’s
awake now, and sure to be screaming.” And feeling a rush of milk, she
hurried to the nursery.
This was not a mere guess; her connection with the child was still so
close, that she could gauge by the flow of her milk his need of food,
and knew for certain he was hungry.
She knew he was crying before she reached the nursery. And he was
indeed crying. She heard him and hastened. But the faster she went, the
louder he screamed. It was a fine healthy scream, hungry and impatient.
“Has he been screaming long, nurse, very long?” said Kitty hurriedly,
seating herself on a chair, and preparing to give the baby the breast.
“But give me him quickly. Oh, nurse, how tiresome you are! There, tie
the cap afterwards, do!”
The baby’s greedy scream was passing into sobs.
“But you can’t manage so, ma’am,” said Agafea Mihalovna, who was almost
always to be found in the nursery. “He must be put straight. A-oo!
a-oo!” she chanted over him, paying no attention to the mother.
The nurse brought the baby to his mother. Agafea Mihalovna followed him
with a face dissolving with tenderness.
“He knows me, he knows me. In God’s faith, Katerina Alexandrovna,
ma’am, he knew me!” Agafea Mihalovna cried above the baby’s screams.
But Kitty did not hear her words. Her impatience kept growing, like the
baby’s.
Their impatience hindered things for a while. The baby could not get
hold of the breast right, and was furious.
At last, after despairing, breathless screaming, and vain sucking,
things went right, and mother and child felt simultaneously soothed,
and both subsided into calm.
“But poor darling, he’s all in perspiration!” said Kitty in a whisper,
touching the baby.
“What makes you think he knows you?” she added, with a sidelong glance
at the baby’s eyes, that peered roguishly, as she fancied, from under
his cap, at his rhythmically puffing cheeks, and the little red-palmed
hand he was waving.
“Impossible! If he knew anyone, he would have known me,” said Kitty, in
response to Agafea Mihalovna’s statement, and she smiled.
She smiled because, though she said he could not know her, in her heart
she was sure that he knew not merely Agafea Mihalovna, but that he knew
and understood everything, and knew and understood a great deal too
that no one else knew, and that she, his mother, had learned and come
to understand only through him. To Agafea Mihalovna, to the nurse, to
his grandfather, to his father even, Mitya was a living being,
requiring only material care, but for his mother he had long been a
mortal being, with whom there had been a whole series of spiritual
relations already.
“When he wakes up, please God, you shall see for yourself. Then when I
do like this, he simply beams on me, the darling! Simply beams like a
sunny day!” said Agafea Mihalovna.
“Well, well; then we shall see,” whispered Kitty. “But now go away,
he’s going to sleep.”
Chapter 7
Agafea Mihalovna went out on tiptoe; the nurse let down the blind,
chased a fly out from under the muslin canopy of the crib, and a
bumblebee struggling on the window-frame, and sat down waving a faded
branch of birch over the mother and the baby.
“How hot it is! if God would send a drop of rain,” she said.
“Yes, yes, sh—sh—sh——” was all Kitty answered, rocking a little, and
tenderly squeezing the plump little arm, with rolls of fat at the
wrist, which Mitya still waved feebly as he opened and shut his eyes.
That hand worried Kitty; she longed to kiss the little hand, but was
afraid to for fear of waking the baby. At last the little hand ceased
waving, and the eyes closed. Only from time to time, as he went on
sucking, the baby raised his long, curly eyelashes and peeped at his
mother with wet eyes, that looked black in the twilight. The nurse had
left off fanning, and was dozing. From above came the peals of the old
prince’s voice, and the chuckle of Katavasov.
“They have got into talk without me,” thought Kitty, “but still it’s
vexing that Kostya’s out. He’s sure to have gone to the bee-house
again. Though it’s a pity he’s there so often, still I’m glad. It
distracts his mind. He’s become altogether happier and better now than
in the spring. He used to be so gloomy and worried that I felt
frightened for him. And how absurd he is!” she whispered, smiling.
She knew what worried her husband. It was his unbelief. Although, if
she had been asked whether she supposed that in the future life, if he
did not believe, he would be damned, she would have had to admit that
he would be damned, his unbelief did not cause her unhappiness. And
she, confessing that for an unbeliever there can be no salvation, and
loving her husband’s soul more than anything in the world, thought with
a smile of his unbelief, and told herself that he was absurd.
“What does he keep reading philosophy of some sort for all this year?”
she wondered. “If it’s all written in those books, he can understand
them. If it’s all wrong, why does he read them? He says himself that he
would like to believe. Then why is it he doesn’t believe? Surely from
his thinking so much? And he thinks so much from being solitary. He’s
always alone, alone. He can’t talk about it all to us. I fancy he’ll be
glad of these visitors, especially Katavasov. He likes discussions with
them,” she thought, and passed instantly to the consideration of where
it would be more convenient to put Katavasov, to sleep alone or to
share Sergey Ivanovitch’s room. And then an idea suddenly struck her,
which made her shudder and even disturb Mitya, who glanced severely at
her. “I do believe the laundress hasn’t sent the washing yet, and all
the best sheets are in use. If I don’t see to it, Agafea Mihalovna will
give Sergey Ivanovitch the wrong sheets,” and at the very idea of this
the blood rushed to Kitty’s face.
“Yes, I will arrange it,” she decided, and going back to her former
thoughts, she remembered that some spiritual question of importance had
been interrupted, and she began to recall what. “Yes, Kostya, an
unbeliever,” she thought again with a smile.
“Well, an unbeliever then! Better let him always be one than like
Madame Stahl, or what I tried to be in those days abroad. No, he won’t
ever sham anything.”
And a recent instance of his goodness rose vividly to her mind. A
fortnight ago a penitent letter had come from Stepan Arkadyevitch to
Dolly. He besought her to save his honor, to sell her estate to pay his
debts. Dolly was in despair, she detested her husband, despised him,
pitied him, resolved on a separation, resolved to refuse, but ended by
agreeing to sell part of her property. After that, with an
irrepressible smile of tenderness, Kitty recalled her husband’s
shamefaced embarrassment, his repeated awkward efforts to approach the
subject, and how at last, having thought of the one means of helping
Dolly without wounding her pride, he had suggested to Kitty—what had
not occurred to her before—that she should give up her share of the
property.
“He an unbeliever indeed! With his heart, his dread of offending
anyone, even a child! Everything for others, nothing for himself.
Sergey Ivanovitch simply considers it as Kostya’s duty to be his
steward. And it’s the same with his sister. Now Dolly and her children
are under his guardianship; all these peasants who come to him every
day, as though he were bound to be at their service.”
“Yes, only be like your father, only like him,” she said, handing Mitya
over to the nurse, and putting her lips to his cheek.
Chapter 8
Ever since, by his beloved brother’s deathbed, Levin had first glanced
into the questions of life and death in the light of these new
convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his
twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish
and youthful beliefs—he had been stricken with horror, not so much of
death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how,
and what it was. The physical organization, its decay, the
indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy,
evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old belief.
These words and the ideas associated with them were very well for
intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin
felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a
muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is
immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature that he
is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.
From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went
on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his
lack of knowledge.
He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were not
merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order of
ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible.
At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had
completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was
staying in Moscow after his wife’s confinement, with nothing to do, the
question that clamored for solution had more and more often, more and
more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.
The question was summed up for him thus: “If I do not accept the
answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do
I accept?” And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from
finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find
anything at all like an answer.
He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops and tool
shops.
Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation,
with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these
questions and their solution.
What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority
of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs
for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this,
and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the
principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were
these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part? or
was it that they understood the answers science gave to these problems
in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously
studied both these men’s opinions and the books which treated of these
scientific explanations.
One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind,
was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of
the circle of his young days at college, that religion had outlived its
day, and that it was now practically non-existent. All the people
nearest to him who were good in their lives were believers. The old
prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all
the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had believed
in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian
people, all the working people for whose life he felt the deepest
respect, believed.
Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many
scientific books, was that the men who shared his views had no other
construction to put on them, and that they gave no explanation of the
questions which he felt he could not live without answering, but simply
ignored their existence and attempted to explain other questions of no
possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the
materialistic theory of consciousness, and so forth.
Moreover, during his wife’s confinement, something had happened that
seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into
praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had
passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into
the rest of his life.
He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now
he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all
fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for his
spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit that it was
a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments. He was
miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual
forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.
Chapter 9
These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger from
time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and the more
he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the aim he
was pursuing.
Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had become convinced
that he would find no solution in the materialists, he had read and
re-read thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and
Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation
of life.
Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or was himself
seeking arguments to refute other theories, especially those of the
materialists; but as soon as he began to read or sought for himself a
solution of problems, the same thing always happened. As long as he
followed the fixed definition of obscure words such as _spirit, will,
freedom, essence,_ purposely letting himself go into the snare of words
the philosophers set for him, he seemed to comprehend something. But he
had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from
life itself to what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with
the fixed definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces
at once like a house of cards, and it became clear that the edifice had
been built up out of those transposed words, apart from anything in
life more important than reason.
At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his _will_ the
word _love_, and for a couple of days this new philosophy charmed him,
till he removed a little away from it. But then, when he turned from
life itself to glance at it again, it fell away too, and proved to be
the same muslin garment with no warmth in it.
His brother Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to read the theological works
of Homiakov. Levin read the second volume of Homiakov’s works, and in
spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, argumentative style which at first
repelled him, he was impressed by the doctrine of the church he found
in them. He was struck at first by the idea that the apprehension of
divine truths had not been vouchsafed to man, but to a corporation of
men bound together by love—to the church. What delighted him was the
thought how much easier it was to believe in a still existing living
church, embracing all the beliefs of men, and having God at its head,
and therefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept the faith in
God, in the creation, the fall, the redemption, than to begin with God,
a mysterious, far-away God, the creation, etc. But afterwards, on
reading a Catholic writer’s history of the church, and then a Greek
orthodox writer’s history of the church, and seeing that the two
churches, in their very conception infallible, each deny the authority
of the other, Homiakov’s doctrine of the church lost all its charm for
him, and this edifice crumbled into dust like the philosophers’
edifices.
All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments of
horror.
“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; and
that I can’t know, and so I can’t live,” Levin said to himself.
“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a
bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that
bubble is Me.”
It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result of ages
of human thought in that direction.
This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated by
human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. It was the
prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had
unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as anyway the
clearest, and made it his own.
But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some wicked
power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit.
He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man had
in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil. And
there was one means—death.
And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several
times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted
to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of
shooting himself.
But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on
living.
Chapter 10
When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he could
find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair, but he left
off questioning himself about it. It seemed as though he knew both what
he was and for what he was living, for he acted and lived resolutely
and without hesitation. Indeed, in these latter days he was far more
decided and unhesitating in life than he had ever been.
When he went back to the country at the beginning of June, he went back
also to his usual pursuits. The management of the estate, his relations
with the peasants and the neighbors, the care of his household, the
management of his sister’s and brother’s property, of which he had the
direction, his relations with his wife and kindred, the care of his
child, and the new bee-keeping hobby he had taken up that spring,
filled all his time.
These things occupied him now, not because he justified them to himself
by any sort of general principles, as he had done in former days; on
the contrary, disappointed by the failure of his former efforts for the
general welfare, and too much occupied with his own thought and the
mass of business with which he was burdened from all sides, he had
completely given up thinking of the general good, and he busied himself
with all this work simply because it seemed to him that he must do what
he was doing—that he could not do otherwise. In former days—almost from
childhood, and increasingly up to full manhood—when he had tried to do
anything that would be good for all, for humanity, for Russia, for the
whole village, he had noticed that the idea of it had been pleasant,
but the work itself had always been incoherent, that then he had never
had a full conviction of its absolute necessity, and that the work that
had begun by seeming so great, had grown less and less, till it
vanished into nothing. But now, since his marriage, when he had begun
to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he
experienced no delight at all at the thought of the work he was doing,
he felt a complete conviction of its necessity, saw that it succeeded
far better than in old days, and that it kept on growing more and more.
Now, involuntarily it seemed, he cut more and more deeply into the soil
like a plough, so that he could not be drawn out without turning aside
the furrow.
To live the same family life as his father and forefathers—that is, in
the same condition of culture—and to bring up his children in the same,
was incontestably necessary. It was as necessary as dining when one was
hungry. And to do this, just as it was necessary to cook dinner, it was
necessary to keep the mechanism of agriculture at Pokrovskoe going so
as to yield an income. Just as incontestably as it was necessary to
repay a debt was it necessary to keep the property in such a condition
that his son, when he received it as a heritage, would say “thank you”
to his father as Levin had said “thank you” to his grandfather for all
he built and planted. And to do this it was necessary to look after the
land himself, not to let it, and to breed cattle, manure the fields,
and plant timber.
It was impossible not to look after the affairs of Sergey Ivanovitch,
of his sister, of the peasants who came to him for advice and were
accustomed to do so—as impossible as to fling down a child one is
carrying in one’s arms. It was necessary to look after the comfort of
his sister-in-law and her children, and of his wife and baby, and it
was impossible not to spend with them at least a short time each day.
And all this, together with shooting and his new bee-keeping, filled up
the whole of Levin’s life, which had no meaning at all for him, when he
began to think.
But besides knowing thoroughly what he had to do, Levin knew in just
the same way _how_ he had to do it all, and what was more important
than the rest.
He knew he must hire laborers as cheaply as possible; but to hire men
under bond, paying them in advance at less than the current rate of
wages, was what he must not do, even though it was very profitable.
Selling straw to the peasants in times of scarcity of provender was
what he might do, even though he felt sorry for them; but the tavern
and the pothouse must be put down, though they were a source of income.
Felling timber must be punished as severely as possible, but he could
not exact forfeits for cattle being driven onto his fields; and though
it annoyed the keeper and made the peasants not afraid to graze their
cattle on his land, he could not keep their cattle as a punishment.
To Pyotr, who was paying a money-lender ten per cent. a month, he must
lend a sum of money to set him free. But he could not let off peasants
who did not pay their rent, nor let them fall into arrears. It was
impossible to overlook the bailiff’s not having mown the meadows and
letting the hay spoil; and it was equally impossible to mow those acres
where a young copse had been planted. It was impossible to excuse a
laborer who had gone home in the busy season because his father was
dying, however sorry he might feel for him, and he must subtract from
his pay those costly months of idleness. But it was impossible not to
allow monthly rations to the old servants who were of no use for
anything.
Levin knew that when he got home he must first of all go to his wife,
who was unwell, and that the peasants who had been waiting for three
hours to see him could wait a little longer. He knew too that,
regardless of all the pleasure he felt in taking a swarm, he must
forego that pleasure, and leave the old man to see to the bees alone,
while he talked to the peasants who had come after him to the
bee-house.
Whether he were acting rightly or wrongly he did not know, and far from
trying to prove that he was, nowadays he avoided all thought or talk
about it.
Reasoning had brought him to doubt, and prevented him from seeing what
he ought to do and what he ought not. When he did not think, but simply
lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge
in his soul, determining which of two possible courses of action was
the better and which was the worse, and as soon as he did not act
rightly, he was at once aware of it.
So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he
was and what he was living for, and harassed at this lack of knowledge
to such a point that he was afraid of suicide, and yet firmly laying
down his own individual definite path in life.
Chapter 11
The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of
Levin’s most painful days. It was the very busiest working time, when
all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in
labor, such as is never shown in any other conditions of life, and
would be highly esteemed if the men who showed these qualities
themselves thought highly of them, and if it were not repeated every
year, and if the results of this intense labor were not so simple.
To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the meadows,
turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the winter corn—all this
seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting through it all
everyone in the village, from the old man to the young child, must toil
incessantly for three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual,
living on rye-beer, onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the
sheaves at night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the
twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over Russia.
Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in the
closest relations with the peasants, Levin always felt in this busy
time that he was infected by this general quickening of energy in the
people.
In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye, and
to the oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and returning home
at the time his wife and sister-in-law were getting up, he drank coffee
with them and walked to the farm, where a new thrashing machine was to
be set working to get ready the seed-corn.
He was standing in the cool granary, still fragrant with the leaves of
the hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled aspen beams of the
new thatch roof. He gazed through the open door in which the dry bitter
dust of the thrashing whirled and played, at the grass of the thrashing
floor in the sunlight and the fresh straw that had been brought in from
the barn, then at the speckly-headed, white-breasted swallows that flew
chirping in under the roof and, fluttering their wings, settled in the
crevices of the doorway, then at the peasants bustling in the dark,
dusty barn, and he thought strange thoughts.
“Why is it all being done?” he thought. “Why am I standing here, making
them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show their zeal
before me? What is that old Matrona, my old friend, toiling for? (I
doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the fire)” he thought,
looking at a thin old woman who was raking up the grain, moving
painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the uneven, rough
floor. “Then she recovered, but today or tomorrow or in ten years she
won’t; they’ll bury her, and nothing will be left either of her or of
that smart girl in the red jacket, who with that skillful, soft action
shakes the ears out of their husks. They’ll bury her and this piebald
horse, and very soon too,” he thought, gazing at the heavily moving,
panting horse that kept walking up the wheel that turned under him.
“And they will bury her and Fyodor the thrasher with his curly beard
full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulders—they will bury
him. He’s untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the
women, and quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel. And
what’s more, it’s not them alone—me they’ll bury too, and nothing will
be left. What for?”
He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to reckon how
much they thrashed in an hour. He wanted to know this so as to judge by
it the task to set for the day.
“It’ll soon be one, and they’re only beginning the third sheaf,”
thought Levin. He went up to the man that was feeding the machine, and
shouting over the roar of the machine he told him to put it in more
slowly. “You put in too much at a time, Fyodor. Do you see—it gets
choked, that’s why it isn’t getting on. Do it evenly.”
Fyodor, black with the dust that clung to his moist face, shouted
something in response, but still went on doing it as Levin did not want
him to.
Levin, going up to the machine, moved Fyodor aside, and began feeding
the corn in himself. Working on till the peasants’ dinner hour, which
was not long in coming, he went out of the barn with Fyodor and fell
into talk with him, stopping beside a neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on
the thrashing floor for seed.
Fyodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which Levin
had once allotted land to his cooperative association. Now it had been
let to a former house porter.
Levin talked to Fyodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a
well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village,
would not take the land for the coming year.
“It’s a high rent; it wouldn’t pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,”
answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt.
“But how does Kirillov make it pay?”
“Mituh!” (so the peasant called the house porter, in a tone of
contempt), “you may be sure he’ll make it pay, Konstantin Dmitrievitch!
He’ll get his share, however he has to squeeze to get it! He’s no mercy
on a Christian. But Uncle Fokanitch” (so he called the old peasant
Platon), “do you suppose he’d flay the skin off a man? Where there’s
debt, he’ll let anyone off. And he’ll not wring the last penny out.
He’s a man too.”
“But why will he let anyone off?”
“Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own
wants and nothing else, like Mituh, he only thinks of filling his
belly, but Fokanitch is a righteous man. He lives for his soul. He does
not forget God.”
“How thinks of God? How does he live for his soul?” Levin almost
shouted.
“Why, to be sure, in truth, in God’s way. Folks are different. Take you
now, you wouldn’t wrong a man....”
“Yes, yes, good-bye!” said Levin, breathless with excitement, and
turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away towards home.
At the peasant’s words that Fokanitch lived for his soul, in truth, in
God’s way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst out as
though they had been locked up, and all striving towards one goal, they
thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with their light.
Chapter 12
Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts
(he could not yet disentangle them) as in his spiritual condition,
unlike anything he had experienced before.
The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric
shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the
whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly
occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind
even when he was talking about the land.
He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new
thing, not yet knowing what it was.
“Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one
say anything more senseless than what he said? He said that one must
not live for one’s own wants, that is, that one must not live for what
we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire, but must live
for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor
even define. What of it? Didn’t I understand those senseless words of
Fyodor’s? And understanding them, did I doubt of their truth? Did I
think them stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I understood him, and exactly
as he understands the words. I understood them more fully and clearly
than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted
nor can I doubt about it. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world
understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no
doubt and are always agreed.
“And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle
which would convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me.
And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing,
surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!
“Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That’s comprehensible
and rational. All of us as rational beings can’t do anything else but
live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one
mustn’t live for one’s belly, but must live for truth, for God, and at
a hint I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages
ago and men living now—peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned,
who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying
the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must
live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm,
incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained
by the reason—it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no
effects.
“If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a
reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of
cause and effect.
“And yet I know it, and we all know it.
“What could be a greater miracle than that?
“Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?”
thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor
his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged
suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him
incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going
farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the
shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head
and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.
“Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,” he thought,
looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the
movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch-grass and
lifting up in its progress a leaf of goat-weed. “What have I
discovered?” he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out
of the beetle’s way and twisting another blade of grass above for the
beetle to cross over onto it. “What is it makes me glad? What have I
discovered?
“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I
understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives
me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.
“Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass
and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened
her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of
matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws.
And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and the clouds and the misty
patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? into
what?—Eternal evolution and struggle.... As though there could be any
sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that
in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not
discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings.
Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: ‘To live for God, for my
soul.’ And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and
marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes,
pride,” he said to himself, turning over on his stomach and beginning
to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them.
“And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect. And most
of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect. The
cheating knavishness of intellect, that’s it,” he said to himself.
And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas
during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear
confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.
Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too,
there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and forgetfulness, he
had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he
must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him
as the evil jest of some devil, or shoot himself.
But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and
feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many joys
and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of his
life.
What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but
thinking wrongly.
He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that
he had sucked in with his mother’s milk, but he had thought, not merely
without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.
Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the
beliefs in which he had been brought up.
“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had
not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and
not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed.
Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed
for me.” And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not
conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not
known what he was living for.
“I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an
answer to my question—it is incommensurable with my question. The
answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is
right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any
way, it was given to me as to all men, _given_, because I could not
have got it from anywhere.
“Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing
that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my
childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already
in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the
struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who
hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of
reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because
it’s irrational.”
Chapter 13
And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and
her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking
raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other’s
mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks,
began reminding them in Levin’s presence of the trouble their mischief
gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their
sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to
drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would
have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.
And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which
the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply
annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not
believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe
it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they
habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were
destroying was the very thing they lived by.
“That all comes of itself,” they thought, “and there’s nothing
interesting or important about it because it has always been so, and
always will be so. And it’s all always the same. We’ve no need to think
about that, it’s all ready. But we want to invent something of our own,
and new. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup, and cooking
them over a candle, and squirting milk straight into each other’s
mouths. That’s fun, and something new, and not a bit worse than
drinking out of cups.”
“Isn’t it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid of
reason for the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of
the life of man?” he thought.
“And don’t all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the
path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him
to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly
that he could not live at all without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be
seen in the development of each philosopher’s theory, that he knows
what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as positively
as the peasant Fyodor, and not a bit more clearly than he, and is
simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what
everyone knows?
“Now then, leave the children to themselves to get things alone and
make their crockery, get the milk from the cows, and so on. Would they
be naughty then? Why, they’d die of hunger! Well, then, leave us with
our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of the
Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any idea of
moral evil.
“Just try and build up anything without those ideas!
“We only try to destroy them, because we’re spiritually provided for.
Exactly like the children!
“Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant, that
alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?
“Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with
the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and
living on those blessings, like the children I did not understand them,
and destroy, that is try to destroy, what I live by. And as soon as an
important moment of life comes, like the children when they are cold
and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than the children when their
mother scolds them for their childish mischief, do I feel that my
childish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned against me.
“Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me,
revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief
thing taught by the church.
“The church! the church!” Levin repeated to himself. He turned over on
the other side, and leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the
distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river.
“But can I believe in all the church teaches?” he thought, trying
himself, and thinking of everything that could destroy his present
peace of mind. Intentionally he recalled all those doctrines of the
church which had always seemed most strange and had always been a
stumbling block to him.
“The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence? By
nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I explain evil?... The
atonement?...
“But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has been
told to me and all men.”
And it seemed to him that there was not a single article of faith of
the church which could destroy the chief thing—faith in God, in
goodness, as the one goal of man’s destiny.
Under every article of faith of the church could be put the faith in
the service of truth instead of one’s desires. And each doctrine did
not simply leave that faith unshaken, each doctrine seemed essential to
complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that made
it possible for each man and millions of different sorts of men, wise
men and imbeciles, old men and children—all men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty,
beggars and kings to understand perfectly the same one thing, and to
build up thereby that life of the soul which alone is worth living, and
which alone is precious to us.
Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. “Do I
not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch?
But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it
not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite
space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome, and more
right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.”
Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to mysterious
voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly within him.
“Can this be faith?” he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness.
“My God, I thank Thee!” he said, gulping down his sobs, and with both
hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.
Chapter 14
Levin looked before him and saw a herd of cattle, then he caught sight
of his trap with Raven in the shafts, and the coachman, who, driving up
to the herd, said something to the herdsman. Then he heard the rattle
of the wheels and the snort of the sleek horse close by him. But he was
so buried in his thoughts that he did not even wonder why the coachman
had come for him.
He only thought of that when the coachman had driven quite up to him
and shouted to him. “The mistress sent me. Your brother has come, and
some gentleman with him.”
Levin got into the trap and took the reins. As though just roused out
of sleep, for a long while Levin could not collect his faculties. He
stared at the sleek horse flecked with lather between his haunches and
on his neck, where the harness rubbed, stared at Ivan the coachman
sitting beside him, and remembered that he was expecting his brother,
thought that his wife was most likely uneasy at his long absence, and
tried to guess who was the visitor who had come with his brother. And
his brother and his wife and the unknown guest seemed to him now quite
different from before. He fancied that now his relations with all men
would be different.
“With my brother there will be none of that aloofness there always used
to be between us, there will be no disputes; with Kitty there shall
never be quarrels; with the visitor, whoever he may be, I will be
friendly and nice; with the servants, with Ivan, it will all be
different.”
Pulling the stiff rein and holding in the good horse that snorted with
impatience and seemed begging to be let go, Levin looked round at Ivan
sitting beside him, not knowing what to do with his unoccupied hand,
continually pressing down his shirt as it puffed out, and he tried to
find something to start a conversation about with him. He would have
said that Ivan had pulled the saddle-girth up too high, but that was
like blame, and he longed for friendly, warm talk. Nothing else
occurred to him.
“Your honor must keep to the right and mind that stump,” said the
coachman, pulling the rein Levin held.
“Please don’t touch and don’t teach me!” said Levin, angered by this
interference. Now, as always, interference made him angry, and he felt
sorrowfully at once how mistaken had been his supposition that his
spiritual condition could immediately change him in contact with
reality.
He was not a quarter of a mile from home when he saw Grisha and Tanya
running to meet him.
“Uncle Kostya! mamma’s coming, and grandfather, and Sergey Ivanovitch,
and someone else,” they said, clambering up into the trap.
“Who is he?”
“An awfully terrible person! And he does like this with his arms,” said
Tanya, getting up in the trap and mimicking Katavasov.
“Old or young?” asked Levin, laughing, reminded of someone, he did not
know whom, by Tanya’s performance.
“Oh, I hope it’s not a tiresome person!” thought Levin.
As soon as he turned, at a bend in the road, and saw the party coming,
Levin recognized Katavasov in a straw hat, walking along swinging his
arms just as Tanya had shown him. Katavasov was very fond of discussing
metaphysics, having derived his notions from natural science writers
who had never studied metaphysics, and in Moscow Levin had had many
arguments with him of late.
And one of these arguments, in which Katavasov had obviously considered
that he came off victorious, was the first thing Levin thought of as he
recognized him.
“No, whatever I do, I won’t argue and give utterance to my ideas
lightly,” he thought.
Getting out of the trap and greeting his brother and Katavasov, Levin
asked about his wife.
“She has taken Mitya to Kolok” (a copse near the house). “She meant to
have him out there because it’s so hot indoors,” said Dolly. Levin had
always advised his wife not to take the baby to the wood, thinking it
unsafe, and he was not pleased to hear this.
“She rushes about from place to place with him,” said the prince,
smiling. “I advised her to try putting him in the ice cellar.”
“She meant to come to the bee-house. She thought you would be there. We
are going there,” said Dolly.
“Well, and what are you doing?” said Sergey Ivanovitch, falling back
from the rest and walking beside him.
“Oh, nothing special. Busy as usual with the land,” answered Levin.
“Well, and what about you? Come for long? We have been expecting you
for such a long time.”
“Only for a fortnight. I’ve a great deal to do in Moscow.”
At these words the brothers’ eyes met, and Levin, in spite of the
desire he always had, stronger than ever just now, to be on
affectionate and still more open terms with his brother, felt an
awkwardness in looking at him. He dropped his eyes and did not know
what to say.
Casting over the subjects of conversation that would be pleasant to
Sergey Ivanovitch, and would keep him off the subject of the Servian
war and the Slavonic question, at which he had hinted by the allusion
to what he had to do in Moscow, Levin began to talk of Sergey
Ivanovitch’s book.
“Well, have there been reviews of your book?” he asked.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled at the intentional character of the question.
“No one is interested in that now, and I less than anyone,” he said.
“Just look, Darya Alexandrovna, we shall have a shower,” he added,
pointing with a sunshade at the white rain clouds that showed above the
aspen tree-tops.
And these words were enough to re-establish again between the brothers
that tone—hardly hostile, but chilly—which Levin had been so longing to
avoid.
Levin went up to Katavasov.
“It was jolly of you to make up your mind to come,” he said to him.
“I’ve been meaning to a long while. Now we shall have some discussion,
we’ll see to that. Have you been reading Spencer?”
“No, I’ve not finished reading him,” said Levin. “But I don’t need him
now.”
“How’s that? that’s interesting. Why so?”
“I mean that I’m fully convinced that the solution of the problems that
interest me I shall never find in him and his like. Now....”
But Katavasov’s serene and good-humored expression suddenly struck him,
and he felt such tenderness for his own happy mood, which he was
unmistakably disturbing by this conversation, that he remembered his
resolution and stopped short.
“But we’ll talk later on,” he added. “If we’re going to the bee-house,
it’s this way, along this little path,” he said, addressing them all.
Going along the narrow path to a little uncut meadow covered on one
side with thick clumps of brilliant heart’s-ease among which stood up
here and there tall, dark green tufts of hellebore, Levin settled his
guests in the dense, cool shade of the young aspens on a bench and some
stumps purposely put there for visitors to the bee-house who might be
afraid of the bees, and he went off himself to the hut to get bread,
cucumbers, and fresh honey, to regale them with.
Trying to make his movements as deliberate as possible, and listening
to the bees that buzzed more and more frequently past him, he walked
along the little path to the hut. In the very entry one bee hummed
angrily, caught in his beard, but he carefully extricated it. Going
into the shady outer room, he took down from the wall his veil, that
hung on a peg, and putting it on, and thrusting his hands into his
pockets, he went into the fenced-in bee-garden, where there stood in
the midst of a closely mown space in regular rows, fastened with bast
on posts, all the hives he knew so well, the old stocks, each with its
own history, and along the fences the younger swarms hived that year.
In front of the openings of the hives, it made his eyes giddy to watch
the bees and drones whirling round and round about the same spot, while
among them the working bees flew in and out with spoils or in search of
them, always in the same direction into the wood to the flowering lime
trees and back to the hives.
His ears were filled with the incessant hum in various notes, now the
busy hum of the working bee flying quickly off, then the blaring of the
lazy drone, and the excited buzz of the bees on guard protecting their
property from the enemy and preparing to sting. On the farther side of
the fence the old bee-keeper was shaving a hoop for a tub, and he did
not see Levin. Levin stood still in the midst of the beehives and did
not call him.
He was glad of a chance to be alone to recover from the influence of
ordinary actual life, which had already depressed his happy mood. He
thought that he had already had time to lose his temper with Ivan, to
show coolness to his brother, and to talk flippantly with Katavasov.
“Can it have been only a momentary mood, and will it pass and leave no
trace?” he thought. But the same instant, going back to his mood, he
felt with delight that something new and important had happened to him.
Real life had only for a time overcast the spiritual peace he had
found, but it was still untouched within him.
Just as the bees, whirling round him, now menacing him and distracting
his attention, prevented him from enjoying complete physical peace,
forced him to restrain his movements to avoid them, so had the petty
cares that had swarmed about him from the moment he got into the trap
restricted his spiritual freedom; but that lasted only so long as he
was among them. Just as his bodily strength was still unaffected, in
spite of the bees, so too was the spiritual strength that he had just
become aware of.
Chapter 15
“Do you know, Kostya, with whom Sergey Ivanovitch traveled on his way
here?” said Dolly, doling out cucumbers and honey to the children;
“with Vronsky! He’s going to Servia.”
“And not alone; he’s taking a squadron out with him at his own
expense,” said Katavasov.
“That’s the right thing for him,” said Levin. “Are volunteers still
going out then?” he added, glancing at Sergey Ivanovitch.
Sergey Ivanovitch did not answer. He was carefully with a blunt knife
getting a live bee covered with sticky honey out of a cup full of white
honeycomb.
“I should think so! You should have seen what was going on at the
station yesterday!” said Katavasov, biting with a juicy sound into a
cucumber.
“Well, what is one to make of it? For mercy’s sake, do explain to me,
Sergey Ivanovitch, where are all those volunteers going, whom are they
fighting with?” asked the old prince, unmistakably taking up a
conversation that had sprung up in Levin’s absence.
“With the Turks,” Sergey Ivanovitch answered, smiling serenely, as he
extricated the bee, dark with honey and helplessly kicking, and put it
with the knife on a stout aspen leaf.
“But who has declared war on the Turks?—Ivan Ivanovitch Ragozov and
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, assisted by Madame Stahl?”
“No one has declared war, but people sympathize with their neighbors’
sufferings and are eager to help them,” said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“But the prince is not speaking of help,” said Levin, coming to the
assistance of his father-in-law, “but of war. The prince says that
private persons cannot take part in war without the permission of the
government.”
“Kostya, mind, that’s a bee! Really, they’ll sting us!” said Dolly,
waving away a wasp.
“But that’s not a bee, it’s a wasp,” said Levin.
“Well now, well, what’s your own theory?” Katavasov said to Levin with
a smile, distinctly challenging him to a discussion. “Why have not
private persons the right to do so?”
“Oh, my theory’s this: war is on one side such a beastly, cruel, and
awful thing, that no one man, not to speak of a Christian, can
individually take upon himself the responsibility of beginning wars;
that can only be done by a government, which is called upon to do this,
and is driven inevitably into war. On the other hand, both political
science and common sense teach us that in matters of state, and
especially in the matter of war, private citizens must forego their
personal individual will.”
Sergey Ivanovitch and Katavasov had their replies ready, and both began
speaking at the same time.
“But the point is, my dear fellow, that there may be cases when the
government does not carry out the will of the citizens and then the
public asserts its will,” said Katavasov.
But evidently Sergey Ivanovitch did not approve of this answer. His
brows contracted at Katavasov’s words and he said something else.
“You don’t put the matter in its true light. There is no question here
of a declaration of war, but simply the expression of a human Christian
feeling. Our brothers, one with us in religion and in race, are being
massacred. Even supposing they were not our brothers nor
fellow-Christians, but simply children, women, old people, feeling is
aroused and Russians go eagerly to help in stopping these atrocities.
Fancy, if you were going along the street and saw drunken men beating a
woman or a child—I imagine you would not stop to inquire whether war
had been declared on the men, but would throw yourself on them, and
protect the victim.”
“But I should not kill them,” said Levin.
“Yes, you would kill them.”
“I don’t know. If I saw that, I might give way to my impulse of the
moment, but I can’t say beforehand. And such a momentary impulse there
is not, and there cannot be, in the case of the oppression of the
Slavonic peoples.”
“Possibly for you there is not; but for others there is,” said Sergey
Ivanovitch, frowning with displeasure. “There are traditions still
extant among the people of Slavs of the true faith suffering under the
yoke of the ‘unclean sons of Hagar.’ The people have heard of the
sufferings of their brethren and have spoken.”
“Perhaps so,” said Levin evasively; “but I don’t see it. I’m one of the
people myself, and I don’t feel it.”
“Here am I too,” said the old prince. “I’ve been staying abroad and
reading the papers, and I must own, up to the time of the Bulgarian
atrocities, I couldn’t make out why it was all the Russians were all of
a sudden so fond of their Slavonic brethren, while I didn’t feel the
slightest affection for them. I was very much upset, thought I was a
monster, or that it was the influence of Carlsbad on me. But since I
have been here, my mind’s been set at rest. I see that there are people
besides me who’re only interested in Russia, and not in their Slavonic
brethren. Here’s Konstantin too.”
“Personal opinions mean nothing in such a case,” said Sergey
Ivanovitch; “it’s not a matter of personal opinions when all Russia—the
whole people—has expressed its will.”
“But excuse me, I don’t see that. The people don’t know anything about
it, if you come to that,” said the old prince.
“Oh, papa!... how can you say that? And last Sunday in church?” said
Dolly, listening to the conversation. “Please give me a cloth,” she
said to the old man, who was looking at the children with a smile.
“Why, it’s not possible that all....”
“But what was it in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to read
that. He read it. They didn’t understand a word of it. Then they were
told that there was to be a collection for a pious object in church;
well, they pulled out their halfpence and gave them, but what for they
couldn’t say.”
“The people cannot help knowing; the sense of their own destinies is
always in the people, and at such moments as the present that sense
finds utterance,” said Sergey Ivanovitch with conviction, glancing at
the old bee-keeper.
The handsome old man, with black grizzled beard and thick silvery hair,
stood motionless, holding a cup of honey, looking down from the height
of his tall figure with friendly serenity at the gentlefolk, obviously
understanding nothing of their conversation and not caring to
understand it.
“That’s so, no doubt,” he said, with a significant shake of his head at
Sergey Ivanovitch’s words.
“Here, then, ask him. He knows nothing about it and thinks nothing,”
said Levin. “Have you heard about the war, Mihalitch?” he said, turning
to him. “What they read in the church? What do you think about it?
Ought we to fight for the Christians?”
“What should we think? Alexander Nikolaevitch our Emperor has thought
for us; he thinks for us indeed in all things. It’s clearer for him to
see. Shall I bring a bit more bread? Give the little lad some more?” he
said addressing Darya Alexandrovna and pointing to Grisha, who had
finished his crust.
“I don’t need to ask,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “we have seen and are
seeing hundreds and hundreds of people who give up everything to serve
a just cause, come from every part of Russia, and directly and clearly
express their thought and aim. They bring their halfpence or go
themselves and say directly what for. What does it mean?”
“It means, to my thinking,” said Levin, who was beginning to get warm,
“that among eighty millions of people there can always be found not
hundreds, as now, but tens of thousands of people who have lost caste,
ne’er-do-wells, who are always ready to go anywhere—to Pogatchev’s
bands, to Khiva, to Servia....”
“I tell you that it’s not a case of hundreds or of ne’er-do-wells, but
the best representatives of the people!” said Sergey Ivanovitch, with
as much irritation as if he were defending the last penny of his
fortune. “And what of the subscriptions? In this case it is a whole
people directly expressing their will.”
“That word ‘people’ is so vague,” said Levin. “Parish clerks, teachers,
and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what it’s all about.
The rest of the eighty millions, like Mihalitch, far from expressing
their will, haven’t the faintest idea what there is for them to express
their will about. What right have we to say that this is the people’s
will?”
Chapter 16
Sergey Ivanovitch, being practiced in argument, did not reply, but at
once turned the conversation to another aspect of the subject.
“Oh, if you want to learn the spirit of the people by arithmetical
computation, of course it’s very difficult to arrive at it. And voting
has not been introduced among us and cannot be introduced, for it does
not express the will of the people; but there are other ways of
reaching that. It is felt in the air, it is felt by the heart. I won’t
speak of those deep currents which are astir in the still ocean of the
people, and which are evident to every unprejudiced man; let us look at
society in the narrow sense. All the most diverse sections of the
educated public, hostile before, are merged in one. Every division is
at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over and over
again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is
carrying them in one direction.”
“Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing,” said the prince.
“That’s true. But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak
before a storm. One can hear nothing for them.”
“Frogs or no frogs, I’m not the editor of a paper and I don’t want to
defend them; but I am speaking of the unanimity in the intellectual
world,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, addressing his brother. Levin would
have answered, but the old prince interrupted him.
“Well, about that unanimity, that’s another thing, one may say,” said
the prince. “There’s my son-in-law, Stepan Arkadyevitch, you know him.
He’s got a place now on the committee of a commission and something or
other, I don’t remember. Only there’s nothing to do in it—why, Dolly,
it’s no secret!—and a salary of eight thousand. You try asking him
whether his post is of use, he’ll prove to you that it’s most
necessary. And he’s a truthful man too, but there’s no refusing to
believe in the utility of eight thousand roubles.”
“Yes, he asked me to give a message to Darya Alexandrovna about the
post,” said Sergey Ivanovitch reluctantly, feeling the prince’s remark
to be ill-timed.
“So it is with the unanimity of the press. That’s been explained to me:
as soon as there’s war their incomes are doubled. How can they help
believing in the destinies of the people and the Slavonic races ... and
all that?”
“I don’t care for many of the papers, but that’s unjust,” said Sergey
Ivanovitch.
“I would only make one condition,” pursued the old prince. “Alphonse
Karr said a capital thing before the war with Prussia: ‘You consider
war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be
enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of
every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!’”
“A nice lot the editors would make!” said Katavasov, with a loud roar,
as he pictured the editors he knew in this picked legion.
“But they’d run,” said Dolly, “they’d only be in the way.”
“Oh, if they ran away, then we’d have grape-shot or Cossacks with whips
behind them,” said the prince.
“But that’s a joke, and a poor one too, if you’ll excuse my saying so,
prince,” said Sergey Ivanovitch.
“I don’t see that it was a joke, that....” Levin was beginning, but
Sergey Ivanovitch interrupted him.
“Every member of society is called upon to do his own special work,”
said he. “And men of thought are doing their work when they express
public opinion. And the single-hearted and full expression of public
opinion is the service of the press and a phenomenon to rejoice us at
the same time. Twenty years ago we should have been silent, but now we
have heard the voice of the Russian people, which is ready to rise as
one man and ready to sacrifice itself for its oppressed brethren; that
is a great step and a proof of strength.”
“But it’s not only making a sacrifice, but killing Turks,” said Levin
timidly. “The people make sacrifices and are ready to make sacrifices
for their soul, but not for murder,” he added, instinctively connecting
the conversation with the ideas that had been absorbing his mind.
“For their soul? That’s a most puzzling expression for a natural
science man, do you understand? What sort of thing is the soul?” said
Katavasov, smiling.
“Oh, you know!”
“No, by God, I haven’t the faintest idea!” said Katavasov with a loud
roar of laughter.
“‘I bring not peace, but a sword,’ says Christ,” Sergey Ivanovitch
rejoined for his part, quoting as simply as though it were the easiest
thing to understand the very passage that had always puzzled Levin
most.
“That’s so, no doubt,” the old man repeated again. He was standing near
them and responded to a chance glance turned in his direction.
“Ah, my dear fellow, you’re defeated, utterly defeated!” cried
Katavasov good-humoredly.
Levin reddened with vexation, not at being defeated, but at having
failed to control himself and being drawn into argument.
“No, I can’t argue with them,” he thought; “they wear impenetrable
armor, while I’m naked.”
He saw that it was impossible to convince his brother and Katavasov,
and he saw even less possibility of himself agreeing with them. What
they advocated was the very pride of intellect that had almost been his
ruin. He could not admit that some dozens of men, among them his
brother, had the right, on the ground of what they were told by some
hundreds of glib volunteers swarming to the capital, to say that they
and the newspapers were expressing the will and feeling of the people,
and a feeling which was expressed in vengeance and murder. He could not
admit this, because he neither saw the expression of such feelings in
the people among whom he was living, nor found them in himself (and he
could not but consider himself one of the persons making up the Russian
people), and most of all because he, like the people, did not know and
could not know what is for the general good, though he knew beyond a
doubt that this general good could be attained only by the strict
observance of that law of right and wrong which has been revealed to
every man, and therefore he could not wish for war or advocate war for
any general objects whatever. He said as Mihalitch did and the people,
who had expressed their feeling in the traditional invitations of the
Varyagi: “Be princes and rule over us. Gladly we promise complete
submission. All the labor, all humiliations, all sacrifices we take
upon ourselves; but we will not judge and decide.” And now, according
to Sergey Ivanovitch’s account, the people had foregone this privilege
they had bought at such a costly price.
He wanted to say too that if public opinion were an infallible guide,
then why were not revolutions and the commune as lawful as the movement
in favor of the Slavonic peoples? But these were merely thoughts that
could settle nothing. One thing could be seen beyond doubt—that was
that at the actual moment the discussion was irritating Sergey
Ivanovitch, and so it was wrong to continue it. And Levin ceased
speaking and then called the attention of his guests to the fact that
the storm clouds were gathering, and that they had better be going home
before it rained.
Chapter 17
The old prince and Sergey Ivanovitch got into the trap and drove off;
the rest of the party hastened homewards on foot.
But the storm-clouds, turning white and then black, moved down so
quickly that they had to quicken their pace to get home before the
rain. The foremost clouds, lowering and black as soot-laden smoke,
rushed with extraordinary swiftness over the sky. They were still two
hundred paces from home and a gust of wind had already blown up, and
every second the downpour might be looked for.
The children ran ahead with frightened and gleeful shrieks. Darya
Alexandrovna, struggling painfully with her skirts that clung round her
legs, was not walking, but running, her eyes fixed on the children. The
men of the party, holding their hats on, strode with long steps beside
her. They were just at the steps when a big drop fell splashing on the
edge of the iron guttering. The children and their elders after them
ran into the shelter of the house, talking merrily.
“Katerina Alexandrovna?” Levin asked of Agafea Mihalovna, who met them
with kerchiefs and rugs in the hall.
“We thought she was with you,” she said.
“And Mitya?”
“In the copse, he must be, and the nurse with him.”
Levin snatched up the rugs and ran towards the copse.
In that brief interval of time the storm clouds had moved on, covering
the sun so completely that it was dark as an eclipse. Stubbornly, as
though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin, and tearing the
leaves and flowers off the lime trees and stripping the white birch
branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it twisted everything on one
side—acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, and tall tree-tops. The
peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into shelter in the
servants’ quarters. The streaming rain had already flung its white veil
over all the distant forest and half the fields close by, and was
rapidly swooping down upon the copse. The wet of the rain spurting up
in tiny drops could be smelt in the air.
Holding his head bent down before him, and struggling with the wind
that strove to tear the wraps away from him, Levin was moving up to the
copse and had just caught sight of something white behind the oak tree,
when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the
vault of heaven seemed crashing overhead. Opening his blinded eyes,
Levin gazed through the thick veil of rain that separated him now from
the copse, and to his horror the first thing he saw was the green crest
of the familiar oak-tree in the middle of the copse uncannily changing
its position. “Can it have been struck?” Levin hardly had time to think
when, moving more and more rapidly, the oak tree vanished behind the
other trees, and he heard the crash of the great tree falling upon the
others.
The flash of lightning, the crash of thunder, and the instantaneous
chill that ran through him were all merged for Levin in one sense of
terror.
“My God! my God! not on them!” he said.
And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that they
should not have been killed by the oak which had fallen now, he
repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this
senseless prayer.
Running up to the place where they usually went, he did not find them
there.
They were at the other end of the copse under an old lime-tree; they
were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (they had been light
summer dresses when they started out) were standing bending over
something. It was Kitty with the nurse. The rain was already ceasing,
and it was beginning to get light when Levin reached them. The nurse
was not wet on the lower part of her dress, but Kitty was drenched
through, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Though the rain was over,
they still stood in the same position in which they had been standing
when the storm broke. Both stood bending over a perambulator with a
green umbrella.
“Alive? Unhurt? Thank God!” he said, splashing with his soaked boots
through the standing water and running up to them.
Kitty’s rosy wet face was turned towards him, and she smiled timidly
under her shapeless sopped hat.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I can’t think how you can be so
reckless!” he said angrily to his wife.
“It wasn’t my fault, really. We were just meaning to go, when he made
such a to-do that we had to change him. We were just....” Kitty began
defending herself.
Mitya was unharmed, dry, and still fast asleep.
“Well, thank God! I don’t know what I’m saying!”
They gathered up the baby’s wet belongings; the nurse picked up the
baby and carried it. Levin walked beside his wife, and, penitent for
having been angry, he squeezed her hand when the nurse was not looking.
Chapter 18
During the whole of that day, in the extremely different conversations
in which he took part, only as it were with the top layer of his mind,
in spite of the disappointment of not finding the change he expected in
himself, Levin had been all the while joyfully conscious of the fulness
of his heart.
After the rain it was too wet to go for a walk; besides, the storm
clouds still hung about the horizon, and gathered here and there, black
and thundery, on the rim of the sky. The whole party spent the rest of
the day in the house.
No more discussions sprang up; on the contrary, after dinner everyone
was in the most amiable frame of mind.
At first Katavasov amused the ladies by his original jokes, which
always pleased people on their first acquaintance with him. Then Sergey
Ivanovitch induced him to tell them about the very interesting
observations he had made on the habits and characteristics of common
houseflies, and their life. Sergey Ivanovitch, too, was in good
spirits, and at tea his brother drew him on to explain his views of the
future of the Eastern question, and he spoke so simply and so well,
that everyone listened eagerly.
Kitty was the only one who did not hear it all—she was summoned to give
Mitya his bath.
A few minutes after Kitty had left the room she sent for Levin to come
to the nursery.
Leaving his tea, and regretfully interrupting the interesting
conversation, and at the same time uneasily wondering why he had been
sent for, as this only happened on important occasions, Levin went to
the nursery.
Although he had been much interested by Sergey Ivanovitch’s views of
the new epoch in history that would be created by the emancipation of
forty millions of men of Slavonic race acting with Russia, a conception
quite new to him, and although he was disturbed by uneasy wonder at
being sent for by Kitty, as soon as he came out of the drawing-room and
was alone, his mind reverted at once to the thoughts of the morning.
And all the theories of the significance of the Slav element in the
history of the world seemed to him so trivial compared with what was
passing in his own soul, that he instantly forgot it all and dropped
back into the same frame of mind that he had been in that morning.
He did not, as he had done at other times, recall the whole train of
thought—that he did not need. He fell back at once into the feeling
which had guided him, which was connected with those thoughts, and he
found that feeling in his soul even stronger and more definite than
before. He did not, as he had had to do with previous attempts to find
comforting arguments, need to revive a whole chain of thought to find
the feeling. Now, on the contrary, the feeling of joy and peace was
keener than ever, and thought could not keep pace with feeling.
He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars that had come out
in the darkening sky, and suddenly he remembered. “Yes, looking at the
sky, I thought that the dome that I see is not a deception, and then I
thought something, I shirked facing something,” he mused. “But whatever
it was, there can be no disproving it! I have but to think, and all
will come clear!”
Just as he was going into the nursery he remembered what it was he had
shirked facing. It was that if the chief proof of the Divinity was His
revelation of what is right, how is it this revelation is confined to
the Christian church alone? What relation to this revelation have the
beliefs of the Buddhists, Mohammedans, who preached and did good too?
It seemed to him that he had an answer to this question; but he had not
time to formulate it to himself before he went into the nursery.
Kitty was standing with her sleeves tucked up over the baby in the
bath. Hearing her husband’s footstep, she turned towards him, summoning
him to her with her smile. With one hand she was supporting the fat
baby that lay floating and sprawling on its back, while with the other
she squeezed the sponge over him.
“Come, look, look!” she said, when her husband came up to her. “Agafea
Mihalovna’s right. He knows us!”
Mitya had on that day given unmistakable, incontestable signs of
recognizing all his friends.
As soon as Levin approached the bath, the experiment was tried, and it
was completely successful. The cook, sent for with this object, bent
over the baby. He frowned and shook his head disapprovingly. Kitty bent
down to him, he gave her a beaming smile, propped his little hands on
the sponge and chirruped, making such a queer little contented sound
with his lips, that Kitty and the nurse were not alone in their
admiration. Levin, too, was surprised and delighted.
The baby was taken out of the bath, drenched with water, wrapped in
towels, dried, and after a piercing scream, handed to his mother.
“Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him,” said Kitty to her
husband, when she had settled herself comfortably in her usual place,
with the baby at her breast. “I am so glad! It had begun to distress
me. You said you had no feeling for him.”
“No; did I say that? I only said I was disappointed.”
“What! disappointed in him?”
“Not disappointed in him, but in my own feeling; I had expected more. I
had expected a rush of new delightful emotion to come as a surprise.
And then instead of that—disgust, pity....”
She listened attentively, looking at him over the baby, while she put
back on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while giving
Mitya his bath.
“And most of all, at there being far more apprehension and pity than
pleasure. Today, after that fright during the storm, I understand how I
love him.”
Kitty’s smile was radiant.
“Were you very much frightened?” she said. “So was I too, but I feel it
more now that it’s over. I’m going to look at the oak. How nice
Katavasov is! And what a happy day we’ve had altogether. And you’re so
nice with Sergey Ivanovitch, when you care to be.... Well, go back to
them. It’s always so hot and steamy here after the bath.”
Chapter 19
Going out of the nursery and being again alone, Levin went back at once
to the thought, in which there was something not clear.
Instead of going into the drawing-room, where he heard voices, he
stopped on the terrace, and leaning his elbows on the parapet, he gazed
up at the sky.
It was quite dark now, and in the south, where he was looking, there
were no clouds. The storm had drifted on to the opposite side of the
sky, and there were flashes of lightning and distant thunder from that
quarter. Levin listened to the monotonous drip from the lime trees in
the garden, and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well, and
the Milky Way with its branches that ran through its midst. At each
flash of lightning the Milky Way, and even the bright stars, vanished,
but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in their places
as though some hand had flung them back with careful aim.
“Well, what is it perplexes me?” Levin said to himself, feeling
beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his soul,
though he did not know it yet. “Yes, the one unmistakable,
incontestable manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and
wrong, which has come into the world by revelation, and which I feel in
myself, and in the recognition of which—I don’t make myself, but
whether I will or not—I am made one with other men in one body of
believers, which is called the church. Well, but the Jews, the
Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists—what of them?” he put to
himself the question he had feared to face. “Can these hundreds of
millions of men be deprived of that highest blessing without which life
has no meaning?” He pondered a moment, but immediately corrected
himself. “But what am I questioning?” he said to himself. “I am
questioning the relation to Divinity of all the different religions of
all mankind. I am questioning the universal manifestation of God to all
the world with all those misty blurs. What am I about? To me
individually, to my heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all
doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here I am obstinately trying to
express that knowledge in reason and words.
“Don’t I know that the stars don’t move?” he asked himself, gazing at
the bright planet which had shifted its position up to the topmost twig
of the birch-tree. “But looking at the movements of the stars, I can’t
picture to myself the rotation of the earth, and I’m right in saying
that the stars move.
“And could the astronomers have understood and calculated anything, if
they had taken into account all the complicated and varied motions of
the earth? All the marvelous conclusions they have reached about the
distances, weights, movements, and deflections of the heavenly bodies
are only founded on the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies about a
stationary earth, on that very motion I see before me now, which has
been so for millions of men during long ages, and was and will be
always alike, and can always be trusted. And just as the conclusions of
the astronomers would have been vain and uncertain if not founded on
observations of the seen heavens, in relation to a single meridian and
a single horizon, so would my conclusions be vain and uncertain if not
founded on that conception of right, which has been and will be always
alike for all men, which has been revealed to me as a Christian, and
which can always be trusted in my soul. The question of other religions
and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, and no
possibility of deciding.”
“Oh, you haven’t gone in then?” he heard Kitty’s voice all at once, as
she came by the same way to the drawing-room.
“What is it? you’re not worried about anything?” she said, looking
intently at his face in the starlight.
But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not
hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face
distinctly, and seeing him calm and happy, she smiled at him.
“She understands,” he thought; “she knows what I’m thinking about.
Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I’ll tell her.” But at the moment he was
about to speak, she began speaking.
“Kostya! do something for me,” she said; “go into the corner room and
see if they’ve made it all right for Sergey Ivanovitch. I can’t very
well. See if they’ve put the new wash stand in it.”
“Very well, I’ll go directly,” said Levin, standing up and kissing her.
“No, I’d better not speak of it,” he thought, when she had gone in
before him. “It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me,
and not to be put into words.
“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and
enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling
for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Faith—or not
faith—I don’t know what it is—but this feeling has come just as
imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.
“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the
coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions
tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of
holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on
scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall
still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall
still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything
that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it
was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have
the power to put into it.”
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