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Anna Karenina
Book II
Chapter
Book
CHAPTER I
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 II
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 III
When she went into Kitty’s little room, a pretty, pink little room, full of knickknacks 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 heartrending, 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 IV
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 awestricken 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 demimonde. For the demimonde 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 V
“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 maidservant 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 maneuvered 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 VI
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 passersby, 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 VII
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 VIII
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 knickknacks 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 IX
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 X
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 XI
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 XII
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 XIII
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 carthorses’ 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 XIV
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 treetops 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 XV
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 XVI
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 percent 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 halfpenny,” 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 XVII
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 XVIII
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 XIX
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 XX
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; goodbye 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 XXI
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 horsebox 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 horsebox, 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 horsebox, dimly lighted by one little window. In the horsebox 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 horsebox, 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 hindquarters were a little drooping, and in her forelegs, and still more in her hind-legs, there was a noticeable curvature. The muscles of both hind- and forelegs 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 hindquarters; and with a glad sense that his mare was in the best possible condition, he went out of the horsebox.
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 XXII
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 XXIII
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 XXIV
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 racecourse 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 horsebox 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 hindquarters 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 XXV
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 hindquarters 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 XXVI
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 XXVII
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; goodbye!” 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 XXVIII
When Alexey Alexandrovitch reached the racecourse, 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 prizefighting or Spanish bullfights, 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 XXIX
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 XXX
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 XXXI
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 turndown 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 XXXII
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 goodbye 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 XXXIII
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 lampshade 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 XXXIV
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 XXXV
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 openhandedness; 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 knickknacks, 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 lighthearted. 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 goodbye, 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 goodbye, 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.