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Levin could not bear to look at his brother, could not even be himself and feel at ease
in his presence. When he came into the sick man's room, his eyes and his motions entirely
absorbed him, and he did not see and did not realize the details of his frightful situation.
He perceived the horrid odor, he saw the uncleanliness and disorder, he heard the sick man's groans,
and it seemed to him that there was no way of helping it.
It did not occur to him to investigate how the body lay under the coverlid; how the lean
long legs, the thighs, the back, were doubled up and accommodated; nor did he ask whether
he might not help him to lie more easily and do something to improve his condition, at
least to make a bad situation less trying.
The mere thought of these details made a cold chill run down his back; he was undoubtedly
persuaded in his own mind that it was impossible to do anything either to prolong his life
or to lighten his sufferings, and the sick man, feeling instinctively that his brother
was powerless to help him, was irritated. And this made it all the harder for Levin.
To be in the sick-room was painful to him; to be away from it was still worse.
And he kept leaving the room under various pretexts, and coming back again, for he was
unable to stay alone by himself.
Kitty thought, felt, and acted in an entirely different way: as soon as she saw the sick
man, she was filled with pity for him, and this pity in her womanly heart, instead of
arousing a sense of fear or repulsion as it did in her husband's case, moved her to act,
moved her to find out all the details of his condition and to ameliorate them. And as she
had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, neither did she doubt the
possibility of it, and she set herself to work without delay.
The details the mere thought of which repelled her husband were the very ones that attracted
her attention.
She sent for a doctor; she sent to the drug-store; she set her own maid and Marya Nikolayevna
to sweeping, washing, and dusting, and she even helped them herself. She had all needless
articles carried away, and she had them replaced by things that were needed.
She went several times to her room, paying no heed to those whom she met on the way,
and she unpacked and carried with her sheets, pillow-cases, towels, shirts.
The waiter who served the table d'hote dinner to the engineers several times came with surly
face when she rang; but she gave her orders with such gentle authority that he never failed
to execute them. Levin did not approve of all this. He did not believe that any advantage
would result from it for the sick man. More than all, he was afraid that it would worry
his brother. But Nikolai, although he seemed to be indifferent,
did not lose his temper and only felt a little ashamed and watched with a certain interest
everything she did for him.
When Levin came back from the doctor's, whither Kitty had sent him, he saw, on opening the
door, that, under Kitty's directions, they were changing the sick man's linen. His long
white back and his stooping shoulders, his prominent ribs and vertebrae, were all uncovered,
while Marya Nikolayevna and the lackey were in great perplexity over the sleeves of Nikolai's
night-shirt, into which they were vainly striving to get his long, thin arms. Kitty, quickly
closing the door behind Levin, did not look at him; but the sick man groaned and she hastened
to him; "Be quick," she said.
"There! don't come near me," muttered the sick man, angrily. "I myself .... "
"What do you say?" asked Marya.
But Kitty had heard and understood that he was ashamed of being stripped in her presence.
"I am not looking, I am not looking," said she, trying to get his arm into the night-shirt.
"Marya Nikolayevna, you go to the other side of the bed and help us. — Please go and
get a little flask out of my bag, and bring it to me," she said to her husband. "You know,
in the side pocket; please bring it, and in the meantime we will finish arranging him."
When Levin came back with the flask, he found the invalid lying down in bed, and everything
about him had assumed a different appearance. The oppressive odor had been exchanged for
that of aromatic vinegar which Kitty, pursing up her lips and puffing out her rosy cheeks,
was scattering about from a glass tube. The dust was all gone; a rug was spread under
the bed; on the table were arranged the medicine vials, a carafe, the necessary linen, and
Kitty's English embroidery. On another table, near the bed, stood a candle, his medicine,
and powders. The sick man, bathed, with smoothly brushed hair, was lying between clean sheets,
and propped up by several pillows, was dressed in a clean night-shirt, the white collar of
which came around his unnaturally thin neck. A new expression of hope shone in his eyes
as he looked at Kitty.
The doctor whom Levin went for and found at the club was not the one who had been treating
Nikolai and had aroused his indignation. The new doctor brought his stethoscope and carefully
sounded the sick man's lungs, shook his head, wrote a prescription, and gave explicit directions
first about the application of his remedies and then about the diet which he wished him
to observe. He ordered fresh eggs, raw, or at least scarcely cooked, and Seltzer water
with milk heated to a certain temperature. After he was gone, the sick man said a few
words to his brother, but Levin heard only the last words: "....your Katya." But by the
way he looked at Kitty, Levin knew that he said something in her praise. Then he called
Katya, as he had named her: —
"I feel much better already," he said to her. "With you I should have got well long ago!
how good everything is."
He took her hand and lifted it to his lips; but as if he feared that it might be unpleasant
to her, he hesitated, put it down again and only caressed it. Kitty pressed his hand affectionately
between her own.
"Now turn me over on the left side, and all of you go to bed."
No one heard what he said; Kitty alone understood. She understood because she was ceaselessly
on the watch for what he needed.
"Turn him on the other side," said she to her husband. "He always sleeps on that side.
It is not pleasant to call the man. I cannot do it. Can you?" she asked of Marya Nikolayevna.
"I am afraid not," she replied.
Levin, terrible as it was to him to put his arms around this frightful body, to feel what
he did not wish to feel under the coverlid, submitted to his wife's influence, and assuming
that resolute air which she knew so well, and putting in his arms, took hold of him;
but in spite of all his strength he was amazed at the strange weight of these emaciated limbs.
While he was, with difficulty, changing his brother's position, Nikolai threw his arms
around his neck, and Kitty quickly turned the pillows so as to make the bed more comfortable,
and carefully arranged his head and his thin hair, which was again sticking to his temples.
Nikolai' kept one of his brother's hands in his. Levin felt that the sick man was going
to do something with his hand and was drawing it toward him. His heart sank within him!
Yes, Nikolai put it to his lips and kissed it! Then, shaken with sobs. Levin hurried
from the room, without being able to utter a word.
CHAPTER XIX "He has hidden it from the wise, and revealed
it unto children and fools;" thus thought Levin about his wife as he was talking with
her a little while later.
He did not mean to compare himself to a wise man in thus quoting the Gospel. He did not
call himself wise; but he could not help feeling that he was more intellectual than his wife
and Agafya Mikhailovna, that he employed all the powers of his soul, when he thought about
death. He knew also that many great and manly minds whose thoughts on this subject he had
read had tried to fathom this mystery, but they had not seemed to know one hundredth
part as much as his wife and his old nurse. Agafya Mikhaiflovna and Katya — as his brother
called her, and he also now began to take pleasure in doing — had, in this respect,
a perfect sympathy, though otherwise they were entirely opposite.
Both unquestionably knew what life meant and what death meant, and though they were of
course incapable of answering or understanding the questions that presented themselves to
Levin's mind, they not only had their own way of explaining these great facts of human
existence, but they also shared their belief in this regard with millions of human beings.
As a proof of their well-grounded knowledge of what death was, they without a second of
doubt knew what to do for those who were dying, and felt no fear of them. While Levin and
others, who could talk much about death, evidently knew nothing about it because they were afraid
of it and actually had no notion what to do when men were dying. If Konstantin Levin had
been alone now with his brother Nikolai', he would have gazed with terror into his face,
and with growing terror awaited his end with fear, and been able to think of nothing to
do for him.
What was more, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to walk. To speak of indifferent
things seemed unworthy, impossible; to speak of melancholy things, of death, was likewise
impossible; to be silent was even worse.
"If I look at him, he will think that I am studying him, I fear; if I do not look at
him, he will believe that my thoughts are elsewhere. To walk on tiptoe irritates him;
to walk as usual seems brutal."
Kitty apparently did not think about herself, and she had not the time. Occupied only with
the invalid, she seemed to have a clear idea of what to do; and she succeeded in her endeavor.
She related the circumstances of their marriage; she told about herself; she smiled on him;
she caressed him; she cited cases of extraordinary cures; and it was all delightful: she understood
how to do it. The proof that her activity — and Agafya Mikhaflovna's — was not instinctive,
was animal, was above reason, lay in the fact that neither of them was satisfied with offering
physical solace or performing purely material acts; both of them demanded for the dying
man something more important than physical care, and something above and beyond merely
physical conditions.
Agafya Mikhaflovna, speaking of the old servant who had lately passed away, said, "Thank God,
he had confession and extreme unction; God grant us all to die likewise."
Katya, though she was busy with her care of the linen, the medicines, and the bed-sores,
even on the first day succeeded in persuading her brother-in-law to receive the sacrament.
When Levin at the end of the day returned from the sick-room to their own two rooms,
he sat down with bowed head, confused, not knowing what to do, unable to think of eating
his supper, of arranging for the night, of doing anything at all; he could not even talk
with his wife: he felt ashamed of himself.
But Kitty showed extraordinary activity. She had supper brought; she herself unpacked the
trunks, helped arrange the beds, and even remembered to scatter Persian powder upon
them. She felt the same excitement and quickness of thought which men of genius show on the
eve of battle, or at those serious and critical moments in their lives, those moments when,
if ever, a man shows his value, and all the preceding days of his life are only the preparation
for these moments.
The whole work made such rapid progress that before twelve o'clock all their things were
neatly and carefully arranged: their two hotel rooms presented a thoroughly homelike appearance;
the beds were remade; the brushes, the combs, the hand-mirrors, were taken out; the towels
were in order.
Levin found it unpardonable in himself to eat, to sleep, even to speak; and he felt
that every motion he made was inappropriate. But she took out her toilet articles and did
everything in such a way that there was nothing in the least disturbing or unsuitable in it.
Neither of them could eat, however, and they sat long before they could make up their minds
to go to bed.
"I am very glad that I persuaded him to receive extreme unction to-morrow," said Kitty, as
she combed her soft perfumed hair, before her mirror, sitting in her dressing-sack.
"I never saw it given; but mamma told me that they repeat prayers for restoration to health."
"Do you believe that he can get well?" asked Levin, as he watched the narrow parting at
the back of her little' round head disappear as she moved the comb forward.
"I asked the doctor; he says that he cannot live more than three days. But what does he
know about it? I am glad that I persuaded him," she said, looking at her husband from
behind her hair. "All things are possible," she added, with that peculiar, almost crafty,
expression which came over her face when she spoke about religion.
Never, since the conversation that they had while they were engaged, had they spoken about
religion; but Kitty still continued to go to church and to say her prayers with the
calm conviction that she was fulfilling a duty. Notwithstanding the confession, which
her husband had felt impelled to make, she firmly believed that he was a good Christian,
perhaps better even than herself, and that all he had said about it was only one of his
absurd masculine freaks such as he liked to indulge in, just as he did when he jested
about her broderie Anglaise — as if good people mended holes, but she purposely created
them.
"There! This woman, Marya Nikolayevna, would never have been able to persuade him," said
Levin; "and.... I must confess that I am very, very glad that you came. You made everything
look so neat and comfortable!" ....
He took her hand, but did not kiss it; it seemed to him a profanation even to kiss her
hand in the presence of death, but he pressed it, as he looked with contrition into her
shining eyes.
"You would have suffered too terribly all alone," she said, as she raised her arms,
which covered the glow of satisfaction that made her cheeks red, and began to coil up
her hair and fasten it to the top of her head. "No, she would not have known how .... but
fortunately I learned many things at Soden."
"Were there people there as ill as he is?"
"Yes, more so."
"It is terrible to me not to see him as he used to be when he was young You can't imagine
what a handsome fellow he was; but I did not understand him then."
"Indeed, indeed, I believe you. I feel that we should have been friends," said she, and
she turned toward her husband, frightened at what she had said, and the tears shone
in her eyes.
"Yes, would have been," he said mournfully. "He is one of those men of whom one can say
with reason that he was not meant for this world."
"Meanwhile, we must not forget that we have many days ahead of us; it is time to go to
bed," said Kitty, consulting her tiny watch.
CHAPTER XX DEATH
On the next morning communion was administered to the sick man. Nikolai prayed fervently
during the ceremony. There was such an expression of passionate entreaty and prayer in his great
eyes gazing at the sacred image placed on a card-table covered with a colored towel
that it was terrible for Levin to look at him so; for he knew that this passionate entreaty
and hope made it all the harder for him to part from life, to which he clung so desperately.
He knew his brother and the trend of his thoughts; he knew that his skepticism did not arise
from the fact that it was easier for him to live without a religion, but from the fact
that gradually his religious beliefs had been supplanted by the theories of modern science;
and therefore he knew that his return to faith was not logical or normal, but was ephemeral
and due simply to his unreasonable hope for recovery. He knew likewise that Kitty had
strengthened this hope by her stories of extraordinary cures.
Levin knew all this and was tormented by these thoughts as he looked at his brother's beseeching,
hopeful eyes, as he saw his difficulty in lifting his emaciated hand to touch his yellow
forehead to make the sign of the cross, and saw his flesh less shoulders, and his hollow,
rattling chest, unable longer to contain the life which he was begging to have restored.
During the sacrament Levin did what he had done a thousand times, skeptic that he was:
"Heal this man if Thou dost exist," he said, addressing God, "and Thou wilt save me also."
The invalid felt suddenly much better after the anointing with the holy oil; for more
than an hour he did not cough once. He assured Kitty, as he kissed her hand with smiles and
tears of thanksgiving, that he felt well, that he was not suffering, and that he felt
a return of strength and appetite. When his broth was brought, he got up by "himself and
asked for a cutlet. Hopeless as his case was, impossible as his recovery was, as any one
might see by a glance. Levin and Kitty spent this hour in a kind of timid joy.
"Is he not better?" "Much better."
"It is astonishing."
"Why should it be astonishing?"
"He is certainly better," they whispered, smiling at each other.
The illusion did not last. The sick man went serenely to sleep, but after half an hour
his cough wakened him and instantly those who were with him and the sick man himself
lost all hope. The actuality of suffering unquestioned made them forget their late hopes.
Nikolai, giving no thought to what he had believed a half-hour previously, and apparently
ashamed even to remember it, asked for a bottle of iodine to inhale.
Levin gave him the bottle, which was covered with a piece of perforated paper, and his
brother looked at him with the same imploring, passionate look which he had given the image,
as if asking him to confirm the words of the doctor, who attributed miraculous virtues
to the inhaling of iodine.
"Kitty isn't here?" he asked in his hoarse whisper, when Levin had unwillingly repeated
the doctor's words, "No? then I may speak!.,.. I played the comedy
for her sake She is so sweet! But you and I cannot deceive ourselves! This is what I
put my faith in," said he, pressing the bottle in his bony hands as he smelt the iodin.
About eight o'clock in the evening Levin and his wife were taking tea in their room, when
Marya Nikolayevna came running toward them all out of breath.
She was pale, and her lips trembled.
"He is dying!" she whispered, "I am afraid that he is dying!"
Both of them hurried to Nikolai. He had lifted himself, and was sitting up in bed leaning
on his elbow, his head bowed, his long back bent.
"How do you feel?" asked Levin, tenderly, after a moment of silence.
"I feel that I am going," whispered Nikolai, struggling painfully to speak, but as yet
pronouncing the words distinctly. He did not raise his head, but only turned his eyes up,
without seeing his brother's face.
"Katya, go away!" he whispered once again.
Levin sprang up and in an imperative whisper bade her leave the room.
"I am going," the dying man whispered once again.
"Why do you think so?" asked Levin, for the sake of saying something.
"Because I am going," he repeated, as if he had an affection for the phrase. "It is the
end."
Marya Nikolayevna came to hira.
"If you would lie down, it would be easier for you," said she.
"Soon I shall be lying down," he remarked softly, — "dead," he added, with angry irony.
"Well, lay me back, if you will."
Levin laid his brother down on his back, took a seat near him, and, hardly able to breathe,
gazed into his face. The dying man lay with his eyes shut, but the muscles of his forehead
twitched from time to time as if he were in deep thought. Levin involuntarily tried to
comprehend what was taking place in him, but in spite of all the efforts of his mind to
accompany his brother's thoughts, he saw by the expression of his calm stern face, and
the play of the muscles above his eyebrows, that his brother perceived mysteries hidden
from him.
"Yes .... yes .... so," the dying man murmured slowly, with long pauses; " lay me down!"
Then long silence followed. "So!" said he suddenly, with an expression of content as
if all had been explained for him. "O Lord!" he exclaimed, and he sighed heavily.
Marya Nikolayevna felt of his feet. "They are growing cold," she said in a low voice.
Long, very long, as it seemed to Levin, the sick man remained motionless; but he was still
alive, and sighed from time to time.
Weary from the mental strain. Levin felt that in spite of all his efforts he could not understand
what his brother meant to express by the exclamation "So,"
He seemed to be far away from the dying man; he could no longer think of the mystery of
death; the most incongruous ideas came into his mind. He asked himself what he was going
to do; — to close his eyes, dress him, order the coffin? Strange! he felt perfectly cold
and indifferent; he did not experience any sense of grief or loss, or even the least
pity for his brother; the principal feeling that he had was one almost of envy for the
knowledge which the dying man would soon have and which he himself could not have.
Long he waited by his bedside, expecting the end; it did not come. The door opened, and
Kitty came in. He got up to stop her, but instantly heard
the dying man move.
"Don't go away!" said Nikolai, stretching out his hand. Levin took it, and angrily motioned
his wife away.
Still holding the dying man's hand, he waited a halfhour — an hour — and still another
hour. He ceased to think of death; he thought what Kitty was doing.
Who was occupying the next room?" Had the doctor a house of his own? Then he became
hungry and sleepy. He gently let go the dying man's hand and felt of his feet. His feet
and legs were cold; but still Nikolai was breathing. Levin started to go away on his
tiptoes; but again the invalid stirred, and said, "Don't go away!"
It began to grow light; the situation was unchanged.
Levin gently rose, and without looking at his brother went to his room, and fell asleep.
When he awoke, instead of hearing of his brother's death as he expected, he was told that he
had come to his senses again. He was sitting up in bed, was coughing, and wanted something
to eat. He became talkative, but ceased to talk about death, and once more began to express
the hope of getting well again, and was more irritable and restless than before. No one,
not even his brother or Kitty, could calm him. He was angry with them all, and said
disagreeable things, and blamed every one for his sufferings, demanding that the famous
doctor from Moscow should be sent for; and whenever they asked him how he was, he replied
with expressions of anger and reproach, "I am suffering terrible, unendurable agony."
He suffered more and more, especially from his bedsores, which they were wholly unable
to heal, and his irritability kept increasing, and he reproached them all bitterly, especially
because they did not fetch the doctor from Moscow. Kitty tried every means in her power
to help him, to calm him; but it was all in vain, and Levin saw that she was suffering
physically as well as morally, although she would not confess it.
The sentiment of death which had been aroused in all by his farewell to life that night
when he had summoned his brother was mightily weakened. All knew that he would inevitably
and speedily reach the end, that he was already half dead. They all felt that the sooner he
died the better it would be; yet, concealing this, they still gave him medicines from vials,
sent for new medicines and doctors, and they deceived him and themselves and one another;
all this was falsehood, vile, humiliating, blasphemous falsehood. And this falsehood
was more painful to Konstantin than to the others, because he loved his brother more
deeply, and because nothing was more contrary to his nature than lack of sincerity.
Levin, who had long felt the desire to reconcile his two brothers before Nikolai' should die,
wrote to Sergyei Ivanovitch. He replied, and Konstantin read the letter to the sick man:
Sergyei Ivanovitch could not come but he asked his brother's pardon in touching terms.
Nikolai said nothing.
"What shall I write him?" asked Konstantin. "I hope you are not angry with him."
"No, not at all," replied Nikolai, in a tone of vexation. "Write him to send me the doctor."
Three cruel days passed in this manner, the invalid remaining in the same condition. All
those who saw him — the hotel waiter and the landlord and all the lodgers and the doctor
and Marya Nikolayevna and Levin and Kitty — now wished only one thing, and that was
his death. The invalid only did not express any such wish, but, on the contrary, continually
grumbled because they did not send for the doctor; and he took his remedies and he spoke
of life. Only at rare moments, when *** caused him for a little to be oblivious of
his incessant agony, he would in a sort of doze confess what weighed on his mind even
more heavily than on the others: "Akh! If this could only end!" or "When this is over."
His sufferings, growing ever more and more severe, did their work and prepared him to
die. There was no position in which he could find relief; there was not a moment in which
he could forget himself; there was not a place or a single member of his body that did not
cause him pain, agony. Even the memories, the impressions, and the thoughts about his
body now awakened in him the same feeling of repulsion as his body itself; the sight
of other people and their talk, their individual recollections, were a torment to him. Those
who surrounded him felt it and instinctively refrained in his presence from using any freedom
of motion, from conversation or from expressing their wishes. All his life was concentrated
in one feeling, suffering, and in an ardent desire to be freed from it.
Evidently there was accomplishing in him that revolution whereby he would be induced to
look on death as a consummation of his desires, even as a joy. Hitherto, every individual
desire called forth by suffering or privation, as by hunger, weariness, thirst, was satisfied
by some bodily exercise producing pleasure; but now privation and suffering got no relief
and any attempt at relieving them caused new suffering. And so all his desires were concentrated
on one thing, — the wish to be delivered from all his woes and the very source of his
woes, from his body. But he had no words to express this thought, and he continued out
of habit to ask for what once gave him comfort, but could no longer satisfy him. "Turn me
on the other side," he would say, and then immediately wish to return to his former position.
"Give me bouillon! Take it away! Speak, and don't stay so still!" and as soon as any one
began to speak, he would shut his eyes and show fatigue, indifference, and disgust.
On the tenth day after their arrival Kitty was taken ill; she had a headache and nausea
and all the morning felt unable to get up.
The doctor declared that it was caused by her emotions and weariness. He advised quiet
and rest.
Yet, after dinner, she got up and went as usual with her work to Nikolai's room. He
looked at her sternly and smiled scornfully when she told him that she had been ill. All
day long he never ceased to cough and to groan piteously.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Worse," he replied with difficulty. "I am in pain,"
"Where do you feel the pain?"
"All over."
"You will see the end will come to-day," said Marya Nikolayevna, in an undertone.
Levin hushed her, thinking that his brother, whose ear was very acute, might hear; he turned
and looked at him. Nikolai had heard, but the words made no impression; his look remained
as before, reproachful and intense.
"What makes you think so?" asked Levin, when she followed him into the corridor.
"He has begun to pick with his fingers."
"What do you mean?"
"This way," she said, plucking at the folds of her woolen dress. Levin himself noticed
that all that day the invalid had been plucking at his bed-clothes as if to pick off something.
Marya Nikolayevna's prediction came true. Toward evening Nikolai had not strength enough
left to lift his arms, and his motionless eyes assumed an expression of concentrated
attention. Even when his brother and Kitty bent over him in order that he might see them,
this look remained unchanged. Kitty had the priest summoned to say the prayers for the
dying.
While the priest was reading the prayer, the dying man gave no sign of life. His eyes were
closed. Levin, Kitty, and Marya Nikolayevna were standing by his bedside. Before the prayers
were ended, Nikolalf stretched himself a little, sighed, and opened his eyes. The priest, having
finished the prayer, placed the crucifix on his icy brow, then put it under his stole,
and after he had stood for a moment or two longer, silently he touched the huge bloodless
hand.
"It is all over," he said at last, and started to go away; but suddenly Nikolai's lips trembled
slightly, and from the depths of his breast came these words, which sounded distinctly
in the silent room:
"Not yet.... soon."
A moment later his face brightened, a smile came to his lips, and the women who had been
summoned hastened to lay out the body.
The sight of his brother and the propinquity of death awakened in Levin's mind that feeling
of horror at the inexplicability and the unavoidableness of death, just as he had felt on that autumn
night when his brother came to see him. This feeling was now more intense than ever.
More than ever he felt his inability to fathom this mystery, and even more terrible seemed
to him its proximity. But now, thanks to his wife's presence, this
feeling did not lead him to despair; for in spite of his terrors. He felt the need of
living, and loving. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love became
all the stronger and purer because it was threatened.
And scarcely had this mystery of death taken place before his eyes ere he found himself
face to face with another miracle of love and of life equally unfathomable.
The doctor confirmed his surmise in regard to Kitty Her discomfort was the beginning
of pregnancy.
END OF VOL. i
CHAPTER XXI AS soon as Aleksei Aleksandrovitch had learned
from Betsy and Stepan Arkadyevitch that all that was expected of him was that he should
leave his wife in peace and not trouble her with his presence, and that his wife herself
wished this, he had felt himself in too great perplexity to be able to decide anything for
himself, and he did not know what he wanted; but, having placed his fate in the hands of
others, who were willing enough to occupy themselves with his affairs, he was ready
to accept whatever might be proposed to him.
Only when Anna had taken her departure and when the English governess sent to inquire
if she should dine with him or by herself, did he for the first time clearly realize
his position and its full horror.
The hardest element in this state of affairs was that he could not coordinate and reconcile
his past with the present. Nor was it the past when he lived happily with his wife that
disturbed him. The transition from that past to the knowledge of his wife's infidelity
he had borne like a martyr; that state of things was trying, but it was comprehensible
to him. If at the time when his wife had confessed her wrong to him she had left him, he would
have been mortified and unhappy; but he would not have been in that inextricable, incomprehensible
position in which he now felt that he was. He could never now reconcile his recent position,
his reconciliation, his love for his sick wife and the alien child, with the present
state of things; in other words, with the fact that as a reward for all his sacrifices
he was now deserted, disgraced, useful to no one, and a ridiculous laughing-stock to
all.
The first two days after his wife's departure Aleksei Aleksandrovitch received petitioners
and his chief secretary, attended committee-meetings, and ate his meals in the dining-room as usual.
Without trying to explain to himself why he did this, he directed all t^^e powers of his
mind to one single aim — to seem calm and indifferent. As he answered the questions
of the servants in regard to what should be done about Anna's rooms and her things, he
made superhuman efforts to assume the manner of a man for whom the event that had occurred
was not unexpected, and had nothing in it outside the range of ordinary, every-day events,
and he accomplished his purpose; no one would have detected in him any signs of despair.
But on the second day after her departure Kornei handed him a milliner's bill which
Anna had neglected to pay, and told him that the manager of the business himself was waiting.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch had the man shown in.
"Excuse me, your excellency," said the manager, "for venturing to disturb you, but if you
order us to apply to her ladyship personally, will you kindly give us her address?"
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch seemed to the manager to be cogitating; then suddenly turning round,
he sat down at the table. Dropping his head into his hands, he sat there a long time in
that position; he tried several times to speak, but still hesitated. Komei, understanding
his barin's feelings, asked the manager to come another time.
When he was left alone again, Aleksei Aleksandroyitch realized that he no longer had the power to
keep up the role of firmness and serenity. He gave orders to send away the carriage which
was waiting for him, and he declined to see callers and would accept no invitations out
to dine. He felt that he could not endure the disdain and derision which he clearly
read on the face of this manager and of Kornei, and of all without exception whom he had met
during those two days. He felt that he could not defend himself from the detestation of
people, because this detestation did not arise from the fact that he had himself committed
any wrong action, for in that case he might have hoped to regain the esteem of the world
by improvement in conduct, but from the fact that he was unhappy, and with an unhappiness
that was odious and shameful. He knew that it was precisely for the reason that his heart
was torn that they would be pitiless to him. It seemed to him that his fellow-men persecuted
him as dogs torture to death some poor cur maimed and howling with pain. He knew that
the only safety from men was to conceal his wounds from them, and he had instinctively
tried for two days to do so; but now he felt that he had no longer the strength to continue
the unequal struggle.
His despair was made deeper by the knowledge that he was absolutely alone with his suffering.
In all Petersburg there was not a man to whom he could confide all his wretchedness, not
one who would have any pity for him now, not as a lofty functionary, or even as a member
of society, but simply as a human being in despair: he had no such friend.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch had lost his mother when he was ten years old; he had no remembrance
of his father; he and his one brother were left orphans with a very small inheritance;
their uncle Karenin, a man of influence, held in high esteem by the late emperor, took charge
of their bringing up.
After a successful course at the gymnasium and the university, Aleksei Aleksandrovitch,
through his uncle's aid, made a brilliant start in official life, and, full of ambition,
devoted himself exclusively to his career. He formed no ties of intimacy either in the
gymnasium or in the university, or afterward in society; his brother alone was dear to
him, but he entered the department of foreign affairs, went abroad to live, and died soon
after Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's marriage.
While Karenin was governor of one of the provinces, Anna's aunt, a wealthy lady of the governmental
capi tal, introduced her niece to this governor, who was young for such a position, if not
in years, and she forced him to the alternative of proposing marriage or leaving the city.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch long hesitated. There seemed as many reasons in favor of this step
as there were opposed to it; there was no definite reason which should impel him to
break his rule, "When in doubt, do it!" but Anna's aunt sent word to him through a friend
that he had compromised the young lady, and that as a man of honor he must offer her his
hand. He offered himself, and gave her, first as his betrothed and afterward as his wife,
all the affection which it was in his power to show.
This attachment prevented him from feeling the need of any other intimacy. And now out
of all the number of his acquaintances he had not one confidential friend.
He had many so-called "friends," but no intimates. There were many persons whom Aleksei Aleksandrovitch
could invite to dinner, or ask favors of, in the interests of his public capacity or
protection for some petitioner; with whom he could freely criticize the actions of other
people and of the highest officers of government. But his relations to these people were exclusively
confined to this official domain, from which it was impossible to escape. There was one
university comrade with whom he had kept up an intimacy in after years, and to whom he
would have confided his private sorrows, but this friend was a trustee ^ of the classical
educational institutes in a distant province. Of all the people in Petersburg, the nearest
and most practicable acquaintances were his Director of the Chancelry and his doctor.
Mikhail Vasilyevitch Sliudin, "manager of affairs," was a simple, good, intelligent,
and well-bred man, and he seemed full of sympathy for Karenin; but five years' association in
official service put a barrier between them which silenced confidences.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, having signed the papers which he brought, sat in silence for
some time looking at Sliudin, and kept trying, but found it impossible, to open his heart
to him. The question, " Have you heard of my misfortune?" was on his lips; but it ended
in his saying as usual, when he dismissed him: —
"You will have the goodness to prepare me this work."
The doctor was another man who was well disposed to him, but between them there had long been
a tacit understanding that they were both full of business and in a hurry.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch did not think at all about his women friends, or even of the chiefest
among them, the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. Women simply as women were strange and repulsive
to him.
CHAPTER XXII Aleksei Aleksandrovitch forgot the Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, but she did not forget him. She reached his house at his darkest moment
of solitary despair, and made her way to his library without waiting to be announced. She
found him still sitting in the same position with his head between his hands.
"y'ai ford la consigned' she said, as she came in with rapid steps, breathless with
emotion and agitation. "I know all, Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, my friend!"
and she pressed his hand between both of hers and looked at him with her beautiful melancholy
eyes.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, with a frown, arose, and, having withdrawn his hand, offered her
a chair.
"I beg you to sit down. I am not receiving because I am suffering, countess," he said,
and his lips quivered.
"My friend!" repeated the countess, without taking her eyes from him; and suddenly she
lifted her eyebrows so that they formed a triangle on her forehead, and this grimace
made her ugly yellow face still uglier than before. Aleksei Aleksandrovitch felt that
she pitied him and was on the point of crying. A wave of feeling overwhelmed him. He seized
her fat hand and kissed it.
"My friend," she said again, in a voice breaking with emotion, "you must not give yourself
up to grief. Your grief is great, but you must find consolation,"I
am wounded, I am killed, I am no longer a man," said Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, letting
go the countess's hand, but still looking into her eyes swimming with tears.
"My situation is all the more unbearable because I can find neither in myself nor outside of
myself any help toward endurance of it."
"You will find this help, not in me, though I beg you to believe in my friendship," said
she, with a sigh. "Our help is love, the love which He has given
for an inheritance. His yoke is easy," she continued, with the exalted look that Aleksei
Aleksandrovitch knew so well. "He will sustain you and will aid you."
Although these words were the expression of an emotion aroused by their lofty feelings,
as well as the symbolical language characteristic of a new mystical exaltation just introduced
into Petersburg, and which seemed extravagant to Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, nevertheless he
found it pleasant at the present time to hear them.
"I am weak, I am humiliated. I foresaw nothing of this, and now I cannot understand it."
"My friend!" repeated Lidia Ivanovna.
"I do not mourn so much my loss," said Aleksei Aleksandrovitch; "but I cannot help a feeling
of shame for the situation in which I am placed before the world.
It is bad, and I cannot, I cannot bear it."
"It is not you who have performed this noble act of forgiveness which has filled me — and
all — with admiration. It is He dwelling in your heart. So, too, you have no cause
for shame," said the countess, ecstatically raising her eyes.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch frowned, and, pressing his hands together, be began to make his knuckles
crack.
"You must know all the details," he said, in his shrill voice. "Man's powers are limited,
countess; and I have reached the limit of mine. All this day I have wasted in details,
domestic details, arising [he accented the word] from my new, lonely situation. The servants,
the governess, the accounts, .... this is a slow fire devouring me, and I have not strength
to endure it. Yesterday I scarcely was able to get through dinner .... I cannot endure
to have my son look at me ....he did not ask me any questions, but I know he wanted to
ask me, and I could not endure his look. He was afraid to look at me ....but that is a
mere trifle ...."
Karenin wanted to speak of the bill that had been brought him, but his voice trembled,
and he stopped. This bill on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons,
was a recollection that made him pity himself.
"I understand, my friend," said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, "I understand it all. Aid
and consolation you will not find in me, but I have come to help you if I can. If I could
free you from these petty annoying tasks .... I think that a woman's word, a woman's hand,
are needed; will you let me help you?"
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch was silent, and pressed her hand gratefully.
"We will look after Serozha together. I am not strong in practical affairs, but I can
get used to them, and I will be your ekonomka. Do not thank me; I do not do it of myself."
"I cannot help being grateful"
"But, my friend, do not yield to the sentiment of which you spoke a moment ago How can you
be ashamed of what is the highest degree of Christian perfection? He who humbles himself
shall be exalted. And you cannot thank me. Thank Him, pray to
Him for help. In Him alone we can find peace, consolation, salvation, and love."
She raised her eyes to heaven, and began to pray, as Aleksei Aleksandrovitch could see
by her silence.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch listened to her, and this phraseology, which before seemed, not
unpleasant to him, but extravagant, now seemed natural and soothing. He did not approve of
this new ecstatic mysticism. He was a sincere believer, and religion interested him principally
in its relation to politics; and the new doctrine which arrogated to itself certain new terms,
for the very reason that it opened the door to controversy and analysis, had aroused his
antipathy from principle. Hitherto, he had taken a cold, and even hostile, attitude to
this new doctrine, and had never discussed it with the countess, who was carried away
by it, but had resolutely met her challenge with silence. But now, for the first time,
he let her speak without hindrance, and even found a secret pleasure in her words.
"I am very, very grateful to you, both for your words and for your sympathy," he said,
when she had ended her prayer.
Again the countess pressed her friend's hand with both of hers.
"Now I am going to set to work," said she, with a smile, wiping away the traces of tears
on her face. "I am going to Serozha, and I shall not trouble you except in serious difficulties."
And she got up and went out.
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna went to Serozha's room, and, while she bathed the scared little
fellow's cheeks with her tears, she told him that his father was a saint and his mother
was dead.
The countess fulfilled her promise. She actually took charge of the details of Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's
house, but she exaggerated in no respect when she declared that she was not strong in practical
affairs. It was necessary to modify all of her arrangements, since it was impossible
to carry them out, and they were modified by Kornei, Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's valet,
who, without any one noticing it, gradually took it on himself to manage the whole establishment,
and calmly and discreetly reported to his barin (while the latter was dressing) such
things as seemed best.
But, nevertheless, the countess's help was to the highest degree useful to him. Her affection
and esteem were a moral support to him, and, as it gave her great consolation to think,
she almost succeeded in converting him to " Christianity "; in other words, she changed
him from an indifferent and lukewarm believer into a fervent and genuine partizan of that
new method of explaining the Christian doctrine which shortly after came into vogue in Petersburg.
It was easy for Aleksei Aleksandrovitch to put his faith in this exegesis. Aleksei Aleksandrovitch,
as well as the countess and all those who shared their views, was not gifted with great
imagination, or at least that faculty of the mind by which the illusions of the imagination
have sufficient conformity with reality to cause their acceptation. Thus he saw no impossibility
or unlikelihood in death existing for unbelievers and not for him, that because he held a complete
and unquestioning faith, judged in his own way, his soul was already free from sin, and
that even in this world he might look upon his safety as assured.
It is true, Aleksei Aleksandrovitch dimly felt the frivolity, the fallacy, of this presentation
of his faith. He knew that when, without a thought that
his forgiveness of his wife was the act of a higher power, he gave himself up to this
immediate feeling, he experienced a greater happiness than when, as now, he constantly
thought that Christ dwelt in his soul, and that by signing certain papers he was following
His will. But it was indispensable for Aleksei Aleksandrovitch to think so; it was so indispensable
to have, in his present humiliation, this elevation, imaginary though it was, from which
he, whom every one despised, could look down on others, that he clung to it as if his salvation
depended on it.
CHAPTER XXIII The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been married
when she was a very young and enthusiastic girl to a very wealthy, aristocratic, good-natured,
and dissolute young fellow. Two months after the wedding her husband deserted her. He had
replied to her effusive expressions of love with scorn and even hatred, which no one who
knew the count's kindliness, and were not acquainted with the faults of Lidia's romantic
nature, could comprehend. Since then, without any formal divorce, they had lived apart;
and when the husband met his wife, he always treated her with a venomous scorn, the reason
for which it puzzled people to understand.
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna long ago ceased to worship her husband, but at no time had
she ceased to be in love with some one. Not seldom she was in love with several at once
— men and women indiscriminately. She had been in love with almost every one of any
prominence. Thus she had lost her heart to each of the new princes and princesses who
married into the imperial family. Then she had been in love with a metropolitan, a vicar,
and a priest. Then she had been in love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, and Komisarof;
then with a foreign minister, a doctor, an English missionary, and finally Karenin. These
multifarious love-affairs and their different phases of warmth or coldness in no wise hindered
her from keeping up the most complicated relations both with the court and society.
But from the day when Karenin was touched by misfortune and she took him under her special
protection, from the time when she began to busy herself with his domestic affairs and
work for his well-being, she felt that all her former passions were of no account, but
that she now loved Karenin alone with perfect sincerity. The feeling which she now cherished
toward him seemed to her stronger than all the previous feelings. As she analyzed her
sentiment and compared it with the former ones, she clearly saw that she would never
have been in love with Komisarof if he had not saved the emperor's life, or with Ristitch-Kudzhitsky
had there been no Slav question. But Karenin she loved for himself, for his great, unappreciated
spirit, for his character, for the delightful sound of his voice, his deliberate intonations,
his weary eyes, and his soft white hands with their swollen veins. Not only did the thought
of seeing him fill her with joy, but it seemed to her that she saw on her friend's face the
signs of the impression which she made on him. She did her best to please him, no less
by her person than by her conversation. Never before had she spent so much time and attention
on her toilet. More than once she found herself wondering what would happen if she were not
married and he were only free! When he came into the room, she colored with emotion, and
she could not restrain a smile of ecstasy if he said something pleasant to her.
For several days the countess had been in a state of great excitement. She knew that
Anna and Vronsky were back in Petersburg. It was necessary to save Aleksei Aleksandrovitch
from seeing her; it was necessary to save him even from the tormenting knowledge that
this wretched woman was living in the same town with him and he might meet her at any
instant.
Lidia Ivanovna made inquiries through acquaintances so as to discover the plans of these repulsive
people as she called Anna and Vronsky; and she tried to direct all of Karenin's movements
so that he might not meet them. The young aide to the emperor, a friend of Vronsky's,
from whom she learned about them, and who was hoping through the Countess Lidia Ivanovna's
influence to get a concession, told her that they were completing their arrangements and
expected to depart on the following day.
Lidia Ivanovna was beginning to breathe freely once more, when on the next morning she received
a note, the handwriting of which she recognized with terror.
It was Anna Karenina's handwriting. The envelop was of paper thick as bark; the oblong sheet
of yellow paper was adorned with an immense monogram. The note exhaled a delicious perfume.
"Who brought it?"
"A messenger from the hotel."
The countess waited long before she had the courage to sit down and read it. Her emotion
almost brought on an attack of asthma, to which she was subject. At last, when she felt
calmer, she opened the following note written in French: —
"Madame la Comtesse: — The Christian sentiments filling your heart prompt me, with unpardonable
boldness, I fear, to address you. I am unhappy at being separated from my son, and I ask
you to do me the favor of letting me see him once more before I depart. If I do not make
direct application to Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, it is because T do not wish to give this generous-hearted
man the pain of thinking of me. Knowing your friendship for him, I felt that you would
understand me; will you have Serozha sent to me here? or do you prefer that I should
come at an appointed hour? or would you let me know how and at what place I could see
him? You cannot imagine my desire to see my child again, and consequently you cannot comprehend
the extent of my gratefulness for the assistance that you can render me in these circumstances.
Anna.
Everything about this note exasperated the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, its tenor, the allusions
to Karenin's magnanimity, and the especially free and easy tone which pervaded it.
"Say that there is no reply," said the Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, and, hurriedly opening her buvard, she wrote to Aleksei Aleksandrovitch that
she hoped to meet him about one o'clock at the birthday reception at the Palace"
"I must consult with you in regard to a sad and serious affair; we will decide at the
Palace when I can see you. The best plan would be at my house, where I will have your tea
ready. It is absolutely necessary. He imposes the cross, but He gives also the
strength," she added, that she might somewhat prepare him.
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna wrote Aleksei Aleksandrovitch two or three times a day;
she liked this way of communication with him, as it had the elegance and mystery which were
lacking in ordinary personal intercourse.
CHAPTER XXIV The congratulations were over. As the visitors
who had met at court went away, they talked about the latest news of the day, the rewards
that had been bestowed, and the changed positions of some high functionaries.
"What should you say if the Countess Marya Borisovna was made minister of war, and the
Princess Vatkovskaya, chief of staff."" asked a little, gray-haired old man, in a gold-embroidered
uniform, who was talking with a tall, handsome maid of honor about the recent changes.
"In that case, I should be made one of the emperor's aides," replied the freilina.
"Your place is already settled. You are to have charge of the department of religions,
and Karenin is to be your assistant."
"How do you do, prince?" said the little old man, shaking hands with some one who came
along.
"Were you speaking of Karenin?" asked the prince.
"Yes; he and Putyatof have been decorated with the order of Alexander Nevsky."
"I thought he had it already."
"No; look at him," said the little old man, pointing with his gold-laced hat toward Karenin,
who was standing in the doorway, talking with one of the influential members of the Imperial
Council; he wore the court uniform, with his new red ribbon across his shoulder.
"Happy and contented as a copper kopek!" he added, pausing to press the hand of a handsome,
athletic chamberlain passing by.
"No; he has grown old," said the chamberlain.
"With cares. He spends all his time writing projects. He, the unfortunate man, will not
let go until he has explained everything point by point."
"What, grown old?" Fait dis passions. I think the Countess Lidia is jealous now of his wife."
"There! I beg of you not to speak ill of the Countess Lidia."
"Is there any harm in her being in love with Karenin?"
"Is it true that Madame Karenin is here?" "Not here at the Palace, but in Petersburg.
I met her yesterday with Aleksei Vronsky dras dessus, bras dessous, on the Morskaya."
"C'est un homme qjii n'a pas" — began the chamberlain; but he broke short off to salute
and make way for a member of the imperial family who was passing.
Thus they were talking about Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, criticizing and ridiculing him, while he himself
was barring the way of the imperial counselor, and, without pausing in his explanations lest
he should lose him, was giving a detailed exposition of a financial scheme.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, about the time his wife left him, had reached a situation painful
for an official, — the culmination of his upward career. This culmination had been reached,
and all clearly saw it, but Aleksei Aleksandrovitch himself was not yet aware that his career
was ended. Either his collision with Stremof, or his trouble with his wife, or the simple
fact that Aleksei Aleksiandrovitch had reached the limit that he had been destined to attain,
the fact remained that every one saw clearly that his official race was run. He still held
an important place; he was a member of many important committees and commissions: but
he was one of those men of whom nothing more is expected; his day was over. Whatever he
said, whatever he proposed^ seemed antiquated and useless. But Aleksei Aleksandrovitch himself
did not realize this; on the contrary, now that he had ceased to have an active participation
in the business of the administration, he saw more clearly than before the faults and
mistakes that others were making, and considered it his duty to indicate certain reforms which
should be introduced.
Shortly after his separation from his wife, he began to write his first pamphlet about
the new tribunals, and proposed to follow it up with an endless series of similar pamphlets,
of no earthly use, on all the different branches of the administration.
He not only did not realize his hopeless situation in the official world, and therefore did not
lose heart, but more than ever he took delight in his activity.
"He that is unmarried is careful for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but
he that is married is careful for the things of the world, how he may please his wife,"
said the Apostle Paul. And Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, who now directed his life in all respects
according to the Epistle, often quoted this text. It seemed to him that, since he had
been deprived of his wife, he served the Lord more faithfully than ever by devotion to these
projects.
The imperial counselor's very manifest impatience and desire to get away from him in no way
abashed Karenin, but he stopped a moment as a prince of the imperial family was passing,
and his victim seized his opportunity to escape.
Left to himself, Aleksei Aleksandrovitch bowed his head, tried to collect his thoughts, and,
with an absentminded glance about him, stepped toward the door, hoping to meet the countess
there.
"How strong and healthy they look physically!" he said to himself, as he looked at the vigorous
neck of the prince, who wore a close-fitting uniform, and the handsome chamberlain with
his well-combed and perfumed side-whiskers. "It is only too true that all is evil in this
world," he thought, as he looked at the chamberlain's sturdy legs. Moving slowly along, Aleksei
Aleksandrovitch, with his customary appearance of weariness and dignity, came up to the gentlemen
who had been talking about him, and, glancing through the door, he looked for the Countess
Lidia Ivanovna.
"Ah! Aleksei Aleksandrovitch!" cried the little Old man, with a wicked light glowing in his
eyes, as Karenin passed him with a cold bow. "I have not yet congratulated you," and he
pointed to the newly received ribbon.
"I thank you. This is jeine day! "' replied Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, accentuating the
adjective prekrasny as was his habit.
He knew that these gentlemen were making sport of him; but he ejected nothing but hostile
feelings, and he was accustomed to it.
Catching sight of the countess's yellow shoulders rising from her corsage, as she appeared at
the door, and her beautiful pensive eyes, inviting him to join her, Aleksei Aleksandrovitch,
with a smile which showed his even white teeth, went to her.
Lidia Ivanovna's toilet had cost her much labor, like all her recent efforts in this
direction; for the object of her toilet was now entirely the reverse of that which she
had followed thirty years before. Formerly she had thought only of adorning herself,
and the more the better; now, on the contrary, she had to be adorned so unsuitably for her
figure and her years that she simply endeavored to render the contrast between her person
and her toilet not too frightful, and in Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's eyes she succeeded; he thought
her fascinating. For him she, with her friendliness and even love for him, was the only island
amid the sea of animosity and ridicule that surrounded him. As he was the gantlet of scornful
glances, he was naturally drawn to her loving eyes like a plant toward the light.
"I congratulate you," she said, looking at his decoration.
Repressing a smile of satisfaction, Karenin shrugged his shoulders and half closed his
eyes, as if to say that this was nothing to him.
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna knew well that these distinctions, even though he would not
confess it, caused him the keenest pleasure.
"How is our angel?" she asked, referring to Serozha.
"I cannot say that I very am well satisfied with him," replied Aleksei Aleksandrovitch,
Hfting his eyebrows and opening his eyes. "And Sitnikof (a pedagogue who had been intrusted
with Serozha's childish education) does not please him. As I told you, I find in him a
certain apathy toward the chief questions which ought to move the soul of every man
and of every child."
And Aleksei Aleksandrovitch began to discourse on a subject which, next to the questions
of administration, gave him the most concern — his son's education.
When Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, with Lidia Ivanovna's aid, once more resumed his ordinary life and
activity again, he felt it his duty to occupy himself with the education of the son who
had been left on his hands. Having never before taken any practical interest in the question
of education, Aleksei Aleksandrovitch consecrated some time to the practical study of the subject.
After having read various works on anthropology, pedagogy, and didactics, he conceived a plan
of education which the best tutor in Petersburg was then intrusted to put into practice. And
this work constantly occupied him.
"Yes; but his heart. I find in this child his father's heart, and with such a heart
he cannot be bad," said the countess, with enthusiasm.
"Well, that may be. So far as in me lies, I perform my duty; it is all that I can do."
"Will you come to my house?" asked the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, after a moment's silence.
"I have a very painful matter to talk with you about. I would have given the world to
spare you certain memories; others do not think the same. I have had a letter from her.
She is here in Petersburg."
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch quivered at the recollection of his wife; but his face instantly assumed
that expression of corpselike immobility that showed how absolutely unable he was to treat
of such a subject.
"I expected it," he said.
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna looked at him with exaltation, and in the presence of a
soul so great, tears of transport sprang to her eyes.
CHAPTER XXV When Aleksei entered the Countess Lidia Ivanovna's
cozy little boudoir, decorated with portraits and old porcelains, he failed to find his
friend.
She was changing her gown.
On a round table covered with a cloth stood a Chinese tea-service and a silver teapot
with an alcohol lamp. Aleksei Aleksandrovitch glanced perfunctorily
at the numberless paintings that adorned the room; then he sat down near a table and took
up a copy of the New Testament which lay on it. The rustling of the countess's silk dress
put his thoughts to flight.
"Well now! We can be a little more free from disturbance," said the countess, with a smile,
gliding between the table and the divan. "We can talk while drinking our tea."
After several words, meant to prepare his mind, she sighed deeply, and, with a tinge
of color in her cheeks, she put Anna's letter into his hands.
He read it, and sat long in silence.
"I do not feel that I have the right to refuse her," he said timidly, raising his eyes.
"My friend, you never can see evil anywhere."
"On the contrary, I see everything is evil. But would it be fair to...."
His face expressed indecision, desire for advice, for support, for guidance, in a question
so beyond his comprehension.
"No," interrupted the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, "there are limits to all things. I understand
immorality," she said, not with absolute sincerity, since she did not know what could induce women
to be immoral, "but what I do not understand is cruelty toward any one!
Toward you! How can she remain in the same city with you? One is never too old to learn,
and I learn every day your grandeur and her baseness!"
"Who shall cast the first stone?" asked Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, evidently satisfied with
the part he was playing. "I have forgiven her for everything, and therefore I cannot
deprive her of what is a need of her heart, — her love for her son." ....
"But is it love — my friend? Is it sincere? Let us agree that you have forgiven her, and
that you still pardon her. But have we the right to vex the soul of this little angel?
He believes that she is dead; he prays for her and asks God to pardon her sins It is
better so. What would he think now?"
"I had not thought of that," said Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, perceiving the justice of
her words.
The countess covered her face with her hands and was silent; she was praying.
"If you ask my advice," she replied, after she had uttered her prayer and taken her hands
from her face, "you will not do this. Do I not see how you suffer, how this opens all
your wounds." But let us admit that you, as always, forget yourself, but where will it
lead you? new sufferings for yourself, to torture for the child!
If she were still capable of human feelings, she herself could not desire this. No! I have
no hesitation about it, I advise you not to, and, if you give me your authority, I will
reply to her."
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch consented, and the countess wrote, in French, this letter:
Chere Madame: — Recalling your existence to your son would be likely to raise questions
which it would be impossible to answer without obliging" the child to criticize that which
should remain sacred to him, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband's refusal
in the spirit of Christian charity. I pray the Omnipotent to be merciful to you.
Comtesse Lidia
This letter accomplished the secret aim which the countess would not confess even to herself.
It wounded Anna to the bottom of her soul. Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, on returning home
from Lidia Ivanovna's, found himself unable to take up his ordinary occupations, or recover
the spiritual calm of a believer who feels that he is among the elect.
The thought of his wife who had been so guilty toward him, and toward whom he had acted so
Hke a saint, as the Counters Lidia Ivanovna had so well expressed it, ought not to have
disturbed him, and yet he was ill at ease. He could not understand a word of the book
he was reading, he could not drive away from his mind the cruel recollections of his relations
to her, of the mistakes which, as it now seemed to him, he himself had made in his treatment
of her. He remembered with a feeling like remorse the way he had received Anna's confession
that day as they were returning from the races. Why had he demanded merely an outward observance
of the proprieties? Why had he not challenged Vronsky to a duel? He was likewise tormented
by his recollection of the letter which he wrote her at that time; especially his forgiveness
of her, which had proved useless to any one, and the pains which he had wasted on the baby
that was not his, all came back to his memory and seared his heart with shame and regret.
And exactly the same feeling of shame and regret she experienced now in reviewing all
his past with her, and remembering the awkward way in which, after long vacillating, he had
offered himself to her.
"But how am I at fault? " he asked himself; and this question immediately gave rise to
another: "Do other men feel differently, fall in love differently, and marry differently,
— these Vronskys, Oblonskys .... these chamberlains with their handsome calves."
His imagination called up a whole line of these vigorous men, self-confident and strong,
who had always and everywhere attracted his curiosity and his wonder.
He drove away these thoughts; he strove to persuade himself that the end and aim of his
life was not this world, but eternity, that peace and charity alone ought to dwell in
his soul. But the fact that in this temporal, insignificant life he had, as it seemed to
him, made some humiliating blunders, tortured him as much as if that eternal salvation in
which he put his trust did not exist.
But this temptation was not long, and soon Aleksei Aleksandrovitch regained that serenity
and elevation of rain by which he succeeded in putting away all that he wished to forget.
CHAPTER XXVI "Well, Kapitonuitch?" said Serozha, as he
came in, rosy and gay, after his walk, on the evening before his birthday, while the
old Swiss, smiling down from his superior height, helped the young man off with his
coat, " did the bandaged chinovnik come to-day? Did papa see him?"
"Yes; the manager had only just got here when I announced him," replied the Swiss, winking
one eye gayly. "Permit me, I will take it."
"Serozha! Serozha!" called the Slavophile tutor, who was standing by the door that led
to the inner rooms, "take off your coat yourself."
But Serozha, though he heard his tutor's weak voice, paid no heed to him; standing by the
Swiss, he held him by the belt, and looked him straight in the face.
"And did papa do what he wanted?"
The Swiss nodded.
This chinovnik, with his head in a bandage, who had come seven times to ask some favor
of Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, interested Serozha and the Swiss. Serozha had met him one day
in the vestibule, and overheard how he begged the Swiss to let him be admitted, saying that
nothing was left for him and his children but to die.
Since that time the lad had felt great concern for the poor man.
"Say, did he seem very glad?" asked Serozha.
"Glad as he could be; he went off almost leaping."
"Has anything come?" asked Serozha, after a moment's silence.
"Well, sir," whispered the Swiss, shaking his head "there is something from the countess."
Serozha instantly understood that what the Swiss meant was a birthday present from the
Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
"What did you say? Where is it?"
"Kornei took it to papa; it must be some beautiful toy!"
"How big? as big as this?"
"Smaller, but beautiful." "Ack A little book?"
"No; a toy. Run away, run away. Vasili Lukitch is calling you," said the Swiss, hearing the
tutor's steps approach, and gently removing the little gloved hand which held his belt.
"In a little bit of a moment, Vasili Lukitch," said Serozha, with the amiable and gracious
smile to whose influence even the stern tutor submitted.
Serozha was in radiant spirits, and wanted to tell his friend, the Swiss, about a piece
of good fortune which the Countess Lidia Ivanovna's niece had told him, while they were walking
in the summer garden, had befallen the family. His happiness seemed greater still since he
heard about the chinovnik's success and his present.
It seemed to Serozha that every one ought to be happy this beautiful day.
"Do you know papa has received the Alexander Nevsky order?"
"Why shouldn't I know? He has been receiving congratulations."
"Is he glad?"
"How could he help being glad of the Tsar's favor."
Of course he deserves it!" said the old Swiss, gravely.
Serozha reflected as he looked into the Swiss's face, which he knew even to the least detail,
but especially the chin, between his gray side-whiskers. No one had seen his chin except
Serozha, who looked up at it from below.
"Well! and your daughter. Isn't it a long time since she has been to see us?"
"The Swiss's daughter was a ballet-dancer.
"How could she find time to come on work?" he exclaimed. "They have their lessons as
well as you; and you had better be off to yours, sir."
When Serozha reached his room, instead of attending to his tasks, he poured out into
the tutor's ears all his surmises about the present which had been brought him.
"It must be a locomotive engine; what do you think about it?" he asked; but Vasili Lukitch
was thinking of nothing except the grammar lesson, which had to be ready for the professor,
who came at two o'clock.
"No, but you must just tell me one thing, Vasili Lukitch," asked the child, who was
now sitting at his desk, with his book in his hands: "what is there higher than the
Alexander Nevsky. You know that papa has just received the Alexander Nevsky."
Vasili Lukitch replied that the order of Vladimir was higher.
"And above that?"
"St. Andrew, above them all"
"And above that?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you know?" and Serozha, leaning his head on his hand, began to think.
The child's thoughts were very varied and complicated; he imagined that his father perhaps
was going to have the orders of Vladimir and St. Andrew, and that therefore he would be
more indulgent for that day's lessons; and that he himself. When he grew up, would do
his best to deserve all the decorations, even those that would be given higher than that
of St. Andrew. A new order would scarcely have time to be founded before he would make
himself worthy of it.
These thoughts made the time pass so quickly that, when the professor came, his lesson
about the circumstances of time, and place, and mode of action was not prepared at all;
and the professor seemed not only dissatisfied, but distressed. His professor'^ distress touched
Serozha. He felt that he was to blame for not having learned his lesson. In spite of
all his efforts, he really had been unable to do it. When the professor was talking to
him, he imagined that he understood; but when he was alone, he really could not remember
or comprehend that such a short and easy word as vdrug, "suddenly," is a circumstance of
the mode of action; but still he was sorry that he had tried his teacher.
He seized on a moment when his teacher was silently looking into a book, to ask him:
"Mikhail Ivanovitch, when will your birthday be?"
"You would do better to think about your work; birthdays have no importance for a reasonable
being. It is only a day just like any other, and must be spent in work."
Serozha looked attentively at his teacher, studied his sparse beard, his eye-glasses
far down on his nose, and got into such a deep brown study that he heard nothing of
what the teacher was explaining to him. He had a dim comprehension that his teacher did
not believe what he said. By the tone in which he said it, he felt that it was incredible.
"But why do they all try to say to me the most tiresome things and the most useless
things, and all in the same way? Why does this man keep me from him, and not love me?"
he asked himself sadly, and he could not discover any answer.
CHAPTER XXVII After the professor, came the lesson with
his father. Serozha, while waiting for him, sat at the
table, playing with his pen-knife, and he fell into new thoughts.
One of his favorite occupations was to look for his mother while he was out walking. He
did not believe in death as a general thing; and especially he did not believe that his
mother was dead, in spite of what the Countess Lidia Ivanovna told him, and though his father
confirmed it. And therefore, after they told him that she was dead, he used to watch for
her while he was out for his walk. Every tall, graceful woman with dark hair he imagined
to be his mother; at the sight of such a woman, his heart would swell with love, the tears
would come into his eyes, and he would wait until the lady drew near him, and raised her
veil; then he would see her face; she would kiss him, smile upon him; he would feel the
sweet caress of her hand, smell the well-known perfume, and weep with joy, as he did one
evening when he lay at her feet, and she tickled him, and he laughed so heartily, and gently
bit her white hand, covered with rings.
Later, when he learned accidentally from the old nurse that his mother was alive, and that
his father and the countess had told him that she was dead because she was a wicked woman,
this seemed still more impossible to Serozha, because he loved her; and he looked for her,
and longed for her.
That very day, in the summer garden, there had been a lady in a lilac veil, and, with
his heart beating violently, expecting that it was she, he saw her take the same footpath
where he was walking; but this lady did not come up where he was, and she disappeared
from sight. Serozha felt a stronger love than ever for
his mother; and now, while waiting for his father, he was cutting his desk with his penknife;
with shining eyes, he was looking straight ahead, and thinking of her.
"Here comes your papa," said Vasili Lukitch.
Serozha jumped up from the chair, ran to kiss his father's hand, and looked for some sign
of pleasure because he had received the order of Alexander Nevsky.
"Did you have a good walk?" asked Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, as he sat down in an armchair,
taking up the Old Testament and opening it.
Though he had often told Serozha that every Christian ought to know the sacred history
by heart, he had often to consult the Old Testament for his lessons; and Serozha noticed
it.
"Yes, papa, I enjoyed it very much," said Serozha, sitting across his chair, and tipping
it, which was forbidden. "I saw Nadenka " (Nadenka was the countess's niece, whom she adopted)
"and she told me that they 've given you a new star. Are you glad, papa?"
"In the first place^ please don't tip your chair so," said Alekser Aleksandrovitch, "and
in the second place, know that what ought to be dear to us is work for itself and not
the reward. I want you to understand that. If you work and study simply for the sake
of receiving the recompense, the work will seem painful; but if you love work, your recompense
will come of itself."
And Aleksei Aleksandrovitch remembered that on this very day he had signed one hundred
and eighteen different papers with no other support in a most unwelcome task than the
feeling of duty.
Serozha's eyes, shining with affection and merriment, grew gloomy, and dropped as his
father looked at him. It was the same well-remembered way his father
had adopted in his treatment of him, and Serozha had already schooled himself to be hypocritical
toward it.
He felt that his father always spoke as if he were addressing some imaginary boy, one
of those children found in books, and not in the least like Serozha. And Serozha, when
he was with his father, tried to make believe that he was that bookish little boy.
"You understand this, I hope."
"Yes, papa," replied the lad, playing the part of this imaginary little boy.
The lesson consisted of the recitation of several verses of the Gospel and the review
of the first part of the Old Testament. The verses from the Gospel Serozha knew fairly
well. But, as he was in the midst of so repeating them, Serozha was struck by the appearance
of his father's forehead, which made almost a right angle near the temples, and he stumbled
and transferred the end of one verse to the next verse which began with the same word.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch concluded that he did not understand the meaning of what he
was reciting, and he was vexed.
He frowned, and began to explain what Serozha had heard so many times that he could not
help remembering because he understood it too well — just as it was with the concept
of the word vdnig, suddenly, being "a circumstance of the mode of action." The child, with scared
eyes, looked at his father and thought about only one thing: would his father oblige him
to repeat the explanation that he had given him, as he had done at other times? This fear
kept him from understanding anything. Fortunately his father passed on to the lesson in Sacred
History. Serozha narrated the facts themselves very well; but when he was required to answer
the questions as to what the fact signified he did not know it at all, though he had already
been punished for this same lesson. The place where he could not recite and hesitated, and
where he had whittled the table and rocked the chair, was the critical moment when he
had to repeat the list of antediluvian patriarchs. Not one could he remember, not even Enoch,
who was snatched up to heaven alive. On other occasions he could remember his name, but
now he had entirely forgotten it, for the very reason that Enoch was his favorite character
in all Biblical history, and he connected with the translation of this patriarch a long
string of ideas which completely absorbed him, while he was staring at his father's
watch-chain and a loose button on his waistcoat.
Serozha absolutely disbelieved in death, though they had told him about it many times. He
could not believe that those whom he loved could die, and especially incredible was the
thought of his own death. It all seemed perfectly impossible and incomprehensible.
But he had been told that all must die; he had asked people in whom he had confidence,
and they had assured him that it was so. The nurse herself, though unwillingly, said the
same thing. But Enoch did not die, and perhaps others might not have to die.
"Why should not others deserve justice before God, and so be snatched up to heaven alive?"
thought Serozha. "The wicked — those whom he disliked — might have to die, but the
good might be like Enoch."
"Well! how about these patriarchs?"
"Enoch .... Enos.... " "You have already mentioned him. This is bad,
Serozha, very bad. If you do not endeavor to learn the things essential for every Christian
to know, what will become of you?" asked his father, getting up. "I am dissatisfied with
you, and Piotr Ignatyevitch" — he was the professor — "is dissatisfied with you .... so
I am compelled to punish you."
Father and pedagogue both found fault with him, and Serozha was doubtless making bad
work of it. Yet it could not possibly be said that he
was a stupid boy; on the contrary, he was far superior to those whom his teacher held
up to him as examples. From his father's point of view, he did not want to learn what was
taught him. In reality, it was because he could not learn it. He could not for the reason
that his mind had needs more essential to him than those that his father and the pedagogue
supposed. These needs were wholly opposed to what they gave him, and he revolted against
his teachers.
He was only nine years old. He was only a child; but he knew his own soul. It was dear
to him; he guarded it jealously, as the eyelid guards the eye; and no one should force a
way in without the key of love. His teachers blamed him for being unwilling
to learn, and yet he was all on fire with the yearning for knowledge; and he learned
from Kapitonuitch, his old nurse, Nadenka, and Vasili Lukitch, but not from his teachers.
The water which the father and the pedagogue poured on the mill-wheel was wasted, but the
work was done in another place.
His father punished Serozha by not letting him go to see Nadenka; but his punishment
turned out to be an advantage. Vasili Lukitch was in good humor, and taught him how to make
wind-mills. The whole afternoon was spent in working and thinking of the ways and means
to make the mill go. Should he fix wings to it, or arrange it so he could turn it himself?
He forgot about his mother all the evening; but after he had got into bed, he suddenly
remembered her, and he prayed in his own fashion that she might cease to hide herself from
him, and make him a visit the next day, which was his birthday.
"Vasili Lukitch, do you know what I prayed God for?"
"To study better?"
"No."
"Toys?"
"No. You must not guess. It is a secret; when it comes to pass, I will tell you. Can't you
guess?"
"No, I can't guess; you must tell me!" said Vasili Lukitch, smiling, which was rare with
him. "Well, get into bed; I am going to put out the light."
"I see that which I prayed for much better when there isn't any light. There, I almost
told my secret!" cried Serozha, laughing gayly.
Serozha believed that he heard his mother and felt her presence when he was in the dark.
She was standing near him, and looking at him tenderly with her loving eyes; then he
saw a mill, a knife; then all melted into darkness, and he was asleep.
CHAPTER XXVIII When Vronsky and Anna reached Petersburg,
they stopped at one of the best hotels. Vronsky had a room to himself on the ground floor;
Anna, up one flight of stairs, with her baby, the nurse, and her maid, occupied a suite
of four rooms.
On the day of his return, Vronsky went to see his brother; he there found his mother,
who had come down from Moscow on business. His mother and sister-in-law received him
as usual, asked him about his travels, spoke of common friends, but not by a word did they
make any allusion to Anna. His brother, however, who returned his call the next morning, asked
him about her and Aleksei. Vronsky declared in no equivocal terms that he considered the
bond which united him to Madame Karenin the same as marriage, that he hoped a divorce
would be obtained, and then he should marry her, but till that time, he should regard
her the same as his wife; and he asked him to explain this to his mother and sister-in-law.
"The world may not approve of me; that is all one to me," he added; "but if my family
wish to remain on good terms with me, they must show proper respect for my wife."
The elder brother, always very respectful of his brother's opinions, was not very certain
in his own mind whether he was doing right or not, and resolved to let society settle
this question; but, as far as he himself was concerned, he saw nothing objectionable in
this, and he went with Aleksei to call on Anna.
Vronsky spoke to Anna with the formal 'vui', you, as he always did before strangers, and
treated her as a mere acquaintance; but it was perfectly understood that the brother
knew of their relations, and they spoke freely of Anna's visit to Vronsky's estate.
Notwithstanding his experience in society, Vronsky, in consequence of this new state
of things, fell into a strange error. It would seem as if he ought to have understood that
society would shut its doors on him and Anna; but now he persuaded himself by a strange
freak of imagination that, however it might have been in former days, now, owing to the
rapid progress made by society, — and he had himself unconsciously become a strong
supporter of progress, — prejudices would have melted away, and the question whether
they would be received by society would not trouble them.
" Of course, she would not be received at court," he thought; " but our relatives, our
friends, will understand things as they are."
A man may sit for some time with his legs doubled up in one position, provided he knows
that he can change it at pleasure; but if he knows that he must sit in such a constrained
position, then he will feel cramped, and his legs will twitch and stretch out toward the
desired freedom. Vronsky experienced this in regard to society. Though he knew in the
bottom of his soul that society was closed to them, he made experiment whether it had
changed, and whether it would receive them
But he quickly found that, even if it were open to him personally, it was closed to Anna.
As in the game of 'Cat-and-Mouse,' the hands raised for him immediately fell before Anna.
One of the first ladies of Petersburg society whom he met was his cousin Betsy.
"At last?" she cried joyously, "and Anna!" How glad I am! Where are you stopping? I can
easily imagine the hideous effect our Petersburg must have on you after such a charming journey!
I can imagine your honeymoon in Rome! And the divorce? is it arranged?"
Vronsky saw that Betsy's enthusiasm cooled when she learned that there was no divorce
as yet.
"I know well that I shall be ***," said she; "but I am coming to see Anna. Yes, I
will certainly come. You won't stay here long, I imagine?"
In fact she called on Anna that very day; but her manner was entirely different from
what it used to be. She evidently prided herself on her courage,
and wanted Anna to appreciate the genuineness of her friendship.
After talking for about ten minutes on the news of the day, she got up, and said as she
went away: —
"You have not told me yet when the divorce is to be.
Though I may disregard the proprieties, stiff-necked people will give you the cold shoulder as
long as you are not married. And it is so easy nowadays. Ca se fait.
So you are going Friday? I am sorry we shall not see each other again,"
From Betsy's manner Vronsky might have got an idea of what he might expect from society.
But he made still another experiment in his own family. He had no hope of any assistance
from his mother. He knew well that, enthusiastic though she had been in Anna's praise at their
first meeting, she would be relentless toward her now that she had spoiled her son's career;
but Vronsky founded great hopes on Varia, his brother's wife. It seemed to him that
she would not be one to cast a stone at Anna, but would come simply and naturally to see
her.
On the next day he called on her, and, finding her alone, he openly expressed his desire.
"You know, Aleksei, how fond I am of you," replied Varia, after hearing what he had to
say, "and how willing I am to do anything for you; but if I kept silent, it is because
I know that I cannot be of the least use to you and Anna Arkadyevna." She took special
pains to use the two names. "Please don't think that I judge her — not at all; perhaps
I should have done the same thing in her place. I cannot enter into details," she added, glancing
timidly up at his clouded face; "but we must call things by their right name. You would
like me to go and see her, and then have her visit me, in order to restore her to society.
But you must know / cannot do it. My daughters are growing up; I am obliged, on my husband's
account, to go into society. Now, I will go and call on Anna Arkadyevna;
but she knows that I cannot invite her here lest she should meet in my drawing-room people
who do not think as I do, and that would wound her. I cannot receive her." ....
"But I do not admit that she has fallen lower than hundreds of women whom you receive,"
interrupted Vronsky, rising, and seeing that his sister-in-law's decision was irrevocable.
"Aleksei, don't be angry with me; please understand, it is not my fault," said Varia, looking at
him with a timid smile.
"I am not angry with you, but I suffer doubly," said he, growing more and more gloomy. "I
suffer because this breaks our friendship, or, at least, seriously impairs it; for you
must know that for me this could not be otherwise."
He left her with these words.
Vronsky understood that further experiments would be idle, and that, during the few days
he would still have to spend in Petersburg, he must act as if he were in a foreign city,
avoiding all dealings with his former society friends so as not to be subjected to vexations
and affronts which were so painful to him.
One of the most unpleasant features of his position in Petersburg was the fact that Aleksei
Aleksandrovitch and his name seemed to be everywhere. It was impossible for a conversation
to begin on any subject without turning on Aleksei Aleksandrovitch; it was impossible
to go anywhere without meeting him. So, at least, it seemed to Vronsky; just as it seems
to a man with a sore finger, that he is always hitting it against everything.
Their stay in Petersburg seemed to Vronsky still more trying because all the time he
saw that Anna was in a strange, incomprehensible moral frame of mind such as he had never seen
before. At one time she was more than usually affectionate; then again she would seem cold,
irritable, and enigmatical. Something was tormenting her, and she was concealing something
from him; and she seemed not to notice the indignities which poisoned his life, and which,
in her delicacy of perception, should have been even more painful for her.
CHAPTER XXIX Anna's chief desire on her return to Russia
was to see her son. From the day she left Italy the thought of seeing him again kept
her in a constant state of excitement; and in proportion as she drew near Petersburg
the prospective delight and importance of this meeting kept growing greater and greater.
She did not trouble herself with the question how she should manage it. It would be a simple
and natural thing, she thought, to see her son once more, when she would be in the same
town with him; but since her arrival she suddenly realized her present relation toward society,'
and found that the interview was not easy to obtain.
She had been two days now in Petersburg, and never for an instant had the thought of her
son left her, if she had not seen him.
She felt that she had no right to go straight to her former home and risk coming face to
face with Alekseif Aleksandrovitch. She might not be admitted; she might be insulted. To
write to her husband and ask permission of him seemed to her painful even to think of.
She could be calm only when she did not think of her husband. To see her son when he was
out taking his walk, even if she could find where and when he went, was too little for
her. She had counted so much on seeing him again! she had so much to say to him; she
had such a desire to hug him, to kiss him.
Serozha's old nurse might have been an assistance to her, and shown her how to manage; but she
was no longer living in Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's house.
On the third day, having learned of Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's intimate relations with
the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided to write her a letter, and this cost her the
greatest pains to write. She told her frankly that permission to see her son depended on
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch's magnanimity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her
husband, he, in his part of magnanimous man, would not refuse her.
The messenger that carried the letter brought back the most cruel and unexpected reply,
that there was no answer. She had never felt so wounded as at the moment when, summoning
the messenger, she heard from him the circumstantial story of how he had waited, and how, after
a time, he had been told that there would be no answer. Anna felt humiliated, insulted,
but she saw that, from her point of view, the countess was right.
Her grief was all the keener because she had to bear it alone. She could not and did not
wish to confide it to Vronsky. She knew that though he was the chief cause of her unhappiness,
he would regard her meeting with her son as of little account; she knew that he would
never be able to sound ail the depths of her anguish; she knew that she should hate him
for the unsympathetic tone in which he would speak of it. And she feared this more than
anything else in the world and so hid from him her action in regard to
her son.
She stayed at home all day long and racked her brain to think of other ways of meeting
her son, and finally she decided to write directly to her husband.
She had already begun her letter, when Lidia Ivanovna's reply was brought to her. The countess's
previous silence had humbled and affronted her, but the note and all that she read between
the lines so exasperated her, — this bitterness against her seemed so shocking when contrasted
with her passionate, legitimate affection for her son, that she grew indignant against
the others, and ceased to blame herself.
"What cruelty! What hypocrisy!" she said to herself. "All they want is to insult me and
torment the child. I will not let them do so. She is worse than I am; at least, I do
not lie."
She immediately decided to go on the morrow, which was Serozha's birthday, directly to
her husband's house; she would bribe the servants, and would make any kind of an excuse, if only
she might once see her son and put an end to the ugly network of lies with which they
were surrounding the innocent child.
She went to a toy shop and purchased some toys, and thus she formed her plan of action:
she would start early in the morning, at eight o'clock, before Aleksei Aleicsandrovitch would
probably be up; she would have the money in her hand all ready to bribe the Swiss and
the valet to let her go up-stairs without raising her veil, under the pretext of laying
on Serozha's bed some presents sent by his godfather. As to what she should say to her
son, she could not form the least idea; she could not make any preparation for that.
The next morning, at eight o'clock, Anna got out of her hired carriage and rang the door-bell
of her former home.
"Go and see what is wanted! It's some lady," said Kapitonuitch, in loose coat and galoshes,
as he looked out of the window and saw a lady closely veiled standing on the porch. The
Swiss's assistant, a young man whom Anna did not know, had scarcely opened the door before
Anna pushed her way in, and, drawing a three-ruble note out of her ***, thrust it into his hand.
"Serozha .... Sergyef Aleksievitch," she stammered, and started down the vestibule.
The Swiss's assistant examined the note, and stopped the visitor at the inner glass door.
"Whom do you wish to see?" he asked.
She did not hear his words, and made no reply.
Kapitonuitch, noticing the stranger's confusion, came out, let her into the entry, and asked
her what she wanted.
"I come from Prince Skorodumof to see Sergyef Aleksievitch."
"He is not up yet," replied the Swiss, looking sharply at her.
Anna had never dreamed that the absolutely unchanged appearance of the anteroom of the
house which for nine years had been her home could have such a powerful effect on her.
One after another, sweet and painful memories arose in her mind, and for a moment she forgot
why she was there. "Will you wait?" risked the Swiss, helping
her to remove her shubka. When he saw her face, he recognized her, and without a word
bowed profoundly.
"Will your ladyship be pleased to enter?" he said to her.
She tried to speak, but her voice refused to utter a sound. Giving the old servant an
entreating look, with light, swift steps she went to the staircase. She flew up the stairs.
Kapitonuitch tried to overtake her, and followed after her, catching his galoshes at every
step.
"His tutor is there; perhaps he is not dressed yet; I will speak to him."
Anna kept on up the stairs which she knew so well, not heeding what the old man said.
"This way. To the left, if you please. Excuse it if all is in disorder. He sleeps in the
front room now," said the Swiss, out of breath. "Will your ladyship be good enough to wait
a moment? I will go and see." And, opening the high door, he disappeared.
Anna stopped and waited.
"He has just waked up," said the Swiss, coming back through the same door.
And, as he spoke, Anna heard the sound of a child yawning, and merely by the sound of
the yawn she recognized her son and seemed to see him alive before her.
"Let me go in.... let me!" she cried, and hurriedly pushed through the door.
At the right of the door stood the bed, and on the bed a child was sitting up in his little
open nightgown; his little body was leaning forward, and he was just finishing a yawn
and stretching himself. His lips were just closing into a sleepy smile, and, with this
smile, he slowly and gently fell back on his pillow.
"Serozha!" she whispered, as she went noiselessly toward him.
At the time of their separation and during that access of love which she had been recently
experiencing for him, Anna had imagined him as still a boy of four, the age when he had
been most charming. Now he no longer bore any resemblance to him whom she had left;
he was still further removed from the four-year-old ideal; he had grown taller and thinner. How
long his face seemed! How short his hair! What long arms!
How he had changed since she had seen him last! But it was still Serozha — the shape
of his head, his lips, his little slender neck, and his broad little shoulders.
"Serozha!" she whispered in the child's ear.
He raised himself on his elbow, turned his disheveled head first to this side, then to
that, as if searching for something, and opened his eyes. For several seconds he looked with
an inquiring face at his mother, who stood motionless before him. Then he suddenly smiled
with joy, and again closing his sleepy eyes he threw himself, not back upon his pillow,
but into his mother's arms.
"Serozha, my dear little boy!" she cried, choking with tears, and throwing her arms
around his plump body.
"Mamma!" he whispered, cuddling into his mother's arms so as to feel their encircling pressure.
Smiling sleepily, still with his eyes closed, he took his chubby little hands from the head
of the bed and put them on his mother's shoulder and climbed into her lap, having that warm
breath of sleep peculiar to children, and pressed his face to his mother's neck and
shoulders. "I knew," he said, opening his eyes; "today
is my birthday; I knew that you would come. I am going to get up now."
And as he spoke he fell asleep again.
Anna devoured him with her eyes. She saw how he had grown and changed during her absence.
She knew and yet she did not know his bare legs, so much longer now, coming below his
nightgown; she recognized his cheeks grown thin; his short hair curled in the neck where
she had so often kissed it. She could not keep her hands from him, and not a word was
she able to say, and the tears choked her. "What are you crying for, maitjma?" he asked,
now entirely awake. "What makes you cry?" he repeated, ready to weep himself.
"I will not cry any more .... I am crying for joy. It is so long since I have seen you.
But I will not, I will not cry any more," said she, drying her tears and turning around.
"Now go and get dressed," she added, after she had grown a little calmer, but still holding
Serozha's hand. She sat down near the bed on a chair which held the child's clothing.
"How do you dress without me? How .... " she wanted to speak simply and gayly, but she
could not, and again she turned her head away.
"I don't wash in cold water any more, papa has forbidden it; but you have not seen Vasili
Lukitch? Here he comes. But you are sitting on my things."
And Serozha laughed heartily. She looked at him and smiled.
"Mamma! dear heart, darling," ^ he cried, again throwing himself into her arms, as if
now for the first time, having seen her smile, he clearly understood what had happened.
"You don't need it on," said he, taking off her hat. And as if again recognizing her with
her head bare, he began to kiss her again.
"What did you think of me? Did you believe that I was dead?"
"I never believed it."
"You believed me alive, my precious?"
"I knew it! I knew it!" he replied, repeating his favorite phrase; and, seizing her hand
which was smoothing his hair, he pressed the palm of it to his little mouth and began to
kiss it.
CHAPTER *** Vasili Lukitch, meantime, not at first knowing
who this lady was, but learning from their conversation that it was Serozha's mother,
the woman who had deserted her husband, and whom he did not know, as he had not come into
the house till after her departure, was in great perplexity. Ought he to go to his pupil,
or should he tell Aleksei Aleksandrovitch?
On mature reflection he came to the conclusion that his duty consisted in going to dress
Serozha at the usual hour, without paying any attention to a third person — his mother
or any one else. So he dressed himself. But as he reached the door and opened it,
the sight of the caresses between the mother and child, the sound of their voices and their
words, made him change his mind. He shook his head, sighed, and quietly closed
the door. "I will wait ten minutes longer," he said
to himself, coughing slightly, and wiping his eyes.
There was great excitement among the servants; they all knew that the baruinya had come,
and that Kapitonuitch had let her in, and that she was in the child's room; they knew,
too, that their master was in the habit of going to Serozha every morning at nine o'clock:
each one felt that the husband and wife ought not to meet, that it must be prevented.
Kornei, the valet, went down to the Swiss to ask why Anna had been let in; and, finding
that Kapitonuitch had taken her up-stairs, he reprimanded him severely.
The Swiss maintained an obstinate silence till the valet declared that he deserved to
lose his place, when the old man jumped at him, and, shaking his fist in his face, said:
"What is that? you would not let her in? You've served here ten years, and had nothing but
kindness from her, but you would have said, 'Now, go away from here!' You know what policy
is, you sly dog. What you don't forget is to rob your master, and to carry off his racoon-skin
shubas!"
"Soldier!" replied Kornei, scornfully, and he turned toward the nurse, who was coming
in just at this moment. "What do you think, Marya Yefimovna? He has let in Anna Arkadyevna,
without saying anything to anybody, and just when Aleksei Aleksandrovitch, as soon as he
is up, will be going to the nursery."
"What a scrape! what a scrape!" said the nurse. "But, Kornei Vasilyevitch, find some way to
keep your master, while I run to warn her, and get her out of .the way. What a scrape!"
'When the nurse went into the child's room, Serozha was telling his mother how Nadenka
and he had fallen when sliding down a hill of ice, and turned three somersaults. Anna
was listening to the sound of her son's voice, looking at his face, watching the play of
his features, feeling his little arms, but not hearing a word that he said. She had to
go away, she had to leave him; this alone she understood and felt. She had heard Vasili
Lukitch's steps, and his little discreet cough, as he came to the door, and now she heard
the nurse coming in; but, unable to move or to speak, she remained as fixed as a statue.
"Mistress, darling," said the nurse, coming up to Anna, and kissing her hands and her
shoulders. "God sent this joy for our birthday celebration! You are not changed at all."
"Akh! nurse, my dear; I did not know that you were in the house," said Anna, coming
to herself.
"I don't live here; I live with my daughter. I came to give my best wishes to Serozha,
Anna Arkadyevna, galubushka."
The nurse suddenly began to weep, and to kiss Anna's hand.
Serozha, with bright, joyful eyes, and holding his mother with one hand and his nurse with
the other, was dancing in his little bare feet on the carpet. His old nurse's tenderness
toward his mother was delightful to him.
"Mamma, she often comes to see me; and when she comes ...." he began, but he stopped short
when he perceived that the nurse whispered something in his mother's ear, and that his
mother's face assumed an expression of fear, and something like shame which did not go
well with his mother.
Anna went to him.
"My precious!" she said.
She could not say the word prashchai, "farewell"; but the expression of her face said it, and
he understood.
"My precious, precious Kutik!" she said, calling him by a pet name which she used when he was
a baby. "You will not forget me; you ...." but she
could not say another word.
Only then she began to think of the words which she wanted to say to him, but now it
was impossible to say them. But Serozha understood all that she would have said; he understood
that she was unhappy, and that she loved him. He even understood what the nurse whispered
in her ear; he heard the words " always at nine o'clock," and he knew that they referred
to his father, and that his mother must not meet him. He understood this, but one thing
he could not understand: why did her face express fear and shame? .... She was not to
blame, but she was afraid of him, and seemed ashamed of something. He wanted to ask a question
which would have explained this doubt, but he did not dare; he saw that she was in sorrow,
and he pitied her. He silently clung close to her, and then he whispered: —
"Don't go yet! He will not come for some time."
His mother pushed him away from her a little, in order to see if he understood the meaning
of what he had said, and in the frightened expression of his face she perceived that
he not only spoke of his father, but seemed to ask her how he ought to think about him.
"Serozha, my dear," she said, "love him; he is better and more upright than I am, and
I have been wicked to him. When you have grown up, you will understand."
"Not better than you!" cried the child, with sobs of despair; and, clinging to his mother's
shoulders, he squeezed her with all his might till his arms trembled with the exertion.
"My darling, my little one!" exclaimed Anna; and, bursting into tears, she sobbed like
a child, even as he sobbed.
At this moment the door opened, and Vasili Lukitch came in. Steps were heard at the other
door; and, in a frightened whisper, he exclaimed, " He is coming," and gave Anna her hat.
Serozha threw himself on the bed, sobbing, and covered his face with his hands. Anna
took them away to kiss yet once again his tear-stained cheeks, and then with quick steps
hurried from the room.
Aleksei Aleksandrovitch met her at the door. When he saw her, he stopped and bowed his
head.
Though she had declared a moment before that he was better and more upright than she, the
swift glance that she gave him, taking in his whole person, with all its peculiarities,
awoke in her only a feeling of hatred and scorn for him, and jealousy on account of
her son.
She hurriedly lowered her veil, and, quickening her step, almost ran from the room.
She had entirely forgotten in her haste the playthings which, on the evening before, she
had bought with so much love and sadness; and she took them back with her to the hotel.
CHAPTER XXXI Eagerly as Anna had desired to see her son
again, long as she had thought about it, prepared herself beforehand, she had no idea of what
an effect the sight of him would have on her; when she got back to her solitary room at
the hotel again, she could not for a long time understand why she was there.
"Yes, all is over; I am alone again," she said to herself; and, without taking off her
hat, she threw herself into an easy-chair which stood near the fireplace.
And, fixing her eyes on a bronze clock standing on a table between two windows, she became
absorbed with thought. The French maid whom she had brought from
abroad with her came and offered to help her dress; Anna looked at her with surprise, and
replied, "By and by." A servant came to announce coffee; "By and
by," she said. The Italian nurse came in, bringing the little
daughter whom she had just dressed; the plump, well-nurtured little one, as always, when
she saw her mother, lifted up her bare little arms with the palms down, and, smiling with
her toothless little mouth, began to beat the air with her plump little hands like a
fish waving its fins, and to pull at the starched tucks of her embroidered skirt. No one could
help smiling back, or kissing the little girl, or letting her catch hold of one of her fingers,
screaming with delight, and jumping; no one could help pressing her lips for a kiss to
the little sweet mouth. All this Anna did, and she took her into her
arms, trotted her on her knee, and she kissed her fresh cheek and bare elbows; but the sight
of this child made her feel clearly that the affection which she felt for it was not the
same kind of love that she had for Serozha. Everything about this little girl was lovely;
but somehow she did not fill the wants of her heart.
In her first-born, although he was the child of a man whom she did not love, was concentrated
all the strength of a love which had not been satisfied. Her daughter, born in the most
trying circumstances, had never received the one-hundredth part of the care which she had
spent on Serozha. Moreover, the little girl, as yet, only represented hopes, while Serozha
was almost a man, and a lovely man! He had already begun to struggle with his thoughts
and feelings; he loved his mother, understood her, judged her perhaps, she thought, recalling
her son's words and looks; and now she was separated from him forever, morally as well
as materially; and she saw no way of remedying the situation.
She gave the little one back to her nurse, and sent them away, and opened a locket containing
Serozha's picture about the same age as his sister; then, removing her hat, she took an
album in which were photographs of her son at different periods; she wanted to compare
them, and she began to take them out of the album. She took them all out. One was left,
the last, the best photograph of him. It represented Serozha astride a chair, in a white frock,
a smile on his lips and a shadow in his eyes; it was his most characteristic, his best expression.
Holding the album in her little deft hands, which to-day moved with extraordinary nervousness,
she tried with her slender white fingers to take it from its place; but the photograph
stuck, and she could not get at it. There was no paper-cutter on the table, and she
took up another photograph at random to push out the card from its place.
It was a picture of Vronsky, taken in Rome, with long hair and a round felt hat.
"Ah! there he is," she said to herself, and as she looked at him she suddenly remembered
that he was the cause of all her present suffering.
Not once had she thought of him all the morning; but now suddenly the sight of this manly and
noble face, which she knew and loved so well, brought a flood of affection to her heart.
"Yes! Where is he? Why does he leave me alone, a prey to my grief?" she asked with bitter
reproach, forgetting that she herself had carefully concealed from him everything concerning
her son. She sent a message to him, asking him to come to her immediately, and waited,
with heavy heart, thinking over the words with which she should tell him all, and the
loving expressions with which he would try to console her. The servant returned to say
that Vronsky had a visitor, but that he would come very soon; and would like to know if
she could receive him with Prince Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg.
"He will not come alone, and he has not seen me since yesterday at dinner," she thought;
" and he does not come so that I can speak with him, but he comes with Yashvin."
And suddenly a cruel thought crossed her mind: what if he no longer loved her?
And as she went over in her mind all the incidents of the past few days, she found her terrible
thought confirmed by them. The day before he had not dined with her; they did not have
the same room, now that they were in Petersburg; and now he was bringing some one with him
as if to avoid being alone with her.
"But he must tell me this. I must know it. If it is true, I know what I must do," she
said to herself, wholly unable to imagine what would happen if Vronsky's indifference
should prove to be true. She began to feel that he did not love her any more; she imagined
herself reduced to despair, and in consequence her feelings made her overexcited; she rang
for her maid, went into her dressing-room, and took extreme pains with her dress as if
the sight of her toilet and becoming way of dressing her hair would bring back Vronsky's
love, if he had grown indifferent.
The bell rang before she was ready.
When she returned to the drawing-room, not Vronsky, but Yashvin, looked at her. Vronsky
was looking at Serozha's picture, which she had left lying on the table, and he did not
hurry to greet her.
"We are old acquaintances," she said to him, going toward him and placing her small hand
in Yashvin's enormous hand. He was all confusion, and this seemed odd, in a man of his gigantic
form and decided features.
"We met last year at the races. — Give them to me," she said, snatching her son's photographs
from Vronsky, who was looking at them, while her eyes blazed at him significantly. "Were
the races successful this year? We saw the races at Rome on the Corso. But
I believe you do not like life abroad," she added, with a fascinating smile. "I know you,
and, although we seldom meet, I know your tastes."
"I am very sorry for that, because my tastes are generally bad," said Yashvin, biting the
left side of his mustache.
After they had talked some little time, Yashvin, seeing Vronsky look at his watch, asked Anna
if she expected to be in Petersburg long. Then, bending down his huge back, he picked
up his kepi.
"Probably not long," she replied, in some confusion, and looked at Vronsky.
"Then we shall not meet again?" said Yashvin, getting up and addressing Vronsky. "Where
are you going to dine?"
"Come and dine with me," said Anna, with decision; and, vexed because she could not conceal her
confusion whenever her false situation became evident before a
Stranger, she blushed. "The table here is not good, but you will at least see each other.
Of all Alekseis messmates, you are his favorite."
"I should be delighted," replied Yashvin, with a smile which proved to Vronsky that
he was very much pleased with Anna. Yashvin took leave of them and went away, while Vronsky
lingered behind.
"Are you going?" she asked him.
"I am already late. Go ahead, I will overtake you" he shouted to Yashvin.
She took his hand, and, without removing her eyes from him, tried to find something to
say to detain him.
"Wait; I want to ask you something," and she pressed Vronsky's hand against her cheek.
"Well! did I do wrong to invite him to dinner?"
"You did quite right," he replied, with a calm smile which showed his solid teeth, and
he kissed her hand.
"Aleksei, do you feel changed toward me?" she asked, pressing his hand between her own.
"Aleksei, I am tired of staying here. When shall we go away?"
"Soon, very soon. You can't imagine how life here weighs upon me too," and he drew away
his hand.
"Well! go, go away!" she said, in an injured tone, and quickly left him.
CHAPTER XXXII When Vronsky came back to the hotel, Anna
was not there. They told him that she had gone out with a lady who came to call on her.
The fact that she had gone out without having left word where, a thing which she had not
done before, the fact that she had also gone somewhere in the morning without telling him,
— all this coupled with the strange expression of excitement on her face that morning, the
manner and the harsh tone with which she had snatched away her son's photographs from him
before Yashvin, made Vronsky wonder. He made up his mind to ask for an explanation, and
waited in the drawing-room for her return. Anna did not come back alone; she brought
with her an old maiden aunt, the Princess Oblonskaya. She was the lady who had come
in the morning, and with whom she had been shopping.
Anna pretended not to notice the expression of Vronsky's face and his uneasy, questioning
manner, and began to talk gayly about the purchases she had made in the morning. He
saw that something unusual was the matter: in her shining eyes, as they flashed their
lightning on him, there was evidence of mental strain; and in her speech and movements there
was that nervous alertness and grace which in the first epoch of their relationship had
so captivated him, but now they troubled and alarmed him.
The table was laid for four, and, just as they were going to sit down in the little
dining-room, Tuskievitch came from the Princess Betsy with a message for Anna.
The Princess Betsy sent her excuses for not coming in person to say good-by to her. She
was not well, and asked Anna to come to see her between half-past seven and nine o'clock.
Vronsky looked at Anna as if he would draw her attention to the fact that in naming a
time she had taken precautions against her meeting any one; but Anna did not seem to
pay any attention to it.
"I am very sorry, but just between half-past seven and nine I shall not be at liberty,"
she said, with a slight smile.
"The princess will be very much disappointed."
"So shall I."
"I suppose you are going to hear Patti," said Tushkievitch.
"Patti." You give me an idea. I would go certainly, if I could get a loge."
"I can get you one," suggested Tushkievitch.
"I should be very much obliged to you," said Anna; " but won't you dine with us?"
Vronsky shrugged his shoulders slightly; he did not know what to make of Anna. Why had
she brought home the old princess, why was she keeping Tushkievitch to dinner, and, above
all, why did she let him get her a box? Was it to be thought of for a moment that she,
in her position, could go to the opera on a Patti subscription night, when she would
meet all her acquaintances there? He looked at her seriously, but she responded with a
half-despairing, half-mocking look, the meaning of which he could not understand.
All through dinner Anna was aggressively lively, and seemed to flirt both with Tushkievitch
and with Yashvin. When they rose from the table, Tushkievitch
went to secure a box, but Yashvin was going to smoke and Vronsky took him down to his
own room; after some time Vronsky came up-stairs again. Anna was already dressed in a light
silk gown bought in Paris. It was trimmed with velvet and had an open front. On her
head she wore costly white lace, which set off to advantage the striking beauty of her
face.
"Are you really going to the theater?" he asked, trying to avoid looking at her.
"Why do you ask me in such a terrified way?" she replied, again hurt because he did not
look at her. "Why shouldn't I go?"
She did not seem to understand the meaning of his words.
"Of course, there is no reason for it," said he; frowning.
"That is exactly what I say," she replied, not wishing to see the sarcasm of his remark,
and calmly putting on a long, perfumed glove.
"Anna, for heaven's sake, what is the matter with you?" he said to her, trying to bring
her to her senses, as her husband had more than once done.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You know very well that you can't go there."
"Why not?" I am not going alone; the Princess Varvara has gone to dress; she is going with
me."
He shrugged his shoulders with a look of perplexity and despair.
"But don't you know?" .... he began.
"No, I don't want to know!" she almost shrieked. "I don't want to know. Am I sorry for anything
I have done? No, no, no, indeed; if it were to begin over again, I would begin over again.
There is only one thing of any consequence to us — to you and me, and that is do we
love each other? Everything else is of no account. Why do we live separate here, and
not see each other? Why can't I go where I please?
I love you, and everything is right, if your feelings have not changed toward me," she
said in Russian, looking at him with a peculiar gleam in her eyes which he could not understand;
" why don't you look at me?"
He looked at her, he saw all her beauty, of her face, of the toilet, which was so becoming
to her; but now this beauty and this elegance were precisely what irritated him.
"You know very well that my feelings cannot change; but I beg you not to go out, I beseech
you," he said again in French, with a prayer in his voice, but with a cold look in his
eyes.
She did not hear his words, but noticed only the coldness of his look, and replied with
an injured air: —
"And I for my part beg you to explain why I should not go."
"Because it may cause you .... "
He grew confused.
"I don't understand at all: Yashvin n'est pas compromettant, and the Princess Varvara
is no worse than anybody else. Ah! here she is!"
For the first time in his life Vronsky felt toward Anna a sensation of vexation bordering
on anger, on account of her intentional misunderstanding of her position. This feeling was intensified
by the fact that he could not explain the reason of his vexation. If he had frankly
said what was in his mind, he would have said: —
"To appear at the opera in such a toilet, with a notorious person like the princess,
is equivalent to throwing down the gauntlet to public opinion; to confessing yourself
a lost woman, and, consequently, renouncing all hope of ever going into society again."
He could not say that to her.
"Why did she not understand it? What has happened to her?" he asked himself.
He felt at one and the same time a lessened esteem for Anna's character, and a greater
sense of her beauty.
With a dark frown he went back to his room, and sat down with Yashvin, who, with his long
legs stretched out on a chair, was drinking cognac and seltzer water.
Vronsky ordered the same for himself.
"You spoke of Lanskof's Moguchi? He is a fine horse, and I advise you to buy him," began
Yashvin, glancing at his comrade's solemn face. "His crupper is tapering, but what legs!
and what a head! You couldn't do better."
"I think I shall take him," replied Vronsky.
The talk about horses occupied him, but not for a moment was the thought of Anna absent
from his mind, and he involuntarily listened for the sound of steps in the corridor, and
kept looking at the clock on the mantel.
"Anna Arkadyevna left word that she has gone to the theater," a servant announced.
Yashvin poured out another little glass of cognac and seltzer, drank it, and rose, buttoning
up his coat.
"Well, shall we go?" said he, half smiling beneath his long mustaches, and showing that
he understood the cause of Vronsky's vexation, but did not attach much importance to it.
"I am not going," replied Vronsky, gloomily.
"I promised, so I must go; well — da svidanya! If you should change your mind, take Krasinsky's
seat, which will be unoccupied," he added, as he went out.
"No; I have some work to do."
"A man has trials with a wife, but with it is even worse," thought Yashvin as he left
the hotel.
When Vronsky was alone, he rose, and began to walk up and down the room.
"Yes! To-night? The fourth subscription night.... My brother Yegor will be there with his wife,
and with my mother, probably; in fact, all Petersburg will be there! Now she is going
in, and is taking off her shuba, and there she is in the light! Tushkievitch, Yashvin,
the Princess Varvara!" he pictured the scene to himself.
"What am I to do? am I afraid? or have I given Tushkievitch the right to protect her? However
you may look at it, it is stupid, it is stupid! .... Why should she place me in this position?"
he said, with a gesture of despair.
This movement jostled the stand on which stood the seltzer water and the decanter with cognac,
and nearly knocked it over; in trying to rescue it, he upset it entirely; he rang, and gave
a kick to the table.
"If you want to remain in my service," said he to his valet who appeared, "then tend to
your business. Don't let this happen again; why didn't you take these things away?"
The valet, knowing his innocence, wished to justify himself: but by one glance at his
barin's face he realized that it was best for him to be silent; and, making a hasty
excuse, he got down on the floor to pick up the broken glasses and water-bottles.
"That is not your business; call a waiter, and get my dress-coat."
Vronsky entered the theater at half-past nine. The performance was in full swing. The Kapelldiener
— a little old man — took his fur-lined shuba, and, recognizing him, called him " your
excellency," and assured him that he needed not to take a number, but that all he had
to do was to call for Feodor.
There was no one in the lighted lobby except the Kapelldiener and two valets with fur garments
on their arms, listening at the door. The sound of the orchestra playing staccato could
be heard, carefully accompanying a woman's voice which was admirably rendering a musical
phrase. The door opened and another Kapelldiener came tiptoeing out, and the phrase, as it
was ending, came distinctly to Vronsky's ear. But instantly the door closed again and he
could not hear the ending of the phrase or the cadenza; but from the applause that followed
he knew that the aria was finished.
The plaudits still continued as he went into the auditorium, brilliantly lighted with chandeliers
and bronze gas-fixtures. On the stage, the prima donna, with bare shoulders and glittering
with diamonds, was bowing and smiling, and, with the assistance of the tenor, who gave
her his hand, was bending forward to receive the bouquets that were thrust awkwardly at
her over the footlights, and then she went toward a gentleman whose hair, shining with
pomade, was parted in the middle, and who reached out his long arms to hand her some
article. The whole audience — those in the boxes and those in the parquet — was wildly
excited and leaning forward, shouting and clapping. The Kapellmeister, on his elevated
stand, helped pass it along, and straightened his white necktie.
Vronsky went down to the middle of the parquet, and, pausing, looked through the audience.
He paid less attention than ever to the familiar stage-setting, to the stage, to the noise,
to all that well-known, variegated, and uninteresting throng of spectators that was packed and crowded
into the theater.
There were the same ladies in the boxes, with the same officers behind them, the same gayly
dressed women, the same uniforms, and the same dress-coats; in the gallery the same
disorderly crowd; and in all this closely packed house, in the boxes and in the front
seats, were some forty genuine men and women! And Vronsky immediately turned his attention
to this oasis, and occupied himself with it exclusively.
The act was just over as Vronsky went toward the first row of seats, and stopped near the
railing beside Serpukhovskof, who, bending his knee and rapping against the rail with
his heel, had seen him at a distance, and beckoned to him with a smile.
Vronsky had not yet seen Anna, and purposely refrained from looking for her; but from the
direction in which people were gazing, he knew where she was.
He glanced round furtively but did not search for her.
Expecting something even worse, he looked to see if Aleksei Aleksandrovitch were there;
to his joy the latter was not at the theater that evening.
"How unmartial you look," said Serpukhovskol; "one would take you for a diplomat — an
artist."
"Yes; on my return home I put on citizen's dress, 'I replied Vronsky, slowly taking out
his opera-glasses. "In this respect, I confess I envy you. When
I return from abroad and put these on," said he, touching his epaulets, "I mourn for my
liberty."
Serpukhovskoi" had long since given up trying to push Vronsky along in his military career,
but he continued to have a warm affection for him, and he now seemed especially friendly
toward him.
"It is too bad that you lost the first act."
Vronsky, while listening with one ear, examined the boxes and the first tier of seats, with
his opera-glass; suddenly Anna's head came into view, proud, and strikingly beautiful,
in its frame of laces, next a lady in a turban, and a bald-headed old man, who blinked as
he gazed through his opera-glass. Anna was in the fifth box, not more than twenty steps
from him; she was seated in the front of the box, turning slightly away, and was talking
with Yashvin. The pose of her head, her neck, her beautiful, broad shoulders, the radiance
of her eyes and face, — all reminded him of her as she had looked that evening at the
ball in Moscow. But her beauty inspired him with entirely
different sentiment; there was no longer anything mysterious in his feeling for her. And so,
although her beauty was more extraordinary than ever, and fascinated him, at the same
time it was now offensive to him. She did not look in his direction, but he felt that
she had already seen him.
When Vronsky again directed life opera-glass toward the box, he saw the Princess Varvara,
very red in the face, was laughing unnaturally, and kept looking at the next box; Anna, striking
her closed fan on the red velvet, was looking away, evidently not seeing and not intending
to see what was going on in the next box. Yashvin's face wore the same expression as
when he lost at cards; he drew his left mustache more and more into his mouth, frowned, and
was looking out of the corner of his eye into the same box.
In this box were the Kartasofs. Vronsky knew them, and he knew that Anna, too, had been
on friendly terms with them; Madame Kartasof, a little, thin woman, was standing with her
back to Anna, and putting on an opera-cloak, which her husband handed to her; her face
was pale and angry; and she was saying something with great excitement. Kartasof, a stout,
bald-headed man, kept looking at Anna, and trying to calm his wife.
When Madame Kartasof left the box, her husband lingered, trying to catch Anna's eye, and
evidently desirous of bowing to her; but apparently she purposely avoided noticing him, and leaned
back to speak to Yashvin, whose shaven head was bent toward her. Kartasof went out without
having bowed, and the box was left empty.
Vronsky did not understand what had just passed between the Kartasofs and Anna, but he felt
perfectly sure that something mortifying had happened to Anna; by the expression of her
face he saw that she was summoning all her strength to keep up her part to the end, and
to appear perfectly calm. And this semblance of external calm was put on to perfection.
Those who knew nothing of her history and her circle, who had not heard her old friends'
expressions of indignation at her appearing in this way, in all the splendor of her beauty
and of her toilet, would have admired her serenity and beauty, and never have suspected
that this woman was enduring the same feelings of shame as a criminal experiences at the
pillory.
Knowing that something had taken place, but not knowing exactly what, Vronsky felt a sense
of deep anxiety, and, hoping to learn something about the matter, went to his brother's box.
He intentionally crossed the parquet, on the side opposite to Anna's box, and, as he went,
ran across his former regimental commander, who was talking with two of his acquaintances.
Vronsky heard the Karenins' name spoken, and noticed that the regimental commander hastened
to call to him aloud, while he gave his friends a significant look.
"Ah! Vronsky. When shall we see you again in the regiment? We shan't let you off without
a banquet.
You are ours, every inch of you," said the regimental commander.
"I shan't have the time now. I am awfully sorry, another time," replied Vronsky, going
rapidly up the steps which led to his brother's box.
The old countess, his mother, with her little steel-colored curls, was in the box. Varia
and the young Princess Sorokin were walking together in the lobby of the belle-etage.
As soon as she saw her brother-in-law, Varia went back to her mother with her companion,
and then, taking Vronsky's arm, immediately began to speak with him about the subject
which concerned him. She showed more excitement than he had ever
seen in her.
"I think it is dastardly and vile; Madame Kartasof had no right to do so. Madame Karenin
.... " she began.
"But what is the matter?" I don't know what you mean."
"What? you haven't heard anything about it?"
"You can well understand that I should be the last person to hear anything about it."
"Is there a more wicked creature in the world than this Madame Kartasof!"
"But what did she do?"
"My husband told me about it .... she insulted Madame Karenin. Her husband began to speak
across from his box to Madame Karenin, and Madame Kartasof made a scene about it. They
say she said something very offensive in a loud voice, and went out."
"Count, your maman is calling you," said the young Princess Sorokin, opening the door of
the box.
"I have been waiting for you all this time," said his mother to him, with a sarcastic smile;
"we never see anything of you now." The son saw that she could not conceal a smile
of satisfaction.
"Good evening, maman. I was coming to see you," he replied coolly.
"What, I hope you are not going faire la coiir a Madame Karnine," she added, when the young
Princess Sorokina was out of hearing; "elle fait sensation.
On otiblie la Patti pow' elle."
"Maman, I have begged you not to speak to me about her," he replied gloomily.
"I only say what everybody is saying."
Vronsky did not reply; and, after exchanging a few words with the young princess, he went
out. He met his brother at the door.
"Ah, Aleksei!" said his brother, "how abominable!
She is a fool, nothing more I was just wishing to go to see Madame Karenin. Let us go together."
Vronsky did not heed him; he ran hastily down the steps, feeling that he ought to do something,
but knew not what.
He was stirred with anger, because Anna had placed them both in such a false position,
and at the same time he felt deep pity for her suffering.
He went down into the parquet, and thence directly to Anna's loge. Stremof was leaning
on the box, talking with her.
"There are no more tenors," he said; "le moule en est bris — the mould is broken — from
which they came."
Vronsky bowed to her and stopped, exchanging greetings with Stremof.
"You came late, it seems to me, and you lost the best aria," said Anna to Vronsky, looking
at him scornfully, as it seemed to him.
"I am not a very good judge," he replied, looking at her severely.
"Like Prince Yashvin," she said, smiling, "who thinks Patti sings too loud.
"Thank you," she said, taking the program that Vronsky passed to her, in her little
hand, incased in a long glove; and at the same moment her beautiful face quivered; she
rose and went to the back of the box.
The last act had hardly begun, when Vronsky, seeing Anna's box empty, left the parquet,
though he was hissed for disturbing the quiet of the theater while a cavatina was going
on, and went back to the hotel.
Anna was already in her room; when Vronsky went to her she was sitting in the same toilet
which she had worn at the theater. She was sitting in the first chair she had come to,
near the wall, looking straight before her. When she saw Vronsky enter, she glanced at
him without moving.
"Anna," he said.
"You, you are to blame for it all!" she exclaimed, rising, with tears of anger, and despair in
her voice.
"I begged you, I implored you, not to go; I knew that it would be unpleasant to you."
....
"Unpleasant!" she exclaimed; "it was horrible! I shall not forget it as long as I live. She
said that it was a disgrace to sit near me."
"She was a stupid woman to say such a. thing; but why did you run the risk of hearing it;
why did you expose yourself?"....
"I hate your calm way. You should never have driven me to this; if you loved me .... "
"Anna! what has my love to do with this?" ....
"Yes, if you loved me as I love you, if you suffered as I ...." she said, .looking at
him with an expression of terror.
He felt sorry for her, and yet he was vexed with her.
He protested his love, because he saw that it was the only way to calm her; and he refrained
from reproaching her, but in his heart he reproached her.
And his expressions of love, which seemed to him so banal that he was ashamed of himself
for repeating them, she drank in, and gradually became herself again.
Two days later they left for the country, completely reconciled.
PART SIXTH
CHAPTER I DARYA ALEKSANDROVNA, with her children, was
spending the summer at Pokrovskoye, at the house of her sister, Kitty Levin. The house
on her own estate, at Yergushovo, was all in ruins, and Levin and his wife had urged
her to come to them for the summer. Stepan Arkadyevitch heartily approved of this
arrangement. He assured them that he very much regretted that his duties would prevent
him from spending the summer with his family in the country, for that would be the greatest
possible delight for him, and if he stayed in Moscow he could occasionally run down for
a day or two at a time.
Besides the Oblonskys and all their children, the Levins had with them the old princess,
who considered her presence near her daughter at this particular time indispensable; they
had also Varenka, Kitty's Soden friend, who was fulfilling her promise of making Kitty
a visit when she should have been married. All these were Kitty's relatives and friends.
Levin, though he liked them all, still felt some regret for his own people and his own
ways, which were swallowed up as in a flood by the "Shcherbatsky element," as he called
it. Of his own relatives that summer Sergyef Ivanovitch was the only representative, and
he was not a Levin but a Koznuishef. So that the Levin spirit was at a great discount.
There were so many persons in the long-deserted house that almost all the rooms were occupied,
and almost every day the old princess, as she sat down at table, would count the guests
and send off to the special table the grandson or granddaughter who made the number thirteen.
And Kitty, diligently occupied with her housekeeping, found it no small burden to provide turkeys,
chickens, and ducks for the satisfaction of the various appetites of young and old, made
keen by the country air.
The whole family were at table. Dolly's children were planning to go out and hunt for mushrooms
with the governess and Varenka, when, to the great astonishment of all, Sergyeif Ivanovitch,
who enjoyed among all the guests a great reputation, amounting almost to reverence, on account
of his wit and learning, evinced a desire to join the expedition.
"Allow me to go with you," said he, addressing Varenka. "I am very fond of getting mushrooms;
I think it is a very admirable occupation."
"Why, certainly, we shall be very glad ...." she answered, blushing.
Kitty exchanged looks with Dolly. The proposition of the learned and intellectual Sergyef Ivanovitch
to go with Varenka after mushrooms confirmed an idea which had been engaging Kitty for
some time.
She hastened to say something to her mother so that their looks might not be observed.
After dinner Sergyeif Ivanovitch was sitting at the drawing-room window with his cup of
coffee, still talking with his brother on some topic which they were discussing, but
he kept his eyes on the door through which the children would have to pass when they
should start after the mushrooms. Levin was sitting at the window near his brother. Kitty
was standing near her husband, evidently expecting the end of a conversation which did not interest
her, so that she might say something to him.
"You have changed a good deal since you were married, and for the better.... " said Sergyei
Ivanovitch, smiUng at Kitty, and evidently not taking much interest either in the conversation,
but at the same time he remained true to his passion for defending the most paradoxical
themes.
"Katya, it is not well for you to stand," said her husband, moving up a chair for her
and giving her a significant look.
"Well, we will finish this some other time," said Sergyef Ivanovitch, as he saw the children
come running out.
In advance of the rest, galloping sidewise in her tightly fitting stockings, came Tania,
waving a basket and Sergyei Ivanovitch's hat.
Boldly darting up to him, and with sparkling eyes, — they were just like her father's
handsome eyes, — she gave Sergyer Ivanovitch his hat, and made believe that she was going
to put it on him, tempering her audacity with a timid and affectionate smile.
"Varenka is waiting," said Tania, carefully putting his hat on his head, seeing by Sergyei
Ivanovitch's smile that she might do so.
Varenka was standing at the door. She had put on a yellow muslin frock, and had tied
a white hat over her head.
"I am coming — I am coming, Varvara Andreyevna!" cried Sergyei' Ivanovitch, finishing his cup
of coffee and putting his handkerchief and cigarette-case into his pocket.
"Isn't Varenka charming?" asked Kitty of her husband, as Sergyei Ivanovitch got up. She
said this so that he might hear, for this was what she especially wanted. "And how pretty
she is, royally pretty. — Varenka," cried Kitty, "are you going to the woods by the
mill? We will join you there."
"You really forget your condition, Kitty," said the old princess, warningly, as she came
hastily to the door. "You ought not to shout so loud."
Varenka, on hearing Kitty's voice and the princess's reproof, came up to them with quick,
light steps. Her quickness of motion, the bright color that flushed her cheek, all proved
that some metamorphosis was taking place in her. Kitty knew that this was something unusual,
and watched her attentively. She now called Varenka only for the sake of bestowing on
her a silent benediction, in the interest of an important event which she firmly believed
would take place that day in the woods.
"Varenka, I shall be very glad if a certain thing comes to pass," she said to her in a
whisper, and giving her a kiss.
"Are you coming with us?" asked Varenka of Levin, confused, and pretending that she had
not heard what had been said.
"Yes, but only as far as the barns; I shall have to stop there."
"What do you propose to do there?" asked Kitty.
"I have some new carts to examine and test. — And where shall I find you?"
"On the terrace."
CHAPTER II All the women were gathered on the terrace.
They generally liked to sit there after dinner, but to-day they had a special matter of interest
before them. Besides the making of baby-shirts and the knitting of bands, in which all of
them were engaged at that time, they were engaged in superintending the cooking of some
preserves after a recipe unknown to Agafya Mikhailovna.
Kitty had brought with her this new process, which had been in use in her own home and
required no water. Agafya Mikhailovna, who had before been shown
how to do it in this way, considering that what had always been done at the Levins' could
not be improved on, insisted on pouring water into the berries, declaring it could not be
made otherwise. She had been detected doing this, and now the berries were cooking in
the presence of them all, and Agafya Mikhailovna was to be brought to a realizing sense of
the fact that the preserves could be made without the use of water.
Agafya MikhaYlovna, with flushed and heated face and disheveled hair and with her sleeves
rolled up to the elbow, was moving a porringer round and round over a portable stove and
looking gloomily at it, wishing with all her soul that the berries would thicken and not
boil.
The old princess, conscious that Agafya Mikhaflovna's indignation must be directed against her as
the chief adviser in the concoction of the sweetmeat, pretended that she was busy with
something else, and was not interested in it; but though she talked of extraneous affairs
she occasionally glanced at the cooking out of the corner of her eyes.
"I always buy my girls' dresses at a cheap shop," the princess was saying in regard to
something they had been talking about " Hadn't you better take off the ***, my dear?" she
added, addressing Agafya Mikhailovna. "It is not at all necessary for you to do it,
and it is hot," said she, stopping Kitty.
"I will do it," said Kitty, who had got up and was carefully stirring the boiling sugar
with a spoon, occasionally pouring out a little on a plate which was already covered with
a variegated, yellowish red and sanguine ***, mixed with syrup.
"How they will like to lick it!" she said to herself, thinking of her children and remembering
how she herself, when she was a little girl, had wondered that grown-up people did not
feed upon that best of all things — ***!
"Stiva says that it is far better to give money," Dolly was saying in regard to the
question of making presents, which they had been discussing. "But .... "
"How can one give money?" exclaimed the mother and Kitty, simultaneously. "They despise it."
"Well, for example, last year I bought our Matriona Semyonovna, not a poplin, but some
of that kind .... " said the princess.
"I remember she wore it on your name-day."
"A lovely figure! So simple and ladylike. I should have liked one of it myself, if she
had not one. Like the kind Varenka wears. So pretty and cheap."
"Now I think it is done," said Dolly, dropping the syrup from the spoon.
"When it crystallizes it is done. Cook it a little more, Agafya Mikhaflovna."
"What an absurdity!" exclaimed Agafya Mikliarlovna. "It would be the same anyway," she added.
"Oh! what a beauty he is! Don't scare him!" suddenly exclaimed Kitty, looking at a sparrow
which perched on the rail, and, turning the heart of a berry over, began to peck at it.
"Yes, but you ought to be farther away from the charcoal," said her mother.
"A propos de Varenka," said Kitty in French, in which language indeed they had been speaking
all the time so that Agafya Mikhai'lovna might not understand them, " do you know, maman,
that I somehow expect something decided. You know what I mean. How nice it would be."
"What a master-hand at matchmaking you are," exclaimed Dolly. "How adroitly she has brought
them together."
"No, but tell me, maman, what do you think of it?"
"What do I think of it? He can at any time have his choice of all the best in Russia;
" by he she meant Sergyei' Ivanovitch. "He is not so young as he was, but still I know
many would set their caps for him. She is very good, but he might...."
"No, indeed, you know perfectly well that nothing better could be imagined for either
of them. In the first place, she is charming," said Kitty, bending down one finger.
"She pleases him very much, that is true," said Dolly, in confirmation.
"In the next place, he has such a position in the world that it would make no difference
to him what his wife's property or social standing was. He needs only one thing — a
sweet, pretty, even-tempered wife."
"Yes, he might be very happy with her," said Dolly, in confirmation of this also.
"In the third place, she must love him, and so it is now.... and so it would be perfectly
lovely.... I expect when they come in from the woods it will be all decided.
I shall read it instantly in their eyes. I should be so glad. What do you think about
it, Dolly?"
"Do not get so excited. You really must not get so excited," said her mother.
"But I am not excited, mamma. I think that he will surely propose to her to-day."
"Oh, how strange it is how and when a man proposes. — Even if there is an obstacle,
it is suddenly swept away," said Dolly, smiling pensively and recalling the old days with
Stepan Arkadyevitch.
"Mamma, how did papa propose to you," asked Kitty, suddenly.
"There was nothing extraordinary about it — very simply," replied the princess; but
her face grew all radiant at the remembrance.
"No, but how was it? Did you love him before you allowed him to speak?"
Kitty found a special charm in the fact that now she could talk with her mother, as with
an equal, on the most important questions in the lives of women.
"Of course I loved him. He came to visit us in the country."
"But how was it decided, mamma?"
"Do you really think that you young people have invented something new? It is always
one and the same thing; it is decided by looks and smiles."
"How well you describe it, mamma. That is just it, 'by looks and smiles,'" said Dolly,
confirming what her mother had said.
"But what words did he say?"
"What words did Kostia say to you?"
"He wrote in chalk. How long it seems since then," said Kitty.
And the three ladies sat occupied with the same thought.
Kitty was the first to break the silence. She had been thinking about that long-past
winter before her marriage, and her infatuation for Vronsky.
"There is one thing — Varenka's first love," said she, remembering this by a natural connection
of thought. "I wanted to give Sergyel Ivanovitch a hint
of that to warn him. All men," she added, "are awfully jealous of our past."
"Not all," said Dolly. "You judge by your husband.
I believe he is even now tormented by the remembrance of Vronsky; isn't that so?"
"He is!" replied Kitty, with a pensive smile in her eyes.
"Well, I don't know what there is in your past life to disquiet him," exclaimed the
princess, her mother, resenting the inference that her maternal vigilance was called in
question. "Is it because Vronsky paid you some attention." That happens to every young
girl."
"Yes, but we were not talking about that," said Kitty, blushing.
"No, permit me to finish what I was saying," pursued the princess; " and besides, you yourself
would not permit me to have an explanation with Vronsky, do you remember?"
"Oh, mamma!" exclaimed Kitty, with an exclamation of pain.
"There is no need of your being vexed. Your behavior toward him could never have been
anything but perfectly proper. I myself should have challenged him!
However, my darling, don't allow yourself to get excited. Please remember this, and
calm yourself."
"I am perfectly calm, maman."
"How fortunate it turned out for Kitty that Anna appeared on the scene," said Dolly, "and
how unfortunate for her. How their positions are reversed," she added, overwhelmed by her
own thought. Anna was so happy then and Kitty thought herself so miserable.
I often think of her. What a complete change!"
"What is the use of thinking about her? She is a vile, disgusting, heartless woman," exclaimed
the princess, who could not forget that Kitty had married Levin instead of Vronsky.
"What is the good of speaking about her, anyway!" said Kitty, in disgust. "I do not think about
her nor do I wish to think of her at all I do not wish to think about her," she repeated,
hearing her husband's well-known step on the steps leading to the terrace.
"Whom do you wish not to think about?" asked Levin, appearing on the terrace.
No one answered, and he did not repeat his question.
"I am sorry that I am disturbing your feminine realm," said he, looking angrily at them all,
and perceiving that they were talking about something which they would not talk about
in his presence. For an instant he felt that he shared Agafya Mikhaiflovna's sentiments
— her dissatisfaction at the Shcherbatsky way of making preserves without water, and
especially the alien regime of his wife's family! Nevertheless, he smiled and went up
to Kitty. "Well, how is it?" he asked, looking at her with the same expression every one
used in addressing her.
"All right," said Kitty, with a smile; "and how is it with you?"
"The three-horse team will take a larger load than we can put on the telyega. Shall we go
to meet the children? I have ordered the men to harness."
"What, are you going to take Kitty in the linyeifka?" exclaimed the princess, reproachfully.
"We shall walk the horses, princess."
Levin never called the princess "viaman," as his brothers-in-law did, and the princess
resented it. But Levin, though he loved and respected her, could not call her so without
doing violence to his feelings toward the memory of his own mother.
"Come with us, maman," said Kitty.
"I do not wish to countenance such imprudence!"
"Well, then, I will walk; that is good for me," said Kitty, rising to take her husband's
arm.
"Good for you! But there's reason in all things," said the princess.
"Well, Agafya Mikhailovna, are your preserves done?
Is the new method good?" asked Levin, smiling at the housekeeper in his desire to cheer
her.
"Perhaps they're good; but, in my opinion, much overdone."
"There's one thing about them that's better, Agafya
MikhaTlovna, they won't spoil," said Kitty, divining her husband's intention, and with
the same feeling addressing the old servant. "And you know the ice in the icehouse is all
melted and we can't get any more. As for your spiced meats, mamma assures me that she has
never eaten any better," she added, adjusting, with a smile, the housekeeper's loosened neckerchief.
Agafya Mikhaiflovna looked angrily at Kitty. "Do not try to console me, baruinya. To see
you with him is enough to content me."
This familiar way of speaking of her master touched Kitty.
"Come and show us the best places to find mushrooms."
The old woman raised her head, smiling, as if to say, "One would gladly guard you from
all hatred, if it were possible."
"Follow my advice, please, and put over each pot of jelly a round piece of paper soaked
in rum, and you will not need ice in order to preserve them," said the princess.
CHAPTER III Kitty was especially glad of the opportunity
to be alone with her husband, because she had noticed how a shadow of dissatisfaction
had crossed his telltale face when he stepped on the terrace and asked what they were talking
about, and no one replied.
As they walked along in front of the others, and, losing sight of the house, took to the
The coachman was sent back on the Cossack horse, and Levin drove on with the pair.