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Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 736 | “That’s the new generation of nobility.”
“New it may be, but nobility it isn’t. They’re proprietors of a sort, but we’re the landowners. As noblemen, they’re cutting their own throats.”
“But you say it’s an institution that’s served its time.”
“That it may be, but still it ought to be treated a little more respectfully. Snetkov, now.... We may be of use, or we may not, but we’re the growth of a thousand years. If we’re laying out a garden, planning one before the house, you know, and there you’ve a tree that’s stood for centuries in the very spot.... Old and gnarled it may be, and yet you don’t cut down the old fellow to make room for the flowerbeds, but lay out your beds so as to take advantage of the tree. You won’t grow him again in a year,” he said cautiously, and he immediately changed the conversation. “Well, and how is your land doing?”
“Oh, not very well. I make five per cent.”
“Yes, but you don’t reckon your own work. Aren’t you worth something too? I’ll tell you my own case. Before I took to seeing after the land, I had a salary of three hundred pounds from the service. Now I do more work than I did in the service, and like you I get five per cent. on the land, and thank God for that. But one’s work is thrown in for nothing.”
“Then why do you do it, if it’s a clear loss?”
“Oh, well, one does it! What would you have? It’s habit, and one knows it’s how it should be. And what’s more,” the landowner went on, leaning his elbows on the window and chatting on, “my son, I must tell you, has no taste for it. There’s no doubt he’ll be a scientific man. So there’ll be no one to keep it up. And yet one does it. Here this year I’ve planted an orchard.”
“Yes, yes,” said Levin, “that’s perfectly true. I always feel there’s no real balance of gain in my work on the land, and yet one does it.... It’s a sort of duty one feels to the land.”
“But I tell you what,” the landowner pursued; “a neighbor of mine, a merchant, was at my place. We walked about the fields and the garden. ‘No,’ said he, ‘Stepan Vassilievitch, everything’s well looked after, but your garden’s neglected.’ But, as a fact, it’s well kept up. ‘To my thinking, I’d cut down that lime-tree. Here you’ve thousands of limes, and each would make two good bundles of bark. And nowadays that bark’s worth something. I’d cut down the lot.’” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 737 | “And with what he made he’d increase his stock, or buy some land for a trifle, and let it out in lots to the peasants,” Levin added, smiling. He had evidently more than once come across those commercial calculations. “And he’d make his fortune. But you and I must thank God if we keep what we’ve got and leave it to our children.”
“You’re married, I’ve heard?” said the landowner.
“Yes,” Levin answered, with proud satisfaction. “Yes, it’s rather strange,” he went on. “So we live without making anything, as though we were ancient vestals set to keep in a fire.”
The landowner chuckled under his white mustaches.
“There are some among us, too, like our friend Nikolay Ivanovitch, or Count Vronsky, that’s settled here lately, who try to carry on their husbandry as though it were a factory; but so far it leads to nothing but making away with capital on it.”
“But why is it we don’t do like the merchants? Why don’t we cut down our parks for timber?” said Levin, returning to a thought that had struck him.
“Why, as you said, to keep the fire in. Besides that’s not work for a nobleman. And our work as noblemen isn’t done here at the elections, but yonder, each in our corner. There’s a class instinct, too, of what one ought and oughtn’t to do. There’s the peasants, too, I wonder at them sometimes; any good peasant tries to take all the land he can. However bad the land is, he’ll work it. Without a return too. At a simple loss.”
“Just as we do,” said Levin. “Very, very glad to have met you,” he added, seeing Sviazhsky approaching him.
“And here we’ve met for the first time since we met at your place,” said the landowner to Sviazhsky, “and we’ve had a good talk too.”
“Well, have you been attacking the new order of things?” said Sviazhsky with a smile.
“That we’re bound to do.”
“You’ve relieved your feelings?”
Sviazhsky took Levin’s arm, and went with him to his own friends.
This time there was no avoiding Vronsky. He was standing with Stepan Arkadyevitch and Sergey Ivanovitch, and looking straight at Levin as he drew near.
“Delighted! I believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you ... at Princess Shtcherbatskaya’s,” he said, giving Levin his hand.
“Yes, I quite remember our meeting,” said Levin, and blushing crimson, he turned away immediately, and began talking to his brother. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 738 | “Delighted! I believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you ... at Princess Shtcherbatskaya’s,” he said, giving Levin his hand.
“Yes, I quite remember our meeting,” said Levin, and blushing crimson, he turned away immediately, and began talking to his brother.
With a slight smile Vronsky went on talking to Sviazhsky, obviously without the slightest inclination to enter into conversation with Levin. But Levin, as he talked to his brother, was continually looking round at Vronsky, trying to think of something to say to him to gloss over his rudeness.
“What are we waiting for now?” asked Levin, looking at Sviazhsky and Vronsky.
“For Snetkov. He has to refuse or to consent to stand,” answered Sviazhsky.
“Well, and what has he done, consented or not?”
“That’s the point, that he’s done neither,” said Vronsky.
“And if he refuses, who will stand then?” asked Levin, looking at Vronsky.
“Whoever chooses to,” said Sviazhsky.
“Shall you?” asked Levin.
“Certainly not I,” said Sviazhsky, looking confused, and turning an alarmed glance at the malignant gentleman, who was standing beside Sergey Ivanovitch.
“Who then? Nevyedovsky?” said Levin, feeling he was putting his foot into it.
But this was worse still. Nevyedovsky and Sviazhsky were the two candidates.
“I certainly shall not, under any circumstances,” answered the malignant gentleman.
This was Nevyedovsky himself. Sviazhsky introduced him to Levin.
“Well, you find it exciting too?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, winking at Vronsky. “It’s something like a race. One might bet on it.”
“Yes, it is keenly exciting,” said Vronsky. “And once taking the thing up, one’s eager to see it through. It’s a fight!” he said, scowling and setting his powerful jaws.
“What a capable fellow Sviazhsky is! Sees it all so clearly.”
“Oh, yes!” Vronsky assented indifferently.
A silence followed, during which Vronsky—since he had to look at something—looked at Levin, at his feet, at his uniform, then at his face, and noticing his gloomy eyes fixed upon him, he said, in order to say something:
“How is it that you, living constantly in the country, are not a justice of the peace? You are not in the uniform of one.”
“It’s because I consider that the justice of the peace is a silly institution,” Levin answered gloomily. He had been all the time looking for an opportunity to enter into conversation with Vronsky, so as to smooth over his rudeness at their first meeting.
“I don’t think so, quite the contrary,” Vronsky said, with quiet surprise. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 739 | “I don’t think so, quite the contrary,” Vronsky said, with quiet surprise.
“It’s a plaything,” Levin cut him short. “We don’t want justices of the peace. I’ve never had a single thing to do with them during eight years. And what I have had was decided wrongly by them. The justice of the peace is over thirty miles from me. For some matter of two roubles I should have to send a lawyer, who costs me fifteen.”
And he related how a peasant had stolen some flour from the miller, and when the miller told him of it, had lodged a complaint for slander. All this was utterly uncalled for and stupid, and Levin felt it himself as he said it.
“Oh, this is such an original fellow!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with his most soothing, almond-oil smile. “But come along; I think they’re voting....”
And they separated.
“I can’t understand,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, who had observed his brother’s clumsiness, “I can’t understand how anyone can be so absolutely devoid of political tact. That’s where we Russians are so deficient. The marshal of the province is our opponent, and with him you’re ami cochon, and you beg him to stand. Count Vronsky, now ... I’m not making a friend of him; he’s asked me to dinner, and I’m not going; but he’s one of our side—why make an enemy of him? Then you ask Nevyedovsky if he’s going to stand. That’s not a thing to do.”
“Oh, I don’t understand it at all! And it’s all such nonsense,” Levin answered gloomily.
“You say it’s all such nonsense, but as soon as you have anything to do with it, you make a muddle.”
Levin did not answer, and they walked together into the big room.
The marshal of the province, though he was vaguely conscious in the air of some trap being prepared for him, and though he had not been called upon by all to stand, had still made up his mind to stand. All was silence in the room. The secretary announced in a loud voice that the captain of the guards, Mihail Stepanovitch Snetkov, would now be balloted for as marshal of the province.
The district marshals walked carrying plates, on which were balls, from their tables to the high table, and the election began. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 740 | The district marshals walked carrying plates, on which were balls, from their tables to the high table, and the election began.
“Put it in the right side,” whispered Stepan Arkadyevitch, as with his brother Levin followed the marshal of his district to the table. But Levin had forgotten by now the calculations that had been explained to him, and was afraid Stepan Arkadyevitch might be mistaken in saying “the right side.” Surely Snetkov was the enemy. As he went up, he held the ball in his right hand, but thinking he was wrong, just at the box he changed to the left hand, and undoubtedly put the ball to the left. An adept in the business, standing at the box and seeing by the mere action of the elbow where each put his ball, scowled with annoyance. It was no good for him to use his insight.
Everything was still, and the counting of the balls was heard. Then a single voice rose and proclaimed the numbers for and against. The marshal had been voted for by a considerable majority. All was noise and eager movement towards the doors. Snetkov came in, and the nobles thronged round him, congratulating him.
“Well, now is it over?” Levin asked Sergey Ivanovitch.
“It’s only just beginning,” Sviazhsky said, replying for Sergey Ivanovitch with a smile. “Some other candidate may receive more votes than the marshal.”
Levin had quite forgotten about that. Now he could only remember that there was some sort of trickery in it, but he was too bored to think what it was exactly. He felt depressed, and longed to get out of the crowd.
As no one was paying any attention to him, and no one apparently needed him, he quietly slipped away into the little room where the refreshments were, and again had a great sense of comfort when he saw the waiters. The little old waiter pressed him to have something, and Levin agreed. After eating a cutlet with beans and talking to the waiters of their former masters, Levin, not wishing to go back to the hall, where it was all so distasteful to him, proceeded to walk through the galleries. The galleries were full of fashionably dressed ladies, leaning over the balustrade and trying not to lose a single word of what was being said below. With the ladies were sitting and standing smart lawyers, high school teachers in spectacles, and officers. Everywhere they were talking of the election, and of how worried the marshal was, and how splendid the discussions had been. In one group Levin heard his brother’s praises. One lady was telling a lawyer: |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 741 | “How glad I am I heard Koznishev! It’s worth losing one’s dinner. He’s exquisite! So clear and distinct all of it! There’s not one of you in the law courts that speaks like that. The only one is Meidel, and he’s not so eloquent by a long way.”
Finding a free place, Levin leaned over the balustrade and began looking and listening.
All the noblemen were sitting railed off behind barriers according to their districts. In the middle of the room stood a man in a uniform, who shouted in a loud, high voice:
“As a candidate for the marshalship of the nobility of the province we call upon staff-captain Yevgeney Ivanovitch Apuhtin!” A dead silence followed, and then a weak old voice was heard: “Declined!”
“We call upon the privy councilor Pyotr Petrovitch Bol,” the voice began again.
“Declined!” a high boyish voice replied.
Again it began, and again “Declined.” And so it went on for about an hour. Levin, with his elbows on the balustrade, looked and listened. At first he wondered and wanted to know what it meant; then feeling sure that he could not make it out he began to be bored. Then recalling all the excitement and vindictiveness he had seen on all the faces, he felt sad; he made up his mind to go, and went downstairs. As he passed through the entry to the galleries he met a dejected high school boy walking up and down with tired-looking eyes. On the stairs he met a couple—a lady running quickly on her high heels and the jaunty deputy prosecutor.
“I told you you weren’t late,” the deputy prosecutor was saying at the moment when Levin moved aside to let the lady pass.
Levin was on the stairs to the way out, and was just feeling in his waistcoat pocket for the number of his overcoat, when the secretary overtook him.
“This way, please, Konstantin Dmitrievitch; they are voting.”
The candidate who was being voted on was Nevyedovsky, who had so stoutly denied all idea of standing. Levin went up to the door of the room; it was locked. The secretary knocked, the door opened, and Levin was met by two red-faced gentlemen, who darted out.
“I can’t stand any more of it,” said one red-faced gentleman.
After them the face of the marshal of the province was poked out. His face was dreadful-looking from exhaustion and dismay.
“I told you not to let anyone out!” he cried to the doorkeeper.
“I let someone in, your excellency!” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 742 | After them the face of the marshal of the province was poked out. His face was dreadful-looking from exhaustion and dismay.
“I told you not to let anyone out!” he cried to the doorkeeper.
“I let someone in, your excellency!”
“Mercy on us!” and with a heavy sigh the marshal of the province walked with downcast head to the high table in the middle of the room, his legs staggering in his white trousers.
Nevyedovsky had scored a higher majority, as they had planned, and he was the new marshal of the province. Many people were amused, many were pleased and happy, many were in ecstasies, many were disgusted and unhappy. The former marshal of the province was in a state of despair, which he could not conceal. When Nevyedovsky went out of the room, the crowd thronged round him and followed him enthusiastically, just as they had followed the governor who had opened the meetings, and just as they had followed Snetkov when he was elected.
The newly elected marshal and many of the successful party dined that day with Vronsky. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 743 | The newly elected marshal and many of the successful party dined that day with Vronsky.
Vronsky had come to the elections partly because he was bored in the country and wanted to show Anna his right to independence, and also to repay Sviazhsky by his support at the election for all the trouble he had taken for Vronsky at the district council election, but chiefly in order strictly to perform all those duties of a nobleman and landowner which he had taken upon himself. But he had not in the least expected that the election would so interest him, so keenly excite him, and that he would be so good at this kind of thing. He was quite a new man in the circle of the nobility of the province, but his success was unmistakable, and he was not wrong in supposing that he had already obtained a certain influence. This influence was due to his wealth and reputation, the capital house in the town lent him by his old friend Shirkov, who had a post in the department of finances and was director of a flourishing bank in Kashin; the excellent cook Vronsky had brought from the country, and his friendship with the governor, who was a schoolfellow of Vronsky’s—a schoolfellow he had patronized and protected indeed. But what contributed more than all to his success was his direct, equable manner with everyone, which very quickly made the majority of the noblemen reverse the current opinion of his supposed haughtiness. He was himself conscious that, except that whimsical gentleman married to Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, who had à propos de bottes poured out a stream of irrelevant absurdities with such spiteful fury, every nobleman with whom he had made acquaintance had become his adherent. He saw clearly, and other people recognized it, too, that he had done a great deal to secure the success of Nevyedovsky. And now at his own table, celebrating Nevyedovsky’s election, he was experiencing an agreeable sense of triumph over the success of his candidate. The election itself had so fascinated him that, if he could succeed in getting married during the next three years, he began to think of standing himself—much as after winning a race ridden by a jockey, he had longed to ride a race himself. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 744 | Today he was celebrating the success of his jockey. Vronsky sat at the head of the table, on his right hand sat the young governor, a general of high rank. To all the rest he was the chief man in the province, who had solemnly opened the elections with his speech, and aroused a feeling of respect and even of awe in many people, as Vronsky saw; to Vronsky he was little Katka Maslov—that had been his nickname in the Pages’ Corps—whom he felt to be shy and tried to mettre à son aise. On the left hand sat Nevyedovsky with his youthful, stubborn, and malignant face. With him Vronsky was simple and deferential.
Sviazhsky took his failure very light-heartedly. It was indeed no failure in his eyes, as he said himself, turning, glass in hand, to Nevyedovsky; they could not have found a better representative of the new movement, which the nobility ought to follow. And so every honest person, as he said, was on the side of today’s success and was rejoicing over it.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was glad, too, that he was having a good time, and that everyone was pleased. The episode of the elections served as a good occasion for a capital dinner. Sviazhsky comically imitated the tearful discourse of the marshal, and observed, addressing Nevyedovsky, that his excellency would have to select another more complicated method of auditing the accounts than tears. Another nobleman jocosely described how footmen in stockings had been ordered for the marshal’s ball, and how now they would have to be sent back unless the new marshal would give a ball with footmen in stockings.
Continually during dinner they said of Nevyedovsky: “our marshal,” and “your excellency.”
This was said with the same pleasure with which a bride is called “Madame” and her husband’s name. Nevyedovsky affected to be not merely indifferent but scornful of this appellation, but it was obvious that he was highly delighted, and had to keep a curb on himself not to betray the triumph which was unsuitable to their new liberal tone.
After dinner several telegrams were sent to people interested in the result of the election. And Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was in high good humor, sent Darya Alexandrovna a telegram: “Nevyedovsky elected by twenty votes. Congratulations. Tell people.” He dictated it aloud, saying: “We must let them share our rejoicing.” Darya Alexandrovna, getting the message, simply sighed over the rouble wasted on it, and understood that it was an after-dinner affair. She knew Stiva had a weakness after dining for faire jouer le télégraphe. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 745 | Everything, together with the excellent dinner and the wine, not from Russian merchants, but imported direct from abroad, was extremely dignified, simple, and enjoyable. The party—some twenty—had been selected by Sviazhsky from among the more active new liberals, all of the same way of thinking, who were at the same time clever and well bred. They drank, also half in jest, to the health of the new marshal of the province, of the governor, of the bank director, and of “our amiable host.”
Vronsky was satisfied. He had never expected to find so pleasant a tone in the provinces.
Towards the end of dinner it was still more lively. The governor asked Vronsky to come to a concert for the benefit of the Servians which his wife, who was anxious to make his acquaintance, had been getting up.
“There’ll be a ball, and you’ll see the belle of the province. Worth seeing, really.”
“Not in my line,” Vronsky answered. He liked that English phrase. But he smiled, and promised to come.
Before they rose from the table, when all of them were smoking, Vronsky’s valet went up to him with a letter on a tray.
“From Vozdvizhenskoe by special messenger,” he said with a significant expression.
“Astonishing! how like he is to the deputy prosecutor Sventitsky,” said one of the guests in French of the valet, while Vronsky, frowning, read the letter.
The letter was from Anna. Before he read the letter, he knew its contents. Expecting the elections to be over in five days, he had promised to be back on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew that the letter contained reproaches for not being back at the time fixed. The letter he had sent the previous evening had probably not reached her yet.
The letter was what he had expected, but the form of it was unexpected, and particularly disagreeable to him. “Annie is very ill, the doctor says it may be inflammation. I am losing my head all alone. Princess Varvara is no help, but a hindrance. I expected you the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and now I am sending to find out where you are and what you are doing. I wanted to come myself, but thought better of it, knowing you would dislike it. Send some answer, that I may know what to do.”
The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter ill, and this hostile tone.
The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy, burdensome love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he had to go, and by the first train that night he set off home. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 746 | The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy, burdensome love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he had to go, and by the first train that night he set off home.
Before Vronsky’s departure for the elections, Anna had reflected that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left home, might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to her, and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear the parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded her, and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed.
In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point—the sense of her own humiliation. “He has the right to go away when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to do it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,” she thought. “That glance shows the beginning of indifference.”
And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her. It is true there was still one means; not to keep him—for that she wanted nothing more than his love—but to be nearer to him, to be in such a position that he would not leave her. That means was divorce and marriage. And she began to long for that, and made up her mind to agree to it the first time he or Stiva approached her on the subject.
Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five days that he was to be at the elections. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 747 | Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five days that he was to be at the elections.
Walks, conversation with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital, and, most of all, reading—reading of one book after another—filled up her time. But on the sixth day, when the coachman came back without him, she felt that now she was utterly incapable of stifling the thought of him and of what he was doing there, just at that time her little girl was taken ill. Anna began to look after her, but even that did not distract her mind, especially as the illness was not serious. However hard she tried, she could not love this little child, and to feign love was beyond her powers. Towards the evening of that day, still alone, Anna was in such a panic about him that she decided to start for the town, but on second thoughts wrote him the contradictory letter that Vronsky received, and without reading it through, sent it off by a special messenger. The next morning she received his letter and regretted her own. She dreaded a repetition of the severe look he had flung at her at parting, especially when he knew that the baby was not dangerously ill. But still she was glad she had written to him. At this moment Anna was positively admitting to herself that she was a burden to him, that he would relinquish his freedom regretfully to return to her, and in spite of that she was glad he was coming. Let him weary of her, but he would be here with her, so that she would see him, would know of every action he took. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 748 | She was sitting in the drawing-room near a lamp, with a new volume of Taine, and as she read, listening to the sound of the wind outside, and every minute expecting the carriage to arrive. Several times she had fancied she heard the sound of wheels, but she had been mistaken. At last she heard not the sound of wheels, but the coachman’s shout and the dull rumble in the covered entry. Even Princess Varvara, playing patience, confirmed this, and Anna, flushing hotly, got up; but instead of going down, as she had done twice before, she stood still. She suddenly felt ashamed of her duplicity, but even more she dreaded how he might meet her. All feeling of wounded pride had passed now; she was only afraid of the expression of his displeasure. She remembered that her child had been perfectly well again for the last two days. She felt positively vexed with her for getting better from the very moment her letter was sent off. Then she thought of him, that he was here, all of him, with his hands, his eyes. She heard his voice. And forgetting everything, she ran joyfully to meet him.
“Well, how is Annie?” he said timidly from below, looking up to Anna as she ran down to him.
He was sitting on a chair, and a footman was pulling off his warm over-boot.
“Oh, she is better.”
“And you?” he said, shaking himself.
She took his hand in both of hers, and drew it to her waist, never taking her eyes off him.
“Well, I’m glad,” he said, coldly scanning her, her hair, her dress, which he knew she had put on for him. All was charming, but how many times it had charmed him! And the stern, stony expression that she so dreaded settled upon his face.
“Well, I’m glad. And are you well?” he said, wiping his damp beard with his handkerchief and kissing her hand.
“Never mind,” she thought, “only let him be here, and so long as he’s here he cannot, he dare not, cease to love me.”
The evening was spent happily and gaily in the presence of Princess Varvara, who complained to him that Anna had been taking morphine in his absence.
“What am I to do? I couldn’t sleep.... My thoughts prevented me. When he’s here I never take it—hardly ever.”
He told her about the election, and Anna knew how by adroit questions to bring him to what gave him most pleasure—his own success. She told him of everything that interested him at home; and all that she told him was of the most cheerful description. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 749 | He told her about the election, and Anna knew how by adroit questions to bring him to what gave him most pleasure—his own success. She told him of everything that interested him at home; and all that she told him was of the most cheerful description.
But late in the evening, when they were alone, Anna, seeing that she had regained complete possession of him, wanted to erase the painful impression of the glance he had given her for her letter. She said:
“Tell me frankly, you were vexed at getting my letter, and you didn’t believe me?”
As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his feelings were to her, he had not forgiven her for that.
“Yes,” he said, “the letter was so strange. First, Annie ill, and then you thought of coming yourself.”
“It was all the truth.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it.”
“Yes, you do doubt it. You are vexed, I see.”
“Not for one moment. I’m only vexed, that’s true, that you seem somehow unwilling to admit that there are duties....”
“The duty of going to a concert....”
“But we won’t talk about it,” he said.
“Why not talk about it?” she said.
“I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up. Now, for instance, I shall have to go to Moscow to arrange about the house.... Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable? Don’t you know that I can’t live without you?”
“If so,” said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, “it means that you are sick of this life.... Yes, you will come for a day and go away, as men do....”
“Anna, that’s cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life.”
But she did not hear him.
“If you go to Moscow, I will go too. I will not stay here. Either we must separate or else live together.”
“Why, you know, that’s my one desire. But for that....”
“We must get a divorce. I will write to him. I see I cannot go on like this.... But I will come with you to Moscow.”
“You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so much as never to be parted from you,” said Vronsky, smiling.
But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.
She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.
“If so, it’s a calamity!” that glance told her. It was a moment’s impression, but she never forgot it. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 750 | She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.
“If so, it’s a calamity!” that glance told her. It was a moment’s impression, but she never forgot it.
Anna wrote to her husband asking him about a divorce, and towards the end of November, taking leave of Princess Varvara, who wanted to go to Petersburg, she went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an answer from Alexey Alexandrovitch, and after that the divorce, they now established themselves together like married people.
The Levins had been three months in Moscow. The date had long passed on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she was still about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. The doctor, the monthly nurse, and Dolly and her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy.
She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of love for the future child, for her to some extent actually existing already, and she brooded blissfully over this feeling. He was not by now altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his own life independently of her. Often this separate being gave her pain, but at the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy.
All the people she loved were with her, and all were so good to her, so attentively caring for her, so entirely pleasant was everything presented to her, that if she had not known and felt that it must all soon be over, she could not have wished for a better and pleasanter life. The only thing that spoiled the charm of this manner of life was that her husband was not here as she loved him to be, and as he was in the country. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 751 | She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country. In the town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as though he were afraid someone would be rude to him, and still more to her. At home in the country, knowing himself distinctly to be in his right place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere. He was never unoccupied. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, as though afraid of missing something, and yet he had nothing to do. And she felt sorry for him. To others, she knew, he did not appear an object of pity. On the contrary, when Kitty looked at him in society, as one sometimes looks at those one loves, trying to see him as if he were a stranger, so as to catch the impression he must make on others, she saw with a panic even of jealous fear that he was far indeed from being a pitiable figure, that he was very attractive with his fine breeding, his rather old-fashioned, reserved courtesy with women, his powerful figure, and striking, as she thought, and expressive face. But she saw him not from without, but from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that was the only way she could define his condition to herself. Sometimes she inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the town; sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him to order his life here so that he could be satisfied with it. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 752 | What had he to do, indeed? He did not care for cards; he did not go to a club. Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky’s type—she knew now what that meant ... it meant drinking and going somewhere after drinking. She could not think without horror of where men went on such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she knew he could only find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in the society of young women, and that she could not wish for. Should he stay at home with her, her mother and her sisters? But much as she liked and enjoyed their conversations forever on the same subjects—“Aline-Nadine,” as the old prince called the sisters’ talks—she knew it must bore him. What was there left for him to do? To go on writing at his book he had indeed attempted, and at first he used to go to the library and make extracts and look up references for his book. But, as he told her, the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything. And besides, he complained that he had talked too much about his book here, and that consequently all his ideas about it were muddled and had lost their interest for him.
One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever happened between them here in town. Whether it was that their conditions were different, or that they had both become more careful and sensible in that respect, they had no quarrels in Moscow from jealousy, which they had so dreaded when they moved from the country.
One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of view, did indeed happen—that was Kitty’s meeting with Vronsky.
The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty’s godmother, who had always been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went with her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 753 | The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty’s godmother, who had always been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went with her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky.
The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting was that at the instant when she recognized in his civilian dress the features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her, the blood rushed to her heart, and a vivid blush—she felt it—overspread her face. But this lasted only a few seconds. Before her father, who purposely began talking in a loud voice to Vronsky, had finished, she was perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to him, if necessary, exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and more than that, to do so in such a way that everything to the faintest intonation and smile would have been approved by her husband, whose unseen presence she seemed to feel about her at that instant.
She said a few words to him, even smiled serenely at his joke about the elections, which he called “our parliament.” (She had to smile to show she saw the joke.) But she turned away immediately to Princess Marya Borissovna, and did not once glance at him till he got up to go; then she looked at him, but evidently only because it would be uncivil not to look at a man when he is saying good-bye.
She was grateful to her father for saying nothing to her about their meeting Vronsky, but she saw by his special warmth to her after the visit during their usual walk that he was pleased with her. She was pleased with herself. She had not expected she would have had the power, while keeping somewhere in the bottom of her heart all the memories of her old feeling for Vronsky, not only to seem but to be perfectly indifferent and composed with him.
Levin flushed a great deal more than she when she told him she had met Vronsky at Princess Marya Borissovna’s. It was very hard for her to tell him this, but still harder to go on speaking of the details of the meeting, as he did not question her, but simply gazed at her with a frown.
“I am very sorry you weren’t there,” she said. “Not that you weren’t in the room ... I couldn’t have been so natural in your presence ... I am blushing now much more, much, much more,” she said, blushing till the tears came into her eyes. “But that you couldn’t see through a crack.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 754 | The truthful eyes told Levin that she was satisfied with herself, and in spite of her blushing he was quickly reassured and began questioning her, which was all she wanted. When he had heard everything, even to the detail that for the first second she could not help flushing, but that afterwards she was just as direct and as much at her ease as with any chance acquaintance, Levin was quite happy again and said he was glad of it, and would not now behave as stupidly as he had done at the election, but would try the first time he met Vronsky to be as friendly as possible.
“It’s so wretched to feel that there’s a man almost an enemy whom it’s painful to meet,” said Levin. “I’m very, very glad.”
“Go, please, go then and call on the Bols,” Kitty said to her husband, when he came in to see her at eleven o’clock before going out. “I know you are dining at the club; papa put down your name. But what are you going to do in the morning?”
“I am only going to Katavasov,” answered Levin.
“Why so early?”
“He promised to introduce me to Metrov. I wanted to talk to him about my work. He’s a distinguished scientific man from Petersburg,” said Levin.
“Yes; wasn’t it his article you were praising so? Well, and after that?” said Kitty.
“I shall go to the court, perhaps, about my sister’s business.”
“And the concert?” she queried.
“I shan’t go there all alone.”
“No? do go; there are going to be some new things.... That interested you so. I should certainly go.”
“Well, anyway, I shall come home before dinner,” he said, looking at his watch.
“Put on your frock coat, so that you can go straight to call on Countess Bola.”
“But is it absolutely necessary?”
“Oh, absolutely! He has been to see us. Come, what is it? You go in, sit down, talk for five minutes of the weather, get up and go away.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it! I’ve got so out of the way of all this that it makes me feel positively ashamed. It’s such a horrible thing to do! A complete outsider walks in, sits down, stays on with nothing to do, wastes their time and worries himself, and walks away!”
Kitty laughed.
“Why, I suppose you used to pay calls before you were married, didn’t you?” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 755 | Kitty laughed.
“Why, I suppose you used to pay calls before you were married, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did, but I always felt ashamed, and now I’m so out of the way of it that, by Jove! I’d sooner go two days running without my dinner than pay this call! One’s so ashamed! I feel all the while that they’re annoyed, that they’re saying, ‘What has he come for?’”
“No, they won’t. I’ll answer for that,” said Kitty, looking into his face with a laugh. She took his hand. “Well, good-bye.... Do go, please.”
He was just going out after kissing his wife’s hand, when she stopped him.
“Kostya, do you know I’ve only fifty roubles left?”
“Oh, all right, I’ll go to the bank and get some. How much?” he said, with the expression of dissatisfaction she knew so well.
“No, wait a minute.” She held his hand. “Let’s talk about it, it worries me. I seem to spend nothing unnecessary, but money seems to fly away simply. We don’t manage well, somehow.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” he said with a little cough, looking at her from under his brows.
That cough she knew well. It was a sign of intense dissatisfaction, not with her, but with himself. He certainly was displeased not at so much money being spent, but at being reminded of what he, knowing something was unsatisfactory, wanted to forget.
“I have told Sokolov to sell the wheat, and to borrow an advance on the mill. We shall have money enough in any case.”
“Yes, but I’m afraid that altogether....”
“Oh, it’s all right, all right,” he repeated. “Well, good-bye, darling.”
“No, I’m really sorry sometimes that I listened to mamma. How nice it would have been in the country! As it is, I’m worrying you all, and we’re wasting our money.”
“Not at all, not at all. Not once since I’ve been married have I said that things could have been better than they are....”
“Truly?” she said, looking into his eyes.
He had said it without thinking, simply to console her. But when he glanced at her and saw those sweet truthful eyes fastened questioningly on him, he repeated it with his whole heart. “I was positively forgetting her,” he thought. And he remembered what was before them, so soon to come.
“Will it be soon? How do you feel?” he whispered, taking her two hands.
“I have so often thought so, that now I don’t think about it or know anything about it.”
“And you’re not frightened?”
She smiled contemptuously.
“Not the least little bit,” she said.
“Well, if anything happens, I shall be at Katavasov’s.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 756 | “I have so often thought so, that now I don’t think about it or know anything about it.”
“And you’re not frightened?”
She smiled contemptuously.
“Not the least little bit,” she said.
“Well, if anything happens, I shall be at Katavasov’s.”
“No, nothing will happen, and don’t think about it. I’m going for a walk on the boulevard with papa. We’re going to see Dolly. I shall expect you before dinner. Oh, yes! Do you know that Dolly’s position is becoming utterly impossible? She’s in debt all round; she hasn’t a penny. We were talking yesterday with mamma and Arseny” (this was her sister’s husband Lvov), “and we determined to send you with him to talk to Stiva. It’s really unbearable. One can’t speak to papa about it.... But if you and he....”
“Why, what can we do?” said Levin.
“You’ll be at Arseny’s, anyway; talk to him, he will tell what we decided.”
“Oh, I agree to everything Arseny thinks beforehand. I’ll go and see him. By the way, if I do go to the concert, I’ll go with Natalia. Well, good-bye.”
On the steps Levin was stopped by his old servant Kouzma, who had been with him before his marriage, and now looked after their household in town.
“Beauty” (that was the left shaft-horse brought up from the country) “has been badly shod and is quite lame,” he said. “What does your honor wish to be done?”
During the first part of their stay in Moscow, Levin had used his own horses brought up from the country. He had tried to arrange this part of their expenses in the best and cheapest way possible; but it appeared that their own horses came dearer than hired horses, and they still hired too.
“Send for the veterinary, there may be a bruise.”
“And for Katerina Alexandrovna?” asked Kouzma.
Levin was not by now struck as he had been at first by the fact that to get from one end of Moscow to the other he had to have two powerful horses put into a heavy carriage, to take the carriage three miles through the snowy slush and to keep it standing there four hours, paying five roubles every time.
Now it seemed quite natural.
“Hire a pair for our carriage from the jobmaster,” said he.
“Yes, sir.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 757 | Now it seemed quite natural.
“Hire a pair for our carriage from the jobmaster,” said he.
“Yes, sir.”
And so, simply and easily, thanks to the facilities of town life, Levin settled a question which, in the country, would have called for so much personal trouble and exertion, and going out onto the steps, he called a sledge, sat down, and drove to Nikitsky. On the way he thought no more of money, but mused on the introduction that awaited him to the Petersburg savant, a writer on sociology, and what he would say to him about his book. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 758 |
Only during the first days of his stay in Moscow Levin had been struck by the expenditure, strange to one living in the country, unproductive but inevitable, that was expected of him on every side. But by now he had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this matter which is said to happen to drunkards—the first glass sticks in the throat, the second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they’re like tiny little birds. When Levin had changed his first hundred-rouble note to pay for liveries for his footmen and hall-porter he could not help reflecting that these liveries were of no use to anyone—but they were indubitably necessary, to judge by the amazement of the princess and Kitty when he suggested that they might do without liveries,—that these liveries would cost the wages of two laborers for the summer, that is, would pay for about three hundred working days from Easter to Ash Wednesday, and each a day of hard work from early morning to late evening—and that hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat. But the next note, changed to pay for providing a dinner for their relations, that cost twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the reflection that twenty-eight roubles meant nine measures of oats, which men would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and thrashed and winnowed and sifted and sown,—this next one he parted with more easily. And now the notes he changed no longer aroused such reflections, and they flew off like little birds. Whether the labor devoted to obtaining the money corresponded to the pleasure given by what was bought with it, was a consideration he had long ago dismissed. His business calculation that there was a certain price below which he could not sell certain grain was forgotten too. The rye, for the price of which he had so long held out, had been sold for fifty kopecks a measure cheaper than it had been fetching a month ago. Even the consideration that with such an expenditure he could not go on living for a year without debt, that even had no force. Only one thing was essential: to have money in the bank, without inquiring where it came from, so as to know that one had the wherewithal to buy meat for tomorrow. And this condition had hitherto been fulfilled; he had always had the money in the bank. But now the money in the bank had gone, and he could not quite tell where to get the next installment. And this it was which, at the moment when Kitty had mentioned money, had disturbed him; but he had no time to think about it. He drove off, thinking of Katavasov and the meeting with Metrov that was before him. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 759 | Levin had on this visit to town seen a great deal of his old friend at the university, Professor Katavasov, whom he had not seen since his marriage. He liked in Katavasov the clearness and simplicity of his conception of life. Levin thought that the clearness of Katavasov’s conception of life was due to the poverty of his nature; Katavasov thought that the disconnectedness of Levin’s ideas was due to his lack of intellectual discipline; but Levin enjoyed Katavasov’s clearness, and Katavasov enjoyed the abundance of Levin’s untrained ideas, and they liked to meet and to discuss.
Levin had read Katavasov some parts of his book, and he had liked them. On the previous day Katavasov had met Levin at a public lecture and told him that the celebrated Metrov, whose article Levin had so much liked, was in Moscow, that he had been much interested by what Katavasov had told him about Levin’s work, and that he was coming to see him tomorrow at eleven, and would be very glad to make Levin’s acquaintance.
“You’re positively a reformed character, I’m glad to see,” said Katavasov, meeting Levin in the little drawing-room. “I heard the bell and thought: Impossible that it can be he at the exact time!... Well, what do you say to the Montenegrins now? They’re a race of warriors.”
“Why, what’s happened?” asked Levin.
Katavasov in a few words told him the last piece of news from the war, and going into his study, introduced Levin to a short, thick-set man of pleasant appearance. This was Metrov. The conversation touched for a brief space on politics and on how recent events were looked at in the higher spheres in Petersburg. Metrov repeated a saying that had reached him through a most trustworthy source, reported as having been uttered on this subject by the Tsar and one of the ministers. Katavasov had heard also on excellent authority that the Tsar had said something quite different. Levin tried to imagine circumstances in which both sayings might have been uttered, and the conversation on that topic dropped.
“Yes, here he’s written almost a book on the natural conditions of the laborer in relation to the land,” said Katavasov; “I’m not a specialist, but I, as a natural science man, was pleased at his not taking mankind as something outside biological laws; but, on the contrary, seeing his dependence on his surroundings, and in that dependence seeking the laws of his development.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Metrov.
“What I began precisely was to write a book on agriculture; but studying the chief instrument of agriculture, the laborer,” said Levin, reddening, “I could not help coming to quite unexpected results.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 760 | “That’s very interesting,” said Metrov.
“What I began precisely was to write a book on agriculture; but studying the chief instrument of agriculture, the laborer,” said Levin, reddening, “I could not help coming to quite unexpected results.”
And Levin began carefully, as it were, feeling his ground, to expound his views. He knew Metrov had written an article against the generally accepted theory of political economy, but to what extent he could reckon on his sympathy with his own new views he did not know and could not guess from the clever and serene face of the learned man.
“But in what do you see the special characteristics of the Russian laborer?” said Metrov; “in his biological characteristics, so to speak, or in the condition in which he is placed?”
Levin saw that there was an idea underlying this question with which he did not agree. But he went on explaining his own idea that the Russian laborer has a quite special view of the land, different from that of other people; and to support this proposition he made haste to add that in his opinion this attitude of the Russian peasant was due to the consciousness of his vocation to people vast unoccupied expanses in the East.
“One may easily be led into error in basing any conclusion on the general vocation of a people,” said Metrov, interrupting Levin. “The condition of the laborer will always depend on his relation to the land and to capital.”
And without letting Levin finish explaining his idea, Metrov began expounding to him the special point of his own theory.
In what the point of his theory lay, Levin did not understand, because he did not take the trouble to understand. He saw that Metrov, like other people, in spite of his own article, in which he had attacked the current theory of political economy, looked at the position of the Russian peasant simply from the point of view of capital, wages, and rent. He would indeed have been obliged to admit that in the eastern—much the larger—part of Russia rent was as yet nil, that for nine-tenths of the eighty millions of the Russian peasants wages took the form simply of food provided for themselves, and that capital does not so far exist except in the form of the most primitive tools. Yet it was only from that point of view that he considered every laborer, though in many points he differed from the economists and had his own theory of the wage-fund, which he expounded to Levin. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 761 | Levin listened reluctantly, and at first made objections. He would have liked to interrupt Metrov, to explain his own thought, which in his opinion would have rendered further exposition of Metrov’s theories superfluous. But later on, feeling convinced that they looked at the matter so differently, that they could never understand one another, he did not even oppose his statements, but simply listened. Although what Metrov was saying was by now utterly devoid of interest for him, he yet experienced a certain satisfaction in listening to him. It flattered his vanity that such a learned man should explain his ideas to him so eagerly, with such intensity and confidence in Levin’s understanding of the subject, sometimes with a mere hint referring him to a whole aspect of the subject. He put this down to his own credit, unaware that Metrov, who had already discussed his theory over and over again with all his intimate friends, talked of it with special eagerness to every new person, and in general was eager to talk to anyone of any subject that interested him, even if still obscure to himself.
“We are late though,” said Katavasov, looking at his watch directly Metrov had finished his discourse.
“Yes, there’s a meeting of the Society of Amateurs today in commemoration of the jubilee of Svintitch,” said Katavasov in answer to Levin’s inquiry. “Pyotr Ivanovitch and I were going. I’ve promised to deliver an address on his labors in zoology. Come along with us, it’s very interesting.”
“Yes, and indeed it’s time to start,” said Metrov. “Come with us, and from there, if you care to, come to my place. I should very much like to hear your work.”
“Oh, no! It’s no good yet, it’s unfinished. But I shall be very glad to go to the meeting.”
“I say, friends, have you heard? He has handed in the separate report,” Katavasov called from the other room, where he was putting on his frock coat.
And a conversation sprang up upon the university question, which was a very important event that winter in Moscow. Three old professors in the council had not accepted the opinion of the younger professors. The young ones had registered a separate resolution. This, in the judgment of some people, was monstrous, in the judgment of others it was the simplest and most just thing to do, and the professors were split up into two parties. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 762 | One party, to which Katavasov belonged, saw in the opposite party a scoundrelly betrayal and treachery, while the opposite party saw in them childishness and lack of respect for the authorities. Levin, though he did not belong to the university, had several times already during his stay in Moscow heard and talked about this matter, and had his own opinion on the subject. He took part in the conversation that was continued in the street, as they all three walked to the buildings of the old university.
The meeting had already begun. Round the cloth-covered table, at which Katavasov and Metrov seated themselves, there were some half-dozen persons, and one of these was bending close over a manuscript, reading something aloud. Levin sat down in one of the empty chairs that were standing round the table, and in a whisper asked a student sitting near what was being read. The student, eyeing Levin with displeasure, said:
“Biography.”
Though Levin was not interested in the biography, he could not help listening, and learned some new and interesting facts about the life of the distinguished man of science.
When the reader had finished, the chairman thanked him and read some verses of the poet Ment sent him on the jubilee, and said a few words by way of thanks to the poet. Then Katavasov in his loud, ringing voice read his address on the scientific labors of the man whose jubilee was being kept. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 763 | When Katavasov had finished, Levin looked at his watch, saw it was past one, and thought that there would not be time before the concert to read Metrov his book, and indeed, he did not now care to do so. During the reading he had thought over their conversation. He saw distinctly now that though Metrov’s ideas might perhaps have value, his own ideas had a value too, and their ideas could only be made clear and lead to something if each worked separately in his chosen path, and that nothing would be gained by putting their ideas together. And having made up his mind to refuse Metrov’s invitation, Levin went up to him at the end of the meeting. Metrov introduced Levin to the chairman, with whom he was talking of the political news. Metrov told the chairman what he had already told Levin, and Levin made the same remarks on his news that he had already made that morning, but for the sake of variety he expressed also a new opinion which had only just struck him. After that the conversation turned again on the university question. As Levin had already heard it all, he made haste to tell Metrov that he was sorry he could not take advantage of his invitation, took leave, and drove to Lvov’s.
Lvov, the husband of Natalia, Kitty’s sister, had spent all his life in foreign capitals, where he had been educated, and had been in the diplomatic service.
During the previous year he had left the diplomatic service, not owing to any “unpleasantness” (he never had any “unpleasantness” with anyone), and was transferred to the department of the court of the palace in Moscow, in order to give his two boys the best education possible.
In spite of the striking contrast in their habits and views and the fact that Lvov was older than Levin, they had seen a great deal of one another that winter, and had taken a great liking to each other.
Lvov was at home, and Levin went in to him unannounced.
Lvov, in a house coat with a belt and in chamois leather shoes, was sitting in an armchair, and with a pince-nez with blue glasses he was reading a book that stood on a reading desk, while in his beautiful hand he held a half-burned cigarette daintily away from him.
His handsome, delicate, and still youthful-looking face, to which his curly, glistening silvery hair gave a still more aristocratic air, lighted up with a smile when he saw Levin. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 764 | His handsome, delicate, and still youthful-looking face, to which his curly, glistening silvery hair gave a still more aristocratic air, lighted up with a smile when he saw Levin.
“Capital! I was meaning to send to you. How’s Kitty? Sit here, it’s more comfortable.” He got up and pushed up a rocking chair. “Have you read the last circular in the Journal de St. Pétersbourg? I think it’s excellent,” he said, with a slight French accent.
Levin told him what he had heard from Katavasov was being said in Petersburg, and after talking a little about politics, he told him of his interview with Metrov, and the learned society’s meeting. To Lvov it was very interesting.
“That’s what I envy you, that you are able to mix in these interesting scientific circles,” he said. And as he talked, he passed as usual into French, which was easier to him. “It’s true I haven’t the time for it. My official work and the children leave me no time; and then I’m not ashamed to own that my education has been too defective.”
“That I don’t believe,” said Levin with a smile, feeling, as he always did, touched at Lvov’s low opinion of himself, which was not in the least put on from a desire to seem or to be modest, but was absolutely sincere.
“Oh, yes, indeed! I feel now how badly educated I am. To educate my children I positively have to look up a great deal, and in fact simply to study myself. For it’s not enough to have teachers, there must be someone to look after them, just as on your land you want laborers and an overseer. See what I’m reading”—he pointed to Buslaev’s Grammar on the desk—“it’s expected of Misha, and it’s so difficult.... Come, explain to me.... Here he says....”
Levin tried to explain to him that it couldn’t be understood, but that it had to be taught; but Lvov would not agree with him.
“Oh, you’re laughing at it!”
“On the contrary, you can’t imagine how, when I look at you, I’m always learning the task that lies before me, that is the education of one’s children.”
“Well, there’s nothing for you to learn,” said Lvov.
“All I know,” said Levin, “is that I have never seen better brought-up children than yours, and I wouldn’t wish for children better than yours.”
Lvov visibly tried to restrain the expression of his delight, but he was positively radiant with smiles.
“If only they’re better than I! That’s all I desire. You don’t know yet all the work,” he said, “with boys who’ve been left like mine to run wild abroad.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 765 | Lvov visibly tried to restrain the expression of his delight, but he was positively radiant with smiles.
“If only they’re better than I! That’s all I desire. You don’t know yet all the work,” he said, “with boys who’ve been left like mine to run wild abroad.”
“You’ll catch all that up. They’re such clever children. The great thing is the education of character. That’s what I learn when I look at your children.”
“You talk of the education of character. You can’t imagine how difficult that is! You have hardly succeeded in combating one tendency when others crop up, and the struggle begins again. If one had not a support in religion—you remember we talked about that—no father could bring children up relying on his own strength alone without that help.”
This subject, which always interested Levin, was cut short by the entrance of the beauty Natalia Alexandrovna, dressed to go out.
“I didn’t know you were here,” she said, unmistakably feeling no regret, but a positive pleasure, in interrupting this conversation on a topic she had heard so much of that she was by now weary of it. “Well, how is Kitty? I am dining with you today. I tell you what, Arseny,” she turned to her husband, “you take the carriage.”
And the husband and wife began to discuss their arrangements for the day. As the husband had to drive to meet someone on official business, while the wife had to go to the concert and some public meeting of a committee on the Eastern Question, there was a great deal to consider and settle. Levin had to take part in their plans as one of themselves. It was settled that Levin should go with Natalia to the concert and the meeting, and that from there they should send the carriage to the office for Arseny, and he should call for her and take her to Kitty’s; or that, if he had not finished his work, he should send the carriage back and Levin would go with her.
“He’s spoiling me,” Lvov said to his wife; “he assures me that our children are splendid, when I know how much that’s bad there is in them.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 766 | “He’s spoiling me,” Lvov said to his wife; “he assures me that our children are splendid, when I know how much that’s bad there is in them.”
“Arseny goes to extremes, I always say,” said his wife. “If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it’s true, as papa says,—that when we were brought up there was one extreme—we were kept in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it’s just the other way—the parents are in the wash house, while the children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for their children.”
“Well, what if they like it better?” Lvov said, with his beautiful smile, touching her hand. “Anyone who didn’t know you would think you were a stepmother, not a true mother.”
“No, extremes are not good in anything,” Natalia said serenely, putting his paper-knife straight in its proper place on the table.
“Well, come here, you perfect children,” Lvov said to the two handsome boys who came in, and after bowing to Levin, went up to their father, obviously wishing to ask him about something.
Levin would have liked to talk to them, to hear what they would say to their father, but Natalia began talking to him, and then Lvov’s colleague in the service, Mahotin, walked in, wearing his court uniform, to go with him to meet someone, and a conversation was kept up without a break upon Herzegovina, Princess Korzinskaya, the town council, and the sudden death of Madame Apraksina.
Levin even forgot the commission intrusted to him. He recollected it as he was going into the hall.
“Oh, Kitty told me to talk to you about Oblonsky,” he said, as Lvov was standing on the stairs, seeing his wife and Levin off.
“Yes, yes, maman wants us, les beaux-frères, to attack him,” he said, blushing. “But why should I?”
“Well, then, I will attack him,” said Madame Lvova, with a smile, standing in her white sheepskin cape, waiting till they had finished speaking. “Come, let us go.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 767 | “Yes, yes, maman wants us, les beaux-frères, to attack him,” he said, blushing. “But why should I?”
“Well, then, I will attack him,” said Madame Lvova, with a smile, standing in her white sheepskin cape, waiting till they had finished speaking. “Come, let us go.”
At the concert in the afternoon two very interesting things were performed. One was a fantasia, King Lear; the other was a quartette dedicated to the memory of Bach. Both were new and in the new style, and Levin was eager to form an opinion of them. After escorting his sister-in-law to her stall, he stood against a column and tried to listen as attentively and conscientiously as possible. He tried not to let his attention be distracted, and not to spoil his impression by looking at the conductor in a white tie, waving his arms, which always disturbed his enjoyment of music so much, or the ladies in bonnets, with strings carefully tied over their ears, and all these people either thinking of nothing at all or thinking of all sorts of things except the music. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs or talkative acquaintances, and stood looking at the floor straight before him, listening.
But the more he listened to the fantasia of King Lear the further he felt from forming any definite opinion of it. There was, as it were, a continual beginning, a preparation of the musical expression of some feeling, but it fell to pieces again directly, breaking into new musical motives, or simply nothing but the whims of the composer, exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these fragmentary musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable, because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything. Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman. And those emotions, like a madman’s, sprang up quite unexpectedly.
During the whole of the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dancing, and was in a state of complete bewilderment when the fantasia was over, and felt a great weariness from the fruitless strain on his attention. Loud applause resounded on all sides. Everyone got up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to throw some light on his own perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 768 | “Marvelous!” Pestsov was saying in his mellow bass. “How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia’s approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict with fate. Isn’t it?”
“You mean ... what has Cordelia to do with it?” Levin asked timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King Lear.
“Cordelia comes in ... see here!” said Pestsov, tapping his finger on the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and passing it to Levin.
Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made haste to read in the Russian translation the lines from Shakespeare that were printed on the back of the program.
“You can’t follow it without that,” said Pestsov, addressing Levin, as the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and he had no one to talk to.
In the entr’acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. “These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on the ladder,” said Levin. The comparison pleased him, but he could not remember whether he had not used the same phrase before, and to Pestsov, too, and as he said it he felt confused.
Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art.
The second piece that was performed Levin could not hear. Pestsov, who was standing beside him, was talking to him almost all the time, condemning the music for its excessive affected assumption of simplicity, and comparing it with the simplicity of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting. As he went out Levin met many more acquaintances, with whom he talked of politics, of music, and of common acquaintances. Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had utterly forgotten to call upon.
“Well, go at once then,” Madame Lvova said, when he told her; “perhaps they’ll not be at home, and then you can come to the meeting to fetch me. You’ll find me still there.”
“Perhaps they’re not at home?” said Levin, as he went into the hall of Countess Bola’s house. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 769 | “Perhaps they’re not at home?” said Levin, as he went into the hall of Countess Bola’s house.
“At home; please walk in,” said the porter, resolutely removing his overcoat.
“How annoying!” thought Levin with a sigh, taking off one glove and stroking his hat. “What did I come for? What have I to say to them?”
As he passed through the first drawing-room Levin met in the doorway Countess Bola, giving some order to a servant with a care-worn and severe face. On seeing Levin she smiled, and asked him to come into the little drawing-room, where he heard voices. In this room there were sitting in armchairs the two daughters of the countess, and a Moscow colonel, whom Levin knew. Levin went up, greeted them, and sat down beside the sofa with his hat on his knees.
“How is your wife? Have you been at the concert? We couldn’t go. Mamma had to be at the funeral service.”
“Yes, I heard.... What a sudden death!” said Levin.
The countess came in, sat down on the sofa, and she too asked after his wife and inquired about the concert.
Levin answered, and repeated an inquiry about Madame Apraksina’s sudden death.
“But she was always in weak health.”
“Were you at the opera yesterday?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Lucca was very good.”
“Yes, very good,” he said, and as it was utterly of no consequence to him what they thought of him, he began repeating what they had heard a hundred times about the characteristics of the singer’s talent. Countess Bola pretended to be listening. Then, when he had said enough and paused, the colonel, who had been silent till then, began to talk. The colonel too talked of the opera, and about culture. At last, after speaking of the proposed folle journée at Turin’s, the colonel laughed, got up noisily, and went away. Levin too rose, but he saw by the face of the countess that it was not yet time for him to go. He must stay two minutes longer. He sat down.
But as he was thinking all the while how stupid it was, he could not find a subject for conversation, and sat silent.
“You are not going to the public meeting? They say it will be very interesting,” began the countess.
“No, I promised my belle-sœur to fetch her from it,” said Levin.
A silence followed. The mother once more exchanged glances with a daughter.
“Well, now I think the time has come,” thought Levin, and he got up. The ladies shook hands with him, and begged him to say mille choses to his wife for them. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 770 | A silence followed. The mother once more exchanged glances with a daughter.
“Well, now I think the time has come,” thought Levin, and he got up. The ladies shook hands with him, and begged him to say mille choses to his wife for them.
The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat, “Where is your honor staying?” and immediately wrote down his address in a big handsomely bound book.
“Of course I don’t care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully stupid,” thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection that everyone does it. He drove to the public meeting, where he was to find his sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.
At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many people, and almost all the highest society. Levin was in time for the report which, as everyone said, was very interesting. When the reading of the report was over, people moved about, and Levin met Sviazhsky, who invited him very pressingly to come that evening to a meeting of the Society of Agriculture, where a celebrated lecture was to be delivered, and Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had only just come from the races, and many other acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered various criticisms on the meeting, on the new fantasia, and on a public trial. But, probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel, he made a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he recalled several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence upon a foreigner who had been condemned in Russia, and of how unfair it would be to punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated what he had heard the day before in conversation from an acquaintance.
“I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp by putting it into the water,” said Levin. Then he recollected that this idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as his own, came from a fable of Krilov’s, and that the acquaintance had picked it up from a newspaper article.
After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 771 | After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.
Levin reached the club just at the right time. Members and visitors were driving up as he arrived. Levin had not been at the club for a very long while—not since he lived in Moscow, when he was leaving the university and going into society. He remembered the club, the external details of its arrangement, but he had completely forgotten the impression it had made on him in old days. But as soon as, driving into the wide semicircular court and getting out of the sledge, he mounted the steps, and the hall-porter, adorned with a crossway scarf, noiselessly opened the door to him with a bow; as soon as he saw in the porter’s room the cloaks and galoshes of members who thought it less trouble to take them off downstairs; as soon as he heard the mysterious ringing bell that preceded him as he ascended the easy, carpeted staircase, and saw the statue on the landing, and the third porter at the top doors, a familiar figure grown older, in the club livery, opening the door without haste or delay, and scanning the visitors as they passed in—Levin felt the old impression of the club come back in a rush, an impression of repose, comfort, and propriety.
“Your hat, please,” the porter said to Levin, who forgot the club rule to leave his hat in the porter’s room. “Long time since you’ve been. The prince put your name down yesterday. Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch is not here yet.”
The porter did not only know Levin, but also all his ties and relationships, and so immediately mentioned his intimate friends.
Passing through the outer hall, divided up by screens, and the room partitioned on the right, where a man sits at the fruit buffet, Levin overtook an old man walking slowly in, and entered the dining-room full of noise and people.
He walked along the tables, almost all full, and looked at the visitors. He saw people of all sorts, old and young; some he knew a little, some intimate friends. There was not a single cross or worried-looking face. All seemed to have left their cares and anxieties in the porter’s room with their hats, and were all deliberately getting ready to enjoy the material blessings of life. Sviazhsky was here and Shtcherbatsky, Nevyedovsky and the old prince, and Vronsky and Sergey Ivanovitch.
“Ah! why are you late?” the prince said smiling, and giving him his hand over his own shoulder. “How’s Kitty?” he added, smoothing out the napkin he had tucked in at his waistcoat buttons. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 772 | “Ah! why are you late?” the prince said smiling, and giving him his hand over his own shoulder. “How’s Kitty?” he added, smoothing out the napkin he had tucked in at his waistcoat buttons.
“All right; they are dining at home, all the three of them.”
“Ah, ‘Aline-Nadine,’ to be sure! There’s no room with us. Go to that table, and make haste and take a seat,” said the prince, and turning away he carefully took a plate of eel soup.
“Levin, this way!” a good-natured voice shouted a little farther on. It was Turovtsin. He was sitting with a young officer, and beside them were two chairs turned upside down. Levin gladly went up to them. He had always liked the good-hearted rake, Turovtsin—he was associated in his mind with memories of his courtship—and at that moment, after the strain of intellectual conversation, the sight of Turovtsin’s good-natured face was particularly welcome.
“For you and Oblonsky. He’ll be here directly.”
The young man, holding himself very erect, with eyes forever twinkling with enjoyment, was an officer from Petersburg, Gagin. Turovtsin introduced them.
“Oblonsky’s always late.”
“Ah, here he is!”
“Have you only just come?” said Oblonsky, coming quickly towards them. “Good day. Had some vodka? Well, come along then.”
Levin got up and went with him to the big table spread with spirits and appetizers of the most various kinds. One would have thought that out of two dozen delicacies one might find something to one’s taste, but Stepan Arkadyevitch asked for something special, and one of the liveried waiters standing by immediately brought what was required. They drank a wine-glassful and returned to their table.
At once, while they were still at the soup, Gagin was served with champagne, and told the waiter to fill four glasses. Levin did not refuse the wine, and asked for a second bottle. He was very hungry, and ate and drank with great enjoyment, and with still greater enjoyment took part in the lively and simple conversation of his companions. Gagin, dropping his voice, told the last good story from Petersburg, and the story, though improper and stupid, was so ludicrous that Levin broke into roars of laughter so loud that those near looked round.
“That’s in the same style as, ‘that’s a thing I can’t endure!’ You know the story?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Ah, that’s exquisite! Another bottle,” he said to the waiter, and he began to relate his good story. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 773 | “That’s in the same style as, ‘that’s a thing I can’t endure!’ You know the story?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Ah, that’s exquisite! Another bottle,” he said to the waiter, and he began to relate his good story.
“Pyotr Illyitch Vinovsky invites you to drink with him,” a little old waiter interrupted Stepan Arkadyevitch, bringing two delicate glasses of sparkling champagne, and addressing Stepan Arkadyevitch and Levin. Stepan Arkadyevitch took the glass, and looking towards a bald man with red mustaches at the other end of the table, he nodded to him, smiling.
“Who’s that?” asked Levin.
“You met him once at my place, don’t you remember? A good-natured fellow.”
Levin did the same as Stepan Arkadyevitch and took the glass.
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s anecdote too was very amusing. Levin told his story, and that too was successful. Then they talked of horses, of the races, of what they had been doing that day, and of how smartly Vronsky’s Atlas had won the first prize. Levin did not notice how the time passed at dinner.
“Ah! and here they are!” Stepan Arkadyevitch said towards the end of dinner, leaning over the back of his chair and holding out his hand to Vronsky, who came up with a tall officer of the Guards. Vronsky’s face too beamed with the look of good-humored enjoyment that was general in the club. He propped his elbow playfully on Stepan Arkadyevitch’s shoulder, whispering something to him, and he held out his hand to Levin with the same good-humored smile.
“Very glad to meet you,” he said. “I looked out for you at the election, but I was told you had gone away.”
“Yes, I left the same day. We’ve just been talking of your horse. I congratulate you,” said Levin. “It was very rapidly run.”
“Yes; you’ve race horses too, haven’t you?”
“No, my father had; but I remember and know something about it.”
“Where have you dined?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“We were at the second table, behind the columns.”
“We’ve been celebrating his success,” said the tall colonel. “It’s his second Imperial prize. I wish I might have the luck at cards he has with horses. Well, why waste the precious time? I’m going to the ‘infernal regions,’” added the colonel, and he walked away. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 774 | “We’ve been celebrating his success,” said the tall colonel. “It’s his second Imperial prize. I wish I might have the luck at cards he has with horses. Well, why waste the precious time? I’m going to the ‘infernal regions,’” added the colonel, and he walked away.
“That’s Yashvin,” Vronsky said in answer to Turovtsin, and he sat down in the vacated seat beside them. He drank the glass offered him, and ordered a bottle of wine. Under the influence of the club atmosphere or the wine he had drunk, Levin chatted away to Vronsky of the best breeds of cattle, and was very glad not to feel the slightest hostility to this man. He even told him, among other things, that he had heard from his wife that she had met him at Princess Marya Borissovna’s.
“Ah, Princess Marya Borissovna, she’s exquisite!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and he told an anecdote about her which set them all laughing. Vronsky particularly laughed with such simplehearted amusement that Levin felt quite reconciled to him.
“Well, have we finished?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up with a smile. “Let us go.”
Getting up from the table, Levin walked with Gagin through the lofty room to the billiard room, feeling his arms swing as he walked with a peculiar lightness and ease. As he crossed the big room, he came upon his father-in-law.
“Well, how do you like our Temple of Indolence?” said the prince, taking his arm. “Come along, come along!”
“Yes, I wanted to walk about and look at everything. It’s interesting.”
“Yes, it’s interesting for you. But its interest for me is quite different. You look at those little old men now,” he said, pointing to a club member with bent back and projecting lip, shuffling towards them in his soft boots, “and imagine that they were shlupiks like that from their birth up.”
“How shlupiks?”
“I see you don’t know that name. That’s our club designation. You know the game of rolling eggs: when one’s rolled a long while it becomes a shlupik. So it is with us; one goes on coming and coming to the club, and ends by becoming a shlupik. Ah, you laugh! but we look out, for fear of dropping into it ourselves. You know Prince Tchetchensky?” inquired the prince; and Levin saw by his face that he was just going to relate something funny.
“No, I don’t know him.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 775 | “No, I don’t know him.”
“You don’t say so! Well, Prince Tchetchensky is a well-known figure. No matter, though. He’s always playing billiards here. Only three years ago he was not a shlupik and kept up his spirits and even used to call other people shlupiks. But one day he turns up, and our porter ... you know Vassily? Why, that fat one; he’s famous for his bon mots. And so Prince Tchetchensky asks him, ‘Come, Vassily, who’s here? Any shlupiks here yet?’ And he says, ‘You’re the third.’ Yes, my dear boy, that he did!”
Talking and greeting the friends they met, Levin and the prince walked through all the rooms: the great room where tables had already been set, and the usual partners were playing for small stakes; the divan room, where they were playing chess, and Sergey Ivanovitch was sitting talking to somebody; the billiard room, where, about a sofa in a recess, there was a lively party drinking champagne—Gagin was one of them. They peeped into the “infernal regions,” where a good many men were crowding round one table, at which Yashvin was sitting. Trying not to make a noise, they walked into the dark reading room, where under the shaded lamps there sat a young man with a wrathful countenance, turning over one journal after another, and a bald general buried in a book. They went, too, into what the prince called the intellectual room, where three gentlemen were engaged in a heated discussion of the latest political news.
“Prince, please come, we’re ready,” said one of his card party, who had come to look for him, and the prince went off. Levin sat down and listened, but recalling all the conversation of the morning he felt all of a sudden fearfully bored. He got up hurriedly, and went to look for Oblonsky and Turovtsin, with whom it had been so pleasant.
Turovtsin was one of the circle drinking in the billiard room, and Stepan Arkadyevitch was talking with Vronsky near the door at the farther corner of the room.
“It’s not that she’s dull; but this undefined, this unsettled position,” Levin caught, and he was hurrying away, but Stepan Arkadyevitch called to him.
“Levin,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and Levin noticed that his eyes were not full of tears exactly, but moist, which always happened when he had been drinking, or when he was touched. Just now it was due to both causes. “Levin, don’t go,” he said, and he warmly squeezed his arm above the elbow, obviously not at all wishing to let him go. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 776 | “This is a true friend of mine—almost my greatest friend,” he said to Vronsky. “You have become even closer and dearer to me. And I want you, and I know you ought, to be friends, and great friends, because you’re both splendid fellows.”
“Well, there’s nothing for us now but to kiss and be friends,” Vronsky said, with good-natured playfulness, holding out his hand.
Levin quickly took the offered hand, and pressed it warmly.
“I’m very, very glad,” said Levin.
“Waiter, a bottle of champagne,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“And I’m very glad,” said Vronsky.
But in spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s desire, and their own desire, they had nothing to talk about, and both felt it.
“Do you know, he has never met Anna?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to Vronsky. “And I want above everything to take him to see her. Let us go, Levin!”
“Really?” said Vronsky. “She will be very glad to see you. I should be going home at once,” he added, “but I’m worried about Yashvin, and I want to stay on till he finishes.”
“Why, is he losing?”
“He keeps losing, and I’m the only friend that can restrain him.”
“Well, what do you say to pyramids? Levin, will you play? Capital!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Get the table ready,” he said to the marker.
“It has been ready a long while,” answered the marker, who had already set the balls in a triangle, and was knocking the red one about for his own diversion.
“Well, let us begin.”
After the game Vronsky and Levin sat down at Gagin’s table, and at Stepan Arkadyevitch’s suggestion Levin took a hand in the game.
Vronsky sat down at the table, surrounded by friends, who were incessantly coming up to him. Every now and then he went to the “infernal” to keep an eye on Yashvin. Levin was enjoying a delightful sense of repose after the mental fatigue of the morning. He was glad that all hostility was at an end with Vronsky, and the sense of peace, decorum, and comfort never left him.
When the game was over, Stepan Arkadyevitch took Levin’s arm.
“Well, let us go to Anna’s, then. At once? Eh? She is at home. I promised her long ago to bring you. Where were you meaning to spend the evening?”
“Oh, nowhere specially. I promised Sviazhsky to go to the Society of Agriculture. By all means, let us go,” said Levin.
“Very good; come along. Find out if my carriage is here,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to the waiter. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 777 | “Oh, nowhere specially. I promised Sviazhsky to go to the Society of Agriculture. By all means, let us go,” said Levin.
“Very good; come along. Find out if my carriage is here,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to the waiter.
Levin went up to the table, paid the forty roubles he had lost; paid his bill, the amount of which was in some mysterious way ascertained by the little old waiter who stood at the counter, and swinging his arms he walked through all the rooms to the way out.
“Oblonsky’s carriage!” the porter shouted in an angry bass. The carriage drove up and both got in. It was only for the first few moments, while the carriage was driving out of the clubhouse gates, that Levin was still under the influence of the club atmosphere of repose, comfort, and unimpeachable good form. But as soon as the carriage drove out into the street, and he felt it jolting over the uneven road, heard the angry shout of a sledge driver coming towards them, saw in the uncertain light the red blind of a tavern and the shops, this impression was dissipated, and he began to think over his actions, and to wonder whether he was doing right in going to see Anna. What would Kitty say? But Stepan Arkadyevitch gave him no time for reflection, and, as though divining his doubts, he scattered them.
“How glad I am,” he said, “that you should know her! You know Dolly has long wished for it. And Lvov’s been to see her, and often goes. Though she is my sister,” Stepan Arkadyevitch pursued, “I don’t hesitate to say that she’s a remarkable woman. But you will see. Her position is very painful, especially now.”
“Why especially now?”
“We are carrying on negotiations with her husband about a divorce. And he’s agreed; but there are difficulties in regard to the son, and the business, which ought to have been arranged long ago, has been dragging on for three months past. As soon as the divorce is over, she will marry Vronsky. How stupid these old ceremonies are, that no one believes in, and which only prevent people being comfortable!” Stepan Arkadyevitch put in. “Well, then their position will be as regular as mine, as yours.”
“What is the difficulty?” said Levin. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 778 | “What is the difficulty?” said Levin.
“Oh, it’s a long and tedious story! The whole business is in such an anomalous position with us. But the point is she has been for three months in Moscow, where everyone knows her, waiting for the divorce; she goes out nowhere, sees no woman except Dolly, because, do you understand, she doesn’t care to have people come as a favor. That fool Princess Varvara, even she has left her, considering this a breach of propriety. Well, you see, in such a position any other woman would not have found resources in herself. But you’ll see how she has arranged her life—how calm, how dignified she is. To the left, in the crescent opposite the church!” shouted Stepan Arkadyevitch, leaning out of the window. “Phew! how hot it is!” he said, in spite of twelve degrees of frost, flinging his open overcoat still wider open.
“But she has a daughter: no doubt she’s busy looking after her?” said Levin.
“I believe you picture every woman simply as a female, une couveuse,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “If she’s occupied, it must be with her children. No, she brings her up capitally, I believe, but one doesn’t hear about her. She’s busy, in the first place, with what she writes. I see you’re smiling ironically, but you’re wrong. She’s writing a children’s book, and doesn’t talk about it to anyone, but she read it to me and I gave the manuscript to Vorkuev ... you know the publisher ... and he’s an author himself too, I fancy. He understands those things, and he says it’s a remarkable piece of work. But are you fancying she’s an authoress?—not a bit of it. She’s a woman with a heart, before everything, but you’ll see. Now she has a little English girl with her, and a whole family she’s looking after.”
“Oh, something in a philanthropic way?”
“Why, you will look at everything in the worst light. It’s not from philanthropy, it’s from the heart. They—that is, Vronsky—had a trainer, an Englishman, first-rate in his own line, but a drunkard. He’s completely given up to drink—delirium tremens—and the family were cast on the world. She saw them, helped them, got more and more interested in them, and now the whole family is on her hands. But not by way of patronage, you know, helping with money; she’s herself preparing the boys in Russian for the high school, and she’s taken the little girl to live with her. But you’ll see her for yourself.”
The carriage drove into the courtyard, and Stepan Arkadyevitch rang loudly at the entrance where sledges were standing. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 779 | The carriage drove into the courtyard, and Stepan Arkadyevitch rang loudly at the entrance where sledges were standing.
And without asking the servant who opened the door whether the lady were at home, Stepan Arkadyevitch walked into the hall. Levin followed him, more and more doubtful whether he was doing right or wrong.
Looking at himself in the glass, Levin noticed that he was red in the face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan Arkadyevitch up the carpeted stairs. At the top Stepan Arkadyevitch inquired of the footman, who bowed to him as to an intimate friend, who was with Anna Arkadyevna, and received the answer that it was M. Vorkuev.
“Where are they?”
“In the study.”
Passing through the dining-room, a room not very large, with dark, paneled walls, Stepan Arkadyevitch and Levin walked over the soft carpet to the half-dark study, lighted up by a single lamp with a big dark shade. Another lamp with a reflector was hanging on the wall, lighting up a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could not help looking at. It was the portrait of Anna, painted in Italy by Mihailov. While Stepan Arkadyevitch went behind the treillage, and the man’s voice which had been speaking paused, Levin gazed at the portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively forgot where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.
“I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the portrait. Anna had come from behind the treillage to meet him, and Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the portrait, in a dark blue shot gown, not in the same position nor with the same expression, but with the same perfection of beauty which the artist had caught in the portrait. She was less dazzling in reality, but, on the other hand, there was something fresh and seductive in the living woman which was not in the portrait. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 780 | She had risen to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him; and in the quiet ease with which she held out her little vigorous hand, introduced him to Vorkuev and indicated a red-haired, pretty little girl who was sitting at work, calling her her pupil, Levin recognized and liked the manners of a woman of the great world, always self-possessed and natural.
“I am delighted, delighted,” she repeated, and on her lips these simple words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva and for your wife’s sake.... I knew her for a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!”
She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood.
“Ivan Petrovitch and I settled in Alexey’s study,” she said in answer to Stepan Arkadyevitch’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as to be able to smoke”—and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a tortoise-shell cigar-case and took a cigarette.
“How are you feeling today?” her brother asked her.
“Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual.”
“Yes, isn’t it extraordinarily fine?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, noticing that Levin was scrutinizing the picture.
“I have never seen a better portrait.”
“And extraordinarily like, isn’t it?” said Vorkuev.
Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar brilliance lighted up Anna’s face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin flushed, and to cover his confusion would have asked whether she had seen Darya Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna spoke. “We were just talking, Ivan Petrovitch and I, of Vashtchenkov’s last pictures. Have you seen them?”
“Yes, I have seen them,” answered Levin.
“But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you ... you were saying?...”
Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately.
“She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high school people on Grisha’s account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had been unfair to him.”
“Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn’t care for them very much,” Levin went back to the subject she had started. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 781 | “She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high school people on Grisha’s account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had been unfair to him.”
“Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn’t care for them very much,” Levin went back to the subject she had started.
Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike attitude to the subject with which he had been talking all the morning. Every word in his conversation with her had a special significance. And talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter it was to listen to her.
Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great weight to the ideas of the person she was talking to.
The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness.
Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism. In the fact of not lying they see poetry.
Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure as this remark. Anna’s face lighted up at once, as at once she appreciated the thought. She laughed.
“I laugh,” she said, “as one laughs when one sees a very true portrait. What you said so perfectly hits off French art now, painting and literature too, indeed—Zola, Daudet. But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinaisons made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.”
“That’s perfectly true,” said Vorknev.
“So you’ve been at the club?” she said to her brother.
“Yes, yes, this is a woman!” Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment before in its repose—suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting something.
“Oh, well, but that’s of no interest to anyone,” she said, and she turned to the English girl.
“Please order the tea in the drawing-room,” she said in English.
The girl got up and went out.
“Well, how did she get through her examination?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Splendidly! She’s a very gifted child and a sweet character.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 782 | “Please order the tea in the drawing-room,” she said in English.
The girl got up and went out.
“Well, how did she get through her examination?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Splendidly! She’s a very gifted child and a sweet character.”
“It will end in your loving her more than your own.”
“There a man speaks. In love there’s no more nor less. I love my daughter with one love, and her with another.”
“I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, “that if she were to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English girl to the public question of the education of Russian children, she would be doing a great and useful work.”
“Yes, but I can’t help it; I couldn’t do it. Count Alexey Kirillovitch urged me very much” (as she uttered the words Count Alexey Kirillovitch she glanced with appealing timidity at Levin, and he unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring look); “he urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several times. The children were very nice, but I could not feel drawn to the work. You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it. I took to this child—I could not myself say why.”
And she glanced again at Levin. And her smile and her glance—all told him that it was to him only she was addressing her words, valuing his good opinion, and at the same time sure beforehand that they understood each other.
“I quite understand that,” Levin answered. “It’s impossible to give one’s heart to a school or such institutions in general, and I believe that’s just why philanthropic institutions always give such poor results.”
She was silent for a while, then she smiled.
“Yes, yes,” she agreed; “I never could. Je n’ai pas le cœur assez large to love a whole asylum of horrid little girls. Cela ne m’a jamais réussi. There are so many women who have made themselves une position sociale in that way. And now more than ever,” she said with a mournful, confiding expression, ostensibly addressing her brother, but unmistakably intending her words only for Levin, “now when I have such need of some occupation, I cannot.” And suddenly frowning (Levin saw that she was frowning at herself for talking about herself) she changed the subject. “I know about you,” she said to Levin; “that you’re not a public-spirited citizen, and I have defended you to the best of my ability.”
“How have you defended me?”
“Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won’t you have some tea?” She rose and took up a book bound in morocco. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 783 | “How have you defended me?”
“Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won’t you have some tea?” She rose and took up a book bound in morocco.
“Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, indicating the book. “It’s well worth taking up.”
“Oh, no, it’s all so sketchy.”
“I told him about it,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to his sister, nodding at Levin.
“You shouldn’t have. My writing is something after the fashion of those little baskets and carving which Liza Mertsalova used to sell me from the prisons. She had the direction of the prison department in that society,” she turned to Levin; “and they were miracles of patience, the work of those poor wretches.”
And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. As she said that she sighed, and her face suddenly taking a hard expression, looked as it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.
She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing-room, while she stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. “About her divorce, about Vronsky, and what he’s doing at the club, about me?” wondered Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the question of what she was saying to Stepan Arkadyevitch, that he scarcely heard what Vorkuev was telling him of the qualities of the story for children Anna Arkadyevna had written. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 784 | At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter, continued. There was not a single instant when a subject for conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to hear what the others were saying. And all that was said, not only by her, but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevitch—all, so it seemed to Levin, gained peculiar significance from her appreciation and her criticism. While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her—her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and was also sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand her. At eleven o’clock, when Stepan Arkadyevitch got up to go (Vorkuev had left earlier), it seemed to Levin that he had only just come. Regretfully Levin too rose.
“Good-bye,” she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face with a winning look. “I am very glad que la glace est rompue.”
She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.
“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.”
“Certainly, yes, I will tell her....” Levin said, blushing.
“What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!” he was thinking, as he stepped out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Well, didn’t I tell you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, seeing that Levin had been completely won over.
“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, “an extraordinary woman! It’s not her cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her!”
“Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be hard on people in future,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, opening the carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”
Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin reached home. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 785 | Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin reached home.
At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and he handed him two letters. Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not overlook them later. One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the corn could not be sold, that it was fetching only five and a half roubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. The other letter was from his sister. She scolded him for her business being still unsettled.
“Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can’t get more,” Levin decided the first question, which had always before seemed such a weighty one, with extraordinary facility on the spot. “It’s extraordinary how all one’s time is taken up here,” he thought, considering the second letter. He felt himself to blame for not having got done what his sister had asked him to do for her. “Today, again, I’ve not been to the court, but today I’ve certainly not had time.” And resolving that he would not fail to do it next day, he went up to his wife. As he went in, Levin rapidly ran through mentally the day he had spent. All the events of the day were conversations, conversations he had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon subjects which, if he had been alone at home, he would never have taken up, but here they were very interesting. And all these conversations were right enough, only in two places there was something not quite right. One was what he had said about the carp, the other was something not “quite the thing” in the tender sympathy he was feeling for Anna.
Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.
“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 786 | “Well, I’m very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural with him. You understand, I shall try not to see him, but I’m glad that this awkwardness is all over,” he said, and remembering that by way of trying not to see him, he had immediately gone to call on Anna, he blushed. “We talk about the peasants drinking; I don’t know which drinks most, the peasantry or our own class; the peasants do on holidays, but....”
But Kitty took not the slightest interest in discussing the drinking habits of the peasants. She saw that he blushed, and she wanted to know why.
“Well, and then where did you go?”
“Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.”
And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once for all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.
Kitty’s eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna’s name, but controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and deceived him.
“Oh!” was all she said.
“I’m sure you won’t be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and Dolly wished it,” Levin went on.
“Oh, no!” she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded him no good.
“She is a very sweet, very, very unhappy, good woman,” he said, telling her about Anna, her occupations, and what she had told him to say to her.
“Yes, of course, she is very much to be pitied,” said Kitty, when he had finished. “Whom was your letter from?”
He told her, and believing in her calm tone, he went to change his coat.
Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went up to her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.
“What? what is it?” he asked, knowing beforehand what.
“You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were drinking at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went ... to her of all people! No, we must go away.... I shall go away tomorrow.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 787 | It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity, in conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for him, that he had succumbed to Anna’s artful influence, and that he would avoid her. One thing he did with more sincerity confess to was that living so long in Moscow, a life of nothing but conversation, eating and drinking, he was degenerating. They talked till three o’clock in the morning. Only at three o’clock were they sufficiently reconciled to be able to go to sleep.
After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of him. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 788 | One thought, and one only, pursued her in different forms, and refused to be shaken off. “If I have so much effect on others, on this man, who loves his home and his wife, why is it he is so cold to me?... not cold exactly, he loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us apart now. Why wasn’t he here all the evening? He told Stiva to say he could not leave Yashvin, and must watch over his play. Is Yashvin a child? But supposing it’s true. He never tells a lie. But there’s something else in it if it’s true. He is glad of an opportunity of showing me that he has other duties; I know that, I submit to that. But why prove that to me? He wants to show me that his love for me is not to interfere with his freedom. But I need no proofs, I need love. He ought to understand all the bitterness of this life for me here in Moscow. Is this life? I am not living, but waiting for an event, which is continually put off and put off. No answer again! And Stiva says he cannot go to Alexey Alexandrovitch. And I can’t write again. I can do nothing, can begin nothing, can alter nothing; I hold myself in, I wait, inventing amusements for myself—the English family, writing, reading—but it’s all nothing but a sham, it’s all the same as morphine. He ought to feel for me,” she said, feeling tears of self-pity coming into her eyes.
She heard Vronsky’s abrupt ring and hurriedly dried her tears—not only dried her tears, but sat down by a lamp and opened a book, affecting composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had not come home as he had promised—displeased only, and not on any account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.
“Well, you’ve not been dull?” he said, eagerly and good-humoredly, going up to her. “What a terrible passion it is—gambling!”
“No, I’ve not been dull; I’ve learned long ago not to be dull. Stiva has been here and Levin.”
“Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?” he said, sitting down beside her.
“Very much. They have not long been gone. What was Yashvin doing?”
“He was winning—seventeen thousand. I got him away. He had really started home, but he went back again, and now he’s losing.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 789 | “Very much. They have not long been gone. What was Yashvin doing?”
“He was winning—seventeen thousand. I got him away. He had really started home, but he went back again, and now he’s losing.”
“Then what did you stay for?” she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes to him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. “You told Stiva you were staying on to get Yashvin away. And you have left him there.”
The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on his face too.
“In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message; and secondly, I never tell lies. But what’s the chief point, I wanted to stay, and I stayed,” he said, frowning. “Anna, what is it for, why will you?” he said after a moment’s silence, bending over towards her, and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.
She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender.
“Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?” she said, getting more and more excited. “Does anyone contest your rights? But you want to be right, and you’re welcome to be right.”
His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more obstinate expression.
“For you it’s a matter of obstinacy,” she said, watching him intently and suddenly finding the right word for that expression that irritated her, “simply obstinacy. For you it’s a question of whether you keep the upper hand of me, while for me....” Again she felt sorry for herself, and she almost burst into tears. “If you knew what it is for me! When I feel as I do now that you are hostile, yes, hostile to me, if you knew what this means for me! If you knew how I feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how afraid I am of myself!” And she turned away, hiding her sobs.
“But what are you talking about?” he said, horrified at her expression of despair, and again bending over her, he took her hand and kissed it. “What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home? Don’t I avoid the society of women?”
“Well, yes! If that were all!” she said. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 790 | “Well, yes! If that were all!” she said.
“Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am ready to do anything to make you happy,” he said, touched by her expression of despair; “what wouldn’t I do to save you from distress of any sort, as now, Anna!” he said.
“It’s nothing, nothing!” she said. “I don’t know myself whether it’s the solitary life, my nerves.... Come, don’t let us talk of it. What about the race? You haven’t told me!” she inquired, trying to conceal her triumph at the victory, which had anyway been on her side.
He asked for supper, and began telling her about the races; but in his tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that he did not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of obstinacy with which she had been struggling had asserted itself again in him. He was colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his surrender. And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his, and still less from her own heart.
There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way. Levin could not have believed three months before that he could have gone quietly to sleep in the condition in which he was that day, that leading an aimless, irrational life, living too beyond his means, after drinking to excess (he could not call what happened at the club anything else), forming inappropriately friendly relations with a man with whom his wife had once been in love, and a still more inappropriate call upon a woman who could only be called a lost woman, after being fascinated by that woman and causing his wife distress—he could still go quietly to sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a sleepless night, and the wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and untroubled.
At five o’clock the creak of a door opening waked him. He jumped up and looked round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was a light moving behind the screen, and he heard her steps.
“What is it?... what is it?” he said, half-asleep. “Kitty! What is it?” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 791 | “What is it?... what is it?” he said, half-asleep. “Kitty! What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle in her hand. “I felt unwell,” she said, smiling a particularly sweet and meaning smile.
“What? has it begun?” he said in terror. “We ought to send....” and hurriedly he reached after his clothes.
“No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.”
And getting into bed, she blew out the candle, lay down and was still. Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind the screen, she said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he fell asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart while she lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She seemed struggling between regret at waking him, and the desire to talk to him.
“Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy.... We ought to send for Lizaveta Petrovna.”
The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days.
“Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,” she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom and then to her lips.
He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her, as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her. He had to go, but he could not tear himself from her eyes. He thought he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to himself, thinking of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed with soft curling hair under her night cap, was radiant with joy and courage. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 792 | Though there was so little that was complex or artificial in Kitty’s character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed now, when suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel of her soul shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul, she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than ever. She looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows twitched, she threw up her head, and going quickly up to him, clutched his hand and pressed close up to him, breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And for the first minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her eyes there was a tenderness that told him that she was far from reproaching him, that she loved him for her sufferings. “If not I, who is to blame for it?” he thought unconsciously, seeking someone responsible for this suffering for him to punish; but there was no one responsible. She was suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her sufferings, and rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that something sublime was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He could not make it out. It was beyond his understanding.
“I have sent to mamma. You go quickly to fetch Lizaveta Petrovna ... Kostya!... Nothing, it’s over.”
She moved away from him and rang the bell.
“Well, go now; Pasha’s coming. I am all right.”
And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting she had brought in in the night and begun working at it again.
As Levin was going out of one door, he heard the maid-servant come in at the other. He stood at the door and heard Kitty giving exact directions to the maid, and beginning to help her move the bedstead.
He dressed, and while they were putting in his horses, as a hired sledge was not to be seen yet, he ran again up to the bedroom, not on tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Two maid-servants were carefully moving something in the bedroom.
Kitty was walking about knitting rapidly and giving directions.
“I’m going for the doctor. They have sent for Lizaveta Petrovna, but I’ll go on there too. Isn’t there anything wanted? Yes, shall I go to Dolly’s?”
She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying.
“Yes, yes. Do go,” she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to him. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 793 | She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying.
“Yes, yes. Do go,” she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to him.
He had just gone into the drawing-room, when suddenly a plaintive moan sounded from the bedroom, smothered instantly. He stood still, and for a long while he could not understand.
“Yes, that is she,” he said to himself, and clutching at his head he ran downstairs.
“Lord have mercy on us! pardon us! aid us!” he repeated the words that for some reason came suddenly to his lips. And he, an unbeliever, repeated these words not with his lips only. At that instant he knew that all his doubts, even the impossibility of believing with his reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder his turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love?
The horse was not yet ready, but feeling a peculiar concentration of his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he started off on foot without waiting for the horse, and told Kouzma to overtake him.
At the corner he met a night cabman driving hurriedly. In the little sledge, wrapped in a velvet cloak, sat Lizaveta Petrovna with a kerchief round her head. “Thank God! thank God!” he said, overjoyed to recognize her little fair face which wore a peculiarly serious, even stern expression. Telling the driver not to stop, he ran along beside her.
“For two hours, then? Not more?” she inquired. “You should let Pyotr Dmitrievitch know, but don’t hurry him. And get some opium at the chemist’s.”
“So you think that it may go on well? Lord have mercy on us and help us!” Levin said, seeing his own horse driving out of the gate. Jumping into the sledge beside Kouzma, he told him to drive to the doctor’s.
The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that “he had been up late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon.” The footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and seemed very busy about them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew or was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more necessary to act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through this wall of indifference and attain his aim. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 794 | “Don’t be in a hurry or let anything slip,” Levin said to himself, feeling a greater and greater flow of physical energy and attention to all that lay before him to do.
Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin considered various plans, and decided on the following one: that Kouzma should go for another doctor, while he himself should go to the chemist’s for opium, and if when he came back the doctor had not yet begun to get up, he would either by tipping the footman, or by force, wake the doctor at all hazards.
At the chemist’s the lank shopman sealed up a packet of powders for a coachman who stood waiting, and refused him opium with the same callousness with which the doctor’s footman had cleaned his lamp chimneys. Trying not to get flurried or out of temper, Levin mentioned the names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the opium was needed for, tried to persuade him. The assistant inquired in German whether he should give it, and receiving an affirmative reply from behind the partition, he took out a bottle and a funnel, deliberately poured the opium from a bigger bottle into a little one, stuck on a label, sealed it up, in spite of Levin’s request that he would not do so, and was about to wrap it up too. This was more than Levin could stand; he took the bottle firmly out of his hands, and ran to the big glass doors. The doctor was not even now getting up, and the footman, busy now in putting down the rugs, refused to wake him. Levin deliberately took out a ten rouble note, and, careful to speak slowly, though losing no time over the business, he handed him the note, and explained that Pyotr Dmitrievitch (what a great and important personage he seemed to Levin now, this Pyotr Dmitrievitch, who had been of so little consequence in his eyes before!) had promised to come at any time; that he would certainly not be angry! and that he must therefore wake him at once.
The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin into the waiting room.
Levin could hear through the door the doctor coughing, moving about, washing, and saying something. Three minutes passed; it seemed to Levin that more than an hour had gone by. He could not wait any longer.
“Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” he said in an imploring voice at the open door. “For God’s sake, forgive me! See me as you are. It’s been going on more than two hours already.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 795 | “Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” he said in an imploring voice at the open door. “For God’s sake, forgive me! See me as you are. It’s been going on more than two hours already.”
“In a minute; in a minute!” answered a voice, and to his amazement Levin heard that the doctor was smiling as he spoke.
“For one instant.”
“In a minute.”
Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting on his boots, and two minutes more while the doctor put on his coat and combed his hair.
“Pyotr Dmitrievitch!” Levin was beginning again in a plaintive voice, just as the doctor came in dressed and ready. “These people have no conscience,” thought Levin. “Combing his hair, while we’re dying!”
“Good morning!” the doctor said to him, shaking hands, and, as it were, teasing him with his composure. “There’s no hurry. Well now?”
Trying to be as accurate as possible, Levin began to tell him every unnecessary detail of his wife’s condition, interrupting his account repeatedly with entreaties that the doctor would come with him at once.
“Oh, you needn’t be in any hurry. You don’t understand, you know. I’m certain I’m not wanted, still I’ve promised, and if you like, I’ll come. But there’s no hurry. Please sit down; won’t you have some coffee?”
Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he was laughing at him; but the doctor had no notion of making fun of him.
“I know, I know,” the doctor said, smiling; “I’m a married man myself; and at these moments we husbands are very much to be pitied. I’ve a patient whose husband always takes refuge in the stables on such occasions.”
“But what do you think, Pyotr Dmitrievitch? Do you suppose it may go all right?”
“Everything points to a favorable issue.”
“So you’ll come immediately?” said Levin, looking wrathfully at the servant who was bringing in the coffee.
“In an hour’s time.”
“Oh, for mercy’s sake!”
“Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway.”
The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.
“The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read yesterday’s telegrams?” said the doctor, munching some roll.
“No, I can’t stand it!” said Levin, jumping up. “So you’ll be with us in a quarter of an hour.”
“In half an hour.”
“On your honor?”
When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the princess, and they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him, and burst into tears. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 796 | “On your honor?”
When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the princess, and they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him, and burst into tears.
“Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?” she queried, clasping the hand of the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anxious face.
“She’s going on well,” she said; “persuade her to lie down. She will be easier so.”
From the moment when he had waked up and understood what was going on, Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to him he could do this. But when he came back from the doctor’s and saw her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently: “Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” He sighed, and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had passed.
But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain.
But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 797 |
All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o’clock in the afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o’clock in the morning, he would not have been more surprised. Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring face, and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not know. The princess was with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the study, where a table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not there, but Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had been sent somewhere. Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had done this eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later on he found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Then he had been sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor had answered and then had said something about the irregularities in the municipal council. Then he had been sent to the bedroom to help the old princess to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the princess’s old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy picture and set it at Kitty’s head, carefully tucking it in behind the pillow. But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could not tell. He did not understand why the old princess took his hand, and looking compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the room, and even the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at him and offered him a drop of something. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 798 | All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief—this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
“Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” he repeated to himself incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.
All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ashtray, with Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner, about politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror that had come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as he looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was filled with terror and prayed: “Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!” And as time went on, both these conditions became more intense; the calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more agonizing became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness before them. He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to her.
Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 799 | Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and hearing the words, “I am worrying you,” he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.
He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the doctor’s stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard the doctor’s chat and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as strange. “I suppose it must be so,” he thought, and still sat where he was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom, edged round Lizaveta Petrovna and the princess, and took up his position at Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he had no wish to see or comprehend. But he saw it by the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. Lizaveta Petrovna’s face was stern and pale, and still as resolute, though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were fixed intently on Kitty. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.
“Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!” she said rapidly. “Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You’re not afraid? Quick, quick, Lizaveta Petrovna....”
She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her face was drawn, she pushed him away.
“Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and again he heard that unearthly scream.
Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,” Dolly called after him. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 800 | “Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and again he heard that unearthly scream.
Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,” Dolly called after him.
But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the door post, and heard shrieks, howls such as he had never heard before, and he knew that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had long ago ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child. He did not even wish for her life now, all he longed for was the end of this awful anguish.
“Doctor! What is it? What is it? By God!” he said, snatching at the doctor’s hand as he came up.
“It’s the end,” said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so grave as he said it that Levin took the end as meaning her death.
Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw was the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was even more frowning and stern. Kitty’s face he did not know. In the place where it had been was something that was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that came from it. He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful, uttered softly, “It’s over!”
He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt, looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.
And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the old every-day world, glorified though now, by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained chords snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he had never foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook, that for long they prevented him from speaking. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 801 | Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s hand before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a flickering light in a lamp, lay the life of a human creature, which had never existed before, and which would now with the same right, with the same importance to itself, live and create in its own image.
“Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!” Levin heard Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking hand.
“Mamma, is it true?” said Kitty’s voice.
The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make. And in the midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply to the mother’s question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room. It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.
If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had died with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was standing before him, he would have been surprised at nothing. But now, coming back to the world of reality, he had to make great mental efforts to take in that she was alive and well, and that the creature squalling so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her agony was over. And he was unutterably happy. That he understood; he was completely happy in it. But the baby? Whence, why, who was he?... He could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him something extraneous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 802 | At ten o’clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and Stepan Arkadyevitch were sitting at Levin’s. Having inquired after Kitty, they had dropped into conversation upon other subjects. Levin heard them, and unconsciously, as they talked, going over the past, over what had been up to that morning, he thought of himself as he had been yesterday till that point. It was as though a hundred years had passed since then. He felt himself exalted to unattainable heights, from which he studiously lowered himself so as not to wound the people he was talking to. He talked, and was all the time thinking of his wife, of her condition now, of his son, in whose existence he tried to school himself into believing. The whole world of woman, which had taken for him since his marriage a new value he had never suspected before, was now so exalted that he could not take it in in his imagination. He heard them talk of yesterday’s dinner at the club, and thought: “What is happening with her now? Is she asleep? How is she? What is she thinking of? Is he crying, my son Dmitri?” And in the middle of the conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped up and went out of the room.
“Send me word if I can see her,” said the prince.
“Very well, in a minute,” answered Levin, and without stopping, he went to her room.
She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother, making plans about the christening.
Carefully set to rights, with hair well-brushed, in a smart little cap with some blue in it, her arms out on the quilt, she was lying on her back. Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to her. Her face, bright before, brightened still more as he drew near her. There was the same change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the face of the dead. But then it means farewell, here it meant welcome. Again a rush of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of the child’s birth, flooded his heart. She took his hand and asked him if he had slept. He could not answer, and turned away, struggling with his weakness.
“I have had a nap, Kostya!” she said to him; “and I am so comfortable now.”
She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.
“Give him to me,” she said, hearing the baby’s cry. “Give him to me, Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at him.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 803 | “I have had a nap, Kostya!” she said to him; “and I am so comfortable now.”
She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.
“Give him to me,” she said, hearing the baby’s cry. “Give him to me, Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at him.”
“To be sure, his papa shall look at him,” said Lizaveta Petrovna, getting up and bringing something red, and queer, and wriggling. “Wait a minute, we’ll make him tidy first,” and Lizaveta Petrovna laid the red wobbling thing on the bed, began untrussing and trussing up the baby, lifting it up and turning it over with one finger and powdering it with something.
Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made strenuous efforts to discover in his heart some traces of fatherly feeling for it. He felt nothing towards it but disgust. But when it was undressed and he caught a glimpse of wee, wee, little hands, little feet, saffron-colored, with little toes, too, and positively with a little big toe different from the rest, and when he saw Lizaveta Petrovna closing the wide-open little hands, as though they were soft springs, and putting them into linen garments, such pity for the little creature came upon him, and such terror that she would hurt it, that he held her hand back.
Lizaveta Petrovna laughed.
“Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened!”
When the baby had been put to rights and transformed into a firm doll, Lizaveta Petrovna dandled it as though proud of her handiwork, and stood a little away so that Levin might see his son in all his glory.
Kitty looked sideways in the same direction, never taking her eyes off the baby. “Give him to me! give him to me!” she said, and even made as though she would sit up.
“What are you thinking of, Katerina Alexandrovna, you mustn’t move like that! Wait a minute. I’ll give him to you. Here we’re showing papa what a fine fellow we are!”
And Lizaveta Petrovna, with one hand supporting the wobbling head, lifted up on the other arm the strange, limp, red creature, whose head was lost in its swaddling clothes. But it had a nose, too, and slanting eyes and smacking lips.
“A splendid baby!” said Lizaveta Petrovna.
Levin sighed with mortification. This splendid baby excited in him no feeling but disgust and compassion. It was not at all the feeling he had looked forward to.
He turned away while Lizaveta Petrovna put the baby to the unaccustomed breast.
Suddenly laughter made him look round. The baby had taken the breast. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 804 | He turned away while Lizaveta Petrovna put the baby to the unaccustomed breast.
Suddenly laughter made him look round. The baby had taken the breast.
“Come, that’s enough, that’s enough!” said Lizaveta Petrovna, but Kitty would not let the baby go. He fell asleep in her arms.
“Look, now,” said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see it. The aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more and the baby sneezed.
Smiling, hardly able to restrain his tears, Levin kissed his wife and went out of the dark room. What he felt towards this little creature was utterly unlike what he had expected. There was nothing cheerful and joyous in the feeling; on the contrary, it was a new torture of apprehension. It was the consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain. And this sense was so painful at first, the apprehension lest this helpless creature should suffer was so intense, that it prevented him from noticing the strange thrill of senseless joy and even pride that he had felt when the baby sneezed.
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s affairs were in a very bad way.
The money for two-thirds of the forest had all been spent already, and he had borrowed from the merchant in advance at ten per cent discount, almost all the remaining third. The merchant would not give more, especially as Darya Alexandrovna, for the first time that winter insisting on her right to her own property, had refused to sign the receipt for the payment of the last third of the forest. All his salary went on household expenses and in payment of petty debts that could not be put off. There was positively no money.
This was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s opinion things could not go on like this. The explanation of the position was, in his view, to be found in the fact that his salary was too small. The post he filled had been unmistakably very good five years ago, but it was so no longer.
Petrov, the bank director, had twelve thousand; Sventitsky, a company director, had seventeen thousand; Mitin, who had founded a bank, received fifty thousand. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 805 | Petrov, the bank director, had twelve thousand; Sventitsky, a company director, had seventeen thousand; Mitin, who had founded a bank, received fifty thousand.
“Clearly I’ve been napping, and they’ve overlooked me,” Stepan Arkadyevitch thought about himself. And he began keeping his eyes and ears open, and towards the end of the winter he had discovered a very good berth and had formed a plan of attack upon it, at first from Moscow through aunts, uncles, and friends, and then, when the matter was well advanced, in the spring, he went himself to Petersburg. It was one of those snug, lucrative berths of which there are so many more nowadays than there used to be, with incomes ranging from one thousand to fifty thousand roubles. It was the post of secretary of the committee of the amalgamated agency of the southern railways, and of certain banking companies. This position, like all such appointments, called for such immense energy and such varied qualifications, that it was difficult for them to be found united in any one man. And since a man combining all the qualifications was not to be found, it was at least better that the post be filled by an honest than by a dishonest man. And Stepan Arkadyevitch was not merely an honest man—unemphatically—in the common acceptation of the words, he was an honest man—emphatically—in that special sense which the word has in Moscow, when they talk of an “honest” politician, an “honest” writer, an “honest” newspaper, an “honest” institution, an “honest” tendency, meaning not simply that the man or the institution is not dishonest, but that they are capable on occasion of taking a line of their own in opposition to the authorities.
Stepan Arkadyevitch moved in those circles in Moscow in which that expression had come into use, was regarded there as an honest man, and so had more right to this appointment than others.
The appointment yielded an income of from seven to ten thousand a year, and Oblonsky could fill it without giving up his government position. It was in the hands of two ministers, one lady, and two Jews, and all these people, though the way had been paved already with them, Stepan Arkadyevitch had to see in Petersburg. Besides this business, Stepan Arkadyevitch had promised his sister Anna to obtain from Karenin a definite answer on the question of divorce. And begging fifty roubles from Dolly, he set off for Petersburg.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sat in Karenin’s study listening to his report on the causes of the unsatisfactory position of Russian finance, and only waiting for the moment when he would finish to speak about his own business or about Anna. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 806 | Stepan Arkadyevitch sat in Karenin’s study listening to his report on the causes of the unsatisfactory position of Russian finance, and only waiting for the moment when he would finish to speak about his own business or about Anna.
“Yes, that’s very true,” he said, when Alexey Alexandrovitch took off the pince-nez, without which he could not read now, and looked inquiringly at his former brother-in-law, “that’s very true in particular cases, but still the principle of our day is freedom.”
“Yes, but I lay down another principle, embracing the principle of freedom,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, with emphasis on the word “embracing,” and he put on his pince-nez again, so as to read the passage in which this statement was made. And turning over the beautifully written, wide-margined manuscript, Alexey Alexandrovitch read aloud over again the conclusive passage.
“I don’t advocate protection for the sake of private interests, but for the public weal, and for the lower and upper classes equally,” he said, looking over his pince-nez at Oblonsky. “But they cannot grasp that, they are taken up now with personal interests, and carried away by phrases.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch knew that when Karenin began to talk of what they were doing and thinking, the persons who would not accept his report and were the cause of everything wrong in Russia, that it was coming near the end. And so now he eagerly abandoned the principle of free-trade, and fully agreed. Alexey Alexandrovitch paused, thoughtfully turning over the pages of his manuscript.
“Oh, by the way,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “I wanted to ask you, some time when you see Pomorsky, to drop him a hint that I should be very glad to get that new appointment of secretary of the committee of the amalgamated agency of the southern railways and banking companies.” Stepan Arkadyevitch was familiar by now with the title of the post he coveted, and he brought it out rapidly without mistake.
Alexey Alexandrovitch questioned him as to the duties of this new committee, and pondered. He was considering whether the new committee would not be acting in some way contrary to the views he had been advocating. But as the influence of the new committee was of a very complex nature, and his views were of very wide application, he could not decide this straight off, and taking off his pince-nez, he said:
“Of course, I can mention it to him; but what is your reason precisely for wishing to obtain the appointment?”
“It’s a good salary, rising to nine thousand, and my means....” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 807 | “Of course, I can mention it to him; but what is your reason precisely for wishing to obtain the appointment?”
“It’s a good salary, rising to nine thousand, and my means....”
“Nine thousand!” repeated Alexey Alexandrovitch, and he frowned. The high figure of the salary made him reflect that on that side Stepan Arkadyevitch’s proposed position ran counter to the main tendency of his own projects of reform, which always leaned towards economy.
“I consider, and I have embodied my views in a note on the subject, that in our day these immense salaries are evidence of the unsound economic assiette of our finances.”
“But what’s to be done?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Suppose a bank director gets ten thousand—well, he’s worth it; or an engineer gets twenty thousand—after all, it’s a growing thing, you know!”
“I assume that a salary is the price paid for a commodity, and it ought to conform with the law of supply and demand. If the salary is fixed without any regard for that law, as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together, both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other is satisfied with two; or when I see lawyers and hussars, having no special qualifications, appointed directors of banking companies with immense salaries, I conclude that the salary is not fixed in accordance with the law of supply and demand, but simply through personal interest. And this is an abuse of great gravity in itself, and one that reacts injuriously on the government service. I consider....”
Stepan Arkadyevitch made haste to interrupt his brother-in-law.
“Yes; but you must agree that it’s a new institution of undoubted utility that’s being started. After all, you know, it’s a growing thing! What they lay particular stress on is the thing being carried on honestly,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with emphasis.
But the Moscow significance of the word “honest” was lost on Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Honesty is only a negative qualification,” he said.
“Well, you’ll do me a great service, anyway,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “by putting in a word to Pomorsky—just in the way of conversation....”
“But I fancy it’s more in Volgarinov’s hands,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Volgarinov has fully assented, as far as he’s concerned,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, turning red. Stepan Arkadyevitch reddened at the mention of that name, because he had been that morning at the Jew Volgarinov’s, and the visit had left an unpleasant recollection. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 808 | “Volgarinov has fully assented, as far as he’s concerned,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, turning red. Stepan Arkadyevitch reddened at the mention of that name, because he had been that morning at the Jew Volgarinov’s, and the visit had left an unpleasant recollection.
Stepan Arkadyevitch believed most positively that the committee in which he was trying to get an appointment was a new, genuine, and honest public body, but that morning when Volgarinov had—intentionally, beyond a doubt—kept him two hours waiting with other petitioners in his waiting room, he had suddenly felt uneasy.
Whether he was uncomfortable that he, a descendant of Rurik, Prince Oblonsky, had been kept for two hours waiting to see a Jew, or that for the first time in his life he was not following the example of his ancestors in serving the government, but was turning off into a new career, anyway he was very uncomfortable. During those two hours in Volgarinov’s waiting room Stepan Arkadyevitch, stepping jauntily about the room, pulling his whiskers, entering into conversation with the other petitioners, and inventing an epigram on his position, assiduously concealed from others, and even from himself, the feeling he was experiencing.
But all the time he was uncomfortable and angry, he could not have said why—whether because he could not get his epigram just right, or from some other reason. When at last Volgarinov had received him with exaggerated politeness and unmistakable triumph at his humiliation, and had all but refused the favor asked of him, Stepan Arkadyevitch had made haste to forget it all as soon as possible. And now, at the mere recollection, he blushed.
“Now there is something I want to talk about, and you know what it is. About Anna,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said, pausing for a brief space, and shaking off the unpleasant impression.
As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna’s name, the face of Alexey Alexandrovitch was completely transformed; all the life was gone out of it, and it looked weary and dead.
“What is it exactly that you want from me?” he said, moving in his chair and snapping his pince-nez.
“A definite settlement, Alexey Alexandrovitch, some settlement of the position. I’m appealing to you” (“not as an injured husband,” Stepan Arkadyevitch was going to say, but afraid of wrecking his negotiation by this, he changed the words) “not as a statesman” (which did not sound à propos), “but simply as a man, and a good-hearted man and a Christian. You must have pity on her,” he said.
“That is, in what way precisely?” Karenin said softly. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 809 | “That is, in what way precisely?” Karenin said softly.
“Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!—I have been spending all the winter with her—you would have pity on her. Her position is awful, simply awful!”
“I had imagined,” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch in a higher, almost shrill voice, “that Anna Arkadyevna had everything she had desired for herself.”
“Oh, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for heaven’s sake, don’t let us indulge in recriminations! What is past is past, and you know what she wants and is waiting for—divorce.”
“But I believe Anna Arkadyevna refuses a divorce, if I make it a condition to leave me my son. I replied in that sense, and supposed that the matter was ended. I consider it at an end,” shrieked Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“But, for heaven’s sake, don’t get hot!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, touching his brother-in-law’s knee. “The matter is not ended. If you will allow me to recapitulate, it was like this: when you parted, you were as magnanimous as could possibly be; you were ready to give her everything—freedom, divorce even. She appreciated that. No, don’t think that. She did appreciate it—to such a degree that at the first moment, feeling how she had wronged you, she did not consider and could not consider everything. She gave up everything. But experience, time, have shown that her position is unbearable, impossible.”
“The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for me,” Alexey Alexandrovitch put in, lifting his eyebrows.
“Allow me to disbelieve that,” Stepan Arkadyevitch replied gently. “Her position is intolerable for her, and of no benefit to anyone whatever. She has deserved it, you will say. She knows that and asks you for nothing; she says plainly that she dare not ask you. But I, all of us, her relatives, all who love her, beg you, entreat you. Why should she suffer? Who is any the better for it?”
“Excuse me, you seem to put me in the position of the guilty party,” observed Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Oh, no, oh, no, not at all! please understand me,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, touching his hand again, as though feeling sure this physical contact would soften his brother-in-law. “All I say is this: her position is intolerable, and it might be alleviated by you, and you will lose nothing by it. I will arrange it all for you, so that you’ll not notice it. You did promise it, you know.”
“The promise was given before. And I had supposed that the question of my son had settled the matter. Besides, I had hoped that Anna Arkadyevna had enough generosity....” Alexey Alexandrovitch articulated with difficulty, his lips twitching and his face white. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 810 | “The promise was given before. And I had supposed that the question of my son had settled the matter. Besides, I had hoped that Anna Arkadyevna had enough generosity....” Alexey Alexandrovitch articulated with difficulty, his lips twitching and his face white.
“She leaves it all to your generosity. She begs, she implores one thing of you—to extricate her from the impossible position in which she is placed. She does not ask for her son now. Alexey Alexandrovitch, you are a good man. Put yourself in her position for a minute. The question of divorce for her in her position is a question of life and death. If you had not promised it once, she would have reconciled herself to her position, she would have gone on living in the country. But you promised it, and she wrote to you, and moved to Moscow. And here she’s been for six months in Moscow, where every chance meeting cuts her to the heart, every day expecting an answer. Why, it’s like keeping a condemned criminal for six months with the rope round his neck, promising him perhaps death, perhaps mercy. Have pity on her, and I will undertake to arrange everything. Vos scrupules....”
“I am not talking about that, about that....” Alexey Alexandrovitch interrupted with disgust. “But, perhaps, I promised what I had no right to promise.”
“So you go back from your promise?”
“I have never refused to do all that is possible, but I want time to consider how much of what I promised is possible.”
“No, Alexey Alexandrovitch!” cried Oblonsky, jumping up, “I won’t believe that! She’s unhappy as only an unhappy woman can be, and you cannot refuse in such....”
“As much of what I promised as is possible. Vous professez d’être libre penseur. But I as a believer cannot, in a matter of such gravity, act in opposition to the Christian law.”
“But in Christian societies and among us, as far as I’m aware, divorce is allowed,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Divorce is sanctioned even by our church. And we see....”
“It is allowed, but not in the sense....”
“Alexey Alexandrovitch, you are not like yourself,” said Oblonsky, after a brief pause. “Wasn’t it you (and didn’t we all appreciate it in you?) who forgave everything, and moved simply by Christian feeling was ready to make any sacrifice? You said yourself: if a man take thy coat, give him thy cloak also, and now....”
“I beg,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch shrilly, getting suddenly onto his feet, his face white and his jaws twitching, “I beg you to drop this ... to drop ... this subject!” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 811 | “I beg,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch shrilly, getting suddenly onto his feet, his face white and his jaws twitching, “I beg you to drop this ... to drop ... this subject!”
“Oh, no! Oh, forgive me, forgive me if I have wounded you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, holding out his hand with a smile of embarrassment; “but like a messenger I have simply performed the commission given me.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch gave him his hand, pondered a little, and said:
“I must think it over and seek for guidance. The day after tomorrow I will give you a final answer,” he said, after considering a moment.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was about to go away when Korney came in to announce:
“Sergey Alexyevitch!”
“Who’s Sergey Alexyevitch?” Stepan Arkadyevitch was beginning, but he remembered immediately.
“Ah, Seryozha!” he said aloud. “Sergey Alexyevitch! I thought it was the director of a department. Anna asked me to see him too,” he thought.
And he recalled the timid, piteous expression with which Anna had said to him at parting: “Anyway, you will see him. Find out exactly where he is, who is looking after him. And Stiva ... if it were possible! Could it be possible?” Stepan Arkadyevitch knew what was meant by that “if it were possible,”—if it were possible to arrange the divorce so as to let her have her son.... Stepan Arkadyevitch saw now that it was no good to dream of that, but still he was glad to see his nephew.
Alexey Alexandrovitch reminded his brother-in-law that they never spoke to the boy of his mother, and he begged him not to mention a single word about her.
“He was very ill after that interview with his mother, which we had not foreseen,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch. “Indeed, we feared for his life. But with rational treatment, and sea-bathing in the summer, he regained his strength, and now, by the doctor’s advice, I have let him go to school. And certainly the companionship of school has had a good effect on him, and he is perfectly well, and making good progress.”
“What a fine fellow he’s grown! He’s not Seryozha now, but quite full-fledged Sergey Alexyevitch!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling, as he looked at the handsome, broad-shouldered lad in blue coat and long trousers, who walked in alertly and confidently. The boy looked healthy and good-humored. He bowed to his uncle as to a stranger, but recognizing him, he blushed and turned hurriedly away from him, as though offended and irritated at something. The boy went up to his father and handed him a note of the marks he had gained in school.
“Well, that’s very fair,” said his father, “you can go.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 812 | “Well, that’s very fair,” said his father, “you can go.”
“He’s thinner and taller, and has grown out of being a child into a boy; I like that,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Do you remember me?”
The boy looked back quickly at his uncle.
“Yes, mon oncle,” he answered, glancing at his father, and again he looked downcast.
His uncle called him to him, and took his hand.
“Well, and how are you getting on?” he said, wanting to talk to him, and not knowing what to say.
The boy, blushing and making no answer, cautiously drew his hand away. As soon as Stepan Arkadyevitch let go his hand, he glanced doubtfully at his father, and like a bird set free, he darted out of the room.
A year had passed since the last time Seryozha had seen his mother. Since then he had heard nothing more of her. And in the course of that year he had gone to school, and made friends among his schoolfellows. The dreams and memories of his mother, which had made him ill after seeing her, did not occupy his thoughts now. When they came back to him, he studiously drove them away, regarding them as shameful and girlish, below the dignity of a boy and a schoolboy. He knew that his father and mother were separated by some quarrel, he knew that he had to remain with his father, and he tried to get used to that idea.
He disliked seeing his uncle, so like his mother, for it called up those memories of which he was ashamed. He disliked it all the more as from some words he had caught as he waited at the study door, and still more from the faces of his father and uncle, he guessed that they must have been talking of his mother. And to avoid condemning the father with whom he lived and on whom he was dependent, and, above all, to avoid giving way to sentimentality, which he considered so degrading, Seryozha tried not to look at his uncle who had come to disturb his peace of mind, and not to think of what he recalled to him.
But when Stepan Arkadyevitch, going out after him, saw him on the stairs, and calling to him, asked him how he spent his playtime at school, Seryozha talked more freely to him away from his father’s presence. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 813 | But when Stepan Arkadyevitch, going out after him, saw him on the stairs, and calling to him, asked him how he spent his playtime at school, Seryozha talked more freely to him away from his father’s presence.
“We have a railway now,” he said in answer to his uncle’s question. “It’s like this, do you see: two sit on a bench—they’re the passengers; and one stands up straight on the bench. And all are harnessed to it by their arms or by their belts, and they run through all the rooms—the doors are left open beforehand. Well, and it’s pretty hard work being the conductor!”
“That’s the one that stands?” Stepan Arkadyevitch inquired, smiling.
“Yes, you want pluck for it, and cleverness too, especially when they stop all of a sudden, or someone falls down.”
“Yes, that must be a serious matter,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, watching with mournful interest the eager eyes, like his mother’s; not childish now—no longer fully innocent. And though he had promised Alexey Alexandrovitch not to speak of Anna, he could not restrain himself.
“Do you remember your mother?” he asked suddenly.
“No, I don’t,” Seryozha said quickly. He blushed crimson, and his face clouded over. And his uncle could get nothing more out of him. His tutor found his pupil on the staircase half an hour later, and for a long while he could not make out whether he was ill-tempered or crying.
“What is it? I expect you hurt yourself when you fell down?” said the tutor. “I told you it was a dangerous game. And we shall have to speak to the director.”
“If I had hurt myself, nobody should have found it out, that’s certain.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“Leave me alone! If I remember, or if I don’t remember?... what business is it of his? Why should I remember? Leave me in peace!” he said, addressing not his tutor, but the whole world.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, as usual, did not waste his time in Petersburg. In Petersburg, besides business, his sister’s divorce, and his coveted appointment, he wanted, as he always did, to freshen himself up, as he said, after the mustiness of Moscow. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 814 | Stepan Arkadyevitch, as usual, did not waste his time in Petersburg. In Petersburg, besides business, his sister’s divorce, and his coveted appointment, he wanted, as he always did, to freshen himself up, as he said, after the mustiness of Moscow.
In spite of its cafés chantants and its omnibuses, Moscow was yet a stagnant bog. Stepan Arkadyevitch always felt it. After living for some time in Moscow, especially in close relations with his family, he was conscious of a depression of spirits. After being a long time in Moscow without a change, he reached a point when he positively began to be worrying himself over his wife’s ill-humor and reproaches, over his children’s health and education, and the petty details of his official work; even the fact of being in debt worried him. But he had only to go and stay a little while in Petersburg, in the circle there in which he moved, where people lived—really lived—instead of vegetating as in Moscow, and all such ideas vanished and melted away at once, like wax before the fire. His wife?... Only that day he had been talking to Prince Tchetchensky. Prince Tchetchensky had a wife and family, grown-up pages in the corps, ... and he had another illegitimate family of children also. Though the first family was very nice too, Prince Tchetchensky felt happier in his second family; and he used to take his eldest son with him to his second family, and told Stepan Arkadyevitch that he thought it good for his son, enlarging his ideas. What would have been said to that in Moscow?
His children? In Petersburg children did not prevent their parents from enjoying life. The children were brought up in schools, and there was no trace of the wild idea that prevailed in Moscow, in Lvov’s household, for instance, that all the luxuries of life were for the children, while the parents have nothing but work and anxiety. Here people understood that a man is in duty bound to live for himself, as every man of culture should live.
His official duties? Official work here was not the stiff, hopeless drudgery that it was in Moscow. Here there was some interest in official life. A chance meeting, a service rendered, a happy phrase, a knack of facetious mimicry, and a man’s career might be made in a trice. So it had been with Bryantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyevitch had met the previous day, and who was one of the highest functionaries in government now. There was some interest in official work like that. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 815 | The Petersburg attitude on pecuniary matters had an especially soothing effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch. Bartnyansky, who must spend at least fifty thousand to judge by the style he lived in, had made an interesting comment the day before on that subject.
As they were talking before dinner, Stepan Arkadyevitch said to Bartnyansky:
“You’re friendly, I fancy, with Mordvinsky; you might do me a favor: say a word to him, please, for me. There’s an appointment I should like to get—secretary of the agency....”
“Oh, I shan’t remember all that, if you tell it to me.... But what possesses you to have to do with railways and Jews?... Take it as you will, it’s a low business.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch did not say to Bartnyansky that it was a “growing thing”—Bartnyansky would not have understood that.
“I want the money, I’ve nothing to live on.”
“You’re living, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but in debt.”
“Are you, though? Heavily?” said Bartnyansky sympathetically.
“Very heavily: twenty thousand.”
Bartnyansky broke into good-humored laughter.
“Oh, lucky fellow!” said he. “My debts mount up to a million and a half, and I’ve nothing, and still I can live, as you see!”
And Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the correctness of this view not in words only but in actual fact. Zhivahov owed three hundred thousand, and hadn’t a farthing to bless himself with, and he lived, and in style too! Count Krivtsov was considered a hopeless case by everyone, and yet he kept two mistresses. Petrovsky had run through five millions, and still lived in just the same style, and was even a manager in the financial department with a salary of twenty thousand. But besides this, Petersburg had physically an agreeable effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch. It made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes found a gray hair in his head, dropped asleep after dinner, stretched, walked slowly upstairs, breathing heavily, was bored by the society of young women, and did not dance at balls. In Petersburg he always felt ten years younger.
His experience in Petersburg was exactly what had been described to him on the previous day by Prince Pyotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty, who had just come back from abroad: |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 816 | His experience in Petersburg was exactly what had been described to him on the previous day by Prince Pyotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty, who had just come back from abroad:
“We don’t know the way to live here,” said Pyotr Oblonsky. “I spent the summer in Baden, and you wouldn’t believe it, I felt quite a young man. At a glimpse of a pretty woman, my thoughts.... One dines and drinks a glass of wine, and feels strong and ready for anything. I came home to Russia—had to see my wife, and, what’s more, go to my country place; and there, you’d hardly believe it, in a fortnight I’d got into a dressing gown and given up dressing for dinner. Needn’t say I had no thoughts left for pretty women. I became quite an old gentleman. There was nothing left for me but to think of my eternal salvation. I went off to Paris—I was as right as could be at once.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt exactly the difference that Pyotr Oblonsky described. In Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be there for long together, he might in good earnest have come to considering his salvation; in Petersburg he felt himself a man of the world again.
Between Princess Betsy Tverskaya and Stepan Arkadyevitch there had long existed rather curious relations. Stepan Arkadyevitch always flirted with her in jest, and used to say to her, also in jest, the most unseemly things, knowing that nothing delighted her so much. The day after his conversation with Karenin, Stepan Arkadyevitch went to see her, and felt so youthful that in this jesting flirtation and nonsense he recklessly went so far that he did not know how to extricate himself, as unluckily he was so far from being attracted by her that he thought her positively disagreeable. What made it hard to change the conversation was the fact that he was very attractive to her. So that he was considerably relieved at the arrival of Princess Myakaya, which cut short their tête-à-tête.
“Ah, so you’re here!” said she when she saw him. “Well, and what news of your poor sister? You needn’t look at me like that,” she added. “Ever since they’ve all turned against her, all those who’re a thousand times worse than she, I’ve thought she did a very fine thing. I can’t forgive Vronsky for not letting me know when she was in Petersburg. I’d have gone to see her and gone about with her everywhere. Please give her my love. Come, tell me about her.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 817 | “Yes, her position is very difficult; she....” began Stepan Arkadyevitch, in the simplicity of his heart accepting as sterling coin Princess Myakaya’s words “tell me about her.” Princess Myakaya interrupted him immediately, as she always did, and began talking herself.
“She’s done what they all do, except me—only they hide it. But she wouldn’t be deceitful, and she did a fine thing. And she did better still in throwing up that crazy brother-in-law of yours. You must excuse me. Everybody used to say he was so clever, so very clever; I was the only one that said he was a fool. Now that he’s so thick with Lidia Ivanovna and Landau, they all say he’s crazy, and I should prefer not to agree with everybody, but this time I can’t help it.”
“Oh, do please explain,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch; “what does it mean? Yesterday I was seeing him on my sister’s behalf, and I asked him to give me a final answer. He gave me no answer, and said he would think it over. But this morning, instead of an answer, I received an invitation from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for this evening.”
“Ah, so that’s it, that’s it!” said Princess Myakaya gleefully, “they’re going to ask Landau what he’s to say.”
“Ask Landau? What for? Who or what’s Landau?”
“What! you don’t know Jules Landau, le fameux Jules Landau, le clairvoyant? He’s crazy too, but on him your sister’s fate depends. See what comes of living in the provinces—you know nothing about anything. Landau, do you see, was a commis in a shop in Paris, and he went to a doctor’s; and in the doctor’s waiting room he fell asleep, and in his sleep he began giving advice to all the patients. And wonderful advice it was! Then the wife of Yury Meledinsky—you know, the invalid?—heard of this Landau, and had him to see her husband. And he cured her husband, though I can’t say that I see he did him much good, for he’s just as feeble a creature as ever he was, but they believed in him, and took him along with them and brought him to Russia. Here there’s been a general rush to him, and he’s begun doctoring everyone. He cured Countess Bezzubova, and she took such a fancy to him that she adopted him.”
“Adopted him?” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 818 | “Adopted him?”
“Yes, as her son. He’s not Landau any more now, but Count Bezzubov. That’s neither here nor there, though; but Lidia—I’m very fond of her, but she has a screw loose somewhere—has lost her heart to this Landau now, and nothing is settled now in her house or Alexey Alexandrovitch’s without him, and so your sister’s fate is now in the hands of Landau, alias Count Bezzubov.”
After a capital dinner and a great deal of cognac drunk at Bartnyansky’s, Stepan Arkadyevitch, only a little later than the appointed time, went in to Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.
“Who else is with the countess?—a Frenchman?” Stepan Arkadyevitch asked the hall-porter, as he glanced at the familiar overcoat of Alexey Alexandrovitch and a queer, rather artless-looking overcoat with clasps.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin and Count Bezzubov,” the porter answered severely.
“Princess Myakaya guessed right,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he went upstairs. “Curious! It would be quite as well, though, to get on friendly terms with her. She has immense influence. If she would say a word to Pomorsky, the thing would be a certainty.”
It was still quite light out-of-doors, but in Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s little drawing-room the blinds were drawn and the lamps lighted. At a round table under a lamp sat the countess and Alexey Alexandrovitch, talking softly. A short, thinnish man, very pale and handsome, with feminine hips and knock-kneed legs, with fine brilliant eyes and long hair lying on the collar of his coat, was standing at the end of the room gazing at the portraits on the wall. After greeting the lady of the house and Alexey Alexandrovitch, Stepan Arkadyevitch could not resist glancing once more at the unknown man.
“Monsieur Landau!” the countess addressed him with a softness and caution that impressed Oblonsky. And she introduced them.
Landau looked round hurriedly, came up, and smiling, laid his moist, lifeless hand in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s outstretched hand and immediately walked away and fell to gazing at the portraits again. The countess and Alexey Alexandrovitch looked at each other significantly.
“I am very glad to see you, particularly today,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, pointing Stepan Arkadyevitch to a seat beside Karenin.
“I introduced you to him as Landau,” she said in a soft voice, glancing at the Frenchman and again immediately after at Alexey Alexandrovitch, “but he is really Count Bezzubov, as you’re probably aware. Only he does not like the title.”
“Yes, I heard so,” answered Stepan Arkadyevitch; “they say he completely cured Countess Bezzubova.”
“She was here today, poor thing!” the countess said, turning to Alexey Alexandrovitch. “This separation is awful for her. It’s such a blow to her!”
“And he positively is going?” queried Alexey Alexandrovitch. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 819 | “Yes, I heard so,” answered Stepan Arkadyevitch; “they say he completely cured Countess Bezzubova.”
“She was here today, poor thing!” the countess said, turning to Alexey Alexandrovitch. “This separation is awful for her. It’s such a blow to her!”
“And he positively is going?” queried Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Yes, he’s going to Paris. He heard a voice yesterday,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, looking at Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Ah, a voice!” repeated Oblonsky, feeling that he must be as circumspect as he possibly could in this society, where something peculiar was going on, or was to go on, to which he had not the key.
A moment’s silence followed, after which Countess Lidia Ivanovna, as though approaching the main topic of conversation, said with a fine smile to Oblonsky:
“I’ve known you for a long while, and am very glad to make a closer acquaintance with you. Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis. But to be a true friend, one must enter into the spiritual state of one’s friend, and I fear that you are not doing so in the case of Alexey Alexandrovitch. You understand what I mean?” she said, lifting her fine pensive eyes.
“In part, countess, I understand the position of Alexey Alexandrovitch....” said Oblonsky. Having no clear idea what they were talking about, he wanted to confine himself to generalities.
“The change is not in his external position,” Countess Lidia Ivanovna said sternly, following with eyes of love the figure of Alexey Alexandrovitch as he got up and crossed over to Landau; “his heart is changed, a new heart has been vouchsafed him, and I fear you don’t fully apprehend the change that has taken place in him.”
“Oh, well, in general outlines I can conceive the change. We have always been friendly, and now....” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, responding with a sympathetic glance to the expression of the countess, and mentally balancing the question with which of the two ministers she was most intimate, so as to know about which to ask her to speak for him.
“The change that has taken place in him cannot lessen his love for his neighbors; on the contrary, that change can only intensify love in his heart. But I am afraid you do not understand me. Won’t you have some tea?” she said, with her eyes indicating the footman, who was handing round tea on a tray.
“Not quite, countess. Of course, his misfortune....”
“Yes, a misfortune which has proved the highest happiness, when his heart was made new, was filled full of it,” she said, gazing with eyes full of love at Stepan Arkadyevitch. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 820 | “Not quite, countess. Of course, his misfortune....”
“Yes, a misfortune which has proved the highest happiness, when his heart was made new, was filled full of it,” she said, gazing with eyes full of love at Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“I do believe I might ask her to speak to both of them,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Oh, of course, countess,” he said; “but I imagine such changes are a matter so private that no one, even the most intimate friend, would care to speak of them.”
“On the contrary! We ought to speak freely and help one another.”
“Yes, undoubtedly so, but there is such a difference of convictions, and besides....” said Oblonsky with a soft smile.
“There can be no difference where it is a question of holy truth.”
“Oh, no, of course; but....” and Stepan Arkadyevitch paused in confusion. He understood at last that they were talking of religion.
“I fancy he will fall asleep immediately,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch in a whisper full of meaning, going up to Lidia Ivanovna.
Stepan Arkadyevitch looked round. Landau was sitting at the window, leaning on his elbow and the back of his chair, his head drooping. Noticing that all eyes were turned on him he raised his head and smiled a smile of childlike artlessness.
“Don’t take any notice,” said Lidia Ivanovna, and she lightly moved a chair up for Alexey Alexandrovitch. “I have observed....” she was beginning, when a footman came into the room with a letter. Lidia Ivanovna rapidly ran her eyes over the note, and excusing herself, wrote an answer with extraordinary rapidity, handed it to the man, and came back to the table. “I have observed,” she went on, “that Moscow people, especially the men, are more indifferent to religion than anyone.”
“Oh, no, countess, I thought Moscow people had the reputation of being the firmest in the faith,” answered Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“But as far as I can make out, you are unfortunately one of the indifferent ones,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, turning to him with a weary smile.
“How anyone can be indifferent!” said Lidia Ivanovna.
“I am not so much indifferent on that subject as I am waiting in suspense,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with his most deprecating smile. “I hardly think that the time for such questions has come yet for me.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna looked at each other.
“We can never tell whether the time has come for us or not,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch severely. “We ought not to think whether we are ready or not ready. God’s grace is not guided by human considerations: sometimes it comes not to those that strive for it, and comes to those that are unprepared, like Saul.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 821 | “No, I believe it won’t be just yet,” said Lidia Ivanovna, who had been meanwhile watching the movements of the Frenchman. Landau got up and came to them.
“Do you allow me to listen?” he asked.
“Oh, yes; I did not want to disturb you,” said Lidia Ivanovna, gazing tenderly at him; “sit here with us.”
“One has only not to close one’s eyes to shut out the light,” Alexey Alexandrovitch went on.
“Ah, if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in our hearts!” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile.
“But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to rise to that height,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this religious height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to acknowledge his free-thinking views before a person who, by a single word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment.
“That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?” said Lidia Ivanovna. “But that is a false idea. There is no sin for believers, their sin has been atoned for. Pardon,” she added, looking at the footman, who came in again with another letter. She read it and gave a verbal answer: “Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess’s, say.” “For the believer sin is not,” she went on.
“Yes, but faith without works is dead,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, recalling the phrase from the catechism, and only by his smile clinging to his independence.
“There you have it—from the epistle of St. James,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a certain reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a subject they had discussed more than once before. “What harm has been done by the false interpretation of that passage! Nothing holds men back from belief like that misinterpretation. ‘I have not works, so I cannot believe,’ though all the while that is not said. But the very opposite is said.”
“Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, “those are the crude ideas of our monks.... Yet that is nowhere said. It is far simpler and easier,” she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which at court she encouraged youthful maids of honor, disconcerted by the new surroundings of the court.
“We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,” Alexey Alexandrovitch chimed in, with a glance of approval at her words.
“Vous comprenez l’anglais?” asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving a reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through a shelf of books. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 822 | “We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,” Alexey Alexandrovitch chimed in, with a glance of approval at her words.
“Vous comprenez l’anglais?” asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving a reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through a shelf of books.
“I want to read him ‘Safe and Happy,’ or ‘Under the Wing,’” she said, looking inquiringly at Karenin. And finding the book, and sitting down again in her place, she opened it. “It’s very short. In it is described the way by which faith can be reached, and the happiness, above all earthly bliss, with which it fills the soul. The believer cannot be unhappy because he is not alone. But you will see.” She was just settling herself to read when the footman came in again. “Madame Borozdina? Tell her, tomorrow at two o’clock. Yes,” she said, putting her finger in the place in the book, and gazing before her with her fine pensive eyes, “that is how true faith acts. You know Marie Sanina? You know about her trouble? She lost her only child. She was in despair. And what happened? She found this comforter, and she thanks God now for the death of her child. Such is the happiness faith brings!”
“Oh, yes, that is most....” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, glad they were going to read, and let him have a chance to collect his faculties. “No, I see I’d better not ask her about anything today,” he thought. “If only I can get out of this without putting my foot in it!”
“It will be dull for you,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, addressing Landau; “you don’t know English, but it’s short.”
“Oh, I shall understand,” said Landau, with the same smile, and he closed his eyes. Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna exchanged meaningful glances, and the reading began.
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt completely nonplussed by the strange talk which he was hearing for the first time. The complexity of Petersburg, as a rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out of his Moscow stagnation. But he liked these complications, and understood them only in the circles he knew and was at home in. In these unfamiliar surroundings he was puzzled and disconcerted, and could not get his bearings. As he listened to Countess Lidia Ivanovna, aware of the beautiful, artless—or perhaps artful, he could not decide which—eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevitch began to be conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 823 | The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his head. “Marie Sanina is glad her child’s dead.... How good a smoke would be now!... To be saved, one need only believe, and the monks don’t know how the thing’s to be done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does know.... And why is my head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or all this being so queer? Anyway, I fancy I’ve done nothing unsuitable so far. But anyway, it won’t do to ask her now. They say they make one say one’s prayers. I only hope they won’t make me! That’ll be too imbecile. And what stuff it is she’s reading! but she has a good accent. Landau—Bezzubov—what’s he Bezzubov for?” All at once Stepan Arkadyevitch became aware that his lower jaw was uncontrollably forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to cover the yawn, and shook himself together. But soon after he became aware that he was dropping asleep and on the very point of snoring. He recovered himself at the very moment when the voice of Countess Lidia Ivanovna was saying “he’s asleep.” Stepan Arkadyevitch started with dismay, feeling guilty and caught. But he was reassured at once by seeing that the words “he’s asleep” referred not to him, but to Landau. The Frenchman was asleep as well as Stepan Arkadyevitch. But Stepan Arkadyevitch’s being asleep would have offended them, as he thought (though even this, he thought, might not be so, as everything seemed so queer), while Landau’s being asleep delighted them extremely, especially Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
“Mon ami,” said Lidia Ivanovna, carefully holding the folds of her silk gown so as not to rustle, and in her excitement calling Karenin not Alexey Alexandrovitch, but “mon ami,” “donnez-lui la main. Vous voyez? Sh!” she hissed at the footman as he came in again. “Not at home.”
The Frenchman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with his head on the back of his chair, and his moist hand, as it lay on his knee, made faint movements, as though trying to catch something. Alexey Alexandrovitch got up, tried to move carefully, but stumbled against the table, went up and laid his hand in the Frenchman’s hand. Stepan Arkadyevitch got up too, and opening his eyes wide, trying to wake himself up if he were asleep, he looked first at one and then at the other. It was all real. Stepan Arkadyevitch felt that his head was getting worse and worse.
“Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte!” articulated the Frenchman, without opening his eyes.
“Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez.... Revenez vers dix heures, encore mieux demain.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 824 | “Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte!” articulated the Frenchman, without opening his eyes.
“Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez.... Revenez vers dix heures, encore mieux demain.”
“Qu’elle sorte!” repeated the Frenchman impatiently.
“C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?” And receiving an answer in the affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor he had meant to ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister’s affairs, caring for nothing, but filled with the sole desire to get away as soon as possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into the street as though from a plague-stricken house. For a long while he chatted and joked with his cab-driver, trying to recover his spirits.
At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and afterwards at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan Arkadyevitch felt a little refreshed in the atmosphere he was used to. But still he felt quite unlike himself all that evening.
On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s, where he was staying, Stepan Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged him to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of the servants, carrying something heavy.
Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevitch, and clinging to him, walked with him into his room and there began telling him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep doing so.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened rarely with him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he could recall to his mind, everything was disgusting; but most disgusting of all, as if it were something shameful, was the memory of the evening he had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.
Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer, refusing to grant Anna’s divorce, and he understood that this decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or pretended trance.
In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertaken. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 825 | In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertaken.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.
Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of summer, and all the trees in the boulevards had long since been in full leaf, and the leaves were covered with dust. But they did not go back to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to do long before; they went on staying in Moscow, though they both loathed it, because of late there had been no agreement between them.
The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and all efforts to come to an understanding intensified it, instead of removing it. It was an inner irritation, grounded in her mind on the conviction that his love had grown less; in his, on regret that he had put himself for her sake in a difficult position, which she, instead of lightening, made still more difficult. Neither of them gave full utterance to their sense of grievance, but they considered each other in the wrong, and tried on every pretext to prove this to one another. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 826 | In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing—love for women, and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on her alone. That love was less; consequently, as she reasoned, he must have transferred part of his love to other women or to another woman—and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not having got an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to another. At one time she was jealous of those low women with whom he might so easily renew his old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might want to marry, for whose sake he would break with her. And this last form of jealousy tortured her most of all, especially as he had unwarily told her, in a moment of frankness, that his mother knew him so little that she had had the audacity to try and persuade him to marry the young Princess Sorokina.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of suspense she had passed in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of Alexey Alexandrovitch, her solitude—she put it all down to him. If he had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her position, and would have rescued her from it. For her being in Moscow and not in the country, he was to blame too. He could not live buried in the country as she would have liked to do. He must have society, and he had put her in this awful position, the bitterness of which he would not see. And again, it was his fault that she was forever separated from her son.
Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been of old, and which exasperated her. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 827 | Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been of old, and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where the noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every detail of their yesterday’s quarrel. Going back from the well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to what had been the ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a long while she could hardly believe that their dissension had arisen from a conversation so inoffensive, of so little moment to either. But so it actually had been. It all arose from his laughing at the girls’ high schools, declaring they were useless, while she defended them. He had spoken slightingly of women’s education in general, and had said that Hannah, Anna’s English protégée, had not the slightest need to know anything of physics.
This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to her occupations. And she bethought her of a phrase to pay him back for the pain he had given her. “I don’t expect you to understand me, my feelings, as anyone who loved me might, but simple delicacy I did expect,” she said.
And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said something unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but at that point, with an unmistakable desire to wound her too, he had said:
“I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that’s true, because I see it’s unnatural.”
The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up for herself so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the injustice with which he had accused her of affectation, of artificiality, aroused her.
“I am very sorry that nothing but what’s coarse and material is comprehensible and natural to you,” she said and walked out of the room.
When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not referred to the quarrel, but both felt that the quarrel had been smoothed over, but was not at an end.
Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on herself and to justify him. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 828 | Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on herself and to justify him.
“I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it up with him, and we’ll go away to the country; there I shall be more at peace.”
“Unnatural!” She suddenly recalled the word that had stung her most of all, not so much the word itself as the intent to wound her with which it was said. “I know what he meant; he meant—unnatural, not loving my own daughter, to love another person’s child. What does he know of love for children, of my love for Seryozha, whom I’ve sacrificed for him? But that wish to wound me! No, he loves another woman, it must be so.”
And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was horrified at herself. “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?” she said to herself, and began again from the beginning. “He’s truthful, he’s honest, he loves me. I love him, and in a few days the divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace of mind and trust, and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go away tomorrow.”
And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability, she rang, and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their things for the country.
At ten o’clock Vronsky came in.
“Well, was it nice?” she asked, coming out to meet him with a penitent and meek expression.
“Just as usual,” he answered, seeing at a glance that she was in one of her good moods. He was used by now to these transitions, and he was particularly glad to see it today, as he was in a specially good humor himself.
“What do I see? Come, that’s good!” he said, pointing to the boxes in the passage.
“Yes, we must go. I went out for a drive, and it was so fine I longed to be in the country. There’s nothing to keep you, is there?” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 829 | “What do I see? Come, that’s good!” he said, pointing to the boxes in the passage.
“Yes, we must go. I went out for a drive, and it was so fine I longed to be in the country. There’s nothing to keep you, is there?”
“It’s the one thing I desire. I’ll be back directly, and we’ll talk it over; I only want to change my coat. Order some tea.”
And he went into his room.
There was something mortifying in the way he had said “Come, that’s good,” as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty, and still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and his self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of strife rising up in her again, but making an effort she conquered it, and met Vronsky as good-humoredly as before.
When he came in she told him, partly repeating phrases she had prepared beforehand, how she had spent the day, and her plans for going away.
“You know it came to me almost like an inspiration,” she said. “Why wait here for the divorce? Won’t it be just the same in the country? I can’t wait any longer! I don’t want to go on hoping, I don’t want to hear anything about the divorce. I have made up my mind it shall not have any more influence on my life. Do you agree?”
“Oh, yes!” he said, glancing uneasily at her excited face.
“What did you do? Who was there?” she said, after a pause.
Vronsky mentioned the names of the guests. “The dinner was first rate, and the boat race, and it was all pleasant enough, but in Moscow they can never do anything without something ridicule. A lady of a sort appeared on the scene, teacher of swimming to the Queen of Sweden, and gave us an exhibition of her skill.”
“How? did she swim?” asked Anna, frowning.
“In an absurd red costume de natation; she was old and hideous too. So when shall we go?”
“What an absurd fancy! Why, did she swim in some special way, then?” said Anna, not answering.
“There was absolutely nothing in it. That’s just what I say, it was awfully stupid. Well, then, when do you think of going?”
Anna shook her head as though trying to drive away some unpleasant idea.
“When? Why, the sooner the better! By tomorrow we shan’t be ready. The day after tomorrow.” |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 830 | Anna shook her head as though trying to drive away some unpleasant idea.
“When? Why, the sooner the better! By tomorrow we shan’t be ready. The day after tomorrow.”
“Yes ... oh, no, wait a minute! The day after tomorrow’s Sunday, I have to be at maman’s,” said Vronsky, embarrassed, because as soon as he uttered his mother’s name he was aware of her intent, suspicious eyes. His embarrassment confirmed her suspicion. She flushed hotly and drew away from him. It was now not the Queen of Sweden’s swimming-mistress who filled Anna’s imagination, but the young Princess Sorokina. She was staying in a village near Moscow with Countess Vronskaya.
“Can’t you go tomorrow?” she said.
“Well, no! The deeds and the money for the business I’m going there for I can’t get by tomorrow,” he answered.
“If so, we won’t go at all.”
“But why so?”
“I shall not go later. Monday or never!”
“What for?” said Vronsky, as though in amazement. “Why, there’s no meaning in it!”
“There’s no meaning in it to you, because you care nothing for me. You don’t care to understand my life. The one thing that I cared for here was Hannah. You say it’s affectation. Why, you said yesterday that I don’t love my daughter, that I love this English girl, that it’s unnatural. I should like to know what life there is for me that could be natural!”
For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution. But even though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself, could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could not give way to him.
“I never said that; I said I did not sympathize with this sudden passion.”
“How is it, though you boast of your straightforwardness, you don’t tell the truth?”
“I never boast, and I never tell lies,” he said slowly, restraining his rising anger. “It’s a great pity if you can’t respect....”
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. And if you don’t love me any more, it would be better and more honest to say so.”
“No, this is becoming unbearable!” cried Vronsky, getting up from his chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said, speaking deliberately: “What do you try my patience for?” looking as though he might have said much more, but was restraining himself. “It has limits.”
“What do you mean by that?” she cried, looking with terror at the undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel, menacing eyes. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 831 | “What do you mean by that?” she cried, looking with terror at the undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel, menacing eyes.
“I mean to say....” he was beginning, but he checked himself. “I must ask what it is you want of me?”
“What can I want? All I can want is that you should not desert me, as you think of doing,” she said, understanding all he had not uttered. “But that I don’t want; that’s secondary. I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.”
She turned towards the door.
“Stop! sto-op!” said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines of his brows, though he held her by the hand. “What is it all about? I said that we must put off going for three days, and on that you told me I was lying, that I was not an honorable man.”
“Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having sacrificed everything for me,” she said, recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel, “that he’s worse than a dishonorable man—he’s a heartless man.”
“Oh, there are limits to endurance!” he cried, and hastily let go her hand.
“He hates me, that’s clear,” she thought, and in silence, without looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room. “He loves another woman, that’s even clearer,” she said to herself as she went into her own room. “I want love, and there is none. So, then, all is over.” She repeated the words she had said, “and it must be ended.”
“But how?” she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before the looking-glass. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 832 | “But how?” she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before the looking-glass.
Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone abroad, and of what he was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends at Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexey Alexandrovitch would look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after this rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, but she could not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her at that time. “Why didn’t I die?” and the words and the feeling of that time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all. “Yes, to die!... And the shame and disgrace of Alexey Alexandrovitch and of Seryozha, and my awful shame, it will all be saved by death. To die! and he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.” With the trace of a smile of commiseration for herself she sat down in the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on her left hand, vividly picturing from different sides his feelings after her death.
Approaching footsteps—his steps—distracted her attention. As though absorbed in the arrangement of her rings, she did not even turn to him.
He went up to her, and taking her by the hand, said softly:
“Anna, we’ll go the day after tomorrow, if you like. I agree to everything.”
She did not speak.
“What is it?” he urged.
“You know,” she said, and at the same instant, unable to restrain herself any longer, she burst into sobs.
“Cast me off!” she articulated between her sobs. “I’ll go away tomorrow ... I’ll do more. What am I? An immoral woman! A stone round your neck. I don’t want to make you wretched, I don’t want to! I’ll set you free. You don’t love me; you love someone else!”
Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that there was no trace of foundation for her jealousy; that he had never ceased, and never would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 833 | Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that there was no trace of foundation for her jealousy; that he had never ceased, and never would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever.
“Anna, why distress yourself and me so?” he said to her, kissing her hands. There was tenderness now in his face, and she fancied she caught the sound of tears in his voice, and she felt them wet on her hand. And instantly Anna’s despairing jealousy changed to a despairing passion of tenderness. She put her arms round him, and covered with kisses his head, his neck, his hands.
Feeling that the reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to work in the morning preparing for their departure. Though it was not settled whether they should go on Monday or Tuesday, as they had each given way to the other, Anna packed busily, feeling absolutely indifferent whether they went a day earlier or later. She was standing in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out.
“I’m going off at once to see maman; she can send me the money by Yegorov. And I shall be ready to go tomorrow,” he said.
Though she was in such a good mood, the thought of his visit to his mother’s gave her a pang.
“No, I shan’t be ready by then myself,” she said; and at once reflected, “so then it was possible to arrange to do as I wished.” “No, do as you meant to do. Go into the dining-room, I’m coming directly. It’s only to turn out those things that aren’t wanted,” she said, putting something more on the heap of frippery that lay in Annushka’s arms.
Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came into the dining-room.
“You wouldn’t believe how distasteful these rooms have become to me,” she said, sitting down beside him to her coffee. “There’s nothing more awful than these chambres garnies. There’s no individuality in them, no soul. These clocks, and curtains, and, worst of all, the wallpapers—they’re a nightmare. I think of Vozdvizhenskoe as the promised land. You’re not sending the horses off yet?”
“No, they will come after us. Where are you going to?”
“I wanted to go to Wilson’s to take some dresses to her. So it’s really to be tomorrow?” she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her face changed. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 834 | “No, they will come after us. Where are you going to?”
“I wanted to go to Wilson’s to take some dresses to her. So it’s really to be tomorrow?” she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her face changed.
Vronsky’s valet came in to ask him to sign a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg. There was nothing out of the way in Vronsky’s getting a telegram, but he said, as though anxious to conceal something from her, that the receipt was in his study, and he turned hurriedly to her.
“By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all.”
“From whom is the telegram?” she asked, not hearing him.
“From Stiva,” he answered reluctantly.
“Why didn’t you show it to me? What secret can there be between Stiva and me?”
Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the telegram.
“I didn’t want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for telegraphing: why telegraph when nothing is settled?”
“About the divorce?”
“Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read it.”
With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what Vronsky had told her. At the end was added: “Little hope; but I will do everything possible and impossible.”
“I said yesterday that it’s absolutely nothing to me when I get, or whether I never get, a divorce,” she said, flushing crimson. “There was not the slightest necessity to hide it from me.” “So he may hide and does hide his correspondence with women from me,” she thought.
“Yashvin meant to come this morning with Voytov,” said Vronsky; “I believe he’s won from Pyevtsov all and more than he can pay, about sixty thousand.”
“No,” she said, irritated by his so obviously showing by this change of subject that he was irritated, “why did you suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to hide it? I said I don’t want to consider it, and I should have liked you to care as little about it as I do.”
“I care about it because I like definiteness,” he said.
“Definiteness is not in the form but the love,” she said, more and more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in which he spoke. “What do you want it for?”
“My God! love again,” he thought, frowning.
“Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children’s in the future.”
“There won’t be children in the future.”
“That’s a great pity,” he said. |
Anna_Karenina_-_Leo_Tolstoy | 2 | 835 | “My God! love again,” he thought, frowning.
“Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children’s in the future.”
“There won’t be children in the future.”
“That’s a great pity,” he said.
“You want it for the children’s sake, but you don’t think of me?” she said, quite forgetting or not having heard that he had said, “For your sake and the children’s.”
The question of the possibility of having children had long been a subject of dispute and irritation to her. His desire to have children she interpreted as a proof he did not prize her beauty.
“Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake,” he repeated, frowning as though in pain, “because I am certain that the greater part of your irritability comes from the indefiniteness of the position.”
“Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred for me is apparent,” she thought, not hearing his words, but watching with terror the cold, cruel judge who looked mocking her out of his eyes.
“The cause is not that,” she said, “and, indeed, I don’t see how the cause of my irritability, as you call it, can be that I am completely in your power. What indefiniteness is there in the position? on the contrary....”
“I am very sorry that you don’t care to understand,” he interrupted, obstinately anxious to give utterance to his thought. “The indefiniteness consists in your imagining that I am free.”
“On that score you can set your mind quite at rest,” she said, and turning away from him, she began drinking her coffee.
She lifted her cup, with her little finger held apart, and put it to her lips. After drinking a few sips she glanced at him, and by his expression, she saw clearly that he was repelled by her hand, and her gesture, and the sound made by her lips.
“I don’t care in the least what your mother thinks, and what match she wants to make for you,” she said, putting the cup down with a shaking hand.
“But we are not talking about that.”
“Yes, that’s just what we are talking about. And let me tell you that a heartless woman, whether she’s old or not old, your mother or anyone else, is of no consequence to me, and I would not consent to know her.”
“Anna, I beg you not to speak disrespectfully of my mother.”
“A woman whose heart does not tell her where her son’s happiness and honor lie has no heart.” |
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