Anna Karenina
jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her
husband abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations of affection
he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that people knowing the
count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the sentimental Lidia,
were at a loss to explain. Though they were divorced and lived apart,
yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her
with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her
husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love with
someone. She was in love with several people at once, both men and
women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had been
particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with all the new
princes and princesses who married into the imperial family; she had
been in love with a high dignitary of the Church, a vicar, and a parish
priest; she had been in love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, with
Komissarov, with a minister, a doctor, an English missionary and
Karenin. All these passions constantly waning or growing more ardent,
did not prevent her from keeping up the most extended and complicated
relations with the court and fashionable society. But from the time
that after Karenin’s trouble she took him under her special protection,
from the time that she set to work in Karenin’s household looking after
his welfare, she felt that all her other attachments were not the real
thing, and that she was now genuinely in love, and with no one but
Karenin. The feeling she now experienced for him seemed to her stronger
than any of her former feelings. Analyzing her feeling, and comparing
it with former passions, she distinctly perceived that she would not
have been in love with Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the
Tsar, that she would not have been in love with Ristitch-Kudzhitsky if
there had been no Slavonic question, but that she loved Karenin for
himself, for his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the sweet—to her—high
notes of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his weary eyes, his
character, and his soft white hands with their swollen veins. She was
not simply overjoyed at meeting him, but she sought in his face signs
of the impression she was making on him. She tried to please him, not
by her words only, but in her whole person. For his sake it was that
she now lavished more care on her dress than before. She caught herself
in reveries on what might have been, if she had not been married and he
had been free. She blushed with emotion when he came into the room, she
could not repress a smile of rapture when he said anything amiable to
her.
For several days now Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been in a state of
intense excitement. She had learned that Anna and Vronsky were in
Petersburg. Alexey Alexandrovitch must be saved from seeing her, he
must be saved even from the torturing knowledge that that awful woman
was in the same town with him, and that he might meet her any minute.
Lidia Ivanovna made inquiries through her friends as to what those
_infamous people_, as she called Anna and Vronsky, intended doing, and
she endeavored so to guide every movement of her friend during those
days that he could not come across them. The young adjutant, an
acquaintance of Vronsky, through whom she obtained her information, and
who hoped through Countess Lidia Ivanovna to obtain a concession, told
her that they had finished their business and were going away next day.
Lidia Ivanovna had already begun to calm down, when the next morning a
note was brought her, the handwriting of which she recognized with
horror. It was the handwriting of Anna Karenina. The envelope was of
paper as thick as bark; on the oblong yellow paper there was a huge
monogram, and the letter smelt of agreeable scent.
“Who brought it?”
“A commissionaire from the hotel.”
It was some time before Countess Lidia Ivanovna could sit down to read
the letter. Her excitement brought on an attack of asthma, to which she
was subject. When she had recovered her composure, she read the
following letter in French:
“Madame la Comtesse,
“The Christian feelings with which your heart is filled give me the, I
feel, unpardonable boldness to write to you. I am miserable at being
separated from my son. I entreat permission to see him once before my
departure. Forgive me for recalling myself to your memory. I apply to
you and not to Alexey Alexandrovitch, simply because I do not wish to
cause that generous man to suffer in remembering me. Knowing your
friendship for him, I know you will understand me. Could you send
Seryozha to me, or should I come to the house at some fixed hour, or
will you let me know when and where I could see him away from home? I
do not anticipate a refusal, knowing the magnanimity of him with whom
it rests. You cannot conceive the craving I have to see him, and so
cannot conceive the gratitude your help will arouse in me.
“Anna.”
Everything in this letter exasperated Countess Lidia Ivanovna: its
contents and the allusion to magnanimity, and especially its free and
easy—as she considered—tone.
“Say that there is no answer,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, and
immediately opening her blotting-book, she wrote to Alexey
Alexandrovitch that she hoped to see him at one o’clock at the levee.
“I must talk with you of a grave and painful subject. There we will
arrange where to meet. Best of all at my house, where I will order tea
_as you like it_. Urgent. He lays the cross, but He gives the strength
to bear it,” she added, so as to give him some slight preparation.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna usually wrote some two or three letters a day
to Alexey Alexandrovitch. She enjoyed that form of communication, which
gave opportunity for a refinement and air of mystery not afforded by
their personal interviews.
Chapter 24
The levee was drawing to a close. People met as they were going away,
and gossiped of the latest news, of the newly bestowed honors and the
changes in the positions of the higher functionaries.
“If only Countess Marya Borissovna were Minister of War, and Princess
Vatkovskaya were Commander-in-Chief,” said a gray-headed, little old
man in a gold-embroidered uniform, addressing a tall, handsome maid of
honor who had questioned him about the new appointments.
“And me among the adjutants,” said the maid of honor, smiling.
“You have an appointment already. You’re over the ecclesiastical
department. And your assistant’s Karenin.”
“Good-day, prince!” said the little old man to a man who came up to
him.
“What were you saying of Karenin?” said the prince.
“He and Putyatov have received the Alexander Nevsky.”
“I thought he had it already.”
“No. Just look at him,” said the little old man, pointing with his
embroidered hat to Karenin in a court uniform with the new red ribbon
across his shoulders, standing in the doorway of the hall with an
influential member of the Imperial Council. “Pleased and happy as a
brass farthing,” he added, stopping to shake hands with a handsome
gentleman of the bedchamber of colossal proportions.
“No; he’s looking older,” said the gentleman of the bedchamber.
“From overwork. He’s always drawing up projects nowadays. He won’t let
a poor devil go nowadays till he’s explained it all to him under
heads.”
“Looking older, did you say? _Il fait des passions_. I believe Countess
Lidia Ivanovna’s jealous now of his wife.”
“Oh, come now, please don’t say any harm of Countess Lidia Ivanovna.”
“Why, is there any harm in her being in love with Karenin?”
“But is it true Madame Karenina’s here?”
“Well, not here in the palace, but in Petersburg. I met her yesterday
with Alexey Vronsky, _bras dessous, bras dessous_, in the Morsky.”
“_C’est un homme qui n’a pas_,...” the gentleman of the bedchamber was
beginning, but he stopped to make room, bowing, for a member of the
Imperial family to pass.
Thus people talked incessantly of Alexey Alexandrovitch, finding fault
with him and laughing at him, while he, blocking up the way of the
member of the Imperial Council he had captured, was explaining to him
point by point his new financial project, never interrupting his
discourse for an instant for fear he should escape.
Almost at the same time that his wife left Alexey Alexandrovitch there
had come to him that bitterest moment in the life of an official—the
moment when his upward career comes to a full stop. This full stop had
arrived and everyone perceived it, but Alexey Alexandrovitch himself
was not yet aware that his career was over. Whether it was due to his
feud with Stremov, or his misfortune with his wife, or simply that
Alexey Alexandrovitch had reached his destined limits, it had become
evident to everyone in the course of that year that his career was at
an end. He still filled a position of consequence, he sat on many
commissions and committees, but he was a man whose day was over, and
from whom nothing was expected. Whatever he said, whatever he proposed,
was heard as though it were something long familiar, and the very thing
that was not needed. But Alexey Alexandrovitch was not aware of this,
and, on the contrary, being cut off from direct participation in
governmental activity, he saw more clearly than ever the errors and
defects in the action of others, and thought it his duty to point out
means for their correction. Shortly after his separation from his wife,
he began writing his first note on the new judicial procedure, the
first of the endless series of notes he was destined to write in the
future.
Alexey Alexandrovitch did not merely fail to observe his hopeless
position in the official world, he was not merely free from anxiety on
this head, he was positively more satisfied than ever with his own
activity.
“He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord,
how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the
things that are of the world, how he may please his wife,” says the
Apostle Paul, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, who was now guided in every
action by Scripture, often recalled this text. It seemed to him that
ever since he had been left without a wife, he had in these very
projects of reform been serving the Lord more zealously than before.
The unmistakable impatience of the member of the Council trying to get
away from him did not trouble Alexey Alexandrovitch; he gave up his
exposition only when the member of the Council, seizing his chance when
one of the Imperial family was passing, slipped away from him.
Left alone, Alexey Alexandrovitch looked down, collecting his thoughts,
then looked casually about him and walked towards the door, where he
hoped to meet Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
“And how strong they all are, how sound physically,” thought Alexey
Alexandrovitch, looking at the powerfully built gentleman of the
bedchamber with his well-combed, perfumed whiskers, and at the red neck
of the prince, pinched by his tight uniform. He had to pass them on his
way. “Truly is it said that all the world is evil,” he thought, with
another sidelong glance at the calves of the gentleman of the
bedchamber.
Moving forward deliberately, Alexey Alexandrovitch bowed with his
customary air of weariness and dignity to the gentleman who had been
talking about him, and looking towards the door, his eyes sought
Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
“Ah! Alexey Alexandrovitch!” said the little old man, with a malicious
light in his eyes, at the moment when Karenin was on a level with them,
and was nodding with a frigid gesture, “I haven’t congratulated you
yet,” said the old man, pointing to his newly received ribbon.
“Thank you,” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch. “What an _exquisite_ day