Anna Karenina
today,” he added, laying emphasis in his peculiar way on the word
_exquisite_.
That they laughed at him he was well aware, but he did not expect
anything but hostility from them; he was used to that by now.
Catching sight of the yellow shoulders of Lidia Ivanovna jutting out
above her corset, and her fine pensive eyes bidding him to her, Alexey
Alexandrovitch smiled, revealing untarnished white teeth, and went
towards her.
Lidia Ivanovna’s dress had cost her great pains, as indeed all her
dresses had done of late. Her aim in dress was now quite the reverse of
that she had pursued thirty years before. Then her desire had been to
adorn herself with something, and the more adorned the better. Now, on
the contrary, she was perforce decked out in a way so inconsistent with
her age and her figure, that her one anxiety was to contrive that the
contrast between these adornments and her own exterior should not be
too appalling. And as far as Alexey Alexandrovitch was concerned she
succeeded, and was in his eyes attractive. For him she was the one
island not only of goodwill to him, but of love in the midst of the sea
of hostility and jeering that surrounded him.
Passing through rows of ironical eyes, he was drawn as naturally to her
loving glance as a plant to the sun.
“I congratulate you,” she said to him, her eyes on his ribbon.
Suppressing a smile of pleasure, he shrugged his shoulders, closing his
eyes, as though to say that that could not be a source of joy to him.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna was very well aware that it was one of his
chief sources of satisfaction, though he never admitted it.
“How is our angel?” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, meaning Seryozha.
“I can’t say I was quite pleased with him,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch,
raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes. “And Sitnikov is not
satisfied with him.” (Sitnikov was the tutor to whom Seryozha’s secular
education had been intrusted.) “As I have mentioned to you, there’s a
sort of coldness in him towards the most important questions which
ought to touch the heart of every man and every child....” Alexey
Alexandrovitch began expounding his views on the sole question that
interested him besides the service—the education of his son.
When Alexey Alexandrovitch with Lidia Ivanovna’s help had been brought
back anew to life and activity, he felt it his duty to undertake the
education of the son left on his hands. Having never before taken any
interest in educational questions, Alexey Alexandrovitch devoted some
time to the theoretical study of the subject. After reading several
books on anthropology, education, and didactics, Alexey Alexandrovitch
drew up a plan of education, and engaging the best tutor in Petersburg
to superintend it, he set to work, and the subject continually absorbed
him.
“Yes, but the heart. I see in him his father’s heart, and with such a
heart a child cannot go far wrong,” said Lidia Ivanovna with
enthusiasm.
“Yes, perhaps.... As for me, I do my duty. It’s all I can do.”
“You’re coming to me,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, after a pause; “we
have to speak of a subject painful for you. I would give anything to
have spared you certain memories, but others are not of the same mind.
I have received a letter from _her_. _She_ is here in Petersburg.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch shuddered at the allusion to his wife, but
immediately his face assumed the deathlike rigidity which expressed
utter helplessness in the matter.
“I was expecting it,” he said.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna looked at him ecstatically, and tears of
rapture at the greatness of his soul came into her eyes.
Chapter 25
When Alexey Alexandrovitch came into the Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s snug
little boudoir, decorated with old china and hung with portraits, the
lady herself had not yet made her appearance.
She was changing her dress.
A cloth was laid on a round table, and on it stood a china tea service
and a silver spirit-lamp and tea kettle. Alexey Alexandrovitch looked
idly about at the endless familiar portraits which adorned the room,
and sitting down to the table, he opened a New Testament lying upon it.
The rustle of the countess’s silk skirt drew his attention off.
“Well now, we can sit quietly,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, slipping
hurriedly with an agitated smile between the table and the sofa, “and
talk over our tea.”
After some words of preparation, Countess Lidia Ivanovna, breathing
hard and flushing crimson, gave into Alexey Alexandrovitch’s hands the
letter she had received.
After reading the letter, he sat a long while in silence.
“I don’t think I have the right to refuse her,” he said, timidly
lifting his eyes.
“Dear friend, you never see evil in anyone!”
“On the contrary, I see that all is evil. But whether it is just....”
His face showed irresolution, and a seeking for counsel, support, and
guidance in a matter he did not understand.
“No,” Countess Lidia Ivanovna interrupted him; “there are limits to
everything. I can understand immorality,” she said, not quite
truthfully, since she never could understand that which leads women to
immorality; “but I don’t understand cruelty: to whom? to you! How can
she stay in the town where you are? No, the longer one lives the more
one learns. And I’m learning to understand your loftiness and her
baseness.”
“Who is to throw a stone?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, unmistakably
pleased with the part he had to play. “I have forgiven all, and so I
cannot deprive her of what is exacted by love in her—by her love for
her son....”
“But is that love, my friend? Is it sincere? Admitting that you have
forgiven—that you forgive—have we the right to work on the feelings of
that angel? He looks on her as dead. He prays for her, and beseeches
God to have mercy on her sins. And it is better so. But now what will
he think?”
“I had not thought of that,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, evidently
agreeing.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna hid her face in her hands and was silent. She
was praying.
“If you ask my advice,” she said, having finished her prayer and
uncovered her face, “I do not advise you to do this. Do you suppose I
don’t see how you are suffering, how this has torn open your wounds?
But supposing that, as always, you don’t think of yourself, what can it
lead to?—to fresh suffering for you, to torture for the child. If there
were a trace of humanity left in her, she ought not to wish for it
herself. No, I have no hesitation in saying I advise not, and if you
will intrust it to me, I will write to her.”
And Alexey Alexandrovitch consented, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna sent
the following letter in French:
“Dear Madame,
“To be reminded of you might have results for your son in leading to
questions on his part which could not be answered without implanting in
the child’s soul a spirit of censure towards what should be for him
sacred, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband’s refusal in
the spirit of Christian love. I pray to Almighty God to have mercy on
you.
“Countess Lidia.”
This letter attained the secret object which Countess Lidia Ivanovna
had concealed from herself. It wounded Anna to the quick.
For his part, Alexey Alexandrovitch, on returning home from Lidia
Ivanovna’s, could not all that day concentrate himself on his usual
pursuits, and find that spiritual peace of one saved and believing
which he had felt of late.
The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned against him, and
towards whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia Ivanovna had so
justly told him, ought not to have troubled him; but he was not easy;
he could not understand the book he was reading; he could not drive
away harassing recollections of his relations with her, of the mistake
which, as it now seemed, he had made in regard to her. The memory of
how he had received her confession of infidelity on their way home from
the races (especially that he had insisted only on the observance of
external decorum, and had not sent a challenge) tortured him like a
remorse. He was tortured too by the thought of the letter he had
written her; and most of all, his forgiveness, which nobody wanted, and
his care of the other man’s child made his heart burn with shame and
remorse.
And just the same feeling of shame and regret he felt now, as he
reviewed all his past with her, recalling the awkward words in which,
after long wavering, he had made her an offer.
“But how have I been to blame?” he said to himself. And this question
always excited another question in him—whether they felt differently,
did their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys and Oblonskys
... these gentlemen of the bedchamber, with their fine calves. And
there passed before his mind a whole series of these mettlesome,
vigorous, self-confident men, who always and everywhere drew his
inquisitive attention in spite of himself. He tried to dispel these
thoughts, he tried to persuade himself that he was not living for this
transient life, but for the life of eternity, and that there was peace
and love in his heart.
But the fact that he had in this transient, trivial life made, as it
seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes tortured him as though the
eternal salvation in which he believed had no existence. But this
temptation did not last long, and soon there was reestablished once
more in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s soul the peace and the elevation by
virtue of which he could forget what he did not want to remember.
Chapter 26
“Well, Kapitonitch?” said Seryozha, coming back rosy and good-humored
from his walk the day before his birthday, and giving his overcoat to
the tall old hall-porter, who smiled down at the little person from the
height of his long figure. “Well, has the bandaged clerk been here
today? Did papa see him?”
“He saw him. The minute the chief secretary came out, I announced him,”
said the hall-porter with a good-humored wink. “Here, I’ll take it
off.”
“Seryozha!” said the tutor, stopping in the doorway leading to the
inner rooms. “Take it off yourself.” But Seryozha, though he heard his
tutor’s feeble voice, did not pay attention to it. He stood keeping
hold of the hall-porter’s belt, and gazing into his face.
“Well, and did papa do what he wanted for him?”
The hall-porter nodded his head affirmatively. The clerk with his face
tied up, who had already been seven times to ask some favor of Alexey
Alexandrovitch, interested both Seryozha and the hall-porter. Seryozha
had come upon him in the hall, and had heard him plaintively beg the
hall-porter to announce him, saying that he and his children had death
staring them in the face.
Since then Seryozha, having met him a second time in the hall, took
great interest in him.
“Well, was he very glad?” he asked.
“Glad? I should think so! Almost dancing as he walked away.”
“And has anything been left?” asked Seryozha, after a pause.
“Come, sir,” said the hall-porter; then with a shake of his head he
whispered, “Something from the countess.”
Seryozha understood at once that what the hall-porter was speaking of
was a present from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for his birthday.
“What do you say? Where?”
“Korney took it to your papa. A fine plaything it must be too!”
“How big? Like this?”
“Rather small, but a fine thing.”
“A book.”
“No, a thing. Run along, run along, Vassily Lukitch is calling you,”
said the porter, hearing the tutor’s steps approaching, and carefully
taking away from his belt the little hand in the glove half pulled off,
he signed with his head towards the tutor.
“Vassily Lukitch, in a tiny minute!” answered Seryozha with that gay
and loving smile which always won over the conscientious Vassily
Lukitch.
Seryozha was too happy, everything was too delightful for him to be