Anna Karenina
When Vronsky returned home, Anna was not yet home. Soon after he had
left, some lady, so they told him, had come to see her, and she had
gone out with her. That she had gone out without leaving word where she
was going, that she had not yet come back, and that all the morning she
had been going about somewhere without a word to him—all this, together
with the strange look of excitement in her face in the morning, and the
recollection of the hostile tone with which she had before Yashvin
almost snatched her son’s photographs out of his hands, made him
serious. He decided he absolutely must speak openly with her. And he
waited for her in her drawing-room. But Anna did not return alone, but
brought with her her old unmarried aunt, Princess Oblonskaya. This was
the lady who had come in the morning, and with whom Anna had gone out
shopping. Anna appeared not to notice Vronsky’s worried and inquiring
expression, and began a lively account of her morning’s shopping. He
saw that there was something working within her; in her flashing eyes,
when they rested for a moment on him, there was an intense
concentration, and in her words and movements there was that nervous
rapidity and grace which, during the early period of their intimacy,
had so fascinated him, but which now so disturbed and alarmed him.
The dinner was laid for four. All were gathered together and about to
go into the little dining-room when Tushkevitch made his appearance
with a message from Princess Betsy. Princess Betsy begged her to excuse
her not having come to say good-bye; she had been indisposed, but
begged Anna to come to her between half-past six and nine o’clock.
Vronsky glanced at Anna at the precise limit of time, so suggestive of
steps having been taken that she should meet no one; but Anna appeared
not to notice it.
“Very sorry that I can’t come just between half-past six and nine,” she
said with a faint smile.
“The princess will be very sorry.”
“And so am I.”
“You’re going, no doubt, to hear Patti?” said Tushkevitch.
“Patti? You suggest the idea to me. I would go if it were possible to
get a box.”
“I can get one,” Tushkevitch offered his services.
“I should be very, very grateful to you,” said Anna. “But won’t you
dine with us?”
Vronsky gave a hardly perceptible shrug. He was at a complete loss to
understand what Anna was about. What had she brought the old Princess
Oblonskaya home for, what had she made Tushkevitch stay to dinner for,
and, most amazing of all, why was she sending him for a box? Could she
possibly think in her position of going to Patti’s benefit, where all
the circle of her acquaintances would be? He looked at her with serious
eyes, but she responded with that defiant, half-mirthful,
half-desperate look, the meaning of which he could not comprehend. At
dinner Anna was in aggressively high spirits—she almost flirted both
with Tushkevitch and with Yashvin. When they got up from dinner and
Tushkevitch had gone to get a box at the opera, Yashvin went to smoke,
and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms. After sitting there
for some time he ran upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a low-necked
gown of light silk and velvet that she had had made in Paris, and with
costly white lace on her head, framing her face, and particularly
becoming, showing up her dazzling beauty.
“Are you really going to the theater?” he said, trying not to look at
her.
“Why do you ask with such alarm?” she said, wounded again at his not
looking at her. “Why shouldn’t I go?”
She appeared not to understand the motive of his words.
“Oh, of course, there’s no reason whatever,” he said, frowning.
“That’s just what I say,” she said, willfully refusing to see the irony
of his tone, and quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove.
“Anna, for God’s sake! what is the matter with you?” he said, appealing
to her exactly as once her husband had done.
“I don’t understand what you are asking.”
“You know that it’s out of the question to go.”
“Why so? I’m not going alone. Princess Varvara has gone to dress, she
is going with me.”
He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair.
“But do you mean to say you don’t know?...” he began.
“But I don’t care to know!” she almost shrieked. “I don’t care to. Do I
regret what I have done? No, no, no! If it were all to do again from
the beginning, it would be the same. For us, for you and for me, there
is only one thing that matters, whether we love each other. Other
people we need not consider. Why are we living here apart and not
seeing each other? Why can’t I go? I love you, and I don’t care for
anything,” she said in Russian, glancing at him with a peculiar gleam
in her eyes that he could not understand. “If you have not changed to
me, why don’t you look at me?”
He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face and full dress,
always so becoming to her. But now her beauty and elegance were just
what irritated him.
“My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat you,” he
said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in his voice,
but with coldness in his eyes.
She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eyes, and
answered with irritation:
“And I beg you to explain why I should not go.”
“Because it might cause you....” he hesitated.
“I don’t understand. Yashvin _n’est pas compromettant_, and Princess
Varvara is no worse than others. Oh, here she is!”
Chapter 33
Vronsky for the first time experienced a feeling of anger against Anna,
almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own
position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her
plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly what he was
thinking, he would have said:
“In that dress, with a princess only too well known to everyone, to
show yourself at the theater is equivalent not merely to acknowledging
your position as a fallen woman, but is flinging down a challenge to
society, that is to say, cutting yourself off from it forever.”
He could not say that to her. “But how can she fail to see it, and what
is going on in her?” he said to himself. He felt at the same time that
his respect for her was diminished while his sense of her beauty was
intensified.
He went back scowling to his rooms, and sitting down beside Yashvin,
who, with his long legs stretched out on a chair, was drinking brandy
and seltzer water, he ordered a glass of the same for himself.
“You were talking of Lankovsky’s Powerful. That’s a fine horse, and I
would advise you to buy him,” said Yashvin, glancing at his comrade’s
gloomy face. “His hind-quarters aren’t quite first-rate, but the legs
and head—one couldn’t wish for anything better.”
“I think I will take him,” answered Vronsky.
Their conversation about horses interested him, but he did not for an
instant forget Anna, and could not help listening to the sound of steps
in the corridor and looking at the clock on the chimney piece.
“Anna Arkadyevna gave orders to announce that she has gone to the
theater.”
Yashvin, tipping another glass of brandy into the bubbling water, drank
it and got up, buttoning his coat.
“Well, let’s go,” he said, faintly smiling under his mustache, and
showing by this smile that he knew the cause of Vronsky’s gloominess,
and did not attach any significance to it.
“I’m not going,” Vronsky answered gloomily.
“Well, I must, I promised to. Good-bye, then. If you do, come to the
stalls; you can take Kruzin’s stall,” added Yashvin as he went out.
“No, I’m busy.”
“A wife is a care, but it’s worse when she’s not a wife,” thought
Yashvin, as he walked out of the hotel.
Vronsky, left alone, got up from his chair and began pacing up and down
the room.
“And what’s today? The fourth night.... Yegor and his wife are there,
and my mother, most likely. Of course all Petersburg’s there. Now she’s
gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the light. Tushkevitch,
Yashvin, Princess Varvara,” he pictured them to himself.... “What about
me? Either that I’m frightened or have given up to Tushkevitch the
right to protect her? From every point of view—stupid, stupid!... And
why is she putting me in such a position?” he said with a gesture of
despair.
With that gesture he knocked against the table, on which there was
standing the seltzer water and the decanter of brandy, and almost upset
it. He tried to catch it, let it slip, and angrily kicked the table
over and rang.
“If you care to be in my service,” he said to the valet who came in,
“you had better remember your duties. This shouldn’t be here. You ought
to have cleared away.”
The valet, conscious of his own innocence, would have defended himself,
but glancing at his master, he saw from his face that the only thing to
do was to be silent, and hurriedly threading his way in and out,
dropped down on the carpet and began gathering up the whole and broken
glasses and bottles.
“That’s not your duty; send the waiter to clear away, and get my dress
coat out.”
Vronsky went into the theater at half-past eight. The performance was
in full swing. The little old box-keeper, recognizing Vronsky as he
helped him off with his fur coat, called him “Your Excellency,” and
suggested he should not take a number but should simply call Fyodor. In
the brightly lighted corridor there was no one but the box-opener and
two attendants with fur cloaks on their arms listening at the doors.
Through the closed doors came the sounds of the discreet _staccato_
accompaniment of the orchestra, and a single female voice rendering
distinctly a musical phrase. The door opened to let the box-opener slip
through, and the phrase drawing to the end reached Vronsky’s hearing
clearly. But the doors were closed again at once, and Vronsky did not
hear the end of the phrase and the cadence of the accompaniment, though
he knew from the thunder of applause that it was over. When he entered
the hall, brilliantly lighted with chandeliers and gas jets, the noise
was still going on. On the stage the singer, bowing and smiling, with
bare shoulders flashing with diamonds, was, with the help of the tenor
who had given her his arm, gathering up the bouquets that were flying
awkwardly over the footlights. Then she went up to a gentleman with
glossy pomaded hair parted down the center, who was stretching across
the footlights holding out something to her, and all the public in the
stalls as well as in the boxes was in excitement, craning forward,
shouting and clapping. The conductor in his high chair assisted in
passing the offering, and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked
into the middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about
him. That day less than ever was his attention turned upon the
familiar, habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the
familiar, uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in the packed
theater.
There were, as always, the same ladies of some sort with officers of
some sort in the back of the boxes; the same gaily dressed women—God
knows who—and uniforms and black coats; the same dirty crowd in the
upper gallery; and among the crowd, in the boxes and in the front rows,
were some forty of the _real_ people. And to those oases Vronsky at
once directed his attention, and with them he entered at once into
relation.
The act was over when he went in, and so he did not go straight to his
brother’s box, but going up to the first row of stalls stopped at the
footlights with Serpuhovskoy, who, standing with one knee raised and
his heel on the footlights, caught sight of him in the distance and
beckoned to him, smiling.
Vronsky had not yet seen Anna. He purposely avoided looking in her
direction. But he knew by the direction of people’s eyes where she was.