Anna Karenina
... then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains....”
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from
sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. “Then the
children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them
up; evil propensities” (she thought of little Masha’s crime among the
raspberries), “education, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and
difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children.” And
there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always
tore her mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had
died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the
little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at
the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the
open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it
was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.
“And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m
wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or
nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and
worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are
growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if it
weren’t for spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we
should be managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much
tact that we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on. They’ll have children,
they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a drag on them as it is. How is
papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that I
can’t even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with
the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we
suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I
bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent
people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what
agonies, what toil!... One’s whole life ruined!” Again she recalled
what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at
the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain of
brutal truth in the words.
“Is it far now, Mihail?” Darya Alexandrovna asked the counting-house
clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were frightening her.
“From this village, they say, it’s five miles.” The carriage drove
along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd
of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders,
gaily and noisily chattering. They stood still on the bridge, staring
inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces turned to Darya
Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of
their enjoyment of life. “They’re all living, they’re all enjoying
life,” Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant
women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the
soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it were from
prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only
looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women
and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all,
but not I.
“And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a
husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him,
while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live.
God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the
same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to
her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then
to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have
loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I
don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she thought about her
husband, “and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that time I
could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,” Darya
Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at
herself in the looking-glass. She had a traveling looking-glass in her
handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the
coachman and the swaying counting-house clerk, she felt that she would
be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take
out the glass.
But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not
too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always
particularly attentive to her, of Stiva’s good-hearted friend,
Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the
scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else, a
quite young man, who—her husband had told her it as a joke—thought her
more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate and
impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. “Anna
did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She
is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as
I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to
every impression,” thought Darya Alexandrovna,—and a sly smile curved
her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya
Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love
affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man
who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to
her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at
this avowal made her smile.
In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to
Vozdvizhenskoe.
Chapter 17
The coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the right,
to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting on a cart. The
counting-house clerk was just going to jump down, but on second
thoughts he shouted peremptorily to the peasants instead, and beckoned
to them to come up. The wind, that seemed to blow as they drove,
dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming
horses that angrily shook them off. The metallic clank of a whetstone
against a scythe, that came to them from the cart, ceased. One of the
peasants got up and came towards the carriage.
“Well, you are slow!” the counting-house clerk shouted angrily to the
peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the ruts of the
rough dry road. “Come along, do!”
A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair, and his
bent back dark with perspiration, came towards the carriage, quickening
his steps, and took hold of the mud-guard with his sunburnt hand.
“Vozdvizhenskoe, the manor house? the count’s?” he repeated; “go on to
the end of this track. Then turn to the left. Straight along the avenue
and you’ll come right upon it. But whom do you want? The count
himself?”
“Well, are they at home, my good man?” Darya Alexandrovna said vaguely,
not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this peasant.
“At home for sure,” said the peasant, shifting from one bare foot to
the other, and leaving a distinct print of five toes and a heel in the
dust. “Sure to be at home,” he repeated, evidently eager to talk. “Only
yesterday visitors arrived. There’s a sight of visitors come. What do
you want?” He turned round and called to a lad, who was shouting
something to him from the cart. “Oh! They all rode by here not long
since, to look at a reaping machine. They’ll be home by now. And who
will you be belonging to?...”
“We’ve come a long way,” said the coachman, climbing onto the box. “So
it’s not far?”
“I tell you, it’s just here. As soon as you get out....” he said,
keeping hold all the while of the carriage.
A healthy-looking, broad-shouldered young fellow came up too.
“What, is it laborers they want for the harvest?” he asked.
“I don’t know, my boy.”
“So you keep to the left, and you’ll come right on it,” said the
peasant, unmistakably loth to let the travelers go, and eager to
converse.
The coachman started the horses, but they were only just turning off
when the peasant shouted: “Stop! Hi, friend! Stop!” called the two
voices. The coachman stopped.
“They’re coming! They’re yonder!” shouted the peasant. “See what a
turn-out!” he said, pointing to four persons on horseback, and two in a
_char-à-banc_, coming along the road.
They were Vronsky with a jockey, Veslovsky and Anna on horseback, and
Princess Varvara and Sviazhsky in the _char-à-banc_. They had gone out
to look at the working of a new reaping machine.
When the carriage stopped, the party on horseback were coming at a
walking pace. Anna was in front beside Veslovsky. Anna, quietly walking
her horse, a sturdy English cob with cropped mane and short tail, her
beautiful head with her black hair straying loose under her high hat,
her full shoulders, her slender waist in her black riding habit, and
all the ease and grace of her deportment, impressed Dolly.
For the first minute it seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to be on
horseback. The conception of riding on horseback for a lady was, in
Darya Alexandrovna’s mind, associated with ideas of youthful flirtation
and frivolity, which, in her opinion, was unbecoming in Anna’s
position. But when she had scrutinized her, seeing her closer, she was
at once reconciled to her riding. In spite of her elegance, everything
was so simple, quiet, and dignified in the attitude, the dress and the
movements of Anna, that nothing could have been more natural.
Beside Anna, on a hot-looking gray cavalry horse, was Vassenka
Veslovsky in his Scotch cap with floating ribbons, his stout legs
stretched out in front, obviously pleased with his own appearance.
Darya Alexandrovna could not suppress a good-humored smile as she
recognized him. Behind rode Vronsky on a dark bay mare, obviously
heated from galloping. He was holding her in, pulling at the reins.
After him rode a little man in the dress of a jockey. Sviazhsky and
Princess Varvara in a new _char-à-banc_ with a big, raven-black
trotting horse, overtook the party on horseback.
Anna’s face suddenly beamed with a joyful smile at the instant when, in
the little figure huddled in a corner of the old carriage, she
recognized Dolly. She uttered a cry, started in the saddle, and set her
horse into a gallop. On reaching the carriage she jumped off without
assistance, and holding up her riding habit, she ran up to greet Dolly.
“I thought it was you and dared not think it. How delightful! You can’t
fancy how glad I am!” she said, at one moment pressing her face against
Dolly and kissing her, and at the next holding her off and examining
her with a smile.
“Here’s a delightful surprise, Alexey!” she said, looking round at
Vronsky, who had dismounted, and was walking towards them.
Vronsky, taking off his tall gray hat, went up to Dolly.
“You wouldn’t believe how glad we are to see you,” he said, giving
peculiar significance to the words, and showing his strong white teeth
in a smile.
Vassenka Veslovsky, without getting off his horse, took off his cap and
greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over his head.
“That’s Princess Varvara,” Anna said in reply to a glance of inquiry
from Dolly as the _char-à-banc_ drove up.
“Ah!” said Darya Alexandrovna, and unconsciously her face betrayed her
dissatisfaction.
Princess Varvara was her husband’s aunt, and she had long known her,
and did not respect her. She knew that Princess Varvara had passed her
whole life toadying on her rich relations, but that she should now be
sponging on Vronsky, a man who was nothing to her, mortified Dolly on
account of her kinship with her husband. Anna noticed Dolly’s
expression, and was disconcerted by it. She blushed, dropped her riding