Anna Karenina
“Come; there’s not such a crowd now,” said Vronsky.
The maid took a handbag and the lap dog, the butler and a porter the
other baggage. Vronsky gave his mother his arm; but just as they were
getting out of the carriage several men ran suddenly by with
panic-stricken faces. The station-master, too, ran by in his
extraordinary colored cap. Obviously something unusual had happened.
The crowd who had left the train were running back again.
“What?... What?... Where?... Flung himself!... Crushed!...” was heard
among the crowd. Stepan Arkadyevitch, with his sister on his arm,
turned back. They too looked scared, and stopped at the carriage door
to avoid the crowd.
The ladies got in, while Vronsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch followed the
crowd to find out details of the disaster.
A guard, either drunk or too much muffled up in the bitter frost, had
not heard the train moving back, and had been crushed.
Before Vronsky and Oblonsky came back the ladies heard the facts from
the butler.
Oblonsky and Vronsky had both seen the mutilated corpse. Oblonsky was
evidently upset. He frowned and seemed ready to cry.
“Ah, how awful! Ah, Anna, if you had seen it! Ah, how awful!” he said.
Vronsky did not speak; his handsome face was serious, but perfectly
composed.
“Oh, if you had seen it, countess,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “And his
wife was there.... It was awful to see her!... She flung herself on the
body. They say he was the only support of an immense family. How
awful!”
“Couldn’t one do anything for her?” said Madame Karenina in an agitated
whisper.
Vronsky glanced at her, and immediately got out of the carriage.
“I’ll be back directly, maman,” he remarked, turning round in the
doorway.
When he came back a few minutes later, Stepan Arkadyevitch was already
in conversation with the countess about the new singer, while the
countess was impatiently looking towards the door, waiting for her son.
“Now let us be off,” said Vronsky, coming in. They went out together.
Vronsky was in front with his mother. Behind walked Madame Karenina
with her brother. Just as they were going out of the station the
station-master overtook Vronsky.
“You gave my assistant two hundred roubles. Would you kindly explain
for whose benefit you intend them?”
“For the widow,” said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders. “I should have
thought there was no need to ask.”
“You gave that?” cried Oblonsky, behind, and, pressing his sister’s
hand, he added: “Very nice, very nice! Isn’t he a splendid fellow?
Good-bye, countess.”
And he and his sister stood still, looking for her maid.
When they went out the Vronsky’s carriage had already driven away.
People coming in were still talking of what happened.
“What a horrible death!” said a gentleman, passing by. “They say he was
cut in two pieces.”
“On the contrary, I think it’s the easiest—instantaneous,” observed
another.
“How is it they don’t take proper precautions?” said a third.
Madame Karenina seated herself in the carriage, and Stepan Arkadyevitch
saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and she was with
difficulty restraining her tears.
“What is it, Anna?” he asked, when they had driven a few hundred yards.
“It’s an omen of evil,” she said.
“What nonsense!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “You’ve come, that’s the
chief thing. You can’t conceive how I’m resting my hopes on you.”
“Have you known Vronsky long?” she asked.
“Yes. You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.”
“Yes?” said Anna softly. “Come now, let us talk of you,” she added,
tossing her head, as though she would physically shake off something
superfluous oppressing her. “Let us talk of your affairs. I got your
letter, and here I am.”
“Yes, all my hopes are in you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Well, tell me all about it.”
And Stepan Arkadyevitch began to tell his story.
On reaching home Oblonsky helped his sister out, sighed, pressed her
hand, and set off to his office.
Chapter 19
When Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in the little
drawing-room with a white-headed fat little boy, already like his
father, giving him a lesson in French reading. As the boy read, he kept
twisting and trying to tear off a button that was nearly off his
jacket. His mother had several times taken his hand from it, but the
fat little hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled the
button off and put it in her pocket.
“Keep your hands still, Grisha,” she said, and she took up her work, a
coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at
depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her
fingers and counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day
before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister
came or not, she had made everything ready for her arrival, and was
expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.
Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she
did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one of the
most important personages in Petersburg, and was a Petersburg _grande
dame_. And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her
threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that her
sister-in-law was coming. “And, after all, Anna is in no wise to
blame,” thought Dolly. “I know nothing of her except the very best, and
I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her towards
myself.” It was true that as far as she could recall her impressions at
Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself;
there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family
life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it
into her head to console me!” thought Dolly. “All consolation and
counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a
thousand times, and it’s all no use.”
All these days Dolly had been alone with her children. She did not want
to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not
talk of outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would
tell Anna everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of
speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her
humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases
of good advice and comfort. She had been on the lookout for her,
glancing at her watch every minute, and, as so often happens, let slip
just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the
bell.
Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door, she looked
round, and her care-worn face unconsciously expressed not gladness, but
wonder. She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.
“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her.
“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!”
“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the
expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew. “Most likely
she knows,” she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well,
come along, I’ll take you to your room,” she went on, trying to defer
as long as possible the moment of confidences.
“Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he’s grown!” said Anna; and kissing him,
never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood still and flushed a little.
“No, please, let us stay here.”
She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in a lock of her
black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook
her hair down.
“You are radiant with health and happiness!” said Dolly, almost with
envy.
“I?... Yes,” said Anna. “Merciful heavens, Tanya! You’re the same age
as my Seryozha,” she added, addressing the little girl as she ran in.
She took her in her arms and kissed her. “Delightful child, delightful!
Show me them all.”
She mentioned them, not only remembering the names, but the years,
months, characters, illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not
but appreciate that.
“Very well, we will go to them,” she said. “It’s a pity Vassya’s
asleep.”
After seeing the children, they sat down, alone now, in the
drawing-room, to coffee. Anna took the tray, and then pushed it away
from her.
“Dolly,” she said, “he has told me.”
Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for phrases of
conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.
“Dolly, dear,” she said, “I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to
try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, I’m simply sorry,
sorry from my heart for you!”
Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered.
She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her vigorous
little hand. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not lose its
frigid expression. She said:
“To comfort me’s impossible. Everything’s lost after what has happened,
everything’s over!”
And directly she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted
the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it and said:
“But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is it best to
act in this awful position—that’s what you must think of.”
“All’s over, and there’s nothing more,” said Dolly. “And the worst of
all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the children, I
am tied. And I can’t live with him! it’s a torture to me to see him.”
“Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from you:
tell me about it.”
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s face.
“Very well,” she said all at once. “But I will tell you it from the
beginning. You know how I was married. With the education mamma gave us
I was more than innocent, I was stupid. I knew nothing. I know they say
men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva”—she corrected
herself—“Stepan Arkadyevitch told me nothing. You’ll hardly believe it,
but till now I imagined that I was the only woman he had known. So I
lived eight years. You must understand that I was so far from
suspecting infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then—try to
imagine it—with such ideas, to find out suddenly all the horror, all
the loathsomeness.... You must try and understand me. To be fully
convinced of one’s happiness, and all at once....” continued Dolly,
holding back her sobs, “to get a letter ... his letter to his mistress,
my governess. No, it’s too awful!” She hastily pulled out her
handkerchief and hid her face in it. “I can understand being carried
away by feeling,” she went on after a brief silence, “but deliberately,
slyly deceiving me ... and with whom?... To go on being my husband
together with her ... it’s awful! You can’t understand....”
“Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do understand,”
said Anna, pressing her hand.
“And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?”
Dolly resumed. “Not the slightest! He’s happy and contented.”
“Oh, no!” Anna interposed quickly. “He’s to be pitied, he’s weighed
down by remorse....”
“Is he capable of remorse?” Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her
sister-in-law’s face.
“Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for
him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s
so humiliated. What touched me most....” (and here Anna guessed what
would touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed
for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you
beyond everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would
have answered—“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she
cannot forgive me,’ he keeps saying.”
Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to
her words.
“Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for the guilty
than the innocent,” she said, “if he feels that all the misery comes