Anna Karenina
from his fault. But how am I to forgive him, how am I to be his wife
again after her? For me to live with him now would be torture, just
because I love my past love for him....”
And sobs cut short her words. But as though of set design, each time
she was softened she began to speak again of what exasperated her.
“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,” she went on. “Do you know, Anna,
my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his
children. I have worked for him, and all I had has gone in his service,
and now of course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him. No
doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they were silent. Do
you understand?”
Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
“And after that he will tell me.... What! can I believe him? Never! No,
everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, the reward of
my work, and my sufferings.... Would you believe it, I was teaching
Grisha just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture. What
have I to strive and toil for? Why are the children here? What’s so
awful is that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and
tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could
kill him.”
“Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself. You are so
distressed, so overwrought, that you look at many things mistakenly.”
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.
“What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over
everything, and I see nothing.”
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each
word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.
“One thing I would say,” began Anna. “I am his sister, I know his
character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything” (she
waved her hand before her forehead), “that faculty for being completely
carried away, but for completely repenting too. He cannot believe it,
he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.”
“No; he understands, he understood!” Dolly broke in. “But I ... you are
forgetting me ... does it make it easier for me?”
“Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not realize all the
awfulness of your position. I saw nothing but him, and that the family
was broken up. I felt sorry for him, but after talking to you, I see
it, as a woman, quite differently. I see your agony, and I can’t tell
you how sorry I am for you! But, Dolly, darling, I fully realize your
sufferings, only there is one thing I don’t know; I don’t know ... I
don’t know how much love there is still in your heart for him. That you
know—whether there is enough for you to be able to forgive him. If
there is, forgive him!”
“No,” Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her hand
once more.
“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how men like
Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her. That never
happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred
to them. Somehow or other these women are still looked on with contempt
by them, and do not touch on their feeling for their family. They draw
a sort of line that can’t be crossed between them and their families. I
don’t understand it, but it is so.”
“Yes, but he has kissed her....”
“Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I
remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all
the poetry and loftiness of his feeling for you, and I know that the
longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You
know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word:
‘Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always been a divinity for him,
and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the
heart....”
“But if it is repeated?”
“It cannot be, as I understand it....”
“Yes, but could you forgive it?”
“I don’t know, I can’t judge.... Yes, I can,” said Anna, thinking a
moment; and grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her
inner balance, she added: “Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could
forgive it. I could not be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and
forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all....”
“Oh, of course,” Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she
had more than once thought, “else it would not be forgiveness. If one
forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take
you to your room,” she said, getting up, and on the way she embraced
Anna. “My dear, how glad I am you came. It has made things better, ever
so much better.”
Chapter 20
The whole of that day Anna spent at home, that’s to say at the
Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some of her acquaintances had
already heard of her arrival, and came to call the same day. Anna spent
the whole morning with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief
note to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at home.
“Come, God is merciful,” she wrote.
Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was general, and his wife,
speaking to him, addressed him as “Stiva,” as she had not done before.
In the relations of the husband and wife the same estrangement still
remained, but there was no talk now of separation, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch saw the possibility of explanation and reconciliation.
Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but
only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some
trepidation, at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg
lady, whom everyone spoke so highly of. But she made a favorable
impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once. Anna was
unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her youth: before Kitty knew
where she was she found herself not merely under Anna’s sway, but in
love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married
women. Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor the mother of a boy of
eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements, the freshness and
the unflagging eagerness which persisted in her face, and broke out in
her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed for a girl of
twenty, had it not been for a serious and at times mournful look in her
eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty felt that Anna was
perfectly simple and was concealing nothing, but that she had another
higher world of interests inaccessible to her, complex and poetic.
After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room, Anna rose quickly
and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar.
“Stiva,” she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and glancing
towards the door, “go, and God help you.”
He threw down the cigar, understanding her, and departed through the
doorway.
When Stepan Arkadyevitch had disappeared, she went back to the sofa
where she had been sitting, surrounded by the children. Either because
the children saw that their mother was fond of this aunt, or that they
felt a special charm in her themselves, the two elder ones, and the
younger following their lead, as children so often do, had clung about
their new aunt since before dinner, and would not leave her side. And
it had become a sort of game among them to sit as close as possible to
their aunt, to touch her, hold her little hand, kiss it, play with her
ring, or even touch the flounce of her skirt.
“Come, come, as we were sitting before,” said Anna Arkadyevna, sitting
down in her place.
And again Grisha poked his little face under her arm, and nestled with
his head on her gown, beaming with pride and happiness.
“And when is your next ball?” she asked Kitty.
“Next week, and a splendid ball. One of those balls where one always
enjoys oneself.”
“Why, are there balls where one always enjoys oneself?” Anna said, with
tender irony.
“It’s strange, but there are. At the Bobrishtchevs’ one always enjoys
oneself, and at the Nikitins’ too, while at the Mezhkovs’ it’s always
dull. Haven’t you noticed it?”
“No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one enjoys oneself,”
said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which
was not open to her. “For me there are some less dull and tiresome.”
“How can _you_ be dull at a ball?”
“Why should not _I_ be dull at a ball?” inquired Anna.
Kitty perceived that Anna knew what answer would follow.
“Because you always look nicer than anyone.”
Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little, and said:
“In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were, what
difference would it make to me?”
“Are you coming to this ball?” asked Kitty.
“I imagine it won’t be possible to avoid going. Here, take it,” she
said to Tanya, who was pulling the loosely-fitting ring off her white,
slender-tipped finger.
“I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you at a ball.”
“Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it’s
a pleasure to you ... Grisha, don’t pull my hair. It’s untidy enough
without that,” she said, putting up a straying lock, which Grisha had
been playing with.
“I imagine you at the ball in lilac.”
“And why in lilac precisely?” asked Anna, smiling. “Now, children, run
along, run along. Do you hear? Miss Hoole is calling you to tea,” she
said, tearing the children from her, and sending them off to the
dining-room.
“I know why you press me to come to the ball. You expect a great deal
of this ball, and you want everyone to be there to take part in it.”
“How do you know? Yes.”
“Oh! what a happy time you are at,” pursued Anna. “I remember, and I
know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains in Switzerland. That
mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is
just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a
path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming
to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is.... Who has not
been through it?”
Kitty smiled without speaking. “But how did she go through it? How I
should like to know all her love story!” thought Kitty, recalling the
unromantic appearance of Alexey Alexandrovitch, her husband.
“I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you. I liked him
so much,” Anna continued. “I met Vronsky at the railway station.”
“Oh, was he there?” asked Kitty, blushing. “What was it Stiva told
you?”
“Stiva gossiped about it all. And I should be so glad ... I traveled
yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,” she went on; “and his mother talked
without a pause of him, he’s her favorite. I know mothers are partial,
but....”
“What did his mother tell you?”
“Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favorite; still one can see
how chivalrous he is.... Well, for instance, she told me that he had
wanted to give up all his property to his brother, that he had done
something extraordinary when he was quite a child, saved a woman out of
the water. He’s a hero, in fact,” said Anna, smiling and recollecting
the two hundred roubles he had given at the station.
But she did not tell Kitty about the two hundred roubles. For some
reason it was disagreeable to her to think of it. She felt that there
was something that had to do with her in it, and something that ought
not to have been.
“She pressed me very much to go and see her,” Anna went on; “and I
shall be glad to go to see her tomorrow. Stiva is staying a long while
in Dolly’s room, thank God,” Anna added, changing the subject, and
getting up, Kitty fancied, displeased with something.
“No, I’m first! No, I!” screamed the children, who had finished tea,
running up to their Aunt Anna.
“All together,” said Anna, and she ran laughing to meet them, and
embraced and swung round all the throng of swarming children, shrieking
with delight.
Chapter 21