Anna Karenina
added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which
at court she encouraged youthful maids of honor, disconcerted by the
new surroundings of the court.
“We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,”
Alexey Alexandrovitch chimed in, with a glance of approval at her
words.
_“Vous comprenez l’anglais?”_ asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving a
reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through a shelf
of books.
“I want to read him ‘Safe and Happy,’ or ‘Under the Wing,’” she said,
looking inquiringly at Karenin. And finding the book, and sitting down
again in her place, she opened it. “It’s very short. In it is described
the way by which faith can be reached, and the happiness, above all
earthly bliss, with which it fills the soul. The believer cannot be
unhappy because he is not alone. But you will see.” She was just
settling herself to read when the footman came in again. “Madame
Borozdina? Tell her, tomorrow at two o’clock. Yes,” she said, putting
her finger in the place in the book, and gazing before her with her
fine pensive eyes, “that is how true faith acts. You know Marie Sanina?
You know about her trouble? She lost her only child. She was in
despair. And what happened? She found this comforter, and she thanks
God now for the death of her child. Such is the happiness faith
brings!”
“Oh, yes, that is most....” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, glad they were
going to read, and let him have a chance to collect his faculties. “No,
I see I’d better not ask her about anything today,” he thought. “If
only I can get out of this without putting my foot in it!”
“It will be dull for you,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, addressing
Landau; “you don’t know English, but it’s short.”
“Oh, I shall understand,” said Landau, with the same smile, and he
closed his eyes. Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna exchanged
meaningful glances, and the reading began.
Chapter 22
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt completely nonplussed by the strange talk
which he was hearing for the first time. The complexity of Petersburg,
as a rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out of his
Moscow stagnation. But he liked these complications, and understood
them only in the circles he knew and was at home in. In these
unfamiliar surroundings he was puzzled and disconcerted, and could not
get his bearings. As he listened to Countess Lidia Ivanovna, aware of
the beautiful, artless—or perhaps artful, he could not decide
which—eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevitch began to be
conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.
The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his head. “Marie Sanina
is glad her child’s dead.... How good a smoke would be now!... To be
saved, one need only believe, and the monks don’t know how the thing’s
to be done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does know.... And why is my
head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or all this being so queer? Anyway, I
fancy I’ve done nothing unsuitable so far. But anyway, it won’t do to
ask her now. They say they make one say one’s prayers. I only hope they
won’t make me! That’ll be too imbecile. And what stuff it is she’s
reading! but she has a good accent. Landau—Bezzubov—what’s he Bezzubov
for?” All at once Stepan Arkadyevitch became aware that his lower jaw
was uncontrollably forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to cover the
yawn, and shook himself together. But soon after he became aware that
he was dropping asleep and on the very point of snoring. He recovered
himself at the very moment when the voice of Countess Lidia Ivanovna
was saying “he’s asleep.” Stepan Arkadyevitch started with dismay,
feeling guilty and caught. But he was reassured at once by seeing that
the words “he’s asleep” referred not to him, but to Landau. The
Frenchman was asleep as well as Stepan Arkadyevitch. But Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s being asleep would have offended them, as he thought
(though even this, he thought, might not be so, as everything seemed so
queer), while Landau’s being asleep delighted them extremely,
especially Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
_“Mon ami,”_ said Lidia Ivanovna, carefully holding the folds of her
silk gown so as not to rustle, and in her excitement calling Karenin
not Alexey Alexandrovitch, but _“mon ami,” “donnez-lui la main. Vous
voyez?_ Sh!” she hissed at the footman as he came in again. “Not at
home.”
The Frenchman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with his head on
the back of his chair, and his moist hand, as it lay on his knee, made
faint movements, as though trying to catch something. Alexey
Alexandrovitch got up, tried to move carefully, but stumbled against
the table, went up and laid his hand in the Frenchman’s hand. Stepan
Arkadyevitch got up too, and opening his eyes wide, trying to wake
himself up if he were asleep, he looked first at one and then at the
other. It was all real. Stepan Arkadyevitch felt that his head was
getting worse and worse.
“_Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande,
qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte!_” articulated the Frenchman, without
opening his eyes.
“_Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez.... Revenez vers dix heures, encore
mieux demain._”
“_Qu’elle sorte!_” repeated the Frenchman impatiently.
“_C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?_” And receiving an answer in the
affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor he had meant to
ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister’s affairs, caring for
nothing, but filled with the sole desire to get away as soon as
possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into the street as though from
a plague-stricken house. For a long while he chatted and joked with his
cab-driver, trying to recover his spirits.
At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and afterwards
at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan Arkadyevitch felt a
little refreshed in the atmosphere he was used to. But still he felt
quite unlike himself all that evening.
On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s, where he was staying, Stepan
Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was
very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged him
to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its
contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of the servants,
carrying something heavy.
Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr
Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told
them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevitch, and
clinging to him, walked with him into his room and there began telling
him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep doing so.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened rarely with
him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he could
recall to his mind, everything was disgusting; but most disgusting of
all, as if it were something shameful, was the memory of the evening he
had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.
Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer,
refusing to grant Anna’s divorce, and he understood that this decision
was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or pretended
trance.
Chapter 23
In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must
necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife,
or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and
neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be
undertaken.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband
and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete
division nor agreement between them.
Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the heat and
dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of summer, and
all the trees in the boulevards had long since been in full leaf, and
the leaves were covered with dust. But they did not go back to
Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to do long before; they went on
staying in Moscow, though they both loathed it, because of late there
had been no agreement between them.
The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and all
efforts to come to an understanding intensified it, instead of removing
it. It was an inner irritation, grounded in her mind on the conviction
that his love had grown less; in his, on regret that he had put himself
for her sake in a difficult position, which she, instead of lightening,
made still more difficult. Neither of them gave full utterance to their
sense of grievance, but they considered each other in the wrong, and
tried on every pretext to prove this to one another.
In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with
all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing—love for
women, and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on
her alone. That love was less; consequently, as she reasoned, he must
have transferred part of his love to other women or to another
woman—and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any particular woman
but of the decrease of his love. Not having got an object for her
jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she
transferred her jealousy from one object to another. At one time she
was jealous of those low women with whom he might so easily renew his
old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might
meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might want to
marry, for whose sake he would break with her. And this last form of
jealousy tortured her most of all, especially as he had unwarily told
her, in a moment of frankness, that his mother knew him so little that
she had had the audacity to try and persuade him to marry the young
Princess Sorokina.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found
grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was
difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of
suspense she had passed in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of
Alexey Alexandrovitch, her solitude—she put it all down to him. If he
had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her position,
and would have rescued her from it. For her being in Moscow and not in
the country, he was to blame too. He could not live buried in the
country as she would have liked to do. He must have society, and he had
put her in this awful position, the bitterness of which he would not
see. And again, it was his fault that she was forever separated from
her son.
Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not
soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of
self-confidence, which had not been of old, and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a
bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where
the noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every
detail of their yesterday’s quarrel. Going back from the
well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to what had been the
ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a long while she
could hardly believe that their dissension had arisen from a
conversation so inoffensive, of so little moment to either. But so it
actually had been. It all arose from his laughing at the girls’ high
schools, declaring they were useless, while she defended them. He had
spoken slightingly of women’s education in general, and had said that
Hannah, Anna’s English protégée, had not the slightest need to know
anything of physics.
This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to her
occupations. And she bethought her of a phrase to pay him back for the