Anna Karenina
it had torn off, while the hoarse whistle of the engine roared in
front, plaintively and gloomily. All the awfulness of the storm seemed
to her more splendid now. He had said what her soul longed to hear,
though she feared it with her reason. She made no answer, and in her
face he saw conflict.
“Forgive me, if you dislike what I said,” he said humbly.
He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so stubbornly,
that for a long while she could make no answer.
“It’s wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you’re a good man, to
forget what you’ve said, as I forget it,” she said at last.
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever
forget....”
“Enough, enough!” she cried trying assiduously to give a stern
expression to her face, into which he was gazing greedily. And
clutching at the cold door post, she clambered up the steps and got
rapidly into the corridor of the carriage. But in the little corridor
she paused, going over in her imagination what had happened. Though she
could not recall her own words or his, she realized instinctively that
the momentary conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she
was panic-stricken and blissful at it. After standing still a few
seconds, she went into the carriage and sat down in her place. The
overstrained condition which had tormented her before did not only come
back, but was intensified, and reached such a pitch that she was afraid
every minute that something would snap within her from the excessive
tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and
in the visions that filled her imagination, there was nothing
disagreeable or gloomy: on the contrary there was something blissful,
glowing, and exhilarating. Towards morning Anna sank into a doze,
sitting in her place, and when she waked it was daylight and the train
was near Petersburg. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son,
and the details of that day and the following came upon her.
At Petersburg, as soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first
person that attracted her attention was her husband. “Oh, mercy! why do
his ears look like that?” she thought, looking at his frigid and
imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment
as propping up the brim of his round hat. Catching sight of her, he
came to meet her, his lips falling into their habitual sarcastic smile,
and his big, tired eyes looking straight at her. An unpleasant
sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary
glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was
especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that
she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar
feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in
her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of
the feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.
“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year
after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his
deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always
took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest
what he said.
“Is Seryozha quite well?” she asked.
“And is this all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor? He’s quite
well....”
Chapter 31
Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his
armchair, looking straight before him or scanning the people who got in
and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed
people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he
seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at
people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law
court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man
asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even
pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a
person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he did at the lamp, and the
young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his
self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him
as a person.
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he
believed that he had made an impression on Anna—he did not yet believe
that,—but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness
and pride.
What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think. He
felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on
one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he
was happy at it. He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he
had come where she was, that all the happiness of his life, the only
meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her. And when he
got out of the carriage at Bologova to get some seltzer water, and
caught sight of Anna, involuntarily his first word had told her just
what he thought. And he was glad he had told her it, that she knew it
now and was thinking of it. He did not sleep all night. When he was
back in the carriage, he kept unceasingly going over every position in
which he had seen her, every word she had uttered, and before his
fancy, making his heart faint with emotion, floated pictures of a
possible future.
When he got out of the train at Petersburg, he felt after his sleepless
night as keen and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused near his
compartment, waiting for her to get out. “Once more,” he said to
himself, smiling unconsciously, “once more I shall see her walk, her
face; she will say something, turn her head, glance, smile, maybe.” But
before he caught sight of her, he saw her husband, whom the
station-master was deferentially escorting through the crowd. “Ah, yes!
The husband.” Only now for the first time did Vronsky realize clearly
the fact that there was a person attached to her, a husband. He knew
that she had a husband, but had hardly believed in his existence, and
only now fully believed in him, with his head and shoulders, and his
legs clad in black trousers; especially when he saw this husband calmly
take her arm with a sense of property.
Seeing Alexey Alexandrovitch with his Petersburg face and severely
self-confident figure, in his round hat, with his rather prominent
spine, he believed in him, and was aware of a disagreeable sensation,
such as a man might feel tortured by thirst, who, on reaching a spring,
should find a dog, a sheep, or a pig, who has drunk of it and muddied
the water. Alexey Alexandrovitch’s manner of walking, with a swing of
the hips and flat feet, particularly annoyed Vronsky. He could
recognize in no one but himself an indubitable right to love her. But
she was still the same, and the sight of her affected him the same way,
physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling his soul with
rapture. He told his German valet, who ran up to him from the second
class, to take his things and go on, and he himself went up to her. He
saw the first meeting between the husband and wife, and noted with a
lover’s insight the signs of slight reserve with which she spoke to her
husband. “No, she does not love him and cannot love him,” he decided to
himself.
At the moment when he was approaching Anna Arkadyevna he noticed too
with joy that she was conscious of his being near, and looked round,
and seeing him, turned again to her husband.
“Have you passed a good night?” he asked, bowing to her and her husband
together, and leaving it up to Alexey Alexandrovitch to accept the bow
on his own account, and to recognize it or not, as he might see fit.
“Thank you, very good,” she answered.
Her face looked weary, and there was not that play of eagerness in it,
peeping out in her smile and her eyes; but for a single instant, as she
glanced at him, there was a flash of something in her eyes, and
although the flash died away at once, he was happy for that moment. She
glanced at her husband to find out whether he knew Vronsky. Alexey
Alexandrovitch looked at Vronsky with displeasure, vaguely recalling
who this was. Vronsky’s composure and self-confidence here struck, like
a scythe against a stone, upon the cold self-confidence of Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
“Count Vronsky,” said Anna.
“Ah! We are acquainted, I believe,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch
indifferently, giving his hand.
“You set off with the mother and you return with the son,” he said,
articulating each syllable, as though each were a separate favor he was
bestowing.
“You’re back from leave, I suppose?” he said, and without waiting for a
reply, he turned to his wife in his jesting tone: “Well, were a great
many tears shed at Moscow at parting?”
By addressing his wife like this he gave Vronsky to understand that he
wished to be left alone, and, turning slightly towards him, he touched
his hat; but Vronsky turned to Anna Arkadyevna.
“I hope I may have the honor of calling on you,” he said.
Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced with his weary eyes at Vronsky.
“Delighted,” he said coldly. “On Mondays we’re at home. Most
fortunate,” he said to his wife, dismissing Vronsky altogether, “that I
should just have half an hour to meet you, so that I can prove my
devotion,” he went on in the same jesting tone.
“You lay too much stress on your devotion for me to value it much,” she
responded in the same jesting tone, involuntarily listening to the
sound of Vronsky’s steps behind them. “But what has it to do with me?”
she said to herself, and she began asking her husband how Seryozha had
got on without her.
“Oh, capitally! Mariette says he has been very good, And ... I must
disappoint you ... but he has not missed you as your husband has. But
once more _merci,_ my dear, for giving me a day. Our dear _Samovar_
will be delighted.” (He used to call the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, well
known in society, a samovar, because she was always bubbling over with
excitement.) “She has been continually asking after you. And, do you
know, if I may venture to advise you, you should go and see her today.
You know how she takes everything to heart. Just now, with all her own
cares, she’s anxious about the Oblonskys being brought together.”
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a friend of her husband’s, and the
center of that one of the coteries of the Petersburg world with which
Anna was, through her husband, in the closest relations.
“But you know I wrote to her?”
“Still she’ll want to hear details. Go and see her, if you’re not too
tired, my dear. Well, Kondraty will take you in the carriage, while I
go to my committee. I shall not be alone at dinner again,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch went on, no longer in a sarcastic tone. “You wouldn’t
believe how I’ve missed....” And with a long pressure of her hand and a
meaning smile, he put her in her carriage.
Chapter 32
The first person to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the
stairs to her, in spite of the governess’s call, and with desperate joy
shrieked: “Mother! mother!” Running up to her, he hung on her neck.
“I told you it was mother!” he shouted to the governess. “I knew!”
And her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to
disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She
had to let herself drop down to the reality to enjoy him as he really
was. But even as he was, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue
eyes, and his plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up
stockings. Anna experienced almost physical pleasure in the sensation
of his nearness, and his caresses, and moral soothing, when she met his
simple, confiding, and loving glance, and heard his naïve questions.
Anna took out the presents Dolly’s children had sent him, and told her