Anna Karenina
habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she
realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to
look after her five children properly, they would be still worse off
where she was going with them all. As it was, even in the course of
these three days, the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome
soup, and the others had almost gone without their dinner the day
before. She was conscious that it was impossible to go away; but,
cheating herself, she went on all the same sorting out her things and
pretending she was going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau
as though looking for something, and only looked round at him when he
had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she tried to give a
severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.
“Dolly!” he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent his head towards
his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all that he
was radiant with freshness and health. In a rapid glance she scanned
his figure that beamed with health and freshness. “Yes, he is happy and
content!” she thought; “while I.... And that disgusting good nature,
which everyone likes him for and praises—I hate that good nature of
his,” she thought. Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek
contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
“What do you want?” she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
“Dolly!” he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. “Anna is coming
today.”
“Well, what is that to me? I can’t see her!” she cried.
“But you must, really, Dolly....”
“Go away, go away, go away!” she shrieked, not looking at him, as
though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought of his wife, he could
hope that she would _come round_, as Matvey expressed it, and could
quietly go on reading his paper and drinking his coffee; but when he
saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice,
submissive to fate and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath
and a lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.
“My God! what have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake!... You know....” He
could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.
She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
“Dolly, what can I say?... One thing: forgive.... Remember, cannot nine
years of my life atone for an instant....”
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as it
were beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe
differently.
“—instant of passion?” he said, and would have gone on, but at that
word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and
again the muscles of her right cheek worked.
“Go away, go out of the room!” she shrieked still more shrilly, “and
don’t talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness.”
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to
support herself. His face relaxed, his lips swelled, his eyes were
swimming with tears.
“Dolly!” he said, sobbing now; “for mercy’s sake, think of the
children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and punish me, make me
expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to
blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive
me!”
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was
unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak,
but could not. He waited.
“You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember
them, and know that this means their ruin,” she said—obviously one of
the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of
the last few days.
She had called him “Stiva,” and he glanced at her with gratitude, and
moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.
“I think of the children, and for that reason I would do anything in
the world to save them, but I don’t myself know how to save them. By
taking them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious
father—yes, a vicious father.... Tell me, after what ... has happened,
can we live together? Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?”
she repeated, raising her voice, “after my husband, the father of my
children, enters into a love affair with his own children’s governess?”
“But what could I do? what could I do?” he kept saying in a pitiful
voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and
lower.
“You are loathsome to me, repulsive!” she shrieked, getting more and
more heated. “Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you
have neither heart nor honorable feeling! You are hateful to me,
disgusting, a stranger—yes, a complete stranger!” With pain and wrath
she uttered the word so terrible to herself—_stranger_.
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed
him. He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her. She
saw in him sympathy for her, but not love. “No, she hates me. She will
not forgive me,” he thought.
“It is awful! awful!” he said.
At that moment in the next room a child began to cry; probably it had
fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face suddenly
softened.
She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though
she did not know where she was, and what she was doing, and getting up
rapidly, she moved towards the door.
“Well, she loves my child,” he thought, noticing the change of her face
at the child’s cry, “my child: how can she hate me?”
“Dolly, one word more,” he said, following her.
“If you come near me, I will call in the servants, the children! They
may all know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and you may
live here with your mistress!”
And she went out, slamming the door.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, wiped his face, and with a subdued tread
walked out of the room. “Matvey says she will come round; but how? I
don’t see the least chance of it. Ah, oh, how horrible it is! And how
vulgarly she shouted,” he said to himself, remembering her shriek and
the words—“scoundrel” and “mistress.” “And very likely the maids were
listening! Horribly vulgar! horrible!” Stepan Arkadyevitch stood a few
seconds alone, wiped his face, squared his chest, and walked out of the
room.
It was Friday, and in the dining-room the German watchmaker was winding
up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this
punctual, bald watchmaker, “that the German was wound up for a whole
lifetime himself, to wind up watches,” and he smiled. Stepan
Arkadyevitch was fond of a joke: “And maybe she will come round! That’s
a good expression, ‘_come round,_’” he thought. “I must repeat that.”
“Matvey!” he shouted. “Arrange everything with Darya in the sitting
room for Anna Arkadyevna,” he said to Matvey when he came in.
“Yes, sir.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out onto the steps.
“You won’t dine at home?” said Matvey, seeing him off.
“That’s as it happens. But here’s for the housekeeping,” he said,
taking ten roubles from his pocketbook. “That’ll be enough.”
“Enough or not enough, we must make it do,” said Matvey, slamming the
carriage door and stepping back onto the steps.
Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing
from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back again to
her bedroom. It was her solitary refuge from the household cares which
crowded upon her directly she went out from it. Even now, in the short
time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and Matrona
Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to her, which
did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer: “What were the
children to put on for their walk? Should they have any milk? Should
not a new cook be sent for?”
“Ah, let me alone, let me alone!” she said, and going back to her
bedroom she sat down in the same place as she had sat when talking to
her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands with the rings that
slipped down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over in her memory
all the conversation. “He has gone! But has he broken it off with her?”
she thought. “Can it be he sees her? Why didn’t I ask him! No, no,
reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we
are strangers—strangers forever!” She repeated again with special
significance the word so dreadful to her. “And how I loved him! my God,
how I loved him!... How I loved him! And now don’t I love him? Don’t I
love him more than before? The most horrible thing is,” she began, but
did not finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head
in at the door.
“Let us send for my brother,” she said; “he can get a dinner anyway, or
we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like
yesterday.”
“Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But did you send for
some new milk?”
And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned
her grief in them for a time.
Chapter 5
Stepan Arkadyevitch had learned easily at school, thanks to his
excellent abilities, but he had been idle and mischievous, and
therefore was one of the lowest in his class. But in spite of his
habitually dissipated mode of life, his inferior grade in the service,
and his comparative youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative
position of president of one of the government boards at Moscow. This
post he had received through his sister Anna’s husband, Alexey
Alexandrovitch Karenin, who held one of the most important positions in
the ministry to whose department the Moscow office belonged. But if
Karenin had not got his brother-in-law this berth, then through a
hundred other personages—brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and
aunts—Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post, or some other
similar one, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely
needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife’s considerable
property, were in an embarrassed condition.
Half Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations of Stepan
Arkadyevitch. He was born in the midst of those who had been and are
the powerful ones of this world. One-third of the men in the
government, the older men, had been friends of his father’s, and had
known him in petticoats; another third were his intimate chums, and the
remainder were friendly acquaintances. Consequently the distributors of
earthly blessings in the shape of places, rents, shares, and such, were
all his friends, and could not overlook one of their own set; and
Oblonsky had no need to make any special exertion to get a lucrative
post. He had only not to refuse things, not to show jealousy, not to be
quarrelsome or take offense, all of which from his characteristic good
nature he never did. It would have struck him as absurd if he had been
told that he would not get a position with the salary he required,
especially as he expected nothing out of the way; he only wanted what
the men of his own age and standing did get, and he was no worse
qualified for performing duties of the kind than any other man.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was not merely liked by all who knew him for his
good humor, but for his bright disposition, and his unquestionable
honesty. In him, in his handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes,
black hair and eyebrows, and the white and red of his face, there was
something which produced a physical effect of kindliness and good humor
on the people who met him. “Aha! Stiva! Oblonsky! Here he is!” was
almost always said with a smile of delight on meeting him. Even though
it happened at times that after a conversation with him it seemed that
nothing particularly delightful had happened, the next day, and the