Anna Karenina
over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, in which the light was
reflected on the big new portrait of himself hanging over the sofa, and
across her boudoir, where two candles burned, lighting up the portraits
of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knick-knacks of her
writing-table, that he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to
the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk,
especially at the parquet of the lighted dining-room, he halted and
said to himself, “Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to; I must
express my view of it and my decision.” And he turned back again. “But
express what—what decision?” he said to himself in the drawing-room,
and he found no reply. “But after all,” he asked himself before turning
into the boudoir, “what has occurred? Nothing. She was talking a long
while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can talk to
whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and
her,” he told himself as he went into her boudoir; but this dictum,
which had always had such weight with him before, had now no weight and
no meaning at all. And from the bedroom door he turned back again; but
as he entered the dark drawing-room some inner voice told him that it
was not so, and that if others noticed it that showed that there was
something. And he said to himself again in the dining-room, “Yes, I
must decide and put a stop to it, and express my view of it....” And
again at the turn in the drawing-room he asked himself, “Decide how?”
And again he asked himself, “What had occurred?” and answered,
“Nothing,” and recollected that jealousy was a feeling insulting to his
wife; but again in the drawing-room he was convinced that something had
happened. His thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle,
without coming upon anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead,
and sat down in her boudoir.
There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case lying at
the top and an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly changed. He
began to think of her, of what she was thinking and feeling. For the
first time he pictured vividly to himself her personal life, her ideas,
her desires, and the idea that she could and should have a separate
life of her own seemed to him so alarming that he made haste to dispel
it. It was the chasm which he was afraid to peep into. To put himself
in thought and feeling in another person’s place was a spiritual
exercise not natural to Alexey Alexandrovitch. He looked on this
spiritual exercise as a harmful and dangerous abuse of the fancy.
“And the worst of it all,” thought he, “is that just now, at the very
moment when my great work is approaching completion” (he was thinking
of the project he was bringing forward at the time), “when I stand in
need of all my mental peace and all my energies, just now this stupid
worry should fall foul of me. But what’s to be done? I’m not one of
those men who submit to uneasiness and worry without having the force
of character to face them.
“I must think it over, come to a decision, and put it out of my mind,”
he said aloud.
“The question of her feelings, of what has passed and may be passing in
her soul, that’s not my affair; that’s the affair of her conscience,
and falls under the head of religion,” he said to himself, feeling
consolation in the sense that he had found to which division of
regulating principles this new circumstance could be properly referred.
“And so,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, “questions as to her
feelings, and so on, are questions for her conscience, with which I can
have nothing to do. My duty is clearly defined. As the head of the
family, I am a person bound in duty to guide her, and consequently, in
part the person responsible; I am bound to point out the danger I
perceive, to warn her, even to use my authority. I ought to speak
plainly to her.” And everything that he would say tonight to his wife
took clear shape in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s head. Thinking over what he
would say, he somewhat regretted that he should have to use his time
and mental powers for domestic consumption, with so little to show for
it, but, in spite of that, the form and contents of the speech before
him shaped itself as clearly and distinctly in his head as a
ministerial report.
“I must say and express fully the following points: first, exposition
of the value to be attached to public opinion and to decorum; secondly,
exposition of religious significance of marriage; thirdly, if need be,
reference to the calamity possibly ensuing to our son; fourthly,
reference to the unhappiness likely to result to herself.” And,
interlacing his fingers, Alexey Alexandrovitch stretched them, and the
joints of the fingers cracked. This trick, a bad habit, the cracking of
his fingers, always soothed him, and gave precision to his thoughts, so
needful to him at this juncture.
There was the sound of a carriage driving up to the front door. Alexey
Alexandrovitch halted in the middle of the room.
A woman’s step was heard mounting the stairs. Alexey Alexandrovitch,
ready for his speech, stood compressing his crossed fingers, waiting to
see if the crack would not come again. One joint cracked.
Already, from the sound of light steps on the stairs, he was aware that
she was close, and though he was satisfied with his speech, he felt
frightened of the explanation confronting him....
Chapter 9
Anna came in with hanging head, playing with the tassels of her hood.
Her face was brilliant and glowing; but this glow was not one of
brightness; it suggested the fearful glow of a conflagration in the
midst of a dark night. On seeing her husband, Anna raised her head and
smiled, as though she had just waked up.
“You’re not in bed? What a wonder!” she said, letting fall her hood,
and without stopping, she went on into the dressing-room. “It’s late,
Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she said, when she had gone through the
doorway.
“Anna, it’s necessary for me to have a talk with you.”
“With me?” she said, wonderingly. She came out from behind the door of
the dressing-room, and looked at him. “Why, what is it? What about?”
she asked, sitting down. “Well, let’s talk, if it’s so necessary. But
it would be better to get to sleep.”
Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her
own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how
likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an
impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had
come to her aid and was supporting her.
“Anna, I must warn you,” he began.
“Warn me?” she said. “Of what?”
She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not know
her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything unnatural,
either in the sound or the sense of her words. But to him, knowing her,
knowing that whenever he went to bed five minutes later than usual, she
noticed it, and asked him the reason; to him, knowing that every joy,
every pleasure and pain that she felt she communicated to him at once;
to him, now to see that she did not care to notice his state of mind,
that she did not care to say a word about herself, meant a great deal.
He saw that the inmost recesses of her soul, that had always hitherto
lain open before him, were closed against him. More than that, he saw
from her tone that she was not even perturbed at that, but as it were
said straight out to him: “Yes, it’s shut up, and so it must be, and
will be in future.” Now he experienced a feeling such as a man might
have, returning home and finding his own house locked up. “But perhaps
the key may yet be found,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“I want to warn you,” he said in a low voice, “that through
thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be talked
about in society. Your too animated conversation this evening with
Count Vronsky” (he enunciated the name firmly and with deliberate
emphasis) “attracted attention.”
He talked and looked at her laughing eyes, which frightened him now
with their impenetrable look, and, as he talked, he felt all the
uselessness and idleness of his words.
“You’re always like that,” she answered, as though completely
misapprehending him, and of all he had said only taking in the last
phrase. “One time you don’t like my being dull, and another time you
don’t like my being lively. I wasn’t dull. Does that offend you?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch shivered, and bent his hands to make the joints
crack.
“Oh, please, don’t do that, I do so dislike it,” she said.
“Anna, is this you?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, quietly making an
effort over himself, and restraining the motion of his fingers.
“But what is it all about?” she said, with such genuine and droll
wonder. “What do you want of me?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch paused, and rubbed his forehead and his eyes. He
saw that instead of doing as he had intended—that is to say, warning
his wife against a mistake in the eyes of the world—he had
unconsciously become agitated over what was the affair of her
conscience, and was struggling against the barrier he fancied between
them.
“This is what I meant to say to you,” he went on coldly and composedly,
“and I beg you to listen to it. I consider jealousy, as you know, a
humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be
influenced by it; but there are certain rules of decorum which cannot
be disregarded with impunity. This evening it was not I observed it,
but judging by the impression made on the company, everyone observed
that your conduct and deportment were not altogether what could be
desired.”
“I positively don’t understand,” said Anna, shrugging her shoulders—“He
doesn’t care,” she thought. “But other people noticed it, and that’s
what upsets him.”—“You’re not well, Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she added,
and she got up, and would have gone towards the door; but he moved
forward as though he would stop her.
His face was ugly and forbidding, as Anna had never seen him. She
stopped, and bending her head back and on one side, began with her
rapid hand taking out her hairpins.
“Well, I’m listening to what’s to come,” she said, calmly and
ironically; “and indeed I listen with interest, for I should like to
understand what’s the matter.”
She spoke, and marveled at the confident, calm, and natural tone in
which she was speaking, and the choice of the words she used.
“To enter into all the details of your feelings I have no right, and
besides, I regard that as useless and even harmful,” began Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “Ferreting in one’s soul, one often ferrets out
something that might have lain there unnoticed. Your feelings are an
affair of your own conscience; but I am in duty bound to you, to
myself, and to God, to point out to you your duties. Our life has been
joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a
crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement.”
“I don’t understand a word. And, oh dear! how sleepy I am, unluckily,”
she said, rapidly passing her hand through her hair, feeling for the
remaining hairpins.
“Anna, for God’s sake don’t speak like that!” he said gently. “Perhaps
I am mistaken, but believe me, what I say, I say as much for myself as
for you. I am your husband, and I love you.”
For an instant her face fell, and the mocking gleam in her eyes died
away; but the word _love_ threw her into revolt again. She thought:
“Love? Can he love? If he hadn’t heard there was such a thing as love,
he would never have used the word. He doesn’t even know what love is.”
“Alexey Alexandrovitch, really I don’t understand,” she said. “Define
what it is you find....”
“Pardon, let me say all I have to say. I love you. But I am not