Anna Karenina
child. And this was what caused his dubious, inquiring, sometimes
hostile, expression, and the shyness and uncertainty which Vronsky
found so irksome. This child’s presence always and infallibly called up
in Vronsky that strange feeling of inexplicable loathing which he had
experienced of late. This child’s presence called up both in Vronsky
and in Anna a feeling akin to the feeling of a sailor who sees by the
compass that the direction in which he is swiftly moving is far from
the right one, but that to arrest his motion is not in his power, that
every instant is carrying him further and further away, and that to
admit to himself his deviation from the right direction is the same as
admitting his certain ruin.
This child, with his innocent outlook upon life, was the compass that
showed them the point to which they had departed from what they knew,
but did not want to know.
This time Seryozha was not at home, and she was completely alone. She
was sitting on the terrace waiting for the return of her son, who had
gone out for his walk and been caught in the rain. She had sent a
manservant and a maid out to look for him. Dressed in a white gown,
deeply embroidered, she was sitting in a corner of the terrace behind
some flowers, and did not hear him. Bending her curly black head, she
pressed her forehead against a cool watering pot that stood on the
parapet, and both her lovely hands, with the rings he knew so well,
clasped the pot. The beauty of her whole figure, her head, her neck,
her hands, struck Vronsky every time as something new and unexpected.
He stood still, gazing at her in ecstasy. But, directly he would have
made a step to come nearer to her, she was aware of his presence,
pushed away the watering pot, and turned her flushed face towards him.
“What’s the matter? You are ill?” he said to her in French, going up to
her. He would have run to her, but remembering that there might be
spectators, he looked round towards the balcony door, and reddened a
little, as he always reddened, feeling that he had to be afraid and be
on his guard.
“No, I’m quite well,” she said, getting up and pressing his
outstretched hand tightly. “I did not expect ... thee.”
“Mercy! what cold hands!” he said.
“You startled me,” she said. “I’m alone, and expecting Seryozha; he’s
out for a walk; they’ll come in from this side.”
But, in spite of her efforts to be calm, her lips were quivering.
“Forgive me for coming, but I couldn’t pass the day without seeing
you,” he went on, speaking French, as he always did to avoid using the
stiff Russian plural form, so impossibly frigid between them, and the
dangerously intimate singular.
“Forgive you? I’m so glad!”
“But you’re ill or worried,” he went on, not letting go her hands and
bending over her. “What were you thinking of?”
“Always the same thing,” she said, with a smile.
She spoke the truth. If ever at any moment she had been asked what she
was thinking of, she could have answered truly: of the same thing, of
her happiness and her unhappiness. She was thinking, just when he came
upon her, of this: why was it, she wondered, that to others, to Betsy
(she knew of her secret connection with Tushkevitch) it was all easy,
while to her it was such torture? Today this thought gained special
poignancy from certain other considerations. She asked him about the
races. He answered her questions, and, seeing that she was agitated,
trying to calm her, he began telling her in the simplest tone the
details of his preparations for the races.
“Tell him or not tell him?” she thought, looking into his quiet,
affectionate eyes. “He is so happy, so absorbed in his races that he
won’t understand as he ought, he won’t understand all the gravity of
this fact to us.”
“But you haven’t told me what you were thinking of when I came in,” he
said, interrupting his narrative; “please tell me!”
She did not answer, and, bending her head a little, she looked
inquiringly at him from under her brows, her eyes shining under their
long lashes. Her hand shook as it played with a leaf she had picked. He
saw it, and his face expressed that utter subjection, that slavish
devotion, which had done so much to win her.
“I see something has happened. Do you suppose I can be at peace,
knowing you have a trouble I am not sharing? Tell me, for God’s sake,”
he repeated imploringly.
“Yes, I shan’t be able to forgive him if he does not realize all the
gravity of it. Better not tell; why put him to the proof?” she thought,
still staring at him in the same way, and feeling the hand that held
the leaf was trembling more and more.
“For God’s sake!” he repeated, taking her hand.
“Shall I tell you?”
“Yes, yes, yes....”
“I’m with child,” she said, softly and deliberately. The leaf in her
hand shook more violently, but she did not take her eyes off him,
watching how he would take it. He turned white, would have said
something, but stopped; he dropped her hand, and his head sank on his
breast. “Yes, he realizes all the gravity of it,” she thought, and
gratefully she pressed his hand.
But she was mistaken in thinking he realized the gravity of the fact as
she, a woman, realized it. On hearing it, he felt come upon him with
tenfold intensity that strange feeling of loathing of someone. But at
the same time, he felt that the turning-point he had been longing for
had come now; that it was impossible to go on concealing things from
her husband, and it was inevitable in one way or another that they
should soon put an end to their unnatural position. But, besides that,
her emotion physically affected him in the same way. He looked at her
with a look of submissive tenderness, kissed her hand, got up, and, in
silence, paced up and down the terrace.
“Yes,” he said, going up to her resolutely. “Neither you nor I have
looked on our relations as a passing amusement, and now our fate is
sealed. It is absolutely necessary to put an end”—he looked round as he
spoke—“to the deception in which we are living.”
“Put an end? How put an end, Alexey?” she said softly.
She was calmer now, and her face lighted up with a tender smile.
“Leave your husband and make our life one.”
“It is one as it is,” she answered, scarcely audibly.
“Yes, but altogether; altogether.”
“But how, Alexey, tell me how?” she said in melancholy mockery at the
hopelessness of her own position. “Is there any way out of such a
position? Am I not the wife of my husband?”
“There is a way out of every position. We must take our line,” he said.
“Anything’s better than the position in which you’re living. Of course,
I see how you torture yourself over everything—the world and your son
and your husband.”
“Oh, not over my husband,” she said, with a quiet smile. “I don’t know
him, I don’t think of him. He doesn’t exist.”
“You’re not speaking sincerely. I know you. You worry about him too.”
“Oh, he doesn’t even know,” she said, and suddenly a hot flush came
over her face; her cheeks, her brow, her neck crimsoned, and tears of
shame came into her eyes. “But we won’t talk of him.”
Chapter 23
Vronsky had several times already, though not so resolutely as now,
tried to bring her to consider their position, and every time he had
been confronted by the same superficiality and triviality with which
she met his appeal now. It was as though there were something in this
which she could not or would not face, as though directly she began to
speak of this, she, the real Anna, retreated somehow into herself, and
another strange and unaccountable woman came out, whom he did not love,
and whom he feared, and who was in opposition to him. But today he was
resolved to have it out.
“Whether he knows or not,” said Vronsky, in his usual quiet and
resolute tone, “that’s nothing to do with us. We cannot ... you cannot
stay like this, especially now.”
“What’s to be done, according to you?” she asked with the same
frivolous irony. She who had so feared he would take her condition too
lightly was now vexed with him for deducing from it the necessity of
taking some step.
“Tell him everything, and leave him.”
“Very well, let us suppose I do that,” she said. “Do you know what the
result of that would be? I can tell you it all beforehand,” and a
wicked light gleamed in her eyes, that had been so soft a minute
before. “‘Eh, you love another man, and have entered into criminal
intrigues with him?’” (Mimicking her husband, she threw an emphasis on
the word “criminal,” as Alexey Alexandrovitch did.) “‘I warned you of
the results in the religious, the civil, and the domestic relation. You
have not listened to me. Now I cannot let you disgrace my name,—’” “and
my son,” she had meant to say, but about her son she could not
jest,—“‘disgrace my name, and’—and more in the same style,” she added.
“In general terms, he’ll say in his official manner, and with all
distinctness and precision, that he cannot let me go, but will take all
measures in his power to prevent scandal. And he will calmly and
punctually act in accordance with his words. That’s what will happen.
He’s not a man, but a machine, and a spiteful machine when he’s angry,”
she added, recalling Alexey Alexandrovitch as she spoke, with all the
peculiarities of his figure and manner of speaking, and reckoning
against him every defect she could find in him, softening nothing for
the great wrong she herself was doing him.
“But, Anna,” said Vronsky, in a soft and persuasive voice, trying to
soothe her, “we absolutely must, anyway, tell him, and then be guided
by the line he takes.”
“What, run away?”
“And why not run away? I don’t see how we can keep on like this. And
not for my sake—I see that you suffer.”
“Yes, run away, and become your mistress,” she said angrily.
“Anna,” he said, with reproachful tenderness.
“Yes,” she went on, “become your mistress, and complete the ruin
of....”
Again she would have said “my son,” but she could not utter that word.
Vronsky could not understand how she, with her strong and truthful
nature, could endure this state of deceit, and not long to get out of
it. But he did not suspect that the chief cause of it was the
word—_son_, which she could not bring herself to pronounce. When she
thought of her son, and his future attitude to his mother, who had
abandoned his father, she felt such terror at what she had done, that
she could not face it; but, like a woman, could only try to comfort
herself with lying assurances that everything would remain as it always
had been, and that it was possible to forget the fearful question of
how it would be with her son.
“I beg you, I entreat you,” she said suddenly, taking his hand, and
speaking in quite a different tone, sincere and tender, “never speak to
me of that!”
“But, Anna....”
“Never. Leave it to me. I know all the baseness, all the horror of my
position; but it’s not so easy to arrange as you think. And leave it to
me, and do what I say. Never speak to me of it. Do you promise me?...
No, no, promise!...”
“I promise everything, but I can’t be at peace, especially after what
you have told me. I can’t be at peace, when you can’t be at peace....”
“I?” she repeated. “Yes, I am worried sometimes; but that will pass, if
you will never talk about this. When you talk about it—it’s only then
it worries me.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“I know,” she interrupted him, “how hard it is for your truthful nature
to lie, and I grieve for you. I often think that you have ruined your
whole life for me.”
“I was just thinking the very same thing,” he said; “how could you
sacrifice everything for my sake? I can’t forgive myself that you’re
unhappy!”
“I unhappy?” she said, coming closer to him, and looking at him with an
ecstatic smile of love. “I am like a hungry man who has been given