Anna Karenina
Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground.
“What’s that? Someone coming,” he thought, catching the tinkle of
bells, and lifting his head. Forty paces from him a carriage with four
horses harnessed abreast was driving towards him along the grassy road
on which he was walking. The shaft-horses were tilted against the
shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held
the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of
the road.
This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be, he
gazed absently at the coach.
In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the window,
evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both hands the
ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light and thought, full of
a subtle, complex inner life, that was remote from Levin, she was
gazing beyond him at the glow of the sunrise.
At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful
eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up with
wondering delight.
He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the
world. There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate
for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was
Kitty. He understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the railway
station. And everything that had been stirring Levin during that
sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at once.
He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There
only, in the carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the
road, and was rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the
solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly
upon him of late.
She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs was no
longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking of dogs
showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left was
the empty fields all round, the village in front, and he himself
isolated and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted
highroad.
He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he had
been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and feelings of
that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell.
There, in the remote heights above, a mysterious change had been
accomplished. There was no trace of shell, and there was stretched over
fully half the sky an even cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets. The
sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same softness, but with the
same remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.
“No,” he said to himself, “however good that life of simplicity and
toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love _her_.”
Chapter 13
None but those who were most intimate with Alexey Alexandrovitch knew
that, while on the surface the coldest and most reasonable of men, he
had one weakness quite opposed to the general trend of his character.
Alexey Alexandrovitch could not hear or see a child or woman crying
without being moved. The sight of tears threw him into a state of
nervous agitation, and he utterly lost all power of reflection. The
chief secretary of his department and his private secretary were aware
of this, and used to warn women who came with petitions on no account
to give way to tears, if they did not want to ruin their chances. “He
will get angry, and will not listen to you,” they used to say. And as a
fact, in such cases the emotional disturbance set up in Alexey
Alexandrovitch by the sight of tears found expression in hasty anger.
“I can do nothing. Kindly leave the room!” he would commonly cry in
such cases.
When returning from the races Anna had informed him of her relations
with Vronsky, and immediately afterwards had burst into tears, hiding
her face in her hands, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for all the fury aroused
in him against her, was aware at the same time of a rush of that
emotional disturbance always produced in him by tears. Conscious of it,
and conscious that any expression of his feelings at that minute would
be out of keeping with the position, he tried to suppress every
manifestation of life in himself, and so neither stirred nor looked at
her. This was what had caused that strange expression of deathlike
rigidity in his face which had so impressed Anna.
When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the carriage,
and making an effort to master himself, took leave of her with his
usual urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound him to nothing; he
said that tomorrow he would let her know his decision.
His wife’s words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a cruel
pang to the heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch. That pang was intensified
by the strange feeling of physical pity for her set up by her tears.
But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his
surprise and delight, felt complete relief both from this pity and from
the doubts and agonies of jealousy.
He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after
suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense of
something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw,
the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at
once that what has so long poisoned his existence and enchained his
attention, exists no longer, and that he can live and think again, and
take interest in other things besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey
Alexandrovitch was experiencing. The agony had been strange and
terrible, but now it was over; he felt that he could live again and
think of something other than his wife.
“No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it and
always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her,” he said
to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen it:
he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen
anything wrong before—now these incidents proved clearly that she had
always been a corrupt woman. “I made a mistake in linking my life to
hers; but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be
unhappy. It’s not I that am to blame,” he told himself, “but she. But I
have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me....”
Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom his sentiments
were as much changed as towards her, ceased to interest him. The only
thing that interested him now was the question of in what way he could
best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and thus with most
justice, extricate himself from the mud with which she had spattered
him in her fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable,
and useful existence.
“I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman has
committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of the
difficult position in which she has placed me. And I shall find it,” he
said to himself, frowning more and more. “I’m not the first nor the
last.” And to say nothing of historical instances dating from the “Fair
Helen” of Menelaus, recently revived in the memory of all, a whole list
of contemporary examples of husbands with unfaithful wives in the
highest society rose before Alexey Alexandrovitch’s imagination.
“Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram.... Yes,
even Dram, such an honest, capable fellow ... Semyonov, Tchagin,
Sigonin,” Alexey Alexandrovitch remembered. “Admitting that a certain
quite irrational _ridicule_ falls to the lot of these men, yet I never
saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt sympathy for it,”
Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, though indeed this was not the
fact, and he had never felt sympathy for misfortunes of that kind, but
the more frequently he had heard of instances of unfaithful wives
betraying their husbands, the more highly he had thought of himself.
“It is a misfortune which may befall anyone. And this misfortune has
befallen me. The only thing to be done is to make the best of the
position.”
And he began passing in review the methods of proceeding of men who had
been in the same position that he was in.
“Daryalov fought a duel....”
The duel had particularly fascinated the thoughts of Alexey
Alexandrovitch in his youth, just because he was physically a coward,
and was himself well aware of the fact. Alexey Alexandrovitch could not
without horror contemplate the idea of a pistol aimed at himself, and
had never made use of any weapon in his life. This horror had in his
youth set him pondering on dueling, and picturing himself in a position
in which he would have to expose his life to danger. Having attained
success and an established position in the world, he had long ago
forgotten this feeling; but the habitual bent of feeling reasserted
itself, and dread of his own cowardice proved even now so strong that
Alexey Alexandrovitch spent a long while thinking over the question of
dueling in all its aspects, and hugging the idea of a duel, though he
was fully aware beforehand that he would never under any circumstances
fight one.
“There’s no doubt our society is still so barbarous (it’s not the same
in England) that very many”—and among these were those whose opinion
Alexey Alexandrovitch particularly valued—“look favorably on the duel;
but what result is attained by it? Suppose I call him out,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch went on to himself, and vividly picturing the night he
would spend after the challenge, and the pistol aimed at him, he
shuddered, and knew that he never would do it—“suppose I call him out.
Suppose I am taught,” he went on musing, “to shoot; I press the
trigger,” he said to himself, closing his eyes, “and it turns out I
have killed him,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, and he shook
his head as though to dispel such silly ideas. “What sense is there in
murdering a man in order to define one’s relation to a guilty wife and
son? I should still just as much have to decide what I ought to do with
her. But what is more probable and what would doubtless occur—I should
be killed or wounded. I, the innocent person, should be the
victim—killed or wounded. It’s even more senseless. But apart from
that, a challenge to fight would be an act hardly honest on my side.
Don’t I know perfectly well that my friends would never allow me to
fight a duel—would never allow the life of a statesman, needed by
Russia, to be exposed to danger? Knowing perfectly well beforehand that
the matter would never come to real danger, it would amount to my
simply trying to gain a certain sham reputation by such a challenge.
That would be dishonest, that would be false, that would be deceiving
myself and others. A duel is quite irrational, and no one expects it of
me. My aim is simply to safeguard my reputation, which is essential for
the uninterrupted pursuit of my public duties.” Official duties, which
had always been of great consequence in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s eyes,
seemed of special importance to his mind at this moment. Considering
and rejecting the duel, Alexey Alexandrovitch turned to divorce—another
solution selected by several of the husbands he remembered. Passing in
mental review all the instances he knew of divorces (there were plenty
of them in the very highest society with which he was very familiar),
Alexey Alexandrovitch could not find a single example in which the
object of divorce was that which he had in view. In all these instances
the husband had practically ceded or sold his unfaithful wife, and the
very party which, being in fault, had not the right to contract a fresh
marriage, had formed counterfeit, pseudo-matrimonial ties with a
self-styled husband. In his own case, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that a