Anna Karenina
beard was stooping down doing something, and all of a sudden he began
saying some strange words in French. Yes, there was nothing else in the
dream,” he said to himself. “But why was it so awful?” He vividly
recalled the peasant again and those incomprehensible French words the
peasant had uttered, and a chill of horror ran down his spine.
“What nonsense!” thought Vronsky, and glanced at his watch.
It was half-past eight already. He rang up his servant, dressed in
haste, and went out onto the steps, completely forgetting the dream and
only worried at being late. As he drove up to the Karenins’ entrance he
looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine. A high, narrow
carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the entrance. He
recognized Anna’s carriage. “She is coming to me,” thought Vronsky,
“and better she should. I don’t like going into that house. But no
matter; I can’t hide myself,” he thought, and with that manner peculiar
to him from childhood, as of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of,
Vronsky got out of his sledge and went to the door. The door opened,
and the hall-porter with a rug on his arm called the carriage. Vronsky,
though he did not usually notice details, noticed at this moment the
amazed expression with which the porter glanced at him. In the very
doorway Vronsky almost ran up against Alexey Alexandrovitch. The gas
jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face under the black
hat and on the white cravat, brilliant against the beaver of the coat.
Karenin’s fixed, dull eyes were fastened upon Vronsky’s face. Vronsky
bowed, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to
his hat and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the
carriage, pick up the rug and the opera-glass at the window and
disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and his
eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.
“What a position!” he thought. “If he would fight, would stand up for
his honor, I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness or
baseness.... He puts me in the position of playing false, which I never
meant and never mean to do.”
Vronsky’s ideas had changed since the day of his conversation with Anna
in the Vrede garden. Unconsciously yielding to the weakness of Anna—who
had surrendered herself up to him utterly, and simply looked to him to
decide her fate, ready to submit to anything—he had long ceased to
think that their tie might end as he had thought then. His ambitious
plans had retreated into the background again, and feeling that he had
got out of that circle of activity in which everything was definite, he
had given himself entirely to his passion, and that passion was binding
him more and more closely to her.
He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her retreating
footsteps. He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him,
and was now going back to the drawing-room.
“No,” she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the
tears came into her eyes. “No; if things are to go on like this, the
end will come much, much too soon.”
“What is it, dear one?”
“What? I’ve been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours ... No, I
won’t ... I can’t quarrel with you. Of course you couldn’t come. No, I
won’t.” She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long
while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time
searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she
had not seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture
of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in
reality) fit with him as he really was.
Chapter 3
“You met him?” she asked, when they had sat down at the table in the
lamplight. “You’re punished, you see, for being late.”
“Yes; but how was it? Wasn’t he to be at the council?”
“He had been and come back, and was going out somewhere again. But
that’s no matter. Don’t talk about it. Where have you been? With the
prince still?”
She knew every detail of his existence. He was going to say that he had
been up all night and had dropped asleep, but looking at her thrilled
and rapturous face, he was ashamed. And he said he had had to go to
report on the prince’s departure.
“But it’s over now? He is gone?”
“Thank God it’s over! You wouldn’t believe how insufferable it’s been
for me.”
“Why so? Isn’t it the life all of you, all young men, always lead?” she
said, knitting her brows; and taking up the crochet work that was lying
on the table, she began drawing the hook out of it, without looking at
Vronsky.
“I gave that life up long ago,” said he, wondering at the change in her
face, and trying to divine its meaning. “And I confess,” he said, with
a smile, showing his thick, white teeth, “this week I’ve been, as it
were, looking at myself in a glass, seeing that life, and I didn’t like
it.”
She held the work in her hands, but did not crochet, and looked at him
with strange, shining, and hostile eyes.
“This morning Liza came to see me—they’re not afraid to call on me, in
spite of the Countess Lidia Ivanovna,” she put in—“and she told me
about your Athenian evening. How loathsome!”
“I was just going to say....”
She interrupted him. “It was that Thérèse you used to know?”
“I was just saying....”
“How disgusting you are, you men! How is it you can’t understand that a
woman can never forget that,” she said, getting more and more angry,
and so letting him see the cause of her irritation, “especially a woman
who cannot know your life? What do I know? What have I ever known?” she
said, “what you tell me. And how do I know whether you tell me the
truth?...”
“Anna, you hurt me. Don’t you trust me? Haven’t I told you that I
haven’t a thought I wouldn’t lay bare to you?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, evidently trying to suppress her jealous
thoughts. “But if only you knew how wretched I am! I believe you, I
believe you.... What were you saying?”
But he could not at once recall what he had been going to say. These
fits of jealousy, which of late had been more and more frequent with
her, horrified him, and however much he tried to disguise the fact,
made him feel cold to her, although he knew the cause of her jealousy
was her love for him. How often he had told himself that her love was
happiness; and now she loved him as a woman can love when love has
outweighed for her all the good things of life—and he was much further
from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he had
thought himself unhappy, but happiness was before him; now he felt that
the best happiness was already left behind. She was utterly unlike what
she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had
changed for the worse. She had broadened out all over, and in her face
at the time when she was speaking of the actress there was an evil
expression of hatred that distorted it. He looked at her as a man looks
at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it
the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he
felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly
wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now, when as at
that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what
bound him to her could not be broken.
“Well, well, what was it you were going to say about the prince? I have
driven away the fiend,” she added. The fiend was the name they had
given her jealousy. “What did you begin to tell me about the prince?
Why did you find it so tiresome?”
“Oh, it was intolerable!” he said, trying to pick up the thread of his
interrupted thought. “He does not improve on closer acquaintance. If
you want him defined, here he is: a prime, well-fed beast such as takes
medals at the cattle shows, and nothing more,” he said, with a tone of
vexation that interested her.
“No; how so?” she replied. “He’s seen a great deal, anyway; he’s
cultured?”
“It’s an utterly different culture—their culture. He’s cultivated, one
sees, simply to be able to despise culture, as they despise everything
but animal pleasures.”
“But don’t you all care for these animal pleasures?” she said, and
again he noticed a dark look in her eyes that avoided him.
“How is it you’re defending him?” he said, smiling.
“I’m not defending him, it’s nothing to me; but I imagine, if you had
not cared for those pleasures yourself, you might have got out of them.
But if it affords you satisfaction to gaze at Thérèse in the attire of
Eve....”
“Again, the devil again,” Vronsky said, taking the hand she had laid on
the table and kissing it.
“Yes; but I can’t help it. You don’t know what I have suffered waiting
for you. I believe I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous: I believe you when
you’re here; but when you’re away somewhere leading your life, so
incomprehensible to me....”
She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the crochet
work, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop
after loop of the wool that was dazzling white in the lamplight, while
the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in the embroidered cuff.
“How was it, then? Where did you meet Alexey Alexandrovitch?” Her voice
sounded in an unnatural and jarring tone.
“We ran up against each other in the doorway.”
“And he bowed to you like this?”
She drew a long face, and half-closing her eyes, quickly transformed
her expression, folded her hands, and Vronsky suddenly saw in her
beautiful face the very expression with which Alexey Alexandrovitch had
bowed to him. He smiled, while she laughed gaily, with that sweet, deep
laugh, which was one of her greatest charms.
“I don’t understand him in the least,” said Vronsky. “If after your
avowal to him at your country house he had broken with you, if he had
called me out—but this I can’t understand. How can he put up with such
a position? He feels it, that’s evident.”
“He?” she said sneeringly. “He’s perfectly satisfied.”
“What are we all miserable for, when everything might be so happy?”
“Only not he. Don’t I know him, the falsity in which he’s utterly
steeped?... Could one, with any feeling, live as he is living with me?
He understands nothing, and feels nothing. Could a man of any feeling
live in the same house with his unfaithful wife? Could he talk to her,
call her ‘my dear’?”
And again she could not help mimicking him: “‘Anna, _ma chère_; Anna,
dear!’”
“He’s not a man, not a human being—he’s a doll! No one knows him; but I
know him. Oh, if I’d been in his place, I’d long ago have killed, have
torn to pieces a wife like me. I wouldn’t have said, ‘Anna, _ma
chère_’! He’s not a man, he’s an official machine. He doesn’t
understand that I’m your wife, that he’s outside, that he’s
superfluous.... Don’t let’s talk of him!...”
“You’re unfair, very unfair, dearest,” said Vronsky, trying to soothe
her. “But never mind, don’t let’s talk of him. Tell me what you’ve been
doing? What is the matter? What has been wrong with you, and what did
the doctor say?”
She looked at him with mocking amusement. Evidently she had hit on
other absurd and grotesque aspects in her husband and was awaiting the
moment to give expression to them.
But he went on:
“I imagine that it’s not illness, but your condition. When will it be?”
The ironical light died away in her eyes, but a different smile, a
consciousness of something, he did not know what, and of quiet
melancholy, came over her face.
“Soon, soon. You say that our position is miserable, that we must put
an end to it. If you knew how terrible it is to me, what I would give
to be able to love you freely and boldly! I should not torture myself
and torture you with my jealousy.... And it will come soon, but not as
we expect.”