Anna Karenina
He embraced Kitty, kissed her face, her hand, her face again, and made
the sign of the cross over her.
And there came over Levin a new feeling of love for this man, till then
so little known to him, when he saw how slowly and tenderly Kitty
kissed his muscular hand.
Chapter 16
The princess sat in her armchair, silent and smiling; the prince sat
down beside her. Kitty stood by her father’s chair, still holding his
hand. All were silent.
The princess was the first to put everything into words, and to
translate all thoughts and feelings into practical questions. And all
equally felt this strange and painful for the first minute.
“When is it to be? We must have the benediction and announcement. And
when’s the wedding to be? What do you think, Alexander?”
“Here he is,” said the old prince, pointing to Levin—“he’s the
principal person in the matter.”
“When?” said Levin blushing. “Tomorrow. If you ask me, I should say,
the benediction today and the wedding tomorrow.”
“Come, _mon cher_, that’s nonsense!”
“Well, in a week.”
“He’s quite mad.”
“No, why so?”
“Well, upon my word!” said the mother, smiling, delighted at this
haste. “How about the trousseau?”
“Will there really be a trousseau and all that?” Levin thought with
horror. “But can the trousseau and the benediction and all that—can it
spoil my happiness? Nothing can spoil it!” He glanced at Kitty, and
noticed that she was not in the least, not in the very least, disturbed
by the idea of the trousseau. “Then it must be all right,” he thought.
“Oh, I know nothing about it; I only said what I should like,” he said
apologetically.
“We’ll talk it over, then. The benediction and announcement can take
place now. That’s very well.”
The princess went up to her husband, kissed him, and would have gone
away, but he kept her, embraced her, and, tenderly as a young lover,
kissed her several times, smiling. The old people were obviously
muddled for a moment, and did not quite know whether it was they who
were in love again or their daughter. When the prince and the princess
had gone, Levin went up to his betrothed and took her hand. He was
self-possessed now and could speak, and he had a great deal he wanted
to tell her. But he said not at all what he had to say.
“How I knew it would be so! I never hoped for it; and yet in my heart I
was always sure,” he said. “I believe that it was ordained.”
“And I!” she said. “Even when....” She stopped and went on again,
looking at him resolutely with her truthful eyes, “Even when I thrust
from me my happiness. I always loved you alone, but I was carried away.
I ought to tell you.... Can you forgive that?”
“Perhaps it was for the best. You will have to forgive me so much. I
ought to tell you....”
This was one of the things he had meant to speak about. He had resolved
from the first to tell her two things—that he was not chaste as she
was, and that he was not a believer. It was agonizing, but he
considered he ought to tell her both these facts.
“No, not now, later!” he said.
“Very well, later, but you must certainly tell me. I’m not afraid of
anything. I want to know everything. Now it is settled.”
He added: “Settled that you’ll take me whatever I may be—you won’t give
me up? Yes?”
“Yes, yes.”
Their conversation was interrupted by Mademoiselle Linon, who with an
affected but tender smile came to congratulate her favorite pupil.
Before she had gone, the servants came in with their congratulations.
Then relations arrived, and there began that state of blissful
absurdity from which Levin did not emerge till the day after his
wedding. Levin was in a continual state of awkwardness and discomfort,
but the intensity of his happiness went on all the while increasing. He
felt continually that a great deal was being expected of him—what, he
did not know; and he did everything he was told, and it all gave him
happiness. He had thought his engagement would have nothing about it
like others, that the ordinary conditions of engaged couples would
spoil his special happiness; but it ended in his doing exactly as other
people did, and his happiness being only increased thereby and becoming
more and more special, more and more unlike anything that had ever
happened.
“Now we shall have sweetmeats to eat,” said Mademoiselle Linon—and
Levin drove off to buy sweetmeats.
“Well, I’m very glad,” said Sviazhsky. “I advise you to get the
bouquets from Fomin’s.”
“Oh, are they wanted?” And he drove to Fomin’s.
His brother offered to lend him money, as he would have so many
expenses, presents to give....
“Oh, are presents wanted?” And he galloped to Foulde’s.
And at the confectioner’s, and at Fomin’s, and at Foulde’s he saw that
he was expected; that they were pleased to see him, and prided
themselves on his happiness, just as everyone whom he had to do with
during those days. What was extraordinary was that everyone not only
liked him, but even people previously unsympathetic, cold, and callous,
were enthusiastic over him, gave way to him in everything, treated his
feeling with tenderness and delicacy, and shared his conviction that he
was the happiest man in the world because his betrothed was beyond
perfection. Kitty too felt the same thing. When Countess Nordston
ventured to hint that she had hoped for something better, Kitty was so
angry and proved so conclusively that nothing in the world could be
better than Levin, that Countess Nordston had to admit it, and in
Kitty’s presence never met Levin without a smile of ecstatic
admiration.
The confession he had promised was the one painful incident of this
time. He consulted the old prince, and with his sanction gave Kitty his
diary, in which there was written the confession that tortured him. He
had written this diary at the time with a view to his future wife. Two
things caused him anguish: his lack of purity and his lack of faith.
His confession of unbelief passed unnoticed. She was religious, had
never doubted the truths of religion, but his external unbelief did not
affect her in the least. Through love she knew all his soul, and in his
soul she saw what she wanted, and that such a state of soul should be
called unbelieving was to her a matter of no account. The other
confession set her weeping bitterly.
Levin, not without an inner struggle, handed her his diary. He knew
that between him and her there could not be, and should not be,
secrets, and so he had decided that so it must be. But he had not
realized what an effect it would have on her, he had not put himself in
her place. It was only when the same evening he came to their house
before the theater, went into her room and saw her tear-stained,
pitiful, sweet face, miserable with suffering he had caused and nothing
could undo, he felt the abyss that separated his shameful past from her
dovelike purity, and was appalled at what he had done.
“Take them, take these dreadful books!” she said, pushing away the
notebooks lying before her on the table. “Why did you give them me? No,
it was better anyway,” she added, touched by his despairing face. “But
it’s awful, awful!”
His head sank, and he was silent. He could say nothing.
“You can’t forgive me,” he whispered.
“Yes, I forgive you; but it’s terrible!”
But his happiness was so immense that this confession did not shatter
it, it only added another shade to it. She forgave him; but from that
time more than ever he considered himself unworthy of her, morally
bowed down lower than ever before her, and prized more highly than ever
his undeserved happiness.
Chapter 17
Unconsciously going over in his memory the conversations that had taken
place during and after dinner, Alexey Alexandrovitch returned to his
solitary room. Darya Alexandrovna’s words about forgiveness had aroused
in him nothing but annoyance. The applicability or non-applicability of
the Christian precept to his own case was too difficult a question to
be discussed lightly, and this question had long ago been answered by
Alexey Alexandrovitch in the negative. Of all that had been said, what
stuck most in his memory was the phrase of stupid, good-natured
Turovtsin—“_Acted like a man, he did! Called him out and shot him!_”
Everyone had apparently shared this feeling, though from politeness
they had not expressed it.
“But the matter is settled, it’s useless thinking about it,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch told himself. And thinking of nothing but the journey
before him, and the revision work he had to do, he went into his room
and asked the porter who escorted him where his man was. The porter
said that the man had only just gone out. Alexey Alexandrovitch ordered
tea to be sent him, sat down to the table, and taking the guidebook,
began considering the route of his journey.
“Two telegrams,” said his manservant, coming into the room. “I beg your
pardon, your excellency; I’d only just that minute gone out.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch took the telegrams and opened them. The first
telegram was the announcement of Stremov’s appointment to the very post
Karenin had coveted. Alexey Alexandrovitch flung the telegram down, and
flushing a little, got up and began to pace up and down the room.
“_Quos vult perdere dementat_,” he said, meaning by _quos_ the persons
responsible for this appointment. He was not so much annoyed that he
had not received the post, that he had been conspicuously passed over;
but it was incomprehensible, amazing to him that they did not see that
the wordy phrase-monger Stremov was the last man fit for it. How could
they fail to see how they were ruining themselves, lowering their
_prestige_ by this appointment?
“Something else in the same line,” he said to himself bitterly, opening
the second telegram. The telegram was from his wife. Her name, written
in blue pencil, “Anna,” was the first thing that caught his eye. “I am
dying; I beg, I implore you to come. I shall die easier with your
forgiveness,” he read. He smiled contemptuously, and flung down the
telegram. That this was a trick and a fraud, of that, he thought for
the first minute, there could be no doubt.
“There is no deceit she would stick at. She was near her confinement.
Perhaps it is the confinement. But what can be their aim? To legitimize
the child, to compromise me, and prevent a divorce,” he thought. “But
something was said in it: I am dying....” He read the telegram again,
and suddenly the plain meaning of what was said in it struck him.
“And if it is true?” he said to himself. “If it is true that in the
moment of agony and nearness to death she is genuinely penitent, and I,
taking it for a trick, refuse to go? That would not only be cruel, and
everyone would blame me, but it would be stupid on my part.”
“Piotr, call a coach; I am going to Petersburg,” he said to his
servant.
Alexey Alexandrovitch decided that he would go to Petersburg and see
his wife. If her illness was a trick, he would say nothing and go away
again. If she was really in danger, and wished to see him before her
death, he would forgive her if he found her alive, and pay her the last
duties if he came too late.
All the way he thought no more of what he ought to do.
With a sense of weariness and uncleanness from the night spent in the
train, in the early fog of Petersburg Alexey Alexandrovitch drove
through the deserted Nevsky and stared straight before him, not
thinking of what was awaiting him. He could not think about it, because
in picturing what would happen, he could not drive away the reflection
that her death would at once remove all the difficulty of his position.
Bakers, closed shops, night-cabmen, porters sweeping the pavements
flashed past his eyes, and he watched it all, trying to smother the
thought of what was awaiting him, and what he dared not hope for, and