Anna Karenina
“So you consider it must be ended?” Alexey Alexandrovitch interrupted
him. “But how?” he added, with a gesture of his hands before his eyes
not usual with him. “I see no possible way out of it.”
“There is some way of getting out of every position,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, standing up and becoming more cheerful. “There was a time
when you thought of breaking off.... If you are convinced now that you
cannot make each other happy....”
“Happiness may be variously understood. But suppose that I agree to
everything, that I want nothing: what way is there of getting out of
our position?”
“If you care to know my opinion,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with the
same smile of softening, almond-oil tenderness with which he had been
talking to Anna. His kindly smile was so winning that Alexey
Alexandrovitch, feeling his own weakness and unconsciously swayed by
it, was ready to believe what Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying.
“She will never speak out about it. But one thing is possible, one
thing she might desire,” he went on, “that is the cessation of your
relations and all memories associated with them. To my thinking, in
your position what’s essential is the formation of a new attitude to
one another. And that can only rest on a basis of freedom on both
sides.”
“Divorce,” Alexey Alexandrovitch interrupted, in a tone of aversion.
“Yes, I imagine that divorce—yes, divorce,” Stepan Arkadyevitch
repeated, reddening. “That is from every point of view the most
rational course for married people who find themselves in the position
you are in. What can be done if married people find that life is
impossible for them together? That may always happen.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed heavily and closed his eyes.
“There’s only one point to be considered: is either of the parties
desirous of forming new ties? If not, it is very simple,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, feeling more and more free from constraint.
Alexey Alexandrovitch, scowling with emotion, muttered something to
himself, and made no answer. All that seemed so simple to Stepan
Arkadyevitch, Alexey Alexandrovitch had thought over thousands of
times. And, so far from being simple, it all seemed to him utterly
impossible. Divorce, the details of which he knew by this time, seemed
to him now out of the question, because the sense of his own dignity
and respect for religion forbade his taking upon himself a fictitious
charge of adultery, and still more suffering his wife, pardoned and
beloved by him, to be caught in the fact and put to public shame.
Divorce appeared to him impossible also on other still more weighty
grounds.
What would become of his son in case of a divorce? To leave him with
his mother was out of the question. The divorced mother would have her
own illegitimate family, in which his position as a stepson and his
education would not be good. Keep him with him? He knew that would be
an act of vengeance on his part, and that he did not want. But apart
from this, what more than all made divorce seem impossible to Alexey
Alexandrovitch was, that by consenting to a divorce he would be
completely ruining Anna. The saying of Darya Alexandrovna at Moscow,
that in deciding on a divorce he was thinking of himself, and not
considering that by this he would be ruining her irrevocably, had sunk
into his heart. And connecting this saying with his forgiveness of her,
with his devotion to the children, he understood it now in his own way.
To consent to a divorce, to give her her freedom, meant in his thoughts
to take from himself the last tie that bound him to life—the children
whom he loved; and to take from her the last prop that stayed her on
the path of right, to thrust her down to her ruin. If she were
divorced, he knew she would join her life to Vronsky’s, and their tie
would be an illegitimate and criminal one, since a wife, by the
interpretation of the ecclesiastical law, could not marry while her
husband was living. “She will join him, and in a year or two he will
throw her over, or she will form a new tie,” thought Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “And I, by agreeing to an unlawful divorce, shall be to
blame for her ruin.” He had thought it all over hundreds of times, and
was convinced that a divorce was not at all simple, as Stepan
Arkadyevitch had said, but was utterly impossible. He did not believe a
single word Stepan Arkadyevitch said to him; to every word he had a
thousand objections to make, but he listened to him, feeling that his
words were the expression of that mighty brutal force which controlled
his life and to which he would have to submit.
“The only question is on what terms you agree to give her a divorce.
She does not want anything, does not dare ask you for anything, she
leaves it all to your generosity.”
“My God, my God! what for?” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch, remembering
the details of divorce proceedings in which the husband took the blame
on himself, and with just the same gesture with which Vronsky had done
the same, he hid his face for shame in his hands.
“You are distressed, I understand that. But if you think it over....”
“Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also; and if any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also,”
thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Yes, yes!” he cried in a shrill voice. “I will take the disgrace on
myself, I will give up even my son, but ... but wouldn’t it be better
to let it alone? Still you may do as you like....”
And turning away so that his brother-in-law could not see him, he sat
down on a chair at the window. There was bitterness, there was shame in
his heart, but with bitterness and shame he felt joy and emotion at the
height of his own meekness.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was touched. He was silent for a space.
“Alexey Alexandrovitch, believe me, she appreciates your generosity,”
he said. “But it seems it was the will of God,” he added, and as he
said it felt how foolish a remark it was, and with difficulty repressed
a smile at his own foolishness.
Alexey Alexandrovitch would have made some reply, but tears stopped
him.
“This is an unhappy fatality, and one must accept it as such. I accept
the calamity as an accomplished fact, and am doing my best to help both
her and you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
When he went out of his brother-in-law’s room he was touched, but that
did not prevent him from being glad he had successfully brought the
matter to a conclusion, for he felt certain Alexey Alexandrovitch would
not go back on his words. To this satisfaction was added the fact that
an idea had just struck him for a riddle turning on his successful
achievement, that when the affair was over he would ask his wife and
most intimate friends. He put this riddle into two or three different
ways. “But I’ll work it out better than that,” he said to himself with
a smile.
Chapter 23
Vronsky’s wound had been a dangerous one, though it did not touch the
heart, and for several days he had lain between life and death. The
first time he was able to speak, Varya, his brother’s wife, was alone
in the room.
“Varya,” he said, looking sternly at her, “I shot myself by accident.
And please never speak of it, and tell everyone so. Or else it’s too
ridiculous.”
Without answering his words, Varya bent over him, and with a delighted
smile gazed into his face. His eyes were clear, not feverish; but their
expression was stern.
“Thank God!” she said. “You’re not in pain?”
“A little here.” He pointed to his breast.
“Then let me change your bandages.”
In silence, stiffening his broad jaws, he looked at her while she
bandaged him up. When she had finished he said:
“I’m not delirious. Please manage that there may be no talk of my
having shot myself on purpose.”
“No one does say so. Only I hope you won’t shoot yourself by accident
any more,” she said, with a questioning smile.
“Of course I won’t, but it would have been better....”
And he smiled gloomily.
In spite of these words and this smile, which so frightened Varya, when
the inflammation was over and he began to recover, he felt that he was
completely free from one part of his misery. By his action he had, as
it were, washed away the shame and humiliation he had felt before. He
could now think calmly of Alexey Alexandrovitch. He recognized all his
magnanimity, but he did not now feel himself humiliated by it. Besides,
he got back again into the beaten track of his life. He saw the
possibility of looking men in the face again without shame, and he
could live in accordance with his own habits. One thing he could not
pluck out of his heart, though he never ceased struggling with it, was
the regret, amounting to despair, that he had lost her forever. That
now, having expiated his sin against the husband, he was bound to
renounce her, and never in future to stand between her with her
repentance and her husband, he had firmly decided in his heart; but he
could not tear out of his heart his regret at the loss of her love, he
could not erase from his memory those moments of happiness that he had
so little prized at the time, and that haunted him in all their charm.
Serpuhovskoy had planned his appointment at Tashkend, and Vronsky
agreed to the proposition without the slightest hesitation. But the
nearer the time of departure came, the bitterer was the sacrifice he
was making to what he thought his duty.
His wound had healed, and he was driving about making preparations for
his departure for Tashkend.
“To see her once and then to bury myself, to die,” he thought, and as
he was paying farewell visits, he uttered this thought to Betsy.
Charged with this commission, Betsy had gone to Anna, and brought him
back a negative reply.
“So much the better,” thought Vronsky, when he received the news. “It
was a weakness, which would have shattered what strength I have left.”
Next day Betsy herself came to him in the morning, and announced that
she had heard through Oblonsky as a positive fact that Alexey
Alexandrovitch had agreed to a divorce, and that therefore Vronsky
could see Anna.
Without even troubling himself to see Betsy out of his flat, forgetting
all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her, where her
husband was, Vronsky drove straight to the Karenins’. He ran up the
stairs seeing no one and nothing, and with a rapid step, almost
breaking into a run, he went into her room. And without considering,
without noticing whether there was anyone in the room or not, he flung
his arms round her, and began to cover her face, her hands, her neck
with kisses.
Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she
would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his
passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself, but it
was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that for a
long while she could say nothing.
“Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours,” she said at last,
pressing his hands to her bosom.
“So it had to be,” he said. “So long as we live, it must be so. I know
it now.”
“That’s true,” she said, getting whiter and whiter, and embracing his
head. “Still there is something terrible in it after all that has
happened.”
“It will all pass, it will all pass; we shall be so happy. Our love, if
it could be stronger, will be strengthened by there being something
terrible in it,” he said, lifting his head and parting his strong teeth
in a smile.
And she could not but respond with a smile—not to his words, but to the
love in his eyes. She took his hand and stroked her chilled cheeks and
cropped head with it.
“I don’t know you with this short hair. You’ve grown so pretty. A boy.
But how pale you are!”
“Yes, I’m very weak,” she said, smiling. And her lips began trembling
again.