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SIXTEEN

As while she was speaking everybody listened to her and the conversation in the circle round the ambassador’s wife stopped, the hostess wished to make one circle of the whole company, and turning to the ambassador’s wife, said:
‘Will you really not have a cup of tea? You should come and join us here.’
‘No, we are very comfortable here,’ replied the ambassador’s wife smiling, and she continued the interrupted conversation.
It was a very pleasant conversation. They were disparaging1 the Karenins, husband and wife.
‘Anna has changed very much since her trip to Moscow.
‘There is something strange about her,’ said a friend of Anna’s.
‘The chief change is that she has brought back with her the shadow of Alexis Vronsky,’ said the ambassador’s wife.
‘Well, why not? Grimm has a fable2 called “The Man Without a Shadow” — about a man who lost his shadow as a punishment for something or other. I never could understand why it was a punishment! But for a woman to be without a shadow can’t be pleasant.’
‘Yes, but a woman with a shadow generally ends badly,’ said Anna’s friend.
‘A murrain on your tongue!’ suddenly remarked the Princess Myagkaya, hearing these words. ‘Anna Karenina is a splendid woman. I don’t like her husband, but I am very fond of her.’
‘Why don’t you like her husband? He is such a remarkable3 man,’ said the ambassador’s wife. ‘My husband says there are few statesmen like him in Europe.’
‘My husband tells me the same, but I don’t believe it,’ replied the Princess Myagkaya. ‘If our husbands didn’t talk, we should see things as they really are; and it’s my opinion that Karenin is simply stupid. I say it in a whisper! Does this not make everything quite clear? Formerly4, when I was told to consider him wise, I kept trying to, and thought I was stupid myself because I was unable to perceive his wisdom; but as soon as I said to myself, he’s stupid (only in a whisper of course), it all became quite clear! Don’t you think so?’
‘How malicious5 you are to-day!’
‘Not at all. I have no choice. One of us is stupid, and you know it’s impossible to say so of oneself.’
‘No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit,’ remarked the attaché, quoting some French lines.
‘That’s it, that’s just it,’ rejoined the Princess Myagkaya, turning quickly toward him. ‘But the point is, that I won’t abandon Anna to you. She is so excellent, so charming! What is she to do, if every one is in love with her and follows her about like a shadow?’
‘But I don’t even think of blaming her!’ Anna’s friend said, justifying6 herself.
‘If no one follows us about like a shadow, that does not prove that we have a right to judge her.’
Having snubbed Anna’s friend handsomely, the Princess Myagkaya rose with the ambassador’s wife and joined those at the table, where there was a general conversation about the King of Prussia.
‘Whom were you backbiting7 there?’ asked Betsy.
‘The Karenins. The Princess was characterizing Karenin,’ replied the ambassador’s wife with a smile, seating herself at the table.
‘It’s a pity we did not hear it!’ said the hostess, glancing at the door. ‘Ah! Here you are at last!’ she added, smilingly addressing Vronsky as he entered the room.
Vronsky not only knew everybody in the room, but saw them all every day, so he entered in the calm manner of one who rejoins those from whom he has parted only a short time before.
‘Where do I come from?’ he said in reply to the ambassador’s wife. ‘There’s no help for it, I must confess that I come from the Théâtre Bouffe. I have been there a hundred times, and always with fresh pleasure. Excellent! I know it’s a disgrace, but at the opera I go to sleep, while at the Bouffe I stay till the last minute enjoying it. To-night . . .’
And he named a French actress and was about to tell them something about her when the ambassador’s wife stopped him with mock alarm.
‘Please don’t talk about those horrors!’
‘All right, I won’t — especially as everybody knows those horrors!’
‘And everybody would go there if it were considered the thing, as the opera is,’ put in the Princess Myagkaya.
Chapter 7
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STEPS were heard at the entrance, and the Princess Betsy, knowing that it was Anna, glanced at Vronsky. He was looking at the door with a strange new expression on his face. He gazed joyfully, intently, and yet timidly at the lady who was entering, and slowly rose from his seat. Anna entered the room holding herself, as usual, very erect, and without changing the direction of her eyes, approached her hostess, walking with that quick, firm yet light step which distinguished her from other Society women. She shook hands, smilingly, and with the same smile looked round at Vronsky. He bowed low and moved a chair toward her.
Anna responded only by an inclination of the head, though she blushed and frowned. But immediately, nodding rapidly to her acquaintances and pressing the hands extended to her, she turned again to her hostess:
‘I have just been at the Countess Lydia’s. I meant to come sooner, but could not get away. Sir John was there — he is very interesting.’
‘Oh, that missionary?’
‘Yes, he was telling us about Indian life. It was very interesting.’ The conversation, interrupted by her entrance, again burnt up like the flame of a lamp that has been blown about.
‘Sir John! Oh yes, Sir John! I have seen him. He speaks very well. The elder Vlasyeva is quite in love with him.’
‘And is it true that the younger Vlasyeva is going to be married to Topov?’
‘Yes; they say it’s quite settled.’
‘I am surprised at her parents. They say it’s a love match.’
‘Love match! What antediluvian ideas you have! Who talks of love nowadays?’ said the ambassador’s wife.
‘What’s to be done? That silly old fashion hasn’t died out yet!’ said Vronsky.
‘So much the worse for those who follow the fashion! I know of happy marriages, but only such as are founded on reason.’
‘Yes, but how often the happiness of marriages founded on reason crumbles to dust because the very passion that was disregarded makes itself felt later,’ said Vronsky.
‘But by “marriages founded on reason,” we mean marriages between those who have both passed through that madness. It’s like scarlet fever: one has to get it over.’
‘Then some one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.’
‘When I was young I was in love with a chorister,’ said Princess Myagkaya. ‘I don’t know whether it did me any good.’
‘No, joking apart, I believe that to understand love one must first make a mistake and then correct it,’ said the Princess Betsy.
‘Even after marriage?’ said the ambassador’s wife archly.
‘It is never too late to mend!’ said the attaché, quoting the English proverb.
‘Exactly!’ chimed in Betsy. ‘One has to make mistakes and correct them. What do you think?’ she asked, addressing Anna, who with a scarcely discernible resolute smile was listening to this conversation.
‘I think,’ replied Anna, toying with the glove she had pulled off, ‘I think . . . if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.’
Vronsky had gazed at Anna and with sinking heart waited to hear what she would say. He sighed, as after a danger averted, when she had uttered these words.
Suddenly Anna addressed him:
‘I have received a letter from Moscow. They write that Kitty Shcherbatskaya is very ill.’
‘Really?’ said Vronsky, frowning.
Anna glanced sternly at him. ‘It does not interest you?’
‘On the contrary, it interests me very much! What exactly do they write, if I may ask?’ he inquired.
Anna rose and went up to Betsy. ‘Give me a cup of tea,’ she said, stopping behind Betsy’s chair.
While Betsy was pouring out the tea, Vronsky went up to Anna. ‘What do they write?’ he asked again.
‘I often think men don’t understand honour, though they are always talking about it,’ said Anna, without answering his question. ‘I have long wanted to tell you,’ she added, and, moving a few steps to a side table on which lay some albums, she sat down.
‘I don’t quite understand your meaning,’ he said, handing her the cup.
‘I wanted to tell you,’ she began again, without looking at him, ‘that you have behaved badly, very badly.’
‘Don’t I know that I behaved badly? But who was the cause?’
‘Why say that to me?’ she asked, looking severely at him.
‘You know why,’ he answered boldly and joyously, meeting her look and continuing to gaze at her.
It was not he, but she, who became abashed.
‘That only proves you have no heart,’ she said. But her look said that she knew he had a heart and that she therefore feared him.
‘What you have just referred to was a mistake, and not love.’
Anna shuddered, and said: ‘Don’t you remember that I forbade you to mention that word, that horrid word?’ But then she felt that the one word forbade showed that she claimed certain rights over him, thereby encouraging him to speak of love. ‘I have long wanted to say that to you,’ she went on, looking resolutely into his eyes, her face all aglow and suffused with a burning blush, ‘and to-day I came on purpose, knowing I should meet you here. I have come to tell you that this must stop! I have never till now had to blush before anyone, but you make me feel as if I were guilty of something.’
He looked at her, and was struck by the new, spiritual beauty of her face.
‘What do you want of me?’ he asked, simply and seriously.
‘I want you to go to Moscow and beg Kitty’s pardon,’ said she.
‘You don’t want that,’ he replied.
He saw that she was saying what she forced herself to utter and not what she wished to say.
‘If you love me as you say you do,’ she whispered, ‘behave so that I may be at peace.’
His face brightened.
‘Don’t you know that you are all my life to me? . . . But peace I do not know, and can’t give to you. My whole being, my love . . . yes! I cannot think about you and about myself separately. You and I are one to me. And I do not see before us the possibility of peace either for me or for you. I see the possibility of despair, misfortune . . . or of happiness — what happiness! . . . Is it impossible?’ he added with his lips only, but she heard.
She exerted all the powers of her mind to say what she ought; but instead she fixed on him her eyes filled with love and did not answer at all.
‘This is it!’ he thought with rapture. ‘Just as I was beginning to despair, and when it seemed as though the end would never come . . . here it is! She loves me! She acknowledges it!’
‘Do this for me: never say such words to me, and let us be good friends.’ These were her words, but her eyes said something very different.
‘Friends we shall not be, you know that yourself; but whether we shall be the happiest or the most miserable of human beings . . . rests with you.’
She wished to say something, but he interrupted her.
‘I ask only one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now; but if even that is impossible, command me to disappear, and I will do it. You shall not see me if my presence is painful to you.’
‘I don’t want to drive you away.’
‘Only don’t change anything. Leave everything as it is!’ he said with trembling voice. ‘Here is your husband.’
Indeed, just at that moment Karenin, with his deliberate, ungraceful gait, entered the drawing-room.
He glanced at his wife and Vronsky, went up to the hostess, and having sat down with a cup of tea began talking in his deliberate and always clear tones, in his usual ironical way ridiculing somebody.
‘Your Hotel Rambouillet is in full muster,’ said he, glancing round the whole company, ‘the Graces and the Muses.’
But the Princess Betsy could not bear that tone of his: ‘sneering’, she called it in English: so, like a clever hostess, she at once led him into a serious conversation on universal military service. Karenin was immediately absorbed in the conversation, and began defending the new law very earnestly against the Princess Betsy, who attacked it.
Vronsky and Anna remained sitting at the little table.
‘This is becoming indecent!’ whispered a lady, indicating by a glance Vronsky, Anna, and Anna’s husband.
‘What did I tell you?’ replied Anna’s friend.
Not these two ladies alone, but nearly all those present in the drawing-room, even the Princess Myagkaya and Betsy herself, several times glanced across at the pair who had gone away from the general circle, as if their having done so disturbed the others. Only Karenin did not once glance that way and was not distracted from the interesting conversation in which he was engaged.
Noticing the unpleasant impression produced on every one, the Princess Betsy manoeuvred for some one else to take her place and to listen to Karenin, and she herself went up to Anna.
‘I am always amazed at your husband’s clearness and exactitude of expression,’ she said. ‘The most transcendental ideas become accessible to me when he speaks.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Anna, radiant with a smile of happiness and not understanding a single word of what Betsy was saying; and going across to the big table she joined in the general conversation.
After half an hour’s stay Karenin went up to his wife and suggested that they should go home together; but, without looking at him, she answered that she would stay to supper. Karenin bowed to the company and went away.
The Karenins’ fat old Tartar coachman, in his shiny leather coat, was finding it hard to control the near grey horse that had grown restive with cold, waiting before the portico. The footman stood holding open the carriage door. The hall-porter stood with his hand on the outer front door, Anna with her deft little hand was disengaging the lace of her sleeve which had caught on a hook of her fur coat, and with bent head was listening with delight to what Vronsky, who accompanied her, was saying.
‘Granted that you have not said anything! I don’t demand anything,’ he was saying, ‘but you know that it is not friendship I want! Only one happiness is possible for me in life, the word you so dislike — yes, love . . .’
‘Love,’ she slowly repeated to herself, and suddenly, while releasing the lace, she added aloud: ‘The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand,’ and she looked him in the face. ‘Au revoir!’
She gave him her hand, and with her quick elastic step went past the hall-porter and vanished into the carriage.
Her glance and the touch of her hand burnt him. He kissed the palm of his hand where she had touched it, and went home happy in the knowledge that in this one evening he had made more progress toward his aim than he had during the previous two months.
Chapter 8
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KARENIN did not see anything peculiar or improper in his wife’s conversing animatedly with Vronsky at a separate table, but he noticed that others in the drawing-room considered it peculiar and improper, therefore he also considered it improper, and decided to speak to his wife about it.
When he reached home he went to his study as usual, seated himself in his easy-chair, and opened a book on the Papacy at the place where his paper-knife was inserted. He read till one o’clock as was his wont, only now and then rubbing his high forehead and jerking his head as if driving something away. At the usual hour he rose and prepared for bed. Anna had not yet returned. With the book under his arm he went upstairs; but to-night, instead of his usual thoughts and calculations about his official affairs, his mind was full of his wife and of something unpleasant that had happened concerning her. Contrary to his habit he did not go to bed, but with his hands clasped behind his back started pacing up and down the rooms. He felt that he could not lie down, till he had thought over these newly-arisen circumstances.
When Karenin had decided to talk the matter over with his wife, it had seemed to him quite easy and simple to do so; but now, when he began considering how to approach her, the matter appeared very difficult and complicated.
He was not of a jealous disposition. Jealousy in his opinion insulted a wife, and a man should have confidence in his wife. Why he should have confidence — that is, a full conviction that his young wife would always love him — he never asked himself; but he felt no distrust, and therefore had confidence, and assured himself that it was right to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy is a shameful feeling, and that one ought to have confidence, had not been destroyed, he felt that he was face to face with something illogical and stupid, and he did not know what to do. Karenin was being confronted with life — with the possibility of his wife’s loving somebody else, and this seemed stupid and incomprehensible to him, because it was life itself. He had lived and worked all his days in official spheres, which deal with reflections of life, and every time he had knocked up against life itself he had stepped out of its way. He now experienced a sensation such as a man might feel who, while quietly crossing a bridge over an abyss, suddenly sees that the bridge is being taken to pieces and that he is facing the abyss. The abyss was real life; the bridge was the artificial life Karenin had been living. It was the first time that the possibility of his wife’s falling in love with anybody had occurred to him, and he was horrified.
He did not undress, but paced up and down with his even step on the resounding parquet floor of the dining-room, which was lit by one lamp, over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, where a light was reflected only from a recently painted portrait of himself which hung above the sofa, and on through her sitting-room, where two candles were burning, lighting up the portraits of her relatives and friends and the elegant knick-knacks, long familiar to him, on her writing-table. Through her room he reached the door of their bedroom and then turned back again.
From time to time he stopped, generally on the parquet floor of the lamp-lit dining-room, and thought: ‘Yes, it is necessary to decide and to stop it: to express my opinion of it and my decision.’ Then he turned back again. ‘But express what? What decision?’ he asked himself in the drawing-room, and could find no answer. ‘But after all,’ he reflected before turning into her room, ‘what is it that has happened? Nothing at all. She had a long talk with him — Well? What of that? Are there not plenty of men with whom a woman may talk? Besides . . . to be jealous is to degrade myself and her,’ he said to himself as he entered her sitting-room. But that consideration which formerly had weighed so much with him now had neither weight nor meaning. At the bedroom door he turned back, and as soon as he re-entered the dark drawing-room a voice seemed to whisper that it was not so, and that if others noticed, that showed that there must have been something for them to notice. And again he repeated to himself in the dining-room: ‘Yes, it is necessary to decide, and stop it, and express my opinion . . .’ And again in the drawing-room, at the turn into her room, he asked himself: ‘Decide what?’ and then, ‘What has happened?’ and he replied ‘Nothing,’ and remembered that jealousy is a feeling which insults a wife; but in the drawing-room he came again to the conviction that something had happened. His mind as well as his body performed a complete circle each time without arriving at anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her room.
Here as he looked at her table, at the malachite cover of her blotting-book and an unfinished letter that lay there, his thoughts suddenly underwent a change. He began thinking about her: of what she thought and felt. For the first time he vividly pictured to himself her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes; but the idea that she might and should have her own independent life appeared to him so dreadful that he hastened to drive it away. That was the abyss into which he feared to look. To put himself in thought and feeling into another being was a mental action foreign to Karenin. He considered such mental acts to be injurious and dangerous romancing.
‘And what is most terrible of all,’ thought he, ‘is that, just now, when my work is coming to completion’ (he was thinking of the project he was then carrying through), ‘when I need peace and all my powers of mind, just now this stupid anxiety falls on me. But what is to be done? I am not one of those who suffer anxiety and agitation and have not the courage to look them in the face!’
‘I must think it over, come to a decision, and throw it off,’ he said aloud. ‘The question of her feelings, of what has taken place or may take place in her soul, is not my business; it is the business of her conscience and belongs to religion,’ said he, feeling relieved at having found the formal category to which the newly-arisen circumstances rightly belonged.
‘Well then,’ thought he, ‘the question of her feelings and so on are questions for her conscience, which cannot concern me. My duty is clearly defined. As head of the family I am the person whose duty is to guide her, and who is therefore partly responsible; I must show her the danger which I see, warn her, and even use my authority. I must speak plainly to her.’
What he would say to his wife took clear shape in Karenin’s head. Thinking it over, he regretted having to expend his time and powers of mind on inconspicuous domestic affairs; but nevertheless, clearly and definitely, as though it were an official report, the form and sequence of the speech he had to make shaped itself in his mind. ‘I must make the following quite clear: First, the importance of public opinion and propriety; secondly, the religious meaning of marriage; thirdly, if necessary, I must refer to the harm that may result to our son; fourthly, allude to her own unhappiness.’ And interlacing his fingers, palms downwards, he stretched them and the joints cracked.
That movement — a bad habit of cracking his fingers — always tranquillized him and brought him back to that precision of mind which he now so needed. The sound of a carriage driving up to the front door was heard, and Karenin stood still in the middle of the room.
A woman’s steps were heard ascending the stairs. Karenin, ready to deliver his speech, stood pressing his interlaced fingers together, trying whether some of them would not crack again. One of the joints did crack.
By the sound of her light step on the stair he was aware of her approach and, though he was satisfied with his speech, he felt some apprehension of the coming explanations.