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SEVENTEEN

Chapter 9

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ANNA walked in with bowed head, playing with the tassels of her hood. Her face shone with a vivid glow, but it was not a joyous glow — it resembled the terrible glow of a conflagration on a dark night. On seeing her husband she lifted her head and, as if awakening from sleep, smiled.
‘You’re not in bed? What a wonder!’ she said, throwing off her hood, and without pausing she went on to her dressing-room. ‘Alexis Alexandrovich, it’s high time!’ she added from beyond the door.
‘Anna, I must have a talk with you.’
‘With me?’ she said with surprise, coming back from the other room and looking at him. ‘What is it? What about?’ she asked, seating herself. ‘Well, let us have a talk, if it is so important. But it would be better to go to bed.’
Anna said what came into her head, and hearing her own words was astonished at her capacity for deception. How simple and natural her words sounded, and how really it seemed as if she were merely sleepy! She felt herself clothed in an impenetrable armour of lies and that some unseen power was helping and supporting her.
‘Anna, I must warn you,’ said he.
‘Warn me?’ she asked; ‘what about?’
She looked so naturally and gaily at him, that one who did not know her as her husband did could not have noticed anything strange in the intonation or the meaning of her words. But for him, who knew her — knew that when he went to bed five minutes late she noticed it and asked the reason — knew that she had always immediately told him all her joys, pleasures and sorrows — for him, her reluctance to notice his state of mind, or to say a word about herself, meant much. He saw that the depths of her soul, till now always open, were closed to him. More than that, he knew from her tone that she was not ashamed of this, but seemed to be saying frankly: ‘Yes, it is closed, and so it should be and will be in future.’ He now felt like a man who on coming home finds his house locked against him. ‘But perhaps the key can still be found,’ thought Karenin.
‘I wish to warn you,’ he said in low tones, ‘that you may, by indiscretion and carelessness, give the world occasion to talk about you. Your too animated conversation to-night with Count Vronsky’ (he pronounced the name firmly and with quiet deliberation) ‘attracted attention.’
As he spoke he looked at her laughing eyes, terrible to him now in their impenetrability, and felt the uselessness and idleness of his words.
‘You are always like that,’ she replied, as if not understanding him at all, and intentionally taking notice only of his last words. ‘One day you dislike my being dull, another day my being happy. I was not dull. Does that offend you?’
Karenin started and bent his hands to crack his fingers.
‘Oh, please don’t crack your fingers! I dislike it so!’ she said.
‘Anna, is this you?’ said he softly, making an effort and refraining from moving his hands.
‘But whatever is the matter?’ she asked in a tone of comical surprise and sincerity. ‘What do you want of me?’
Karenin paused and rubbed his forehead and eyes. He felt that instead of doing what he had meant to do and warning his wife that she was making a mistake in the eyes of the world, he was involuntarily getting excited about a matter which concerned her conscience, and was struggling against some barrier of his imagination.
‘This is what I intended to say,’ he continued coldly and calmly, ‘and I ask you to listen to me. As you know, I consider jealousy an insulting and degrading feeling and will never allow myself to be guided by it; but there are certain laws of propriety which one cannot disregard with impunity. I did not notice it this evening, but, judging by the impression created, all present noticed that you behaved and acted not quite as was desirable.’
‘Really, I don’t understand at all,’ said Anna, shrugging her shoulders. ‘It is all the same to him!’ she said to herself. ‘But Society noticed, and that disturbs him!’ ‘You are not well, Alexis Alexandrovich!’ she added, rose and was about to pass out of the room, but he moved forward as if wishing to stop her.
His face looked plainer and gloomier than she had ever yet seen it. Anna stopped and, throwing back her head and bending it to one side, she began with her quick hands to take out her hairpins.
‘Well, I’m listening! What next?’ said she quietly and mockingly. ‘I am even listening with interest, because I should like to understand what it is all about.’
As she spoke she wondered at her quietly natural tone and at her correct choice of words.
‘I have not the right to inquire into all the details of your feelings, and in general I consider it useless and even harmful to do so,’ began Karenin. ‘By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed. Your feelings concern your own conscience, but it is my duty to you, to myself and to God, to point out to you your duties. Our lives are bound together not by men but by God. This bond can only be broken by a crime, and that kind of crime brings its punishment.’
‘I don’t understand anything. . . . Oh dear! And as ill-luck will have it, I am dreadfully sleepy!’ said she, while with deft fingers she felt for the remaining pins in her hair.
‘Anna, for God’s sake don’t talk like that!’ he said mildly. ‘Perhaps I am mistaken, but believe me that what I am saying I say equally for my own sake and for yours. I am your husband, and I love you.’
For an instant her head had drooped and the mocking spark in her eyes had died away, but the word ‘love’ aroused her again. ‘Love!’ she thought, ‘as if he can love! If he had never heard people talk of love, he would never have wanted that word. He does not know what love is.’
‘Alexis Alexandrovich, I really do not understand,’ she replied. ‘Explain what you consider . . .’
‘Allow me to finish. I love you. But I am not talking of myself. The chief persons concerned are our son and yourself. I repeat — perhaps my words may seem quite superfluous to you; perhaps they result from a mistake of mine. In that case I ask your pardon! But if you feel that there are any grounds, however slight, I beg you to reflect, and if your heart prompts you to tell me . . .’
Karenin did not notice that he was saying something quite different from what he had prepared.
‘I have nothing to say. Besides . . .’ she added, rapidly, and hardly repressing a smile, ‘it really is bedtime.’
Karenin sighed, and without saying anything more went into the bedroom.
When she went there he was already in bed. His lips were sternly compressed and his eyes did not look at her. Anna got into her bed, and every moment expected that he would address her. She was afraid of what he would say, and yet wished to hear it. But he remained silent. She lay waiting and motionless for a long time, and then forgot him. She was thinking of another; she saw him, and felt her heart fill with excitement and guilty joy at the thought. Suddenly she heard an even, quiet, nasal sound like whistling. For a moment the sound he emitted seemed to have startled Karenin, and he stopped; but, after he had breathed twice, the whistling recommenced with fresh and calm regularity.
‘It’s late, it’s late,’ she whispered to herself, and smiled. For a long time she lay still with wide-open eyes, the brightness of which it seemed to her she could herself see in the darkness.

Chapter 10

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FROM that time a new life began for Karenin and his wife. Nothing particular happened. Anna went into Society as before, frequently visiting the Princess Betsy, and she met Vronsky everywhere. Karenin noticed this, but could do nothing. She met all his efforts to bring about an explanation by presenting an impenetrable wall of merry perplexity. Externally things seemed as before, but their intimate relations with one another were completely changed. Karenin, strong as he was in his official activities, felt himself powerless here. Like an ox he waited submissively with bowed head for the pole-axe which he felt was raised above him. Each time he began to think about it, he felt that he must try again, that by kindness, tenderness, and persuasion there was still a hope of saving her and obliging her to bethink herself. Every day he prepared himself to have a talk with her. But each time he began to speak with her he felt the same spirit of evil and falsehood which had taken possession of her master him also, and he neither said the things he meant to, nor spoke in the tone he had meant to adopt. He spoke involuntarily in his habitual half-bantering tone which seemed to make fun of those who said such things seriously; and in that tone it was impossible to say what had to be said to her.

Chapter 11

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THAT which for nearly a year had been Vronsky’s sole and exclusive desire, supplanting all his former desires: that which for Anna had been an impossible, dreadful, but all the more bewitching dream of happiness, had come to pass. Pale, with trembling lower jaw, he stood over her, entreating her to be calm, himself not knowing why or how.
‘Anna, Anna,’ he said in trembling voice, ‘Anna, for God’s sake!’
But the louder he spoke the lower she drooped her once proud, bright, but now dishonoured head, and she writhed, slipping down from the sofa on which she sat to the floor at his feet. She would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.
‘My God! Forgive me!’ she said, sobbing and pressing Vronsky’s hand to her breast.
She felt so guilty, so much to blame, that it only remained for her to humble herself and ask to be forgiven; but she had no one in the world now except him, so that even her prayer for forgiveness was addressed to him. Looking at him, she felt her degradation physically, and could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel when looking at the body he has deprived of life. The body he had deprived of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something frightful and revolting in the recollection of what had been paid for with this terrible price of shame. The shame she felt at her spiritual nakedness communicated itself to him. But in spite of the murderer’s horror of the body of his victim, that body must be cut in pieces and hidden away, and he must make use of what he has obtained by the murder.
Then, as the murderer desperately throws himself on the body, as though with passion, and drags it and hacks it, so Vronsky covered her face and shoulders with kisses.
She held his hand and did not move. Yes! These kisses were what had been bought by their shame! ‘Yes, and this hand, which will always be mine, is the hand of my accomplice.’ She lifted his hand and kissed it. He knelt down and tried to see her face, but she hid it and did not speak. At last, as though mastering herself, she sat up and pushed him away. Her face was as beautiful as ever, but all the more piteous.
‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘I have nothing but you left. Remember that.’
‘I cannot help remembering what is life itself to me! For one moment of that bliss . . .’
‘What bliss?’ she said with disgust and horror, and the horror was involuntarily communicated to him. ‘For heaven’s sake, not another word!’
She rose quickly and moved away from him.
‘Not another word!’ she repeated, and with a look of cold despair, strange to him, she left him. She felt that at that moment she could not express in words her feeling of shame, joy, and horror at this entrance on a new life, and she did not wish to vulgarize that feeling by inadequate words. Later on, the next day and the next, she still could not find words to describe all the complexity of those feelings, and could not even find thoughts with which to reflect on all that was in her soul.
She said to herself: ‘No, I can’t think about it now; later, when I am calmer.’ But that calm, necessary for reflection, never came. Every time the thought of what she had done, and of what was to become of her and of what she should do, came to her mind, she was seized with horror and drove these thoughts away.
‘Not now; later, when I am calmer!’ she said to herself.
But in her dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position appeared to her in all its shocking nakedness. One dream she had almost every night. She dreamt that both at once were her husbands, and lavished their caresses on her. Alexis Alexandrovich wept, kissing her hands, saying: ‘How beautiful it is now!’ and Alexis Vronsky was there too, and he also was her husband. And she was surprised that formerly this had seemed impossible to her, and laughingly explained to them how much simpler it really was, and that they were both now contented and happy. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she woke from it filled with horror.

Chapter 12

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WHEN Levin first returned from Moscow, and while he still started and blushed every time he remembered the disgrace of the refusal, he had said to himself, ‘I blushed and started like this when I was ploughed in physics, and had to remain in the second class; and in the same way I felt myself lost when I made a mess of my sister’s affair that had been entrusted to me. And what happened? Now that years have passed, when I remember it, I am surprised that it could have grieved me so much. So it will be with this grief. Time will pass, and I shall become indifferent.’
But three months passed and he had not become indifferent to it, and to think of it still hurt him as it had done in the first days. He could not find peace, because he had so long dreamed of family life and felt so ripe for it, but was still unmarried and further than ever from marriage.
He himself felt painfully what all those around him felt too, that it is not good for a man of his age to be alone. He remembered how, just before leaving for Moscow, he had said to Nicholas, his cowman, a naïve peasant with whom he liked to talk: ‘Well, Nicholas, I want to get married,’ and how Nicholas had promptly replied, as on a matter about which there could be no doubt: ‘And it’s high time, Constantine Dmitrich.’ But now he was further from marriage than ever. The place was unoccupied, and when in imagination he tried to put one of the girls he knew there, he felt that it was quite impossible. Moreover, the memory of her refusal, and the part he had played in it, tormented him with shame. However much he told himself that he was not at all to blame in that matter, the memory of it, together with other shameful memories, made him start and blush. There had been in his past, as in that of every man, actions which he realized were bad, and for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the recollections of those bad actions did not torment him nearly as much as these trivial yet shameful memories. These wounds never closed up. And among these recollections stood the memory of her refusal and the pitiful rôle he must have played in the eyes of the others that evening. But time and work told. The painful memories became more and more covered over by the commonplace but important events of country life. Every week he thought less and less about Kitty. He waited impatiently to hear that she was married or was getting married soon, hoping that such news, like the drawing of an aching tooth, would quite cure him.
Meanwhile spring had come, a glorious steady spring, without the expectations and disappointments spring usually brings. It was one of these rare springs which plants, animals, and men alike rejoice in. This lovely spring roused Levin still more and confirmed him in the determination completely to renounce the past in order to fashion his solitary life firmly and independently. Though he had not carried out many of the plans with which he had returned to the country from Moscow, he had held to the most important one, that of living a pure life, and he was not experiencing the shame which used to torment him when he had fallen, but was able to look people boldly in the face. Already in February he had received a letter from Mary Nikolavna to say that his brother Nicholas’s health was getting worse, but that he would not submit to any treatment. In consequence of this news Levin went to Moscow, saw his brother, and managed to persuade him to consult a doctor and go to a watering-place abroad. He was so successful in persuading his brother, and in lending him money for the journey without irritating him, that he was satisfied with himself in this respect. Besides his agricultural pursuits, which required special attention in spring, and besides reading, Levin had another occupation. He had that winter begun writing a book on agriculture, the basis of which was that the character of the labourer was treated as a definite factor, like climate and soil, and that therefore the conclusions of agricultural science should be deduced not from data supplied by climate and soil only, but from data of climate, soil, and the immutable character of the labourer. So that in spite of his solitary life, or rather because of it, his time was completely filled up; only occasionally he felt an unsatisfied desire to share with some one besides Agatha Mikhaylovna the thoughts that wandered through his brain — for even with her he often discussed physics, agricultural theories, and especially philosophy, which last was her favourite subject.
The spring had set in late. During the last weeks of Lent the weather had been clear and frosty. It thawed in the sunshine by day, but at night the thermometer went down to sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. The snow was covered with a crust of ice so thick that carts could pass even where there were no roads. Easter found snow still on the ground; but on Easter Monday a warm wind began to blow, the clouds gathered, and for three days and nights warm stormy rain poured down. On the Thursday the wind fell and a thick grey mist rose as if to hide the secret of the changes nature was carrying on. Beneath the mist the snow-waters rushed down, the ice on the river cracked and moved, and the turbid, foaming torrents flowed quicker, till on the first Sunday after Easter toward evening the mists dissolved, the clouds broke into fleecy cloudlets and dispersed, the sky cleared, and real spring was there. In the morning the bright rising sun quickly melted the thin ice on the water and the warm air all around vibrated with the vapour given off by the awakening earth. Last year’s grass grew green again and new blades came up like needle-points, buds swelled on the guelder-rose and currant bushes and on the sticky, spicy birch trees, and among the golden catkins and on the willow branches the bees began to hum. The unseen larks burst into song above the velvety fresh green and the frozen stubble, the peewits began to cry above the water brought down by the storm and still flooding the low-lying places and marshes, and high up the cranes and geese flew, uttering their spring call. The cattle, who had lost all but a few patches of their winter coats, began to low in the meadows; the crooked-legged lambs began to play round their bleating mothers, who were losing their wool; swift-footed children began to run along the quickly-drying paths marked with imprints of bare feet, the merry voices of women who were bleaching their linen began to chatter by the ponds, and the axes of peasants, getting ready their wooden ploughs and harrows, clicked in the yards.
The real spring had come.