FORTY

PART FOUR
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Chapter 1
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THE Karenins, husband and wife, continued to live in the same house and to meet daily, but they were wholly estranged, Karenin made it a rule to see his wife every day, so as not to give the servants any grounds for making conjectures, but he avoided dining at home. Vronsky never came to the Karenins’ house, but Anna met him elsewhere and her husband knew it.
The situation was a torment to all three, and not one of them could have stood it for a single day but for the hope that it would change and that the whole matter was only a temporary, though painful, trial. Karenin expected the passion to pass, as everything passes; all would be forgotten and his name not dishonoured. Anna, who was responsible for the situation, and for whom among the three it was most painful bore it because she not only expected, but felt sure, that very soon everything would be settled and cleared up. She had not the least idea what would settle it, but was quite certain that it would now come very soon. Involuntarily submitting to her judgment, Vronsky too expected something, not dependent on him, to clear up all these difficulties.
In the middle of the winter he spent a very dull week. He had been chosen to act as guide to a foreign Prince, and was obliged to show him the sights of Petersburg. Vronsky had a distinguished appearance, possessed the art of carrying himself with respectful dignity, and was in the habit of associating with people of that class. That was why he was chosen to attend the Prince; but the task seemed a hard one to him. The Prince did not want to miss seeing anything about which he might be questioned at home and he also wanted to enjoy as many Russian amusements as possible; and Vronsky was obliged to accompany him in both cases. In the mornings they went sight-seeing, and in the evenings took part in the national amusements. The Prince enjoyed unusually good health even for a Prince, and by means of gymnastics and care of his body had developed his strength to such a degree that, in spite of the excess he indulged in when amusing himself, he looked as fresh as a big green shining cucumber. He had travelled a great deal, and considered that one of the chief advantages of the present convenient ways of communication was the easy access they afforded to national amusements. He had been to Spain, where he arranged serenades and became intimate with a Spanish woman who played the mandoline. In Switzerland he had shot a chamois, in England he had jumped hedges in a pink coat and shot two hundred pheasants for a bet. He had been in a harem in Turkey, ridden an elephant in India, and now in Russia he wanted a taste of distinctive Russian amusements.
Vronsky, who was, so to say, the Prince’s chief master of ceremonies, had great difficulty in organizing all the Russian amusements offered to the Prince by various people: trotting-races, pancakes, bear-hunting, and drives in three-horse sledges, gipsies, and Russian sprees with smashing of crockery. And the Prince imbibed the Russian spirit with the greatest ease, smashed trays full of crockery, made gipsy girls sit on his lap, and yet seemed to be always asking: ‘What next? Is this the whole of the Russian spirit?’
But, on the whole, of all the Russian amusements the Prince liked the French actresses, a ballet girl and white-seal champagne best. Vronsky was used to Princes, but whether it was that he himself had lately changed, or whether his intimacy with this Prince was too close, that week at any rate appeared very wearisome to him. All that week he felt like a man attending a lunatic and afraid for his own reason too. He was obliged to be on his guard the whole time not to deviate from the path of severe official respect, for fear of being insulted. The Prince’s manner toward the very people who, to Vronsky’s astonishment, were ready to go through fire and water to provide Russian amusements for him, was contemptuous. His opinion of Russian women, whom he wanted to study, more than once made Vronsky flush with indignation.
But the chief reason why the Prince’s presence oppressed Vronsky was that he saw himself reflected in the Prince, and what he saw in that mirror was not flattering to his vanity. The Prince was a very stupid, very healthy and very cleanly man — and nothing more. He was a gentleman, it is true, and Vronsky could not deny it. He was quiet and not cringing with those above him, free and simple with his equals, and contemptuously good-natured with his inferiors. Vronsky was the same, and considered it very meritorious to be so, but in his relations with the Prince he was the inferior and felt indignant with that condescendingly good-natured treatment.
‘Stupid ox! can I really be like that myself?’ he thought.
However this may have been, he parted from the Prince (who went on to Moscow) and received his thanks. Vronsky was very pleased to be rid of the embarrassing situation and the unpleasant mirror. He took leave of him at the railway station on the seventh day, on returning from a bear-hunt, after which there had been demonstrations of Russian ‘prowess’ all night.
Chapter 2
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ON returning home Vronsky found a note from Anna awaiting him. She wrote, ‘I am ill and unhappy. I cannot go out, neither can I go on any longer without seeing you. Come this evening; Alexis Alexandrovich is going to the Council and will remain there till ten.’ After wondering for a moment at the strangeness of her asking him straight out to come to her house in spite of her husband’s injunctions, he decided to go.
He had that winter been promoted to the rank of colonel, had left the regiment, and was living alone. Immediately after lunch he lay down on the sofa. Five minutes later the memory of the disreputable scenes at which he had been present during the last few days became jumbled and connected with pictures of Anna and a peasant who had played an important part as a beater at the bear-hunting; and Vronsky fell asleep. He woke up in the dark trembling with fear, and hurriedly lit a candle. ‘What has happened? What horrors I dreamt! Yes, yes, the peasant, the beater — I think he was small and dirty with a tangled beard — was stooping down and doing something or other, and suddenly began to say strange words in French. That is all there was in that dream,’ he thought. ‘But why did it seem so terrible?’ He vividly recalled the peasant and the incomprehensible words that the man had uttered, and a shudder of terror ran down his back. ‘What nonsense!’ he thought, glancing at his watch. It was already half-past eight.
He rang for his valet, dressed hurriedly, and went out into the porch, having quite forgotten his dream and feeling worried only by the fact that he was late. As he drove up to the Karenins’ porch he again glanced at his watch and saw that it was ten minutes to nine. A high narrow brougham with a pair of grey horses stood before the front door. ‘She was coming to me,’ thought Vronsky; ‘that would have been better. It is unpleasant for me to enter this house: But no matter! I cannot hide,’ he thought; and with the manner, habitual to him since childhood, of one 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 over his arm called to the coachman. Vronsky, though not in the habit of noticing details, noticed the look of surprise on the man’s face. In the doorway he nearly knocked up against Karenin. The gaslight lit up Karenin’s worn, bloodless face beneath the black hat, and his white tie showing from beneath the beaver collar of his overcoat. His dull, expressionless eyes were fixed on Vronsky’s face. Vronsky bowed, and Karenin silently moved his lips, lifted his hand to his hat, and went out. Vronsky saw him get into the carriage without looking round, take the rug and a pair of opera-glasses through the carriage window; then he disappeared in the darkness. Vronsky entered the hall. His brows were knit and his eyes shone with a proud, angry light.
‘That is a nice position!’ he thought. ‘If he struggled, if he defended his honour, I could act and could express my feelings; but this weakness or meanness. . . . He puts me in the position of an impostor — which I did not and do not mean to be.’
Since the explanation with Anna in the Vrede Gardens Vronsky’s ideas had changed. Involuntarily submitting to Anna’s weakness, who, ready in advance to accept anything, gave herself up to him entirely and expected him to decide her fate, he had long ceased to imagine that their union could end in the way he had then expected. His ambitious plans had receded to the background, and feeling that he had come out of the range of activity in which everything was definite, he completely gave himself up to his passion, and that passion bound him closer and closer to her.
While still in the hall he heard her retreating footsteps, and knew that she had been waiting and listening for him, but had now gone back to the drawing-room.
‘No!’ she cried when she saw him, and at the first sound of her voice tears filled her eyes. ‘No! If things go on like this for long, it will happen much, much sooner!’
‘What, my dear?’
‘What! I wait in torment, one hour, two hours. . . . No, no! I won’t. . . . I cannot quarrel with you. I expect you could not help it. No, I won’t!’
She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in, actual existence) with his real self.
Chapter 3
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‘YOU met him?’ she asked when they sat down at a table under the lamp. ‘That is your punishment for being late.’
‘Yes, but how did it happen? He had to be at the Council!’
‘He had been and had come back, and afterwards went somewhere else. But never mind: don’t speak about it. Where have you been? With the Prince all the time?’
She knew all the details of his life. He wished to say that he had been up all night and had fallen asleep, but seeing her excited and happy face he felt ashamed. So he said that he had to go and report the Prince’s departure.
‘But now that is all over? He has gone?’
‘Yes, thank heaven! That is all over. You would hardly believe how intolerable it was.’
‘Why? Is it not the kind of life all you young men lead?’ she said, frowning; and taking up her crochet-work from the table began disentangling the hook without looking at Vronsky.
‘I have long since abandoned that kind of life,’ he said, wondering at the change in her face and trying to penetrate its meaning. ‘And I must own,’ he went on, smiling and showing his compact row of teeth, ‘that I seem to have been looking in a mirror the whole of this week while watching that kind of life, and it was very unpleasant.’ She held her work in her hands, without crocheting, gazing at him with a strange, glittering, unfriendly look.
‘Lisa called on me this morning; they still visit me in spite of the Countess Lydia Ivanovna,’ she said, ‘and she told me about your Athenian party. How disgusting!’
‘I was only going to say that . . .’
She interrupted him.
‘It was Thérèse, whom you knew before?’
‘I was going to say . . .’
‘How horrid you men are! How is it that you can forget that a woman cannot forget these things?’ she said, getting more and more heated and thereby betraying the cause of her irritation. ‘Especially a woman who cannot know your life. What do I know? What did I know? Only what you tell me. And what proof have I that you tell me the truth?’
‘Anna, you hurt me. Don’t you believe me? Have I not told you that I have not a thought that I would hide from you?’
‘Yes, yes!’ she said, evidently trying to drive away her jealous thoughts. ‘But if you only knew how hard it is for me! I believe you, I do believe you. . . . Well, what were you going to say?’
But he could not at once remember what he had wished to say. These fits of jealousy which had lately begun to repeat themselves more and more frequently, horrified him and, however much he tried to hide the fact, they made him feel colder toward her, although he knew that the jealousy was caused by love for him. How often he had told himself that to be loved by her was happiness! and now that she loved him as only a woman can for whom love outweighs all else that is good in life, he was much further from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past. She was not at all such as he had first seen her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out, and as she spoke of the actress there was a malevolent look on her face which distorted its expression. He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it. Yet in spite of this he felt that though at first while his love was strong he would have been able, had he earnestly desired it, to pull that love out of his heart — yet now when he imagined, as he did at that moment, that he felt no love for her, he knew that the bond between them could not be broken.
‘Well, what were you going to tell me about the Prince? I have driven away the demon,’ she added. They spoke of jealousy as ‘the demon’. ‘Yes, what had you begun telling me about the Prince? What was it you found so hard to bear?’
‘Oh, it was intolerable!’ he said, trying to pick up the lost thread of what he had in his mind. ‘He does not improve on nearer acquaintance. If I am to describe him, he is a finely-bred animal, like those that get prizes at cattle-shows, and nothing more,’ he concluded in a tone of vexation which awoke her interest.
‘Oh, but in what way?’ she rejoined. ‘Anyhow he must have seen much, and is well educated. . . .’
‘It is quite a different kind of education — that education of theirs. One can see that he has been educated only to have the right to despise education, as they despise everything except animal pleasures.’
‘But don’t all of you like those animal pleasures?’ she remarked, and he again noticed on her face that dismal look which evaded his.
‘Why do you take his part so?’ he said, smiling.
‘I don’t take his part, and it is a matter of complete indifference to me, but I should say that as you did not like these pleasures you might have declined to go. But it gives you pleasure to see Thérèse dressed as Eve . . .’
‘Again! Again the demon!’ said Vronsky, taking the hand which she had put on the table, and kissing it.
‘Yes, but I can’t help it! You don’t know how I have suffered while waiting for you! I don’t think I have a jealous nature. I am not jealous; I trust you when you are here near me; but when you are away, living your life, which I don’t understand . . .’
She turned away from him and, managing at last to disentangle her hook, with the aid of her forefinger began to draw the stitches of white wool, shining in the lamplight, through each other, the delicate wrist moving rapidly and nervously within her embroidered cuff.
‘Well, and what happened? Where did you meet Alexis Alexandrovich?’ she suddenly asked, her voice ringing unnaturally.
‘I knocked up against him in the doorway.’
‘And he bowed like this to you?’ She drew up her face, half closed her eyes and quickly changed the expression of her face, folding her hands; and Vronsky saw at once upon her beautiful face the very look with which Karenin had bowed to him. He smiled, and she laughed merrily, with that delightful laughter from the chest which was one of her special charms.
‘I can’t at all understand him,’ said Vronsky. ‘Had he after your explanation in the country broken with you, had he challenged me, yes! But this sort of thing I do not understand. How can he put up with such a position? He suffers, that is evident.’
‘He?’ she said, sarcastically. ‘He is perfectly contented.’
‘Why are we all tormenting each other when everything might be so comfortable?’
‘But not he! As if I did not know him, and the falsehood with which he is saturated! . . . As if it were possible for anyone to live as he is living with me! He understands and feels nothing. Could a man who has any feelings live in the same house with his guilty wife? Could he talk to her and call her by her Christian name?’ And without meaning to, she again mimicked him: ‘Ma chère Anna; my dear!’
‘He is not a man, not a human being. He is . . . a doll! No one else knows it, but I do. Oh, if I were he, I should long since have killed, have torn in pieces, a wife such as I, and not have called her “Ma chère Anna”. He is not a man but an official machine. He does not understand that I am your wife, that he is a stranger, a superfluous . . . But don’t let us talk about him.’
‘You are unjust, unjust, my dear,’ said Vronsky, trying to pacify her. ‘But still, don’t let us talk about him. Tell me what you have been doing? What is the matter with you? What is that illness of yours? What does the doctor say?’
She looked at him with quizzical joy. She had evidently remembered other comical and unpleasant sides of her husband’s character and waited for an opportunity to mention them.
He continued:
‘I expect it is not illness at all, but only your condition. When is it to be?’
The mocking light in her eyes faded, but a smile of a different kind — the knowledge of something unknown to him, and gentle sadness — replaced the former expression of her face.
‘Soon, soon. You were saying that our position was full of torment and should be put an end to. If you only knew how hard it is on me! What would I not give to be able to love you freely and boldly! I should not be tortured, I would not torment you with my jealousy. . . . It will happen soon, but not in the way you think.’ And at the thought of how it was going to happen she felt so sorry for herself that the tears came into her eyes and she could not continue. She laid her hand, sparkling with rings and the whiteness of the skin, on his sleeve.
‘It will not happen as we think. I did not want to tell you, but you make me do it. Soon, very soon, everything will get disentangled and we shall be able to rest and not torment each other any more.’
‘I do not understand,’ he said, though he did understand.
‘You were asking when? Soon, and I shall not survive it. Don’t interrupt,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I shall die, and I am very glad that I shall die: I shall find deliverance and deliver you.’
The tears ran down her cheeks; he stooped over her hand and began kissing it, trying to hide the emotion which he knew to be groundless but could not master.
‘That is right, that is better,’ she said, firmly pressing his hand. ‘This is all, all that remains to us.’
He recovered and lifted his head.
‘What rubbish, what senseless rubbish you are talking!’
‘No, it is not! It is true.’
‘What is true?’
‘That I am going to die; I have had a dream.’
‘A dream?’ Vronsky instantly remembered the peasant of his dream.
‘Yes, a dream,’ she said. ‘I dreamed it a long time ago. I thought I had run into my bedroom, that I had to fetch or find out something there: you know how it happens in dreams,’ and her eyes dilated with horror. ‘And in the bedroom there was something standing in the corner.’
‘Oh what nonsense! How can one believe? . . .’
But she would not allow him to stop her. What she was saying was of too much importance to her.
‘And that something turned round, and I saw it was a peasant with a rough beard, small and dreadful. I wanted to run away, but he stooped over a sack and was fumbling about in it. . . .’
She showed how he fumbled in the sack. Her face was full of horror. And Vronsky, remembering his dream, felt the same horror filling his soul.
‘He fumbles about and mutters French words, so quickly, so quickly, and with a burr, you know: “Il faut le battre, le fer: le broyer, le pétrir. . . .” [“It must be beaten, the iron: pound it, knead it. . . .”] And in my horror I tried to wake, but I woke still in a dream and began asking myself what it could mean; and Korney says to me: “You will die in childbed, in childbed, ma’am. . . .” Then I woke.’
‘What nonsense, what nonsense!’ said Vronsky, but he felt that there was no conviction in his voice.
‘Well, don’t let us talk about it. Ring the bell, I will order tea. But wait, it won’t be long and I . . .’
But suddenly she stopped. The expression of her face changed instantaneously. The horror and agitation were replaced by an expression of quiet, serious, and blissful attention. He could not understand the meaning of this change. She had felt a new life quickening within her.