by Leo Tolstoy
'The shame and disgrace of Alexei Alexandrovich and of Seryozha, and my own terrible shame - death will save it all. To die - and he will repent, pity, love and suffer for me.' With a fixed smile of compassion for herself, she sat in the chair, taking off and putting on the rings on her left hand, vividly imagining from all sides his feelings after her death.
Approaching steps, his steps, distracted her. As if occupied with arranging her rings, she did not even turn to him.
He went up to her, took her hand and said softly:
'Anna, let's go the day after tomorrow, if you like. I agree to everything.'
She was silent.
'What is it?' he asked.
'You know yourself,' she said, and at the same moment, unable to restrain herself any longer, she burst into sobs.
'Leave me, leave me!' she repeated between sobs. 'I'll go away tomorrow ... I'll do more. What am I? A depraved woman. A stone around your neck. I don't want to torment you, I don't! I'll release you. You don't love me, you love another woman!'
Vronsky implored her to calm herself and assured her that there was not the shadow of a reason for her jealousy, that he had never stopped and never would stop loving her, that he loved her more than ever.
'Anna, why torment yourself and me like this?' he said, kissing her hands. There was tenderness in his face now, and it seemed to her that she heard the sound of tears in his voice and felt their moisture on her hand. And instantly Anna's desperate jealousy changed to a desperate, passionate tenderness; she embraced him and covered his head and neck and hands with kisses.
XXV
Feeling that their reconciliation was complete, in the morning Anna briskly began preparing for departure. Though it had not been decided whether they would go on Monday or on Tuesday, since they had kept yielding to each other the night before, Anna actively prepared for departure, now completely indifferent to whether they left a day earlier or later. She was standing in her room over an open trunk, sorting things, when he, already dressed, came into her room earlier than usual.
'I'm going to see maman right now. She can send me the money through Yegorov. And tomorrow I'll be ready to leave.'
Good as her state of mind was, the mention of going to his mother's country house stung her.
'No, I won't be ready myself,' she said, and at once thought, 'So he could have arranged to do it the way I wanted.' 'No, do it the way you wanted. Go to the dining room, I'll come presently, as soon as I've sorted out the things I don't need,' she said, putting something else over Annushka's arm, where a pile of clothes already hung.
Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came out to the dining room.
'You wouldn't believe how sick I am of these rooms,' she said, sitting down beside him over her coffee. 'There's nothing more terrible than these chambres garnies.* They have no face to them, no soul. This clock, these curtains, above all this wallpaper - a nightmare. I think of Vozdvizhenskoe as a promised land. You're not sending the horses yet?'
'No, they'll go after us. Are you going out somewhere?'
'I wanted to go to Mrs Wilson, to take her some dresses. So it's tomorrow for certain?' she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her face changed.
* Furnished rooms.
Vronsky's valet came to ask for a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg. There was nothing special in Vronsky's receiving a telegram, but he, as if wishing to hide something from her, said that the receipt was in the study and quickly turned to her.
'I'll certainly be done with everything by tomorrow.'
'Who was the telegram from?' she asked, not listening to him.
'Stiva,' he answered reluctantly.
'Why didn't you show it to me? What secrets can there be between Stiva and me?'
Vronsky called the valet back and told him to bring the telegram.
'I didn't want to show it because Stiva has a passion for sending telegrams. Why send telegrams if nothing's been decided?'
'About the divorce?'
'Yes, but he writes: "Unable to obtain anything yet. Decisive answer promised in a day or two." Read here.'
With trembling hands Anna took the telegram and read the same thing Vronsky had said. At the end there was also added: 'Little hope, but will do everything possible and impossible.'
'I said yesterday that I'm totally indifferent to when I get the divorce, or even whether I get it at all,' she said, flushing. 'There was no need to hide it from me.' And she thought, 'In the same way he can and does conceal his correspondence with women from me.'
'And Yashvin wanted to come this morning with Voitov,' said Vronsky. 'It seems he's won everything from Pevtsov, even more than he can pay - about sixty thousand.'
'No,' she said, irritated that by this change of subject he should make it so obvious to her that she was irritated, 'why do you think this news interests me so much that you even have to conceal it? I said I don't want to think about it, and I wish you were as little interested in it as I am.'
'I'm interested because I like clarity,' he said.
'Clarity is not in form but in love,' she said, getting more and more irritated, not by his words but by the tone of calm tranquillity in which he spoke. 'What do you want that for?'
'My God,' he thought, wincing, 'again about love.'
'You know what for: for you and for the children to come,' he said.
'There won't be any children.'
'That's a great pity,' he said.
'You need it for the children, but you don't think about me?' she said, completely forgetting or not hearing that he had said 'for you and for the children'.
The question about the possibility of having children had long been in dispute and it irritated her. She explained his wish to have children by the fact that he did not value her beauty.
'Ah, I did say "for you". For you most of all,' he repeated, wincing as if from pain, 'because I'm sure that the greater part of your irritation comes from the uncertainty of your situation.'
'Yes, now he's stopped pretending and I can see all his cold hatred of me,' she thought, not listening to his words, but gazing with horror at the cold and cruel judge who looked out of his eyes, taunting her.
'That's not the cause,' she said, 'and I do not even understand how the fact that I am completely in your power can be a cause of irritation, as you put it. What is uncertain in my situation? On the contrary.'
'It's a great pity you don't want to understand,' he interrupted her, stubbornly wishing to express his thought. 'The uncertainty consists in the fact that to you it seems I'm free.'
'Concerning that you may be perfectly at ease,' she said and, turning away, began to drink her coffee.
She raised her cup, holding out her little finger, and brought it to her lips. After taking several sips, she glanced at him and, from the expression on his face, clearly understood that he was disgusted by her hand, and her gesture, and the sound her lips made.
'I am perfectly indifferent to what your mother thinks and how she wants to get you married,' she said, setting the cup down with a trembling hand.
'But we're not talking about that.'
'Yes, precisely about that. And believe me, a woman with no heart, whether she's old or not, your mother or someone else's, is of no interest to me, and I do not care to know her.'
'Anna, I beg you not to speak disrespectfully of my mother.'
'A woman whose heart cannot tell her what makes for the happiness and honour of her son, is a woman with no heart.'
'I repeat my request: do not speak disrespectfully of my mother, whom I respect,' he said, raising his voice and looking sternly at her.
She did not reply. Gazing intently at him, at his face, his hands, she remembered in all its details the scene of yesterday's reconciliation and his passionate caresses. 'Those caresses, exactly the same as he has lavished, and will lavish, and wants to lavish on other women,' she thought.
'You don't love your mother. It's all words, words, words!' she said, looking at him w
ith hatred.
'In that case, we must...'
'We must decide, and I have decided,' she said and was about to leave, but just then Yashvin came into the room. Anna greeted him and stopped.
Why, when there was a storm in her soul and she felt she was standing at a turning point in her life that might have terrible consequences, why at such a moment she should have to pretend in front of a stranger, who would learn everything sooner or later anyway, she did not know; but having instantly calmed the storm within her, she sat down and began talking with the visitor.
'Well, how are things? Did you get what was owed you?' she asked Yashvin.
'Oh, things are all right. It seems I won't be getting the whole sum, and I have to leave on Wednesday. And when are you leaving?' said Yashvin, narrowing his eyes and glancing at Vronsky, obviously guessing that a quarrel had taken place.
'The day after tomorrow, I think,' said Vronsky.
'You've been intending to for a long time, though.'
'But now it's decided,' said Anna, looking straight into Vronsky's eyes, with a stare meant to tell him that he should not even think of the possibility of a reconciliation.
'Aren't you sorry for this poor Pevtsov?' she went on talking with Yashvin.
'I've never asked myself whether I'm sorry or not, Anna Arkadyevna. Just as in war you don't ask whether you're sorry or not. My whole fortune is here,' he pointed to his side pocket, 'and I'm a rich man now. But tonight I'll go to the club and maybe leave it a beggar. The one who sits down with me also wants to leave me without a shirt, as I do him. So we struggle, and that's where the pleasure lies.'
'Well, and if you were married,' said Anna, 'how would your wife feel?'
Yashvin laughed.
'That must be why I never married and never wanted to.'
'And Helsingfors?' said Vronsky, entering the conversation, and he glanced at the smiling Anna.
Meeting his glance, Anna's face suddenly assumed a coldly stern expression, as if she were telling him: 'It's not forgotten. It's as it was.'
'Can you have been in love?' she said to Yashvin.
'Oh, Lord, more than once! But you see, one man can sit down to cards, but be able to get up when the time comes for a rendezvous. Whereas I can be busy with love, but not be late for a game in the evening. That's how I arrange it.'
'No, I'm not asking about that, but about the present.' She was going to say 'Helsingfors', but did not want to say the word Vronsky had said.
Voitov came, the purchaser of the stallion. Anna got up and walked out.
Before leaving the house, Vronsky came to her room. She was about to pretend to be looking for something on the table but, ashamed of pretending, she looked straight into his face with cold eyes.
'What do you want?' she asked him in French.
'Gambetta's papers. I've sold him,' he replied, in a tone that said more clearly than words, 'I have no time to talk, and it gets us nowhere.'
'I'm not guilty before her in anything,' he thought. 'If she wants to punish herself, tant pis pour elle.' * But, as he went out, he thought she said something, and his heart was suddenly shaken with compassion for her.
'What, Anna?' he asked.
'Nothing,' she replied in the same cold and calm voice.
'If it's nothing, then tant pis,' he thought, growing cold again, and he turned and went out. As he was leaving, he saw her face in the mirror, pale, with trembling lips. He would have liked to stop and say something comforting to her, but his legs carried him out of the room before he could think of what to say. He spent the whole day away from home, and when he came back late in the evening, the maid told him that Anna Arkadyevna had a headache and asked him not to come to her.
XXVI
Never before had a quarrel lasted a whole day. This was the first time. And it was not a quarrel. It was an obvious admission of a complete cooling off. How could he look at her as he had when he came into the
* Too bad for her.
room to get the papers? Look at her, see that her heart was breaking with despair, and pass by silently with that calmly indifferent face? He had not simply cooled towards her, he hated her, because he loved another woman - that was clear.
And, remembering all the cruel words he had said, Anna also invented the words he obviously had wished to say and might have said to her, and she grew more and more irritated.
'I am not holding you,' he might have said. 'You may go wherever you like. You probably did not want to divorce your husband so that you could go back to him. Go back, then. If you need money, I will give it to you. How many roubles do you need?'
All the cruellest words a coarse man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as if he had actually said them to her.
'And wasn't it only yesterday that he swore he loved me, he, a truthful and honest man? Haven't I despaired uselessly many times before?' she said to herself after that.
All that day, except for the visit to Mrs Wilson, which took two hours, Anna spent wondering whether everything was finished or there was hope of a reconciliation, and whether she ought to leave at once or see him one more time. She waited for him the whole day, and in the evening, going to her room and giving the order to tell him she had a headache, she thought, 'If he comes in spite of what the maid says, it means he still loves me. If not, it means it's all over, and then I'll decide what to do! ...'
In the evening she heard the sound of his carriage stopping, his ring, his footsteps and conversation with the maid: he believed what he was told, did not want to find out any more, and went to his room. Therefore it was all over.
And death presented itself to her clearly and vividly as the only way to restore the love for her in his heart, to punish him and to be victorious in the struggle that the evil spirit lodged in her heart was waging with him.
Now it made no difference whether they went to Vozdvizhenskoe or not, whether she got the divorce from her husband or not - none of it was necessary. The one thing necessary was to punish him.
When she poured herself the usual dose of opium and thought that she had only to drink the whole bottle in order to die, it seemed so easy and simple to her that she again began to enjoy thinking how he would suffer, repent, and love her memory when it was too late. She lay in bed with her eyes open, looking at the moulded cornice of the ceiling and the shadow of a screen extending over part of it in the light of one burnt-down candle, and she vividly pictured to herself what he would feel when she was no more and had become only a memory for him. 'How could I have said those cruel words to her?' he would say. 'How could I have left the room without saying anything? But now she's no more. She's gone from us forever. She's there ...' Suddenly the shadow of the screen wavered, spread over the whole cornice, over the whole ceiling; other shadows from the other side rushed to meet it; for a moment the shadows left, but then with renewed swiftness came over again, wavered, merged, and everything became dark. 'Death!' she thought. And she was overcome with such terror that for a long time she could not understand where she was, and her trembling hands were unable to find a match and light another candle in place of the one that had burned down and gone out. 'No, anything - only to live! I do love him. He does love me. It was and it will be no more,' she said, feeling tears of joy at the return of life running down her cheeks. And to save herself from her fear, she hastily went to him in the study.
He was in the study fast asleep. She went over to him and, lighting his face from above, looked at him for a long time. Now, when he was asleep, she loved him so much that, looking at him, she could not keep back tears of tenderness; but she knew that if he woke up he would give her a cold look, conscious of his own rightness, and that before talking to him of her love, she would have to prove to him how guilty he was before her. She went back to her room without waking him up and, after a second dose of opium, towards morning fell into a heavy, incomplete sleep, in which she never lost awareness of herself.
In the morning a
dreadful nightmare, which had come to her repeatedly even before her liaison with Vronsky, came to her again and woke her up. A little old muzhik with a dishevelled beard was doing something, bent over some iron, muttering meaningless French words, and, as always in this nightmare (here lay its terror), she felt that this little muzhik paid no attention to her, but was doing this dreadful thing with iron over her, was doing something dreadful over her. And she awoke in a cold sweat.