Leo Tolstoy

by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)

  ‘Yes, she was unhappy before, but proud and calm; and now she cannot be calm and dignified, though she doesn’t show it. Yes, this must be ended,’ he decided to himself.

  And for the first time the clear thought occurred to him that it was necessary to stop this lie, and the sooner the better. ‘To drop everything, both of us, and hide ourselves away somewhere with our love,’ he said to himself.

  XXII

  The downpour did not last long, and when Vronsky drove up at the full trot of his shaft horse, pulling along the outrunners who rode over the mud with free reins, the sun was already peeking out again, the roofs of the country houses and the old lindens in the gardens on both sides of the main street shone with a wet glitter, and water dripped merrily from the branches and ran off the roofs. He no longer thought of how the downpour would ruin the racetrack, but now rejoiced that, owing to this rain, he would be sure to find her at home and alone, because he knew that Alexei Alexandrovich, who had recently returned from taking the waters, had not yet moved from Petersburg.

  Hoping to find her alone, Vronsky got out before crossing the bridge, as he always did in order to attract less attention, and continued on foot. He did not go to the porch from the street but went into the courtyard.

  ‘Has the master come?’ he asked the gardener.

  ‘No, sir. The mistress is at home. Use the porch if you please; there are people there, they’ll open the door,’ replied the gardener.

  ‘No, I’ll go through the garden.’

  Having made sure that she was alone and wishing to take her unawares, because he had not promised to come that day and she probably did not think that he would come before the race, he walked towards the terrace that looked out on the garden, holding his sword and stepping carefully over the sand of the flower–lined path. Vronsky now forgot everything he had thought on the way about the difficulty and painfulness of his position. He thought of only one thing, that he was about to see her, not just in imagination, but alive, all of her, as she was in reality. He was already going up the low steps of the terrace, placing his whole foot on each step to avoid making noise, when he suddenly remembered something that he always forgot and that constituted the most painful side of his relations with her – her son, with his questioning and, as it seemed to him, hostile look.

  This boy was a more frequent hindrance to their relations than anyone else. When he was there, not only would neither Vronsky nor Anna allow themselves to speak of something they could not repeat in front of everyone, but they would not allow themselves to say even in hints anything that the boy would not understand. They did not arrange it that way, but it got established by itself. They would have considered it insulting to themselves to deceive this child. In his presence they spoke to each other as acquaintances. But in spite of this precaution, Vronsky often saw the attentive and perplexed look of the child directed at him, and the strange timidity, the unevenness – now affectionate, now cold and shy – in the boy’s attitude towards him. As if the child felt that between this man and his mother there was some important relation the meaning of which he could not understand.

  Indeed, the boy did feel that he could not understand this relation, and he tried but was unable to make out what feeling he ought to have for this man. With a child’s sensitivity to any show of feelings, he saw clearly that his father, his governess, his nanny – all of them not only disliked Vronsky, but looked at him with disgust and fear, though they never said anything about him, while his mother looked at him as at a best friend.

  ‘What does it mean? Who is he? How should I love him? If I don’t understand, I’m to blame, or else I’m stupid, or a bad boy,’ the child thought; and this led to his probing, questioning, partly inimical expression, and to his timidity and unevenness, which so embarrassed Vronsky. The child’s presence always and inevitably provoked in Vronsky that strange feeling of groundless loathing he had been experiencing lately. It provoked in Vronsky and Anna a feeling like that of a mariner who can see by his compass that the direction in which he is swiftly moving diverges widely from his proper course, but that he is powerless to stop the movement which every moment takes him further and further from the right direction, and that to admit the deviation to himself is the same as admitting disaster.

  This child with his naive outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.

  This time Seryozha was not at home, and she was quite alone, sitting on the terrace, waiting for the return of her son, who had gone for a walk and had been caught in the rain. She had sent a man and a maid to look for him and sat waiting. Wearing a white dress with wide embroidery, she was sitting in a corner of the terrace behind some flowers and did not hear him. Her dark, curly head bowed, she leaned her forehead to the cold watering can that stood on the parapet, and her two beautiful hands with their so–familiar rings held the watering can in place. The beauty of her whole figure, her head, neck, and arms, struck Vronsky each time as something unexpected. He stood gazing at her in admiration. But as soon as he wanted to take a step to approach her, she felt his approach, pushed the watering can away, and turned her flushed face to him.

  ‘What’s the matter? You’re unwell?’ he said in French, going up to her. He wanted to run to her, but remembering that other people might be there, he glanced back at the balcony door and blushed as he did each time he felt he had to be afraid and look around.

  ‘No, I’m well,’ she said, getting up and firmly pressing the hand he held out. ‘I didn’t expect… you.’

  ‘My God, what cold hands!’ he said.

  ‘You frightened me,’ she said. ‘I’m alone and waiting for Seryozha. He went for a walk, they’ll come from that way.’

  But, despite all her efforts to be calm, her lips were trembling.

  ‘Forgive me for coming, but I couldn’t let the day pass without seeing you,’ he went on in French, as he always did, avoiding the impossible coldness of formal Russian and the danger of the informal.

  ‘What is there to forgive? I’m so glad!’

  ‘But you’re unwell or upset,’ he went on, without letting go of her hand and bending over her. ‘What were you thinking about?’

  ‘Always the same thing,’ she said with a smile.

  She was telling the truth. Whenever, at whatever moment, she might be asked what she was thinking about, she could answer without mistake: about the same thing, about her happiness and her unhappiness. Precisely now, when he found her, she had been thinking about why it was all so easy for others – Betsy, for instance (she knew of her liaison with Tushkevich, concealed from society) – while for her it was so painful? That day, owing to certain considerations, this thought was particularly painful for her. She asked him about the races. He answered her and, seeing that she was excited, tried to divert her by describing in the simplest tone the details of the preparation for the races.

  ‘Shall I tell him or not?’ she thought, looking into his calm, tender eyes. ‘He’s so happy, so taken up with his races, that he won’t understand it as he should, won’t understand all the significance of this event for us.’

  ‘But you haven’t told me what you were thinking about when I came,’ he said, interrupting his account. ‘Please tell me!’

  She did not answer and, bowing her head slightly, looked at him questioningly from under her brows, her eyes shining behind their long lashes. Her hand, playing with a plucked leaf, was trembling. He saw it, and his face showed that obedience, that slavish devotion, which touched her so.

  ‘I see that something has happened. Can I be calm for a moment, knowing you have a grief that I don’t share? Tell me, for God’s sake!’ he repeated pleadingly.

  ‘No, I will never forgive him if he doesn’t understand all the significance of it. Better not to tell. Why test him?’ she thought, gazing at him in the same way and feeling that her hand holding the leaf was trembling more and more.

  ‘For God’s sake!’
he repeated, taking her hand.

  ‘Shall I tell you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes …’

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said softly and slowly.

  The leaf in her hand trembled still more violently, but she did not take her eyes off him, wanting to see how he would take it. He paled, was about to say something, but stopped, let go of her hand and hung his head. ‘Yes, he understands all the significance of this event,’ she thought, and gratefully pressed his hand.

  But she was mistaken in thinking that he understood the significance of the news as she, a woman, understood it. At this news he felt with tenfold force an attack of that strange feeling of loathing for someone that had been coming over him; but along with that he understood that the crisis he desired had now come, that it was no longer possible to conceal it from her husband and in one way or another this unnatural situation had to be broken up quickly. Besides that, her excitement communicated itself physically to him. He gave her a tender, obedient look, kissed her hand, rose and silently paced the terrace.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, resolutely going up to her. ‘Neither of us has looked on our relation as a game, and now our fate is decided. It’s necessary to end,’ he said, looking around, ‘the lie we live in.’

  ‘End it? But end it how, Alexei?’ she said softly. She was calm now, and her face shone with a tender smile.

  ‘Leave your husband and unite our lives.’

  ‘They’re already united,’ she replied, barely audibly.

  ‘Yes, but completely, completely.’

  ‘But how, Alexei, teach me how?’ she said with sad mockery at the hopelessness of her situation. ‘Is there a way out of such a situation? Am I not my husband’s wife?’

  ‘There’s a way out of every situation. A decision has to be made,’ he said. ‘Anything’s better than the situation you are living in. I can see how you suffer over everything, over society, and your son, and your husband.’

  ‘Ah, only not my husband,’ she said with a simple smile. ‘I don’t know him, I don’t think about him. He doesn’t exist.’

  ‘You’re not speaking sincerely. I know you. You suffer over him, too.’

  ‘But he doesn’t even know,’ she said, and bright colour suddenly began to rise in her face; her cheeks, forehead, and neck turned red, and tears of shame welled up in her eyes. ‘And let’s not talk about him.’

  XXIII

  Vronsky had already tried several times, though not as resolutely as now, to bring her to a discussion of her situation, and each time had run into that superficiality and lightness of judgement with which she now responded to his challenge. It was as if there were something in it that she could not or would not grasp, as if the moment she began talking about it, she, the real Anna, withdrew somewhere into herself and another woman stepped forward, strange and alien to him, whom he did not love but feared, and who rebuffed him. But today he ventured to say everything.

  ‘Whether he knows or not,’ Vronsky said in his usual firm and calm tone, ‘whether he knows or not is not our affair. We can’t. .. you can’t go on like this, especially now.’

  ‘What’s to be done, then, in your opinion?’ she asked, with the same light mockery. She, who had so feared he might take her pregnancy lightly, was now vexed that he had drawn from it the necessity for doing something.

  ‘Tell him everything and leave him.’

  ‘Very well, suppose I do that,’ she said. ‘Do you know what will come of it? I’ll tell you everything beforehand.’ And a wicked light lit up in her eyes, which a moment before had been tender. ‘ "Ah, madam, so you love another man and have entered into a criminal liaison with him?" ’ (Impersonating her husband, she stressed the word ‘criminal’, just as Alexei Alexandrovich would have done.) ‘ "I warned you about the consequences in their religious, civil and familial aspects. You did not listen to me. Now I cannot lend my name to disgrace …" ’ – ‘nor my son’s,’ she was going to say, but she could not joke about her son –’ "lend my name to disgrace," and more of the same,’ she added. ‘Generally, he will say in his statesmanly manner, and with clarity and precision, that he cannot release me but will take what measures are in his power to prevent a scandal. And he will do, calmly and accurately, what he says. That’s what will happen. He’s not a man, he’s a machine, and a wicked machine when he gets angry,’ she added, recalling Alexei Alexandrovich in all the details of his figure, manner of speaking and character, holding him guilty for everything bad she could find in him and forgiving him nothing, on account of the terrible fault for which she stood guilty before him.

  ‘But, Anna,’ Vronsky said in a soft, persuasive voice, trying to calm her down, ‘all the same it’s necessary to tell him, and then be guided by what he does.’

  ‘What, run away?’

  ‘Why not run away? I see no possibility of this continuing. And not on my account –I see you’re suffering.’

  ‘Yes, run away, and I’ll become your mistress?’ she said spitefully.

  ‘Anna!’ he said, with reproachful tenderness.

  ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘I’ll become your mistress and ruin… everything.’

  Again she was going to say ‘my son’, but could not utter the word.

  Vronsky could not understand how she, with her strong, honest nature, could endure this situation of deceit and not wish to get out of it; but he did not suspect that the main reason for it was that word ‘son’ which she could not utter. When she thought of her son and his future attitude towards the mother who had abandoned his father, she felt so frightened at what she had done that she did not reason, but, like a woman, tried only to calm herself with false reasonings and words, so that everything would remain as before and she could forget the terrible question of what would happen with her son.[29]

  ‘I beg you, I implore you,’ she said suddenly in a completely different, sincere and tender tone, taking his hand, ‘never speak to me of that!’

  ‘But, Anna …’

  ‘Never. Leave it to me. I know all the meanness, all the horror of my situation; but it’s not as easy to resolve as you think. Leave it to me and listen to me. Never speak of that to me. Do you promise me? … No, no, promise! …’

  ‘I promise everything, but I can’t be at peace, especially after what you’ve said. I can’t be at peace when you are not at peace …’

  ‘I?’ she repeated. ‘Yes, I’m tormented sometimes; but it will go away if you never speak to me of that. It’s only when you speak of it that it torments me.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she interrupted him, ‘how hard it is for your honest nature to lie, and I’m sorry for you. I often think how you ruined your life for me.’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing just now,’ he said. ‘How could you have sacrificed everything for me? I can’t forgive myself that you are unhappy.’

  ‘I’m unhappy?’ she said, coming close to him and looking at him with a rapturous smile of love. ‘I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy. I’m unhappy? No, this is my happiness …’

  She heard the voice of her returning son and, casting a quick glance around the terrace, rose impetuously. Her eyes lit up with a fire familiar to him, she raised her beautiful, ring–covered hands with a quick gesture, took his head, gave him a long look and, bringing her face closer, quickly kissed his mouth and both eyes with her open, smiling lips and pushed him away. She wanted to go, but he held her back.

  ‘When?’ he said in a whisper, looking at her rapturously.

  ‘Tonight, at one,’ she whispered and, after a deep sigh, walked with her light, quick step to meet her son.