by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)
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 with 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 stu
dy 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.
When she got up, she recalled the previous day as in a fog.
‘There was a quarrel. There was what had already happened several times. I said I had a headache, and he didn’t come in. Tomorrow we’re leaving, I must see him and get ready for the departure,’ she said to herself. And, learning that he was in his study, she went to him. As she passed through the drawing room she heard a vehicle stop by the entrance, and, looking out the window, she saw a carriage with a young girl in a violet hat leaning out of it and giving orders to the footman who was ringing at the door. After negotiations in the front hall, someone came upstairs, and Vronsky’s steps were heard by the drawing room. He was going downstairs with quick steps. Anna went to the window again. Now he came out on the steps without a hat and went up to the carriage. The young girl in the violet hat handed him a package. Vronsky, smiling, said something to her. The carriage drove off; he quickly ran back up the stairs.
The fog that had covered everything in her soul suddenly cleared. Yesterday’s feelings wrung her aching heart with a new pain. She could not understand now how she could have lowered herself so far as to spend a whole day with him in his house. She went into his study to announce her decision to him.
‘That was Mme Sorokin and her daughter calling by to bring me money and papers from maman. I couldn’t get them yesterday. How’s your head? Better?’ he said calmly, not wishing to see or understand the gloomy and solemn expression on her face.
She stood silently in the middle of the room, gazing fixedly at him. He glanced at her, frowned momentarily, and went on reading a letter. She turned and slowly started out of the room. He could still bring her back, but she reached the door, he remained silent, and only the rustle of the turning page was heard.
‘Ah, incidentally,’ he said, when she was already in the doorway, ‘we’re definitely going tomorrow, aren’t we?’
‘You are, but I’m not,’ she said, turning to him.
‘Anna, we can’t live like this …’
‘You are, but I’m not,’ she repeated.
‘This is becoming unbearable!’
‘You … you will regret that,’ she said and walked out.
Frightened by the desperate look with which these words were spoken, he jumped up and was about to run after her, but, recollecting himself, sat down again, clenched his teeth tightly and frowned. This improper – as he found it – threat of something irritated him. ‘I’ve tried everything,’ he thought, ‘the only thing left is to pay no attention,’ and he began getting ready to go to town and again to his mother’s, whose signature he needed on the warrant.
She heard the sound of his steps in the study and the dining room. He stopped by the drawing room. But he did not turn to her, he only gave orders to hand the stallion over to Voitov in his absence. Then she heard the carriage being brought, the door opening, him going out again. But now he was back in the front hall, and someone was running up the stairs. It was his valet running to fetch the gloves he had forgotten. She went to the window and saw him take the gloves without looking, touch the driver’s back and say something to him. Then, without looking at the windows, he assumed his usual posture in the carriage, his legs crossed, and, pulling on a glove, disappeared round the corner.
XXVII
‘He’s gone. It’s over!’ Anna said to herself, standing at the window. And in response to this question the impressions of the horrible dream and of the darkness when the candle had gone out merged into one, filling her heart with cold terror.
‘No, it can’t be!’ she cried out and, crossing the room, loudly rang the bell. She was now so afraid of staying alone that, without waiting for the servant to come, she went to meet him.
‘Find out where the count went,’ she said.
The servant replied that the count had gone to the stables.
‘He said to tell you that the carriage will return at once, if you would like to go out.’
‘Very well. Wait. I’ll write a note. Send Mikhaila to the stables with the note. Quickly.’
She sat down and wrote:
T am to blame. Come home, we must talk. For God’s sake come, I’m frightened!’
She sealed it and gave it to the servant.
She was afraid to stay alone now. She left the room after the servant and went to the nursery.
‘No, this isn’t right, it’s not him! Where are his blue eyes, his sweet and timid smile?’ was her first thought when she saw her plump, red–cheeked little girl with curly hair instead of Seryozha, whom, in the confusion of her thoughts, she had expected to see in the nursery. The girl, sitting at the table, was loudly and persistently banging on it with a stopper, looking senselessly at her mother with two black currants –her eyes. Having said, in reply to the governess’s question, that she was quite well and was going to the country the next day, Anna sat down with the girl and began twirling the stopper of the carafe in front of her. But the child’s loud, ringing laughter and the movement she made with her eyebrow reminded her so vividly of Vronsky that she hastily got up, stifling her sobs, and left. ‘Is it really all over? No, it can’t be,’ she thought. ‘He’ll come back. But how will he explain to me that smile, that animation after talking with her? But even if he doesn’t explain, I’ll still believe him. If I don’t, there is only one thing left for me – and I don’t want it.’
She looked at the clock. Twelve minutes had passed. ‘He has received the note now and is coming back. It won’t be long, another ten minutes … But what if he doesn’t come? No, that can’t be. He mustn’t see me with tearful eyes. I’ll go and wash. Ah, and did I do my hair or not?’ she asked herself. And could not remember. She felt her head with her hand. ‘Yes, my hair’s been done, but I certainly don’t remember when.’ She did not even believe her hand and went to the pier–glass to see whether her hair had indeed been done or not. It had been, but she could not remember when she had done it. ‘Who is that?’ she thought, looking in the mirror at the inflamed face with strangely shining eyes fearfully looking at her. ‘Ah, it’s me,’ she realized, and looking herself all over, she suddenly felt his kisses on her and, shuddering, moved her shoulders. Then she raised her hand to her lips and kissed it.
‘What is this? I’m losing my mind.’ And she went to her bedroom, where Annushka was tidying up.
‘Annushka,’ she said, stopping before the maid and looking at her, not knowing what she was going to say to her.
‘You wanted to go to Darya Alexandrovna’s,’ said the maid, as if she understood.
‘To Darya Alexandrovna’s? Yes, I’ll go.’
‘Fifteen minutes there, fifteen minutes back. He’s on his way, he’ll be here at any moment.’ She took out her watch and looked at it. ‘But how could he go away and leave me in such a state? How can he live without making it up with me?’ She went to the window and began to look out. In terms of time, he could already be back. But her calculation could be wrong, and again she started recalling when he had left and counting the minutes.