The Killing of Anna Karenina

by Richard Freeborn

  ‘Come again,’ said Gerald, knitting his brows.

  ‘Tetanus poisoning,’ the prince whispered.

  Gerald looked at him blankly. ‘I knew he was ill but I didn’t know he was poisoned.’

  ‘No, not poisoned by someone…’

  At that moment the organ burst into peals of sound from the gallery at one end of the hall. The effect was so thunderous it caught everyone unawares. Most guests were still standing near tables where all manner of vegetarian food was laid ready – plates of raw vegetables, chunks of cheese, nut cutlets, stuffed eggs, fruit from the kitchen gardens and orchards, cucumber and egg sandwiches, potatoes in various resourceful combinations and so on, accompanied by the dispensing of glasses of fruit cordial and lemonade. The ensuing concentrated munching coupled with the loud music meant the end of conversation. Most people exchanged no more than significant looks and posed themselves attentively in listening mode.

  The prince more or less intentionally drifted towards Lady Helen. A glance exchanged with her silently inquired if this was Carew Kingston’s composition. She removed a strip of carrot from her lower lip and nodded. Next to her was Oswald Holmcroft in evening dress a shade too tight for him. He bowed rather stiffly.

  ‘I think it gets quieter soon,’ she managed to say and licked her lips.

  The composition had opened in a spirit of true Russian patriotism with a fanfare celebrating the victory over Napoleon – at least that was what could be justifiably assumed. Successive loud chords illustrated the resistance and courage of the Russian people and concluded with a series of crescendos representing the Battle of Leipzig and the triumphant arrival of Russian troops in Paris in 1814.

  Just when the unwary English ear might have supposed it was all over and there had been one or two tentative handclaps, the piece picked itself up off the floor and launched into a plaintive, meandering melody evocative of lakes and forests, snow-covered rowans and silver birches, icy sunsets and smoke rising into pale wintry skies. This thin musical gruel of Tchaikovsky at his most sentimental continued for a while until it suddenly transformed itself into Borodin at his loudest. Surges of wild brassy chords, causing ladies to blink rapidly and clutch their reticules, evoked happy peasants celebrating the joys of harvesting. Once again the composition sank back into whimsical snatches of melancholy folksong, not that the guests, judging by the regular jaw movements and the fixed looks, were at all aware of the music’s intentions. When the whole piece concluded with a strident march clearly suggestive of sunlit uplands and the liberation of the working class, a philistine majority of the guests concluded aloud that the organ bellows needed more muscle. Higher notes had tended to end up as little more than dying whistles and some of the deeper chords had proved reedy. In short, it ended not with a bang, but a whimper, and elicited only a few desultory handclaps.

  The guests knew the form and quickly settled themselves into the rows of chairs facing a small podium and lectern set up beside the enclosed stairs to the organ gallery. The lectern had a row of candles that illuminated the whole area. Giles Irmingham at once stepped forward. He raised both hands. The down-falling light from the high windows, coupled with the candlelight, emphasised the priestly authority of his cassock and his strong features. He stood there and his uplifted arms coupled with the gaze of his blue eyes quelled all attempts to make conversation.

  In his sonorous voice he began by thanking everyone for coming to the soiree. It was necessary, he explained, gesticulating with the soft movements of an orchestral conductor, to set an early start to the proceedings because many guests had come a long way and were busy people who had work to contemplate in the morning and, what is more, in the name of the great Russian writer and thinker, Count Leo Tolstoy, the spiritual values of life – as celebrated, of course, by the “Russian Rhapsody”, the composition of ‘our remarkable jack-of-all-trades, Mr Kingston, to which we have just been listening with such rapt attention’ – the spiritual values, he assured us, were uppermost. The remarks ended with an appeal to the Reverend Ellis Chalmers to make an opening statement and explain – ‘far better than I can myself, I assure you all’ – the true relevance of Tolstoyanism for the present age.

  The Reverend Ellis Chalmers rose from his seat in the front row and strode up to the lectern. Again there were a few handclaps, but Giles gestured for quiet. The new speaker, a tall, long-faced man dressed in clerical black, adjusted his pince-nez, surveyed his audience and cleared his throat. His long, lean body bent forward against the lectern with the thrusting intentness of a figurehead on a ship’s prow. His voice matched this stance in its Ulster brogue as thick as sea-spume.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, should we not all be in awe, in deep and profound awe, of the majesty and might of the great pantocrator, after listening to such music? Despite certain what I might call minor technical defects, the spiritual effectiveness, the, ah, rich paean of heavenly praise that the music offered, must give us pause, just for a very, very brief instant in our busy lives, to consider – to consider what? – to consider, I say, the most important question we can ever ask ourselves. And that question is: ‘What is our life? What is it that gives meaning to our lives? Do we really know what our lives mean?’

  A hardly unexpected fidgeting passed through the audience in the pause that followed. The Reverend Ellis Chalmers dry-washed his hands and then spread them wide in front of him as if confessing to a secret.

  ‘The great Russian writer, Count Leo Tolstoy, to whom Lord Irmingham has referred, author of such great works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, having achieved all the fame any man can reasonably hope for, felt at the age of fifty that he was overwhelmed by a dread of the dark, by a sense of horror at the meaninglessness of his own life. He fell into deep despair, despair not just for himself but for all humanity, and it brought him to the verge of suicide. He posed to himself the ultimate question: “Is there any meaning in my life which would not be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?” It is a question we should all be courageous enough to pose to ourselves. And if we are honest we have to answer it by saying, No, there is no meaning to my life that will not be destroyed by the inevitability of my approaching death. So why go on living?

  ‘To go on living you have to love life and to love life you must have faith. “Faith,” said Tolstoy, “is a knowledge of the meaning of human life as a result of which man does not destroy himself but lives.” “Faith,” he said, “is the power of life.” The power of life itself, once a man yields to it and lets it carry him forward, brings him into an incessant search for God, since “God is life,” as Tolstoy puts it. Man therefore acquires a task in life. He has to save his soul. And in order to save his soul he has to live in a way that is godly. Which means denying himself certain so-called pleasures of the flesh, such as the flesh of animals who have to be slaughtered to assuage his perverted tastes…’

  ‘Poppycock!’ cried the voice of Raymond Vernoncourt. Ripples of disgruntled and facetious murmuring spread quickly among the audience and people craned their necks to see who had spoken.

  ‘…such as alcoholic stimulants and tobacco, such as the indulgence in sexual activity outside of marriage – and incidentally,’ the Reverend Ellis Chalmers now raised his voice, ‘I will not be put off by such ignorant and ni-hi-li-st-ic barracking from someone who should know better! But that is not the main thing in Tolstoyan teaching. The main thing is that goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect. If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness, and if it has a reward it is not goodness either. To put it very simply, it is the simplest people who have the best and fullest understanding of the meaning of goodness, and at the heart of that understanding is the simple intuition that temporal life always stands under the imminent judgment of the eternal. To be fully aware of what this means a change of heart is needed…’

  ‘Poppycock! Pretentious poppycock!’ roared Raymond Vernoncourt.

  ‘Shut up!’ a voice cried, supported vigorously by several ot
hers.

  ‘To be fully aware of what this means a change of heart is necessary. Human beings must change. They must change in their hearts. They must recognise the central importance of Christ’s teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, namely that the true good of mankind is only served by a policy of non-resistance to evil by violence. Think of that a moment! It deserves serious thought not only for its essential pacificism but also for its very grandeur. In other words, no good is served by retaliation. The evil in man is eradicated only by love, by that love of life which faith nurtures and which leads to our lives being slowly assimilated into the life of God, permeated by His love and forever transfigured by it so that our lives are no longer meaningless, no longer corrupted by despair and rotted by thoughts of suicide. That is what we mean by Tolstoyanism! Amen! Amen!’

  ‘Amen! Amen!’ echoed several voices.

  Tears clearly stood in the speaker’s eyes. Too moved, it seemed, to continue speaking, he took off his pince-nez, wiped his eyes and slowly and blindly staggered away from the lectern to increasing ripples of rather self-conscious and unsure applause. As it quickly died away, the steady, chill, obtrusive sound of heavy rain wafted into the hall from outside, accompanied by hissings from the log burning in the large marble fireplace.

  ‘Can you resist the ideas?’ Lady Helen whispered. Sitting beside her in the front row, the prince was so enchanted by her bright eyes that even a murmur of dissent would have seemed a shame, so he smiled. At that moment she leant towards Oswald Holmcroft on her other side and requested her silk shawl. The arranging of it over her bare shoulders, in which the prince assisted, occurred just as the organ bellows could be heard recharging. One pure strong chord emerged.

  Absorbed as he was by Lady Helen’s extraordinarily sensual, musky perfume, which he knew would hardly have met with Tolstoy’s approval, he was astonished to find himself confronted at that moment by a slim, dark-haired boy of about sixteen, in well-pressed trousers and gleaming white shirt. He stood on the podium beside the lectern and began to sing unaccompanied. The song was ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes.’ It was sung in a voice so pure and commanding, with such range and sweetness, it seemed in its higher registers to flicker like a star throughout the resonant spaces of the hall and overpower the noise of the rainfall.

  The audience exploded into applause the instant the singing stopped. The boy, at first astonished, looked round in bewilderment and then broke into a shy smile. He gave a low bow. The stately figure of Mrs Emerald Stephenson in a tea-gown of bright red silk with large gigot sleeves rose from the front seats and approached him, arms outstretched, as if recognising a long-lost child. The boy’s response to her kisses and embraces was a kind of mystified squirming. He went quite red and eventually managed to escape into the shadows of the hallway.

  ‘Why,’ she exclaimed, ‘that is a most wondrous experience! Who is this delightful and talented boy?’

  Someone explained he was a member of the kitchen staff.

  ‘Why, that sure is the neatest thing I ever heard!’ Her strong American voice matched in its resonance the redness of her dress. ‘Lord Irmingham, let me say this – if I’ve heard nothing truly enlightening since being here in your beautiful home as an honored guest, then right now, this very moment, I have heard the most uplifting words and the most uplifting voice of any I have ever heard in my entire life! An’ I’d just like to say how I will surely treasure these last few moments until I draw my last mortal breath, I surely will…’

  ‘Mother, please desist,’ came the voice of her son.

  Monty Coulsham had risen to his feet beside her. His outfit of green velvet jacket with a pink handkerchief dangling from the breast pocket and a purple kummerbund wrapped round his slender waist was sufficiently surprising to elicit a few titters from the ladies in the audience and some not very complimentary low-key remarks from the men. He had no sooner spoken than a series of loud hammer strokes came from the direction of the organ gallery.

  They grew louder and turned out to be footsteps descending from the top of the enclosed gallery stairs. Julie Mayhew-Summers, Julie the Unruly, slowly emerged into view at the bottom of the stairs in a bottle-green dress, shading her eyes from the hardly very strong candlelight of the podium. She gave a little mock bow and demonstrated with a pumping movement that she had been assisting the organist. Sympathetic laughter and shouts of approval greeted her.

  She spent a short while unselfconsciously putting her hair to rights. It was clear she had arrived for a purpose because Monty Coulsham handed her a small volume. He then raised a hand to insist on quiet and opened his mouth as if about to speak. In a moment utter silence reigned.

  What followed was a short oration delivered in a self-confident American way. It began with a reference to the fact that Count Leo Tolstoy’s teaching sought to embrace the whole personality, the whole of life. Monty Coulsham said he believed in the same thing so far as art was concerned, especially poetry, the most articulate of the arts. Symbioticism – the word was pronounced slowly syllable by syllable as if it were an incantation. Sym-bi-ot-ic-ism, the poetry of the new age, should embrace all planes of experience. It should appeal to man’s religious sense in transcending the mundane and it should stimulate the natural wellsprings of charity and altruism in man by demonstrating the universally divine character of language. And it should, above all, abolish the unreal distinction between so-called fiction and so-called reality and thereby transmute the sordid reality of life as we know it into the moral ideal for which all mankind yearned.

  ‘Mood!’ he suddenly declared, sensing the beginnings of restlessness in his audience.

  People sat up quickly.

  ‘Mood!’ he repeated.

  His audience blinked nervously.

  ‘Yes, mood! Just a few miles from where we are right here and now…’ a raised and shaken hand brought preacherly justification to his claim ‘…your great English poet, William Wordsworth, felt the mood of place. There is no greater symbiosis between man and his environment than a mood of place. “O sylvan Wye!” your poet sang, “thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!” “That serene and blessed mood” is what he called the experience of recollecting the Wye and its “beauteous forms” – “that serene and beauteous mood”…’

  ‘“In which,”’ broke in Julie the Unruly’s soft, intense voice,

  ‘“the affections gently lead us on, –

  Until the breath of this corporeal frame

  And even the motion of our human blood

  Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

  In body, and become a living soul:

  While with an eye made quiet by the power

  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

  We see into the life of things.”’

  Julie’s articulation was a little theatrical, a little high-pitched and certainly thinner than the rounded, resonant sound of Monty Coulsham’s deep American voice.

  ‘Supposing God is life,’ he went on, his eyes moving to and fro over his audience as if he were watching a slow tennis rally, ‘then your great poet celebrates divinity in his very singing, does he not? He is a seer as well as a celebrant. He is “a living soul” who sees into “the life of things.” Most of all he encompasses that sense of the eternal forever immanent in our temporal life, a sense of divine impulse springing from the symbiosis of man and nature. In that he claims to discern “the still, sad music of humanity.” We here, on the banks of the river Wye just above Tintern…’

  ‘Why, Montgomery!’ interrupted his mother. She had been seated during his oration, but now rose commandingly to her feet and addressed the audience. ‘My son Montgomery will not mind me saying, ladies and gentlemen, that he is the very best symbiotical poet in the entire world. Excuse me, Montgomery, for interrupting.’

  She resumed her seat.

  ‘Thank you, mother. That sure clarifies things. Now I know my friend Miss Julie Mayhew-Summers is ready to deliver your great En
glish poet’s grandest lines. Julie, please. They express, if I may put it this way, the still, sad music of humanity as the river Wye flows ever onwards and is ever present to us, as it is right now, and enters our lives like “a motion and spirit that impels all thinking things.” Julie.’

  ‘“For I have learned,”’ said Julie the Unruly at her most articulate,

  ‘“To look on nature, not as in the hour

  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

  The still, sad music of humanity,

  Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power

  To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

  A presence that disturbs me with the joy

  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

  Of something far more deeply interfused,

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

  A motion and a spirit that impels

  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

  And rolls through all things.”’

  The prince did not hear the appreciative applause that greeted the end of this reading. He felt suddenly assailed by an inexplicable, cold frisson. Someone, he felt, had just walked on his grave. The nape of his neck felt cold as if a drop of cold rainwater had fallen from the high ceiling. He automatically raised a hand to feel for it but there was nothing there.

  ‘Oh, look, father’s going to say something!’ Lady Helen whispered. ‘Oh, what a pity! It’ll be over in a minute!’

  There was something in her whispering that made the prince shiver all the more. Giles stood motionless before the lectern. The general mood in the hall had no doubt achieved a form of symbiosis in the sense that it had grown perceptibly more solemn and emotional. The steady hiss of rain persisted, though the row of candles by the lectern suddenly appeared to be struck by a gust of air. The flames all bent sideways and then recovered. Giles’s sonorous, well-modulated voice filled the immediate gap of expectation to be sensed throughout the hall but it had a slight unsureness and the audience listened very attentively.