by Leo Tolstoy
'Here's the horse that belongs to Mak ... Mak ... I never can say the name,' the Englishman said over his shoulder, pointing with his dirty-nailed thumb to Gladiator's stall.
'Makhotin? Yes, that's my one serious rival,' said Vronsky.
'If you were riding him,' said the Englishman, 'I'd place my bet on you.'
'He's stronger, Frou-Frou's more high-strung,' said Vronsky, smiling at the compliment to his riding.
'In a steeplechase everything depends on riding and pluck,' said the Englishman.
Vronsky not only felt that he had enough 'pluck' - that is, energy and boldness - but, what was much more important, he was firmly convinced that no one in the world could have more of this 'pluck' than he had.
'And you're sure there was no need for a longer work-out?'
'No need,' the Englishman replied. 'Please don't talk loudly. The horse is excited,' he added, nodding towards the closed stall they were standing in front of, from which they heard a stirring of hoofs on straw.
He opened the door, and Vronsky went into the stall, faintly lit by one little window. In the stall stood a dark bay horse, shifting her feet on the fresh straw. Looking around the half-lit stall, Vronsky again inadvertently took in at a glance all the qualities of his beloved horse. Frou-Frou was of average height and not irreproachable. She was narrow-boned all over; though her breast-bone protruded sharply, her chest was narrow. Her rump drooped slightly, and her front legs, and more especially her hind legs, were noticeably bowed inwards. The muscles of her hind and front legs were not particularly big; on the other hand, the horse was of unusually wide girth, which was especially striking now, with her trained shape and lean belly. Her leg bones below the knee seemed no thicker than a finger, seen from the front, but were unusually wide seen from the side. Except for her ribs, she looked as if she was all squeezed from the sides and drawn out in depth. But she possessed in the highest degree a quality that made one forget all shortcomings; this quality was blood, that blood which tells, as the English say. Her muscles, standing out sharply under the web of veins stretched through the thin, mobile and satin-smooth skin, seemed strong as bones. Her lean head, with prominent, shining, merry eyes, widened at the nose into flared nostrils with bloodshot inner membranes. In her whole figure and especially in her head there was a distinctly energetic and at the same time tender expression. She was one of those animals who, it seems, do not talk only because the mechanism of their mouths does not permit it.
To Vronsky at least it seemed that she understood everything he was feeling now as he looked at her.
As soon as he came in, she drew a deep breath and, rolling back her prominent eye so that the white was shot with blood, looked at the people coming in from the opposite side, tossing her muzzle and shifting lithely from one foot to the other.
'Well, there you see how excited she is,' said the Englishman.
'Oh, you sweetheart!' said Vronsky, approaching the horse and coaxing her.
But the closer he came, the more excited she grew. Only when he came to her head did she suddenly quiet down, her muscles quivering under her thin, tender skin. Vronsky stroked her firm neck, straightened a strand of her mane that had fallen on the wrong side of her sharp withers, and put his face to her nostrils, taut and thin as a bat's wing. She noisily breathed in and out with her strained nostrils, gave a start, lay her sharp ear back, and stretched out her firm black lip to Vronsky, as if she wanted to nibble his sleeve. Then, remembering the muzzle, she tossed it and again began shifting from one sculpted leg to the other.
'Calm down, sweetheart, calm down!' he said, patting her on the rump again; and with a joyful awareness that the horse was in the best condition, he left the stall.
The horse's excitement had communicated itself to Vronsky; he felt the blood rushing to his heart and, like the horse, he wanted to move, to bite; it was both terrifying and joyful.
'Well, I'm relying on you,' he said to the Englishman, 'six-thirty, at the appointed place.' 'Everything's in order,' the Englishman said. 'And where are you going, my lord?' he asked, unexpectedly using this title 'my lord', which he hardly ever used.
Vronsky raised his head in surprise and looked as he knew how to look, not into the Englishman's eyes but at his forehead, surprised by the boldness of the question. But, realizing that the Englishman, in putting this question, was looking at him as a jockey, not as an employer, he answered him:
'I must go to Briansky's, I'll be back in an hour.'
'How many times have I been asked that question today!' he said to himself and blushed, something that rarely happened to him. The Englishman looked at him intently and, as if he knew where he was going, added:
'The first thing is to be calm before you ride. Don't be out of sorts or upset by anything.'
'All right,' Vronsky, smiling, replied in English and, jumping into his carriage, gave orders to drive to Peterhof.
He had driven only a few paces when the storm clouds that had been threatening rain since morning drew over and there was a downpour.
'That's bad!' Vronsky thought, putting the top up. 'It was muddy to begin with, but now it will turn into a real swamp.' Sitting in the solitude of the closed carriage, he took out his mother's letter and his brother's note and read them.
Yes, it was all the same thing over and over. His mother, his brother, everybody found it necessary to interfere in the affairs of his heart. This interference aroused his spite - a feeling he rarely experienced. 'What business is it of theirs? Why does everybody consider it his duty to take care of me? And why do they pester me? Because they see that this is something they can't understand. If it was an ordinary, banal, society liaison, they'd leave me in peace. They feel that this is something else, that this is not a game, this woman is dearer to me than life. That's what they don't understand, and it vexes them. Whatever our fate is or will be, we have made it, and we don't complain about it,' he said, uniting himself and Anna in the word 'we'. 'No, they have to teach us how to live. They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us - there is no life,' he thought.
He was angry with everybody for their interference precisely because in his soul he felt that they, all of them, were right. He felt that the love which joined him to Anna was not a momentary passion that would go away, as society liaisons do, leaving no traces in the life of either one of them except some pleasant or unpleasant memories. He felt all the painfulness of his position and of hers, how difficult it was, exposed as they were to the eyes of all society, to conceal their love, to lie and deceive; and to lie, and deceive, and scheme, and constantly think of others, while the passion that joined them was so strong that they both forgot everything but their love.
He vividly remembered all those oft-repeated occasions of the necessity for lying and deceit, which were so contrary to his nature; he remembered especially vividly the feeling of shame he had noticed in her more than once at this necessity for deceit and lying. And he experienced a strange feeling that had sometimes come over him since his liaison with Anna. This was a feeling of loathing for something - whether for Alexei Alexandrovich, or for himself, or for the whole world, he did not quite know. But he always drove this strange feeling away. And now, rousing himself, he continued his train of thought.
'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 mai
n 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?'
