by Leo Tolstoy
Alexei Alexandrovich gave him his hand, not holding back the tears that poured from his eyes.
'Thank God, thank God,' she said, 'now everything is ready. Just let me stretch my legs a little. There, that's wonderful. How tastelessly these flowers are done, quite unlike violets,' she said, pointing to the wallpaper. 'My God, my God! When will it end? Give me morphine. Doctor, give me morphine! Oh, my God, my God!'
And she began thrashing about in her bed.
The doctor and his colleagues said it was puerperal fever, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ends in death. All day there was fever, delirium and unconsciousness. By midnight the sick woman lay without feeling and almost without pulse.
The end was expected at any moment.
Vronsky went home, but came in the morning to inquire, and Alexei Alexandrovich, meeting him in the front hall, said:
'Stay, she may ask for you,' and himself led him to his wife's boudoir.
Towards morning the excitement, liveliness, quickness of thought and speech began again, and again ended in unconsciousness. On the third day it was the same, and the doctors said there was hope. That day Alexei Alexandrovich came to the boudoir where Vronsky was sitting and, closing the door, sat down facing him.
'Alexei Alexandrovich,' said Vronsky, feeling that a talk was imminent, 'I am unable to speak, unable to understand. Spare me! However painful it is for you, believe me, it is still more terrible for me.'
He was about to get up. But Alexei Alexandrovich took his hand and said:
'I beg you to hear me out, it's necessary. I must explain my feelings to you, those that have guided me and those that will guide me, so that you will not be mistaken regarding me. You know that I had decided on a divorce and had even started proceedings. I won't conceal from you that, when I started proceedings, I was undecided, I suffered; I confess that I was driven by a desire for revenge on you and on her. When I received her telegram, I came here with the same feelings - I will say more: I wished for her death. But...' he paused, pondering whether to reveal his feelings to him or not. 'But I saw her and I forgave. And the happiness of forgiveness revealed my duty to me. I forgave her completely. I want to turn the other cheek, I want to give my shirt when my caftan is taken, and I only pray to God that He not take from me the happiness of forgiveness!' Tears welled up in his eyes, and their luminous, serene look struck Vronsky. 'That is my position. You may trample me in the mud, make me the laughing-stock of society, I will not abandon her, I will never say a word of reproach to you,' he went on. 'My duty is clearly ordained for me: I must be with her and I will be. If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose it will be better if you leave.'
He stood up, and sobs broke off his speech. Vronsky also got up and in a stooping, unstraightened posture looked at him from under his brows. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich's feelings. But he felt that this was something lofty and even inaccessible to him in his world-view.
XVIII
After his conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky went out to the porch of the Karenins' house and stopped, hardly remembering where he was and where he had to go or drive. He felt himself shamed, humiliated, guilty and deprived of any possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt himself thrown out of the rut he had been following so proudly and easily till then. All the habits and rules of his life, which had seemed so firm, suddenly turned out to be false and inapplicable. The deceived husband, who till then had seemed a pathetic being, an accidental and somewhat comic hindrance to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her and raised to an awesome height, and on that height the husband appeared not wicked, not false, not ludicrous, but kind, simple and majestic. Vronsky could not but feel it. The roles had been suddenly changed. Vronsky felt Karenin's loftiness and his own abasement, Karenin's Tightness and his own wrongness. He felt that the husband had been magnanimous even in his grief, while he had been mean and petty in his deceit. But this realization of his meanness before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of his grief. He felt himself inexpressibly unhappy now, because his passion for Anna, which had been cooling, as it had seemed to him, in recent days, now, when he knew he had lost her forever, had become stronger than it had ever been. He had seen the whole of her during her illness, had come to know her soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her before then. And now, when he had come to know her, to love her as he ought to have loved her, he had been humiliated before her and had lost her forever, leaving her with nothing but a disgraceful memory of himself. Most terrible of all had been his ridiculous, shameful position when Alexei Alexandrovich tore his hands from his ashamed face. He stood on the porch of the Karenins' house like a lost man and did not know what to do.
'Shall I call a cab?' asked the porter.
'A cab, yes.' Returning home after three sleepless nights, Vronsky lay face down on the sofa without undressing, his arms folded and his head resting on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories and the strangest thoughts followed one another with extreme rapidity and clarity: now it was the medicine he had poured for the sick woman, overfilling the spoon, now the midwife's white arms, now Alexei Alexandrovich's strange position on the floor beside the bed.
'Sleep! Forget!' he said to himself with the calm certainty of a healthy man that, if he was tired and wanted to sleep, he would fall asleep at once. And indeed at that moment there was confusion in his head, and he began to fall into the abyss of oblivion. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness were already beginning to close over his head when suddenly - as if a strong electric shock was discharged in him - he gave such a start that his whole body jumped on the springs of the sofa and, propping himself with his arms, he got to his knees. His eyes were wide open, as if he had never slept. The heaviness of head and sluggishness of limb that he had experienced a moment before suddenly vanished.
'You may trample me in the mud.' He heard Alexei Alexandrovich's words and saw him before his eyes, and he saw Anna's face with its feverish flush and shining eyes, looking tenderly and lovingly not at him but at Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own stupid and ridiculous figure, as it seemed to him, when Alexei Alexandrovich drew his hands away from his face. He stretched his legs out again, threw himself on the sofa in the same position, and closed his eyes.
'Sleep! Sleep!' he repeated to himself. But with his eyes closed he saw still more clearly the face of Anna as it had been on that evening, so memorable for him, before the race.
'It is not and will not be, and she wishes to wipe it from her memory. And I cannot live without it. How, how can we be reconciled?' he said aloud, and began unconsciously to repeat these words. The repetition of the words held back the emergence of new images and memories which he felt thronging in his head. But not for long. Again, one after another, the best moments presented themselves with extreme rapidity, and together with them the recent humiliation. 'Take your hands away,' Anna's voice says. He takes his hands away and senses the ashamed and stupid look on his face.
He went on lying there, trying to fall asleep, though he felt that there was not the slightest hope, and he went on repeating in a whisper the accidental words of some thought, wishing to hold back the emergence of new images. He listened - and heard, repeated in a strange, mad whisper, the words: 'Unable to value, unable to enjoy; unable to value, unable to enjoy.'
'What is this? Or am I losing my mind?' he said to himself. 'Maybe so. Why else do people lose their minds, why else do they shoot themselves?' he answered himself and, opening his eyes, was surprised to see an embroidered pillow by his head, made by Varya, his brother's wife. He touched the pillow's tassel and tried to recall Varya and when he had seen her last. But to think of something extraneous was painful. 'No, I must sleep!' He moved the pillow and pressed his head to it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes closed. He sat up abruptly. 'That is finished for me,' he said to himself. 'I must think what to do. What's left?' His thought quickly ran through his life apart from his love for Ann
a.
'Ambition? Serpukhovskoy? Society? Court?' He could not fix on any of them. That had all had meaning once, but now nothing remained of it. He got up from the sofa, took off his frock coat, loosened his belt and, baring his shaggy chest in order to breathe more freely, paced up and down the room. 'This is how people lose their minds,' he repeated, 'and shoot themselves ... so as not to be ashamed,' he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it. Then with a fixed gaze and tightly clenched teeth he went to the table, took his revolver, examined it, turned it to a loaded chamber, and lapsed into thought. For a couple of minutes, his head bowed in an expression of mental effort, he stood motionless with the revolver in his hands and considered. 'Of course,' he said to himself, as if a logical, continuous and clear train of thought had brought him to an unquestionable conclusion. In fact, this 'of course' that he found so convincing was only the consequence of a repetition of exactly the same round of memories and notions that he had already gone through a dozen times within the hour. It was the same memory of happiness lost forever, the same notion of the meaninglessness of everything he saw ahead of him in life, the same consciousness of his humiliation. The sequence of these notions and feelings was also the same.
'Of course,' he repeated, when his thought started for the third time on the same enchanted round of memories and thoughts, and, putting the revolver to the left side of his chest and forcefully jerking his whole hand as if clenching it into a fist, he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the shot, but a strong blow to his chest knocked him off his feet. He tried to catch hold of the edge of the table, dropped the revolver, staggered and sat down on the floor, looking around himself in surprise. He did not recognize his room as he looked from below at the curved legs of the table, the wastepaper basket and the tiger-skin rug. The quick, creaking steps of his servant, walking through the drawing room, brought him to his senses. He made a mental effort and understood that he was on the floor, and, seeing blood on the tiger-skin and on his hand, understood that he had tried to shoot himself.
'Stupid! I missed,' he said, groping for the revolver with his hand. The revolver was close by him, but he groped for it further away. Continuing to search, he reached out on the other side and, unable to keep his balance, fell over, bleeding profusely.
The elegant servant with side-whiskers, who had complained to his acquaintances more than once about the weakness of his nerves, was so frightened when he saw his master lying on the floor that he left him bleeding profusely while he ran for help. An hour later, Varya, his brother's wife, came and with the help of three doctors, whom she had summoned from all sides and who arrived at the same time, lay the wounded man in bed and stayed there to look after him.
XIX
The mistake Alexei Alexandrovich had made, while preparing to see his wife, in not taking into account the eventuality that her repentance would be sincere and he would forgive her, and then she would not die - this mistake presented itself to him in all its force two months after his return from Moscow. But the mistake came not only from his not having taken this eventuality into account, but also from the fact that, prior to the day when he saw his dying wife, he had not known his own heart. At his wife's bedside he had given himself for the first time in his life to that feeling of tender compassion which other people's suffering evoked in him, and which he had previously been ashamed of as a bad weakness. Pity for her, and repentance at having wished for her death, and above all the very joy of forgiveness, made it so that he suddenly felt not only relief from his suffering but also an inner peace that he had never experienced before. He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy, that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated, became simple and clear when he forgave and loved.
He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and repentance. He forgave Vronsky and pitied him, especially after rumours reached him of his desperate act. He also pitied his son more than before, and now reproached himself for having been too little concerned with him. But for the newborn little girl he had some special feeling, not only of pity but also of tenderness. At first it was only out of compassion that he concerned himself with the newborn, weak little girl, who was not his daughter and who was neglected during her mother's illness and would probably have died if he had not looked after her - and he did not notice how he came to love her. He went to the nursery several times a day and sat there for a long while, so that the wet nurse and the nanny, who were intimidated at first, became used to him. He would sometimes spend half an hour silently gazing at the saffron-red, downy and wrinkled little face of the sleeping baby, watching the movements of her scowling forehead and plump little hands with curled fingers that rubbed her little eyes and nose with their backs. At such moments especially Alexei Alexandrovich felt utterly at peace and in harmony with himself, and saw nothing extraordinary in his situation, nothing that needed to be changed.
But the more time that passed, the more clearly he saw that, natural as this situation was for him now, he would not be allowed to remain in it. He felt that, besides the good spiritual force that guided his soul, there was another force, crude and equally powerful, if not more so, that guided his life, and that this force would not give him the humble peace he desired. He felt that everybody looked at him with questioning surprise, not understanding him and expecting something from him. In particular, he felt the precariousness and unnaturalness of his relations with his wife.
When the softening produced in her by the nearness of death passed, Alexei Alexandrovich began to notice that Anna was afraid of him, felt burdened by him, and could not look him straight in the eye. It was as if there were something she wanted but could not bring herself to say to him, and as if, also anticipating that their relations could not continue, she expected something from him.
At the end of February it happened that Anna's newborn daughter, who had also been named Anna, fell ill. Alexei Alexandrovich visited the nursery in the morning and, after giving orders to send for the doctor, went to the ministry. Having finished his work, he returned home towards four o'clock. On entering the front hall, he saw a handsome footman in galloons and a bear-skin cape, holding a white cloak of American dog.
'Who is here?' asked Alexei Alexandrovich.
'Princess Elizaveta Fyodorovna Tverskoy,' the footman replied, with what seemed to Alexei Alexandrovich like a smile.
Throughout that difficult time, Alexei Alexandrovich had noticed that his society acquaintances, especially the women, took a special interest in him and his wife. He had noticed that all these acquaintances had trouble concealing their joy over something, the same joy he had seen in the lawyer's eyes and now in the eyes of the footman. They were all as if delighted, as if they were getting somebody married. When meeting him, they would ask about his wife's health with barely concealed joy.
The presence of Princess Tverskoy, both by the memories associated with her and because he generally disliked her, was unpleasant for Alexei Alexandrovich, and he went directly to the nursery. In the first nursery Seryozha, his chest leaning on the desk and his legs on the chair, was drawing something and merrily talking away. The English governess, who had replaced the Frenchwoman during Anna's illness, was sitting by the boy crocheting migniardise and hastily rose and curtsied, giving Seryozha a tug.
Alexei Alexandrovich stroked the boy's hair with his hand, answered the governess's question about his wife's health, and asked what the doctor had said about the baby.
'The doctor said there was nothing dangerous, sir, and prescribed baths.'
'But she's still suffering,' said Alexei Alexandrovich, listening to the baby crying in the next room.
'I think the wet nurse is no good, sir,' the governess said resolutely.
'What makes you think so?' he asked, stopping.
'That's what happened with Countess Paul, sir. The baby was treated, but it turned out that it was simply
hungry: the wet nurse had no milk, sir.'
Alexei Alexandrovich reflected and, after standing there for a few seconds, went through the other door. The little girl lay, her head thrown back, squirming in the wet nurse's arms, and refused either to take the plump breast offered to her or to be silent, despite the double shushing of the wet nurse and the nanny leaning over her.
'Still no better?' said Alexei Alexandrovich.
'She's very restless,' the nanny answered in a whisper.
'Miss Edwards says the wet nurse may have no milk,' he said.
'I've been thinking so myself, Alexei Alexandrovich.'
'Then why didn't you say so?'
'Who was I to say it to? Anna Arkadyevna's still unwell,' the nanny said, displeased.
The nanny was an old household servant. And in these simple words of/hers Alexei Alexandrovich seemed to hear a hint at his situation.
The baby cried still louder, ran out of breath and choked. The nanny waved her hand, went over to her, took her from the wet nurse's arms and began rocking her as she walked.
'We must ask the doctor to examine the wet nurse,' said Alexei Alexandrovich.
The healthy-looking, well-dressed wet nurse, afraid that she might be dismissed, muttered something under her breath and, hiding away her big breast, smiled contemptuously at any doubt of her milkiness. In that smile Alexei Alexandrovich also detected mockery of his situation.
