Leo Tolstoy

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

  ‘Well, go, go!’ she said, offended, and quickly left him.

  XXXII

  When Vronsky came home, Anna was not yet there. He was told that some lady had come to see her shortly after he left and they had gone off together. The fact that she had gone without saying where, that she was still away, that she had also gone somewhere in the morning without telling him anything – all this, along with the strangely excited expression of her face that morning and the memory of the hostile tone with which, in Yashvin’s presence, she had all but torn the photographs of her son out of his hands, made him ponder. He decided that it was necessary to have a talk with her. And he waited for her in her drawing room. But Anna did not come back alone; she brought her aunt with her, an old maid, Princess Oblonsky. This was the same one who had come in the morning and with whom Anna had gone shopping. Anna seemed not to notice Vronsky’s concerned and questioning expression and cheerfully told him what she had bought that morning. He saw that something peculiar was going on in her: her shining eyes, when they fleetingly rested on him, showed a strained attention, and her talk and movements had that nervous quickness and grace that in the first time of their intimacy had so delighted him and now troubled and alarmed him.

  Dinner was set for four. They were all about to go to the small dining room when Tushkevich arrived with a message for Anna from Princess Betsy. Princess Betsy apologized for not coming to say goodbye; she was not well but asked Anna to come to her between half–past six and nine. At this specification of the time, showing that measures had been taken so that she would not meet anyone, Vronsky glanced at Anna; but Anna seemed not to notice it.

  ‘I regret that between half–past six and nine is precisely when I cannot come,’ she said, smiling slightly.

  ‘The princess will be very sorry.’

  ‘I am, too.’

  ‘You must be going to hear Patti?’[42] said Tushkevich.

  ‘Patti? That gives me an idea. I would go if I could get a box.’ ‘I can get one,’ Tushkevich volunteered.

  ‘I’d be very, very grateful to you,’ said Anna. ‘And would you care to dine with us?’

  Vronsky gave a barely noticeable shrug. He utterly failed to understand what Anna was doing. Why had she brought this old princess, why had she asked Tushkevich to stay for dinner, and, most surprising, why was she sending him to get a box? Was it thinkable in her situation to go to a subscription performance by Patti, when all her society acquaintances would be there? He gave her a serious look, but she answered with the same defiant look, something between cheerful and desperate, the meaning of which he could not fathom. During dinner Anna was aggressively cheerful: she seemed to flirt with both Tushkevich and Yashvin. When they got up from the table, Tushkevich went for the box, while Yashvin went to smoke. Vronsky accompanied him to his room. Having stayed for some time, he ran back upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a light–coloured gown of silk and velvet with a low–cut neck that had been made for her in Paris, and had costly white lace on her head, which framed her face and showed off her striking beauty to particular advantage.

  ‘Are you really going to the theatre?’ he said, trying not to look at her.

  ‘Why do you ask so fearfully?’ she said, again offended that he was not looking at her. ‘Why shouldn’t I go?’

  It was as if she did not understand the meaning of his words.

  ‘Of course, there’s no reason at all,’ he said, frowning.

  ‘That’s just what I say,’ she said, deliberately not understanding the irony of his tone and calmly rolling up a long, perfumed glove.[43]

  ‘Anna, for God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?’ he said, trying to wake her up, in the same way that her husband had once spoken to her.

  T don’t understand what you’re asking.’

  ‘You know it’s impossible to go.’

  ‘Why? I’m not going alone. Princess Varvara has gone to dress; she will go with me.’

  He shrugged his shoulders with a look of bewilderment and despair.

  ‘But don’t you know …’ he tried to begin.

  T don’t even want to know!’ she almost shouted. T don’t. Do I repent of what I’ve done? No, no, no! If it were all to be done over again, it would be the same. For us, for me and for you, only one thing matters: whether we love each other. There are no other considerations. Why do we live separately here and not see each other? Why can’t I go? I love you, and it makes no difference to me,’ she said in Russian, glancing at him with eyes that had a peculiar, incomprehensible gleam, ‘as long as you haven’t changed. Why don’t you look at me?’

  He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face and of her attire, which had always been so becoming to her. But now it was precisely her beauty and elegance that irritated him.

  ‘My feeling cannot change, you know that, but I ask you not to go, I implore you,’ he said again in French, with a tender plea in his voice, but with coldness in his eyes.

  She did not hear the words but saw the coldness of his eyes and answered with irritation:

  ‘And I ask you to tell me why I shouldn’t go.’

  ‘Because it may cause you to be …’ he faltered.

  ‘I understand nothing. Yashvin n’est pas compromettant* and Princess Varvara is no worse than others. And here she is.’

  XXXIII

  Vronsky experienced for the first time a feeling of vexation, almost of anger, with Anna for her deliberate refusal to understand her position. This feeling was intensified by his being unable to explain to her the cause of his vexation. If he had told her directly what he thought, he would have said: ‘To appear in the theatre in that attire and with that notorious princess is not only to acknowledge your position as a ruined woman but also to throw down a challenge to society – that is, to renounce it forever.’

  He could not say that to her. ‘But how can she not understand it, and what is going on inside her?’ he said to himself. He felt that his respect for her was decreasing at the same time as his consciousness of her beauty increased.

  Frowning, he returned to his rooms and, sitting down by Yashvin, who had stretched his long legs out on a chair and was drinking cognac with seltzer water, ordered the same for himself.

  ‘You mentioned Lankovsky’s Powerful. A fine horse, I advise you to buy him,’ Yashvin said, glancing at his friend’s gloomy face. ‘He’s got a

  * Is not compromising.

  low–slung rump, but for legs and head you couldn’t ask for better.’

  ‘I think I’ll take him,’ replied Vronsky.

  The conversation about horses interested him, but he did not forget Anna for a moment, involuntarily listened for the sound of steps in the corridor and kept glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Anna Arkadyevna asked me to tell you, sir, that she has gone to the theatre.’

  Yashvin, having poured another glass of cognac into the fizzy water, drank it and got up, buttoning his jacket.

  ‘Well, shall we go?’ he said, smiling slightly under his moustache, and showing by this smile that he understood the reason for Vronsky’s gloominess but attached no importance to it.

  ‘I’m not going,’ Vronsky said gloomily.

  ‘But I have to go, I promised. Well, good–bye. Or else come to the stalls, you can take Krasinsky’s seat,’ Yashvin added on his way out.

  ‘No, I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘A wife’s a worry, a non–wife’s even worse,’ thought Yashvin as he left the hotel.

  Vronsky, left alone, got up from his chair and began pacing the room.

  ‘What’s today? The fourth subscription . .. Yegor’s there with his wife, and probably my mother. That means all Petersburg is there. She’s gone in now, taken off her fur coat, come out to the light. Tushkevich, Yashvin, Princess Varvara…’ he pictured it to himself. ‘What about me? Am I afraid, or did I pass it on to Tushkevich to chaperone her? However you look at it, it’s stupid, stupid … And why does she put me in such a position?�
� he said, waving his arm.

  In that movement he brushed against the little table on which the seltzer water and decanter of cognac stood and almost knocked it over. He went to catch it, dropped it, kicked the table in vexation, and rang the bell.

  ‘If you want to work for me,’ he said to the valet as he came in, ‘then remember your duty. No more of this. You must clean it up.’

  The valet, feeling that it was not his fault, was about to vindicate himself but, glancing at his master, realized from his look that he had better keep silent; squirming, he hastily got down on the rug and began sorting out the whole glasses and bottles from the broken.

  ‘That’s not for you to do. Send a lackey to clean up, and lay out a tailcoat for me.’ Vronsky entered the theatre at half–past eight. The performance was in full swing. An old usher helped Vronsky off with his fur coat and, recognizing him, called him ‘your highness’ and suggested that he not take a tag but simply ask for Fyodor. There was no one in the bright corridor except the usher and two lackeys with fur coats in their hands, listening by the door. From behind the closed door came the sounds of the orchestra’s careful staccato accompaniment and one female voice distinctly pronouncing a musical phrase. The door opened to allow the usher to slip in, and the concluding phrase clearly struck Vronsky’s ear. The door closed at once and he did not hear the end of the phrase or the cadenza, but he could tell by the thunder of applause behind the door that it was over. When he entered the hall, brightly lit by chandeliers and bronze gas brackets, the noise still continued. On stage the singer, her bare shoulders and diamonds gleaming, bent over and, with the help of the tenor who held her hand, smilingly picked up the bouquets that had been awkwardly thrown across the footlights, then went over to a gentleman with glistening, pomaded hair parted in the middle, who reached his long arms across the footlights, holding out something or other – and all the audience in the stalls as well as in the boxes stirred, stretched forward, shouted and applauded. The conductor on his podium helped to hand it on and straightened his white tie. Vronsky went into the middle of the stalls, stopped and began to look around. Tonight he paid less attention than ever to the habitual surroundings, to the stage, to the noise, to this whole familiar, uninteresting, motley flock of spectators in the tightly packed theatre.

  As usual, there were the same sort of ladies in the boxes with the same sort of officers behind them; the same multi–coloured women, uniforms, frock coats, God knows who they were; the same dirty crowd in the gallery; and in all this crowd, in the boxes and front rows, there were about forty real men and women. And to these oases Vronsky at once paid attention, and with them he at once entered into contact.

  The act ended as he came in, and therefore, without going to his brother’s box, he walked up to the front row and stopped by the footlights with Serpukhovskoy, who, bending his knee and tapping his heel against the wall, had seen him from a distance and summoned him with a smile.

  Vronsky had not yet seen Anna; he purposely did not look her way. But from the direction of all eyes he knew where she was. He looked around surreptitiously, but not for her; expecting the worst, his eyes were seeking Alexei Alexandrovich. To his good fortune, Alexei Alexandrovich was not in the theatre this time.

  ‘How little of the military is left in you!’ Serpukhovskoy said to him. ‘A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort.’

  ‘Yes, I put on a tailcoat as soon as I got home,’ Vronsky replied, smiling and slowly taking out his opera–glasses.

  ‘In that, I confess, I envy you. When I come back from abroad and put this on,’ he tapped his epaulettes, ‘I regret my lost freedom.’

  Serpukhovskoy had long since given up on Vronsky’s career, but he loved him as before and now was especially amiable with him.

  ‘Too bad you were late for the first act.’

  Vronsky, listening with one ear, transferred his opera–glasses from the baignoire to the dress circle and scanned the boxes. Next to a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who blinked angrily into the lenses of the moving opera–glasses, Vronsky suddenly saw Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, and smiling in its frame of lace. She was in the fifth baignoire, twenty steps away from him. She was sitting at the front and, turning slightly, was saying something to Yashvin. The poise of her head on her beautiful, broad shoulders, the glow of restrained excitement in her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her exactly as he had seen her at the ball in Moscow. But his sense of this beauty was quite different now. His feeling for her now had nothing mysterious in it, and therefore her beauty, though it attracted him more strongly than before, at the same time offended him. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky could sense that she had seen him.

  When Vronsky again looked in that direction through his opera–glasses, he noticed that Princess Varvara was especially red, laughed unnaturally and kept turning to look at the neighbouring box, while Anna, tapping on the red velvet with a folded fan, gazed off somewhere and did not see or want to see what was happening in that box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression it had when he was losing at cards. He sulkily put the left side of his moustache further and further into his mouth, glancing sidelong at the same neighbouring box.

  In this box to the left were the Kartasovs. Vronsky knew them and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Mme Kartasov, a thin, small woman, was standing in her box, her back turned to Anna, and putting on a cape that her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and cross, and she was saying something excitedly. Kartasov, a fat, bald gentleman, kept looking round at Anna and trying to calm his wife.

  When his wife left, the husband lingered for a long time, his eyes seeking Anna’s, apparently wishing to bow to her. But Anna, obviously ignoring him on purpose, turned round and was saying something to Yashvin, who leaned his cropped head towards her. Kartasov went out without bowing, and the box was left empty.

  Vronsky did not understand precisely what had taken place between the Kartasovs and Anna, but he realized that it had been humiliating for Anna. He realized it both from what he had seen and, most of all, from Anna’s look. He knew she had gathered her last forces in order to maintain the role she had taken upon herself. And in this role of ostensible calm she succeeded fully. People who did not know her and her circle, and who had not heard all the expressions of commiseration, indignation and astonishment from women that she should allow herself to appear in society and appear so conspicuously in her lace attire and in all her beauty, admired the calm and beauty of this woman and did not suspect that she was experiencing the feelings of a person in the pillory.

  Knowing that something had happened but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky felt a tormenting anxiety and, hoping to find something out, went to his brother’s box. On his way, deliberately choosing the aisle in the stalls on the side opposite Anna’s box, he ran into the commander of his former regiment, who was talking with two acquaintances. Vronsky heard the name Karenina spoken, and noticed how the commander hastened to address him loudly, with a meaningful glance at the speakers.

  ‘Ah, Vronsky! When will you visit the regiment? We can’t let you go without a banquet. You’re one of us,’ said the commander.

  ‘Can’t stop, very sorry, another time,’ Vronsky said and ran up the stairs to his brother’s box.

  The old countess, Vronsky’s mother, with her steely little curls, was in his brother’s box. Varya and the young princess Sorokin met him in the corridor of the dress circle.

  After taking Princess Sorokin to his mother, Varya gave her brother–in–law her hand and at once began talking to him about what interested him. He had rarely seen her so agitated.

  ‘I find it mean and nasty, and Mme Kartasov had no right. Anna Arkadyevna …’ she began.

  ‘But what? I don’t know.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t heard?’ ‘You know I’ll be the last to hear of it.’