by Anna Karenina (tr Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky) (Penguin Classics) (epub)
* But I won’t let you off anything.
him, he was hanging around Betsy. Now he’s been dismissed and he’s come to us. As Alexei puts it, he’s one of those people who are quite agreeable if taken as they would like to appear, et puis, il est comme il faut* as Princess Varvara says. Then there’s Veslovsky … that one you know. A very nice boy,’ she said, and a sly smile puckered her lips. ‘What’s this wild story with Levin? Veslovsky told Alexei, but we can’t believe it. Il est très gentil et naïf,* she said, again with the same smile. ‘Men need diversion, and Alexei needs an audience, so I value this whole company. We must keep it gay and animated, so that Alexei won’t wish for anything new. Then you’ll meet the steward. A German, very nice and knows his business. Alexei values him highly. Then the doctor, a young man, not an outright nihilist, but, you know, eats with his knife. But a very good doctor. Then the architect… Une petite cour.’*
XX
‘Well, here’s Dolly for you, Princess, you wanted so much to see her,’ said Anna, coming out with Darya Alexandrovna to the big stone terrace, where Princess Varvara was sitting in the shade over her embroidery frame, making a chair seat for Count Alexei Kirillovich. ‘She says she wants nothing before dinner, but you order lunch to be served and I’ll go and find Alexei and bring them all here.’
Princess Varvara received Dolly benignly and somewhat condescendingly, and at once began explaining to her that she was living with Anna because she had always loved Anna more than had her sister Katerina Pavlovna, the one who had brought Anna up, and now, when everyone had abandoned Anna, she considered it her duty to help her in this most difficult transitional period.
‘Her husband will give her a divorce, and then I shall go back into my seclusion, but now I can be of use and, however hard it is for me, I shall fulfil my duty – not like some others. And how nice of you, what a good thing you’ve done, to come! They live just like the best of couples. It’s for God to judge them, not us. Aren’t Biriuzovsky and Mme Avenyev … And Nikandrov himself, and Vassilyev and Mme Mamonov, and
* And then, he’s proper enough.
* He is very nice and simple.
* A little court.
Liza Neptunov … And has anyone ever said anything? And it ended with everyone receiving them. And then, c’est un intérieur si joli, si comme il faut. Tout–à–fait à I’anglaise. On se réunit le matin au breakfast et puis on se sépare. * Everyone does what he likes till dinner. Dinner is at seven. Stiva did very well to send you. He must stick by them. You know, through his mother and brother he can do anything. And then they do so much good. Hasn’t he told you about his hospital? Ce sera admirable* – everything comes from Paris.’
Their conversation was interrupted by Anna, who had found the men gathered in the billiard room and returned with them to the terrace. There was still a long time till dinner and, as the weather was fine, several ways were suggested for passing the remaining two hours. There were a great many ways of passing the time in Vozdvizhenskoe, and they were all different from what was done at Pokrovskoe.
‘Une partie de lawn tennis,’* Veslovsky suggested, smiling his handsome smile. ‘We can be partners again, Anna Arkadyevna.’
‘No, it’s too hot. Better to stroll in the garden and go for a boat ride, to show Darya Alexandrovna the banks,’ suggested Vronsky.
‘I’m agreeable to everything,’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘I think Dolly would like most to take a stroll, isn’t that right? And then go for a boat ride,’ said Anna.
So it was decided. Veslovsky and Tushkevich went to the bathing house, and promised to get the boat ready there and wait for them.
They walked down the path in two pairs, Anna with Sviyazhsky and Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly was slightly embarrassed and worried in the totally new milieu in which she found herself. Abstractly, theoretically, she not only justified but even approved of what Anna had done. "Weary of the monotony of a moral life, as irreproachably moral women in general often are, she not only excused criminal love from a distance but even envied it. Besides, she loved Anna from the heart. But in reality, seeing her among these people she found so alien, with their good tone that was so new for her, she felt awkward. It was especially unpleasant for her to see Princess Varvara, who forgave them everything for the sake of the comfort she enjoyed.
In general, abstractly, Dolly approved of what Anna had done, but to
* It’s such a pretty interior, in such good taste. Quite in the English style. We get together in the morning for breakfast and then go our separate ways,
* It will be wonderful,
* A game of lawn tennis.
see the man for whose sake she had done it was unpleasant for her. Besides, she had never liked Vronsky. She considered him very proud and saw nothing in him that he could be proud of except his wealth. But, against her will, here, in his own house, he impressed her still more than before, and she could not be comfortable with him. She felt with him as she had felt with the maid about her chemise. As she had felt not so much ashamed as ill at ease with the maid about the patches, so with him she felt not so much ashamed as ill at ease about herself.
Dolly felt embarrassed and searched for a topic of conversation. She thought that he, with his pride, was sure to find praise of his house and garden displeasing but, unable to come up with anything else, she told him all the same that she liked his house very much.
‘Yes, it’s a very handsome building and in the good old style,’ he said.
‘I like the courtyard in front of the porch very much. Is that how it was?’
‘Oh, no!’ he said, and his face lit up with pleasure. ‘You should have seen that courtyard in the spring!’
And, cautiously at first, but then more and more enthusiastically, he began to draw her attention to various details of the embellishment of the house and garden. One could see that, having devoted much work to improving and embellishing his estate, Vronsky felt a need to boast of it before a new person and was heartily glad of Darya Alexandrovna’s praise.
‘If you’re not tired and would like to have a look at the hospital, it’s not far. Let’s go,’ he said, glancing at her face to be sure she was indeed not bored.
‘Will you come, Anna?’ he turned to her.
‘Yes, we’ll come. Won’t we?’ She turned to Sviyazhsky. ‘Mais il ne faut pas laisser le pauvre Veslovsky et Tushkevich se morfondre là dans le bateau.* Send somebody to tell them. Yes, he’ll leave it behind as a memorial,’ said Anna, turning to Dolly with the same sly, knowing smile as when she had spoken of the hospital earlier.
‘Oh, a capital affair!’ said Sviyazhsky. But to avoid seeming to fall in with Vronsky, he at once added a slightly deprecatory observation. ‘I’m astonished, though, Count,’ he said, ‘that you, who are doing so much for the people in the sanitary respect, are so indifferent to schools.’
* But we mustn’t leave poor Veslovsky and Tushkevich to languish there in the boat.
‘C’est devenu tellement commun, les écoles!’* said Vronsky. ‘It’s not because of that, you understand, I just got carried away. This way to the hospital.’ He turned to Darya Alexandrovna, pointing to a side path off the avenue.
The ladies opened their parasols and went down the side path. After making several turns and passing through a gate, Darya Alexandrovna saw on a rise before her a large, red, fancifully designed and nearly completed building. The still unpainted iron roof shone dazzlingly in the bright sun. Beside the completed building, another one, surrounded by scaffolding, was under construction, and on the planks workmen in aprons were laying bricks, taking mortar from troughs and smoothing it with trowels.
‘How quickly your work’s going!’ said Sviyazhsky. ‘The last time I was here, there was no roof yet.’
‘It will all be done by the autumn. The interior’s nearly finished now,’ said Anna.
‘And what’s this new one?’
‘This will house the doctor and the dispensary,’ Vronsky replied and, see
ing the architect in his short coat coming towards them, he excused himself to the ladies and went to meet him.
Sidestepping a trough from which the workmen took lime, he stopped with the architect and heatedly began telling him something.
‘The pediment still comes out too low,’ he answered Anna, who had asked him what was the matter.
‘I kept saying the foundation had to be raised,’ said Anna.
‘Yes, certainly, that would have been better, Anna Arkadyevna,’ said the architect, ‘but it’s too late now.’
‘Yes, I’m very interested in it,’ Anna replied to Sviyazhsky, who had expressed surprise at her knowledge of architecture. ‘The new building ought to correspond to the hospital. But it was thought of later and begun without a plan.’
When he finished talking with the architect, Vronsky joined the ladies and showed them into the hospital.
Though they were still working on the cornices outside, and the ground floor was still being painted, upstairs almost everything was done. Having climbed the wide cast–iron stairway to the landing, they went into the first big room. The walls had been plastered to look like
* They’ve become so common, these schools! marble, enormous plate–glass windows had already been installed, only the parquet floor was not yet finished, and the joiners, who were planing a square they had removed, stopped work and took off their headbands to greet the gentlefolk.
‘This is the reception room,’ said Vronsky. ‘It will have a desk, a table, a cupboard, and that’s all.’
‘Here, come this way. Don’t go near the window,’ said Anna, testing whether the paint was dry. ‘The paint’s already dry, Alexei,’ she added.
From the reception room they went into the corridor. Here Vronsky showed them the new ventilation system he had installed. Then he showed them marble baths, beds with extraordinary springs. Then, one after the other, he showed them the wards, the store room, the linen room, then stoves of some new construction, then special carts that would make no noise when conveying necessary things through the corridors, and much more. Sviyazhsky appreciated it all like one familiar with all the new improvements. Dolly was simply surprised at what she had never seen before and, wishing to understand it all, asked about everything in great detail, which obviously pleased Vronsky very much.
‘Yes, I think this will be the only quite properly set–up hospital in Russia,’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘And won’t you have a maternity ward?’ asked Dolly. ‘It’s so needed in the country. I often …’
In spite of his courtesy, Vronsky interrupted her. ‘ ‘This is not a maternity home, it’s a hospital, and meant for all illnesses except infectious ones,’ he said. ‘And take a look at this …’ He wheeled a newly ordered convalescent chair up to Darya Alexandrovna. ‘Watch now.’ He sat in the chair and began moving it. ‘He can’t walk, he’s weak or has bad legs, but he needs air, and so he wheels himself about in it . . .’
Darya Alexandrovna was interested in it all, liked it all very much, but most of all she liked Vronsky himself, with his natural, naive passion. ‘Yes, he’s a very nice, good man,’ she thought occasionally, not listening to him but trying to penetrate his expression and mentally putting herself inside Anna. She now liked him so much in his animation that she understood how Anna could fall in love with him.
XXI
‘No, I think the princess is tired, and horses don’t interest her,’ Vronsky said to Anna, who had suggested strolling over to the stud farm, where Sviyazhsky wanted to see the new stallion. ‘You go and I’ll take the princess home, and we can talk,’ he said, ‘if you’d like that.’ He turned to her.
‘I understand nothing about horses and shall be very glad,’ said Darya Alexandrovna, slightly surprised.
She saw by Vronsky’s face that he wanted something from her. Nor was she mistaken. As soon as they went back through the gate into the garden, he looked in the direction Anna had gone and, having made sure that she could not hear or see them, began:
‘You’ve guessed that I wanted to talk with you?’ he said, looking at her with laughing eyes. ‘I’m not mistaken in thinking that you’re Anna’s friend.’ He removed his hat, took out a handkerchief, and wiped his balding head.
Darya Alexandrovna made no reply and only looked fearfully at him. Now that she was left alone with him, she suddenly became frightened: his laughing eyes and the stern expression of his face scared her.
The most varied suppositions as to the subject of his talk with her flashed through her head: ‘He’s going to ask me to come and stay here with my children, and I’ll have to say no to him; or to become part of Anna’s circle in Moscow … Or is it about Vasenka Veslovsky and his relations with Anna? Maybe about Kitty, about how he feels himself guilty?’ She foresaw only unpleasantness, but failed to guess what he wanted to talk with her about.
‘You have such influence on Anna, and she loves you so,’ he said. ‘Help me.’
Darya Alexandrovna looked with questioning timidity at his energetic face, which kept moving into sunlit gaps in the shade of the lindens, then was darkened again by the shade, and waited for what more he would say; but he walked silently beside her, his stick grazing the gravel.
‘If you have come to us, you, the only woman among Anna’s former friends –I don’t count Princess Varvara –I understand that you’ve done it not because you consider our situation normal, but because, realizing all the difficulty of that situation, you still love her and want to help her. Have I understood you rightly?’ he asked, turning to look at her.
‘Oh, yes,’ Darya Alexandrovna replied, folding her parasol, ‘but.. .’
‘No,’ he interrupted and stopped involuntarily, forgetting that he was thereby putting her into an awkward position, so that she had to stop as well. ‘No one feels all the difficulty of Anna’s situation more fully or strongly than I do. And that is understandable, if you do me the honour of considering me a man who has a heart. I am the cause of that situation, and that is why I feel it.’
‘I understand,’ said Darya Alexandrovna, involuntarily admiring him for having said it so sincerely and firmly. ‘But precisely because you feel yourself the cause of it, I’m afraid you exaggerate,’ she said. ‘Her situation in society is difficult, I understand that.’
‘It’s hell in society!’ he said quickly, with a dark frown. ‘It’s impossible to imagine moral torments worse than those she lived through for two weeks in Petersburg … I beg you to believe that.’
‘Yes, but here, so long as neither Anna … nor you feel any need of society…’
‘Society!’ he said scornfully. ‘What need can I have of society?’
‘Then for so long – and that may mean for ever – you’ll be happy and at peace. I can see that Anna is happy, perfectly happy, she’s already had time to tell me so,’ Darya Alexandrovna said, smiling; and now, as she said it, she involuntarily doubted whether Anna was indeed happy.
