Leo Tolstoy

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

  The same thing again, and again a ‘decline’. It went on that way for about an hour. Levin, leaning on the balustrade, looked and listened. At first he was surprised and wanted to understand what it meant; then, realizing that he was unable to understand it, he became bored. Then, remembering the agitation and anger he had seen on all faces, he felt sad. He decided to leave and went downstairs. Passing through the corridor behind the gallery, he met a dejected high–school student with puffy eyes pacing up and down. And on the stairs he met a couple: a lady running quickly on her high–heeled shoes and a light–footed assistant prosecutor.

  ‘I told you you wouldn’t be late,’ the prosecutor said just as Levin stepped aside to let the lady pass.

  Levin was already on the main stairway and taking the tag for his coat from his waistcoat pocket, when the secretary caught up with him. ‘Please come, Konstantin Dmitrich, we’re voting.’ The so resolutely declining Nevedovsky was now standing as a candidate.

  Levin came to the door of the big room: it was locked. The secretary knocked, the door opened, and two red–faced landowners whisked out past Levin.

  ‘I can’t stand anymore,’ said one red–faced landowner.

  After him, the face of the provincial marshal stuck itself out. Exhaustion and fear gave this face a dreadful look.

  ‘I told you not to let them out!’ he shouted to the doorkeeper.

  ‘I was letting them in, your excellency!’

  ‘Lord!’ And with a heavy sigh, the provincial marshal, shuffling wearily in his white trousers, his head bowed, walked across the room to the governor’s table.

  Nevedovsky got the majority of votes, as had been calculated, and became the provincial marshal. Many were amused, many were pleased, happy, many were delighted, many were displeased and unhappy. The provincial marshal was in despair, which he was unable to conceal. As Nevedovsky left the big room, the crowd surrounded him and followed him out, just as it had followed the governor on the first day when he had opened the elections, and just as it had followed Snetkov when he had been elected.

  XXXI

  The newly elected provincial marshal and many from the victorious party of the new dined that day at Vronsky’s.

  Vronsky had come to the elections because he was bored in the country and had to assert his right to freedom before Anna, and in order to repay Sviyazhsky with support at the elections for all the trouble he had taken for him at the zemstvo elections, and most of all in order to strictly fulfil all the responsibilities of the position of nobleman and landowner that he had chosen for himself. But he had never expected that this business of the elections could get him so involved, could so touch him to the quick, or that he could do it so well. He was a completely new man in the circle of the noblemen, but he was obviously a success, and he was not mistaken in thinking that he had already gained influence among them. Contributing to that influence were: his wealth and high birth; his splendid lodgings in town, which his old acquaintance, Shirkov, a financial dealer who had established a flourishing bank in Kashin, allowed him to use; an excellent chef, whom Vronsky had brought along from the country; his friendship with the governor, who had been Vronsky’s comrade, and a patronized comrade at that; and most of all his simple, equable treatment of everyone, which very soon made most of the noblemen change their opinion about his supposed pride. He himself felt that, apart from the crack–brained gentleman married to Kitty Shcherbatsky, who, à propos de bottes,* had told him, with ridiculous anger, heaps of totally inappropriate inanities, every nobleman whose acquaintance he had made had ended by becoming his adherent. He saw clearly, and others admitted it as well, that he had contributed greatly to Nevedovsky’s success. And now, at his own table, celebrating Nevedovsky’s victory, he experienced a pleasant feeling of triumph for the man of his choice. The elections themselves enticed him so much that, should he be married by the end of the three–year term, he was thinking of standing himself – in the same way as, after winning a prize through a jockey, he would always wish he had raced himself.

  But now the jockey’s victory was being celebrated. Vronsky sat at the head of the table; to his right sat the young governor, a general at imperial headquarters. For everyone else he was the master of the province, who had solemnly opened the elections, delivered a speech, and inspired both respect and servility in many, as Vronsky could see; but for Vronsky he was Katie Maslov – as he had been nicknamed in the Corps of Pages – who felt abashed before him and whom Vronsky tried to mettre à son aise.* To the left of him sat Nevedovsky, with his youthful, unshakable and venomous face. With him Vronsky was simple and respectful.

  Sviyazhsky bore his failure cheerfully. It was not even a failure for him, as he said himself, addressing Nevedovsky with a glass: it was impossible to find a better representative of that new direction which the nobility must follow. And therefore all that was honest, as he said, stood on the side of the present success and celebrated it.

  Stepan Arkadyich was also glad that he was having a merry time and that everyone was pleased. Over an excellent dinner they recalled

  * Apropos of nothing.

  * Set at ease.

  episodes from the elections. Sviyazhsky comically imitated the marshal’s tearful speech and observed, turning to Nevedovsky, that his excellency would have to find a different method, more complicated than tears, for auditing the books. Another jocular nobleman told them that stockinged lackeys had been summoned for the provincial marshal’s ball, and that now they would have to be sent back, unless the new provincial marshal gave a ball with stockinged lackeys.

  During dinner Nevedovsky was constantly addressed with the words ‘our provincial marshal’ and ‘your excellency’.

  This was done with the same pleasure as when a young woman is addressed as ‘madame’ and with her husband’s last name. Nevedovsky pretended that he was not only indifferent to but even scorned the title, yet it was obvious that he was happy and only kept a tight rein on himself so as not to express a delight unsuited to the new liberal milieu in which they all found themselves.

  Over dinner several telegrams were sent to people interested in the course of the elections. And Stepan Arkadyich, who was very merry, sent Darya Alexandrovna a telegram with the following content: ‘Nevedovsky won by twelve votes. Congratulations. Spread news.’ He dictated it aloud, observing: ‘They must share the glad tidings.’ When she received the telegram, Darya Alexandrovna merely sighed over the waste of a rouble, realizing that it must have been the end of the dinner. She knew that Stiva had a weakness for faire jouer le télégraphe* at the end of a good dinner.

  Everything, including the excellent dinner and the wines (not from Russian wine merchants but bottled abroad), was very noble, simple and merry. The circle of twenty people had been selected by Sviyazhsky from like–minded new liberal activists who were at the same time witty and respectable. Toasts were drunk, also half in jest, to the new provincial marshal, to the governor, to the bank director, and to ‘our gentle host’.

  Vronsky was pleased. He had never expected such nice tone in the provinces.

  At the end of dinner things grew merrier still. The governor asked Vronsky to attend a concert for the benefit of the brothers,[12] arranged by his wife, who wished to make his acquaintance.

  * Bringing the telegraph into play.

  ‘There will be a ball, and you’ll see our beauty. In fact, she’s remarkable.’

  ‘Not in my line,’ Vronsky answered in English, having a fondness for the expression, but he smiled and promised to come.

  Before leaving the table, when everyone had already begun to smoke, Vronsky’s butler came to him with a letter on a tray.

  ‘By messenger from Vozdvizhenskoe,’ he said with a significant look.

  ‘It’s amazing how much he resembles the assistant prosecutor Sventitsky,’ one of the guests said in French, referring to the butler, while Vronsky read the letter with a frown.

  The letter was from Anna. He knew its contents even be
fore reading it. Supposing the elections would be over in five days, he had promised to be home on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew the letter contained reproaches for his not having come on time. The letter he had sent the previous evening probably had not yet reached her.

  The contents were just as he had expected, but the form was unexpected and particularly disagreeable to him. ‘Annie is very sick, the doctor says it may be an infection. Alone I lose my head. Princess Varvara is not a help but a hindrance. I expected you two days ago, then yesterday, and now I’m sending to find out where and how you are. I wanted to come myself but changed my mind, knowing it would displease you. Give me some answer so that I know what to do.’

  Their child was sick, and she wanted to come herself. Their daughter was sick, and there was this hostile tone.

  The innocent merriment of the elections and that gloomy, oppressive love he had to go back to struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he had to go, and that night he took the first train home.

  XXXII

  Before Vronsky left for the elections, Anna, considering that the scenes repeated each time he left might only make him colder and not bind him to her, decided to try as hard as she could to calmly endure her separation from him. But the cold, stern look he gave her when he came to announce that he was leaving offended her, and even before he left her calm was already broken.

  Later, when she was alone, she thought about that look, which expressed his right to freedom, and arrived, as always, at one thing –the awareness of her humiliation. ‘He has the right to go off wherever and whenever he wants. Not only to go off but to abandon me. He has all the rights and I have none. But, knowing that, he shouldn’t have done it. And yet what did he do? … He looked at me with a cold, stern expression. Of course, that is indefinable, intangible, but it wasn’t so before, and that look means a lot,’ she thought. ‘That look shows that the cooling off has begun.’

  And though she was convinced that the cooling off had begun, still there was nothing she could do, she could not change anything in her relations with him. Just as before, she could only try to keep him by her love and her attractiveness. And as before, by being occupied during the day and taking morphine at night, she could stifle the terrible thoughts of what would happen if he stopped loving her. True, there was one other means, not to keep him – for that she wanted nothing but his love – but to get so close to him, to be in such a position, that he could not abandon her. That means was divorce and marriage. And she began to wish for it, and decided to agree to it the very first time he or Stiva brought it up.

  In such thoughts she spent five days without him, those days when he intended to be away.

  Walks, conversations with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital and, above all, reading, reading one book after another, occupied her time. But on the sixth day, when the coachman came back without him, she felt that she no longer had the strength to stifle her thoughts of him and of what he was doing there. Just then her daughter became sick. Anna began to look after her, but that did not distract her either, particularly as the sickness was not dangerous. Much as she tried, she could not love this girl, nor could she pretend to love her. Towards evening of that day, left alone, Anna felt such fear about him that she almost decided to go to town, but, thinking better of it, wrote that contradictory letter which Vronsky received and, without rereading it, sent it with a messenger. The next morning she received his letter and regretted her own. She anticipated with horror the repetition of that stern look he had cast at her as he was leaving, especially when he discovered that the girl was not dangerously sick. But all the same she was glad she had written to him. Anna now admitted to herself that he was burdened by her, that he would regret parting with his freedom and coming back to her, but in spite of that she was glad of his coming. Let him be burdened, but let him be there with her, so that she could see him and know his every move.

  She was sitting in the drawing room, under a lamp, with a new book by Taine,[13] reading and listening to the noise of the wind outside, and expecting the carriage to arrive any moment. Several times she thought she heard the sound of wheels, but was mistaken; at last she heard not only the sound of wheels but the driver’s shouts and the hollow sound under the portico. Even Princess Varvara, who was playing patience, confirmed it, and Anna, flushing, got up, but instead of going downstairs as she had already done twice, she stopped. She suddenly felt ashamed of her lie, but frightened most of all at how he was going to greet her. The offended feeling was gone now; she only feared he would show his displeasure. She remembered that their daughter had already been well for two days. She was even vexed that she had recovered just as the letter was bent. Then she remembered him, that he was there, all of him, with his hands, his eyes. She heard his voice. And, forgetting everything, she joyfully ran to meet him.

  ‘Well, how’s Annie?’ he said timidly from below, looking at Anna running down to him.

  He was sitting in a chair, and the footman was pulling off one of his warm boots.

  ‘All right, she’s better.’

  ‘And you?’ he said, giving himself a shake.

  She took his hand in both of hers and drew it to her waist, not taking her eyes off him.

  ‘Well, I’m very glad,’ he said, coldly looking at her, her hair, the dress he knew she had put on for him.

  He liked it all, but he had already liked it so many times! And the stony, stern expression she had been so afraid of settled on his face.

  ‘Well, I’m very glad. And are you well?’ he said, wiping his wet beard with a handkerchief and kissing her hand.

  ‘It makes no difference,’ she thought, ‘as long as he’s here, and when he’s here he can’t, he daren’t not love me.’

  The evening passed happily and cheerfully in the presence of Princess Varvara, who complained to him that without him Anna took morphine.

  ‘What was I to do? I couldn’t sleep … My thoughts troubled me. When he’s here I never take it. Almost never.’ He told her about the elections, and Anna, with her questions, was able to guide him to the very thing that cheered him – his success. She told him about everything that interested him at home. And all her news was most cheerful.

  But late at night, when they were alone, Anna, seeing that she was again in full possession of him, wished to wipe away the painful impression of that look owing to the letter. She said:

  ‘But confess, you were vexed to get the letter and didn’t believe me?’

  As soon as she said it, she realized that however amorously disposed he was towards her now, he had not forgiven her for it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The letter was so strange. First Annie’s sick, and then you want to come yourself.’

  ‘It was all true.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You’re displeased, I can see.’

  ‘Not for one minute. I’m only displeased, it’s true, that you seem not to want to admit there are responsibilities …’

  ‘Responsibilities to go to a concert…’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ he said.

  ‘And why not talk about it?’ she said.

  ‘I merely wish to say that business may come up, something necessary. Now, you see, I’ll have to go to Moscow to do with the house … Ah, Anna, why are you so irritable ? Don’t you know I can’t live without you ?’

  ‘If so,’ said Anna, in a suddenly changed voice, ‘then this life is a burden to you… Yes, you’ll come for a day and then go, as men do …’

  ‘Anna, that’s cruel. I’m ready to give my whole life …’

  But she was not listening to him.

  ‘If you go to Moscow, I’ll go, too. I won’t stay here. Either we separate or we live together.’

  ‘You know that that is my only wish. But for that…’

  ‘A divorce is necessary? I’ll write to him. I see that I can’t live like this … But I will go with you to Moscow.’

  ‘It’s as if you’re threatenin
g me. Yet there’s nothing I wish more than not to be separated from you,’ Vronsky said, smiling.