Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 150
1056 words | Chapter 150
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and sentimental girl,
been married to a wealthy man of high rank, an extremely good-natured,
jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her
husband abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations of affection
he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that people knowing the
count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the sentimental Lidia,
were at a loss to explain. Though they were divorced and lived apart,
yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her
with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her
husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love with
someone. She was in love with several people at once, both men and
women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had been
particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with all the new
princes and princesses who married into the imperial family; she had
been in love with a high dignitary of the Church, a vicar, and a parish
priest; she had been in love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, with
Komissarov, with a minister, a doctor, an English missionary and
Karenin. All these passions constantly waning or growing more ardent,
did not prevent her from keeping up the most extended and complicated
relations with the court and fashionable society. But from the time
that after Karenin’s trouble she took him under her special protection,
from the time that she set to work in Karenin’s household looking after
his welfare, she felt that all her other attachments were not the real
thing, and that she was now genuinely in love, and with no one but
Karenin. The feeling she now experienced for him seemed to her stronger
than any of her former feelings. Analyzing her feeling, and comparing
it with former passions, she distinctly perceived that she would not
have been in love with Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the
Tsar, that she would not have been in love with Ristitch-Kudzhitsky if
there had been no Slavonic question, but that she loved Karenin for
himself, for his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the sweet—to her—high
notes of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his weary eyes, his
character, and his soft white hands with their swollen veins. She was
not simply overjoyed at meeting him, but she sought in his face signs
of the impression she was making on him. She tried to please him, not
by her words only, but in her whole person. For his sake it was that
she now lavished more care on her dress than before. She caught herself
in reveries on what might have been, if she had not been married and he
had been free. She blushed with emotion when he came into the room, she
could not repress a smile of rapture when he said anything amiable to
her.
For several days now Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been in a state of
intense excitement. She had learned that Anna and Vronsky were in
Petersburg. Alexey Alexandrovitch must be saved from seeing her, he
must be saved even from the torturing knowledge that that awful woman
was in the same town with him, and that he might meet her any minute.
Lidia Ivanovna made inquiries through her friends as to what those
_infamous people_, as she called Anna and Vronsky, intended doing, and
she endeavored so to guide every movement of her friend during those
days that he could not come across them. The young adjutant, an
acquaintance of Vronsky, through whom she obtained her information, and
who hoped through Countess Lidia Ivanovna to obtain a concession, told
her that they had finished their business and were going away next day.
Lidia Ivanovna had already begun to calm down, when the next morning a
note was brought her, the handwriting of which she recognized with
horror. It was the handwriting of Anna Karenina. The envelope was of
paper as thick as bark; on the oblong yellow paper there was a huge
monogram, and the letter smelt of agreeable scent.
“Who brought it?”
“A commissionaire from the hotel.”
It was some time before Countess Lidia Ivanovna could sit down to read
the letter. Her excitement brought on an attack of asthma, to which she
was subject. When she had recovered her composure, she read the
following letter in French:
“Madame la Comtesse,
“The Christian feelings with which your heart is filled give me the, I
feel, unpardonable boldness to write to you. I am miserable at being
separated from my son. I entreat permission to see him once before my
departure. Forgive me for recalling myself to your memory. I apply to
you and not to Alexey Alexandrovitch, simply because I do not wish to
cause that generous man to suffer in remembering me. Knowing your
friendship for him, I know you will understand me. Could you send
Seryozha to me, or should I come to the house at some fixed hour, or
will you let me know when and where I could see him away from home? I
do not anticipate a refusal, knowing the magnanimity of him with whom
it rests. You cannot conceive the craving I have to see him, and so
cannot conceive the gratitude your help will arouse in me.
“Anna.”
Everything in this letter exasperated Countess Lidia Ivanovna: its
contents and the allusion to magnanimity, and especially its free and
easy—as she considered—tone.
“Say that there is no answer,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, and
immediately opening her blotting-book, she wrote to Alexey
Alexandrovitch that she hoped to see him at one o’clock at the levee.
“I must talk with you of a grave and painful subject. There we will
arrange where to meet. Best of all at my house, where I will order tea
_as you like it_. Urgent. He lays the cross, but He gives the strength
to bear it,” she added, so as to give him some slight preparation.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna usually wrote some two or three letters a day
to Alexey Alexandrovitch. She enjoyed that form of communication, which
gave opportunity for a refinement and air of mystery not afforded by
their personal interviews.
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