Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 184
1454 words | Chapter 184
“Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your position,
if possible,” said Dolly.
“Yes, if possible,” said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly
different tone, subdued and mournful.
“Surely you don’t mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your husband
had consented to it.”
“Dolly, I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Oh, we won’t then,” Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing the
expression of suffering on Anna’s face. “All I see is that you take too
gloomy a view of things.”
“I? Not at all! I’m always bright and happy. You see, _je fais des
passions._ Veslovsky....”
“Yes, to tell the truth, I don’t like Veslovsky’s tone,” said Darya
Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject.
“Oh, that’s nonsense! It amuses Alexey, and that’s all; but he’s a boy,
and quite under my control. You know, I turn him as I please. It’s just
as it might be with your Grisha.... Dolly!”—she suddenly changed the
subject—“you say I take too gloomy a view of things. You can’t
understand. It’s too awful! I try not to take any view of it at all.”
“But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can.”
“But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexey, and say I
don’t think about it. I don’t think about it!” she repeated, and a
flush rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and
sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the
room, stopping now and then. “I don’t think of it? Not a day, not an
hour passes that I don’t think of it, and blame myself for thinking of
it ... because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!” she
repeated. “When I think of it, I can’t sleep without morphine. But
never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me, divorce. In the first
place, he won’t give me a divorce. He’s under the influence of Countess
Lidia Ivanovna now.”
Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head,
following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.
“You ought to make the attempt,” she said softly.
“Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?” she said, evidently
giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and
learned by heart. “It means that I, hating him, but still recognizing
that I have wronged him—and I consider him magnanimous—that I humiliate
myself to write to him.... Well, suppose I make the effort; I do it.
Either I receive a humiliating refusal or consent.... Well, I have
received his consent, say....” Anna was at that moment at the furthest
end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the curtain
at the window. “I receive his consent, but my ... my son? They won’t
give him up to me. He will grow up despising me, with his father, whom
I’ve abandoned. Do you see, I love ... equally, I think, but both more
than myself—two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.”
She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with
her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white dressing gown
her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She bent her head,
and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at Dolly, a thin
little pitiful figure in her patched dressing jacket and nightcap,
shaking all over with emotion.
“It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the
other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want.
And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care
about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I
can’t, I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me
for anything. You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m
suffering.” She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look,
peeped into her face and took her hand.
“What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise
me. I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy,
I am,” she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears.
Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed. She
had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but
now she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home
and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm
quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own
seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any
account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that
she would certainly go back next day.
Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine-glass and dropped
into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient
was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a little while,
she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind.
When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He was
looking for traces of the conversation which he knew that, staying so
long in Dolly’s room, she must have had with her. But in her expression
of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he could find
nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh though he was
used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that it should
affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been talking of,
but he hoped that she would tell him something of her own accord. But
she only said:
“I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’ve known her a long while, you know. She’s very good-hearted, I
suppose, _mais excessivement terre-à-terre._ Still, I’m very glad to
see her.”
He took Anna’s hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.
Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him. Next morning, in spite of
the protests of her hosts, Darya Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward
journey. Levin’s coachman, in his by no means new coat and shabby hat,
with his ill-matched horses and his coach with the patched mud-guards,
drove with gloomy determination into the covered gravel approach.
Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the
gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her
hosts were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and that
it was better for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew that
now, from Dolly’s departure, no one again would stir up within her soul
the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to
stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of
her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in
the life she was leading.
As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a
delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men how
they had liked being at Vronsky’s, when suddenly the coachman, Philip,
expressed himself unasked:
“Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all they
gave us. Everything cleared up till there wasn’t a grain left by
cockcrow. What are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now down to
forty-five kopecks. At our place, no fear, all comers may have as much
as they can eat.”
“The master’s a screw,” put in the counting-house clerk.
“Well, did you like their horses?” asked Dolly.
“The horses!—there’s no two opinions about them. And the food was good.
But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna. I don’t
know what you thought,” he said, turning his handsome, good-natured
face to her.
“I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?”
“Eh, we must!”
On reaching home and finding everyone entirely satisfactory and
particularly charming, Darya Alexandrovna began with great liveliness
telling them how she had arrived, how warmly they had received her, of
the luxury and good taste in which the Vronskys lived, and of their
recreations, and she would not allow a word to be said against them.
“One has to know Anna and Vronsky—I have got to know him better now—to
see how nice they are, and how touching,” she said, speaking now with
perfect sincerity, and forgetting the vague feeling of dissatisfaction
and awkwardness she had experienced there.
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