The thought of decided action concerned with her son — of going away somewhere with him — made her feel calmer.
She dressed quickly and with determined steps entered the drawing-room, where Serezha and his governess were waiting breakfast for her as usual. Serezha, dressed all in white, was standing by a table under a looking-glass, and arranging some flowers he had brought, with bent head and back, showing that strained attention familiar to her in which he resembled his father.
His governess was looking exceptionally stern. Serezha exclaimed in a piercing voice, as he often did, ‘Ah! Mama!’ and stopped, hesitating whether to go and bid her good-morning and leave the flowers, or to finish the crown he was making and take it to her.
The governess began to give a long and detailed account of his misconduct, but Anna did not listen to her. She was wondering whether to take her also or not.
‘No, I won’t,’ she decided. ‘I will go alone with my son.’
‘Yes, that was very wrong,’ said Anna, and putting her hand on his shoulder she looked at him not with a severe but with a timid expression which confused and gladdened the boy. She kissed him.
‘Leave him to me,’ she said to the astonished governess, and still holding his hand she sat down at the breakfast table.
‘Mama! I … I … I …’ he said, trying to find out from her face what he was to expect for eating the peach.
‘Serezha,’ she said as soon as the governess had gone away, ‘it was wrong, but you won’t do it again? … You love me?’
She felt the tears coming into her eyes.
‘As if I could help loving him,’ she said to herself looking into his frightened and yet happy face. ‘And is it possible that he would take sides with his father to torment me?’ The tears were already streaming down her cheeks, and in order to hide them she jumped up abruptly and went out on to the verandah.
After the thunderstorms of the last few days the weather had grown clear and cold.
She shivered with cold, and with the terror that seized her with new power out in the open air.
‘Go to Mariette,’ she said to Serezha, who had come out after her; and she began pacing up and down the straw matting of the verandah.
‘Is it possible that they could not forgive me or understand that it could not have been otherwise?’ she asked herself.
She stopped and looked at the crown of an aspen trembling in the wind, with its clean-washed leaves glistening brilliantly in the cold sunshine, and she felt that they would not forgive, that everybody would now be as pitiless toward her as the sky and the trees, and again she felt that duality in her soul.
‘No, no, I must not think,’ she said to herself; ‘I must get ready to go. Where? When? Whom shall I take with me?’
‘To Moscow? Yes, by the evening train, with Annushka and Serezha, and with only the most necessary things. But first I must write to both of them.’
She quickly went to her sitting-room and wrote to her husband.
‘After what has happened I can no longer remain in your house. I am going away and taking my son. I do not know the law and therefore I do not know to which of his parents a son must be left, but I am taking him because I cannot live without him. Be generous and leave him to me!’
Up to that point she wrote quickly and naturally; but the appeal to his generosity, in which she did not believe, and the necessity of finishing the letter with something moving, stopped her… .
‘I cannot speak of my fault and my repentance, because …’ She stopped again, unable to connect her thoughts. ‘No, I will say nothing,’ she thought, tore up the letter, rewrote it, omitting the reference to his generosity, and sealed it.
The other letter she meant to write was to Vronsky.
‘I have informed my husband,’ she began, and was unable to write any more. It seemed so coarse and unwomanly. ‘Besides, what can I write to him?’ she asked herself; and again she blushed with shame. She thought of his calmness, and a feeling of vexation with him made her tear the paper to pieces, with the one sentence written on it.
‘There is no need to write anything,’ she thought, closed her blotting-book, went upstairs to tell the governess and the servant that she was going to Moscow that evening, and then began packing.
Chapter 16
IN all the rooms of the country house porters, gardeners, and footmen went about carrying out the things. Cupboards and chests of drawers stood open, twice the nearest shop had been sent to for balls of string. The floor was strewn with newspapers. Two trunks, several bags, and some strapped-up rugs had been taken down to the hall. A closed carriage and two izvoshchiks [one-horse cabs] were waiting at the front porch. Anna, who had forgotten her agitation while she was working, stood at a table in the sitting-room packing her handbag when Annushka drew her attention to the noise of approaching carriage wheels. Anna looked out and saw Karenin’s messenger in the porch ringing the bell.
‘Go and see what it is,’ she said, and, calmly prepared for anything, sat down in an easy-chair and folded her hands on her knees. A footman brought her a thick envelope addressed in her husband’s handwriting.
‘The messenger has been told to wait for an answer,’ he said.
‘All right,’ she replied, and as soon as he had gone she tore open the envelope with trembling fingers.
A packet of new still unfolded notes in a paper band fell out. She unfolded the letter and read the end first: ‘All necessary preparations shall be made for your return. I beg you will note that I attach importance to this request of mine,’ she read. Having glanced through it, she went back and read it again from the beginning. When she had finished she felt cold, and knew that a more dreadful misfortune had befallen her than she had ever expected.
She had that morning repented of having told her husband and wished it were possible to unsay her words; and here was a letter treating her words as unsaid and giving her what she had desired; but now the letter appeared more terrible than anything she could have imagined.
‘He’s in the right, he’s in the right!’ she muttered; ‘of course he always is in the right, he is a Christian, he is magnanimous! Yes, a mean, horrid man! And no one but I understands or will understand it, and I cannot explain it. They say he’s a religious, moral, honest, and wise man, but they do not see what I have seen. They do not know how for eight years he has been smothering my life, smothering everything that was alive in me, that he never once thought I was a live woman, in need of love. They do not know how at every step he hurt me and remained self-satisfied. Have I not tried, tried with all my might, to find a purpose in my life? Have I not tried to love him, tried to love my son when I could no longer love my husband? But the time came when I understood that I could no longer deceive myself, that I am alive, and cannot be blamed because God made me so, that I want to love and to live. And now? If he killed me — if he had killed him, — I would have borne anything, I would have forgiven anything! But no! He …
‘How was it I did not guess what he would do? He will do what is consistent with his low nature. He will be in the right, but as for me who am already disgraced he will disgrace me more and more!
“You can yourself foresee what awaits you and your son!” ’ — she repeated the words of the letter. ‘That is a threat that he will take my son from me, and probably their stupid laws will permit it. But don’t