‘Do this for me: never say such words to me, and let us be good friends.’ These were her words, but her eyes said something very different.
‘Friends we shall not be, you know that yourself; but whether we shall be the happiest or the most miserable of human beings … rests with you.’
She wished to say something, but he interrupted her.
‘I ask only one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now; but if even that is impossible, command me to disappear, and I will do it. You shall not see me if my presence is painful to you.’
‘I don’t want to drive you away.’
‘Only don’t change anything. Leave everything as it is!’ he said with trembling voice. ‘Here is your husband.’
Indeed, just at that moment Karenin, with his deliberate, ungraceful gait, entered the drawing-room.
He glanced at his wife and Vronsky, went up to the hostess, and having sat down with a cup of tea began talking in his deliberate and always clear tones, in his usual ironical way ridiculing somebody.
‘Your Hotel Rambouillet is in full muster,’ said he, glancing round the whole company, ‘the Graces and the Muses.’
But the Princess Betsy could not bear that tone of his: ‘sneering’, she called it in English: so, like a clever hostess, she at once led him into a serious conversation on universal military service. Karenin was immediately absorbed in the conversation, and began defending the new law very earnestly against the Princess Betsy, who attacked it.
Vronsky and Anna remained sitting at the little table.
‘This is becoming indecent!’ whispered a lady, indicating by a glance Vronsky, Anna, and Anna’s husband.
‘What did I tell you?’ replied Anna’s friend.
Not these two ladies alone, but nearly all those present in the drawing-room, even the Princess Myagkaya and Betsy herself, several times glanced across at the pair who had gone away from the general circle, as if their having done so disturbed the others. Only Karenin did not once glance that way and was not distracted from the interesting conversation in which he was engaged.
Noticing the unpleasant impression produced on every one, the Princess Betsy manoeuvred for some one else to take her place and to listen to Karenin, and she herself went up to Anna.
‘I am always amazed at your husband’s clearness and exactitude of expression,’ she said. ‘The most transcendental ideas become accessible to me when he speaks.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Anna, radiant with a smile of happiness and not understanding a single word of what Betsy was saying; and going across to the big table she joined in the general conversation.
After half an hour’s stay Karenin went up to his wife and suggested that they should go home together; but, without looking at him, she answered that she would stay to supper. Karenin bowed to the company and went away.
The Karenins’ fat old Tartar coachman, in his shiny leather coat, was finding it hard to control the near grey horse that had grown restive with cold, waiting before the portico. The footman stood holding open the carriage door. The hall-porter stood with his hand on the outer front door, Anna with her deft little hand was disengaging the lace of her sleeve which had caught on a hook of her fur coat, and with bent head was listening with delight to what Vronsky, who accompanied her, was saying.
‘Granted that you have not said anything! I don’t demand anything,’ he was saying, ‘but you know that it is not friendship I want! Only one happiness is possible for me in life, the word you so dislike — yes, love …’
‘Love,’ she slowly repeated to herself, and suddenly, while releasing the lace, she added aloud: ‘The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand,’ and she looked him in the face. ‘Au revoir!’
She gave him her hand, and with her quick elastic step went past the hall-porter and vanished into the carriage.
Her glance and the touch of her hand burnt him. He kissed the palm of his hand where she had touched it, and went home happy in the knowledge that in this one evening he had made more progress toward his aim than he had during the previous two months.
Chapter 8
KARENIN did not see anything peculiar or improper in his wife’s conversing animatedly with Vronsky at a separate table, but he noticed that others in the drawing-room considered it peculiar and improper, therefore he also considered it improper, and decided to speak to his wife about it.
When he reached home he went to his study as usual, seated himself in his easy-chair, and opened a book on the Papacy at the place where his paper-knife was inserted. He read till one o’clock as was his wont, only now and then rubbing his high forehead and jerking his head as if driving something away. At the usual hour he rose and prepared for bed. Anna had not yet returned. With the book under his arm he went upstairs; but tonight, instead of his usual thoughts and calculations about his official affairs, his mind was full of his wife and of something unpleasant that had happened concerning her. Contrary to his habit he did not go to bed, but with his hands clasped behind his back started pacing up and down the rooms. He felt that he could not lie down, till he had thought over these newly-arisen circumstances.
When Karenin had decided to talk the matter over with his wife, it had seemed to him quite easy and simple to do so; but now, when he began considering how to approach her, the matter appeared very difficult and complicated.
He was not of a jealous disposition. Jealousy in his opinion insulted a wife, and a man should have confidence in his wife. Why he should have confidence — that is, a full conviction that his young wife would always love him — he never asked himself; but he felt no distrust, and therefore had confidence, and assured himself that it was right to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy is a shameful feeling, and that one ought to have confidence, had not been destroyed, he felt that he was face to face with something illogical and stupid, and he did not know what to do. Karenin was being confronted with life — with the possibility of his wife’s loving somebody else, and this seemed stupid and incomprehensible to him, because it was life itself. He had lived and worked all his days in official spheres, which deal with reflections of life, and every time he had knocked up against life itself he had stepped out of its way. He now experienced a sensation such as a man might feel who, while quietly crossing a bridge over an abyss, suddenly sees that the bridge is being taken to pieces and that he is facing the abyss. The abyss was real life; the bridge was the artificial life Karenin had been living. It was the first time that the possibility of his wife’s falling in love with anybody had occurred to him, and he was horrified.
He did not undress, but paced up and down with his even step on the resounding parquet floor of the dining-room, which was lit by one lamp, over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, where a light was reflected only from a recently painted portrait of himself which hung above the sofa, and on through her sitting-room, where two candles were burning, lighting up the portraits of her relatives and friends and the elegant knick-knacks, long familiar to him, on her writing-table. Through her room he reached the door of their bedroom and then turned back again.
From time to time he stopped, generally on the parquet floor of the lamp-lit dining-room, and thought: ‘Yes, it is necessary to decide and to stop it: to express my opinion of it and my decision.’ Then he turned back again. ‘But express what? What decision?’ he asked himself in the drawing-room, and could find no answer. ‘But after all,’ he reflected before turning into her room, ‘what is it that has happened? Nothing at all. She had a long talk with him — Well? What of that? Are