Chapter 25…

Chapter 25

“So you see,” pursued Nikolay Levin, painfully wrinkling his forehead and twitching.

It was obviously difficult for him to think of what to say and do.

“Here, do you see?”... He pointed to some sort of iron bars, fastened together with strings, lying in a corner of the room. “Do you see that? That’s the beginning of a new thing we’re going into. It’s a productive association....”

Konstantin scarcely heard him. He looked into his sickly, consumptive face, and he was more and more sorry for him, and he could not force himself to listen to what his brother was telling him about the association. He saw that this association was a mere anchor to save him from self-contempt. Nikolay Levin went on talking:

“You know that capital oppresses the laborer. The laborers with us, the peasants, bear all the burden of labor, and are so placed that however much they work they can’t escape from their position of beasts of burden. All the profits of labor, on which they might improve their position, and gain leisure for themselves, and after that education, all the surplus values are taken from them by the capitalists. And society’s so constituted that the harder they work, the greater the profit of the merchants and landowners, while they stay beasts of burden to the end. And that state of things must be changed,” he finished up, and he looked questioningly at his brother.

“Yes, of course,” said Konstantin, looking at the patch of red that had come out on his brother’s projecting cheekbones.

“And so we’re founding a locksmiths’ association, where all the production and profit and the chief instruments of production will be in common.”

“Where is the association to be?” asked Konstantin Levin.

“In the village of Vozdrem, Kazan government.”

“But why in a village? In the villages, I think, there is plenty of work as it is. Why a locksmiths’ association in a village?”

“Why? Because the peasants are just as much slaves as they ever were, and that’s why you and Sergey Ivanovitch don’t like people to try and get them out of their slavery,” said Nikolay Levin, exasperated by the objection.

Konstantin Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless and dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolay still more.

“I know your and Sergey Ivanovitch’s aristocratic views. I know that he applies all the power of his intellect to justify existing evils.”

“No; and what do you talk of Sergey Ivanovitch for?” said Levin, smiling.

“Sergey Ivanovitch? I’ll tell you what for!” Nikolay Levin shrieked suddenly at the name of Sergey Ivanovitch. “I’ll tell you what for.... But what’s the use of talking? There’s only one thing.... What did you come to me for? You look down on this, and you’re welcome to,—and go away, in God’s name go away!” he shrieked, getting up from his chair. “And go away, and go away!”

“I don’t look down on it at all,” said Konstantin Levin timidly. “I don’t even dispute it.”

At that instant Marya Nikolaevna came back. Nikolay Levin looked round angrily at her. She went quickly to him, and whispered something.

“I’m not well; I’ve grown irritable,” said Nikolay Levin, getting calmer and breathing painfully; “and then you talk to me of Sergey Ivanovitch and his article. It’s such rubbish, such lying, such self-deception. What can a man write of justice who knows nothing of it? Have you read his article?” he asked Kritsky, sitting down again at the table, and moving back off half of it the scattered cigarettes, so as to clear a space.

“I’ve not read it,” Kritsky responded gloomily, obviously not desiring to enter into the conversation.

“Why not?” said Nikolay Levin, now turning with exasperation upon Kritsky.

“Because I didn’t see the use of wasting my time over it.”

“Oh, but excuse me, how did you know it would be wasting your time? That article’s too deep for many people—that’s to say it’s over their heads. But with me, it’s another thing; I see through his ideas, and I know where its weakness lies.”

Everyone was mute. Kritsky got up deliberately and reached his cap.

“Won’t you have supper? All right, good-bye! Come round tomorrow with the locksmith.”

Kritsky had hardly gone out when Nikolay Levin smiled and winked.

“He’s no good either,” he said. “I see, of course....”

But at that instant Kritsky, at the door, called him....

“What do you want now?” he said, and went out to him in the passage. Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.

“Have you been long with my brother?” he said to her.

“Yes, more than a year. Nikolay Dmitrievitch’s health has become very poor. Nikolay Dmitrievitch drinks a great deal,” she said.

“That is ... how does he drink?”

“Drinks vodka, and it’s bad for him.”

“And a great deal?” whispered Levin.

“Yes,” she said, looking timidly towards the doorway, where Nikolay Levin had reappeared.

“What were you talking about?” he said, knitting his brows, and turning his scared eyes from one to the other. “What was it?”

“Oh, nothing,” Konstantin answered in confusion.

“Oh, if you don’t want to say, don’t. Only it’s no good your talking to her. She’s a wench, and you’re a gentleman,” he said with a jerk of the neck. “You understand everything, I see, and have taken stock of everything, and look with commiseration on my shortcomings,” he began again, raising his voice.

“Nikolay Dmitrievitch, Nikolay Dmitrievitch,” whispered Marya Nikolaevna, again going up to him.

“Oh, very well, very well!... But where’s the supper? Ah, here it is,” he said, seeing a waiter with a tray. “Here, set it here,” he added angrily, and promptly seizing the vodka, he poured out a glassful and drank it greedily. “Like a drink?” he turned to his brother, and at once became better humored.

“Well, enough of Sergey Ivanovitch. I’m glad to see you, anyway. After all’s said and done, we’re not strangers. Come, have a drink. Tell me what you’re doing,” he went on, greedily munching a piece of bread, and pouring out another glassful. “How are you living?”

“I live alone in the country, as I used to. I’m busy looking after the land,” answered Konstantin, watching with horror the greediness with which his brother ate and drank, and trying to conceal that he noticed it.

“Why don’t you get married?”

“It hasn’t happened so,” Konstantin answered, reddening a little.

“Why not? For me now ... everything’s at an end! I’ve made a mess of my life. But this I’ve said, and I say still, that if my share had been given me when I needed it, my whole life would have been different.”

Konstantin made haste to change the conversation.

“Do you know your little Vanya’s with me, a clerk in the countinghouse at Pokrovskoe.”

Nikolay jerked his neck, and sank into thought.

“Yes, tell me what’s going on at Pokrovskoe. Is the house standing still, and the birch trees, and our schoolroom? And Philip the gardener, is he living? How I remember the arbor and the seat! Now mind and don’t alter anything in the house, but make haste and get married, and make everything as it used to be again. Then I’ll come and see you, if your wife is nice.”

“But come to me now,” said Levin. “How nicely we would arrange it!”

“I’d come and see you if I were sure I should not find Sergey Ivanovitch.”

“You wouldn’t find him there. I live quite independently of him.”

“Yes, but say what you like, you will have to choose between me and him,” he said, looking timidly into his brother’s face.

This timidity touched Konstantin.

“If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I tell you that in your quarrel with Sergey Ivanovitch I take neither side. You’re both wrong. You’re more wrong externally, and he inwardly.”

“Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!” Nikolay shouted joyfully.

“But I personally value friendly relations with you more because....”

“Why, why?”

Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolay was unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolay knew that this was just what he meant to say, and scowling he took up the vodka again.

“Enough, Nikolay Dmitrievitch!” said Marya Nikolaevna, stretching out her plump, bare arm towards the decanter.

“Let it be! Don’t insist! I’ll beat you!” he shouted.

Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humored smile, which was at once reflected on Nikolay’s face, and she took the bottle.

“And do you suppose she understands nothing?” said Nikolay. “She understands it all better than any of us. Isn’t it true there’s something good and sweet in her?”

“Were you never before in Moscow?” Konstantin said to her, for the sake of saying something.

“Only you mustn’t be polite and stiff with her. It frightens her. No one ever spoke to her so but the justices of the peace who tried her for trying to get out of a house of ill-fame. Mercy on us, the senselessness in the world!” he cried suddenly. “These new institutions, these justices of the peace, rural councils, what hideousness it all is!”

And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions.

Konstantin Levin heard him, and the disbelief in the sense of all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed, was distasteful to him now from his brother’s lips.

“In another world we shall understand it all,” he said lightly.

“In another world! Ah, I don’t like that other world! I don’t like it,” he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother’s eyes. “Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one’s own and other people’s, would be a good thing, and yet I’m afraid of death, awfully afraid of death.” He shuddered. “But do drink something. Would you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let’s go to the Gypsies! Do you know I have got so fond of the Gypsies and Russian songs.”

His speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one subject to another. Konstantin with the help of Masha persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.

Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to persuade Nikolay Levin to go and stay with his brother.

Chapter 26

In the morning Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and towards evening he reached home. On the journey in the train he talked to his neighbors about politics and the new railways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other. But when he got out at his own station, when he saw his one-eyed coachman, Ignat, with the collar of his coat turned up; when, in the dim light reflected by the station fires, he saw his own sledge, his own horses with their tails tied up, in their harness trimmed with rings and tassels; when the coachman Ignat, as he put in his luggage, told him the village news, that the contractor had arrived, and that Pava had calved,—he felt that little by little the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and self-dissatisfaction were passing away. He felt this at the mere sight of Ignat and the horses; but when he had put on the sheepskin brought for him, had sat down wrapped up in the sledge, and had driven off pondering on the work that lay before him in the village, and staring at the side-horse, that had been his saddle-horse, past his prime now, but a spirited beast from the Don, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before. In the first place he resolved that from that day he would give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage must have given him, and consequently he would not so disdain what he really had. Secondly, he would never again let himself give way to low passion, the memory of which had so tortured him when he had been making up his mind to make an offer. Then remembering his brother Nikolay, he resolved to himself that he would never allow himself to forget him, that he would follow him up, and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help when things should go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then, too, his brother’s talk of communism, which he had treated so lightly at the time, now made him think. He considered a revolution in economic conditions nonsense. But he always felt the injustice of his own abundance in comparison with the poverty of the peasants, and now he determined that so as to feel quite in the right, though he had worked hard and lived by no means luxuriously before, he would now work still harder, and would allow himself even less luxury. And all this seemed to him so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the whole drive in the pleasantest daydreams. With a resolute feeling of hope in a new, better life, he reached home before nine o’clock at night.

The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a light in the bedroom windows of his old nurse, Agafea Mihalovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She was not yet asleep. Kouzma, waked up by her, came sidling sleepily out onto the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, ran out too, almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, turned round about Levin’s knees, jumping up and longing, but not daring, to put her forepaws on his chest.

“You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna.

“I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,” he answered, and went into his study.

The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father’s sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ashtray, a manuscript book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: “No, you’re not going to get away from us, and you’re not going to be different, but you’re going to be the same as you’ve always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won’t get, and which isn’t possible for you.”

This the things said to him, but another voice in his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the sway of the past, and that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice, he went into the corner where stood his two heavy dumbbells, and began brandishing them like a gymnast, trying to restore his confident temper. There was a creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumbbells.

The bailiff came in, and said everything, thank God, was doing well; but informed him that the buckwheat in the new drying machine had been a little scorched. This piece of news irritated Levin. The new drying machine had been constructed and partly invented by Levin. The bailiff had always been against the drying machine, and now it was with suppressed triumph that he announced that the buckwheat had been scorched. Levin was firmly convinced that if the buckwheat had been scorched, it was only because the precautions had not been taken, for which he had hundreds of times given orders. He was annoyed, and reprimanded the bailiff. But there had been an important and joyful event: Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at a show, had calved.

“Kouzma, give me my sheepskin. And you tell them to take a lantern. I’ll come and look at her,” he said to the bailiff.

The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just behind the house. Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by the lilac tree, he went into the cowhouse. There was the warm, steamy smell of dung when the frozen door was opened, and the cows, astonished at the unfamiliar light of the lantern, stirred on the fresh straw. He caught a glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and piebald back of Hollandka. Berkoot, the bull, was lying down with his ring in his lip, and seemed about to get up, but thought better of it, and only gave two snorts as they passed by him. Pava, a perfect beauty, huge as a hippopotamus, with her back turned to them, prevented their seeing the calf, as she sniffed her all over.

Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs. Pava, uneasy, began lowing, but when Levin put the calf close to her she was soothed, and, sighing heavily, began licking her with her rough tongue. The calf, fumbling, poked her nose under her mother’s udder, and stiffened her tail out straight.

“Here, bring the light, Fyodor, this way,” said Levin, examining the calf. “Like the mother! though the color takes after the father; but that’s nothing. Very good. Long and broad in the haunch. Vassily Fedorovitch, isn’t she splendid?” he said to the bailiff, quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his delight in the calf.

“How could she fail to be? Oh, Semyon the contractor came the day after you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the bailiff. “I did inform you about the machine.”

This question was enough to take Levin back to all the details of his work on the estate, which was on a large scale, and complicated. He went straight from the cowhouse to the counting house, and after a little conversation with the bailiff and Semyon the contractor, he went back to the house and straight upstairs to the drawing-room.

Chapter 27

The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone, had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this was stupid, he knew that it was positively not right, and contrary to his present new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had dreamed of beginning with his wife, his family.

Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his mother had been.

He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that.

When he had gone into the little drawing-room, where he always had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book, and Agafea Mihalovna had brought him tea, and with her usual, “Well, I’ll stay a while, sir,” had taken a chair in the window, he felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from his daydreams, and that he could not live without them. Whether with her, or with another, still it would be. He was reading a book, and thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to listen to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life and work in the future rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its place, settled down, and laid to rest.

He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten his duty to God, and with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, had been drinking without stopping, and had beaten his wife till he’d half killed her. He listened, and read his book, and recalled the whole train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall’s Treatise on Heat. He recalled his own criticisms of Tyndall of his complacent satisfaction in the cleverness of his experiments, and for his lack of philosophic insight. And suddenly there floated into his mind the joyful thought: “In two years’ time I shall have two Dutch cows; Pava herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen young daughters of Berkoot and the three others—how lovely!”

He took up his book again. “Very good, electricity and heat are the same thing; but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the other in the equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively.... It’s particulary nice if Pava’s daughter should be a red-spotted cow, and all the herd will take after her, and the other three, too! Splendid! To go out with my wife and visitors to meet the herd.... My wife says, ‘Kostya and I looked after that calf like a child.’ ‘How can it interest you so much?’ says a visitor. ‘Everything that interests him, interests me.’ But who will she be?” And he remembered what had happened at Moscow.... “Well, there’s nothing to be done.... It’s not my fault. But now everything shall go on in a new way. It’s nonsense to pretend that life won’t let one, that the past won’t let one. One must struggle to live better, much better.”... He raised his head, and fell to dreaming. Old Laska, who had not yet fully digested her delight at his return, and had run out into the yard to bark, came back wagging her tail, and crept up to him, bringing in the scent of fresh air, put her head under his hand, and whined plaintively, asking to be stroked.

“There, who’d have thought it?” said Agafea Mihalovna. “The dog now ... why, she understands that her master’s come home, and that he’s low-spirited.”

“Why low-spirited?”

“Do you suppose I don’t see it, sir? It’s high time I should know the gentry. Why, I’ve grown up from a little thing with them. It’s nothing, sir, so long as there’s health and a clear conscience.”

Levin looked intently at her, surprised at how well she knew his thought.

“Shall I fetch you another cup?” said she, and taking his cup she went out.

Laska kept poking her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she promptly curled up at his feet, laying her head on a hindpaw. And in token of all now being well and satisfactory, she opened her mouth a little, smacked her lips, and settling her sticky lips more comfortably about her old teeth, she sank into blissful repose. Levin watched all her movements attentively.

“That’s what I’ll do,” he said to himself; “that’s what I’ll do! Nothing’s amiss.... All’s well.”

Chapter 28

After the ball, early next morning, Anna Arkadyevna sent her husband a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.

“No, I must go, I must go”; she explained to her sister-in-law the change in her plans in a tone that suggested that she had to remember so many things that there was no enumerating them: “no, it had really better be today!”

Stepan Arkadyevitch was not dining at home, but he promised to come and see his sister off at seven o’clock.

Kitty, too, did not come, sending a note that she had a headache. Dolly and Anna dined alone with the children and the English governess. Whether it was that the children were fickle, or that they had acute senses, and felt that Anna was quite different that day from what she had been when they had taken such a fancy to her, that she was not now interested in them,—but they had abruptly dropped their play with their aunt, and their love for her, and were quite indifferent that she was going away. Anna was absorbed the whole morning in preparations for her departure. She wrote notes to her Moscow acquaintances, put down her accounts, and packed. Altogether Dolly fancied she was not in a placid state of mind, but in that worried mood, which Dolly knew well with herself, and which does not come without cause, and for the most part covers dissatisfaction with self. After dinner, Anna went up to her room to dress, and Dolly followed her.

“How queer you are today!” Dolly said to her.

“I? Do you think so? I’m not queer, but I’m nasty. I am like that sometimes. I keep feeling as if I could cry. It’s very stupid, but it’ll pass off,” said Anna quickly, and she bent her flushed face over a tiny bag in which she was packing a nightcap and some cambric handkerchiefs. Her eyes were particularly bright, and were continually swimming with tears. “In the same way I didn’t want to leave Petersburg, and now I don’t want to go away from here.”

“You came here and did a good deed,” said Dolly, looking intently at her.

Anna looked at her with eyes wet with tears.

“Don’t say that, Dolly. I’ve done nothing, and could do nothing. I often wonder why people are all in league to spoil me. What have I done, and what could I do? In your heart there was found love enough to forgive....”

“If it had not been for you, God knows what would have happened! How happy you are, Anna!” said Dolly. “Everything is clear and good in your heart.”

“Every heart has its own skeletons, as the English say.”

“You have no sort of skeleton, have you? Everything is so clear in you.”

“I have!” said Anna suddenly, and, unexpectedly after her tears, a sly, ironical smile curved her lips.

“Come, he’s amusing, anyway, your skeleton, and not depressing,” said Dolly, smiling.

“No, he’s depressing. Do you know why I’m going today instead of tomorrow? It’s a confession that weighs on me; I want to make it to you,” said Anna, letting herself drop definitely into an armchair, and looking straight into Dolly’s face.

And to her surprise Dolly saw that Anna was blushing up to her ears, up to the curly black ringlets on her neck.

“Yes,” Anna went on. “Do you know why Kitty didn’t come to dinner? She’s jealous of me. I have spoiled ... I’ve been the cause of that ball being a torture to her instead of a pleasure. But truly, truly, it’s not my fault, or only my fault a little bit,” she said, daintily drawling the words “a little bit.”

“Oh, how like Stiva you said that!” said Dolly, laughing.

Anna was hurt.

“Oh no, oh no! I’m not Stiva,” she said, knitting her brows. “That’s why I’m telling you, just because I could never let myself doubt myself for an instant,” said Anna.

But at the very moment she was uttering the words, she felt that they were not true. She was not merely doubting herself, she felt emotion at the thought of Vronsky, and was going away sooner than she had meant, simply to avoid meeting him.

“Yes, Stiva told me you danced the mazurka with him, and that he....”

“You can’t imagine how absurdly it all came about. I only meant to be matchmaking, and all at once it turned out quite differently. Possibly against my own will....”

She crimsoned and stopped.

“Oh, they feel it directly?” said Dolly.

“But I should be in despair if there were anything serious in it on his side,” Anna interrupted her. “And I am certain it will all be forgotten, and Kitty will leave off hating me.”

“All the same, Anna, to tell you the truth, I’m not very anxious for this marriage for Kitty. And it’s better it should come to nothing, if he, Vronsky, is capable of falling in love with you in a single day.”

“Oh, heavens, that would be too silly!” said Anna, and again a deep flush of pleasure came out on her face, when she heard the idea, that absorbed her, put into words. “And so here I am going away, having made an enemy of Kitty, whom I liked so much! Ah, how sweet she is! But you’ll make it right, Dolly? Eh?”

Dolly could scarcely suppress a smile. She loved Anna, but she enjoyed seeing that she too had her weaknesses.

“An enemy? That can’t be.”

“I did so want you all to care for me, as I do for you, and now I care for you more than ever,” said Anna, with tears in her eyes. “Ah, how silly I am today!”

She passed her handkerchief over her face and began dressing.

At the very moment of starting Stepan Arkadyevitch arrived, late, rosy and good-humored, smelling of wine and cigars.

Anna’s emotionalism infected Dolly, and when she embraced her sister-in-law for the last time, she whispered: “Remember, Anna, what you’ve done for me—I shall never forget. And remember that I love you, and shall always love you as my dearest friend!”

“I don’t know why,” said Anna, kissing her and hiding her tears.

“You understood me, and you understand. Good-bye, my darling!”

Chapter 29

“Come, it’s all over, and thank God!” was the first thought that came to Anna Arkadyevna, when she had said good-bye for the last time to her brother, who had stood blocking up the entrance to the carriage till the third bell rang. She sat down on her lounge beside Annushka, and looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping-carriage. “Thank God! tomorrow I shall see Seryozha and Alexey Alexandrovitch, and my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual.”

Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day, Anna took pleasure in arranging herself for the journey with great care. With her little deft hands she opened and shut her little red bag, took out a cushion, laid it on her knees, and carefully wrapping up her feet, settled herself comfortably. An invalid lady had already lain down to sleep. Two other ladies began talking to Anna, and a stout elderly lady tucked up her feet, and made observations about the heating of the train. Anna answered a few words, but not foreseeing any entertainment from the conversation, she asked Annushka to get a lamp, hooked it onto the arm of her seat, and took from her bag a paper-knife and an English novel. At first her reading made no progress. The fuss and bustle were disturbing; then when the train had started, she could not help listening to the noises; then the snow beating on the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled guard passing by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations about the terrible snowstorm raging outside, distracted her attention. Farther on, it was continually the same again and again: the same shaking and rattling, the same snow on the window, the same rapid transitions from steaming heat to cold, and back again to heat, the same passing glimpses of the same figures in the twilight, and the same voices, and Anna began to read and to understand what she read. Annushka was already dozing, the red bag on her lap, clutched by her broad hands, in gloves, of which one was torn. Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper-knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.

The hero of the novel was already almost reaching his English happiness, a baronetcy and an estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with him to the estate, when she suddenly felt that he ought to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what had he to be ashamed of? “What have I to be ashamed of?” she asked herself in injured surprise. She laid down the book and sank against the back of the chair, tightly gripping the paper-cutter in both hands. There was nothing. She went over all her Moscow recollections. All were good, pleasant. She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and his face of slavish adoration, remembered all her conduct with him: there was nothing shameful. And for all that, at the same point in her memories, the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some inner voice, just at the point when she thought of Vronsky, were saying to her, “Warm, very warm, hot.” “Well, what is it?” she said to herself resolutely, shifting her seat in the lounge. “What does it mean? Am I afraid to look it straight in the face? Why, what is it? Can it be that between me and this officer boy there exist, or can exist, any other relations than such as are common with every acquaintance?” She laughed contemptuously and took up her book again; but now she was definitely unable to follow what she read. She passed the paper-knife over the window pane, then laid its smooth, cool surface to her cheek, and almost laughed aloud at the feeling of delight that all at once without cause came over her. She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness. Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether; whether it were Annushka at her side or a stranger. “What’s that on the arm of the chair, a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself? Myself or some other woman?” She was afraid of giving way to this delirium. But something drew her towards it, and she could yield to it or resist it at will. She got up to rouse herself, and slipped off her plaid and the cape of her warm dress. For a moment she regained her self-possession, and realized that the thin peasant who had come in wearing a long overcoat, with buttons missing from it, was the stoveheater, that he was looking at the thermometer, that it was the wind and snow bursting in after him at the door; but then everything grew blurred again.... That peasant with the long waist seemed to be gnawing something on the wall, the old lady began stretching her legs the whole length of the carriage, and filling it with a black cloud; then there was a fearful shrieking and banging, as though someone were being torn to pieces; then there was a blinding dazzle of red fire before her eyes and a wall seemed to rise up and hide everything. Anna felt as though she were sinking down. But it was not terrible, but delightful. The voice of a man muffled up and covered with snow shouted something in her ear. She got up and pulled herself together; she realized that they had reached a station and that this was the guard. She asked Annushka to hand her the cape she had taken off and her shawl, put them on and moved towards the door.

“Do you wish to get out?” asked Annushka.

“Yes, I want a little air. It’s very hot in here.” And she opened the door. The driving snow and the wind rushed to meet her and struggled with her over the door. But she enjoyed the struggle.

She opened the door and went out. The wind seemed as though lying in wait for her; with gleeful whistle it tried to snatch her up and bear her off, but she clung to the cold door post, and holding her skirt got down onto the platform and under the shelter of the carriages. The wind had been powerful on the steps, but on the platform, under the lee of the carriages, there was a lull. With enjoyment she drew deep breaths of the frozen, snowy air, and standing near the carriage looked about the platform and the lighted station.

Chapter 30

The raging tempest rushed whistling between the wheels of the carriages, about the scaffolding, and round the corner of the station. The carriages, posts, people, everything that was to be seen was covered with snow on one side, and was getting more and more thickly covered. For a moment there would come a lull in the storm, but then it would swoop down again with such onslaughts that it seemed impossible to stand against it. Meanwhile men ran to and fro, talking merrily together, their steps crackling on the platform as they continually opened and closed the big doors. The bent shadow of a man glided by at her feet, and she heard sounds of a hammer upon iron. “Hand over that telegram!” came an angry voice out of the stormy darkness on the other side. “This way! No. 28!” several different voices shouted again, and muffled figures ran by covered with snow. Two gentlemen with lighted cigarettes passed by her. She drew one more deep breath of the fresh air, and had just put her hand out of her muff to take hold of the door post and get back into the carriage, when another man in a military overcoat, quite close beside her, stepped between her and the flickering light of the lamp post. She looked round, and the same instant recognized Vronsky’s face. Putting his hand to the peak of his cap, he bowed to her and asked, Was there anything she wanted? Could he be of any service to her? She gazed rather a long while at him without answering, and, in spite of the shadow in which he was standing, she saw, or fancied she saw, both the expression of his face and his eyes. It was again that expression of reverential ecstasy which had so worked upon her the day before. More than once she had told herself during the past few days, and again only a few moments before, that Vronsky was for her only one of the hundreds of young men, forever exactly the same, that are met everywhere, that she would never allow herself to bestow a thought upon him. But now at the first instant of meeting him, she was seized by a feeling of joyful pride. She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.

“I didn’t know you were going. What are you coming for?” she said, letting fall the hand with which she had grasped the door post. And irrepressible delight and eagerness shone in her face.

“What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he said; “I can’t help it.”

At that moment the wind, as it were, surmounting all obstacles, sent the snow flying from the carriage roofs, and clanked some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the hoarse whistle of the engine roared in front, plaintively and gloomily. All the awfulness of the storm seemed to her more splendid now. He had said what her soul longed to hear, though she feared it with her reason. She made no answer, and in her face he saw conflict.

“Forgive me, if you dislike what I said,” he said humbly.

He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so stubbornly, that for a long while she could make no answer.

“It’s wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you’re a good man, to forget what you’ve said, as I forget it,” she said at last.

“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget....”

“Enough, enough!” she cried trying assiduously to give a stern expression to her face, into which he was gazing greedily. And clutching at the cold door post, she clambered up the steps and got rapidly into the corridor of the carriage. But in the little corridor she paused, going over in her imagination what had happened. Though she could not recall her own words or his, she realized instinctively that the momentary conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she was panic-stricken and blissful at it. After standing still a few seconds, she went into the carriage and sat down in her place. The overstrained condition which had tormented her before did not only come back, but was intensified, and reached such a pitch that she was afraid every minute that something would snap within her from the excessive tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and in the visions that filled her imagination, there was nothing disagreeable or gloomy: on the contrary there was something blissful, glowing, and exhilarating. Towards morning Anna sank into a doze, sitting in her place, and when she waked it was daylight and the train was near Petersburg. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son, and the details of that day and the following came upon her.

At Petersburg, as soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. “Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?” she thought, looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round hat. Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips falling into their habitual sarcastic smile, and his big, tired eyes looking straight at her. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.

“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said.

“Is Seryozha quite well?” she asked.

“And is this all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor? He’s quite well....”

Chapter 31

Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his armchair, looking straight before him or scanning the people who got in and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he did at the lamp, and the young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him as a person.

Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna—he did not yet believe that,—but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.

What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think. He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he was happy at it. He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he had come where she was, that all the happiness of his life, the only meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her. And when he got out of the carriage at Bologova to get some seltzer water, and caught sight of Anna, involuntarily his first word had told her just what he thought. And he was glad he had told her it, that she knew it now and was thinking of it. He did not sleep all night. When he was back in the carriage, he kept unceasingly going over every position in which he had seen her, every word she had uttered, and before his fancy, making his heart faint with emotion, floated pictures of a possible future.

When he got out of the train at Petersburg, he felt after his sleepless night as keen and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused near his compartment, waiting for her to get out. “Once more,” he said to himself, smiling unconsciously, “once more I shall see her walk, her face; she will say something, turn her head, glance, smile, maybe.” But before he caught sight of her, he saw her husband, whom the station-master was deferentially escorting through the crowd. “Ah, yes! The husband.” Only now for the first time did Vronsky realize clearly the fact that there was a person attached to her, a husband. He knew that she had a husband, but had hardly believed in his existence, and only now fully believed in him, with his head and shoulders, and his legs clad in black trousers; especially when he saw this husband calmly take her arm with a sense of property.

Seeing Alexey Alexandrovitch with his Petersburg face and severely self-confident figure, in his round hat, with his rather prominent spine, he believed in him, and was aware of a disagreeable sensation, such as a man might feel tortured by thirst, who, on reaching a spring, should find a dog, a sheep, or a pig, who has drunk of it and muddied the water. Alexey Alexandrovitch’s manner of walking, with a swing of the hips and flat feet, particularly annoyed Vronsky. He could recognize in no one but himself an indubitable right to love her. But she was still the same, and the sight of her affected him the same way, physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling his soul with rapture. He told his German valet, who ran up to him from the second class, to take his things and go on, and he himself went up to her. He saw the first meeting between the husband and wife, and noted with a lover’s insight the signs of slight reserve with which she spoke to her husband. “No, she does not love him and cannot love him,” he decided to himself.

At the moment when he was approaching Anna Arkadyevna he noticed too with joy that she was conscious of his being near, and looked round, and seeing him, turned again to her husband.

“Have you passed a good night?” he asked, bowing to her and her husband together, and leaving it up to Alexey Alexandrovitch to accept the bow on his own account, and to recognize it or not, as he might see fit.

“Thank you, very good,” she answered.

Her face looked weary, and there was not that play of eagerness in it, peeping out in her smile and her eyes; but for a single instant, as she glanced at him, there was a flash of something in her eyes, and although the flash died away at once, he was happy for that moment. She glanced at her husband to find out whether he knew Vronsky. Alexey Alexandrovitch looked at Vronsky with displeasure, vaguely recalling who this was. Vronsky’s composure and self-confidence here struck, like a scythe against a stone, upon the cold self-confidence of Alexey Alexandrovitch.

“Count Vronsky,” said Anna.

“Ah! We are acquainted, I believe,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch indifferently, giving his hand.

“You set off with the mother and you return with the son,” he said, articulating each syllable, as though each were a separate favor he was bestowing.

“You’re back from leave, I suppose?” he said, and without waiting for a reply, he turned to his wife in his jesting tone: “Well, were a great many tears shed at Moscow at parting?”

By addressing his wife like this he gave Vronsky to understand that he wished to be left alone, and, turning slightly towards him, he touched his hat; but Vronsky turned to Anna Arkadyevna.

“I hope I may have the honor of calling on you,” he said.

Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced with his weary eyes at Vronsky.

“Delighted,” he said coldly. “On Mondays we’re at home. Most fortunate,” he said to his wife, dismissing Vronsky altogether, “that I should just have half an hour to meet you, so that I can prove my devotion,” he went on in the same jesting tone.

“You lay too much stress on your devotion for me to value it much,” she responded in the same jesting tone, involuntarily listening to the sound of Vronsky’s steps behind them. “But what has it to do with me?” she said to herself, and she began asking her husband how Seryozha had got on without her.

“Oh, capitally! Mariette says he has been very good, And ... I must disappoint you ... but he has not missed you as your husband has. But once more merci, my dear, for giving me a day. Our dear Samovar will be delighted.” (He used to call the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, well known in society, a samovar, because she was always bubbling over with excitement.) “She has been continually asking after you. And, do you know, if I may venture to advise you, you should go and see her today. You know how she takes everything to heart. Just now, with all her own cares, she’s anxious about the Oblonskys being brought together.”

The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a friend of her husband’s, and the center of that one of the coteries of the Petersburg world with which Anna was, through her husband, in the closest relations.

“But you know I wrote to her?”

“Still she’ll want to hear details. Go and see her, if you’re not too tired, my dear. Well, Kondraty will take you in the carriage, while I go to my committee. I shall not be alone at dinner again,” Alexey Alexandrovitch went on, no longer in a sarcastic tone. “You wouldn’t believe how I’ve missed....” And with a long pressure of her hand and a meaning smile, he put her in her carriage.

Chapter 32

The first person to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the stairs to her, in spite of the governess’s call, and with desperate joy shrieked: “Mother! mother!” Running up to her, he hung on her neck.

“I told you it was mother!” he shouted to the governess. “I knew!”

And her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She had to let herself drop down to the reality to enjoy him as he really was. But even as he was, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue eyes, and his plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up stockings. Anna experienced almost physical pleasure in the sensation of his nearness, and his caresses, and moral soothing, when she met his simple, confiding, and loving glance, and heard his naïve questions. Anna took out the presents Dolly’s children had sent him, and told her son what sort of little girl was Tanya at Moscow, and how Tanya could read, and even taught the other children.

“Why, am I not so nice as she?” asked Seryozha.

“To me you’re nicer than anyone in the world.”

“I know that,” said Seryozha, smiling.

Anna had not had time to drink her coffee when the Countess Lidia Ivanovna was announced. The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a tall, stout woman, with an unhealthily sallow face and splendid, pensive black eyes. Anna liked her, but today she seemed to be seeing her for the first time with all her defects.

“Well, my dear, so you took the olive branch?” inquired Countess Lidia Ivanovna, as soon as she came into the room.

“Yes, it’s all over, but it was all much less serious than we had supposed,” answered Anna. “My belle-sœur is in general too hasty.”

But Countess Lidia Ivanovna, though she was interested in everything that did not concern her, had a habit of never listening to what interested her; she interrupted Anna:

“Yes, there’s plenty of sorrow and evil in the world. I am so worried today.”

“Oh, why?” asked Anna, trying to suppress a smile.

“I’m beginning to be weary of fruitlessly championing the truth, and sometimes I’m quite unhinged by it. The Society of the Little Sisters” (this was a religiously-patriotic, philanthropic institution) “was going splendidly, but with these gentlemen it’s impossible to do anything,” added Countess Lidia Ivanovna in a tone of ironical submission to destiny. “They pounce on the idea, and distort it, and then work it out so pettily and unworthily. Two or three people, your husband among them, understand all the importance of the thing, but the others simply drag it down. Yesterday Pravdin wrote to me....”

Pravdin was a well-known Panslavist abroad, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna described the purport of his letter.

Then the countess told her of more disagreements and intrigues against the work of the unification of the churches, and departed in haste, as she had that day to be at the meeting of some society and also at the Slavonic committee.

“It was all the same before, of course; but why was it I didn’t notice it before?” Anna asked herself. “Or has she been very much irritated today? It’s really ludicrous; her object is doing good; she a Christian, yet she’s always angry; and she always has enemies, and always enemies in the name of Christianity and doing good.”

After Countess Lidia Ivanovna another friend came, the wife of a chief secretary, who told her all the news of the town. At three o’clock she too went away, promising to come to dinner. Alexey Alexandrovitch was at the ministry. Anna, left alone, spent the time till dinner in assisting at her son’s dinner (he dined apart from his parents) and in putting her things in order, and in reading and answering the notes and letters which had accumulated on her table.

The feeling of causeless shame, which she had felt on the journey, and her excitement, too, had completely vanished. In the habitual conditions of her life she felt again resolute and irreproachable.

She recalled with wonder her state of mind on the previous day. “What was it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which it was easy to put a stop to, and I answered as I ought to have done. To speak of it to my husband would be unnecessary and out of the question. To speak of it would be to attach importance to what has no importance.” She remembered how she had told her husband of what was almost a declaration made her at Petersburg by a young man, one of her husband’s subordinates, and how Alexey Alexandrovitch had answered that every woman living in the world was exposed to such incidents, but that he had the fullest confidence in her tact, and could never lower her and himself by jealousy. “So then there’s no reason to speak of it? And indeed, thank God, there’s nothing to speak of,” she told herself.

Chapter 33

Alexey Alexandrovitch came back from the meeting of the ministers at four o’clock, but as often happened, he had not time to come in to her. He went into his study to see the people waiting for him with petitions, and to sign some papers brought him by his chief secretary. At dinner time (there were always a few people dining with the Karenins) there arrived an old lady, a cousin of Alexey Alexandrovitch, the chief secretary of the department and his wife, and a young man who had been recommended to Alexey Alexandrovitch for the service. Anna went into the drawing-room to receive these guests. Precisely at five o’clock, before the bronze Peter the First clock had struck the fifth stroke, Alexey Alexandrovitch came in, wearing a white tie and evening coat with two stars, as he had to go out directly after dinner. Every minute of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s life was portioned out and occupied. And to make time to get through all that lay before him every day, he adhered to the strictest punctuality. “Unhasting and unresting,” was his motto. He came into the dining hall, greeted everyone, and hurriedly sat down, smiling to his wife.

“Yes, my solitude is over. You wouldn’t believe how uncomfortable” (he laid stress on the word uncomfortable) “it is to dine alone.”

At dinner he talked a little to his wife about Moscow matters, and, with a sarcastic smile, asked her after Stepan Arkadyevitch; but the conversation was for the most part general, dealing with Petersburg official and public news. After dinner he spent half an hour with his guests, and again, with a smile, pressed his wife’s hand, withdrew, and drove off to the council. Anna did not go out that evening either to the Princess Betsy Tverskaya, who, hearing of her return, had invited her, nor to the theater, where she had a box for that evening. She did not go out principally because the dress she had reckoned upon was not ready. Altogether, Anna, on turning, after the departure of her guests, to the consideration of her attire, was very much annoyed. She was generally a mistress of the art of dressing well without great expense, and before leaving Moscow she had given her dressmaker three dresses to transform. The dresses had to be altered so that they could not be recognized, and they ought to have been ready three days before. It appeared that two dresses had not been done at all, while the other one had not been altered as Anna had intended. The dressmaker came to explain, declaring that it would be better as she had done it, and Anna was so furious that she felt ashamed when she thought of it afterwards. To regain her serenity completely she went into the nursery, and spent the whole evening with her son, put him to bed herself, signed him with the cross, and tucked him up. She was glad she had not gone out anywhere, and had spent the evening so well. She felt so light-hearted and serene, she saw so clearly that all that had seemed to her so important on her railway journey was only one of the common trivial incidents of fashionable life, and that she had no reason to feel ashamed before anyone else or before herself. Anna sat down at the hearth with an English novel and waited for her husband. Exactly at half-past nine she heard his ring, and he came into the room.

“Here you are at last!” she observed, holding out her hand to him.

He kissed her hand and sat down beside her.

“Altogether then, I see your visit was a success,” he said to her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and she began telling him about everything from the beginning: her journey with Countess Vronskaya, her arrival, the accident at the station. Then she described the pity she had felt, first for her brother, and afterwards for Dolly.

“I imagine one cannot exonerate such a man from blame, though he is your brother,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch severely.

Anna smiled. She knew that he said that simply to show that family considerations could not prevent him from expressing his genuine opinion. She knew that characteristic in her husband, and liked it.

“I am glad it has all ended so satisfactorily, and that you are back again,” he went on. “Come, what do they say about the new act I have got passed in the council?”

Anna had heard nothing of this act, and she felt conscience-stricken at having been able so readily to forget what was to him of such importance.

“Here, on the other hand, it has made a great sensation,” he said, with a complacent smile.

She saw that Alexey Alexandrovitch wanted to tell her something pleasant to him about it, and she brought him by questions to telling it. With the same complacent smile he told her of the ovations he had received in consequence of the act he had passed.

“I was very, very glad. It shows that at last a reasonable and steady view of the matter is becoming prevalent among us.”

Having drunk his second cup of tea with cream, and bread, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up, and was going towards his study.

“And you’ve not been anywhere this evening? You’ve been dull, I expect?” he said.

“Oh, no!” she answered, getting up after him and accompanying him across the room to his study. “What are you reading now?” she asked.

“Just now I’m reading Duc de Lille, Poésie des Enfers,” he answered. “A very remarkable book.”

Anna smiled, as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love, and, putting her hand under his, she escorted him to the door of the study. She knew his habit, that had grown into a necessity, of reading in the evening. She knew, too, that in spite of his official duties, which swallowed up almost the whole of his time, he considered it his duty to keep up with everything of note that appeared in the intellectual world. She knew, too, that he was really interested in books dealing with politics, philosophy, and theology, that art was utterly foreign to his nature; but, in spite of this, or rather, in consequence of it, Alexey Alexandrovitch never passed over anything in the world of art, but made it his duty to read everything. She knew that in politics, in philosophy, in theology, Alexey Alexandrovitch often had doubts, and made investigations; but on questions of art and poetry, and, above all, of music, of which he was totally devoid of understanding, he had the most distinct and decided opinions. He was fond of talking about Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, of the significance of new schools of poetry and music, all of which were classified by him with very conspicuous consistency.

“Well, God be with you,” she said at the door of the study, where a shaded candle and a decanter of water were already put by his armchair. “And I’ll write to Moscow.”

He pressed her hand, and again kissed it.

“All the same he’s a good man; truthful, good-hearted, and remarkable in his own line,” Anna said to herself going back to her room, as though she were defending him to someone who had attacked him and said that one could not love him. “But why is it his ears stick out so strangely? Or has he had his hair cut?”

Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing-table, finishing a letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, freshly washed and combed, with a book under his arm, came in to her.

“It’s time, it’s time,” said he, with a meaning smile, and he went into their bedroom.

“And what right had he to look at him like that?” thought Anna, recalling Vronsky’s glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch.

Undressing, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of the eagerness which, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away.

Chapter 34

When Vronsky went to Moscow from Petersburg, he had left his large set of rooms in Morskaia to his friend and favorite comrade Petritsky.

Petritsky was a young lieutenant, not particularly well-connected, and not merely not wealthy, but always hopelessly in debt. Towards evening he was always drunk, and he had often been locked up after all sorts of ludicrous and disgraceful scandals, but he was a favorite both of his comrades and his superior officers. On arriving at twelve o’clock from the station at his flat, Vronsky saw, at the outer door, a hired carriage familiar to him. While still outside his own door, as he rang, he heard masculine laughter, the lisp of a feminine voice, and Petritsky’s voice. “If that’s one of the villains, don’t let him in!” Vronsky told the servant not to announce him, and slipped quietly into the first room. Baroness Shilton, a friend of Petritsky’s, with a rosy little face and flaxen hair, resplendent in a lilac satin gown, and filling the whole room, like a canary, with her Parisian chatter, sat at the round table making coffee. Petritsky, in his overcoat, and the cavalry captain Kamerovsky, in full uniform, probably just come from duty, were sitting each side of her.

“Bravo! Vronsky!” shouted Petritsky, jumping up, scraping his chair. “Our host himself! Baroness, some coffee for him out of the new coffee pot. Why, we didn’t expect you! Hope you’re satisfied with the ornament of your study,” he said, indicating the baroness. “You know each other, of course?”

“I should think so,” said Vronsky, with a bright smile, pressing the baroness’s little hand. “What next! I’m an old friend.”

“You’re home after a journey,” said the baroness, “so I’m flying. Oh, I’ll be off this minute, if I’m in the way.”

“You’re home, wherever you are, baroness,” said Vronsky. “How do you do, Kamerovsky?” he added, coldly shaking hands with Kamerovsky.

“There, you never know how to say such pretty things,” said the baroness, turning to Petritsky.

“No; what’s that for? After dinner I say things quite as good.”

“After dinner there’s no credit in them? Well, then, I’ll make you some coffee, so go and wash and get ready,” said the baroness, sitting down again, and anxiously turning the screw in the new coffee pot. “Pierre, give me the coffee,” she said, addressing Petritsky, whom she called Pierre as a contraction of his surname, making no secret of her relations with him. “I’ll put it in.”

“You’ll spoil it!”

“No, I won’t spoil it! Well, and your wife?” said the baroness suddenly, interrupting Vronsky’s conversation with his comrade. “We’ve been marrying you here. Have you brought your wife?”

“No, baroness. I was born a Bohemian, and a Bohemian I shall die.”

“So much the better, so much the better. Shake hands on it.”

And the baroness, detaining Vronsky, began telling him, with many jokes, about her last new plans of life, asking his advice.

“He persists in refusing to give me a divorce! Well, what am I to do?” (He was her husband.) “Now I want to begin a suit against him. What do you advise? Kamerovsky, look after the coffee; it’s boiling over. You see, I’m engrossed with business! I want a lawsuit, because I must have my property. Do you understand the folly of it, that on the pretext of my being unfaithful to him,” she said contemptuously, “he wants to get the benefit of my fortune.”

Vronsky heard with pleasure this light-hearted prattle of a pretty woman, agreed with her, gave her half-joking counsel, and altogether dropped at once into the tone habitual to him in talking to such women. In his Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly opposed classes. One, the lower class, vulgar, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one’s children, earn one’s bread, and pay one’s debts; and various similar absurdities. This was the class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.

For the first moment only, Vronsky was startled after the impression of a quite different world that he had brought with him from Moscow. But immediately as though slipping his feet into old slippers, he dropped back into the light-hearted, pleasant world he had always lived in.

The coffee was never really made, but spluttered over everyone, and boiled away, doing just what was required of it—that is, providing much cause for much noise and laughter, and spoiling a costly rug and the baroness’s gown.

“Well now, good-bye, or you’ll never get washed, and I shall have on my conscience the worst sin a gentleman can commit. So you would advise a knife to his throat?”

“To be sure, and manage that your hand may not be far from his lips. He’ll kiss your hand, and all will end satisfactorily,” answered Vronsky.

“So at the Français!” and, with a rustle of her skirts, she vanished.

Kamerovsky got up too, and Vronsky, not waiting for him to go, shook hands and went off to his dressing-room.

While he was washing, Petritsky described to him in brief outlines his position, as far as it had changed since Vronsky had left Petersburg. No money at all. His father said he wouldn’t give him any and pay his debts. His tailor was trying to get him locked up, and another fellow, too, was threatening to get him locked up. The colonel of the regiment had announced that if these scandals did not cease he would have to leave. As for the baroness, he was sick to death of her, especially since she’d taken to offering continually to lend him money. But he had found a girl—he’d show her to Vronsky—a marvel, exquisite, in the strict Oriental style, “genre of the slave Rebecca, don’t you know.” He’d had a row, too, with Berkoshov, and was going to send seconds to him, but of course it would come to nothing. Altogether everything was supremely amusing and jolly. And, not letting his comrade enter into further details of his position, Petritsky proceeded to tell him all the interesting news. As he listened to Petritsky’s familiar stories in the familiar setting of the rooms he had spent the last three years in, Vronsky felt a delightful sense of coming back to the careless Petersburg life that he was used to.

“Impossible!” he cried, letting down the pedal of the washing basin in which he had been sousing his healthy red neck. “Impossible!” he cried, at the news that Laura had flung over Fertinghof and had made up to Mileev. “And is he as stupid and pleased as ever? Well, and how’s Buzulukov?”

“Oh, there is a tale about Buzulukov—simply lovely!” cried Petritsky. “You know his weakness for balls, and he never misses a single court ball. He went to a big ball in a new helmet. Have you seen the new helmets? Very nice, lighter. Well, so he’s standing.... No, I say, do listen.”

“I am listening,” answered Vronsky, rubbing himself with a rough towel.

“Up comes the Grand Duchess with some ambassador or other, and, as ill-luck would have it, she begins talking to him about the new helmets. The Grand Duchess positively wanted to show the new helmet to the ambassador. They see our friend standing there.” (Petritsky mimicked how he was standing with the helmet.) “The Grand Duchess asked him to give her the helmet; he doesn’t give it to her. What do you think of that? Well, everyone’s winking at him, nodding, frowning—give it to her, do! He doesn’t give it to her. He’s mute as a fish. Only picture it!... Well, the ... what’s his name, whatever he was ... tries to take the helmet from him ... he won’t give it up!... He pulls it from him, and hands it to the Grand Duchess. ‘Here, your Highness,’ says he, ‘is the new helmet.’ She turned the helmet the other side up, And—just picture it!—plop went a pear and sweetmeats out of it, two pounds of sweetmeats!... He’d been storing them up, the darling!”

Vronsky burst into roars of laughter. And long afterwards, when he was talking of other things, he broke out into his healthy laugh, showing his strong, close rows of teeth, when he thought of the helmet.

Having heard all the news, Vronsky, with the assistance of his valet, got into his uniform, and went off to report himself. He intended, when he had done that, to drive to his brother’s and to Betsy’s and to pay several visits with a view to beginning to go into that society where he might meet Madame Karenina. As he always did in Petersburg, he left home not meaning to return till late at night.

PART TWO

Chapter 1

At the end of the winter, in the Shtcherbatskys’ house, a consultation was being held, which was to pronounce on the state of Kitty’s health and the measures to be taken to restore her failing strength. She had been ill, and as spring came on she grew worse. The family doctor gave her cod liver oil, then iron, then nitrate of silver, but as the first and the second and the third were alike in doing no good, and as his advice when spring came was to go abroad, a celebrated physician was called in. The celebrated physician, a very handsome man, still youngish, asked to examine the patient. He maintained, with peculiar satisfaction, it seemed, that maiden modesty is a mere relic of barbarism, and that nothing could be more natural than for a man still youngish to handle a young girl naked. He thought it natural because he did it every day, and felt and thought, as it seemed to him, no harm as he did it and consequently he considered modesty in the girl not merely as a relic of barbarism, but also as an insult to himself.

There was nothing for it but to submit, since, although all the doctors had studied in the same school, had read the same books, and learned the same science, and though some people said this celebrated doctor was a bad doctor, in the princess’s household and circle it was for some reason accepted that this celebrated doctor alone had some special knowledge, and that he alone could save Kitty. After a careful examination and sounding of the bewildered patient, dazed with shame, the celebrated doctor, having scrupulously washed his hands, was standing in the drawing-room talking to the prince. The prince frowned and coughed, listening to the doctor. As a man who had seen something of life, and neither a fool nor an invalid, he had no faith in medicine, and in his heart was furious at the whole farce, specially as he was perhaps the only one who fully comprehended the cause of Kitty’s illness. “Conceited blockhead!” he thought, as he listened to the celebrated doctor’s chatter about his daughter’s symptoms. The doctor was meantime with difficulty restraining the expression of his contempt for this old gentleman, and with difficulty condescending to the level of his intelligence. He perceived that it was no good talking to the old man, and that the principal person in the house was the mother. Before her he decided to scatter his pearls. At that instant the princess came into the drawing-room with the family doctor. The prince withdrew, trying not to show how ridiculous he thought the whole performance. The princess was distracted, and did not know what to do. She felt she had sinned against Kitty.

“Well, doctor, decide our fate,” said the princess. “Tell me everything.”

“Is there hope?” she meant to say, but her lips quivered, and she could not utter the question. “Well, doctor?”

“Immediately, princess. I will talk it over with my colleague, and then I will have the honor of laying my opinion before you.”

“So we had better leave you?”

“As you please.”

The princess went out with a sigh.

When the doctors were left alone, the family doctor began timidly explaining his opinion, that there was a commencement of tuberculous trouble, but ... and so on. The celebrated doctor listened to him, and in the middle of his sentence looked at his big gold watch.

“Yes,” said he. “But....”

The family doctor respectfully ceased in the middle of his observations.

“The commencement of the tuberculous process we are not, as you are aware, able to define; till there are cavities, there is nothing definite. But we may suspect it. And there are indications; malnutrition, nervous excitability, and so on. The question stands thus: in presence of indications of tuberculous process, what is to be done to maintain nutrition?”

“But, you know, there are always moral, spiritual causes at the back in these cases,” the family doctor permitted himself to interpolate with a subtle smile.

“Yes, that’s an understood thing,” responded the celebrated physician, again glancing at his watch. “Beg pardon, is the Yausky bridge done yet, or shall I have to drive around?” he asked. “Ah! it is. Oh, well, then I can do it in twenty minutes. So we were saying the problem may be put thus: to maintain nutrition and to give tone to the nerves. The one is in close connection with the other, one must attack both sides at once.”

“And how about a tour abroad?” asked the family doctor.

“I’ve no liking for foreign tours. And take note: if there is an early stage of tuberculous process, of which we cannot be certain, a foreign tour will be of no use. What is wanted is means of improving nutrition, and not for lowering it.” And the celebrated doctor expounded his plan of treatment with Soden waters, a remedy obviously prescribed primarily on the ground that they could do no harm.

The family doctor listened attentively and respectfully.

“But in favor of foreign travel I would urge the change of habits, the removal from conditions calling up reminiscences. And then the mother wishes it,” he added.

“Ah! Well, in that case, to be sure, let them go. Only, those German quacks are mischievous.... They ought to be persuaded.... Well, let them go then.”

He glanced once more at his watch.

“Oh! time’s up already,” And he went to the door. The celebrated doctor announced to the princess (a feeling of what was due from him dictated his doing so) that he ought to see the patient once more.

“What! another examination!” cried the mother, with horror.

“Oh, no, only a few details, princess.”

“Come this way.”

And the mother, accompanied by the doctor, went into the drawing-room to Kitty. Wasted and flushed, with a peculiar glitter in her eyes, left there by the agony of shame she had been put through, Kitty stood in the middle of the room. When the doctor came in she flushed crimson, and her eyes filled with tears. All her illness and treatment struck her as a thing so stupid, ludicrous even! Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders? But she could not grieve her mother, especially as her mother considered herself to blame.

“May I trouble you to sit down, princess?” the celebrated doctor said to her.

He sat down with a smile, facing her, felt her pulse, and again began asking her tiresome questions. She answered him, and all at once got up, furious.

“Excuse me, doctor, but there is really no object in this. This is the third time you’ve asked me the same thing.”

The celebrated doctor did not take offense.

“Nervous irritability,” he said to the princess, when Kitty had left the room. “However, I had finished....”

And the doctor began scientifically explaining to the princess, as an exceptionally intelligent woman, the condition of the young princess, and concluded by insisting on the drinking of the waters, which were certainly harmless. At the question: Should they go abroad? the doctor plunged into deep meditation, as though resolving a weighty problem. Finally his decision was pronounced: they were to go abroad, but to put no faith in foreign quacks, and to apply to him in any need.

It seemed as though some piece of good fortune had come to pass after the doctor had gone. The mother was much more cheerful when she went back to her daughter, and Kitty pretended to be more cheerful. She had often, almost always, to be pretending now.

“Really, I’m quite well, mamma. But if you want to go abroad, let’s go!” she said, and trying to appear interested in the proposed tour, she began talking of the preparations for the journey.

Chapter 2

Soon after the doctor, Dolly had arrived. She knew that there was to be a consultation that day, and though she was only just up after her confinement (she had another baby, a little girl, born at the end of the winter), though she had trouble and anxiety enough of her own, she had left her tiny baby and a sick child, to come and hear Kitty’s fate, which was to be decided that day.

“Well, well?” she said, coming into the drawing-room, without taking off her hat. “You’re all in good spirits. Good news, then?”

They tried to tell her what the doctor had said, but it appeared that though the doctor had talked distinctly enough and at great length, it was utterly impossible to report what he had said. The only point of interest was that it was settled they should go abroad.

Dolly could not help sighing. Her dearest friend, her sister, was going away. And her life was not a cheerful one. Her relations with Stepan Arkadyevitch after their reconciliation had become humiliating. The union Anna had cemented turned out to be of no solid character, and family harmony was breaking down again at the same point. There had been nothing definite, but Stepan Arkadyevitch was hardly ever at home; money, too, was hardly ever forthcoming, and Dolly was continually tortured by suspicions of infidelity, which she tried to dismiss, dreading the agonies of jealousy she had been through already. The first onslaught of jealousy, once lived through, could never come back again, and even the discovery of infidelities could never now affect her as it had the first time. Such a discovery now would only mean breaking up family habits, and she let herself be deceived, despising him and still more herself, for the weakness. Besides this, the care of her large family was a constant worry to her: first, the nursing of her young baby did not go well, then the nurse had gone away, now one of the children had fallen ill.

“Well, how are all of you?” asked her mother.

“Ah, mamma, we have plenty of troubles of our own. Lili is ill, and I’m afraid it’s scarlatina. I have come here now to hear about Kitty, and then I shall shut myself up entirely, if—God forbid—it should be scarlatina.”

The old prince too had come in from his study after the doctor’s departure, and after presenting his cheek to Dolly, and saying a few words to her, he turned to his wife:

“How have you settled it? you’re going? Well, and what do you mean to do with me?”

“I suppose you had better stay here, Alexander,” said his wife.

“That’s as you like.”

“Mamma, why shouldn’t father come with us?” said Kitty. “It would be nicer for him and for us too.”

The old prince got up and stroked Kitty’s hair. She lifted her head and looked at him with a forced smile. It always seemed to her that he understood her better than anyone in the family, though he did not say much about her. Being the youngest, she was her father’s favorite, and she fancied that his love gave him insight. When now her glance met his blue kindly eyes looking intently at her, it seemed to her that he saw right through her, and understood all that was not good that was passing within her. Reddening, she stretched out towards him expecting a kiss, but he only patted her hair and said:

“These stupid chignons! There’s no getting at the real daughter. One simply strokes the bristles of dead women. Well, Dolinka,” he turned to his elder daughter, “what’s your young buck about, hey?”

“Nothing, father,” answered Dolly, understanding that her husband was meant. “He’s always out; I scarcely ever see him,” she could not resist adding with a sarcastic smile.

“Why, hasn’t he gone into the country yet—to see about selling that forest?”

“No, he’s still getting ready for the journey.”

“Oh, that’s it!” said the prince. “And so am I to be getting ready for a journey too? At your service,” he said to his wife, sitting down. “And I tell you what, Katia,” he went on to his younger daughter, “you must wake up one fine day and say to yourself: Why, I’m quite well, and merry, and going out again with father for an early morning walk in the frost. Hey?”

What her father said seemed simple enough, yet at these words Kitty became confused and overcome like a detected criminal. “Yes, he sees it all, he understands it all, and in these words he’s telling me that though I’m ashamed, I must get over my shame.” She could not pluck up spirit to make any answer. She tried to begin, and all at once burst into tears, and rushed out of the room.

“See what comes of your jokes!” the princess pounced down on her husband. “You’re always....” she began a string of reproaches.

The prince listened to the princess’s scolding rather a long while without speaking, but his face was more and more frowning.

“She’s so much to be pitied, poor child, so much to be pitied, and you don’t feel how it hurts her to hear the slightest reference to the cause of it. Ah! to be so mistaken in people!” said the princess, and by the change in her tone both Dolly and the prince knew she was speaking of Vronsky. “I don’t know why there aren’t laws against such base, dishonorable people.”

“Ah, I can’t bear to hear you!” said the prince gloomily, getting up from his low chair, and seeming anxious to get away, yet stopping in the doorway. “There are laws, madam, and since you’ve challenged me to it, I’ll tell you who’s to blame for it all: you and you, you and nobody else. Laws against such young gallants there have always been, and there still are! Yes, if there has been nothing that ought not to have been, old as I am, I’d have called him out to the barrier, the young dandy. Yes, and now you physic her and call in these quacks.”

The prince apparently had plenty more to say, but as soon as the princess heard his tone she subsided at once, and became penitent, as she always did on serious occasions.

“Alexander, Alexander,” she whispered, moving to him and beginning to weep.

As soon as she began to cry the prince too calmed down. He went up to her.

“There, that’s enough, that’s enough! You’re wretched too, I know. It can’t be helped. There’s no great harm done. God is merciful ... thanks....” he said, not knowing what he was saying, as he responded to the tearful kiss of the princess that he felt on his hand. And the prince went out of the room.

Before this, as soon as Kitty went out of the room in tears, Dolly, with her motherly, family instincts, had promptly perceived that here a woman’s work lay before her, and she prepared to do it. She took off her hat, and, morally speaking, tucked up her sleeves and prepared for action. While her mother was attacking her father, she tried to restrain her mother, so far as filial reverence would allow. During the prince’s outburst she was silent; she felt ashamed for her mother, and tender towards her father for so quickly being kind again. But when her father left them she made ready for what was the chief thing needful—to go to Kitty and console her.

“I’d been meaning to tell you something for a long while, mamma: did you know that Levin meant to make Kitty an offer when he was here the last time? He told Stiva so.”

“Well, what then? I don’t understand....”

“So did Kitty perhaps refuse him?... She didn’t tell you so?”

“No, she has said nothing to me either of one or the other; she’s too proud. But I know it’s all on account of the other.”

“Yes, but suppose she has refused Levin, and she wouldn’t have refused him if it hadn’t been for the other, I know. And then, he has deceived her so horribly.”

It was too terrible for the princess to think how she had sinned against her daughter, and she broke out angrily.

“Oh, I really don’t understand! Nowadays they will all go their own way, and mothers haven’t a word to say in anything, and then....”

“Mamma, I’ll go up to her.”

“Well, do. Did I tell you not to?” said her mother.

Chapter 3

When she went into Kitty’s little room, a pretty, pink little room, full of knick-knacks in vieux saxe, as fresh, and pink, and white, and gay as Kitty herself had been two months ago, Dolly remembered how they had decorated the room the year before together, with what love and gaiety. Her heart turned cold when she saw Kitty sitting on a low chair near the door, her eyes fixed immovably on a corner of the rug. Kitty glanced at her sister, and the cold, rather ill-tempered expression of her face did not change.

“I’m just going now, and I shall have to keep in and you won’t be able to come to see me,” said Dolly, sitting down beside her. “I want to talk to you.”

“What about?” Kitty asked swiftly, lifting her head in dismay.

“What should it be, but your trouble?”

“I have no trouble.”

“Nonsense, Kitty. Do you suppose I could help knowing? I know all about it. And believe me, it’s of so little consequence.... We’ve all been through it.”

Kitty did not speak, and her face had a stern expression.

“He’s not worth your grieving over him,” pursued Darya Alexandrovna, coming straight to the point.

“No, because he has treated me with contempt,” said Kitty, in a breaking voice. “Don’t talk of it! Please, don’t talk of it!”

“But who can have told you so? No one has said that. I’m certain he was in love with you, and would still be in love with you, if it hadn’t....”

“Oh, the most awful thing of all for me is this sympathizing!” shrieked Kitty, suddenly flying into a passion. She turned round on her chair, flushed crimson, and rapidly moving her fingers, pinched the clasp of her belt first with one hand and then with the other. Dolly knew this trick her sister had of clenching her hands when she was much excited; she knew, too, that in moments of excitement Kitty was capable of forgetting herself and saying a great deal too much, and Dolly would have soothed her, but it was too late.

“What, what is it you want to make me feel, eh?” said Kitty quickly. “That I’ve been in love with a man who didn’t care a straw for me, and that I’m dying of love for him? And this is said to me by my own sister, who imagines that ... that ... that she’s sympathizing with me!... I don’t want these condolences and humbug!”

“Kitty, you’re unjust.”

“Why are you tormenting me?”

“But I ... quite the contrary ... I see you’re unhappy....”

But Kitty in her fury did not hear her.

“I’ve nothing to grieve over and be comforted about. I am too proud ever to allow myself to care for a man who does not love me.”

“Yes, I don’t say so either.... Only one thing. Tell me the truth,” said Darya Alexandrovna, taking her by the hand: “tell me, did Levin speak to you?...”

The mention of Levin’s name seemed to deprive Kitty of the last vestige of self-control. She leaped up from her chair, and flinging her clasp on the ground, she gesticulated rapidly with her hands and said:

“Why bring Levin in too? I can’t understand what you want to torment me for. I’ve told you, and I say it again, that I have some pride, and never, never would I do as you’re doing—go back to a man who’s deceived you, who has cared for another woman. I can’t understand it! You may, but I can’t!”

And saying these words she glanced at her sister, and seeing that Dolly sat silent, her head mournfully bowed, Kitty, instead of running out of the room as she had meant to do, sat down near the door, and hid her face in her handkerchief.

The silence lasted for two minutes: Dolly was thinking of herself. That humiliation of which she was always conscious came back to her with a peculiar bitterness when her sister reminded her of it. She had not looked for such cruelty in her sister, and she was angry with her. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and with it the sound of heart-rending, smothered sobbing, and felt arms about her neck. Kitty was on her knees before her.

“Dolinka, I am so, so wretched!” she whispered penitently. And the sweet face covered with tears hid itself in Darya Alexandrovna’s skirt.

As though tears were the indispensable oil, without which the machinery of mutual confidence could not run smoothly between the two sisters, the sisters after their tears talked, not of what was uppermost in their minds, but, though they talked of outside matters, they understood each other. Kitty knew that the words she had uttered in anger about her husband’s infidelity and her humiliating position had cut her poor sister to the heart, but that she had forgiven her. Dolly for her part knew all she had wanted to find out. She felt certain that her surmises were correct; that Kitty’s misery, her inconsolable misery, was due precisely to the fact that Levin had made her an offer and she had refused him, and Vronsky had deceived her, and that she was fully prepared to love Levin and to detest Vronsky. Kitty said not a word of that; she talked of nothing but her spiritual condition.

“I have nothing to make me miserable,” she said, getting calmer; “but can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome, coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can’t imagine what loathsome thoughts I have about everything.”

“Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?” asked Dolly, smiling.

“The most utterly loathsome and coarse: I can’t tell you. It’s not unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most loathsome. Come, how am I to tell you?” she went on, seeing the puzzled look in her sister’s eyes. “Father began saying something to me just now.... It seems to me he thinks all I want is to be married. Mother takes me to a ball: it seems to me she only takes me to get me married off as soon as may be, and be rid of me. I know it’s not the truth, but I can’t drive away such thoughts. Eligible suitors, as they call them—I can’t bear to see them. It seems to me they’re taking stock of me and summing me up. In old days to go anywhere in a ball dress was a simple joy to me, I admired myself; now I feel ashamed and awkward. And then! The doctor.... Then....” Kitty hesitated; she wanted to say further that ever since this change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyevitch had become insufferably repulsive to her, and that she could not see him without the grossest and most hideous conceptions rising before her imagination.

“Oh, well, everything presents itself to me, in the coarsest, most loathsome light,” she went on. “That’s my illness. Perhaps it will pass off.”

“But you mustn’t think about it.”

“I can’t help it. I’m never happy except with the children at your house.”

“What a pity you can’t be with me!”

“Oh, yes, I’m coming. I’ve had scarlatina, and I’ll persuade mamma to let me.”

Kitty insisted on having her way, and went to stay at her sister’s and nursed the children all through the scarlatina, for scarlatina it turned out to be. The two sisters brought all the six children successfully through it, but Kitty was no better in health, and in Lent the Shtcherbatskys went abroad.

Chapter 4

The highest Petersburg society is essentially one: in it everyone knows everyone else, everyone even visits everyone else. But this great set has its subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close ties in three different circles of this highest society. One circle was her husband’s government official set, consisting of his colleagues and subordinates, brought together in the most various and capricious manner, and belonging to different social strata. Anna found it difficult now to recall the feeling of almost awe-stricken reverence which she had at first entertained for these persons. Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them. She knew their relations with one another and with the head authorities, knew who was for whom, and how each one maintained his position, and where they agreed and disagreed. But the circle of political, masculine interests had never interested her, in spite of countess Lidia Ivanovna’s influence, and she avoided it.

Another little set with which Anna was in close relations was the one by means of which Alexey Alexandrovitch had made his career. The center of this circle was the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. It was a set made up of elderly, ugly, benevolent, and godly women, and clever, learned, and ambitious men. One of the clever people belonging to the set had called it “the conscience of Petersburg society.” Alexey Alexandrovitch had the highest esteem for this circle, and Anna with her special gift for getting on with everyone, had in the early days of her life in Petersburg made friends in this circle also. Now, since her return from Moscow, she had come to feel this set insufferable. It seemed to her that both she and all of them were insincere, and she felt so bored and ill at ease in that world that she went to see the Countess Lidia Ivanovna as little as possible.

The third circle with which Anna had ties was preeminently the fashionable world—the world of balls, of dinners, of sumptuous dresses, the world that hung on to the court with one hand, so as to avoid sinking to the level of the demi-monde. For the demi-monde the members of that fashionable world believed that they despised, though their tastes were not merely similar, but in fact identical. Her connection with this circle was kept up through Princess Betsy Tverskaya, her cousin’s wife, who had an income of a hundred and twenty thousand roubles, and who had taken a great fancy to Anna ever since she first came out, showed her much attention, and drew her into her set, making fun of Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s coterie.

“When I’m old and ugly I’ll be the same,” Betsy used to say; “but for a pretty young woman like you it’s early days for that house of charity.”

Anna had at first avoided as far as she could Princess Tverskaya’s world, because it necessitated an expenditure beyond her means, and besides in her heart she preferred the first circle. But since her visit to Moscow she had done quite the contrary. She avoided her serious-minded friends, and went out into the fashionable world. There she met Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at those meetings. She met Vronsky specially often at Betsy’s for Betsy was a Vronsky by birth and his cousin. Vronsky was everywhere where he had any chance of meeting Anna, and speaking to her, when he could, of his love. She gave him no encouragement, but every time she met him there surged up in her heart that same feeling of quickened life that had come upon her that day in the railway carriage when she saw him for the first time. She was conscious herself that her delight sparkled in her eyes and curved her lips into a smile, and she could not quench the expression of this delight.

At first Anna sincerely believed that she was displeased with him for daring to pursue her. Soon after her return from Moscow, on arriving at a soirée where she had expected to meet him, and not finding him there, she realized distinctly from the rush of disappointment that she had been deceiving herself, and that this pursuit was not merely not distasteful to her, but that it made the whole interest of her life.

The celebrated singer was singing for the second time, and all the fashionable world was in the theater. Vronsky, seeing his cousin from his stall in the front row, did not wait till the entr’acte, but went to her box.

“Why didn’t you come to dinner?” she said to him. “I marvel at the second sight of lovers,” she added with a smile, so that no one but he could hear; “she wasn’t there. But come after the opera.”

Vronsky looked inquiringly at her. She nodded. He thanked her by a smile, and sat down beside her.

“But how I remember your jeers!” continued Princess Betsy, who took a peculiar pleasure in following up this passion to a successful issue. “What’s become of all that? You’re caught, my dear boy.”

“That’s my one desire, to be caught,” answered Vronsky, with his serene, good-humored smile. “If I complain of anything it’s only that I’m not caught enough, to tell the truth. I begin to lose hope.”

“Why, whatever hope can you have?” said Betsy, offended on behalf of her friend. “Entendons nous....” But in her eyes there were gleams of light that betrayed that she understood perfectly and precisely as he did what hope he might have.

“None whatever,” said Vronsky, laughing and showing his even rows of teeth. “Excuse me,” he added, taking an opera-glass out of her hand, and proceeding to scrutinize, over her bare shoulder, the row of boxes facing them. “I’m afraid I’m becoming ridiculous.”

He was very well aware that he ran no risk of being ridiculous in the eyes of Betsy or any other fashionable people. He was very well aware that in their eyes the position of an unsuccessful lover of a girl, or of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous. But the position of a man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into adultery, has something fine and grand about it, and can never be ridiculous; and so it was with a proud and gay smile under his mustaches that he lowered the opera-glass and looked at his cousin.

“But why was it you didn’t come to dinner?” she said, admiring him.

“I must tell you about that. I was busily employed, and doing what, do you suppose? I’ll give you a hundred guesses, a thousand ... you’d never guess. I’ve been reconciling a husband with a man who’d insulted his wife. Yes, really!”

“Well, did you succeed?”

“Almost.”

“You really must tell me about it,” she said, getting up. “Come to me in the next entr’acte.”

“I can’t; I’m going to the French theater.”

“From Nilsson?” Betsy queried in horror, though she could not herself have distinguished Nilsson’s voice from any chorus girl’s.

“Can’t help it. I’ve an appointment there, all to do with my mission of peace.”

“‘Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’” said Betsy, vaguely recollecting she had heard some similar saying from someone. “Very well, then, sit down, and tell me what it’s all about.”

And she sat down again.

Chapter 5

“This is rather indiscreet, but it’s so good it’s an awful temptation to tell the story,” said Vronsky, looking at her with his laughing eyes. “I’m not going to mention any names.”

“But I shall guess, so much the better.”

“Well, listen: two festive young men were driving—”

“Officers of your regiment, of course?”

“I didn’t say they were officers,—two young men who had been lunching.”

“In other words, drinking.”

“Possibly. They were driving on their way to dinner with a friend in the most festive state of mind. And they beheld a pretty woman in a hired sledge; she overtakes them, looks round at them, and, so they fancy anyway, nods to them and laughs. They, of course, follow her. They gallop at full speed. To their amazement, the fair one alights at the entrance of the very house to which they were going. The fair one darts upstairs to the top story. They get a glimpse of red lips under a short veil, and exquisite little feet.”

“You describe it with such feeling that I fancy you must be one of the two.”

“And after what you said, just now! Well, the young men go in to their comrade’s; he was giving a farewell dinner. There they certainly did drink a little too much, as one always does at farewell dinners. And at dinner they inquire who lives at the top in that house. No one knows; only their host’s valet, in answer to their inquiry whether any ‘young ladies’ are living on the top floor, answered that there were a great many of them about there. After dinner the two young men go into their host’s study, and write a letter to the unknown fair one. They compose an ardent epistle, a declaration in fact, and they carry the letter upstairs themselves, so as to elucidate whatever might appear not perfectly intelligible in the letter.”

“Why are you telling me these horrible stories? Well?”

“They ring. A maid-servant opens the door, they hand her the letter, and assure the maid that they’re both so in love that they’ll die on the spot at the door. The maid, stupefied, carries in their messages. All at once a gentleman appears with whiskers like sausages, as red as a lobster, announces that there is no one living in the flat except his wife, and sends them both about their business.”

“How do you know he had whiskers like sausages, as you say?”

“Ah, you shall hear. I’ve just been to make peace between them.”

“Well, and what then?”

“That’s the most interesting part of the story. It appears that it’s a happy couple, a government clerk and his lady. The government clerk lodges a complaint, and I became a mediator, and such a mediator!... I assure you Talleyrand couldn’t hold a candle to me.”

“Why, where was the difficulty?”

“Ah, you shall hear.... We apologize in due form: we are in despair, we entreat forgiveness for the unfortunate misunderstanding. The government clerk with the sausages begins to melt, but he, too, desires to express his sentiments, and as soon as ever he begins to express them, he begins to get hot and say nasty things, and again I’m obliged to trot out all my diplomatic talents. I allowed that their conduct was bad, but I urged him to take into consideration their heedlessness, their youth; then, too, the young men had only just been lunching together. ‘You understand. They regret it deeply, and beg you to overlook their misbehavior.’ The government clerk was softened once more. ‘I consent, count, and am ready to overlook it; but you perceive that my wife—my wife’s a respectable woman—has been exposed to the persecution, and insults, and effrontery of young upstarts, scoundrels....’ And you must understand, the young upstarts are present all the while, and I have to keep the peace between them. Again I call out all my diplomacy, and again as soon as the thing was about at an end, our friend the government clerk gets hot and red, and his sausages stand on end with wrath, and once more I launch out into diplomatic wiles.”

“Ah, he must tell you this story!” said Betsy, laughing, to a lady who came into her box. “He has been making me laugh so.”

“Well, bonne chance!” she added, giving Vronsky one finger of the hand in which she held her fan, and with a shrug of her shoulders she twitched down the bodice of her gown that had worked up, so as to be duly naked as she moved forward towards the footlights into the light of the gas, and the sight of all eyes.

Vronsky drove to the French theater, where he really had to see the colonel of his regiment, who never missed a single performance there. He wanted to see him, to report on the result of his mediation, which had occupied and amused him for the last three days. Petritsky, whom he liked, was implicated in the affair, and the other culprit was a capital fellow and first-rate comrade, who had lately joined the regiment, the young Prince Kedrov. And what was most important, the interests of the regiment were involved in it too.

Both the young men were in Vronsky’s company. The colonel of the regiment was waited upon by the government clerk, Venden, with a complaint against his officers, who had insulted his wife. His young wife, so Venden told the story—he had been married half a year—was at church with her mother, and suddenly overcome by indisposition, arising from her interesting condition, she could not remain standing, she drove home in the first sledge, a smart-looking one, she came across. On the spot the officers set off in pursuit of her; she was alarmed, and feeling still more unwell, ran up the staircase home. Venden himself, on returning from his office, heard a ring at their bell and voices, went out, and seeing the intoxicated officers with a letter, he had turned them out. He asked for exemplary punishment.

“Yes, it’s all very well,” said the colonel to Vronsky, whom he had invited to come and see him. “Petritsky’s becoming impossible. Not a week goes by without some scandal. This government clerk won’t let it drop, he’ll go on with the thing.”

Vronsky saw all the thanklessness of the business, and that there could be no question of a duel in it, that everything must be done to soften the government clerk, and hush the matter up. The colonel had called in Vronsky just because he knew him to be an honorable and intelligent man, and, more than all, a man who cared for the honor of the regiment. They talked it over, and decided that Petritsky and Kedrov must go with Vronsky to Venden’s to apologize. The colonel and Vronsky were both fully aware that Vronsky’s name and rank would be sure to contribute greatly to the softening of the injured husband’s feelings.

And these two influences were not in fact without effect; though the result remained, as Vronsky had described, uncertain.

On reaching the French theater, Vronsky retired to the foyer with the colonel, and reported to him his success, or non-success. The colonel, thinking it all over, made up his mind not to pursue the matter further, but then for his own satisfaction proceeded to cross-examine Vronsky about his interview; and it was a long while before he could restrain his laughter, as Vronsky described how the government clerk, after subsiding for a while, would suddenly flare up again, as he recalled the details, and how Vronsky, at the last half word of conciliation, skillfully manœuvered a retreat, shoving Petritsky out before him.

“It’s a disgraceful story, but killing. Kedrov really can’t fight the gentleman! Was he so awfully hot?” he commented, laughing. “But what do you say to Claire today? She’s marvelous,” he went on, speaking of a new French actress. “However often you see her, every day she’s different. It’s only the French who can do that.”

Chapter 6

Princess Betsy drove home from the theater, without waiting for the end of the last act. She had only just time to go into her dressing-room, sprinkle her long, pale face with powder, rub it, set her dress to rights, and order tea in the big drawing-room, when one after another carriages drove up to her huge house in Bolshaia Morskaia. Her guests stepped out at the wide entrance, and the stout porter, who used to read the newspapers in the mornings behind the glass door, to the edification of the passers-by, noiselessly opened the immense door, letting the visitors pass by him into the house.

Almost at the same instant the hostess, with freshly arranged coiffure and freshened face, walked in at one door and her guests at the other door of the drawing-room, a large room with dark walls, downy rugs, and a brightly lighted table, gleaming with the light of candles, white cloth, silver samovar, and transparent china tea-things.

The hostess sat down at the table and took off her gloves. Chairs were set with the aid of footmen, moving almost imperceptibly about the room; the party settled itself, divided into two groups: one round the samovar near the hostess, the other at the opposite end of the drawing-room, round the handsome wife of an ambassador, in black velvet, with sharply defined black eyebrows. In both groups conversation wavered, as it always does, for the first few minutes, broken up by meetings, greetings, offers of tea, and as it were, feeling about for something to rest upon.

“She’s exceptionally good as an actress; one can see she’s studied Kaulbach,” said a diplomatic attaché in the group round the ambassador’s wife. “Did you notice how she fell down?...”

“Oh, please, don’t let us talk about Nilsson! No one can possibly say anything new about her,” said a fat, red-faced, flaxen-headed lady, without eyebrows and chignon, wearing an old silk dress. This was Princess Myakaya, noted for her simplicity and the roughness of her manners, and nicknamed enfant terrible. Princess Myakaya, sitting in the middle between the two groups, and listening to both, took part in the conversation first of one and then of the other. “Three people have used that very phrase about Kaulbach to me today already, just as though they had made a compact about it. And I can’t see why they liked that remark so.”

The conversation was cut short by this observation, and a new subject had to be thought of again.

“Do tell me something amusing but not spiteful,” said the ambassador’s wife, a great proficient in the art of that elegant conversation called by the English small talk. She addressed the attaché, who was at a loss now what to begin upon.

“They say that that’s a difficult task, that nothing’s amusing that isn’t spiteful,” he began with a smile. “But I’ll try. Get me a subject. It all lies in the subject. If a subject’s given me, it’s easy to spin something round it. I often think that the celebrated talkers of the last century would have found it difficult to talk cleverly now. Everything clever is so stale....”

“That has been said long ago,” the ambassador’s wife interrupted him, laughing.

The conversation began amiably, but just because it was too amiable, it came to a stop again. They had to have recourse to the sure, never-failing topic—gossip.

“Don’t you think there’s something Louis Quinze about Tushkevitch?” he said, glancing towards a handsome, fair-haired young man, standing at the table.

“Oh, yes! He’s in the same style as the drawing-room and that’s why it is he’s so often here.”

This conversation was maintained, since it rested on allusions to what could not be talked of in that room—that is to say, of the relations of Tushkevitch with their hostess.

Round the samovar and the hostess the conversation had been meanwhile vacillating in just the same way between three inevitable topics: the latest piece of public news, the theater, and scandal. It, too, came finally to rest on the last topic, that is, ill-natured gossip.

“Have you heard the Maltishtcheva woman—the mother, not the daughter—has ordered a costume in diable rose color?”

“Nonsense! No, that’s too lovely!”

“I wonder that with her sense—for she’s not a fool, you know—that she doesn’t see how funny she is.”

Everyone had something to say in censure or ridicule of the luckless Madame Maltishtcheva, and the conversation crackled merrily, like a burning faggot-stack.

The husband of Princess Betsy, a good-natured fat man, an ardent collector of engravings, hearing that his wife had visitors, came into the drawing-room before going to his club. Stepping noiselessly over the thick rugs, he went up to Princess Myakaya.

“How did you like Nilsson?” he asked.

“Oh, how can you steal upon anyone like that! How you startled me!” she responded. “Please don’t talk to me about the opera; you know nothing about music. I’d better meet you on your own ground, and talk about your majolica and engravings. Come now, what treasure have you been buying lately at the old curiosity shops?”

“Would you like me to show you? But you don’t understand such things.”

“Oh, do show me! I’ve been learning about them at those—what’s their names?... the bankers ... they’ve some splendid engravings. They showed them to us.”

“Why, have you been at the Schützburgs?” asked the hostess from the samovar.

“Yes, ma chère. They asked my husband and me to dinner, and told us the sauce at that dinner cost a hundred pounds,” Princess Myakaya said, speaking loudly, and conscious everyone was listening; “and very nasty sauce it was, some green mess. We had to ask them, and I made them sauce for eighteen pence, and everybody was very much pleased with it. I can’t run to hundred-pound sauces.”

“She’s unique!” said the lady of the house.

“Marvelous!” said someone.

The sensation produced by Princess Myakaya’s speeches was always unique, and the secret of the sensation she produced lay in the fact that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she said simple things with some sense in them. In the society in which she lived such plain statements produced the effect of the wittiest epigram. Princess Myakaya could never see why it had that effect, but she knew it had, and took advantage of it.

As everyone had been listening while Princess Myakaya spoke, and so the conversation around the ambassador’s wife had dropped, Princess Betsy tried to bring the whole party together, and turned to the ambassador’s wife.

“Will you really not have tea? You should come over here by us.”

“No, we’re very happy here,” the ambassador’s wife responded with a smile, and she went on with the conversation that had been begun.

It was a very agreeable conversation. They were criticizing the Karenins, husband and wife.

“Anna is quite changed since her stay in Moscow. There’s something strange about her,” said her friend.

“The great change is that she brought back with her the shadow of Alexey Vronsky,” said the ambassador’s wife.

“Well, what of it? There’s a fable of Grimm’s about a man without a shadow, a man who’s lost his shadow. And that’s his punishment for something. I never could understand how it was a punishment. But a woman must dislike being without a shadow.”

“Yes, but women with a shadow usually come to a bad end,” said Anna’s friend.

“Bad luck to your tongue!” said Princess Myakaya suddenly. “Madame Karenina’s a splendid woman. I don’t like her husband, but I like her very much.”

“Why don’t you like her husband? He’s such a remarkable man,” said the ambassador’s wife. “My husband says there are few statesmen like him in Europe.”

“And my husband tells me just the same, but I don’t believe it,” said Princess Myakaya. “If our husbands didn’t talk to us, we should see the facts as they are. Alexey Alexandrovitch, to my thinking, is simply a fool. I say it in a whisper ... but doesn’t it really make everything clear? Before, when I was told to consider him clever, I kept looking for his ability, and thought myself a fool for not seeing it; but directly I said, he’s a fool, though only in a whisper, everything’s explained, isn’t it?”

“How spiteful you are today!”

“Not a bit. I’d no other way out of it. One of the two had to be a fool. And, well, you know one can’t say that of oneself.”

“‘No one is satisfied with his fortune, and everyone is satisfied with his wit.’” The attaché repeated the French saying.

“That’s just it, just it,” Princess Myakaya turned to him. “But the point is that I won’t abandon Anna to your mercies. She’s so nice, so charming. How can she help it if they’re all in love with her, and follow her about like shadows?”

“Oh, I had no idea of blaming her for it,” Anna’s friend said in self-defense.

“If no one follows us about like a shadow, that’s no proof that we’ve any right to blame her.”

And having duly disposed of Anna’s friend, the Princess Myakaya got up, and together with the ambassador’s wife, joined the group at the table, where the conversation was dealing with the king of Prussia.

“What wicked gossip were you talking over there?” asked Betsy.

“About the Karenins. The princess gave us a sketch of Alexey Alexandrovitch,” said the ambassador’s wife with a smile, as she sat down at the table.

“Pity we didn’t hear it!” said Princess Betsy, glancing towards the door. “Ah, here you are at last!” she said, turning with a smile to Vronsky, as he came in.

Vronsky was not merely acquainted with all the persons whom he was meeting here; he saw them all every day; and so he came in with the quiet manner with which one enters a room full of people from whom one has only just parted.

“Where do I come from?” he said, in answer to a question from the ambassador’s wife. “Well, there’s no help for it, I must confess. From the opera bouffe. I do believe I’ve seen it a hundred times, and always with fresh enjoyment. It’s exquisite! I know it’s disgraceful, but I go to sleep at the opera, and I sit out the opera bouffe to the last minute, and enjoy it. This evening....”

He mentioned a French actress, and was going to tell something about her; but the ambassador’s wife, with playful horror, cut him short.

“Please don’t tell us about that horror.”

“All right, I won’t especially as everyone knows those horrors.”

“And we should all go to see them if it were accepted as the correct thing, like the opera,” chimed in Princess Myakaya.

Chapter 7

Steps were heard at the door, and Princess Betsy, knowing it was Madame Karenina, glanced at Vronsky. He was looking towards the door, and his face wore a strange new expression. Joyfully, intently, and at the same time timidly, he gazed at the approaching figure, and slowly he rose to his feet. Anna walked into the drawing-room. Holding herself extremely erect, as always, looking straight before her, and moving with her swift, resolute, and light step, that distinguished her from all other society women, she crossed the short space to her hostess, shook hands with her, smiled, and with the same smile looked around at Vronsky. Vronsky bowed low and pushed a chair up for her.

She acknowledged this only by a slight nod, flushed a little, and frowned. But immediately, while rapidly greeting her acquaintances, and shaking the hands proffered to her, she addressed Princess Betsy:

“I have been at Countess Lidia’s, and meant to have come here earlier, but I stayed on. Sir John was there. He’s very interesting.”

“Oh, that’s this missionary?”

“Yes; he told us about the life in India, most interesting things.”

The conversation, interrupted by her coming in, flickered up again like the light of a lamp being blown out.

“Sir John! Yes, Sir John; I’ve seen him. He speaks well. The Vlassieva girl’s quite in love with him.”

“And is it true the younger Vlassieva girl’s to marry Topov?”

“Yes, they say it’s quite a settled thing.”

“I wonder at the parents! They say it’s a marriage for love.”

“For love? What antediluvian notions you have! Can one talk of love in these days?” said the ambassador’s wife.

“What’s to be done? It’s a foolish old fashion that’s kept up still,” said Vronsky.

“So much the worse for those who keep up the fashion. The only happy marriages I know are marriages of prudence.”

“Yes, but then how often the happiness of these prudent marriages flies away like dust just because that passion turns up that they have refused to recognize,” said Vronsky.

“But by marriages of prudence we mean those in which both parties have sown their wild oats already. That’s like scarlatina—one has to go through it and get it over.”

“Then they ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.”

“I was in love in my young days with a deacon,” said the Princess Myakaya. “I don’t know that it did me any good.”

“No; I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them,” said Princess Betsy.

“Even after marriage?” said the ambassador’s wife playfully.

“‘It’s never too late to mend.’” The attaché repeated the English proverb.

“Just so,” Betsy agreed; “one must make mistakes and correct them. What do you think about it?” she turned to Anna, who, with a faintly perceptible resolute smile on her lips, was listening in silence to the conversation.

“I think,” said Anna, playing with the glove she had taken off, “I think ... of so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”

Vronsky was gazing at Anna, and with a fainting heart waiting for what she would say. He sighed as after a danger escaped when she uttered these words.

Anna suddenly turned to him.

“Oh, I have had a letter from Moscow. They write me that Kitty Shtcherbatskaya’s very ill.”

“Really?” said Vronsky, knitting his brows.

Anna looked sternly at him.

“That doesn’t interest you?”

“On the contrary, it does, very much. What was it exactly they told you, if I may know?” he questioned.

Anna got up and went to Betsy.

“Give me a cup of tea,” she said, standing at her table.

While Betsy was pouring out the tea, Vronsky went up to Anna.

“What is it they write to you?” he repeated.

“I often think men have no understanding of what’s not honorable though they’re always talking of it,” said Anna, without answering him. “I’ve wanted to tell you so a long while,” she added, and moving a few steps away, she sat down at a table in a corner covered with albums.

“I don’t quite understand the meaning of your words,” he said, handing her the cup.

She glanced towards the sofa beside her, and he instantly sat down.

“Yes, I have been wanting to tell you,” she said, not looking at him. “You behaved wrongly, very wrongly.”

“Do you suppose I don’t know that I’ve acted wrongly? But who was the cause of my doing so?”

“What do you say that to me for?” she said, glancing severely at him.

“You know what for,” he answered boldly and joyfully, meeting her glance and not dropping his eyes.

Not he, but she, was confused.

“That only shows you have no heart,” she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him.

“What you spoke of just now was a mistake, and not love.”

“Remember that I have forbidden you to utter that word, that hateful word,” said Anna, with a shudder. But at once she felt that by that very word “forbidden” she had shown that she acknowledged certain rights over him, and by that very fact was encouraging him to speak of love. “I have long meant to tell you this,” she went on, looking resolutely into his eyes, and hot all over from the burning flush on her cheeks. “I’ve come on purpose this evening, knowing I should meet you. I have come to tell you that this must end. I have never blushed before anyone, and you force me to feel to blame for something.”

He looked at her and was struck by a new spiritual beauty in her face.

“What do you wish of me?” he said simply and seriously.

“I want you to go to Moscow and ask for Kitty’s forgiveness,” she said.

“You don’t wish that?” he said.

He saw she was saying what she forced herself to say, not what she wanted to say.

“If you love me, as you say,” she whispered, “do so that I may be at peace.”

His face grew radiant.

“Don’t you know that you’re all my life to me? But I know no peace, and I can’t give it to you; all myself—and love ... yes. I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are one to me. And I see no chance before us of peace for me or for you. I see a chance of despair, of wretchedness ... or I see a chance of bliss, what bliss!... Can it be there’s no chance of it?” he murmured with his lips; but she heard.

She strained every effort of her mind to say what ought to be said. But instead of that she let her eyes rest on him, full of love, and made no answer.

“It’s come!” he thought in ecstasy. “When I was beginning to despair, and it seemed there would be no end—it’s come! She loves me! She owns it!”

“Then do this for me: never say such things to me, and let us be friends,” she said in words; but her eyes spoke quite differently.

“Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people—that’s in your hands.”

She would have said something, but he interrupted her.

“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”

“I don’t want to drive you away.”

“Only don’t change anything, leave everything as it is,” he said in a shaky voice. “Here’s your husband.”

At that instant Alexey Alexandrovitch did in fact walk into the room with his calm, awkward gait.

Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, he went up to the lady of the house, and sitting down for a cup of tea, began talking in his deliberate, always audible voice, in his habitual tone of banter, ridiculing someone.

“Your Rambouillet is in full conclave,” he said, looking round at all the party; “the graces and the muses.”

But Princess Betsy could not endure that tone of his—“sneering,” as she called it, using the English word, and like a skillful hostess she at once brought him into a serious conversation on the subject of universal conscription. Alexey Alexandrovitch was immediately interested in the subject, and began seriously defending the new imperial decree against Princess Betsy, who had attacked it.

Vronsky and Anna still sat at the little table.

“This is getting indecorous,” whispered one lady, with an expressive glance at Madame Karenina, Vronsky, and her husband.

“What did I tell you?” said Anna’s friend.

But not only those ladies, almost everyone in the room, even the Princess Myakaya and Betsy herself, looked several times in the direction of the two who had withdrawn from the general circle, as though that were a disturbing fact. Alexey Alexandrovitch was the only person who did not once look in that direction, and was not diverted from the interesting discussion he had entered upon.

Noticing the disagreeable impression that was being made on everyone, Princess Betsy slipped someone else into her place to listen to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and went up to Anna.

“I’m always amazed at the clearness and precision of your husband’s language,” she said. “The most transcendental ideas seem to be within my grasp when he’s speaking.”

“Oh, yes!” said Anna, radiant with a smile of happiness, and not understanding a word of what Betsy had said. She crossed over to the big table and took part in the general conversation.

Alexey Alexandrovitch, after staying half an hour, went up to his wife and suggested that they should go home together. But she answered, not looking at him, that she was staying to supper. Alexey Alexandrovitch made his bows and withdrew.

The fat old Tatar, Madame Karenina’s coachman, was with difficulty holding one of her pair of grays, chilled with the cold and rearing at the entrance. A footman stood opening the carriage door. The hall-porter stood holding open the great door of the house. Anna Arkadyevna, with her quick little hand, was unfastening the lace of her sleeve, caught in the hook of her fur cloak, and with bent head listening to the words Vronsky murmured as he escorted her down.

“You’ve said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing,” he was saying; “but you know that friendship’s not what I want: that there’s only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so ... yes, love!...”

“Love,” she repeated slowly, in an inner voice, and suddenly, at the very instant she unhooked the lace, she added, “Why I don’t like the word is that it means too much to me, far more than you can understand,” and she glanced into his face. “Au revoir!”

She gave him her hand, and with her rapid, springy step she passed by the porter and vanished into the carriage.

Her glance, the touch of her hand, set him aflame. He kissed the palm of his hand where she had touched it, and went home, happy in the sense that he had got nearer to the attainment of his aims that evening than during the last two months.

Chapter 8

Alexey Alexandrovitch had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a table apart, in eager conversation with him about something. But he noticed that to the rest of the party this appeared something striking and improper, and for that reason it seemed to him too to be improper. He made up his mind that he must speak of it to his wife.

On reaching home Alexey Alexandrovitch went to his study, as he usually did, seated himself in his low chair, opened a book on the Papacy at the place where he had laid the paper-knife in it, and read till one o’clock, just as he usually did. But from time to time he rubbed his high forehead and shook his head, as though to drive away something. At his usual time he got up and made his toilet for the night. Anna Arkadyevna had not yet come in. With a book under his arm he went upstairs. But this evening, instead of his usual thoughts and meditations upon official details, his thoughts were absorbed by his wife and something disagreeable connected with her. Contrary to his usual habit, he did not get into bed, but fell to walking up and down the rooms with his hands clasped behind his back. He could not go to bed, feeling that it was absolutely needful for him first to think thoroughly over the position that had just arisen.

When Alexey Alexandrovitch had made up his mind that he must talk to his wife about it, it had seemed a very easy and simple matter. But now, when he began to think over the question that had just presented itself, it seemed to him very complicated and difficult.

Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions was an insult to one’s wife, and one ought to have confidence in one’s wife. Why one ought to have confidence—that is to say, complete conviction that his young wife would always love him—he did not ask himself. But he had no experience of lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife’s loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time the question presented itself to him of the possibility of his wife’s loving someone else, and he was horrified at it.

He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread over the resounding parquet of the dining-room, where one lamp was burning, over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, in which the light was reflected on the big new portrait of himself hanging over the sofa, and across her boudoir, where two candles burned, lighting up the portraits of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knick-knacks of her writing-table, that he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk, especially at the parquet of the lighted dining-room, he halted and said to himself, “Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to; I must express my view of it and my decision.” And he turned back again. “But express what—what decision?” he said to himself in the drawing-room, and he found no reply. “But after all,” he asked himself before turning into the boudoir, “what has occurred? Nothing. She was talking a long while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can talk to whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and her,” he told himself as he went into her boudoir; but this dictum, which had always had such weight with him before, had now no weight and no meaning at all. And from the bedroom door he turned back again; but as he entered the dark drawing-room some inner voice told him that it was not so, and that if others noticed it that showed that there was something. And he said to himself again in the dining-room, “Yes, I must decide and put a stop to it, and express my view of it....” And again at the turn in the drawing-room he asked himself, “Decide how?” And again he asked himself, “What had occurred?” and answered, “Nothing,” and recollected that jealousy was a feeling insulting to his wife; but again in the drawing-room he was convinced that something had happened. His thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle, without coming upon anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her boudoir.

There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case lying at the top and an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly changed. He began to think of her, of what she was thinking and feeling. For the first time he pictured vividly to himself her personal life, her ideas, her desires, and the idea that she could and should have a separate life of her own seemed to him so alarming that he made haste to dispel it. It was the chasm which he was afraid to peep into. To put himself in thought and feeling in another person’s place was a spiritual exercise not natural to Alexey Alexandrovitch. He looked on this spiritual exercise as a harmful and dangerous abuse of the fancy.

“And the worst of it all,” thought he, “is that just now, at the very moment when my great work is approaching completion” (he was thinking of the project he was bringing forward at the time), “when I stand in need of all my mental peace and all my energies, just now this stupid worry should fall foul of me. But what’s to be done? I’m not one of those men who submit to uneasiness and worry without having the force of character to face them.

“I must think it over, come to a decision, and put it out of my mind,” he said aloud.

“The question of her feelings, of what has passed and may be passing in her soul, that’s not my affair; that’s the affair of her conscience, and falls under the head of religion,” he said to himself, feeling consolation in the sense that he had found to which division of regulating principles this new circumstance could be properly referred.

“And so,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, “questions as to her feelings, and so on, are questions for her conscience, with which I can have nothing to do. My duty is clearly defined. As the head of the family, I am a person bound in duty to guide her, and consequently, in part the person responsible; I am bound to point out the danger I perceive, to warn her, even to use my authority. I ought to speak plainly to her.” And everything that he would say tonight to his wife took clear shape in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s head. Thinking over what he would say, he somewhat regretted that he should have to use his time and mental powers for domestic consumption, with so little to show for it, but, in spite of that, the form and contents of the speech before him shaped itself as clearly and distinctly in his head as a ministerial report.

“I must say and express fully the following points: first, exposition of the value to be attached to public opinion and to decorum; secondly, exposition of religious significance of marriage; thirdly, if need be, reference to the calamity possibly ensuing to our son; fourthly, reference to the unhappiness likely to result to herself.” And, interlacing his fingers, Alexey Alexandrovitch stretched them, and the joints of the fingers cracked. This trick, a bad habit, the cracking of his fingers, always soothed him, and gave precision to his thoughts, so needful to him at this juncture.

There was the sound of a carriage driving up to the front door. Alexey Alexandrovitch halted in the middle of the room.

A woman’s step was heard mounting the stairs. Alexey Alexandrovitch, ready for his speech, stood compressing his crossed fingers, waiting to see if the crack would not come again. One joint cracked.

Already, from the sound of light steps on the stairs, he was aware that she was close, and though he was satisfied with his speech, he felt frightened of the explanation confronting him....

Chapter 9

Anna came in with hanging head, playing with the tassels of her hood. Her face was brilliant and glowing; but this glow was not one of brightness; it suggested the fearful glow of a conflagration in the midst of a dark night. On seeing her husband, Anna raised her head and smiled, as though she had just waked up.

“You’re not in bed? What a wonder!” she said, letting fall her hood, and without stopping, she went on into the dressing-room. “It’s late, Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she said, when she had gone through the doorway.

“Anna, it’s necessary for me to have a talk with you.”

“With me?” she said, wonderingly. She came out from behind the door of the dressing-room, and looked at him. “Why, what is it? What about?” she asked, sitting down. “Well, let’s talk, if it’s so necessary. But it would be better to get to sleep.”

Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.

“Anna, I must warn you,” he began.

“Warn me?” she said. “Of what?”

She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not know her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything unnatural, either in the sound or the sense of her words. But to him, knowing her, knowing that whenever he went to bed five minutes later than usual, she noticed it, and asked him the reason; to him, knowing that every joy, every pleasure and pain that she felt she communicated to him at once; to him, now to see that she did not care to notice his state of mind, that she did not care to say a word about herself, meant a great deal. He saw that the inmost recesses of her soul, that had always hitherto lain open before him, were closed against him. More than that, he saw from her tone that she was not even perturbed at that, but as it were said straight out to him: “Yes, it’s shut up, and so it must be, and will be in future.” Now he experienced a feeling such as a man might have, returning home and finding his own house locked up. “But perhaps the key may yet be found,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.

“I want to warn you,” he said in a low voice, “that through thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be talked about in society. Your too animated conversation this evening with Count Vronsky” (he enunciated the name firmly and with deliberate emphasis) “attracted attention.”

He talked and looked at her laughing eyes, which frightened him now with their impenetrable look, and, as he talked, he felt all the uselessness and idleness of his words.

“You’re always like that,” she answered, as though completely misapprehending him, and of all he had said only taking in the last phrase. “One time you don’t like my being dull, and another time you don’t like my being lively. I wasn’t dull. Does that offend you?”

Alexey Alexandrovitch shivered, and bent his hands to make the joints crack.

“Oh, please, don’t do that, I do so dislike it,” she said.

“Anna, is this you?” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, quietly making an effort over himself, and restraining the motion of his fingers.

“But what is it all about?” she said, with such genuine and droll wonder. “What do you want of me?”

Alexey Alexandrovitch paused, and rubbed his forehead and his eyes. He saw that instead of doing as he had intended—that is to say, warning his wife against a mistake in the eyes of the world—he had unconsciously become agitated over what was the affair of her conscience, and was struggling against the barrier he fancied between them.

“This is what I meant to say to you,” he went on coldly and composedly, “and I beg you to listen to it. I consider jealousy, as you know, a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be influenced by it; but there are certain rules of decorum which cannot be disregarded with impunity. This evening it was not I observed it, but judging by the impression made on the company, everyone observed that your conduct and deportment were not altogether what could be desired.”

“I positively don’t understand,” said Anna, shrugging her shoulders—“He doesn’t care,” she thought. “But other people noticed it, and that’s what upsets him.”—“You’re not well, Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she added, and she got up, and would have gone towards the door; but he moved forward as though he would stop her.

His face was ugly and forbidding, as Anna had never seen him. She stopped, and bending her head back and on one side, began with her rapid hand taking out her hairpins.

“Well, I’m listening to what’s to come,” she said, calmly and ironically; “and indeed I listen with interest, for I should like to understand what’s the matter.”

She spoke, and marveled at the confident, calm, and natural tone in which she was speaking, and the choice of the words she used.

“To enter into all the details of your feelings I have no right, and besides, I regard that as useless and even harmful,” began Alexey Alexandrovitch. “Ferreting in one’s soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed. Your feelings are an affair of your own conscience; but I am in duty bound to you, to myself, and to God, to point out to you your duties. Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement.”

“I don’t understand a word. And, oh dear! how sleepy I am, unluckily,” she said, rapidly passing her hand through her hair, feeling for the remaining hairpins.

“Anna, for God’s sake don’t speak like that!” he said gently. “Perhaps I am mistaken, but believe me, what I say, I say as much for myself as for you. I am your husband, and I love you.”

For an instant her face fell, and the mocking gleam in her eyes died away; but the word love threw her into revolt again. She thought: “Love? Can he love? If he hadn’t heard there was such a thing as love, he would never have used the word. He doesn’t even know what love is.”

“Alexey Alexandrovitch, really I don’t understand,” she said. “Define what it is you find....”

“Pardon, let me say all I have to say. I love you. But I am not speaking of myself; the most important persons in this matter are our son and yourself. It may very well be, I repeat, that my words seem to you utterly unnecessary and out of place; it may be that they are called forth by my mistaken impression. In that case, I beg you to forgive me. But if you are conscious yourself of even the smallest foundation for them, then I beg you to think a little, and if your heart prompts you, to speak out to me....”

Alexey Alexandrovitch was unconsciously saying something utterly unlike what he had prepared.

“I have nothing to say. And besides,” she said hurriedly, with difficulty repressing a smile, “it’s really time to be in bed.”

Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed, and, without saying more, went into the bedroom.

When she came into the bedroom, he was already in bed. His lips were sternly compressed, and his eyes looked away from her. Anna got into her bed, and lay expecting every minute that he would begin to speak to her again. She both feared his speaking and wished for it. But he was silent. She waited for a long while without moving, and had forgotten about him. She thought of that other; she pictured him, and felt how her heart was flooded with emotion and guilty delight at the thought of him. Suddenly she heard an even, tranquil snore. For the first instant Alexey Alexandrovitch seemed, as it were, appalled at his own snoring, and ceased; but after an interval of two breathings the snore sounded again, with a new tranquil rhythm.

“It’s late, it’s late,” she whispered with a smile. A long while she lay, not moving, with open eyes, whose brilliance she almost fancied she could herself see in the darkness.

Chapter 10

From that time a new life began for Alexey Alexandrovitch and for his wife. Nothing special happened. Anna went out into society, as she had always done, was particularly often at Princess Betsy’s, and met Vronsky everywhere. Alexey Alexandrovitch saw this, but could do nothing. All his efforts to draw her into open discussion she confronted with a barrier which he could not penetrate, made up of a sort of amused perplexity. Outwardly everything was the same, but their inner relations were completely changed. Alexey Alexandrovitch, a man of great power in the world of politics, felt himself helpless in this. Like an ox with head bent, submissively he awaited the blow which he felt was lifted over him. Every time he began to think about it, he felt that he must try once more, that by kindness, tenderness, and persuasion there was still hope of saving her, of bringing her back to herself, and every day he made ready to talk to her. But every time he began talking to her, he felt that the spirit of evil and deceit, which had taken possession of her, had possession of him too, and he talked to her in a tone quite unlike that in which he had meant to talk. Involuntarily he talked to her in his habitual tone of jeering at anyone who should say what he was saying. And in that tone it was impossible to say what needed to be said to her.

Chapter 11

That which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm, not knowing how or why.

“Anna! Anna!” he said with a choking voice, “Anna, for pity’s sake!...”

But the louder he spoke, the lower she dropped her once proud and gay, now shame-stricken head, and she bowed down and sank from the sofa where she was sitting, down on the floor, at his feet; she would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.

“My God! Forgive me!” she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to her bosom.

She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left her but to humiliate herself and beg forgiveness; and as now there was no one in her life but him, to him she addressed her prayer for forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.

And with fury, as it were with passion, the murderer falls on the body, and drags it and hacks at it; so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses. She held his hand, and did not stir. “Yes, these kisses—that is what has been bought by this shame. Yes, and one hand, which will always be mine—the hand of my accomplice.” She lifted up that hand and kissed it. He sank on his knees and tried to see her face; but she hid it, and said nothing. At last, as though making an effort over herself, she got up and pushed him away. Her face was still as beautiful, but it was only the more pitiful for that.

“All is over,” she said; “I have nothing but you. Remember that.”

“I can never forget what is my whole life. For one instant of this happiness....”

“Happiness!” she said with horror and loathing and her horror unconsciously infected him. “For pity’s sake, not a word, not a word more.”

She rose quickly and moved away from him.

“Not a word more,” she repeated, and with a look of chill despair, incomprehensible to him, she parted from him. She felt that at that moment she could not put into words the sense of shame, of rapture, and of horror at this stepping into a new life, and she did not want to speak of it, to vulgarize this feeling by inappropriate words. But later too, and the next day and the third day, she still found no words in which she could express the complexity of her feelings; indeed, she could not even find thoughts in which she could clearly think out all that was in her soul.

She said to herself: “No, just now I can’t think of it, later on, when I am calmer.” But this calm for thought never came; every time the thought rose of what she had done and what would happen to her, and what she ought to do, a horror came over her and she drove those thoughts away.

“Later, later,” she said—“when I am calmer.”

But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. One dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexey Alexandrovitch was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, “How happy we are now!” And Alexey Vronsky was there too, and he too was her husband. And she was marveling that it had once seemed impossible to her, was explaining to them, laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both of them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.

Chapter 12

In the early days after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he said to himself: “This was just how I used to shudder and blush, thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I had mismanaged that affair of my sister’s that was entrusted to me. And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing too with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.”

But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about it; and it was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those first days. He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and was further than ever from marriage. He was painfully conscious himself, as were all about him, that at his years it is not well for man to be alone. He remembered how before starting for Moscow he had once said to his cowman Nikolay, a simple-hearted peasant, whom he liked talking to: “Well, Nikolay! I mean to get married,” and how Nikolay had promptly answered, as of a matter on which there could be no possible doubt: “And high time too, Konstantin Dmitrievitch.” But marriage had now become further off than ever. The place was taken, and whenever he tried to imagine any of the girls he knew in that place, he felt that it was utterly impossible. Moreover, the recollection of the rejection and the part he had played in the affair tortured him with shame. However often he told himself that he was in no wise to blame in it, that recollection, like other humiliating reminiscences of a similar kind, made him twinge and blush. There had been in his past, as in every man’s, actions, recognized by him as bad, for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the memory of these evil actions was far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but humiliating reminiscences. These wounds never healed. And with these memories was now ranged his rejection and the pitiful position in which he must have appeared to others that evening. But time and work did their part. Bitter memories were more and more covered up by the incidents—paltry in his eyes, but really important—of his country life. Every week he thought less often of Kitty. He was impatiently looking forward to the news that she was married, or just going to be married, hoping that such news would, like having a tooth out, completely cure him.

Meanwhile spring came on, beautiful and kindly, without the delays and treacheries of spring,—one of those rare springs in which plants, beasts, and man rejoice alike. This lovely spring roused Levin still more, and strengthened him in his resolution of renouncing all his past and building up his lonely life firmly and independently. Though many of the plans with which he had returned to the country had not been carried out, still his most important resolution—that of purity—had been kept by him. He was free from that shame, which had usually harassed him after a fall; and he could look everyone straight in the face. In February he had received a letter from Marya Nikolaevna telling him that his brother Nikolay’s health was getting worse, but that he would not take advice, and in consequence of this letter Levin went to Moscow to his brother’s and succeeded in persuading him to see a doctor and to go to a watering-place abroad. He succeeded so well in persuading his brother, and in lending him money for the journey without irritating him, that he was satisfied with himself in that matter. In addition to his farming, which called for special attention in spring, and in addition to reading, Levin had begun that winter a work on agriculture, the plan of which turned on taking into account the character of the laborer on the land as one of the unalterable data of the question, like the climate and the soil, and consequently deducing all the principles of scientific culture, not simply from the data of soil and climate, but from the data of soil, climate, and a certain unalterable character of the laborer. Thus, in spite of his solitude, or in consequence of his solitude, his life was exceedingly full. Only rarely he suffered from an unsatisfied desire to communicate his stray ideas to someone besides Agafea Mihalovna. With her indeed he not infrequently fell into discussion upon physics, the theory of agriculture, and especially philosophy; philosophy was Agafea Mihalovna’s favorite subject.

Spring was slow in unfolding. For the last few weeks it had been steadily fine frosty weather. In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but at night there were even seven degrees of frost. There was such a frozen surface on the snow that they drove the wagons anywhere off the roads. Easter came in the snow. Then all of a sudden, on Easter Monday, a warm wind sprang up, storm clouds swooped down, and for three days and three nights the warm, driving rain fell in streams. On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick gray fog brooded over the land as though hiding the mysteries of the transformations that were being wrought in nature. Behind the fog there was the flowing of water, the cracking and floating of ice, the swift rush of turbid, foaming torrents; and on the following Monday, in the evening, the fog parted, the storm clouds split up into little curling crests of cloud, the sky cleared, and the real spring had come. In the morning the sun rose brilliant and quickly wore away the thin layer of ice that covered the water, and all the warm air was quivering with the steam that rose up from the quickened earth. The old grass looked greener, and the young grass thrust up its tiny blades; the buds of the guelder-rose and of the currant and the sticky birch-buds were swollen with sap, and an exploring bee was humming about the golden blossoms that studded the willow. Larks trilled unseen above the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble-land; peewits wailed over the low lands and marshes flooded by the pools; cranes and wild geese flew high across the sky uttering their spring calls. The cattle, bald in patches where the new hair had not grown yet, lowed in the pastures; the bowlegged lambs frisked round their bleating mothers. Nimble children ran about the drying paths, covered with the prints of bare feet. There was a merry chatter of peasant women over their linen at the pond, and the ring of axes in the yard, where the peasants were repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come.

Chapter 13

Levin put on his big boots, and, for the first time, a cloth jacket, instead of his fur cloak, and went out to look after his farm, stepping over streams of water that flashed in the sunshine and dazzled his eyes, and treading one minute on ice and the next into sticky mud.

Spring is the time of plans and projects. And, as he came out into the farmyard, Levin, like a tree in spring that knows not what form will be taken by the young shoots and twigs imprisoned in its swelling buds, hardly knew what undertakings he was going to begin upon now in the farm work that was so dear to him. But he felt that he was full of the most splendid plans and projects. First of all he went to the cattle. The cows had been let out into their paddock, and their smooth sides were already shining with their new, sleek, spring coats; they basked in the sunshine and lowed to go to the meadow. Levin gazed admiringly at the cows he knew so intimately to the minutest detail of their condition, and gave orders for them to be driven out into the meadow, and the calves to be let into the paddock. The herdsman ran gaily to get ready for the meadow. The cowherd girls, picking up their petticoats, ran splashing through the mud with bare legs, still white, not yet brown from the sun, waving brush wood in their hands, chasing the calves that frolicked in the mirth of spring.

After admiring the young ones of that year, who were particularly fine—the early calves were the size of a peasant’s cow, and Pava’s daughter, at three months old, was as big as a yearling—Levin gave orders for a trough to be brought out and for them to be fed in the paddock. But it appeared that as the paddock had not been used during the winter, the hurdles made in the autumn for it were broken. He sent for the carpenter, who, according to his orders, ought to have been at work at the thrashing machine. But it appeared that the carpenter was repairing the harrows, which ought to have been repaired before Lent. This was very annoying to Levin. It was annoying to come upon that everlasting slovenliness in the farm work against which he had been striving with all his might for so many years. The hurdles, as he ascertained, being not wanted in winter, had been carried to the cart-horses’ stable; and there broken, as they were of light construction, only meant for feeding calves. Moreover, it was apparent also that the harrows and all the agricultural implements, which he had directed to be looked over and repaired in the winter, for which very purpose he had hired three carpenters, had not been put into repair, and the harrows were being repaired when they ought to have been harrowing the field. Levin sent for his bailiff, but immediately went off himself to look for him. The bailiff, beaming all over, like everyone that day, in a sheepskin bordered with astrachan, came out of the barn, twisting a bit of straw in his hands.

“Why isn’t the carpenter at the thrashing machine?”

“Oh, I meant to tell you yesterday, the harrows want repairing. Here it’s time they got to work in the fields.”

“But what were they doing in the winter, then?”

“But what did you want the carpenter for?”

“Where are the hurdles for the calves’ paddock?”

“I ordered them to be got ready. What would you have with those peasants!” said the bailiff, with a wave of his hand.

“It’s not those peasants but this bailiff!” said Levin, getting angry. “Why, what do I keep you for?” he cried. But, bethinking himself that this would not help matters, he stopped short in the middle of a sentence, and merely sighed. “Well, what do you say? Can sowing begin?” he asked, after a pause.

“Behind Turkin tomorrow or the next day they might begin.”

“And the clover?”

“I’ve sent Vassily and Mishka; they’re sowing. Only I don’t know if they’ll manage to get through; it’s so slushy.”

“How many acres?”

“About fifteen.”

“Why not sow all?” cried Levin.

That they were only sowing the clover on fifteen acres, not on all the forty-five, was still more annoying to him. Clover, as he knew, both from books and from his own experience, never did well except when it was sown as early as possible, almost in the snow. And yet Levin could never get this done.

“There’s no one to send. What would you have with such a set of peasants? Three haven’t turned up. And there’s Semyon....”

“Well, you should have taken some men from the thatching.”

“And so I have, as it is.”

“Where are the peasants, then?”

“Five are making compôte” (which meant compost), “four are shifting the oats for fear of a touch of mildew, Konstantin Dmitrievitch.”

Levin knew very well that “a touch of mildew” meant that his English seed oats were already ruined. Again they had not done as he had ordered.

“Why, but I told you during Lent to put in pipes,” he cried.

“Don’t put yourself out; we shall get it all done in time.”

Levin waved his hand angrily, went into the granary to glance at the oats, and then to the stable. The oats were not yet spoiled. But the peasants were carrying the oats in spades when they might simply let them slide down into the lower granary; and arranging for this to be done, and taking two workmen from there for sowing clover, Levin got over his vexation with the bailiff. Indeed, it was such a lovely day that one could not be angry.

“Ignat!” he called to the coachman, who, with his sleeves tucked up, was washing the carriage wheels, “saddle me....”

“Which, sir?”

“Well, let it be Kolpik.”

“Yes, sir.”

While they were saddling his horse, Levin again called up the bailiff, who was hanging about in sight, to make it up with him, and began talking to him about the spring operations before them, and his plans for the farm.

The wagons were to begin carting manure earlier, so as to get all done before the early mowing. And the ploughing of the further land to go on without a break so as to let it ripen lying fallow. And the mowing to be all done by hired labor, not on half-profits. The bailiff listened attentively, and obviously made an effort to approve of his employer’s projects. But still he had that look Levin knew so well that always irritated him, a look of hopelessness and despondency. That look said: “That’s all very well, but as God wills.”

Nothing mortified Levin so much as that tone. But it was the tone common to all the bailiffs he had ever had. They had all taken up that attitude to his plans, and so now he was not angered by it, but mortified, and felt all the more roused to struggle against this, as it seemed, elemental force continually ranged against him, for which he could find no other expression than “as God wills.”

“If we can manage it, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the bailiff.

“Why ever shouldn’t you manage it?”

“We positively must have another fifteen laborers. And they don’t turn up. There were some here today asking seventy roubles for the summer.”

Levin was silent. Again he was brought face to face with that opposing force. He knew that however much they tried, they could not hire more than forty—thirty-seven perhaps or thirty-eight—laborers for a reasonable sum. Some forty had been taken on, and there were no more. But still he could not help struggling against it.

“Send to Sury, to Tchefirovka; if they don’t come we must look for them.”

“Oh, I’ll send, to be sure,” said Vassily Fedorovitch despondently. “But there are the horses, too, they’re not good for much.”

“We’ll get some more. I know, of course,” Levin added laughing, “you always want to do with as little and as poor quality as possible; but this year I’m not going to let you have things your own way. I’ll see to everything myself.”

“Why, I don’t think you take much rest as it is. It cheers us up to work under the master’s eye....”

“So they’re sowing clover behind the Birch Dale? I’ll go and have a look at them,” he said, getting on to the little bay cob, Kolpik, who was led up by the coachman.

“You can’t get across the streams, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” the coachman shouted.

“All right, I’ll go by the forest.”

And Levin rode through the slush of the farmyard to the gate and out into the open country, his good little horse, after his long inactivity, stepping out gallantly, snorting over the pools, and asking, as it were, for guidance. If Levin had felt happy before in the cattle pens and farmyard, he felt happier yet in the open country. Swaying rhythmically with the ambling paces of his good little cob, drinking in the warm yet fresh scent of the snow and the air, as he rode through his forest over the crumbling, wasted snow, still left in parts, and covered with dissolving tracks, he rejoiced over every tree, with the moss reviving on its bark and the buds swelling on its shoots. When he came out of the forest, in the immense plain before him, his grass fields stretched in an unbroken carpet of green, without one bare place or swamp, only spotted here and there in the hollows with patches of melting snow. He was not put out of temper even by the sight of the peasants’ horses and colts trampling down his young grass (he told a peasant he met to drive them out), nor by the sarcastic and stupid reply of the peasant Ipat, whom he met on the way, and asked, “Well, Ipat, shall we soon be sowing?” “We must get the ploughing done first, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” answered Ipat. The further he rode, the happier he became, and plans for the land rose to his mind each better than the last; to plant all his fields with hedges along the southern borders, so that the snow should not lie under them; to divide them up into six fields of arable and three of pasture and hay; to build a cattle yard at the further end of the estate, and to dig a pond and to construct movable pens for the cattle as a means of manuring the land. And then eight hundred acres of wheat, three hundred of potatoes, and four hundred of clover, and not one acre exhausted.

Absorbed in such dreams, carefully keeping his horse by the hedges, so as not to trample his young crops, he rode up to the laborers who had been sent to sow clover. A cart with the seed in it was standing, not at the edge, but in the middle of the crop, and the winter corn had been torn up by the wheels and trampled by the horse. Both the laborers were sitting in the hedge, probably smoking a pipe together. The earth in the cart, with which the seed was mixed, was not crushed to powder, but crusted together or adhering in clods. Seeing the master, the laborer, Vassily, went towards the cart, while Mishka set to work sowing. This was not as it should be, but with the laborers Levin seldom lost his temper. When Vassily came up, Levin told him to lead the horse to the hedge.

“It’s all right, sir, it’ll spring up again,” responded Vassily.

“Please don’t argue,” said Levin, “but do as you’re told.”

“Yes, sir,” answered Vassily, and he took the horse’s head. “What a sowing, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” he said, hesitating; “first rate. Only it’s a work to get about! You drag a ton of earth on your shoes.”

“Why is it you have earth that’s not sifted?” said Levin.

“Well, we crumble it up,” answered Vassily, taking up some seed and rolling the earth in his palms.

Vassily was not to blame for their having filled up his cart with unsifted earth, but still it was annoying.

Levin had more than once already tried a way he knew for stifling his anger, and turning all that seemed dark right again, and he tried that way now. He watched how Mishka strode along, swinging the huge clods of earth that clung to each foot; and getting off his horse, he took the sieve from Vassily and started sowing himself.

“Where did you stop?”

Vassily pointed to the mark with his foot, and Levin went forward as best he could, scattering the seed on the land. Walking was as difficult as on a bog, and by the time Levin had ended the row he was in a great heat, and he stopped and gave up the sieve to Vassily.

“Well, master, when summer’s here, mind you don’t scold me for these rows,” said Vassily.

“Eh?” said Levin cheerily, already feeling the effect of his method.

“Why, you’ll see in the summer time. It’ll look different. Look you where I sowed last spring. How I did work at it! I do my best, Konstantin Dmitrievitch, d’ye see, as I would for my own father. I don’t like bad work myself, nor would I let another man do it. What’s good for the master’s good for us too. To look out yonder now,” said Vassily, pointing, “it does one’s heart good.”

“It’s a lovely spring, Vassily.”

“Why, it’s a spring such as the old men don’t remember the like of. I was up home; an old man up there has sown wheat too, about an acre of it. He was saying you wouldn’t know it from rye.”

“Have you been sowing wheat long?”

“Why, sir, it was you taught us the year before last. You gave me two measures. We sold about eight bushels and sowed a rood.”

“Well, mind you crumble up the clods,” said Levin, going towards his horse, “and keep an eye on Mishka. And if there’s a good crop you shall have half a rouble for every acre.”

“Humbly thankful. We are very well content, sir, as it is.”

Levin got on his horse and rode towards the field where was last year’s clover, and the one which was ploughed ready for the spring corn.

The crop of clover coming up in the stubble was magnificent. It had survived everything, and stood up vividly green through the broken stalks of last year’s wheat. The horse sank in up to the pasterns, and he drew each hoof with a sucking sound out of the half-thawed ground. Over the ploughland riding was utterly impossible; the horse could only keep a foothold where there was ice, and in the thawing furrows he sank deep in at each step. The ploughland was in splendid condition; in a couple of days it would be fit for harrowing and sowing. Everything was capital, everything was cheering. Levin rode back across the streams, hoping the water would have gone down. And he did in fact get across, and startled two ducks. “There must be snipe too,” he thought, and just as he reached the turning homewards he met the forest keeper, who confirmed his theory about the snipe.

Levin went home at a trot, so as to have time to eat his dinner and get his gun ready for the evening.

Chapter 14

As he rode up to the house in the happiest frame of mind, Levin heard the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the house.

“Yes, that’s someone from the railway station,” he thought, “just the time to be here from the Moscow train ... Who could it be? What if it’s brother Nikolay? He did say: ‘Maybe I’ll go to the waters, or maybe I’ll come down to you.’” He felt dismayed and vexed for the first minute, that his brother Nikolay’s presence should come to disturb his happy mood of spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once he opened, as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened feeling of joy and expectation, now he hoped with all his heart that it was his brother. He pricked up his horse, and riding out from behind the acacias he saw a hired three-horse sledge from the railway station, and a gentleman in a fur coat. It was not his brother. “Oh, if it were only some nice person one could talk to a little!” he thought.

“Ah,” cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. “Here’s a delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!” he shouted, recognizing Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“I shall find out for certain whether she’s married, or when she’s going to be married,” he thought. And on that delicious spring day he felt that the thought of her did not hurt him at all.

“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting out of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits. “I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and kissing him, “to have some stand-shooting second, and to sell the forest at Ergushovo third.”

“Delightful! What a spring we’re having! How ever did you get along in a sledge?”

“In a cart it would have been worse still, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” answered the driver, who knew him.

“Well, I’m very, very glad to see you,” said Levin, with a genuine smile of childlike delight.

Levin led his friend to the room set apart for visitors, where Stepan Arkadyevitch’s things were carried also—a bag, a gun in a case, a satchel for cigars. Leaving him there to wash and change his clothes, Levin went off to the counting house to speak about the ploughing and clover. Agafea Mihalovna, always very anxious for the credit of the house, met him in the hall with inquiries about dinner.

“Do just as you like, only let it be as soon as possible,” he said, and went to the bailiff.

When he came back, Stepan Arkadyevitch, washed and combed, came out of his room with a beaming smile, and they went upstairs together.

“Well, I am glad I managed to get away to you! Now I shall understand what the mysterious business is that you are always absorbed in here. No, really, I envy you. What a house, how nice it all is! So bright, so cheerful!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting that it was not always spring and fine weather like that day. “And your nurse is simply charming! A pretty maid in an apron might be even more agreeable, perhaps; but for your severe monastic style it does very well.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch told him many interesting pieces of news; especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother, Sergey Ivanovitch, was intending to pay him a visit in the summer.

Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say in reference to Kitty and the Shtcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan Arkadyevitch his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans for the land, and his thoughts and criticisms on the books he had been reading, and the idea of his own book, the basis of which really was, though he was unaware of it himself, a criticism of all the old books on agriculture. Stepan Arkadyevitch, always charming, understanding everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were, and a new tone of respect that flattered him.

The efforts of Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner should be particularly good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking the preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread and butter, salt goose and salted mushrooms, and in Levin’s finally ordering the soup to be served without the accompaniment of little pies, with which the cook had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But though Stepan Arkadyevitch was accustomed to very different dinners, he thought everything excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter, and above all the salt goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup, and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean wine—everything was superb and delicious.

“Splendid, splendid!” he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast. “I feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after the noise and jolting of a steamer. And so you maintain that the laborer himself is an element to be studied and to regulate the choice of methods in agriculture. Of course, I’m an ignorant outsider; but I should fancy theory and its application will have its influence on the laborer too.”

“Yes, but wait a bit. I’m not talking of political economy, I’m talking of the science of agriculture. It ought to be like the natural sciences, and to observe given phenomena and the laborer in his economic, ethnographical....”

At that instant Agafea Mihalovna came in with jam.

“Oh, Agafea Mihalovna,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, kissing the tips of his plump fingers, “what salt goose, what herb brandy!... What do you think, isn’t it time to start, Kostya?” he added.

Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare tree-tops of the forest.

“Yes, it’s time,” he said. “Kouzma, get ready the trap,” and he ran downstairs.

Stepan Arkadyevitch, going down, carefully took the canvas cover off his varnished gun case with his own hands, and opening it, began to get ready his expensive new-fashioned gun. Kouzma, who already scented a big tip, never left Stepan Arkadyevitch’s side, and put on him both his stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevitch readily left him.

“Kostya, give orders that if the merchant Ryabinin comes ... I told him to come today, he’s to be brought in and to wait for me....”

“Why, do you mean to say you’re selling the forest to Ryabinin?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“To be sure I do. I have had to do business with him, ‘positively and conclusively.’”

Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed. “Positively and conclusively” were the merchant’s favorite words.

“Yes, it’s wonderfully funny the way he talks. She knows where her master’s going!” he added, patting Laska, who hung about Levin, whining and licking his hands, his boots, and his gun.

The trap was already at the steps when they went out.

“I told them to bring the trap round; or would you rather walk?”

“No, we’d better drive,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting into the trap. He sat down, tucked the tiger-skin rug round him, and lighted a cigar. “How is it you don’t smoke? A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure. Come, this is life! How splendid it is! This is how I should like to live!”

“Why, who prevents you?” said Levin, smiling.

“No, you’re a lucky man! You’ve got everything you like. You like horses—and you have them; dogs—you have them; shooting—you have it; farming—you have it.”

“Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don’t fret for what I haven’t,” said Levin, thinking of Kitty.

Stepan Arkadyevitch comprehended, looked at him, but said nothing.

Levin was grateful to Oblonsky for noticing, with his never-failing tact, that he dreaded conversation about the Shtcherbatskys, and so saying nothing about them. But now Levin was longing to find out what was tormenting him so, yet he had not the courage to begin.

“Come, tell me how things are going with you,” said Levin, bethinking himself that it was not nice of him to think only of himself.

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes sparkled merrily.

“You don’t admit, I know, that one can be fond of new rolls when one has had one’s rations of bread—to your mind it’s a crime; but I don’t count life as life without love,” he said, taking Levin’s question his own way. “What am I to do? I’m made that way. And really, one does so little harm to anyone, and gives oneself so much pleasure....”

“What! is there something new, then?” queried Levin.

“Yes, my boy, there is! There, do you see, you know the type of Ossian’s women.... Women, such as one sees in dreams.... Well, these women are sometimes to be met in reality ... and these women are terrible. Woman, don’t you know, is such a subject that however much you study it, it’s always perfectly new.”

“Well, then, it would be better not to study it.”

“No. Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in the finding it.”

Levin listened in silence, and in spite of all the efforts he made, he could not in the least enter into the feelings of his friend and understand his sentiments and the charm of studying such women.

Chapter 15

The place fixed on for the stand-shooting was not far above a stream in a little aspen copse. On reaching the copse, Levin got out of the trap and led Oblonsky to a corner of a mossy, swampy glade, already quite free from snow. He went back himself to a double birch tree on the other side, and leaning his gun on the fork of a dead lower branch, he took off his full overcoat, fastened his belt again, and worked his arms to see if they were free.

Gray old Laska, who had followed them, sat down warily opposite him and pricked up her ears. The sun was setting behind a thick forest, and in the glow of sunset the birch trees, dotted about in the aspen copse, stood out clearly with their hanging twigs, and their buds swollen almost to bursting.

From the thickest parts of the copse, where the snow still remained, came the faint sound of narrow winding threads of water running away. Tiny birds twittered, and now and then fluttered from tree to tree.

In the pauses of complete stillness there came the rustle of last year’s leaves, stirred by the thawing of the earth and the growth of the grass.

“Imagine! One can hear and see the grass growing!” Levin said to himself, noticing a wet, slate-colored aspen leaf moving beside a blade of young grass. He stood, listened, and gazed sometimes down at the wet mossy ground, sometimes at Laska listening all alert, sometimes at the sea of bare tree tops that stretched on the slope below him, sometimes at the darkening sky, covered with white streaks of cloud.

A hawk flew high over a forest far away with slow sweep of its wings; another flew with exactly the same motion in the same direction and vanished. The birds twittered more and more loudly and busily in the thicket. An owl hooted not far off, and Laska, starting, stepped cautiously a few steps forward, and putting her head on one side, began to listen intently. Beyond the stream was heard the cuckoo. Twice she uttered her usual cuckoo call, and then gave a hoarse, hurried call and broke down.

“Imagine! the cuckoo already!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, coming out from behind a bush.

“Yes, I hear it,” answered Levin, reluctantly breaking the stillness with his voice, which sounded disagreeable to himself. “Now it’s coming!”

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s figure again went behind the bush, and Levin saw nothing but the bright flash of a match, followed by the red glow and blue smoke of a cigarette.

“Tchk! tchk!” came the snapping sound of Stepan Arkadyevitch cocking his gun.

“What’s that cry?” asked Oblonsky, drawing Levin’s attention to a prolonged cry, as though a colt were whinnying in a high voice, in play.

“Oh, don’t you know it? That’s the hare. But enough talking! Listen, it’s flying!” almost shrieked Levin, cocking his gun.

They heard a shrill whistle in the distance, and in the exact time, so well known to the sportsman, two seconds later—another, a third, and after the third whistle the hoarse, guttural cry could be heard.

Levin looked about him to right and to left, and there, just facing him against the dusky blue sky above the confused mass of tender shoots of the aspens, he saw the flying bird. It was flying straight towards him; the guttural cry, like the even tearing of some strong stuff, sounded close to his ear; the long beak and neck of the bird could be seen, and at the very instant when Levin was taking aim, behind the bush where Oblonsky stood, there was a flash of red lightning: the bird dropped like an arrow, and darted upwards again. Again came the red flash and the sound of a blow, and fluttering its wings as though trying to keep up in the air, the bird halted, stopped still an instant, and fell with a heavy splash on the slushy ground.

“Can I have missed it?” shouted Stepan Arkadyevitch, who could not see for the smoke.

“Here it is!” said Levin, pointing to Laska, who with one ear raised, wagging the end of her shaggy tail, came slowly back as though she would prolong the pleasure, and as it were smiling, brought the dead bird to her master. “Well, I’m glad you were successful,” said Levin, who, at the same time, had a sense of envy that he had not succeeded in shooting the snipe.

“It was a bad shot from the right barrel,” responded Stepan Arkadyevitch, loading his gun. “Sh... it’s flying!”

The shrill whistles rapidly following one another were heard again. Two snipe, playing and chasing one another, and only whistling, not crying, flew straight at the very heads of the sportsmen. There was the report of four shots, and like swallows the snipe turned swift somersaults in the air and vanished from sight.

The stand-shooting was capital. Stepan Arkadyevitch shot two more birds and Levin two, of which one was not found. It began to get dark. Venus, bright and silvery, shone with her soft light low down in the west behind the birch trees, and high up in the east twinkled the red lights of Arcturus. Over his head Levin made out the stars of the Great Bear and lost them again. The snipe had ceased flying; but Levin resolved to stay a little longer, till Venus, which he saw below a branch of birch, should be above it, and the stars of the Great Bear should be perfectly plain. Venus had risen above the branch, and the ear of the Great Bear with its shaft was now all plainly visible against the dark blue sky, yet still he waited.

“Isn’t it time to go home?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.

It was quite still now in the copse, and not a bird was stirring.

“Let’s stay a little while,” answered Levin.

“As you like.”

They were standing now about fifteen paces from one another.

“Stiva!” said Levin unexpectedly; “how is it you don’t tell me whether your sister-in-law’s married yet, or when she’s going to be?”

Levin felt so resolute and serene that no answer, he fancied, could affect him. But he had never dreamed of what Stepan Arkadyevitch replied.

“She’s never thought of being married, and isn’t thinking of it; but she’s very ill, and the doctors have sent her abroad. They’re positively afraid she may not live.”

“What!” cried Levin. “Very ill? What is wrong with her? How has she...?”

While they were saying this, Laska, with ears pricked up, was looking upwards at the sky, and reproachfully at them.

“They have chosen a time to talk,” she was thinking. “It’s on the wing.... Here it is, yes, it is. They’ll miss it,” thought Laska.

But at that very instant both suddenly heard a shrill whistle which, as it were, smote on their ears, and both suddenly seized their guns and two flashes gleamed, and two bangs sounded at the very same instant. The snipe flying high above instantly folded its wings and fell into a thicket, bending down the delicate shoots.

“Splendid! Together!” cried Levin, and he ran with Laska into the thicket to look for the snipe.

“Oh, yes, what was it that was unpleasant?” he wondered. “Yes, Kitty’s ill.... Well, it can’t be helped; I’m very sorry,” he thought.

“She’s found it! Isn’t she a clever thing?” he said, taking the warm bird from Laska’s mouth and packing it into the almost full game bag. “I’ve got it, Stiva!” he shouted.

Chapter 16

On the way home Levin asked all details of Kitty’s illness and the Shtcherbatskys’ plans, and though he would have been ashamed to admit it, he was pleased at what he heard. He was pleased that there was still hope, and still more pleased that she should be suffering who had made him suffer so much. But when Stepan Arkadyevitch began to speak of the causes of Kitty’s illness, and mentioned Vronsky’s name, Levin cut him short.

“I have no right whatever to know family matters, and, to tell the truth, no interest in them either.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled hardly perceptibly, catching the instantaneous change he knew so well in Levin’s face, which had become as gloomy as it had been bright a minute before.

“Have you quite settled about the forest with Ryabinin?” asked Levin.

“Yes, it’s settled. The price is magnificent; thirty-eight thousand. Eight straight away, and the rest in six years. I’ve been bothering about it for ever so long. No one would give more.”

“Then you’ve as good as given away your forest for nothing,” said Levin gloomily.

“How do you mean for nothing?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a good-humored smile, knowing that nothing would be right in Levin’s eyes now.

“Because the forest is worth at least a hundred and fifty roubles the acre,” answered Levin.

“Oh, these farmers!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch playfully. “Your tone of contempt for us poor townsfolk!... But when it comes to business, we do it better than anyone. I assure you I have reckoned it all out,” he said, “and the forest is fetching a very good price—so much so that I’m afraid of this fellow’s crying off, in fact. You know it’s not ‘timber,’” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, hoping by this distinction to convince Levin completely of the unfairness of his doubts. “And it won’t run to more than twenty-five yards of fagots per acre, and he’s giving me at the rate of seventy roubles the acre.”

Levin smiled contemptuously. “I know,” he thought, “that fashion not only in him, but in all city people, who, after being twice in ten years in the country, pick up two or three phrases and use them in season and out of season, firmly persuaded that they know all about it. ‘Timber, run to so many yards the acre.’ He says those words without understanding them himself.”

“I wouldn’t attempt to teach you what you write about in your office,” said he, “and if need arose, I should come to you to ask about it. But you’re so positive you know all the lore of the forest. It’s difficult. Have you counted the trees?”

“How count the trees?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing, still trying to draw his friend out of his ill-temper. “Count the sands of the sea, number the stars. Some higher power might do it.”

“Oh, well, the higher power of Ryabinin can. Not a single merchant ever buys a forest without counting the trees, unless they get it given them for nothing, as you’re doing now. I know your forest. I go there every year shooting, and your forest’s worth a hundred and fifty roubles an acre paid down, while he’s giving you sixty by installments. So that in fact you’re making him a present of thirty thousand.”

“Come, don’t let your imagination run away with you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch piteously. “Why was it none would give it, then?”

“Why, because he has an understanding with the merchants; he’s bought them off. I’ve had to do with all of them; I know them. They’re not merchants, you know: they’re speculators. He wouldn’t look at a bargain that gave him ten, fifteen per cent. profit, but holds back to buy a rouble’s worth for twenty kopecks.”

“Well, enough of it! You’re out of temper.”

“Not the least,” said Levin gloomily, as they drove up to the house.

At the steps there stood a trap tightly covered with iron and leather, with a sleek horse tightly harnessed with broad collar-straps. In the trap sat the chubby, tightly belted clerk who served Ryabinin as coachman. Ryabinin himself was already in the house, and met the friends in the hall. Ryabinin was a tall, thinnish, middle-aged man, with mustache and a projecting clean-shaven chin, and prominent muddy-looking eyes. He was dressed in a long-skirted blue coat, with buttons below the waist at the back, and wore high boots wrinkled over the ankles and straight over the calf, with big galoshes drawn over them. He rubbed his face with his handkerchief, and wrapping round him his coat, which sat extremely well as it was, he greeted them with a smile, holding out his hand to Stepan Arkadyevitch, as though he wanted to catch something.

“So here you are,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, giving him his hand. “That’s capital.”

“I did not venture to disregard your excellency’s commands, though the road was extremely bad. I positively walked the whole way, but I am here at my time. Konstantin Dmitrievitch, my respects”; he turned to Levin, trying to seize his hand too. But Levin, scowling, made as though he did not notice his hand, and took out the snipe. “Your honors have been diverting yourselves with the chase? What kind of bird may it be, pray?” added Ryabinin, looking contemptuously at the snipe: “a great delicacy, I suppose.” And he shook his head disapprovingly, as though he had grave doubts whether this game were worth the candle.

“Would you like to go into my study?” Levin said in French to Stepan Arkadyevitch, scowling morosely. “Go into my study; you can talk there.”

“Quite so, where you please,” said Ryabinin with contemptuous dignity, as though wishing to make it felt that others might be in difficulties as to how to behave, but that he could never be in any difficulty about anything.

On entering the study Ryabinin looked about, as his habit was, as though seeking the holy picture, but when he had found it, he did not cross himself. He scanned the bookcases and bookshelves, and with the same dubious air with which he had regarded the snipe, he smiled contemptuously and shook his head disapprovingly, as though by no means willing to allow that this game were worth the candle.

“Well, have you brought the money?” asked Oblonsky. “Sit down.”

“Oh, don’t trouble about the money. I’ve come to see you to talk it over.”

“What is there to talk over? But do sit down.”

“I don’t mind if I do,” said Ryabinin, sitting down and leaning his elbows on the back of his chair in a position of the intensest discomfort to himself. “You must knock it down a bit, prince. It would be too bad. The money is ready conclusively to the last farthing. As to paying the money down, there’ll be no hitch there.”

Levin, who had meanwhile been putting his gun away in the cupboard, was just going out of the door, but catching the merchant’s words, he stopped.

“Why, you’ve got the forest for nothing as it is,” he said. “He came to me too late, or I’d have fixed the price for him.”

Ryabinin got up, and in silence, with a smile, he looked Levin down and up.

“Very close about money is Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” he said with a smile, turning to Stepan Arkadyevitch; “there’s positively no dealing with him. I was bargaining for some wheat of him, and a pretty price I offered too.”

“Why should I give you my goods for nothing? I didn’t pick it up on the ground, nor steal it either.”

“Mercy on us! nowadays there’s no chance at all of stealing. With the open courts and everything done in style, nowadays there’s no question of stealing. We are just talking things over like gentlemen. His excellency’s asking too much for the forest. I can’t make both ends meet over it. I must ask for a little concession.”

“But is the thing settled between you or not? If it’s settled, it’s useless haggling; but if it’s not,” said Levin, “I’ll buy the forest.”

The smile vanished at once from Ryabinin’s face. A hawklike, greedy, cruel expression was left upon it. With rapid, bony fingers he unbuttoned his coat, revealing a shirt, bronze waistcoat buttons, and a watch chain, and quickly pulled out a fat old pocketbook.

“Here you are, the forest is mine,” he said, crossing himself quickly, and holding out his hand. “Take the money; it’s my forest. That’s Ryabinin’s way of doing business; he doesn’t haggle over every half-penny,” he added, scowling and waving the pocketbook.

“I wouldn’t be in a hurry if I were you,” said Levin.

“Come, really,” said Oblonsky in surprise. “I’ve given my word, you know.”

Levin went out of the room, slamming the door. Ryabinin looked towards the door and shook his head with a smile.

“It’s all youthfulness—positively nothing but boyishness. Why, I’m buying it, upon my honor, simply, believe me, for the glory of it, that Ryabinin, and no one else, should have bought the copse of Oblonsky. And as to the profits, why, I must make what God gives. In God’s name. If you would kindly sign the title-deed....”

Within an hour the merchant, stroking his big overcoat neatly down, and hooking up his jacket, with the agreement in his pocket, seated himself in his tightly covered trap, and drove homewards.

“Ugh, these gentlefolks!” he said to the clerk. “They—they’re a nice lot!”

“That’s so,” responded the clerk, handing him the reins and buttoning the leather apron. “But I can congratulate you on the purchase, Mihail Ignatitch?”

“Well, well....”

Chapter 17

Stepan Arkadyevitch went upstairs with his pocket bulging with notes, which the merchant had paid him for three months in advance. The business of the forest was over, the money in his pocket; their shooting had been excellent, and Stepan Arkadyevitch was in the happiest frame of mind, and so he felt specially anxious to dissipate the ill-humor that had come upon Levin. He wanted to finish the day at supper as pleasantly as it had been begun.

Levin certainly was out of humor, and in spite of all his desire to be affectionate and cordial to his charming visitor, he could not control his mood. The intoxication of the news that Kitty was not married had gradually begun to work upon him.

Kitty was not married, but ill, and ill from love for a man who had slighted her. This slight, as it were, rebounded upon him. Vronsky had slighted her, and she had slighted him, Levin. Consequently Vronsky had the right to despise Levin, and therefore he was his enemy. But all this Levin did not think out. He vaguely felt that there was something in it insulting to him, and he was not angry now at what had disturbed him, but he fell foul of everything that presented itself. The stupid sale of the forest, the fraud practiced upon Oblonsky and concluded in his house, exasperated him.

“Well, finished?” he said, meeting Stepan Arkadyevitch upstairs. “Would you like supper?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say no to it. What an appetite I get in the country! Wonderful! Why didn’t you offer Ryabinin something?”

“Oh, damn him!”

“Still, how you do treat him!” said Oblonsky. “You didn’t even shake hands with him. Why not shake hands with him?”

“Because I don’t shake hands with a waiter, and a waiter’s a hundred times better than he is.”

“What a reactionist you are, really! What about the amalgamation of classes?” said Oblonsky.

“Anyone who likes amalgamating is welcome to it, but it sickens me.”

“You’re a regular reactionist, I see.”

“Really, I have never considered what I am. I am Konstantin Levin, and nothing else.”

“And Konstantin Levin very much out of temper,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling.

“Yes, I am out of temper, and do you know why? Because—excuse me—of your stupid sale....”

Stepan Arkadyevitch frowned good-humoredly, like one who feels himself teased and attacked for no fault of his own.

“Come, enough about it!” he said. “When did anybody ever sell anything without being told immediately after the sale, ‘It was worth much more’? But when one wants to sell, no one will give anything.... No, I see you’ve a grudge against that unlucky Ryabinin.”

“Maybe I have. And do you know why? You’ll say again that I’m a reactionist, or some other terrible word; but all the same it does annoy and anger me to see on all sides the impoverishing of the nobility to which I belong, and, in spite of the amalgamation of classes, I’m glad to belong. And their impoverishment is not due to extravagance—that would be nothing; living in good style—that’s the proper thing for noblemen; it’s only the nobles who know how to do it. Now the peasants about us buy land, and I don’t mind that. The gentleman does nothing, while the peasant works and supplants the idle man. That’s as it ought to be. And I’m very glad for the peasant. But I do mind seeing the process of impoverishment from a sort of—I don’t know what to call it—innocence. Here a Polish speculator bought for half its value a magnificent estate from a young lady who lives in Nice. And there a merchant will get three acres of land, worth ten roubles, as security for the loan of one rouble. Here, for no kind of reason, you’ve made that rascal a present of thirty thousand roubles.”

“Well, what should I have done? Counted every tree?”

“Of course, they must be counted. You didn’t count them, but Ryabinin did. Ryabinin’s children will have means of livelihood and education, while yours maybe will not!”

“Well, you must excuse me, but there’s something mean in this counting. We have our business and they have theirs, and they must make their profit. Anyway, the thing’s done, and there’s an end of it. And here come some poached eggs, my favorite dish. And Agafea Mihalovna will give us that marvelous herb-brandy....”

Stepan Arkadyevitch sat down at the table and began joking with Agafea Mihalovna, assuring her that it was long since he had tasted such a dinner and such a supper.

“Well, you do praise it, anyway,” said Agafea Mihalovna, “but Konstantin Dmitrievitch, give him what you will—a crust of bread—he’ll eat it and walk away.”

Though Levin tried to control himself, he was gloomy and silent. He wanted to put one question to Stepan Arkadyevitch, but he could not bring himself to the point, and could not find the words or the moment in which to put it. Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone down to his room, undressed, again washed, and attired in a nightshirt with goffered frills, he had got into bed, but Levin still lingered in his room, talking of various trifling matters, and not daring to ask what he wanted to know.

“How wonderfully they make this soap,” he said gazing at a piece of soap he was handling, which Agafea Mihalovna had put ready for the visitor but Oblonsky had not used. “Only look; why, it’s a work of art.”

“Yes, everything’s brought to such a pitch of perfection nowadays,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with a moist and blissful yawn. “The theater, for instance, and the entertainments ... a—a—a!” he yawned. “The electric light everywhere ... a—a—a!”

“Yes, the electric light,” said Levin. “Yes. Oh, and where’s Vronsky now?” he asked suddenly, laying down the soap.

“Vronsky?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, checking his yawn; “he’s in Petersburg. He left soon after you did, and he’s not once been in Moscow since. And do you know, Kostya, I’ll tell you the truth,” he went on, leaning his elbow on the table, and propping on his hand his handsome ruddy face, in which his moist, good-natured, sleepy eyes shone like stars. “It’s your own fault. You took fright at the sight of your rival. But, as I told you at the time, I couldn’t say which had the better chance. Why didn’t you fight it out? I told you at the time that....” He yawned inwardly, without opening his mouth.

“Does he know, or doesn’t he, that I did make an offer?” Levin wondered, gazing at him. “Yes, there’s something humbugging, diplomatic in his face,” and feeling he was blushing, he looked Stepan Arkadyevitch straight in the face without speaking.

“If there was anything on her side at the time, it was nothing but a superficial attraction,” pursued Oblonsky. “His being such a perfect aristocrat, don’t you know, and his future position in society, had an influence not with her, but with her mother.”

Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was at home, and the walls of home are a support.

“Stay, stay,” he began, interrupting Oblonsky. “You talk of his being an aristocrat. But allow me to ask what it consists in, that aristocracy of Vronsky or of anybody else, beside which I can be looked down upon? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don’t. A man whose father crawled up from nothing at all by intrigue, and whose mother—God knows whom she wasn’t mixed up with.... No, excuse me, but I consider myself aristocratic, and people like me, who can point back in the past to three or four honorable generations of their family, of the highest degree of breeding (talent and intellect, of course that’s another matter), and have never curried favor with anyone, never depended on anyone for anything, like my father and my grandfather. And I know many such. You think it mean of me to count the trees in my forest, while you make Ryabinin a present of thirty thousand; but you get rents from your lands and I don’t know what, while I don’t and so I prize what’s come to me from my ancestors or been won by hard work.... We are aristocrats, and not those who can only exist by favor of the powerful of this world, and who can be bought for twopence halfpenny.”

“Well, but whom are you attacking? I agree with you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, sincerely and genially; though he was aware that in the class of those who could be bought for twopence halfpenny Levin was reckoning him too. Levin’s warmth gave him genuine pleasure. “Whom are you attacking? Though a good deal is not true that you say about Vronsky, but I won’t talk about that. I tell you straight out, if I were you, I should go back with me to Moscow, and....”

“No; I don’t know whether you know it or not, but I don’t care. And I tell you—I did make an offer and was rejected, and Katerina Alexandrovna is nothing now to me but a painful and humiliating reminiscence.”

“What ever for? What nonsense!”

“But we won’t talk about it. Please forgive me, if I’ve been nasty,” said Levin. Now that he had opened his heart, he became as he had been in the morning. “You’re not angry with me, Stiva? Please don’t be angry,” he said, and smiling, he took his hand.

“Of course not; not a bit, and no reason to be. I’m glad we’ve spoken openly. And do you know, stand-shooting in the morning is unusually good—why not go? I couldn’t sleep the night anyway, but I might go straight from shooting to the station.”

“Capital.”

Chapter 18

Although all Vronsky’s inner life was absorbed in his passion, his external life unalterably and inevitably followed along the old accustomed lines of his social and regimental ties and interests. The interests of his regiment took an important place in Vronsky’s life, both because he was fond of the regiment, and because the regiment was fond of him. They were not only fond of Vronsky in his regiment, they respected him too, and were proud of him; proud that this man, with his immense wealth, his brilliant education and abilities, and the path open before him to every kind of success, distinction, and ambition, had disregarded all that, and of all the interests of life had the interests of his regiment and his comrades nearest to his heart. Vronsky was aware of his comrades’ view of him, and in addition to his liking for the life, he felt bound to keep up that reputation.

It need not be said that he did not speak of his love to any of his comrades, nor did he betray his secret even in the wildest drinking bouts (though indeed he was never so drunk as to lose all control of himself). And he shut up any of his thoughtless comrades who attempted to allude to his connection. But in spite of that, his love was known to all the town; everyone guessed with more or less confidence at his relations with Madame Karenina. The majority of the younger men envied him for just what was the most irksome factor in his love—the exalted position of Karenin, and the consequent publicity of their connection in society.

The greater number of the young women, who envied Anna and had long been weary of hearing her called virtuous, rejoiced at the fulfillment of their predictions, and were only waiting for a decisive turn in public opinion to fall upon her with all the weight of their scorn. They were already making ready their handfuls of mud to fling at her when the right moment arrived. The greater number of the middle-aged people and certain great personages were displeased at the prospect of the impending scandal in society.

Vronsky’s mother, on hearing of his connection, was at first pleased at it, because nothing to her mind gave such a finishing touch to a brilliant young man as a liaison in the highest society; she was pleased, too, that Madame Karenina, who had so taken her fancy, and had talked so much of her son, was, after all, just like all other pretty and well-bred women,—at least according to the Countess Vronskaya’s ideas. But she had heard of late that her son had refused a position offered him of great importance to his career, simply in order to remain in the regiment, where he could be constantly seeing Madame Karenina. She learned that great personages were displeased with him on this account, and she changed her opinion. She was vexed, too, that from all she could learn of this connection it was not that brilliant, graceful, worldly liaison which she would have welcomed, but a sort of Wertherish, desperate passion, so she was told, which might well lead him into imprudence. She had not seen him since his abrupt departure from Moscow, and she sent her elder son to bid him come to see her.

This elder son, too, was displeased with his younger brother. He did not distinguish what sort of love his might be, big or little, passionate or passionless, lasting or passing (he kept a ballet girl himself, though he was the father of a family, so he was lenient in these matters), but he knew that this love affair was viewed with displeasure by those whom it was necessary to please, and therefore he did not approve of his brother’s conduct.

Besides the service and society, Vronsky had another great interest—horses; he was passionately fond of horses.

That year races and a steeplechase had been arranged for the officers. Vronsky had put his name down, bought a thoroughbred English mare, and in spite of his love affair, he was looking forward to the races with intense, though reserved, excitement....

These two passions did not interfere with one another. On the contrary, he needed occupation and distraction quite apart from his love, so as to recruit and rest himself from the violent emotions that agitated him.