Anna Karenina

L >> Leo Tolstoy >> Anna Karenina


"What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if
I did dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my
horses," he said. "You never told me that you were going for
certain. Hiring horses in the village is disagreeable to me,
and, what's of more importance, they'll undertake the job and
never get you there. I have horses. And if you don't want to
wound me, you'll take mine."

Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and on the day fixed Levin had
ready for his sister-in-law a set of four horses and relays,
getting them together from the farm- and saddle-horses--not at
all a smart-looking set, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna
the whole distance in a single day. At that moment, when horses
were wanted for the princess, who was going, and for the midwife,
it was a difficult matter for Levin to make up the number, but
the duties of hospitality would not let him allow Darya
Alexandrovna to hire horses when staying in his house. Moreover,
he was well aware that the twenty roubles that would be asked for
the journey were a serious matter for her; Darya Alexandrovna's
pecuniary affairs, which were in a very unsatisfactory state,
were taken to heart by the Levins as if they were their own.

Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin's advice, started before daybreak.
The road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted
along merrily, and on the box, besides the coachman, sat the
counting-house clerk, whom Levin was sending instead of a groom
for greater security. Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only
on reaching the inn where the horses were to be changed.

After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant's with whom
Levin had stayed on the way to Sviazhsky's, and chatting with the
women about their children, and with the old man about Count
Vronsky, whom the latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna,
at ten o'clock, went on again. At home, looking after her
children, she had no time to think. So now, after this journey
of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed
swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she
never had before, and from the most different points of view.
Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first she
thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although
the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised
to look after them. "If only Masha does not begin her naughty
tricks, if Grisha isn't kicked by a horse, and Lily's stomach
isn't upset again!" she thought. But these questions of the
present were succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She
began thinking how she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the
coming winter, to renew the drawing room furniture, and to make
her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the more remote future
occurred to her: how she was to place her children in the world.
"The girls are all right," she thought; "but the boys?"

"It's very well that I'm teaching Grisha, but of course that's
only because I am free myself now, I'm not with child. Stiva,
of course, there's no counting on. And with the help of
good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there's another
baby coming?..." And the thought struck her how untruly it was
said that the curse laid on woman was that in sorrow she should
bring forth children.

"The birth itself, that's nothing; but the months of carrying the
child--that's what's so intolerable," she thought, picturing to
herself her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And
she recalled the conversation she had just had with the young
woman at the inn. On being asked whether she had any children,
the handsome young woman had answered cheerfully:

"I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent."

"Well, did you grieve very much for her?" asked Darya
Alexandrovna.

"Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It
was only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie."

This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite
of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now
she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words
there was indeed a grain of truth.

"Yes, altogether," thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over
her whole existence during those fifteen years of her married
life, "pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to
everything, and most of all--hideousness. Kitty, young and
pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I'm
with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the
hideous agonies, that last moment...then the nursing, the
sleepless nights, the fearful pains...."

Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain
from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child.
"Then the children's illnesses, that everlasting apprehension;
then bringing them up; evil propensities" (she thought of little
Masha's crime among the raspberries), "education, Latin--it's all
so incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the
death of these children." And there rose again before her
imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother's
heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of
croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little
pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at
the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples,
and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the
moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a
cross braided on it.

"And all this, what's it for? What is to come of it all? That
I'm wasting my life, never having a moment's peace, either with
child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched
myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the
children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless.
Even now, if it weren't for spending the summer at the Levins',
I don't know how we should be managing to live. Of course Kostya
and Kitty have so much tact that we don't feel it; but it can't
go on. They'll have children, they won't be able to keep us;
it's a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly
anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can't even
bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the
help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if
we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don't die,
and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they'll simply be
decent people. That's all I can hope for. And to gain simply
that--what agonies, what toil!... One's whole life ruined!"
Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and
again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help
admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.

"Is it far now, Mihail?" Darya Alexandrovna asked the
counting house clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were
frightening her.

"From this village, they say, it's five miles." The carriage
drove along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge
was a crowd of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves
on their shoulders, gaily and noisily chattering. They stood
still on the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All
the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and
happy, making her envious of their enjoyment of life. "They're
all living, they're all enjoying life," Darya Alexandrovna still
mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving
uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of
the old carriage, "while I, let out, as it were from prison, from
the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about
me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my
sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see--all,
but not I.

"And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have,
anyway, a husband I love--not as I should like to love him, still
I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame?
She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely
I should have done the same. Even to this day I don't feel sure
I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she
came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband
and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been
loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don't
respect him. He's necessary to me," she thought about her
husband, "and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that
time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me
still," Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would
have liked to look at herself in the looking glass. She had a
traveling looking glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take
it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying
counting house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if
either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the
glass.

But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it
was not too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was
always particularly attentive to her, of Stiva's good-hearted
friend, Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through
the scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone
else, a quite young man, who--her husband had told her it as a
joke--thought her more beautiful than either of her sisters. And
the most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya
Alexandrovna's imagination. "Anna did quite right, and certainly
I shall never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes
another person happy, and she's not broken down as I am, but most
likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every
impression," thought Darya Alexandrovna,--and a sly smile curved
her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna's love affair, Darya
Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical
love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the
ideal man who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed
the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and
perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at this avowal made her smile.

In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that
led to Vozdvizhenskoe.



Chapter 17


The coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the
right, to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting on a
cart. The counting house clerk was just going to jump down, but
on second thoughts he shouted peremptorily to the peasants
instead, and beckoned to them to come up. The wind, that seemed
to blow as they drove, dropped when the carriage stood still;
gadflies settled on the steaming horses that angrily shook them
off. The metallic clank of a whetstone against a scythe, that
came to them from the cart, ceased. One of the peasants got up
and came towards the carriage.

"Well, you are slow!" the counting house clerk shouted angrily to
the peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the
ruts of the rough dry road. "Come along, do!"

A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair,
and his bent back dark with perspiration, came towards the
carriage, quickening his steps, and took hold of the mud-guard
with his sunburnt hand.

"Vozdvizhenskoe, the manor house? the count's?" he repeated; "go
on to the end of this track. Then turn to the left. Straight
along the avenue and you'll come right upon it. But whom do you
want? The count himself?"

"Well, are they at home, my good man?" Darya Alexandrovna said
vaguely, not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this peasant.

"At home for sure," said the peasant, shifting from one bare foot
to the other, and leaving a distinct print of five toes and a
heel in the dust. "Sure to be at home," he repeated, evidently
eager to talk. "Only yesterday visitors arrived. There's a
sight of visitors come. What do you want?" He turned round and
called to a lad, who was shouting something to him from the cart.
"Oh! They all rode by here not long since, to look at a reaping
machine. They'll be home by now. And who will you be belonging
to?..."

"We've come a long way," said the coachman, climbing onto the
box. "So it's not far?"

"I tell you, it's just here. As soon as you get out..." he said,
keeping hold all the while of the carriage.

A healthy-looking, broad-shouldered young fellow came up too.

"What, is it laborers they want for the harvest?" he asked.

"I don't know, my boy."

"So you keep to the left, and you'll come right on it," said the
peasant, unmistakably loth to let the travelers go, and eager to
converse.

The coachman started the horses, but they were only just turning
off when the peasant shouted: "Stop! Hi, friend! Stop!" called
the two voices. The coachman stopped.

"They're coming! They're yonder!" shouted the peasant. "See
what a turn-out!" he said, pointing to four persons on horseback,
and two in a _char-a-banc_, coming along the road.

They were Vronsky with a jockey, Veslovsky and Anna on horseback,
and Princess Varvara and Sviazhsky in the _char-a-banc_. They had
gone out to look at the working of a new reaping machine.

When the carriage stopped, the party on horseback were coming at
a walking pace. Anna was in front beside Veslovsky. Anna,
quietly walking her horse, a sturdy English cob with cropped mane
and short tail, her beautiful head with her black hair straying
loose under her high hat, her full shoulders, her slender waist
in her black riding habit, and all the ease and grace of her
deportment, impressed Dolly.

For the first minute it seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to be
on horseback. The conception of riding on horseback for a lady
was, in Darya Alexandrovna's mind, associated with ideas of
youthful flirtation and frivolity, which, in her opinion, was
unbecoming in Anna's position. But when she had scrutinized her,
seeing her closer, she was at once reconciled to her riding. In
spite of her elegance, everything was so simple, quiet, and
dignified in the attitude, the dress and the movements of Anna,
that nothing could have been more natural.

Beside Anna, on a hot-looking gray cavalry horse, was Vassenka
Veslovsky in his Scotch cap with floating ribbons, his stout
legs stretched out in front, obviously pleased with his own
appearance. Darya Alexandrovna could not suppress a good-humored
smile as she recognized him. Behind rode Vronsky on a dark bay
mare, obviously heated from galloping. He was holding her in,
pulling at the reins.

After him rode a little man in the dress of a jockey. Sviazhsky
and Princess Varvara in a new _char-a-banc_ with a big, raven-black
trotting horse, overtook the party on horseback.

Anna's face suddenly beamed with a joyful smile at the instant
when, in the little figure huddled in a corner of the old
carriage, she recognized Dolly. She uttered a cry, started in
the saddle, and set her horse into a gallop. On reaching the
carriage she jumped off without assistance, and holding up her
riding habit, she ran up to greet Dolly.

"I thought it was you and dared not think it. How delightful!
You can't fancy how glad I am!" she said, at one moment pressing
her face against Dolly and kissing her, and at the next holding
her off and examining her with a smile.

"Here's a delightful surprise, Alexey!" she said, looking round
at Vronsky, who had dismounted, and was walking towards them.

Vronsky, taking off his tall gray hat, went up to Dolly.

"You wouldn't believe how glad we are to see you," he said,
giving peculiar significance to the words, and showing his strong
white teeth in a smile.

Vassenka Veslovsky, without getting off his horse, took off his
cap and greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over
his head.

"That's Princess Varvara," Anna said in reply to a glance of
inquiry from Dolly as the _char-a-banc_ drove up.

"Ah!" said Darya Alexandrovna, and unconsciously her face
betrayed her dissatisfaction.

Princess Varvara was her husband's aunt, and she had long known
her, and did not respect her. She knew that Princess Varvara had
passed her whole life toadying on her rich relations, but that
she should now be sponging on Vronsky, a man who was nothing to
her, mortified Dolly on account of her kinship with her husband.
Anna noticed Dolly's expression, and was disconcerted by it. She
blushed, dropped her riding habit, and stumbled over it.

Darya Alexandrovna went up to the _char-a-banc_ and coldly greeted
Princess Varvara. Sviazhsky too she knew. He inquired how his
queer friend with the young wife was, and running his eyes over
the ill-matched horses and the carriage with its patched
mud-guards, proposed to the ladies that they should get into the
_char-a-banc_.

"And I'll get into this vehicle," he said. "The horse is quiet,
and the princess drives capitally."

"No, stay as you were," said Anna, coming up, "and we'll go in
the carriage," and taking Dolly's arm, she drew her away.

Darya Alexandrovna's eyes were fairly dazzled by the elegant
carriage of a pattern she had never seen before, the splendid
horses, and the elegant and gorgeous people surrounding her. But
what struck her most of all was the change that had taken place
in Anna, whom she knew so well and loved. Any other woman, a
less close observer, not knowing Anna before, or not having
thought as Darya Alexandrovna had been thinking on the road,
would not have noticed anything special in Anna. But now Dolly
was struck by that temporary beauty, which is only found in
women during the moments of love, and which she saw now in Anna's
face. Everything in her face, the clearly marked dimples in her
cheeks and chin, the line of her lips, the smile which, as it
were, fluttered about her face, the brilliance of her eyes, the
grace and rapidity of her movements, the fulness of the notes of
her voice, even the manner in which, with a sort of angry
friendliness, she answered Veslovsky when he asked permission to
get on her cob, so as to teach it to gallop with the right leg
foremost--it was all peculiarly fascinating, and it seemed as if
she were herself aware of it, and rejoicing in it.

When both the women were seated in the carriage, a sudden
embarrassment came over both of them. Anna was disconcerted by
the intent look of inquiry Dolly fixed upon her. Dolly was
embarrassed because after Sviazhsky's phrase about "this
vehicle," she could not help feeling ashamed of the dirty old
carriage in which Anna was sitting with her. The coachman Philip
and the counting house clerk were experiencing the same
sensation. The counting house clerk, to conceal his confusion,
busied himself settling the ladies, but Philip the coachman
became sullen, and was bracing himself not to be overawed in
future by this external superiority. He smiled ironically,
looking at the raven horse, and was already deciding in his own
mind that this smart trotter in the _char-a-banc_ was only good for
_promenade_, and wouldn't do thirty miles straight off in the heat.

The peasants had all got up from the cart and were inquisitively
and mirthfully staring at the meeting of the friends, making
their comments on it.

"They're pleased, too; haven't seen each other for a long while,"
said the curly-headed old man with the bast round his hair.

"I say, Uncle Gerasim, if we could take that raven horse now, to
cart the corn, that 'ud be quick work!"

"Look-ee! Is that a woman in breeches?" said one of them,
pointing to Vassenka Veslovsky sitting in a side saddle.

"Nay, a man! See how smartly he's going it!"

"Eh, lads! seems we're not going to sleep, then?"

"What chance of sleep today!" said the old man, with a sidelong
look at the sun. "Midday's past, look-ee! Get your hooks, and
come along!"



Chapter 18


Anna looked at Dolly's thin, care-worn face, with its wrinkles
filled with dust from the road, and she was on the point of
saying what she was thinking, that is, that Dolly had got
thinner. But, conscious that she herself had grown handsomer,
and that Dolly's eyes were telling her so, she sighed and began
to speak about herself.

"You are looking at me," she said, "and wondering how I can be
happy in my position? Well! it's shameful to confess, but I...
I'm inexcusably happy. Something magical has happened to me,
like a dream, when you're frightened, panic-stricken, and all of
a sudden you wake up and all the horrors are no more. I have
waked up. I have lived through the misery, the dread, and now
for a long while past, especially since we've been here, I've
been so happy!..." she said, with a timid smile of inquiry
looking at Dolly.

"How glad I am!" said Dolly smiling, involuntarily speaking more
coldly than she wanted to. "I'm very glad for you. Why haven't
you written to me?"

"Why?... Because I hadn't the courage.... You forget my
position..."

"To me? Hadn't the courage? If you knew how I...I look at..."

Darya Alexandrovna wanted to express her thoughts of the morning,
but for some reason it seemed to her now out of place to do so.

"But of that we'll talk later. What's this, what are all these
buildings?" she asked, wanting to change the conversation and
pointing to the red and green roofs that came into view behind
the green hedges of acacia and lilac. "Quite a little town."

But Anna did not answer.

"No, no! How do you look at my position, what do you think of
it?" she asked.

"I consider..." Darya Alexandrovna was beginning, but at that
instant Vassenka Veslovsky, having brought the cob to gallop with
the right leg foremost, galloped past them, bumping heavily up
and down in his short jacket on the chamois leather of the
side saddle. "He's doing it, Anna Arkadyevna!" he shouted.

Anna did not even glance at him; but again it seemed to Darya
Alexandrovna out of place to enter upon such a long conversation
in the carriage, and so she cut short her thought.

"I don't think anything," she said, "but I always loved you, and
if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they
are and not as one would like them to be...."

Anna, taking her eyes off her friend's face and dropping her
eyelids (this was a new habit Dolly had not seen in her before),
pondered, trying to penetrate the full significance of the words.
And obviously interpreting them as she would have wished, she
glanced at Dolly.

"If you had any sins," she said, "they would all be forgiven you
for your coming to see me and these words."

And Dolly saw that tears stood in her eyes. She pressed Anna's
hand in silence.

"Well, what are these buildings? How many there are of them!"
After a moment's silence she repeated her question.

"These are the servants' houses, barns, and stables," answered
Anna. "And there the park begins. It had all gone to ruin, but
Alexey had everything renewed. He is very fond of this place,
and, what I never expected, he has become intensely interested in
looking after it. But his is such a rich nature! Whatever he
takes up, he does splendidly. So far from being bored by it, he
works with passionate interest. He--with his temperament as I
know it--he has become careful and businesslike, a first-rate
manager, he positively reckons every penny in his management of
the land. But only in that. When it's a question of tens of
thousands, he doesn't think of money." She spoke with that
gleefully sly smile with which women often talk of the secret
characteristics only known to them--of those they love. "Do you
see that big building? that's the new hospital. I believe it
will cost over a hundred thousand; that's his hobby just now.
And do you know how it all came about? The peasants asked him
for some meadowland, I think it was, at a cheaper rate, and he
refused, and I accused him of being miserly. Of course it was
not really because of that, but everything together, he began
this hospital to prove, do you see, that he was not miserly about
money. _C'est une petitesse_, if you like, but I love him all the
more for it. And now you'll see the house in a moment. It was
his grandfather's house, and he has had nothing changed outside."

"How beautiful!" said Dolly, looking with involuntary admiration
at the handsome house with columns, standing out among the
different-colored greens of the old trees in the garden.

"Isn't it fine? And from the house, from the top, the view is
wonderful."

They drove into a courtyard strewn with gravel and bright with
flowers, in which two laborers were at work putting an edging of
stones round the light mould of a flower bed, and drew up in a
covered entry.

"Ah, they're here already!" said Anna, looking at the saddle
horses, which were just being led away from the steps. "It is a
nice horse, isn't it? It's my cob; my favorite. Lead him here
and bring me some sugar. Where is the count?" she inquired of
two smart footmen who darted out. "Ah, there he is!" she said,
seeing Vronsky coming to meet her with Veslovsky.