Anna Karenina (Literature Classics Series). Leo Tolstoy

she began with her quick hands to take out her hairpins.

      ‘Well, I’m listening! What next?’ said she quietly and mockingly. ‘I am even listening with interest, because I should like to understand what it is all about.’

      As she spoke she wondered at her quietly natural tone and at her correct choice of words.

      ‘I have not the right to inquire into all the details of your feelings, and in general I consider it useless and even harmful to do so,’ began Karenin. ‘By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed. Your feelings concern your own conscience, but it is my duty to you, to myself and to God, to point out to you your duties. Our lives are bound together not by men but by God. This bond can only be broken by a crime, and that kind of crime brings its punishment.’

      ‘I don’t understand anything… . Oh dear! And as ill-luck will have it, I am dreadfully sleepy!’ said she, while with deft fingers she felt for the remaining pins in her hair.

      ‘Anna, for God’s sake don’t talk like that!’ he said mildly. ‘Perhaps I am mistaken, but believe me that what I am saying I say equally for my own sake and for yours. I am your husband, and I love you.’

      For an instant her head had drooped and the mocking spark in her eyes had died away, but the word ‘love’ aroused her again. ‘Love!’ she thought, ‘as if he can love! If he had never heard people talk of love, he would never have wanted that word. He does not know what love is.’

      ‘Alexis Alexandrovich, I really do not understand,’ she replied. ‘Explain what you consider …’

      ‘Allow me to finish. I love you. But I am not talking of myself. The chief persons concerned are our son and yourself. I repeat — perhaps my words may seem quite superfluous to you; perhaps they result from a mistake of mine. In that case I ask your pardon! But if you feel that there are any grounds, however slight, I beg you to reflect, and if your heart prompts you to tell me …’

      Karenin did not notice that he was saying something quite different from what he had prepared.

      ‘I have nothing to say. Besides …’ she added, rapidly, and hardly repressing a smile, ‘it really is bedtime.’

      Karenin sighed, and without saying anything more went into the bedroom.

      When she went there he was already in bed. His lips were sternly compressed and his eyes did not look at her. Anna got into her bed, and every moment expected that he would address her. She was afraid of what he would say, and yet wished to hear it. But he remained silent. She lay waiting and motionless for a long time, and then forgot him. She was thinking of another; she saw him, and felt her heart fill with excitement and guilty joy at the thought. Suddenly she heard an even, quiet, nasal sound like whistling. For a moment the sound he emitted seemed to have startled Karenin, and he stopped; but, after he had breathed twice, the whistling recommenced with fresh and calm regularity.

      ‘It’s late, it’s late,’ she whispered to herself, and smiled. For a long time she lay still with wide-open eyes, the brightness of which it seemed to her she could herself see in the darkness.

      Chapter 10

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      FROM that time a new life began for Karenin and his wife. Nothing particular happened. Anna went into Society as before, frequently visiting the Princess Betsy, and she met Vronsky everywhere. Karenin noticed this, but could do nothing. She met all his efforts to bring about an explanation by presenting an impenetrable wall of merry perplexity. Externally things seemed as before, but their intimate relations with one another were completely changed. Karenin, strong as he was in his official activities, felt himself powerless here. Like an ox he waited submissively with bowed head for the pole-axe which he felt was raised above him. Each time he began to think about it, he felt that he must try again, that by kindness, tenderness, and persuasion there was still a hope of saving her and obliging her to bethink herself. Every day he prepared himself to have a talk with her. But each time he began to speak with her he felt the same spirit of evil and falsehood which had taken possession of her master him also, and he neither said the things he meant to, nor spoke in the tone he had meant to adopt. He spoke involuntarily in his habitual half-bantering tone which seemed to make fun of those who said such things seriously; and in that tone it was impossible to say what had to be said to her.

      Chapter 11

       Table of Contents

      THAT which for nearly a year had been Vronsky’s sole and exclusive desire, supplanting all his former desires: that which for Anna had been an impossible, dreadful, but all the more bewitching dream of happiness, had come to pass. Pale, with trembling lower jaw, he stood over her, entreating her to be calm, himself not knowing why or how.

      ‘Anna, Anna,’ he said in trembling voice, ‘Anna, for God’s sake!’

      But the louder he spoke the lower she drooped her once proud, bright, but now dishonoured head, and she writhed, slipping down from the sofa on which she sat to 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 and pressing Vronsky’s hand to her breast.

      She felt so guilty, so much to blame, that it only remained for her to humble herself and ask to be forgiven; but she had no one in the world now except him, so that even her prayer for forgiveness was addressed to him. Looking at him, she felt her degradation physically, and could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel when looking at the body he has deprived of life. The body he had deprived of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something frightful and revolting in the recollection of what had been paid for with this terrible price of shame. The shame she felt at her spiritual nakedness communicated itself to him. But in spite of the murderer’s horror of the body of his victim, that body must be cut in pieces and hidden away, and he must make use of what he has obtained by the murder.

      Then, as the murderer desperately throws himself on the body, as though with passion, and drags it and hacks it, so Vronsky covered her face and shoulders with kisses.

      She held his hand and did not move. Yes! These kisses were what had been bought by their shame! ‘Yes, and this hand, which will always be mine, is the hand of my accomplice.’ She lifted his hand and kissed it. He knelt down and tried to see her face, but she hid it and did not speak. At last, as though mastering herself, she sat up and pushed him away. Her face was as beautiful as ever, but all the more piteous.

      ‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘I have nothing but you left. Remember that.’

      ‘I cannot help remembering what is life itself to me! For one moment of that bliss …’

      ‘What bliss?’ she said with disgust and horror, and the horror was involuntarily communicated to him. ‘For heaven’s sake, not another word!’

      She rose quickly and moved away from him.

      ‘Not another word!’ she repeated, and with a look of cold despair, strange to him, she left him. She felt that at that moment she could not express in words her feeling of shame, joy, and horror at this entrance on a new life, and she did not wish to vulgarize that feeling by inadequate words. Later on, the next day and the next, she still could not find words to describe all the complexity of those feelings, and could not even find thoughts with which to reflect on all that was in her soul.

      She said to herself: ‘No, I can’t think about it now; later, when I am calmer.’ But that calm, necessary for reflection, never came. Every time the thought of what she had done, and of what was to become of her and of what she should do, came to her mind, she was seized with horror and drove these thoughts away.

      ‘Not now; later, when I am calmer!’