Anna Karenina (Literature Classics Series). Leo Tolstoy

[‘You should never overdo anything’], she said to her one day.

      But her daughter did not reply; she only felt in her soul that one could not speak of overdoing Christianity. How was it possible to exaggerate, when following the teaching which bids us turn the other cheek when we are struck, and give our coat when our cloak is taken? But the Princess disliked this excess, and disliked it all the more because she felt that Kitty did not wish to open her whole heart to her. And Kitty really did hide her new views and feelings from her mother. She kept them secret not from want of respect and love, but just because her mother was her mother. She would have revealed them to anyone sooner than to her.

      ‘It seems a long time since Anna Pavlovna was here,’ said the Princess once, speaking of Mrs. Petrova. ‘I invited her and she did not seem pleased.’

      ‘I did not notice anything, Mama,’ said Kitty, flushing up.

      ‘Is it long since you went to see them?’

      ‘We are all arranging to go for a drive up the mountains to-morrow,’ replied Kitty.

      ‘Well, go if you like,’ said the Princess, looking intently into her daughter’s confused face and trying to guess the cause of her confusion.

      That same day Varenka came to dinner, and said that Anna Pavlovna had changed her mind about going to the mountains to-morrow.

      The Princess noticed that Kitty blushed again.

      ‘Kitty, have you not had some unpleasantness with the Petrovs?’ the Princess asked when they were again alone together. ‘Why has she stopped sending the children here and coming herself?’

      Kitty replied that nothing had passed between them and that she did not at all understand why Anna Pavlovna seemed dissatisfied with her. Kitty spoke the truth: she did not know why Anna Pavlovna had changed toward her, but she guessed it. She guessed it to be something that she could not tell her mother and did not even say to herself. It was one of those things which one knows and yet cannot say even to oneself — so dreadful and shameful would it be to make a mistake.

      Again and again she went over in memory all the relations she had had with that family. She remembered the naïve pleasure expressed in Anna Pavlovna’s round, good-natured face whenever they met; remembered their secret consultations about the patient, and their plots to draw him away from his work which the doctor had forbidden and to take him for walks, and the attachment to her felt by the youngest boy, who called her ‘my Kitty’, and did not want to go to bed without her. How good it had all been! Then she recalled Petrov’s thin, emaciated figure in his brown coat, with his long neck, his thin, curly hair, his inquiring blue eyes, which had at first seemed to her terrible, — and his sickly efforts to appear vigorous and animated in her presence. She remembered her first efforts to conquer the repulsion she felt for him, as for all consumptives, and her efforts to find something to say to him. She remembered the timid look, full of emotion, with which he gazed at her, and the strange feeling of compassion and awkwardness, followed by a consciousness of her own benevolence, that she had experienced. How good it had all been! But all that had been at first. Now for some days past all had suddenly been spoilt. Anna Pavlovna now met Kitty with affected amiability and constantly watched her husband and her.

      Could his touching pleasure when she drew near be the cause of Anna Pavlovna’s coldness?

      ‘Yes,’ she remembered, ‘there was something unnatural in Anna Pavlovna, quite unlike her usual kindness, when the day before yesterday she said crossly:

      ‘ “There, he has been waiting for you and would not drink his coffee without you, though he was growing dreadfully weak.”

      ‘Yes, and perhaps my giving him his plaid may also have been unpleasant to her. It was such a simple thing, but he took it so awkwardly, and thanked me so much that I myself felt awkward. And then that portrait of me, which he did so well! And above all — that look, confused and tender… . Yes, yes, it is so!’ Kitty said to herself quite horrified; and then, ‘No, it is impossible, it must not be! He is so pathetic.’

      Chapter 34

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      QUITE toward the end of the season Prince Shcherbatsky, who from Carlsbad had gone on to Baden and Kissingen to see some Russian friends and to ‘inhale some Russian spirit’, as he expressed it, returned to his family.

      The views of the Prince and Princess on life abroad were diametrically opposed. The Princess found everything admirable, and, in spite of her firmly-established position in Russian Society, tried when abroad to appear like a European lady, which she was not — being thoroughly Russian. She therefore became somewhat artificial, which made her feel uncomfortable. The Prince, on the contrary, considered everything foreign detestable and life abroad oppressive, and kept to his Russian habits, purposely trying to appear more unlike a European than he really was.

      He returned looking thinner, with the skin on his cheeks hanging loose, but in the brightest of spirits. His spirits were still better when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The news of her friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the information the Princess gave him of the change she had observed in Kitty, disturbed him and aroused in him his usual feelings of jealousy toward anything that drew his daughter away from him and of fear lest she might escape from his influence into regions inaccessible to him. But these unpleasant rumours were soon drowned in that sea of kind-hearted cheerfulness which was always within him and which was increased by the Carlsbad water.

      The day after his arrival the Prince, attired in a long overcoat, and with his Russian wrinkles, and his slightly puffy cheeks supported by a stiff collar, went out in the brightest of spirits to the Springs with his daughter.

      The morning was lovely: the bright, tidy houses with their little gardens, the sight of the red-faced, red-armed, beer-saturated German housemaids, and the clear sunshine, cheered the heart; but the nearer one came to the Spring the more often one met sick people, whose appearance seemed yet sadder amid these customary well-ordered conditions of German life. Kitty was no longer struck by this contrast. The bright sunshine, the gay glitter of the green trees, and the sounds of music had become for her the natural framework of all these familiar figures, and of the changes for better or for worse which she watched. But to the Prince the radiance of the June morning, the sounds of the band playing a fashionable and merry valse, and particularly the appearance of the sturdy maidservants, seemed improper and monstrous in contrast with all those melancholy living corpses collected from all parts of Europe.

      In spite of the pride and the sense of renewed youth which he experienced while walking arm-in-arm with his favourite daughter, he felt almost awkward and ashamed of his powerful stride and his large healthy limbs. He had almost the feeling that might be caused by appearing in company without clothes.

      ‘Introduce me, introduce me to your new friends,’ he said to his daughter, pressing her arm with his elbow. ‘I have even taken a liking to your nasty Soden because it has done you so much good. But it’s sad — this place of yours, very sad. Who is that?’

      Kitty told him the names of the acquaintances and others whom they met. Just at the entrance to the gardens they met the blind Madame Berthe with her guide, and the Prince was pleased by the tender look on the old Frenchwoman’s face when she heard Kitty’s voice. With French exaggeration she at once began talking to him, admiring him for having such a delightful daughter, and in Kitty’s presence praised her up to the skies, calling her a treasure, a pearl, and a ministering angel.

      ‘Then she must be angel No. 2,’ the Prince remarked with a smile. ‘She calls Mlle Varenka angel No. 1.’

      ‘Oh, Mlle Varenka is a real angel, allez,’ said Madame Berthe.

      In the gallery they met Varenka herself. She was walking hurriedly toward them with an elegant little red bag in her hand.

      ‘See! Papa has come!’ said Kitty to her.

      Simply and naturally, as