Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head, following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.
“You ought to make the attempt,” she said softly.
“Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?” she said, evidently giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and learned by heart. “It means that I, hating him, but still recognizing that I have wronged him—and I consider him magnanimous—that I humiliate myself to write to him…. Well, suppose I make the effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating refusal or consent…. Well, I have received his consent, say…” Anna was at that moment at the furthest end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the curtain at the window. “I receive his consent, but my…my son? They won’t give him up to me. He will grow up despising me, with his father, whom I’ve abandoned. Do you see, I love… equally, I think, but both more than myself—two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.”
She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white dressing gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing jacket and nightcap, shaking all over with emotion.
“It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything. You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m suffering.” She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her face and took her hand.
“What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise me. I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am,” she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears.
Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed. She had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day.
Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine glass and dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a little while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind.
When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He was looking for traces of the conversation which he knew that, staying so long in Dolly’s room, she must have had with her. But in her expression of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he could find nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh though he was used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that it should affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been talking of, but he hoped that she would tell him something of her own accord. But she only said:
“I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’ve known her a long while, you know. She’s very good-hearted, I suppose, mais excessivement terre-à-terre. Still, I’m very glad to see her.”
He took Anna’s hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.
Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him. Next morning, in spite of the protests of her hosts, Darya Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward journey. Levin’s coachman, in his by no means new coat and shabby hat, with his ill-matched horses and his coach with the patched mud-guards, drove with gloomy determination into the covered gravel approach.
Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her hosts were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and that it was better for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew that now, from Dolly’s departure, no one again would stir up within her soul the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.
As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men how they had liked being at Vronsky’s, when suddenly the coachman, Philip, expressed himself unasked:
“Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all they gave us. Everything cleared up till there wasn’t a grain left by cockcrow. What are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now down to forty-five kopecks. At our place, no fear, all comers may have as much as they can eat.”
“The master’s a screw,” put in the counting house clerk.
“Well, did you like their horses?” asked Dolly.
“The horses!—there’s no two opinions about them. And the food was good. But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna. I don’t know what you thought,” he said, turning his handsome, good-natured face to her.
“I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?”
“Eh, we must!”
On reaching home and finding everyone entirely satisfactory and particularly charming, Darya Alexandrovna began with great liveliness telling them how she had arrived, how warmly they had received her, of the luxury and good taste in which the Vronskys lived, and of their recreations, and she would not allow a word to be said against them.
“One has to know Anna and Vronsky—I have got to know him better now—to see how nice they are, and how touching,” she said, speaking now with perfect sincerity, and forgetting the vague feeling of dissatisfaction and awkwardness she had experienced there.
Chapter 25
Vronsky and Anna spent the whole summer and part of the winter in the country, living in just the same condition, and still taking no steps to obtain a divorce. It was an understood thing between them that they should not go away anywhere; but both felt, the longer they lived alone, especially in the autumn, without guests in the house, that they could not stand this existence, and that they would have to alter it.
Their life was apparently such that nothing better could be desired. They had the fullest abundance of everything; they had a child, and both had occupation. Anna devoted just as much care to her appearance when they had no visitors, and she did a great deal of reading, both of novels and of what serious literature was in fashion. She ordered all the books that were praised in the foreign papers and reviews she received, and read them with that concentrated attention which is only given to what is read in seclusion. Moreover, every subject that was of interest to Vronsky, she studied in books and special journals, so that he often went straight to her with questions relating to agriculture or architecture, sometimes even with questions relating to horse-breeding or sport. He was amazed at her knowledge, her memory, and at first was disposed to doubt it, to ask for confirmation of her facts; and she would find what he asked for in some book, and show it to him.
The building of the hospital, too, interested her. She did not merely assist, but planned and suggested a great deal herself. But her chief thought was still of herself—how far she was dear to Vronsky, how far she could make up to him for all he had given up. Vronsky appreciated this desire not only to please, but to serve him, which had become the sole aim of her existence, but at the same time he wearied of the loving snares in which she tried to hold him fast. As time went on, and he saw himself more and more often held fast in these snares, he had an ever growing desire, not so much to escape from them, as to try whether they hindered his freedom. Had it not been for this growing desire to be free, not to have scenes every time he wanted to go to the town to a meeting or a race, Vronsky would have been perfectly satisfied with his life. The rôle he had taken up, the rôle of a wealthy landowner, one of that class which ought to be the very heart of the Russian aristocracy, was entirely to his taste; and now, after spending six months in that character, he derived even greater satisfaction from it. And his
