you, nor to try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, dar118
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ling, I’m simply sorry, sorry from my heart for you!’
Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly
glittered. She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her
hand in her vigorous little hand. Dolly did not shrink away,
but her face did not lose its frigid expression. She said:
‘To comfort me’s impossible. Everything’s lost after what
has happened, everything’s over!’
And directly she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it
and said:
‘But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is
it best to act in this awful position—that’s what you must
think of.’
‘All’s over, and there’s nothing more,’ said Dolly. ‘And the
worst of all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the
children, I am tied. And I can’t live with him! it’s a torture
to me to see him.’
‘Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it
from you: tell me about it.’
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s
face.
‘Very well,’ she said all at once. ‘But I will tell you it
from the beginning. You know how I was married. With
the education mamma gave us I was more than innocent, I
was stupid. I knew nothing. I know they say men tell their
wives of their former lives, but Stiva’—she corrected herself—‘Stepan Arkadyevitch told me nothing. You’ll hardly
believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the only woman
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he had known. So I lived eight years. You must understand
that I was so far from suspecting infidelity, I regarded it as
impossible, and then— try to imagine it—with such ideas,
to find out suddenly all the horror, all the loathsomeness….
You must try and understand me. To be fully convinced of
one’s happiness, and all at once…’ continued Dolly, holding back her sobs, ‘to get a letter…his letter to his mistress,
my governess. No, it’s too awful!’ She hastily pulled out her
handkerchief and hid her face in it. ‘I can understand being
carried away by feeling,’ she went on after a brief silence,
‘but deliberately, slyly deceiving me…and with whom?… To
go on being my husband together with her…it’s awful! You
can’t understand…’
‘Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do
understand,’ said Anna, pressing her hand.
‘And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my
position?’ Dolly resumed. ‘Not the slightest! He’s happy and
contented.’
‘Oh, no!’ Anna interposed quickly. ‘He’s to be pitied, he’s
weighed down by remorse…’
‘Is he capable of remorse?’ Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her sister-in-law’s face.
‘Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted,
but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated. What touched
me most…’ (and here Anna guessed what would touch Dolly most) ‘he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed for
the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving
you beyond everything on earth,’ she hurriedly interrupted
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Dolly, who would have answered—‘he has hurt you, pierced
you to the heart. ‘No, no, she cannot forgive me,’ he keeps
saying.’
Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as
she listened to her words.
‘Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for the
guilty than the innocent,’ she said, ‘if he feels that all the
misery comes from his fault. But how am I to forgive him,
how am I to be his wife again after her? For me to live with
him now would be torture, just because I love my past love
for him…’
And sobs cut short her words. But as though of set design, each time she was softened she began to speak again of
what exasperated her.
‘She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,’ she went on. ‘Do you
know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by
whom? By him and his children. I have worked for him,
and all I had has gone in his service, and now of course any
fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him. No doubt
they talked of me together, or, worse still, they were silent.
Do you understand?’
Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
‘And after that he will tell me…. What! can I believe him?
Never! No, everything is over, everything that once made
my comfort, the reward of my work, and my sufferings….
Would you believe it, I was teaching Grisha just now: once
this was a joy to me, now it is a torture. What have I to strive
and toil for? Why are the children here? What’s so awful is
that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and
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tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred.
I could kill him.’
‘Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself. You are so distressed, so overwrought, that you look at
many things mistakenly.’
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.
‘What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have
thought over everything, and I see nothing.’
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded
instantly to each word, to each change of expression of her
sister-in-law.
‘One thing I would say,’ began Anna. ‘I am his sister, I
know his character, that faculty of forgetting everything,
everything’ (she waved her hand before her forehead), ‘that
faculty for being completely carried away, but for completely
repenting too. He cannot believe it, he cannot comprehend
now how he can have acted as he did.’
‘No; he understands, he understood!’ Dolly broke in. ‘But
I…you are forgetting me…does it make it easier for me?’
‘Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not
realize all the awfulness of your position. I saw nothing but
him, and that the family was broken up. I felt sorry for him,
but after talking to you, I see it, as a woman, quite differently. I see your agony, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am for
you! But, Dolly, darling, I fully realize your sufferings, only
there is one thing I don’t know; I don’t know…I don’t know
how much love there is still in your heart for him. That you
know—whether there is enough for you to be able to forgive
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him. If there is, forgive him!’
‘No,’ Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her hand once more.
‘I know more of the world than you do,’ she said. ‘I know
how men like Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of
you with her. That never happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred to them. Somehow
or other these women are still looked on with contempt by
them, and do not touch on their feeling for their family.
They draw a sort of line that can’t be crossed between them
and their families. I don’t understand it, but it is so.’
‘Yes, but he has kissed her…’
‘Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with
you. I remember the time when he came to me and cried,
talking of you, and all the poetry and loftiness of his feeling
for you, and I know that the longer he has lived with you the
loftier you have been in his eyes. You know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word: ‘Dolly’s
a marvelous woman.’ You have always been a divinity for
him, and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the heart…’
‘But if it is repeated?’
‘It cannot be, as I understand it…’
‘Yes, but could you forgive it?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t judge…. Yes, I can,’ said Anna, thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her thought and
weighing it in her inner balance, she added: ‘Yes, I can, I
can, I can. Yes, I could forgive it. I could not be the same, no;
but I could forgive it, and forgive it as though it had never
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been, never been at all…’
‘Oh, of course,’ Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she had more than once thought, ‘else it would not
be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take you to your room,’ she said,
getting up, and on the way she embraced Anna. ‘My dear,
how glad I am you came. It has made things better, ever so
much better.’
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Chapter 20
The whole of that day Anna spent at home, that’s to say
at the Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some of her
acquaintances had already heard of her arrival, and came
to call; the same day. Anna spent the whole morning with
Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief note to her
brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at home.
‘Come, God is merciful,’ she wrote.
Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was general, and his wife, speaking to him, addressed him as ‘Stiva,’
as she had not done before. In the relations of the husband
and wife the same estrangement still remained, but there
was no talk now of separation, and Stepan Arkadyevitch
saw the possibility of explanation and reconciliation.
Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna
Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to
her sister’s with some trepidation, at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom everyone spoke
so highly of. But she made a favorable impression on Anna
Arkadyevna—she saw that at once. Anna was unmistakably
admiring her loveliness and her youth: before Kitty knew
where she was she found herself not merely under Anna’s
sway, but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with
older and married women. Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor the mother of a boy of eight years old. In the
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elasticity of her movements, the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted in her face, and broke out
in her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed
for a girl of twenty, had it not been for a serious and at
times mournful look in her eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty felt that Anna was perfectly simple
