‘Half an hour.’
‘How many times have I told you to tell me at once?’
‘One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least,’
said Matvey, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it
was impossible to be angry.
‘Well, show the person up at once,’ said Oblonsky, frowning with vexation.
The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin,
came with a request impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did, made her sit down,
heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her,
and gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and
legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage
who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain’s widow, Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped
to recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared
that he had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget—his wife.
‘Ah, yes!’ He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a harassed expression. ‘To go, or not to go!’ he said
to himself; and an inner voice told him he must not go, that
nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set
right their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to inspire love, or
to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and
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Anna Karenina
lying were opposed to his nature.
‘It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,’
he said, trying to give himself courage. He squared his
chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, flung it
into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps walked
through the drawing room, and opened the other door into
his wife’s bedroom.
19
Chapter 4
Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her
now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up
with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin
face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from
the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all
sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open
bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her
husband’s steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and
trying assiduously to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and
afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting
to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in
these last three days—to sort out the children’s things and
her own, so as to take them to her mother’s—and again she
could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each
time before, she kept saying to herself, ‘that things cannot
go on like this, that she must take some step’ to punish him,
put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of
the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell
herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that
this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not
get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and
loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in
her own house she could hardly manage to look after her
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Anna Karenina
five children properly, they would be still worse off where
she was going with them all. As it was, even in the course of
these three days, the youngest was unwell from being given
unwholesome soup, and the others had almost gone without their dinner the day before. She was conscious that it
was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself, she went
on all the same sorting out her things and pretending she
was going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the
drawer of the bureau as though looking for something, and
only looked round at him when he had come quite up to her.
But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute
expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.
‘Dolly!’ he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent
his head towards his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and
humble, but for all that he was radiant with freshness and
health. In a rapid glance she scanned his figure that beamed
with health and freshness. ‘Yes, he is happy and content!’
she thought; ‘while I…. And that disgusting good nature,
which every one likes him for and praises—I hate that good
nature of his,’ she thought. Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale,
nervous face.
‘What do you want?’ she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
‘Dolly!’ he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. ‘Anna is
coming today.’
‘Well, what is that to me? I can’t see her!’ she cried.
‘But you must, really, Dolly…’
21
‘Go away, go away, go away!’ she shrieked, not looking at
him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought of
his wife, he could hope that she would come round, as Matvey expressed it, and could quietly go on reading his paper
and drinking his coffee; but when he saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate
and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath and a
lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.
‘My God! what have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake!…. You
know….’ He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.
She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
‘Dolly, what can I say?…. One thing: forgive…Remember,
cannot nine years of my life atone for an instant….’
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he
would say, as it were beseeching him in some way or other
to make her believe differently.
‘—instant of passion?’ he said, and would have gone
on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips
stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek
worked.
‘Go away, go out of the room!’ she shrieked still more
shrilly, ‘and don’t talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness.’
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of
a chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips swelled,
his eyes were swimming with tears.
‘Dolly!’ he said, sobbing now; ‘for mercy’s sake, think of
the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and pun22
Anna Karenina
ish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am
ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can express
how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!’
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing,
and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times
to begin to speak, but could not. He waited.
‘You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them;
but I remember them, and know that this means their ruin,’
she said—obviously one of the phrases she had more than
once repeated to herself in the course of the last few days.
She had called him ‘Stiva,’ and he glanced at her with
gratitude, and moved to take her hand, but she drew back
from him with aversion.
‘I think of the children, and for that reason I would do
anything in the world to save them, but I don’t myself know
how to save them. By taking them away from their father, or
by leaving them with a vicious father—yes, a vicious father….
Tell me, after what…has happened, can we live together? Is
that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?’ she repeated, raising her voice, ‘after my husband, the father of my children,
enters into a love affair with his own children’s governess?’
‘But what could I do? what could I do?’ he kept saying in
a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head
sank lower and lower.
‘You are loathsome to me, repulsive!’ she shrieked, getting more and more heated. ‘Your tears mean nothing! You
have never loved me; you have neither heart nor honorable
feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger—yes,
a complete stranger!’ With pain and wrath she uttered the
23
word so terrible to herself—stranger.
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face
alarmed and amazed him. He did not understand how his
pity for her exasperated her. She saw in him sympathy for
her, but not love. ‘No, she hates me. She will not forgive me,’
he thought.
‘It is awful! awful!’ he said.
At that moment in the next room a child began to cry;
probably it had fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened,
and her face suddenly softened.
She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though she did not know where she was, and what
she was doing, and getting up rapidly, she moved towards
the door.
‘Well, she loves my child,’ he thought, noticing the
change of her face at the child’s cry, ‘my child: how can she
hate me?’
‘Dolly, one word more,’ he said, following her.
‘If you come near me, I will call in the servants, the children! They may all know you are a scoundrel! I am going
away at once, and you may live here with your mistress!’
And she went out, slamming the door.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, wiped his face, and with a
subdued tread walked out of the room. ‘Matvey says she will
come round; but how? I don’t see the least chance of it. Ah,
oh, how horrible it is! And how vulgarly she shouted,’ he
said to himself, remembering her shriek and the words—
‘scoundrel’ and ‘mistress.’ ‘And very likely the maids were
listening! Horribly vulgar! horrible!’ Stepan Arkadyevitch
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Anna Karenina
stood a few seconds alone, wiped his face, squared his chest,
and walked out of the room.
It was Friday, and in the dining room the German watchmaker was winding up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevitch
remembered his joke about this punctual, bald watchmaker,
‘that the German was wound up for a whole lifetime himself,
to wind up watches,’ and he smiled. Stepan Arkadyevitch
was fond of a joke: ‘And maybe she will come round!
