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Anna Karenina

by graf Leo Tolstoy · English · Gutenberg #1399 · 1,984,088 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Anna Karenina

Author: graf Leo Tolstoy

Translator: Constance Garnett


        
Release date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1399]
                Most recently updated: March 24, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1399

Credits: David Brannan, Andrew Sly and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNA KARENINA ***

[Illustration]




 ANNA KARENINA 

 by Leo Tolstoy 

 Translated by Constance Garnett 

Contents


 PART ONE
 PART TWO
 PART THREE
 PART FOUR
 PART FIVE
 PART SIX
 PART SEVEN
 PART EIGHT




PART ONE

Chapter 1


Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had
discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French
girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced
to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with
him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only
the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family
and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the
house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that
the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in
common with one another than they, the members of the family and
household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the
husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all
over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper,
and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for
her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time;
the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch
Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at
his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his
wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned
over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he
would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow
on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped
up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

“Yes, yes, how was it now?” he thought, going over his dream. “Now, how
was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not
Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in
America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the
tables sang, _Il mio tesoro_—not _Il mio tesoro_ though, but something
better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and
they were women, too,” he remembered.

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a
smile. “Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that
was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even
expressing it in one’s thoughts awake.” And noticing a gleam of light
peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his
feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his
slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on
gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine
years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place
where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he
suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in
his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his
brows.

“Ah, ah, ah! Oo!...” he muttered, recalling everything that had
happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was
present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and
worst of all, his own fault.

“Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And the most
awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—all my fault, though I’m
not to blame. That’s the point of the whole situation,” he reflected.
“Oh, oh, oh!” he kept repeating in despair, as he remembered the
acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.

Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming, happy and
good-humored, from the theater, with a huge pear in his hand for his
wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise
had not found her in the study either, and saw her at last in her
bedroom with the unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.

She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details,
and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting perfectly still
with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of
horror, despair, and indignation.

“What’s this? this?” she asked, pointing to the letter.

And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case,
was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he
had met his wife’s words.

There happened to him at that instant what does happen to people when
they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful. He did not
succeed in adapting his face to the position in which he was placed
towards his wife by the discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt,
denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining
indifferent even—anything would have been better than what he did
do—his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology)—utterly involuntarily
assumed its habitual, good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.

This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself. Catching sight of that
smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical pain, broke out with her
characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed out of the
room. Since then she had refused to see her husband.

“It’s that idiotic smile that’s to blame for it all,” thought Stepan
Arkadyevitch.

“But what’s to be done? What’s to be done?” he said to himself in
despair, and found no answer.


Chapter 2

Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself.
He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he
repented of his conduct. He could not at this date repent of the fact
that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love
with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and
only a year younger than himself. All he repented of was that he had
not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife. But he felt all the
difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children,
and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better
from his wife if he had anticipated that the knowledge of them would
have had such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out the
subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have
suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the
fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer young
or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good
mother, ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It
had turned out quite the other way.

“Oh, it’s awful! oh dear, oh dear! awful!” Stepan Arkadyevitch kept
repeating to himself, and he could think of nothing to be done. “And
how well things were going up till now! how well we got on! She was
contented and happy in her children; I never interfered with her in
anything; I let her manage the children and the house just as she
liked. It’s true it’s bad _her_ having been a governess in our house.
That’s bad! There’s something common, vulgar, in flirting with one’s
governess. But what a governess!” (He vividly recalled the roguish
black eyes of Mlle. Roland and her smile.) “But after all, while she
was in the house, I kept myself in hand. And the worst of it all is
that she’s already ... it seems as if ill-luck would have it so! Oh,
oh! But what, what is to be done?”

There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to
all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one
must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself. To forget
himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could
not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must
forget himself in the dream of daily life.

“Then we shall see,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said to himself, and getting
up he put on a gray dressing-gown lined with blue silk, tied the
tassels in a knot, and, drawing a deep breath of air into his broad,
bare chest, he walked to the window with his usual confident step,
turning out his feet that carried his full frame so easily. He pulled
up the blind and rang the bell loudly. It was at once answered by the
appearance of an old friend, his valet, Matvey, carrying his clothes,
his boots, and a telegram. Matvey was followed by the barber with all
the necessaries for shaving.

“Are there any papers from the office?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch,
taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking-glass.

“On the table,” replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring sympathy at his
master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile, “They’ve
sent from the carriage-jobbers.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced at Matvey in the
looking-glass. In the glance, in which their eyes met in the
looking-glass, it was clear that they understood one another. Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: “Why do you tell me that? don’t you know?”

Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg, and
gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint smile, at his master.

“I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you or
themselves for nothing,” he said. He had obviously prepared the
sentence beforehand.

Stepan Arkadyevitch saw Matvey wanted to make a joke and attract
attention to himself. Tearing open the telegram, he read it through,
guessing at the words, misspelt as they always are in telegrams, and
his face brightened.

“Matvey, my sister Anna Arkadyevna will be here tomorrow,” he said,
checking for a minute the sleek, plump hand of the barber, cutting a
pink path through his long, curly whiskers.

“Thank God!” said Matvey, showing by this response that he, like his
master, realized the significance of this arrival—that is, that Anna
Arkadyevna, the sister he was so fond of, might bring about a
reconciliation between husband and wife.

“Alone, or with her husband?” inquired Matvey.

Stepan Arkadyevitch could not answer, as the barber was at work on his
upper lip, and he raised one finger. Matvey nodded at the
looking-glass.

“Alone. Is the room to be got ready upstairs?”

“Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders.”

“Darya Alexandrovna?” Matvey repeated, as though in doubt.

“Yes, inform her. Here, take the telegram; give it to her, and then do
what she tells you.”

“You want to try it on,” Matvey understood, but he only said, “Yes,
sir.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch was already washed and combed and ready to be
dressed, when Matvey, stepping deliberately in his creaky boots, came
back into the room with the telegram in his hand. The barber had gone.

“Darya Alexandrovna told me to inform you that she is going away. Let
him do—that is you—as he likes,” he said, laughing only with his eyes,
and putting his hands in his pockets, he watched his master with his
head on one side. Stepan Arkadyevitch was silent a minute. Then a
good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his handsome
face.

“Eh, Matvey?” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s all right, sir; she will come round,” said Matvey.

“Come round?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you think so? Who’s there?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, hearing the
rustle of a woman’s dress at the door.

“It’s I,” said a firm, pleasant, woman’s voice, and the stern,
pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in at
the doorway.

“Well, what is it, Matrona?” queried Stepan Arkadyevitch, going up to
her at the door.

Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the wrong as regards his
wife, and was conscious of this himself, almost everyone in the house
(even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna’s chief ally) was on his side.

“Well, what now?” he asked disconsolately.

“Go to her, sir; own your fault again. Maybe God will aid you. She is
suffering so, it’s sad to see her; and besides, everything in the house
is topsy-turvy. You must have pity, sir, on the children. Beg her
forgiveness, sir. There’s no help for it! One must take the
consequences....”

“But she won’t see me.”

“You do your part. God is merciful; pray to God, sir, pray to God.”

“Come, that’ll do, you can go,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, blushing
suddenly. “Well now, do dress me.” He turned to Matvey and threw off
his dressing-gown decisively.

Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse’s collar, and,
blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure
over the well-groomed body of his master.


Chapter 3

When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on
himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his
cigarettes, pocketbook, matches, and watch with its double chain and
seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean,
fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness,
he walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where
coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and
papers from the office.

He read the letters. One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who was
buying a forest on his wife’s property. To sell this forest was
absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his
wife, the subject could not be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of
all was that his pecuniary interests should in this way enter into the
question of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that he
might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a reconciliation
with his wife on account of the sale of the forest—that idea hurt him.

When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevitch moved the
office-papers close to him, rapidly looked through two pieces of
business, made a few notes with a big pencil, and pushing away the
papers, turned to his coffee. As he sipped his coffee, he opened a
still damp morning paper, and began reading it.

Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme
one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of
the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for
him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held
by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the
majority changed them—or, more strictly speaking, he did not change
them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.

Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views;
these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just
as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took
those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain
society—owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion,
for some degree of mental activity—to have views was just as
indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his
preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many
of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more
rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of
life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and
certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of
money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out
of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly
afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into
lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal
party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is
only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and
Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without
his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the
object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world
when life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all this,
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man
by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop
at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family—the monkey. And so
Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked
his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it
diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which it was
maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry
that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative
elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the
revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, “in our opinion the danger
lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of
traditionalism clogging progress,” etc., etc. He read another article,
too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped
some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic
quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it
came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him,
as it always did, a certain satisfaction. But today that satisfaction
was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna’s advice and the unsatisfactory
state of the household. He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to
have left for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and
of the sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a
situation; but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a
quiet, ironical gratification. Having finished the paper, a second cup
of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs of the
roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled
joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his
mind—the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.

But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him, and he grew
thoughtful.

Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevitch recognized the voices of
Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tanya, his eldest girl) were heard
outside the door. They were carrying something, and dropped it.

“I told you not to sit passengers on the roof,” said the little girl in
English; “there, pick them up!”

“Everything’s in confusion,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch; “there are
the children running about by themselves.” And going to the door, he
called them. They threw down the box, that represented a train, and
came in to their father.

The little girl, her father’s favorite, ran up boldly, embraced him,
and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the smell
of scent that came from his whiskers. At last the little girl kissed
his face, which was flushed from his stooping posture and beaming with
tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her
father held her back.

“How is mamma?” he asked, passing his hand over his daughter’s smooth,
soft little neck. “Good morning,” he said, smiling to the boy, who had
come up to greet him. He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and
always tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond with
a smile to his father’s chilly smile.

“Mamma? She is up,” answered the girl.

Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed. “That means that she’s not slept again all
night,” he thought.

“Well, is she cheerful?”

The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her father and
mother, and that her mother could not be cheerful, and that her father
must be aware of this, and that he was pretending when he asked about
it so lightly. And she blushed for her father. He at once perceived it,
and blushed too.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She did not say we must do our lessons, but
she said we were to go for a walk with Miss Hoole to grandmamma’s.”

“Well, go, Tanya, my darling. Oh, wait a minute, though,” he said,
still holding her and stroking her soft little hand.

He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yesterday, a little
box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her favorites, a chocolate
and a fondant.

“For Grisha?” said the little girl, pointing to the chocolate.

“Yes, yes.” And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed her on
the roots of her hair and neck, and let her go.

“The carriage is ready,” said Matvey; “but there’s someone to see you
with a petition.”

“Been here long?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“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
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.


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 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 everyone 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....”

“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 punish 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 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 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! That’s
a good expression, ‘_come round,_’” he thought. “I must repeat that.”

“Matvey!” he shouted. “Arrange everything with Darya in the sitting
room for Anna Arkadyevna,” he said to Matvey when he came in.

“Yes, sir.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out onto the steps.

“You won’t dine at home?” said Matvey, seeing him off.

“That’s as it happens. But here’s for the housekeeping,” he said,
taking ten roubles from his pocketbook. “That’ll be enough.”

“Enough or not enough, we must make it do,” said Matvey, slamming the
carriage door and stepping back onto the steps.

Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing
from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back again to
her bedroom. It was her solitary refuge from the household cares which
crowded upon her directly she went out from it. Even now, in the short
time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and Matrona
Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to her, which
did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer: “What were the
children to put on for their walk? Should they have any milk? Should
not a new cook be sent for?”

“Ah, let me alone, let me alone!” she said, and going back to her
bedroom she sat down in the same place as she had sat when talking to
her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands with the rings that
slipped down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over in her memory
all the conversation. “He has gone! But has he broken it off with her?”
she thought. “Can it be he sees her? Why didn’t I ask him! No, no,
reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we
are strangers—strangers forever!” She repeated again with special
significance the word so dreadful to her. “And how I loved him! my God,
how I loved him!... How I loved him! And now don’t I love him? Don’t I
love him more than before? The most horrible thing is,” she began, but
did not finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head
in at the door.

“Let us send for my brother,” she said; “he can get a dinner anyway, or
we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like
yesterday.”

“Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But did you send for
some new milk?”

And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned
her grief in them for a time.


Chapter 5

Stepan Arkadyevitch had learned easily at school, thanks to his
excellent abilities, but he had been idle and mischievous, and
therefore was one of the lowest in his class. But in spite of his
habitually dissipated mode of life, his inferior grade in the service,
and his comparative youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative
position of president of one of the government boards at Moscow. This
post he had received through his sister Anna’s husband, Alexey
Alexandrovitch Karenin, who held one of the most important positions in
the ministry to whose department the Moscow office belonged. But if
Karenin had not got his brother-in-law this berth, then through a
hundred other personages—brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and
aunts—Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post, or some other
similar one, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely
needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife’s considerable
property, were in an embarrassed condition.

Half Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations of Stepan
Arkadyevitch. He was born in the midst of those who had been and are
the powerful ones of this world. One-third of the men in the
government, the older men, had been friends of his father’s, and had
known him in petticoats; another third were his intimate chums, and the
remainder were friendly acquaintances. Consequently the distributors of
earthly blessings in the shape of places, rents, shares, and such, were
all his friends, and could not overlook one of their own set; and
Oblonsky had no need to make any special exertion to get a lucrative
post. He had only not to refuse things, not to show jealousy, not to be
quarrelsome or take offense, all of which from his characteristic good
nature he never did. It would have struck him as absurd if he had been
told that he would not get a position with the salary he required,
especially as he expected nothing out of the way; he only wanted what
the men of his own age and standing did get, and he was no worse
qualified for performing duties of the kind than any other man.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was not merely liked by all who knew him for his
good humor, but for his bright disposition, and his unquestionable
honesty. In him, in his handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes,
black hair and eyebrows, and the white and red of his face, there was
something which produced a physical effect of kindliness and good humor
on the people who met him. “Aha! Stiva! Oblonsky! Here he is!” was
almost always said with a smile of delight on meeting him. Even though
it happened at times that after a conversation with him it seemed that
nothing particularly delightful had happened, the next day, and the
next, everyone was just as delighted at meeting him again.

After filling for three years the post of president of one of the
government boards at Moscow, Stepan Arkadyevitch had won the respect,
as well as the liking, of his fellow-officials, subordinates, and
superiors, and all who had had business with him. The principal
qualities in Stepan Arkadyevitch which had gained him this universal
respect in the service consisted, in the first place, of his extreme
indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own
shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism—not the liberalism he
read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in
virtue of which he treated all men perfectly equally and exactly the
same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly—the most
important point—his complete indifference to the business in which he
was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and
never made mistakes.

On reaching the offices of the board, Stepan Arkadyevitch, escorted by
a deferential porter with a portfolio, went into his little private
room, put on his uniform, and went into the boardroom. The clerks and
copyists all rose, greeting him with good-humored deference. Stepan
Arkadyevitch moved quickly, as ever, to his place, shook hands with his
colleagues, and sat down. He made a joke or two, and talked just as
much as was consistent with due decorum, and began work. No one knew
better than Stepan Arkadyevitch how to hit on the exact line between
freedom, simplicity, and official stiffness necessary for the agreeable
conduct of business. A secretary, with the good-humored deference
common to everyone in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s office, came up with
papers, and began to speak in the familiar and easy tone which had been
introduced by Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“We have succeeded in getting the information from the government
department of Penza. Here, would you care?...”

“You’ve got them at last?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laying his finger
on the paper. “Now, gentlemen....”

And the sitting of the board began.

“If they knew,” he thought, bending his head with a significant air as
he listened to the report, “what a guilty little boy their president
was half an hour ago.” And his eyes were laughing during the reading of
the report. Till two o’clock the sitting would go on without a break,
and at two o’clock there would be an interval and luncheon.

It was not yet two, when the large glass doors of the boardroom
suddenly opened and someone came in.

All the officials sitting on the further side under the portrait of the
Tsar and the eagle, delighted at any distraction, looked round at the
door; but the doorkeeper standing at the door at once drove out the
intruder, and closed the glass door after him.

When the case had been read through, Stepan Arkadyevitch got up and
stretched, and by way of tribute to the liberalism of the times took
out a cigarette in the boardroom and went into his private room. Two of
the members of the board, the old veteran in the service, Nikitin, and
the _Kammerjunker_ Grinevitch, went in with him.

“We shall have time to finish after lunch,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“To be sure we shall!” said Nikitin.

“A pretty sharp fellow this Fomin must be,” said Grinevitch of one of
the persons taking part in the case they were examining.

Stepan Arkadyevitch frowned at Grinevitch’s words, giving him thereby
to understand that it was improper to pass judgment prematurely, and
made him no reply.

“Who was that came in?” he asked the doorkeeper.

“Someone, your excellency, crept in without permission directly my back
was turned. He was asking for you. I told him: when the members come
out, then....”

“Where is he?”

“Maybe he’s gone into the passage, but here he comes anyway. That is
he,” said the doorkeeper, pointing to a strongly built,
broad-shouldered man with a curly beard, who, without taking off his
sheepskin cap, was running lightly and rapidly up the worn steps of the
stone staircase. One of the members going down—a lean official with a
portfolio—stood out of his way and looked disapprovingly at the legs of
the stranger, then glanced inquiringly at Oblonsky.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was standing at the top of the stairs. His
good-naturedly beaming face above the embroidered collar of his uniform
beamed more than ever when he recognized the man coming up.

“Why, it’s actually you, Levin, at last!” he said with a friendly
mocking smile, scanning Levin as he approached. “How is it you have
deigned to look me up in this den?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and not
content with shaking hands, he kissed his friend. “Have you been here
long?”

“I have just come, and very much wanted to see you,” said Levin,
looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around.

“Well, let’s go into my room,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who knew his
friend’s sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew
him along, as though guiding him through dangers.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was on familiar terms with almost all his
acquaintances, and called almost all of them by their Christian names:
old men of sixty, boys of twenty, actors, ministers, merchants, and
adjutant-generals, so that many of his intimate chums were to be found
at the extreme ends of the social ladder, and would have been very much
surprised to learn that they had, through the medium of Oblonsky,
something in common. He was the familiar friend of everyone with whom
he took a glass of champagne, and he took a glass of champagne with
everyone, and when in consequence he met any of his disreputable chums,
as he used in joke to call many of his friends, in the presence of his
subordinates, he well knew how, with his characteristic tact, to
diminish the disagreeable impression made on them. Levin was not a
disreputable chum, but Oblonsky, with his ready tact, felt that Levin
fancied he might not care to show his intimacy with him before his
subordinates, and so he made haste to take him off into his room.

Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not
rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of
his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the
difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one
another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this,
each of them—as is often the way with men who have selected careers of
different kinds—though in discussion he would even justify the other’s
career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the
life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his
friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight
mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up
to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what
precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he
took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited
and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his own want of
ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected view of
things. Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same
way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his friend,
and his official duties, which he laughed at, and regarded as trifling.
But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as
everyone did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin
laughed without complacency and sometimes angrily.

“We have long been expecting you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, going into
his room and letting Levin’s hand go as though to show that here all
danger was over. “I am very, very glad to see you,” he went on. “Well,
how are you? Eh? When did you come?”

Levin was silent, looking at the unknown faces of Oblonsky’s two
companions, and especially at the hand of the elegant Grinevitch, which
had such long white fingers, such long yellow filbert-shaped nails, and
such huge shining studs on the shirt-cuff, that apparently they
absorbed all his attention, and allowed him no freedom of thought.
Oblonsky noticed this at once, and smiled.

“Ah, to be sure, let me introduce you,” he said. “My colleagues: Philip
Ivanitch Nikitin, Mihail Stanislavitch Grinevitch”—and turning to
Levin—“a district councilor, a modern district councilman, a gymnast
who lifts thirteen stone with one hand, a cattle-breeder and sportsman,
and my friend, Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, the brother of Sergey
Ivanovitch Koznishev.”

“Delighted,” said the veteran.

“I have the honor of knowing your brother, Sergey Ivanovitch,” said
Grinevitch, holding out his slender hand with its long nails.

Levin frowned, shook hands coldly, and at once turned to Oblonsky.
Though he had a great respect for his half-brother, an author well
known to all Russia, he could not endure it when people treated him not
as Konstantin Levin, but as the brother of the celebrated Koznishev.

“No, I am no longer a district councilor. I have quarreled with them
all, and don’t go to the meetings any more,” he said, turning to
Oblonsky.

“You’ve been quick about it!” said Oblonsky with a smile. “But how?
why?”

“It’s a long story. I will tell you some time,” said Levin, but he
began telling him at once. “Well, to put it shortly, I was convinced
that nothing was really done by the district councils, or ever could
be,” he began, as though someone had just insulted him. “On one side
it’s a plaything; they play at being a parliament, and I’m neither
young enough nor old enough to find amusement in playthings; and on the
other side” (he stammered) “it’s a means for the coterie of the
district to make money. Formerly they had wardships, courts of justice,
now they have the district council—not in the form of bribes, but in
the form of unearned salary,” he said, as hotly as though someone of
those present had opposed his opinion.

“Aha! You’re in a new phase again, I see—a conservative,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch. “However, we can go into that later.”

“Yes, later. But I wanted to see you,” said Levin, looking with hatred
at Grinevitch’s hand.

Stepan Arkadyevitch gave a scarcely perceptible smile.

“How was it you used to say you would never wear European dress again?”
he said, scanning his new suit, obviously cut by a French tailor. “Ah!
I see: a new phase.”

Levin suddenly blushed, not as grown men blush, slightly, without being
themselves aware of it, but as boys blush, feeling that they are
ridiculous through their shyness, and consequently ashamed of it and
blushing still more, almost to the point of tears. And it was so
strange to see this sensible, manly face in such a childish plight,
that Oblonsky left off looking at him.

“Oh, where shall we meet? You know I want very much to talk to you,”
said Levin.

Oblonsky seemed to ponder.

“I’ll tell you what: let’s go to Gurin’s to lunch, and there we can
talk. I am free till three.”

“No,” answered Levin, after an instant’s thought, “I have got to go on
somewhere else.”

“All right, then, let’s dine together.”

“Dine together? But I have nothing very particular, only a few words to
say, and a question I want to ask you, and we can have a talk
afterwards.”

“Well, say the few words, then, at once, and we’ll gossip after
dinner.”

“Well, it’s this,” said Levin; “but it’s of no importance, though.”

His face all at once took an expression of anger from the effort he was
making to surmount his shyness.

“What are the Shtcherbatskys doing? Everything as it used to be?” he
said.

Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had long known that Levin was in love with his
sister-in-law, Kitty, gave a hardly perceptible smile, and his eyes
sparkled merrily.

“You said a few words, but I can’t answer in a few words, because....
Excuse me a minute....”

A secretary came in, with respectful familiarity and the modest
consciousness, characteristic of every secretary, of superiority to his
chief in the knowledge of their business; he went up to Oblonsky with
some papers, and began, under pretense of asking a question, to explain
some objection. Stepan Arkadyevitch, without hearing him out, laid his
hand genially on the secretary’s sleeve.

“No, you do as I told you,” he said, softening his words with a smile,
and with a brief explanation of his view of the matter he turned away
from the papers, and said: “So do it that way, if you please, Zahar
Nikititch.”

The secretary retired in confusion. During the consultation with the
secretary Levin had completely recovered from his embarrassment. He was
standing with his elbows on the back of a chair, and on his face was a
look of ironical attention.

“I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it,” he said.

“What don’t you understand?” said Oblonsky, smiling as brightly as
ever, and picking up a cigarette. He expected some queer outburst from
Levin.

“I don’t understand what you are doing,” said Levin, shrugging his
shoulders. “How can you do it seriously?”

“Why not?”

“Why, because there’s nothing in it.”

“You think so, but we’re overwhelmed with work.”

“On paper. But, there, you’ve a gift for it,” added Levin.

“That’s to say, you think there’s a lack of something in me?”

“Perhaps so,” said Levin. “But all the same I admire your grandeur, and
am proud that I’ve a friend in such a great person. You’ve not answered
my question, though,” he went on, with a desperate effort looking
Oblonsky straight in the face.

“Oh, that’s all very well. You wait a bit, and you’ll come to this
yourself. It’s very nice for you to have over six thousand acres in the
Karazinsky district, and such muscles, and the freshness of a girl of
twelve; still you’ll be one of us one day. Yes, as to your question,
there is no change, but it’s a pity you’ve been away so long.”

“Oh, why so?” Levin queried, panic-stricken.

“Oh, nothing,” responded Oblonsky. “We’ll talk it over. But what’s
brought you up to town?”

“Oh, we’ll talk about that, too, later on,” said Levin, reddening again
up to his ears.

“All right. I see,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I should ask you to come
to us, you know, but my wife’s not quite the thing. But I tell you
what; if you want to see them, they’re sure now to be at the Zoological
Gardens from four to five. Kitty skates. You drive along there, and
I’ll come and fetch you, and we’ll go and dine somewhere together.”

“Capital. So good-bye till then.”

“Now mind, you’ll forget, I know you, or rush off home to the country!”
Stepan Arkadyevitch called out laughing.

“No, truly!”

And Levin went out of the room, only when he was in the doorway
remembering that he had forgotten to take leave of Oblonsky’s
colleagues.

“That gentleman must be a man of great energy,” said Grinevitch, when
Levin had gone away.

“Yes, my dear boy,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, nodding his head, “he’s a
lucky fellow! Over six thousand acres in the Karazinsky district;
everything before him; and what youth and vigor! Not like some of us.”

“You have a great deal to complain of, haven’t you, Stepan
Arkadyevitch?”

“Ah, yes, I’m in a poor way, a bad way,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with
a heavy sigh.


Chapter 6

When Oblonsky asked Levin what had brought him to town, Levin blushed,
and was furious with himself for blushing, because he could not answer,
“I have come to make your sister-in-law an offer,” though that was
precisely what he had come for.

The families of the Levins and the Shtcherbatskys were old, noble
Moscow families, and had always been on intimate and friendly terms.
This intimacy had grown still closer during Levin’s student days. He
had both prepared for the university with the young Prince
Shtcherbatsky, the brother of Kitty and Dolly, and had entered at the
same time with him. In those days Levin used often to be in the
Shtcherbatskys’ house, and he was in love with the Shtcherbatsky
household. Strange as it may appear, it was with the household, the
family, that Konstantin Levin was in love, especially with the feminine
half of the household. Levin did not remember his own mother, and his
only sister was older than he was, so that it was in the
Shtcherbatskys’ house that he saw for the first time that inner life of
an old, noble, cultivated, and honorable family of which he had been
deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the members of that
family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as it were,
wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he not only
perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that
shrouded them he assumed the existence of the loftiest sentiments and
every possible perfection. Why it was the three young ladies had one
day to speak French, and the next English; why it was that at certain
hours they played by turns on the piano, the sounds of which were
audible in their brother’s room above, where the students used to work;
why they were visited by those professors of French literature, of
music, of drawing, of dancing; why at certain hours all the three young
ladies, with Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the coach to the Tversky
boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long one, Natalia
in a half-long one, and Kitty in one so short that her shapely legs in
tightly-drawn red stockings were visible to all beholders; why it was
they had to walk about the Tversky boulevard escorted by a footman with
a gold cockade in his hat—all this and much more that was done in their
mysterious world he did not understand, but he was sure that everything
that was done there was very good, and he was in love precisely with
the mystery of the proceedings.

In his student days he had all but been in love with the eldest, Dolly,
but she was soon married to Oblonsky. Then he began being in love with
the second. He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love with one of
the sisters, only he could not quite make out which. But Natalia, too,
had hardly made her appearance in the world when she married the
diplomat Lvov. Kitty was still a child when Levin left the university.
Young Shtcherbatsky went into the navy, was drowned in the Baltic, and
Levin’s relations with the Shtcherbatskys, in spite of his friendship
with Oblonsky, became less intimate. But when early in the winter of
this year Levin came to Moscow, after a year in the country, and saw
the Shtcherbatskys, he realized which of the three sisters he was
indeed destined to love.

One would have thought that nothing could be simpler than for him, a
man of good family, rather rich than poor, and thirty-two years old, to
make the young Princess Shtcherbatskaya an offer of marriage; in all
likelihood he would at once have been looked upon as a good match. But
Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in
every respect that she was a creature far above everything earthly; and
that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be
conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy
of her.

After spending two months in Moscow in a state of enchantment, seeing
Kitty almost every day in society, into which he went so as to meet
her, he abruptly decided that it could not be, and went back to the
country.

Levin’s conviction that it could not be was founded on the idea that in
the eyes of her family he was a disadvantageous and worthless match for
the charming Kitty, and that Kitty herself could not love him. In her
family’s eyes he had no ordinary, definite career and position in
society, while his contemporaries by this time, when he was thirty-two,
were already, one a colonel, and another a professor, another director
of a bank and railways, or president of a board like Oblonsky. But he
(he knew very well how he must appear to others) was a country
gentleman, occupied in breeding cattle, shooting game, and building
barns; in other words, a fellow of no ability, who had not turned out
well, and who was doing just what, according to the ideas of the world,
is done by people fit for nothing else.

The mysterious, enchanting Kitty herself could not love such an ugly
person as he conceived himself to be, and, above all, such an ordinary,
in no way striking person. Moreover, his attitude to Kitty in the
past—the attitude of a grown-up person to a child, arising from his
friendship with her brother—seemed to him yet another obstacle to love.
An ugly, good-natured man, as he considered himself, might, he
supposed, be liked as a friend; but to be loved with such a love as
that with which he loved Kitty, one would need to be a handsome and,
still more, a distinguished man.

He had heard that women often did care for ugly and ordinary men, but
he did not believe it, for he judged by himself, and he could not
himself have loved any but beautiful, mysterious, and exceptional
women.

But after spending two months alone in the country, he was convinced
that this was not one of those passions of which he had had experience
in his early youth; that this feeling gave him not an instant’s rest;
that he could not live without deciding the question, would she or
would she not be his wife, and that his despair had arisen only from
his own imaginings, that he had no sort of proof that he would be
rejected. And he had now come to Moscow with a firm determination to
make an offer, and get married if he were accepted. Or ... he could not
conceive what would become of him if he were rejected.


Chapter 7

On arriving in Moscow by a morning train, Levin had put up at the house
of his elder half-brother, Koznishev. After changing his clothes he
went down to his brother’s study, intending to talk to him at once
about the object of his visit, and to ask his advice; but his brother
was not alone. With him there was a well-known professor of philosophy,
who had come from Harkov expressly to clear up a difference that had
arisen between them on a very important philosophical question. The
professor was carrying on a hot crusade against materialists. Sergey
Koznishev had been following this crusade with interest, and after
reading the professor’s last article, he had written him a letter
stating his objections. He accused the professor of making too great
concessions to the materialists. And the professor had promptly
appeared to argue the matter out. The point in discussion was the
question then in vogue: Is there a line to be drawn between
psychological and physiological phenomena in man? and if so, where?

Sergey Ivanovitch met his brother with the smile of chilly friendliness
he always had for everyone, and introducing him to the professor, went
on with the conversation.

A little man in spectacles, with a narrow forehead, tore himself from
the discussion for an instant to greet Levin, and then went on talking
without paying any further attention to him. Levin sat down to wait
till the professor should go, but he soon began to get interested in
the subject under discussion.

Levin had come across the magazine articles about which they were
disputing, and had read them, interested in them as a development of
the first principles of science, familiar to him as a natural science
student at the university. But he had never connected these scientific
deductions as to the origin of man as an animal, as to reflex action,
biology, and sociology, with those questions as to the meaning of life
and death to himself, which had of late been more and more often in his
mind.

As he listened to his brother’s argument with the professor, he noticed
that they connected these scientific questions with those spiritual
problems, that at times they almost touched on the latter; but every
time they were close upon what seemed to him the chief point, they
promptly beat a hasty retreat, and plunged again into a sea of subtle
distinctions, reservations, quotations, allusions, and appeals to
authorities, and it was with difficulty that he understood what they
were talking about.

“I cannot admit it,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, with his habitual
clearness, precision of expression, and elegance of phrase. “I cannot
in any case agree with Keiss that my whole conception of the external
world has been derived from perceptions. The most fundamental idea, the
idea of existence, has not been received by me through sensation;
indeed, there is no special sense-organ for the transmission of such an
idea.”

“Yes, but they—Wurt, and Knaust, and Pripasov—would answer that your
consciousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your
sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your
sensations. Wurt, indeed, says plainly that, assuming there are no
sensations, it follows that there is no idea of existence.”

“I maintain the contrary,” began Sergey Ivanovitch.

But here it seemed to Levin that just as they were close upon the real
point of the matter, they were again retreating, and he made up his
mind to put a question to the professor.

“According to that, if my senses are annihilated, if my body is dead, I
can have no existence of any sort?” he queried.

The professor, in annoyance, and, as it were, mental suffering at the
interruption, looked round at the strange inquirer, more like a
bargeman than a philosopher, and turned his eyes upon Sergey
Ivanovitch, as though to ask: What’s one to say to him? But Sergey
Ivanovitch, who had been talking with far less heat and one-sidedness
than the professor, and who had sufficient breadth of mind to answer
the professor, and at the same time to comprehend the simple and
natural point of view from which the question was put, smiled and said:

“That question we have no right to answer as yet.”

“We have not the requisite data,” chimed in the professor, and he went
back to his argument. “No,” he said; “I would point out the fact that
if, as Pripasov directly asserts, perception is based on sensation,
then we are bound to distinguish sharply between these two
conceptions.”

Levin listened no more, and simply waited for the professor to go.


Chapter 8

When the professor had gone, Sergey Ivanovitch turned to his brother.

“Delighted that you’ve come. For some time, is it? How’s your farming
getting on?”

Levin knew that his elder brother took little interest in farming, and
only put the question in deference to him, and so he only told him
about the sale of his wheat and money matters.

Levin had meant to tell his brother of his determination to get
married, and to ask his advice; he had indeed firmly resolved to do so.
But after seeing his brother, listening to his conversation with the
professor, hearing afterwards the unconsciously patronizing tone in
which his brother questioned him about agricultural matters (their
mother’s property had not been divided, and Levin took charge of both
their shares), Levin felt that he could not for some reason begin to
talk to him of his intention of marrying. He felt that his brother
would not look at it as he would have wished him to.

“Well, how is your district council doing?” asked Sergey Ivanovitch,
who was greatly interested in these local boards and attached great
importance to them.

“I really don’t know.”

“What! Why, surely you’re a member of the board?”

“No, I’m not a member now; I’ve resigned,” answered Levin, “and I no
longer attend the meetings.”

“What a pity!” commented Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning.

Levin in self-defense began to describe what took place in the meetings
in his district.

“That’s how it always is!” Sergey Ivanovitch interrupted him. “We
Russians are always like that. Perhaps it’s our strong point, really,
the faculty of seeing our own shortcomings; but we overdo it, we
comfort ourselves with irony which we always have on the tip of our
tongues. All I say is, give such rights as our local self-government to
any other European people—why, the Germans or the English would have
worked their way to freedom from them, while we simply turn them into
ridicule.”

“But how can it be helped?” said Levin penitently. “It was my last
effort. And I did try with all my soul. I can’t. I’m no good at it.”

“It’s not that you’re no good at it,” said Sergey Ivanovitch; “it is
that you don’t look at it as you should.”

“Perhaps not,” Levin answered dejectedly.

“Oh! do you know brother Nikolay’s turned up again?”

This brother Nikolay was the elder brother of Konstantin Levin, and
half-brother of Sergey Ivanovitch; a man utterly ruined, who had
dissipated the greater part of his fortune, was living in the strangest
and lowest company, and had quarreled with his brothers.

“What did you say?” Levin cried with horror. “How do you know?”

“Prokofy saw him in the street.”

“Here in Moscow? Where is he? Do you know?” Levin got up from his
chair, as though on the point of starting off at once.

“I am sorry I told you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, shaking his head at
his younger brother’s excitement. “I sent to find out where he is
living, and sent him his IOU to Trubin, which I paid. This is the
answer he sent me.”

And Sergey Ivanovitch took a note from under a paper-weight and handed
it to his brother.

Levin read in the queer, familiar handwriting: “I humbly beg you to
leave me in peace. That’s the only favor I ask of my gracious
brothers.—Nikolay Levin.”

Levin read it, and without raising his head stood with the note in his
hands opposite Sergey Ivanovitch.

There was a struggle in his heart between the desire to forget his
unhappy brother for the time, and the consciousness that it would be
base to do so.

“He obviously wants to offend me,” pursued Sergey Ivanovitch; “but he
cannot offend me, and I should have wished with all my heart to assist
him, but I know it’s impossible to do that.”

“Yes, yes,” repeated Levin. “I understand and appreciate your attitude
to him; but I shall go and see him.”

“If you want to, do; but I shouldn’t advise it,” said Sergey
Ivanovitch. “As regards myself, I have no fear of your doing so; he
will not make you quarrel with me; but for your own sake, I should say
you would do better not to go. You can’t do him any good; still, do as
you please.”

“Very likely I can’t do any good, but I feel—especially at such a
moment—but that’s another thing—I feel I could not be at peace.”

“Well, that I don’t understand,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “One thing I
do understand,” he added; “it’s a lesson in humility. I have come to
look very differently and more charitably on what is called infamous
since brother Nikolay has become what he is ... you know what he
did....”

“Oh, it’s awful, awful!” repeated Levin.

After obtaining his brother’s address from Sergey Ivanovitch’s footman,
Levin was on the point of setting off at once to see him, but on second
thought he decided to put off his visit till the evening. The first
thing to do to set his heart at rest was to accomplish what he had come
to Moscow for. From his brother’s Levin went to Oblonsky’s office, and
on getting news of the Shtcherbatskys from him, he drove to the place
where he had been told he might find Kitty.


Chapter 9

At four o’clock, conscious of his throbbing heart, Levin stepped out of
a hired sledge at the Zoological Gardens, and turned along the path to
the frozen mounds and the skating ground, knowing that he would
certainly find her there, as he had seen the Shtcherbatskys’ carriage
at the entrance.

It was a bright, frosty day. Rows of carriages, sledges, drivers, and
policemen were standing in the approach. Crowds of well-dressed people,
with hats bright in the sun, swarmed about the entrance and along the
well-swept little paths between the little houses adorned with carving
in the Russian style. The old curly birches of the gardens, all their
twigs laden with snow, looked as though freshly decked in sacred
vestments.

He walked along the path towards the skating-ground, and kept saying to
himself—“You mustn’t be excited, you must be calm. What’s the matter
with you? What do you want? Be quiet, stupid,” he conjured his heart.
And the more he tried to compose himself, the more breathless he found
himself. An acquaintance met him and called him by his name, but Levin
did not even recognize him. He went towards the mounds, whence came the
clank of the chains of sledges as they slipped down or were dragged up,
the rumble of the sliding sledges, and the sounds of merry voices. He
walked on a few steps, and the skating-ground lay open before his eyes,
and at once, amidst all the skaters, he knew her.

He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his
heart. She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the
ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or
her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a
rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the
smile that shed light on all round her. “Is it possible I can go over
there on the ice, go up to her?” he thought. The place where she stood
seemed to him a holy shrine, unapproachable, and there was one moment
when he was almost retreating, so overwhelmed was he with terror. He
had to make an effort to master himself, and to remind himself that
people of all sorts were moving about her, and that he too might come
there to skate. He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at
her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without
looking.

On that day of the week and at that time of day people of one set, all
acquainted with one another, used to meet on the ice. There were crack
skaters there, showing off their skill, and learners clinging to chairs
with timid, awkward movements, boys, and elderly people skating with
hygienic motives. They seemed to Levin an elect band of blissful beings
because they were here, near her. All the skaters, it seemed, with
perfect self-possession, skated towards her, skated by her, even spoke
to her, and were happy, quite apart from her, enjoying the capital ice
and the fine weather.

Nikolay Shtcherbatsky, Kitty’s cousin, in a short jacket and tight
trousers, was sitting on a garden seat with his skates on. Seeing
Levin, he shouted to him:

“Ah, the first skater in Russia! Been here long? First-rate ice—do put
your skates on.”

“I haven’t got my skates,” Levin answered, marveling at this boldness
and ease in her presence, and not for one second losing sight of her,
though he did not look at her. He felt as though the sun were coming
near him. She was in a corner, and turning out her slender feet in
their high boots with obvious timidity, she skated towards him. A boy
in Russian dress, desperately waving his arms and bowed down to the
ground, overtook her. She skated a little uncertainly; taking her hands
out of the little muff that hung on a cord, she held them ready for
emergency, and looking towards Levin, whom she had recognized, she
smiled at him, and at her own fears. When she had got round the turn,
she gave herself a push off with one foot, and skated straight up to
Shtcherbatsky. Clutching at his arm, she nodded smiling to Levin. She
was more splendid than he had imagined her.

When he thought of her, he could call up a vivid picture of her to
himself, especially the charm of that little fair head, so freely set
on the shapely girlish shoulders, and so full of childish brightness
and good humor. The childishness of her expression, together with the
delicate beauty of her figure, made up her special charm, and that he
fully realized. But what always struck him in her as something unlooked
for, was the expression of her eyes, soft, serene, and truthful, and
above all, her smile, which always transported Levin to an enchanted
world, where he felt himself softened and tender, as he remembered
himself in some days of his early childhood.

“Have you been here long?” she said, giving him her hand. “Thank you,”
she added, as he picked up the handkerchief that had fallen out of her
muff.

“I? I’ve not long ... yesterday ... I mean today ... I arrived,”
answered Levin, in his emotion not at once understanding her question.
“I was meaning to come and see you,” he said; and then, recollecting
with what intention he was trying to see her, he was promptly overcome
with confusion and blushed.

“I didn’t know you could skate, and skate so well.”

She looked at him earnestly, as though wishing to make out the cause of
his confusion.

“Your praise is worth having. The tradition is kept up here that you
are the best of skaters,” she said, with her little black-gloved hand
brushing a grain of hoarfrost off her muff.

“Yes, I used once to skate with passion; I wanted to reach perfection.”

“You do everything with passion, I think,” she said smiling. “I should
so like to see how you skate. Put on skates, and let us skate
together.”

“Skate together! Can that be possible?” thought Levin, gazing at her.

“I’ll put them on directly,” he said.

And he went off to get skates.

“It’s a long while since we’ve seen you here, sir,” said the attendant,
supporting his foot, and screwing on the heel of the skate. “Except
you, there’s none of the gentlemen first-rate skaters. Will that be all
right?” said he, tightening the strap.

“Oh, yes, yes; make haste, please,” answered Levin, with difficulty
restraining the smile of rapture which would overspread his face.
“Yes,” he thought, “this now is life, this is happiness! _Together,_
she said; _let us skate together!_ Speak to her now? But that’s just
why I’m afraid to speak—because I’m happy now, happy in hope,
anyway.... And then?... But I must! I must! I must! Away with
weakness!”

Levin rose to his feet, took off his overcoat, and scurrying over the
rough ice round the hut, came out on the smooth ice and skated without
effort, as it were, by simple exercise of will, increasing and
slackening speed and turning his course. He approached with timidity,
but again her smile reassured him.

She gave him her hand, and they set off side by side, going faster and
faster, and the more rapidly they moved the more tightly she grasped
his hand.

“With you I should soon learn; I somehow feel confidence in you,” she
said to him.

“And I have confidence in myself when you are leaning on me,” he said,
but was at once panic-stricken at what he had said, and blushed. And
indeed, no sooner had he uttered these words, when all at once, like
the sun going behind a cloud, her face lost all its friendliness, and
Levin detected the familiar change in her expression that denoted the
working of thought; a crease showed on her smooth brow.

“Is there anything troubling you?—though I’ve no right to ask such a
question,” he added hurriedly.

“Oh, why so?... No, I have nothing to trouble me,” she responded
coldly; and she added immediately: “You haven’t seen Mlle. Linon, have
you?”

“Not yet.”

“Go and speak to her, she likes you so much.”

“What’s wrong? I have offended her. Lord help me!” thought Levin, and
he flew towards the old Frenchwoman with the gray ringlets, who was
sitting on a bench. Smiling and showing her false teeth, she greeted
him as an old friend.

“Yes, you see we’re growing up,” she said to him, glancing towards
Kitty, “and growing old. _Tiny bear_ has grown big now!” pursued the
Frenchwoman, laughing, and she reminded him of his joke about the three
young ladies whom he had compared to the three bears in the English
nursery tale. “Do you remember that’s what you used to call them?”

He remembered absolutely nothing, but she had been laughing at the joke
for ten years now, and was fond of it.

“Now, go and skate, go and skate. Our Kitty has learned to skate
nicely, hasn’t she?”

When Levin darted up to Kitty her face was no longer stern; her eyes
looked at him with the same sincerity and friendliness, but Levin
fancied that in her friendliness there was a certain note of deliberate
composure. And he felt depressed. After talking a little of her old
governess and her peculiarities, she questioned him about his life.

“Surely you must be dull in the country in the winter, aren’t you?” she
said.

“No, I’m not dull, I am very busy,” he said, feeling that she was
holding him in check by her composed tone, which he would not have the
force to break through, just as it had been at the beginning of the
winter.

“Are you going to stay in town long?” Kitty questioned him.

“I don’t know,” he answered, not thinking of what he was saying. The
thought that if he were held in check by her tone of quiet friendliness
he would end by going back again without deciding anything came into
his mind, and he resolved to make a struggle against it.

“How is it you don’t know?”

“I don’t know. It depends upon you,” he said, and was immediately
horror-stricken at his own words.

Whether it was that she had heard his words, or that she did not want
to hear them, she made a sort of stumble, twice struck out, and
hurriedly skated away from him. She skated up to Mlle. Linon, said
something to her, and went towards the pavilion where the ladies took
off their skates.

“My God! what have I done! Merciful God! help me, guide me,” said
Levin, praying inwardly, and at the same time, feeling a need of
violent exercise, he skated about describing inner and outer circles.

At that moment one of the young men, the best of the skaters of the
day, came out of the coffee-house in his skates, with a cigarette in
his mouth. Taking a run, he dashed down the steps in his skates,
crashing and bounding up and down. He flew down, and without even
changing the position of his hands, skated away over the ice.

“Ah, that’s a new trick!” said Levin, and he promptly ran up to the top
to do this new trick.

“Don’t break your neck! it needs practice!” Nikolay Shtcherbatsky
shouted after him.

Levin went to the steps, took a run from above as best he could, and
dashed down, preserving his balance in this unwonted movement with his
hands. On the last step he stumbled, but barely touching the ice with
his hand, with a violent effort recovered himself, and skated off,
laughing.

“How splendid, how nice he is!” Kitty was thinking at that time, as she
came out of the pavilion with Mlle. Linon, and looked towards him with
a smile of quiet affection, as though he were a favorite brother. “And
can it be my fault, can I have done anything wrong? They talk of
flirtation. I know it’s not he that I love; but still I am happy with
him, and he’s so jolly. Only, why did he say that?...” she mused.

Catching sight of Kitty going away, and her mother meeting her at the
steps, Levin, flushed from his rapid exercise, stood still and pondered
a minute. He took off his skates, and overtook the mother and daughter
at the entrance of the gardens.

“Delighted to see you,” said Princess Shtcherbatskaya. “On Thursdays we
are home, as always.”

“Today, then?”

“We shall be pleased to see you,” the princess said stiffly.

This stiffness hurt Kitty, and she could not resist the desire to
smooth over her mother’s coldness. She turned her head, and with a
smile said:

“Good-bye till this evening.”

At that moment Stepan Arkadyevitch, his hat cocked on one side, with
beaming face and eyes, strode into the garden like a conquering hero.
But as he approached his mother-in-law, he responded in a mournful and
crestfallen tone to her inquiries about Dolly’s health. After a little
subdued and dejected conversation with his mother-in-law, he threw out
his chest again, and put his arm in Levin’s.

“Well, shall we set off?” he asked. “I’ve been thinking about you all
this time, and I’m very, very glad you’ve come,” he said, looking him
in the face with a significant air.

“Yes, come along,” answered Levin in ecstasy, hearing unceasingly the
sound of that voice saying, “Good-bye till this evening,” and seeing
the smile with which it was said.

“To the England or the Hermitage?”

“I don’t mind which.”

“All right, then, the England,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, selecting
that restaurant because he owed more there than at the Hermitage, and
consequently considered it mean to avoid it. “Have you got a sledge?
That’s first-rate, for I sent my carriage home.”

The friends hardly spoke all the way. Levin was wondering what that
change in Kitty’s expression had meant, and alternately assuring
himself that there was hope, and falling into despair, seeing clearly
that his hopes were insane, and yet all the while he felt himself quite
another man, utterly unlike what he had been before her smile and those
words, “Good-bye till this evening.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch was absorbed during the drive in composing the menu
of the dinner.

“You like turbot, don’t you?” he said to Levin as they were arriving.

“Eh?” responded Levin. “Turbot? Yes, I’m _awfully_ fond of turbot.”


Chapter 10

When Levin went into the restaurant with Oblonsky, he could not help
noticing a certain peculiarity of expression, as it were, a restrained
radiance, about the face and whole figure of Stepan Arkadyevitch.
Oblonsky took off his overcoat, and with his hat over one ear walked
into the dining-room, giving directions to the Tatar waiters, who were
clustered about him in evening coats, bearing napkins. Bowing to right
and left to the people he met, and here as everywhere joyously greeting
acquaintances, he went up to the sideboard for a preliminary appetizer
of fish and vodka, and said to the painted Frenchwoman decked in
ribbons, lace, and ringlets, behind the counter, something so amusing
that even that Frenchwoman was moved to genuine laughter. Levin for his
part refrained from taking any vodka simply because he felt such a
loathing of that Frenchwoman, all made up, it seemed, of false hair,
_poudre de riz,_ and _vinaigre de toilette_. He made haste to move away
from her, as from a dirty place. His whole soul was filled with
memories of Kitty, and there was a smile of triumph and happiness
shining in his eyes.

“This way, your excellency, please. Your excellency won’t be disturbed
here,” said a particularly pertinacious, white-headed old Tatar with
immense hips and coat-tails gaping widely behind. “Walk in, your
excellency,” he said to Levin; by way of showing his respect to Stepan
Arkadyevitch, being attentive to his guest as well.

Instantly flinging a fresh cloth over the round table under the bronze
chandelier, though it already had a table cloth on it, he pushed up
velvet chairs, and came to a standstill before Stepan Arkadyevitch with
a napkin and a bill of fare in his hands, awaiting his commands.

“If you prefer it, your excellency, a private room will be free
directly; Prince Golistin with a lady. Fresh oysters have come in.”

“Ah! oysters.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch became thoughtful.

“How if we were to change our program, Levin?” he said, keeping his
finger on the bill of fare. And his face expressed serious hesitation.
“Are the oysters good? Mind now.”

“They’re Flensburg, your excellency. We’ve no Ostend.”

“Flensburg will do, but are they fresh?”

“Only arrived yesterday.”

“Well, then, how if we were to begin with oysters, and so change the
whole program? Eh?”

“It’s all the same to me. I should like cabbage soup and porridge
better than anything; but of course there’s nothing like that here.”

“_Porridge à la Russe,_ your honor would like?” said the Tatar, bending
down to Levin, like a nurse speaking to a child.

“No, joking apart, whatever you choose is sure to be good. I’ve been
skating, and I’m hungry. And don’t imagine,” he added, detecting a look
of dissatisfaction on Oblonsky’s face, “that I shan’t appreciate your
choice. I am fond of good things.”

“I should hope so! After all, it’s one of the pleasures of life,” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Well, then, my friend, you give us two—or better
say three—dozen oysters, clear soup with vegetables....”

“_Printanière,_” prompted the Tatar. But Stepan Arkadyevitch apparently
did not care to allow him the satisfaction of giving the French names
of the dishes.

“With vegetables in it, you know. Then turbot with thick sauce, then
... roast beef; and mind it’s good. Yes, and capons, perhaps, and then
sweets.”

The Tatar, recollecting that it was Stepan Arkadyevitch’s way not to
call the dishes by the names in the French bill of fare, did not repeat
them after him, but could not resist rehearsing the whole menu to
himself according to the bill:—“_Soupe printanière, turbot, sauce
Beaumarchais, poulard à l’estragon, macédoine de fruits_ ... etc.,” and
then instantly, as though worked by springs, laying down one bound bill
of fare, he took up another, the list of wines, and submitted it to
Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“What shall we drink?”

“What you like, only not too much. Champagne,” said Levin.

“What! to start with? You’re right though, I dare say. Do you like the
white seal?”

“_Cachet blanc,_” prompted the Tatar.

“Very well, then, give us that brand with the oysters, and then we’ll
see.”

“Yes, sir. And what table wine?”

“You can give us Nuits. Oh, no, better the classic Chablis.”

“Yes, sir. And _your_ cheese, your excellency?”

“Oh, yes, Parmesan. Or would you like another?”

“No, it’s all the same to me,” said Levin, unable to suppress a smile.

And the Tatar ran off with flying coat-tails, and in five minutes
darted in with a dish of opened oysters on mother-of-pearl shells, and
a bottle between his fingers.

Stepan Arkadyevitch crushed the starchy napkin, tucked it into his
waistcoat, and settling his arms comfortably, started on the oysters.

“Not bad,” he said, stripping the oysters from the pearly shell with a
silver fork, and swallowing them one after another. “Not bad,” he
repeated, turning his dewy, brilliant eyes from Levin to the Tatar.

Levin ate the oysters indeed, though white bread and cheese would have
pleased him better. But he was admiring Oblonsky. Even the Tatar,
uncorking the bottle and pouring the sparkling wine into the delicate
glasses, glanced at Stepan Arkadyevitch, and settled his white cravat
with a perceptible smile of satisfaction.

“You don’t care much for oysters, do you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
emptying his wine-glass, “or you’re worried about something. Eh?”

He wanted Levin to be in good spirits. But it was not that Levin was
not in good spirits; he was ill at ease. With what he had in his soul,
he felt sore and uncomfortable in the restaurant, in the midst of
private rooms where men were dining with ladies, in all this fuss and
bustle; the surroundings of bronzes, looking-glasses, gas, and
waiters—all of it was offensive to him. He was afraid of sullying what
his soul was brimful of.

“I? Yes, I am; but besides, all this bothers me,” he said. “You can’t
conceive how queer it all seems to a country person like me, as queer
as that gentleman’s nails I saw at your place....”

“Yes, I saw how much interested you were in poor Grinevitch’s nails,”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing.

“It’s too much for me,” responded Levin. “Do try, now, and put yourself
in my place, take the point of view of a country person. We in the
country try to bring our hands into such a state as will be most
convenient for working with. So we cut our nails; sometimes we turn up
our sleeves. And here people purposely let their nails grow as long as
they will, and link on small saucers by way of studs, so that they can
do nothing with their hands.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled gaily.

“Oh, yes, that’s just a sign that he has no need to do coarse work. His
work is with the mind....”

“Maybe. But still it’s queer to me, just as at this moment it seems
queer to me that we country folks try to get our meals over as soon as
we can, so as to be ready for our work, while here are we trying to
drag out our meal as long as possible, and with that object eating
oysters....”

“Why, of course,” objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. “But that’s just the
aim of civilization—to make everything a source of enjoyment.”

“Well, if that’s its aim, I’d rather be a savage.”

“And so you are a savage. All you Levins are savages.”

Levin sighed. He remembered his brother Nikolay, and felt ashamed and
sore, and he scowled; but Oblonsky began speaking of a subject which at
once drew his attention.

“Oh, I say, are you going tonight to our people, the Shtcherbatskys’, I
mean?” he said, his eyes sparkling significantly as he pushed away the
empty rough shells, and drew the cheese towards him.

“Yes, I shall certainly go,” replied Levin; “though I fancied the
princess was not very warm in her invitation.”

“What nonsense! That’s her manner.... Come, boy, the soup!... That’s
her manner—_grande dame,_” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I’m coming, too,
but I have to go to the Countess Bonina’s rehearsal. Come, isn’t it
true that you’re a savage? How do you explain the sudden way in which
you vanished from Moscow? The Shtcherbatskys were continually asking me
about you, as though I ought to know. The only thing I know is that you
always do what no one else does.”

“Yes,” said Levin, slowly and with emotion, “you’re right. I am a
savage. Only, my savageness is not in having gone away, but in coming
now. Now I have come....”

“Oh, what a lucky fellow you are!” broke in Stepan Arkadyevitch,
looking into Levin’s eyes.

“Why?”

“‘I know a gallant steed by tokens sure,

And by his eyes I know a youth in love,’”



declaimed Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Everything is before you.”

“Why, is it over for you already?”

“No; not over exactly, but the future is yours, and the present is
mine, and the present—well, it’s not all that it might be.”

“How so?”

“Oh, things go wrong. But I don’t want to talk of myself, and besides I
can’t explain it all,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Well, why have you
come to Moscow, then?... Hi! take away!” he called to the Tatar.

“You guess?” responded Levin, his eyes like deep wells of light fixed
on Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“I guess, but I can’t be the first to talk about it. You can see by
that whether I guess right or wrong,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, gazing
at Levin with a subtle smile.

“Well, and what have you to say to me?” said Levin in a quivering
voice, feeling that all the muscles of his face were quivering too.
“How do you look at the question?”

Stepan Arkadyevitch slowly emptied his glass of Chablis, never taking
his eyes off Levin.

“I?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “there’s nothing I desire so much as
that—nothing! It would be the best thing that could be.”

“But you’re not making a mistake? You know what we’re speaking of?”
said Levin, piercing him with his eyes. “You think it’s possible?”

“I think it’s possible. Why not possible?”

“No! do you really think it’s possible? No, tell me all you think! Oh,
but if ... if refusal’s in store for me!... Indeed I feel sure....”

“Why should you think that?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling at his
excitement.

“It seems so to me sometimes. That will be awful for me, and for her
too.”

“Oh, well, anyway there’s nothing awful in it for a girl. Every girl’s
proud of an offer.”

“Yes, every girl, but not she.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled. He so well knew that feeling of Levin’s,
that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes:
one class—all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with
all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other
class—she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all
humanity.

“Stay, take some sauce,” he said, holding back Levin’s hand as it
pushed away the sauce.

Levin obediently helped himself to sauce, but would not let Stepan
Arkadyevitch go on with his dinner.

“No, stop a minute, stop a minute,” he said. “You must understand that
it’s a question of life and death for me. I have never spoken to anyone
of this. And there’s no one I could speak of it to, except you. You
know we’re utterly unlike each other, different tastes and views and
everything; but I know you’re fond of me and understand me, and that’s
why I like you awfully. But for God’s sake, be quite straightforward
with me.”

“I tell you what I think,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling. “But I’ll
say more: my wife is a wonderful woman....” Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed,
remembering his position with his wife, and, after a moment’s silence,
resumed—“She has a gift of foreseeing things. She sees right through
people; but that’s not all; she knows what will come to pass,
especially in the way of marriages. She foretold, for instance, that
Princess Shahovskaya would marry Brenteln. No one would believe it, but
it came to pass. And she’s on your side.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s not only that she likes you—she says that Kitty is certain to be
your wife.”

At these words Levin’s face suddenly lighted up with a smile, a smile
not far from tears of emotion.

“She says that!” cried Levin. “I always said she was exquisite, your
wife. There, that’s enough, enough said about it,” he said, getting up
from his seat.

“All right, but do sit down.”

But Levin could not sit down. He walked with his firm tread twice up
and down the little cage of a room, blinked his eyelids that his tears
might not fall, and only then sat down to the table.

“You must understand,” said he, “it’s not love. I’ve been in love, but
it’s not that. It’s not my feeling, but a sort of force outside me has
taken possession of me. I went away, you see, because I made up my mind
that it could never be, you understand, as a happiness that does not
come on earth; but I’ve struggled with myself, I see there’s no living
without it. And it must be settled.”

“What did you go away for?”

“Ah, stop a minute! Ah, the thoughts that come crowding on one! The
questions one must ask oneself! Listen. You can’t imagine what you’ve
done for me by what you said. I’m so happy that I’ve become positively
hateful; I’ve forgotten everything. I heard today that my brother
Nikolay ... you know, he’s here ... I had even forgotten him. It seems
to me that he’s happy too. It’s a sort of madness. But one thing’s
awful.... Here, you’ve been married, you know the feeling ... it’s
awful that we—old—with a past ... not of love, but of sins ... are
brought all at once so near to a creature pure and innocent; it’s
loathsome, and that’s why one can’t help feeling oneself unworthy.”

“Oh, well, you’ve not many sins on your conscience.”

“Alas! all the same,” said Levin, “when with loathing I go over my
life, I shudder and curse and bitterly regret it.... Yes.”

“What would you have? The world’s made so,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“The one comfort is like that prayer, which I always liked: ‘Forgive me
not according to my unworthiness, but according to Thy
loving-kindness.’ That’s the only way she can forgive me.”


Chapter 11

Levin emptied his glass, and they were silent for a while.

“There’s one other thing I ought to tell you. Do you know Vronsky?”
Stepan Arkadyevitch asked Levin.

“No, I don’t. Why do you ask?”

“Give us another bottle,” Stepan Arkadyevitch directed the Tatar, who
was filling up their glasses and fidgeting round them just when he was
not wanted.

“Why you ought to know Vronsky is that he’s one of your rivals.”

“Who’s Vronsky?” said Levin, and his face was suddenly transformed from
the look of childlike ecstasy which Oblonsky had just been admiring to
an angry and unpleasant expression.

“Vronsky is one of the sons of Count Kirill Ivanovitch Vronsky, and one
of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of Petersburg. I made his
acquaintance in Tver when I was there on official business, and he came
there for the levy of recruits. Fearfully rich, handsome, great
connections, an aide-de-camp, and with all that a very nice,
good-natured fellow. But he’s more than simply a good-natured fellow,
as I’ve found out here—he’s a cultivated man, too, and very
intelligent; he’s a man who’ll make his mark.”

Levin scowled and was dumb.

“Well, he turned up here soon after you’d gone, and as I can see, he’s
over head and ears in love with Kitty, and you know that her
mother....”

“Excuse me, but I know nothing,” said Levin, frowning gloomily. And
immediately he recollected his brother Nikolay and how hateful he was
to have been able to forget him.

“You wait a bit, wait a bit,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling and
touching his hand. “I’ve told you what I know, and I repeat that in
this delicate and tender matter, as far as one can conjecture, I
believe the chances are in your favor.”

Levin dropped back in his chair; his face was pale.

“But I would advise you to settle the thing as soon as may be,” pursued
Oblonsky, filling up his glass.

“No, thanks, I can’t drink any more,” said Levin, pushing away his
glass. “I shall be drunk.... Come, tell me how are you getting on?” he
went on, obviously anxious to change the conversation.

“One word more: in any case I advise you to settle the question soon.
Tonight I don’t advise you to speak,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Go
round tomorrow morning, make an offer in due form, and God bless
you....”

“Oh, do you still think of coming to me for some shooting? Come next
spring, do,” said Levin.

Now his whole soul was full of remorse that he had begun this
conversation with Stepan Arkadyevitch. A feeling such as his was
profaned by talk of the rivalry of some Petersburg officer, of the
suppositions and the counsels of Stepan Arkadyevitch.

Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled. He knew what was passing in Levin’s soul.

“I’ll come some day,” he said. “But women, my boy, they’re the pivot
everything turns upon. Things are in a bad way with me, very bad. And
it’s all through women. Tell me frankly now,” he pursued, picking up a
cigar and keeping one hand on his glass; “give me your advice.”

“Why, what is it?”

“I’ll tell you. Suppose you’re married, you love your wife, but you’re
fascinated by another woman....”

“Excuse me, but I’m absolutely unable to comprehend how ... just as I
can’t comprehend how I could now, after my dinner, go straight to a
baker’s shop and steal a roll.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes sparkled more than usual.

“Why not? A roll will sometimes smell so good one can’t resist it.”

“Himmlisch ist’s, wenn ich bezwungen

    Meine irdische Begier;

Aber doch wenn’s nich gelungen

    Hatt’ ich auch recht hübsch Plaisir!”



As he said this, Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled subtly. Levin, too, could
not help smiling.

“Yes, but joking apart,” resumed Stepan Arkadyevitch, “you must
understand that the woman is a sweet, gentle loving creature, poor and
lonely, and has sacrificed everything. Now, when the thing’s done,
don’t you see, can one possibly cast her off? Even supposing one parts
from her, so as not to break up one’s family life, still, can one help
feeling for her, setting her on her feet, softening her lot?”

“Well, you must excuse me there. You know to me all women are divided
into two classes ... at least no ... truer to say: there are women and
there are ... I’ve never seen exquisite fallen beings, and I never
shall see them, but such creatures as that painted Frenchwoman at the
counter with the ringlets are vermin to my mind, and all fallen women
are the same.”

“But the Magdalen?”

“Ah, drop that! Christ would never have said those words if He had
known how they would be abused. Of all the Gospel those words are the
only ones remembered. However, I’m not saying so much what I think, as
what I feel. I have a loathing for fallen women. You’re afraid of
spiders, and I of these vermin. Most likely you’ve not made a study of
spiders and don’t know their character; and so it is with me.”

“It’s very well for you to talk like that; it’s very much like that
gentleman in Dickens who used to fling all difficult questions over his
right shoulder. But to deny the facts is no answer. What’s to be
done—you tell me that, what’s to be done? Your wife gets older, while
you’re full of life. Before you’ve time to look round, you feel that
you can’t love your wife with love, however much you may esteem her.
And then all at once love turns up, and you’re done for, done for,”
Stepan Arkadyevitch said with weary despair.

Levin half smiled.

“Yes, you’re done for,” resumed Oblonsky. “But what’s to be done?”

“Don’t steal rolls.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed outright.

“Oh, moralist! But you must understand, there are two women; one
insists only on her rights, and those rights are your love, which you
can’t give her; and the other sacrifices everything for you and asks
for nothing. What are you to do? How are you to act? There’s a fearful
tragedy in it.”

“If you care for my profession of faith as regards that, I’ll tell you
that I don’t believe there was any tragedy about it. And this is why.
To my mind, love ... both the sorts of love, which you remember Plato
defines in his Banquet, served as the test of men. Some men only
understand one sort, and some only the other. And those who only know
the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love
there can be no sort of tragedy. ‘I’m much obliged for the
gratification, my humble respects’—that’s all the tragedy. And in
platonic love there can be no tragedy, because in that love all is
clear and pure, because....”

At that instant Levin recollected his own sins and the inner conflict
he had lived through. And he added unexpectedly:

“But perhaps you are right. Very likely ... I don’t know, I don’t
know.”

“It’s this, don’t you see,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “you’re very much
all of a piece. That’s your strong point and your failing. You have a
character that’s all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be
of a piece too—but that’s not how it is. You despise public official
work because you want the reality to be invariably corresponding all
the while with the aim—and that’s not how it is. You want a man’s work,
too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to
be undivided—and that’s not how it is. All the variety, all the charm,
all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”

Levin sighed and made no reply. He was thinking of his own affairs, and
did not hear Oblonsky.

And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends, though
they had been dining and drinking together, which should have drawn
them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs, and they
had nothing to do with one another. Oblonsky had more than once
experienced this extreme sense of aloofness, instead of intimacy,
coming on after dinner, and he knew what to do in such cases.

“Bill!” he called, and he went into the next room where he promptly
came across an aide-de-camp of his acquaintance and dropped into
conversation with him about an actress and her protector. And at once
in the conversation with the aide-de-camp Oblonsky had a sense of
relaxation and relief after the conversation with Levin, which always
put him to too great a mental and spiritual strain.

When the Tatar appeared with a bill for twenty-six roubles and odd
kopecks, besides a tip for himself, Levin, who would another time have
been horrified, like anyone from the country, at his share of fourteen
roubles, did not notice it, paid, and set off homewards to dress and go
to the Shtcherbatskys’ there to decide his fate.


Chapter 12

The young Princess Kitty Shtcherbatskaya was eighteen. It was the first
winter that she had been out in the world. Her success in society had
been greater than that of either of her elder sisters, and greater even
than her mother had anticipated. To say nothing of the young men who
danced at the Moscow balls being almost all in love with Kitty, two
serious suitors had already this first winter made their appearance:
Levin, and immediately after his departure, Count Vronsky.

Levin’s appearance at the beginning of the winter, his frequent visits,
and evident love for Kitty, had led to the first serious conversations
between Kitty’s parents as to her future, and to disputes between them.
The prince was on Levin’s side; he said he wished for nothing better
for Kitty. The princess for her part, going round the question in the
manner peculiar to women, maintained that Kitty was too young, that
Levin had done nothing to prove that he had serious intentions, that
Kitty felt no great attraction to him, and other side issues; but she
did not state the principal point, which was that she looked for a
better match for her daughter, and that Levin was not to her liking,
and she did not understand him. When Levin had abruptly departed, the
princess was delighted, and said to her husband triumphantly: “You see
I was right.” When Vronsky appeared on the scene, she was still more
delighted, confirmed in her opinion that Kitty was to make not simply a
good, but a brilliant match.

In the mother’s eyes there could be no comparison between Vronsky and
Levin. She disliked in Levin his strange and uncompromising opinions
and his shyness in society, founded, as she supposed, on his pride and
his queer sort of life, as she considered it, absorbed in cattle and
peasants. She did not very much like it that he, who was in love with
her daughter, had kept coming to the house for six weeks, as though he
were waiting for something, inspecting, as though he were afraid he
might be doing them too great an honor by making an offer, and did not
realize that a man, who continually visits at a house where there is a
young unmarried girl, is bound to make his intentions clear. And
suddenly, without doing so, he disappeared. “It’s as well he’s not
attractive enough for Kitty to have fallen in love with him,” thought
the mother.

Vronsky satisfied all the mother’s desires. Very wealthy, clever, of
aristocratic family, on the highroad to a brilliant career in the army
and at court, and a fascinating man. Nothing better could be wished
for.

Vronsky openly flirted with Kitty at balls, danced with her, and came
continually to the house, consequently there could be no doubt of the
seriousness of his intentions. But, in spite of that, the mother had
spent the whole of that winter in a state of terrible anxiety and
agitation.

Princess Shtcherbatskaya had herself been married thirty years ago, her
aunt arranging the match. Her husband, about whom everything was well
known beforehand, had come, looked at his future bride, and been looked
at. The matchmaking aunt had ascertained and communicated their mutual
impression. That impression had been favorable. Afterwards, on a day
fixed beforehand, the expected offer was made to her parents, and
accepted. All had passed very simply and easily. So it seemed, at
least, to the princess. But over her own daughters she had felt how far
from simple and easy is the business, apparently so commonplace, of
marrying off one’s daughters. The panics that had been lived through,
the thoughts that had been brooded over, the money that had been
wasted, and the disputes with her husband over marrying the two elder
girls, Darya and Natalia! Now, since the youngest had come out, she was
going through the same terrors, the same doubts, and still more violent
quarrels with her husband than she had over the elder girls. The old
prince, like all fathers indeed, was exceedingly punctilious on the
score of the honor and reputation of his daughters. He was irrationally
jealous over his daughters, especially over Kitty, who was his
favorite. At every turn he had scenes with the princess for
compromising her daughter. The princess had grown accustomed to this
already with her other daughters, but now she felt that there was more
ground for the prince’s touchiness. She saw that of late years much was
changed in the manners of society, that a mother’s duties had become
still more difficult. She saw that girls of Kitty’s age formed some
sort of clubs, went to some sort of lectures, mixed freely in men’s
society; drove about the streets alone, many of them did not curtsey,
and, what was the most important thing, all the girls were firmly
convinced that to choose their husbands was their own affair, and not
their parents’. “Marriages aren’t made nowadays as they used to be,”
was thought and said by all these young girls, and even by their
elders. But how marriages were made now, the princess could not learn
from anyone. The French fashion—of the parents arranging their
children’s future—was not accepted; it was condemned. The English
fashion of the complete independence of girls was also not accepted,
and not possible in Russian society. The Russian fashion of matchmaking
by the offices of intermediate persons was for some reason considered
unseemly; it was ridiculed by everyone, and by the princess herself.
But how girls were to be married, and how parents were to marry them,
no one knew. Everyone with whom the princess had chanced to discuss the
matter said the same thing: “Mercy on us, it’s high time in our day to
cast off all that old-fashioned business. It’s the young people have to
marry; and not their parents; and so we ought to leave the young people
to arrange it as they choose.” It was very easy for anyone to say that
who had no daughters, but the princess realized that in the process of
getting to know each other, her daughter might fall in love, and fall
in love with someone who did not care to marry her or who was quite
unfit to be her husband. And, however much it was instilled into the
princess that in our times young people ought to arrange their lives
for themselves, she was unable to believe it, just as she would have
been unable to believe that, at any time whatever, the most suitable
playthings for children five years old ought to be loaded pistols. And
so the princess was more uneasy over Kitty than she had been over her
elder sisters.

Now she was afraid that Vronsky might confine himself to simply
flirting with her daughter. She saw that her daughter was in love with
him, but tried to comfort herself with the thought that he was an
honorable man, and would not do this. But at the same time she knew how
easy it is, with the freedom of manners of today, to turn a girl’s
head, and how lightly men generally regard such a crime. The week
before, Kitty had told her mother of a conversation she had with
Vronsky during a mazurka. This conversation had partly reassured the
princess; but perfectly at ease she could not be. Vronsky had told
Kitty that both he and his brother were so used to obeying their mother
that they never made up their minds to any important undertaking
without consulting her. “And just now, I am impatiently awaiting my
mother’s arrival from Petersburg, as peculiarly fortunate,” he told
her.

Kitty had repeated this without attaching any significance to the
words. But her mother saw them in a different light. She knew that the
old lady was expected from day to day, that she would be pleased at her
son’s choice, and she felt it strange that he should not make his offer
through fear of vexing his mother. However, she was so anxious for the
marriage itself, and still more for relief from her fears, that she
believed it was so. Bitter as it was for the princess to see the
unhappiness of her eldest daughter, Dolly, on the point of leaving her
husband, her anxiety over the decision of her youngest daughter’s fate
engrossed all her feelings. Today, with Levin’s reappearance, a fresh
source of anxiety arose. She was afraid that her daughter, who had at
one time, as she fancied, a feeling for Levin, might, from extreme
sense of honor, refuse Vronsky, and that Levin’s arrival might
generally complicate and delay the affair so near being concluded.

“Why, has he been here long?” the princess asked about Levin, as they
returned home.

“He came today, mamma.”

“There’s one thing I want to say....” began the princess, and from her
serious and alert face, Kitty guessed what it would be.

“Mamma,” she said, flushing hotly and turning quickly to her, “please,
please don’t say anything about that. I know, I know all about it.”

She wished for what her mother wished for, but the motives of her
mother’s wishes wounded her.

“I only want to say that to raise hopes....”

“Mamma, darling, for goodness’ sake, don’t talk about it. It’s so
horrible to talk about it.”

“I won’t,” said her mother, seeing the tears in her daughter’s eyes;
“but one thing, my love; you promised me you would have no secrets from
me. You won’t?”

“Never, mamma, none,” answered Kitty, flushing a little, and looking
her mother straight in the face, “but there’s no use in my telling you
anything, and I ... I ... if I wanted to, I don’t know what to say or
how.... I don’t know....”

“No, she could not tell an untruth with those eyes,” thought the
mother, smiling at her agitation and happiness. The princess smiled
that what was taking place just now in her soul seemed to the poor
child so immense and so important.


Chapter 13

After dinner, and till the beginning of the evening, Kitty was feeling
a sensation akin to the sensation of a young man before a battle. Her
heart throbbed violently, and her thoughts would not rest on anything.

She felt that this evening, when they would both meet for the first
time, would be a turning point in her life. And she was continually
picturing them to herself, at one moment each separately, and then both
together. When she mused on the past, she dwelt with pleasure, with
tenderness, on the memories of her relations with Levin. The memories
of childhood and of Levin’s friendship with her dead brother gave a
special poetic charm to her relations with him. His love for her, of
which she felt certain, was flattering and delightful to her; and it
was pleasant for her to think of Levin. In her memories of Vronsky
there always entered a certain element of awkwardness, though he was in
the highest degree well-bred and at ease, as though there were some
false note—not in Vronsky, he was very simple and nice, but in herself,
while with Levin she felt perfectly simple and clear. But, on the other
hand, directly she thought of the future with Vronsky, there arose
before her a perspective of brilliant happiness; with Levin the future
seemed misty.

When she went upstairs to dress, and looked into the looking-glass, she
noticed with joy that it was one of her good days, and that she was in
complete possession of all her forces,—she needed this so for what lay
before her: she was conscious of external composure and free grace in
her movements.

At half-past seven she had only just gone down into the drawing-room,
when the footman announced, “Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin.” The
princess was still in her room, and the prince had not come in. “So it
is to be,” thought Kitty, and all the blood seemed to rush to her
heart. She was horrified at her paleness, as she glanced into the
looking-glass. At that moment she knew beyond doubt that he had come
early on purpose to find her alone and to make her an offer. And only
then for the first time the whole thing presented itself in a new,
different aspect; only then she realized that the question did not
affect her only—with whom she would be happy, and whom she loved—but
that she would have that moment to wound a man whom she liked. And to
wound him cruelly. What for? Because he, dear fellow, loved her, was in
love with her. But there was no help for it, so it must be, so it would
have to be.

“My God! shall I myself really have to say it to him?” she thought.
“Can I tell him I don’t love him? That will be a lie. What am I to say
to him? That I love someone else? No, that’s impossible. I’m going
away, I’m going away.”

She had reached the door, when she heard his step. “No! it’s not
honest. What have I to be afraid of? I have done nothing wrong. What is
to be, will be! I’ll tell the truth. And with him one can’t be ill at
ease. Here he is,” she said to herself, seeing his powerful, shy
figure, with his shining eyes fixed on her. She looked straight into
his face, as though imploring him to spare her, and gave her hand.

“It’s not time yet; I think I’m too early,” he said glancing round the
empty drawing-room. When he saw that his expectations were realized,
that there was nothing to prevent him from speaking, his face became
gloomy.

“Oh, no,” said Kitty, and sat down at the table.

“But this was just what I wanted, to find you alone,” he began, not
sitting down, and not looking at her, so as not to lose courage.

“Mamma will be down directly. She was very much tired....
Yesterday....”

She talked on, not knowing what her lips were uttering, and not taking
her supplicating and caressing eyes off him.

He glanced at her; she blushed, and ceased speaking.

“I told you I did not know whether I should be here long ... that it
depended on you....”

She dropped her head lower and lower, not knowing herself what answer
she should make to what was coming.

“That it depended on you,” he repeated. “I meant to say ... I meant to
say ... I came for this ... to be my wife!” he brought out, not knowing
what he was saying; but feeling that the most terrible thing was said,
he stopped short and looked at her....

She was breathing heavily, not looking at him. She was feeling ecstasy.
Her soul was flooded with happiness. She had never anticipated that the
utterance of love would produce such a powerful effect on her. But it
lasted only an instant. She remembered Vronsky. She lifted her clear,
truthful eyes, and seeing his desperate face, she answered hastily:

“That cannot be ... forgive me.”

A moment ago, and how close she had been to him, of what importance in
his life! And how aloof and remote from him she had become now!

“It was bound to be so,” he said, not looking at her.

He bowed, and was meaning to retreat.


Chapter 14

But at that very moment the princess came in. There was a look of
horror on her face when she saw them alone, and their disturbed faces.
Levin bowed to her, and said nothing. Kitty did not speak nor lift her
eyes. “Thank God, she has refused him,” thought the mother, and her
face lighted up with the habitual smile with which she greeted her
guests on Thursdays. She sat down and began questioning Levin about his
life in the country. He sat down again, waiting for other visitors to
arrive, in order to retreat unnoticed.

Five minutes later there came in a friend of Kitty’s, married the
preceding winter, Countess Nordston.

She was a thin, sallow, sickly, and nervous woman, with brilliant black
eyes. She was fond of Kitty, and her affection for her showed itself,
as the affection of married women for girls always does, in the desire
to make a match for Kitty after her own ideal of married happiness; she
wanted her to marry Vronsky. Levin she had often met at the
Shtcherbatskys’ early in the winter, and she had always disliked him.
Her invariable and favorite pursuit, when they met, consisted in making
fun of him.

“I do like it when he looks down at me from the height of his grandeur,
or breaks off his learned conversation with me because I’m a fool, or
is condescending to me. I like that so; to see him condescending! I am
so glad he can’t bear me,” she used to say of him.

She was right, for Levin actually could not bear her, and despised her
for what she was proud of and regarded as a fine characteristic—her
nervousness, her delicate contempt and indifference for everything
coarse and earthly.

The Countess Nordston and Levin got into that relation with one another
not seldom seen in society, when two persons, who remain externally on
friendly terms, despise each other to such a degree that they cannot
even take each other seriously, and cannot even be offended by each
other.

The Countess Nordston pounced upon Levin at once.

“Ah, Konstantin Dmitrievitch! So you’ve come back to our corrupt
Babylon,” she said, giving him her tiny, yellow hand, and recalling
what he had chanced to say early in the winter, that Moscow was a
Babylon. “Come, is Babylon reformed, or have you degenerated?” she
added, glancing with a simper at Kitty.

“It’s very flattering for me, countess, that you remember my words so
well,” responded Levin, who had succeeded in recovering his composure,
and at once from habit dropped into his tone of joking hostility to the
Countess Nordston. “They must certainly make a great impression on
you.”

“Oh, I should think so! I always note them all down. Well, Kitty, have
you been skating again?...”

And she began talking to Kitty. Awkward as it was for Levin to withdraw
now, it would still have been easier for him to perpetrate this
awkwardness than to remain all the evening and see Kitty, who glanced
at him now and then and avoided his eyes. He was on the point of
getting up, when the princess, noticing that he was silent, addressed
him.

“Shall you be long in Moscow? You’re busy with the district council,
though, aren’t you, and can’t be away for long?”

“No, princess, I’m no longer a member of the council,” he said. “I have
come up for a few days.”

“There’s something the matter with him,” thought Countess Nordston,
glancing at his stern, serious face. “He isn’t in his old argumentative
mood. But I’ll draw him out. I do love making a fool of him before
Kitty, and I’ll do it.”

“Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” she said to him, “do explain to me, please,
what’s the meaning of it. You know all about such things. At home in
our village of Kaluga all the peasants and all the women have drunk up
all they possessed, and now they can’t pay us any rent. What’s the
meaning of that? You always praise the peasants so.”

At that instant another lady came into the room, and Levin got up.

“Excuse me, countess, but I really know nothing about it, and can’t
tell you anything,” he said, and looked round at the officer who came
in behind the lady.

“That must be Vronsky,” thought Levin, and, to be sure of it, glanced
at Kitty. She had already had time to look at Vronsky, and looked round
at Levin. And simply from the look in her eyes, that grew unconsciously
brighter, Levin knew that she loved that man, knew it as surely as if
she had told him so in words. But what sort of a man was he? Now,
whether for good or for ill, Levin could not choose but remain; he must
find out what the man was like whom she loved.

There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what,
are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and
to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who
desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he
has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what
is good. Levin belonged to the second class. But he had no difficulty
in finding what was good and attractive in Vronsky. It was apparent at
the first glance. Vronsky was a squarely built, dark man, not very
tall, with a good-humored, handsome, and exceedingly calm and resolute
face. Everything about his face and figure, from his short-cropped
black hair and freshly shaven chin down to his loosely fitting,
brand-new uniform, was simple and at the same time elegant. Making way
for the lady who had come in, Vronsky went up to the princess and then
to Kitty.

As he approached her, his beautiful eyes shone with a specially tender
light, and with a faint, happy, and modestly triumphant smile (so it
seemed to Levin), bowing carefully and respectfully over her, he held
out his small broad hand to her.

Greeting and saying a few words to everyone, he sat down without once
glancing at Levin, who had never taken his eyes off him.

“Let me introduce you,” said the princess, indicating Levin.
“Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, Count Alexey Kirillovitch Vronsky.”

Vronsky got up and, looking cordially at Levin, shook hands with him.

“I believe I was to have dined with you this winter,” he said, smiling
his simple and open smile; “but you had unexpectedly left for the
country.”

“Konstantin Dmitrievitch despises and hates town and us townspeople,”
said Countess Nordston.

“My words must make a deep impression on you, since you remember them
so well,” said Levin, and, suddenly conscious that he had said just the
same thing before, he reddened.

Vronsky looked at Levin and Countess Nordston, and smiled.

“Are you always in the country?” he inquired. “I should think it must
be dull in the winter.”

“It’s not dull if one has work to do; besides, one’s not dull by
oneself,” Levin replied abruptly.

“I am fond of the country,” said Vronsky, noticing, and affecting not
to notice, Levin’s tone.

“But I hope, count, you would not consent to live in the country
always,” said Countess Nordston.

“I don’t know; I have never tried for long. I experienced a queer
feeling once,” he went on. “I never longed so for the country, Russian
country, with bast shoes and peasants, as when I was spending a winter
with my mother in Nice. Nice itself is dull enough, you know. And
indeed, Naples and Sorrento are only pleasant for a short time. And
it’s just there that Russia comes back to me most vividly, and
especially the country. It’s as though....”

He talked on, addressing both Kitty and Levin, turning his serene,
friendly eyes from one to the other, and saying obviously just what
came into his head.

Noticing that Countess Nordston wanted to say something, he stopped
short without finishing what he had begun, and listened attentively to
her.

The conversation did not flag for an instant, so that the princess, who
always kept in reserve, in case a subject should be lacking, two heavy
guns—the relative advantages of classical and of modern education, and
universal military service—had not to move out either of them, while
Countess Nordston had not a chance of chaffing Levin.

Levin wanted to, and could not, take part in the general conversation;
saying to himself every instant, “Now go,” he still did not go, as
though waiting for something.

The conversation fell upon table-turning and spirits, and Countess
Nordston, who believed in spiritualism, began to describe the marvels
she had seen.

“Ah, countess, you really must take me, for pity’s sake do take me to
see them! I have never seen anything extraordinary, though I am always
on the lookout for it everywhere,” said Vronsky, smiling.

“Very well, next Saturday,” answered Countess Nordston. “But you,
Konstantin Dmitrievitch, do you believe in it?” she asked Levin.

“Why do you ask me? You know what I shall say.”

“But I want to hear your opinion.”

“My opinion,” answered Levin, “is only that this table-turning simply
proves that educated society—so called—is no higher than the peasants.
They believe in the evil eye, and in witchcraft and omens, while
we....”

“Oh, then you don’t believe in it?”

“I can’t believe in it, countess.”

“But if I’ve seen it myself?”

“The peasant women too tell us they have seen goblins.”

“Then you think I tell a lie?”

And she laughed a mirthless laugh.

“Oh, no, Masha, Konstantin Dmitrievitch said he could not believe in
it,” said Kitty, blushing for Levin, and Levin saw this, and, still
more exasperated, would have answered, but Vronsky with his bright
frank smile rushed to the support of the conversation, which was
threatening to become disagreeable.

“You do not admit the conceivability at all?” he queried. “But why not?
We admit the existence of electricity, of which we know nothing. Why
should there not be some new force, still unknown to us, which....”

“When electricity was discovered,” Levin interrupted hurriedly, “it was
only the phenomenon that was discovered, and it was unknown from what
it proceeded and what were its effects, and ages passed before its
applications were conceived. But the spiritualists have begun with
tables writing for them, and spirits appearing to them, and have only
later started saying that it is an unknown force.”

Vronsky listened attentively to Levin, as he always did listen,
obviously interested in his words.

“Yes, but the spiritualists say we don’t know at present what this
force is, but there is a force, and these are the conditions in which
it acts. Let the scientific men find out what the force consists in.
No, I don’t see why there should not be a new force, if it....”

“Why, because with electricity,” Levin interrupted again, “every time
you rub tar against wool, a recognized phenomenon is manifested, but in
this case it does not happen every time, and so it follows it is not a
natural phenomenon.”

Feeling probably that the conversation was taking a tone too serious
for a drawing-room, Vronsky made no rejoinder, but by way of trying to
change the conversation, he smiled brightly, and turned to the ladies.

“Do let us try at once, countess,” he said; but Levin would finish
saying what he thought.

“I think,” he went on, “that this attempt of the spiritualists to
explain their marvels as some sort of new natural force is most futile.
They boldly talk of spiritual force, and then try to subject it to
material experiment.”

Everyone was waiting for him to finish, and he felt it.

“And I think you would be a first-rate medium,” said Countess Nordston;
“there’s something enthusiastic in you.”

Levin opened his mouth, was about to say something, reddened, and said
nothing.

“Do let us try table-turning at once, please,” said Vronsky. “Princess,
will you allow it?”

And Vronsky stood up, looking for a little table.

Kitty got up to fetch a table, and as she passed, her eyes met Levin’s.
She felt for him with her whole heart, the more because she was pitying
him for suffering of which she was herself the cause. “If you can
forgive me, forgive me,” said her eyes, “I am so happy.”

“I hate them all, and you, and myself,” his eyes responded, and he took
up his hat. But he was not destined to escape. Just as they were
arranging themselves round the table, and Levin was on the point of
retiring, the old prince came in, and after greeting the ladies,
addressed Levin.

“Ah!” he began joyously. “Been here long, my boy? I didn’t even know
you were in town. Very glad to see you.” The old prince embraced Levin,
and talking to him did not observe Vronsky, who had risen, and was
serenely waiting till the prince should turn to him.

Kitty felt how distasteful her father’s warmth was to Levin after what
had happened. She saw, too, how coldly her father responded at last to
Vronsky’s bow, and how Vronsky looked with amiable perplexity at her
father, as though trying and failing to understand how and why anyone
could be hostilely disposed towards him, and she flushed.

“Prince, let us have Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said Countess Nordston;
“we want to try an experiment.”

“What experiment? Table-turning? Well, you must excuse me, ladies and
gentlemen, but to my mind it is better fun to play the ring game,” said
the old prince, looking at Vronsky, and guessing that it had been his
suggestion. “There’s some sense in that, anyway.”

Vronsky looked wonderingly at the prince with his resolute eyes, and,
with a faint smile, began immediately talking to Countess Nordston of
the great ball that was to come off next week.

“I hope you will be there?” he said to Kitty. As soon as the old prince
turned away from him, Levin went out unnoticed, and the last impression
he carried away with him of that evening was the smiling, happy face of
Kitty answering Vronsky’s inquiry about the ball.


Chapter 15

At the end of the evening Kitty told her mother of her conversation
with Levin, and in spite of all the pity she felt for Levin, she was
glad at the thought that she had received an _offer_. She had no doubt
that she had acted rightly. But after she had gone to bed, for a long
while she could not sleep. One impression pursued her relentlessly. It
was Levin’s face, with his scowling brows, and his kind eyes looking
out in dark dejection below them, as he stood listening to her father,
and glancing at her and at Vronsky. And she felt so sorry for him that
tears came into her eyes. But immediately she thought of the man for
whom she had given him up. She vividly recalled his manly, resolute
face, his noble self-possession, and the good nature conspicuous in
everything towards everyone. She remembered the love for her of the man
she loved, and once more all was gladness in her soul, and she lay on
the pillow, smiling with happiness. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry; but what
could I do? It’s not my fault,” she said to herself; but an inner voice
told her something else. Whether she felt remorse at having won Levin’s
love, or at having refused him, she did not know. But her happiness was
poisoned by doubts. “Lord, have pity on us; Lord, have pity on us;
Lord, have pity on us!” she repeated to herself, till she fell asleep.

Meanwhile there took place below, in the prince’s little library, one
of the scenes so often repeated between the parents on account of their
favorite daughter.

“What? I’ll tell you what!” shouted the prince, waving his arms, and at
once wrapping his squirrel-lined dressing-gown round him again. “That
you’ve no pride, no dignity; that you’re disgracing, ruining your
daughter by this vulgar, stupid matchmaking!”

“But, really, for mercy’s sake, prince, what have I done?” said the
princess, almost crying.

She, pleased and happy after her conversation with her daughter, had
gone to the prince to say good-night as usual, and though she had no
intention of telling him of Levin’s offer and Kitty’s refusal, still
she hinted to her husband that she fancied things were practically
settled with Vronsky, and that he would declare himself so soon as his
mother arrived. And thereupon, at those words, the prince had all at
once flown into a passion, and began to use unseemly language.

“What have you done? I’ll tell you what. First of all, you’re trying to
catch an eligible gentleman, and all Moscow will be talking of it, and
with good reason. If you have evening parties, invite everyone, don’t
pick out the possible suitors. Invite all the young bucks. Engage a
piano player, and let them dance, and not as you do things nowadays,
hunting up good matches. It makes me sick, sick to see it, and you’ve
gone on till you’ve turned the poor wench’s head. Levin’s a thousand
times the better man. As for this little Petersburg swell, they’re
turned out by machinery, all on one pattern, and all precious rubbish.
But if he were a prince of the blood, my daughter need not run after
anyone.”

“But what have I done?”

“Why, you’ve....” The prince was crying wrathfully.

“I know if one were to listen to you,” interrupted the princess, “we
should never marry our daughter. If it’s to be so, we’d better go into
the country.”

“Well, and we had better.”

“But do wait a minute. Do I try and catch them? I don’t try to catch
them in the least. A young man, and a very nice one, has fallen in love
with her, and she, I fancy....”

“Oh, yes, you fancy! And how if she really is in love, and he’s no more
thinking of marriage than I am!... Oh, that I should live to see it!
Ah! spiritualism! Ah! Nice! Ah! the ball!” And the prince, imagining
that he was mimicking his wife, made a mincing curtsey at each word.
“And this is how we’re preparing wretchedness for Kitty; and she’s
really got the notion into her head....”

“But what makes you suppose so?”

“I don’t suppose; I know. We have eyes for such things, though
women-folk haven’t. I see a man who has serious intentions, that’s
Levin: and I see a peacock, like this feather-head, who’s only amusing
himself.”

“Oh, well, when once you get an idea into your head!...”

“Well, you’ll remember my words, but too late, just as with Dolly.”

“Well, well, we won’t talk of it,” the princess stopped him,
recollecting her unlucky Dolly.

“By all means, and good-night!”

And signing each other with the cross, the husband and wife parted with
a kiss, feeling that they each remained of their own opinion.

The princess had at first been quite certain that that evening had
settled Kitty’s future, and that there could be no doubt of Vronsky’s
intentions, but her husband’s words had disturbed her. And returning to
her own room, in terror before the unknown future, she, too, like
Kitty, repeated several times in her heart, “Lord, have pity; Lord,
have pity; Lord, have pity.”


Chapter 16

Vronsky had never had a real home life. His mother had been in her
youth a brilliant society woman, who had had during her married life,
and still more afterwards, many love affairs notorious in the whole
fashionable world. His father he scarcely remembered, and he had been
educated in the Corps of Pages.

Leaving the school very young as a brilliant officer, he had at once
got into the circle of wealthy Petersburg army men. Although he did go
more or less into Petersburg society, his love affairs had always
hitherto been outside it.

In Moscow he had for the first time felt, after his luxurious and
coarse life at Petersburg, all the charm of intimacy with a sweet and
innocent girl of his own rank, who cared for him. It never even entered
his head that there could be any harm in his relations with Kitty. At
balls he danced principally with her. He was a constant visitor at
their house. He talked to her as people commonly do talk in society—all
sorts of nonsense, but nonsense to which he could not help attaching a
special meaning in her case. Although he said nothing to her that he
could not have said before everybody, he felt that she was becoming
more and more dependent upon him, and the more he felt this, the better
he liked it, and the tenderer was his feeling for her. He did not know
that his mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a definite
character, that it is courting young girls with no intention of
marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions common
among brilliant young men such as he was. It seemed to him that he was
the first who had discovered this pleasure, and he was enjoying his
discovery.

If he could have heard what her parents were saying that evening, if he
could have put himself at the point of view of the family and have
heard that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he would
have been greatly astonished, and would not have believed it. He could
not believe that what gave such great and delicate pleasure to him, and
above all to her, could be wrong. Still less could he have believed
that he ought to marry.

Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. He not
only disliked family life, but a family, and especially a husband was,
in accordance with the views general in the bachelor world in which he
lived, conceived as something alien, repellant, and, above all,
ridiculous.

But though Vronsky had not the least suspicion what the parents were
saying, he felt on coming away from the Shtcherbatskys’ that the secret
spiritual bond which existed between him and Kitty had grown so much
stronger that evening that some step must be taken. But what step could
and ought to be taken he could not imagine.

“What is so exquisite,” he thought, as he returned from the
Shtcherbatskys’, carrying away with him, as he always did, a delicious
feeling of purity and freshness, arising partly from the fact that he
had not been smoking for a whole evening, and with it a new feeling of
tenderness at her love for him—“what is so exquisite is that not a word
has been said by me or by her, but we understand each other so well in
this unseen language of looks and tones, that this evening more clearly
than ever she told me she loves me. And how secretly, simply, and most
of all, how trustfully! I feel myself better, purer. I feel that I have
a heart, and that there is a great deal of good in me. Those sweet,
loving eyes! When she said: ‘Indeed I do....’

“Well, what then? Oh, nothing. It’s good for me, and good for her.” And
he began wondering where to finish the evening.

He passed in review of the places he might go to. “Club? a game of
bezique, champagne with Ignatov? No, I’m not going. _Château des
Fleurs_; there I shall find Oblonsky, songs, the cancan. No, I’m sick
of it. That’s why I like the Shtcherbatskys’, that I’m growing better.
I’ll go home.” He went straight to his room at Dussots’ Hotel, ordered
supper, and then undressed, and as soon as his head touched the pillow,
fell into a sound sleep.


Chapter 17

Next day at eleven o’clock in the morning Vronsky drove to the station
of the Petersburg railway to meet his mother, and the first person he
came across on the great flight of steps was Oblonsky, who was
expecting his sister by the same train.

“Ah! your excellency!” cried Oblonsky, “whom are you meeting?”

“My mother,” Vronsky responded, smiling, as everyone did who met
Oblonsky. He shook hands with him, and together they ascended the
steps. “She is to be here from Petersburg today.”

“I was looking out for you till two o’clock last night. Where did you
go after the Shtcherbatskys’?”

“Home,” answered Vronsky. “I must own I felt so well content yesterday
after the Shtcherbatskys’ that I didn’t care to go anywhere.”

“I know a gallant steed by tokens sure,

And by his eyes I know a youth in love,”



declaimed Stepan Arkadyevitch, just as he had done before to Levin.

Vronsky smiled with a look that seemed to say that he did not deny it,
but he promptly changed the subject.

“And whom are you meeting?” he asked.

“I? I’ve come to meet a pretty woman,” said Oblonsky.

“You don’t say so!”

“_Honi soit qui mal y pense!_ My sister Anna.”

“Ah! that’s Madame Karenina,” said Vronsky.

“You know her, no doubt?”

“I think I do. Or perhaps not ... I really am not sure,” Vronsky
answered heedlessly, with a vague recollection of something stiff and
tedious evoked by the name Karenina.

“But Alexey Alexandrovitch, my celebrated brother-in-law, you surely
must know. All the world knows him.”

“I know him by reputation and by sight. I know that he’s clever,
learned, religious somewhat.... But you know that’s not ... _not in my
line,_” said Vronsky in English.

“Yes, he’s a very remarkable man; rather a conservative, but a splendid
man,” observed Stepan Arkadyevitch, “a splendid man.”

“Oh, well, so much the better for him,” said Vronsky smiling. “Oh,
you’ve come,” he said, addressing a tall old footman of his mother’s,
standing at the door; “come here.”

Besides the charm Oblonsky had in general for everyone, Vronsky had
felt of late specially drawn to him by the fact that in his imagination
he was associated with Kitty.

“Well, what do you say? Shall we give a supper on Sunday for the
_diva?_” he said to him with a smile, taking his arm.

“Of course. I’m collecting subscriptions. Oh, did you make the
acquaintance of my friend Levin?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“Yes; but he left rather early.”

“He’s a capital fellow,” pursued Oblonsky. “Isn’t he?”

“I don’t know why it is,” responded Vronsky, “in all Moscow
people—present company of course excepted,” he put in jestingly,
“there’s something uncompromising. They are all on the defensive, lose
their tempers, as though they all want to make one feel something....”

“Yes, that’s true, it is so,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing
good-humoredly.

“Will the train soon be in?” Vronsky asked a railway official.

“The train’s signaled,” answered the man.

The approach of the train was more and more evident by the preparatory
bustle in the station, the rush of porters, the movement of policemen
and attendants, and people meeting the train. Through the frosty vapor
could be seen workmen in short sheepskins and soft felt boots crossing
the rails of the curving line. The hiss of the boiler could be heard on
the distant rails, and the rumble of something heavy.

“No,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who felt a great inclination to tell
Vronsky of Levin’s intentions in regard to Kitty. “No, you’ve not got a
true impression of Levin. He’s a very nervous man, and is sometimes out
of humor, it’s true, but then he is often very nice. He’s such a true,
honest nature, and a heart of gold. But yesterday there were special
reasons,” pursued Stepan Arkadyevitch, with a meaning smile, totally
oblivious of the genuine sympathy he had felt the day before for his
friend, and feeling the same sympathy now, only for Vronsky. “Yes,
there were reasons why he could not help being either particularly
happy or particularly unhappy.”

Vronsky stood still and asked directly: “How so? Do you mean he made
your _belle-sœur_ an offer yesterday?”

“Maybe,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “I fancied something of the sort
yesterday. Yes, if he went away early, and was out of humor too, it
must mean it.... He’s been so long in love, and I’m very sorry for
him.”

“So that’s it! I should imagine, though, she might reckon on a better
match,” said Vronsky, drawing himself up and walking about again,
“though I don’t know him, of course,” he added. “Yes, that is a hateful
position! That’s why most fellows prefer to have to do with Klaras. If
you don’t succeed with them it only proves that you’ve not enough cash,
but in this case one’s dignity’s at stake. But here’s the train.”

The engine had already whistled in the distance. A few instants later
the platform was quivering, and with puffs of steam hanging low in the
air from the frost, the engine rolled up, with the lever of the middle
wheel rhythmically moving up and down, and the stooping figure of the
engine-driver covered with frost. Behind the tender, setting the
platform more and more slowly swaying, came the luggage van with a dog
whining in it. At last the passenger carriages rolled in, oscillating
before coming to a standstill.

A smart guard jumped out, giving a whistle, and after him one by one
the impatient passengers began to get down: an officer of the guards,
holding himself erect, and looking severely about him; a nimble little
merchant with a satchel, smiling gaily; a peasant with a sack over his
shoulder.

Vronsky, standing beside Oblonsky, watched the carriages and the
passengers, totally oblivious of his mother. What he had just heard
about Kitty excited and delighted him. Unconsciously he arched his
chest, and his eyes flashed. He felt himself a conqueror.

“Countess Vronskaya is in that compartment,” said the smart guard,
going up to Vronsky.

The guard’s words roused him, and forced him to think of his mother and
his approaching meeting with her. He did not in his heart respect his
mother, and without acknowledging it to himself, he did not love her,
though in accordance with the ideas of the set in which he lived, and
with his own education, he could not have conceived of any behavior to
his mother not in the highest degree respectful and obedient, and the
more externally obedient and respectful his behavior, the less in his
heart he respected and loved her.


Chapter 18

Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage, and at the door of the
compartment he stopped short to make room for a lady who was getting
out.

With the insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady’s
appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society. He
begged pardon, and was getting into the carriage, but felt he must
glance at her once more; not that she was very beautiful, not on
account of the elegance and modest grace which were apparent in her
whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as
she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and
soft. As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her shining gray
eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly
attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him, and then
promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as though seeking someone.
In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness
which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and
the faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature
were so brimming over with something that against her will it showed
itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately
she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in
the faintly perceptible smile.

Vronsky stepped into the carriage. His mother, a dried-up old lady with
black eyes and ringlets, screwed up her eyes, scanning her son, and
smiled slightly with her thin lips. Getting up from the seat and
handing her maid a bag, she gave her little wrinkled hand to her son to
kiss, and lifting his head from her hand, kissed him on the cheek.

“You got my telegram? Quite well? Thank God.”

“You had a good journey?” said her son, sitting down beside her, and
involuntarily listening to a woman’s voice outside the door. He knew it
was the voice of the lady he had met at the door.

“All the same I don’t agree with you,” said the lady’s voice.

“It’s the Petersburg view, madame.”

“Not Petersburg, but simply feminine,” she responded.

“Well, well, allow me to kiss your hand.”

“Good-bye, Ivan Petrovitch. And could you see if my brother is here,
and send him to me?” said the lady in the doorway, and stepped back
again into the compartment.

“Well, have you found your brother?” said Countess Vronskaya,
addressing the lady.

Vronsky understood now that this was Madame Karenina.

“Your brother is here,” he said, standing up. “Excuse me, I did not
know you, and, indeed, our acquaintance was so slight,” said Vronsky,
bowing, “that no doubt you do not remember me.”

“Oh, no,” said she, “I should have known you because your mother and I
have been talking, I think, of nothing but you all the way.” As she
spoke she let the eagerness that would insist on coming out show itself
in her smile. “And still no sign of my brother.”

“Do call him, Alexey,” said the old countess. Vronsky stepped out onto
the platform and shouted:

“Oblonsky! Here!”

Madame Karenina, however, did not wait for her brother, but catching
sight of him she stepped out with her light, resolute step. And as soon
as her brother had reached her, with a gesture that struck Vronsky by
its decision and its grace, she flung her left arm around his neck,
drew him rapidly to her, and kissed him warmly. Vronsky gazed, never
taking his eyes from her, and smiled, he could not have said why. But
recollecting that his mother was waiting for him, he went back again
into the carriage.

“She’s very sweet, isn’t she?” said the countess of Madame Karenina.
“Her husband put her with me, and I was delighted to have her. We’ve
been talking all the way. And so you, I hear ... _vous filez le parfait
amour. Tant mieux, mon cher, tant mieux._”

“I don’t know what you are referring to, maman,” he answered coldly.
“Come, maman, let us go.”

Madame Karenina entered the carriage again to say good-bye to the
countess.

“Well, countess, you have met your son, and I my brother,” she said.
“And all my gossip is exhausted. I should have nothing more to tell
you.”

“Oh, no,” said the countess, taking her hand. “I could go all around
the world with you and never be dull. You are one of those delightful
women in whose company it’s sweet to be silent as well as to talk. Now
please don’t fret over your son; you can’t expect never to be parted.”

Madame Karenina stood quite still, holding herself very erect, and her
eyes were smiling.

“Anna Arkadyevna,” the countess said in explanation to her son, “has a
little son eight years old, I believe, and she has never been parted
from him before, and she keeps fretting over leaving him.”

“Yes, the countess and I have been talking all the time, I of my son
and she of hers,” said Madame Karenina, and again a smile lighted up
her face, a caressing smile intended for him.

“I am afraid that you must have been dreadfully bored,” he said,
promptly catching the ball of coquetry she had flung him. But
apparently she did not care to pursue the conversation in that strain,
and she turned to the old countess.

“Thank you so much. The time has passed so quickly. Good-bye,
countess.”

“Good-bye, my love,” answered the countess. “Let me have a kiss of your
pretty face. I speak plainly, at my age, and I tell you simply that
I’ve lost my heart to you.”

Stereotyped as the phrase was, Madame Karenina obviously believed it
and was delighted by it. She flushed, bent down slightly, and put her
cheek to the countess’s lips, drew herself up again, and with the same
smile fluttering between her lips and her eyes, she gave her hand to
Vronsky. He pressed the little hand she gave him, and was delighted, as
though at something special, by the energetic squeeze with which she
freely and vigorously shook his hand. She went out with the rapid step
which bore her rather fully-developed figure with such strange
lightness.

“Very charming,” said the countess.

That was just what her son was thinking. His eyes followed her till her
graceful figure was out of sight, and then the smile remained on his
face. He saw out of the window how she went up to her brother, put her
arm in his, and began telling him something eagerly, obviously
something that had nothing to do with him, Vronsky, and at that he felt
annoyed.

“Well, maman, are you perfectly well?” he repeated, turning to his
mother.

“Everything has been delightful. Alexander has been very good, and
Marie has grown very pretty. She’s very interesting.”

And she began telling him again of what interested her most—the
christening of her grandson, for which she had been staying in
Petersburg, and the special favor shown her elder son by the Tsar.

“Here’s Lavrenty,” said Vronsky, looking out of the window; “now we can
go, if you like.”

The old butler, who had traveled with the countess, came to the
carriage to announce that everything was ready, and the countess got up
to go.

“Come; there’s not such a crowd now,” said Vronsky.

The maid took a handbag and the lap dog, the butler and a porter the
other baggage. Vronsky gave his mother his arm; but just as they were
getting out of the carriage several men ran suddenly by with
panic-stricken faces. The station-master, too, ran by in his
extraordinary colored cap. Obviously something unusual had happened.
The crowd who had left the train were running back again.

“What?... What?... Where?... Flung himself!... Crushed!...” was heard
among the crowd. Stepan Arkadyevitch, with his sister on his arm,
turned back. They too looked scared, and stopped at the carriage door
to avoid the crowd.

The ladies got in, while Vronsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch followed the
crowd to find out details of the disaster.

A guard, either drunk or too much muffled up in the bitter frost, had
not heard the train moving back, and had been crushed.

Before Vronsky and Oblonsky came back the ladies heard the facts from
the butler.

Oblonsky and Vronsky had both seen the mutilated corpse. Oblonsky was
evidently upset. He frowned and seemed ready to cry.

“Ah, how awful! Ah, Anna, if you had seen it! Ah, how awful!” he said.

Vronsky did not speak; his handsome face was serious, but perfectly
composed.

“Oh, if you had seen it, countess,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “And his
wife was there.... It was awful to see her!... She flung herself on the
body. They say he was the only support of an immense family. How
awful!”

“Couldn’t one do anything for her?” said Madame Karenina in an agitated
whisper.

Vronsky glanced at her, and immediately got out of the carriage.

“I’ll be back directly, maman,” he remarked, turning round in the
doorway.

When he came back a few minutes later, Stepan Arkadyevitch was already
in conversation with the countess about the new singer, while the
countess was impatiently looking towards the door, waiting for her son.

“Now let us be off,” said Vronsky, coming in. They went out together.
Vronsky was in front with his mother. Behind walked Madame Karenina
with her brother. Just as they were going out of the station the
station-master overtook Vronsky.

“You gave my assistant two hundred roubles. Would you kindly explain
for whose benefit you intend them?”

“For the widow,” said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders. “I should have
thought there was no need to ask.”

“You gave that?” cried Oblonsky, behind, and, pressing his sister’s
hand, he added: “Very nice, very nice! Isn’t he a splendid fellow?
Good-bye, countess.”

And he and his sister stood still, looking for her maid.

When they went out the Vronsky’s carriage had already driven away.
People coming in were still talking of what happened.

“What a horrible death!” said a gentleman, passing by. “They say he was
cut in two pieces.”

“On the contrary, I think it’s the easiest—instantaneous,” observed
another.

“How is it they don’t take proper precautions?” said a third.

Madame Karenina seated herself in the carriage, and Stepan Arkadyevitch
saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and she was with
difficulty restraining her tears.

“What is it, Anna?” he asked, when they had driven a few hundred yards.

“It’s an omen of evil,” she said.

“What nonsense!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “You’ve come, that’s the
chief thing. You can’t conceive how I’m resting my hopes on you.”

“Have you known Vronsky long?” she asked.

“Yes. You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.”

“Yes?” said Anna softly. “Come now, let us talk of you,” she added,
tossing her head, as though she would physically shake off something
superfluous oppressing her. “Let us talk of your affairs. I got your
letter, and here I am.”

“Yes, all my hopes are in you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.

“Well, tell me all about it.”

And Stepan Arkadyevitch began to tell his story.

On reaching home Oblonsky helped his sister out, sighed, pressed her
hand, and set off to his office.


Chapter 19

When Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in the little
drawing-room with a white-headed fat little boy, already like his
father, giving him a lesson in French reading. As the boy read, he kept
twisting and trying to tear off a button that was nearly off his
jacket. His mother had several times taken his hand from it, but the
fat little hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled the
button off and put it in her pocket.

“Keep your hands still, Grisha,” she said, and she took up her work, a
coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at
depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her
fingers and counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day
before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister
came or not, she had made everything ready for her arrival, and was
expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.

Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she
did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one of the
most important personages in Petersburg, and was a Petersburg _grande
dame_. And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her
threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that her
sister-in-law was coming. “And, after all, Anna is in no wise to
blame,” thought Dolly. “I know nothing of her except the very best, and
I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her towards
myself.” It was true that as far as she could recall her impressions at
Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself;
there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family
life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it
into her head to console me!” thought Dolly. “All consolation and
counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a
thousand times, and it’s all no use.”

All these days Dolly had been alone with her children. She did not want
to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not
talk of outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would
tell Anna everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of
speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her
humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases
of good advice and comfort. She had been on the lookout for her,
glancing at her watch every minute, and, as so often happens, let slip
just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the
bell.

Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door, she looked
round, and her care-worn face unconsciously expressed not gladness, but
wonder. She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.

“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her.

“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!”

“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the
expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew. “Most likely
she knows,” she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well,
come along, I’ll take you to your room,” she went on, trying to defer
as long as possible the moment of confidences.

“Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he’s grown!” said Anna; and kissing him,
never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood still and flushed a little.
“No, please, let us stay here.”

She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in a lock of her
black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook
her hair down.

“You are radiant with health and happiness!” said Dolly, almost with
envy.

“I?... Yes,” said Anna. “Merciful heavens, Tanya! You’re the same age
as my Seryozha,” she added, addressing the little girl as she ran in.
She took her in her arms and kissed her. “Delightful child, delightful!
Show me them all.”

She mentioned them, not only remembering the names, but the years,
months, characters, illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not
but appreciate that.

“Very well, we will go to them,” she said. “It’s a pity Vassya’s
asleep.”

After seeing the children, they sat down, alone now, in the
drawing-room, to coffee. Anna took the tray, and then pushed it away
from her.

“Dolly,” she said, “he has told me.”

Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for phrases of
conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.

“Dolly, dear,” she said, “I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to
try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, 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 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 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
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 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 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.”


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 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 and was concealing nothing, but that she had another
higher world of interests inaccessible to her, complex and poetic.

After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room, Anna rose quickly
and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar.

“Stiva,” she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and glancing
towards the door, “go, and God help you.”

He threw down the cigar, understanding her, and departed through the
doorway.

When Stepan Arkadyevitch had disappeared, she went back to the sofa
where she had been sitting, surrounded by the children. Either because
the children saw that their mother was fond of this aunt, or that they
felt a special charm in her themselves, the two elder ones, and the
younger following their lead, as children so often do, had clung about
their new aunt since before dinner, and would not leave her side. And
it had become a sort of game among them to sit as close as possible to
their aunt, to touch her, hold her little hand, kiss it, play with her
ring, or even touch the flounce of her skirt.

“Come, come, as we were sitting before,” said Anna Arkadyevna, sitting
down in her place.

And again Grisha poked his little face under her arm, and nestled with
his head on her gown, beaming with pride and happiness.

“And when is your next ball?” she asked Kitty.

“Next week, and a splendid ball. One of those balls where one always
enjoys oneself.”

“Why, are there balls where one always enjoys oneself?” Anna said, with
tender irony.

“It’s strange, but there are. At the Bobrishtchevs’ one always enjoys
oneself, and at the Nikitins’ too, while at the Mezhkovs’ it’s always
dull. Haven’t you noticed it?”

“No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one enjoys oneself,”
said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which
was not open to her. “For me there are some less dull and tiresome.”

“How can _you_ be dull at a ball?”

“Why should not _I_ be dull at a ball?” inquired Anna.

Kitty perceived that Anna knew what answer would follow.

“Because you always look nicer than anyone.”

Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little, and said:

“In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were, what
difference would it make to me?”

“Are you coming to this ball?” asked Kitty.

“I imagine it won’t be possible to avoid going. Here, take it,” she
said to Tanya, who was pulling the loosely-fitting ring off her white,
slender-tipped finger.

“I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you at a ball.”

“Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it’s
a pleasure to you ... Grisha, don’t pull my hair. It’s untidy enough
without that,” she said, putting up a straying lock, which Grisha had
been playing with.

“I imagine you at the ball in lilac.”

“And why in lilac precisely?” asked Anna, smiling. “Now, children, run
along, run along. Do you hear? Miss Hoole is calling you to tea,” she
said, tearing the children from her, and sending them off to the
dining-room.

“I know why you press me to come to the ball. You expect a great deal
of this ball, and you want everyone to be there to take part in it.”

“How do you know? Yes.”

“Oh! what a happy time you are at,” pursued Anna. “I remember, and I
know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains in Switzerland. That
mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is
just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a
path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming
to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is.... Who has not
been through it?”

Kitty smiled without speaking. “But how did she go through it? How I
should like to know all her love story!” thought Kitty, recalling the
unromantic appearance of Alexey Alexandrovitch, her husband.

“I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you. I liked him
so much,” Anna continued. “I met Vronsky at the railway station.”

“Oh, was he there?” asked Kitty, blushing. “What was it Stiva told
you?”

“Stiva gossiped about it all. And I should be so glad ... I traveled
yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,” she went on; “and his mother talked
without a pause of him, he’s her favorite. I know mothers are partial,
but....”

“What did his mother tell you?”

“Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favorite; still one can see
how chivalrous he is.... Well, for instance, she told me that he had
wanted to give up all his property to his brother, that he had done
something extraordinary when he was quite a child, saved a woman out of
the water. He’s a hero, in fact,” said Anna, smiling and recollecting
the two hundred roubles he had given at the station.

But she did not tell Kitty about the two hundred roubles. For some
reason it was disagreeable to her to think of it. She felt that there
was something that had to do with her in it, and something that ought
not to have been.

“She pressed me very much to go and see her,” Anna went on; “and I
shall be glad to go to see her tomorrow. Stiva is staying a long while
in Dolly’s room, thank God,” Anna added, changing the subject, and
getting up, Kitty fancied, displeased with something.

“No, I’m first! No, I!” screamed the children, who had finished tea,
running up to their Aunt Anna.

“All together,” said Anna, and she ran laughing to meet them, and
embraced and swung round all the throng of swarming children, shrieking
with delight.


Chapter 21

Dolly came out of her room to the tea of the grown-up people. Stepan
Arkadyevitch did not come out. He must have left his wife’s room by the
other door.

“I am afraid you’ll be cold upstairs,” observed Dolly, addressing Anna;
“I want to move you downstairs, and we shall be nearer.”

“Oh, please, don’t trouble about me,” answered Anna, looking intently
into Dolly’s face, trying to make out whether there had been a
reconciliation or not.

“It will be lighter for you here,” answered her sister-in-law.

“I assure you that I sleep everywhere, and always like a marmot.”

“What’s the question?” inquired Stepan Arkadyevitch, coming out of his
room and addressing his wife.

From his tone both Kitty and Anna knew that a reconciliation had taken
place.

“I want to move Anna downstairs, but we must hang up blinds. No one
knows how to do it; I must see to it myself,” answered Dolly addressing
him.

“God knows whether they are fully reconciled,” thought Anna, hearing
her tone, cold and composed.

“Oh, nonsense, Dolly, always making difficulties,” answered her
husband. “Come, I’ll do it all, if you like....”

“Yes, they must be reconciled,” thought Anna.

“I know how you do everything,” answered Dolly. “You tell Matvey to do
what can’t be done, and go away yourself, leaving him to make a muddle
of everything,” and her habitual, mocking smile curved the corners of
Dolly’s lips as she spoke.

“Full, full reconciliation, full,” thought Anna; “thank God!” and
rejoicing that she was the cause of it, she went up to Dolly and kissed
her.

“Not at all. Why do you always look down on me and Matvey?” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, smiling hardly perceptibly, and addressing his wife.

The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone to
her husband, while Stepan Arkadyevitch was happy and cheerful, but not
so as to seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his
offense.

At half-past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and pleasant family
conversation over the tea-table at the Oblonskys’ was broken up by an
apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some reason
struck everyone as strange. Talking about common acquaintances in
Petersburg, Anna got up quickly.

“She is in my album,” she said; “and, by the way, I’ll show you my
Seryozha,” she added, with a mother’s smile of pride.

Towards ten o’clock, when she usually said good-night to her son, and
often before going to a ball put him to bed herself, she felt depressed
at being so far from him; and whatever she was talking about, she kept
coming back in thought to her curly-headed Seryozha. She longed to look
at his photograph and talk of him. Seizing the first pretext, she got
up, and with her light, resolute step went for her album. The stairs up
to her room came out on the landing of the great warm main staircase.

Just as she was leaving the drawing-room, a ring was heard in the hall.

“Who can that be?” said Dolly.

“It’s early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it’s late,”
observed Kitty.

“Sure to be someone with papers for me,” put in Stepan Arkadyevitch.
When Anna was passing the top of the staircase, a servant was running
up to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself was standing
under a lamp. Anna glancing down at once recognized Vronsky, and a
strange feeling of pleasure and at the same time of dread of something
stirred in her heart. He was standing still, not taking off his coat,
pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant when she was just
facing the stairs, he raised his eyes, caught sight of her, and into
the expression of his face there passed a shade of embarrassment and
dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing
behind her Stepan Arkadyevitch’s loud voice calling him to come up, and
the quiet, soft, and composed voice of Vronsky refusing.

When Anna returned with the album, he was already gone, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch was telling them that he had called to inquire about the
dinner they were giving next day to a celebrity who had just arrived.
“And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he is!”
added Stepan Arkadyevitch.

Kitty blushed. She thought that she was the only person who knew why he
had come, and why he would not come up. “He has been at home,” she
thought, “and didn’t find me, and thought I should be here, but he did
not come up because he thought it late, and Anna’s here.”

All of them looked at each other, saying nothing, and began to look at
Anna’s album.

There was nothing either exceptional or strange in a man’s calling at
half-past nine on a friend to inquire details of a proposed dinner
party and not coming in, but it seemed strange to all of them. Above
all, it seemed strange and not right to Anna.


Chapter 22

The ball was only just beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the
great staircase, flooded with light, and lined with flowers and footmen
in powder and red coats. From the rooms came a constant, steady hum, as
from a hive, and the rustle of movement; and while on the landing
between trees they gave last touches to their hair and dresses before
the mirror, they heard from the ballroom the careful, distinct notes of
the fiddles of the orchestra beginning the first waltz. A little old
man in civilian dress, arranging his gray curls before another mirror,
and diffusing an odor of scent, stumbled against them on the stairs,
and stood aside, evidently admiring Kitty, whom he did not know. A
beardless youth, one of those society youths whom the old Prince
Shtcherbatsky called “young bucks,” in an exceedingly open waistcoat,
straightening his white tie as he went, bowed to them, and after
running by, came back to ask Kitty for a quadrille. As the first
quadrille had already been given to Vronsky, she had to promise this
youth the second. An officer, buttoning his glove, stood aside in the
doorway, and stroking his mustache, admired rosy Kitty.

Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the ball
had cost Kitty great trouble and consideration, at this moment she
walked into the ballroom in her elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip
as easily and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the
minute details of her attire, had not cost her or her family a moment’s
attention, as though she had been born in that tulle and lace, with her
hair done up high on her head, and a rose and two leaves on the top of
it.

When, just before entering the ballroom, the princess, her mother,
tried to turn right side out of the ribbon of her sash, Kitty had drawn
back a little. She felt that everything must be right of itself, and
graceful, and nothing could need setting straight.

It was one of Kitty’s best days. Her dress was not uncomfortable
anywhere; her lace berthe did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were not
crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, hollowed-out heels
did not pinch, but gladdened her feet; and the thick rolls of fair
chignon kept up on her head as if they were her own hair. All the three
buttons buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her
hand without concealing its lines. The black velvet of her locket
nestled with special softness round her neck. That velvet was
delicious; at home, looking at her neck in the looking-glass, Kitty had
felt that that velvet was speaking. About all the rest there might be a
doubt, but the velvet was delicious. Kitty smiled here too, at the
ball, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare shoulders and arms
gave Kitty a sense of chill marble, a feeling she particularly liked.
Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not keep from smiling from
the consciousness of her own attractiveness. She had scarcely entered
the ballroom and reached the throng of ladies, all tulle, ribbons,
lace, and flowers, waiting to be asked to dance—Kitty was never one of
that throng—when she was asked for a waltz, and asked by the best
partner, the first star in the hierarchy of the ballroom, a renowned
director of dances, a married man, handsome and well-built, Yegorushka
Korsunsky. He had only just left the Countess Bonina, with whom he had
danced the first half of the waltz, and, scanning his kingdom—that is
to say, a few couples who had started dancing—he caught sight of Kitty,
entering, and flew up to her with that peculiar, easy amble which is
confined to directors of balls. Without even asking her if she cared to
dance, he put out his arm to encircle her slender waist. She looked
round for someone to give her fan to, and their hostess, smiling to
her, took it.

“How nice you’ve come in good time,” he said to her, embracing her
waist; “such a bad habit to be late.” Bending her left hand, she laid
it on his shoulder, and her little feet in their pink slippers began
swiftly, lightly, and rhythmically moving over the slippery floor in
time to the music.

“It’s a rest to waltz with you,” he said to her, as they fell into the
first slow steps of the waltz. “It’s exquisite—such lightness,
precision.” He said to her the same thing he said to almost all his
partners whom he knew well.

She smiled at his praise, and continued to look about the room over his
shoulder. She was not like a girl at her first ball, for whom all faces
in the ballroom melt into one vision of fairyland. And she was not a
girl who had gone the stale round of balls till every face in the
ballroom was familiar and tiresome. But she was in the middle stage
between these two; she was excited, and at the same time she had
sufficient self-possession to be able to observe. In the left corner of
the ballroom she saw the cream of society gathered together.
There—incredibly naked—was the beauty Lidi, Korsunsky’s wife; there was
the lady of the house; there shone the bald head of Krivin, always to
be found where the best people were. In that direction gazed the young
men, not venturing to approach. There, too, she descried Stiva, and
there she saw the exquisite figure and head of Anna in a black velvet
gown. And _he_ was there. Kitty had not seen him since the evening she
refused Levin. With her long-sighted eyes, she knew him at once, and
was even aware that he was looking at her.

“Another turn, eh? You’re not tired?” said Korsunsky, a little out of
breath.

“No, thank you!”

“Where shall I take you?”

“Madame Karenina’s here, I think ... take me to her.”

“Wherever you command.”

And Korsunsky began waltzing with measured steps straight towards the
group in the left corner, continually saying, “Pardon, mesdames,
pardon, pardon, mesdames”; and steering his course through the sea of
lace, tulle, and ribbon, and not disarranging a feather, he turned his
partner sharply round, so that her slim ankles, in light transparent
stockings, were exposed to view, and her train floated out in fan shape
and covered Krivin’s knees. Korsunsky bowed, set straight his open
shirt front, and gave her his arm to conduct her to Anna Arkadyevna.
Kitty, flushed, took her train from Krivin’s knees, and, a little
giddy, looked round, seeking Anna. Anna was not in lilac, as Kitty had
so urgently wished, but in a black, low-cut, velvet gown, showing her
full throat and shoulders, that looked as though carved in old ivory,
and her rounded arms, with tiny, slender wrists. The whole gown was
trimmed with Venetian guipure. On her head, among her black hair—her
own, with no false additions—was a little wreath of pansies, and a
bouquet of the same in the black ribbon of her sash among white lace.
Her coiffure was not striking. All that was noticeable was the little
wilful tendrils of her curly hair that would always break free about
her neck and temples. Round her well-cut, strong neck was a thread of
pearls.

Kitty had been seeing Anna every day; she adored her, and had pictured
her invariably in lilac. But now seeing her in black, she felt that she
had not fully seen her charm. She saw her now as someone quite new and
surprising to her. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in
lilac, and that her charm was just that she always stood out against
her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her
black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was
only the frame, and all that was seen was she—simple, natural, elegant,
and at the same time gay and eager.

She was standing holding herself, as always, very erect, and when Kitty
drew near the group she was speaking to the master of the house, her
head slightly turned towards him.

“No, I don’t throw stones,” she was saying, in answer to something,
“though I can’t understand it,” she went on, shrugging her shoulders,
and she turned at once with a soft smile of protection towards Kitty.
With a flying, feminine glance she scanned her attire, and made a
movement of her head, hardly perceptible, but understood by Kitty,
signifying approval of her dress and her looks. “You came into the room
dancing,” she added.

“This is one of my most faithful supporters,” said Korsunsky, bowing to
Anna Arkadyevna, whom he had not yet seen. “The princess helps to make
balls happy and successful. Anna Arkadyevna, a waltz?” he said, bending
down to her.

“Why, have you met?” inquired their host.

“Is there anyone we have not met? My wife and I are like white
wolves—everyone knows us,” answered Korsunsky. “A waltz, Anna
Arkadyevna?”

“I don’t dance when it’s possible not to dance,” she said.

“But tonight it’s impossible,” answered Korsunsky.

At that instant Vronsky came up.

“Well, since it’s impossible tonight, let us start,” she said, not
noticing Vronsky’s bow, and she hastily put her hand on Korsunsky’s
shoulder.

“What is she vexed with him about?” thought Kitty, discerning that Anna
had intentionally not responded to Vronsky’s bow. Vronsky went up to
Kitty reminding her of the first quadrille, and expressing his regret
that he had not seen her all this time. Kitty gazed in admiration at
Anna waltzing, and listened to him. She expected him to ask her for a
waltz, but he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him. He flushed
slightly, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had only just put
his arm round her waist and taken the first step when the music
suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her
own, and long afterwards—for several years after—that look, full of
love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony
of shame.

“_Pardon! pardon!_ Waltz! waltz!” shouted Korsunsky from the other side
of the room, and seizing the first young lady he came across he began
dancing himself.


Chapter 23

Vronsky and Kitty waltzed several times round the room. After the first
waltz Kitty went to her mother, and she had hardly time to say a few
words to Countess Nordston when Vronsky came up again for the first
quadrille. During the quadrille nothing of any significance was said:
there was disjointed talk between them of the Korsunskys, husband and
wife, whom he described very amusingly, as delightful children at
forty, and of the future town theater; and only once the conversation
touched her to the quick, when he asked her about Levin, whether he was
here, and added that he liked him so much. But Kitty did not expect
much from the quadrille. She looked forward with a thrill at her heart
to the mazurka. She fancied that in the mazurka everything must be
decided. The fact that he did not during the quadrille ask her for the
mazurka did not trouble her. She felt sure she would dance the mazurka
with him as she had done at former balls, and refused five young men,
saying she was engaged for the mazurka. The whole ball up to the last
quadrille was for Kitty an enchanted vision of delightful colors,
sounds, and motions. She only sat down when she felt too tired and
begged for a rest. But as she was dancing the last quadrille with one
of the tiresome young men whom she could not refuse, she chanced to be
_vis-à-vis_ with Vronsky and Anna. She had not been near Anna again
since the beginning of the evening, and now again she saw her suddenly
quite new and surprising. She saw in her the signs of that excitement
of success she knew so well in herself; she saw that she was
intoxicated with the delighted admiration she was exciting. She knew
that feeling and knew its signs, and saw them in Anna; saw the
quivering, flashing light in her eyes, and the smile of happiness and
excitement unconsciously playing on her lips, and the deliberate grace,
precision, and lightness of her movements.

“Who?” she asked herself. “All or one?” And not assisting the harassed
young man she was dancing with in the conversation, the thread of which
he had lost and could not pick up again, she obeyed with external
liveliness the peremptory shouts of Korsunsky starting them all into
the _grand rond_, and then into the _chaîne_, and at the same time she
kept watch with a growing pang at her heart. “No, it’s not the
admiration of the crowd has intoxicated her, but the adoration of one.
And that one? can it be he?” Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous
light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red
lips. She seemed to make an effort to control herself, to try not to
show these signs of delight, but they came out on her face of
themselves. “But what of him?” Kitty looked at him and was filled with
terror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s
face she saw in him. What had become of his always self-possessed
resolute manner, and the carelessly serene expression of his face? Now
every time he turned to her, he bent his head, as though he would have
fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was nothing but humble
submission and dread. “I would not offend you,” his eyes seemed every
time to be saying, “but I want to save myself, and I don’t know how.”
On his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before.

They were speaking of common acquaintances, keeping up the most trivial
conversation, but to Kitty it seemed that every word they said was
determining their fate and hers. And strange it was that they were
actually talking of how absurd Ivan Ivanovitch was with his French, and
how the Eletsky girl might have made a better match, yet these words
had all the while consequence for them, and they were feeling just as
Kitty did. The whole ball, the whole world, everything seemed lost in
fog in Kitty’s soul. Nothing but the stern discipline of her
bringing-up supported her and forced her to do what was expected of
her, that is, to dance, to answer questions, to talk, even to smile.
But before the mazurka, when they were beginning to rearrange the
chairs and a few couples moved out of the smaller rooms into the big
room, a moment of despair and horror came for Kitty. She had refused
five partners, and now she was not dancing the mazurka. She had not
even a hope of being asked for it, because she was so successful in
society that the idea would never occur to anyone that she had remained
disengaged till now. She would have to tell her mother she felt ill and
go home, but she had not the strength to do this. She felt crushed. She
went to the furthest end of the little drawing-room and sank into a low
chair. Her light, transparent skirts rose like a cloud about her
slender waist; one bare, thin, soft, girlish arm, hanging listlessly,
was lost in the folds of her pink tunic; in the other she held her fan,
and with rapid, short strokes fanned her burning face. But while she
looked like a butterfly, clinging to a blade of grass, and just about
to open its rainbow wings for fresh flight, her heart ached with a
horrible despair.

“But perhaps I am wrong, perhaps it was not so?” And again she recalled
all she had seen.

“Kitty, what is it?” said Countess Nordston, stepping noiselessly over
the carpet towards her. “I don’t understand it.”

Kitty’s lower lip began to quiver; she got up quickly.

“Kitty, you’re not dancing the mazurka?”

“No, no,” said Kitty in a voice shaking with tears.

“He asked her for the mazurka before me,” said Countess Nordston,
knowing Kitty would understand who were “he” and “her.” “She said:
‘Why, aren’t you going to dance it with Princess Shtcherbatskaya?’”

“Oh, I don’t care!” answered Kitty.

No one but she herself understood her position; no one knew that she
had just refused the man whom perhaps she loved, and refused him
because she had put her faith in another.

Countess Nordston found Korsunsky, with whom she was to dance the
mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty.

Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she had not to
talk, because Korsunsky was all the time running about directing the
figure. Vronsky and Anna sat almost opposite her. She saw them with her
long-sighted eyes, and saw them, too, close by, when they met in the
figures, and the more she saw of them the more convinced was she that
her unhappiness was complete. She saw that they felt themselves alone
in that crowded room. And on Vronsky’s face, always so firm and
independent, she saw that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and
humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when
it has done wrong.

Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful,
and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to
Anna’s face. She was fascinating in her simple black dress, fascinating
were her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her firm neck
with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose
hair, fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and
hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was
something terrible and cruel in her fascination.

Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute was her
suffering. Kitty felt overwhelmed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky
saw her, coming across her in the mazurka, he did not at once recognize
her, she was so changed.

“Delightful ball!” he said to her, for the sake of saying something.

“Yes,” she answered.

In the middle of the mazurka, repeating a complicated figure, newly
invented by Korsunsky, Anna came forward into the center of the circle,
chose two gentlemen, and summoned a lady and Kitty. Kitty gazed at her
in dismay as she went up. Anna looked at her with drooping eyelids, and
smiled, pressing her hand. But, noticing that Kitty only responded to
her smile by a look of despair and amazement, she turned away from her,
and began gaily talking to the other lady.

“Yes, there is something uncanny, devilish and fascinating in her,”
Kitty said to herself.

Anna did not mean to stay to supper, but the master of the house began
to press her to do so.

“Nonsense, Anna Arkadyevna,” said Korsunsky, drawing her bare arm under
the sleeve of his dress coat, “I’ve such an idea for a _cotillion! Un
bijou!_”

And he moved gradually on, trying to draw her along with him. Their
host smiled approvingly.

“No, I am not going to stay,” answered Anna, smiling, but in spite of
her smile, both Korsunsky and the master of the house saw from her
resolute tone that she would not stay.

“No; why, as it is, I have danced more at your ball in Moscow than I
have all the winter in Petersburg,” said Anna, looking round at
Vronsky, who stood near her. “I must rest a little before my journey.”

“Are you certainly going tomorrow then?” asked Vronsky.

“Yes, I suppose so,” answered Anna, as it were wondering at the
boldness of his question; but the irrepressible, quivering brilliance
of her eye

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