Chapter 2

Soon after the doctor, Dolly had arrived. She knew that there was to be a consultation that day, and though she was only just up after her confinement (she had another baby, a little girl, born at the end of the winter), though she had trouble and anxiety enough of her own, she had left her tiny baby and a sick child, to come and hear Kitty’s fate, which was to be decided that day.

‘Well, well?’ she said, coming into the drawing room, without taking off her hat. ‘You’re all in good spirits. Good news, then?’

They tried to tell her what the doctor had said, but it appeared that though the doctor had talked distinctly enough and at great length, it was utterly impossible to report what he had said. The only point of interest was that it was settled they should go abroad.

Dolly could not help sighing. Her dearest friend, her sister, was going away. And her life was not a cheerful one. Her relations with Stepan Arkadyevitch after their reconciliation had become humiliating. The union Anna had cemented turned out to be of no solid character, and family harmony was breaking down again at the same point. There had been nothing definite, but Stepan Arkadyevitch was hardly ever at home; money, too, was hardly ever forthcoming, and Dolly was continually tortured by suspicions of infidelity, which she tried to dismiss, dreading the agonies of jealousy she had been through already. The first onslaught of jealousy, once lived through, could never come back again, and even the discovery of infidelities could never now affect her as it had the first time. Such a discovery now would only mean breaking up family habits, and she let herself be deceived, despising him and still more herself, for the weakness. Besides this, the care of her large family was a constant worry to her: first, the nursing of her young baby did not go well, then the nurse had gone away, now one of the children had fallen ill.

‘Well, how are all of you?’ asked her mother.

‘Ah, mamma, we have plenty of troubles of our own. Lili is ill, and I’m afraid it’s scarlatina. I have come here now to hear about Kitty, and then I shall shut myself up entirely, if—God forbid—it should be scarlatina.’

The old prince too had come in from his study after the doctor’s departure, and after presenting his cheek to Dolly, and saying a few words to her, he turned to his wife:

‘How have you settled it? you’re going? Well, and what do you mean to do with me?’

‘I suppose you had better stay here, Alexander,’ said his wife.

‘That’s as you like.’

‘Mamma, why shouldn’t father come with us?’ said Kitty. ‘It would be nicer for him and for us too.’

The old prince got up and stroked Kitty’s hair. She lifted her head and looked at him with a forced smile. It always seemed to her that he understood her better than anyone in the family, though he did not say much about her. Being the youngest, she was her father’s favorite, and she fancied that his love gave him insight. When now her glance met his blue kindly eyes looking intently at her, it seemed to her that he saw right through her, and understood all that was not good that was passing within her. Reddening, she stretched out towards him expecting a kiss, but he only patted her hair and said:

‘These stupid chignons! There’s no getting at the real daughter. One simply strokes the bristles of dead women. Well, Dolinka,’ he turned to his elder daughter, ‘what’s your young buck about, hey?’

‘Nothing, father,’ answered Dolly, understanding that her husband was meant. ‘He’s always out; I scarcely ever see him,’ she could not resist adding with a sarcastic smile.

‘Why, hasn’t he gone into the country yet—to see about selling that forest?’

‘No, he’s still getting ready for the journey.’

‘Oh, that’s it!’ said the prince. ‘And so am I to be getting ready for a journey too? At your service,’ he said to his wife, sitting down. ‘And I tell you what, Katia,’ he went on to his younger daughter, ‘you must wake up one fine day and say to yourself: Why, I’m quite well, and merry, and going out again with father for an early morning walk in the frost. Hey?’

What her father said seemed simple enough, yet at these words Kitty became confused and overcome like a detected criminal. ‘Yes, he sees it all, he understands it all, and in these words he’s telling me that though I’m ashamed, I must get over my shame.’ She could not pluck up spirit to make any answer. She tried to begin, and all at once burst into tears, and rushed out of the room.

‘See what comes of your jokes!’ the princess pounced down on her husband. ‘You’re always…’ she began a string of reproaches.

The prince listened to the princess’s scolding rather a long while without speaking, but his face was more and more frowning.

‘She’s so much to be pitied, poor child, so much to be pitied, and you don’t feel how it hurts her to hear the slightest reference to the cause of it. Ah! to be so mistaken in people!’ said the princess, and by the change in her tone both Dolly and the prince knew she was speaking of Vronsky. ‘I don’t know why there aren’t laws against such base, dishonorable people.’

‘Ah, I can’t bear to hear you!’ said the prince gloomily, getting up from his low chair, and seeming anxious to get away, yet stopping in the doorway. ‘There are laws, madam, and since you’ve challenged me to it, I’ll tell you who’s to blame for it all: you and you, you and nobody else. Laws against such young gallants there have always been, and there still are! Yes, if there has been nothing that ought not to have been, old as I am, I’d have called him out to the barrier, the young dandy. Yes, and now you physic her and call in these quacks.’

The prince apparently had plenty more to say, but as soon as the princess heard his tone she subsided at once, and became penitent, as she always did on serious occasions.

‘Alexander, Alexander,’ she whispered, moving to him and beginning to weep.

As soon as she began to cry the prince too calmed down. He went up to her.

‘There, that’s enough, that’s enough! You’re wretched too, I know. It can’t be helped. There’s no great harm done. God is merciful…thanks…’ he said, not knowing what he was saying, as he responded to the tearful kiss of the princess that he felt on his hand. And the prince went out of the room.

Before this, as soon as Kitty went out of the room in tears, Dolly, with her motherly, family instincts, had promptly perceived that here a woman’s work lay before her, and she prepared to do it. She took off her hat, and, morally speaking, tucked up her sleeves and prepared for action. While her mother was attacking her father, she tried to restrain her mother, so far as filial reverence would allow. During the prince’s outburst she was silent; she felt ashamed for her mother, and tender towards her father for so quickly being kind again. But when her father left them she made ready for what was the chief thing needful—to go to Kitty and console her.

‘I’d been meaning to tell you something for a long while, mamma: did you know that Levin meant to make Kitty an offer when he was here the last time? He told Stiva so.’

‘Well, what then? I don’t understand…’

‘So did Kitty perhaps refuse him?… She didn’t tell you so?’

‘No, she has said nothing to me either of one or the other; she’s too proud. But I know it’s all on account of the other.’

‘Yes, but suppose she has refused Levin, and she wouldn’t have refused him if it hadn’t been for the other, I know. And then, he has deceived her so horribly.’

It was too terrible for the princess to think how she had sinned against her daughter, and she broke out angrily.

‘Oh, I really don’t understand! Nowadays they will all go their own way, and mothers haven’t a word to say in anything, and then…’

‘Mamma, I’ll go up to her.’

‘Well, do. Did I tell you not to?’ said her mother.

Chapter 3

When she went into Kitty’s little room, a pretty, pink little room, full of knick-knacks in vieux saxe, as fresh, and pink, and white, and gay as Kitty herself had been two months ago, Dolly remembered how they had decorated the room the year before together, with what love and gaiety. Her heart turned cold when she saw Kitty sitting on a low chair near the door, her eyes fixed immovably on a corner of the rug. Kitty glanced at her sister, and the cold, rather ill-tempered expression of her face did not change.

‘I’m just going now, and I shall have to keep in and you won’t be able to come to see me,’ said Dolly, sitting down beside her. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘What about?’ Kitty asked swiftly, lifting her head in dismay.

‘What should it be, but your trouble?’

‘I have no trouble.’

‘Nonsense, Kitty. Do you suppose I could help knowing? I know all about it. And believe me, it’s of so little consequence…. We’ve all been through it.’

Kitty did not speak, and her face had a stern expression.

‘He’s not worth your grieving over him,’ pursued Darya Alexandrovna, coming straight to the point.

‘No, because he has treated me with contempt,’ said Kitty, in a breaking voice. ‘Don’t talk of it! Please, don’t talk of it!’

‘But who can have told you so? No one has said that. I’m certain he was in love with you, and would still be in love with you, if it hadn’t…

‘Oh, the most awful thing of all for me is this sympathizing!’ shrieked Kitty, suddenly flying into a passion. She turned round on her chair, flushed crimson, and rapidly moving her fingers, pinched the clasp of her belt first with one hand and then with the other. Dolly knew this trick her sister had of clenching her hands when she was much excited; she knew, too, that in moments of excitement Kitty was capable of forgetting herself and saying a great deal too much, and Dolly would have soothed her, but it was too late.

‘What, what is it you want to make me feel, eh?’ said Kitty quickly. ‘That I’ve been in love with a man who didn’t care a straw for me, and that I’m dying of love for him? And this is said to me by my own sister, who imagines that…that…that she’s sympathizing with me!…I don’t want these condolences and humbug!’

‘Kitty, you’re unjust.’

‘Why are you tormenting me?’

‘But I…quite the contrary…I see you’re unhappy…’

But Kitty in her fury did not hear her.

‘I’ve nothing to grieve over and be comforted about. I am too proud ever to allow myself to care for a man who does not love me.’

‘Yes, I don’t say so either…. Only one thing. Tell me the truth,’ said Darya Alexandrovna, taking her by the hand: ‘tell me, did Levin speak to you?…’

The mention of Levin’s name seemed to deprive Kitty of the last vestige of self-control. She leaped up from her chair, and flinging her clasp on the ground, she gesticulated rapidly with her hands and said:

‘Why bring Levin in too? I can’t understand what you want to torment me for. I’ve told you, and I say it again, that I have some pride, and never, never would I do as you’re doing—go back to a man who’s deceived you, who has cared for another woman. I can’t understand it! You may, but I can’t!’

And saying these words she glanced at her sister, and seeing that Dolly sat silent, her head mournfully bowed, Kitty, instead of running out of the room as she had meant to do, sat down near the door, and hid her face in her handkerchief.

The silence lasted for two minutes: Dolly was thinking of herself. That humiliation of which she was always conscious came back to her with a peculiar bitterness when her sister reminded her of it. She had not looked for such cruelty in her sister, and she was angry with her. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and with it the sound of heart-rending, smothered sobbing, and felt arms about her neck. Kitty was on her knees before her.

‘Dolinka, I am so, so wretched!’ she whispered penitently. And the sweet face covered with tears hid itself in Darya Alexandrovna’s skirt.

As though tears were the indispensable oil, without which the machinery of mutual confidence could not run smoothly between the two sisters, the sisters after their tears talked, not of what was uppermost in their minds, but, though they talked of outside matters, they understood each other. Kitty knew that the words she had uttered in anger about her husband’s infidelity and her humiliating position had cut her poor sister to the heart, but that she had forgiven her. Dolly for her part knew all she had wanted to find out. She felt certain that her surmises were correct; that Kitty’s misery, her inconsolable misery, was due precisely to the fact that Levin had made her an offer and she had refused him, and Vronsky had deceived her, and that she was fully prepared to love Levin and to detest Vronsky. Kitty said not a word of that; she talked of nothing but her spiritual condition.

‘I have nothing to make me miserable,’ she said, getting calmer; ‘but can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome, coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can’t imagine what loathsome thoughts I have about everything.’

‘Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?’ asked Dolly, smiling.

‘The most utterly loathsome and coarse: I can’t tell you. It’s not unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most loathsome. Come, how am I to tell you?’ she went on, seeing the puzzled look in her sister’s eyes. ‘Father began saying something to me just now…. It seems to me he thinks all I want is to be married. Mother takes me to a ball: it seems to me she only takes me to get me married off as soon as may be, and be rid of me. I know it’s not the truth, but I can’t drive away such thoughts. Eligible suitors, as they call them—I can’t bear to see them. It seems to me they’re taking stock of me and summing me up. In old days to go anywhere in a ball dress was a simple joy to me, I admired myself; now I feel ashamed and awkward. And then! The doctor…. Then…’ Kitty hesitated; she wanted to say further that ever since this change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyevitch had become insufferably repulsive to her, and that she could not see him without the grossest and most hideous conceptions rising before her imagination.

‘Oh, well, everything presents itself to me, in the coarsest, most loathsome light,’ she went on. ‘That’s my illness. Perhaps it will pass off.’

‘But you mustn’t think about it.’

‘I can’t help it. I’m never happy except with the children at your house.’

‘What a pity you can’t be with me!’

‘Oh, yes, I’m coming. I’ve had scarlatina, and I’ll persuade mamma to let me.’

Kitty insisted on having her way, and went to stay at her sister’s and nursed the children all through the scarlatina, for scarlatina it turned out to be. The two sisters brought all the six children successfully through it, but Kitty was no better in health, and in Lent the Shtcherbatskys went abroad.