Chapter 23

Dolly was wanting to go to bed when Anna came in to see her, attired for the night. In the course of the day Anna had several times begun to speak of matters near her heart, and every time after a few words she had stopped: ‘Afterwards, by ourselves, we’ll talk about everything. I’ve got so much I want to tell you,’ she said.

Now they were by themselves, and Anna did not know what to talk about. She sat in the window looking at Dolly, and going over in her own mind all the stores of intimate talk which had seemed so inexhaustible beforehand, and she found nothing. At that moment it seemed to her that everything had been said already.

‘Well, what of Kitty?’ she said with a heavy sigh, looking penitently at Dolly. ‘Tell me the truth, Dolly: isn’t she angry with me?’

‘Angry? Oh, no!’ said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling.

‘But she hates me, despises me?’

‘Oh, no! But you know that sort of thing isn’t forgiven.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Anna, turning away and looking out of the open window. ‘But I was not to blame. And who is to blame? What’s the meaning of being to blame? Could it have been otherwise? What do you think? Could it possibly have happened that you didn’t become the wife of Stiva?’

‘Really, I don’t know. But this is what I want you to tell me…’

‘Yes, yes, but we’ve not finished about Kitty. Is she happy? He’s a very nice man, they say.’

‘He’s much more than very nice. I don’t know a better man.’

‘Ah, how glad I am! I’m so glad! Much more than very nice,’ she repeated.

Dolly smiled.

‘But tell me about yourself. We’ve a great deal to talk about. And I’ve had a talk with…’ Dolly did not know what to call him. She felt it awkward to call him either the count or Alexey Kirillovitch.

‘With Alexey,’ said Anna, ‘I know what you talked about. But I wanted to ask you directly what you think of me, of my life?’

‘How am I to say like that straight off? I really don’t know.’

‘No, tell me all the same…. You see my life. But you mustn’t forget that you’re seeing us in the summer, when you have come to us and we are not alone…. But we came here early in the spring, lived quite alone, and shall be alone again, and I desire nothing better. But imagine me living alone without him, alone, and that will be…I see by everything that it will often be repeated, that he will be half the time away from home,’ she said, getting up and sitting down close by Dolly.

‘Of course,’ she interrupted Dolly, who would have answered, ‘of course I won’t try to keep him by force. I don’t keep him indeed. The races are just coming, his horses are running, he will go. I’m very glad. But think of me, fancy my position…. But what’s the use of talking about it?’ She smiled. ‘Well, what did he talk about with you?’

‘He spoke of what I want to speak about of myself, and it’s easy for me to be his advocate; of whether there is not a possibility …whether you could not…’ (Darya Alexandrovna hesitated) ‘correct, improve your position…. You know how I look at it…. But all the same, if possible, you should get married….’

‘Divorce, you mean?’ said Anna. ‘Do you know, the only woman who came to see me in Petersburg was Betsy Tverskaya? You know her, of course? Au fond, c’est la femme la plus depravee qui existe. She had an intrigue with Tushkevitch, deceiving her husband in the basest way. And she told me that she did not care to know me so long as my position was irregular. Don’t imagine I would compare…I know you, darling. But I could not help remembering…. Well, so what did he say to you?’ she repeated.

‘He said that he was unhappy on your account and his own. Perhaps you will say that it’s egoism, but what a legitimate and noble egoism. He wants first of all to legitimize his daughter, and to be your husband, to have a legal right to you.’

‘What wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my position?’ she put in gloomily.

‘The chief thing he desires…he desires that you should not suffer.’

‘That’s impossible. Well?’

‘Well, and the most legitimate desire—he wishes that your children should have a name.’

‘What children?’ Anna said, not looking at Dolly, and half closing her eyes.

‘Annie and those to come…’

‘He need not trouble on that score; I shall have no more children.’

‘How can you tell that you won’t?’

‘I shall not, because I don’t wish it.’ And, in spite of all her emotion, Anna smiled, as she caught the naive expression of curiosity, wonder, and horror on Dolly’s face.

‘The doctor told me after my illness…’

‘Impossible!’ said Dolly, opening her eyes wide.

For her this was one of those discoveries the consequences and deductions from which are so immense that all that one feels for the first instant is that it is impossible to take it all in, and that one will have to reflect a great, great deal upon it.

This discovery, suddenly throwing light on all those families of one or two children, which had hitherto been so incomprehensible to her, aroused so many ideas, reflections, and contradictory emotions, that she had nothing to say, and simply gazed with wide-open eyes of wonder at Anna. This was the very thing she had been dreaming of, but now learning that it was possible, she was horrified. She felt that it was too simple a solution of too complicated a problem.

‘N’est-ce pas immoral?’ was all she said, after a brief pause.

‘Why so? Think, I have a choice between two alternatives: either to be with child, that is an invalid, or to be the friend and companion of my husband—practically my husband,’ Anna said in a tone intentionally superficial and frivolous.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Darya Alexandrovna, hearing the very arguments she had used to herself, and not finding the same force in them as before.

‘For you, for other people,’ said Anna, as though divining her thoughts, ‘there may be reason to hesitate; but for me…. You must consider, I am not his wife; he loves me as long as he loves me. And how am I to keep his love? Not like this!’

She moved her white hands in a curve before her waist with extraordinary rapidity, as happens during moments of excitement; ideas and memories rushed into Darya Alexandrovna’s head. ‘I,’ she thought, ‘did not keep my attraction for Stiva; he left me for others, and the first woman for whom he betrayed me did not keep him by being always pretty and lively. He deserted her and took another. And can Anna attract and keep Count Vronsky in that way? If that is what he looks for, he will find dresses and manners still more attractive and charming. And however white and beautiful her bare arms are, however beautiful her full figure and her eager face under her black curls, he will find something better still, just as my disgusting, pitiful, and charming husband does.’

Dolly made no answer, she merely sighed. Anna noticed this sigh, indicating dissent, and she went on. In her armory she had other arguments so strong that no answer could be made to them.

‘Do you say that it’s not right? But you must consider,’ she went on; ‘you forget my position. How can I desire children? I’m not speaking of the suffering, I’m not afraid of that. Think only, what are my children to be? Ill-fated children, who will have to bear a stranger’s name. For the very fact of their birth they will be forced to be ashamed of their mother, their father, their birth.’

‘But that is just why a divorce is necessary.’ But Anna did not hear her. She longed to give utterance to all the arguments with which she had so many times convinced herself.

‘What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!’ She looked at Dolly, but without waiting for a reply she went on:

‘I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children,’ she said. ‘If they are not, at any rate they are not unhappy; while if they are unhappy, I alone should be to blame for it.’

These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her own reflections; but she heard them without understanding them. ‘How can one wrong creatures that don’t exist?’ she thought. And all at once the idea struck her: could it possibly, under any circumstances, have been better for her favorite Grisha if he had never existed? And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that she shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling, mad ideas.

‘No, I don’t know; it’s not right,’ was all she said, with an expression of disgust on her face.

‘Yes, but you mustn’t forget that you and I…. And besides that,’ added Anna, in spite of the wealth of her arguments and the poverty of Dolly’s objections, seeming still to admit that it was not right, ‘don’t forget the chief point, that I am not now in the same position as you. For you the question is: do you desire not to have any more children; while for me it is: do I desire to have them? And that’s a great difference. You must see that I can’t desire it in my position.’

Darya Alexandrovna made no reply. She suddenly felt that she had got far away from Anna; that there lay between them a barrier of questions on which they could never agree, and about which it was better not to speak.

Chapter 24

‘Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your position, if possible,’ said Dolly.

‘Yes, if possible,’ said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly different tone, subdued and mournful.

‘Surely you don’t mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your husband had consented to it.’

‘Dolly, I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘Oh, we won’t then,’ Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing the expression of suffering on Anna’s face. ‘All I see is that you take too gloomy a view of things.’

‘I? Not at all! I’m always bright and happy. You see, je fais des passions. Veslovsky…’

‘Yes, to tell the truth, I don’t like Veslovsky’s tone,’ said Darya Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject.

‘Oh, that’s nonsense! It amuses Alexey, and that’s all; but he’s a boy, and quite under my control. You know, I turn him as I please. It’s just as it might be with your Grisha…. Dolly!’— she suddenly changed the subject—‘you say I take too gloomy a view of things. You can’t understand. It’s too awful! I try not to take any view of it at all.’

‘But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can.’

‘But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexey, and say I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it!’ she repeated, and a flush rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the room, stopping now and then. ‘I don’t think of it? Not a day, not an hour passes that I don’t think of it, and blame myself for thinking of it…because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!’ she repeated. ‘When I think of it, I can’t sleep without morphine. But never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me, divorce. In the first place, he won’t give me a divorce. He’s under the influence of Countess Lidia Ivanovna now.’

Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head, following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.

‘You ought to make the attempt,’ she said softly.

‘Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?’ she said, evidently giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and learned by heart. ‘It means that I, hating him, but still recognizing that I have wronged him—and I consider him magnanimous—that I humiliate myself to write to him…. Well, suppose I make the effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating refusal or consent…. Well, I have received his consent, say…’ Anna was at that moment at the furthest end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the curtain at the window. ‘I receive his consent, but my…my son? They won’t give him up to me. He will grow up despising me, with his father, whom I’ve abandoned. Do you see, I love… equally, I think, but both more than myself—two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.’

She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white dressing gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing jacket and nightcap, shaking all over with emotion.

‘It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything. You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m suffering.’ She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her face and took her hand.

‘What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise me. I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am,’ she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears.

Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed. She had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day.

Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine glass and dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a little while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind.

When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He was looking for traces of the conversation which he knew that, staying so long in Dolly’s room, she must have had with her. But in her expression of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he could find nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh though he was used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that it should affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been talking of, but he hoped that she would tell him something of her own accord. But she only said:

‘I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?’

‘Oh, I’ve known her a long while, you know. She’s very good-hearted, I suppose, mais excessivement terre-a-terre. Still, I’m very glad to see her.’

He took Anna’s hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.

Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him. Next morning, in spite of the protests of her hosts, Darya Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward journey. Levin’s coachman, in his by no means new coat and shabby hat, with his ill-matched horses and his coach with the patched mud-guards, drove with gloomy determination into the covered gravel approach.

Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her hosts were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and that it was better for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew that now, from Dolly’s departure, no one again would stir up within her soul the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.

As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men how they had liked being at Vronsky’s, when suddenly the coachman, Philip, expressed himself unasked:

‘Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all they gave us. Everything cleared up till there wasn’t a grain left by cockcrow. What are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now down to forty-five kopecks. At our place, no fear, all comers may have as much as they can eat.’

‘The master’s a screw,’ put in the counting house clerk.

‘Well, did you like their horses?’ asked Dolly.

‘The horses!—there’s no two opinions about them. And the food was good. But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna. I don’t know what you thought,’ he said, turning his handsome, good-natured face to her.

‘I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?’

‘Eh, we must!’

On reaching home and finding everyone entirely satisfactory and particularly charming, Darya Alexandrovna began with great liveliness telling them how she had arrived, how warmly they had received her, of the luxury and good taste in which the Vronskys lived, and of their recreations, and she would not allow a word to be said against them.

‘One has to know Anna and Vronsky—I have got to know him better now—to see how nice they are, and how touching,’ she said, speaking now with perfect sincerity, and forgetting the vague feeling of dissatisfaction and awkwardness she had experienced there.