Chapter 20

Vronsky was staying in a roomy, clean, Finnish hut, divided into two by a partition. Petritsky lived with him in camp too. Petritsky was asleep when Vronsky and Yashvin came into the hut.

‘Get up, don’t go on sleeping,’ said Yashvin, going behind the partition and giving Petritsky, who was lying with ruffled hair and with his nose in the pillow, a prod on the shoulder.

Petritsky jumped up suddenly onto his knees and looked round.

‘Your brother’s been here,’ he said to Vronsky. ‘He waked me up, damn him, and said he’d look in again.’ And pulling up the rug he flung himself back on the pillow. ‘Oh, do shut up, Yashvin!’ he said, getting furious with Yashvin, who was pulling the rug off him. ‘Shut up!’ He turned over and opened his eyes. ‘You’d better tell me what to drink; such a nasty taste in my mouth, that…’

‘Brandy’s better than anything,’ boomed Yashvin. ‘Tereshtchenko! brandy for your master and cucumbers,’ he shouted, obviously taking pleasure in the sound of his own voice.

‘Brandy, do you think? Eh?’ queried Petritsky, blinking and rubbing his eyes. ‘And you’ll drink something? All right then, we’ll have a drink together! Vronsky, have a drink?’ said Petritsky, getting up and wrapping the tiger-skin rug round him. He went to the door of the partition wall, raised his hands, and hummed in French, ‘There was a king in Thule.’ ‘Vronsky, will you have a drink?’

‘Go along,’ said Vronsky, putting on the coat his valet handed to him.

‘Where are you off to?’ asked Yashvin. ‘Oh, here are your three horses,’ he added, seeing the carriage drive up.

‘To the stables, and I’ve got to see Bryansky, too, about the horses,’ said Vronsky.

Vronsky had as a fact promised to call at Bryansky’s, some eight miles from Peterhof, and to bring him some money owing for some horses; and he hoped to have time to get that in too. But his comrades were at once aware that he was not only going there.

Petritsky, still humming, winked and made a pout with his lips, as though he would say: ‘Oh, yes, we know your Bryansky.’

‘Mind you’re not late!’ was Yashvin’s only comment; and to change the conversation: ‘How’s my roan? is he doing all right?’ he inquired, looking out of the window at the middle one of the three horses, which he had sold Vronsky.

‘Stop!’ cried Petritsky to Vronsky as he was just going out. ‘Your brother left a letter and a note for you. Wait a bit; where are they?’

Vronsky stopped.

‘Well, where are they?’

‘Where are they? That’s just the question!’ said Petritsky solemnly, moving his forefinger upwards from his nose.

‘Come, tell me; this is silly!’ said Vronsky smiling.

‘I have not lighted the fire. Here somewhere about.’

‘Come, enough fooling! Where is the letter?’

‘No, I’ve forgotten really. Or was it a dream? Wait a bit, wait a bit! But what’s the use of getting in a rage. If you’d drunk four bottles yesterday as I did you’d forget where you were lying. Wait a bit, I’ll remember!’

Petritsky went behind the partition and lay down on his bed.

‘Wait a bit! This was how I was lying, and this was how he was standing. Yes—yes—yes…. Here it is!’—and Petritsky pulled a letter out from under the mattress, where he had hidden it.

Vronsky took the letter and his brother’s note. It was the letter he was expecting—from his mother, reproaching him for not having been to see her—and the note was from his brother to say that he must have a little talk with him. Vronsky knew that it was all about the same thing. ‘What business is it of theirs!’ thought Vronsky, and crumpling up the letters he thrust them between the buttons of his coat so as to read them carefully on the road. In the porch of the hut he was met by two officers; one of his regiment and one of another.

Vronsky’s quarters were always a meeting place for all the officers.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘I must go to Peterhof.’

‘Has the mare come from Tsarskoe?’

‘Yes, but I’ve not seen her yet.’

‘They say Mahotin’s Gladiator’s lame.’

‘Nonsense! But however are you going to race in this mud?’ said the other.

‘Here are my saviors!’ cried Petritsky, seeing them come in. Before him stood the orderly with a tray of brandy and salted cucumbers. ‘Here’s Yashvin ordering me to drink a pick-me-up.’

‘Well, you did give it to us yesterday,’ said one of those who had come in; ‘you didn’t let us get a wink of sleep all night.’

‘Oh, didn’t we make a pretty finish!’ said Petritsky. ‘Volkov climbed onto the roof and began telling us how sad he was. I said: ‘Let’s have music, the funeral march!’ He fairly dropped asleep on the roof over the funeral march.’

‘Drink it up; you positively must drink the brandy, and then seltzer water and a lot of lemon,’ said Yashvin, standing over Petritsky like a mother making a child take medicine, ‘and then a little champagne—just a small bottle.’

‘Come, there’s some sense in that. Stop a bit, Vronsky. We’ll all have a drink.’

‘No; good-bye all of you. I’m not going to drink today.’

‘Why, are you gaining weight? All right, then we must have it alone. Give us the seltzer water and lemon.’

‘Vronsky!’ shouted someone when he was already outside.

‘Well?’

‘You’d better get your hair cut, it’ll weigh you down, especially at the top.’

Vronsky was in fact beginning, prematurely, to get a little bald. He laughed gaily, showing his even teeth, and pulling his cap over the thin place, went out and got into his carriage.

‘To the stables!’ he said, and was just pulling out the letters to read them through, but he thought better of it, and put off reading them so as not to distract his attention before looking at the mare. ‘Later!’

Chapter 21

The temporary stable, a wooden shed, had been put up close to the race course, and there his mare was to have been taken the previous day. He had not yet seen her there.

During the last few days he had not ridden her out for exercise himself, but had put her in the charge of the trainer, and so now he positively did not know in what condition his mare had arrived yesterday and was today. He had scarcely got out of his carriage when his groom, the so-called ‘stable boy,’ recognizing the carriage some way off, called the trainer. A dry-looking Englishman, in high boots and a short jacket, clean-shaven, except for a tuft below his chin, came to meet him, walking with the uncouth gait of jockey, turning his elbows out and swaying from side to side.

‘Well, how’s Frou-Frou?’ Vronsky asked in English.

‘All right, sir,’ the Englishman’s voice responded somewhere in the inside of his throat. ‘Better not go in,’ he added, touching his hat. ‘I’ve put a muzzle on her, and the mare’s fidgety. Better not go in, it’ll excite the mare.’

‘No, I’m going in. I want to look at her.’

‘Come along, then,’ said the Englishman, frowning, and speaking with his mouth shut, and, with swinging elbows, he went on in front with his disjointed gait.

They went into the little yard in front of the shed. A stable boy, spruce and smart in his holiday attire, met them with a broom in his hand, and followed them. In the shed there were five horses in their separate stalls, and Vronsky knew that his chief rival, Gladiator, a very tall chestnut horse, had been brought there, and must be standing among them. Even more than his mare, Vronsky longed to see Gladiator, whom he had never seen. But he knew that by the etiquette of the race course it was not merely impossible for him to see the horse, but improper even to ask questions about him. Just as he was passing along the passage, the boy opened the door into the second horse-box on the left, and Vronsky caught a glimpse of a big chestnut horse with white legs. He knew that this was Gladiator, but, with the feeling of a man turning away from the sight of another man’s open letter, he turned round and went into Frou-Frou’s stall.

‘The horse is here belonging to Mak…Mak…I never can say the name,’ said the Englishman, over his shoulder, pointing his big finger and dirty nail towards Gladiator’s stall.

‘Mahotin? Yes, he’s my most serious rival,’ said Vronsky.

‘If you were riding him,’ said the Englishman, ‘I’d bet on you.’

‘Frou-Frou’s more nervous; he’s stronger,’ said Vronsky, smiling at the compliment to his riding.

‘In a steeplechase it all depends on riding and on pluck,’ said the Englishman.

Of pluck—that is, energy and courage—Vronsky did not merely feel that he had enough; what was of far more importance, he was firmly convinced that no one in the world could have more of this ‘pluck’ than he had.

‘Don’t you think I want more thinning down?’

‘Oh, no,’ answered the Englishman. ‘Please, don’t speak loud. The mare’s fidgety,’ he added, nodding towards the horse-box, before which they were standing, and from which came the sound of restless stamping in the straw.

He opened the door, and Vronsky went into the horse-box, dimly lighted by one little window. In the horse-box stood a dark bay mare, with a muzzle on, picking at the fresh straw with her hoofs. Looking round him in the twilight of the horse-box, Vronsky unconsciously took in once more in a comprehensive glance all the points of his favorite mare. Frou-Frou was a beast of medium size, not altogether free from reproach, from a breeder’s point of view. She was small-boned all over; though her chest was extremely prominent in front, it was narrow. Her hind-quarters were a little drooping, and in her fore-legs, and still more in her hind-legs, there was a noticeable curvature. The muscles of both hindand fore-legs were not very thick; but across her shoulders the mare was exceptionally broad, a peculiarity specially striking now that she was lean from training. The bones of her legs below the knees looked no thicker than a finger from in front, but were extraordinarily thick seen from the side. She looked altogether, except across the shoulders, as it were, pinched in at the sides and pressed out in depth. But she had in the highest degree the quality that makes all defects forgotten: that quality was blood, the blood that tells, as the English expression has it. The muscles stood up sharply under the network of sinews, covered with the delicate, mobile skin, soft as satin, and they were hard as bone. Her clean-cut head, with prominent, bright, spirited eyes, broadened out at the open nostrils, that showed the red blood in the cartilage within. About all her figure, and especially her head, there was a certain expression of energy, and, at the same time, of softness. She was one of those creatures which seem only not to speak because the mechanism of their mouth does not allow them to.

To Vronsky, at any rate, it seemed that she understood all he felt at that moment, looking at her.

Directly Vronsky went towards her, she drew in a deep breath, and, turning back her prominent eye till the white looked bloodshot, she started at the approaching figures from the opposite side, shaking her muzzle, and shifting lightly from one leg to the other.

‘There, you see how fidgety she is,’ said the Englishman.

‘There, darling! There!’ said Vronsky, going up to the mare and speaking soothingly to her.

But the nearer he came, the more excited she grew. Only when he stood by her head, she was suddenly quieter, while the muscles quivered under her soft, delicate coat. Vronsky patted her strong neck, straightened over her sharp withers a stray lock of her mane that had fallen on the other side, and moved his face near her dilated nostrils, transparent as a bat’s wing. She drew a loud breath and snorted out through her tense nostrils, started, pricked up her sharp ear, and put out her strong, black lip towards Vronsky, as though she would nip hold of his sleeve. But remembering the muzzle, she shook it and again began restlessly stamping one after the other her shapely legs.

‘Quiet, darling, quiet!’ he said, patting her again over her hind-quarters; and with a glad sense that his mare was in the best possible condition, he went out of the horse-box.

The mare’s excitement had infected Vronsky. He felt that his heart was throbbing, and that he, too, like the mare, longed to move, to bite; it was both dreadful and delicious.

‘Well, I rely on you, then,’ he said to the Englishman; ‘half-past six on the ground.’

‘All right,’ said the Englishman. ‘Oh, where are you going, my lord?’ he asked suddenly, using the title ‘my lord,’ which he had scarcely ever used before.

Vronsky in amazement raised his head, and stared, as he knew how to stare, not into the Englishman’s eyes, but at his forehead, astounded at the impertinence of his question. But realizing that in asking this the Englishman had been looking at him not as an employer, but as a jockey, he answered:

‘I’ve got to go to Bryansky’s; I shall be home within an hour.’

‘How often I’m asked that question today!’ he said to himself, and he blushed, a thing which rarely happened to him. The Englishman looked gravely at him; and, as though he, too, knew where Vronsky was going, he added:

‘The great thing’s to keep quiet before a race,’ said he; ‘don’t get out of temper or upset about anything.’

‘All right,’ answered Vronsky, smiling; and jumping into his carriage, he told the man to drive to Peterhof.

Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had been threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour of rain.

‘What a pity!’ thought Vronsky, putting up the roof of the carriage. ‘It was muddy before, now it will be a perfect swamp.’ As he sat in solitude in the closed carriage, he took out his mother’s letter and his brother’s note, and read them through.

Yes, it was the same thing over and over again. Everyone, his mother, his brother, everyone thought fit to interfere in the affairs of his heart. This interference aroused in him a feeling of angry hatred—a feeling he had rarely known before. ‘What business is it of theirs? Why does everybody feel called upon to concern himself about me? And why do they worry me so? Just because they see that this is something they can’t understand. If it were a common, vulgar, worldly intrigue, they would have left me alone. They feel that this is something different, that this is not a mere pastime, that this woman is dearer to me than life. And this is incomprehensible, and that’s why it annoys them. Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it,’ he said, in the word we linking himself with Anna. ‘No, they must needs teach us how to live. They haven’t an idea of what happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness nor unhappiness—no life at all,’ he thought.

He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right. He felt that the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary impulse, which would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving no other traces in the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant memories. He felt all the torture of his own and her position, all the difficulty there was for them, conspicuous as they were in the eye of all the world, in concealing their love, in lying and deceiving; and in lying, deceiving, feigning, and continually thinking of others, when the passion that united them was so intense that they were both oblivious of everything else but their love.

He vividly recalled all the constantly recurring instances of inevitable necessity for lying and deceit, which were so against his natural bent. He recalled particularly vividly the shame he had more than once detected in her at this necessity for lying and deceit. And he experienced the strange feeling that had sometimes come upon him since his secret love for Anna. This was a feeling of loathing for something—whether for Alexey Alexandrovitch, or for himself, or for the whole world, he could not have said. But he always drove away this strange feeling. Now, too, he shook it off and continued the thread of his thoughts.

‘Yes, she was unhappy before, but proud and at peace; and now she cannot be at peace and feel secure in her dignity, though she does not show it. Yes, we must put an end to it,’ he decided.

And for the first time the idea clearly presented itself that it was essential to put an end to this false position, and the sooner the better. ‘Throw up everything, she and I, and hide ourselves somewhere alone with our love,’ he said to himself.