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 a 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.