Chapter 15
After escorting his wife upstairs, Levin went to Dolly’s part of the house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was in great distress too that day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a little girl, who stood in the corner roaring.
‘And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all alone, and not see one of your dolls, and I won’t make you a new frock,’ she said, not knowing how to punish her.
‘Oh, she is a disgusting child!’ she turned to Levin. ‘Where does she get such wicked propensities?’
‘Why, what has she done?’ Levin said without much interest, for he had wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at an unlucky moment.
‘Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there…I can’t tell you really what she did. It’s a thousand pities Miss Elliot’s not with us. This one sees to nothing—she’s a machine…. Figurez-vous que la petite?…’
And Darya Alexandrovna described Masha’s crime.
‘That proves nothing; it’s not a question of evil propensities at all, it’s simply mischief,’ Levin assured her.
‘But you are upset about something? What have you come for?’ asked Dolly. ‘What’s going on there?’
And in the tone of her question Levin heard that it would be easy for him to say what he had meant to say.
‘I’ve not been in there, I’ve been alone in the garden with Kitty. We’ve had a quarrel for the second time since…Stiva came.’
Dolly looked at him with her shrewd, comprehending eyes.
‘Come, tell me, honor bright, has there been…not in Kitty, but in that gentleman’s behavior, a tone which might be unpleasant— not unpleasant, but horrible, offensive to a husband?’
‘You mean, how shall I say…. Stay, stay in the corner!’ she said to Masha, who, detecting a faint smile in her mother’s face, had been turning round. ‘The opinion of the world would be that he is behaving as young men do behave. Il fait la cour a une jeune et jolie femme, and a husband who’s a man of the world should only be flattered by it.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Levin gloomily; ‘but you noticed it?’
‘Not only I, but Stiva noticed it. Just after breakfast he said to me in so many words, Je crois que Veslovsky fait un petit brin de cour a Kitty.’
‘Well, that’s all right then; now I’m satisfied. I’ll send him away,’ said Levin.
‘What do you mean! Are you crazy?’ Dolly cried in horror; ‘nonsense, Kostya, only think!’ she said, laughing. ‘You can go now to Fanny,’ she said to Masha. ‘No, if you wish it, I’ll speak to Stiva. He’ll take him away. He can say you’re expecting visitors. Altogether he doesn’t fit into the house.’
‘No, no, I’ll do it myself.’
‘But you’ll quarrel with him?’
‘Not a bit. I shall so enjoy it,’ Levin said, his eyes flashing with real enjoyment. ‘Come, forgive her, Dolly, she won’t do it again,’ he said of the little sinner, who had not gone to Fanny, but was standing irresolutely before her mother, waiting and looking up from under her brows to catch her mother’s eye.
The mother glanced at her. The child broke into sobs, hid her face on her mother’s lap, and Dolly laid her thin, tender hand on her head.
‘And what is there in common between us and him?’ thought Levin, and he went off to look for Veslovsky.
As he passed through the passage he gave orders for the carriage to be got ready to drive to the station.
‘The spring was broken yesterday,’ said the footman.
‘Well, the covered trap, then, and make haste. Where’s the visitor?’
‘The gentleman’s gone to his room.’
Levin came upon Veslovsky at the moment when the latter, having unpacked his things from his trunk, and laid out some new songs, was putting on his gaiters to go out riding.
Whether there was something exceptional in Levin’s face, or that Vassenka was himself conscious that ce petit brin de cour he was making was out of place in this family, but he was somewhat (as much as a young man in society can be) disconcerted at Levin’s entrance.
‘You ride in gaiters?’
‘Yes, it’s much cleaner,’ said Vassenka, putting his fat leg on a chair, fastening the bottom hook, and smiling with simple-hearted good humor.
He was undoubtedly a good-natured fellow, and Levin felt sorry for him and ashamed of himself, as his host, when he saw the shy look on Vassenka’s face.
On the table lay a piece of stick which they had broken together that morning, trying their strength. Levin took the fragment in his hands and began smashing it up, breaking bits off the stick, not knowing how to begin.
‘I wanted….’ He paused, but suddenly, remembering Kitty and everything that had happened, he said, looking him resolutely in the face: ‘I have ordered the horses to be put-to for you.’
‘How so?’ Vassenka began in surprise. ‘To drive where?’
‘For you to drive to the station,’ Levin said gloomily.
‘Are you going away, or has something happened?’
‘It happens that I expect visitors,’ said Levin, his strong fingers more and more rapidly breaking off the ends of the split stick. ‘And I’m not expecting visitors, and nothing has happened, but I beg you to go away. You can explain my rudeness as you like.’
Vassenka drew himself up.
‘I beg you to explain…’ he said with dignity, understanding at last.
‘I can’t explain,’ Levin said softly and deliberately, trying to control the trembling of his jaw; ‘and you’d better not ask.’
And as the split ends were all broken off, Levin clutched the thick ends in his finger, broke the stick in two, and carefully caught the end as it fell.
Probably the sight of those nervous fingers, of the muscles he had proved that morning at gymnastics, of the glittering eyes, the soft voice, and quivering jaws, convinced Vassenka better than any words. He bowed, shrugging his shoulders, and smiling contemptuously.
‘Can I not see Oblonsky?’
The shrug and the smile did not irritate Levin.
‘What else was there for him to do?’ he thought.
‘I’ll send him to you at once.’
‘What madness is this?’ Stepan Arkadyevitch said when, after hearing from his friend that he was being turned out of the house, he found Levin in the garden, where he was walking about waiting for his guest’s departure. ‘Mais c’est ridicule! What fly has stung you? Mais c’est du dernier ridicule! What did you think, if a young man…’
But the place where Levin had been stung was evidently still sore, for he turned pale again, when Stepan Arkadyevitch would have enlarged on the reason, and he himself cut him short.
‘Please don’t go into it! I can’t help it. I feel ashamed of how I’m treating you and him. But it won’t be, I imagine, a great grief to him to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife.’
‘But it’s insulting to him! Et puis c’est ridicule.’
‘And to me it’s both insulting and distressing! And I’m not at fault in any way, and there’s no need for me to suffer.’
‘Well, this I didn’t expect of you! On peut etre jaloux, mais a ce point, c’est du dernier ridicule!’
Levin turned quickly, and walked away from him into the depths of the avenue, and he went on walking up and down alone. Soon he heard the rumble of the trap, and saw from behind the trees how Vassenka, sitting in the hay (unluckily there was no seat in the trap) in his Scotch cap, was driven along the avenue, jolting up and down over the ruts.
‘What’s this?’ Levin thought, when a footman ran out of the house and stopped the trap. It was the mechanician, whom Levin had totally forgotten. The mechanician, bowing low, said something to Veslovsky, then clambered into the trap, and they drove off together.
Stepan Arkadyevitch and the princess were much upset by Levin’s action. And he himself felt not only in the highest degree ridicule, but also utterly guilty and disgraced. But remembering what sufferings he and his wife had been through, when he asked himself how he should act another time, he answered that he should do just the same again.
In spite of all this, towards the end of that day, everyone except the princess, who could not pardon Levin’s action, became extraordinarily lively and good humored, like children after a punishment or grown-up people after a dreary, ceremonious reception, so that by the evening Vassenka’s dismissal was spoken of, in the absence of the princess, as though it were some remote event. And Dolly, who had inherited her father’s gift of humorous storytelling, made Varenka helpless with laughter as she related for the third and fourth time, always with fresh humorous additions, how she had only just put on her new shoes for the benefit of the visitor, and on going into the drawing room, heard suddenly the rumble of the trap. And who should be in the trap but Vassenka himself, with his Scotch cap, and his songs and his gaiters, and all, sitting in the hay.
‘If only you’d ordered out the carriage! But no! and then I hear: ‘Stop!’ Oh, I thought they’ve relented. I look out, and behold a fat German being sat down by him and driving away…. And my new shoes all for nothing!…’
Chapter 16
Darya Alexandrovna carried out her intention and went to see Anna. She was sorry to annoy her sister and to do anything Levin disliked. She quite understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to have anything to do with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see Anna, and show her that her feelings could not be changed, in spite of the change in her position. That she might be independent of the Levins in this expedition, Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire horses for the drive; but Levin learning of it went to her to protest.
‘What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if I did dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my horses,’ he said. ‘You never told me that you were going for certain. Hiring horses in the village is disagreeable to me, and, what’s of more importance, they’ll undertake the job and never get you there. I have horses. And if you don’t want to wound me, you’ll take mine.’
Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and on the day fixed Levin had ready for his sister-in-law a set of four horses and relays, getting them together from the farmand saddle-horses—not at all a smart-looking set, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the whole distance in a single day. At that moment, when horses were wanted for the princess, who was going, and for the midwife, it was a difficult matter for Levin to make up the number, but the duties of hospitality would not let him allow Darya Alexandrovna to hire horses when staying in his house. Moreover, he was well aware that the twenty roubles that would be asked for the journey were a serious matter for her; Darya Alexandrovna’s pecuniary affairs, which were in a very unsatisfactory state, were taken to heart by the Levins as if they were their own.
Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak. The road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted along merrily, and on the box, besides the coachman, sat the counting-house clerk, whom Levin was sending instead of a groom for greater security. Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only on reaching the inn where the horses were to be changed.
After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant’s with whom Levin had stayed on the way to Sviazhsky’s, and chatting with the women about their children, and with the old man about Count Vronsky, whom the latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna, at ten o’clock, went on again. At home, looking after her children, she had no time to think. So now, after this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she never had before, and from the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to look after them. ‘If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if Grisha isn’t kicked by a horse, and Lily’s stomach isn’t upset again!’ she thought. But these questions of the present were succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She began thinking how she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew the drawing room furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her children in the world. ‘The girls are all right,’ she thought; ‘but the boys?’
‘It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only because I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course, there’s no counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there’s another baby coming?…’ And the thought struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman was that in sorrow she should bring forth children.
‘The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the child—that’s what’s so intolerable,’ she thought, picturing to herself her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled the conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young woman had answered cheerfully:
‘I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.’
‘Well, did you grieve very much for her?’ asked Darya Alexandrovna.
‘Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.’
This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed a grain of truth.
‘Yes, altogether,’ thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life, ‘pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything, and most of all—hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I’m with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment…then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains….’
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child. ‘Then the children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up; evil propensities’ (she thought of little Masha’s crime among the raspberries), ‘education, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children.’ And there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.
‘And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if it weren’t for spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we should be managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty have so much tact that we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on. They’ll have children, they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can’t even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil!… One’s whole life ruined!’ Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.
‘Is it far now, Mihail?’ Darya Alexandrovna asked the counting house clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were frightening her.
‘From this village, they say, it’s five miles.’ The carriage drove along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders, gaily and noisily chattering. They stood still on the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of their enjoyment of life. ‘They’re all living, they’re all enjoying life,’ Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, ‘while I, let out, as it were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all, but not I.
‘And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,’ she thought about her husband, ‘and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,’ Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at herself in the looking glass. She had a traveling looking glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying counting house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the glass.
But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always particularly attentive to her, of Stiva’s good-hearted friend, Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else, a quite young man, who—her husband had told her it as a joke—thought her more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. ‘Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every impression,’ thought Darya Alexandrovna,—and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at this avowal made her smile.
In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to Vozdvizhenskoe.