Читать книгу Anna Karenina (Maude Translation, Unabridged and Annotated) - Leo Tolstoy - Страница 48

STEPS were heard at the entrance, and the Princess Betsy, knowing that it was Anna, glanced at Vronsky. He was looking at the door with a strange new expression on his face. He gazed joyfully, intently, and yet timidly at the lady who was entering, and slowly rose from his seat. Anna entered the room holding herself, as usual, very erect, and without changing the direction of her eyes, approached her hostess, walking with that quick, firm yet light step which distinguished her from other Society women. She shook hands, smilingly, and with the same smile looked round at Vronsky. He bowed low and moved a chair toward her.

Anna responded only by an inclination of the head, though she blushed and frowned. But immediately, nodding rapidly to her acquaintances and pressing the hands extended to her, she turned again to her hostess:

‘I have just been at the Countess Lydia’s. I meant to come sooner, but could not get away. Sir John was there — he is very interesting.’

‘Oh, that missionary?’

‘Yes, he was telling us about Indian life. It was very interesting.’ The conversation, interrupted by her entrance, again burnt up like the flame of a lamp that has been blown about.

‘Sir John! Oh yes, Sir John! I have seen him. He speaks very well. The elder Vlasyeva is quite in love with him.’

‘And is it true that the younger Vlasyeva is going to be married to Topov?’

‘Yes; they say it’s quite settled.’

‘I am surprised at her parents. They say it’s a love match.’

‘Love match! What antediluvian ideas you have! Who talks of love nowadays?’ said the ambassador’s wife.

‘What’s to be done? That silly old fashion hasn’t died out yet!’ said Vronsky.

‘So much the worse for those who follow the fashion! I know of happy marriages, but only such as are founded on reason.’

‘Yes, but how often the happiness of marriages founded on reason crumbles to dust because the very passion that was disregarded makes itself felt later,’ said Vronsky.

‘But by “marriages founded on reason,” we mean marriages between those who have both passed through that madness. It’s like scarlet fever: one has to get it over.’

‘Then some one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.’

‘When I was young I was in love with a chorister,’ said Princess Myagkaya. ‘I don’t know whether it did me any good.’

‘No, joking apart, I believe that to understand love one must first make a mistake and then correct it,’ said the Princess Betsy.

‘Even after marriage?’ said the ambassador’s wife archly.

‘It is never too late to mend!’ said the attaché, quoting the English proverb.

‘Exactly!’ chimed in Betsy. ‘One has to make mistakes and correct them. What do you think?’ she asked, addressing Anna, who with a scarcely discernible resolute smile was listening to this conversation.

‘I think,’ replied Anna, toying with the glove she had pulled off, ‘I think … if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.’

Vronsky had gazed at Anna and with sinking heart waited to hear what she would say. He sighed, as after a danger averted, when she had uttered these words.

Suddenly Anna addressed him:

‘I have received a letter from Moscow. They write that Kitty Shcherbatskaya is very ill.’

‘Really?’ said Vronsky, frowning.

Anna glanced sternly at him. ‘It does not interest you?’

‘On the contrary, it interests me very much! What exactly do they write, if I may ask?’ he inquired.

Anna rose and went up to Betsy. ‘Give me a cup of tea,’ she said, stopping behind Betsy’s chair.

While Betsy was pouring out the tea, Vronsky went up to Anna. ‘What do they write?’ he asked again.

‘I often think men don’t understand honour, though they are always talking about it,’ said Anna, without answering his question. ‘I have long wanted to tell you,’ she added, and, moving a few steps to a side table on which lay some albums, she sat down.

‘I don’t quite understand your meaning,’ he said, handing her the cup.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ she began again, without looking at him, ‘that you have behaved badly, very badly.’

‘Don’t I know that I behaved badly? But who was the cause?’

‘Why say that to me?’ she asked, looking severely at him.

‘You know why,’ he answered boldly and joyously, meeting her look and continuing to gaze at her.

It was not he, but she, who became abashed.

‘That only proves you have no heart,’ she said. But her look said that she knew he had a heart and that she therefore feared him.

‘What you have just referred to was a mistake, and not love.’

Anna shuddered, and said: ‘Don’t you remember that I forbade you to mention that word, that horrid word?’ But then she felt that the one word forbade showed that she claimed certain rights over him, thereby encouraging him to speak of love. ‘I have long wanted to say that to you,’ she went on, looking resolutely into his eyes, her face all aglow and suffused with a burning blush, ‘and to-day I came on purpose, knowing I should meet you here. I have come to tell you that this must stop! I have never till now had to blush before anyone, but you make me feel as if I were guilty of something.’

He looked at her, and was struck by the new, spiritual beauty of her face.

‘What do you want of me?’ he asked, simply and seriously.

‘I want you to go to Moscow and beg Kitty’s pardon,’ said she.

‘You don’t want that,’ he replied.

He saw that she was saying what she forced herself to utter and not what she wished to say.

‘If you love me as you say you do,’ she whispered, ‘behave so that I may be at peace.’

His face brightened.

‘Don’t you know that you are all my life to me? … But peace I do not know, and can’t give to you. My whole being, my love … yes! I cannot think about you and about myself separately. You and I are one to me. And I do not see before us the possibility of peace either for me or for you. I see the possibility of despair, misfortune … or of happiness — what happiness! … Is it impossible?’ he added with his lips only, but she heard.

She exerted all the powers of her mind to say what she ought; but instead she fixed on him her eyes filled with love and did not answer at all.

‘This is it!’ he thought with rapture. ‘Just as I was beginning to despair, and when it seemed as though the end would never come … here it is! She loves me! She acknowledges it!’

‘Do this for me: never say such words to me, and let us be good friends.’ These were her words, but her eyes said something very different.

‘Friends we shall not be, you know that yourself; but whether we shall be the happiest or the most miserable of human beings … rests with you.’

She wished to say something, but he interrupted her.

‘I ask only one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now; but if even that is impossible, command me to disappear, and I will do it. You shall not see me if my presence is painful to you.’

‘I don’t want to drive you away.’

‘Only don’t change anything. Leave everything as it is!’ he said with trembling voice. ‘Here is your husband.’

Indeed, just at that moment Karenin, with his deliberate, ungraceful gait, entered the drawing-room.

He glanced at his wife and Vronsky, went up to the hostess, and having sat down with a cup of tea began talking in his deliberate and always clear tones, in his usual ironical way ridiculing somebody.

‘Your Hotel Rambouillet is in full muster,’ said he, glancing round the whole company, ‘the Graces and the Muses.’

But the Princess Betsy could not bear that tone of his: ‘sneering’, she called it in English: so, like a clever hostess, she at once led him into a serious conversation on universal military service. Karenin was immediately absorbed in the conversation, and began defending the new law very earnestly against the Princess Betsy, who attacked it.

Vronsky and Anna remained sitting at the little table.

‘This is becoming indecent!’ whispered a lady, indicating by a glance Vronsky, Anna, and Anna’s husband.

‘What did I tell you?’ replied Anna’s friend.

Not these two ladies alone, but nearly all those present in the drawing-room, even the Princess Myagkaya and Betsy herself, several times glanced across at the pair who had gone away from the general circle, as if their having done so disturbed the others. Only Karenin did not once glance that way and was not distracted from the interesting conversation in which he was engaged.

Noticing the unpleasant impression produced on every one, the Princess Betsy manoeuvred for some one else to take her place and to listen to Karenin, and she herself went up to Anna.

‘I am always amazed at your husband’s clearness and exactitude of expression,’ she said. ‘The most transcendental ideas become accessible to me when he speaks.’

‘Oh yes!’ said Anna, radiant with a smile of happiness and not understanding a single word of what Betsy was saying; and going across to the big table she joined in the general conversation.

After half an hour’s stay Karenin went up to his wife and suggested that they should go home together; but, without looking at him, she answered that she would stay to supper. Karenin bowed to the company and went away.

The Karenins’ fat old Tartar coachman, in his shiny leather coat, was finding it hard to control the near grey horse that had grown restive with cold, waiting before the portico. The footman stood holding open the carriage door. The hall-porter stood with his hand on the outer front door, Anna with her deft little hand was disengaging the lace of her sleeve which had caught on a hook of her fur coat, and with bent head was listening with delight to what Vronsky, who accompanied her, was saying.

‘Granted that you have not said anything! I don’t demand anything,’ he was saying, ‘but you know that it is not friendship I want! Only one happiness is possible for me in life, the word you so dislike — yes, love …’

‘Love,’ she slowly repeated to herself, and suddenly, while releasing the lace, she added aloud: ‘The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand,’ and she looked him in the face. ‘Au revoir!’

She gave him her hand, and with her quick elastic step went past the hall-porter and vanished into the carriage.

Her glance and the touch of her hand burnt him. He kissed the palm of his hand where she had touched it, and went home happy in the knowledge that in this one evening he had made more progress toward his aim than he had during the previous two months.