countess.”
And he and his sister stood still, looking for her maid.
When they went out the Vronsky’s carriage had already driven away.
People coming in were still talking of what happened.
“What a horrible death!” said a gentleman, passing by. “They say he was
cut in two pieces.”
“On the contrary, I think it’s the easiest—instantaneous,” observed
another.
“How is it they don’t take proper precautions?” said a third.
Madame Karenina seated herself in the carriage, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and she was
with difficulty restraining her tears.
“What is it, Anna?” he asked, when they had driven a few hundred yards.
“It’s an omen of evil,” she said.
“What nonsense!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “You’ve come, that’s the
chief thing. You can’t conceive how I’m resting my hopes on you.”
“Have you known Vronsky long?” she asked.
“Yes. You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.”
“Yes?” said Anna softly. “Come now, let us talk of you,” she added,
tossing her head, as though she would physically shake off something
superfluous oppressing her. “Let us talk of your affairs. I got your letter, and
here I am.”
“Yes, all my hopes are in you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Well, tell me all about it.”
And Stepan Arkadyevitch began to tell his story.
On reaching home Oblonsky helped his sister out, sighed, pressed her
hand, and set off to his office.
Chapter 19
When Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in the little drawing-
room with a white-headed fat little boy, already like his father, giving him a
lesson in French reading. As the boy read, he kept twisting and trying to
tear off a button that was nearly off his jacket. His mother had several times
taken his hand from it, but the fat little hand went back to the button again.
His mother pulled the button off and put it in her pocket.
“Keep your hands still, Grisha,” she said, and she took up her work, a
coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at
depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her
fingers and counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day before
to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister came or not, she
had made everything ready for her arrival, and was expecting her sister-in-
law with emotion.
Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she did
not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one of the most
important personages in Petersburg, and was a Petersburg grande dame.
And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her threat to her
husband—that is to say, she remembered that her sister-in-law was coming.
“And, after all, Anna is in no wise to blame,” thought Dolly. “I know
nothing of her except the very best, and I have seen nothing but kindness
and affection from her towards myself.” It was true that as far as she could
recall her impressions at Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their
household itself; there was something artificial in the whole framework of
their family life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take
it into her head to console me!” thought Dolly. “All consolation and counsel
and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a thousand times, and
it’s all no use.”
All these days Dolly had been alone with her children. She did not want
to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of
outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna
everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of speaking freely,
and angry at the necessity of speaking of her humiliation with her, his sister,
and of hearing her ready-made phrases of good advice and comfort. She had
been on the lookout for her, glancing at her watch every minute, and, as so
often happens, let slip just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she
did not hear the bell.
Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door, she looked round,
and her care-worn face unconsciously expressed not gladness, but wonder.
She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.
“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her.
“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!”
“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the expression
of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew. “Most likely she knows,” she
thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well, come along, I’ll take
you to your room,” she went on, trying to defer as long as possible the
moment of confidences.
“Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he’s grown!” said Anna; and kissing him,
never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood still and flushed a little. “No,
please, let us stay here.”
She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in a lock of her
black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook her
hair down.
“You are radiant with health and happiness!” said Dolly, almost with
envy.
“I?… Yes,” said Anna. “Merciful heavens, Tanya! You’re the same age as
my Seryozha,” she added, addressing the little girl as she ran in. She took
her in her arms and kissed her. “Delightful child, delightful! Show me them
all.”
She mentioned them, not only remembering the names, but the years,
months, characters, illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not but
appreciate that.
“Very well, we will go to them,” she said. “It’s a pity Vassya’s asleep.”
After seeing the children, they sat down, alone now, in the drawing-room,
to coffee. Anna took the tray, and then pushed it away from her.
“Dolly,” she said, “he has told me.”
Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for phrases of
conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.
“Dolly, dear,” she said, “I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to try
to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, I’m simply sorry, sorry from
my heart for you!”
Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered. She
moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her vigorous little
hand. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not lose its frigid
expression. She said:
“To comfort me’s impossible. Everything’s lost after what has happened,
everything’s over!”
And directly she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted the
wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it and said:
“But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is it best to act in
this awful position—that’s what you must think of.”
“All’s over, and there’s nothing more,” said Dolly. “And the worst of all
is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the children, I am tied. And I
can’t live with him! it’s a torture to me to see him.”
“Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from you: tell
me about it.”
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s face.
“Very well,” she said all at once. “But I will tell you it from the
beginning. You know how I was married. With the education mamma gave
us I was more than innocent, I was stupid. I knew nothing. I know they say
men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva”—she corrected herself
—“Stepan Arkadyevitch told me nothing. You’ll hardly believe it, but till
now I imagined that I was the only woman he had known. So I lived eight
years. You must understand that I was so far from suspecting infidelity, I
regarded it as impossible, and then—try to imagine it—with such ideas, to
find out suddenly all the horror, all the loathsomeness…. You must try and
understand me. To be fully convinced of one’s happiness, and all at once….”
continued Dolly, holding back her sobs, “to get a letter … his letter to his
mistress, my governess. No, it’s too awful!” She hastily pulled out her
handkerchief and hid her face in it. “I can understand being carried away by
feeling,” she went on after a brief silence, “but deliberately, slyly deceiving
me … and with whom?… To go on being my husband together with her …
it’s awful! You can’t understand….”
“Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do understand,”
said Anna, pressing her hand.
“And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?”
Dolly resumed. “Not the slightest! He’s happy and contented.”
“Oh, no!” Anna interposed quickly. “He’s to be pitied, he’s weighed
down by remorse….”
“Is he capable of remorse?” Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her
sister-in-law’s face.
“Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for him.
We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s so
humiliated. What touched me most….” (and here Anna guessed what would
touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed for the
children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you beyond
everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would have
answered—“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she cannot
forgive me,’ he keeps saying.”
Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to
her words.
“Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for the guilty than the
innocent,” she said, “if he feels that all the misery comes from his fault. But
how am I to forgive him, how am I to be his wife again after her? For me to
live with him now would be torture, just because I love my past love for
him….”
And sobs cut short her words. But as though of set design, each time she
was softened she began to speak again of what exasperated her.
“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,” she went on. “Do you know, Anna,
my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his
children. I have worked for him, and all I had has gone in his service, and
now of course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him. No doubt
they talked of me together, or, worse still, they were silent. Do you
understand?”
Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
“And after that he will tell me…. What! can I believe him? Never! No,
everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, the reward of
my work, and my sufferings…. Would you believe it, I was teaching Grisha
just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture. What have I to strive
and toil for? Why are the children here? What’s so awful is that all at once
my heart’s turned, and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but
hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could kill him.”
“Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself. You are so
distressed, so overwrought, that you look at many things mistakenly.”
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.
“What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over
everything, and I see nothing.”
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each
word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.
“One thing I would say,” began Anna. “I am his sister, I know his
character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything” (she waved her
hand before her forehead), “that faculty for being completely carried away,
but for completely repenting too. He cannot believe it, he cannot
comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.”
“No; he understands, he understood!” Dolly broke in. “But I … you are
forgetting me … does it make it easier for me?”
“Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not realize all the
awfulness of your position. I saw nothing but him, and that the family was
broken up. I felt sorry for him, but after talking to you, I see it, as a woman,
quite differently. I see your agony, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am for
you! But, Dolly, darling, I fully realize your sufferings, only there is one
thing I don’t know; I don’t know … I don’t know how much love there is
still in your heart for him. That you know—whether there is enough for you
to be able to forgive him. If there is, forgive him!”
“No,” Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her hand once
more.
“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how men like
Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her. That never
happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred to
them. Somehow or other these women are still looked on with contempt by
them, and do not touch on their feeling for their family. They draw a sort of
line that can’t be crossed between them and their families. I don’t
understand it, but it is so.”
“Yes, but he has kissed her….”
“Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I
remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all
the poetry and loftiness of his feeling for you, and I know that the longer he
