he had got nearer to the attainment of his aims that evening than during the
last two months.
Chapter 8
Alexey Alexandrovitch had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact
that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a table apart, in eager conversation
with him about something. But he noticed that to the rest of the party this
appeared something striking and improper, and for that reason it seemed to
him too to be improper. He made up his mind that he must speak of it to his
wife.
On reaching home Alexey Alexandrovitch went to his study, as he
usually did, seated himself in his low chair, opened a book on the Papacy at
the place where he had laid the paper-knife in it, and read till one o’clock,
just as he usually did. But from time to time he rubbed his high forehead
and shook his head, as though to drive away something. At his usual time
he got up and made his toilet for the night. Anna Arkadyevna had not yet
come in. With a book under his arm he went upstairs. But this evening,
instead of his usual thoughts and meditations upon official details, his
thoughts were absorbed by his wife and something disagreeable connected
with her. Contrary to his usual habit, he did not get into bed, but fell to
walking up and down the rooms with his hands clasped behind his back. He
could not go to bed, feeling that it was absolutely needful for him first to
think thoroughly over the position that had just arisen.
When Alexey Alexandrovitch had made up his mind that he must talk to
his wife about it, it had seemed a very easy and simple matter. But now,
when he began to think over the question that had just presented itself, it
seemed to him very complicated and difficult.
Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions
was an insult to one’s wife, and one ought to have confidence in one’s wife.
Why one ought to have confidence—that is to say, complete conviction that
his young wife would always love him—he did not ask himself. But he had
no experience of lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and
told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that
jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had
not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something
illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey
Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of
his wife’s loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very
irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey
Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with
the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he
had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a
man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly
discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That
chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey
Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time the question presented itself to
him of the possibility of his wife’s loving someone else, and he was
horrified at it.
He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread over
the resounding parquet of the dining-room, where one lamp was burning,
over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, in which the light was reflected
on the big new portrait of himself hanging over the sofa, and across her
boudoir, where two candles burned, lighting up the portraits of her parents
and woman friends, and the pretty knick-knacks of her writing-table, that he
knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to the bedroom door, and
turned back again. At each turn in his walk, especially at the parquet of the
lighted dining-room, he halted and said to himself, “Yes, this I must decide
and put a stop to; I must express my view of it and my decision.” And he
turned back again. “But express what—what decision?” he said to himself
in the drawing-room, and he found no reply. “But after all,” he asked
himself before turning into the boudoir, “what has occurred? Nothing. She
was talking a long while with him. But what of that? Surely women in
society can talk to whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering
both myself and her,” he told himself as he went into her boudoir; but this
dictum, which had always had such weight with him before, had now no
weight and no meaning at all. And from the bedroom door he turned back
again; but as he entered the dark drawing-room some inner voice told him
that it was not so, and that if others noticed it that showed that there was
something. And he said to himself again in the dining-room, “Yes, I must
decide and put a stop to it, and express my view of it….” And again at the
turn in the drawing-room he asked himself, “Decide how?” And again he
asked himself, “What had occurred?” and answered, “Nothing,” and
recollected that jealousy was a feeling insulting to his wife; but again in the
drawing-room he was convinced that something had happened. His
thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle, without coming upon
anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her
boudoir.
There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case lying at the
top and an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly changed. He began to
think of her, of what she was thinking and feeling. For the first time he
pictured vividly to himself her personal life, her ideas, her desires, and the
idea that she could and should have a separate life of her own seemed to
him so alarming that he made haste to dispel it. It was the chasm which he
was afraid to peep into. To put himself in thought and feeling in another
person’s place was a spiritual exercise not natural to Alexey
Alexandrovitch. He looked on this spiritual exercise as a harmful and
dangerous abuse of the fancy.
“And the worst of it all,” thought he, “is that just now, at the very
moment when my great work is approaching completion” (he was thinking
of the project he was bringing forward at the time), “when I stand in need of
all my mental peace and all my energies, just now this stupid worry should
fall foul of me. But what’s to be done? I’m not one of those men who
submit to uneasiness and worry without having the force of character to
face them.
“I must think it over, come to a decision, and put it out of my mind,” he
said aloud.
“The question of her feelings, of what has passed and may be passing in
her soul, that’s not my affair; that’s the affair of her conscience, and falls
under the head of religion,” he said to himself, feeling consolation in the
sense that he had found to which division of regulating principles this new
circumstance could be properly referred.
“And so,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, “questions as to her
feelings, and so on, are questions for her conscience, with which I can have
nothing to do. My duty is clearly defined. As the head of the family, I am a
person bound in duty to guide her, and consequently, in part the person
responsible; I am bound to point out the danger I perceive, to warn her,
