trace of shell, and there was stretched over fully half the sky an even cover
of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets. The sky had grown blue and bright; and
with the same softness, but with the same remoteness, it met his questioning
gaze.
“No,” he said to himself, “however good that life of simplicity and toil
may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her.”
Chapter 13
None but those who were most intimate with Alexey Alexandrovitch
knew that, while on the surface the coldest and most reasonable of men, he
had one weakness quite opposed to the general trend of his character.
Alexey Alexandrovitch could not hear or see a child or woman crying
without being moved. The sight of tears threw him into a state of nervous
agitation, and he utterly lost all power of reflection. The chief secretary of
his department and his private secretary were aware of this, and used to
warn women who came with petitions on no account to give way to tears, if
they did not want to ruin their chances. “He will get angry, and will not
listen to you,” they used to say. And as a fact, in such cases the emotional
disturbance set up in Alexey Alexandrovitch by the sight of tears found
expression in hasty anger. “I can do nothing. Kindly leave the room!” he
would commonly cry in such cases.
When returning from the races Anna had informed him of her relations
with Vronsky, and immediately afterwards had burst into tears, hiding her
face in her hands, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for all the fury aroused in him
against her, was aware at the same time of a rush of that emotional
disturbance always produced in him by tears. Conscious of it, and conscious
that any expression of his feelings at that minute would be out of keeping
with the position, he tried to suppress every manifestation of life in himself,
and so neither stirred nor looked at her. This was what had caused that
strange expression of deathlike rigidity in his face which had so impressed
Anna.
When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the carriage, and
making an effort to master himself, took leave of her with his usual
urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound him to nothing; he said that
tomorrow he would let her know his decision.
His wife’s words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a cruel pang
to the heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch. That pang was intensified by the
strange feeling of physical pity for her set up by her tears. But when he was
all alone in the carriage Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his surprise and delight,
felt complete relief both from this pity and from the doubts and agonies of
jealousy.
He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after
suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense of
something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw, the
sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at once that
what has so long poisoned his existence and enchained his attention, exists
no longer, and that he can live and think again, and take interest in other
things besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey Alexandrovitch was
experiencing. The agony had been strange and terrible, but now it was over;
he felt that he could live again and think of something other than his wife.
“No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it and
always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her,” he said to
himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen it: he
recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen anything
wrong before—now these incidents proved clearly that she had always been
a corrupt woman. “I made a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there
was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy. It’s not I
that am to blame,” he told himself, “but she. But I have nothing to do with
her. She does not exist for me….”
Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom his sentiments
were as much changed as towards her, ceased to interest him. The only
thing that interested him now was the question of in what way he could
best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and thus with most
justice, extricate himself from the mud with which she had spattered him in
her fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable, and useful
existence.
“I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman has
committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of the difficult
position in which she has placed me. And I shall find it,” he said to himself,
frowning more and more. “I’m not the first nor the last.” And to say nothing
of historical instances dating from the “Fair Helen” of Menelaus, recently
revived in the memory of all, a whole list of contemporary examples of
husbands with unfaithful wives in the highest society rose before Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s imagination. “Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov,
Count Paskudin, Dram…. Yes, even Dram, such an honest, capable fellow …
Semyonov, Tchagin, Sigonin,” Alexey Alexandrovitch remembered.
“Admitting that a certain quite irrational ridicule falls to the lot of these
men, yet I never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt
sympathy for it,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, though indeed this
was not the fact, and he had never felt sympathy for misfortunes of that
kind, but the more frequently he had heard of instances of unfaithful wives
betraying their husbands, the more highly he had thought of himself. “It is a
misfortune which may befall anyone. And this misfortune has befallen me.
The only thing to be done is to make the best of the position.”
And he began passing in review the methods of proceeding of men who
had been in the same position that he was in.
“Daryalov fought a duel….”
The duel had particularly fascinated the thoughts of Alexey
Alexandrovitch in his youth, just because he was physically a coward, and
was himself well aware of the fact. Alexey Alexandrovitch could not
without horror contemplate the idea of a pistol aimed at himself, and had
never made use of any weapon in his life. This horror had in his youth set
him pondering on dueling, and picturing himself in a position in which he
would have to expose his life to danger. Having attained success and an
established position in the world, he had long ago forgotten this feeling; but
the habitual bent of feeling reasserted itself, and dread of his own cowardice
proved even now so strong that Alexey Alexandrovitch spent a long while
thinking over the question of dueling in all its aspects, and hugging the idea
of a duel, though he was fully aware beforehand that he would never under
any circumstances fight one.
“There’s no doubt our society is still so barbarous (it’s not the same in
England) that very many”—and among these were those whose opinion
Alexey Alexandrovitch particularly valued—“look favorably on the duel;
but what result is attained by it? Suppose I call him out,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch went on to himself, and vividly picturing the night he
would spend after the challenge, and the pistol aimed at him, he shuddered,
and knew that he never would do it—“suppose I call him out. Suppose I am
taught,” he went on musing, “to shoot; I press the trigger,” he said to
himself, closing his eyes, “and it turns out I have killed him,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch said to himself, and he shook his head as though to dispel
such silly ideas. “What sense is there in murdering a man in order to define
one’s relation to a guilty wife and son? I should still just as much have to
decide what I ought to do with her. But what is more probable and what
would doubtless occur—I should be killed or wounded. I, the innocent
person, should be the victim—killed or wounded. It’s even more senseless.
But apart from that, a challenge to fight would be an act hardly honest on
my side. Don’t I know perfectly well that my friends would never allow me
to fight a duel—would never allow the life of a statesman, needed by
Russia, to be exposed to danger? Knowing perfectly well beforehand that
the matter would never come to real danger, it would amount to my simply
trying to gain a certain sham reputation by such a challenge. That would be
dishonest, that would be false, that would be deceiving myself and others. A
duel is quite irrational, and no one expects it of me. My aim is simply to
safeguard my reputation, which is essential for the uninterrupted pursuit of
my public duties.” Official duties, which had always been of great
consequence in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s eyes, seemed of special
importance to his mind at this moment. Considering and rejecting the duel,
Alexey Alexandrovitch turned to divorce—another solution selected by
several of the husbands he remembered. Passing in mental review all the
instances he knew of divorces (there were plenty of them in the very highest
society with which he was very familiar), Alexey Alexandrovitch could not
find a single example in which the object of divorce was that which he had
in view. In all these instances the husband had practically ceded or sold his
unfaithful wife, and the very party which, being in fault, had not the right to
contract a fresh marriage, had formed counterfeit, pseudo-matrimonial ties
with a self-styled husband. In his own case, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that
a legal divorce, that is to say, one in which only the guilty wife would be
repudiated, was impossible of attainment. He saw that the complex
conditions of the life they led made the coarse proofs of his wife’s guilt,
required by the law, out of the question; he saw that a certain refinement in
that life would not admit of such proofs being brought forward, even if he
had them, and that to bring forward such proofs would damage him in the
public estimation more than it would her.
An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a public scandal, which
would be a perfect godsend to his enemies for calumny and attacks on his
high position in society. His chief object, to define the position with the
least amount of disturbance possible, would not be attained by divorce
either. Moreover, in the event of divorce, or even of an attempt to obtain a
divorce, it was obvious that the wife broke off all relations with the husband
and threw in her lot with the lover. And in spite of the complete, as he
supposed, contempt and indifference he now felt for his wife, at the bottom
of his heart Alexey Alexandrovitch still had one feeling left in regard to her
—a disinclination to see her free to throw in her lot with Vronsky, so that
her crime would be to her advantage. The mere notion of this so
exasperated Alexey Alexandrovitch, that directly it rose to his mind he
groaned with inward agony, and got up and changed his place in the
carriage, and for a long while after, he sat with scowling brows, wrapping
his numbed and bony legs in the fleecy rug.
“Apart from formal divorce, One might still do like Karibanov, Paskudin,
and that good fellow Dram—that is, separate from one’s wife,” he went on
thinking, when he had regained his composure. But this step too presented
the same drawback of public scandal as a divorce, and what was more, a
separation, quite as much as a regular divorce, flung his wife into the arms
of Vronsky. “No, it’s out of the question, out of the question!” he said again,
twisting his rug about him again. “I cannot be unhappy, but neither she nor
he ought to be happy.”
The feeling of jealousy, which had tortured him during the period of
uncertainty, had passed away at the instant when the tooth had been with
agony extracted by his wife’s words. But that feeling had been replaced by
another, the desire, not merely that she should not be triumphant, but that
she should get due punishment for her crime. He did not acknowledge this
feeling, but at the bottom of his heart he longed for her to suffer for having
destroyed his peace of mind—his honor. And going once again over the
conditions inseparable from a duel, a divorce, a separation, and once again
rejecting them, Alexey Alexandrovitch felt convinced that there was only
one solution,—to keep her with him, concealing what had happened from
the world, and using every measure in his power to break off the intrigue,
