will you let me know when and where I could see him away from
home? I do not anticipate a refusal, knowing the magnanimity of him
with whom it rests. You cannot conceive the craving I have to see him,
and so cannot conceive the gratitude your help will arouse in me.
“Anna.”
Everything in this letter exasperated Countess Lidia Ivanovna: its
contents and the allusion to magnanimity, and especially its free and easy—
as she considered—tone.
“Say that there is no answer,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, and
immediately opening her blotting-book, she wrote to Alexey
Alexandrovitch that she hoped to see him at one o’clock at the levee.
“I must talk with you of a grave and painful subject. There we will
arrange where to meet. Best of all at my house, where I will order tea as
you like it. Urgent. He lays the cross, but He gives the strength to bear it,”
she added, so as to give him some slight preparation. Countess Lidia
Ivanovna usually wrote some two or three letters a day to Alexey
Alexandrovitch. She enjoyed that form of communication, which gave
opportunity for a refinement and air of mystery not afforded by their
personal interviews.
Chapter 24
The levee was drawing to a close. People met as they were going away,
and gossiped of the latest news, of the newly bestowed honors and the
changes in the positions of the higher functionaries.
“If only Countess Marya Borissovna were Minister of War, and Princess
Vatkovskaya were Commander-in-Chief,” said a gray-headed, little old man
in a gold-embroidered uniform, addressing a tall, handsome maid of honor
who had questioned him about the new appointments.
“And me among the adjutants,” said the maid of honor, smiling.
“You have an appointment already. You’re over the ecclesiastical
department. And your assistant’s Karenin.”
“Good-day, prince!” said the little old man to a man who came up to him.
“What were you saying of Karenin?” said the prince.
“He and Putyatov have received the Alexander Nevsky.”
“I thought he had it already.”
“No. Just look at him,” said the little old man, pointing with his
embroidered hat to Karenin in a court uniform with the new red ribbon
across his shoulders, standing in the doorway of the hall with an influential
member of the Imperial Council. “Pleased and happy as a brass farthing,”
he added, stopping to shake hands with a handsome gentleman of the
bedchamber of colossal proportions.
“No; he’s looking older,” said the gentleman of the bedchamber.
“From overwork. He’s always drawing up projects nowadays. He won’t
let a poor devil go nowadays till he’s explained it all to him under heads.”
“Looking older, did you say? Il fait des passions. I believe Countess
Lidia Ivanovna’s jealous now of his wife.”
“Oh, come now, please don’t say any harm of Countess Lidia Ivanovna.”
“Why, is there any harm in her being in love with Karenin?”
“But is it true Madame Karenina’s here?”
“Well, not here in the palace, but in Petersburg. I met her yesterday with
Alexey Vronsky, bras dessous, bras dessous, in the Morsky.”
“C’est un homme qui n’a pas,…” the gentleman of the bedchamber was
beginning, but he stopped to make room, bowing, for a member of the
Imperial family to pass.
Thus people talked incessantly of Alexey Alexandrovitch, finding fault
with him and laughing at him, while he, blocking up the way of the member
of the Imperial Council he had captured, was explaining to him point by
point his new financial project, never interrupting his discourse for an
instant for fear he should escape.
Almost at the same time that his wife left Alexey Alexandrovitch there
had come to him that bitterest moment in the life of an official—the
moment when his upward career comes to a full stop. This full stop had
arrived and everyone perceived it, but Alexey Alexandrovitch himself was
not yet aware that his career was over. Whether it was due to his feud with
Stremov, or his misfortune with his wife, or simply that Alexey
Alexandrovitch had reached his destined limits, it had become evident to
everyone in the course of that year that his career was at an end. He still
filled a position of consequence, he sat on many commissions and
committees, but he was a man whose day was over, and from whom
nothing was expected. Whatever he said, whatever he proposed, was heard
as though it were something long familiar, and the very thing that was not
needed. But Alexey Alexandrovitch was not aware of this, and, on the
contrary, being cut off from direct participation in governmental activity, he
saw more clearly than ever the errors and defects in the action of others, and
thought it his duty to point out means for their correction. Shortly after his
separation from his wife, he began writing his first note on the new judicial
procedure, the first of the endless series of notes he was destined to write in
the future.
Alexey Alexandrovitch did not merely fail to observe his hopeless
position in the official world, he was not merely free from anxiety on this
head, he was positively more satisfied than ever with his own activity.
“He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how
he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things that are
of the world, how he may please his wife,” says the Apostle Paul, and
Alexey Alexandrovitch, who was now guided in every action by Scripture,
often recalled this text. It seemed to him that ever since he had been left
without a wife, he had in these very projects of reform been serving the
Lord more zealously than before.
The unmistakable impatience of the member of the Council trying to get
away from him did not trouble Alexey Alexandrovitch; he gave up his
exposition only when the member of the Council, seizing his chance when
one of the Imperial family was passing, slipped away from him.
Left alone, Alexey Alexandrovitch looked down, collecting his thoughts,
then looked casually about him and walked towards the door, where he
hoped to meet Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
“And how strong they all are, how sound physically,” thought Alexey
Alexandrovitch, looking at the powerfully built gentleman of the
bedchamber with his well-combed, perfumed whiskers, and at the red neck
of the prince, pinched by his tight uniform. He had to pass them on his way.
“Truly is it said that all the world is evil,” he thought, with another sidelong
glance at the calves of the gentleman of the bedchamber.
Moving forward deliberately, Alexey Alexandrovitch bowed with his
customary air of weariness and dignity to the gentleman who had been
talking about him, and looking towards the door, his eyes sought Countess
Lidia Ivanovna.
“Ah! Alexey Alexandrovitch!” said the little old man, with a malicious
light in his eyes, at the moment when Karenin was on a level with them,
and was nodding with a frigid gesture, “I haven’t congratulated you yet,”
said the old man, pointing to his newly received ribbon.
“Thank you,” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch. “What an exquisite day
today,” he added, laying emphasis in his peculiar way on the word
exquisite.
That they laughed at him he was well aware, but he did not expect
anything but hostility from them; he was used to that by now.
Catching sight of the yellow shoulders of Lidia Ivanovna jutting out
above her corset, and her fine pensive eyes bidding him to her, Alexey
Alexandrovitch smiled, revealing untarnished white teeth, and went towards
her.
Lidia Ivanovna’s dress had cost her great pains, as indeed all her dresses
had done of late. Her aim in dress was now quite the reverse of that she had
pursued thirty years before. Then her desire had been to adorn herself with
something, and the more adorned the better. Now, on the contrary, she was
perforce decked out in a way so inconsistent with her age and her figure,
that her one anxiety was to contrive that the contrast between these
adornments and her own exterior should not be too appalling. And as far as
Alexey Alexandrovitch was concerned she succeeded, and was in his eyes
attractive. For him she was the one island not only of goodwill to him, but
of love in the midst of the sea of hostility and jeering that surrounded him.
Passing through rows of ironical eyes, he was drawn as naturally to her
loving glance as a plant to the sun.
“I congratulate you,” she said to him, her eyes on his ribbon.
Suppressing a smile of pleasure, he shrugged his shoulders, closing his
eyes, as though to say that that could not be a source of joy to him.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna was very well aware that it was one of his chief
sources of satisfaction, though he never admitted it.
“How is our angel?” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, meaning Seryozha.
