Although she had just said he was better and kinder than she, in the rapid
glance she flung at him, taking in his whole figure in all its details, feelings
of repulsion and hatred for him and jealousy over her son took possession
of her. With a swift gesture she put down her veil, and, quickening her pace,
almost ran out of the room.
She had not time to undo, and so carried back with her, the parcel of toys
she had chosen the day before in a toy shop with such love and sorrow.
Chapter 31
As intensely as Anna had longed to see her son, and long as she had been
thinking of it and preparing herself for it, she had not in the least expected
that seeing him would affect her so deeply. On getting back to her lonely
rooms in the hotel she could not for a long while understand why she was
there. “Yes, it’s all over, and I am again alone,” she said to herself, and
without taking off her hat she sat down in a low chair by the hearth. Fixing
her eyes on a bronze clock standing on a table between the windows, she
tried to think.
The French maid brought from abroad came in to suggest she should
dress. She gazed at her wonderingly and said, “Presently.” A footman
offered her coffee. “Later on,” she said.
The Italian nurse, after having taken the baby out in her best, came in
with her, and brought her to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on
seeing her mother, as she always did, held out her fat little hands, and with a
smile on her toothless mouth, began, like a fish with a float, bobbing her
fingers up and down the starched folds of her embroidered skirt, making
them rustle. It was impossible not to smile, not to kiss the baby, impossible
not to hold out a finger for her to clutch, crowing and prancing all over;
impossible not to offer her a lip which she sucked into her little mouth by
way of a kiss. And all this Anna did, and took her in her arms and made her
dance, and kissed her fresh little cheek and bare little elbows; but at the
sight of this child it was plainer than ever to her that the feeling she had for
her could not be called love in comparison with what she felt for Seryozha.
Everything in this baby was charming, but for some reason all this did not
go deep to her heart. On her first child, though the child of an unloved
father, had been concentrated all the love that had never found satisfaction.
Her baby girl had been born in the most painful circumstances and had not
had a hundredth part of the care and thought which had been concentrated
on her first child. Besides, in the little girl everything was still in the future,
while Seryozha was by now almost a personality, and a personality dearly
loved. In him there was a conflict of thought and feeling; he understood her,
he loved her, he judged her, she thought, recalling his words and his eyes.
And she was forever—not physically only but spiritually—divided from
him, and it was impossible to set this right.
She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the locket in
which there was Seryozha’s portrait when he was almost of the same age as
the girl. She got up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a little table an
album in which there were photographs of her son at different ages. She
wanted to compare them, and began taking them out of the album. She took
them all out except one, the latest and best photograph. In it he was in a
white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes and smiling lips. It
was his best, most characteristic expression. With her little supple hands,
her white, delicate fingers, that moved with a peculiar intensity today, she
pulled at a corner of the photograph, but the photograph had caught
somewhere, and she could not get it out. There was no paper-knife on the
table, and so, pulling out the photograph that was next to her son’s (it was a
photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with long hair),
she used it to push out her son’s photograph. “Oh, here is he!” she said,
glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was
the cause of her present misery. She had not once thought of him all the
morning. But now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so
familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.
“But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?” she
thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting she had herself
kept from him everything concerning her son. She sent to ask him to come
to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited him, rehearsing to
herself the words in which she would tell him all, and the expressions of
love with which he would console her. The messenger returned with the
answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately,
and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince Yashvin,
who had just arrived in Petersburg. “He’s not coming alone, and since
dinner yesterday he has not seen me,” she thought; “he’s not coming so that
I could tell him everything, but coming with Yashvin.” And all at once a
strange idea came to her: what if he had ceased to love her?
And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her that she
saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea. The fact that he had
not dined at home yesterday, and the fact that he had insisted on their taking
separate sets of rooms in Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming
to her alone, as though he were trying to avoid meeting her face to face.
“But he ought to tell me so. I must know that it is so. If I knew it, then I
know what I should do,” she said to herself, utterly unable to picture to
herself the position she would be in if she were convinced of his not caring
for her. She thought he had ceased to love her, she felt close upon despair,
and consequently she felt exceptionally alert. She rang for her maid and
went to her dressing-room. As she dressed, she took more care over her
appearance than she had done all those days, as though he might, if he had
grown cold to her, fall in love with her again because she had dressed and
arranged her hair in the way most becoming to her.
She heard the bell ring before she was ready. When she went into the
drawing-room it was not he, but Yashvin, who met her eyes. Vronsky was
looking through the photographs of her son, which she had forgotten on the
table, and he made no haste to look round at her.
“We have met already,” she said, putting her little hand into the huge
hand of Yashvin, whose bashfulness was so queerly out of keeping with his
immense frame and coarse face. “We met last year at the races. Give them
to me,” she said, with a rapid movement snatching from Vronsky the
photographs of her son, and glancing significantly at him with flashing
eyes. “Were the races good this year? Instead of them I saw the races in the
Corso in Rome. But you don’t care for life abroad,” she said with a cordial
smile. “I know you and all your tastes, though I have seen so little of you.”
“I’m awfully sorry for that, for my tastes are mostly bad,” said Yashvin,
gnawing at his left mustache.
Having talked a little while, and noticing that Vronsky glanced at the
clock, Yashvin asked her whether she would be staying much longer in
Petersburg, and unbending his huge figure reached after his cap.
“Not long, I think,” she said hesitatingly, glancing at Vronsky.
