“What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing
unhappy beings into the world!” She looked at Dolly, but without waiting
for a reply she went on:
“I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children,” she said.
“If they are not, at any rate they are not unhappy; while if they are unhappy,
I alone should be to blame for it.”
These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her own
reflections; but she heard them without understanding them. “How can one
wrong creatures that don’t exist?” she thought. And all at once the idea
struck her: could it possibly, under any circumstances, have been better for
her favorite Grisha if he had never existed? And this seemed to her so wild,
so strange, that she shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling,
mad ideas.
“No, I don’t know; it’s not right,” was all she said, with an expression of
disgust on her face.
“Yes, but you mustn’t forget that you and I…. And besides that,” added
Anna, in spite of the wealth of her arguments and the poverty of Dolly’s
objections, seeming still to admit that it was not right, “don’t forget the
chief point, that I am not now in the same position as you. For you the
question is: do you desire not to have any more children; while for me it is:
do I desire to have them? And that’s a great difference. You must see that I
can’t desire it in my position.”
Darya Alexandrovna made no reply. She suddenly felt that she had got
far away from Anna; that there lay between them a barrier of questions on
which they could never agree, and about which it was better not to speak.
Chapter 24
“Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your position, if
possible,” said Dolly.
“Yes, if possible,” said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly different
tone, subdued and mournful.
“Surely you don’t mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your husband
had consented to it.”
“Dolly, I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Oh, we won’t then,” Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing the
expression of suffering on Anna’s face. “All I see is that you take too
gloomy a view of things.”
“I? Not at all! I’m always bright and happy. You see, je fais des passions.
Veslovsky….”
“Yes, to tell the truth, I don’t like Veslovsky’s tone,” said Darya
Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject.
“Oh, that’s nonsense! It amuses Alexey, and that’s all; but he’s a boy, and
quite under my control. You know, I turn him as I please. It’s just as it might
be with your Grisha…. Dolly!”—she suddenly changed the subject—“you
say I take too gloomy a view of things. You can’t understand. It’s too awful!
I try not to take any view of it at all.”
“But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can.”
“But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexey, and say I
don’t think about it. I don’t think about it!” she repeated, and a flush rose
into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and sighed heavily. With
her light step she began pacing up and down the room, stopping now and
then. “I don’t think of it? Not a day, not an hour passes that I don’t think of
it, and blame myself for thinking of it … because thinking of that may drive
me mad. Drive me mad!” she repeated. “When I think of it, I can’t sleep
without morphine. But never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me,
divorce. In the first place, he won’t give me a divorce. He’s under the
influence of Countess Lidia Ivanovna now.”
Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head, following
Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.
“You ought to make the attempt,” she said softly.
“Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?” she said, evidently
giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and learned by
heart. “It means that I, hating him, but still recognizing that I have wronged
him—and I consider him magnanimous—that I humiliate myself to write to
him…. Well, suppose I make the effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating
refusal or consent…. Well, I have received his consent, say….” Anna was at
that moment at the furthest end of the room, and she stopped there, doing
something to the curtain at the window. “I receive his consent, but my … my
son? They won’t give him up to me. He will grow up despising me, with his
father, whom I’ve abandoned. Do you see, I love … equally, I think, but
both more than myself—two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.”
She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with
her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white dressing gown her
figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She bent her head, and
with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at Dolly, a thin little
pitiful figure in her patched dressing jacket and nightcap, shaking all over
with emotion.
“It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other. I
can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t
have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything.
And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of it.
So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything. You can’t with your pure
heart understand all that I’m suffering.” She went up, sat down beside
Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her face and took her hand.
“What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise
me. I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I
am,” she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears.
Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed. She
had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now
she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home and of
her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to
her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed to her now
so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day
outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next
day.
Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine-glass and dropped
into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient was
morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a little while, she went into
her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind.
When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He was
looking for traces of the conversation which he knew that, staying so long
in Dolly’s room, she must have had with her. But in her expression of
restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he could find nothing but the
beauty that always bewitched him afresh though he was used to it, the
consciousness of it, and the desire that it should affect him. He did not want
to ask her what they had been talking of, but he hoped that she would tell
him something of her own accord. But she only said:
“I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’ve known her a long while, you know. She’s very good-hearted, I
suppose, mais excessivement terre-à-terre. Still, I’m very glad to see her.”
He took Anna’s hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.
Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him. Next morning, in spite of the
protests of her hosts, Darya Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward
journey. Levin’s coachman, in his by no means new coat and shabby hat,
with his ill-matched horses and his coach with the patched mud-guards,
drove with gloomy determination into the covered gravel approach.
Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the
gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her hosts
were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and that it was better
for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew that now, from Dolly’s
departure, no one again would stir up within her soul the feelings that had
been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but
yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her
soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.
As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a
delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men how they
had liked being at Vronsky’s, when suddenly the coachman, Philip,
expressed himself unasked:
“Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all they gave
us. Everything cleared up till there wasn’t a grain left by cockcrow. What
are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now down to forty-five kopecks.
At our place, no fear, all comers may have as much as they can eat.”
“The master’s a screw,” put in the counting-house clerk.
“Well, did you like their horses?” asked Dolly.
“The horses!—there’s no two opinions about them. And the food was
good. But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna. I don’t
know what you thought,” he said, turning his handsome, good-natured face
to her.
“I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?”
