“It will be dull for you,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, addressing
Landau; “you don’t know English, but it’s short.”
“Oh, I shall understand,” said Landau, with the same smile, and he closed
his eyes. Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna exchanged meaningful
glances, and the reading began.
Chapter 22
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt completely nonplussed by the strange talk
which he was hearing for the first time. The complexity of Petersburg, as a
rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out of his Moscow
stagnation. But he liked these complications, and understood them only in
the circles he knew and was at home in. In these unfamiliar surroundings he
was puzzled and disconcerted, and could not get his bearings. As he listened
to Countess Lidia Ivanovna, aware of the beautiful, artless—or perhaps
artful, he could not decide which—eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan
Arkadyevitch began to be conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.
The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his head. “Marie
Sanina is glad her child’s dead…. How good a smoke would be now!… To
be saved, one need only believe, and the monks don’t know how the thing’s
to be done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does know…. And why is my head
so heavy? Is it the cognac, or all this being so queer? Anyway, I fancy I’ve
done nothing unsuitable so far. But anyway, it won’t do to ask her now.
They say they make one say one’s prayers. I only hope they won’t make
me! That’ll be too imbecile. And what stuff it is she’s reading! but she has a
good accent. Landau—Bezzubov—what’s he Bezzubov for?” All at once
Stepan Arkadyevitch became aware that his lower jaw was uncontrollably
forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to cover the yawn, and shook
himself together. But soon after he became aware that he was dropping
asleep and on the very point of snoring. He recovered himself at the very
moment when the voice of Countess Lidia Ivanovna was saying “he’s
asleep.” Stepan Arkadyevitch started with dismay, feeling guilty and
caught. But he was reassured at once by seeing that the words “he’s asleep”
referred not to him, but to Landau. The Frenchman was asleep as well as
Stepan Arkadyevitch. But Stepan Arkadyevitch’s being asleep would have
offended them, as he thought (though even this, he thought, might not be so,
as everything seemed so queer), while Landau’s being asleep delighted
them extremely, especially Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
“Mon ami,” said Lidia Ivanovna, carefully holding the folds of her silk
gown so as not to rustle, and in her excitement calling Karenin not Alexey
Alexandrovitch, but “mon ami,” “donnez-lui la main. Vous voyez? Sh!” she
hissed at the footman as he came in again. “Not at home.”
The Frenchman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with his head on
the back of his chair, and his moist hand, as it lay on his knee, made faint
movements, as though trying to catch something. Alexey Alexandrovitch
got up, tried to move carefully, but stumbled against the table, went up and
laid his hand in the Frenchman’s hand. Stepan Arkadyevitch got up too, and
opening his eyes wide, trying to wake himself up if he were asleep, he
looked first at one and then at the other. It was all real. Stepan Arkadyevitch
felt that his head was getting worse and worse.
“Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu’elle
sorte! Qu’elle sorte!” articulated the Frenchman, without opening his eyes.
“Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez…. Revenez vers dix heures, encore
mieux demain.”
“Qu’elle sorte!” repeated the Frenchman impatiently.
“C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?” And receiving an answer in the affirmative,
Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor he had meant to ask of Lidia
Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister’s affairs, caring for nothing, but filled
with the sole desire to get away as soon as possible, went out on tiptoe and
ran out into the street as though from a plague-stricken house. For a long
while he chatted and joked with his cab-driver, trying to recover his spirits.
At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and afterwards at
the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan Arkadyevitch felt a little
refreshed in the atmosphere he was used to. But still he felt quite unlike
himself all that evening.
On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s, where he was staying, Stepan
Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was very
anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged him to come
next day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its contents, when
