CHAPTER VII
Steps were heard near the door, and the Princess Betsy, knowing that it was Madame Karenina, looked at Vronsky. He was looking toward the door, and his face had a strange, new expression. Joyfully, expectantly, and almost timidly he gazed at Anna as she entered, and he rose slowly. Anna came into the drawing-room, as always holding herself very erect and looking neither to right nor to left. She crossed the short distance between her and the hostess, with that rapid, light, but decided step which distinguished her from all the other women of this circle. She went directly up to Betsy, and shook hands with a smile, and with the same smile she looked at Vronsky, He bowed low and offered her a chair.
She responded only by bending her head a little, and blushed, and frowned. But instantly she was nodding to her acquaintances and shaking hands; then she turned to Betsy:—
"I have been at the Countess Lidya's; I wanted to get away earlier, but I was detained. Sir John was there. He is very interesting."
"Oh, that missionary?"
"Yes; he related many very curious things about life in India."
The conversation, which Anna's entrance had interrupted, again wavered, like the flame of a lamp in a draught.
"Sir John! yes, Sir John! I have seen him. He speaks well. The Vlasieva is actually in love with him!"
"Is it true that the youngest Vlasieva is going to marry Topof?"
"Yes; people say that it is fully decided."
"I am astonished at her parents. They say that it is a love-match."
"A love-match? What antediluvian ideas you have! Who speaks of love in our days?" said the ambassador's wife.
"What is to be done about it? That foolish old custom has not entirely gone out of date," said Vronsky.
"So much the worse for those who adhere to it; the only happy marriages that I know about are those of reason."
"Yes; but how often it happens that these marriages of reason break like ropes of sand, precisely because of this love which you affect to scorn!" said Vronsky.
"But what we call a marriage of reason is where both parties take an equal risk. It is like scarlatina, through which we all must pass."
"In that case it would be wise to find an artificial means of inoculation for love, as for small-pox."
"When I was young I fell in love with a sacristan; I should like to know what good that did me!" said the Princess Miagkaya.
"No; but, jesting aside, I believe that to know what love really is, one must have been deceived once, and then been set right," said the Princess Betsy.
"Even after marriage?" asked the ambassador's wife, laughing.
"It is never too late to mend," said the diplomatist, quoting the English proverb.
"But really," interrupted Betsy, "you must be deceived, so as afterwards to get into the right path. What do you think about this?" said she, addressing Anna, who was listening silently to the conversation with a scarcely perceptible smile on her firm lips.
"I think," said Anna, playing with her glove, which she had removed, "I think.... if there are as many opinions as there are heads, then there are as many ways of loving as there are hearts."
Vronsky looked at her, and with a violent beating of the heart waited for her answer; after she had spoken those words he drew a deep breath, as if he had escaped some danger.
She turned suddenly to Vronsky.
"I have just had a letter from Moscow. They write me that Kitty Shcherbatskaya is very ill."
"Really," said Vronsky, with a frown.
Anna looked at him with a severe expression.
"Does n't that interest you?"
"It certainly does. I am very sorry. Exactly what did they write you, if I may be permitted to inquire?"
Anna arose and went to Betsy.
"Will you give me a cup of tea?" she said, standing behind her chair. While Betsy was pouring the tea, Vronsky went to Anna.
"What did they write you?"
"I often think that men do not know what nobility means, though they are all the time talking about it," said Anna, not answering his question.
"I have been wanting to tell you for a long time," she added, and taking a few steps she sat down at a corner table laden with albums.
"I don't quite know what your words mean," he said, offering her a cup of tea.
She glanced at the divan near her, and he instantly sat down on it.
"Yes, I have been wanting to tell you," she continued, without looking at him. "You have acted badly,—very badly."
"Don't I know that I have? But whose fault was it?"
"Why do you say that to me?" said she, with a severe look.
"You know why," he replied boldly and joyously, meeting her gaze, and without dropping his eyes.
She, not he, felt confused.
"This simply proves that you have no heart," said she. But her eyes told the story, that she knew that he had a heart, and that therefore she feared him.
"What you were talking about just now was error, not love."
"Remember that I have forbidden you to speak that word, that hateful word," said Anna, trembling; and instantly she felt that by the use of that one word "forbidden," she recognized a certain jurisdiction over him, and thus encouraged him to speak of love. " For a long time I have been wanting to say this to you," she continued, looking steadily into his eyes, and all aflame with the color that burned in her face. "I have come to-night on purpose, knowing that I should find you here; I have come to tell you this must come to an end. I have never had to blush before any one before, and you somehow cause me to feel guilty in my own eyes."
He looked at her, and was struck with the new spiritual beauty of her face.
"What do you want me to do?" said he, simply and gravely.
"I want you to go to Moscow, and beg Kitty's pardon."
"You do not want that," said he.
He saw that she was compelling herself to say one thing, while she really desired something else.
"If you love me, as you say you do," she murmured, "then do what will give me peace!"
Vronsky's face lighted up.
"Don't you know that you are my life? But I don't know what peace means, and I can't give it to you. Myself, my love, I can give—yes, I cannot think of you and of myself separately. For me, you and I are one. I see no hope of peace for you or for me in the future. I see the possibility of despair, of misfortune,—unless I see the possibility of happiness, and what happiness! .... Is it really impossible?" he murmured, with his lips only, but she heard him.
She directed all the forces of her mind to say what she ought; but, instead of that, she looked at him with love in her eyes, and said nothing.
"Ah!" he thought, with rapture, "at the very moment when I was in despair, when it seemed I should never succeed, it has come! She loves me! She confesses it."
"Then do this for me, and never speak to me in this way again; let us be good friends," said her words: her eyes told a totally different story.
"We can never be mere friends; you yourself know it. Shall we be the most miserable, or the happiest, of human beings? It is for you to decide."
She began to speak, but he interrupted her.
"You see I ask only one thing, the right of hoping and suffering, as I do now; if it is impossible, order me to disappear, and I will disappear; you shall not see me if my presence is painful to you."
"I do not wish to drive you away."
"Then change nothing; let things go as they are," said he, with trembling voice. "Here is your husband!"
Indeed, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch at that instant was entering the drawing-room, with his calm face and awkward gait.
Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, he went first to the hostess, and then he sat down with a cup of tea, and in his slow and well-modulated voice, in his habitual tone of persiflage, which seemed always to deride some one or something, he said, as he glanced around at the assembly:—
"Your Rambouillet is complete,—the Graces and the Muses!"
But the Princess Betsy could not endure this "sneering" tone of his, as she called it,—and, like a clever hostess, quickly brought him round to a serious discussion of the forced conscription. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch immediately entered into it, and began gravely to defend the new ukase against Betsy's attacks.
Vronsky and Anna still sat near their little table.
"That is getting rather pronounced," said a lady, in a whisper, indicating with her eyes Karenin, Anna, and Vronsky.
"What did I tell you?" said Anna's friend.
Not only these ladies, but nearly all who were in the drawing-room, even the Princess Miagkaya and Betsy herself, glanced more than once at them sitting apart from the general company, as if it disturbed them. Only Alekseï Aleksandrovitch never once looked in their direction, and was not diverted from the interesting conversation on which he had started.
Betsy, perceiving the disagreeable impression that all felt, substituted some one else in her place to listen to Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, and crossed over to Anna.
"I always admire your husband's clear and explicit language," she said. "The most transcendental thoughts seem within my reach when he speaks."
"Oh, yes!" said Anna, with a radiant smile of joy, and not understanding a word that Betsy had said. Then she went over to the large table, and joined in the general conversation.
After he had stayed half an hour Alekseï Aleksandrovitch spoke to his wife and proposed to her that they should go home together; but she answered, without looking at him, that she wished to remain to supper. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch took leave of the company and departed.
Madame Karenina's coachman, a portly old Tatar, in his lacquered leather coat, was having some difficulty in restraining his left-hand gray, which was excited with the cold. A lackey stood holding open the carriage door. The Swiss was standing ready to open the outer door; Anna Arkadyevna was listening with ecstasy to what Vronsky whispered, while she was freeing, with nervous fingers, the lace of her sleeve, which had caught on the hook of her fur cloak.
"You have said nothing, let us admit, and I make no claim," Vronsky was saying, as he accompanied her down, " but you know that it is not friendship that I ask for; for me, the only possible happiness of my life is contained in that word that you do not like .... love."
"Love ...." she repeated slowly, as if she had spoken to herself; then suddenly, as she disentangled her lace, she said, "I do not like this word, because it means to much, far more than you can imagine," and she looked hirh full in the face. "Da svidanya!" [1]
She reached him her hand, and, with a quick elastic step, passed the Swiss, and disappeared in her carriage.
Her look, her pressure of his hand, filled Vronsky with passion. He kissed the palm on the place which she had touched, and went home with the happy conviction that that evening had brought him nearer to the goal of which he dreamed, than all the two months past.
- ↑ Da svidanya, like au revoir or auf wiedersehen, has no equivalent in English.