Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Four/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
KARENIN and his wife continued to live in the same house, and to meet every day, and yet they remained entire strangers to each other. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch made a point every day to be seen with his wife so that the servants might not have the right to gossip, but he avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never seen there; Anna met him outside, and her husband knew it.
All three suffered from a situation which would have been intolerable for a single day had not each believed it to be transitory. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch expected to see this passion, like everything else in the world, come to an end and thus his name would not be dishonored. Anna, the cause of all the trouble, and the one on whom the consequences weighed the most cruelly, accepted her position simply and solely because she expected—nay, was firmly convinced—that the matter would soon be explained and settled. She had not the least idea how it would come about, but she was certain that it would now come about very speedily.
Vronsky in spite of himself, submitting to her views, was also awaiting something to happen independent of himself, which should resolve all their difficulty.
Toward the middle of the winter Vronsky had to spend a very tiresome week. He was delegated to show a foreign prince about Petersburg. Vronsky himself was a representative Russian. Not only was he irreproachable in his bearing but he was accustomed to the society of such exalted personages; therefore he was given the charge of the prince. But this responsibility was very distasteful to him. The prince did not want to let anything pass concerning which he might be asked on his return, "Did you see that in Russia?" And moreover he wanted to enjoy as far as possible all the pleasures peculiar to the country. Vronsky was obliged to be his guide in the one and in the other. In the morning they went out to see the sights; in the evening they took part in the national amusements.
This prince enjoyed exceptionally good health, even for a prince; and, owing to his gymnastic exercises and the scrupulous care he took of himself, notwithstanding the excesses to which he let his love for pleasure carry him, he remained as fresh as a great, green, shiny Dutch cucumber.
He had been a great traveler, and had found that one of the great advantages of easy modern communication consisted in the fact that it brought national amusements into easy reach. In Spain he had given serenades, and fallen in love with a Spanish girl who played the mandolin; in Switzerland he had killed a chamois; in England leaped ditches in a red shooting jacket, and shot two hundred pheasants on a wager; in Turkey he had penetrated a harem; in India he had ridden the elephant; and now he wanted to taste the special pleasures that Russia afforded.
Vronsky, as master of ceremonies, arranged, with no little difficulty, a program of amusements truly Russian in character. There were races and blinui, or carnival cakes, and bear-hunts and troïka parties and gipsies, and feasts set forth with Russian dishes, and the prince with extraordinary aptitude entered into the spirit of these Russian sports, broke his waiter of glasses with the rest, took a gipsy girl on his knee, and apparently asked himself if the whole Russian spirit consisted only in this, without going further.
In reality, the prince took more delight in French actresses, ballet-dancers, and white-seal champagne, than in all the other pleasures which the Russians could offer him.
Vronsky was accustomed to princes, but either because he had changed of late, or else because he had too close a view of this particular prince, this week seemed terribly burdensome to him. During the whole week, without cessation, he experienced a feeling like that of a man placed in charge of a dangerous lunatic, who dreaded his patient, and, at the same time, from very force of proximity, feared for his own reason. Vronsky was constantly under the necessity of keeping up the strictest barriers of official reserve in order not to feel insulted. The prince's behavior toward the very persons who, to Vronsky's amazement, were ready to crawl out of their skin to give him experiences of Russian amusements, was scornful. His criticism on the Russian women whom he wanted to study more than once made Vronsky grow red with indignation. What irritated Vronsky most violently about this prince was that he could not help seeing himself in him. And what he saw in this mirror was not flattering to his vanity. What he saw there was a very stupid, and a very self-confident, and very healthy, and very fastidious man, and that was all. He was a gentleman[1] and Vronsky could not deny the fact. He was smooth and frank with his superiors, free and easy with his equals, coolly kind toward his inferiors. Vronsky himself was exactly the same, and was proud of it; but in his relations to the prince he was the inferior, and this scornfully good-natured treatment of himself nettled him.
"Stupid ox! Is it possible that I am like him?" he thought.
However this may have been, at the end of the week, when he took leave of the prince, who was on his way to Moscow, he was delighted to be delivered from this inconvenient situation and this disagreeable mirror. They went directly to the station from a bear-hunt, which had occupied all the night with brilliant exhibitions of Russian daring.
- ↑ Buil dzhentl'men.