Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Seven/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
"What a wonderful, lovely, and pitiable woman!" thought Levin, as he went out with Stepan Arkadyevitch into the cold night air.
"There! what did I tell you?" demanded Oblonsky, as he saw that Levin was perfectly overcome. "Wasn't I right?"
"Yes," answered Levin, thoughtfully, "an extraordinary woman! Not only intellectual, but she has a wonderfully warm heart. What a terrible pity it is about her!"
"Now, thank God, all will soon be arranged, I hope. Well, after this, don't form hasty judgments," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, opening his carriage-door. "Proshchaï—farewell; we go different ways."
Levin went home, never ceasing to think about Anna, recaUing the smallest incidents of the evening, bringing back all the charm of her face, and understanding her situation better and better, and, at the same time, feeling the deepest commiseration for her.
When he reached his house, Kuzma told Levin that Katerina Aleksandrovna was well, and that her sisters had but just left her. He handed him at the same time two letters. Levin, as he stood in the vestibule, ran through them at once so as not to be distracted afterward. One was from his superintendent, Sokolof. Sokolof wrote that he had not found a purchaser who would give more than five and a half rubles for the wheat, and that he could not raise the money elsewhere. The other letter was from his sister. She reproached him because her affairs were not yet regulated.
"Well, we'll sell for five rubles and a half if they won't give more," thought he, settling with extraordinary promptness the first question which had been troubling him.
"It is wonderful how the time here is occupied," he said to himself, thinking of the second letter. He felt that he was to blame toward his sister, because he had not yet accomplished what she had asked him to do for her. "To-day I did not get to the court either, but I did not have a moment's time." And, making up his mind that he would surely go the next day, he went to his wife's room. On his way, he cast a quick glance back at his day. There had been nothing except conversations,—conversations in which he had listened, and in which he had taken part. No one of the subjects touched on would have occupied him when in the country, but here they were very interesting. And all the conversations in which he had engaged were good: only in two places they were not absolutely good,—one was his remark about the fish at the club, the other was something intangibly wrong in his feeling of tender pity for Anna.
Levin found his wife sad and absent-minded. The dinner of the three sisters had been merry; but afterward they had waited and waited for him, and the evening had seemed long to them; and now Kitty was alone.
"Well, what have you been doing?" she asked him, looking at him, as she did so, with a suspicious light in her eyes; but she took good care to conceal her intentions, so as not to prevent him from telling her the whole story, and with an encouraging smile she listened as he told her how he had spent the evening.
"Well, I met Vronsky at the club, and I am very glad of it. I felt very much at my ease with him, and enjoyed it. Of course, I shall try to avoid him, but still henceforth I shan't feel that awkwardness in his society." As he said these words, he remembered that in order not to "avoid him," he had immediately gone to Anna's house, and his face grew red. "Here we say the peasantry drink; but I don't know which drink more, the peasantry, or men in society. The peasantry drink on festival days, but...."
Kitty was not interested in the question how much the peasantry drink. She saw her husband's face grow red, and she wanted to know the reason,
"Well, where else did you go?"
"Stiva insisted on my going with him to Anna Arkadyevna's," answered he, blushing more and more, and his doubts as to the propriety of his visit to Anna were decided for him. He now knew that he ought not to have done so.
Kitty's eyes opened wide and flashed lightning at the mention of Anna; but she restrained herself, and, concealing her emotion, she misled him.
She merely said, "Ah!"
"You are not going to be vexed because I went? Stiva begged me to go; and Dolly wanted me to."
"Oh, no!" said she; but in her eyes he saw a look which boded little good.
"She is a very charming woman, who is very much to be pitied, a good woman," continued Levin; and he described the life which Anna led, and gave her message of remembrance to Kitty.
"Yes, of course she is to be pitied," said Kitty, when he had finished. "Whom did you get a letter from?"
He told her, and, misled by her apparent calmness, went to undress.
When he came back, he found Kitty in the same armchair. When he approached, she looked at him, and burst into tears.
"What is it? What's the matter?" he asked, with some annoyance; for he understood the cause of her tears.
"You are in love with that horrid woman. She has bewitched you. I saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What will be the end of it? You were at the club; you drank too much; you gambled; and then you went—where! No! this shall not go on. We must leave. I am going home to-morrow!"
It was long before Levin could pacify his wife; and when at last he succeeded, it was only by acknowledging that his feeling of pity for Anna, together with the wine, had clouded his brain, and that he had fallen under her seductive influence, and by promising that he would avoid her. What he acknowledged with more sincerity was the ill effect produced on him by this idle life in Moscow, passed in eating, drinking, and gossiping. They talked till three o'clock in the morning. Only when it was three o'clock were they sufficiently reconciled to go to sleep.