Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Seven/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt perfectly bewildered by these strange and to him unwonted discourses to which he had been listening. After the stagnation of Moscow, the complication of life in Petersburg as a general thing had an enlivening effect on him; but he liked it and was at home in it when he was among those whom he knew well. In this unfamiliar environment, he was bewildered and stupefied, and could not make anything out of it.
As he listened to the reading, and saw the brilliant eyes of Laudau—naive or knavish, he could not tell which—fixed on him, he felt a peculiar heaviness in his head. The most heterogeneous thoughts went whirling through his brain.
"Marie Sanina is happy in having lost her son. .... It would be good if I could only smoke! .... To be saved, one needs only to believe. .... The monks do not understand about this, but the Countess Lidia Ivanovna does. What makes my head feel so heavy? Is it the brandy, or the strangeness of all this? I have done nothing out of the way as yet; but I shan't venture to ask anything to-day. It is said they make you say your prayers. Suppose they should make me say mine! That would be too nonsensical. What stuff that is she is reading! But she reads well. Landau Bezzubof .... why is he Bezzubof?"
Suddenly Stepan Arkadyevitch felt that his lower jaw was irresistibly beginning to accomplish a yawn. He smoothed his whiskers to conceal the yawn, and shook himself; but the next moment he felt sure that he was asleep, and even beginning to snore. The voice of the Countess Lidia Ivanovna waked him, saying:—
"He's asleep."
Stepan Arkadyevitch waked with a start, feeling a consciousness of guilt. But instantly he was relieved to find that the words, "He's asleep," had reference, not to himself, but to Landau. The Frenchman was as sound asleep as Stepan Arkadyevitch had been. But Stepan Arkadyevitch's nap would have offended them,—he did not think of this at the time, so strange did everything seem,—but Landau's rejoiced them exceedingly, and especially the Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
"Mon ami," said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, cautiously, so as not to disturb him; and, picking up the folds of her silk gown, in the enthusiasm of the moment, calling Karenin, not Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, but, "Mon ami, donnez lui la main! vous voyez? Sh-h!" said she to the lackey, who once more entered the parlor with a message. "I can't receive it now."
The Frenchman slept, or pretended to sleep, leaning his head on the back of his arm-chair, and resting his hand on his knee, but making feeble gestures, as if he were trying to catch something.
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch got up, and cautiously, though he tripped over a table as he did so, stepped over to the chair, and put his hand into the Frenchman's hand. Stepan Arkadyevitch also got up, and opening his eyes wide, and trying to decide whether he were asleep or not, looked from one to the other, and felt his ideas growing more and more confused.
"Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu'elle ....sorte. Qu'elle sorte,"[1] murmured the Frenchman, without opening his eyes.
"Vous m'excuserez, mais vous voyez—revenez vers dix heures, encore mieux demain." [2]
"Qu'elle sorte,' repeated the Frenchman, impatiently.
"C'est moi, n'est ce pas?" asked Oblonsky, and at an affirmative sign, forgetting what he was going to ask Lidia Ivanovna, forgetting his sister's affairs, with one single desire to escape as soon as possible, hastened out on his tiptoes and rushed down into the street, as if he were fleeing from a pest-house, and for a long time talked and jested with his driver, so as to bring back his spirits.At the French Theater, which he reached in time for the last act, and afterward over his champagne at the the Tartars', Stepan Arkadyevitch gradually began to breathe more freely in the familiar atmosphere. Nevertheless, all that evening he was very far from being himself.
When he returned to the house of Piotr Oblonsky, where he made his home in Petersburg, he found a note from Betsy. She wrote him that she was very desirous of finishing their talk, and urged him to call the next day. He had hardly finished reading this note and making up a face at it, when heavy shuffling steps were heard down-stairs as of men lifting some heavy object.
Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to see what it was. It was the rejuvenated Piotr Oblonsky, who was so tipsy that he could not walk up-stairs; but when he caught sight of Stepan Arkadyevitch, he ordered his attendants to put him on his feet, and, clinging to Stepan Arkadyevitch's arm, he managed to reach his room, where he began to relate how he had spent the evening, till he fell asleep.
Stepan Arkadyevitch himself was in such a weak state of mind, that, contrary to his custom, he did not fall asleep quickly. What he had heard and seen during the day was disgusting. But more disgusting than anything else was the recollection of the evening at the Countess Lidia Ivanovna's.
The next day he received from Alekseï Aleksandrovitch a flat refusal in the matter of the divorce, and knew that this decision was based on the words which the Frenchman had uttered during his slumber, real or feigned.