Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Six/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
About ten o'clock the next morning, after inspecting the farm, Levin knocked at the door of the room in which Vasenka had spent the night.
"Entrez" cried Veslovsky. "Excuse me, but I am just finishing my ablutions," he added, with a smile, standing before Levin in his bare skin.
"Do not let me disturb you," said Levin, and he sat down by the window. "Did you sleep well?"
"Like the dead. Is it a good day for hunting?"
"What do you drink, tea or coffee?"
"Neither; I always go down to breakfast; I am mortified at being so late. The ladies, I suppose, are already up? Splendid time for a ride! You must show me your horses."
After walking around the garden, examining the stable, and performing a few gymnastic exercises together on the parallel bars. Levin and his guest returned to the house and went into the drawing-room,
"We had splendid sport and got so many new impressions," said Veslovsky, approaching Kitty, who was sitting near the samovar. "What a pity that ladies are deprived of this pleasure!"
"Well, of course he must have something to say to the lady of the house," thought Levin. Again he detected something peculiar in the smile and in the triumphant air with which his guest behaved toward Kitty.
The princess, who was sitting on the other side of the table with Marya Vlasyevna and Stepan Arkadyevitch, called Levin to her and began to broach her idea that they should go to Moscow for Kitty's confinement, and explained to him how the rooms should be prepared for her.
Just as all the preparations for his wedding had seemed distasteful to Levin because they were so insignificant in comparison with the majesty of the event itself, so now even more humiliating were all the preparations for the approaching confinement, the time of which they were reckoning up on their fingers. He tried to shut his ears to all the talk about the various kinds of swaddling-clothes for the unborn infant; he did his best to shut his eyes to all the mysterious and numberless bands and triangular pieces of linen to which Dolly seemed to attribute special importance and the like.
The event of the birth of a son—for he was firmly persuaded that it would be a son—seemed to him so extraordinary that he could not believe in its possibility, and while on the one hand it promised him a happiness too enormous and therefore incredible, on the other hand it seemed to him too mysterious to admit of trying to imagine what it meant, and consequently all this preparation as if for something commonplace, for something in the hands of men, seemed to him revolting and humiliating. The princess did not understand his feelings, and she attributed his unwillingness to think and talk about this to indifference and carelessness, and so she gave him no peace. She had just been charging Stepan Arkadyevitch to look up a suite of rooms, and now she called Levin to her.
"Do as you think best, princess; I understand nothing about the matter," said he.
"But it must be decided just when you will go to Moscow."
"Truly I don't know; what I know is that millions of children are born away from Moscow, and doctors ... and all that ...."
"Yes, but in that case ...."
"Let Kitty do as she pleases about it."
"It is impossible to speak with Kitty about it. Do you want me to frighten her? Only this spring Natali Golitsuin died in consequence of an unskilful accoucheur."
"I shall do as you wish," repeated Levin, angrily.
The princess began to say something more to him, but he was not listening. Though his conversation with the princess upset him, he was not angered by what she said, but by what he saw at the samovar.
"No; that can't go on," thought he, as he from time to time glanced over at Vasenka, who was bending down to Kitty, with a flattering smile, and making some remark to her; and he also noticed his wife's disturbed and blushing face.
There was something improper in Veslovsky's attitude, his smile, his eyes. So, too, Kitty's action and appearance seemed to him unbecoming, and again the light flashed in his eyes. And again, as happened two days before, he felt himself suddenly, without the least warning, precipitated from the height of happiness, contentment, and dignity, into an abyss of despair, hatred, and confusion. Again they seemed to him, each and all, his enemies.
"Do just as you please, princess," said he again, turning round.
"Heavy is the cap of Monomakh," said Stepan Arkadyevitch in jest, referring evidently, not to Levin's conversation with the princess, but to the cause of Levin's agitated face, which he had noticed. "How late you are, Dolly!"
All rose to greet Darya Aleksandrovna. Vasenka also arose, but only for a moment; and with the lack of politeness characteristic of up-to-date young men toward ladies, scarcely bowing, he resumed his conversation with some humorous remarks.
"Masha has been wearing me all out," said Dolly. "She did not sleep well and she is terribly fretful to-day."
The conversation which Vasenka and Kitty were engaged in once more turned, as it had the evening before, on Anna and whether love could hold outside the conventions of society This conversation was disagreeable to Kitty, and it agitated her, not only by reason of the topic and the tone in which it was carried on, but still more because she was already conscious of the effect it would have on her husband. But she was too simple and innocent to understand how to put an end to it, or even to hide the signs of agitation which this young man's too pronounced attentions produced in her. Whatever she did, she knew perfectly well would be remarked by her husband and would be absolutely misinterpreted.
And indeed, when she asked Dolly what was the matter with Masha, and Vasenka, waiting till this new subject of conversation, which was a bore to him, should be finished, stared with an indifferent look at Dolly, this question struck Levin as an unnatural and obnoxious kind of slyness.
"Well, are we going after mushrooms to-day?" asked Dolly.
"Oh, yes, do let us go, I should like to get some,' said Kitty, and she blushed. For mere politeness' sake she wanted to ask Vasenka if he would go with them, but she did not do so.
"Where are you going, Kostia?" she asked, with a guilty air, as her husband, with deliberate steps, went by her on his way out of the room.
This guilty confusion confirmed all his suspicions.
"A machinist came while I was away. I have not had a chance to see him yet," he answered, without looking at her.
He had gone down-stairs, but had not yet left his library, before he heard Kitty's well-known footsteps imprudently hurrying after him.
"What is it? We are busy," said he, curtly.
"Excuse me," said Kitty, addressing the German machinist; "I wish to say a few words to my husband."
The mechanic was about to leave, but Levin stopped him: "Don't disturb yourself."
"I don't want to lose the three o'clock train," remarked the German.
Without answering him. Levin went out into the corridor with his wife.
"Well, what do you wish to say to me?" he asked in French.
He did not look at her face, and did not want to see how it quivered and what a look of pathetic humiliation was in her eyes.
"I .... I wanted to say that it is impossible to live so; it is torture" .... murmured she,
"There is some one there at the cupboard," he replied angrily. "Don't make a scene."
"Then let us go in here, then,"
Kitty wanted to go into the next room, but there the English governess was teaching Tania.
"Then let us go into the garden."
In the garden they ran across a muzhik who was weeding a path. And now no longer thinking that the muzhik would see her tearful or his agitated face, not thinking that they were in sight of people, as if running from some unhappiness, they went with swift steps straight on, feeling that they must have a mutual explanation, and find some lonely spot where they could talk, and free themselves from this misery that was oppressing them both.
"It is impossible to live so. It is torture. I suffer. You suffer. Why is it?" she said, when at last they reached a bench standing by itself in the corner of the linden alley.
"But tell me one thing: was not his manner indecent, improper, horribly insulting?" he asked, standing in front of her in the same position, with his fists doubled up on his chest, in which he had stood before her two days before.
"It was," said she, in a trembling voice; " but, Kostia, can't you see that I am not to blame? All this morning I have been trying to act so that.... but oh, these men.... why did he come? How happy we were!" she said, choking with the sobs that shook her whole body.
The gardener saw with surprise that, though nothing was chasing them, and there was nothing to run away from, and there was nothing especially attractive about the bench where they had been sitting, yet still they went past him back to the house with peaceful, shining faces.