Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Six/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
"That shows all the more necessity for legalizing your position, if possible."
"Yes, if possible," answered Anna, in an entirely different tone, calm and sweet.
"Is a divorce entirely impossible? They tell me your husband has consented."
"Dolly, I do not wish to talk about this."
"Well, we will not," Darya Aleksandrovna hastened to say, noticing the expression of suffering on Anna's face. "Only it seems to me that you look too much on the dark side."
"I? Not at all; I am very happy and contented. You saw, Je fais des passions with Veslovsky ...."
"Yes! To tell the truth, Veslovsky's manner displeases me very much," said Darya Aleksandrovna, willing enough to change the conversation.
"Oh! there's nothing! It tickles Alekseï, and that's all there is of it. But he is a mere boy and entirely in my hands. You understand, I do as I please with him; just as you do with your Grisha. ... Dolly!"—she suddenly changed the subject—"you say that I look on the dark side. You can't understand. This is too terrible; I try not to look at all!"
"You are wrong; you ought to do what is necessary.'
"But what is necessary? You say I must marry Alekseï, and that I don't think about that. I not think about that!" she exclaimed, and the color flew over her face. She got up, straightened herself, and began walking up and down the room with her graceful gait, stopping now and then. "Not think about that! There is not a day or an hour when I do not think of it, and blame myself for thinking of it;—because the thought of it will make me mad—will make me mad," she repeated. "When I think of it, I cannot go to sleep without morphine. But very good! let us speak calmly. You talk about divorce, but in the first place he would not consent; he is now under the Countess Lidya's influence."
Darya Aleksandrovna, reclining in her easy-chair with a sympathetic and sorrowful face, watched Anna as she walked up and down. She shook her head.
"We must try," said she.
"Suppose I should try. What does it mean?" she asked, evidently expressing a thought which she had gone over in her own mind a thousand times and had learned by heart. "It means that I, who hate him, and who have nevertheless confessed my guilt to him—I believe in his magnanimity—that I humiliate myself to write him. .... Well! suppose I make the effort; suppose I do it. I shall receive either an insulting answer or his consent. Good, I get his consent ...." Anna at this time was in the farthest end of the room and stopped there to arrange a window-curtain. "I get his consent .... but my s-son? You see he will not give him to me. .... I No, he will grow up despising me, living with his father, whom I have left. Just think, I love these two almost equally, both more than myself; these two, Serozha and Alekseï."
She advanced to the middle of the room and stood in front of Dolly, pressing her hands to her breast. In her white peignoir she seemed wonderfully tall and large. She bent her head, and, looking out of her moist, shining eyes on the little, homely, lean Dolly, sitting there in her darned nightgown and nightcap, all a-tremble with emotion, went on: -
"These two only I love, and the one excludes the other. I cannot bring them together, and yet this is the one thing I want. If this were not so, it would be all the same,—all, all the same. It will end in some way; but I cannot, I will not, talk about this. So do not despise me, do not judge me. You in your purity could never imagine what I suffer!"
She sat down beside Dolly and, with a guilty expression in her eyes, took her hand.
"What do you think? What do you think of me? Do not despise me! I do not deserve that; I am miserably unhappy. If there is any one unhappy, it is I ...." said she, and, turning away, she began to weep.
After Anna left her, Dolly said her prayers and went to bed. She pitied Anna with all her soul while she was talking with her; but now she could not bring herself to think of her. Memories of home and her children arose in her imagination with new and wonderful joy. So dear and precious seemed this little world to her that she decided that nothing would tempt her to stay longer away from them, and that she would leave the next day.
Anna, meantime, returning to her dressing-room, took a glass, and poured into it several drops of a mixture containing chiefly morphine, and, having swallowed it, she sat a little while motionless, then went with a calm and joyous heart to her bedroom.
When she went into her sleeping-room, Vronsky looked scrutinizingly into her face. He was trying to discover some trace of the talk which he knew by the length of her stay in Dolly's room she must have had with her. But in her expression, which betrayed a certain repressed excitement, as if she were trying to conceal something, he found nothing except the beauty to which he was so accustomed, and which always intoxicated him, and the consciousness of it and the desire that it might still have its usual effect on him.
He did not like to ask her what they had been talking about, but hoped that she herself would tell him. But she only said:—
"I am glad you like Dolly; you do, don't you?"
"Yes! I've known her for a long time. She's a very good woman, mais excessivement terre a terre. But still I am well pleased at her visit."
He gave Anna another questioning look, and took her hand; but she understood his look in another way, and smiled.
The next morning, in spite of repeated urging from her hosts, Darya Aleksandrovna prepared to go away. Levin's coachman, in his old kaftan and a sort of postilion's cap, put the unmatched horses into the old carrriage with its shabby harness, and, looking stern and resolute, drove up the sanded driveway to the covered portico.
Darya Aleksandrovna took a cold farewell of the Princess Varvara and the gentlemen. The day that they had passed together made them all see clearly that they had no interests in common, and that they were better apart. Anna only was sad. She knew that no one would waken again in her the feelings which Dolly had aroused in her soul. To have these feelings aroused was painful to her, but still she knew that they represented all the better side of her nature, and that soon all vestige of such feelings would be stifled by the life that she was leading.
As soon as she got fairly away from the house, Darya Aleksandrovna experienced a pleasant feeling of relief, and she was about to ask her men how they liked the Vronskys, when suddenly the coachman, Filipp himself, spoke out:—
"They 're rich, rich enough, but they give only three measures of oats. The horses cleaned it all up before cockcrow. What are three measures? Only a bite. Nowadays oats cost only forty-five kopeks. With us, we give our visitors' horses as much as they will eat."
"A stingy barin," said the bookkeeper.
"Well, but you liked their horses, didn't you?" asked Dolly.
"The horses, yes, they were all right. And the food was good. But still somehow I felt kind of homesick, Darya Aleksandrovna; I don't know how it was with you," said he, turning to her his good, handsome face.
"Yes, and so did I. But do you think we shall get home this evening?"
"We must get home."
On reaching home and finding every one perfectly happy and glad to see her, Darya Aleksandrovna, with great liveliness, told the story of her trip and how warmly she had been received, about the luxury and good taste of the Vronskys' estabhshment and about their amusements; and she would not allow any one to say a word against them.
"You must know Anna and Vronsky,—and I know him better than I did,—to appreciate how kind and affectionate they are," said she, with perfect sincerity, forgetting the vague feeling of discomfort that she had felt when she was there.