Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

(Barré) #1
458 459

Alexey Alexandrovitch had gone away without saying anything. “I
saw Vronsky and did not tell him. At the very instant he was going
away I would have turned him back and told him, but I changed my
mind, because it was strange that I had not told him the first minute.
Why was it I wanted to tell him and did not tell him?” And in answer
to this question a burning blush of shame spread over her face. She
knew what had kept her from it, she knew that she had been ashamed.
Her position, which had seemed to her simplified the night before,
suddenly struck her now as not only not simple, but as absolutely
hopeless. She felt terrified at the disgrace, of which she had not ever
thought before. Directly she thought of what her husband would do,
the most terrible ideas came to her mind. She had a vision of being
turned out of the house, of her shame being proclaimed to all the world.
She asked herself where she should go when she was turned out of the
house, and she could not find an answer.
When she thought of Vronsky, it seemed to her that he did not love
her, that he was already beginning to be tired of her, that she could not
offer herself to him, and she felt bitter against him for it. It seemed to
her that the words that she had spoken to her husband, and had
continually repeated in her imagination, she had said to everyone, and
everyone had heard them. She could not bring herself to look those of
her own household in the face. She could not bring herself to call her
maid, and still less go downstairs and see her son and his governess.
The maid, who had been listening at her door for a long while,
came into her room of her own accord. Anna glanced inquiringly into
her face, and blushed with a scared look. The maid begged her pardon
for coming in, saying that she had fancied the bell rang. She brought
her clothes and a note. The note was from Betsy. Betsy reminded her
that Liza Merkalova and Baroness Shtoltz were coming to play cro-


quet with her that morning with their adorers, Kaluzhsky and old
Stremov. “Come, if only as a study in morals. I shall expect you,” she
finished.
Anna read the note and heaved a deep sigh.
“Nothing, I need nothing,” she said to Annushka, who was rear-
ranging the bottles and brushes on the dressing table. “You can go. I’ll
dress at once and come down. I need nothing.”
Annushka went out, but Anna did not begin dressing, and sat in
the same position, her head and hands hanging listlessly, and every
now and then she shivered all over, seemed as though she would make
some gesture, utter some word, and sank back into lifelessness again.
She repeated continually, “My God! my God!” But neither “God” nor
“my” had any meaning to her. The idea of seeking help in her difficulty
in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexey
Alexandrovitch himself, although she had never had doubts of the
faith in which she had been brought up. She knew that the support of
religion was possible only upon condition of renouncing what made up
for her the whole meaning of life. She was not simply miserable, she
began to feel alarm at the new spiritual condition, never experienced
before, in which she found herself. She felt as though everything were
beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear
double to over-tired eyes. She hardly knew at times what it was she
feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what
had happened, or what was going to happen, and exactly what she
longed for, she could not have said.
“Ah, what am I doing!” she said to herself, feeling a sudden thrill of
pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself, she saw that
she was holding her hair in both hands, each side of her temples, and
pulling it. She jumped up, and began walking about.
Free download pdf