572 573
“Oh, what nonsense! How can you believe...”
But she would not let him interrupt her. What she was saying was
too important to her.
“And the something turned round, and I saw it was a peasant with
a disheveled beard, little, and dreadful looking. I wanted to run away,
but he bent down over a sack, and was fumbling there with his hands...”
She showed how he had moved his hands. There was terror in her
face. And Vronsky, remembering his dream, felt the same terror filling
his soul.
“He was fumbling and kept talking quickly, quickly in French, you
know: Il faut le battre, le fer, le brayer, le petrir.... And in my horror I
tried to wake up, and woke up...but woke up in the dream. And I
began asking myself what it meant. And Korney said to me: ‘In child-
birth you’ll die, ma’am, you’ll die....’ And I woke up.”
“What nonsense, what nonsense!” said Vronsky; but he felt him-
self that there was no conviction in his voice.
“But don’t let’s talk of it. Ring the bell, I’ll have tea. And stay a little
now; it’s not long I shall...”
But all at once she stopped. The expression of her face instanta-
neously changed. Horror and excitement were suddenly replaced by a
look of soft, solemn, blissful attention. He could not comprehend the
meaning of the change. She was listening to the stirring of the new life
within her.
Chapter 4.
Alexey Alexandrovitch, after meeting Vronsky on his own steps,
drove, as he had intended, to the Italian opera. He sat through two
acts there, and saw everyone he had wanted to see. On returning
home, he carefully scrutinized the hat stand, and noticing that there
was not a military overcoat there, he went, as usual, to his own room.
But, contrary to his usual habits, he did not go to bed, he walked up
and down his study till three o’clock in the morning. The feeling of
furious anger with his wife, who would not observe the proprieties and
keep to the one stipulation he had laid on her, not to receive her lover
in her own home, gave him no peace. She had not complied with his
request, and he was bound to punish her and carry out his threat—
obtain a divorce and take away his son. He knew all the difficulties
connected with this course, but he had said he would do it, and now he
must carry out his threat. Countess Lidia Ivanovna had hinted that
this was the best way out of his position, and of late the obtaining of
divorces had been brought to such perfection that Alexey
Alexandrovitch saw a possibility of overcoming the formal difficulties.
Misfortunes never come singly, and the affairs of the reorganization of
the native tribes, and of the irrigation of the lands of the Zaraisky
province, had brought such official worries upon Alexey Alexandrovitch
that he had been of late in a continual condition of extreme irritability.