.
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу - страница 56
Chapter 11
THAT which for nearly a year had been Vronsky’s sole and exclusive desire, supplanting all his former desires: that which for Anna had been an impossible, dreadful, but all the more bewitching dream of happiness, had come to pass. Pale, with trembling lower jaw, he stood over her, entreating her to be calm, himself not knowing why or how.
‘Anna, Anna,’ he said in trembling voice, ‘Anna, for God’s sake!’
But the louder he spoke the lower she drooped her once proud, bright, but now dishonoured head, and she writhed, slipping down from the sofa on which she sat to the floor at his feet. She would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.
‘My God! Forgive me!’ she said, sobbing and pressing Vronsky’s hand to her breast.
She felt so guilty, so much to blame, that it only remained for her to humble herself and ask to be forgiven; but she had no one in the world now except him, so that even her prayer for forgiveness was addressed to him. Looking at him, she felt her degradation physically, and could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel when looking at the body he has deprived of life. The body he had deprived of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something frightful and revolting in the recollection of what had been paid for with this terrible price of shame. The shame she felt at her spiritual nakedness communicated itself to him. But in spite of the murderer’s horror of the body of his victim, that body must be cut in pieces and hidden away, and he must make use of what he has obtained by the murder.
Then, as the murderer desperately throws himself on the body, as though with passion, and drags it and hacks it, so Vronsky covered her face and shoulders with kisses.
She held his hand and did not move. Yes! These kisses were what had been bought by their shame! ‘Yes, and this hand, which will always be mine, is the hand of my accomplice.’ She lifted his hand and kissed it. He knelt down and tried to see her face, but she hid it and did not speak. At last, as though mastering herself, she sat up and pushed him away. Her face was as beautiful as ever, but all the more piteous.
‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘I have nothing but you left. Remember that.’
‘I cannot help remembering what is life itself to me! For one moment of that bliss …’
‘What bliss?’ she said with disgust and horror, and the horror was involuntarily communicated to him. ‘For heaven’s sake, not another word!’
She rose quickly and moved away from him.
‘Not another word!’ she repeated, and with a look of cold despair, strange to him, she left him. She felt that at that moment she could not express in words her feeling of shame, joy, and horror at this entrance on a new life, and she did not wish to vulgarize that feeling by inadequate words. Later on, the next day and the next, she still could not find words to describe all the complexity of those feelings, and could not even find thoughts with which to reflect on all that was in her soul.
She said to herself: ‘No, I can’t think about it now; later, when I am calmer.’ But that calm, necessary for reflection, never came. Every time the thought of what she had done, and of what was to become of her and of what she should do, came to her mind, she was seized with horror and drove these thoughts away.
‘Not now; later, when I am calmer!’ she said to herself.
But in her dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position appeared to her in all its shocking nakedness. One dream she had almost every night. She dreamt that both at once were her husbands, and lavished their caresses on her. Alexis Alexandrovich wept, kissing her hands, saying: ‘How beautiful it is now!’ and Alexis Vronsky was there too, and he also was her husband. And she was surprised that formerly this had seemed impossible to her, and laughingly explained to them how much simpler it really was, and that they were both now contented and happy. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she woke from it filled with horror.
Chapter 12
WHEN Levin first returned from Moscow, and while he still started and blushed every time he remembered the disgrace of the refusal, he had said to himself, ‘I blushed and started like this when I was ploughed in physics, and had to remain in the second class; and in the same way I felt myself lost when I made a mess of my sister’s affair that had been entrusted to me. And what happened? Now that years have passed, when I remember it, I am surprised that it could have grieved me so much. So it will be with this grief. Time will pass, and I shall become indifferent.’
But three months passed and he had not become indifferent to it, and to think of it still hurt him as it had done in the first days. He could not find peace, because he had so long dreamed of family life and felt so ripe for it, but was still unmarried and further than ever from marriage.
He himself felt painfully what all those around him felt too, that it is not good for a man of his age to be alone. He remembered how, just before leaving for Moscow, he had said to Nicholas, his cowman, a naïve peasant with whom he liked to talk: ‘Well, Nicholas, I want to get married,’ and how Nicholas had promptly replied, as on a matter about which there could be no doubt: ‘And it’s high time, Constantine Dmitrich.’ But now he was further from marriage than ever. The place was unoccupied, and when in imagination he tried to put one of the girls he knew there, he felt that it was quite impossible. Moreover, the memory of her refusal, and the part he had played in it, tormented him with shame. However much he told himself that he was not at all to blame in that matter, the memory of it, together with other shameful memories, made him start and blush. There had been in his past, as in that of every man, actions which he realized were bad, and for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the recollections of those bad actions did not torment him nearly as much as these trivial yet shameful memories. These wounds never closed up. And among these recollections stood the memory of her refusal and the pitiful rôle he must have played in the eyes of the others that evening. But time and work told. The painful memories became more and more covered over by the commonplace but important events of country life. Every week he thought less and less about Kitty. He waited impatiently to hear that she was married or was getting married soon, hoping that such news, like the drawing of an aching tooth, would quite cure him.
Meanwhile spring had come, a glorious steady spring, without the expectations and disappointments spring usually brings. It was one of these rare springs which plants, animals, and men alike rejoice in. This lovely spring roused Levin still more and confirmed him in the determination completely to renounce the past in order to fashion his solitary life firmly and independently. Though he had not carried out many of the plans with which he had returned to the country from Moscow, he had held to the most important one, that of living a pure life, and he was not experiencing the shame which used to torment him when he had fallen, but was able to look people boldly in the face. Already in February he had received a letter from Mary Nikolavna to say that his brother Nicholas’s health was getting worse, but that he would not submit to any treatment. In consequence of this news Levin went to Moscow, saw his brother, and managed to persuade him to consult a doctor and go to a watering-place abroad. He was so successful in persuading his brother, and in lending him money for the journey without irritating him, that he was satisfied with himself in this respect. Besides his agricultural pursuits, which required special attention in spring, and besides reading, Levin had another occupation. He had that winter begun writing a book on agriculture, the basis of which was that the character of the labourer was treated as a definite factor, СКАЧАТЬ