ANNA KARENINA (Collector's Edition). Leo Tolstoy

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      Chapter 2

      ON returning home Vronsky found a note from Anna awaiting him. She wrote, ‘I am ill and unhappy. I cannot go out, neither can I go on any longer without seeing you. Come this evening; Alexis Alexandrovich is going to the Council and will remain there till ten.’ After wondering for a moment at the strangeness of her asking him straight out to come to her house in spite of her husband’s injunctions, he decided to go.

      He had that winter been promoted to the rank of colonel, had left the regiment, and was living alone. Immediately after lunch he lay down on the sofa. Five minutes later the memory of the disreputable scenes at which he had been present during the last few days became jumbled and connected with pictures of Anna and a peasant who had played an important part as a beater at the bear-hunting; and Vronsky fell asleep. He woke up in the dark trembling with fear, and hurriedly lit a candle. ‘What has happened? What horrors I dreamt! Yes, yes, the peasant, the beater — I think he was small and dirty with a tangled beard — was stooping down and doing something or other, and suddenly began to say strange words in French. That is all there was in that dream,’ he thought. ‘But why did it seem so terrible?’ He vividly recalled the peasant and the incomprehensible words that the man had uttered, and a shudder of terror ran down his back. ‘What nonsense!’ he thought, glancing at his watch. It was already half-past eight.

      He rang for his valet, dressed hurriedly, and went out into the porch, having quite forgotten his dream and feeling worried only by the fact that he was late. As he drove up to the Karenins’ porch he again glanced at his watch and saw that it was ten minutes to nine. A high narrow brougham with a pair of grey horses stood before the front door. ‘She was coming to me,’ thought Vronsky; ‘that would have been better. It is unpleasant for me to enter this house: But no matter! I cannot hide,’ he thought; and with the manner, habitual to him since childhood, of one who has nothing to be ashamed of, Vronsky got out of his sledge and went to the door. The door opened and the hall porter with a rug over his arm called to the coachman. Vronsky, though not in the habit of noticing details, noticed the look of surprise on the man’s face. In the doorway he nearly knocked up against Karenin. The gaslight lit up Karenin’s worn, bloodless face beneath the black hat, and his white tie showing from beneath the beaver collar of his overcoat. His dull, expressionless eyes were fixed on Vronsky’s face. Vronsky bowed, and Karenin silently moved his lips, lifted his hand to his hat, and went out. Vronsky saw him get into the carriage without looking round, take the rug and a pair of opera-glasses through the carriage window; then he disappeared in the darkness. Vronsky entered the hall. His brows were knit and his eyes shone with a proud, angry light.

      ‘That is a nice position!’ he thought. ‘If he struggled, if he defended his honour, I could act and could express my feelings; but this weakness or meanness… . He puts me in the position of an impostor — which I did not and do not mean to be.’

      Since the explanation with Anna in the Vrede Gardens Vronsky’s ideas had changed. Involuntarily submitting to Anna’s weakness, who, ready in advance to accept anything, gave herself up to him entirely and expected him to decide her fate, he had long ceased to imagine that their union could end in the way he had then expected. His ambitious plans had receded to the background, and feeling that he had come out of the range of activity in which everything was definite, he completely gave himself up to his passion, and that passion bound him closer and closer to her.

      While still in the hall he heard her retreating footsteps, and knew that she had been waiting and listening for him, but had now gone back to the drawing-room.

      ‘No!’ she cried when she saw him, and at the first sound of her voice tears filled her eyes. ‘No! If things go on like this for long, it will happen much, much sooner!’

      ‘What, my dear?’

      ‘What! I wait in torment, one hour, two hours… . No, no! I won’t… . I cannot quarrel with you. I expect you could not help it. No, I won’t!’

      She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in, actual existence) with his real self.