Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part One/Chapter 1
ANNA KARENINA
PART FIRST
"Vengeance is mine, I will repay"
CHAPTER I
ALL happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
All was confusion in the house of the Oblonskys. The wife had discovered that her husband was having an intrigue with a French governess who had been in their employ, and she declared that she could not live in the same house with him. This condition of things had lasted now three days, and was causing deep discomfort, not only to the husband and wife, but also to all the members of the family and the domestics. All the members of the family and the domestics felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that in any hotel people meeting casually had more mutual interests than they, the members of the family and the domestics of the house of Oblonsky. The wife did not come out of her own rooms; the husband had not been at home for two days. The children were running over the whole house as if they were crazy; the English maid was angry with the housekeeper and wrote to a friend begging her to find her a new place. The head cook had departed the evening before just at dinnertime; the kitchen-maid and the coachman demanded their wages.
On the third day after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in society—awoke at the usual hour, that is to say about eight o'clock in the morning, not in his wife's chamber, but in his library, on a leather-covered divan. He turned his portly pampered body on the springs of the divan, as if intending to go to sleep again, and as he did so threw his arm round the cushion and pressed his cheek to it. But suddenly he sat up and opened his eyes.
"Well, well! how was it?" he mused, recalling a dream. "Yes, how was it? Yes! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not at Darmstadt, but it was something American. Yes, but that Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, yes, and the tables sang 'Il mio tesoro'; no, not 'Il mio tesoro,' but something better; and some little water-bottles, they were women!" said he, continuing his recollections.
Prince Stepan's eyes flashed gayly and he smiled as he said to himself:—
"Yes, it was very good, very good. There was something extremely elegant about it, but you can't tell it in words, and when you are awake you can't express the reality even in thought."
Then, as he noticed a ray of sunlight which came in at the side of one of the heavy window-curtains, he gayly set his feet down from the divan, found his gilt morocco slippers—they had been embroidered for him by his wife the year before as a birthday present—and, according to an old custom which he had kept up for nine years, he, without rising, stretched out his hand to the place where in his chamber hung his dressing-gown. And then he suddenly remembered how and why he had been sleeping, not in his wife's chamber, but in the library; the smile vanished from his face and he frowned.
"Akh! akh! akh! akh!" he groaned, as he recollected everything that had occurred. And before his mind arose once more all the details of the quarrel with his wife, all the hopelessness of his situation, and most lamentable of all, his own fault.
"No! she will not and she cannot forgive me. And what is the worst of it, 't was my own fault—my own fault, and yet I am not to blame. In that lies all the tragedy of it," he said to himself. "Akh! akh! akh!" he kept murmuring in his despair, as he thought over the exceedingly unpleasant consequences that would result to him from this quarrel.
The most disagreeable moment was at the very first, when, as he came home from the theater, happy and self-satisfied, bringing a monstrous pear for his wife, he did not find her in the sitting-room, nor, to his surprise, was she in the library, and at last he saw her in her chamber holding the fatal, all-revealing letter in her hand.
She—Dolly, that forever busy and fussy and foolish creature as he always considered her—was sitting motionless with the note in her hand, and looked at him with an expression of terror, despair, and wrath.
"What is this? This?" she demanded, pointing to the note.
And as often happens, Stepan's torment at this recollection was caused less by the fact itself than by the answer which he gave to those words of his wife. His experience at that moment was the same as other people have had when unexpectedly detected in some shameful deed. He was unable to prepare his face for the situation caused by his wife's discovery of his sin. Instead of getting offended, denying it, justifying himself, asking forgiveness, or even showing indifference—anything would have been better than what he really did—in spite of himself (by a reflex action of the brain as Stepan Arkadyevitch explained it, for he loved Physiology) absolutely in spite of himself he suddenly smiled with his ordinary good-humored and therefore stupid smile.
He could not forgive himself for that stupid smile. When Dolly saw that smile, she trembled as with physical pain, poured forth a torrent of bitter words, quite in accordance with her natural temper, and fled from the room. Since that time she had not been willing to see her husband.
"That stupid smile caused the whole trouble," thought Stepan Arkadyevitch.
"But what is to be done about it, what is to be done?" he asked himself in despair, and found no answer.