Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Three/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
In all the rooms of the villa, the men-servants, the gardeners, the lackeys, were hurrying about laden with various things. Cupboards and commodes were cleared of their contents. Twice they had gone to the shop for packing-cord; on the floor lay piles of newspapers. Two trunks, traveling-bags, and a bundle of plaids had been carried into the anteroom. A carriage and two cabs were waiting at the front door. Anna, who in the haste of packing had somewhat forgotten her inward anguish, was standing by her table in her boudoir and packing her bag, when Annushka called her attention to the rumble of a carriage approaching the house.
Anna looked out of the window, and saw on the steps Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's messenger-boy ringing the front-door bell.
"Go and see what it is," said she, and then sat down in her chair and, folding her hands on her knees, waited with calm resignation. A lackey brought her a fat packet directed in Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's handwriting.
"The messenger was ordered to wait an answer," said he.
"Very well," she replied; and as soon as he left the room she opened the packet with trembling fingers. A roll of fresh, new bank-notes, in a wrapper, fell out first. She unfolded the letter and began to read it at the end. "All the necessary measures for your return hither will be taken I attach a very particular importance to your attention to my request," she read.
She ran it through hastily backwards, a second time, read it all through, and then she read it again from beginning to end. When she had finished it, she felt chilled, and had the consciousness that some terrible and unexpected misfortune was crushing her.
That very morning she had regretted her confession to her husband, and desired nothing so much as that she had not spoken those words. And this letter treated her words as if they had not been spoken, gave her what she desired. And yet it seemed to her more cruel than anything that she could have imagined.
"Right, he is right!" she murmured. "Of course he is always right; he is a Christian, he is magnanimous! Yes, the low, vile man! No one understands, no one knows him but me; and I cannot explain it. People say, 'He is a religious, moral, honorable, intellectual man.' But they have not seen what I have seen; they do not know how for eight years he has crushed my life, crushed everything that was vital in me; how he has never once thought of me as a living woman who needed love. They don't know how at every step he has insulted me, and yet remained self-satisfied. Have I not striven, striven with all my powers, to find a justification of my life? Have I not done my best to love him, to love his son when I could not love my husband? But the time came when I found I could no longer deceive myself, that I am a living being, that I am not to blame, that God has made me so, that I must love and live. And now what? He might kill me, he might kill him, and I could endure it, I could forgive it. But no, he....
"Why should I not have foreseen what he would do? He does exactly in accordance with his despicable character; he stands on his rights. But I, poor unfortunate, am sunk lower and more irreclaimably than ever toward ruin.' You may surmise what awaits you and your son,'" she repeated to herself, remembering a sentence in his letter. "It is a threat that he means to rob me of my son, and doubtless their wretched laws allow it. But, do I not see why he said that? He has no belief in my love for my son; or else he is deriding,—as he always does, in his sarcastic manner,—is deriding this feeling of mine, for he knows that I will not abandon my son—I cannot abandon him; that without my son, life would be unsupportable, even with him whom I love; and that to abandon my son, and leave him, I should fall like the worst of women. This he knows, and knows that I should never have the power to do so.
"'Our lives must remain unchanged,'" she continued, remembering another sentence in the letter. "This life was a torture before; but of late it has grown worse than ever. What will it be now? And he knows all this,—knows that I cannot repent because I breathe, because I love; he knows that nothing except falsehood and deceit can result from this: but he must needs prolong my torture. I know him, and I know that he swims in perjury like a fish in water. But no; I will not give him this pleasure. I will break this network of lies in which he wants to enwrap me. Come what may, anything is better than lies and deception.
"But how? Bozhe moï! Bozhe moï! Was there ever woman so unhappy as I?" ....
"No, I will break it! I will break it!" she cried, springing to her feet and striving to keep back the tears. And she went to her writing-table to begin another letter to him. But in the lowest depths of her soul she felt that she had not the power to break the network of circumstances,—that she had not the power to escape from the situation in which she was placed, false and dishonorable though it was.
She sat down at the table; but, instead of writing, she folded her arms on the table, and bowed her head on them, and began to weep like a child, with heaving breast and convulsive sobs. She wept because her visions about an explanation, about a settlement of her position, had vanished forever. She knew that now all things would go on as before, and even worse than before. She felt that her position in society, which she had slighted, and even that morning counted as dross, was dear to her; that she should never have the strength to abandon it for the shameful position of a woman who has deserted her husband and son and joined her lover; she felt that in spite of all her efforts she should never be stronger than herself. She never would know what freedom to love meant, but would be always a guilty woman, constantly under the threat of detection, deceiving her husband for the disgraceful society of an independent stranger, with whose life she could never join hers. She knew that this would be so, and yet at the same time it was so terrible that she could not acknowledge, even to herself, how it would end. And she wept, unrestrainedly as a child who has been punished sobs.
The steps of a lackey approaching brought her to herself; and, hiding from him her face, she pretended to be writing.
"The courier would like his answer," said the lackey.
"His answer? Oh, yes!" said Anna. "Let him wait. I will ring."
"What can I write?" she asked herself "How decide by myself alone? What do I know? What do I want? Whom do I love?"
Again it seemed to her that in her soul she felt the dual nature. She was alarmed at this feeling, and seized on the first pretext for activity that presented itself so that she might be freed from thoughts about herself.
"I must see Alekseï (thus in thought she called Vronsky); "he alone can tell me what I must do. I will go to Betsy's. Perhaps I shall find him there."
She completely forgot that on the evening before, when she told him that she was not going to the Princess Tverskaya's, he said that in that case he should not go there either.
She went to the table again, and wrote her husband:—
I have received your letter.
A.
She rang, and gave it to the lackey.
"We are not going," said she to Annushka, who was just coming in.
"Not going at all?"
"No; but don't unpack before to-morrow, and have the carriage wait. I am going to the princess's."
"What gown shall you wear?"