Anna Karenina (Annotated Maude Translation). Leo Tolstoy
children and their English governess. Whether it is that children are inconstant or that they are sensitive and felt that Anna was not the same person to-day as she had been that other day when they had been so fond of her, and that she no longer took any interest in them, at any rate they suddenly left off playing with their aunt and loving her, and were not at all concerned about her leaving. Anna spent the whole morning preparing for her departure: writing notes to her Moscow acquaintances, making up accounts, and packing. It seemed to Dolly that Anna was not at ease in her mind, but in a state of anxiety that Dolly knew well from her own experience, a state which does not come on without a cause, but generally hides dissatisfaction with oneself. After dinner Anna went to her room to dress, and Dolly followed her.
‘How strange you are to-day!’ said Dolly.
‘I? Do you think so? I am not strange, but wicked. It sometimes happens to me. I feel ready to cry. It is very silly, but it will pass,’ said Anna hurriedly, and she bent her flushed face over the tiny bag into which she was packing a nightcap and some lawn handkerchiefs. Her eyes shone peculiarly and kept filling with tears. ‘I did not want to leave Petersburg, and now I do not want to leave here.’
‘You came here and did a good action,’ said Dolly, scrutinizing her attentively.
Anna looked at her with her eyes wet with tears.
‘Do not say that, Dolly. I have done and could do nothing. I often wonder why people conspire to spoil me. What have I done and what could I do? There was enough love in your heart to forgive …’
‘But for you, God only knows what would have happened! How lucky you are, Anna,’ said Dolly. ‘Everything in your soul is clear and good.’
‘Every one has a skeleton in their cupboard, as the English say.’
‘What skeleton have you? Everything about you is so clear.’
‘I have one!’ said Anna, and unexpectedly following her tears, a sly humorous smile puckered her lips.
‘Well, at least your skeleton is a funny one and not a dismal one,’ said Dolly smiling.
‘No, it is a dismal one. Do you know why I am going to-day and not to-morrow? This is a confession of something that oppresses me, and I want to make it to you,’ said Anna, determinedly throwing herself back in an armchair and looking straight into Dolly’s eyes.
And to her surprise Dolly saw that Anna was blushing to her ears and to the curly black locks on her neck.
‘Do you know,’ continued Anna, ‘why Kitty did not come to dinner? She is jealous of me. I have spoiled … I mean I was the cause of the ball being a torture instead of a pleasure to her. But really, really I was not to blame, or only a very little,’ she said, drawling out the word ‘very’ in a high-pitched voice.
‘Oh, how like Stiva you said that,’ remarked Dolly laughing.
Anna was annoyed.
‘Oh no, no, I am not Stiva,’ she said frowning. ‘The reason I have told you is that I do not even for a moment allow myself to distrust myself.’
But at the moment when she uttered these words she knew they were untrue: she not only distrusted herself but was agitated by the thought of Vronsky, and was leaving sooner than she had intended only that she might not meet him again.
‘Yes, Stiva told me that you danced the mazurka with him, and that he …’
‘You cannot think how queerly it came about. I only thought of arranging the match, and — suddenly it all came out quite differently… . Perhaps against my own will I …’
She blushed and stopped.
‘Oh, they feel that at once!’ said Dolly.
‘But I should be in despair if there were anything serious in it on his side,’ Anna interrupted her. ‘I am sure that it will all be forgotten, and Kitty will no longer hate me.’
‘Well, do you know, Anna, to tell you the truth, I am not very anxious that Kitty should marry him. It is much better that it should come to nothing if he, Vronsky, is capable of falling in love with you in a day.’
‘Oh, my goodness! How stupid it would be,’ said Anna, and again a deep flush of pleasure suffused her face at hearing the thought that occupied her mind expressed in words. ‘So I am going away having made an enemy of Kitty, of whom I am so fond. Oh, what a darling she is! But you will put it right? Eh, Dolly?’
Dolly could hardly repress a smile. She was fond of Anna, but it was pleasant to find that she too had a weakness.
‘An enemy? That is impossible.’
‘I should so like you all to love me as I love you; and now I love you still more,’ said Anna with tears in her eyes. ‘Oh dear, how silly I am to-day.’
She dabbed her face with her handkerchief and began to dress.
Oblonsky, smelling of wine and cigars, with his face red and happy, came in late, just as she was about to start.
Anna’s emotion had spread to Dolly, who as she embraced her sister-in-law for the last time whispered: ‘Remember that I love and always shall love you as my best friend!’
‘I do not know why you should,’ said Anna, kissing her and trying to hide her tears.
‘You understood and understand me. Goodbye, my sweet one!’
Chapter 29
‘WELL, that’s all over, thank Heaven!’ was Anna’s first thought when she had taken leave of her brother, who stood to the last moment obstructing the entrance to the railway carriage.
She sat down beside her maid Annushka, and peered round the dimly-lit sleeping compartment. ‘Thank Heaven, to-morrow I shall see Serezha and Alexis Alexandrovich again, and my good accustomed life will go on as of old.’
With the same preoccupied mind she had had all that day, Anna prepared with pleasure and great deliberation for the journey. With her deft little hands she unlocked her red bag, took out a small pillow which she placed on her knees, and locked the bag again; then she carefully wrapped up her feet and sat down comfortably. An invalid lady was already going to bed. Two other ladies began talking to Anna. One, a fat old woman, while wrapping up her feet, remarked upon the heating of the carriage. Anna said a few words in answer, but not foreseeing anything interesting from the conversation asked her maid to get out her reading-lamp, fixed it to the arm of her seat, and took a paper-knife and an English novel from her handbag. At first she could not read. For a while the bustle of people moving about disturbed her, and when the train had finally started it was impossible not to listen to the noises; then there was the snow, beating against the window on her left, to which it stuck, and the sight of the guard, who passed through the carriage closely wrapped up and covered with snow on one side; also the conversation about the awful snow-storm which was raging outside distracted her attention. And so it went on and on: the same jolting and knocking, the same beating of the snow on the windowpane, the same rapid changes from steaming heat to cold, and back again to heat, the gleam of the same faces through the semi-darkness, and the same voices, — but at last Anna began to read and to follow what she read. Annushka was already dozing, her broad hands, with a hole in one of the gloves, holding the red bag on her lap. Anna read and understood, but it was unpleasant to read, that is to say, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She was too eager to live herself. When she read how the heroine of the novel nursed a sick man, she wanted to move about the sick-room with noiseless footsteps; when she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she wished to make that speech; when she read how Lady Mary rode to hounds, teased her sister-in-law, and astonished everybody by her boldness — she wanted to do it herself. But there was nothing to be done, so she forced herself to read, while her little hand toyed with the smooth paper-knife.
The hero of the novel had nearly attained to his English happiness of a baronetcy and an estate, and Anna wanted to go to the estate with him, when she