“Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?” he said, sitting down beside her.
“Very much.”
Anna did not mention the puzzling business with the code words. Instead she changed the subject, inquiring after Vronsky’s louche friend, Yashvin.
“He was winning-seventeen thousand, when the Toy Soldiers showed up and vaporized the tables. Some others were planning to make do with hand-carved dice, I don’t know who found them or where, when at last I got Yashvin away. He had really started home, but he went back again, and now he’s losing.”
“So what did you stay for?” she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes to him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. “You told Stiva you were staying on to get Yashvin away. And you have left him there.”
The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on his face too.
“In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message; and secondly, I never tell lies. But what’s the chief point, I wanted to stay, and I stayed,” he said, frowning. “Anna, what is it for, why?” he said after a moment’s silence, bending over toward her, and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.
She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings; it was as though the tactics of combat they had studied together at Vozdvizhenskoe were now being turned upon one another.
“Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?” she said, getting more and more excited. “Does anyone contest your rights? But you want to be right, and you’re welcome to be right.”
His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more obstinate expression.
“For you it’s a matter of obstinacy,” she said, watching him intently and suddenly finding the right word for that expression that irritated her, “simply obstinacy. For you it’s a question of whether you keep the upper hand of me, while for me…” Again she felt sorry for herself, and she almost burst into tears. “If you knew what it is for me! When I feel as I do now that you are hostile, yes, hostile to me, if you knew what this means for me! If you knew how I feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how afraid I am of myself!” And she turned away, hiding her sobs.
“But what are you talking about?” he said, horrified at her expression of despair, and again bending over her, he took her hand and kissed it. “What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home? Don’t I avoid the society of women?”
“Well, yes! If that were all!” she said.
“Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am ready to do anything to make you happy,” he said, touched by her expression of despair. “What wouldn’t I do to save you from distress of any sort, as now, Anna!” he said.
“It’s nothing, nothing!” she said. “I don’t know myself whether it’s the solitary life, my nerves… Come, don’t let us talk of it.” She spoke in a conciliatory manner now, imploring that he tell her more about the Toy Soldiers and the Class Is. They marveled together at the changes overtaking society, asked each other how long it would take before the Ministry would makes its decision about them. Neither spoke the name Alexei Alexandrovich, though both knew it was he in particular, and not the Higher Branches in general, who would make this decision.
They talked this way, as if both stood in the same corner of the world, facing their uncertain fate together. But in his tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that he did not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of obstinacy with which she had been struggling had asserted itself again in him. He was colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his surrender. And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his-and still less from her own-heart.
She thought of the abandoned farmhouse, the proud hand-sewn standards of Vozdvizhenskoe, and all she had left behind her.
What have I done? Anna thought, looking wearily at Alexei Kirillovich. What have I traded for a love affair, which proves to be nothing more than an illusion?
CHAPTER 8
THERE ARE NO CONDITIONS to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way. Levin could not have believed three months before that he could have gone quietly to sleep in the condition in which he was that day; that leading an aimless, irrational life, living too beyond his means, after drinking to excess (he could not call what happened at the club anything else), making an inappropriate call upon a woman who could only be called a lost woman, after being fascinated by that woman and causing his wife distress-he could still go quietly to sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a sleepless night, and the wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and untroubled.
At five o’clock the creak of a door opening woke him. He jumped up and looked round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was a light moving behind the screen, and he heard her steps.
“What is it?… What is it?” he said, half asleep. “Kitty! What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle in her hand. “I felt unwell,” she said, smiling a particularly sweet and meaningful smile.
“What? Has it begun?” he said in terror. “We ought to send…,” and hurriedly he reached after his clothes.
“No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.”
And getting into bed, she blew out the candle-which the new servant had found in a box in the attic, after a Toy Soldier collected the lumières-lay down and was still. Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind the screen, she had said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he fell asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart while she lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She seemed to be struggling between regret at waking him and the desire to talk to him.
“Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy… we ought to send for the doctor.”
The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days.
“Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,” she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom and then to her lips.
He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her, as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her. He had to go, but he could not tear himself from her eyes. He thought he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to himself, thinking of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed with soft, curling hair under her nightcap, was radiant with joy and courage.
Though there was so little that was complex or artificial in Kitty’s character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed now, when suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel of her soul shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul, she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than ever. She looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows twitched, she threw up her head, and going quickly up to him, clutched his hand and pressed close up to him, breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And for the first minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her eyes there was a tenderness that told him that she was far from reproaching him, that she loved him for her sufferings. If not I, who is to blame for it? he thought, without even noticing that he was thinking instead of speaking; though thoughts of such importance, touching on life and death, would always in the past have been uttered aloud to his beloved-companion. She was suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her sufferings, and rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that something sublime was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He could not make it out. It was beyond his understanding.