VRONSKY FOR THE FIRST TIME experienced a feeling of anger against Anna, almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said:
“In that dress, with that android-cast glow, to show yourself at the theater is not merely equivalent to acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, it is flinging down a challenge to society-that is to say, cutting yourself off from it forever.”
What Alexei Kirillovich could not yet understand was that such concerns simply did not matter any longer. After that night at the Vox Fourteen, a night that would be long remembered and long mourned by the people of Russia, he would understood much better.
Left alone in the wake of her departure, he finally got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room.
“And what’s today?”
Lupo gave a gruff yelp, tilted his head, and scraped the hard wooden floor four times with his right front claw. “Yes, of course, the fourth night. Yegor and his wife are there, and my mother, most likely. Of course all Petersburg’s there. By now she’s gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the light.” Vronsky threw himself back into the chair and patted his lap for Lupo to leap into it. “What about me? What about us? Are we frightened? From every point of view-stupid, stupid!… And why is she putting me in such a position?” he said with a gesture of despair.
“Come, friend,” Vronsky snarled, and his fierce beloved-companion obeyed. “We’re going to the theater.”
When they arrived at the palatial Vox Fourteen it was half past eight and the performance was in full swing. The II/Boxkeeper/19, recognizing Vronsky as he peeled off his fur coat, called him “your Excellency.” In the brightly lighted corridor there was no one but the II/Boxkeeper/19 and two II/Attendant/77s listening at the doors. Through the closed doors came the sounds of the discreet staccato accompaniment of the orchestra, and a single female voice rendering distinctly a musical phrase. The door opened to let the Boxkeeper slide through, and the phrase drawing to the end reached Vronsky’s hearing clearly. But the doors were closed again at once, and Vronsky did not hear the end of the phrase and the cadence of the accompaniment, though he knew from the thunder of applause that it was over.
When he entered the Vox Fourteen, brilliantly lighted with I/Lumiére/7s and gas jets, the noise was still going on. On the stage the singer, bowing and smiling, with bare shoulders flashing with diamonds, was, with the help of the tenor who had given her his arm, gathering up the bouquets that were flying awkwardly over the footlights. Then she went up to a gentleman with glossy pomaded hair parted down the center, who was stretching across the footlights holding out something to her, and all the public in the stalls as well as in the boxes was in excitement, craning forward, shouting and clapping. The conductor from his podium assisted in passing the offering, and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked into the middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about him. His attention turned upon the familiar, habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the familiar, uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in the packed theater. There were no Class Ills. No beloved-companions lounging at their master’s elbows, shedding flattering light, fetching spectacles and lighting cigarettes. All these people-the uniforms and black coats, the dirty crowd in the upper gallery, and in the boxes and front rows, the real people, the people of society-but not a robot moving among them.
Or so it appeared to Count Vronsky.
He had not yet seen Anna. He purposely avoided looking in her direction. But he knew by the direction of people’s eyes where she was. He looked round discreetly, but he was not seeking her; expecting the worst, his eyes sought out Alexei Alexandrovich. To his relief he was not in the theater that evening.
“How little of the military man there is left in you!” his friend Serpuhovskoy was saying to him. “A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort, one would say.”
“Yes, it was like going back home when I put on a black coat,” answered Vronsky, smiling and with a few clicks activating his opera glass.
“Well, I’ll own I envy you there. When I come back from abroad and put on this,” he touched his epaulets, “I regret my freedom.”
Serpuhovskoy had long given up all hope of Vronsky’s career, but he liked him as before, and was now particularly cordial to him.
“What a pity you were not in time for the first act!”
Vronsky, listening with one ear, moved his opera glass from the stalls and scanned the boxes. Near a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who seemed to wave angrily in the moving opera glass, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, with Android Karenina’s pearl glow casting intricate shadows through the lace of her collar. She was in the fifth box, twenty paces from him. She was sitting in front, and, slightly turning, was saying something to Yashvin. The setting of her head on her handsome, broad shoulders, the restrained excitement and brilliance of her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her just as he had seen her at the float in Moscow. But he felt utterly different toward her beauty now. In his feeling for her now there was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of injury. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she had seen him already.
When Vronsky turned the opera glass again in that direction, he noticed that Anna’s friend Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept laughing unnaturally and looking round at the next box. Anna, de-telescoping her I/Fan/6 and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and obviously did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left end of his mustache further and further into his mouth, and cast sidelong glances at the next box.
In that box on the left were the Kartasovs Vronsky knew them, and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartasova, a thin little woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon Anna, she was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly. Kartasov, a fat, bald man, was continually looking round at Anna, while he attempted to soothe his wife. When the wife had gone out, the husband lingered a long while, and tried to catch Anna’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to her. But Anna, with unmistakable intention, avoided noticing him, and talked to Yashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her.
Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the Kartasovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna had happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all from the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to carry through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this attitude of external composure she was completely successful. Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation, and amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, and with the audacity to parade her Class III in such circumstances-anyone would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman, without suspecting that she was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks.
Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out something, he went toward the box where she sat. Working his way through the aisles toward her, he jostled as he came out against the colonel of his regiment, talking to two strangers.