‘Oh no, I do understand! I do understand, dearest Dolly, I do,’ said Anna, squeezing her hand.
‘And do you think he understands the full horror of my position?’ Dolly continued. ‘Not at all! He’s happy and contented.’
‘Oh no,’ Anna interrupted quickly. ‘He’s pitiful, he’s consumed with remorse …’
‘Is he capable of remorse?’ interrupted Dolly as she scrutinized her sister-in-law’s face.
‘Yes, I know him. I couldn’t look at him without feeling pity. We both know him. He is a good person, but he is proud, and now he is so humiliated. What touched me most (and here Anna guessed what could touch Dolly the most)—there are two things tormenting him: firstly shame before the children, and secondly the fact that while loving you … yes, yes, more than anything else in the world,’ she hastily interrupted Dolly who was about to object, ‘he has hurt you, crushed you. “No, no, she won’t forgive me,” he keeps saying.’
Dolly gazed pensively past her sister-in-law as she listened to her words.
‘Yes, I understand that his position is terrible; it’s worse for the guilty party than for the innocent one,’ she said, ‘if he feels he is to blame for this whole misfortune. But how can I forgive him, how can I be his wife again, after her? It will be agony living with him now, precisely because I loved him as I did, because I love my past love for him …’
And her words were halted by sobbing.
But as if intentionally, each time she softened, she again began to talk about what annoyed her.
‘She is young, she is beautiful after all,’ she continued. ‘And do you realize who my youth and beauty were taken by, Anna? By him and his children. I have outlived my usefulness to him, I gave it my all, and of course he finds a young, vulgar creature more attractive now. They must have talked about me, or even worse, didn’t say anything—you understand?’ Her eyes blazed with hatred again. ‘And after this, he is going to tell me … So, am I to believe him? Never. No, everything that was a consolation and a reward for all that hard work and suffering is completely over, all of it … Can you believe it? I was just teaching Grisha: it used to be a joy, and now it’s torture. Why do I bother, why do I toil away? Why have children? What is awful is that my heart has suddenly been turned upside down, and instead of love and tenderness, all I feel for him is anger, yes, anger. I could kill him and …’
‘Dolly dearest, I understand, but don’t torment yourself. You have been so hurt, and you are so worked up that there is a lot you can’t see clearly.’
Dolly quietened down, and they were both silent for a couple of minutes.
‘Think about what I should do, Anna, help me. I have thought everything over and cannot see any solution.’
Anna could not think of anything, but her heart responded directly to every word and every expression on her sister-in-law’s face.
‘There’s one thing I will say,’ began Anna, ‘I’m his sister, I know his character, that capacity he has of forgetting absolutely everything’—she made a gesture in front of her forehead—‘that capacity he has of complete infatuation but then complete repentance. He cannot believe or understand now how he could have done what he did.’
‘No, he does understand, he did understand!’ interrupted Dolly. ‘But I … you’re forgetting me … do you think it’s easier for me?’
‘Wait. When he told me, I must confess that I did not yet understand the full horror of your situation. I only saw his position and the fact that the family was upset; I felt sorry for him, but now that I have talked to you, and being a woman, I see things differently; I see your suffering, and I can’t tell you how sorry I feel for you! But, Dolly, darling, although I completely understand what you are going through, there is one thing I don’t know: I don’t know … I don’t know how much love there still is for him in your soul. Only you know whether there is enough to allow you to forgive. If there is, then forgive him!’
‘No,’ began Dolly; but Anna interrupted her, kissing her hand again.
‘I know society better than you do,’ she said. ‘I know these sorts of people, people like Stiva, and how they view this. You say that he talked to her about you. That won’t have happened. These people may commit infidelities, but their home and their wife—they are sacrosanct to them. Somehow these women remain objects of contempt for them and don’t get in the way of family life. They draw some kind of invisible line between their family and them. I do not understand it, but that’s how it is.’
‘Yes, but he kissed her …’
‘Dolly, wait, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I remember the time when he used to come and see me and how he used to cry when he talked about you, and what a poetic and exalted being you were for him, and I know that the longer he has lived with you, the higher you have risen in his eyes. We used to laugh at him you know, because he would tack on “Dolly is a remarkable woman” to everything he said. You were always a goddess for him and still are, whereas this infatuation is not from his soul …’
‘But what if the infatuation happens again?’
‘It can’t, as far as I understand it …’
‘Yes, but would you forgive?’
‘I don’t know, I cannot judge … No, actually I can,’ said Anna upon reflection; and after pondering the situation and weighing it up in her mind, she added: ‘No, I can, I definitely can. Yes, I would forgive. It is true I would not be the same, but I would forgive, and would forgive as if it had never happened, as if it had never ever happened.’
‘Well, of course,’ interrupted Dolly quickly, as if she was saying something she had often thought herself, ‘otherwise it would not be forgiveness. If you forgive, you have to forgive completely. Well, let us go, I’ll show you to your room,’ she said, getting up, and on the way there Dolly embraced Anna. ‘I’m so glad that you have come, my dear, I really am. I feel better, so much better.’
20
ANNA spent the whole of that day at home, that is, at the Oblonskys, and did not receive anyone, since some of her acquaintances, having already managed to learn of her arrival, came to call that same day. Anna spent all morning with Dolly and the children. She only sent a note to her brother telling him he should without fail dine at home. ‘Come, God is merciful,’ she wrote.
Oblonsky dined at home; the conversation was general, and his wife talked to him using the familiar form of address, which she had not done earlier. The frostiness in the relations between husband and wife remained, but there was no longer any talk of separation, and Stepan Arkadyich saw the possibility of dialogue and reconciliation.
Kitty arrived immediately after dinner. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and had driven now to her sister’s with some trepidation as to how she would be received by this Petersburg society lady, about whom everyone sang such praises. But Anna Arkadyevna liked her—she saw that straight away. Anna clearly admired her beauty and youth, and before Kitty could collect herself, she not only felt she was under her spell, but was in love with her, as young girls are capable of falling in love with older married ladies. Anna was not like a society lady or the mother of an eight-year-old son, but would have more closely resembled a twenty-year-old girl in the lissom movements, vitality, and constant animation in her face, one minute breaking out into a smile and into a glance the next, were it not for the serious and sometimes sad expression of her eyes, which struck Kitty and drew her to Anna. Kitty felt that Anna was completely straightforward and was not hiding anything, but that there was some kind of other, higher world of complex and romantic interests within her, to which she had no access.