Anna Karenina

hen he got home, Vronsky found there a note from Anna. She wrote, “I
am ill and unhappy. I cannot come out, but I cannot go on longer
without seeing you. Come in this evening. Alexey Alexandrovitch goes to
the council at seven and will be there till ten.” Thinking for an
instant of the strangeness of her bidding him come straight to her, in
spite of her husband’s insisting on her not receiving him, he decided
to go.

Vronsky had that winter got his promotion, was now a colonel, had left
the regimental quarters, and was living alone. After having some lunch,
he lay down on the sofa immediately, and in five minutes memories of
the hideous scenes he had witnessed during the last few days were
confused together and joined on to a mental image of Anna and of the
peasant who had played an important part in the bear hunt, and Vronsky
fell asleep. He waked up in the dark, trembling with horror, and made
haste to light a candle. “What was it? What? What was the dreadful
thing I dreamed? Yes, yes; I think a little dirty man with a disheveled
beard was stooping down doing something, and all of a sudden he began
saying some strange words in French. Yes, there was nothing else in the
dream,” he said to himself. “But why was it so awful?” He vividly
recalled the peasant again and those incomprehensible French words the
peasant had uttered, and a chill of horror ran down his spine.

“What nonsense!” thought Vronsky, and glanced at his watch.

It was half-past eight already. He rang up his servant, dressed in
haste, and went out onto the steps, completely forgetting the dream and
only worried at being late. As he drove up to the Karenins’ entrance he
looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine. A high, narrow
carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the entrance. He
recognized Anna’s carriage. “She is coming to me,” thought Vronsky,
“and better she should. I don’t like going into that house. But no
matter; I can’t hide myself,” he thought, and with that manner peculiar
to him from childhood, as of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of,
Vronsky got out of his sledge and went to the door. The door opened,
and the hall-porter with a rug on his arm called the carriage. Vronsky,
though he did not usually notice details, noticed at this moment the
amazed expression with which the porter glanced at him. In the very
doorway Vronsky almost ran up against Alexey Alexandrovitch. The gas
jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face under the black
hat and on the white cravat, brilliant against the beaver of the coat.
Karenin’s fixed, dull eyes were fastened upon Vronsky’s face. Vronsky
bowed, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to
his hat and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the
carriage, pick up the rug and the opera-glass at the window and
disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and his
eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.

“What a position!” he thought. “If he would fight, would stand up for
his honor, I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness or
baseness.... He puts me in the position of playing false, which I never
meant and never mean to do.”

Vronsky’s ideas had changed since the day of his conversation with Anna
in the Vrede garden. Unconsciously yielding to the weakness of Anna—who
had surrendered herself up to him utterly, and simply looked to him to
decide her fate, ready to submit to anything—he had long ceased to
think that their tie might end as he had thought then. His ambitious
plans had retreated into the background again, and feeling that he had
got out of that circle of activity in which everything was definite, he
had given himself entirely to his passion, and that passion was binding
him more and more closely to her.

He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her retreating
footsteps. He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him,
and was now going back to the drawing-room.

“No,” she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the
tears came into her eyes. “No; if things are to go on like this, the
end will come much, much too soon.”

“What is it, dear one?”

“What? I’ve been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours ... No, I
won’t ... I can’t quarrel with you. Of course you couldn’t come. No, I
won’t.” She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long
while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time
searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she
had not seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture
of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in
reality) fit with him as he really was.