Anna Karenina

tepan Arkadyevitch, with the same somewhat solemn expression with
which he used to take his presidential chair at his board, walked into
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s room. Alexey Alexandrovitch was walking about
his room with his hands behind his back, thinking of just what Stepan
Arkadyevitch had been discussing with his wife.

“I’m not interrupting you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, on the sight of
his brother-in-law becoming suddenly aware of a sense of embarrassment
unusual with him. To conceal this embarrassment he took out a cigarette
case he had just bought that opened in a new way, and sniffing the
leather, took a cigarette out of it.

“No. Do you want anything?” Alexey Alexandrovitch asked without
eagerness.

“Yes, I wished ... I wanted ... yes, I wanted to talk to you,” said
Stepan Arkadyevitch, with surprise aware of an unaccustomed timidity.

This feeling was so unexpected and so strange that he did not believe
it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he was meaning to
do was wrong.

Stepan Arkadyevitch made an effort and struggled with the timidity that
had come over him.

“I hope you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere affection
and respect for you,” he said, reddening.

Alexey Alexandrovitch stood still and said nothing, but his face struck
Stepan Arkadyevitch by its expression of an unresisting sacrifice.

“I intended ... I wanted to have a little talk with you about my sister
and your mutual position,” he said, still struggling with an
unaccustomed constraint.

Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled mournfully, looked at his brother-in-law,
and without answering went up to the table, took from it an unfinished
letter, and handed it to his brother-in-law.

“I think unceasingly of the same thing. And here is what I had begun
writing, thinking I could say it better by letter, and that my presence
irritates her,” he said, as he gave him the letter.

Stepan Arkadyevitch took the letter, looked with incredulous surprise
at the lusterless eyes fixed so immovably on him, and began to read.

“I see that my presence is irksome to you. Painful as it is to me to
believe it, I see that it is so, and cannot be otherwise. I don’t blame
you, and God is my witness that on seeing you at the time of your
illness I resolved with my whole heart to forget all that had passed
between us and to begin a new life. I do not regret, and shall never
regret, what I have done; but I have desired one thing—your good, the
good of your soul—and now I see I have not attained that. Tell me
yourself what will give you true happiness and peace to your soul. I
put myself entirely in your hands, and trust to your feeling of what’s
right.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch handed back the letter, and with the same surprise
continued looking at his brother-in-law, not knowing what to say. This
silence was so awkward for both of them that Stepan Arkadyevitch’s lips
began twitching nervously, while he still gazed without speaking at
Karenin’s face.

“That’s what I wanted to say to her,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch,
turning away.

“Yes, yes....” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, not able to answer for the
tears that were choking him.

“Yes, yes, I understand you,” he brought out at last.

“I want to know what she would like,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch.

“I am afraid she does not understand her own position. She is not a
judge,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, recovering himself. “She is crushed,
simply crushed by your generosity. If she were to read this letter, she
would be incapable of saying anything, she would only hang her head
lower than ever.”

“Yes, but what’s to be done in that case? how explain, how find out her
wishes?”

“If you will allow me to give my opinion, I think that it lies with you
to point out directly the steps you consider necessary to end the
position.”

“So you consider it must be ended?” Alexey Alexandrovitch interrupted
him. “But how?” he added, with a gesture of his hands before his eyes
not usual with him. “I see no possible way out of it.”

“There is some way of getting out of every position,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, standing up and becoming more cheerful. “There was a time
when you thought of breaking off.... If you are convinced now that you
cannot make each other happy....”

“Happiness may be variously understood. But suppose that I agree to
everything, that I want nothing: what way is there of getting out of
our position?”

“If you care to know my opinion,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with the
same smile of softening, almond-oil tenderness with which he had been
talking to Anna. His kindly smile was so winning that Alexey
Alexandrovitch, feeling his own weakness and unconsciously swayed by
it, was ready to believe what Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying.

“She will never speak out about it. But one thing is possible, one
thing she might desire,” he went on, “that is the cessation of your
relations and all memories associated with them. To my thinking, in
your position what’s essential is the formation of a new attitude to
one another. And that can only rest on a basis of freedom on both
sides.”

“Divorce,” Alexey Alexandrovitch interrupted, in a tone of aversion.

“Yes, I imagine that divorce—yes, divorce,” Stepan Arkadyevitch
repeated, reddening. “That is from every point of view the most
rational course for married people who find themselves in the position
you are in. What can be done if married people find that life is
impossible for them together? That may always happen.”

Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed heavily and closed his eyes.

“There’s only one point to be considered: is either of the parties
desirous of forming new ties? If not, it is very simple,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, feeling more and more free from constraint.

Alexey Alexandrovitch, scowling with emotion, muttered something to
himself, and made no answer. All that seemed so simple to Stepan
Arkadyevitch, Alexey Alexandrovitch had thought over thousands of
times. And, so far from being simple, it all seemed to him utterly
impossible. Divorce, the details of which he knew by this time, seemed
to him now out of the question, because the sense of his own dignity
and respect for religion forbade his taking upon himself a fictitious
charge of adultery, and still more suffering his wife, pardoned and
beloved by him, to be caught in the fact and put to public shame.
Divorce appeared to him impossible also on other still more weighty
grounds.

What would become of his son in case of a divorce? To leave him with
his mother was out of the question. The divorced mother would have her
own illegitimate family, in which his position as a stepson and his
education would not be good. Keep him with him? He knew that would be
an act of vengeance on his part, and that he did not want. But apart
from this, what more than all made divorce seem impossible to Alexey
Alexandrovitch was, that by consenting to a divorce he would be
completely ruining Anna. The saying of Darya Alexandrovna at Moscow,
that in deciding on a divorce he was thinking of himself, and not
considering that by this he would be ruining her irrevocably, had sunk
into his heart. And connecting this saying with his forgiveness of her,
with his devotion to the children, he understood it now in his own way.
To consent to a divorce, to give her her freedom, meant in his thoughts
to take from himself the last tie that bound him to life—the children
whom he loved; and to take from her the last prop that stayed her on
the path of right, to thrust her down to her ruin. If she were
divorced, he knew she would join her life to Vronsky’s, and their tie
would be an illegitimate and criminal one, since a wife, by the
interpretation of the ecclesiastical law, could not marry while her
husband was living. “She will join him, and in a year or two he will
throw her over, or she will form a new tie,” thought Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “And I, by agreeing to an unlawful divorce, shall be to
blame for her ruin.” He had thought it all over hundreds of times, and
was convinced that a divorce was not at all simple, as Stepan
Arkadyevitch had said, but was utterly impossible. He did not believe a
single word Stepan Arkadyevitch said to him; to every word he had a
thousand objections to make, but he listened to him, feeling that his
words were the expression of that mighty brutal force which controlled
his life and to which he would have to submit.

“The only question is on what terms you agree to give her a divorce.
She does not want anything, does not dare ask you for anything, she
leaves it all to your generosity.”

“My God, my God! what for?” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch, remembering
the details of divorce proceedings in which the husband took the blame
on himself, and with just the same gesture with which Vronsky had done
the same, he hid his face for shame in his hands.

“You are distressed, I understand that. But if you think it over....”

“Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
also; and if any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also,”
thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.

“Yes, yes!” he cried in a shrill voice. “I will take the disgrace on
myself, I will give up even my son, but ... but wouldn’t it be better
to let it alone? Still you may do as you like....”

And turning away so that his brother-in-law could not see him, he sat
down on a chair at the window. There was bitterness, there was shame in
his heart, but with bitterness and shame he felt joy and emotion at the
height of his own meekness.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was touched. He was silent for a space.

“Alexey Alexandrovitch, believe me, she appreciates your generosity,”
he said. “But it seems it was the will of God,” he added, and as he
said it felt how foolish a remark it was, and with difficulty repressed
a smile at his own foolishness.

Alexey Alexandrovitch would have made some reply, but tears stopped
him.

“This is an unhappy fatality, and one must accept it as such. I accept
the calamity as an accomplished fact, and am doing my best to help both
her and you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.

When he went out of his brother-in-law’s room he was touched, but that
did not prevent him from being glad he had successfully brought the
matter to a conclusion, for he felt certain Alexey Alexandrovitch would
not go back on his words. To this satisfaction was added the fact that
an idea had just struck him for a riddle turning on his successful
achievement, that when the affair was over he would ask his wife and
most intimate friends. He put this riddle into two or three different
ways. “But I’ll work it out better than that,” he said to himself with
a smile.