Anna Karenina

hen Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in the little
drawing-room with a white-headed fat little boy, already like his
father, giving him a lesson in French reading. As the boy read, he kept
twisting and trying to tear off a button that was nearly off his
jacket. His mother had several times taken his hand from it, but the
fat little hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled the
button off and put it in her pocket.

“Keep your hands still, Grisha,” she said, and she took up her work, a
coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at
depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her
fingers and counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day
before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister
came or not, she had made everything ready for her arrival, and was
expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.

Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she
did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one of the
most important personages in Petersburg, and was a Petersburg grande
dame. And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her
threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that her
sister-in-law was coming. “And, after all, Anna is in no wise to
blame,” thought Dolly. “I know nothing of her except the very best, and
I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her towards
myself.” It was true that as far as she could recall her impressions at
Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself;
there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family
life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it
into her head to console me!” thought Dolly. “All consolation and
counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a
thousand times, and it’s all no use.”

All these days Dolly had been alone with her children. She did not want
to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not
talk of outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would
tell Anna everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of
speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her
humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases
of good advice and comfort. She had been on the lookout for her,
glancing at her watch every minute, and, as so often happens, let slip
just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the
bell.

Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door, she looked
round, and her care-worn face unconsciously expressed not gladness, but
wonder. She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.

“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her.

“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!”

“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the
expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew. “Most likely
she knows,” she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well,
come along, I’ll take you to your room,” she went on, trying to defer
as long as possible the moment of confidences.

“Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he’s grown!” said Anna; and kissing him,
never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood still and flushed a little.
“No, please, let us stay here.”

She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in a lock of her
black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook
her hair down.

“You are radiant with health and happiness!” said Dolly, almost with
envy.

“I?... Yes,” said Anna. “Merciful heavens, Tanya! You’re the same age
as my Seryozha,” she added, addressing the little girl as she ran in.
She took her in her arms and kissed her. “Delightful child, delightful!
Show me them all.”

She mentioned them, not only remembering the names, but the years,
months, characters, illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not
but appreciate that.

“Very well, we will go to them,” she said. “It’s a pity Vassya’s
asleep.”

After seeing the children, they sat down, alone now, in the
drawing-room, to coffee. Anna took the tray, and then pushed it away
from her.

“Dolly,” she said, “he has told me.”

Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for phrases of
conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.

“Dolly, dear,” she said, “I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to
try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, I’m simply sorry,
sorry from my heart for you!”

Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered.
She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her vigorous
little hand. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not lose its
frigid expression. She said:

“To comfort me’s impossible. Everything’s lost after what has happened,
everything’s over!”

And directly she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted
the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it and said:

“But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is it best to
act in this awful position—that’s what you must think of.”

“All’s over, and there’s nothing more,” said Dolly. “And the worst of
all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the children, I
am tied. And I can’t live with him! it’s a torture to me to see him.”

“Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from you:
tell me about it.”

Dolly looked at her inquiringly.

Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s face.

“Very well,” she said all at once. “But I will tell you it from the
beginning. You know how I was married. With the education mamma gave us
I was more than innocent, I was stupid. I knew nothing. I know they say
men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva”—she corrected
herself—“Stepan Arkadyevitch told me nothing. You’ll hardly believe it,
but till now I imagined that I was the only woman he had known. So I
lived eight years. You must understand that I was so far from
suspecting infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then—try to
imagine it—with such ideas, to find out suddenly all the horror, all
the loathsomeness.... You must try and understand me. To be fully
convinced of one’s happiness, and all at once....” continued Dolly,
holding back her sobs, “to get a letter ... his letter to his mistress,
my governess. No, it’s too awful!” She hastily pulled out her
handkerchief and hid her face in it. “I can understand being carried
away by feeling,” she went on after a brief silence, “but deliberately,
slyly deceiving me ... and with whom?... To go on being my husband
together with her ... it’s awful! You can’t understand....”

“Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do understand,”
said Anna, pressing her hand.

“And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?”
Dolly resumed. “Not the slightest! He’s happy and contented.”

“Oh, no!” Anna interposed quickly. “He’s to be pitied, he’s weighed
down by remorse....”

“Is he capable of remorse?” Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her
sister-in-law’s face.

“Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for
him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s
so humiliated. What touched me most....” (and here Anna guessed what
would touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed
for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you
beyond everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would
have answered—“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she
cannot forgive me,’ he keeps saying.”

Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to
her words.

“Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for the guilty
than the innocent,” she said, “if he feels that all the misery comes
from his fault. But how am I to forgive him, how am I to be his wife
again after her? For me to live with him now would be torture, just
because I love my past love for him....”

And sobs cut short her words. But as though of set design, each time
she was softened she began to speak again of what exasperated her.

“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,” she went on. “Do you know, Anna,
my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his
children. I have worked for him, and all I had has gone in his service,
and now of course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him. No
doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they were silent. Do
you understand?”

Again her eyes glowed with hatred.

“And after that he will tell me.... What! can I believe him? Never! No,
everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, the reward of
my work, and my sufferings.... Would you believe it, I was teaching
Grisha just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture. What
have I to strive and toil for? Why are the children here? What’s so
awful is that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and
tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could
kill him.”

“Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself. You are so
distressed, so overwrought, that you look at many things mistakenly.”

Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.

“What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over
everything, and I see nothing.”

Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each
word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.

“One thing I would say,” began Anna. “I am his sister, I know his
character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything” (she
waved her hand before her forehead), “that faculty for being completely
carried away, but for completely repenting too. He cannot believe it,
he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.”

“No; he understands, he understood!” Dolly broke in. “But I ... you are
forgetting me ... does it make it easier for me?”

“Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not realize all the
awfulness of your position. I saw nothing but him, and that the family
was broken up. I felt sorry for him, but after talking to you, I see
it, as a woman, quite differently. I see your agony, and I can’t tell
you how sorry I am for you! But, Dolly, darling, I fully realize your
sufferings, only there is one thing I don’t know; I don’t know ... I
don’t know how much love there is still in your heart for him. That you
know—whether there is enough for you to be able to forgive him. If
there is, forgive him!”

“No,” Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her hand
once more.

“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how men like
Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her. That never
happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred
to them. Somehow or other these women are still looked on with contempt
by them, and do not touch on their feeling for their family. They draw
a sort of line that can’t be crossed between them and their families. I
don’t understand it, but it is so.”

“Yes, but he has kissed her....”

“Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I
remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all
the poetry and loftiness of his feeling for you, and I know that the
longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You
know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word:
‘Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always been a divinity for him,
and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the
heart....”

“But if it is repeated?”

“It cannot be, as I understand it....”

“Yes, but could you forgive it?”

“I don’t know, I can’t judge.... Yes, I can,” said Anna, thinking a
moment; and grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her
inner balance, she added: “Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could
forgive it. I could not be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and
forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all....”

“Oh, of course,” Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she
had more than once thought, “else it would not be forgiveness. If one
forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take
you to your room,” she said, getting up, and on the way she embraced
Anna. “My dear, how glad I am you came. It has made things better, ever
so much better.”