Anna Karenina

tepan Arkadyevitch felt completely nonplussed by the strange talk
which he was hearing for the first time. The complexity of Petersburg,
as a rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out of his
Moscow stagnation. But he liked these complications, and understood
them only in the circles he knew and was at home in. In these
unfamiliar surroundings he was puzzled and disconcerted, and could not
get his bearings. As he listened to Countess Lidia Ivanovna, aware of
the beautiful, artless—or perhaps artful, he could not decide
which—eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevitch began to be
conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.

The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his head. “Marie Sanina
is glad her child’s dead.... How good a smoke would be now!... To be
saved, one need only believe, and the monks don’t know how the thing’s
to be done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does know.... And why is my
head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or all this being so queer? Anyway, I
fancy I’ve done nothing unsuitable so far. But anyway, it won’t do to
ask her now. They say they make one say one’s prayers. I only hope they
won’t make me! That’ll be too imbecile. And what stuff it is she’s
reading! but she has a good accent. Landau—Bezzubov—what’s he Bezzubov
for?” All at once Stepan Arkadyevitch became aware that his lower jaw
was uncontrollably forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to cover the
yawn, and shook himself together. But soon after he became aware that
he was dropping asleep and on the very point of snoring. He recovered
himself at the very moment when the voice of Countess Lidia Ivanovna
was saying “he’s asleep.” Stepan Arkadyevitch started with dismay,
feeling guilty and caught. But he was reassured at once by seeing that
the words “he’s asleep” referred not to him, but to Landau. The
Frenchman was asleep as well as Stepan Arkadyevitch. But Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s being asleep would have offended them, as he thought
(though even this, he thought, might not be so, as everything seemed so
queer), while Landau’s being asleep delighted them extremely,
especially Countess Lidia Ivanovna.

“Mon ami,” said Lidia Ivanovna, carefully holding the folds of her
silk gown so as not to rustle, and in her excitement calling Karenin
not Alexey Alexandrovitch, but “mon ami,” “donnez-lui la main. Vous
voyez? Sh!” she hissed at the footman as he came in again. “Not at
home.”

The Frenchman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with his head on
the back of his chair, and his moist hand, as it lay on his knee, made
faint movements, as though trying to catch something. Alexey
Alexandrovitch got up, tried to move carefully, but stumbled against
the table, went up and laid his hand in the Frenchman’s hand. Stepan
Arkadyevitch got up too, and opening his eyes wide, trying to wake
himself up if he were asleep, he looked first at one and then at the
other. It was all real. Stepan Arkadyevitch felt that his head was
getting worse and worse.

“Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande,
qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte!” articulated the Frenchman, without
opening his eyes.

“Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez.... Revenez vers dix heures, encore
mieux demain.”

“Qu’elle sorte!” repeated the Frenchman impatiently.

“C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?” And receiving an answer in the
affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor he had meant to
ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister’s affairs, caring for
nothing, but filled with the sole desire to get away as soon as
possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into the street as though from
a plague-stricken house. For a long while he chatted and joked with his
cab-driver, trying to recover his spirits.

At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and afterwards
at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan Arkadyevitch felt a
little refreshed in the atmosphere he was used to. But still he felt
quite unlike himself all that evening.

On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s, where he was staying, Stepan
Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was
very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged him
to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its
contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of the servants,
carrying something heavy.

Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr
Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told
them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevitch, and
clinging to him, walked with him into his room and there began telling
him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep doing so.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened rarely with
him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he could
recall to his mind, everything was disgusting; but most disgusting of
all, as if it were something shameful, was the memory of the evening he
had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.

Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer,
refusing to grant Anna’s divorce, and he understood that this decision
was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or pretended
trance.