Anna Karenina

owards the end of May, when everything had been more or less
satisfactorily arranged, she received her husband’s answer to her
complaints of the disorganized state of things in the country. He wrote
begging her forgiveness for not having thought of everything before,
and promised to come down at the first chance. This chance did not
present itself, and till the beginning of June Darya Alexandrovna
stayed alone in the country.

On the Sunday in St. Peter’s week Darya Alexandrovna drove to mass for
all her children to take the sacrament. Darya Alexandrovna in her
intimate, philosophical talks with her sister, her mother, and her
friends very often astonished them by the freedom of her views in
regard to religion. She had a strange religion of transmigration of
souls all her own, in which she had firm faith, troubling herself
little about the dogmas of the Church. But in her family she was strict
in carrying out all that was required by the Church—and not merely in
order to set an example, but with all her heart in it. The fact that
the children had not been at the sacrament for nearly a year worried
her extremely, and with the full approval and sympathy of Marya
Philimonovna she decided that this should take place now in the summer.

For several days before, Darya Alexandrovna was busily deliberating on
how to dress all the children. Frocks were made or altered and washed,
seams and flounces were let out, buttons were sewn on, and ribbons got
ready. One dress, Tanya’s, which the English governess had undertaken,
cost Darya Alexandrovna much loss of temper. The English governess in
altering it had made the seams in the wrong place, had taken up the
sleeves too much, and altogether spoilt the dress. It was so narrow on
Tanya’s shoulders that it was quite painful to look at her. But Marya
Philimonovna had the happy thought of putting in gussets, and adding a
little shoulder-cape. The dress was set right, but there was nearly a
quarrel with the English governess. On the morning, however, all was
happily arranged, and towards ten o’clock—the time at which they had
asked the priest to wait for them for the mass—the children in their
new dresses, with beaming faces, stood on the step before the carriage
waiting for their mother.

To the carriage, instead of the restive Raven, they had harnessed,
thanks to the representations of Marya Philimonovna, the bailiff’s
horse, Brownie, and Darya Alexandrovna, delayed by anxiety over her own
attire, came out and got in, dressed in a white muslin gown.

Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair, and dressed with care and
excitement. In the old days she had dressed for her own sake to look
pretty and be admired. Later on, as she got older, dress became more
and more distasteful to her. She saw that she was losing her good
looks. But now she began to feel pleasure and interest in dress again.
Now she did not dress for her own sake, not for the sake of her own
beauty, but simply that as the mother of those exquisite creatures she
might not spoil the general effect. And looking at herself for the last
time in the looking-glass she was satisfied with herself. She looked
nice. Not nice as she would have wished to look nice in old days at a
ball, but nice for the object which she now had in view.

In the church there was no one but the peasants, the servants and their
women-folk. But Darya Alexandrovna saw, or fancied she saw, the
sensation produced by her children and her. The children were not only
beautiful to look at in their smart little dresses, but they were
charming in the way they behaved. Aliosha, it is true, did not stand
quite correctly; he kept turning round, trying to look at his little
jacket from behind; but all the same he was wonderfully sweet. Tanya
behaved like a grown-up person, and looked after the little ones. And
the smallest, Lily, was bewitching in her naïve astonishment at
everything, and it was difficult not to smile when, after taking the
sacrament, she said in English, “Please, some more.”

On the way home the children felt that something solemn had happened,
and were very sedate.

Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch Grisha began
whistling, and, what was worse, was disobedient to the English
governess, and was forbidden to have any tart. Darya Alexandrovna would
not have let things go so far on such a day had she been present; but
she had to support the English governess’s authority, and she upheld
her decision that Grisha should have no tart. This rather spoiled the
general good humor. Grisha cried, declaring that Nikolinka had whistled
too, and he was not punished, and that he wasn’t crying for the tart—he
didn’t care—but at being unjustly treated. This was really too tragic,
and Darya Alexandrovna made up her mind to persuade the English
governess to forgive Grisha, and she went to speak to her. But on the
way, as she passed the drawing-room, she beheld a scene, filling her
heart with such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes, and she
forgave the delinquent herself.

The culprit was sitting at the window in the corner of the
drawing-room; beside him was standing Tanya with a plate. On the
pretext of wanting to give some dinner to her dolls, she had asked the
governess’s permission to take her share of tart to the nursery, and
had taken it instead to her brother. While still weeping over the
injustice of his punishment, he was eating the tart, and kept saying
through his sobs, “Eat yourself; let’s eat it together ... together.”

Tanya had at first been under the influence of her pity for Grisha,
then of a sense of her noble action, and tears were standing in her
eyes too; but she did not refuse, and ate her share.

On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed, but, looking into
her face, they saw they were not doing wrong. They burst out laughing,
and, with their mouths full of tart, they began wiping their smiling
lips with their hands, and smearing their radiant faces all over with
tears and jam.

“Mercy! Your new white frock! Tanya! Grisha!” said their mother, trying
to save the frock, but with tears in her eyes, smiling a blissful,
rapturous smile.

The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given for the little
girls to have their blouses put on, and the boys their old jackets, and
the wagonette to be harnessed; with Brownie, to the bailiff’s
annoyance, again in the shafts, to drive out for mushroom picking and
bathing. A roar of delighted shrieks arose in the nursery, and never
ceased till they had set off for the bathing-place.

They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even Lily found a birch
mushroom. It had always happened before that Miss Hoole found them and
pointed them out to her; but this time she found a big one quite of
herself, and there was a general scream of delight, “Lily has found a
mushroom!”

Then they reached the river, put the horses under the birch trees, and
went to the bathing-place. The coachman, Terenty, fastened the horses,
who kept whisking away the flies, to a tree, and, treading down the
grass, lay down in the shade of a birch and smoked his shag, while the
never-ceasing shrieks of delight of the children floated across to him
from the bathing-place.

Though it was hard work to look after all the children and restrain
their wild pranks, though it was difficult too to keep in one’s head
and not mix up all the stockings, little breeches, and shoes for the
different legs, and to undo and to do up again all the tapes and
buttons, Darya Alexandrovna, who had always liked bathing herself, and
believed it to be very good for the children, enjoyed nothing so much
as bathing with all the children. To go over all those fat little legs,
pulling on their stockings, to take in her arms and dip those little
naked bodies, and to hear their screams of delight and alarm, to see
the breathless faces with wide-open, scared, and happy eyes of all her
splashing cherubs, was a great pleasure to her.

When half the children had been dressed, some peasant women in holiday
dress, out picking herbs, came up to the bathing-shed and stopped
shyly. Marya Philimonovna called one of them and handed her a sheet and
a shirt that had dropped into the water for her to dry them, and Darya
Alexandrovna began to talk to the women. At first they laughed behind
their hands and did not understand her questions, but soon they grew
bolder and began to talk, winning Darya Alexandrovna’s heart at once by
the genuine admiration of the children that they showed.

“My, what a beauty! as white as sugar,” said one, admiring Tanitchka,
and shaking her head; “but thin....”

“Yes, she has been ill.”

“And so they’ve been bathing you too,” said another to the baby.

“No; he’s only three months old,” answered Darya Alexandrovna with
pride.

“You don’t say so!”

“And have you any children?”

“I’ve had four; I’ve two living—a boy and a girl. I weaned her last
carnival.”

“How old is she?”

“Why, two years old.”

“Why did you nurse her so long?”

“It’s our custom; for three fasts....”

And the conversation became most interesting to Darya Alexandrovna.
What sort of time did she have? What was the matter with the boy? Where
was her husband? Did it often happen?

Darya Alexandrovna felt disinclined to leave the peasant women, so
interesting to her was their conversation, so completely identical were
all their interests. What pleased her most of all was that she saw
clearly what all the women admired more than anything was her having so
many children, and such fine ones. The peasant women even made Darya
Alexandrovna laugh, and offended the English governess, because she was
the cause of the laughter she did not understand. One of the younger
women kept staring at the Englishwoman, who was dressing after all the
rest, and when she put on her third petticoat she could not refrain
from the remark, “My, she keeps putting on and putting on, and she’ll
never have done!” she said, and they all went off into roars.