________________________________________________
_ In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there
must necessarily be either complete division between the husband
and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are
vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of
enterprise can be undertaken.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both
husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither
complete division nor agreement between them.
Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the
heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare
of summer, and all the trees in the boulevards had long since
been in full leaf, and the leaves were covered with dust. But
they did not go back to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to
do long before; they went on staying in Moscow, though they both
loathed it, because of late there had been no agreement between
them.
The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and
all efforts to come to an understanding intensified it, instead
of removing it. It was an inner irritation, grounded in her mind
on the conviction that his love had grown less; in his, on regret
that he had put himself for her sake in a difficult position,
which she, instead of lightening, made still more difficult.
Neither of them gave full utterance to their sense of grievance,
but they considered each other in the wrong, and tried on every
pretext to prove this to one another.
In her eyes the whole of hirn, with all his habits, ideas,
desires, with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one
thing--love for women, and that love, she felt, ought to be
entirely concentrated on her alone. That love was less;
consequently, as she reasoned, he must have transferred part of
his love to other women or to another woman--and she was jealous.
She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease
of his love. Not having got an object for her jealousy, she was
on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her
jealousy from one object to another. At one time she was jealous
of those low women with whom he might so easily renew his old
bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might
meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might
want to marry, for whose sake he would break with her. And this
last form of jealousy tortured her most of all, especially as he
had unwarily told her, in a moment of frankness, that his mother
knew him so little that she had had the audacity to try and
persuade him to marry the young Princess Sorokina.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and
found grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that
was difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing
condition of suspense she had passed in Moscow, the tardiness and
indecision of Alexey Alexandrovitch, her solitude--she put it all
down to him. If he had loved her he would have seen all the
bitterness of her position, and would have rescued her from it.
For her being in Moscow and not in the country, he was to blame
too. He could not live buried in the country as she would have
liked. to do. He must have society, and he had put her in this
awful position, the bitterness of which he would not see. And
again, it was his fault that she was forever separated from her
son.
Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time
did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of
complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been of old and
which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was atone, and waiting for him to come back
from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the
room where the noise from the street was least heard), and
thought over every detail of their yesterday's quarrel. Going
back from the well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to
what had been the ground of it, she arrived at last at its
origin. For a long while she could hardly believe that their
dissension had arisen from a conversation so inoffensive, of so
little moment to either. But so it actually had been. It all
arose from his laughing at the girls' high schools, declaring
they were useless, while she defended them. He had spoken
slightingly of women's education in general, and had said that
Hannah, Anna's English protegee, had not the slightest need to
know anything of physics.
This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to
her occupations. And she bethought her of a phrase to pay him
back for the pain he had given her. "I don't expect you to
understand me, my feelings, as any one who loved me might, but
simple delicacy I did expect," she said.
And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said something
unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but at that point,
with an unmistakable desire to wound her too, he had said:
"I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that's
true, because I see it's unnatural."
The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up
for herself so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life,
the injustice with which he had accused her of affectation, of
artificiality, aroused her.
"I am very sorry that nothing but what's coarse and material is
comprehensible and natural to you," she said and walked out of
the room.
When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not
referred to the quarrel, but both felt that the quarrel had been
smoothed over, but was not at an end.
To-day he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely
and wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to
forget it all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she
wanted to throw the blame on herself and to justify him.
"I am myself to blame. I'm irritable, I'm insanely jealous. I
will make it up with him, and we'll go away to the country; there
I shall be more at peace."
"Unnatural!" She suddenly recalled the word that had stung her
most of all, not so much the word itself as the intent to wound
her with which it was said. "I know what he meant; he meant--
unnatural, not loving my own daughter, to love another person's
child. What does he know of love for children, of my love for
Seryozha, whom I've sacrificed for him? But that wish to wound
me! No, he loves another woman, it must be so."
And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind,
she had
gone round the same circle that she had been round so often
before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation,
she was horrified at herself. "Can it be impossible? Can it be
beyond me to control myself?" she said to herself, and began
again from the beginning. "He's truthful, he's honest, he loves
me. I love him, and in a few days the divorce will come. What
more do I want? I want peace of mind and trust, and I will take
the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will tell him I
was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go away
to-morrow."
And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by
irritability, she rang, and ordered the boxes to be brought up
for packing their things for the country.
At ten o'clock Vronsky came in. _
Read next: Part Seven: Chapter 24
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