LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 8

      KARENIN did not see anything peculiar or improper in his wife’s conversing animatedly with Vronsky at a separate table, but he noticed that others in the drawing-room considered it peculiar and improper, therefore he also considered it improper, and decided to speak to his wife about it.

      When he reached home he went to his study as usual, seated himself in his easy-chair, and opened a book on the Papacy at the place where his paper-knife was inserted. He read till one o’clock as was his wont, only now and then rubbing his high forehead and jerking his head as if driving something away. At the usual hour he rose and prepared for bed. Anna had not yet returned. With the book under his arm he went upstairs; but tonight, instead of his usual thoughts and calculations about his official affairs, his mind was full of his wife and of something unpleasant that had happened concerning her. Contrary to his habit he did not go to bed, but with his hands clasped behind his back started pacing up and down the rooms. He felt that he could not lie down, till he had thought over these newly-arisen circumstances.

      When Karenin had decided to talk the matter over with his wife, it had seemed to him quite easy and simple to do so; but now, when he began considering how to approach her, the matter appeared very difficult and complicated.

      He was not of a jealous disposition. Jealousy in his opinion insulted a wife, and a man should have confidence in his wife. Why he should have confidence — that is, a full conviction that his young wife would always love him — he never asked himself; but he felt no distrust, and therefore had confidence, and assured himself that it was right to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy is a shameful feeling, and that one ought to have confidence, had not been destroyed, he felt that he was face to face with something illogical and stupid, and he did not know what to do. Karenin was being confronted with life — with the possibility of his wife’s loving somebody else, and this seemed stupid and incomprehensible to him, because it was life itself. He had lived and worked all his days in official spheres, which deal with reflections of life, and every time he had knocked up against life itself he had stepped out of its way. He now experienced a sensation such as a man might feel who, while quietly crossing a bridge over an abyss, suddenly sees that the bridge is being taken to pieces and that he is facing the abyss. The abyss was real life; the bridge was the artificial life Karenin had been living. It was the first time that the possibility of his wife’s falling in love with anybody had occurred to him, and he was horrified.

      He did not undress, but paced up and down with his even step on the resounding parquet floor of the dining-room, which was lit by one lamp, over the carpet of the dark drawing-room, where a light was reflected only from a recently painted portrait of himself which hung above the sofa, and on through her sitting-room, where two candles were burning, lighting up the portraits of her relatives and friends and the elegant knick-knacks, long familiar to him, on her writing-table. Through her room he reached the door of their bedroom and then turned back again.

      From time to time he stopped, generally on the parquet floor of the lamp-lit dining-room, and thought: ‘Yes, it is necessary to decide and to stop it: to express my opinion of it and my decision.’ Then he turned back again. ‘But express what? What decision?’ he asked himself in the drawing-room, and could find no answer. ‘But after all,’ he reflected before turning into her room, ‘what is it that has happened? Nothing at all. She had a long talk with him — Well? What of that? Are there not plenty of men with whom a woman may talk? Besides … to be jealous is to degrade myself and her,’ he said to himself as he entered her sitting-room. But that consideration which formerly had weighed so much with him now had neither weight nor meaning. At the bedroom door he turned back, and as soon as he re-entered the dark drawing-room a voice seemed to whisper that it was not so, and that if others noticed, that showed that there must have been something for them to notice. And again he repeated to himself in the dining-room: ‘Yes, it is necessary to decide, and stop it, and express my opinion …’ And again in the drawing-room, at the turn into her room, he asked himself: ‘Decide what?’ and then, ‘What has happened?’ and he replied ‘Nothing,’ and remembered that jealousy is a feeling which insults a wife; but in the drawing-room he came again to the conviction that something had happened. His mind as well as his body performed a complete circle each time without arriving at anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her room.

      Here as he looked at her table, at the malachite cover of her blotting-book and an unfinished letter that lay there, his thoughts suddenly underwent a change. He began thinking about her: of what she thought and felt. For the first time he vividly pictured to himself her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes; but the idea that she might and should have her own independent life appeared to him so dreadful that he hastened to drive it away. That was the abyss into which he feared to look. To put himself in thought and feeling into another being was a mental action foreign to Karenin. He considered such mental acts to be injurious and dangerous romancing.

      ‘And what is most terrible of all,’ thought he, ‘is that, just now, when my work is coming to completion’ (he was thinking of the project he was then carrying through), ‘when I need peace and all my powers of mind, just now this stupid anxiety falls on me. But what is to be done? I am not one of those who suffer anxiety and agitation and have not the courage to look them in the face!’

      ‘I must think it over, come to a decision, and throw it off,’ he said aloud. ‘The question of her feelings, of what has taken place or may take place in her soul, is not my business; it is the business of her conscience and belongs to religion,’ said he, feeling relieved at having found the formal category to which the newly-arisen circumstances rightly belonged.

      ‘Well then,’ thought he, ‘the question of her feelings and so on are questions for her conscience, which cannot concern me. My duty is clearly defined. As head of the family I am the person whose duty is to guide her, and who is therefore partly responsible; I must show her the danger which I see, warn her, and even use my authority. I must speak plainly to her.’

      What he would say to his wife took clear shape in Karenin’s head. Thinking it over, he regretted having to expend his time and powers of mind on inconspicuous domestic affairs; but nevertheless, clearly and definitely, as though it were an official report, the form and sequence of the speech he had to make shaped itself in his mind. ‘I must make the following quite clear: First, the importance of public opinion and propriety; secondly, the religious meaning of marriage; thirdly, if necessary, I must refer to the harm that may result to our son; fourthly, allude to her own unhappiness.’ And interlacing his fingers, palms downwards, he stretched them and the joints cracked.

      That movement — a bad habit of cracking his fingers — always tranquillized him and brought him back to that precision of mind which he now so needed. The sound of a carriage driving up to the front door was heard, and Karenin stood still in the middle of the room.

      A woman’s steps were heard ascending the stairs. Karenin, ready to deliver his speech, stood pressing his interlaced fingers together, trying whether some of them would not crack again. One of the joints did crack.

      By the sound of her light step on the stair he was aware of her approach and, though he was satisfied with his speech, he felt some apprehension of the coming explanations.