Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [110]
To Vronsky at least it seemed that she understood everything he was feeling now as he looked at her.
As soon as he came in, she drew a deep breath and, rolling back her prominent eye so that the white was shot with blood, looked at the people coming in from the opposite side, tossing her muzzle and shifting lithely from one foot to the other.
‘Well, there you see how excited she is,’ said the Englishman.
‘Oh, you sweetheart!’ said Vronsky, approaching the horse and coaxing her.
But the closer he came, the more excited she grew. Only when he came to her head did she suddenly quiet down, her muscles quivering under her thin, tender skin. Vronsky stroked her firm neck, straightened a strand of her mane that had fallen on the wrong side of her sharp withers, and put his face to her nostrils, taut and thin as a bat’s wing. She noisily breathed in and out with her strained nostrils, gave a start, lay her sharp ear back, and stretched out her firm black lip to Vronsky, as if she wanted to nibble his sleeve. Then, remembering the muzzle, she tossed it and again began shifting from one sculpted leg to the other.
‘Calm down, sweetheart, calm down!’ he said, patting her on the rump again; and with a joyful awareness that the horse was in the best condition, he left the stall.
The horse’s excitement had communicated itself to Vronsky; he felt the blood rushing to his heart and, like the horse, he wanted to move, to bite; it was both terrifying and joyful.
‘Well, I’m relying on you,’ he said to the Englishman, ‘six-thirty, at the appointed place.’
‘Everything’s in order,’ the Englishman said. ‘And where are you going, my lord?’ he asked, unexpectedly using this title ‘my lord’, which he hardly ever used.
Vronsky raised his head in surprise and looked as he knew how to look, not into the Englishman’s eyes but at his forehead, surprised by the boldness of the question. But, realizing that the Englishman, in putting this question, was looking at him as a jockey, not as an employer, he answered him:
‘I must go to Briansky’s, I’ll be back in an hour.’
‘How many times have I been asked that question today!’ he said to himself and blushed, something that rarely happened to him. The Englishman looked at him intently and, as if he knew where he was going, added:
‘The first thing is to be calm before you ride. Don’t be out of sorts or upset by anything.’
‘All right,’ Vronsky, smiling, replied in English and, jumping into his carriage, gave orders to drive to Peterhof.
He had driven only a few paces when the storm clouds that had been threatening rain since morning drew over and there was a downpour.
‘That’s bad!’ Vronsky thought, putting the top up. ‘It was muddy to begin with, but now it will turn into a real swamp.’ Sitting in the solitude of the closed carriage, he took out his mother’s letter and his brother’s note and read them.
Yes, it was all the same thing over and over. His mother, his brother, everybody found it necessary to interfere in the affairs of his heart. This interference aroused his spite - a feeling he rarely experienced. ‘What business is it of theirs? Why does everybody consider it his duty to take care of me? And why do they pester me? Because they see that this is something they can’t understand. If it was an ordinary, banal, society liaison, they’d leave me in peace. They feel that this is something else, that this is not a game, this woman is dearer to me than life. That’s what they don’t understand, and it vexes them. Whatever our fate is or will be, we have made it, and we don’t complain about it,’ he said, uniting himself and Anna in the word ‘we’. ‘No, they have to teach us how to live. They’ve got no idea what happiness is, they don’t know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us - there is no life,’ he thought.
He was angry with everybody for their interference precisely because in his soul he felt that they, all of them, were right. He felt that the love which joined him to Anna was not a momentary passion