Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [165]
All that was going to befall her and their son, towards whom his feeling had changed just as it had towards her, ceased to concern him. The only thing that concerned him now was the question of how to shake off in the best, most decent, most convenient for him, and therefore most just way, the mud she had spattered on him in her fall, and to continue on his path of active, honest and useful life.
‘I cannot be unhappy because a despicable woman has committed a crime; I must only find the best way out of the painful situation she has put me in. And I will find it,’ he said to himself, frowning more and more. ‘I am not the first, nor am I the last.’ And, to say nothing of historical examples, beginning with Menelaus, refreshed in everyone’s memory by La Belle Hélène,12 a whole series of cases of contemporary unfaithfulness of wives to husbands in high society emerged in Alexei Alexandrovich’s imagination. ‘Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram ... Yes, Dram, too ... such an honest, efficient man ... Semyonov, Chagin, Sigonin,’ recalled Alexei Alexandrovich. ‘Granted, some unreasonable ridicule falls on these people, but I never saw anything but misfortune in it, and I always sympathized with them,’ he said to himself, though it was not true; he had never sympathized with misfortunes of that sort, but had valued himself the higher, the more frequent were the examples of women being unfaithful to their husbands. ‘It is a misfortune that may befall anybody. And this misfortune has befallen me. The only thing is how best to endure this situation.’ And he began going through the details of the modes of action chosen by others who had found themselves in the same position.
‘Daryalov fought a duel...’
In his youth Karenin’s thoughts had been especially drawn to duelling, precisely because he was physically a timid man and knew it very well. Alexei Alexandrovich could not think without horror of a pistol pointed at him, and had never in his life used any weapon. In his youth this horror had made him think often about duelling and measure himself against a situation in which he would have to put his life in danger. Having achieved success and a firm position in life, he had long forgotten this feeling; yet the habit of the feeling claimed its own, and the fear of cowardliness proved so strong in him even now that Alexei Alexandrovich pondered and mentally fondled the question of a duel for a long time from all sides, though he knew beforehand that he would not fight under any circumstances.
‘No doubt our society is still so savage (a far cry from England) that a great many’ - and among the many were those whose opinion Alexei Alexandrovich especially valued - ‘would look favourably upon a duel. But what result would be achieved? Suppose I challenge him,’ Alexei Alexandrovich went on to himself and, vividly imagining the night he would spend after the challenge and the pistol pointed at him, he shuddered and realized that he would never do it. ‘Suppose I challenge him to a duel. Suppose they teach me how,’ he went on thinking. ’‘They place me, I pull the trigger,’ he said to himself, shutting his eyes, ‘and it turns out that I’ve killed him.‘ Alexei Alexandrovich shook his head to drive these foolish thoughts away. ’ What is the sense of killing a man in order to define one’s attitude towards a criminal wife and a son? I’ll have to decide what I am to do with her just the same. But what is still more likely and what would undoubtedly happen, is that I would be killed or wounded. I, the innocent one, the victim, would be killed or wounded. Still more senseless.