Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [175]
‘The more so as I can’t stay with you long, I must go to see old Vrede. I promised her ages ago,’ said Anna, for whom lying, foreign to her nature, had not only become simple and natural in society, but even gave her pleasure.
Why she had said something that she had not thought of a second before, she would have been quite unable to explain. She had said it only with the idea that, since Vronsky was not coming, she had to secure some freedom for herself and try to see him somehow. But why precisely she had mentioned the old lady-in-waiting Vrede, whom she had to visit no more than many others, she would not have known how to explain, and yet, as it turned out later, had she been inventing the cleverest way of seeing Vronsky, she could have found nothing better.
‘No, I won’t let you go for anything,’ replied Betsy, peering attentively into Anna’s face. ‘Really, if I didn’t love you, I’d be offended. As if you’re afraid my company might compromise you. Please bring us tea in the small drawing room,’ she said, narrowing her eyes as she always did when addressing a footman. She took a note from him and read it. ‘Alexei has made us a false leap,’ she said in French.v ‘He writes that he can’t come,’ she added in such a natural, simple tone as if it never could have entered her head that Vronsky was anything more to Anna than a croquet partner.
Anna knew that Betsy knew everything, but, listening to the way she talked about Vronsky, she always had a momentary conviction that she knew nothing.
‘Ah!’ Anna said indifferently, as if it was of little interest to her, and went on with a smile: ‘How could your company compromise anyone?’ This playing with words, this concealment of the secret, held great charm for Anna, as for all women. It was not the need for concealment, not the purpose of the concealment, but the very process of concealment that fascinated her. ‘I cannot be more Catholic than the pope,’ she said. ‘Stremov and Liza Merkalov are the cream of the cream of society. They are also received everywhere, and I,’ she especially emphasized the I, ‘have never been strict and intolerant. I simply have no time.’
‘Perhaps you don’t want to run into Stremov? Let him and Alexei Alexandrovich be at loggerheads on some committee, that’s no concern of ours. But in society he’s the most amiable man I know and a passionate croquet player. You’ll see. And despite his ridiculous position as Liza’s aged wooer, you must see how he gets himself out of it! He’s very sweet. You don’t know Sappho Stolz? This is a new, a quite new, tone.’
While Betsy was saying all this, Anna sensed from her cheerful, intelligent look that she partly understood her position and was up to something. They were in the small drawing room.
‘Anyhow, I must write to Alexei,’ and Betsy sat down at the table, wrote a few lines and put them in an envelope. ‘I’m writing that he should come for dinner. I have one lady for dinner who is left without a man. See if it sounds convincing. Excuse me, I’ll leave you for a moment. Seal it, please, and send it off,’ she said from the door, ‘I must make some arrangements.’
Without a moment’s thought, Anna sat down at the table with Betsy’s letter and, without reading it, added at the bottom: ‘I must see you. Come to Vrede’s garden. I’ll be there at six o’clock.’ She sealed it, and Betsy, having returned, sent the letter off in her presence.
Over tea, which was brought to them on a tray-table in the cool small drawing room, the two women indeed engaged in a ‘cosy chat’, as Princess Tverskoy had promised, until the guests arrived. They discussed the people who were expected, and the conversation came to rest on Liza Merkalov.
‘She’s very sweet and I’ve always found her sympathetic,’ Anna said.
‘You ought to love her.