Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [213]
IV
After meeting Vronsky on his porch, Alexei Alexandrovich drove, as he had intended, to the Italian Opera. He sat out two acts there and saw everyone he had to. On returning home, he studied the coat-rack attentively and, observing that no military coat hung there, went to his rooms as usual. But, contrary to his habit, he did not go to bed but paced up and down his study till three o‘clock in the morning. The feeling of wrath against his wife, who did not want to observe propriety and fulfil the only condition placed upon her - not to receive her lover at home - left him no peace. She had not fulfilled his request, and he must now carry out his threat - demand a divorce and take her son from her. He knew all the difficulties connected with this matter, but he had said that he would do it and now he had to carry out his threat. Countess Lydia Ivanovna had hinted to him that this was the best way out of his situation, and lately the practice of divorce had brought the matter to such perfection that Alexei Alexandrovich saw a possibility of overcoming the formal difficulties. Besides, misfortunes never come singly, and the cases of the settlement of the racial minorities and the irrigation of the fields in Zaraysk province had brought down on Alexei Alexandrovich such troubles at work that he had been extremely vexed all the time recently.
He did not sleep the entire night, and his wrath, increasing in a sort of enormous progression, by morning had reached the ultimate limits. He dressed hurriedly and, as if carrying a full cup of wrath and fearing to spill it, fearing to lose along with it the energy needed for a talk with his wife, went into her room as soon as he knew that she was up.
Anna, who thought she knew her husband so well, was struck by his look when he came in. His brow was scowling, and his grim eyes stared straight ahead, avoiding hers; his lips were tightly and contemptuously compressed. In his stride, in his movements, in the sound of his voice there were such resolution and firmness as his wife had never seen in him before. He came into the room without greeting her, made straight for her writing desk and, taking the keys, opened the drawer.
‘What do you want?!’ she cried.
‘Your lover’s letters,’ he said.
‘They’re not here,’ she said, closing the drawer; but by that movement he understood that he had guessed right and, rudely pushing her hand away, he quickly snatched the portfolio in which he knew she kept her most important papers. She tried to tear it from him, but he pushed her away.3
‘Sit down! I must talk with you,’ he said, putting the portfolio under his arm and pressing it so tightly with his elbow that his shoulder rose up.
Surprised and intimidated, she gazed at him silently.
‘I told you that I would not allow you to receive your lover at home.’
‘I had to see him, in order to ...’
She stopped, unable to invent anything.
‘I will not go into the details of why a woman needs to see her lover.’
‘I wanted, I only ...’ she said, flushing. His rudeness annoyed her and gave her courage. ‘Can’t you feel how easy it is for you to insult me?’ she said.
‘One can insult an honest man or an honest woman, but to tell a thief that he is a thief is merely la constatation d’un fait.’ag
‘This cruelty is a new feature - I did not know it was in you.’
‘You call it cruelty when a husband offers his wife freedom, giving her the honourable shelter of his name, only on condition that propriety is observed. Is that cruelty?’
‘It’s worse than cruelty, it’s baseness, if you really want to know!’ Anna cried out in a burst of anger and got up, intending to leave.
‘No!’ he shouted in his squeaky voice, which now rose a pitch higher than usual, and, seizing her arm so strongly with his big fingers that the bracelet he pressed left red marks on it, he forced her to sit down. ‘Baseness? Since you want to use that word, it is baseness to abandon a husband and son