Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [238]
‘Yes, yes.’
Their conversation was interrupted by Mile Linon, who, smiling falsely but tenderly, came to congratulate her favourite charge. Before she left, the servants came with their congratulations. Then relatives arrived, and that blissful tumult began from which Levin did not escape till the day after his wedding. Levin felt constantly awkward, bored, but the tension of happiness went on, ever increasing. He kept feeling that much that he did not know was demanded of him, and he did everything he was told and it all made him happy. He thought that his engagement would have nothing in common with others, that the ordinary conditions of engagement would spoil his particular happiness; but it ended with him doing the same things as others, and his happiness was only increased by it and became more and more special, the like of which had never been known and never would be.
‘Now we’ll have some sweets,’ Mlle Linon would say, and Levin would go to buy sweets.
‘Well, I’m very glad,’ said Sviyazhsky. ‘I advise you to buy flowers at Fomin’s.’
‘Must I?’ And he went to Fomin’s.
His brother told him that he would have to borrow money, because there would be many expenses, presents ...
‘Must there be presents?’ And he galloped off to Fulde’s.15
At the confectioner‘s, at Fomin’s and at Fulde’s he saw that they expected him, were glad to see him, and celebrated his happiness just as did everyone he had to deal with during those days. The extraordinary thing was not only that everyone loved him, but that all formerly unsympathetic, cold, indifferent people admired him and obeyed him in all things, treated his feeling with tenderness and delicacy, and shared his conviction that he was the happiest man in the world because his fiancée was the height of perfection. And Kitty felt the same. When Countess Nordston allowed herself to hint that she had wished for something better, Kitty flew into such a passion and proved so persuasively that nothing in the world could be better than Levin, that Countess Nordston had to admit it and never afterwards met Levin in Kitty’s presence without a smile of admiration.
The explanation he had promised was the one painful event during that time. He discussed it with the old prince and, having obtained his permission, gave Kitty his diary, in which he had written down what tormented him. He had written this diary with his future fiancée in mind. Two things tormented him: his impurity and his unbelief. His confession of unbelief went unnoticed. She was religious, had never doubted the truths of religion, but his external unbelief did not affect her in the least. She knew his whole soul through love, and in his soul she saw what she wanted, and if such a state of soul was called unbelief, it made no difference to her. But the other confession made her weep bitterly.
It was not without inner struggle that Levin gave her his diary. He knew that there could not and should not be any secrets between them, and therefore he decided that it had to be so: but he did not realize how it might affect her, he did not put himself in her place. Only when he came to them that evening before the theatre, went to her room and saw her tear-stained, pathetic and dear face, miserable from the irremediable grief he had caused her, did he understand the abyss that separated his shameful past from her dove-like purity and feel horrified at what he had done.
‘Take them, take these terrible books!’ she said, pushing away the notebooks that lay before her on the table. ‘Why did you give them to me! ... No, all the same it’s better,’ she added, taking pity on his desperate face. ‘But it’s terrible, terrible!’
He bowed his head and was silent. There was nothing he could say.
‘You won’t forgive me,’ he whispered.
‘No, I’ve forgiven you, but it’s terrible!’
However, his happiness was so great that this confession did not destroy it, but only added a new shade to it. She forgave him; but after that he considered himself still more unworthy of her, bowed still lower before her morally, and valued