Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [242]
And she began thrashing about in her bed.
*
The doctor and his colleagues said it was puerperal fever, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ends in death. All day there was fever, delirium and unconsciousness. By midnight the sick woman lay without feeling and almost without pulse.
The end was expected at any moment.
Vronsky went home, but came in the morning to inquire, and Alexei Alexandrovich, meeting him in the front hall, said:
‘Stay, she may ask for you,’ and himself led him to his wife’s boudoir.
Towards morning the excitement, liveliness, quickness of thought and speech began again, and again ended in unconsciousness. On the third day it was the same, and the doctors said there was hope. That day Alexei Alexandrovich came to the boudoir where Vronsky was sitting and, closing the door, sat down facing him.
‘Alexei Alexandrovich,’ said Vronsky, feeling that a talk was imminent, ‘I am unable to speak, unable to understand. Spare me! However painful it is for you, believe me, it is still more terrible for me.’
He was about to get up. But Alexei Alexandrovich took his hand and said:
‘I beg you to hear me out, it’s necessary. I must explain my feelings to you, those that have guided me and those that will guide me, so that you will not be mistaken regarding me. You know that I had decided on a divorce and had even started proceedings. I won’t conceal from you that, when I started proceedings, I was undecided, I suffered; I confess that I was driven by a desire for revenge on you and on her. When I received her telegram, I came here with the same feelings - I will say more: I wished for her death. But ...’ he paused, pondering whether to reveal his feelings to him or not. ‘But I saw her and I forgave. And the happiness of forgiveness revealed my duty to me. I forgave her completely. I want to turn the other cheek, I want to give my shirt when my caftan is taken, and I only pray to God that He not take from me the happiness of forgiveness!’ Tears welled up in his eyes, and their luminous, serene look struck Vronsky. ‘That is my position. You may trample me in the mud, make me the laughing-stock of society, I will not abandon her, I will never say a word of reproach to you,’ he went on. ‘My duty is clearly ordained for me: I must be with her and I will be. If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose it will be better if you leave.’
He stood up, and sobs broke off his speech. Vronsky also got up and in a stooping, unstraightened_ posture looked at him from under his brows. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich’s feelings. But he felt that this was something lofty and even inaccessible to him in his world-view.
XVIII
After his conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky went out to the porch of the Karenins’ house and stopped, hardly remembering where he was and where he had to go or drive. He felt himself shamed, humiliated, guilty and deprived of any possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt himself thrown out of the rut he had been following so proudly and easily till then. All the habits and rules of his life, which had seemed so firm, suddenly turned out to be false and inapplicable. The deceived husband, who till then had seemed a pathetic being, an accidental and somewhat comic hindrance to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her and raised to an awesome height, and on that height the husband appeared not wicked, not false, not ludicrous, but kind, simple and majestic. Vronsky could not but feel it. The roles had been suddenly changed. Vronsky felt Karenin’s loftiness and his own abasement, Karenin’s rightness and his own wrongness. He felt that the husband had been magnanimous even in his grief, while he had been mean and petty in his deceit. But this realization of his meanness before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of his grief. He felt himself inexpressibly unhappy now, because his passion for Anna, which had been cooling,