Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [249]
‘I’m very glad you think so,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, shaking his head with a grave and painfully compassionate look on his face. ‘I’ve come to Petersburg on account of that.’
‘The whole town is talking about it,’ she said. ‘This is an impossible situation. She’s wasting away. He doesn’t understand that she’s one of those women who can’t trifle with their feelings. One of two things: he must either take her away, act energetically, or give her a divorce. But this is stifling her.’
‘Yes, yes ... precisely ...’ Oblonsky said, sighing. ‘That’s why I’ve come. That is, not essentially for that ... I’ve been made a gentleman of the chamber, so I must show my gratitude. But above all, this has got to be settled.’
‘Well, God help you!’ said Betsy.
Having seen Princess Betsy to the front hall and kissed her hand above the glove, where the pulse beats, and having told her a heap of such unseemly drivel that she no longer knew whether to laugh or be angry, Stepan Arkadyich went to his sister. He found her in tears.
Despite the ebulliently merry mood he was in, Stepan Arkadyich naturally changed at once to the compassionate, poetically agitated tone that suited her mood. He asked about her health and how she had spent the night.
‘Very, very badly. And the afternoon, and the morning, and all days past and to come,’ she said.
‘I think you’re surrendering to dejection. You must shake yourself up, look at life straight on. I know it’s hard, but ...’
‘I’ve heard that women love people even for their vices,’ Anna suddenly began, ‘but I hate him for his virtues. I cannot live with him. You understand, the look of him affects me physically, I get beside myself. I cannot, cannot live with him. What am I to do? I was unhappy and thought it was impossible to be more unhappy, but I could not have imagined the terrible state I live in now. Would you believe that, though I know he’s a good and excellent man and I’m not worth his fingernail, I hate him even so? I hate him for his magnanimity. And I have nothing left, except...’
She was about to say ‘death’, but Stepan Arkadyich did not let her finish.
‘You’re ill and annoyed,’ he said. ‘Believe me, you exaggerate terribly. There’s nothing so dreadful in it.’
And Stepan Arkadyich smiled. No one in Stepan Arkadyich’s place, having to deal with such despair, would have allowed himself to smile (a smile would seem crude), but in his smile there was so much kindness and almost feminine tenderness that it could not be offensive. His quiet words and smiles worked softeningly and soothingly, like almond butter. And Anna soon felt it.
‘No, Stiva,’ she said. ‘I’m lost, lost! Worse than lost. I’m not lost yet, I can’t say it’s all ended, on the contrary, I feel that it hasn’t ended. I’m like a tightened string that’s about to snap. It hasn’t ended ... and it will end horribly.’
‘Never mind, the string can be gently loosened. There’s no situation that has no way out.’
‘I’ve been thinking and thinking. There’s only one ...’
Again he understood from her frightened eyes that this one way out, in her opinion, was death, and he did not let her finish.
‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘excuse me. You can’t see your situation as I can see it. Allow me to tell you frankly my opinion.’ Again he warily smiled his almond-butter smile. ‘I’ll begin from the beginning: you married a man twenty years older than yourself. You married without love or not knowing what love is. That was a mistake, let’s assume.’
‘A terrible mistake!’ said Anna.
‘But I repeat: it’s an accomplished fact. Then you had, let’s say, the misfortune to fall in love with someone other than your husband. That is a misfortune, but it’s also an accomplished fact. And your husband has accepted and forgiven it.’ He paused after each sentence, expecting her to object, but she made no reply. ‘That’s so. The question now is: can you go on living with your husband? Do you want that? Does he want