Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [308]
‘Alexei! Don’t be angry with me. Please understand that it’s not my fault,’ said Varya, looking at him with a timid smile.
‘I’m not angry with you,’ he said just as sullenly, ‘but it doubles my pain. What also pains me is that it breaks up our friendship. Or let’s say it doesn’t break it up, but weakens it. You realize that for me, too, it cannot be otherwise.’
And with that he left her.
Vronsky understood that further attempts were futile and that they would have to spend those few days in Petersburg as in a foreign city, avoiding all contacts with their former society so as not to be subjected to insults and unpleasantnesses, which were so painful for him. One of the most unpleasant things about the situation in Petersburg was that Alexei Alexandrovich and his name seemed to be everywhere. It was impossible to begin talking about anything without the conversation turning to Alexei Alexandrovich; it was impossible to go anywhere without meeting him. At least it seemed so to Vronsky, as it seems to a man with a sore finger that he keeps knocking into everything, as if on purpose, with that finger.
The stay in Petersburg seemed the more difficult to Vronsky because all that time he saw some new, incomprehensible mood in Anna. At one moment she appeared to be in love with him, at another she became cold, irritable and impenetrable. She was suffering over something and concealing something from him, and seemed not to notice those insults that poisoned his life and that for her, with her subtle perceptiveness, ought to have been still more painful.
XXIX
For Anna one of the objects of the trip to Russia was to see her son. Since the day she left Italy, the thought of seeing him had not ceased to excite her. And the closer she came to Petersburg, the greater became the joy and significance of this meeting for her. She never asked herself the question of how to arrange it. To her it seemed natural and simple to see her son when she was in the same town with him; but on arriving in Petersburg, she suddenly saw her present position in society clearly and realized that it would be difficult to arrange the meeting.
She had already been in Petersburg for two days. The thought of her son had never left her for a moment, but she still had not seen him. She felt she did not have the right to go directly to the house, where she might encounter Alexei Alexandrovich. She might be insulted and turned away. As for writing and entering into relations with her husband, it was painful even to think of it: she could be at peace only when not thinking of her husband. To find out when and where her son went for his walks and see him then, was not enough for her: she had been preparing so long for this meeting, she had so much to tell him, she wanted so much to embrace him, to kiss him. Seryozha’s old nanny might have helped her and instructed her. But the nanny no longer lived in Alexei Alexandrovich’s house. In these hesitations and in the search for the nanny, two days passed.
Learning of the close relations between Alexei Alexandrovich and Countess Lydia Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write her a letter, which cost her great effort, in which she said deliberately that permission to see her son depended on her husband’s magnanimity. She knew that if her husband were shown the letter, he, pursuing his role of magnanimity, would not refuse her.
The messenger who had carried the letter brought her a most cruel and unexpected reply - that there would be no reply. She had never felt so humiliated as in that moment when, having summoned the messenger, she heard from him a detailed account of how he had waited and how he had then been told: ‘There will be no reply.’ Anna felt herself humiliated, offended, but she saw that from her own point of view Countess Lydia Ivanovna was right. Her grief was the stronger because it was solitary. She could not and did not want to share it with Vronsky. She knew that for him, though he was the chief cause of her unhappiness, the question