Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [317]
The act ended as he came in, and therefore, without going to his brother’s box, he walked up to the front row and stopped by the footlights with Serpukhovskoy, who, bending his knee and tapping his heel against the wall, had seen him from a distance and summoned him with a smile.
Vronsky had not yet seen Anna; he purposely did not look her way. But from the direction of all eyes he knew where she was. He looked around surreptitiously, but not for her; expecting the worst, his eyes were seeking Alexei Alexandrovich. To his good fortune, Alexei Alexandrovich was not in the theatre this time.
‘How little of the military is left in you!’ Serpukhovskoy said to him. ‘A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort.’
‘Yes, I put on a tailcoat as soon as I got home,’ Vronsky replied, smiling and slowly taking out his opera-glasses.
‘In that, I confess, I envy you. When I come back from abroad and put this on,’ he tapped his epaulettes, ‘I regret my lost freedom.’
Serpukhovskoy had long since given up on Vronsky’s career, but he loved him as before and now was especially amiable with him.
‘Too bad you were late for the first act.’
Vronsky, listening with one ear, transferred his opera-glasses from the baignoire to the dress circle and scanned the boxes. Next to a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who blinked angrily into the lenses of the moving opera-glasses, Vronsky suddenly saw Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, and smiling in its frame of lace. She was in the fifth baignoire, twenty steps away from him. She was sitting at the front and, turning slightly, was saying something to Yashvin. The poise of her head on her beautiful, broad shoulders, the glow of restrained excitement in her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her exactly as he had seen her at the ball in Moscow. But his sense of this beauty was quite different now. His feeling for her now had nothing mysterious in it, and therefore her beauty, though it attracted him more strongly than before, at the same time offended him. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky could sense that she had seen him.
When Vronsky again looked in that direction through his opera-glasses, he noticed that Princess Varvara was especially red, laughed unnaturally and kept turning to look at the neighbouring box, while Anna, tapping on the red velvet with a folded fan, gazed off somewhere and did not see or want to see what was happening in that box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression it had when he was losing at cards. He sulkily put the left side of his moustache further and further into his mouth, glancing sidelong at the same neighbouring box.
In this box to the left were the Kartasovs. Vronsky knew them and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Mme Kartasov, a thin, small woman, was standing in her box, her back turned to Anna, and putting on a cape that her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and cross, and she was saying something excitedly. Kartasov, a fat, bald gentleman, kept looking round at Anna and trying to calm his wife. When his wife left, the husband lingered for a long time, his eyes seeking Anna’s, apparently wishing to bow to her. But Anna, obviously ignoring him on purpose, turned round and was saying something to Yashvin, who leaned his cropped head towards her. Kartasov went out without bowing, and the box was left empty.
Vronsky did not understand precisely what had taken place between the Kartasovs and Anna, but he realized that it had been humiliating for Anna. He realized it both from what he had seen and, most of all, from Anna’s look. He knew she had gathered her last forces in order to maintain the role she had taken upon herself.