Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [331]
Fortunately for Levin, the old princess put an end to his agony by getting up herself and advising Kitty to go to bed. But here, too, it did not pass without new suffering for Levin. Saying good-night to his hostess, Vasenka again went to kiss her hand, but Kitty, blushing, with a naive rudeness for which she was later reprimanded by her mother, drew back her hand and said:
‘That’s not done in our house.’
In Levin’s eyes she was to blame for having permitted such relations, and still more to blame for showing so awkwardly that she did not like them.
‘Well, who cares about sleep!’ said Stepan Arkadyich, who, after drinking several glasses of wine at dinner, was in his sweetest, most poetical mood. ‘Look, Kitty, look!’ he said, pointing to the moon rising from behind the lindens. ‘How lovely! Veslovsky, it’s time for a serenade. You know, he has a fine voice; he and I sang together on our way here. He’s brought some wonderful romances along, two new ones. We should sing with Varvara Andreevna.’
When they had all dispersed, Stepan Arkadyich and Veslovsky paced up and down the drive for a long time, and their voices could be heard singing a new romance together.
Listening to those voices, Levin sat scowling in the armchair in his wife’s bedroom and to her questions about what was the matter maintained an obstinate silence; but when she finally asked with a timid smile: ‘Was it something you disliked about Veslovsky?’ - he burst out and said everything. What he said was insulting to himself and therefore irritated him still more.
He stood before her, his eyes flashing terribly from under his scowling eyebrows, pressing his strong hands to his chest, as if straining with all his might to hold himself back. The expression on his face would have been stern and even cruel had it not at the same time expressed suffering, which touched her. His jaw was twitching, and his voice broke.
‘You understand that I’m not jealous: it’s a vile word. I cannot be jealous, or believe that ... I cannot say what I’m feeling, but it’s terrible ... I’m not jealous, but I’m offended, humiliated that someone dares to think, dares to look at you with such eyes...’
‘What eyes?’ said Kitty, trying as conscientiously as she could to recall all the words and gestures of that evening and all their nuances.
In the depths of her soul she found that there had been something of the sort, precisely at the moment when he had gone after her to the other end of the table, but she dared not confess it even to herself, much less venture to tell it to him and so increase his suffering.
‘But what can be attractive in me the way I am? ...’
‘Ah!’ he cried, clutching his head. ‘Hear what she says! ... So, if you were attractive ...’
‘No, Kostya, wait, listen!’ she said, looking at him with an expression of suffering commiseration. ‘What can you be thinking? When nobody exists for me, nobody, nobody!... Do you want me not to see anyone?’
In the first moment his jealousy offended her; she was vexed that the smallest diversion, and the most innocent, was forbidden her; but now she would gladly have sacrificed not just such trifles but everything to deliver him from the suffering he was going through.
‘You understand the horror and comicality of my position,’ he went on in a desperate whisper, ‘that he’s in my house, that he essentially did nothing improper, except for this casualness and tucking his leg under. He considers it the best tone, and so I have to be courteous to him.’
‘But, Kostya, you’re exaggerating,’ said Kitty, who in the depths of her soul rejoiced at the strength of his love which was now expressing itself in his jealousy.
‘The most terrible thing is that you - the way you always are, and now, when you’re so sacred to me and we’re so happy, so especially happy, and suddenly this trash... Not trash, why do I abuse him? I don’t care about him. But why should my happiness, your happiness ... ?’
‘You know, I understand how it happened,’ Kitty began.