Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [360]
Darya Alexandrovna made no reply and only looked fearfully at him. Now that she was left alone with him, she suddenly became frightened: his laughing eyes and the stern expression of his face scared her.
The most varied suppositions as to the subject of his talk with her flashed through her head: ‘He’s going to ask me to come and stay here with my children, and I’ll have to say no to him; or to become part of Anna’s circle in Moscow ... Or is it about Vasenka Veslovsky and his relations with Anna? Maybe about Kitty, about how he feels himself guilty?’ She foresaw only unpleasantness, but failed to guess what he wanted to talk with her about.
‘You have such influence on Anna, and she loves you so,’ he said. ‘Help me.’
Darya Alexandrovna looked with questioning timidity at his energetic face, which kept moving into sunlit gaps in the shade of the lindens, then was darkened again by the shade, and waited for what more he would say; but he walked silently beside her, his stick grazing the gravel.
‘If you have come to us, you, the only woman among Anna’s former friends - I don’t count Princess Varvara - I understand that you’ve done it not because you consider our situation normal, but because, realizing all the difficulty of that situation, you still love her and want to help her. Have I understood you rightly?’ he asked, turning to look at her.
‘Oh, yes,’ Darya Alexandrovna replied, folding her parasol, ‘but...’
‘No,’ he interrupted and stopped involuntarily, forgetting that he was thereby putting her into an awkward position, so that she had to stop as well. ‘No one feels all the difficulty of Anna’s situation more fully or strongly than I do. And that is understandable, if you do me the honour of considering me a man who has a heart. I am the cause of that situation, and that is why I feel it.’
‘I understand,’ said Darya Alexandrovna, involuntarily admiring him for having said it so sincerely and firmly. ‘But precisely because you feel yourself the cause of it, I’m afraid you exaggerate,’ she said. ‘Her situation in society is difficult, I understand that.’
‘It’s hell in society!’ he said quickly, with a dark frown. ‘It’s impossible to imagine moral torments worse than those she lived through for two weeks in Petersburg ... I beg you to believe that.’
‘Yes, but here, so long as neither Anna ... nor you feel any need of society ...’
‘Society!’ he said scornfully. ‘What need can I have of society?’
‘Then for so long - and that may mean for ever — you’ll be happy and at peace. I can see that Anna is happy, perfectly happy, she’s already had time to tell me so,’ Darya Alexandrovna said, smiling; and now, as she said it, she involuntarily doubted whether Anna was indeed happy.
But Vronsky, it seemed, did not doubt it.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I know she has revived after all her sufferings; she’s happy. She’s happy in the present. But I? ... I’m afraid of what awaits us ... Sorry, would you like to move on?’
‘No, it makes no difference.’
‘Let’s sit down here then.’
Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden bench in the corner of the avenue. He stood in front of her.
‘I see that she’s happy,’ he repeated, and the doubt whether she was happy struck Darya Alexandrovna still more strongly. ‘But can it go on like this? Whether what we did was good or bad is another question. The die is cast,’ he said, going from Russian to French, ‘and we’re bound for our whole life. We’re united by the bonds of love, which are the most sacred thing for us. We have a child, we may have more children. But the law and all the conditions of our situation are such that thousands of complications exist that she doesn’t see and doesn’t want to see now, as she rests her soul after all her sufferings and ordeals. And that is understandable. But I can’t help seeing them. My daughter, according to the law, is not my daughter, she