Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [422]
‘Que la personne qui est arrivée la dernière, celle qui demande, qu’elle sorte! Qu‘elle sorte!’dm the Frenchman said, without opening his eyes.
‘Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez ... Revenez vers dix heures, encore mieux demain.’dn
‘Qu’elle sorte!’ the Frenchman impatiently repeated.
‘C’est moi, n‘est-ce pas?’do
And, receiving an affirmative reply, Stepan Arkadyich, forgetting about what he had wanted to ask Lydia Ivanovna, and also forgetting about his sister’s business, with the sole desire of quickly getting out of there, left on tiptoe and, as if it were a plague house, ran out to the street and spent a long time talking and joking with a cabby, hoping the sooner to come to his senses.
At the French Theatre, where he arrived for the last act, and then over champagne at the Tartars‘, Stepan Arkadyich caught his breath a little in an atmosphere more suitable to him. But even so he felt quite out of sorts that evening.
Returning home to Pyotr Oblonsky‘s, where he was staying in Petersburg, Stepan Arkadyich found a note from Betsy. She wrote that she wished very much to finish the conversation they had started and invited him to come the next day. No sooner had he read the note and winced at it than he heard downstairs the heavy footsteps of people carrying some weighty object.
Stepan Arkadyich went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he was unable to climb the stairs; but he ordered them to stand him on his feet when he saw Stepan Arkadyich, and, hanging on to him, went with him to his room, there began telling about how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep on the spot.
Stepan Arkadyich was in low spirits, which rarely happened to him, and could not fall asleep for a long time. Everything he recalled, everything, was vile, but vilest of all was the recollection, as if of something shameful, of the evening at Countess Lydia Ivanovna’s.
The next day he received from Alexei Alexandrovich a definitive refusal to divorce Anna and understood that this decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or feigned sleep.
XXIII
In order to undertake anything in family life, it is necessary that there be either complete discord between the spouses or loving harmony. But when the relations between spouses are uncertain and there is neither the one nor the other, nothing can be undertaken.
Many families stay for years in the same old places, hateful to both spouses, only because there is neither full discord nor harmony.
For both Vronsky and Anna, Moscow life in the heat and dust, when the sun no longer shone as in spring but as in summer, and all the trees on the boulevards had long been in leaf, and the leaves were already covered with dust, was unbearable. But instead of moving to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had long ago decided to do, they went on living in the Moscow they both hated, because lately there had been no harmony between them.
The irritation that divided them had no external cause, and all attempts to talk about it not only did not remove it but increased it. This was an inner irritation, which for her was based on the diminishing of his love, and for him on his regret at having put himself, for her sake, in a difficult situation, which she, instead of making easier, made still more difficult. Neither of them spoke of the causes of their irritation, but each considered the other in the wrong and tried to prove it at every opportunity.
For her, all of him, with all his habits, thoughts, desires, with his entire mental and physical cast, amounted to one thing: love