Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [434]
‘He went to the country,’ Kitty said, blushing.
‘Be sure to give him my regards.’
‘I’ll be sure to!’ Kitty naïvely repeated, looking into her eyes with compassion.
‘Farewell then, Dolly!’ and having kissed Dolly and shaken Kitty’s hand, Anna hastily went out.
‘The same as always and just as attractive. Such a handsome woman!’ said Kitty, when she was alone with her sister. ‘But there’s something pathetic about her! Terribly pathetic!’
‘No, today there was something peculiar about her,’said Dolly. ‘When I saw her off in the front hall, I thought she was going to cry.’
XXIX
Anna got into the carriage in a still worse state than when she had left the house. To the former torment was now added the feeling of being insulted and cast out, which she clearly felt when she met Kitty.
‘Where to, ma’am? Home?’ asked Pyotr.
‘Yes, home,’ she said, not even thinking of where she was going.
‘How they looked at me as if at something frightful, incomprehensible and curious. What can he be talking about so ardently with the other one?’ she thought, looking at two passers-by. ‘Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels? I wanted to tell Dolly, and it’s a good thing I didn’t. How glad she would be of my unhappiness! She would hide it, but her main feeling would be joy that I’ve been punished for the pleasures she envied me. Kitty, she would be even more glad. How I see right through her! She knows that I was more than usually friendly to her husband. And she’s jealous, and she hates me. And also despises me. In her eyes I’m an immoral woman. If I were an immoral woman, I could get her husband to fall in love with me ... if I wanted to. And I did want to. This one is pleased with himself,’ she thought of a fat, red-cheeked gentleman who, as he drove by in the opposite direction, took her for an acquaintance and raised a shiny hat over his bald, shiny head and then realized he was mistaken. ‘He thought he knew me. And he knows me as little as anyone else in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. Those two want that dirty ice cream. That they know for certain,’ she thought, looking at two boys who had stopped an ice-cream man, who was taking the barrel down from his head and wiping his sweaty face with the end of a towel. ‘We all want something sweet, tasty. If not candy, then dirty ice cream. And Kitty’s the same: if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me. And hates me. We all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. That’s the truth. Twitkin, Coiffeur ... Je me fais coiffer par Twitkin ...ds I’ll tell him when he comes,’ she thought and smiled. But at the same moment she remembered that she now had no one to tell anything funny to. ‘And there isn’t anything gay or funny. Everything is vile. The bells ring for vespers and this merchant crosses himself so neatly! As if he’s afraid of dropping something. Why these churches, this ringing and this lie? Only to hide the fact that we all hate each other, like these cabbies who quarrel so spitefully. Yashvin says, “He wants to leave me without a shirt, and I him.” That’s the truth!’
In these thoughts, which carried her away so much that she even stopped thinking about her situation, she pulled up at the entrance of her house. Only on seeing the hall porter coming out to meet her did she remember that she had sent the note and the telegram.
‘Is there an answer?’ she asked.
‘I’ll look at once,’ said the porter and, glancing at the desk, he picked up the thin, square envelope of a telegram and handed it to her. ‘I cannot come before ten. Vronsky,’ she read.
‘And the messenger hasn’t come back yet?’
‘No, ma’am,’ replied the porter.
‘Ah, in that case I know what to do,’ she said, and, feeling a vague wrath surge up in her, and a need for revenge, she ran upstairs. ‘I’ll go to him myself. Before going away for ever, I’ll tell him everything. I’ve never hated anyone as I do this man!’ she thought.