Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [88]
At each section of his walk, and most often on the parquet of the lamp-lit dining room, he stopped and said to himself: ‘Yes, it is necessary to resolve this and stop it, to express my view of it and my resolution.’ And he turned back. ‘But express what? What resolution?’ he said to himself in the drawing room, and found no answer. ‘But, finally,’ he asked himself before turning into the boudoir, ‘what has happened? Nothing. She talked with him for a long time. What of it? A woman can talk with all sorts of men in society. And besides, to be jealous means to humiliate both myself and her,’ he told himself, going into her boudoir; but this reasoning, which used to have such weight for him, now weighed nothing and meant nothing. And from the bedroom door he turned back to the main room; but as soon as he entered the dark drawing room again, some voice said to him that this was not so, that if others had noticed it, it meant there was something. And again he said to himself in the dining room: ‘Yes, it is necessary to resolve this and stop it and to express my view ...’ And again in the drawing room, before turning back, he asked himself: resolve it how? And then asked himself, what had happened? And answered: nothing, and remembered that jealousy was a feeling humiliating for a wife, but again in the drawing room he was convinced that something had happened. His thoughts, like his body, completed a full circle without encountering anything new. He noticed it, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in her boudoir.
Here, looking at her desk with the malachite blotter and an unfinished letter lying on it, his thoughts suddenly changed. He began thinking about her, about what she thought and felt. For the first time he vividly pictured to himself her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes, and the thought that she could and should have her own particular life seemed so frightening to him that he hastened to drive it away. It was that bottomless deep into which it was frightening to look. To put himself in thought and feeling into another being was a mental act alien to Alexei Alexandrovich. He regarded this mental act as harmful and dangerous fantasizing.
‘And most terrible of all,’ he thought, ‘is that precisely now, when my work is coming to a conclusion’ (he was thinking of the project he was putting through), ‘when I need all my calm and all my inner forces, this senseless anxiety falls upon me. But what am I to do? I’m not one of those people who suffer troubles and anxieties and have no strength to look them in the face.’
‘I must think it over, resolve it and cast it aside,’ he said aloud.
‘Questions about her feelings, about what has been or might be going on in her soul, are none of my business; they are the business of her conscience and belong to religion,’ he said to himself, feeling relieved at the awareness that he had found the legitimate category to which the arisen circumstance belonged.
‘And so,’ Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself, ‘questions of her feelings and so on are questions of her conscience, which can be no business of mine. My duty is then clearly defined. As head of the family, I am the person whose duty it is to guide her and am therefore in part the person responsible: I must point out the danger I see, caution her, and even use authority. I must speak out to her.’
And in Alexei Alexandrovich’s head everything he would presently say to his wife took clear shape. Thinking over what he would say, he regretted that he had to put his time and mental powers to such inconspicuous domestic use; but, in spite of that, the form and sequence of the imminent speech took shape in his head clearly and distinctly, like a report. ‘I must say and speak out the following: first, an explanation of the meaning of public opinion and propriety; second, a religious explanation of the meaning of marriage; third, if necessary, an indication of the possible unhappiness for our son; fourth, an indication of her