Chapter 11
IN ORDER TO CARRY THROUGH any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertaken.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.
Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of summer—especially that terrible summer, with the city streets beset by aliens, who had begun to brazenly burst into people’s homes in search of human prey. But of late there had been no agreement between Anna and Vronsky and so they went on staying in Moscow, in their state of limbo, expecting any day to hear that they had been granted amnesty and permission to marry—or that their appeal had been denied and they would be punished. Neither of them gave full utterance to their sense of grievance, but they considered each other in the wrong, and tried on every pretext to prove this to one another.
It was during this time that it became obvious to Anna that Vronsky had turned his attentions to other women. In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing—love for women; and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on her alone. That love was lessening; consequently, as she reasoned, he must have transferred part of his love to other women or to another woman—and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Without an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to another. At one time she was jealous of those low women with whom he might so easily renew his old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might want to marry, for whose sake he would break with her.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of suspense she had endured in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of Alexei Alexandrovich, the loss of Android Karenina—she put it all down to Vronsky. If he had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her position, and would have rescued her from it. For her being in Moscow and not back at Vozdvizhenskoe, he was to blame too. He could not live buried in the country as she would have liked to do. He must have society, and he had put her in this awful position, the bitterness of which he would not see. And again, it was his fault that she was forever separated from her son, and from her beloved-companion, for whom her heart ached more with each passing day. She woke from nightmares of Android Karenina singing sadly to her, singing a melancholy song of love and betrayal. Waking with cold sweat drying along her spine, Anna told herself that Android Karenina had no Vox-Em, could not sing, and even more so that she had no heart with which to love or be loved.
Even Vronsky’s rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been there of old, and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where the noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every detail of their yesterday’s quarrel.
The subject of the quarrel had been Vronsky’s decision to hire a slow-witted, middle-aged bachelor named Pyotr as a household servant. Anna, seemingly alone among the people of society, still loathed the thought of using humans to perform the work of household Class IIs: to serve food and drink, to clean and tidy, to open the door and announce visitors. For Anna there remained something appalling in the idea of human beings serving each other as if they were robots. Vronsky found what he considered charming in the new arrangement, and professed it delightful to have a flesh-and-blood man clipping his cigars and trimming his mustache, providing that petite liberté Oblonsky had spoken up for in Karenin’s office.
“Yes, but if our little freedoms are made possible only by the subjugation of other people, what manner of freedom can that be?” Anna asked sulkily, when Pyotr shuffled from the room bearing the emptied tray of drinks. Vronsky had made the mistake, then, of purposefully taking her objection, which he knew to be sincere, as if it were mere drollery; he went so far as to suggest that if she did not care for Pyotr, they might hire a pretty young woman in his place. Anna reddened at this remark and stormed angrily from the room.
When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not referred to the quarrel, but both felt that the quarrel had been smoothed over, but was not at an end.
Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on herself and to justify him.
I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it up with him, and we’ll go away to somewhere in the country—no! To the moon! We shall return to the moon!
And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was horrified at herself. “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?” she said to herself, and began again from the beginning. “He’s truthful, he’s honest, he loves me. I love him, and in a few days the divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace of mind and trust, and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go tomorrow.”
And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability, she rang, and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their things for lunar launch.
At ten o’clock Vronsky came in.