Chapter 16
THOUGH SHE HAD SENT word the day before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister came or not, Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya had made everything ready for her arrival, and was expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.
Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of an official in the Higher Branches of the Ministry, and was a Petersburg grande dame. And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that her sister-in-law was coming, along with her elegant and imposing Class III. “And, after all, Anna is in no way to blame,” Dolly said to Dolichka, who nodded vigorously and agreed.
“Oh no, not at all to blame! The dear.”
“I know nothing of her except the very best, and I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her toward myself.”
“Only kindness, true kindness indeed.”
And it was true that as far as she could recall her impressions of Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself; Karenin was a strange and distant man, as were most men she had ever known from the Higher Branches, and there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it into her head to console me!” said Dolly to Dolichka, who clucked “Oh dear” and “I should think not,” while the two of them together folded laundry.
“All consolation and counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a thousand times, and it’s all no use.”
“No use, no use at all!”
Dolly did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases of good advice and comfort. She had been on the lookout for her, glancing at her watch every minute, and, as so often happens, let slip just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the three happy tinkles of the I/Doorchime/6.
She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.
“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her. Dolichka gave a low bow to Android Karenina, who offered a reserved nod in return.
“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!” Anna began.
“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew. Most likely she knows, she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well, come along, I’ll take you to your room,” she went on, trying to defer as long as possible the moment of confidences.
Anna greeted the children, and handed her kerchief and her hat to Android Karenina. She tossed her head and shook out her mass of black curls.
“You are radiant with health and happiness!” said Dolly, almost with envy.
“I? . . . Yes,” said Anna. They sat down to coffee in the drawing room, and Anna meaningfully sent Android Karenina into Surcease.
“Dolly,” Anna said, pushing the coffee tray away, “he has told me.”
Dolly flicked off her own Class III, but she looked coldly at Anna. She was waiting now for phrases of conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.
“Dolly, dear,” she said, “I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, I’m simply sorry, sorry from my heart for you!”
Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered. She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her own vigorous little hand. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not lose its blank expression. She said:
“To comfort me is impossible. Everything’s lost after what has happened, everything’s over!”
And as soon as she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it, and said:
“But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is it best to act in this awful position—that’s what you must think of.”
“All’s over, and there’s nothing more,” said Dolly. “And the worst of all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the children, I am tied. And I can’t live with him! It’s a torture to me to see him.”
“Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from you: tell me about it.”
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s face.
“Very well,” she said all at once. “But I will tell you it from the beginning. You know how I was married. With the education Mamma gave us, I knew nothing. I know they say men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva”—she corrected herself—“Stepan Arkadyich told me nothing. You’ll hardly believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the only woman he had known. So I lived, for eight years.
“You must understand that I was so far from suspecting infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then—try to imagine it—with such ideas, for all to be revealed, played back in a communiqué, suddenly all the horror, all the loathsomeness. . . . You must try and understand me. To be fully convinced of one’s happiness, and all at once . . .” continued Dolly, holding back her sobs, “a mistress, my mécanicienne, with grease on her jumpsuit, and metal shavings beneath her nails! No, it’s too awful!” She hastily pulled out her handkerchief and hid her face in it. “I can understand being carried away by feeling,” she went on after a brief silence, “but deliberately, slyly deceiving me . . . and with whom? . . . To go on being my husband together with her . . . it’s awful! You can’t understand. . . .”
“Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do understand,” said Anna, pressing her hand.
“And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?” Dolly resumed. “Not the slightest! He’s happy and contented.”
“Oh, no!” Anna interposed quickly. “He’s to be pitied, he’s weighed down by remorse. . . .”
“Is he capable of remorse?” Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her sister-in-law’s face.
“Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated. What touched me most . . .” (and here Anna guessed what would touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you beyond everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would have answered—“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she cannot forgive me,’ he keeps saying.”
Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to her words, and then responded angrily.
“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty, she’s technically proficient. Do you know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his children.”
Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
“And after that he will tell me . . . . What! Can I believe him? Never! No, everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, the reward of my work, and my sufferings . . . . What’s so awful is that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could kill him.”
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.
“What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over everything, and I see nothing.”
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.
“One thing I would say,” began Anna. “I am his sister, I know his character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything.” She waved her hand before her forehead, as if a person’s circuits could be unspooled in the same way as those of a Class III. “That faculty for being completely carried away, but for completely repenting too. He cannot believe it, he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.”
“No, he understands, he understood!” Dolly broke in. “But I . . . you are forgetting me . . . does it make it easier for me?”
Anna cut her short, kissing her hand once more.
“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how men like Stiva look at it. They project a sort of electric barrier that can’t be crossed between them and their families. I don’t understand it, but it is so.”
“Yes, but he has kissed her . . .”
“Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all the wild oscillations of his heart for you, and I know that the longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word:’Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always been a divinity for him, and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the heart. . . .”
“But if it is repeated?”
“It cannot be, as I understand it. . . .”
“Yes, but could you forgive it?”
“I don’t know, I can’t judge. . . . Yes, I can,” said Anna, thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her inner balance, she added: “Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could forgive it. I could not be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all . . .”
“Oh, of course,” Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she had more than once thought, “else it would not be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take you to your room,” she said, getting up to flick Dolichka back to life, while Anna did the same with Android Karenina. As the Class IIIs reanimated, their respective mistresses embraced.
“My dear, how glad I am you came,” Dolly said, and then offered a polite bow to Android Karenina, who tilted her head with kindness in place of a smile. “That both of you came. It has made things better, ever so much better.”