Chapter 11
WHEN ANNA FOUND DOLLY at home before her, she looked intently in her eyes, as though questioning her about the talk she had had with Vronsky, but she made no inquiry in words.
“I believe it’s dinnertime,” she said. “We’ve not seen each other at all yet. I am reckoning on the evening. Now I want to go and dress. I expect you do too; we have all been splattered with mud, and with the spilt, stinking yellow gore of our attacker.” Dolly went to her room and she felt amused. To change her dress was impossible, for she had already put on her best dress. She brushed it off as best she could, wringing out some of the more gore-soaked patches of fabric; then, in order to signify in some way her preparation for dinner, she changed her cuffs and tie, and put some lace on her head.
“This is all I can do,” she said with a smile to Anna, who came in to escort her to the ramshackle little tent where the sarcastic mécanicien served as camp cook as well.
“Yes, we are too formal here,” Anna said, as it were apologizing for the unceremoniousness of the dining. “Alexei is delighted at your visit, as he rarely is at anything. He has completely lost his heart to you,” she added. “You’re not tired?”
There was no time for talking about anything before dinner. The dinner, the wine, the decoration of the table were all of a compelling simplicity; flasks open on the long wooden table; candlelight serving for lumières, in the old way.
After dinner they sat on the terrace, then they proceeded to play a quaint, old manual game called lawn tennis that Anna and Vronsky had come to enjoy in the absence of Flickerfly and other grozniumage amusements. The players, divided into two parties—humans against robots—stood on opposite sides of a tightly drawn net with gilt poles on the carefully leveled and rolled croquet ground. Darya Alexandrovna made an attempt to play, but it was a long time before she could understand the game, and by the time she did understand it, she was so tired that she sat down and simply looked on at the players. Her partner, Witch Hazel, gave up playing too and sat beside her; and after asking permission, began braiding her hair, an intimate kind of Class III action that brought tears to Dolly’s eyes.
The others kept the game up for a long time. Vronsky and Anna played very well and seriously: they kept a sharp lookout on the balls served to them, and without haste or getting in each other’s way, they ran adroitly up to them, waited for the rebound, and neatly and accurately returned them over the net. Veslovsky played worse than the others. He was too eager, but he kept the players lively with his high spirits. His laughter and outcries never paused. With the ladies’ permission, he took off his coat, and his solid, comely figure in his white shirtsleeves, with his red, perspiring face and his impulsive movements, made a picture that imprinted itself vividly on the memory.
During the game Darya Alexandrovna was not enjoying herself. She did not like the light tone of raillery that was kept up all the time between Vassenka Veslovsky and Anna; she felt strangely disquieted by the attention he paid to her. But to avoid breaking up the party and to get through the time somehow, after a rest she joined the game again, and pretended to be enjoying it. All that day it seemed to her as though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance. She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that she would ask that Witch Hazel guide her home the next day. The maternal cares and worries, which she had so hated on the way, now, after a day spent without them, struck her in quite another light, and tempted her back to them.
* * *
When Darya Alexandrovna lay in bed that night, as soon as she closed her eyes, she saw Vassenka Veslovsky flying about the match ground. Something about that man, with his frivolous manner and appearance, caused her such disquiet—even distress.