Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Anna Karenin.
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917.
Chapter XXX
T
‘I didn’t know you were going. What are you coming for?’ she said, letting fall the hand with which she had grasped the doorpost. And irrepressible delight and eagerness shone in her face.
‘What am I coming for?’ he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. ‘You know that I have come to be where you are,’ he said, ‘I can’t help it.’
At that moment the wind, as it were surmounting all obstacles, sent the snow flying from the carriage roofs, and clanked some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the hoarse whistle of the engine roared in front, plaintively and gloomily. All the awfulness of the storm seemed to her more splendid now. He had said what her soul longed to hear, though she feared it with her reason. She made no answer, and in her face he saw conflict.
‘Forgive me, if you dislike what I said,’ he said humbly.
He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so stubbornly, that for a long while she could make no answer.
‘It’s wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you’re a good man, to forget what you’ve said as I forget it,’ she said at last.
‘Not one word not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget.…’
‘Enough, enough!’ she cried, trying assiduously to give a stern expression to her face, into which he was gazing greedily. And clutching at the cold doorpost, she clambered up the steps and got rapidly into the corridor of the carriage. But in the little corridor she paused, going over in her imagination what had happened. Though she could not recall her own words or his, she realised instinctively that that momentary conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she was panic-stricken and blissful at it. After standing still a few seconds, she went into the carriage and sat down in her place. The overstrained condition which had tormented her before did not only come back, but was intensified, and reached such a pitch that she was afraid every minute that something would snap within her from the excessive tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and in the visions that filled her imagination, there was nothing disagreeable or gloomy: on the contrary there was something blissful, glowing, and exhilarating. Towards morning Anna sank into a doze, sitting in her place, and when she waked it was daylight and the train was near Petersburg. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son, and the details of that day and the following came upon her.
At Petersburg, so soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. ‘Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?’ she thought, looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round hat. Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips falling into their habitual sarcastic smile, and his big, tired eyes looking straight at her. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.
‘Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,’ he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at any one who should say in earnest what he said.
‘Is Seryozha quite well?’ she asked.
‘And is this all the reward,’ said he, ‘for my ardour? He’s quite well.…