‘Yes, I’m very interested in it,’ Anna replied to Sviyazhsky, who had expressed surprise at her knowledge of architecture. ‘The new building ought to correspond to the hospital. But it was thought of later and begun without a plan.’
When he finished talking with the architect, Vronsky joined the ladies and showed them into the hospital.
Though they were still working on the cornices outside, and the ground floor was still being painted, upstairs almost everything was done. Having climbed the wide cast-iron stairway to the landing, they went into the first big room. The walls had been plastered to look like marble, enormous plate-glass windows had already been installed, only the parquet floor was not yet finished, and the joiners, who were planing a square they had removed, stopped work and took off their headbands to greet the gentlefolk.
‘This is the reception room,’ said Vronsky. ‘It will have a desk, a table, a cupboard, and that’s all.’
‘Here, come this way. Don’t go near the window,’ said Anna, testing whether the paint was dry. ‘The paint’s already dry, Alexei,’ she added.
From the reception room they went into the corridor. Here Vronsky showed them the new ventilation system he had installed. Then he showed them marble baths, beds with extraordinary springs. Then, one after the other, he showed them the wards, the store room, the linen room, then stoves of some new construction, then special carts that would make no noise when conveying necessary things through the corridors, and much more. Sviyazhsky appreciated it all like one familiar with all the new improvements. Dolly was simply surprised at what she had never seen before and, wishing to understand it all, asked about everything in great detail, which obviously pleased Vronsky very much.
‘Yes, I think this will be the only quite properly set-up hospital in Russia,’ said Sviyazhsky.
‘And won’t you have a maternity ward?’ asked Dolly. ‘It’s so needed in the country. I often ...’
In spite of his courtesy, Vronsky interrupted her.
‘This is not a maternity home, it’s a hospital, and meant for all illnesses except infectious ones,’ he said. ‘And take a look at this ...’ He wheeled a newly ordered convalescent chair up to Darya Alexandrovna. ‘Watch now.’ He sat in the chair and began moving it. ‘He can’t walk, he’s weak or has bad legs, but he needs air, and so he wheels himself about in it...’
Darya Alexandrovna was interested in it all, liked it all very much, but most of all she liked Vronsky himself, with his natural, naïve passion. ‘Yes, he’s a very nice, good man,’ she thought occasionally, not listening to him but trying to penetrate his expression and mentally putting herself inside Anna. She now liked him so much in his animation that she understood how Anna could fall in love with him.
XXI
‘No, I think the princess is tired, and horses don’t interest her,’ Vronsky said to Anna, who had suggested strolling over to the stud farm, where Sviyazhsky wanted to see the new stallion. ‘You go and I’ll take the princess home, and we can talk,’ he said, ‘if you’d like that.’ He turned to her.
‘I understand nothing about horses and shall be very glad,’ said Darya Alexandrovna, slightly surprised.
She saw by Vronsky’s face that he wanted something from her. Nor was she mistaken. As soon as they went back through the gate into the garden, he looked in the direction Anna had gone and, having made sure that she could not hear or see them, began:
‘You’ve guessed that I wanted to talk with you?’ he said, looking at her with laughing eyes. ‘I’m not mistaken in thinking that you’re Anna’s friend.’ He removed his hat, took out a handkerchief, and wiped his balding head.
Darya Alexandrovna made no reply and only looked fearfully at him. Now that she was left alone with him, she suddenly became frightened: his laughing eyes and the stern expression of his face scared her.
The most varied suppositions as to the subject of his talk with her flashed through her head: ‘He’s going to ask me to come and stay here with my children, and I’ll have to say no to him; or to become part of Anna’s circle in Moscow ... Or is it about Vasenka Veslovsky and his relations with Anna? Maybe about Kitty, about how he feels himself guilty?’ She foresaw only unpleasantness, but failed to guess what he wanted to talk with her about.
‘You have such influence on Anna, and she loves you so,’ he said. ‘Help me.’
Darya Alexandrovna looked with questioning timidity at his energetic face, which kept moving into sunlit gaps in the shade of the lindens, then was darkened again by the shade, and waited for what more he would say; but he walked silently beside her, his stick grazing the gravel.
