Everything, including the excellent dinner and the wines (not from Russian wine merchants but bottled abroad), was very noble, simple and merry. The circle of twenty people had been selected by Sviyazhsky from like-minded new liberal activists who were at the same time witty and respectable. Toasts were drunk, also half in jest, to the new provincial marshal, to the governor, to the bank director, and to ‘our gentle host’.
Vronsky was pleased. He had never expected such nice tone in the provinces.
At the end of dinner things grew merrier still. The governor asked Vronsky to attend a concert for the benefit of the
‘There will be a ball, and you’ll see our beauty. In fact, she’s remarkable.’
‘Not in my line,’ Vronsky answered in English, having a fondness for the expression, but he smiled and promised to come.
Before leaving the table, when everyone had already begun to smoke, Vronsky’s butler came to him with a letter on a tray.
‘By messenger from Vozdvizhenskoe,’ he said with a significant look.
‘It’s amazing how much he resembles the assistant prosecutor Sventitsky,’ one of the guests said in French, referring to the butler, while Vronsky read the letter with a frown.
The letter was from Anna. He knew its contents even before reading it. Supposing the elections would be over in five days, he had promised to be home on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew the letter contained reproaches for his not having come on time. The letter he had sent the previous evening probably had not yet reached her.
The contents were just as he had expected, but the form was unexpected and particularly disagreeable to him. ‘Annie is very sick, the doctor says it may be an infection. Alone I lose my head. Princess Varvara is not a help but a hindrance. I expected you two days ago, then yesterday, and now I’m sending to find out where and how you are. I wanted to come myself but changed my mind, knowing it would displease you. Give me some answer so that I know what to do.’
Their child was sick, and she wanted to come herself. Their daughter was sick, and there was this hostile tone.
The innocent merriment of the elections and that gloomy, oppressive love he had to go back to struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he had to go, and that night he took the first train home.
XXXII
Before Vronsky left for the elections, Anna, considering that the scenes repeated each time he left might only make him colder and not bind him to her, decided to try as hard as she could to calmly endure her separation from him. But the cold, stern look he gave her when he came to announce that he was leaving offended her, and even before he left her calm was already broken.
Later, when she was alone, she thought about that look, which expressed his right to freedom, and arrived, as always, at one thing - the awareness of her humiliation. ‘He has the right to go off wherever and whenever he wants. Not only to go off but to abandon me. He has all the rights and I have none. But, knowing that, he shouldn’t have done it. And yet what did he do? ... He looked at me with a cold, stern expression. Of course, that is indefinable, intangible, but it wasn’t so before, and that look means a lot,’ she thought. ‘That look shows that the cooling off has begun.’
And though she was convinced that the cooling off had begun, still there was nothing she could do, she could not change anything in her relations with him. Just as before, she could only try to keep him by her love and her attractiveness. And as before, by being occupied during the day and taking morphine at night, she could stifle the terrible thoughts of what would happen if he stopped loving her. True, there was one other means, not to keep him - for that she wanted nothing but his love - but to get so close to him, to be in such a position, that he could not abandon her. That means was divorce and marriage. And she began to wish for it, and decided to agree to it the very first time he or Stiva brought it up.
In such thoughts she spent five days without him, those days when he intended to be away.
