‘Well, I’m relying on you,’ he said to the Englishman, ‘six-thirty, at the appointed place.’
‘Everything’s in order,’ the Englishman said. ‘And where are you going, my lord?’ he asked, unexpectedly using this title ‘my lord’, which he hardly ever used.
Vronsky raised his head in surprise and looked as he knew how to look, not into the Englishman’s eyes but at his forehead, surprised by the boldness of the question. But, realizing that the Englishman, in putting this question, was looking at him as a jockey, not as an employer, he answered him:
‘I must go to Briansky’s, I’ll be back in an hour.’
‘How many times have I been asked that question today!’ he said to himself and blushed, something that rarely happened to him. The Englishman looked at him intently and, as if he knew where he was going, added:
‘The first thing is to be calm before you ride. Don’t be out of sorts or upset by anything.’
‘All right,’ Vronsky, smiling, replied in English and, jumping into his carriage, gave orders to drive to Peterhof.
He had driven only a few paces when the storm clouds that had been threatening rain since morning drew over and there was a downpour.
‘That’s bad!’ Vronsky thought, putting the top up. ‘It was muddy to begin with, but now it will turn into a real swamp.’ Sitting in the solitude of the closed carriage, he took out his mother’s letter and his brother’s note and read them.
Yes, it was all the same thing over and over. His mother, his brother, everybody found it necessary to interfere in the affairs of his heart. This interference aroused his spite - a feeling he rarely experienced. ‘What business is it of theirs? Why does everybody consider it his duty to take care of me? And why do they pester me? Because they see that this is something they can’t understand. If it was an ordinary, banal, society liaison, they’d leave me in peace. They feel that this is something else, that this is not a game, this woman is dearer to me than life. That’s what they don’t understand, and it vexes them. Whatever our fate is or will be, we have made it, and we don’t complain about it,’ he said, uniting himself and Anna in the word ‘we’. ‘No, they have to teach us how to live. They’ve got no idea what happiness is, they don’t know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us - there is no life,’ he thought.
He was angry with everybody for their interference precisely because in his soul he felt that they, all of them, were right. He felt that the love which joined him to Anna was not a momentary passion that would go away, as society liaisons do, leaving no traces in the life of either one of them except some pleasant or unpleasant memories. He felt all the painfulness of his position and of hers, how difficult it was, exposed as they were to the eyes of all society, to conceal their love, to lie and deceive; and to lie, and deceive, and scheme, and constantly think of others, while the passion that joined them was so strong that they both forgot everything but their love.
He vividly remembered all those oft-repeated occasions of the necessity for lying and deceit, which were so contrary to his nature; he remembered especially vividly the feeling of shame he had noticed in her more than once at this necessity for deceit and lying. And he experienced a strange feeling that had sometimes come over him since his liaison with Anna. This was a feeling of loathing for something - whether for Alexei Alexandrovich, or for himself, or for the whole world, he did not quite know. But he always drove this strange feeling away. And now, rousing himself, he continued his train of thought.
‘Yes, she was unhappy before, but proud and calm; and now she cannot be calm and dignified, though she doesn’t show it. Yes, this must be ended,’ he decided to himself.
And for the first time the clear thought occurred to him that it was necessary to stop this lie, and the sooner the better. ‘To drop everything, both of us, and hide ourselves away somewhere with our love,’ he said to himself.
XXII
The downpour did not last long, and when Vronsky drove up at the full trot of his shaft horse, pulling along the outrunners who rode over the mud with free reins, the sun was already peeking out again, the roofs of the country houses and the old lindens in the gardens on both sides of the main street shone with a wet glitter, and water dripped merrily from the branches and ran off the roofs. He no longer thought of how the downpour would ruin the racetrack, but now rejoiced that, owing to this rain, he would be sure to find her at home and alone, because he knew that Alexei Alexandrovich, who had recently returned from taking the waters, had not yet moved from Petersburg.
Hoping to find her alone, Vronsky got out before crossing the bridge, as he always did in order to attract less attention, and continued on foot. He did not go to the porch from the street but went into the courtyard.
‘Has the master come?’ he asked the gardener.
