Leo Tolstoy - Leo Tolstoy - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 4)

And Alexey Alexandrovitch consented, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna sent the following letter in French:

“Dear Madame,

“To be reminded of you might have results for your son in leading to questions on his part which could not be answered without implanting in the child’s soul a spirit of censure towards what should be for him sacred, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband’s refusal in the spirit of Christian love. I pray to Almighty God to have mercy on you. Countess Lidia”

This letter attained the secret object which Countess Lidia Ivanovna had concealed from herself. It wounded Anna to the quick.

For his part, Alexey Alexandrovitch, on returning home from Lidia Ivanovna’s, could not all that day concentrate himself on his usual pursuits, and find that spiritual peace of one saved and believing which he had felt of late.

The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned against him, and towards whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia Ivanovna had so justly told him, ought not to have troubled him; but he was not easy; he could not understand the book he was reading; he could not drive away harassing recollections of his relations with her, of the mistake which, as it now seemed, he had made in regard to her. The memory of how he had received her confession of infidelity on their way home from the races (especially that he had insisted only on the observance of external decorum, and had not sent a challenge) tortured him like a remorse. He was tortured too by the thought of the letter he had written her; and most of all, his forgiveness, which nobody wanted, and his care of the other man’s child made his heart burn with shame and remorse.

And just the same feeling of shame and regret he felt now, as he reviewed all his past with her, recalling the awkward words in which, after long wavering, he had made her an offer.

“But how have I been to blame?” he said to himself. And this question always excited another question in him—whether they felt differently, did their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys and Oblonskys…these gentlemen of the bedchamber, with their fine calves. And there passed before his mind a whole series of these mettlesome, vigorous, self-confident men, who always and everywhere drew his inquisitive attention in spite of himself. He tried to dispel these thoughts, he tried to persuade himself that he was not living for this transient life, but for the life of eternity, and that there was peace and love in his heart.

But the fact that he had in this transient, trivial life made, as it seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes tortured him as though the eternal salvation in which he believed had no existence. But this temptation did not last long, and soon there was reestablished once more in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s soul the peace and the elevation by virtue of which he could forget what he did not want to remember.

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“Well, Kapitonitch?” said Seryozha, coming back rosy and good-humored from his walk the day before his birthday, and giving his overcoat to the tall old hall porter, who smiled down at the little person from the height of his long figure. “Well, has the bandaged clerk been here today? Did papa see him?”

“He saw him. The minute the chief secretary came out, I announced him,” said the hall porter with a good-humored wink. “Here, I’ll take it off.”

“Seryozha!” said the tutor, stopping in the doorway leading to the inner rooms. “Take it off yourself.” But Seryozha, though he heard his tutor’s feeble voice, did not pay attention to it. He stood keeping hold of the hall porter’s belt, and gazing into his face.

“Well, and did papa do what he wanted for him?”

The hall porter nodded his head affirmatively. The clerk with his face tied up, who had already been seven times to ask some favor of Alexey Alexandrovitch, interested both Seryozha and the hall porter. Seryozha had come upon him in the hall, and had heard him plaintively beg the hall porter to announce him, saying that he and his children had death staring them in the face.

Since then Seryozha, having met him a second time in the hall, took great interest in him.

“Well, was he very glad?” he asked.

“Glad? I should think so! Almost dancing as he walked away.”

“And has anything been left?” asked Seryozha, after a pause.

“Come, sir,” said the hall-porter; then with a shake of his head he whispered, “Something from the countess.”

Seryozha understood at once that what the hall porter was speaking of was a present from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for his birthday.

“What do you say? Where?”

“Korney took it to your papa. A fine plaything it must be too!”

“How big? Like this?”

“Rather small, but a fine thing.”

“A book.”

“No, a thing. Run along, run along, Vassily Lukitch is calling you,” said the porter, hearing the tutor’s steps approaching, and carefully taking away from his belt the little hand in the glove half pulled off, he signed with his head towards the tutor.

“Vassily Lukitch, in a tiny minute!” answered Seryozha with that gay and loving smile which always won over the conscientious Vassily Lukitch.

Seryozha was too happy, everything was too delightful for him to be able to help sharing with his friend the porter the family good fortune of which he had heard during his walk in the public gardens from Lidia Ivanovna’s niece. This piece of good news seemed to him particularly important from its coming at the same time with the gladness of the bandaged clerk and his own gladness at toys having come for him. It seemed to Seryozha that this was a day on which everyone ought to be glad and happy.

“You know papa’s received the Alexander Nevsky today?”

“To be sure I do! People have been already to congratulate him.”

“And is he glad?”

“Glad at the Tsar’s gracious favor! I should think so! It’s a proof he’s deserved it,” said the porter severely and seriously.

Seryozha fell to dreaming, gazing up at the face of the porter, which he had thoroughly studied in every detail, especially the chin that hung down between the gray whiskers, never seen by anyone but Seryozha, who saw him only from below.

“Well, and has your daughter been to see you lately?”

The porter’s daughter was a ballet dancer.

“When is she to come on week-days? They’ve their lessons to learn too. And you’ve your lesson, sir; run along.”

On coming into the room, Seryozha, instead of sitting down to his lessons, told his tutor of his supposition that what had been brought him must be a machine. “What do you think?” he inquired.

But Vassily Lukitch was thinking of nothing but the necessity of learning the grammar lesson for the teacher, who was coming at two.

“No, do just tell me, Vassily Lukitch,” he asked suddenly, when he was seated at their work table with the book in his hands, “what is greater than the Alexander Nevsky? You know papa’s received the Alexander Nevsky?”

Vassily Lukitch replied that the Vladimir was greater than the

Alexander Nevsky.

“And higher still?”

“Well, highest of all is the Andrey Pervozvanny.”

“And higher than the Andrey?”

“I don’t know.”

“What, you don’t know?” and Seryozha, leaning on his elbows, sank into deep meditation.

His meditations were of the most complex and diverse character. He imagined his father’s having suddenly been presented with both the Vladimir and the Andrey today, and in consequence being much better tempered at his lesson, and dreamed how, when he was grown up, he would himself receive all the orders, and what they might invent higher than the Andrey. Directly any higher order were invented, he would win it. They would make a higher one still, and he would immediately win that too.