Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

"My God! What have I done? Dolly! For God's sake!… You know…" He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.

She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.

"Dolly, what can I say?… One thing: forgive me… Remember, cannot nine years of our life atone for an instant…"

She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as if beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe differently.

"…instant of passion…" he said, and would have gone on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek worked.

"Go away, go out of the room!" she shrieked still more shrilly, "and don't talk to me of your passions and your vilenesses."

She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips became puffy; tears welled up in his eyes.

"Dolly!" he said, sobbing now. "For mercy's sake, think of the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame- punish me then, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do! I am to blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!"

She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was unutterably sorry for her. She made several attempts to speak, but could not. He waited.

"You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember, and know that they go to ruin now," she said- obviously one of the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of the last three days.

She had called him "Stiva," and he glanced at her with gratitude and moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.

"I remember the children, and for that reason I would do anything in the world to save them; but I don't myself know the means. By taking them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious father- yes, a vicious father… Tell me, after what… has happened, can we live together? Is that possible? Do tell me- is it possible?" she repeated, raising her voice. "After my husband, the father of my children, enters into a love affair with his own children's governess…"

"But what's to be done? What's to be done?" he kept saying in a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and lower.

"You are loathsome to me, repulsive!" she shrieked, getting more and more heated. "Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you have neither a heart nor a sense of honor! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger- yes, a complete stranger!" With pain and wrath she uttered the word so terrible to herself- stranger.

He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed him. He did not understand that it was his pity for her that exasperated her. She saw in him compassion for her, but not love. "No, she hates me. She will not forgive me," he thought.

"It is awful Awful!" he said.

At that moment in the next room a child began to cry; probably it had fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face suddenly softened.

She seemed pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though she did not know where she was nor what she was doing, and, getting up rapidly, she moved toward the door.

"Well, she loves my child," he thought, noticing the change of her face at the child's cry, "my child: how can she hate me then?"

"Dolly, one word more," he said, following her.

"If you follow me, I will call in the servants, and the children! Let them all know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and you may live here with your mistress!"

And she went out, slamming the door.

Stepan Arkadyevich sighed, mopped his face, and with a subdued tread walked out of the room. "Matvei says everything will come round; but how? I don't see the least chance of it. Ah, ah, how horrible it is! And how vulgarly she shouted," he said to himself, remembering her shrieks and the words- "scoundrel" and "mistress." "And very likely the maids were listening! Horribly vulgar, horribly." Stepan Arkadyevich stood a few seconds alone, wiped his eyes, thrust out his chest and walked out of the room.

It was Friday, and in the dining room the watchmaker, a German, was winding up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevich remembered his joke about this punctual, bald watchmaker, "that the German was wound up for a whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches," and he smiled. Stepan Arkadyevich was fond of a nice joke. "And maybe it will come round!" That's a good expression, 'come round,' he thought. "I must tell that."

"Matvei!" he shouted. "Arrange everything with Marya in the sitting room for Anna Arkadyevna," he said to Matvei when he came in.

"Yes, sir."

Stepan Arkadyevich put on his fur coat and went out on the front steps.

"You won't dine at home?" said Matvei, seeing him off.

"It all depends. But here's for the housekeeping," he said, taking ten roubles from his pocketbook. "Will it be enough?"

"Enough or not enough, we must make it do," said Matvei, slamming the carriage door and going back to the steps.

Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back to her bedroom. It was her only refuge from the household cares which crowded upon her directly she went out from it. Even now, in the short time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and Matriona Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to her, which did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer: "What were the children to put on for their walk? Should they have any milk? Should not a new cook be sent for?"

"Ah, let me alone, let me alone!" she said, and going back to her bedroom she sat down in the same place she had occupied when talking to her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands, her rings slipping down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over her recollections of the entire interview. "He has gone! But what has he finally arrived at with her?" she thought. "Can it be he sees her? Why didn't I ask him! No, no, reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers- strangers forever!" She repeated again with special significance the word so dreadful to her. "And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him!… How I loved him! And now don't I love him? Don't I love him more than before? The most horrible thing is," she began, but did not finish her thought, because Matriona Philimonovna put her head in at the door.

"Let us send for my brother," she said; "he can get a dinner anyway, or we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like yesterday."

"Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But did you send for some new milk?"

And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned her grief in them for a time.

Stepan Arkadyevich had learned easily at school, thanks to his excellent abilities, but he had been idle and mischievous, and therefore was one of the lowest in his class. But in spite of his habitually dissipated mode of life, his inferior grade in the service, and his comparative youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative position of president of one of the government boards at Moscow. This post he had received through his sister Anna's husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, who held one of the most important positions in the ministry to which the Moscow office belonged. But if Karenin had not got his brother-in-law this berth, then through a hundred other personages- brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts- Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post or some other like it, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife's considerable property, were in a poor state.