Annushka went out, but Anna did not begin dressing, and sat in the same position, her head and hands hanging listlessly, and every now and then she shivered all over, was apparently about to make some gesture, utter some word, and sank back into lifelessness again. She repeated continually, `My God! my God!' But neither `God' nor `my' had any meaning to her. The idea of seeking help in her difficulty in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexei Alexandrovich himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in which she had been brought up. She knew that the support of religion was possible only upon condition of renouncing what made up for her the whole meaning of life. She was not simply miserable, she began to feel alarm at the new spiritual condition, never experienced before, in which she found herself. She felt as though everything were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear double to overtired eyes. She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen, and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.
`Ah, what am I doing!' she said to herself, feeling a sudden thrill of pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself, she saw that she was holding her hair in both hands, each side of her temples, and she was pressing them. She jumped up, and began walking about.
`The coffee is ready, and mademoiselle and Seriozha are waiting,'
said Annushka, coming back again and finding Anna in the same position.
`Seriozha? What about Seriozha?' Anna asked, with sudden eagerness, recollecting her son's existence for the first time that morning.
`He's been naughty, I think,' answered Annushka with a smile.
`In what way?'
`Some peaches were lying on the table in the corner room. I think he ate one of them on the sly.'
The recollection of her son suddenly roused Anna from the helpless condition in which she found herself. She recalled the partly sincere, though greatly exaggerated, role of the mother living for her child, which she had taken up of late years, and she felt with joy that in the plight in which she found herself she had a dominion independent of any position she would be placed in by her relations to her husband or to Vronsky. This dominion was her son. In whatever position she might be placed, she could not abandon her son. Her husband might put her to shame and turn her out, Vronsky might grow cold to her and go on living his own life apart (she thought of him again with bitterness and reproach); she could not leave her son. She had an aim in life. And she must act; act to secure the position of her son, so that he might not be taken from her. Quickly indeed, as quickly as possible, she must take action before he was taken from her.
She must take her son and go away. Here was the one thing she had to do now. She must be calm, and get out of this insufferable position. The thought of immediate action binding her to her son, of going away somewhere with him, gave her this calming.
She dressed quickly, went downstairs, and with resolute steps walked into the drawing room, where she found, as usual, waiting for her, the coffee, Seriozha, and his governess. Seriozha, all in white, with his back and head bent, was standing at a table under a looking glass, and with an expression of intense concentration which she knew well, and in which he resembled his father, he was doing something to the flowers he carried.
The governess had a particularly severe expression. Seriozha screamed shrilly, as he often did, `Ah, mamma!' and stopped, hesitating whether to go to greet his mother and put down the flowers, or to finish ****** the wreath and go with the flowers.
The governess, after saying good morning, began a long and detailed account of Seriozha's naughtiness, but Anna did not hear her; she was considering whether she would take her with her or not. `No, I won't take her,' she decided. `I'll go alone with my son.'
`Yes, it's very wrong,' said Anna, and taking her son by the shoulder she looked at him, not severely, but with a timid glance that bewildered and delighted the boy, and she kissed him. `Leave him to me,' she said to the astonished governess, and without letting go of her son, she sat down at the table, where coffee was set ready for her.
`Mamma! I... I didn't...' he said, trying to make out from her expression what was in store for him in regard to the peaches.
`Seriozha,' she said, as soon as the governess had left the room, `that was wrong, but you'll never do it again, will you?... You love me?'
She felt that the tears were coming into her eyes. `Can I help loving him?' she said to herself, looking deeply into his scared and at the same time delighted eyes. `And can he ever join his father in punishing me? Is it possible he will not feel for me?' Tears were already flowing down her face, and to hide them she got up abruptly and almost ran out on the terrace.
After the thundershowers of the last few days, cold, bright weather had set in. The air was cold in the bright sun that filtered through the freshly washed leaves.
She shivered, both from the cold and from the inward horror which had clutched her with fresh force in the open air.
`Run along, run along to Mariette,' she said to Seriozha, who had followed her out, and she began walking up and down on the straw matting of the terrace. `Can it be that they won't forgive me, won't understand how it all could not have been otherwise?' she said to herself.
Standing still, and looking at the tops of the aspen trees waving in the wind, with their freshly washed, brightly shining leaves in the cold sunshine, she knew that they would not forgive her, that everyone and everything would be merciless to her now as was that sky, that green.
And again she felt that everything was doubling in her soul. `I mustn't, mustn't think,' she said to herself. `I must get ready. To go where? When?