Whom to take with me? Yes - to Moscow, by the evening train. Annushka and Seriozha, and only the most necessary things. But first I must write to them both.' She went quickly indoors into her boudoir, sat down at the table, and wrote to her husband:
`After what has happened I cannot remain any longer in your house.
I am going away, and taking my son with me. I don't know the law; and so I don't know with which of the parents the son should remain; but I take him with me because I cannot live without him. Be generous, leave him to me.'
Up to this point she wrote rapidly and naturally, but the appeal to his generosity, a quality she did not recognize in him, and the necessity of winding up the letter with something touching, pulled her up.
`Of my fault and my remorse I cannot speak, because...'
She stopped again, finding no connection in her ideas. `No,' she said to herself, `there's no need of anything,' and tearing up the letter, she wrote it again, leaving out the allusion to generosity, and sealed it up.
Another letter had to be written to Vronsky. `I have told my husband,'
she wrote, and she sat a long while unable to write more. It was so coarse, so unfeminine. `And what more am I to write him?' she said to herself.
Again a flush of shame spread over her face; she recalled his composure, and a feeling of anger against him impelled her to tear the sheet with the phrase she had written into tiny bits. `No need of anything,' she said to herself, and closing her blotting case she went upstairs, told the governess and the servants that she was going that day to Moscow, and at once set to work to pack up her things.
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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 3, Chapter 16[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 16 All the rooms of the summer villa were full of porters, gardeners, and footmen, going to and fro carrying out things. Cupboards and chests were open; twice they had to run to a store for cord; pieces of newspaper were cluttering the floor. Two trunks, some bags and strapped-up plaids had been carried down into the hall. The carriage and two hired cabs were waiting at the steps. Anna, forgetting her inward agitation in the work of packing, was standing at a table in her boudoir, packing her traveling bag, when Annushka called her attention to the clatter of some carriage driving up.
Anna looked out of the window and saw Alexei Alexandrovich's messenger on the steps, ringing at the front doorbell.
`Run and find out what it is,' she said, and, with a calm sense of being prepared for anything, she sat down in a low chair, folding her hands on her knees. A footman brought in a thick packet directed in Alexei Alexandrovich's hand.
`The messenger has orders to wait for an answer,' he said.
`Very well,' she said, and as soon as he had left the room she tore open the letter with trembling fingers. A packet of unfolded banknotes done up with a band fell out of it. She extricated the letter and began reading it from the end. `Preparations shall be made for your arrival here...
I attach particular significance to compliance....' she read. She ran through it backward, read it all through, and once more read the letter all through again, from the beginning. When she had finished, she felt that she was cold all over, and that a fearful calamity, such as she had not expected, had burst upon her.
In the morning she had regretted that she had spoken to her husband, and wished for nothing so much as that those words might be unspoken. And here this letter regarded them as unspoken, and gave her what she had wanted.
But now this letter seemed to her more awful than anything she had been able to conceive.
`He's right!' she said. `Of course, he's always right; he's a Christian, he's generous! Yes, vile, base creature! And no one understands it except me, and no one ever will; and I can't explain it. They say he's so religious, so high-principled, so upright, so clever; but they don't see what I've seen. They don't know how he has crushed my life for eight years, crushed everything that was living in me - he has not once even thought that I'm a live woman who must have love. They don't know how at every step he's humiliated me, and been just as pleased with himself. Haven't I striven - striven with all my strength - to find something to give meaning to my life? Haven't I struggled to love him, to love my son when I could not love my husband? But the time came when I knew that I couldn't cheat myself any longer, that I was alive, that I was not to blame, that God has made me so that I must love and live. And now what does he do? If he'd killed me, if he'd killed him, I could have borne anything, I could have forgiven anything; but, no, he...'
`How was it I didn't guess what he would do? He's doing just what's natural to his mean character. He'll keep himself in the right, while he'll drive me, in my ruin, still lower, still to worse ruin...'
`'You can conjecture what awaits you and your son,'' she recalled a part of his letter. `That's a threat to take away my child, and most likely according to their stupid law he can. But I know very well why he says it. He doesn't believe even in my love for my child, or he despises it (just as he always used to ridicule it). He despises that feeling in me, but he knows that I won't abandon my child, that I can't abandon my child, that there could be no life for me without my child, even with him whom I love; but that if I abandoned my child and ran away from him, Ishould be acting like the most infamous, basest of women. He knows that, and knows that I am incapable of doing that.'
`Our life must go on as it has done in the past,' she recalled another sentence in his letter. `That life was miserable enough in the old days; it has been awful of late. What will it be now? And he knows all that; he knows that I can't repent breathing, repent loving; he knows that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he wants to go on torturing me. I know him; I know that he's at home and is happy in deceit, like a fish swimming in the water. No, I won't give him that happiness.