TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 1, Chapter 04[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 4 Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty hair (once luxuriant and beautiful) fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing, among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband's steps, she stopped, looking toward the door, and trying in vain to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days - to sort out the children's things and her own, so as to take them to her mother's - and again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself, that things cannot go on like this, that she must undertake something, punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and of loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, they would be still worse off where she was going with all of them. As it was, even in the course of these three days, the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome soup, and the others had almost gone without their dinner the day before.
She was conscious that it was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself, she went on all the same sorting out her things and pretending she was going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau as though looking for something, and only looked round at him when he had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute expression, expressed bewilderment and suffering.
`Dolly!' he said in a subdued and timid voice. He had hunched up his shoulders and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all that he was radiant with freshness and health. In a rapid glance she scanned his figure, beaming with freshness and health. `Yes, he is happy and content!'
she thought; `while I... And that disgusting good nature which everyone likes him for and praises - I hate that good nature of his,' she thought.
Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek trembled on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
`What do you want?' she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
`Dolly!' he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. `Anna is coming today.'
`Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!' she cried.
`But you must, really, Dolly...'
`Go away, go away, go away!' she shrieked, without looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevich could be calm when he thought of his wife, he could hope that everything would come round, as Matvei expressed it, and had been able to go on reading his paper and drinking his coffee; but when he saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate and full of despair, his breath was cut short and a lump came to this throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.
`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.