第153章
Chapter 1 The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexei Alexandrovich made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexei Alexandrovich's house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it.
The position was one of torture for all three; and not one of them would have been equal to enduring this position for a single day, had it not been for the expectation that it would change, that it was merely a temporary painful difficulty which would pass over. Alexei Alexandrovich hoped that this passion would pass, as everything does pass, that everyone would forget about it, and his name would remain unsullied. Anna, on whom the position depended, and for whom it was more poignant than for any other, endured it because she not merely hoped, but firmly believed, that it would all very soon be settled and come right. She had not the least idea what would settle the situation, but she firmly believed that something would now very soon turn up. Vronsky unaccountably followed her lead, hoping too that something, independent of him, would be sure to clear up all difficulties.
In the middle of the winter Vronsky spent a very tiresome week.
A foreign Prince, who had come on a visit to Peterburg, was put under his charge, and he had to show him the sights worth seeing. Vronsky was of distinguished appearance; he possessed, moreover, the art of behaving with respectful dignity, and was used to having to do with such grand personages - that was how he came to be put in charge of the Prince. But he felt his duties to be very irksome. The Prince was anxious to miss nothing about which he would be asked at home: Had he seen this and that in Russia? And on his own account he was anxious to enjoy to the utmost all Russian forms of amusement. Vronsky was obliged to be his guide in satisfying both these inclinations. The mornings they spent driving to look at places of interest:
the evenings they passed enjoying the national amusements. The prince enjoyed a health exceptional even among Princes. By gymnastics and careful attention to his person he had brought himself to such a point that in spite of his excesses in pleasure he looked as fresh as a big, glossy, green Dutch cucumber.
The Prince had traveled a great deal, and considered one of the chief advantages of modern facilities of communication the accessibility of the pleasures of all nations. He had been in Spain, and there had indulged in serenades, and had made friends with a Spanish girl who played the mandolin. In Switzerland he had killed chamois. In England he had galloped in a red coat over hedges and killed two hundred pheasants on a bet. In Turkey he had got into a harem; in India he had traveled on an elephant; and now, in Russia, he wished to taste all the peculiarly Russian forms of pleasure.
Vronsky, who was, as it were, chief master of the ceremonies to him, was at great pains to distribute all the Russian amusements suggested by various persons to the Prince. They had race horses, and Russian pancakes and bear hunts, and troikas, and gypsy choruses, and drinking orgies, with the Russian accompaniment of broken crockery. And the Prince, with surprising ease, fell in with the Russian spirit; he smashed trays full of crockery, sat with a gypsy girl on his knee, and seemed to be asking: What more?
Or does the whole Russian spirit consist in just this?
In reality, of all the Russian entertainments the Prince liked best French actresses, a ballet dancer, and white-seal champagne. Vronsky was used to Princes, but, either because he had himself changed of late, or that he was in too close proximity to the Prince, that week seemed fearfully wearisome to him. The whole of that week he experienced unceasingly a sensation such as a man might have who has been put in charge of a dangerous madman, who is afraid of the madman, and, at the same time, from being with him, fears for his own reason. Vronsky was continually conscious of the necessity of never for a second relaxing the tone of stern official respectfulness, so that he might not himself be insulted. The Prince's manner of treating the very people who, to Vronsky's surprise, were ready to descend to any depths to provide him with Russian amusements, was contemptuous. His criticisms of Russian women, whom he wished to study, more than once made Vronsky crimson with indignation. The chief reason why the Prince was so particularly disagreeable to Vronsky was that he could not help seeing himself in him.
And what he saw in this mirror did not gratify his self-esteem. He was a very stupid and a very self-satisfied and a very healthy and a very well-washed man, and nothing else. He was a gentleman, it was true, and Vronsky could not deny it. He was equable and not cringing with his superiors, was free and ingratiating in his behavior with his equals, and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors. Vronsky was himself the same, and regarded it as a great merit to be so. But to this Prince he was an inferior, and his contemptuous and indulgent attitude to him revolted him.
`Brainless beef! Can I be like that?' he reflected.
Be that as it might, when, on the seventh day, he parted from the Prince, who was starting for Moscow, and received his thanks, he was happy to be rid of his uncomfortable position and the unpleasant reflection of himself. He said good-by to him at the station, on their return from a bear hunt, at which they had had a display of Russian derring-do kept up all night.