Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 13
Suppose I am taught,” he went on musing, “to shoot; I press the trigger,” he said to
himself, closing his eyes, “and it turns out I have killed him,” Alexey Alexandrovitch
said to himself, and he shook his head as though to dispel such silly ideas. “What
sense is there in murdering a man in order to define one’s relation to a guilty wife
and son? I should still just as much have to decide what I ought to do with her.
But what is more probable and what would doubtless occur–I should be killed or
wounded. I, the innocent person, should be the victim–killed or wounded. It’s even
more senseless. But apart from that, a challenge to fight would be an act hardly honest
on my side. Don’t I know perfectly well that my friends would never allow me
to fight a duel–would never allow the life of a statesman, needed by Russia, to be
exposed to danger? Knowing perfectly well beforehand that the matter would never
come to real danger, it would amount to my simply trying to gain a certain sham
reputation by such a challenge. That would be dishonest, that would be false, that
would be deceiving myself and others. A duel is quite irrational, and no one expects
it of me. My aim is simply to safeguard my reputation, which is essential for the uninterrupted
pursuit of my public duties.” Official duties, which had always been of
great consequence in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s eyes, seemed of special importance to
his mind at this moment. Considering and rejecting the duel, Alexey Alexandrovitch
turned to divorce–another solution selected by several of the husbands he remembered.
Passing in mental review all the instances he knew of divorces (there were
plenty of them in the very highest society with which he was very familiar), Alexey
Alexandrovitch could not find a single example in which the object of divorce was
that which he had in view. In all these instances the husband had practically ceded
or sold his unfaithful wife, and the very party which, being in fault, had not the
right to contract a fresh marriage, had formed counterfeit, pseudo-matrimonial ties
with a self-styled husband. In his own case, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that a legal
divorce, that is to say, one in which only the guilty wife would be repudiated, was
impossible of attainment. He saw that the complex conditions of the life they led
made the coarse proofs of his wife’s guilt, required by the law, out of the question;
he saw that a certain refinement in that life would not admit of such proofs being
brought forward, even if he had them, and that to bring forward such proofs would
damage him in the public estimation more than it would her.
An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a public scandal, which would
be a perfect godsend to his enemies for calumny and attacks on his high position in
society. His chief object, to define the position with the least amount of disturbance
possible, would not be attained by divorce either. Moreover, in the event of divorce,
or even of an attempt to obtain a divorce, it was obvious that the wife broke off
all relations with the husband and threw in her lot with the lover. And in spite of
the complete, as he supposed, contempt and indifference he now felt for his wife,
at the bottom of his heart Alexey Alexandrovitch still had one feeling left in regard
to her–a disinclination to see her free to throw in her lot with Vronsky, so that her
crime would be to her advantage. The mere notion of this so exasperated Alexey
Alexandrovitch, that directly it rose to his mind he groaned with inward agony, and
got up and changed his place in the carriage, and for a long while after, he sat with
scowling brows, wrapping his numbed and bony legs in the fleecy rug.
“Apart from formal divorce, One might still do like Karibanov, Paskudin, and that
good fellow Dram–that is, separate from one’s wife,” he went on thinking, when
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