Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 2
Chapter 2
WHEN he got home, Vronsky found there a note from Anna. She wrote, “I am
ill and unhappy. I cannot come out, but I cannot go on longer without seeing
you. Come in this evening. Alexey Alexandrovitch goes to the council at seven and
will be there till ten.” Thinking for an instant of the strangeness of her bidding him
come straight to her, in spite of her husband’s insisting on her not receiving him, he
decided to go.
Vronsky had that winter got his promotion, was now a colonel, had left the regimental
quarters, and was living alone. After having some lunch, he lay down on
the sofa immediately, and in five minutes memories of the hideous scenes he had
witnessed during the last few days were confused together and joined on to a mental
image of Anna and of the peasant who had played an important part in the bear
hunt, and Vronsky fell asleep. He waked up in the dark, trembling with horror, and
made haste to light a candle. “What was it? What? What was the dreadful thing I
dreamed? Yes, yes; I think a little dirty man with a disheveled beard was stooping
down doing something, and all of a sudden he began saying some strange words
in French. Yes, there was nothing else in the dream,” he said to himself. “But why
was it so awful?” He vividly recalled the peasant again and those incomprehensible
French words the peasant had uttered, and a chill of horror ran down his spine.
“What nonsense!” thought Vronsky, and glanced at his watch.
It was half-past eight already. He rang up his servant, dressed in haste, and went
out onto the steps, completely forgetting the dream and only worried at being late.
As he drove up to the Karenins’ entrance he looked at his watch and saw it was ten
minutes to nine. A high, narrow carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the
entrance. He recognized Anna’s carriage. “She is coming to me,” thought Vronsky,
“and better she should. I don’t like going into that house. But no matter; I can’t hide
myself,” he thought, and with that manner peculiar to him from childhood, as of
a man who has nothing to be ashamed of, Vronsky got out of his sledge and went
to the door. The door opened, and the hall porter with a rug on his arm called the
carriage. Vronsky, though he did not usually notice details, noticed at this moment
the amazed expression with which the porter glanced at him. In the very doorway
Vronsky almost ran up against Alexey Alexandrovitch. The gas jet threw its full
light on the bloodless, sunken face under the black hat and on the white cravat,
brilliant against the beaver of the coat. Karenin’s fixed, dull eyes were fastened upon
Vronsky’s face. Vronsky bowed, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, chewing his lips, lifted
his hand to his hat and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the
carriage, pick up the rug and the opera-glass at the window and disappear. Vronsky
went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and his eyes gleamed with a proud and
angry light in them.
“What a position!” he thought. “If he would fight, would stand up for his honor,
I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness or baseness.... He puts me
in the position of playing false, which I never meant and never mean to do.”
Vronsky’s ideas had changed since the day of his conversation with Anna in the
Vrede garden. Unconsciously yielding to the weakness of Anna–who had surrendered
herself up to him utterly, and simply looked to him to decide her fate, ready
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