Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 3
A
Chapter 3
crowd of people, principally women, was thronging round the church lighted
up for the wedding. Those who had not succeeded in getting into the main entrance
were crowding about the windows, pushing, wrangling, and peeping through
the gratings.
More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up in ranks along the street
by the police. A police officer, regardless of the frost, stood at the entrance, gorgeous
in his uniform. More carriages were continually driving up, and ladies wearing
flowers and carrying their trains, and men taking off their helmets or black hats kept
walking into the church. Inside the church both lusters were already lighted, and all
the candles before the holy pictures. The gilt on the red ground of the holy picturestand,
and the gilt relief on the pictures, and the silver of the lusters and candlesticks,
and the stones of the floor, and the rugs, and the banners above in the choir, and the
steps of the altar, and the old blackened books, and the cassocks and surplices–all
were flooded with light. On the right side of the warm church, in the crowd of frock
coats and white ties, uniforms and broadcloth, velvet, satin, hair and flowers, bare
shoulders and arms and long gloves, there was discreet but lively conversation that
echoed strangely in the high cupola. Every time there was heard the creak of the
opened door the conversation in the crowd died away, and everybody looked round
expecting to see the bride and bridegroom come in. But the door had opened more
than ten times, and each time it was either a belated guest or guests, who joined
the circle of the invited on the right, or a spectator, who had eluded or softened the
police officer, and went to join the crowd of outsiders on the left. Both the guests and
the outside public had by now passed through all the phases of anticipation.
At first they imagined that the bride and bridegroom would arrive immediately,
and attached no importance at all to their being late. Then they began to look more
and more often towards the door, and to talk of whether anything could have happened.
Then the long delay began to be positively discomforting, and relations and
guests tried to look as if they were not thinking of the bridegroom but were engrossed
in conversation.
The head deacon, as though to remind them of the value of his time, coughed impatiently,
making the window-panes quiver in their frames. In the choir the bored
choristers could be heard trying their voices and blowing their noses. The priest
was continually sending first the beadle and then the deacon to find out whether the
bridegroom had not come, more and more often he went himself, in a lilac vestment
and an embroidered sash, to the side door, expecting to see the bridegroom. At last
one of the ladies, glancing at her watch, said, “It really is strange, though!” and all
the guests became uneasy and began loudly expressing their wonder and dissatisfaction.
One of the bridegroom’s best men went to find out what had happened.
Kitty meanwhile had long ago been quite ready, and in her white dress and long
veil and wreath of orange blossoms she was standing in the drawing-room of the
Shtcherbatskys’ house with her sister, Madame Lvova, who was her bridal-mother.
She was looking out of the window, and had been for over half an hour anxiously
expecting to hear from the best man that her bridegroom was at the church.
Levin meanwhile, in his trousers, but without his coat and waistcoat, was walking
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