Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 21
Chapter 21
FROM the moment when Alexey Alexandrovitch understood from his interviews
with Betsy and with Stepan Arkadyevitch that all that was expected of him was
to leave his wife in peace, without burdening her with his presence, and that his wife
herself desired this, he felt so distraught that he could come to no decision of himself;
he did not know himself what he wanted now, and putting himself in the hands of
those who were so pleased to interest themselves in his affairs, he met everything
with unqualified assent. It was only when Anna had left his house, and the English
governess sent to ask him whether she should dine with him or separately, that for
the first time he clearly comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most
difficult of all in this position was the fact that he could not in any way connect
and reconcile his past with what was now. It was not the past when he had lived
happily with his wife that troubled him. The transition from that past to a knowledge
of his wife’s unfaithfulness he had lived through miserably already; that state was
painful, but he could understand it. If his wife had then, on declaring to him her
unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would not
have been in the hopeless position–incomprehensible to himself–in which he felt
himself now. He could not now reconcile his immediate past, his tenderness, his
love for his sick wife, and for the other man’s child with what was now the case, that
is with the fact that, as it were, in return for all this he now found himself alone, put
to shame, a laughing-stock, needed by no one, and despised by everyone.
For the first two days after his wife’s departure Alexey Alexandrovitch received
applicants for assistance and his chief secretary, drove to the committee, and went
down to dinner in the dining room as usual. Without giving himself a reason for
what he was doing, he strained every nerve of his being for those two days, simply
to preserve an appearance of composure, and even of indifference. Answering inquiries
about the disposition of Anna Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he had
exercised immense self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes what had occurred
was not unforeseen nor out of the ordinary course of events, and he attained
his aim: no one could have detected in him signs of despair. But on the second day
after her departure, when Korney gave him a bill from a fashionable draper’s shop,
which Anna had forgotten to pay, and announced that the clerk from the shop was
waiting, Alexey Alexandrovitch told him to show the clerk up.
“Excuse me, your excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But if you direct us to
apply to her excellency, would you graciously oblige us with her address?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, as it seemed to the clerk, and all at once, turning
round, he sat down at the table. Letting his head sink into his hands, he sat for a long
while in that position, several times attempted to speak and stopped short. Korney,
perceiving his master’s emotion, asked the clerk to call another time. Left alone,
Alexey Alexandrovitch recognized that he had not the strength to keep up the line
of firmness and composure any longer. He gave orders for the carriage that was
awaiting him to be taken back, and for no one to be admitted, and he did not go
down to dinner.
He felt that he could not endure the weight of universal contempt and exasperation,
which he had distinctly seen in the face of the clerk and of Korney, and of
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