Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 22
Alexey Alexandrovitch knitted his brows, and crooking his hands, he cracked his
fingers.
“One must know all the facts,” he said in his thin voice. “A man’s strength has
its limits, countess, and I have reached my limits. The whole day I have had to be
making arrangements, arrangements about household matters arising” (he emphasized
the word arising) “from my new, solitary position. The servants, the governess,
the accounts.... These pinpricks have stabbed me to the heart, and I have not the
strength to bear it. At dinner... yesterday, I was almost getting up from the dinner
table. I could not bear the way my son looked at me. He did not ask me the meaning
of it all, but he wanted to ask, and I could not bear the look in his eyes. He was afraid
to look at me, but that is not all....” Alexey Alexandrovitch would have referred to
the bill that had been brought him, but his voice shook, and he stopped. That bill on
blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, he could not recall without a rush of self-pity.
“I understand, dear friend,” said Lidia Ivanovna. “I understand it all. Succor
and comfort you will find not in me, though I have come only to aid you if I can.
If I could take from off you all these petty, humiliating cares...I understand that a
woman’s word, a woman’s superintendence is needed. You will intrust it to me?”
Silently and gratefully Alexey Alexandrovitch pressed her hand.
“Together we will take care of Seryozha. Practical affairs are not my strong point.
But I will set to work. I will be your housekeeper. Don’t thank me. I do it not from
myself...”
“I cannot help thanking you.”
“But, dear friend, do not give way to the feeling of which you spoke–being
ashamed of what is the Christian’s highest glory: he who humbles himself shall be exalted.
And you cannot thank me. You must thank Him, and pray to Him for succor.
In Him alone we find peace, consolation, salvation, and love,” she said, and turning
her eyes heavenwards, she began praying, as Alexey Alexandrovitch gathered from
her silence.
Alexey Alexandrovitch listened to her now, and those expressions which had
seemed to him, if not distasteful, at least exaggerated, now seemed to him natural
and consolatory. Alexey Alexandrovitch had disliked this new enthusiastic fervor.
He was a believer, who was interested in religion primarily in its political aspect, and
the new doctrine which ventured upon several new interpretations, just because it
paved the way to discussion and analysis, was in principle disagreeable to him. He
had hitherto taken up a cold and even antagonistic attitude to this new doctrine,
and with Countess Lidia Ivanovna, who had been carried away by it, he had never
argued, but by silence had assiduously parried her attempts to provoke him into
argument. Now for the first time he heard her words with pleasure, and did not
inwardly oppose them.
“I am very, very grateful to you, both for your deeds and for your words,” he said,
when she had finished praying.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna once more pressed both her friend’s hands.
“Now I will enter upon my duties,” she said with a smile after a pause, as she
wiped away the traces of tears. “I am going to Seryozha. Only in the last extremity
shall I apply to you.” And she got up and went out.
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