Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 29
Chapter 29
ONE of Anna’s objects in coming back to Russia had been to see her son. From
the day she left Italy the thought of it had never ceased to agitate her. And
as she got nearer to Petersburg, the delight and importance of this meeting grew
ever greater in her imagination. She did not even put to herself the question how to
arrange it. It seemed to her natural and simple to see her son when she should be in
the same town with him. But on her arrival in Petersburg she was suddenly made
distinctly aware of her present position in society, and she grasped the fact that to
arrange this meeting was no easy matter.
She had now been two days in Petersburg. The thought of her son never left her
for a single instant, but she had not yet seen him. To go straight to the house, where
she might meet Alexey Alexandrovitch, that she felt she had no right to do. She
might be refused admittance and insulted. To write and so enter into relations with
her husband–that it made her miserable to think of doing; she could only be at peace
when she did not think of her husband. To get a glimpse of her son out walking,
finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for her; she had so looked
forward to this meeting, she had so much she must say to him, she so longed to
embrace him, to kiss him. Seryozha’s old nurse might be a help to her and show her
what to do. But the nurse was not now living in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s house. In
this uncertainty, and in efforts to find the nurse, two days had slipped by.
Hearing of the close intimacy between Alexey Alexandrovitch and Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write to her a letter, which cost her
great pains, and in which she intentionally said that permission to see her son must
depend on her husband’s generosity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her
husband, he would keep up his character of magnanimity, and would not refuse her
request.
The commissionaire who took the letter had brought her back the most cruel and
unexpected answer, that there was no answer. She had never felt so humiliated as
at the moment when, sending for the commissionaire, she heard from him the exact
account of how he had waited, and how afterwards he had been told there was no
answer. Anna felt humiliated, insulted, but she saw that from her point of view
Countess Lidia Ivanovna was right. Her suffering was the more poignant that she
had to bear it in solitude. She could not and would not share it with Vronsky. She
knew that to him, although he was the primary cause of her distress, the question of
her seeing her son would seem a matter of very little consequence. She knew that he
would never be capable of understanding all the depth of her suffering, that for his
cool tone at any allusion to it she would begin to hate him. And she dreaded that
more than anything in the world, and so she hid from him everything that related
to her son. Spending the whole day at home she considered ways of seeing her son,
and had reached a decision to write to her husband. She was just composing this
letter when she was handed the letter from Lidia Ivanovna. The countess’s silence
had subdued and depressed her, but the letter, all that she read between the lines in
it, so exasperated her, this malice was so revolting beside her passionate, legitimate
tenderness for her son, that she turned against other people and left off blaming
herself.
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