Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy

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Vronsky and Kitty waltzed several times round the
room. After the first waltz Kitty went to her mother, and
she had hardly time to say a few words to Countess
Nordston when Vronsky came up again for the first
quadrille. During the quadrille nothing of any significance
was said: there was disjointed talk between them of the
Korsunskys, husband and wife, whom he described very
amusingly, as delightful children at forty, and of the future
town theater; and only once the conversation touched her
to the quick, when he asker her about Levin, whether he
was here, and added that he liked him so much. But Kitty
did not expect much from the quadrille. She looked
forward with a thrill at her heart to the mazurka. She
fancied that in the mazurka everything must be decided.
The fact that he did not during the quadrille ask her for
the mazurka did not trouble her. She felt sure she would
dance the mazurka with him as she had done at former
balls, and refused five young men, saying she was engaged
for the mazurka. The whole ball up to the last quadrille
was for Kitty an enchanted vision of delightful colors,
sounds, and motions. she only sat down when she felt too
tired and begged for a rest. But as she was dancing the last
quadrille with one of the tiresome young men whom she
could not refuse, she chanced to be vis-a-vis with Vronsky
and Anna. She had not been near Anna again since the
beginning of the evening, and now again she saw her
suddenly quite new and surprising. She saw in her the
signs of that excitement of success she knew so well in
herself; she saw that she was intoxicated with the delighted
admiration she was exciting. She knew that feeling and
knew its signs, and saw them in Anna; saw the quivering,
flashing light in her eyes, and the smile of happiness and
excitement unconsciously playing on her lips, and the
deliberate grace, precision, and lightness of her
movements.
‘Who?’ she asked herself. ‘All or one?’ And not assisting
the harassed young man she was dancing with in the
conversation, the thread of which he had lost and could
not pick up again, she obeyed with external liveliness the
peremptory shouts of Korsunsky starting them all into the
grand round, and then into the chaine, and at the same
time she kept watch with a growing pang at her heart.
‘No, it’s not the admiration of the crowd has intoxicated
her, but the adoration of one. And that one? can it be he?’
Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous light flashed into
her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red lips.
she seemed to make an effort to control herself, to try not
to show these signs of delight, but they came out on her
face of themselves. ‘But what of him?’ Kitty looked at him
and was filled with terror. What was pictured so clearly to
Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face she saw in him. What
had become of his always self-possessed resolute manner,
and the carelessly serene expression of his face? Now every
time he turned to her, he bent his head, as though he
would have fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was
nothing but humble submission and dread. ‘I would not
offend you,’ his eyes seemed every time to be saying, ‘but
I want to save myself, and I don’t know how.’ On his face
was a look such as Kitty have never seen before.
They were speaking of common acquaintances,
keeping up the most trivial conversation, but to Kitty it
seemed that every word they said was determining their
fate and hers. And strange it was that they were actually
talking of how absurd Ivan Ivanovitch was with his
French, and how the Eletsky girl might have made a better
match, yet these words had all the while consequence for
them, and they were feeling just as Kitty did. The whole
ball, the whole world, everything seemed lost in fog in
Kitty’s soul. Nothing but the stern discipline of her
bringing-up supported her and forced her to do what was
expected of her, that is, to dance, to answer questions, to
talk, even to smile. But before the mazurka, when they
were beginning to rearrange the chairs and a few couples
moved out of the smaller rooms into the big room, a
moment of despair and horror came for Kitty. She had
refused five partners, and now she was not dancing the
mazurka. She had not even a hope of being asked for it,
because she was so successful in society that the idea
would never occur to anyone that she had remained
disengaged till now. She would have to tell her mother
she felt ill and go home, but she had not the strength to do
this. She felt crushed. She went to the furthest end of the
little drawing room and sank into a low chair. Her light,
transparent skirts rose like a cloud about her slender waist;
one bare, thin, soft, girlish arm, hanging listlessly, was lost
in the folds of her pink tunic; in the other she held her
fan, and with rapid, short strokes fanned her burning face.
But while she looked like a butterfly, clinging to a blade of
grass, and just about to open its rainbow wings for fresh
flight, her heart ached with a horrible despair.
‘But perhaps I am wrong, perhaps it was not so?’ And
again she recalled all she had seen.
‘Kitty, what is it?’ said Countess Nordston, stepping
noiselessly over the carpet towards her. ‘I don’t understand
it.’
Kitty’s lower lip began to quiver; she got up quickly.
‘Kitty, you’re not dancing the mazurka?’
‘No, no,’ said Kitty in a voice shaking with tears.
‘He asked her for the mazurka before me,’ said
Countess Nordston, knowing Kitty would understand
who were ‘he’ and ‘her.’ ‘She said: ‘Why, aren’t you
going to dance it with Princess Shtcherbatskaya?’.’
‘Oh, I don’t care!’ answered Kitty.
No one but she herself understood her position; no one
knew that she had just refused the man whom perhaps she
loved, and refused him because she had put her faith in
another.
Countess Nordston found Korsunsky, with whom she
was to dance the mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty.
Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she
had not to talk, because Korsunsky was all the time
running about directing the figure. Vronsky and Anna sat
almost opposite her. She saw them with her long-sighted
eyes, and saw them, too, close by, when they met in the
figures, and the more she saw of them the more convinced
was she that her unhappiness was complete. She saw that
they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And on
Vronsky’s face, always so firm and independent, she saw
that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble
submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog
when it has done wrong.
Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She
grew thoughtful, and he became serious. Some
supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She
was fascinating in her simple black dress, fascinating were
her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her
firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying
curls of her loose hair, fascinating the graceful, light
movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that
lovely face in its eagerness, but there was something
terrible and cruel in her fascination.
Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more
acute was her suffering. Kitty felt overwhelmed, and her
face showed it. When Vronsky saw her, coming across her
in the mazurka, he did not at once recognize her, she was
so changed.
‘Delightful ball!’ he said to her, for the sake of saying
something.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
In the middle of the mazurka, repeating a complicated
figure, newly invented by Korsunsky, Anna came forward
into the center of the circle, chose two gentlemen, and
summoned a lady and Kitty. Kitty gazed at her in dismay
as she went up. Anna looked at her with drooping eyelids,
and smiled, pressing her had. But, noticing that Kitty only
responded to her smile by a look of despair and
amazement, she turned away from her, and began gaily
talking to the other lady.
‘Yes, there is something uncanny, devilish and
fascinating in her,’ Kitty said to herself.
Anna did not mean to stay to supper, but the master of
the house began to press her to do so.
‘Nonsense, Anna Arkadyevna,’ said Korsunsky,
drawing her bare arm under the sleeve of his dress coat,
‘I’ve such an idea for a cotillion! Un bijou!’
And he moved gradually on, trying to draw her along
with him. Their hose smiled approvingly.
‘No, I am not going to stay,’ answered Anna, smiling,
but in spite of her smile, both Korsunsky and the master of
the house saw from her resolute tone that she would not
stay.
‘No; why, as it is, I have danced mor at your ball in
Moscow that I have all the winter in Petersburg,’ said
Anna, looking round at Vronsky, who stood near her. ‘I
must rest a little before my journey.’
‘Are you certainly going tomorrow then?’ asked
Vronsky.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ answered Anna, as it were
wondering at the boldness of his question; but the
irrepressible, quivering brilliance of her eyes and her smile
set him on fire as she said it.
Anna Arkadyevna did not stay to supper, but went
home.
Chapter 24
‘Yes, there is something in be hatful, repulsive,’
thought Levin, as he came away from the Shtcherbatskys’,
and walked in the direction of his brother’s lodgings. ‘And
I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I
have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put
myself in such a position.’ And he pictured to himself
Vronsky, happy, good-natured, clever, and self-possessed,
certainly never placed in the awful position in which he
had been that evening. ‘Yes, she was bound to choose
him. So it had to be, and I cannot complain of anyone or
anything. I am myself to blame. What right had I to
imagine she would care to join her life to mine? Whom
am I and what am I? A nobody, not wanted by any one,
nor of use to anybody.’ And he recalled his brother
Nikolay, and dwelt with pleasure on the thought of him.
‘Isn’t he right that everything in the world is base and
loathsome? And are we fair in our judgment of brother
Nikolay? Of course, from the point of view of Prokofy,
seeing him in a torn cloak and tipsy, he’s a despicable
person. But I know him differently. I know his soul, and
know that we are like him. And I, instead of going to seek
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him out, went out to dinner, and came here.’ Levin
walked up to a lamppost, read his brother’s address, which
was in his pocketbook, and called a sledge. All the long
way to his brother’s, Levin vividly recalled all the facts
familiar to him of his brother Nikolay’s life. He
remembered how his brother, while at the university, and
for a year afterwards, had, in spite of the jeers of his
companions, lived like a monk, strictly observing all
religious rites, services, and fasts, and avoiding every sort
of pleasure, especially women. And afterwards, how he
had all at once broken out: he had associated with the
most horrible people, and rushed into the most senseless
debauchery. He remembered later the scandal over a boy,
whom he had taken from the country to bring up, and, in
a fit of rage, had so violently beaten that proceedings were
brought against him for unlawfully wounding. Then he
recalled the scandal with a sharper, to whom he had lost
money, and given a promissory note, and against whom
he had himself lodged a complaint, asserting that he had
cheated him. (This was the money Sergey Ivanovitch had
paid.) Then he remembered how he had spent a night in
the lockup for disorderly conduct in the street. He
remembered the shameful proceedings he had tried to get
up against his brother Sergey Ivanovitch, accusing him of
not having paid him his share of his mother’s fortune, and
the last scandal, when he had gone to a western province
in an official capacity, and there had got into trouble for
assaulting a village elder.... It was all horribly disgusting,
yet to Levin it appeared not at all in the same disgusting
light as it inevitably would to those who did not know
Nikolay, did not know all his story, did not know his
heart.
Levin remembered that when Nikolay had been in the
devout stage, the period of fasts and monks and church
services, when he was seeking in religion a support and a
curb for his passionate temperament, everyone, far from
encouraging him, had jeered at him, and he, too, with the
others. They had teased him, called him Noah and Monk;
and, when he had broken out, no one had helped him,
but everyone had turned away from him with horror and
disgust.