第87章

As he was coming away, the doctor chanced to meet on the steps an acquaintance of his, Sludin, who was head clerk in Alexei Alexandrovich's office. They had been comrades at the university, and, though they rarely met, they thought highly of each other and were excellent friends, and hence there was no one to whom the doctor would have given his opinion of a patient so freely as to Sludin.

`How glad I am you've been seeing him!' said Sludin. `He's not well, and I fancy... Well, what do you think of him?'

`I'll tell you,' said the doctor, beckoning over Sludin's head to his coachman to bring the carriage round. `It's just this,' said the doctor, taking a finger of his kid glove in his white hands and pulling it, `if you don't strain the strings, and then try to break them, you'll find it a difficult job; but strain a string to its very utmost, and the mere weight of one finger on the strained string will snap it. And with his close assiduity, his conscientious devotion to his work, he's strained to the utmost; and there's some outside burden weighing on him, and that not a light one,' concluded the doctor, raising his eyebrows significantly.

`Will you be at the races?' he added, as he came down to his carriage.

`Yes, yes, to be sure; it does waste a lot of time,' the doctor responded vaguely to some reply of Sludin's he had not caught.

Directly after the doctor, who had taken up so much time, came the celebrated traveler, and Alexei Alexandrovich, by means of the pamphlet he had only just finished reading, and his previous acquaintance with the subject, impressed the traveler by the depth of his knowledge of the subject and the breadth and enlightenment of his view of it.

At the same time with the traveler there was announced a provincial marshal of nobility on a visit to Peterburg, with whom Alexei Alexandrovich had to have some conversation. After his departure, he had to finish the daily routine of business with his head clerk, and then he still had to drive round to call on a certain personage on a matter of grave and serious import. Alexei Alexandrovich hardly managed to be back by five o'clock, his dinner hour, and, after dining with his head clerk, he invited him to drive with him to his summer villa and to the races.

Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, Alexei Alexandrovich always tried nowadays to secure the presence of a third person in his interviews with his wife.

[Next Chapter] [Table of Contents]TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 2, Chapter 27[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 27 Anna was upstairs, standing before the looking glass, and, with Annushka's assistance, pinning the last ribbon on her gown when she heard carriage wheels crunching the gravel at the entrance.

`It's too early for Betsy,' she thought, and, glancing out of the window, she caught sight of the carriage and, protruded from it, the black hat of Alexei Alexandrovich, and the ears that she knew so well.

`How unlucky! Can he be going to stay the night?' she wondered, and the thought of all that might come of such a chance struck her as so awful and terrible that, without dwelling on it for a moment, she went down to meet him with a bright and radiant face; and conscious of the presence of that spirit of falsehood and deceit in herself that she had come to know of late, she abandoned herself to that spirit and began talking, hardly knowing what she was saying.

`Ah, how lovely of you!' she said, giving her husband her hand, and with a smile greeting Sludin, who was like one of the family. `You're staying the night, I hope?' was the first word the spirit of falsehood prompted her to utter. `And now we'll go together. Only it's a pity I've promised Betsy. She's coming for me.'

Alexei Alexandrovich knit his brows at Betsy's name.

`Oh, I'm not going to separate the inseparables,' he said in his usual bantering tone. `I'm going with Mikhail Vassilyevich. Even the doctors order me to walk. I'll walk, and fancy myself at the springs again.'

`There's no hurry,' said Anna. `Would you like tea?'

She rang.

`Bring in tea, and tell Seriozha that Alexei Alexandrovich is here. Well, tell me, how have you been? Mikhail Vassilyevich, you've not been to see me before. Look how lovely it is out on the terrace,' she said, turning first to one and then to the other.

She spoke very simply and naturally, but too much and too fast.

She was the more aware of this from noticing in the inquisitive look which Mikhail Vassilyevich turned on her that he was, as it were, keeping watch on her.

Mikhail Vassilyevich promptly went out on the terrace.

She sat down beside her husband.

`You don't look quite well,' she said.

`Yes,' he said; `the doctor's been with me today and wasted an hour of my time. I feel that some one of our friends must have sent him:

my health's so precious....'

`Come: what did he say?'

She questioned him about his health, and what he had been doing, and tried to persuade him to take a rest and come out to her.

All this she said brightly, rapidly, and with a peculiar brilliance in her eyes. But Alexei Alexandrovich did not now attach any special significance to this tone of hers. He heard only her words and gave them only the direct sense they bore. And he answered simply, though jestingly. There was nothing remarkable in all this conversation, but never after could Anna recall this brief scene without an agonizing pang of shame.

Seriozha came in, preceded by his governess. If Alexei Alexandrovich had allowed himself to observe he would have noticed the timid and bewildered eyes with which Seriozha glanced first at his father and then at his mother.

But he would not see anything, and he did not see it.

`Ah, the young man! He's grown. Really, he's getting quite a man.

How are you, young man?'

And he gave his hand to the scared child.