The Baby's Bath : "With one hand Kitty was supporting the head of the chubby baby: he was floating on his back in the bath and diddling his legs. With her other hand she squeezed the sponge over him, and the muscles of her forearm contracted in measured motion. ..." (Again mistranslated by Gar-nett, who leaves out all reference to the muscles.)
*
The Garnett translation reads: "Holding his head bent down before him," on which VN fastidiously notes, "Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man." Ed.
†
VN interjects: "The point of this is of course messed up by Garnett," who writes, "they had been light summer dresses when they started out." Ed.
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The nurse supporting him with one hand under his little belly, lifted him out of the bath, poured a jugful of water over him, he was wrapped in towels, dried and after some piercing screams handed over to his mother.
" 'Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him,' said Kitty to her husband, when she had settled comfortably in her usual place, with the baby at her breast. 'You remember you said you had no feeling for him.'
' 'Really? Did I say that? Oh—I only said I was sort of disappointed.'
" 'In him?'
" 'Not in him but well—in my own feeling. I had somehow expected more, some new delightful emotion, a big surprise, and then instead—disgust, pity.'
"She listened attentively looking at him over the baby while she put back on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while giving the baby his bath. . . . [Tolstoy never misses a gesture.]
"Lyovin on leaving the nursery and finding himself alone,* went back in thought to the blurry something in his mind.
Instead of going into the drawing-room where he heard voices, he stopped on the terrace and leaning his elbows on the parapet gazed at the sky. It was quite dark now. The south was free of clouds which had drifted on towards the opposite side. There were flashes of lightning and distant rumbles from that quarter. He listened to the measured drip-drip from the lime-trees in the garden and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well and the milky way with all its ramifications.
[Now comes a delightful comparison to be marked with love and foresight.] At each flash the Milky Way and even the bright stars vanished but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in their places as though a hand had thrown them back with careful aim. [Is this delightful comparison clear?]
" 'Well, what is perplexing me?' Lyovin said to himself. 'I am wondering about the relationship to God of all the different religions of all mankind. But why do I bother? [Why indeed, murmurs the good reader.] To me individually, personally, to my own heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here am I obstinately trying to use my reason.... The question of other creeds and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, no possibility of deciding.'
" 'Oh, you have not gone in,' said Kitty's voice all at once as she went by through the terrace on her way to the drawing-room. 'What is the matter?' she said, looking intently at his face in the starlight.
"But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face clearly and seeing him happy and calm, she smiled at him. [This is the functional after effect of the delightful comparison we have noticed. It helps to clear matters.]
" 'She understands,' he thought. 'Shall I tell her? Yes.' But at that moment she began speaking. 'Do me a favor,' she said. 'Go into that guest room and see if they have fixed it right for Sergey [his half brother]. I can't very well. See if they have put the new wash-stand there.'
" 'O.K.,' said Lyovin and gave her a kiss. 'No, I had better not speak of it,' he thought. 'It is strictly for me alone, vitally for me alone, and not to be put into words.
'This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy as I had dreamt it would in regard to that feeling for my child. No surprise in this either. But faith or no faith this feeling has come to stay.'
*
In a note VN objects to Mrs. Garnett's phrasing of this opening, "Going out of the nursery and being alone again." Ed.
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'I shall go on, in the same old way, losing my temper with the coachman, falling into angry discussions, being tactless.
There will still be the same wall of reticence between my soul and other people, even between me and my wife. I shall still go on blaming her for my own fears and regretting it. I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my whole life now, apart from anything that may happen to me, every minute of it is no longer meaningless as it was before. It has acquired now the positive meaning of good which I have the power to give it.'
Thus the book ends, on a mystic note which seems to me rather a part of Tolstoy's own diary than that of the character he created. This is the background of the book, the Milky Way of the book, the Lyovin-Kitty family life line. We shall presently turn to the pattern of iron and blood, to the Vronski-Anna pattern that stands in awful relief against this star-dusted sky.
Although he is mentioned earlier, Vronski makes his first appearance in part one, chapter 14, at the Shcherbatskis.
Incidentally, it is here that starts an interesting little line, the line of "spiritualism," table tilting, entranced mediums, and so on, a fashionable pastime in those days. Vronski in a light-hearted mood wishes to try out this fashionable fad; but much later, in chapter 22 of part seven, it is, curiously enough, owing to the mediumistic visions of a French quack who has found patrons among Petersburg society people, it is owing to him that Karenin decides not to give Anna a divorce—and a telegram to that effect during a final period of tragic tension between Anna and Vronski helps to build up the mood that leads to her suicide.
Some time before Vronski met Anna, a young official in her husband's department had confessed his love to her and she had gaily relayed it to her husband; but now, from the very first look exchanged with Vronski at the ball, a fateful mystery enfolds her life. She says nothing to her sister-in-law about Vronski's giving a sum of money for the widow of the killed railway guard, an act which establishes, through death as it
were, a kind of secret link between her and her future lover.
And further, Vronski has called on the Shcherbatskis the
evening before the ball at the exact moment when Anna
remembers so vividly her child from whom she is separated
for the few days she has spent in Moscow smoothing her
brother's troubles. It is the fact of her having this beloved
child which will later constantly interfere with her passion
for Vron-ski.
The scenes of the horse race in the middle chapters of part