It was a big thick book. Miriam sat down before it. The lights had come on. The book lay in a pool of sharp yellow light; Tolstoy, surrounded by a waiting gloom; the secret of Tolstoy standing at her side, rapidly taking off his overcoat. He drew up the chair from the next place and sat close, flattening out the book at the first chapter and beginning to read at once, bent low over the book. She bent too, stretching her hands out beyond her knees to make herself narrow, and fastening on the title. Her anticipations fell dead. It was the name of a woman … Anna; of all names. Karenine. The story of a woman told by a man with a man’s ideas about people. But Anna Karenine was not what Tolstoy had written. Behind the ugly feebleness of the substituted word was something quite different, strong and beautiful; a whole legend in itself. Why had the translator altered the surname? Anna Karayninna was a line of Russian poetry. His word was nothing, neither English nor French, and sounded like a face-cream. She scanned sceptically up and down the pages of English words, chilled by the fear of detecting the trail of the translator.
Mr. Shatov read steadily, breathing his enthusiasm in gusts, pausing as each fresh name appeared, to pronounce it in Russian and to explain the three names belonging to each character. They were all expressive; easy to remember because of their expressiveness. The threefold name, giving each character three faces, each turned towards a different part of his world, was fascinating. … Conversation began almost at once and kept breaking out; strange abrupt conversation different to any she had read elsewhere. … What was it? She wanted to hold the pages and find out; but Mr. Shatov read on and on, steadily turning the leaves. She skipped, fastening upon the patches of dialogue on her side of the open page, reading them backwards and forwards, glancing at the solid intervening portions to snatch an idea of the background. What was the mysterious difference? Why did she feel she could hear the tone of the voices and the pauses between the talk; the curious feeling of things moving and changing in the air that is always there in all conversations? Her excitement grew, drawing her upright to stare her question into the gloom beyond the lamp.
“Well?” demanded Mr. Shatov.
“It’s fascinating.”
“What have I told you? That is Tolstoy,” he said proudly; “but this is a most vile translation. All these nu and da. Why not simply well and yes; and boszhe moi is quite simply, my God. But this preliminary part is not so interesting as later. There is in this book the self-history of Tolstoy. He is Layvin, and Kitty is the Countess Tolstoy. That is all most wonderful. When we see her in the early morning; and the picture of this wedding. There is only Tolstoy for those marvellous touches. I shall show you.”
“Why does he call it Anna Karaynina?” asked Miriam anxiously.
“Certainly. It is a most masterly study of a certain type of woman.”
The fascination of the book still flickered brightly; but far away, retreated into the lonely incommunicable distance of her mind. It seemed always to be useless and dangerous to talk about books. They were always about something else. … If she had not asked she would have read the book without finding out it was a masterly study of Anna. Why must a book be a masterly study of some single thing? Everybody wisely raving about it. … But if one never found out what a book was a masterly study of, it meant being ignorant of things everyone knew and agreed about; a kind of hopeless personal ignorance and unintelligence; reading whole books through and through, and only finding out what they were about by accident, when people happened to talk about them, and even then, reading them again, and finding principally quite other things, which stayed, after one had forgotten what people had explained.
“I see,” she said intelligently. The readers on either side were glancing angrily. Miriam guiltily recalled her own anger with people who sat together murmuring and hissing. But it felt so different when you were one of the people. The next time she felt angry in this way she would realise how interested the talkers were, and try to forget them. Still it was wrong. “We must not talk,” she breathed. He glanced about and returned to his shuffling of pages.
“Heere it is!” he exclaimed in a guttural whisper far more distinct than his mutterings; “I shall show you this wonderful passage.”
“Ssh, yes,” murmured Miriam firmly, peering at the indicated phrase. The large warm gloom of the library, with its green-capped pools of happy light, was stricken into desolation as she read. She swung back to her world of English books and glanced for comfort at the forms of Englishmen seated in various attitudes of reading about the far edges of her circle of vision. But the passage was inexorably there; poison dropping from the book into the world; foreign poison, but translated and therefore read by at least some Englishmen. The sense of being in arms against an onslaught already achieved, filled her with despair. The enemy was far away, inaccessibly gone forward spreading more poison. She turned furiously on Mr. Shatov. She could not disprove the lie; but at least he should not sit there near her, holding it unconcerned.
“I can’t see anything wonderful. It isn’t true,” she said.
“Ah that is very English,” beamed Mr. Shatov.
“It is. Any English person would know that it is not true.”
Mr. Shatov gurgled his laughter. “Ah that is very naive.”
“It may be. That doesn’t make any difference.”
“It makes the difference that you are inexperienced,” he growled gently. That was true. She had
