Anna Karenina (Literature Classics Series). Leo TolstoyЧитать онлайн книгу.
read, but then changed his mind, not wishing to be upset before examining his horse. ‘Later will do! …’
Chapter 21
THE temporary stable, a wooden structure, had been built close to the racecourse, and it was there his mare was to have been brought the day before. He had not yet been to look at her. During these last days he had not exercised her himself, but had entrusted it to the trainer, and therefore did not in the least know in what condition she had arrived or now was. Hardly had he stepped out of the calèche before his groom, who had recognized it from a distance, had called out the trainer. A lean Englishman in top boots and a short jacket, with only a tuft of beard left under his chin, came to meet him with the awkward gait of a jockey, swaying from side to side with his elbows sticking out.
‘Well, how is Frou-Frou?’ asked Vronsky in English.
‘All right, sir,’ came the answer from somewhere inside the man’s throat. ‘Better not go in, ‘ he added, touching his cap. ‘I have put a muzzle on her, and she is fidgety. Better not go in, it excites the mare.’
‘No, I’ll go in. I want to have a look at her.’
‘Come along,’ said the Englishman frowning and speaking as before without opening his mouth. Swaying his elbows and walking with his loose gait he led the way.
They entered a little yard in front of the shed. A smart, well-dressed lad in a short and clean jacket, with a broom in his hand, met them and followed them. In the shed five horses stood in the horse-boxes, and Vronsky knew that his principal rival, Makhotin’s sixteen-hand chestnut, Gladiator, was to have been brought that day and should be standing there too. Vronsky was even more anxious to have a look at Gladiator, whom he had never seen, than at his own mare; but he knew that horse-racing etiquette not only forbade his seeing it, but made it improper for him even to ask about it. As he went along the passage the lad opened the second horse-box to the left, and Vronsky caught sight of a big chestnut horse with white legs. He knew it was Gladiator, but like one who avoids seeing another’s open letter, he turned and went to Frou-Frou’s box.
‘Here is the horse of Mak … Mak … I never can pronounce his name,’ said the Englishman over his shoulder, pointing with his black-nailed thumb to Gladiator’s box.
‘Makhotin’s? Yes, that is my only serious rival,’ said Vronsky.
‘If you were riding him, I would back you,’ said the Englishman.
‘Frou-Frou is the braver, but the other is the more powerful horse,’ said Vronsky, smiling at the compliment to his riding.
‘In a steeplechase everything depends on the riding and on pluck,’ said the Englishman.
Vronsky felt that he not only had enough pluck (that is, energy and courage), but, what is much more important, he was firmly convinced that no one in the world could have more pluck than he had.
‘Are you quite sure that more training was unnecessary?’
‘Quite unnecessary,’ said the Englishman. ‘Please don’t talk loud. The mare is nervous,’ he added, nodding toward the closed horse-box before which they were standing, and from which was heard the trampling of hoofs among the straw.
He opened the door, and Vronsky entered the box, which was dimly lit by one small window. In the box stood a muzzled dark-bay mare stepping from foot to foot among the fresh litter. When he had got used to the dim light of the box, Vronsky again instinctively took in at one comprehensive glance all the points of his favourite mare. Frou-Frou was of medium size and by no means free from blemish. She was slenderly built. Her chest, though well arched, was narrow. Her hindquarters tapered rather too much, and her legs, especially her hind legs, were perceptibly bowed inwards. Neither fore nor hind legs were particularly muscular, but on the other hand she was extremely broad in the girth, now that she was lean from her strict training. Seen from the front, her canon bones were very fine and sharp, but unusually wide seen sideways. She appeared all the more narrow in build because so deep in the breadth. But she possessed in the highest degree a characteristic which made one forget all her defects. This was her thoroughbred quality — the kind of blood that tells, as they say in English. The muscles, clearly marked beneath the network of sinews, stretched in the fine, mobile skin, which was smooth as satin, seemed hard as bone. Her lean head with the prominent, bright, sparkling eyes, broadened out to her muzzle with its wide crimson nostrils. Her whole appearance, more especially about the head, was spirited yet gentle. She was one of those creatures who seem as if they would certainly speak if only the mechanical construction of their mouths allowed them to.
To Vronsky at any rate it seemed that she understood all he was feeling while looking at her.
As soon as Vronsky entered, she drew a deep breath and, turning her prominent eyes so that their whites became bloodshot, looked from the other side of the box at the newcomers, shook her muzzle, and stepped lightly from foot to foot.
‘There, you see how nervous she is,’ said the Englishman.
‘Oh, you darling!’ said Vronsky, stepping toward the horse and soothing her.
But the nearer he came the more nervous she grew. Only when he reached to her head did she suddenly calm down, and the muscles under her fine, delicate coat vibrated. Vronsky stroked her firm neck, adjusted a lock of her mane that had got on to the wrong side of her sharply-defined withers and brought his face close to her dilated nostrils, delicate as a bat’s wing. Her extended nostrils loudly inhaled and exhaled her breath, and she set back one of her finely-pointed ears with a start, and stretched out her black firm lips toward Vronsky, as if wishing to catch hold of his sleeve. But remembering her muzzle she gave it a jerk, and again began stepping from one of her finely chiselled feet to the other.
‘Be quiet, darling, be quiet!’ he said, again stroking her flank, and left the box with a joyful conviction that the horse was in the very best condition.
The mare’s excitement had communicated itself to Vronsky. He felt that the blood was rushing to his heart, and that he, like the horse, wished to move and to bite; it was both frightening and joyful.
‘Well then, I rely on you,’ said Vronsky to the Englishman. ‘You will be on the spot at half-past six.’
‘All right,’ said the Englishman. ‘And where are you going, my lord?’ he asked unexpectedly, addressing him as ‘my lord,’ which he hardly ever did.
Vronsky raised his head in amazement and looked as he knew how to, not into the Englishman’s eyes but at his forehead, surprised at the boldness of the question. But realizing that the Englishman in asking the question regarded him not as an employer, but as a jockey, he replied:
‘I have to see Bryansky, but I shall be home in an hour.’
‘How often have I been asked that question to-day?’ he thought, and blushed, a thing he rarely did. The Englishman looked at him attentively and, as if he knew where he was going, added: ‘The chief thing before a race is to keep cool: don’t be put out or upset.’
‘All right,’ said Vronsky smiling, and jumping into the calèche, he told the coachman to drive to Peterhof.
He had not gone many yards before the clouds, which had been threatening since morning, broke, and there was a downpour of rain.
‘This is bad!’ thought Vronsky, raising the hood of the calèche. ‘It was muddy before, but now it will be a swamp.’ Sitting alone in the closed calèche he drew out his mother’s letter and his brother’s note and read them through.
Yes, it was the same thing over and over again. They all, his mother and his brother and everybody, considered it necessary to interfere with his intimate affairs. This interference roused him to anger, a feeling he rarely experienced. ‘What business is it of theirs? Why does everybody consider it his duty to look after me? And why do they bother me? Because