# Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Five/Chapter 22

CHAPTER XXII
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch forgot the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, but she did not forget him. She reached his house at his darkest moment of solitary despair, and made her way to his library without waiting to be announced. She found him still sitting in the same position with his head between his hands.
"J'ai forcé la consigne," she said, as she came in with rapid steps, breathless with emotion and agitation. "I know all, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, my friend!" and she pressed his hand between both of hers and looked at him with her beautiful melancholy eyes.
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, with a frown, arose, and, having withdrawn his hand, offered her a chair.
"I beg you to sit down. I am not receiving because I am suffering, countess," he said, and his lips quivered.
"My friend!" repeated the countess, without taking her eyes from him; and suddenly she lifted her eyebrows so that they formed a triangle on her forehead, and this grimace made her ugly yellow face still uglier than ​before. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch felt that she pitied him and was on the point of crying. A wave of feeling overwhelmed him. He seized her fat hand and kissed it.
"My friend," she said again, in a voice breaking with emotion, "you must not give yourself up to grief. Your grief is great, but you must find consolation."
"I am wounded, I am killed, I am no longer a man," said Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, letting go the countess's hand, but still looking into her eyes swimming with tears. "My situation is all the more unbearable because I can find neither in myself nor outside of myself any help toward endurance of it."
"You will find this help, not in me, though I beg you to believe in my friendship," said she, with a sigh. "Our help is love, the love which He has given for an inheritance. His yoke is easy," she continued, with the exalted look that Alekseï Aleksandrovitch knew so well. "He will sustain you and will aid you."
Although these words were the expression of an emotion aroused by their lofty feelings, as well as the symbolical language characteristic of a new mystical exaltation just introduced into Petersburg, and which seemed extravagant to Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, nevertheless he found it pleasant at the present time to hear them.
"I am weak, I am humiliated. I foresaw nothing of this, and now I cannot understand it."
"My friend!" repeated Lidia Ivanovna.
"I do not mourn so much my loss," said Alekseï Aleksandrovitch; "but I cannot help a feeling of shame for the situation in which I am placed before the world. It is bad, and I cannot, I cannot bear it."
"It is not you who have performed this noble act of forgiveness which has filled me—and all—with admiration. It is He dwelling in your heart. So, too, you have no cause for shame," said the countess, ecstatically raising her eyes.
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch frowned, and, pressing his hands together, be began to make his knuckles crack.
​"You must know all the details," he said, in his shrill voice. "Man's powers are limited, countess; and I have reached the limit of mine. All this day I have wasted in details, domestic details, arising [he accented the word] from my new, lonely situation. The servants, the governess, the accounts, .... this is a slow fire devouring me, and I have not strength to endure it. Yesterday I scarcely was able to get through dinner .... I cannot endure to have my son look at me ....he did not ask me any questions, but I know he wanted to ask me, and I could not endure his look. He was afraid to look at me ....but that is a mere trifle ...."
Karenin wanted to speak of the bill that had been brought him, but his voice trembled, and he stopped. This bill on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, was a recollection that made him pity himself.
"I understand, my friend," said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, "I understand it all. Aid and consolation you will not find in me, but I have come to help you if I can. If I could free you from these petty annoying tasks .... I think that a woman's word, a woman's hand, are needed; will you let me help you?"
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch was silent, and pressed her hand gratefully.
"We will look after Serozha together. I am not strong in practical affairs, but I can get used to them, and I will be your ekonomka. Do not thank me; I do not do it of myself." ....
"I cannot help being grateful."
"But, my friend, do not yield to the sentiment of which you spoke a moment ago. .... How can you be ashamed of what is the highest degree of Christian perfection? He who humbles himself shall be exalted. And you cannot thank me. Thank Him, pray to Him for help. In Him alone we can find peace, consolation, salvation, and love."
She raised her eyes to heaven, and began to pray, as Alekseï Aleksandrovitch could see by her silence.
Alekseï Aleksandrovitch listened to her, and this phraseology, which before seemed, not unpleasant to him, ​but extravagant, now seemed natural and soothing. He did not approve of this new ecstatic mysticism. He was a sincere believer, and religion interested him principally in its relation to politics; and the new doctrine which arrogated to itself certain new terms, for the very reason that it opened the door to controversy and analysis, had aroused his antipathy from principle. Hitherto, he had taken a cold, and even hostile, attitude to this new doctrine, and had never discussed it with the countess, who was carried away by it, but had resolutely met her challenge with silence. But now, for the first time, he let her speak without hindrance, and even found a secret pleasure in her words.
"I am very, very grateful to you, both for your words and for your sympathy," he said, when she had ended her prayer.
Again the countess pressed her friend's hand with both of hers.
"Now I am going to set to work," said she, with a smile, wiping away the traces of tears on her face. "I am going to Serozha, and I shall not trouble you except in serious difficulties." And she got up and went out.
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna went to Serozha's room, and, while she bathed the scared little fellow's cheeks with her tears, she told him that his father was a saint and his mother was dead.
The countess fulfilled her promise. She actually took charge of the details of Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's house, but she exaggerated in no respect when she declared that she was not strong in practical affairs. It was necessary to modify all of her arrangements, since it was impossible to carry them out, and they were modified by Korneï, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's valet, who, without any one noticing it, gradually took it on himself to manage the whole establishment, and calmly and discreetly reported to his barin (while the latter was dressing) such things as seemed best.
But, nevertheless, the countess's help was to the highest degree useful to him. Her affection and esteem were a moral support to him, and, as it gave her ​great consolation to think, she almost succeeded in converting him to "Christianity"; in other words, she changed him from an indifferent and lukewarm believer into a fervent and genuine partizan of that new method of explaining the Christian doctrine which shortly after came into vogue in Petersburg. It was easy for Alekseï Aleksandrovitch to put his faith in this exegesis. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, as well as the countess and all those who shared their views, was not gifted with great imagination, or at least that faculty of the mind by which the illusions of the imagination have sufficient conformity with reality to cause their acceptation. Thus he saw no impossibility or unlikelihood in death existing for unbelievers and not for him, that because he held a complete and unquestioning faith, judged in his own way, his soul was already free from sin, and that even in this world he might look upon his safety as assured.
It is true, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch dimly felt the frivolity, the fallacy, of this presentation of his faith. He knew that when, without a thought that his forgiveness of his wife was the act of a higher power, he gave himself up to this immediate feeling, he experienced a greater happiness than when, as now, he constantly thought that Christ dwelt in his soul, and that by signing certain papers he was following His will. But it was indispensable for Alekseï Aleksandrovitch to think so; it was so indispensable to have, in his present humiliation, this elevation, imaginary though it was, from which he, whom every one despised, could look down on others, that he clung to it as if his salvation depended on it.