“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.”