Anna Karenina - Part 5

A crowd of people, principally women, was thronging round the

church lighted up for the wedding. Those who had not succeeded

in getting into the main entrance were crowding about the

windows, pushing, wrangling, and peeping through the gratings.

More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up in ranks

along the street by the police. A police officer, regardless of

the frost, stood at the entrance, gorgeous in his uniform. More

carriages were continually driving up, and ladies wearing flowers

and carrying their trains, and men taking off their helmets or

black hats kept walking into the church. Inside the church both

lusters were already lighted, and all the candles before the holy

pictures. The gilt on the red ground of the holy picture-stand,

and the gilt relief on the pictures, and the silver of the

lusters and candlesticks, and the stones of the floor, and the

rugs, and the banners above in the choir, and the steps of the

altar, and the old blackened books, and the cassocks and

surplices--all were flooded with light. On the right side of the

warm church, in the crowd of frock coats and white ties, uniforms

and broadcloth, velvet, satin, hair and flowers, bare shoulders

and arms and long gloves, there was discreet but lively

conversation that echoed strangely in the high cupola. Every

time there was heard the creak of the opened door the

conversation in the crowd died away, and everybody looked round

expecting to see the bride and bridegroom come in. But the door

had opened more than ten times, and each time it was either a

belated guest or guests, who joined the circle of the invited on

the right, or a spectator, who had eluded or softened the police

officer, and went to join the crowd of outsiders on the left.

Both the guests and the outside public had by now passed through

all the phases of anticipation.

At first they imagined that the bride and bridegroom would arrive

immediately, and attached no importance at all to their being

late. Then they began to look more and more often towards the

door, and to talk of whether anything could have happened. Then

the long delay began to be positively discomforting, and

relations and guests tried to look as if they were not thinking

of the bridegroom but were engrossed in conversation.

The head deacon, as though to remind them of the value of his

time, coughed impatiently, making the window-panes quiver in

their frames. In the choir the bored choristers could be heard

trying their voices and blowing their noses. The priest was

continually sending first the beadle and then the deacon to find

out whether the bridegroom had not come, more and more often he

went himself, in a lilac vestment and an embroidered sash, to the

side door, expecting to see the bridegroom. At last one of the

ladies, glancing at her watch, said, "It really is strange,

though!" and all the guests became uneasy and began loudly

expressing their wonder and dissatisfaction. One of the

bridegroom's best men went to find out what had happened. Kitty

meanwhile had long ago been quite ready, and in her white dress

and long veil and wreath of orange blossoms she was standing in

the drawing-room of the Shtcherbatskys' house with her sister,

Madame Lvova, who was her bridal-mother. She was looking out of

the window, and had been for over half an hour anxiously

expecting to hear from the best man that her bridegroom was at

the church.