Anna Karenina
off thinking of her own position, when the carriage drew up at the
steps of her house. It was only when she saw the porter running out to
meet her that she remembered she had sent the note and the telegram.
“Is there an answer?” she inquired.
“I’ll see this minute,” answered the porter, and glancing into his
room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram.
“I can’t come before ten o’clock.—Vronsky,” she read.
“And hasn’t the messenger come back?”
“No,” answered the porter.
“Then, since it’s so, I know what I must do,” she said, and feeling a
vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she ran
upstairs. “I’ll go to him myself. Before going away forever, I’ll tell
him all. Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!” she thought.
Seeing his hat on the rack, she shuddered with aversion. She did not
consider that his telegram was an answer to her telegram and that he
had not yet received her note. She pictured him to herself as talking
calmly to his mother and Princess Sorokina and rejoicing at her
sufferings. “Yes, I must go quickly,” she said, not knowing yet where
she was going. She longed to get away as quickly as possible from the
feelings she had gone through in that awful house. The servants, the
walls, the things in that house—all aroused repulsion and hatred in her
and lay like a weight upon her.
“Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if he’s not there, then go
there and catch him.” Anna looked at the railway timetable in the
newspapers. An evening train went at two minutes past eight. “Yes, I
shall be in time.” She gave orders for the other horses to be put in
the carriage, and packed in a traveling-bag the things needed for a few
days. She knew she would never come back here again.
Among the plans that came into her head she vaguely determined that
after what would happen at the station or at the countess’s house, she
would go as far as the first town on the Nizhni road and stop there.
Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and
cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She
ordered the carriage and went out. The house threw a shadow now right
across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in the
sunshine. Annushka, who came down with her things, and Pyotr, who put
the things in the carriage, and the coachman, evidently out of humor,
were all hateful to her, and irritated her by their words and actions.
“I don’t want you, Pyotr.”
“But how about the ticket?”
“Well, as you like, it doesn’t matter,” she said crossly.
Pyotr jumped on the box, and putting his arms akimbo, told the coachman
to drive to the booking-office.
Chapter 30
“Here it is again! Again I understand it all!” Anna said to herself, as
soon as the carriage had started and swaying lightly, rumbled over the
tiny cobbles of the paved road, and again one impression followed
rapidly upon another.
“Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly?” she tried to
recall it. “‘_Tiutkin, coiffeur?_’—no, not that. Yes, of what Yashvin
says, the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds
men together. No, it’s a useless journey you’re making,” she said,
mentally addressing a party in a coach and four, evidently going for an
excursion into the country. “And the dog you’re taking with you will be
no help to you. You can’t get away from yourselves.” Turning her eyes
in the direction Pyotr had turned to look, she saw a factory-hand
almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman.
“Come, he’s found a quicker way,” she thought. “Count Vronsky and I did
not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.”
And now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she
was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had
hitherto avoided thinking about. “What was it he sought in me? Not love
so much as the satisfaction of vanity.” She remembered his words, the
expression of his face, that recalled an abject setter-dog, in the
early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this.
“Yes, there was the triumph of success in him. Of course there was love
too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me.
Now that’s over. There’s nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of,
but to be ashamed of. He has taken from me all he could, and now I am
no use to him. He is weary of me and is trying not to be dishonorable
in his behavior to me. He let that out yesterday—he wants divorce and
marriage so as to burn his ships. He loves me, but how? The zest is
gone, as the English say. That fellow wants everyone to admire him and
is very much pleased with himself,” she thought, looking at a red-faced
clerk, riding on a riding-school horse. “Yes, there’s not the same
flavor about me for him now. If I go away from him, at the bottom of
his heart he will be glad.”
This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing
light, which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human
relations.
“My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is
waning and waning, and that’s why we’re drifting apart.” She went on
musing. “And there’s no help for it. He is everything for me, and I
want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants
more and more to get away from me. We walked to meet each other up to
the time of our love, and then we have been irresistibly drifting in
different directions. And there’s no altering that. He tells me I’m
insanely jealous, and I have told myself that I am insanely jealous;
but it’s not true. I’m not jealous, but I’m unsatisfied. But....” she
opened her lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the
excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. “If I
could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but
his caresses; but I can’t and I don’t care to be anything else. And by
that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it
cannot be different. Don’t I know that he wouldn’t deceive me, that he
has no schemes about Princess Sorokina, that he’s not in love with
Kitty, that he won’t desert me! I know all that, but it makes it no
better for me. If without loving me, from _duty_ he’ll be good and kind
to me, without what I want, that’s a thousand times worse than
unkindness! That’s—hell! And that’s just how it is. For a long while
now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins. I don’t know
these streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses....
And in the houses always people and people.... How many of them, no
end, and all hating each other! Come, let me try and think what I want,
to make me happy. Well? Suppose I am divorced, and Alexey
Alexandrovitch lets me have Seryozha, and I marry Vronsky.” Thinking of
Alexey Alexandrovitch, she at once pictured him with extraordinary
vividness as though he were alive before her, with his mild, lifeless,
dull eyes, the blue veins in his white hands, his intonations and the
cracking of his fingers, and remembering the feeling which had existed
between them, and which was also called love, she shuddered with
loathing. “Well, I’m divorced, and become Vronsky’s wife. Well, will
Kitty cease looking at me as she looked at me today? No. And will
Seryozha leave off asking and wondering about my two husbands? And is
there any new feeling I can awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there
possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery? No, no!” she
answered now without the slightest hesitation. “Impossible! We are
drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness, and he mine, and
there’s no altering him or me. Every attempt has been made, the screw
has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I’m
sorry for her. Aren’t we all flung into the world only to hate each
other, and so to torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys
coming—laughing Seryozha?” she thought. “I thought, too, that I loved
him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived
without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the
exchange till that love was satisfied.” And with loathing she thought
of what she meant by that love. And the clearness with which she saw
life now, her own and all men’s, was a pleasure to her. “It’s so with
me and Pyotr, and the coachman, Fyodor, and that merchant, and all the
people living along the Volga, where those placards invite one to go,
and everywhere and always,” she thought when she had driven under the
low-pitched roof of the Nizhigorod station, and the porters ran to meet
her.
“A ticket to Obiralovka?” said Pyotr.
She had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a
great effort she understood the question.
“Yes,” she said, handing him her purse, and taking a little red bag in
her hand, she got out of the carriage.
Making her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting-room, she
gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the plans
between which she was hesitating. And again at the old sore places,
hope and then despair poisoned the wounds of her tortured, fearfully
throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa waiting for the
train, she gazed with aversion at the people coming and going (they
were all hateful to her), and thought how she would arrive at the
station, would write him a note, and what she would write to him, and
how he was at this moment complaining to his mother of his position,
not understanding her sufferings, and how she would go into the room,
and what she would say to him. Then she thought that life might still
be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully
her heart was beating.
Chapter 31
A bell rang, some young men, ugly and impudent, and at the same time
careful of the impression they were making, hurried by. Pyotr, too,
crossed the room in his livery and top-boots, with his dull, animal
face, and came up to her to take her to the train. Some noisy men were
quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one whispered something
about her to another—something vile, no doubt. She stepped up on the
high step, and sat down in a carriage by herself on a dirty seat that
had been white. Her bag lay beside her, shaken up and down by the
springiness of the seat. With a foolish smile Pyotr raised his hat,
with its colored band, at the window, in token of farewell; an impudent
conductor slammed the door and the latch. A grotesque-looking lady
wearing a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman, and was appalled
at her hideousness), and a little girl laughing affectedly ran down the
platform.
“Katerina Andreevna, she’s got them all, _ma tante!_” cried the girl.
“Even the child’s hideous and affected,” thought Anna. To avoid seeing
anyone, she got up quickly and seated herself at the opposite window of
the empty carriage. A misshapen-looking peasant covered with dirt, in a
cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all round, passed by that
window, stooping down to the carriage wheels. “There’s something
familiar about that hideous peasant,” thought Anna. And remembering her
dream, she moved away to the opposite door, shaking with terror. The
conductor opened the door and let in a man and his wife.
“Do you wish to get out?”
Anna made no answer. The conductor and her two fellow-passengers did
not notice under her veil her panic-stricken face. She went back to her
corner and sat down. The couple seated themselves on the opposite side,
and intently but surreptitiously scrutinized her clothes. Both husband
and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked, would she allow
him to smoke, obviously not with a view to smoking but to getting into