Chapter 30

 

 

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‘THERE, again it is that girl! Again I understand it all,’ Anna said to herself as soon as the carriage started and, rocking slightly, rattled over the stones; and again different impressions succeeded one another in her brain.

 

‘What was the last thing I thought of that was so good?’ She tried to remember it. ‘ “Tyutkin, Coiffeur”? No, not that. Oh yes! What Yashvin said: the struggle for existence and hatred are the only things that unite people. No, you are going in vain,’ she mentally addressed a company of people in a calèche with four horses, who were evidently going out of town on a spree. ‘And the dog you have with you won’t help you! You can’t escape from yourselves.’ Glancing in the direction in which Peter was looking, she saw a workman, nearly dead-drunk, with his head swaying about, who was being led off somewhere by a policeman. ‘That one is more likely to,’ she thought. ‘Count Vronsky and I have also been unable to find that pleasure from which we expected so much.’ And now for the first time Anna turned the bright light in which she saw everything upon her relations with him, about which she had always avoided thinking. ‘What did he look for in me? Not so much love as the satisfaction of his vanity.’ She remembered his words, the expression of his face, suggestive of a faithful setter’s, in the early days of their union. Everything now confirmed her view. ‘Yes, there was in him the triumph of successful vanity. Of course there was love too; but the greater part was pride in his success. He boasted of me. Now that is past. There is nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud but to be ashamed! He has taken from me all he could, and now he does not need me. He is weary of me and is trying not to act dishonourably toward me. Yesterday he betrayed himself — he wants the divorce and a marriage in order to burn his boats. He loves me, but how? The zest is gone!’ she said to herself in English. ‘That man wants to astonish everybody and is very well satisfied with himself,’ she thought, glancing at a rosy-faced shop-assistant who was riding a hired horse. ‘No, I have no longer the right flavour for him. If I go away he will, at the bottom of his heart, be pleased.’

 

That was not a surmise. She saw it clearly in the piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of human relations.

 

‘My love grows more and more passionate and egotistic, and his dwindles and dwindles, and that is why we are separating,’ she went on thinking. ‘And there is no remedy. For me everything centres on him, and I demand that he should give himself up to me more and more completely. But he wants more and more to get away from me. Before we were united we really drew together, but now we are irresistibly drifting apart; and it cannot be altered. He tells me I am unreasonably jealous, and I have told myself that I am unreasonably jealous; but it is not true. I am not jealous, but dissatisfied. But . . .’ She opened her mouth and changed her place in the carriage from agitation produced by a sudden thought. ‘If I could be anything but his mistress, passionately loving nothing but his caresses — but I cannot and do not want to be anything else. And this desire awakens disgust in him, and that arouses anger in me, and it cannot be otherwise. Don’t I know that he would not deceive me, that he has no designs on that Sorokina, that he is not in love with Kitty, and will not be unfaithful to me? I know all that, but that does not make it easier for me. If, without loving me, he is kind and tender to me from a sense of duty, but what I desire is lacking — that would be a thousand times worse than anger! It would be hell! And that is just how it is. He has long ceased to love me. And where love ceases, there hate begins. . . . I don’t know these streets at all. Here is a hill, and houses and houses. . . . And in the houses are people, and more people. . . . There is no end to them, and they all hate one another. Well, supposing I picture to myself what I want in order to be happy? Well, I get divorced, and Alexis Alexandrovich gives me Serezha, and I marry Vronsky!’ Remembering Karenin, she pictured him to herself with extraordinary vividness, as if he stood before her, with his mild, dull, lifeless eyes, the blue veins of his white hands, his intonations, his cracking fingers, and remembering the feeling that had once existed between them and which had also been called love, she shuddered with revulsion. ‘Well, I get divorced and become Vronsky’s wife! What then? Will Kitty cease looking at me as she did this afternoon? No. Will Serezha stop asking and wondering about my two husbands? And between Vronsky and myself what new feeling can I invent? Is any kind — not of happiness even, but of absence of torture — possible? No! No!’ she now answered herself without the least hesitation. ‘It is impossible! Life is sundering us, and I am the cause of his unhappiness — and he of mine, and neither he nor I can be made different. Every effort has been made, but the screws have given way. . . . A beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I pity her. Are we not all flung into the world only to hate each other, and therefore to torment ourselves and others? There go schoolboys — they are laughing. Serezha?’ she remembered. ‘I thought I loved him, too, and was touched at my own tenderness for him. Yet I lived without him and exchanged his love for another’s, and did not complain of the change as long as the other love satisfied me.’ And she thought with disgust of what she called ‘the other love’. The clearness with which she now saw her own and every one else’s life pleased her. ‘It’s the same with me, and Peter and Theodore the coachman, and with that tradesman, and with all the people that live away there by the Volga where those advertisements invite one to go, and everywhere and always,’ she thought as she drove up to the low building of the Nizhny station, where the porters ran out to meet her.

 

‘Shall I take a ticket to Obiralovka?’ asked Peter.

 

She had quite forgotten where and why she was going, and only understood the question by a great effort.

 

‘Yes,’ she said, giving him her purse; and hanging her little red handbag on her arm, she descended from the carriage.

 

As she moved among the crowd toward the first-class waiting-room she gradually recalled all the details of her position and the resolutions between which she vacillated. And again hope and despair, alternately chafing the old sores, lacerated the wounds of her tortured and violently fluttering heart. Sitting on the star-shaped couch, waiting for her train, she looked with repulsion at those who passed in and out. They were all objectionable to her. She thought now of how she would reach the station and would write him a note, and of what she would write, and of how he was now (without understanding her sufferings) complaining of his position to his mother, and of how she would enter the room and what she would say to him. And then she thought how happy life might still be, and how tormentingly she loved and hated him and how dreadfully her heart was beating.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 31

 

 

 

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THE bell rang. Some young men, ugly and bold-faced, passed by hurriedly and yet attentive to the impression they created. Peter, in his livery and gaiters, with his dull animal face, also crossed the room, and came to her to see her into the train. Two noisy men became quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one of them whispered to the other something about her: something nasty, of course. She mounted the high step of the railway carriage and seated herself in an empty compartment on the dirty — though once white — cover of the spring seat. Peter with a stupid smile raised his gold-braided hat to take leave of her; an insolent guard slammed the door and drew the latch. A misshapen lady with a bustle (Anna mentally stripped that woman and was horrified at her deformity) and a girl, laughing affectedly, ran past outside.

 

‘Catherine Andreevna has everything, ma tante!’ cried the little girl.

 

‘Quite a child, and yet already affected and pulling faces,’ thought Anna. In order not to see anyone, she rose quickly and sat down at the opposite window of the empty compartment. A grimy, misshaped peasant in a cap from under which his tousled hair stuck out, passed that window, stooping over the carriage wheels. ‘There is something familiar about that misshaped peasant,’ she thought. And remembering her dream she went to the opposite door, trembling with fright. The guard opened it to let in a husband and wife.

 

‘Do you wish to get out?’

 

Anna did not answer. Neither the guard nor those entering noticed the horror on her face beneath the veil. She went back to her corner and sat down. The couple sat down opposite her, attentively but stealthily examining her dress. Both the husband and the wife seemed to Anna disgusting. The husband asked if she would allow him to smoke, evidently not because he wanted to, but to enter into conversation with her. Having received her permission, he began speaking to his wife in French, about things he wanted to speak about still less than he wanted to smoke. They talked nonsense insincerely, only in order that she should hear them. Anna saw distinctly how weary they were of one another and how they hated each other. And it was impossible not to hate such ugly wretches.

 

She heard the second bell ring, and then a moving of luggage, noise, shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that no one had any cause for joy that this laughter jarred on her painfully, and she wished to stop her ears, not to hear it. At last the third bell rang, the engine whistled and creaked, the coupling chains gave a jerk, and the husband crossed himself. ‘It would be interesting to ask him what he means by it,’ thought Anna, regarding him spitefully. She looked out of the window, past the lady, at the people on the platform who had been seeing the train off and who appeared to be gliding backward. With rhythmic jerks over the joints of the rails, the carriage in which Anna sat rattled past the platform and a brick wall, past the signals and some other carriages; the sound of wheels slightly ringing against the rails became more rhythmical and smooth; the bright evening sunshine shone through the window, and a breeze moved the blind.

 

Anna forgot her fellow-travellers; softly rocked by the motion of the carriage and inhaling the fresh air, she again began to think:

 

‘Where did I leave off? At the point that I cannot imagine a situation in which life would not be a torment; that we all have been created in order to suffer, and that we all know this and all try to invent means of deceiving ourselves. But when you see the truth, what are you to do?’

 

‘Reason has been given to man to enable him to escape from his troubles,’ said the lady, in French, evidently pleased with her phrase and mincing with her tongue.

 

These words seemed to answer Anna’s thought.

 

‘To escape from his troubles,’ Anna mentally repeated. And glancing at the red-cheeked husband and his thin wife, she saw that the sickly wife considered herself misunderstood, and that the husband deceived her and encouraged her in her opinion of herself. Directing her searchlight upon them, Anna thought she saw their story and all the hidden recesses of their souls. But there was nothing of interest there, and she continued her reflections.

 

‘Yes, it troubles me very much, and reason was given us to enable us to escape; therefore I must escape! Why not put out the candle, if there is nothing more to look at? If everything is repulsive to look at? But how? Why did the guard run past holding the handrail? Why are those young men in the next carriage shouting? Why are they talking and laughing? It’s all untrue, all lies, all deception, all evil! . . .’

 

When the train stopped at the station, Anna got out with the crowd of passengers, and shunning them as if they were lepers, stopped on the platform trying to remember why she had come there and what she had intended to do. Everything that had appeared possible before was now so difficult to grasp, especially in this noisy crowd of odious people who would not leave her in peace. Porters rushed up, offering their services. Young men passed along the platform, clattering their heels on the planks, talking loudly and gazing at her; and people she met tried to get out of her way on the wrong side. Recollecting that she meant to go on if there was no reply, she stopped a porter and asked him whether there was not a coachman bringing a note from Count Vronsky there.

 

‘Count Vronsky? Some one from there was here just now, to meet the Princess Sorokina and her daughter. What is the coachman like?’

 

While she was talking to the porter, Michael the coachman, rosy and cheerful, came up in his smart blue coat with a watch-chain, evidently proud of having carried out his errand so well, and handed her a note. She opened it, and her heart sank even before she read it.

 

‘Very sorry the note did not catch me. I shall be back at ten,’ Vronsky wrote in a careless hand.

 

‘Yes, I expected it!’ she said to herself with a malicious smile.

 

‘All right, you may go home,’ she said softly to Michael. She spoke softly, because the rapid beating of her heart impeded her breathing. ‘No, I will not let you torture me,’ she thought, addressing her threat not to him nor to herself but to that which forced her to suffer, and she walked along the platform, past the station buildings.

 

Two maid-servants, strolling about on the platform, turned their heads to look at her, and made some audible remarks about her dress. ‘It’s real,’ they said of the lace she was wearing. The young men did not leave her in peace. Gazing into her face and laughing and shouting unnaturally they again passed by. The station-master asked her in passing whether she was going on. A boy selling kvas fixed his eyes on her. ‘O God! where am I to go?’ she thought, walking further and further along the platform. She stopped at the end of it. Some ladies and children, who had come to meet a spectacled gentleman and were laughing and talking noisily, became silent and gazed at her as she passed them. She walked faster away from them to the very end of the platform. A goods train was approaching. The platform shook, and it seemed to her as if she were again in the train.

 

Suddenly remembering the man who had been run over the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she had to do. Quickly and lightly descending the steps that led from the water-tank to the rails, she stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottom of the trucks, at the bolts and chains and large iron wheels of the slowly-moving front truck, and tried to estimate the middle point between the front and back wheels, and the moment when that point would be opposite her.

 

‘There!’ she said to herself, looking at the shadow of the truck on the mingled sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers. ‘There, into the very middle, and I shall punish him and escape from everybody and from myself!’

 

She wanted to fall half-way between the wheels of the front truck, which was drawing level with her, but the little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her, and then it was too late. The middle had passed her. She was obliged to wait for the next truck. A feeling seized her like that she had experienced when preparing to enter the water in bathing, and she crossed herself. The familiar gesture of making the sign of the cross called up a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness, that obscured everything for her, broke, and life showed itself to her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second truck, and at the very moment when the midway point between the wheels drew level, she threw away her red bag, and drawing her head down between her shoulders threw herself forward on her hands under the truck, and with a light movement as if preparing to rise again, immediately dropped on her knees. And at the same moment she was horror-struck at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wished to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and relentless struck her on the head and dragged her down. ‘God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling. . . . A little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up with a brighter light, lit up for her all that had before been dark, crackled, began to flicker, and went out for ever.

 

 

 

 

 

PART EIGHT

 

 

 

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Chapter 1

 

 

 

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NEARLY two months had gone by. It was already the middle of the hot summer, but Sergius Ivanich Koznyshev was only now preparing to leave Moscow.

 

In Koznyshev’s life during that time events of importance for him had taken place. His book, the result of six years’ labour, entitled, An Attempt to Review the Foundations and Forms of Government of Europe and Russia, had been finished a year ago. Some parts of it and the introduction had appeared in periodicals, and other parts had been read by Koznyshev to people of his set, so that the ideas of the work could not be very novel to the public; but all the same Koznyshev expected that the publication of the book would create a serious impression on Society, and if not a revolution in science, at any rate a strong agitation in the scientific world.

 

The book had been issued last year after careful revision, and had been sent out to the booksellers.

 

Not asking anyone about it, reluctantly and with feigned indifference replying to his friends’ inquiries as to how it was going, and not even asking the booksellers how it was selling, Koznyshev watched keenly and with strained attention for the first impression his book would produce in Society and in literature.

 

But a week passed, and another, and a third, and no impression was noticeable in Society. His friends, the specialists and the scholars, sometimes — from politeness — mentioned it; his other acquaintances, not interested in learned works, did not mention it to him at all. In Society, now particularly occupied with something else, absolute indifference reigned. In the periodicals also, for a whole month, there had not been any mention of the book.

 

Koznyshev had calculated exactly the time necessary for a review to be written; but a month passed, and another, and the silence continued.

 

Only in the Northern Beetle, in a facetious feuilleton about the singer Drabanti who had lost his voice, were a few contemptuous remarks interpolated about Koznyshev’s book, indicating that it had long ago been condemned by everybody and consigned to general ridicule.

 

At last, in the third month, a criticism appeared in a serious magazine. Koznyshev knew the author of the article. He had met him once at Golubkov’s.

 

The author was a very young and sickly journalist; very bold as a writer, but extremely uneducated, and shy in personal intercourse.

 

Despite his entire contempt for this man, Koznyshev began reading the review most respectfully. The article was horrible.

 

The critic had evidently understood the book in an impossible way. But he had so adroitly selected his quotations that to those who had not read the book (and evidently hardly anyone had read it) it would appear quite clear that the whole book was nothing but a collection of high-sounding words, not even used appropriately (as was indicated by notes of interrogation), and that its author was a totally ignorant man. All this was put with so much wit that Koznyshev himself would not have been averse to wielding it; and that was what was dreadful.

 

Notwithstanding the thorough conscientiousness with which Koznyshev verified the correctness of the critic’s arguments, he did not dwell for a moment on the deficiencies and mistakes which were ridiculed, but at once involuntarily began to recall his meeting and conversation with the author of the review, down to the minutest details.

 

‘Did not I offend him in some way?’ he asked himself.

 

And remembering how when he met him he had corrected the young man’s use of a word that betrayed ignorance, Koznyshev found an explanation of the article.