He got up, and sobs cut short his words. Vronsky too was getting up, and
in a stooping, not yet erect posture, looked up at him from under his brows.
He did not understand Alexey Alexandrovitch’s feeling, but he felt that it
was something higher and even unattainable for him with his view of life.
Chapter 18
After the conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch, Vronsky went out
onto the steps of the Karenins’ house and stood still, with difficulty
remembering where he was, and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt
disgraced, humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of washing
away his humiliation. He felt thrust out of the beaten track along which he
had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the habits and rules of his
life that had seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false and inapplicable.
The betrayed husband, who had figured till that time as a pitiful creature, an
incidental and somewhat ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly
been summoned by her herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and
on the pinnacle that husband had shown himself, not malignant, not false,
not ludicrous, but kind and straightforward and large. Vronsky could not but
feel this, and the parts were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt his elevation
and his own abasement, his truth and his own falsehood. He felt that the
husband was magnanimous even in his sorrow, while he had been base and
petty in his deceit. But this sense of his own humiliation before the man he
had unjustly despised made up only a small part of his misery. He felt
unutterably wretched now, for his passion for Anna, which had seemed to
him of late to be growing cooler, now that he knew he had lost her forever,
was stronger than ever it had been. He had seen all of her in her illness, had
come to know her very soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved
her till then. And now when he had learned to know her, to love her as she
should be loved, he had been humiliated before her, and had lost her
forever, leaving with her nothing of himself but a shameful memory. Most
terrible of all had been his ludicrous, shameful position when Alexey
Alexandrovitch had pulled his hands away from his humiliated face. He
stood on the steps of the Karenins’ house like one distraught, and did not
know what to do.
“A sledge, sir?” asked the porter.
“Yes, a sledge.”
On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without
undressing, lay down flat on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying his
head on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories, and ideas of the
strangest description followed one another with extraordinary rapidity and
vividness. First it was the medicine he had poured out for the patient and
spilt over the spoon, then the midwife’s white hands, then the queer posture
of Alexey Alexandrovitch on the floor beside the bed.
“To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the serene confidence of a
healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy, he will go to sleep at once. And
the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he began to drop off
into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness had begun to
meet over his head, when all at once—it was as though a violent shock of
electricity had passed over him. He started so that he leaped up on the
springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a panic onto his knees.
His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep. The heaviness
in his head and the weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before
had suddenly gone.
“You may trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexey Alexandrovitch’s
words and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna’s face with its
burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at
him but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish
and ludicrous figure when Alexey Alexandrovitch took his hands away
from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the sofa
in the same position and shut his eyes.
“To sleep! To forget!” he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut he
saw more distinctly than ever Anna’s face as it had been on the memorable
evening before the races.
“That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her memory.
But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? how can we be
reconciled?” he said aloud, and unconsciously began to repeat these words.
This repetition checked the rising up of fresh images and memories, which
he felt were thronging in his brain. But repeating words did not check his
imagination for long. Again in extraordinarily rapid succession his best
moments rose before his mind, and then his recent humiliation. “Take away
his hands,” Anna’s voice says. He takes away his hands and feels the
shamestruck and idiotic expression of his face.
He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the
smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of
thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He
listened, and heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: “I did not
appreciate it, did not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it, did not make
enough of it.”
“What’s this? Am I going out of my mind?” he said to himself. “Perhaps.
What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men shoot
themselves?” he answered himself, and opening his eyes, he saw with
wonder an embroidered cushion beside him, worked by Varya, his brother’s
wife. He touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to think of Varya, of
when he had seen her last. But to think of anything extraneous was an
agonizing effort. “No, I must sleep!” He moved the cushion up, and pressed
his head into it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes shut. He
jumped up and sat down. “That’s all over for me,” he said to himself. “I
must think what to do. What is left?” His mind rapidly ran through his life
apart from his love of Anna.
“Ambition? Serpuhovskoy? Society? The court?” He could not come to a
pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now there was no
reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat, undid his belt, and
uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more freely, walked up and down the
room. “This is how people go mad,” he repeated, “and how they shoot
themselves … to escape humiliation,” he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched teeth
he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked round him, turned it to a
loaded barrel, and sank into thought. For two minutes, his head bent
forward with an expression of an intense effort of thought, he stood with the
revolver in his hand, motionless, thinking.
“Of course,” he said to himself, as though a logical, continuous, and clear
chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion. In reality
this “of course,” that seemed convincing to him, was simply the result of
exactly the same circle of memories and images through which he had
passed ten times already during the last hour—memories of happiness lost
forever. There was the same conception of the senselessness of everything
