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
conversation with her. Receiving her assent, he said to his wife in French
something about caring less to smoke than to talk. They made inane and
affected remarks to one another, entirely for her benefit. Anna saw clearly
that they were sick of each other, and hated each other. And no one could
have helped hating such miserable monstrosities.
A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise,
shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was nothing for
anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her agonizingly, and she
would have liked to stop up her ears not to hear it. At last the third bell rang,
there was a whistle and a hiss of steam, and a clank of chains, and the man
in her carriage crossed himself. “It would be interesting to ask him what
meaning he attaches to that,” thought Anna, looking angrily at him. She
looked past the lady out of the window at the people who seemed whirling
by as they ran beside the train or stood on the platform. The train, jerking at
regular intervals at the junctions of the rails, rolled by the platform, past a
stone wall, a signal-box, past other trains; the wheels, moving more
smoothly and evenly, resounded with a slight clang on the rails. The
window was lighted up by the bright evening sun, and a slight breeze
fluttered the curtain. Anna forgot her fellow passengers, and to the light
swaying of the train she fell to thinking again, as she breathed the fresh air.
“Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn’t conceive a position in which life
would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we
all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one
sees the truth, what is one to do?”
“That’s what reason is given man for, to escape from what worries him,”
said the lady in French, lisping affectedly, and obviously pleased with her
phrase.
The words seemed an answer to Anna’s thoughts.
“To escape from what worries him,” repeated Anna. And glancing at the
red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she saw that the sickly wife
considered herself misunderstood, and the husband deceived her and
encouraged her in that idea of herself. Anna seemed to see all their history
and all the crannies of their souls, as it were turning a light upon them. But
there was nothing interesting in them, and she pursued her thought.
“Yes, I’m very much worried, and that’s what reason was given me for, to
escape; so then one must escape: why not put out the light when there’s
nothing more to look at, when it’s sickening to look at it all? But how? Why
did the conductor run along the footboard, why are they shrieking, those
young men in that train? why are they talking, why are they laughing? It’s
all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all cruelty!…”
When the train came into the station, Anna got out into the crowd of
passengers, and moving apart from them as if they were lepers, she stood on
the platform, trying to think what she had come here for, and what she
meant to do. Everything that had seemed to her possible before was now so
difficult to consider, especially in this noisy crowd of hideous people who
would not leave her alone. One moment porters ran up to her proffering
their services, then young men, clacking their heels on the planks of the
platform and talking loudly, stared at her; people meeting her dodged past
on the wrong side. Remembering that she had meant to go on further if
there were no answer, she stopped a porter and asked if her coachman were
not here with a note from Count Vronsky.
“Count Vronsky? They sent up here from the Vronskys just this minute,
to meet Princess Sorokina and her daughter. And what is the coachman
like?”
Just as she was talking to the porter, the coachman Mihail, red and
cheerful in his smart blue coat and chain, evidently proud of having so
successfully performed his commission, came up to her and gave her a
letter. She broke it open, and her heart ached before she had read it.
“I am very sorry your note did not reach me. I will be home at ten,”
Vronsky had written carelessly….
“Yes, that’s what I expected!” she said to herself with an evil smile.
“Very good, you can go home then,” she said softly, addressing Mihail.
She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart’s beating hindered her
breathing. “No, I won’t let you make me miserable,” she thought
menacingly, addressing not him, not herself, but the power that made her
suffer, and she walked along the platform.
Two maid-servants walking along the platform turned their heads, staring
at her and making some remarks about her dress. “Real,” they said of the
lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in peace. Again
they passed by, peering into her face, and with a laugh shouting something
in an unnatural voice. The station-master coming up asked her whether she
was going by train. A boy selling kvas never took his eyes off her. “My
God! where am I to go?” she thought, going farther and farther along the
platform. At the end she stopped. Some ladies and children, who had come
to meet a gentleman in spectacles, paused in their loud laughter and talking,
and stared at her as she reached them. She quickened her pace and walked
away from them to the edge of the platform. A luggage train was coming in.
The platform began to sway, and she fancied she was in the train again.
And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she
had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a rapid, light
step she went down the steps that led from the tank to the rails and stopped
quite near the approaching train.
She looked at the lower part of the carriages, at the screws and chains and
the tall cast-iron wheel of the first carriage slowly moving up, and trying to
measure the middle between the front and back wheels, and the very minute
when that middle point would be opposite her.
“There,” she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage, at
the sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers—“there, in the very
middle, and I will punish him and escape from everyone and from myself.”
She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it
reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed
her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the
next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first
plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar
gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish
memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her
was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright
past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second
carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels
came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into
her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though
she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same
instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What
am I doing? What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but
something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her
back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A
peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the
light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods,
sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her
all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was
quenched forever.
