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.
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‘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
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Anna Karenina
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.
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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,
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Anna Karenina
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
1327
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
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Anna Karenina
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
1329
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
