Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Four/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII
After this conversation with Alekseï Aleksandrovitch Vronsky went out on the steps of the Karenin house and stopped, hardly knowing where he was and what he had to do. He felt humiliated, perplexed, and deprived of all means of washing away his shame; he felt thrown out of the path where till now he had walked proudly and easily. All the rules which had been the guides of his life, and which he had believed irreproachable, proved false and untrue. The deceived husband, whom he had considered a melancholy character, an accidental obstacle, at times absurd, happily for him had suddenly been raised by her to a height inspiring respect; and this husband on this height appeared not ugly, not false, not ridiculous, but good, grand, and generous. Vronsky could not understand it; their rôles had suddenly been interchanged. He felt Karenin's grandeur and straightforwardness, and his own baseness and falsity. He felt that this husband was magnanimous in his grief, while he himself seemed little and miserable in his deception. But this consciousness of inferiority, in comparison to a man whom he had unjustly scorned, constituted only a small part of his grief.
He felt profoundly unhappy from the fact that his passion for Anna, which of late had as it seemed to him grown cool, was more violent than ever now that he knew he was to lose her. During her illness he had seen her as she was, had learned to know her very soul, and it seemed to him that he had never really loved her till now. He must lose her just as he had come to know her and love her truly,—lose her, and be left with the most humiliating recollections. More horrible than anything else was his ridiculous and odious position when Alekseï Aleksandrovitch had uncovered his face while he was hiding it in his hands. Standing motionless on the steps of the Karenin house, he seemed to be entirely unconscious of what he was doing.
"Shall I call an izvoshchik?" asked the Swiss.
"Yes, an izvoshchik."
When he reached home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without undressing, threw himself down on a divan, folded his arms, and laid his head on them. His head was heavy. The strangest reminiscences, thoughts, and impressions succeeded one another in his mind with extraordinary rapidity and clearness. Now it was a drink which he poured out and gave the invalid from a spoon; now he saw the nurse's white hands, then Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's singular attitude as he knelt on the floor by the bed.
"Sleep, and forget," he said to himself, with the calm resolution of a man in good health who knows that when he feels tired he can sleep if he will. His ideas became confused; he felt himself falling into the abyss of forgetfulness. The billows of the sea of unconscious life were already beginning to swell over his head, when suddenly something like a violent electric shock passed through him. He started up so abruptly that his body bounded upon the springs of the divan; and he found himself in his terror on his knees. His eyes were as wide open as if he had not slept at all. The heaviness of his head and the lassitude which he felt in all his members but a moment before had suddenly vanished.
"You may drag me in the mire."
These words of Alekseï Aleksandrovitch rang in his ears. He saw him standing before him; he saw, too, Anna's feverish face, and her brilliant eyes looking tenderly, not at him, but at Alekseï Aleksandrovitch; he saw the stupid, ridiculous figure he must have presented when Alekseï Aleksandrovitch drew away his hands from his face. Again he threw himself back on the divan, and closed his eyes.
"Sleep, and forget," he repeated to himself.
But though his eyes were closed he saw clearer than ever Anna's face, just as it looked on that memorable evening of the races.
"It's impossible, and will not be; how can she efface this from her memory? I cannot live without this! But how can we be reconciled? how can we be reconciled?"
He unconsciously pronounced these words aloud, and their mechanical repetition for some minutes prevented the recollections and forms which besieged his brain from returning. But the repetition of the words did not long deceive his imagination. Again, one after the other with extraordinary swiftness, the sweet moments of the past and his recent humiliation began to arise in his mind. "Uncover his face," said Anna's voice. He took away his hands, and realized how humiliated and ridiculous he must have appeared.
He still lay there trying to sleep, though he felt that there was not the slightest hope of it, and repeating in a whisper some formula with the design of driving away the new and distressing hallucinations that kept arising. He listened to his own voice repeating, with a strange persistence: "You did not know how to appreciate her, you did not know how to value her; you did not know how to appreciate her, you did not know how to value her."
"What is going to happen to me? Am I going mad?" he asked himself. "Perhaps so. Why do people go mad? and why do they commit suicide?"
And, while he was answering himself, he opened his eyes and was surprised to see at his head a cushion embroidered by Varia, his brother's wife. He lightly touched the tassel of the cushion and tried to fix the thought of Varia in his mind and how she looked the last time he saw her; but any idea foreign to what tormented him was still more intolerable.
"No, I must sleep." He placed the cushion under his head, but it required an effort to keep his eyes closed. He leaped to his feet and sat down. "All is over with me; what else can I do?" And his imagination vividly pictured what life without Anna would be.
"Ambition? Serpukhovskoï? the world? the court?" No more these had power to stop him. All this once had some meaning, but now it had none. He rose from the divan, took off his coat, loosened his necktie and bared his shaggy chest that he might breathe more freely, and began to stride up and down the room.
"This makes people insane," he repeated; "this causes suicide, .... to avoid disgrace," he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it; then, with a look of determination, and with his teeth set, he went to the table, took his revolver, examined it, turned the loaded chamber round, and stopped to consider. He stood motionless for two minutes, with the revolver in his hand, his head bowed in the attitude of intense thought. "Of course," he said to himself, as if a logical sequence of clear and exact ideas led him to this unquestionable decision; but in reality this to him conclusive Of Course was only the consequence of a continued circle of recollections and impressions which he had gone over for the tenth time in the last hour. There were the same recollections of a happiness lost forever, the conception of the meaninglessness of all that was now before him in life, the same consciousness of his shame. There was the same repetition of these impressions and thoughts.
"Of course," he repeated, when for the third time his mind directed itself to the same enchanted circle of thoughts and recollections; and holding the revolver to the left side of his breast, with an unflinching grip he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the report, but the violent blow that he received in the chest knocked him over. He tried to save himself by catching hold of the table; he dropped his revolver, staggered, and fell on the floor, looking about him with astonishment. He could not recognize his room; the twisted legs of the table, the waste-paper basket, the tiger-skin on the floor,—all seemed strange to him.
The quick steps of his servant running to the drawing-room obliged him to get control of himself; he collected his thoughts with an effort, and seeing that he was on the floor, and that blood was on his hands and on the tiger-skin, he realized what he had done.
"What stupidity! I missed my aim," he muttered, feeling round for his pistol. It was quite near him, but he could not find it. As he continued to grope for it, he lost his balance, and fell again, bathed in his own blood.
His valet, an elegant person with side-whiskers, who complained freely to his friends about his delicate nerves, was so frightened at the sight of his master lying on the floor that he let him lie bleeding, and ran for help.
In an hour Varia, Vronsky's sister-in-law, arrived, and with the assistance of the three doctors whom she sent for in all directions, and who all came at once, she succeeded in putting the wounded man to bed, and established herself as his nurse.