Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Seven/Chapter 30
CHAPTER XXX
"Now I am myself again. Now I remember it all," said Anna to herself, as soon as the calash started, and, rocking a little, rattled along over the cobble-stones of the pavement; and once more her impressions began to go whirling through her mind.
"Yes, what was that good thing that I was thinking about last? Tiutkin, the coiffeur? Oh, no; not that. Oh, yes; what Yashvin said about the struggle for existence, and hatred, the only thing that unites men. No; we go at haphazard."
She saw in a carriage drawn by four horses a party of merrymakers, who had evidently come to the city for a pleasure-trip.
"And the dog which you take with you does not help you at all. You can't get out of yourself." Glancing in the direction where Piotr was turning, she saw a working-man almost dead drunk, who, with a flopping head, was being led by a policeman. She added: "That man's way is quicker. Count Vronsky and I did not reach this pleasure, though we expected much."
And now for the first time Anna turned this bright light, all-revealing, upon her relations with the count; hitherto she had steadfastly refused to do so.
"What did he seek in me? A satisfaction for his vanity, rather than for his love!"
She remembered Vronsky's words, and the expression of his face, which reminded her of a submissive dog, when they first met and loved. Everything seemed a confirmation of this thought.
"Yes; he cared for the triumph of success above everything. Of course, he loved me, but chiefly from vanity. Now that he is not proud of me any more, it is over. He is ashamed of me. He has taken from me all that he could take, and now I am of no use to him. I weigh upon him, and he does not want to be in dishonorable relationship with me. He said, yesterday, he wanted the divorce and to marry me so as to burn his ships. Perhaps he loves me still,—but how? The zest is gone," she said in English.—"That man likes to show off, and he is mighty proud of himself," she added, as she looked at a ruddy-faced man riding by on a hired horse.
"There is nothing about me any longer to his taste. If I leave him, he will rejoice in the bottom of his heart."
This was not mere hypothesis; she saw this clearly, in that penetrating light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of her false relations.
"My love has been growing more and more passionate and selfish; his has been growing fainter and fainter. That is why we cannot get on together." She went on thinking. "There can't be any help for it. He is all in all to me. I struggle to draw him closer and closer to me, and he wants to fly from me. Up to the time of our union, we flew to meet each other; but now we move irresistibly apart. This cannot be altered. He accuses me of being absurdly jealous,—and I am; I confess that I am absurdly jealous, and yet I am not either. I am not jealous, but my love is no longer satisfied. But ...." she opened her mouth to speak, and, in the excitement caused by the stress of her thoughts, she changed her place in the carriage.
"If I could only be something else than a passionate mistress, but I cannot, and I do not wish to be; and by this very wish I awake his dislike of me, while he stirs up all my evil passions, and this cannot be otherwise.
"Don't I know that he would not deceive me, that he is no longer in love with Kitty, that he has no intention of marrying Sorokina? I know it well, but it is none the easier for me. If now that he no longer loves me, he is kind, affectionate to me, merely from a sense of duty, but cannot be what I must have, that would be a thousand times worse than to have him angry with me. That would be—hell! And so it is. He has long ceased to love me. When love ceases, hate begins.—I don't know these streets at all. What hosts of houses! in them, people, people,—no end of them! and they all hate one another!
"Well! let me think what could happen to me now that would give me happiness again? Suppose that Alekseï Aleksandrovitch should consent to the divorce, and would give me back Serozha, and that I should marry Vronsky?"
And as she thought of Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, Anna could see him with extraordinary vividness before her, as if alive, with his dull, lifeless, faded eyes, his white, blue-veined hands, and his cracking joints, and the intonations of his voice, and, as she recalled their relation to each other, which had been called love, she shuddered with aversion.
"Well! Suppose I got the divorce, and were married to Vronsky, would not Kitty still look at me as she looked at me to-day? She certainly would. Would not Serozha ask and wonder why I had two husbands? But between me and Vronsky what new feeling could I imagine? Is it possible that our relations might be, if not pleasanter, at least not so tormenting as they are now? No, and no!" she replied, without the least hesitation. "Impossible! We are growing apart; and I make him unhappy; he makes me unhappy, and I cannot change him; every means has been tried. The screw has been turned for the last time. ....
"Now, there's a beggar with a child. She thinks she inspires pity. Were we not thrown into the world to hate one another, and to torment ourselves and everybody else? Here come the schoolboys out to play! Serozha?"
It reminded her of her son.
"I used to think that I loved him, and I was touched by his gentleness. I have lived without him, I have given him up for my love, and was not sorry for the change, as long as I was contented with him whom I loved."
And she remembered with disgust what she called that love. And the clearness with which she now saw her own life, as well as the lives of others, delighted her.
"Thus am I, and Piotr and the coachman, Feodor, and that merchant, and all people from here to the Volga, wherever these remarks are applicable .... and everywhere and always," she thought, as the carriage stopped in front of the low-roofed station of the Nizhni Novgorod Railway, and the porters came hurrying out to meet her.
"Shall I book you for Obiralovka?" asked Piotr.
She had entirely forgotten why she had come, and only by a great effort could she understand what he meant.
"Yes," she said, handing him her purse; and, taking her little red bag, she got out of the carriage. As she entered the waiting-room for the first-class passengers with the throng, she reviewed all the details of her situation and the plans between which she was halting. And again hope and despair in alternation irritated the wounds in her tortured, cruelly palpitating heart. As she sat on the stelliform divan waiting for the train, she looked with aversion on the people going and coming,—they were all her enemies,—and thought now of how, when she reached the station, she would write to him, and what she would write, and then how at this very moment he—not thinking of her suffering—was complaining to his mother of his position, and how she would go to his room, and what she would say to him.
The thought that she might yet live happily crossed her brain; and how hard it was to love and hate him at the same time! And, above all, how frightfully her heart was beating!