Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Seven/Chapter 31
CHAPTER XXXI
A bell sounded, and some impudent young men, ugly and vulgar, and yet mindful of the impression they produced, hurried before her. Then Piotr, in his livery and top-boots, with his dull, good-natured face, crossed the waiting-room, and came up to escort her to the carriage. The noisy men about the door stopped talking while she passed out on the platform; then one of them whispered to his neighbor some remark, which was apparently impudent. Anna mounted the high steps, and sat down alone in the compartment on the dirty sofa which once had been white, and laid her bag beside her on the springy seat. Piotr, at the window, raised his gold-laced hat, with an inane smile, for a farewell, and departed. The saucy conductor shut the door. A woman, deformed, and ridiculously dressed up, followed by a little girl laughing affectedly, passed below the car-window. Anna looked at her with disgust. "Katerina Andreyevna has everything, ma tante," screamed the little girl.
"That child, even she is grotesque and makes grimaces," thought Anna; and she seated herself at the opposite window of the empty apartment, to avoid seeing the people.
A dirty hunchback muzhik passed close to the window, and examined the car-wheels; he wore a cap, from beneath which could be seen tufts of disheveled hair.
"There is something familiar about that humpbacked muzhik," thought Anna; and suddenly she remembered her nightmare, and drew back, trembling with fright, toward the carriage-door, which the conductor was just opening to admit a lady and gentleman.
"Do you want to get out?"
Anna did not answer; under her veil the conductor and the passengers did not see the horror in her face. She returned to her corner and sat down again. The couple took seats opposite her, and cast stealthy but curious glances at her gown. The husband and wife were obnoxious to her. The husband asked her if she objected to smoking,—evidently not for the sake of smoking, but as an excuse for entering into conversation with her. Having obtained her permission, he remarked to his wife in French that he felt even more inclined to talk than to smoke. They exchanged stupid remarks, with the hope of attracting Anna's attention.
Anna clearly saw how they bored each other, how they hated each other. It was impossible not to hate such painful monstrosities.
The second gong sounded, and was followed by the rumble of baggage, noise, shouts, laughter. Anna saw so clearly that there was nothing to rejoice at, that this laughter roused her indignation, and she longed to stop her ears so as not to hear it.
At last the third signal was given, the locomotive whistled, there was a sound of escaping steam, the train started, and the gentleman crossed himself.
"It would be interesting to ask him what he meant by that," thought Anna, looking at him angrily. Then she looked past the woman's head, out of the car-window, at the people apparently moving backward even while they were standing and walking on the platform. The carriage in which Anna sat moved past the stone walls of the station, the switches, the other carriages. The wheels with a ringing sound moved more easily and smoothly over the rails; the rays of the setting sun slanted into the car-window, and a light breeze played through the slats of the blinds in the carriages, and Anna forgot her neighbors, breathed in the fresh air, and took up again the course of her thoughts.
"There! What was I thinking about? Oh, yes, I was just deciding that I could not imagine any situation in which my life could be anything but one long misery. We are all dedicated to unhappiness; we all know it, and only seek for ways to deceive ourselves. But when we see the truth, what is to be done?"
"Reason was given to man, that he might avoid what annoys him," remarked the woman, in French, apparently delighted with her sentence, and putting out her tongue.
The words fitted in with Anna's thought.
"To avoid what annoys him," she repeated, and a glance at the red-faced man, and his thin companion, showed her that the woman looked on herself as a misunderstood creature, and that her stout husband did not contradict this opinion, and took advantage of it to deceive her. Anna, as it were, read their history, and looked into the most secret depths of their hearts; but it was not interesting, and she went on with her reflections.
"Yes, it annoys me very much, and reason was given to avoid it; therefore it must be done. Why not extinguish the light when it shines on things disgusting to see? But how? Why does the conductor keep hurrying through the car? Why do the young people in this carriage scream so loud? Why do they speak? What are they laughing at? It is all false, all a lie, all deception, all vanity and vexation."
When the train reached the station, Anna went out with the other passengers, and, with the idea of avoiding too rude a contact with the bustling crowd, she hesitated on the platform, trying to recollect why she had come, and what she meant to do. All that seemed to her possible before to do, now seemed to her difficult to execute, especially amid this noisy crowd, which would not leave her in peace. Now the porters came to her, to offer her their services; now some young men, clattering with their heels up and down the platform, and talking loud, observed her curiously; now hurrying passengers pushed her aside.
Finally, remembering that she was proposing to go farther if there was no answer from Vronsky, she stopped an official, and asked him if a coachman had not been there with a letter for Count Vronsky.
"Count Vronsky? Just now some one was here. Princess Sorokin and her daughter met him. What kind of a looking man is this coachman?"
Even while she was talking with the official, the coachman Mikhaïl, rosy and gay in his elegant blue livery and watch-chain, immensely proud that he had fulfilled his commission so well, came to her and handed her a note.
Anna broke the seal, and her heart stood still even before she had read the carelessly written lines:—
I am very sorry that your note did not find me in Moscow. I shall return at ten o'clock.
"Yes, that is what I expected," she said to herself, with an angry grimace.
"Very good, you may go home," she said to Mikhaïl. She spoke the words slowly and gently, because the tumultuous beating of her heart almost prevented her from breathing.
"No, I will not let you make me suffer so," thought she, addressing, with a threat, neither Vronsky nor her own self, so much as the thought that was torturing her; and she moved along the platform, past the station. Two chambermaids walking on the platform turned to look at her, and made audible remarks about her toilet. "She has genuine lace," they said. The young men would not leave her in peace. They stared at her, and passed her again and again, joking and talking with loud voices. The station-master came to her, and asked if she was going to take the train. A lad selling kvas did not take his eyes from her.
"Bozhe moï! where shall I go?" she said to herself, as she walked farther and farther along the platform.
When she reached the end of it, she stopped. Some women and children, who had come to the station to meet a man in spectacles, were talking and laughing. They too stopped talking, and turned to see Anna pass by. She hastened her steps, and reached the very limit of the platform. A freight-train was coming. The platform shook, and made her feel as if she were on a moving train.
Suddenly she remembered the man who was run over on the day when she met Vronsky for the first time, and she knew then what was left for her to do. With light and swift steps she descended the stairway which led from the water-tank at the end of the platform down to the rails, and stood very near the train, which was slowly passing by. She looked under the cars, at the chains and the brake, and at the high iron wheels of the first car, and she tried to estimate with her eye the distance between the fore and back wheels, and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.
"There," she said, looking at the shadow of the car thrown upon the black coal-dust which covered the sleepers," there, in the center; he will be punished, and I shall be delivered from it all .... and from myself."
She was going to throw herself under the first car as its center came opposite where she stood. Her little red traveling-bag caused her to lose the moment; she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul a whole series of memories of her youth and childhood; and suddenly the darkness which hid everything from her was torn asunder. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her. But she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the center, between the two wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. For a second she was horror-struck at what she was doing.
"Where am I? What am I doing? Why?"
She tried to get up, to draw back; but something monstrous, inflexible, struck her head, and threw her on her back.
"Lord, forgive me all!" she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain.
A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.