by Leo Tolstoy
Twitkin, Coiffeur ... Je me fais coiffer par Twitkin . . .* I'll tell him when he comes,' she thought and smiled. But at the same moment she remembered that she now had no one to tell anything funny to. 'And there isn't anything gay or funny. Everything is vile. The bells ring for vespers and this merchant crosses himself so neatly! As if he's afraid of dropping something. Why these churches, this ringing and this lie? Only to hide the fact that we all hate each other, like these cabbies who quarrel so spitefully. Yashvin says, "He wants to leave me without a shirt, and I him." That's the truth!'
In these thoughts, which carried her away so much that she even stopped thinking about her situation, she pulled up at the entrance of her house. Only on seeing the hall porter coming out to meet her did she remember that she had sent the note and the telegram.
'Is there an answer?' she asked.
'I'll look at once,' said the porter and, glancing at the desk, he picked up the thin, square envelope of a telegram and handed it to her. 'I cannot come before ten. Vronsky,' she read.
'And the messenger hasn't come back yet?'
'No, ma'am,' replied the porter.
'Ah, in that case I know what to do,' she said, and, feeling a vague wrath surge up in her, and a need for revenge, she ran upstairs. 'I'll go to him myself. Before going away forever, I'll tell him everything. I've never hated anyone as I do this man!' she thought. Seeing his hat on the coat rack, she shuddered with revulsion. She did not realize that his telegram was a reply to her telegram and that he had not yet received her note. She imagined him now, calmly talking with his mother and Princess Sorokin and rejoicing at her suffering. 'Yes, I must go quickly,' she said to herself, still not knowing where to go. She wanted to get away quickly from the feelings she experienced in that terrible house. The servants, the walls, the things in the house - it all gave her a feeling of revulsion and anger and pressed her down with its weight.
'Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if I don't find him, I'll go there myself and expose him.' Anna looked up the train schedule in the newspaper. The evening train left at 8:02. 'Yes, I can make it.' She ordered other horses to be harnessed and began packing her travelling bag with the things necessary for several days. She knew she would not come back there any more. Among other plans that entered her head,
* I have ray hair done by Twitkin.
she also vaguely decided that after whatever happened there at the station or at the countess's estate, she would take the Nizhni Novgorod railway to the first town and stay there.
Dinner was on the table; she went up to it, smelled the bread and cheese and, convinced that the smell of all food disgusted her, ordered the carriage to be brought and went out. The house already cast its shadow across the whole street, and the clear evening was still warm in the sun. Annushka, who accompanied her with her things, and Pyotr, who put them into the carriage, and the obviously disgruntled driver -they all disgusted her and irritated her with their words and movements.
'I don't need you, Pyotr.'
'And what about your ticket?'
'Well, as you like, it makes no difference to me,' she said with vexation.
Pyotr jumped up on the box and, arms akimbo, told the driver to go to the railway station.
XXX
'Here it is again! Again I understand everything,' Anna said to herself as soon as the carriage set off, rocking and clattering over the small cobbles, and again the impressions began changing one after another.
'Yes, what was that last thing I thought about so nicely?' she tried to remember. 'Twitkin, Coiffeur? No, not that. Yes, it was what Yashvin said: the struggle for existence and hatred - the only thing that connects people. No, you're going in vain,' she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who were evidently going out of town for some merriment. 'And the dog you're taking with you won't help you. You won't get away from yourselves.' Glancing in the direction in which Pyotr had just turned, she saw a half-dead-drunk factory worker with a lolling head being taken somewhere by a policeman. 'Sooner that one,' she thought. 'Count Vronsky and I didn't find that pleasure either, though we expected so much from it.' And now for the first time Anna turned the bright light in which she saw everything upon her relations with him, which she had avoided thinking about before. 'What was he looking for in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of his vanity.' She remembered his words, the expression on his face, like an obedient pointer, in the early days of their liaison. And now everything confirmed it. 'Yes, there was the triumph of successful vanity in him. Of course, there was love, too, but for the most part it was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now it's past. Nothing to be proud of. Not proud but ashamed. He took all he could from me, and I'm of no use to him any more. I'm a burden to him, and he tries not to be dishonourable towards me. He let it slip yesterday - he wants the divorce and marriage in order to burn his boats. He loves me - but how? The zest is gone,' she said to herself in English. 'This one wants to astonish everybody and is very pleased with himself,' she thought, looking at a red-cheeked sales clerk riding a rented horse. 'Yes, I no longer have the same savour for him. If I leave him, at the bottom of his heart he'll be glad.'
This was not a supposition. She saw it clearly in that piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of people's relations.
'My love grows ever more passionate and self-centred, and his keeps fading and fading, and that's why we move apart,' she went on thinking. 'And there's no help for it. For me, everything is in him alone, and I demand that he give his entire self to me more and more. While he wants more and more to get away from me. We precisely went towards each other before our liaison, and after it we irresistibly move in different directions. And it's impossible to change that. He tells me I'm senselessly jealous, and I've told myself that I'm senselessly jealous, but it's not true. I'm not jealous, I'm dissatisfied. But...' She opened her mouth and shifted her place in the carriage from the excitement provoked by the thought that suddenly occurred to her. 'If I could be anything else but a mistress who passionately loves only his caresses - but I cannot and do not want to be anything else. And by this desire I provoke his disgust, and he provokes my anger, and it cannot be otherwise. Don't I know that he would not deceive me, that he doesn't have any intentions towards Princess Sorokin, that he is not in love with Kitty, that he will not be unfaithful to me? I know all that, but it's none the easier for me. If he is kind and gentle towards me out of duty, without loving me, and I am not to have what I want - that is a thousand times worse even than anger! It's hell! And that is what we have. He has long ceased loving me. And where love stops, hatred begins. I don't know these streets at all. Some sort of hills, and houses, houses ... And in the houses people, people ... So many, no end of them, and they all hate each other. Well, so let me think up for myself what I want in order to be happy. Well? I get the divorce, Alexei Alexandrovich gives me Seryozha, and I marry Vronsky.' Remembering Alexei Alexandrovich, she immediately pictured him with extraordinary vividness as if he were standing before her, with his meek, lifeless, extinguished eyes, the blue veins on his white hands, his intonations, the cracking of his fingers, and, remembering the feeling there had been between them, which was also called love, she shuddered with disgust. 'Well, I'll get the divorce and be Vronsky's wife. What, then? Will Kitty stop looking at me as she did today? No. And will Seryozha stop asking or thinking about my two husbands? And between me and Vronsky what new feeling will I think up? Is anything - not even happiness but just not torment - possible? No, nothing!' she answered herself now without the least hesitation. 'Impossible! Our lives are parting ways, and I have become his unhappiness and he mine, and it's impossible to remake either him or me. All efforts have been made; the screw is stripped. Ah, a beggar woman with a child. She thinks she's to be pitied. Aren't we all thrown into the world only in order to hate each other and so to torment ourselves and others. Students going by, laughing. Seryozha?' she remembered. 'I also thought I loved him and used to be moved by m
y own tenderness. But I did live without him, exchanged him for another love, and didn't complain of the exchange as long as I was satisfied by that love.' And with disgust she remembered what it was that she called 'that love'. And she was glad of the clarity with which she now saw her own and everyone else's life. 'So it is with me, and with Pyotr, with the driver Fyodor, and that merchant, and all the people living there on the Volga, where these announcements invite one to go, and everywhere and always,' she thought, as she drove up to the low building of the Nizhni Novgorod station and the attendants came running to meet her.
'A ticket to Obiralovka?' said Pyotr.
She had completely forgotten where and why she was going, and only with great effort was able to understand the question.
'Yes,' she said, handing him her purse and, with her small red bag on her arm, she got out of the carriage.
Walking through the crowd into the first-class waiting room, she gradually recalled all the details of her situation and the decisions among which she had been hesitating. And first hope, then despair over old hurts again began to chafe the wounds of her tormented, terribly fluttering heart. Sitting on a star-shaped sofa and waiting for the train, looking with revulsion at the people coming in and going out (they all disgusted her), she thought of how she would arrive at the station, write a note to him, and of what she would write, then of how he was now complaining to his mother (not understanding her suffering) about his situation, and how she would come into the room and what she would say to him. Then she thought of how life could still be happy, and how tormentingly she loved and hated him, and how terribly her heart was pounding.
XXXI
The bell rang, some young men went by, ugly, insolent and hurried, and at the same time conscious of the impression they produced; Pyotr also crossed the room in his livery and gaiters, with a dull, animal face, and came up to her in order to escort her to the train. The noisy men quieted down when she passed them on the platform, and one whispered something about her to another - something nasty, to be sure. She mounted the high step and sat by herself in a compartment, on a soiled, once white, spring seat. Her bag bounced on the springs and lay still. Outside the window, Pyotr, with a foolish smile, raised his gold-braided cap in a sign of farewell; an insolent conductor slammed the door and latched it. An ugly lady with a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman and was horrified at her hideousness) and a little girl, laughing unnaturally, ran by under the window.
'Katerina Andreevna has it, she has everything, ma tante' cried the girl.
'The little girl - even she is ugly and affected,' Anna thought. So as not to see anyone, she quickly got up and sat at the opposite window in the empty carriage. A dirty, ugly muzhik in a peaked cap, his matted hair sticking out from under it, passed by the window, bending down to the wheels of the carriage. 'There's something familiar about that hideous muzhik,' thought Anna. And recalling her dream, she stepped away to the opposite door, trembling with fear. The conductor was opening the door, letting in a husband and wife.
'Would you like to get out?'
Anna did not reply. Neither the conductor nor the people who entered noticed the expression of terror on her face under the veil. She went back to her corner and sat down. The couple sat on the opposite side, studying her dress attentively but surreptitiously. Anna found both husband and wife repulsive. The husband asked whether she would allow him to smoke, obviously not in order to smoke, but in order to strike up a conversation with her. Having received her consent, he began talking with his wife in French about things he needed to talk about still less than he needed to smoke. They said foolish things in an affected way only so that she would overhear them. Anna saw clearly how sick they were of each other and how they hated each other. And it was impossible not to hate such pathetically ugly people.
The second bell rang and was followed by the moving of luggage, noise, shouting, laughter. It was so clear to Anna that no one had anything to be glad about, that this laughter irritated her painfully, and she would have liked to stop her ears so as not to hear it. Finally the third bell rang, the whistle sounded, the engine screeched, the chain jerked and the man crossed himself. 'It would be interesting to ask him what he means by that,' thought Anna, looking at him spitefully. She was gazing out of the window past the lady at the people who, as if rolling backwards, were standing on the platform seeing the train off. Rhythmically jolting over the joints of the tracks, the carriage in which Anna sat rolled past the platform, the brick wall, the signal disc, other carriages; the well-oiled, smooth-rolling wheels rang slightly over the rails, the window lit up with bright evening sunlight, and the breeze played with the curtain. Anna forgot her companions in the carriage and, to the slight rocking of the train, breathing in the fresh air, again began to think.
'Yes, where did I leave off ? At the fact that I'm unable to think up a situation in which life would not be suffering, that we're all created in order to suffer, and that we all know it and keep thinking up ways of deceiving ourselves. But if you see the truth, what can you do?'
'Man has been given reason in order to rid himself of that which troubles him,' the lady said in French, obviously pleased with her phrase and grimacing with her tongue between her teeth.
The words were like a response to Anna's thought.
'To rid himself of that which troubles,' Anna repeated. And, glancing at the red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she realized that the sickly wife considered herself a misunderstood woman and that her husband deceived her and supported her in this opinion of herself. It was as if Anna could see their story and all the hidden corners of their souls, turning her light on them. But there was nothing interesting there, and she went on with her thinking.
'Yes, troubles me very much, and reason was given us in order to rid ourselves of it. So I must rid myself of it. Why not put out the candle, if there's nothing more to look at, if it's vile to look at it all? But how? Why was that conductor running along the footboard? Why are those young men in the other carriage shouting? Why do they talk? Why do they laugh? It's all untrue, all a lie, all deceit, all evil! ...'
When the train arrived at the station, Anna got off in a crowd of other passengers and, shunning them like lepers, stopped on the platform, trying to remember why she had come there and what she had intended to do. Everything that had seemed possible to her earlier was now very hard for her to grasp, especially in the noisy crowd of all these hideous people who would not leave her alone. Attendants came running up to her offering their services; young men, stomping their heels on the boards of the platform and talking loudly, looked her over; the people she met stepped aside the wrong way. Remembering that she wanted to go further if there was no answer, she stopped an attendant and asked whether there was a coachman there with a note for Count Vronsky.
'Count Vronsky? There was someone here from him just now. Meeting Princess Sorokin and her daughter. What is the coachman like?'
As she was speaking with the attendant, the coachman Mikhaila, red-cheeked, cheerful, in smart blue jacket with a watch chain, obviously proud of having fulfilled his errand so well, came up to her and handed her a note. She opened it, and her heart sank even before she read it.
'I'm very sorry the note did not find me. I'll be back at ten,' Vronsky wrote in a careless hand.
'So! I expected that!' she said to herself with a spiteful smile.
'Very well, you may go home,' she said softly, addressing Mikhaila. She spoke softly because the quick beating of her heart interfered with her breathing. 'No, I won't let you torment me,' she thought, addressing her threat not to him, not to herself, but to the one who made her suffer, and she walked along the platform past the station-house.
Two maids who were pacing the platform bent their heads back, looking at her and voicing their thoughts about her clothes. 'The real thing,' they said of the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her alone. They passed by again, peering into her face, laughing and shouting something in unnatural voi
ces. The stationmaster, as he passed by, asked whether she would be getting on the train. A boy selling kvass could not take his eyes off her. 'My God, where to go?' she thought, walking further and further down the platform. At the end of it she stopped. Some ladies and children, who were laughing and talking loudly as they met a gentleman in spectacles, fell silent and looked her over as she went past them. She quickened her pace and walked away from them to the edge of the platform. A goods train was coming. The platform shook, and it seemed to her that she was on the train again.
And suddenly, remembering the man who was run over the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she must do. With a quick, light step she went down the stairs that led from the water pump to the rails and stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottoms of the carriages, at the bolts and chains and big cast-iron wheels of the first carriage slowly rolling by, and tried to estimate by eye the midpoint between the front and back wheels and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.