Anna Karenina

bell rang, some young men, ugly and impudent, and at the same time
careful of the impression they were making, hurried by. Pyotr, too,
crossed the room in his livery and top-boots, with his dull, animal
face, and came up to her to take her to the train. Some noisy men were
quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one whispered something
about her to another—something vile, no doubt. She stepped up on the
high step, and sat down in a carriage by herself on a dirty seat that
had been white. Her bag lay beside her, shaken up and down by the
springiness of the seat. With a foolish smile Pyotr raised his hat,
with its colored band, at the window, in token of farewell; an impudent
conductor slammed the door and the latch. A grotesque-looking lady
wearing a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman, and was appalled
at her hideousness), and a little girl laughing affectedly ran down the
platform.

“Katerina Andreevna, she’s got them all, ma tante!” cried the girl.

“Even the child’s hideous and affected,” thought Anna. To avoid seeing
anyone, she got up quickly and seated herself at the opposite window of
the empty carriage. A misshapen-looking peasant covered with dirt, in a
cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all round, passed by that
window, stooping down to the carriage wheels. “There’s something
familiar about that hideous peasant,” thought Anna. And remembering her
dream, she moved away to the opposite door, shaking with terror. The
conductor opened the door and let in a man and his wife.

“Do you wish to get out?”

Anna made no answer. The conductor and her two fellow-passengers did
not notice under her veil her panic-stricken face. She went back to her
corner and sat down. The couple seated themselves on the opposite side,
and intently but surreptitiously scrutinized her clothes. Both husband
and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked, would she allow
him to smoke, obviously not with a view to smoking but to getting into
conversation with her. Receiving her assent, he said to his wife in
French something about caring less to smoke than to talk. They made
inane and affected remarks to one another, entirely for her benefit.
Anna saw clearly that they were sick of each other, and hated each
other. And no one could have helped hating such miserable
monstrosities.

A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise,
shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was nothing
for anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her agonizingly,
and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to hear it. At last
the third bell rang, there was a whistle and a hiss of steam, and a
clank of chains, and the man in her carriage crossed himself. “It would
be interesting to ask him what meaning he attaches to that,” thought
Anna, looking angrily at him. She looked past the lady out of the
window at the people who seemed whirling by as they ran beside the
train or stood on the platform. The train, jerking at regular intervals
at the junctions of the rails, rolled by the platform, past a stone
wall, a signal-box, past other trains; the wheels, moving more smoothly
and evenly, resounded with a slight clang on the rails. The window was
lighted up by the bright evening sun, and a slight breeze fluttered the
curtain. Anna forgot her fellow passengers, and to the light swaying of
the train she fell to thinking again, as she breathed the fresh air.

“Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn’t conceive a position in which
life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable,
and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other.
And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”

“That’s what reason is given man for, to escape from what worries him,”
said the lady in French, lisping affectedly, and obviously pleased with
her phrase.

The words seemed an answer to Anna’s thoughts.

“To escape from what worries him,” repeated Anna. And glancing at the
red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she saw that the sickly wife
considered herself misunderstood, and the husband deceived her and
encouraged her in that idea of herself. Anna seemed to see all their
history and all the crannies of their souls, as it were turning a light
upon them. But there was nothing interesting in them, and she pursued
her thought.

“Yes, I’m very much worried, and that’s what reason was given me for,
to escape; so then one must escape: why not put out the light when
there’s nothing more to look at, when it’s sickening to look at it all?
But how? Why did the conductor run along the footboard, why are they
shrieking, those young men in that train? why are they talking, why are
they laughing? It’s all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all
cruelty!...”

When the train came into the station, Anna got out into the crowd of
passengers, and moving apart from them as if they were lepers, she
stood on the platform, trying to think what she had come here for, and
what she meant to do. Everything that had seemed to her possible before
was now so difficult to consider, especially in this noisy crowd of
hideous people who would not leave her alone. One moment porters ran up
to her proffering their services, then young men, clacking their heels
on the planks of the platform and talking loudly, stared at her; people
meeting her dodged past on the wrong side. Remembering that she had
meant to go on further if there were no answer, she stopped a porter
and asked if her coachman were not here with a note from Count Vronsky.

“Count Vronsky? They sent up here from the Vronskys just this minute,
to meet Princess Sorokina and her daughter. And what is the coachman
like?”

Just as she was talking to the porter, the coachman Mihail, red and
cheerful in his smart blue coat and chain, evidently proud of having so
successfully performed his commission, came up to her and gave her a
letter. She broke it open, and her heart ached before she had read it.

“I am very sorry your note did not reach me. I will be home at ten,”
Vronsky had written carelessly....

“Yes, that’s what I expected!” she said to herself with an evil smile.

“Very good, you can go home then,” she said softly, addressing Mihail.
She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart’s beating hindered
her breathing. “No, I won’t let you make me miserable,” she thought
menacingly, addressing not him, not herself, but the power that made
her suffer, and she walked along the platform.

Two maid-servants walking along the platform turned their heads,
staring at her and making some remarks about her dress. “Real,” they
said of the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in
peace. Again they passed by, peering into her face, and with a laugh
shouting something in an unnatural voice. The station-master coming up
asked her whether she was going by train. A boy selling kvas never took
his eyes off her. “My God! where am I to go?” she thought, going
farther and farther along the platform. At the end she stopped. Some
ladies and children, who had come to meet a gentleman in spectacles,
paused in their loud laughter and talking, and stared at her as she
reached them. She quickened her pace and walked away from them to the
edge of the platform. A luggage train was coming in. The platform began
to sway, and she fancied she was in the train again.

And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she
had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a rapid,
light step she went down the steps that led from the tank to the rails
and stopped quite near the approaching train.

She looked at the lower part of the carriages, at the screws and chains
and the tall cast-iron wheel of the first carriage slowly moving up,
and trying to measure the middle between the front and back wheels, and
the very minute when that middle point would be opposite her.

“There,” she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage,
at the sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers—“there, in the
very middle, and I will punish him and escape from everyone and from
myself.”

She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it
reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand
delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to
wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about
to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed
herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole
series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that
had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before
her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take
her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the
moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped
the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her
hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again
at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was
terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing?
What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge
and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord,
forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant
muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by
which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow,
and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her
all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was
quenched forever.

PART EIGHT