Anna Karenina

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 voices. 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.

‘There!’ she said to herself, staring into the shadow of the carriage at the sand mixed with coal poured between the sleepers, ‘there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself.’

She wanted to fall under the first carriage, the midpoint of which had drawn even with her. But the red bag, which she started taking off her arm, delayed her, and it was too late: the midpoint went by. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling seized her, similar to what she experienced when preparing to go into the water for a swim, and she crossed herself. The habitual gesture of making the sign of the cross called up in her soul a whole series of memories from childhood and girlhood, and suddenly the darkness that covered everything for her broke and life rose up before her momentarily with all its bright past joys. Yet she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the approaching second carriage. And just at the moment when the midpoint between the two wheels came even with her, she threw the red bag aside and, drawing her head down between her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement, as if preparing to get up again at once, sank to her knees. And in that same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed at her head and dragged over her. ‘Lord, forgive me for everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle. A little muzhik, muttering to himself, was working over some iron. And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.

Part Eight

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