Anna Karenina

Chapter 18
After the conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch, Vronsky went out onto
the steps of the Karenins' house and stood still, with difficulty remembering
where he was, and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt disgraced,
humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of washing away his
humiliation. He felt thrust out of the beaten track along which he had so
proudly and lightly walked till then. All the habits and rules of his life that
had seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false and inapplicable. The
betrayed husband, who had figured till that time as a pitiful creature, an
incidental and somewhat ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly
been summoned by her herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and
on the pinnacle that husband had shown himself, not malignant, not false,
not ludicrous, but kind and straightforward and large. Vronsky could not
but feel this, and the parts were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt his
elevation and his own abasement, his truth and his own falsehood. He felt
that the husband was magnanimous even in his sorrow, while he had been
base and petty in his deceit. But this sense of his own humiliation before
the man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of his misery.
He felt unutterably wretched now, for his passion for Anna, which had
seemed to him of late to be growing cooler, now that he knew he had lost
her forever, was stronger than ever it had been. He had seen all of her in her
illness, had come to know her very soul, and it seemed to him that he had
never loved her till then. And now when he had learned to know her, to
love her as she should be loved, he had been humiliated before her, and had
lost her forever, leaving with her nothing of himself but a shameful
memory. Most terrible of all had been his ludicrous, shameful position
when Alexey Alexandrovitch had pulled his hands away from his
humiliated face. He stood on the steps of the Karenins' house like one
distraught, and did not know what to do.
"A sledge, sir?" asked the porter.
"Yes, a sledge."
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On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without undressing,
lay down fiat on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying his head on them.
His head was heavy. Images, memories, and ideas of the strangest
description followed one another with extraordinary rapidity and vividness.
First it was the medicine he had poured out for the patient and spilt over the
spoon, then the midwife's white hands, then the queer posture of Alexey
Alexandrovitch on the floor beside the bed.
"To sleep! To forget!" he said to himself with the serene confidence of a
healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy, he will go to sleep at once. And
the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he began to drop off
into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness had begun to
meet over his head, when all at once--it was as though a violent shock of
electricity had passed over him. He started so that he leaped up on the
springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a panic onto his knees.
His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep. The
heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs that he had felt a
minute before had suddenly gone.
"You may trample me in the mud," he heard Alexey Alexandrovitch's
words and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna's face with its
burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at
him but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish
and ludicrous figure when Alexey Alexandrovitch took his hands away
from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the sofa
in the same position and shut his eyes.
"To sleep! To forget!" he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut he saw
more distinctly than ever Anna's face as it had been on the memorable
evening before the races.
"That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her memory.
But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? how can we be
reconciled?" he said aloud, and unconsciously began to repeat these words.
This repetition checked the rising up of fresh images and memories, which
he felt were thronging in his brain. But repeating words did not check his
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imagination for long. Again in extraordinarily rapid succession his best
moments rose before his mind, and then his recent humiliation. "Take away
his hands," Anna's voice says. He takes away his hands and feels the
shamestruck and idiotic expression of his face.
He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the smallest
hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of thought,
trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He listened, and
heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: "I did not appreciate it, did
not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it."
"What's this? Am I going out of my mind?" he said to himself. "Perhaps.
What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men shoot
themselves?" he answered himself, and opening his eyes, he saw with
wonder an embroidered cushion beside him, worked by Varya, his brother's
wife. He touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to think of Varya, of
when he had seen her last. But to think of anything extraneous was an
agonizing effort. "No, I must sleep!" He moved the cushion up, and pressed
his head into it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes shut. He
jumped up and sat down. "That's all over for me," he said to himself. "I
must think what to do. What is left?" His mind rapidly ran through his life
apart from his love of Anna.
"Ambition? Serpuhovskoy? Society? The court?" He could not come to a
pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now there was no
reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat, undid his belt, and
uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more freely, walked up and down the
room. "This is how people go mad," he repeated, "and how they shoot
themselves...to escape humiliation," he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched teeth
he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked round him, turned it to a
loaded barrel, and sank into thought. For two minutes, his head bent
forward with an expression of an intense effort of thought, he stood with
the revolver in his hand, motionless, thinking.
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"Of course," he said to himself, as though a logical, continuous, and clear
chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion. In reality
this "of course," that seemed convincing to him, was simply the result of
exactly the same circle of memories and images through which he had
passed ten times already during the last hour--memories of happiness lost
forever. There was the same conception of the senselessness of everything
to come in life, the same consciousness of humiliation. Even the sequence
of these images and emotions was the same.
"Of course," he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed again
round the same spellbound circle of memories and images, and pulling the
revolver to the left side of his chest, and clutching it vigorously with his
whole hand, as it were, squeezing it in his fist, he pulled the trigger. He did
not hear the sound of the shot, but a violent blow on his chest sent him
reeling. He tried to clutch at the edge of the table, dropped the revolver,
staggered, and sat down on the ground, looking about him in astonishment.
He did not recognize his room, looking up from the ground, at the bent legs
of the table, at the wastepaper basket, and the tiger-skin rug. The hurried,
creaking steps of his servant coming through the drawing room brought
him to his senses. He made an effort at thought, and was aware that he was
on the floor; and seeing blood on the tiger-skin rug and on his arm, he knew
he had shot himself.
"Idiotic! Missed!" he said, fumbling after the revolver. The revolver was
close beside him--he sought further off. Still feeling for it, he stretched out
to the other side, and not being strong enough to keep his balance, fell over,
streaming with blood.
The elegant, whiskered manservant, who used to be continually
complaining to his acquaintances of the delicacy of his nerves, was so
panic-stricken on seeing his master lying on the floor, that he left him
losing blood while he ran for assistance. An hour later Varya, his brother's
wife, had arrived, and with the assistance of three doctors, whom she had
sent for in all directions, and who all appeared at the same moment, she got
the wounded man to bed, and remained to nurse him.
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