• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1039 0

as it had seemed to him, in recent days, now, when he knew he had lost her for ever, had become stronger than it had ever been. He had seen the whole of her during her illness, had come to know her soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her before then. And now, when he had come to know her, to love her as he ought to have loved her, he had been humiliated before her and had lost her for ever, leaving her with nothing but a disgraceful memory of himself. Most terrible of all had been his ridiculous, shameful position when Alexei Alexandrovich tore his hands from his ashamed face. He stood on the porch of the Karenins’ house like a lost man and did not know what to do.

‘Shall I call a cab?’ asked the porter.

‘A cab, yes.’

Returning home after three sleepless nights, Vronsky lay face down on the sofa without undressing, his arms folded and his head resting on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories and the strangest thoughts followed one another with extreme rapidity and clarity: now it was the medicine he had poured for the sick woman, overfilling the spoon, now the midwife’s white arms, now Alexei Alexandrovich’s strange position on the floor beside the bed.

‘Sleep! Forget!’ he said to himself, with the calm certainty of a healthy man that, if he was tired and wanted to sleep, he would fall asleep at once. And indeed at that moment there was confusion in his head, and he began to fall into the abyss of oblivion. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness were already beginning to close over his head when suddenly - as if a strong electric shock was discharged in him - he gave such a start that his whole body jumped on the springs of the sofa and, propping himself with his arms, he got to his knees. His eyes were wide open, as if he had never slept. The heaviness of head and sluggishness of limb that he had experienced a moment before suddenly vanished.

‘You may trample me in the mud.’ He heard Alexei Alexandrovich’s words and saw him before his eyes, and he saw Anna’s face with its feverish flush and shining eyes, looking tenderly and lovingly not at him but at Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own stupid and ridiculous figure, as it seemed to him, when Alexei Alexandrovich drew his hands away from his face. He stretched his legs out again, threw himself on the sofa in the same position, and closed his eyes.

‘Sleep! Sleep!’ he repeated to himself. But with his eyes closed he saw still more clearly the face of Anna as it had been on that evening, so memorable for him, before the race.

‘It is not and will not be, and she wishes to wipe it from her memory. And I cannot live without it. How, how can we be reconciled?’ he said aloud, and began unconsciously to repeat these words. The repetition of the words held back the emergence of new images and memories which he felt thronging in his head. But not for long. Again, one after another, the best moments presented themselves with extreme rapidity, and together with them the recent humiliation. ‘Take your hands away,’ Anna’s voice says. He takes his hands away and senses the ashamed and stupid look on his face.

He went on lying there, trying to fall asleep, though he felt that there was not the slightest hope, and he went on repeating in a whisper the accidental words of some thought, wishing to hold back the emergence of new images. He listened - and heard, repeated in a strange, mad whisper, the words: ‘Unable to value, unable to enjoy; unable to value, unable to enjoy.’

‘What is this? Or am I losing my mind?’ he said to himself. ‘Maybe so. Why else do people lose their minds, why else do they shoot themselves?’ he answered himself and, opening his eyes, was surprised to see an embroidered pillow by his head, made by Varya, his brother’s wife. He touched the pillow’s tassel and tried to recall Varya and when he had seen her last. But to think of something extraneous was painful. ‘No, I must sleep!’ He moved the pillow and pressed his head to it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes closed. He sat up abruptly. ‘That is finished for me,’ he said to