Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [429]
‘I am not holding you,’ he might have said. ‘You may go wherever you like. You probably did not want to divorce your husband so that you could go back to him. Go back, then. If you need money, I will give it to you. How many roubles do you need?’
All the cruellest words a coarse man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as if he had actually said them to her.
‘And wasn’t it only yesterday that he swore he loved me, he, a truthful and honest man? Haven’t I despaired uselessly many times before?’ she said to herself after that.
All that day, except for the visit to Mrs Wilson, which took two hours, Anna spent wondering whether everything was finished or there was hope of a reconciliation, and whether she ought to leave at once or see him one more time. She waited for him the whole day, and in the evening, going to her room and giving the order to tell him she had a headache, she thought, ‘If he comes in spite of what the maid says, it means he still loves me. If not, it means it’s all over, and then I’ll decide what to do! ...’
In the evening she heard the sound of his carriage stopping, his ring, his footsteps and conversation with the maid: he believed what he was told, did not want to find out any more, and went to his room. Therefore it was all over.
And death presented itself to her clearly and vividly as the only way to restore the love for her in his heart, to punish him and to be victorious in the struggle that the evil spirit lodged in her heart was waging with him.
Now it made no difference whether they went to Vozdvizhenskoe or not, whether she got the divorce from her husband or not - none of it was necessary. The one thing necessary was to punish him.
When she poured herself the usual dose of opium and thought that she had only to drink the whole bottle in order to die, it seemed so easy and simple to her that she again began to enjoy thinking how he would suffer, repent, and love her memory when it was too late. She lay in bed with her eyes open, looking at the moulded cornice of the ceiling and the shadow of a screen extending over part of it in the light of one burnt-down candle, and she vividly pictured to herself what he would feel when she was no more and had become only a memory for him. ‘How could I have said those cruel words to her?’ he would say. ‘How could I have left the room without saying anything? But now she’s no more. She’s gone from us for ever. She’s there ...’ Suddenly the shadow of the screen wavered, spread over the whole cornice, over the whole ceiling; other shadows from the other side rushed to meet it; for a moment the shadows left, but then with renewed swiftness came over again, wavered, merged, and everything became dark. ‘Death!’ she thought. And she was overcome with such terror that for a long time she could not understand where she was, and her trembling hands were unable to find a match and light another candle in place of the one that had burned down and gone out. ‘No, anything - only to live! I do love him. He does love me. It was and it will be no more,’ she said, feeling tears of joy at the return of life running down her cheeks. And to save herself from her fear, she hastily went to him in the study.
He was in the study fast asleep. She went over to him and, lighting his face from above, looked at him for a long time. Now, when he was asleep, she loved him so much that, looking at him, she could not keep back tears of tenderness; but she knew that if he woke up he would give her a cold look, conscious of his own rightness, and that before talking to him of her love, she would have to prove to him how guilty he was before her. She went back to her room without waking him up and, after a second dose of opium, towards morning fell into a heavy, incomplete sleep, in which she never lost awareness of herself.
In the morning a dreadful nightmare, which had come to her repeatedly even before her liaison with Vronsky, came