Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [435]
‘Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if I don’t find him, I’ll go there myself and expose him.’ Anna looked up the train schedule in the newspaper. The evening train left at 8:02. ‘Yes, I can make it.’ She ordered other horses to be harnessed and began packing her travelling bag with the things necessary for several days. She knew she would not come back there any more. Among other plans that entered her head, she also vaguely decided that after whatever happened there at the station or at the countess’s estate, she would take the Nizhni Novgorod railway to the first town and stay there.
Dinner was on the table; she went up to it, smelled the bread and cheese and, convinced that the smell of all food disgusted her, ordered the carriage to be brought and went out. The house already cast its shadow across the whole street, and the clear evening was still warm in the sun. Annushka, who accompanied her with her things, and Pyotr, who put them into the carriage, and the obviously disgruntled driver - they all disgusted her and irritated her with their words and movements.
‘I don’t need you, Pyotr.’
‘And what about your ticket?’
‘Well, as you like, it makes no difference to me,’she said with vexation.
Pyotr jumped up on the box and, arms akimbo, told the driver to go to the railway station.
XXX
‘Here it is again! Again I understand everything,’ Anna said to herself as soon as the carriage set off, rocking and clattering over the small cobbles, and again the impressions began changing one after another.
‘Yes, what was that last thing I thought about so nicely?’ she tried to remember. ‘Twitkin, Coiffeur? No, not that. Yes, it was what Yashvin said: the struggle for existence and hatred - the only thing that connects people. No, you’re going in vain,’ she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who were evidently going out of town for some merriment. ‘And the dog you’re taking with you won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.’ Glancing in the direction in which Pyotr had just turned, she saw a half-dead-drunk factory worker with a lolling head being taken somewhere by a policeman. ‘Sooner that one,’ she thought. ‘Count Vronsky and I didn’t find that pleasure either, though we expected so much from it.’ And now for the first time Anna turned the bright light in which she saw everything upon her relations with him, which she had avoided thinking about before. ‘What was he looking for in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of his vanity.’ She remembered his words, the expression on his face, like an obedient pointer, in the early days of their liaison. And now everything confirmed it. ‘Yes, there was the triumph of successful vanity in him. Of course, there was love, too, but for the most part it was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now it’s past. Nothing to be proud of. Not proud but ashamed. He took all he could from me, and I’m of no use to him any more. I’m a burden to him, and he tries not to be dishonourable towards me. He let it slip yesterday - he wants the divorce and marriage in order to burn his boats. He loves me - but how? The zest is gone,’ she said to herself in English. ‘This one wants to astonish everybody and is very pleased with himself,’ she thought, looking at a red-cheeked sales clerk riding a rented horse. ‘Yes, I no longer have the same savour for him. If I leave him, at the bottom of his heart he’ll be glad.’
This was not a supposition. She saw it clearly in that piercing light which