Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [438]
‘Yes, where did I leave off? At the fact that I’m unable to think up a situation in which life would not be suffering, that we’re all created in order to suffer, and that we all know it and keep thinking up ways of deceiving ourselves. But if you see the truth, what can you do?’
‘Man has been given reason in order to rid himself of that which troubles him,’ the lady said in French, obviously pleased with her phrase and grimacing with her tongue between her teeth.
The words were like a response to Anna’s thought.
‘To rid himself of that which troubles,’ Anna repeated. And, glancing at the red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she realized that the sickly wife considered herself a misunderstood woman and that her husband deceived her and supported her in this opinion of herself. It was as if Anna could see their story and all the hidden corners of their souls, turning her light on them. But there was nothing interesting there, and she went on with her thinking.
‘Yes, troubles me very much, and reason was given us in order to rid ourselves of it. So I must rid myself of it. Why not put out the candle, if there’s nothing more to look at, if it’s vile to look at it all? But how? Why was that conductor running along the footboard? Why are those young men in the other carriage shouting? Why do they talk? Why do they laugh? It’s all untrue, all a lie, all deceit, all evil! ...’
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