Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [439]
‘There!’ she said to herself, staring into the shadow of the carriage at the sand mixed with coal poured between the sleepers, ‘there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself.’
She wanted to fall under the first carriage, the midpoint of which had drawn even with her. But the red bag, which she started taking off her arm, delayed her, and it was too late: the midpoint went by. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling seized her, similar to what she experienced when preparing to go into the water for a swim, and she crossed herself. The habitual gesture of making the sign of the cross called up in her soul a whole series of memories from childhood and girlhood, and suddenly the darkness that covered everything for her broke and life rose up before her momentarily with all its bright past joys. Yet she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the approaching second carriage. And just at the moment when the midpoint between the two wheels came even with her, she threw the red bag aside and, drawing her head down between her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement, as if preparing to get up again at once, sank to her knees. And in that same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed at her head and dragged over her. ‘Lord, forgive me for everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle. A little muzhik, muttering to himself, was working over some iron. And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.
Part Eight
I
Nearly two months had gone by. It was already the middle of the hot summer, and Sergei Ivanovich was only now preparing to leave Moscow.
During that time, Sergei Ivanovich had his own events going on in his life. His book, the fruit of six years of toil, entitled An Essay in Survey of the Principles and Forms of Statehood in Europe and Russia, had been finished a year ago. Some sections of the book and the introduction had been printed in periodical publications and other parts had been read by Sergei Ivanovich to people of his circle, so that the ideas of the work could no longer be quite new to the public; but all the same Sergei Ivanovich expected the appearance of the book to make a serious impression in society and cause, if not a revolution in scholarship, at least a great stir in the scholarly world.
This book, after careful polishing, had been published last year and sent out to the booksellers.
Asking no one about it, responding with reluctance and feigned indifference to his friends’ questions about how the book was doing, not even asking the booksellers how the sales were, Sergei Ivanovich watched keenly and with strained attention for the first impression his book would make in society and in literature.
But a week went by, a second, a third, and there was no noticeable impression in society. His friends, the specialists and scholars, sometimes mentioned it, evidently out of politeness. But his other acquaintances, not interested in a book of learned content, did not speak to him about it at all. And in society, which especially now was busy with other things, there was complete indifference. In literature, too, for a whole month there was not a word about the book.
Sergei Ivanovich calculated in detail the time