Chapter XVIII
After the conversation with Alexey
Alexandrovitch, Vronsky went out onto the steps of the Karenins’
house and stood still, with difficulty remembering where he was,
and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt disgraced, humiliated,
guilty, and deprived of all possibility of washing away his
humiliation. He felt thrust out of the beaten track along which he
had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the habits and
rules of his life that had seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly
false and inapplicable. The betrayed husband, who had figured till
that time as a pitiful creature, an incidental and somewhat
ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by
her herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and on the
pinnacle that husband had shown himself, not malignant, not false,
not ludicrous, but kind and straightforward and large. Vronsky
could not but feel this, and the parts were suddenly reversed.
Vronsky felt his elevation and his own abasement, his truth and his
own falsehood. He felt that the husband was magnanimous even in his
sorrow, while he had been base and petty in his deceit. But this
sense of his own humiliation before the man he had unjustly
despised made up only a small part of his misery. He felt
unutterably wretched now, for his passion for Anna, which had
seemed to him of late to be growing cooler, now that he knew he had
lost her forever, was stronger than ever it had been. He had seen
all of her in her illness, had come to know her very soul, and it
seemed to him that he had never loved her till then. And now when
he had learned to know her, to love her as she should be loved, he
had been humiliated before her, and had lost her forever, leaving
with her nothing of himself but a shameful memory. Most terrible of
all had been his ludicrous, shameful position when Alexey
Alexandrovitch had pulled his hands away from his humiliated face.
He stood on the steps of the Karenins’ house like one distraught,
and did not know what to do.
“A sledge, sir?” asked the porter.
“Yes, a sledge.”
On getting home, after three sleepless nights,
Vronsky, without undressing, lay down flat on the sofa, clasping
his hands and laying his head on them. His head was heavy. Images,
memories, and ideas of the strangest description followed one
another with extraordinary rapidity and vividness. First it was the
medicine he had poured out for the patient and spilt over the
spoon, then the midwife’s white hands, then the queer posture of
Alexey Alexandrovitch on the floor beside the bed.
“To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the
serene confidence of a healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy,
he will go to sleep at once. And the same instant his head did
begin to feel drowsy and he began to drop off into forgetfulness.
The waves of the sea of unconsciousness had begun to meet over his
head, when all at once—it was as though a violent shock of
electricity had passed over him. He started so that he leaped up on
the springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a panic
onto his knees. His eyes were wide open as though he had never been
asleep. The heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs
that he had felt a minute before had suddenly gone.
“You may trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s words and saw him standing before him, and saw
Anna’s face with its burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with
love and tenderness not at him but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw
his own, as he fancied, foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexey
Alexandrovitch took his hands away from his face. He stretched out
his legs again and flung himself on the sofa in the same position
and shut his eyes.
“To sleep! To forget!” he repeated to himself. But
with his eyes shut he saw more distinctly than ever Anna’s face as
it had been on the memorable evening before the races.
“That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe
it out of her memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be
reconciled? how can we be reconciled?” he said aloud, and
unconsciously began to repeat these words. This repetition checked
the rising up of fresh images and memories, which he felt were
thronging in his brain. But repeating words did not check his
imagination for long. Again in extraordinarily rapid succession his
best moments rose before his mind, and then his recent humiliation.
“Take away his hands,” Anna’s voice says. He takes away his hands
and feels the shamestruck and idiotic expression of his face.
He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt
there was not the smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray
words from some chain of thought, trying by this to check the
rising flood of fresh images. He listened, and heard in a strange,
mad whisper words repeated: “I did not appreciate it, did not make
enough of it. I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of
it.”
“What’s this? Am I going out of my mind?” he said
to himself. “Perhaps. What makes men go out of their minds; what
makes men shoot themselves?” he answered himself, and opening his
eyes, he saw with wonder an embroidered cushion beside him, worked
by Varya, his brother’s wife. He touched the tassel of the cushion,
and tried to think of Varya, of when he had seen her last. But to
think of anything extraneous was an agonizing effort. “No, I must
sleep!” He moved the cushion up, and pressed his head into it, but
he had to make an effort to keep his eyes shut. He jumped up and
sat down. “That’s all over for me,” he said to himself. “I must
think what to do. What is left?” His mind rapidly ran through his
life apart from his love of Anna.
“Ambition? Serpuhovskoy? Society? The court?” He
could not come to a pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning
before, but now there was no reality in it. He got up from the
sofa, took off his coat, undid his belt, and uncovering his hairy
chest to breathe more freely, walked up and down the room. “This is
how people go mad,” he repeated, “and how they shoot themselves . .
. to escape humiliation,” he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed
eyes and clenched teeth he went up to the table, took a revolver,
looked round him, turned it to a loaded barrrel, and sank into
thought. For two minutes, his head bent forward with an expression
of an intense effort of thought, he stood with the revolver in his
hand, motionless, thinking.
“Of course,” he said to himself, as though a
logical, continuous, and clear chain of reasoning had brought him
to an indubitable conclusion. In reality this “of course,” that
seemed convincing to him, was simply the result of exactly the same
circle of memories and images through which he had passed ten times
already during the last hour—memories of happiness lost forever.
There was the same conception of the senselessness of everything to
come in life, the same consciousness of humiliation. Even the
sequence of these images and emotions was the same.
“Of course,” he repeated, when for the third time
his thought passed again round the same spellbound circle of
memories and images, and pulling the revolver to the left side of
his chest, and clutching it vigorously with his whole hand, as it
were, squeezing it in his fist, he pulled the trigger. He did not
hear the sound of the shot, but a violent blow on his chest sent
him reeling. He tried to clutch at the edge of the table, dropped
the revolver, staggered, and sat down on the ground, looking about
him in astonishment. He did not recognize his room, looking up from
the ground, at the bent legs of the table, at the
wastepaper-basket, and the tiger-skin rug. The hurried, creaking
steps of his servant coming through the drawing-room brought him to
his senses. He made an effort at thought, and was aware that he was
on the floor; and seeing blood on the tiger-skin rug and on his
arm, he knew he had shot himself.
“Idiotic! Missed!” he said, fumbling after the
revolver. The revolver was close beside him—he sought further off.
Still feeling for it, he stretched out to the other side, and not
being strong enough to keep his balance, fell over, streaming with
blood.
The elegant, whiskered manservant, who used to be
continually complaining to his acquaintances of the delicacy of his
nerves, was so panic-stricken on seeing his master lying on the
floor, that he left him losing blood while he ran for assistance.
An hour later Varya, his brother’s wife, had arrived, and with the
assistance of three doctors, whom she had sent for in all
directions, and who all appeared at the same moment, she got the
wounded man to bed, and remained to nurse him.