Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 18
ing 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 barrel,
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
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