Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 30
I want, that’s a thousand times worse than unkindness! That’s–hell! And that’s just
how it is. For a long while now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins.
I don’t know these streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses ....
And in the houses always people and people.... How many of them, no end, and all
hating each other! Come, let me try and think what I want, to make me happy. Well?
Suppose I am divorced, and Alexey Alexandrovitch lets me have Seryozha, and I
marry Vronsky.” Thinking of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she at once pictured him with
extraordinary vividness as though he were alive before her, with his mild, lifeless,
dull eyes, the blue veins in his white hands, his intonations and the cracking of his
fingers, and remembering the feeling which had existed between them, and which
was also called love, she shuddered with loathing. “Well, I’m divorced, and become
Vronsky’s wife. Well, will Kitty cease looking at me as she looked at me today? No.
And will Seryozha leave off asking and wondering about my two husbands? And
is there any new feeling I can awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there possible, if
not happiness, some sort of ease from misery? No, no!” she answered now without
the slightest hesitation. “Impossible! We are drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness,
and he mine, and there’s no altering him or me. Every attempt has been
made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar woman with a baby. She thinks
I’m sorry for her. Aren’t we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so
to torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming–laughing Seryozha?” she
thought. “I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness.
But I have lived without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not
regret the exchange till that love was satisfied.” And with loathing she thought of
what she meant by that love. And the clearness with which she saw life now, her
own and all men’s, was a pleasure to her. “It’s so with me and Pyotr, and the coachman,
Fyodor, and that merchant, and all the people living along the Volga, where
those placards invite one to go, and everywhere and always,” she thought when she
had driven under the low-pitched roof of the Nizhigorod station, and the porters ran
to meet her.
“A ticket to Obiralovka?” said Pyotr.
She had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a great effort
she understood the question.
“Yes,” she said, handing him her purse, and taking a little red bag in her hand, she
got out of the carriage.
Making her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting-room, she gradually
recollected all the details of her position, and the plans between which she was hesitating.
And again at the old sore places, hope and then despair poisoned the wounds
of her tortured, fearfully throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa waiting
for the train, she gazed with aversion at the people coming and going (they were all
hateful to her), and thought how she would arrive at the station, would write him a
note, and what she would write to him, and how he was at this moment complaining
to his mother of his position, not understanding her sufferings, and how she would
go into the room, and what she would say to him. Then she thought that life might
still be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully her
heart was beating.
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