XVIII.

After the conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky went out on 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 grand. Vronsky could not but feel this, and the roles were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt the other’s elevation and his own abasement, the other’s 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 Alexei Alexandrovich 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 hack, sir?” asked the porter.

“Yes — a hack.”

On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without undressing, lay prone 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 spilled out of the spoon; then the midwife’s white hands; then the queer posture of Alexei Alexandrovich 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 seemed 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 on his knees in a fright. His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep. The heaviness in his head and the flabbiness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had suddenly gone.

“You may trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexei Alexandrovich’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 Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexei Alexandrovich had taken 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 sleep!” 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.

“This cannot, 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 of words checked the rising 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 was saying. He takes away his hands and feels the shame-struck and idiotic expression of his face.

He was still lying 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 words repeated in a strange, mad whisper: “You did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it. You 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 Varia, his brother’s wife. He touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to think of Varia, 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? Serpukhovskoy? 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, and then with fixed eyes and clenched teeth he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked it about, 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,” so convincing to him, was simply the result of repeating exactly the same circle of memories and images through which he had already passed ten times during the last hour. There were the same memories of happiness lost forever, the same conception of the senselessness of everything to come in life, the same consciousness of humiliation. There was the same sequence of these images and emotions too.

“Of course,” he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed again round the same spellbound circle of memories and images, and, putting the revolver to the left side of his chest, and twitching vigorously with his whole hand, as though 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 knocked him down. 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, as he looked up from the ground at the bent legs of the table, at the wastepaper basket, and the tigerskin 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 tigerskin 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 was groping farther off. Still groping 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 Varia, 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.