`Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if he's not there, then go there and catch him.' Anna looked at the railway timetable in the newspapers. An evening train went at two minutes past eight. `Yes, I shall be in time.' She gave orders for the other horses to be put in the carriage, and packed in a traveling bag the things needed for a few days. She knew she would never come back here again.
Among the plans that came into her head she vaguely determined that after what would happen at the station or at the Countess's house, she would go as far as the first town on the Nizhny-Novgorod railway and stop there.
Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She ordered the carriage and went out. The house threw a shadow now right across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in the sunshine.
Annushka, who came down with her things, and Piotr, who put the things in the carriage, and the coachman, evidently out of humor, were all hateful to her, and irritated her by their words and actions.
`I don't want you, Piotr.'
`But how about the ticket?'
`Well, as you like, it doesn't matter,' she said crossly.
Piotr jumped on the box, and putting his arms akimbo, told the coachman to drive to the station.
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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 7, Chapter 30[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 30 `Here it is again! Again I understand it all!' Anna said to herself, as soon as the carriage had started and swaying lightly, rumbled over the small cobbles of the paved road, and again one impression followed rapidly upon another.
`Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly?' she tried to recall. `Tiutkin, coiffeur? - No, not that. Yes, of what Iashvin says, the struggle for existence and hatred is all that holds men together. No, it's a useless journey you're ******,' she said, mentally addressing a party in a coach and four, evidently going for an excursion into the country.
`And the dog you're taking with you will be no help to you. You can't get away from yourselves.' Turning her eyes in the direction Piotr had turned to look, she saw a factory hand almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman. `Come, he's found a quicker way,' she thought.
`Count Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.' And now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she was seeing everything on her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. `What was it he sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity.' She remembered his words, the expression of his face, that recalled a submissive setter dog, in the early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this. `Yes, there was the triumph of vanity in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that's over. There's nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He has taken from me all he could, and now I am no use to him. He is weary of me and is trying not to be dishonorable in his behavior to me.
He let that out yesterday - he wants divorce and marriage so as to burn his ships. He loves me, but how? The zest is gone, as the English say.
That fellow wants everyone to admire him and is very much pleased with himself,' she thought, looking at a red-faced clerk, riding on a riding-school horse. `Yes, there's not the same zest about me for him now. If I go away from him, at the bottom of his heart he will be glad.'
This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing light which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human relations.
`My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is waning and waning, and that's why we're drifting apart.' She went on musing. `And there's no help for it. He is everything for me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. Precisely: we went to meet one another up to the time of our liaison, and since then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there's no altering that. He tells me I'm insanely jealous, and I have told myself that I am insanely jealous; but it's not true. I'm not jealous, but I'm unsatisfied. But...' she opened her lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. `If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can't, and I don't care to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different. Don't I know that he wouldn't deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokina, that he's not in love with Kitty, that he won't desert me! I know all that, but it makes it no better for me. If without loving me, from duty, he'll be good and kind to me, without what 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, apparently, and still houses, and houses....