‘I beg you to hear me out, it’s necessary. I must explain my feelings to you, those that have guided me and those that will guide me, so that you will not be mistaken regarding me. You know that I had decided on a divorce and had even started proceedings. I won’t conceal from you that, when I started proceedings, I was undecided, I suffered; I confess that I was driven by a desire for revenge on you and on her. When I received her telegram, I came here with the same feelings - I will say more: I wished for her death. But ...’ he paused, pondering whether to reveal his feelings to him or not. ‘But I saw her and I forgave. And the happiness of forgiveness revealed my duty to me. I forgave her completely. I want to turn the other cheek, I want to give my shirt when my caftan is taken, and I only pray to God that He not take from me the happiness of forgiveness!’ Tears welled up in his eyes, and their luminous, serene look struck Vronsky. ‘That is my position. You may trample me in the mud, make me the laughing-stock of society, I will not abandon her, I will never say a word of reproach to you,’ he went on. ‘My duty is clearly ordained for me: I must be with her and I will be. If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose it will be better if you leave.’
He stood up, and sobs broke off his speech. Vronsky also got up and in a stooping, unstraightened_ posture looked at him from under his brows. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich’s feelings. But he felt that this was something lofty and even inaccessible to him in his world-view.
XVIII
After his conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky went out to the porch of the Karenins’ house and stopped, hardly remembering where he was and where he had to go or drive. He felt himself shamed, humiliated, guilty and deprived of any possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt himself thrown out of the rut he had been following so proudly and easily till then. All the habits and rules of his life, which had seemed so firm, suddenly turned out to be false and inapplicable. The deceived husband, who till then had seemed a pathetic being, an accidental and somewhat comic hindrance to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her and raised to an awesome height, and on that height the husband appeared not wicked, not false, not ludicrous, but kind, simple and majestic. Vronsky could not but feel it. The roles had been suddenly changed. Vronsky felt Karenin’s loftiness and his own abasement, Karenin’s rightness and his own wrongness. He felt that the husband had been magnanimous even in his grief, while he had been mean and petty in his deceit. But this realization of his meanness before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of his grief. He felt himself inexpressibly unhappy now, because his passion for Anna, which had been cooling, as it had seemed to him, in recent days, now, when he knew he had lost her for ever, had become stronger than it had ever been. He had seen the whole of her during her illness, had come to know her soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her before then. And now, when he had come to know her, to love her as he ought to have loved her, he had been humiliated before her and had lost her for ever, leaving her with nothing but a disgraceful memory of himself. Most terrible of all had been his ridiculous, shameful position when Alexei Alexandrovich tore his hands from his ashamed face. He stood on the porch of the Karenins’ house like a lost man and did not know what to do.
‘Shall I call a cab?’ asked the porter.
‘A cab, yes.’
Returning home after three sleepless nights, Vronsky lay face down on the sofa without undressing, his arms folded and his head resting on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories and the strangest thoughts followed one another with extreme rapidity and clarity: now it was the medicine he had poured for the sick woman, overfilling the spoon, now the midwife’s white arms, now Alexei Alexandrovich’s strange position on the floor beside the bed.
‘Sleep! Forget!’ he said to himself, with the calm certainty of a healthy man that, if he was tired and wanted to sleep, he would fall asleep at once. And indeed at that moment there was confusion in his head, and he began to fall into the abyss of oblivion. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness were already beginning to close over his head when suddenly - as if a strong electric shock was discharged in him - he gave such a start that his whole body jumped on the springs of the sofa and, propping himself with his arms, he got to his knees. His eyes were wide open, as if he had never slept. The heaviness of head and sluggishness of limb that he had experienced a moment before suddenly vanished.
