As she was going to the big clock to check her watch, someone drove up. Looking out of the window, she saw his carriage. But no one came up the stairs and voices could be heard below. This was the messenger, who had come back in the carriage. She went down to him.
‘I didn’t find the count. He left for the Nizhni Novgorod railway.’
‘What are you doing? What ...’ she said to the merry, red-cheeked Mikhaila, who was handing her note back to her.
‘Ah, yes, he didn’t get it,’ she remembered.
‘Take this note to Countess Vronsky’s country estate. You know it? And bring an answer at once,’ she said to the messenger.
‘And I, what shall I do?’ she thought. ‘Ah, I’m going to Dolly’s, that’s right, otherwise I’ll go out of my mind. Ah, I can also send a telegram.’ And she wrote a telegram:
Having sent the telegram, she went to get dressed. Dressed and with her hat on, she again looked into the eyes of the plump, placid Annushka. Obvious compassion could be seen in those small, kind, grey eyes.
‘Annushka, dear, what am I to do?’ Anna said, sobbing, as she sank helplessly into an armchair.
‘Why worry so, Anna Arkadyevna! It happens. You go and take your mind off it,’ said the maid.
‘Yes, I’ll go,’ said Anna, recollecting herself and getting up. ‘And if a telegram comes while I’m gone, send it to Darya Alexandrovna’s ... No, I’ll come back myself.
‘Yes, I mustn’t think, I must do something, go out, first of all-leave this house,’ she said, listening with horror to the terrible turmoil in her heart, and she hurriedly went out and got into the carriage.
‘Where to, ma’am?’ asked Pyotr, before climbing up on the box.
‘To Znamenka, to the Oblonskys’.
XXVIII
The weather was clear. All morning there had been a fine, light drizzle, but now it had cleared up. The iron roofs, the flagstones of the pavements, the cobbles of the roadway, the wheels and leather, copper and tin of the carriages - everything glistened brightly in the May sun. It was three o‘clock and the liveliest time in the streets.
Sitting in the corner of the comfortable carriage, barely rocking on its resilient springs to the quick pace of the greys, again going over the events of the last few days, under the incessant clatter of the wheels and the quickly changing impressions of the open air, Anna saw her situation quite differently from the way it had seemed to her at home. Now the thought of death no longer seemed to her so terrible and clear, and death itself no longer appeared inevitable. Now she reproached herself for stooping to such humiliation. ‘I begged him to forgive me. I submitted to him. I acknowledged myself guilty. Why? Can’t I live without him?’ And, not answering the question of how she would live without him, she began reading the signboards. ‘Office and Warehouse. Dentist. Yes, I’ll tell Dolly everything. She doesn’t like Vronsky. It will be shameful, painful, but I’ll tell her everything. She loves me, and I’ll follow her advice. I won’t submit to him; I won’t allow him to teach me. Filippov, Baker. They say he also sells his dough in Petersburg. Moscow water is so good. The Mytishchi springs and the pancakes.’ And she remembered how long, long ago, when she was just seventeen years old, she had gone with her aunt to the Trinity Monastery.26 ‘One still went by carriage. Was that really me with the red hands? How much of what then seemed so wonderful and unattainable has become insignificant, and what there was then is now for ever unattainable. Would I have believed then that I could come to such humiliation? How proud and pleased he’ll be when he gets my note! But I’ll prove to him ... How bad that paint smells. Why are they always painting and building? Fashions and Attire,’ she read. A man bowed to her. It was Annushka’s husband. ‘Our parasites,’ she remembered Vronsky saying. ‘Ours? Why ours? The terrible thing is that it’s impossible to tear the past out by the roots. Impossible to tear it out, but possible to hide the memory of it. And I will hide it.’ Here she remembered her past with Alexei Alexandrovich and how she had wiped him from her memory. ‘Dolly will think I’m leaving a second husband and so I’m probably in the wrong. As if I want to be right! I can’t be!’ she said, and wanted to cry. But she at once began thinking what those two young girls could be smiling at. ‘Love, probably? They don’t know how joyless it is, how low ... A boulevard and children. Three boys running, playing horses. Seryozha! And I’ll lose everything and not get him back. Yes, I’ll lose everything if he doesn’t come back. Maybe he was late for the train and is back by now. Again you want humiliation!’ she said to herself. ‘No, I’ll go to Dolly and tell her straight out: I’m unhappy, I deserve it, I’m to blame, but even so I’m unhappy, help me. These horses, this carriage - how loathsome I am to myself in this carriage - it’s all his. But I won’t see them any more.’
