第325章

`I am very sorry your note did not reach me. I will be home at ten,' Vronsky had written carelessly.

`Yes, that's what I expected!' she said to herself with an evil smile.

`Very good, you can go home now,' she said softly, addressing Mikhail. She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart's beating hindered her breathing. `No, I won't let Thee make me miserable,' she thought menacingly, addressing not him, not herself, but the power that made her suffer, and she walked along the platform.

Two maidservants walking along the platform turned their heads, staring at her and making some remarks about her dress. `Real,' they said of the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in peace.

Again they passed by, peering into her face, and with a laugh shouting something in an unnatural voice. The stationmaster coming up asked her whether she was going by the train. A boy selling kvass never took his eyes off her. `My God! Where am I to go?' she thought, going farther and farther along the platform. At the end she stopped. Some ladies and children, who had come to meet a gentleman in spectacles, paused in their loud laughter and talking, and stared at her as she reached them. She quickened her pace and walked away from them to the edge of the platform. A goods train was coming in. The platform began to sway, and she fancied she was in the train again.

And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a rapid, light step she went down the steps that led from the platform to the rails and stopped quite near the approaching train. She looked at the lower part of the carriages, at the screws and chains, and the tall cast-iron wheel of the first carriage slowly moving up, and tried to measure the middle between the front and back wheels, and the very minute when that middle point would be opposite her.

`There,' she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage, at the sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers - `there, in the very middle, and I will punish him and escape from everyone and from myself.'

She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first car as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the middle of the car. She had to wait for the next one. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself.

That familiar gesture of crossing brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second car. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the car, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped onto her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. `Where am I? What am I doing? What for?' She tried to get up, to drop backward;but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and drew along on her back. `Lord, forgive me all!' she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant, muttering something, was working at the iron. And the candle by which she had been reading the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, sputtered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.