"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 then," she said softly, addressing
Mihail. She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart's
beating hindered her breathing. "No, I won't let you 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
station-master coming up asked her whether she was going by
train. A boy selling kvas 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 luggage 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 tank 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 trying 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 carriage
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
moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. 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
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 carriage. 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 carriage, and lightly, as
though she would rise again at once, dropped on to 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 backwards; but something huge and merciless
struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. "Lord,
forgive me all!" she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A
peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her.
And the light by which she had read 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, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.