Chapter XXX
The raging tempest rushed whistling between
the wheels of the carriages, about the scaffolding, and round the
corner of the station. The carriages, posts, people, everything
that was to be seen was covered with snow on one side, and was
getting more and more thickly covered. For a moment there would
come a lull in the storm, but then it would swoop down again with
such onslaughts that it seemed impossible to stand against it.
Meanwhile men ran to and fro, talking merrily together, their steps
crackling on the platform as they continually opened and closed the
big doors. The bent shadow of a man glided by at her feet, and she
heard sounds of a hammer upon iron. “Hand over that telegram!” came
an angry voice out of the stormy darkness on the other side. “This
way! No. 28!” several different voices shouted again, and muffled
figures ran by covered with snow. Two gentlemen with lighted
cigarettes passed by her. She drew one more deep breath of the
fresh air, and had just put her hand out of her muff to take hold
of the door-post and get back into the carriage, when another man
in a military overcoat, quite close beside her, stepped between her
and the flickering light of the lamp-post. She looked round, and
the same instant recognized Vronsky’s face. Putting his hand to the
peak of his cap, he bowed to her and asked, Was there anything she
wanted? Could he be of any service to her? She gazed rather a long
while at him without answering, and, in spite of the shadow in
which he was standing, she saw, or fancied she saw, both the
expression of his face and his eyes. It was again that expression
of reverential ecstasy which had so worked upon her the day before.
More than once she had told herself during the past few days, and
again only a few moments before, that Vronsky was for her only one
of the hundreds of young men, forever exactly the same, that are
met everywhere, that she would never allow herself to bestow a
thought upon him. But now at the first instant of meeting him, she
was seized by a feeling of joyful pride. She had no need to ask why
he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he
was here to be where she was.
“I didn’t know you were going. What are you coming
for?” she said, letting fall the hand with which she had grasped
the door-post. And irrepressible delight and eagerness shone in her
face.
“What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking
straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you
are,” he said; “I can’t help it.”
At that moment the wind, as it were, surmounting
all obstacles, sent the snow flying from the carriage roofs, and
clanked some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the hoarse
whistle of the engine roared in front, plaintively and gloomily.
All the awfulness of the storm seemed to her more splendid now. He
had said what her soul longed to hear, though she feared it with
her reason. She made no answer, and in her face he saw
conflict.
“Forgive me, if you dislike what I said,” he said
humbly.
He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so
firmly, so stubbornly, that for a long while she could make no
answer.
“It’s wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you’re
a good man, to forget what you’ve said, as I forget it,” she said
at last.
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I,
could I, ever forget. . . .”
“Enough, enough!” she cried, trying assiduously to
give a stern expression to her face, into which he was gazing
greedily. And clutching at the cold door-post, she clambered up the
steps and got rapidly into the corridor of the carriage. But in the
little corridor she paused, going over in her imagination what had
happened. Though she could not recall her own words or his, she
realized instinctively that that momentary conversation had brought
them fearfully closer; and she was panic-stricken and blissful at
it. After standing still a few seconds, she went into the carriage
and sat down in her place. The overstrained condition which had
tormented her before did not only come back, but was intensified,
and reached such a pitch that she was afraid every minute that
something would snap within her from the excessive tension. She did
not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and in the
visions that filled her imagination, there was nothing disagreeable
or gloomy: on the contrary there was something blissful, glowing,
and exhilarating. Towards morning Anna sank into a doze, sitting in
her place, and when she waked it was daylight and the train was
near Petersburg. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son,
and the details of that day and the following came upon her.
At Petersburg, as soon as the train stopped and she
got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her
husband. “Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?” she thought,
looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears
that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round
hat. Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips falling
into their habitual sarcastic smile, and his big, tired eyes
looking straight at her. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her
heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she
had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the
feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on
meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a
consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations
with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the
feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.
“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as
the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,”
he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone
which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at any one
who should say in earnest what he said.
“Is Seryozha quite well?” she asked.
“And is this all the reward,” said he, “for my
ardor? He’s quite well....”