He got up, and sobs cut short his words. Vronsky too was getting up, and in a stooping, not yet erect posture, looked up at him from under his brows. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich’s feeling, but he felt that it was something higher and even unattainable for him with his view of life.
The Face was silent, but not vanquished. It dwelled in hidden chambers, biding its time, analyzing opportunities. Waiting.
CHAPTER 10
ON GETTING HOME, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without undressing, lay down flat on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying his head on them. His head was heavy.
“To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the serene confidence of a healthy man who, if he is tired and sleepy, will go to sleep at once. And the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he began to drop off into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness had begun to meet over his head, when all at once-it was as though a violent shock of electricity had passed over him. He started so that he leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a panic onto his knees. His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep. The heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had suddenly gone.
“You can trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexei Alexandrovich’s words and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna’s face with its burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not at him but at Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own, as he fancied, foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexei Alexandrovich had mysteriously pulled his hands away from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung himself on the sofa in the same position and shut his eyes.
“To sleep! To forget!” he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut he saw more distinctly than ever Anna’s face as it had been on the memorable evening before the Cull.
“That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? How can we be reconciled?” he said aloud, and unconsciously began to repeat these words. This repetition checked the rising up of fresh images and memories, which he felt were thronging in his brain. Not Memories, but memories-he remembered as a child remembers. Again in extraordinarily rapid succession his best moments rose before his mind, and then his recent humiliation. “Take away his hands,” Anna’s voice said. He felt the strange force remove the hands from his face, and felt the shame-stricken and idiotic expression of his face. He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He listened, and heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: “I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it.”
“What’s this? Am I going out of my mind?” he said quietly to Lupo, who shook his thickly whiskered head unit in an energetic no.
“What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men shoot themselves?”
Lupo growled with worry; his mechanical tail stood straight back; the hair bristled up and down the ladder of his spine.
“No, I must sleep!” Vronsky moved the cushion up, and pressed his head into it, but he had to make an effort to keep his eyes shut. He jumped up. “That’s all over for me,” he said, pacing, Lupo pacing behind him. “I must think what to do. What is left?”
His mind rapidly ran through his life apart from his love of Anna. “The regiment? The court? Destroying koschei?” He could not come to a pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now there was no reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat, undid his belt, and uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more freely, walked up and down the room. “This is how people go mad,” he repeated, “and how they shoot themselves… to escape humiliation,” he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched teeth he approached his full-length mirror, and unholstered his twin smokers. For two minutes, his head bent forward with an expression of an intense effort of thought, he stood with the smokers in his hand, motionless, thinking.
“Of course,” he announced at last-as though a logical, continuous, and clear chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion. In reality this “of course,” which seemed convincing to him, was simply the result of exactly the same circle of memories and images through which he had passed ten times already during the last hour-memories of happiness lost forever. There was the same conception of the senselessness of everything to come in life, the same consciousness of humiliation. Even the sequence of these images and emotions was the same.
“Of course,” he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed again round the same spellbound circle of memories and images. With a minute and yet decisive flick of his thumbs he sent the smokers to life, and felt the pleasant, familiar sensations of their barrels glowing in his palms.
Lupo began to protest, barking madly-“Yelpyelpyelp!”-charging in circles at the foot of his master; with the unseeing determination of the sleepwalker, Vronsky crouched down on his knees and flicked the mighty wolf into Surcease. Lupo was stopped in mid-motion, a forepaw raised in desperation, a gleaming silver statue of unavailing loyalty.
Pulling one of the smokers to the left side of his chest, and clutching it vigorously with his whole hand, as it were, squeezing it in his fist, he pulled the trigger. He did not hear the hot zap of the shot, but a violent blow on his chest sent him reeling.
He tried to clutch at the edge of the table, dropped the smokers, staggered, and sat down on the ground, looking about him in astonishment. The groznium plating of his uniform had of course absorbed 80 or more percent of the blast, exactly as it was designed to do. “Idiotic!” he cried.
Meanwhile, the 20 percent of unabsorbed smoker blast was ricocheting wildly around the room.
He heard the sound of the subsequent explosion, as the smoker stream landed in the worst possible place: the trunk of munitions in the opposite corner of the room. The Disrupter, its feather trigger activated by the force of the smoker stream, exploded to life, and the whole room began to shake violently; next the six-load of glowbombs erupted one after the other, a string of deafening, concussive explosions. Vronsky clutched at his forehead and ducked under the settee, grasping with desperate fingers for Lupo, exposed in the center of the room, helpless in Surcease.
He cowered there, his chest throbbing, covering his beloved-companion with his body, until the firestorm abated. When Vronsky looked up from the floor, he could barely recognize his room: the bent legs of the table, the wastepaper basket, and the tiger-skin rug, all of it a smoking ruin. He breathed with difficulty through scorched lungs, stumbled for the exit, smelled the terrible odor of his own singed hair and skin.
“I’ve got you, old friend,” he muttered raggedly to Lupo, shielding his eyes against the smoke with one hand while with the other he flicked his beloved-companion back to life.
“I’ve got you.”
CHAPTER 11
THE MISTAKE MADE by Alexei Alexandrovich-that, when preparing to see his wife, he had overlooked the possibility that her repentance might be sincere, and he might forgive her, and she might not die-this mistake was, two months after his return from Moscow, brought home to him in all its significance. But the mistake made by him had arisen not simply from his having overlooked that contingency, but also from the fact that until that day of his interview with his dying wife, he had not known his own heart. At his sick wife’s bedside he had for the first time in his life given way to that feeling of sympathetic suffering always roused in him by the sufferings of others, and hitherto looked on by him with shame as a harmful weakness. And pity for her, and remorse for having desired her death, and most of all, the joy of forgiveness made him at once conscious, not simply of the relief of his own sufferings, but of a spiritual peace he had never experienced before. In the profound silence of the Face’s unexpected disappearance, he suddenly felt that the very thing that was the source of his sufferings had become the source of his spiritual joy; that what had seemed insoluble while he was judging, blaming, and hating had become clear and simple when he forgave and loved.