Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/1017

Rh she knew then what was left for her to do. With light and swift steps she descended the stairway which led from the water-tank at the end of the platform down to the rails, and stood very near the train, which was slowly passing by. She looked under the cars, at the chains and the brake, and at the high iron wheels of the first car, and she tried to estimate with her eye the distance between the fore and back wheels, and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.

"There," she said, looking at the shadow of the car thrown upon the black coal-dust which covered the sleepers," there, in the center; he will be punished, and I shall be delivered from it all .... and from myself."

She was going to throw herself under the first car as its center came opposite where she stood. Her little red traveling-bag caused her to lose the moment; she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul a whole series of memories of her youth and childhood; and suddenly the darkness which hid everything from her was torn asunder. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her. But she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the center, between the two wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. For a second she was horror-struck at what she was doing.

"Where am I? What am I doing? Why?"

She tried to get up, to draw back; but something monstrous, inflexible, struck her head, and threw her on her back.

"Lord, forgive me all!" she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain.

A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.

And the candle by which she had read the book