Android Karenina (61 page)

They talked till three o’clock in the morning, and as the hours passed the thrill he had felt about Anna, about the resistance and the Golden Hope, steadily dimmed in his breast. Only at three o’clock were they sufficiently reconciled to be able to go to sleep.

A
FTER TAKING LEAVE
of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. Oh, how she missed her dear Android Karenina at such times as these, when her mind was unsettled, her soul aflutter, her thoughts muddy and indistinct. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both.

But what had he meant by that strange word he spoke so urgently, and how had she known how to respond to it? Her response, her understanding, had clearly resonated with him. Somehow she had known the exact right thing to say—but how? How had she known?

As one troubling thought departed another arrived, like Gravs at a station. This one was connected to Vronsky, and Anna’s growing sense of the dislocation between them.
If I have so much effect on others, on this Levin, who loves his home and his wife, why is it
he
is so cold to me? . . . not cold exactly, he loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us apart now. Here we sit in Moscow, waiting to hear of our fate. Soon we shall be proper members of this new Russian society. So why is he not here? Why wasn’t he here all the evening?

She heard Vronsky’s abrupt chime at the door and hurriedly dried her tears, and affected composure. She wanted to show him that she was
displeased that he had not come home as he had promised—displeased only, and not on any account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.

“Well, you’ve not been dull?” he said, eagerly and good-humoredly. “You will hardly believe it, but they have smashed up all the Class Ones! All will be gone within the week. I think your husband and his compatriots mean to drain every vestige of technology from the nation—next they’ll have the Tsars back, and Russia will end up as some sort of vast agrarian monarchy, complete with horse races and peasants threshing wheat.”

He laughed, but Anna remained composed.

“Stiva has been here and Levin.”

“Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?” he said, sitting down beside her.

“Very much.”

Anna did not mention the puzzling business with the code words. Instead she changed the subject, inquiring after Vronsky’s louche friend, Yashvin.

“He was winning—seventeen thousand, when the Toy Soldiers showed up and vaporized the tables. Some others were planning to make do with hand-carved dice, I don’t know who found them or where, when at last I got Yashvin away. He had really started home, but he went back again, and now he’s losing.”

“So what did you stay for?” she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes to him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. “You told Stiva you were staying on to get Yashvin away. And you have left him there.”

The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on his face too.

“In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message; and secondly, I never tell lies. But what’s the chief point, I wanted to stay, and I stayed,” he said, frowning. “Anna, what is it for, why?” he said after
a moment’s silence, bending over toward her, and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.

She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings; it was as though the tactics of combat they had studied together at Vozdvizhenskoe were now being turned upon one another.

“Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?” she said, getting more and more excited. “Does anyone contest your rights? But you want to be right, and you’re welcome to be right.”

His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more obstinate expression.

“For you it’s a matter of obstinacy,” she said, watching him intently and suddenly finding the right word for that expression that irritated her, “simply obstinacy. For you it’s a question of whether you keep the upper hand of me, while for me . . .” Again she felt sorry for herself, and she almost burst into tears. “If you knew what it is for me! When I feel as I do now that you are hostile, yes, hostile to me, if you knew what this means for me! If you knew how I feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how afraid I am of myself!” And she turned away, hiding her sobs.

“But what are you talking about?” he said, horrified at her expression of despair, and again bending over her, he took her hand and kissed it. “What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home? Don’t I avoid the society of women?”

“Well, yes! If that were all!” she said.

“Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am ready to do anything to make you happy,” he said, touched by her expression of despair. “What wouldn’t I do to save you from distress of any sort, as now, Anna!” he said.

“It’s nothing, nothing!” she said. “I don’t know myself whether it’s the solitary life, my nerves . . . . Come, don’t let us talk of it.” She
spoke in a conciliatory manner now, imploring that he tell her more about the Toy Soldiers and the Class Is. They marveled together at the changes overtaking society, asked each other how long it would take before the Ministry would makes its decision about them. Neither spoke the name Alexei Alexandrovich, though both knew it was he in particular, and not the Higher Branches in general, who would make this decision.

They talked this way, as if both stood in the same corner of the world, facing their uncertain fate together. But in his tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that he did not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of obstinacy with which she had been struggling had asserted itself again in him. He was colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his surrender. And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some
evil spirit of strife,
which she could not exorcise from his—and still less from her own—heart.

She thought of the abandoned farmhouse, the proud hand-sewn standards of Vozdvizhenskoe, and all she had left behind her.

What have I done?
Anna thought, looking wearily at Alexei Kirillovich.
What have I traded for a love affair, which proves to be nothing more than an illusion?

T
HERE ARE NO CONDITIONS
to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in
the same way. Levin could not have believed three months before that he could have gone quietly to sleep in the condition in which he was that day; that leading an aimless, irrational life, living too beyond his means, after drinking to excess (he could not call what happened at the club anything else), making an inappropriate call upon a woman who could only be called a lost woman, after being fascinated by that woman and causing his wife distress—he could still go quietly to sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a sleepless night, and the wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and untroubled.

At five o’clock the creak of a door opening woke him. He jumped up and looked round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was a light moving behind the screen, and he heard her steps.

“What is it? . . . What is it?” he said, half asleep. “Kitty! What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle in her hand. “I felt unwell,” she said, smiling a particularly sweet and meaningful smile.

“What? Has it begun?” he said in terror. “We ought to send . . . ,” and hurriedly he reached after his clothes.

“No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.”

And getting into bed, she blew out the candle—which the new servant had found in a box in the attic, after a Toy Soldier collected the
lumières
—lay down and was still. Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind the screen, she had said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he fell asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart while she lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She seemed to be struggling between regret at waking him and the desire to talk to him.

“Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy . . . we ought to send for the doctor.”

The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days.

“Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,” she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom and then to her lips.

He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her, as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her. He had to go, but he could not tear himself from her eyes. He thought he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to himself, thinking of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed with soft, curling hair under her nightcap, was radiant with joy and courage.

Though there was so little that was complex or artificial in Kitty’s character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed now, when suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel of her soul shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul, she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than ever. She looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows twitched, she threw up her head, and going quickly up to him, clutched his hand and pressed close up to him, breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And for the first minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her eyes there was a tenderness that told him that she was far from reproaching him, that she loved him for her sufferings.
If not I, who is to blame for it?
he thought, without even noticing that he was thinking instead of speaking; though thoughts of such importance, touching on life and death, would always in the past have been uttered aloud to his beloved-companion. She was suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her sufferings, and rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that something sublime was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He could not make it out. It was
beyond his understanding.

“I have sent to Mamma. You go quickly to fetch the doctor . . . Kostya! . . . Nothing, it’s over. Well, go now. I am all right.”

And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting she had brought in during the night and begun working at it again. She was secure, serene, hardly even noticing that Tatiana was not with her. For so long Kitty and Levin had relied on their beloved-companions for support, but in this most human of situations, neither felt their absence.

He dressed, and after sending the new houseboy to prepare the horses—another new habit to get used to—Levin ran again up to the bedroom, not on tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Kitty was walking about knitting rapidly and giving directions to the servants.

“I’m going for the doctor.”

She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying.

“Yes, yes. Do go,” she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to him.

He had just gone into the drawing room, when suddenly a plaintive moan sounded from the bedroom, smothered instantly. He stood still, and for a long while he could not understand.

Yes, that is she,
he said to himself, and clutching at his head he ran downstairs.

The horses were not yet ready, so, feeling a peculiar concentration of his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he started off on foot without waiting.

T
HE DOCTOR WAS NOT
yet up, and the footman said that he had been up late, and had given orders not to be waked, but
would get up soon. The footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and making a proper mess of the job.

Levin waited impatiently in the street for the doctor, and finally decided that he could wait no longer, and would burst in on the man and wake him if he had to. He stormed back toward the doctor’s door—but was stopped by a fat little man in a tattered lab coat, who appeared in the shadows holding a small silver box. This man was not Federov, but looked much like him: the same tangled beard, the same beady eyes, the tattered lab coat.

“Rearguard,” the man said gravely.

“Action,” Levin responded immediately.

The man stepped fully from the shadows. “Konstantin Dmitrich, my name is Dmitriev.”

“I cannot speak to you now! I have urgent business this night!”

“Not so urgent as this,” the agent of UnConSciya replied. “Levin, the time has come.”