Chapter 5
SHE HAD RISEN to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him.
“You will excuse me for being ill at ease,” Anna began. “I neither look nor feel myself since I have lost the company of my beloved-companion, Android Karenina.”
Levin smiled with pleasure at her unexpected forthrightness: how refreshing to hear someone speak openly of the great collective loss the Russian people had suffered.
“I am delighted, delighted,” she went on, and upon her lips these simple words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva and for your wife’s sake. . . . I knew her for a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!”
She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood.
“I am settled in Alexei’s study,” she said in answer to Stepan Arkadyich’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as to be able to smoke”—and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a I/CigarCase/6 and activated herself a cigarette.
“Enjoy such luxury while you can, Anna,” her brother said. “Class Ones are now added to the list.”
“You jest!”
“Alas, I do not. Ours were junkered only hours ago at the club, by one of those lifelike friends of ours.”
Anna gritted her teeth, as if to say, I shall accept the New Russia—indeed I must—but I cannot be forced to like it.
Yes, yes, this is a woman! Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment before in its repose—suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting something.
And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. She sighed, and her face suddenly took a hard expression, looking as if it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors, and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.
In the next moment, this wonderment translated itself into action. When Stiva went out of the room a few steps ahead of Levin, before he could stop to think, he stopped at the doorframe, turned back to Anna, and whispered, urgently and impetuously: “Rearguard.”
Neither smiling nor frowning, she leaned slightly forward in her chair and replied: “Action.”
They both stared at the other for a long moment.
“Well, good-bye,” Anna said at last, rising to take his hand and glancing into his face with a winning look. “I am very glad que la glace est rompue.”
She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.
“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.”
“Certainly, yes, I will tell her. . . .” Levin said, blushing. “And . . . but . . .”
“Goodnight,” said Anna Arkadyevna with finality.