Chapter 6
WELL, DIDN’T I TELL YOU?” said Stepan Arkadyich, seeing that Levin had been completely won over.
“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, his mind racing with thoughts of Anna Karenina and the Golden Hope. “An extraordinary woman! It’s not her cleverness, but she has such depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her!”
“Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be hard on people in the future,” said Stepan Arkadyich, opening the carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”
Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin traveled home.
All the way there, he reeled with excitement, and in particular with anticipation of sharing with Kitty what he had learned: that Anna Karenina, despite the abandonment of Vozdvizhenskoe and the junker army, despite their return to Moscow and the petition to Karenin, remained in her heart a partisan.
What Levin did not know, what he could not know, was that Vronsky had never told Anna Karenina the code words. On returning home from the Huntshed, he had given her the barest outline of his meeting with Federov, but then they had passed into argument, and from there to reconciliation, and that reconciliation had led them back to Moscow.
Never had he told her of Federov’s dying exhortation; never had he mentioned the words rearguard or action at all.
Somehow, Anna knew the words anyway.
* * *
At home their new servant, a man named Kouzma, told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and then handed him a neatly folded piece of paper. This was a “letter,” an old-fashioned means of information transmission in which the correspondent commits his thoughts to paper with pen and ink—along with “books” and “newspapers,” it had come back into vogue since the disappearance of monitor-and-communiqué technology. Levin read the letter at once in the hall, and found it was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the latest gleanings from the pit were faulty, that it was fetching only five and a half rubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. Levin scowled. He had been forced, like all other groznium miners, to hire human beings to administer his land in his absence, and they were terrible at it.
Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.
“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.
“First, as for Vronsky, I fear your assessment was correct: he has decidedly gone to the other side. Still, I do not think he intends to turn us in. For now, anyway, I think we are safe.”
“Well, and then where did you go?”
“Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.”
And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once and for all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.
Kitty’s eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna’s name, but controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and deceived him.
“Oh!” was all she said.
“I’m sure you won’t be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and Dolly wished it,” Levin went on.
“Oh, no!” she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded him no good.
“She is a very sweet, very, very unhappy, good woman,” he said. “And—Kitty—there is more!”
Again, she said, “Oh?”
“Anna Karenina, unlike Vronsky, remains one of us! She responded to the code word immediately and appropriately. I am convinced that she holds our views on the necessary changes that must come to society. Think how useful she could be. . . .”
But Kitty hardly responded as Levin had anticipated.
“Yes, of course, her involvement is very much to be celebrated,” said Kitty coldly, when he had finished. “Whom was your letter from?”
Disappointed that his co-conspirator should take such little interest in his exciting discovery of Anna’s allegiances, he told her about the letter from Sokolov. Then, believing in her calm tone, he went to change his coat.
Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went up to her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.
“What? What is it?” he asked, knowing beforehand what.
“You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were drinking at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went . . . to her of all people! No, we must go away. . . . I shall go away tomorrow.”
It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity, in conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for him, that he had succumbed to Anna’s artful influence, and that he would avoid her. One thing he did confess to with more sincerity was that by living so long in Moscow, leading a life of nothing but conversation, eating, and drinking, he was degenerating. And in the meantime, he was hardly progressing in his efforts on behalf of the Golden Hope. If anything, telling Kitty of his one significant advance in that goal acted to dampen his wife’s zeal for the enterprise. She now seemed to feel that if resistance meant alliance with Anna Karenina, it might be best to abandon their resistance.
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.