Chapter 9
IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK ALREADY, and so, in order to reach Anna quickly, and at the same time not to drive with his own carriage, known to everyone, Vronsky got into Yashvin’s hired fly, and ordered the II/Coachman/644 to drive as quickly as possible. It was a roomy, old-fashioned fly, with seats for four. He sat in one corner, stretched his legs out on the front seat, and sank into meditation.
I’m happy, very happy I he said to himself. He had often before had a sense of physical joy in his own body, but he had never felt so fond of himself, of his every sinew, as at that moment. He enjoyed the slight ache in his strong leg, an aftereffect of the catastrophe at the Cull, and he enjoyed the muscular sensation of movement in his chest as he breathed. The bright, cold August day, which had made Anna feel so hopeless, seemed to him keenly stimulating, and refreshed his face and neck, which still tingled from the cold water. The scent of brilliantine on his whiskers struck him as particularly pleasant in the fresh air. Everything he saw from the carriage window, everything in that cold, pure air, in the pale light of the sunset, was as fresh and cheery and strong as he was himself: the roofs of the houses shining in the rays of the setting sun, the strong Russian four-treads driven by gleaming groznium androids, the sharp outlines of fences and angles of buildings, the figures of passers-by, the motionless green of the trees and grass, the airships in their slow, majestic glide, the hydroponic greenhouses where grew the massive super-potatoes, each of which would feed a peasant family for a week—everything was bright like a pretty landscape just finished and freshly varnished.
“Get on, get on!” he said to the driver, putting his head out of the window, giving the Class II a light jolt with his hot-whip, and the carriage rolled rapidly along the smooth highroad.
“I want nothing, nothing but this happiness,” Vronsky declared to Lupo, who gave a happy woof of agreement before sticking his head out the carriage window to taste the wind.
“And as I go on,” Vronsky declared further, “I love her more and more. Ah, here’s the garden of the Vrede Villa”—where they had planned to meet. Whereabouts will she be? he wondered. How will she look?
He ordered the driver to stop before reaching the avenue, and, opening the door, jumped out of the carriage as it was moving, and went into the avenue that led up to the house. There was no one in the avenue; but looking round to the right he caught sight of her. Her face was hidden by a veil, but he drank in with glad eyes the special movement in walking, peculiar to her alone, the slope of the shoulders and the setting of the head, and at once a sort of electric shock ran all over him, as if someone had jolted him with a hot-whip. With fresh force, he felt conscious of himself, from the springy motions of his legs to the movements of his lungs as he breathed, and something set his lips twitching.
Joining him, she pressed his hand tightly.
“You’re not angry that I sent for you? I absolutely had to see you,” she said; and the serious and set line of her lips, which he saw under the veil, transformed his mood at once.
“I, angry?” he stammered, taken aback by her somber demeanor. “Of course not! But—how have you come, where from?”
“Never mind,” she said, laying her hand on his. “I must talk to you.”
She and Android Karenina were standing beneath a flowering tree, of a kind that Vronsky had never seen before, with large, overhanging emerald petals. The tree had an unfamiliar and vaguely foreboding appearance, which seemed in keeping with Anna’s expression. Vronsky saw clearly that something had happened, and that the rendezvous would not be a joyous one. For all the elation he had felt just a minute before, in her presence he had no will of his own: without knowing the grounds of her distress, he already felt the same distress unconsciously passing over him. He felt like a robot who’d had a burst of rainwater splashed violently behind its faceplate, shorting out his ability to reason and rendering him a useless, immobile hunk of man-shaped debris.
“What is it? What?” he asked her, squeezing her hand with his elbow, and trying to read her thoughts in her face.
She waited a few steps in silence, leaning against the trunk of the peculiar tree, gathering her courage; then suddenly she stopped.
“Yesterday,” she began, breathing quickly and painfully, “coming home with Alexei Alexandrovich I told him everything . . . told him I could not be his wife, that . . . and told him everything.”
He heard her, unconsciously bending his whole figure down to her as though hoping in this way to soften the hardness of her position for her. But as soon as she had said this he suddenly drew himself up, and a proud and hard expression came over his face.
“Yes, yes, that’s better, a thousand times better! I know how painful it was,” he said.
But she was not listening to his words; she was reading his thoughts from the expression of his face. She could not guess that that expression arose from the first idea that presented itself to Vronsky—that a duel was now inevitable. The idea of a duel had never crossed her mind, and so she put a different interpretation on this passing expression of hardness.
For Anna, when she got her husband’s communiqué, she knew at the bottom of her heart that everything would go on in the old way, that she would not have the strength of will to forego her position, to abandon her son, and to join her lover. But this talk with Vronsky was still of the utmost gravity for her. She had hoped that their conversation would transform her position, and save her. If on hearing this news he were to say to her resolutely, passionately, without an instant’s wavering: “Throw up everything and come with me!” she would give up her son and go away with him. But her news had not produced what she had expected in him; he simply seemed as though he were resenting some affront.
“It was not in the least painful to me. It happened of itself,” she said irritably, “and see . . . “With a brusque gesture, she directed Android Karenina to play the communiqué for Vronsky.
“I understand, I understand,” he interrupted her, ignoring the android’s display, not hearing Anna’s words, only trying to in vain to soothe her. As he held her in his arms he happened to glance above her head, and observed that one of the unusual tree’s emerald flowers had suddenly blossomed—at least, the flower was open, and he was certain, or thought he was certain, that only a moment ago it had been quite shut.
“Anna,” he began, but then drew silent, staring at the curious tree as it grew more curious still: A thin film had emerged from within the bell of the flower, and it descended slowly, pouring down over the sides, as if a child with a Class I toy were inside the plant, blowing a bubble.
Anna scowled at his distraction, and he shook his head and focused his eyes upon her. “The one thing I longed for,” he continued, “the one thing I prayed for, was to cut short this position, so as to devote my life to your happiness.”
“Why do you tell me that?” she said. “Do you suppose I can doubt it? If I doubted—”
A sudden noise made Vronsky start. “Who’s that coming?” he asked, pointing to two ladies walking toward them. “Perhaps they know us!” He abruptly took a step backward into the foliage.
“Oh, I don’t care!” Anna said, turning away from him. Her lips were quivering. And he fancied that her eyes looked with strange fury at him from under the veil. “Just see what he says to me. Watch the communiqué.” She cued Android Karenina to begin again.
Vronsky watched the display, and once again was unconsciously carried away by the sensations aroused in him by his own relation to the betrayed husband. Now he could not help picturing the challenge, which he would most likely find at home today or tomorrow, and the duel itself, in which, with the same cold and haughty expression that his face was assuming at this moment, he would await the injured husband’s shot, after having himself gallantly fired his smokers into the air. And at that instant there flashed across his mind the thought of what Serpuhovskoy had said to him, and what he had himself been thinking in the morning—that it was better not to bind himself—and he knew that this thought he could not tell her.
Neither Anna nor Vronsky, preoccupied by these thoughts and counter-thoughts running through their minds while the communiqué played, noticed what transpired directly above her head: the transparent film oozing from the odd flowering tree had silently ballooned outward to huge, though near-invisible, proportions. Now, like a soap bubble, it popped free of the tree and closed around Anna’s body, so thin and transparent as to be imperceptible even as it hardened into an impenetrable shell.
“You see the sort of man he is,” Anna said, with a shaking voice. “He . . .”
“I rejoice at this!” Vronsky said, speaking at the same time. Each was on their own side of the unseen sphere, and so neither could hear the other; and with Anna looking off into the distance, neither could even see that the other was speaking.
“Things can’t go on as they have,” Vronsky continued. “hope that now you will leave him. I hope that you will let me arrange and plan our life.”
Unaware, Anna carried on her own conversation: “. . . my child! I should have to leave him!”
Android Karenina looked around curiously. Lupo sniffed the air, with a dawning awareness that something was dreadfully amiss.
And so it went. Not hearing, both lovers simply assumed they knew what the other was thinking. When Vronsky finally looked away from Android Karenina’s monitor and raised his eyes to Anna, she did not know what caused them to seem so implacable; she knew only that, whatever he might say to her, he would not say all he thought. And she was certain her last hope had failed her. This was not what she had been reckoning on. And while these sickening thoughts chased themselves around in her mind, the sides of the near-invisible sheath drew taut under her feet like the cinching of a drawstring sack, and she lurched off the ground and up into the air.
“My God!” Vronsky shouted, noticing her for the first time:” Anna! You are floating!”
As if the strange conveyance that was carrying Anna into the air somehow knew it had been discovered, it accelerated the upward motion with which it was lifting her off her feet. Lupo leaped up on his powerful, pneumatic-actuated legs toward the mysterious conveyance, but it was already too high to be reached.
“Stay the thing, Lupo!” shouted Vronsky, reverting at once to his regimental training. Lupo, settling back on his haunches, made his wide, fierce mouth into a perfect O and howled out a resonating battle-cry, sending a precisely modulated echo wave toward the base of Anna’s airborne prison—steadying it against the wind and holding it in place. Vronsky searched furiously for a way to deliver Anna to safety, even as, in the back of his mind, he wondered: first a godmouth, and now this bubble-like cage of a prison? UnConSciya was trying to capture or kill Anna Karenina. But why?
He squatted, plucked the crackle-dagger from his boot, and stared carefully towards his target. An inch too high, and the dagger would sail uselessly off into the gardens; an inch too low, and it would bounce harmlessly off the side of the bubble—or, worse, slice through the exterior and into Anna’s precious flesh. He squinted, took aim . . . and hesitated, as the wind shifted the bubble ever so slightly upon the air. Lupo redoubled his powerful air-disrupting war cry, but Vronsky knew he hadn’t much time left before the shell would be borne off by the winds.
Inside her queer floating prison, Anna looked down upon Vronsky, in his soldier’s crouch with weapons drawn, and, despite the furious tangle of fears and doubts that had gripped her, felt her heart wrung by love. He is a man of action, she thought, a man who does not hesitate to grab hold of whatever life presents to him. That is how I am meant to live: with truth, with purpose, with vitality. I cannot give this up—cannot give him up, cannot stop loving him. But . . . am I really prepared to leave my husband? To lose my son? To abandon all I have begun, all I have known? To uproot my life entirely?
At that thought, all her problems coalesced. Of course! Anna gestured frantically to Vronsky, waving and pointing. Her wild but deliberate motions captured his attention, stopping him just before his cocked arm would have sent the deadly crackle-dagger arcing towards her. At last, they were communicating.
Vronsky, following her pantomimed suggestion, swung his crackle-dagger around to attack not the flowering bubble that held her fast, but at the base of the tree whence it had come. Lupo joined in the assault, extending excavation-quality end-effectors from his paws to dig furiously at the root of the mechanical plant. Within moments, they severed the trunk from the earth, and as it creaked and fell to the ground, the bubble that had been its progeny dissipated—sending Anna tumbling down to where Android Karenina waited to catch her beloved mistress in her arms.
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“MY GOD!” VRONSKY SHOUTED, AT LAST NOTICING: “ANNA! YOU ARE FLOATING!”
* * *
After Anna had assured Vronsky for the third time that she had suffered nothing but minor bruising in the fall, they sat beside each other upon the stone wall beside the tree.
She turned his face to hers, looking him squarely in the eye. With the intensity brought on by peril, they focused and listened to one another.
“I cannot lose my son,” Anna began simply.
“But, for God’s sake, which is better?—leave your child, or keep up this degrading position?”
“To whom is it degrading?”
“To all, and most of all to you.”
As they spoke, Lupo padded carefully around the tree, sniffing at the earth, gathering up fragments of the translucent sheath for later analysis.
“You say degrading . . . don’t say that. That has no meaning for me.” Her voice shook. She did not want him now to say what was untrue. She had nothing left but his love, and she wanted to love him. “Don’t you understand that from the day I loved you everything has changed for me? For me there is one thing, and one thing only—your love. If that’s mine, I feel so exalted, so strong, that nothing can be humiliating to me. I am proud of my position, because . . . proud of being . . . proud . . .” She could not say what she was proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her utterance. She stood still and sobbed.
He, too, felt, something swelling in his throat and twitching in his nose, and for the first time in his life Vronsky found himself on the point of weeping. The flower-trap; his love; their impossible situation; he could not have said exactly what it was that touched him so. He felt sorry for her, and he felt he could not help her, and with that he knew that he was to blame for her wretchedness, and that he had done something wrong.
“Is not a divorce possible?” he said feebly. She shook her head, not answering. “Couldn’t you take your son, and still leave him?”
“Yes; but it all depends on him. Now I must go to him,” she said shortly. Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way had not deceived her.
“On Tuesday I shall be in Petersburg, and everything can be settled.”
“Yes,” she said. “But don’t let us talk any more of it.”
Anna’s carriage, which she had sent away and ordered to come back to the little gate of the Vrede Garden, drove up. Anna said good-bye to Vronsky. Android Karenina gingerly lifted her up into their carriage, and they drove home.