PART FOUR: A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF A MAN
Chapter 1
THE KARENINS, HUSBAND AND WIFE, continued living in the same house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexei Alexandrovich, though consumed with preparations for the next and most delicate phase of his cherished Project, made it a rule to see his wife every day so that the servants would have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexei Alexandrovich’s house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it.
The position was one of misery for all three, and not one of them would have been equal to enduring this position for a single day if it had not been for the expectation that it would change, that it was merely a temporary, painful ordeal which would pass over. Alexei Alexandrovich hoped that this passion would pass, as everything does pass, that everyone would forget about it, and his name would remain unsullied. Anna, on whom the position depended, and for whom it was more miserable than for anyone, endured it because she not merely hoped, but firmly believed, as she repeatedly expressed to Android Karenina, that it would all very soon be settled and come right. Vronsky, against his own will or wishes, followed her lead, hoped too that something, apart from his own action, would be sure to solve all difficulties.
* * *
Vronsky had that winter endured and survived a particularly brutal and long-lasting inter-regimental Cull, one intended to prepare the ranks for a new and quite serious threat to the Motherland, the details of which were murky, but for which the Ministry demanded all soldiers hone their readiness. Vronsky had advanced as his reward to the rank of colonel, and as part of his new responsibilities, he was dispatched by his superior officer to spend a week entertaining a foreign prince—an assignment that promised at first some mild amusement, but ended up being the most tedious of chores. The prince’s tastes ran to the most excessive and wearisome form of indulgence, and all week long Alexei Kirillovich was obliged to partake in flute after flute of champagne, to sit through long games of Flickerfly, and to attend the robot-human diversions known as metal-flesh, officially illegal but widely enjoyed during such “stag nights.”
When the visitor had at last departed, and Vronsky’s time was his own again, Vronsky arrived home to find a note from Anna. She wrote, “I am ill and unhappy. I cannot come out, but I cannot go on longer without seeing you. Come in this evening. Alexei Alexandrovich goes to the Ministry at seven and will be there till ten.” Thinking for an instant of the strangeness of her bidding him come straight to her, in spite of her husband’s insisting on her not receiving him, he decided to go.
After having some lunch, he lay down on the sofa and cued Lupo’s monitor to display a soothing Memory to aid him in falling off to sleep. He did not know how long he slept, but at some point he became aware that time had passed, and that Lupo’s monitor still glowed on—and as Vronsky gazed with heavy lids at the screen, he saw that the images had grown distorted and unsettling. Here was Anna being sucked again into that horrid godmouth; here she was in theVrede Garden, encased in the translucent sheath, drifting upward toward some uncertain doom. And here, at the Grav Station, the two of them together, watching the charred and battered body, curtained in burlap, lifted from the magnet bed. . . .
“Lupo!” Vronsky screamed, sitting up in a wild panic, and the Class III looked chastened and confused, for apparently the strange images had played unbidden. He hurried to cue a new Memory, but it was too late;Vronsky’s rest had become impossible.
“What queer maltuning is this!” muttered Vronsky darkly, rising from the sofa drenched in sweat, and glanced at his watch. He rang up his servant, dressed in haste, and went out onto the steps, trying to shake from his head the sequence of alarming Memories, worried too about being late.
As he drove up to the Karenins’ entrance he looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine. A high, narrow carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the entrance. He recognized Anna’s carriage. “She is coming to me,” muttered Vronsky, “and better she should. I don’t like going into that house. But no matter; I can’t hide myself,” and with that manner peculiar to him from childhood, as of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of, Vronsky got out of his sledge, his thumb tracing anxious circles on the hilt of his hot-whip, and went to the door. The door opened, and the II/Porter/7e62, a rug draped in the grip of its end-effector, called the carriage.
And then, suddenly, in the doorway, Vronsky almost ran up against Alexei Alexandrovich. The gas jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face, half-concealed beneath the gleaming alloy mask and the black hat, the white cravat brilliant against the beaver of the coat. Karenin’s fixed, dull eye was fastened upon Vronsky’s face.
A long moment passed, and Vronsky bowed—or rather, he began to bow, and stopped short, feeling himself unable to do so. Lupo swiveled his big silver head unit back and forth, now with trepidation at Alexei Karenin, now with fear and uncertainty at his master. Vronsky, thinking in one confused moment that it was fear, or even social awkwardness, that held him in his place, tried again to bow; it was then he realized that his body was held fast, seemingly wrapped in thick blankets of invisible force.
The telescopic eye starkly obtruded from Alexei Alexandrovich’s face as the man stood chewing his lips, directed straight at him. The invisible grip tightened slowly, constricting about Vronsky’s body like a snake . . . and then sliding him, slowly at first and then quickly, toward the heavy oaken front door. Lupo whimpered and huddled weakly in the opposite corner. Vronsky felt he was a piece of furniture set on rollers, only he moved not in the strong grips of II/Porter/7e62s, but was propelled instead by some invisible push radiating from Anna’s queer husband. Karenin stood, calm and composed, staring at him through that lenticular eye like a jeweler examining a stone, as Vronsky smashed with terrible force into the door.
In the next moment, the force that had held him relaxed like an unclenching fist, and he lay on the ground in a numb heap, pain radiating from where his back had banged into the heavy wood of the door, drinking in great, heaving gasps of sweet air.
Without a word, Alexei Karenin stepped over him, lifted his hand to his hat, and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into the carriage, pick up the rug and the opera glass at the window, and disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, sweat was pouring off his body, and his eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.
“What a position!” he said to Lupo, trotting at his heels. “If he would fight fair, would stand up for his honor, I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness or baseness . . . He puts me in the position of playing false, which I never meant and never mean to do. . . .”
He trailed off, then added darkly: “How in blazes did he do that?”
He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of Anna Karenina’s retreating footsteps. He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him, and was now going back to the drawing room.
“No,” she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the tears came into her eyes. “No, if things are to go on like this, the end will come much, much too soon.”
“What is it, dear one?”
“What? I’ve been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours. . . . You met him?” she asked, when they had sat down at the table in the lamplight. “You’re punished, you see, for being late.”
“Such punishment,” he replied, rubbing at the small of his back, where he could feel the first tender blossom of the angry bruise to come. “seems rather excessive. Wasn’t he to be at the Ministry?”
“He had been and come back, and was going out somewhere again.”
“Never mind, never mind,” Vronsky said, and she looked a long while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit with him as he really was.