Chapter 6
SOME WEEKS AFTER the stormy conclusion of Vassenka Veslovsky’s tenure at Pokrovskoe, Kitty answered the door at the sound of a quiet though insistent knocking, and found on the doorstep a very thin woman wrapped in a ratty old blanket. Immediately Kitty beckoned the bedraggled creature inside, assuming this was one of the poor peasants they had lately heard of, those wandering the countryside, their homes having been destroyed by the alien marauders. Kitty had even heard that some had found employment in the homes of the wealthy as intimate worker-friends—in other words, as poor substitutes for the absented Class Ills, though she herself was horrified by the idea of employing a human in that function.
But once inside, the woman pushed back the cowl of the blanket, revealing not the haggard face of a hungry peasant, but an obsidian faceplate, flashing a frantic electric green.
“It’s . . .” Kitty put a hand before her mouth. “My goodness, it’s a Class III!”
“A fugitive,” said Levin, hastening down the stairs and closing the front door behind the machine.
The Class Ill’s name was Witch Hazel, and she would not speak of who her mistress was, or how she had escaped the circuitry adjustment protocol; there could be no doubting, however, that her journey had been a perilous one. Witch Hazel’s head unit jerked nervously about as she spoke, and she generally displayed all the sensory twitchiness and navigational confusion inherent in masterless beloved-companions. She insisted instead that she had a communiqué to deliver, which turned out to be intended not for Kitty and Levin, but for Darya Alexandrovna.
Dolly was duly summoned, and the communiqué viewed—it was from Anna Karenina, and its substance was simple: Dolly was invited to visit Anna and Vronsky in their secret encampment. Witch Hazel would act as her guide.
Darya Alexandrovna decided right away to accept this invitation and go to see Anna. She was sorry to annoy her sister and do anything Levin disliked. She quite understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to have anything to do with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see Anna, and show her that her feelings could not be changed, in spite of the change in her position. It was decided that she and Witch Hazel would leave the next morning; the machine-woman, whose reluctance to speak further of her past and current situation was manifestly clear, gratefully accepted a dosing of humectant and was Surceased for the night.
That she might be independent of the Levins for the expedition, Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire a carriage for the drive; but Levin, learning of it, went to her to protest.
“What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if I did dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my carriage and engine,” he said. “Hiring Coachmen in the village is disagreeable to me, and, what’s of more importance, they’ll undertake the job and never get you there. I have a four-treaded II/Puller. And if you don’t want to wound me, you’ll take mine.”
Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and Levin made ready for his sister-in-law a four-tread and carriage set—not at all a smart-looking conveyance, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the whole distance in a single day, if the pointedly vague information of the location and direction of travel that Witch Hazel had provided could be believed.
Dolly and the robot, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak. The road was good, the carriage comfortable, and the carriage hummed along merrily, and on the box sat the junker, the mysteriously ownerless robot. With the steering shaft in her end-effectors, Witch Hazel’s formerly nervous, scattered mien dissipated, leaving Dolly to wonder whether, before the adjustment protocol had torn her from her duties, this robot had been beloved-companion to a hunter or racewoman.
As Dolly rode, she thought. At home, looking after her children, she had no time to think. So now, during this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she never had before, and from the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself, the words bouncing around in her skull—how odd, this Class-III-less life, without Dolichka to speak her thoughts aloud to! At first she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to look after them. If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if Grisha isn’t bit by the dog, and Lily isn’t upset again! she thought.
Witch Hazel, at this point in the journey, pulled the coach off to the side of the road and, with stammering apologies, fit her passenger with a silken blindfold. “We must be drawing closer to our destination,” Dolly thought out loud, her musings turning to her sister-in-law.
They attack Anna. What for? Am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame?
She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me, she thought about her husband, and I put up with him. Is that any better? She remembered his dull words of comfort when Dolichka was taken away, and blamed him for that, too.
As the carriage bumped along, the road becoming more rutted and uneven as they drew toward their destination, the most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every impression, thought Darya Alexandrovna—and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with her. And Dolichka lived and stood arm in arm with her as she, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyich at this avowal made her smile.
It was with such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to the rebel encampment at Vozdvizhenskoe.