“Have you known Vronsky long?” she asked, trying to match her brother’s easy calm. She glanced at Android Karenina, who bathed her in reassuring silence and a gentle lavender glow. Unusual for a Class III robot, Android Karenina never spoke, only buttressed by her constant reassuring presence Anna’s natural feeling of dignity and reserve.
“Yes,” Stiva answered cheerily. “You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.”
“Yes?” said Anna softly. “Come now, let us talk of you,” she added, tossing her head as though she would physically shake off something superfluous oppressing her. “Let us talk of your affairs. I got your letter, and here I am.”
“Yes, all my hopes are in you,” said Stepan Arkadyich.
“Well, tell me all about it.”
CHAPTER 16
THOUGH SHE HAD SENT word the day before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister came or not, Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya had made everything ready for her arrival, and was expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.
Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of an official in the Higher Branches of the Ministry, and was a Petersburg grande dame. And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that her sister-in-law was coming, along with her elegant and imposing Class III. “And, after all, Anna is in no way to blame,” Dolly said to Dolichka, who nodded vigorously and agreed.
“Oh no, not at all to blame! The dear.”
“I know nothing of her except the very best, and I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her toward myself.”
“Only kindness, true kindness indeed.”
And it was true that as far as she could recall her impressions of Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself; Karenin was a strange and distant man, as were most men she had ever known from the Higher Branches, and there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it into her head to console me!” said Dolly to Dolichka, who clucked “Oh dear” and “I should think not,” while the two of them together folded laundry.
“All consolation and counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a thousand times, and it’s all no use.”
“No use, no use at all!”
Dolly did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases of good advice and comfort. She had been on the lookout for her, glancing at her watch every minute, and, as so often happens, let slip just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the three happy tinkles of the I/Doorchime/6.
She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.
“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her. Dolichka gave a low bow to Android Karenina, who offered a reserved nod in return.
“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!” Anna began.
“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew. Most likely she knows, she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well, come along, I’ll take you to your room,” she went on, trying to defer as long as possible the moment of confidences.
Anna greeted the children, and handed her kerchief and her hat to Android Karenina. She tossed her head and shook out her mass of black curls.
“You are radiant with health and happiness!” said Dolly, almost with envy.
“I? . . . Yes,” said Anna. They sat down to coffee in the drawing room, and Anna meaningfully sent Android Karenina into Surcease.
“Dolly,” Anna said, pushing the coffee tray away, “he has told me.”
Dolly flicked off her own Class III, but she looked coldly at Anna. She was waiting now for phrases of conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.
“Dolly, dear,” she said, “I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, I’m simply sorry, sorry from my heart for you!”
Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered. She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her own vigorous little hand. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not lose its blank expression. She said:
“To comfort me is impossible. Everything’s lost after what has happened, everything’s over!”
And as soon as she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it, and said:
“But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is it best to act in this awful position—that’s what you must think of.”
“All’s over, and there’s nothing more,” said Dolly. “And the worst of all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the children, I am tied. And I can’t live with him! It’s a torture to me to see him.”
“Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from you: tell me about it.”
Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s face.
“Very well,” she said all at once. “But I will tell you it from the beginning. You know how I was married. With the education Mamma gave us, I knew nothing. I know they say men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva”—she corrected herself—“Stepan Arkadyich told me nothing. You’ll hardly believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the only woman he had known. So I lived, for eight years.
“You must understand that I was so far from suspecting infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then—try to imagine it—with such ideas, for all to be revealed, played back in a communiqué, suddenly all the horror, all the loathsomeness. . . . You must try and understand me. To be fully convinced of one’s happiness, and all at once . . .” continued Dolly, holding back her sobs, “a mistress, my mécanicienne, with grease on her jumpsuit, and metal shavings beneath her nails! No, it’s too awful!” She hastily pulled out her handkerchief and hid her face in it. “I can understand being carried away by feeling,” she went on after a brief silence, “but deliberately, slyly deceiving me . . . and with whom? . . . To go on being my husband together with her . . . it’s awful! You can’t understand. . . .”
“Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do understand,” said Anna, pressing her hand.
“And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?” Dolly resumed. “Not the slightest! He’s happy and contented.”
“Oh, no!” Anna interposed quickly. “He’s to be pitied, he’s weighed down by remorse. . . .”
“Is he capable of remorse?” Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her sister-in-law’s face.
“Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated. What touched me most . . .” (and here Anna guessed what would touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you beyond everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would have answered—“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she cannot forgive me,’ he keeps saying.”
Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to her words, and then responded angrily.
“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty, she’s technically proficient. Do you know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his children.”
Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
“And after that he will tell me . . . . What! Can I believe him? Never! No, everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, th
e reward of my work, and my sufferings . . . . What’s so awful is that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could kill him.”
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.
“What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over everything, and I see nothing.”
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.
“One thing I would say,” began Anna. “I am his sister, I know his character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything.” She waved her hand before her forehead, as if a person’s circuits could be unspooled in the same way as those of a Class III. “That faculty for being completely carried away, but for completely repenting too. He cannot believe it, he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.”
“No, he understands, he understood!” Dolly broke in. “But I . . . you are forgetting me . . . does it make it easier for me?”
Anna cut her short, kissing her hand once more.
“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how men like Stiva look at it. They project a sort of electric barrier that can’t be crossed between them and their families. I don’t understand it, but it is so.”
“Yes, but he has kissed her . . .”
“Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all the wild oscillations of his heart for you, and I know that the longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word:’Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always been a divinity for him, and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the heart. . . .”
“But if it is repeated?”
“It cannot be, as I understand it. . . .”
“Yes, but could you forgive it?”
“I don’t know, I can’t judge. . . . Yes, I can,” said Anna, thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her inner balance, she added: “Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could forgive it. I could not be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all . . .”
“Oh, of course,” Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she had more than once thought, “else it would not be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take you to your room,” she said, getting up to flick Dolichka back to life, while Anna did the same with Android Karenina. As the Class IIIs reanimated, their respective mistresses embraced.
“My dear, how glad I am you came,” Dolly said, and then offered a polite bow to Android Karenina, who tilted her head with kindness in place of a smile. “That both of you came. It has made things better, ever so much better.”
CHAPTER 17
THE WHOLE OF THAT DAY ANNA and Android Karemna spent at the Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some of Anna’s acquaintances had already heard of their arrival, and came to call. Anna spent the whole morning with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief note to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at home. “Come, God is merciful,” she wrote.
Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was general, and his wife, speaking to him, addressed him as “Stiva,” as she had not done before. In the relations of the husband and wife the same estrangement still remained, but there was no talk now of separation, and Stepan Arkadyich saw the possibility of explanation and reconciliation. Small Stiva, while attending as usual to his master, once dared to flash the red eye-shapes of his frontal display flirtatiously at Dolichka, who turned away but did not swat him.
Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some trepidation at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom everyone spoke so highly of. But she made a favorable impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once. Anna was unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her youth, and before Kitty knew where she was she found herself not merely under Anna’s sway, but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married women. Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor like the mother of a boy of eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements, the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted in her face and broke out in her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed for a girl of twenty, had it not been for a serious and at times mournful look in her eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Her Class III, Android Karenina, too, seemed even in her perfect silence to be marked by a soulful depth of emotions—inaccessible, complex, and poetic—unlike any companion robot Kitty had ever seen.
After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room, Anna rose quickly and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar, having flicked open Small Stiva’s torso to use his groznium core for a light.
“Stiva,” she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and glancing toward the door, “go, and God help you.”
He chucked the cigar into Small Stiva’s core, where it was consumed, winked back at his sister, and departed through the doorway.
“And when is your next float?” Anna asked Kitty.
“Next week, and a splendid float it shall be! Finally I am considered a woman, old enough to receive my very own Class III at last.”
“My congratulations,” murmured Anna Karenina, trying to remember the days of her own life, so many years ago, before her android had been brought to her—it seemed she could hardly recall a time when she hadn’t had the comforting presence of her beloved-companion at her heel.
“Yes,” Kitty added brightly. “I feel it will be one of those floats where one always enjoys oneself.”
“For me there are no floats now where one enjoys oneself,” said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which was not open to her. “For me there are some less dull and tiresome.”
“How can you be dull at a float?”
“Why should I not be dull at a float?” inquired Anna.
“Because you always look nicer than anyone.”
Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little, and said: “In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were, what difference would it make to me?”
“Are you coming to this float?” Kitty asked. “I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you dancing.”
“Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it’s a pleasure to you.”
“I imagine your android at the ball glowing with a lilac hue,” Kitty said, daring a quick glance at Android Karenina, who had her faceplate turned toward the window, gazing it seemed at the Eye in the Tower, in its slow, eternal revolution.
“And why lilac precisely?” asked Anna, smiling. Class IIIs were often programmed, at public events, to glow from “bow to stern” in fanciful colors, to lend an extraje ne sais quoi to their mistresses’ appearance. “I know why you press me to come to the float. You expect perhaps to leave this float with your companion robot and a human companion as well! And you want everyone to be there to take part in it.”
“How do you know? Yes.”
“Oh! What a happy time you are at,” pursued Anna. “I remember, that feeling as if gravity has been oh-so-slightly suspended, not just at the float, but everywhere you go! That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is. . . . Who has not been through it?”
Kitty smiled without speaking. But how did she go through it? How I should like to know all her love story! thought Kitty, recalling the foreboding, unromantic appearance of Alexei Alexandrovich, her husband.
“I know something. Stiva t
old me, and I congratulate you. I liked him so much,” Anna continued. “I met Vronsky at the Grav station.”
“Oh, was he there?” asked Kitty, blushing. “What was it Stiva told you?”
“Stiva gossiped about it all. I traveled yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,” she went on, “and his mother talked without a pause of him; he’s her favorite. I know mothers are partial, but . . .”
“What did his mother tell you?”
“Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favorite; still one can see how chivalrous he is. . . . Well, for instance, she told me that he has served in the Border Wars, and is now with a regiment hunting UnConSciya operatives. He has destroyed many koschei, saving many lives. He’s a hero, in fact,” said Anna.
But she did not tell Kitty about her encounter with Vronsky at the Grav station, nor how Vronsky had gallantly interposed himself before her line of sight, to protect her from seeing the person dead upon the magnet bed. She was about to, when she glanced at Android Karenina, who bent her head forward by several degrees toward her lap, and for some reason made Anna feel it was disagreeable to her to think of it. She felt that there was something that had to do with her in it, and something that ought not to have been.
CHAPTER 18
STIVA AND DOLLY soon emerged, their Class IIIs scuttling noisily behind them like happy children, and both Kitty and Anna could tell that a reconciliation had taken place. The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone to her husband, while Stepan Arkadyich was happy and cheerful, but not so as to seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his offense.
At half past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and pleasant family conversation over the tea table at the Oblonskys’ was broken up by an apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck everyone as strange. Anna had gone upstairs with her light, resolute step to retrieve a favorite polishing cloth from her valise, so that she might give Android Karenina’s monitor a sheen before displaying Memories of her Sergey. The stairs up to her room came out on the landing of the great warm main staircase.
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