Even Vronsky’s rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been there of old, and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where the noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every detail of their yesterday’s quarrel.
The subject of the quarrel had been Vronsky’s decision to hire a slow-witted, middle-aged bachelor named Pyotr as a household servant. Anna, seemingly alone among the people of society, still loathed the thought of using humans to perform the work of household Class IIs: to serve food and drink, to clean and tidy, to open the door and announce visitors. For Anna there remained something appalling in the idea of human beings serving each other as if they were robots. Vronsky found what he considered charming in the new arrangement, and professed it delightful to have a flesh-and-blood man clipping his cigars and trimming his mustache, providing that petite liberté Oblonsky had spoken up for in Karenin’s office.
“Yes, but if our little freedoms are made possible only by the subjugation of other people, what manner of freedom can that be?” Anna asked sulkily, when Pyotr shuffled from the room bearing the emptied tray of drinks. Vronsky had made the mistake, then, of purposefully taking her objection, which he knew to be sincere, as if it were mere drollery; he went so far as to suggest that if she did not care for Pyotr, they might hire a pretty young woman in his place. Anna reddened at this remark and stormed angrily from the room.
When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not referred to the quarrel, but both felt that the quarrel had been smoothed over, but was not at an end.
Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on herself and to justify him.
I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it up with him, and we’ll go away to somewhere in the country—no! To the moon! We shall return to the moon!
And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was horrified at herself. “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?” she said to herself, and began again from the beginning. “He’s truthful, he’s honest, he loves me. I love him, and in a few days the divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace of mind and trust, and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go tomorrow.”
And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability, she rang, and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their things for lunar launch.
At ten o’clock Vronsky came in.
CHAPTER 12
WELL, WAS IT NICE?” she asked, coming out to meet him with a penitent and meek expression.
“Just as usual,” he answered, seeing at a glance that she was in one of her good moods. He was by now used to these transitions, and he was particularly glad to see it today, as he was in a specially good humor himself.
“What do I see? Come, that’s good!” he said, pointing to the boxes in the passage.
“Yes, we must launch. I went out for a drive, and became bewitched all over by the pale-orange light of the moon. I felt my soul drawn back to that place as the sure restorer of our happiness. There’s nothing to keep you, is there?”
“It’s the one thing I desire. I’ll be back directly, and we’ll talk it over; I only want to change my coat. Order some tea.”
He went into his room, and she rang to ask Pyotr for some tea. But as she waited for him to bring it, cringing at the crash of cup and kettle in the kitchen, Anna felt a new wave of irritation. There was something mortifying in the way Vronsky had said “Come, that’s good,” as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty, and still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and his self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of strife rising up in her again, but making an effort she conquered it, and met Vronsky as good-humoredly as before.
When he came in she told him, partly repeating phrases she had prepared beforehand, how she had spent the day, and her plans for going away.
“You know it came to me almost like an inspiration,” she said. “Why wait here for the divorce? Won’t it be just the same up there? I can’t wait any longer! I don’t want to go on hoping, I don’t want to hear anything about the divorce. I have made up my mind it shall not have any more influence on my life. Do you agree?”
“Oh, yes!” he said, glancing uneasily at her excited face.
“Things shall be lovely on the moon. We shan’t have the threat of the Ministry hanging over us, and nor shall we rely on human labor, for surely the Moonies cannot also have been cashiered.”
“Let us not get ahead of things, Anna,” Vronsky interrupted, with an expression of forced patience. “We shall bring Pyotr, of course we shall. Class Twos are all forbidden, and the law of Russia extends to her colonies on the moon, as you well know. And as for the Ministry, I do not expect we need be moon-people forever. We shall take our holiday, until your divorce is granted and we can be married. On our return I will apply to the Department of Operations to lead a regiment.”
“Ah, is that it, then? This is the reason you have dragged me back to Moscow, to this dreary life: so you can play the alien-slaying hero?”
Vronsky threw up his hands. “Anna! What can be the meaning of this?”
“There’s no meaning in it to you, because you care nothing for me. You don’t care to understand my life.”
For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution to keep peace between them. But even though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself, could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could not give way to him. “How is it,” she said, “though you boast of your straightforwardness, you don’t tell the truth?”
“I never boast, and I never tell lies,” he said slowly, restraining his rising anger. “It’s a great pity if you can’t respect . . .”
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. And if you don’t love me anymore, it would be better and more honest to say so.”
“No, this is becoming unbearable!” cried Vronsky getting up from his chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said, speaking deliberately: “What do you try my patience for?” looking as though he might have said much more, but was restraining himself. “It has limits.”
“What do you mean by that?” she cried, looking with terror at the undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel, menacing eyes.
“I mean to say . . .” he was beginning, but he checked himself. “I must ask what it is you want of me?”
“What can I want? I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.”
She turned toward the door.
“Stop! Stop!” said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines of his brows, though he held her by the hand. “What is it all about? I said that we must bring Pyotr to serve us on the moon, and on that you told me I was lying, that I was not an honorable man.”
Pyotr, as if on cue, entered the room and tripped over the ottoman, sending the tea tray with its contents clattering across the floor.
“Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having sacrificed everything for me,” she said, recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel, “that he’s worse than a dishonorable man—he’s a heartless man.”
“Oh, there are limits to endurance!” he cried, and hastily let go her hand. Pyotr rose unsteadily and gathered up the tea things to start again.
“He hates m
e, that’s clear,” Anna said, speaking the words in exactly the warm and confidential voice she once used to spill her utmost thoughts to her beloved-companion. Alexei Kirillovich listened in silence, without looking round, while she walked with faltering steps out of the room. “He loves himself, and he loves the New Russia, that’s even clearer,” she said in addition, no longer caring that she was speaking aloud. “I want love, and I want robots, and both are gone. So, then, all is over.” She repeated the words she had said, “And it must be ended.” She knew what Android Karenina would do: she would glow deep lilac with sympathy, would reflect Anna’s own emotions back to her in cooler colors, would open her effectors and lend her mistress consolation and calm.
But Android Karenina was gone.
In the bedchamber, Anna threw the lock and slumped into the armchair. Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone to the moon, and of what he was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends in Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexei Alexandrovich would look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after this rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, some secret she knew and yet did not know . . . she could not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexei Alexandrovich, she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her at that time. “Why didn’t I die?” she cried, and the words and the feeling of that time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all.
“Yes, to die! . . . And the shame and disgrace of Alexei Alexandrovich and of Seryozha, and my awful shame, it will all be saved by death. To die! and he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.” With the trace of a smile of commiseration for herself, she sat down in the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on her left hand.
She heard a pounding at the door, but, as though absorbed in the arrangement of her rings, she did not even turn toward it. Let him knock, she thought, let him worry. Vividly she pictured from different sides his feelings after her death.
The knock was not from the door, however, but the windowpane. It shattered violently and an Honored Guest burst into the chamber and flew across the room toward her, shrieking horribly, its dozens of grimy yellow eyes flashing, its razor-sharp beak aimed like a dagger at her breast. Anna rolled from the armchair, scrabbled backward and threw her hands over her face, and now the beast was atop her, slashing at her with its three-fingered talons, jabbing at the flesh of her throat with its snaggled aculeus. She screamed Vronsky’s name, clawed back at the thing, her fingers scrabbling uselessly across the tough, crocodilian hide. A drip of the monster’s saliva landed on her clavicle and burned like boiling tea.
The alien screeched and jabbered. Why, Anna asked herself, why did she fight? A moment ago she had felt the desire to die; why not let this terrible eater of flesh consume her and be done with it? But even as her mind raced, her desperate fingers were seeking a vulnerability to exploit; she sought out the soft underside of the squamous beast, finding the belly meat and digging in her nails—the thing howled and pulled off, allowing room for Anna, bracing her heels in the wooden floor, to fling herself up and the alien off her.
The multitude of eyes blinked off-sync, and a hot stream of saliva flooded from its jagged snout and pooled on the floor, burning a smoking hole in the wood. In this moment’s respite, Anna jumped on the armchair like a timid woman in fear of a mouse, removed one of her heeled shoes to brandish as a weapon, and heard Vronsky call “Anna!” from the other side of the door, followed by the reverberant thud of his shoulder against the wood.
The creature was up and in motion, ropy talons entangling themselves around her torso, arms like knotted saplings, needled mouth driving up toward her neck. Anna screamed; there was nowhere to hide, no counter-attack to launch; her vision filled with the furious nictitation of the beast; on the street outside she heard a queer pulsing tikkatikkatikka; death had come for her, now, in the form of this space monster . . . Anna’s world went black. . . . and snapped back to light, and to life, at the familiar, snapping sizzle of a hot-whip. She felt the grip of the alien slacken and release. The whip cracked again, and then again, and Anna opened her eyes to see the stinking corpse of the alien sliding slowly down her frame into a slack, sizzling heap at her feet. Anna, trembling, looked to Vronsky, who stood calmly in the doorway, his hot-whip already retracting into its hip-sheath.
“Thank you,” Anna said quietly. And then, unable to bear the sight, she rolled the noxious corpse across the room, kicked open the window, and pushed it out; turning her head away in disgust, she did not see the body fall, did not see the massive, faceless worm, large and long and gray-green, that caught the broken alien body on its segmented back and slithered quickly away down the Moscow street.
Vronsky went up to her, and, taking her by the hand, said softly: “Anna, we’ll go to the moon the day after tomorrow, if you like. I agree to everything.”
She did not speak.
“What is it?” he urged. “This . . .” He indicated the burst window, the steaming crater on the floorboards.
“No . . . no . . . you know,” she said, and at the same instant, unable to restrain herself any longer, she burst into tears.
“Cast me off!” she articulated between her sobs. “I’ll go away tomorrow . . . I’ll do more. What am I? An immoral woman! A stone round your neck. I don’t want to make you wretched, I don’t want to! I’ll set you free. You don’t love me; you have a role to play in the New Russia, and I have none! Go and play your role!”
Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that he had never ceased, and never would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever.
“Anna, why distress yourself and me so?” he said to her, kissing her hands. There was tenderness now in his face, and she fancied she caught the sound of tears in his voice, and she felt them wet on her hand. Anna’s despairing jealousy had changed to a despairing passion of tenderness. She put her arms round him, and covered with kisses his head, his neck, his hands.
CHAPTER 13
FEELING THAT THE reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to work in the morning preparing for their departure, not taking the time to repair the wrecked bedchamber. Though it was not settled how long they would stay on the moon, or how they would be served, as they had each given way to the other, Anna packed busily. She was standing in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out.
Pyotr came in to ask Vronsky to sign a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg. Anna was curious, despite herself, regarding this clumsy technology that was supposedly to replace the simple elegance of monitor-to-monitor communication, but Vronsky jammed the paper hurriedly into a pocket, as if anxious to conceal something from her.
“By tomorrow, without fail, we shall launch for the moon.”
“From whom is the telegram?” she asked, not hearing him.
“From Stiva,” he answered reluctantly.
“Why didn’t you show it to me? What secret can there be between Stiva and me?”
“I didn’t want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for telegraphing: he seems to have discovered a particular enjoyment of this new mode of communication. But why telegraph when nothing is settled?”
“Did he speak to Karenin?
“Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read it.”
With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read something very different from what Vronsky had told her. “He has power and inclination to destroy you both completely STOP Has not yet decided when or how but will de
stroy you STOP I sorry STOP I so sorry END.”
“I said yesterday that I was quite certain he would refuse our request for amnesty,” Anna said, flushing crimson. “So why did you suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to hide it?” she challenged him.
“Why do I suppose it? Because your husband, who has made himself the most powerful man in Russia, has sworn to destroy us!”
“Already we were preparing to go to the moon. So we shall go immediately, and plan our next move there. Maybe back to Vozdvizhenskoe, maybe—”
Vronsky interrupted her, scowling: “I want defmiteness!”
“Defmiteness is not in the form but in the love,” she said, more and more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in which he spoke.
“I am certain that the greater part of your irritability since our return to Moscow comes from the indefmiteness of our position.”
Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred for me is apparent, she thought, not hearing his words, but watching with terror the cold, cruel judge who looked mockingly at her out of his eyes.
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