What Levin did not know, what he could not know, was that Vronsky had never told Anna Karenina the code words. On returning home from the Huntshed, he had given her the barest outline of his meeting with Federov, but then they had passed into argument, and from there to reconciliation, and that reconciliation had led them back to Moscow.
Never had he told her of Federov’s dying exhortation; never had he mentioned the words rearguard or action at all.
Somehow, Anna knew the words anyway.
At home their new servant, a man named Kouzma, told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and then handed him a neatly folded piece of paper. This was a “letter,” an old-fashioned means of information transmission in which the correspondent commits his thoughts to paper with pen and ink-along with “books” and “newspapers,” it had come back into vogue since the disappearance of monitor-and-communiqué technology. Levin read the letter at once in the hall, and found it was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the latest gleanings from the pit were faulty, that it was fetching only five and a half rubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. Levin scowled. He had been forced, like all other groznium miners, to hire human beings to administer his land in his absence, and they were terrible at it.
Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.
“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.
“First, as for Vronsky, I fear your assessment was correct: he has decidedly gone to the other side. Still, I do not think he intends to turn us in. For now, anyway, I think we are safe.”
“Well, and then where did you go?”
“Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.”
And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once and for all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.
Kitty’s eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna’s name, but controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and deceived him.
“Oh!” was all she said.
“I’m sure you won’t be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and Dolly wished it,” Levin went on.
“Oh, no!” she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded him no good.
“She is a very sweet, very, very unhappy, good woman,” he said. “And-Kitty-there is more!”
Again, she said, “Oh?”
“Anna Karenina, unlike Vronsky, remains one of us! She responded to the code word immediately and appropriately. I am convinced that she holds our views on the necessary changes that must come to society. Think how useful she could be…”
But Kitty hardly responded as Levin had anticipated.
“Yes, of course, her involvement is very much to be celebrated,” said Kitty coldly, when he had finished. “Whom was your letter from?”
Disappointed that his co-conspirator should take such little interest in his exciting discovery of Anna’s allegiances, he told her about the letter from Sokolov. Then, believing in her calm tone, he went to change his coat.
Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went up to her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.
“What? What is it?” he asked, knowing beforehand what.
“You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were drinking at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went… to her of all people! No, we must go away… I shall go away tomorrow.”
It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity, in conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for him, that he had succumbed to Anna’s artful influence, and that he would avoid her. One thing he did confess to with more sincerity was that by living so long in Moscow, leading a life of nothing but conversation, eating, and drinking, he was degenerating. And in the meantime, he was hardly progressing in his efforts on behalf of the Golden Hope. If anything, telling Kitty of his one significant advance in that goal acted to dampen his wife’s zeal for the enterprise. She now seemed to feel that if resistance meant alliance with Anna Karenina, it might be best to abandon their resistance.
They talked till three o’clock in the morning, and as the hours passed the thrill he had felt about Anna, about the resistance and the Golden Hope, steadily dimmed in his breast. Only at three o’clock were they sufficiently reconciled to be able to go to sleep.
CHAPTER 7
AFTER TAKING LEAVE of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. Oh, how she missed her dear Android Karenina at such times as these, when her mind was unsettled, her soul aflutter, her thoughts muddy and indistinct. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love-as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men-and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both.
But what had he meant by that strange word he spoke so urgently, and how had she known how to respond to it? Her response, her understanding, had clearly resonated with him. Somehow she had known the exact right thing to say-but how? How had she known?
As one troubling thought departed another arrived, like Gravs at a station. This one was connected to Vronsky, and Anna’s growing sense of the dislocation between them. If I have so much effect on others, on this Levin, who loves his home and his wife, why is it he is so cold to me?… not cold exactly, he loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us apart now. Here we sit in Moscow, waiting to hear of our fate. Soon we shall be proper members of this new Russian society. So why is he not here? Why wasn’t he here all the evening?
She heard Vronsky’s abrupt chime at the door and hurriedly dried her tears, and affected composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had not come home as he had promised-displeased only, and not on any account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.
“Well, you’ve not been dull?” he said, eagerly and good-humoredly. “You will hardly believe it, but they have smashed up all the Class Ones! All will be gone within the week. I think your husband and his compatriots mean to drain every vestige of technology from the nation-next they’ll have the Tsars back, and Russia will end up as some sort of vast agrarian monarchy, complete with horse races and peasants threshing wheat.”
He laughed, but Anna remained composed.
“Stiva has been here and Levin.”