“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 destroy 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.
“Well, our position is quite definite now,” she said finally, holding the telegraph between two fingers. “The defmiteness of doom.”
As he was going out he caught a glimpse in the looking glass of her face, white, with quivering lips. He even wanted to stop and to say some comforting word to her, but his legs carried him out of the room before he could think what to say. The whole of that day he spent away from home, and when he came in late in the evening was told that Anna Arkadyevna was sore from fighting the alien and he was not to go in to her.
CHAPTER 14
NEVER BEFORE HAD A DAY been passed in quarrel. Today was the first time. And this was not a quarrel. It was the open acknowledgment of complete coldness. Was it possible to glance at her as he had glanced when he came into the room? To look at her, see her heart was breaking with despair, and go out without a word with that face of callous composure? He was not merely cold to her, he hated her because he loved another woman-that was clear.
Remembering all the cruel words he had said, Anna supplied, too, the words that he had unmistakably wished to say and could have said to her, had their encounter unfolded just a bit differently.
“I won’t prevent you,” he might have said. “You can go where you like. You were unwilling to be divorced from your husband, no doubt so that you might go back to him. Go back to him. If you want money, I’ll give it to you. How many rubles do you want?”
All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, she watched and heard him say as clearly as if he were projected before her on a monitor, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them.
But didn’t he only yesterday swear he loved me, he, a truthful and sincere man? Haven’t I despaired for nothing many times already? she thought immediately.
Anna left the house and wandered the streets of Moscow, surveying the New Russia with a cold and despairing eye. No II/Lamplighter/76s lit the lamps; no II/Porter/44s swung open doors. Everywhere she turned, she saw sullen peasants performing the menial tasks that for decades had been the province of the machines: cleaning gutters, pushing brooms, opening doors. She saw too, as grim reminders of her personal grief, countless iconographs of her husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, plastered with thick glue in the alleys and in the marketplace. Strangest and most galling of all was the text accompanying each poster, hailing him as “Tsar.” Anna Karenina felt herself a stranger in a queerly altered country.
She returned home in doubts whether everything were over with Vronsky or whether there were still hope of reconciliation, whether she should go away at once or see him once more. She was expecting him the whole day, and in the evening, as she went to her own room, leaving a message with Pyotr that she still felt unwell, she said to herself, If he comes to me, in spite of what Pyotr tells him, it means that he loves me still. If not, it means that all is over, and then I will decide what I’m to do!…
In the evening she heard the rumbling of his carriage stop at the entrance, his ring, his steps, and his conversation with the servant; he believed what was told him, did not care to find out more, and went to his own room. So then everything was over.
And death again rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession of her heart was waging with him. How she now regretted the surge of animal strength that had pushed her to fight back yesterday against the Honored Guest-she looked with bitterness through the shattered windowpane and wished another alien would come.