Toward morning Anna sank into a doze, sitting in her place, and when she woke it was daylight and the Grav was gliding into the Petersburg station. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son, and the details of that day and the following came upon her.
At Petersburg, as soon as the Grav stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted Anna’s attention was her husband. “Oh, mercy! That face!” she murmured to Android Karenina. Covering the right side of Alexei Alexandrovich’s face as always, nearly entirely hiding it, was a mask of steely silver, descending from brow to chin, with only enough metal cut away to allow his nose and mouth their full functioning. While Alexei’s left eyebrow could and did twitch sardonically, and while his left cheek could and did rise in wry humor, the corresponding parts on the opposite side were hidden behind an unreadable sheen of metallic cold, laced with dark veins of pure groznium-not tempered or alloyed by the Ministry’s metallurgists, but the raw, scarlet-black ore itself. Where his right eye once had sat was a large aperture, a cyborgicist’s reinvention of a human eye socket, from which emerged a telescoping oculus. It was with this rotating orbital that Alexei Alexandrovich was now scanning the crowd, looking for his wife.
Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips sliding into their habitual, sarcastic smile, and his left human eye looking straight at her, while its mechanized companion eye mechanically scanned the station. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling; now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.
“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said. He took his wife’s valise from Android Karenina, offering her Class III no greeting, and naturally receiving none in return.
“Is Seryozha quite well?” Anna asked.
“This is all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor? He’s quite well…”
CHAPTER 23
AFTER THE MAYHEM with the koschei, Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. Rather, as Lupo lay curled in Surcease at his feet, he sat in his Grav carriage, looking straight before him or examining the people who got in and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he would a Class I device, and the young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him as a person.
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. Occasionally, he passed his eye over the revivified carriage to ensure no more of the vicious skittering koschei were aboard, even while he was certain in his heart that none remained: not when he, Alexei Kirillovich, with all his battlefield acuity and self-assurance, had junkered the lot.
He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna-he did not yet believe that-but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride. His hot-whip crackled pleasantly along his thigh, an old fellow soldier whose very presence reminded him of past successes.
What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think. He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he was happy at it. He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he had come where she was, that all the happiness of his life, the only meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her. When he had climbed out on the platform and seen her, in the adrenalin-charged moments after the koschei were destroyed, involuntarily his first word had told her just what he thought. And he was glad he had told her it, that she knew it now and was thinking of it. He did not sleep all night. When he was back in the carriage, he kept unceasingly going over every position in which he had seen her, every word she had uttered, and before his fancy, making his heart faint with emotion, floated pictures of a possible future.
When he got out of the train at Petersburg, he felt after his sleepless night as keen and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused near his compartment, waiting for her to get out. “Once more,” he said quietly to Lupo, who growled happily, “once more I shall see her walk, her face, her striking beloved-companion; she will say something, turn her head, glance, smile, maybe.” But before he caught sight of her, he saw her husband, whom the Stationmaster was deferentially escorting through the crowd. “Ah, yes! The husband.” Only now for the first time did Vronsky realize clearly the fact that there was a person attached to her, a husband. He knew that she had a husband, but had hardly believed in his existence, and only now fully believed in him, with his head and shoulders, his cold, mechanical faceplate, his legs clad in black trousers; especially when he saw this husband calmly take her arm with a sense of property.
Seeing Alexei Alexandrovich with his severely self-confident figure, in his round hat, with his rather prominent spine, he believed in him, and was aware of a disagreeable sensation, such as a man might feel tortured by thirst, who, on reaching a spring, should find a dog, a sheep, or a pig who has drunk of it and muddied the water. Alexei Alexandrovich’s outsize automated eye, now slowly scanning Anna from within its prominent metal socket, particularly annoyed Vronsky. He could recognize in no one but himself an indubitable right to love her. But she was still the same, and the sight of her affected him the same way, physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling his soul with rapture.
He saw the first meeting between the husband and wife, and noted with a lover’s insight the signs of slight reserve with which she spoke to her husband. Lupo, at his feet, bristled and arched his back. “Yes, Lupo, I notice it too,” Vronsky said in a low voice to the beast. “She does not love him and cannot love him.”
He strode toward the pair, and at the moment before approaching them, he noticed too with joy that Anna Arkadyevna was conscious of his being near, and looked round, and seeing him, turned again to her husband.
“The koschei certainly provided us with a restless evening,” Vronsky greeted her. “Are you feeling well this morning?” he asked, bowing to her and her husband together, and leaving it up to Alexei Alexandrovich to accept the bow on his own account, and to recognize it or not, as he might see fit.