No. Jealousy according to my notions is an insult to one’s wife, and one ought to have confidence in one’s wife.
AND YOU HAVE NO SUCH LACK OF CONFIDENCE. The Face’s tone was decidedly neutral, implying no opinion.
“Yes,” Alexei Alexandrovich replied aloud. “For though my conviction that jealousy is a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence has not broken down-I feel that I was standing face to face-”
AS IT WERE .
“Yes, very clever, face to face, as it were, with something illogical and irrational, and I do not know what is to be done.”
INDEED. FOR YOU STAND FACE TO FACE WITH LIFE, WITH THE POSSIBILITY OFYOUR WIFE’S LOVING SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOU, AND THIS FEELS IRRATIONAL AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE.
Alexei Alexandrovich silently contemplated this position, and the Face remained silent as well. All his life he had lived and worked in official spheres having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexei Alexandrovich had lived. His focus had been on his work, on the innovations in technology and weaponry, in physiolography and transportation-those innovations so crucial to his beloved country’s continued advancement, to protect her from her enemies.
Now, for the first time, the question presented itself to him of the possibility of his wife’s loving someone else, and he was horrified at it.
He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread over the resounding parquet of the dining room, where one lumiére shone bright, over the carpet of the dark drawing room, in which the light was reflected on the big new portrait of himself hanging over the sofa, and across her boudoir, where two lumiéres glowed, lighting up the portraits of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knickknacks of her table, that he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk, especially at the parquet of the lighted dining room, he halted and announced to his Face, “Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to; I must express my view of it and my decision.”
BUT EXPRESS WHAT? WHAT DECISION? the Face asked innocently, and Alexei Alexandrovich had no ready reply.
“But after all,” Alexei added,” what has occurred? Nothing!”
NOTHING ?
He hesitated. “Yes. Nothing. She was talking a long while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can talk to whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and her.”
For some reason Alexei remembered at this moment Sarkovich, the underling from his department who had made impertinent overtures to Anna. Alexei had not been jealous, for then, as now, he had considered the emotion beneath him. He next recalled, with a twinge of unease, how he had later found the man out to be a Janus. Or, rather, the Face-having performed unbidden the relevant set of analyses-had discovered that the man was a spy for UnConSciya, Alexei Alexandrovich had announced the finding, and Sarkovich had been appropriately punished.
For some reason this led Alexei Alexandrovich’s restless mind to a more recent recollection-the encounter at the Grav station with Vronsky and his incessantly barking Class III. He had been thinking how much he wished the animal would be quiet, had even been saying to himself: Quiet. Quiet! And then, echoing through the chambers of his mind came the Face repeating the same word: QUIET!
And the next moment the irritating canine Class III had been lying on the floor of the Grav station, quivering and stricken.
Now, shaking these reflections away, postponing their analysis for another time, he entered the dining room of his house and said aloud, “Yes, I must decide and put a stop to it, and express my view of it…”
DECIDE HOW? HOW MUST WE DECIDE?
But Alexei’s thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle, without coming upon anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in Anna’s boudoir.
And the worst of it all, he thought, is that just now, at the very moment when my great work is approaching completion-he was thinking of the long-term project for Class III improvement, a project of which the Face represented but the first phase-when I stand in need of all my mental peace and all my energies, just now this stupid worry should fall foul of me. But what’s to be done? I’m not one of those men who submit to uneasiness and worry without having the force of character to face them.
HERE IS WHAT YOU MUST DO, pronounced the Face in a calming, even fatherly tone. YOU MUST THINK IT OVER, COME TO A DECISION, AND PUT IT OUT OF YOUR MIND.
There was the sound of a carriage driving up to the front door. Alexei Alexandrovich halted in the middle of the room.
CHAPTER 5
ANNA CAME IN with hanging head, with Android Karenina at her heels, glowing an easy nighttime red-orange glow. On seeing her husband, Anna raised her head and smiled, as though she had just woken up.
“You’re not in bed? What a wonder!” she said, letting fall her hood, and without stopping, she went on into the dressing room. “It’s late, Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, when she had gone through the doorway.
“Anna, it’s necessary for me to have a talk with you.”
“With me?” she said, wonderingly. She came out from behind the door of the dressing room, and looked at him. His one human eye blinked back, while the mechanical iris of the other dilated with a barely audible whir, adjusting automatically to the room’s semidarkness. “Why, what is it? What about?” she asked, sitting down. “Well, let’s talk, if it’s so necessary. But it would be better to get to sleep.”
Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable force field of falsehood.
“Anna, I must warn you,” he began, and flicked Android Karenina-her Class III-into Surcease, exercising a crude patriarchal prerogative that caused Anna’s eyes to widen with startlement. The warm glow that Android Karenina had been shedding snapped off, plunging the room into a preternatural gloom.
“Warn me?” Anna said, when she had recovered from the start of surprise. “Of what?”
She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not know her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything unnatural, in either the sound or the sense of her words. Moving bit by minute bit, his steely oculus scanned every inch of her flesh, gathering in an instant a universe of physiognomic datum points: the subtle flinch of her retinas, her skin’s agitated flush. He saw that the inmost recesses of her soul, which had always hitherto lain open before him, were closed against him. More than that, he heard from her tone that she was not even perturbed at that, but, as it were, said straight out to him: Yes, it’s shut up, and so it must be, and will be in the future. Now he experienced a feeling such as a man might have, returning home and finding his own house locked up.
BUT PERHAPS THE KEY MAY YET BE FOUND, suggested the ever-thinking Face of Alexei Alexandrovich.
“I want to warn you…” he said in a low voice, and then found himself embarrassed, unable to continue.