“You know, Kitty’s coming here, and is going to spend the summer with me.”
“Really,” he said, flushing, and at once, to change the conversation, he said: “Then I’ll send you a new cow, shall I? I heard from Stiva you had a bit of trouble with your II/MilkExtractor/47. If you insist on a bill you shall pay me five rubles a month; but you really shouldn’t.”
“No, thank you. We can manage very well now.”
And Levin, to turn the conversation, explained to Dolly the theory of cow-keeping, based on the principle that the cow is simply a kind of machine, designed for the transformation of food into milk, and so on.
He talked of this, and passionately longed to hear more of Kitty, and, at the same time, was afraid of hearing it. He dreaded the breaking up of the inward peace he had gained with such effort.
“Yes, but still all this has to be looked after, and who is there to look after it?” Dolly responded, without interest.
“Pardon,” interrupted Socrates, and they all turned to look at the robot; under the weight of their collective stare, he absently began flicking a switch on his hip assembly, on and off, on and off. “I have been running a full analysis on the matter of the worm-beast. I cannot compute: If it is true that the creature we encountered is but a larger version of the koschei that have previously infested the land-for what reason? Why would a simple UnConSciya device grow to such a size? And… how?”
“Oh dear!” said Dolichka.
And, thought Levin, loathe to float such a possibility within the hearing of Darya Alexandrovna and her her children, or even to Socrates, can it be that there are other things the Ministry is hiding from us?
CHAPTER 4
KITTY REPORTS IN HER LATEST communiqué that there’s nothing she longs for so much as quiet and solitude,” Dolly said.
“And how is she-better?” Levin asked in agitation.
“Thank God, she’s quite well again. I never believed her lungs were affected.”
“Oh, I’m very glad!” said Levin, and Dolly fancied she saw something touching, helpless, in his face as he said this and looked silently into her face.
“Let me ask you, Konstantin Dmitrich,” she said then, smiling her kindly and rather mocking smile, “why is it you are angry with Kitty?”
“I? I’m not angry with her,” said Levin.
“Yes, you are angry. Why was it you did not come to see us or them when you were in Moscow?”
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, blushing up to the roots of his hair, “I wonder really that with your kind heart you don’t feel this. How it is you feel no pity for me, if nothing else, when you know…”
“What do I know?”
“You know I made an offer and that I was refused,” said Levin, and all the tenderness he had been feeling for Kitty a minute before was replaced by a feeling of anger for the slight he had suffered.
Dolly traded expressions of mock astonishment with Dolichka.
“What makes you suppose I know?”
“Because everybody knows it…”
“That’s just where you are mistaken; I did not know it, though I had guessed it was so.”
“Well, now you know it.”
“All I knew was that something had happened that made Kitty dreadfully miserable, and that she begged me never to speak of it, and then they left to orbit Venus. And if she would not tell me, she would certainly not speak of it to anyone else. But what did pass between you? Tell me.”
“I have told you.”
“When was it?”
“When I was at their house the last time.”
“Do you know that,” said Darya Alexandrovna, “I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. You suffer only from pride…”
“Perhaps so,” said Levin, “but-”
She interrupted him.
“But she, poor girl… I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. Now I see it all.”
“Well, Darya Alexandrovna, you must excuse me,” he said, getting up and signaling to Socrates his readiness to depart.
“No, wait a minute,” she said, clutching him by the sleeve, as tears came into her eyes. “Wait a minute, sit down. If I did not like you, and if I did not know you, as I do know you…”
The feeling that had seemed dead revived more and more, rose up and took possession of Levin’s heart.
“Yes, I understand it all now,” Dolly said. “You can’t understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own choice, it’s always clear whom you love. But a girl’s in a position of suspense, with all a woman’s or maiden’s modesty, a girl who sees you men from afar, who takes everything on trust-a girl may have, and often has, such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say.”
“Yes, if the heart does not speak…”
“No, but I mean even when the heart does speak! You mean, you make an offer when your love is ripe or when the balance has completely turned between the two you are choosing from. But a girl is not asked. She is expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot choose, she can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky, thought Levin, and the dead thing that had come to life within him died again, and weighed on his heart and set it aching. Socrates, with an uncharacteristic gesture of physical tenderness, placed a comforting arm across his master’s hunched and agitated shoulders as Levin recalled Kitty’s words. She had said: “No, that cannot be…“
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said dryly, “I appreciate your confidence in me, but I believe you are making a mistake. But whether I am right or wrong, that pride you so despise makes any thought of Katerina Alexandrovna out of the question for me, you understand, utterly out of the question.”
“I will only say one thing more,” Dolly said. “You know that I am speaking of my sister, whom I love as I love my own children. I don’t say she cared for you; all I meant to say is that her refusal at that moment proves nothing.”
“I don’t know!” said Levin, jumping up. “If you only knew how you are hurting me. It’s just as if a child of yours were dead, and they were to say to you: He might have been like this, or like that, and if you could travel back in time… but man cannot travel in time! The experiment has been attempted and abandoned, so what is the use of imagining!”
“How absurd you are!” said Dolly, looking with mournful tenderness at Levin’s excitement. “Yes, I see it all more and more clearly,” she went on musingly. “So you won’t come to see us, then, when Kitty’s here?”
“No, I shan’t come. Of course I won’t avoid meeting Katerina Alexandrovna, but as far as I can, I will try to save her the annoyance of my presence.”
“You are very, very absurd,” Dolly repeated, looking with tenderness into his face.
Levin and Socrates said good-bye and drove away while Dolly and her beloved-companion bade them farewell from the front yard of the house at Ergushovo. Before she turned back into the house Dolly paused, her hands frozen at her hips, as she listened to a faint but distinct noise from the middle distance:
Tikka tikka tikka.
Tikka tikka tikka. Tikkatikkatikkatikka…
“Oh dear oh dear,” said Dolichka, and Dolly murmured her agreement. “Oh dear, indeed.”
CHAPTER 5
WELL, WHAT AM I GOING to do with my life?” said Levin to Socrates the next morning, as they joined a team of peasants, delivering a freshly excavated batch of ore to the smeltworks. “How am I to set about it?”
He was trying to express to his Class III the range of ideas and emotions he had passed through since their visit to Dolly and her family. Socrates, employing his advanced circuits for logic, sorted all his master’s thoughts and feelings into a thought matrix for him. Thought Category A was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education. This renunciation gave Levin satisfaction, and was easy and simple. Thought Category B was a series of mental images related to the life he longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably conscious.