“I don’t, I don’t believe it!” Dolly began, trying to catch his glance, which avoided her.
“One cannot disbelieve facts, Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, with an emphasis on the word “facts.”
“But what has she done?” said Darya Alexandrovna. “What precisely has she done?”
“She has forsaken her duty, and deceived her husband. That’s what she has done,” said he.
“No, no, it can’t be! No, for God’s sake, you are mistaken,” said Dolly, putting her hands to her temples and closing her eyes.
Alexei Alexandrovich smiled coldly, with his lips alone, meaning to signify to her and to himself the firmness of his conviction; but this hot defense, though it could not shake him, reopened his wound. He began to speak with greater heat.
“It is extremely difficult to be mistaken when a wife herself informs her husband of the fact-informs him that eight years of her life, and a son, all that’s a mistake, and that she wants to begin life again,” he said angrily, with a snort.
“Anna and sin-I cannot connect them, I cannot believe it!”
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, now looking straight into Dolly’s kindly, troubled face, and feeling that his tongue was being loosened in spite of himself, “I would give a great deal for doubt to be still possible. When I doubted, I was miserable, but it was better than now. When I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope, and still I doubt of everything. I am in such doubt of everything that I even hate my son, and sometimes do not believe he is my son. I am very unhappy.”
He had no need to say that. Darya Alexandrovna had seen that as soon as he glanced into her face; and she felt sorry for him, and her faith in the innocence of her friend began to totter.
Karenin’s inner voice for once was silent, and he was glad for that-he could bear, he thought, this woman’s childish pity, but not the ruthless disdain of the Face.
“Oh, this is awful, awful! But can it be true that you are resolved on a divorce?”
“I am resolved on extreme measures. There is nothing else for me to do.”
“Nothing else to do, nothing else to do…,” Dolly echoed, with tears in her eyes.
“Nothing else? Nothing?” came the third echo, this from Dolichka, parroting her mistress in sad, mechanical tones.
OH BUT THERE IS SOMETHING, came the brutal dead whisper of the Face.
OH BUT THERE IS.
DIVORCE HER? YOU MUST Kl-
“No! It is enough!!” said Karenin, with a force shocking to Dolly. “I shall divorce her, and that is all!”
“No, it is awful! She will be no one’s wife, she will be lost!”
“What can I do?” said Alexei Alexandrovich, raising his shoulders and his eyebrows. “I am very grateful for your sympathy, but I must be going,” he said, getting up.
“No, wait a minute. You must not ruin her. Wait a little; I will tell you about myself. I was married, and my husband deceived me; in anger and jealousy, I would have thrown away everything, I would myself… But I came to myself again; and who did it? Anna saved me. And here I am living on. The children are growing up, my husband has come back to his family, and feels his fault, is growing purer, better, and I live on… I have forgiven it, and you ought to forgive!”
Alexei Alexandrovich heard her, but her words had no effect on him now. All the hatred of that day when he had resolved on a divorce had sprung up again in his soul. He shook himself, and said in a shrill, loud voice:
“Forgive I cannot, and do not wish to, and I regard it as wrong. You must understand that divorce is not the worst I can do to her, but the best she might hope for. I have done everything for this woman, and she has trodden it all in the mud to which she is akin. I am not a spiteful man, I have never hated anyone, but I hate her with my whole soul, and I cannot even forgive her, because I hate her too much for all the wrong she has done me!”
“Love those who hate you…” Darya Alexandrovna whispered timorously.
When he spoke in response his natural speaking voice was displaced with the cruel rasp of the Face, speaking out from his mouth.
“NO,” he said. “HATE THEM MORE.”
And turning on his heel, he left Dolly there to shudder and to whisper to Dolichka, exactly as others had whispered before: “What is he?”
Meanwhile Karenin himself gathered his coat and hat and stopped at the door, glaring icily at the two old intellectuals, who still sat over their drained bowls of soup, parsing the question of robot intelligence.
“I might humbly suggest, gentlemen, you spend too much effort debating these ancient and intricate questions. In short order, the issue will be… let us say… moot.”
And then, Alexei Alexandrovich quietly took leave and went away.
CHAPTER 7
WHEN THE GROUP finished eating and rose from the table, Levin would have liked to follow Kitty into the drawing room, but he was afraid she might dislike this as too obviously paying her attention. He remained in the little ring of men, taking part in the general conversation, and without looking at Kitty, he was aware of her movements, her looks, and the place where she was in the drawing room.
“I thought you were going toward the piano,” he said, at last approaching her. “That’s something I miss in the country-music.”
She rewarded him with a smile that was like a gift. “What do they want to argue for? No one ever convinces anyone, you know.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Levin. “It generally happens that one argues hotly simply because one can’t make out what one’s opponent wants to prove.”
And with that the two in the drawing room, with their beloved-companions standing back a deferential distance, closed their eyes against the discussion in the other room, and felt at once that all the world was theirs alone. Kitty, going up to a game table, sat down, and, taking up a mini-blade, began drawing diverging circles over the new acetate surface.
They began on another of the subjects that had been started at dinner-the liberty and occupations of women. Levin was of the opinion of Darya Alexandrovna that a girl who did not marry should find a woman’s duties in a family: that of petite mécanicienne, maintaining the Class Is of the household.
“No,” said Kitty, blushing, but looking at him all the more boldly with her truthful eyes, “a girl may be so positioned that she cannot live in the family without humiliation, while she herself…”
At the hint he understood her.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes-you’re right, you’re right!”
Socrates and Tatiana exchanged a knowing look, and then both enacted an exceedingly rare gesture, in tacit acknowledgment of the powerful mood of intimacy blossoming between their respective masters: reaching up at the same moment beneath their chins, they put themselves in Surcease.
A silence followed. She was still tracing shapes with the blade on the table. Kitty’s eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of happiness.
“Ah! I’ve scratched figures all over the acetate!” she said, and, laying down the little blade, she made a movement as though to get up.
“What! Shall I be left alone-without her?” he thought with horror, and he took the knife. “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting down to the table. “I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.”
He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.
“Please, ask it.”