Anna looked at him with dreamy, shining eyes, and said nothing.
Outside the room, Alexei Alexandrovich heard all, and the Face heard all, and took its chance to strike.
YOU SEE? it shouted, the cruel and taunting voice bouncing like rocket fire off the corners of his mind.
YOU SEE WHAT YOUR FORGIVENESS HAS EARNED YOU?
Alexei flushed with shame and anger and returned to his room, where he paced like a caged animal. Louder and louder grew the vituperative roar of the Face.
NO MORE GENTLENESS.
NO MORE FORGIVENESS.
ONLY CONTROL.
Stepan Arkadyich, with the same, somewhat solemn expression with which he used to take his presidential chair at his board, walked into Alexei Alexandrovich’s room. Alexei Alexandrovich was walking about his room with his hands behind his back, lost deep in the violent eddies of his mind.
“I’m not interrupting you?” said Stepan Arkadyich, on the sight of his brother-in-law. To conceal this embarrassment he took out a Class I cigarette case he had just bought that opened in a new way, and, flicking the blue-green toggle, took a cigarette out of it.
“No. Do you want anything?” Alexei Alexandrovich asked, while into his mind’s eye came a picture of the Class I exploding, of Stepan Arkadyich’s fat, smirking face melting off of his skull.
LET HIM PAY.
LET THEM ALL PAY.
“Yes, I wished… I wanted… yes, I wanted to talk to you,” said Stepan Arkadyich, with surprise, aware of an unaccustomed timidity.
This feeling was so unexpected and so strange that he did not believe it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he was meaning to do was wrong.
Alexei Alexandrovich meanwhile looked with angry eyes at Small Stiva, that squat, twittering fool of a Class III.
SOON. SOON ITS TIME TOO WILL COME.
Stepan Arkadyich made an effort and struggled with the timidity that had come over him.
Alexei knew what Stepan Arkadyich would say, and knew as well what his reply would be. Let her have her divorce; let her go; who cared? What did it matter? There were weightier matters at hand. He had wrested control of his Project back from his opponents; Stremov lay in a Petersburg basement, buried to his neck in rock and gravel, never to mount another challenge.
His focus must remain on his work: even now new ideas were flooding into his head; even now the Project was evolving… becoming exactly what the Face had always wanted it to be.
SO LET HER GO. LET HER GO WITH HER HANDSOME BORDER OFFICER.
“I hope you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere affection and respect for you,” he said, reddening.
Alexei Alexandrovich stood still and said nothing.
LET THEM ROAM FREE LET THEM TASTE FREEDOM. LET THEM ENJOY IT WHILE THEY CAN.
“I intended… I wanted to have a little talk with you about my sister and your mutual position,” he said, still struggling with an unaccustomed constraint. “If you will allow me to give my opinion, I think that it lies with you to point out directly the steps you consider necessary to end the position.”
“If you consider that it must be ended, let it be so,” Alexei Alexandrovich interrupted him.
“Then you would consent to a divorce?” Stiva said timidly, dragging on his cigarette. Small Stiva’s irritating, tinny Vox-Em repeated the stupid word: “Divorce? Divorce?”
“Let her be divorced. LET HER DIE,” Alexei Alexandrovich said suddenly and harshly, the silver mask pulsing and undulating, veins of hot groznium alive inside it. “LET HER BODY BE BORNE TO THE FAR WINDS OF THE UNIVERSE, ONLY LET ME NEVER SEE HER, OR HIM, OR YOU AGAIN!”
Stepan Arkadyich went slack-mouthed: whatever horrid thing Anna had warned him of, whatever force lurked inside of Alexei Alexandrovich, it was that which he was in conversation with now, not the man.
“Yes, I imagine that divorce-yes, divorce,” Stepan Arkadyich repeated, backing away. “That is from every point of view the most rational course for married people who find themselves in the position you are in. What can be done if married people find that life is impossible for them together? That may always happen.”
Alexei Alexandrovich raised his fists and screamed, “GET OUT!”
The scream poured forth from him like a wave roaring up from the depths of the roiling sea; it threw Stiva and Small Stiva across the room, and they slammed against the opposite wall. Stiva’s head rang from the impact, and a deep dent was knocked in Small Stiva’s heretofore unbendable exterior.
When Stiva crawled out of his brother-in-law’s room he was scared, deeply scared, of what he had just witnessed; but that did not prevent him from being glad he had successfully brought the matter to a conclusion.
Alexei Alexandrovich threw on his coat and stomped off through the snow-crusted streets, and within a half hour was at his St. Petersburg office. Waiting for him there was a crowd of fashionable young men, all of them thin-framed and handsome, each wearing black boots and a neat blond mustache.
“My friends,” he said, and the blond men nodded in unison. “The Project begins in earnest. Find the Class IIIs.
“Find them all.”
CHAPTER 13
VRONSKY’S WOUND HAD BEEN a dangerous one, filling his lungs with smoke and leaving him with a system of nasty burns along his chest, and for several days he had lain between life and death.
And yet he felt that he was completely free from one part of his misery. By his action he had, as it were, washed away the shame and humiliation he had felt before. He could now think calmly of Alexei Alexandrovich. He recognized all his magnanimity, but he did not now feel himself humiliated by it. Besides, he got back again into the beaten track of his life. He saw the possibility of looking men in the face again without shame, and he could live in accordance with his own habits. One thing he could not pluck out of his heart, though he never ceased struggling with it, was the regret, amounting to despair, that he had lost her forever. That now, having expiated his sin against the husband, he was bound to renounce her, and never in the future to stand between her with her repentance and her husband, he had firmly decided in his heart; but he could not tear out of his heart his regret at the loss of her love, he could not erase from his memory those moments of happiness that he had so little prized at the time, and that haunted him in all their charm.
Serpuhovskoy had arranged Vronsky’s appointment at the head of a new and elite regiment, one being formed to take on this still-unnamed grave threat spoken of by the Ministry of War, and Vronsky agreed to the proposition without the slightest hesitation. But the nearer the time of departure came, the bitterer was the sacrifice he was making to what he thought his duty.
His wounds had healed, and he was making preparations for his departure for the new regiment, when late in the afternoon he answered his door to find Android Karenina, staring at him in her cold and quiet way, her eyebank glowing an unceasing and meaningful purple. The Class III did not say a word, only held out a hand, and pointed back to the carriage in which she had come.
“She desires to see me?”
Without even troubling himself to finish his preparations, forgetting all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her, where her husband was, Vronsky went with Android Karenina and together they drove straight to the Karenins’. He ran up the stairs seeing no one and nothing, Lupo chasing at his heels, and with a rapid step, almost breaking into a run, he went into her room. And without considering, without noticing whether there was anyone in the room or not, he flung his arms round her, and began to cover her face, her hands, her neck with kisses.