“Nor I, my dear,” was Levin’s reply, as he looked gravely out the front window, watching the Toy Soldiers ride off. “Nor I.”
“And what will they do with them? I mean, really do?”
“I don’t know, Kitty.”
“Madame?” interjected Tatiana anxiously, as Levin and Kitty embraced.
“Sir?” echoed Socrates.
“Yes, yes, beloved-companions,” Levin said. “You are quite right. Now we must leave Pokrovskoe. And fast.”
CHAPTER 9
IMMEDIATELY THERE COMMENCED in the Levin household that frenzy of activity, among robots and humans alike, attendant upon a rapid and secret flight to safety. What to take? How much luggage? How best to travel undetected? And where to go?
“I shall take the Class Ills with me to the small provincial town of Urgensky, where my brother Nikolai is residing,” Levin said. “In his last communiqué he said his own Class III, Karnak, has not been taken in for adjustment. We may hope that Urgensky is too out of the way, with too few Class III companion robots in residence there, to be considered worth the effort of the state to collect them.”
Kitty’s face changed at once.
“When?” she said.
“Immediately! A visit to my ailing brother is a perfectly reasonable excuse for travel, and I shall carry the Surceased robots with my luggage.”
“And I will go with you, can I?” Kitty said.
“Kitty! What are you thinking of?” he said reproachfully.
“How do you mean?” she said, offended that he should seem to take her suggestion unwillingly and with vexation. “Why shouldn’t I go? I shan’t be in your way. I-”
“The journey is to be long, and likely dangerous,” said Levin, all the fire of their earlier quarrel returning. “Why should you-”
“Why? For the same reason as you.”
“Ah!” said Levin, and bitterly muttered to Socrates, though loud enough for Kitty to hear. “At a moment of such gravity, she only thinks of her being dull by herself, alone here in the pit-house without me or Tatiana.”
“Now now,” counseled Socrates, looking guiltily at Kitty. “Do not be cross with her.”
“No!” said Levin sternly. “It’s out of the question.”
Tatiana brought Kitty a cup of tea from the I/Samovar/1(8); Kitty did not even notice her. The tone in which her husband had said the last words wounded her, especially because he evidently did not believe what she had said.
“I tell you, that if you go, I shall come with you; I shall certainly come,” she said hastily and wrathfully.
“It is out of the question!”
“Why out of the question? Why do you say it’s out of the question?”
“Because I’ll be going God knows where, by all sorts of roads and to all sorts of hotels. And my brother lives in entirely unsuitable circumstances! That would be reason enough to bar your coming, before one even considers the danger of our being discovered by agents of the Ministry and prosecuted as Januses for disobeying the compulsory adjustment order. You would be a hindrance to me,” said Levin, trying to be cool.
“What dangers you can face, I can!” replied Kitty hotly.
“Yes, yes. But think, too, of where we are going, and whom we will meet. For one thing then, this woman’s there whom you can’t meet.”
“I don’t know and don’t care to know who’s there and what. My husband is undertaking a risk, to protect his beloved-companion as well as mine, and I will go with my husband too…”
“Kitty! Don’t get angry. But just think a little: this is a matter of such importance that I can’t bear to think that you should bring in a feeling of weakness, of dislike to being left alone. Come, you’ll be dull alone, so go and stay at Moscow a little.”
“There, you always ascribe base, vile motives to me,” she said with tears of wounded pride and fury. “I didn’t mean, it wasn’t weakness, it wasn’t… I feel that it’s my duty to be with my husband when he’s in trouble, but you try on purpose to hurt me, you try on purpose not to understand…”
“No, this is awful! To be such a slave!” cried Levin, getting up, and unable to restrain his anger any longer. But at the same second he felt that he was beating himself.
“Then why did you marry? You could have been free. Why did you, if you regret it?”
He began to speak, trying to find words not to dissuade but simply to soothe her. But she did not heed him, and would not agree to anything. He bent down to her and took her hand, which resisted him. He kissed her hand, kissed her hair, kissed her hand again-still she was silent. But when he took her face in both his hands and said “Kitty!” she suddenly recovered herself, and began to cry, and they were reconciled.
It was decided that they should go together, as soon as possible. The robots were put in Surcease, and locked together in a trunk.
CHAPTER 10
THE HOTEL IN URGENSKY, the provincial town where Nikolai Levin was living, was one of those provincial hotels which are constructed on the newest model of modern improvements, with the best intentions of cleanliness, comfort, and even elegance, but owing to the public that patronizes them, are with astounding rapidity transformed into filthy taverns with a pretension of modern improvement that only makes them worse than the old-fashioned, honestly filthy hotels.
There remained only one filthy room, which would barely fit the two of them, and their robots, once revivified. Levin was feeling angry with his wife because what he had expected had come to pass: at the moment of arrival, when his heart throbbed with emotion and anxiety to find his brother and make whatever arrangements were necessary to find a place where the Class Ills could stay here undetected, he had to be seeing after her.
“Go, do go!” she said, looking at him with timid and guilty eyes.
He went out of the door without a word, and at once stumbled over his brother’s consort, Marya Nikolaevna, who had heard of his arrival and had not dared to go in to see him. She was just the same as when he saw her in Moscow; the same woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the same good-naturedly stupid, pockmarked face, only a little plumper.
Speaking rapidly and with obvious apprehension, Marya Nikolaevna expressed her relief at seeing him: Nikolai’s illness, she explained, had dramatically worsened, and indeed she feared he was now at death’s door.
“What? Well, and how is he at present?”
“Very bad. He can’t get up. His body writhes with pain, and there is in the texture of his flesh a strange and unseemly rippling. I fear the worst. Come,” Marya Nikolaevna continued. “He has kept expecting you.”
The door of his room opened and Kitty peeped out. Tatiana’s head peeped out just under hers. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger with his wife, who had put herself and him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She positively shrank and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching the ends of her apron in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what to say or what to do.
For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so incomprehensible to her; but it lasted only a single instant.
“Well! Have you explained to her our plan, regarding the Class III robots?” she turned to her husband and then to her.
“But one can’t go on talking in the corridor like this!” Levin said, looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant across the corridor, as though going about his affairs. Could this be one of them? A Toy Soldier? Some other agent of the state, disguised in everyday clothes?
“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who had recovered herself, but noticing her husband’s face of dismay, she added, “or go on; go, and then come for me,” and she and Tatiana went back into the room.