“No, better spend the day here tomorrow, or Dolly won’t see anything of her husband, and will set off the day after,” said Kitty.
The motive of Kitty’s words was interpreted by Levin thus: Don’t separate me from him. I don’t care about your going, but do let me enjoy the society of this delightful young man.
“Oh, if you wish, we’ll stay here tomorrow,” Levin answered, with peculiar amiability.
Vassenka, meanwhile, got up from the table after Kitty, and watching her with smiling and admiring eyes, he followed her.
Levin saw that look. He turned white, and for a minute he could hardly breathe. How dare he look at my wife like that! was the feeling that boiled within him.
“Tomorrow, then? Do, please, let us go,” said Veslovsky, sitting down on a chair, and again crossing his leg as was his habit.
Levin’s jealousy went further still, growing from moment to moment, evolving as it were from I/Jealousy/4 to I/Jealousy/5 to I/Jealousy/6. Already he saw himself a deceived husband, looked upon by his wife and her lover as simply necessary to provide them with the conveniences and pleasures of life… But in spite of that, he made polite and hospitable inquiries of Vassenka about his shooting, his gun, and his boots, and agreed to go hunting the next day.
Happily for Levin, the old princess cut short his agonies by getting up herself and advising Kitty to go to bed. But even at this point Levin could not escape another agony. As he said goodnight to his hostess, Vassenka would again have kissed her hand, but Kitty, reddening, drew back her hand and said with a naive bluntness, for which the old princess scolded her afterward:
“We don’t like that fashion.”
In Levin’s eyes she was to blame for having allowed such relations to arise, and still more to blame for showing so awkwardly that she did not like them.
Levin scowled and stalked up the stairs to compose a communiqué to Socrates about the terrible worms.
CHAPTER 4
KONSTANTIN DMITRICH SPENT several hours in concentration, composing, recording, and reviewing the communiqé, as he carefully considered how to express his dawning understanding of the worm-machines: what they were, where they came from, and how they were connected to the other troubles plaguing Russia. He went to sleep happy and satisfied with the process of his inquiry, looking eagerly forward to a return communiqué from his poor, exiled beloved-companion.
But it took very little time, the next morning, for Levin’s jealousy to be coaxed back to life by the nettlesome Veslovsky. At breakfast, the conversation Vassenka had started with Kitty was running on the same lines as on the previous evening: discussing Anna, and whether love is to be put higher than worldly considerations. Kitty disliked the subject, and she was disturbed as well both by the tone in which it was conducted and by the knowledge of the effect it would have on her husband. But she was too simple and innocent to know how to cut short the talk, or even to conceal the superficial pleasure afforded her by the young man’s very obvious admiration. She wanted to stop it, but she did not know what to do. Whatever she did she knew would be observed by her husband, and the worst interpretation put on it. And, in fact, when she asked Dolly what was wrong with her daughter Masha, and Vassenka, waiting till this uninteresting conversation was over, began to gaze indifferently at Dolly, the question struck Levin as an unnatural and disgusting piece of hypocrisy.
“What do you say, shall we go and look for mushrooms today?” said Dolly.
“By all means, please, and I shall come too,” said Kitty, and she blushed. She wanted from politeness to ask Vassenka whether he would come, but she did not ask him.
“Where are you going, Kostya?” she asked her husband with a guilty face, as he passed by her with a resolute step. This guilty air confirmed all his suspicions.
“To inspect the pit for aliens,” he said, not looking at her.
“Again?”
He went downstairs, but before he had time to leave his study he heard his wife’s familiar footsteps running with reckless speed to him. He did not turn, but stalked out of the house into the surrounding gardens, past a II/Gardener/9, who Levin had put to work visually scanning for Honored Guests in the woods. Finally he had to acknowledge Kitty’s presence:
“Well, what do you have to say to me?”
He did not look her in the face, and did not care to see that she in her condition was trembling all over, and had a piteous, crushed look. He did not care, that is to say, to recall how difficult it must be for a woman with child, deprived of the special comfort that only a Class III can provide.
“We can’t go on like this! It’s misery! I’m wretched, you are wretched! What for?” she said, when they had at last reached a solitary garden seat at a turn in the lime tree avenue.
“But tell me one thing: was there in his tone anything unseemly, not nice, humiliatingly horrible?” he said, standing before her again in the same position with his clenched fists on his chest, as he had stood before her that night.
“Yes,” she said in a shaking voice. “But, Kostya, surely you see I’m not to blame? All the morning I’ve been trying to take a tone… but such people… Why did he come? How happy we were! Happy, and united, not only in our love for each other, but for our robots, united in our devotion to them!” she said, breathless with sobs that shook her.
A short time later, they passed the II/Gardener/9 once again. Its visual sensors registered astonishment that, though nothing pursued them, they hurried toward the house; and that, though rain had begun to fall, their faces were content and radiant.
CHAPTER 5
AFTER ESCORTING HIS WIFE upstairs, Levin went to Dolly’s part of the house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was in great distress too that day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a little girl who stood in the corner weeping.
“And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all alone, and not play with one of your Class Is, and I won’t make you a new frock,” she said, not knowing how to punish her.
“Oh, she is a disgusting child!” she turned to Levin. “Where does she get such wicked propensities?”
“Why, what has she done?” Levin said without much interest, for he had wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at an unlucky moment.
“Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there… I can’t tell you really what she did. It’s a thousand pities Dolichka’s no longer with us. She always gave me the best, the most reliable counsel on how to deal with this sort of thing. Oh, how I loved that robot!” Tears trembled in Dolly’s eyes. Outside the pitter-patter of the rain intensified, as if the sky itself were mourning Darya Alexandrovna’s loss.
“But you are upset about something? What have you come for?” asked Dolly. “What’s going on there?”
And in the tone of her question Levin heard that it would be easy for him to say what he had meant to say.
“I’ve not been in there, I’ve been alone in the garden with Kitty. We’ve had a quarrel for the second time since Veslovsky came. Come, tell me, honestly, has there been… not in Kitty, but in that gentleman’s behavior, a tone which might be unpleasant-not unpleasant, but horrible, offensive to a husband?”
“You mean, how shall I say… Stay, stay in the corner!” she said to Masha, who, detecting a faint smile in her mother’s face, had been turning round. “The opinion of the world would be that he is behaving as young men do behave. A husband who’s a man of the world should only be flattered by it.”
“Yes, yes,” said Levin gloomily, “but you noticed it?”
“Not only I, but Stiva noticed it. Just after breakfast he said to me in so many words, Je crois que Veslovsky fait un petit brin de cour à Kitty.”