“I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the portrait. Anna had come from behind the treillage to meet him, and Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the portrait, in a dark-blue short gown, not in the same position, nor with the same expression, but with the same perfection of beauty which the artist had caught in the portrait. She was less dazzling in reality, but of course in the picture she had the advantage of the radiant backlight cast by a Class III. Now, in person, and in the New Russia, that enhancement was sadly lacking.
CHAPTER 5
SHE HAD RISEN to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him.
“You will excuse me for being ill at ease,” Anna began. “I neither look nor feel myself since I have lost the company of my beloved-companion, Android Karenina.”
Levin smiled with pleasure at her unexpected forthrightness: how refreshing to hear someone speak openly of the great collective loss the Russian people had suffered.
“I am delighted, delighted,” she went on, and upon her lips these simple words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva and for your wife’s sake… I knew her for a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!”
She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood.
“I am settled in Alexei’s study,” she said in answer to Stepan Arkadyich’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as to be able to smoke”-and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a I/CigarCase/6 and activated herself a cigarette.
“Enjoy such luxury while you can, Anna,” her brother said. “Class Ones are now added to the list.”
“You jest!”
“Alas, I do not. Ours were junkered only hours ago at the club, by one of those lifelike friends of ours.”
Anna gritted her teeth, as if to say, I shall accept the New Russia-indeed I must-but I cannot be forced to like it.
Yes, yes, this is a woman! Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face-so handsome a moment before in its repose-suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting something.
And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. She sighed, and her face suddenly took a hard expression, looking as if it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors, and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.
In the next moment, this wonderment translated itself into action. When Stiva went out of the room a few steps ahead of Levin, before he could stop to think, he stopped at the doorframe, turned back to Anna, and whispered, urgently and impetuously: “Rearguard.”
Neither smiling nor frowning, she leaned slightly forward in her chair and replied: “Action.”
They both stared at the other for a long moment.
“Well, good-bye,” Anna said at last, rising to take his hand and glancing into his face with a winning look. “I am very glad que la glace est rompue.”
She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.
“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.”
“Certainly, yes, I will tell her…” Levin said, blushing. “And… but…”
“Goodnight,” said Anna Arkadyevna with finality.
CHAPTER 6
WELL, DIDN’T I TELL YOU?” said Stepan Arkadyich, seeing that Levin had been completely won over.
“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, his mind racing with thoughts of Anna Karenina and the Golden Hope. “An extraordinary woman! It’s not her cleverness, but she has such depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her!”
“Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be hard on people in the future,” said Stepan Arkadyich, opening the carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”
Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin traveled home.
All the way there, he reeled with excitement, and in particular with anticipation of sharing with Kitty what he had learned: that Anna Karenina, despite the abandonment of Vozdvizhenskoe and the junker army, despite their return to Moscow and the petition to Karenin, remained in her heart a partisan.
What Levin did not know, what he could not know, was that Vronsky had never told Anna Karenina the code words. On returning home from the Huntshed, he had given her the barest outline of his meeting with Federov, but then they had passed into argument, and from there to reconciliation, and that reconciliation had led them back to Moscow.
Never had he told her of Federov’s dying exhortation; never had he mentioned the words rearguard or action at all.
Somehow, Anna knew the words anyway.
At home their new servant, a man named Kouzma, told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and then handed him a neatly folded piece of paper. This was a “letter,” an old-fashioned means of information transmission in which the correspondent commits his thoughts to paper with pen and ink-along with “books” and “newspapers,” it had come back into vogue since the disappearance of monitor-and-communiqué technology. Levin read the letter at once in the hall, and found it was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the latest gleanings from the pit were faulty, that it was fetching only five and a half rubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. Levin scowled. He had been forced, like all other groznium miners, to hire human beings to administer his land in his absence, and they were terrible at it.
Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.
“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.
“First, as for Vronsky, I fear your assessment was correct: he has decidedly gone to the other side. Still, I do not think he intends to turn us in. For now, anyway, I think we are safe.”